The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have often pointed out that an ancient wisdom present in mankind can be characterized by the fact that through this ancient wisdom, people were aware that they were citizens of the universe, not merely of the earth. Take a mental look at what is present in the consciousness of thinking humanity today and what is present in the consciousness of those who, from certain scientific backgrounds, reflect on the human being's place in the world. Both are actually the same. For just as the broad masses of people in primeval times on earth thought and felt what was taught in the mysteries, in the mysteries that were the centers of the surrounding culture and civilization, so today people in wide circles absorb what is taught and researched in the profane mysteries of the present, at the universities and colleges. Just as the mysteries of ancient times were related to the beliefs of the general population, so too are the universities of today related to the general public. What the ancient teachers in the mysteries believed about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the zodiac, was naturally believed by the masses. What the professors of the universities and colleges say and do not say about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the moon, is believed by the masses. The fact that the entire wisdom about man is exhausted by pointing out that man has gradually developed physically from his animal ancestors is a one-sided, a very, very one-sided truth; it does not exhaust the real facts. But modern people relate to their initiates, to the university professors, as the ancients related to their initiates in the mysteries. There is actually no particular psychological difference between these two relationships. It is just that the ancients knew: All that is in man is connected not only with what develops on earth, but with what is seen by the eye into the space of the stars. That which takes place in man, even physically, is connected with the activity of the sun and the other planets belonging to the solar system.

If you read my “Occult Science in Outline”, you will see that through that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which this “Occult Science” wants to serve, this consciousness of people is to be restored, that the human being not only has a relationship to the earth, but also to extra-terrestrial worlds. It is pointed out that our Earth itself is only a temporary embodiment of that which was there before in its essence as the Moon, as the Sun, as Saturn, and it is pointed out that the human being continues to develop and that these further developmental forms of the human being will be connected with future developmental forms of the Earth planet, with Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. Thus that which belongs to man is raised up out of the merely earthly. Man's gaze is again directed from the earth to the Cosmos. This is one of the facts which humanity must again become aware of if it is not to degenerate on earth: that man belongs to the Cosmos, that man is connected in his inner being with extra-earthly spheres.

Why is this knowledge necessary? It must be known because self-knowledge is necessary; not the self-knowledge that consists of brooding over one's own dear self, but the knowledge of man as a universal being. This self-knowledge must spread; it must become general and ever more general. For without a grasp of the human being, there will be no support for him, especially no psychological support in the future of human development. But it cannot be a matter of merely brooding a little over the subordinate, chaotic human being; rather, it must be a matter of concretely surveying this inner human being in his structure, just as one does not characterize the outer nature merely by saying: nature, nature, nature! but by pointing out: there are plants, there are animals, and distinguishing the individual species and varieties within the individual plants. In the same way, within the soul of man, one must distinguish above all the individual metamorphoses of this soul life. Now let us characterize these individual metamorphoses of the soul life, I would say, the one side of it. First, there is the metamorphosis of our soul life that is most closely connected with our physical body, that is most dependent on our physical body. It is the soul faculty that we denote by the term memory or the ability to remember. Through memory, we are able to renew the experiences of our individual life. Through memory we are able to draw a thread from a certain moment, which lies two, three, four years or even longer after birth, to the phenomena of the respective present moment, and man would be inwardly ill if this thread were to be torn. I have already explained this several times. If we had to look back on a part of our lives in such a way that we would lose the memory of certain events, the context of our experiences would not be there. And that would mean that we would be ill in our sense of self. But on the other hand, a person will at least be able to know how strongly memory is connected to his physical constitution. One need only remember the fact, which I have often mentioned and which is actually widely known, that when we suffer from insomnia or when we are prevented from sleeping properly by external events, our memory suffers. This and much else that can occur in cases of illness proves how memory depends on the physical constitution.

What we call our intelligence is less dependent on this bodily constitution, and thus more independent of it. However, this intelligence is still very much dependent on the bodily constitution. After all, memory only relates to the individual. We have intelligence in common with other people, at least to a high degree. Of course, one person is more intelligent, the other less so; each usually considers himself the most intelligent; but in general one can say: the fact is that one person is more intelligent, the other less so. But a certain uniformity of human intelligence is emerging. While everyone has their own memory content that no one else can see into, and while this memory content is very individual, the content of intelligence is something more common to humanity. It is simply less bound to the physical constitution of the human being. The physical constitution of the human being is actually only like a mirror to what unfolds as intellectual processes. Anyone who claims that the processes in the human nervous system, in the brain, cause thoughts, is saying no more than someone standing in front of a mirror and saying to themselves, “Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz,” and saying, “The mirror has produced Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz.” Just as the mirror relates to the images of the three named individuals, and just as the three named individuals are also outside the mirror and actually have nothing to do with it other than being reflected by the mirror, so too does the intellect have to do with the brain only insofar as it is reflected for our consciousness by the brain; but the processes of the intellect itself are outside the brain. We would know nothing of the processes of the senses if we had no brain. The processes of intelligence would not be reflected in our brain. But these intelligent processes themselves are a being outside the brain, which is only mirrored by the brain.

And then we come to the third faculty of the human being, which is at least to a large extent most independent of our bodily constitution. But people believe it least of all, because they consider it to be most dependent on our bodily constitution. This is the activity of the senses. Take the eye. The eye itself as such has nothing to do with the processes that are the visual processes. The visual processes are much less bound to the tool of the eye than the intelligent processes are to the tool of the brain. What the eye has to do with seeing is something quite different. The processes that occur in our consciousness as the content of seeing have nothing to do with the eye. What happens in the eye merely causes us to be present with our consciousness, with our ego, during the visual processes. Please note this fundamental, but not easily grasped, difference.

Take, for example, a person who has lost both eyes due to some disease. He has not lost the visual process as such, but he has lost the perception of what the visual process is through his ego. His ego knows nothing about it. The ego knows nothing of what the visual process is. It is simply the ego that is excluded from the visual process. What happens can be compared to the following.

Suppose you have three telegraph stations, A, B, C; at each telegraph station you have a telegraph operator. When the man at A telegraphs to €, the man at € can read what is being telegraphed from A to C. There is no question of the Morse apparatus at A producing the content of the telegram. It is only the mediator. The Morse telegraph in C cannot read either, but it mediates. But if apparatus B is switched on in the A-C path, then the man operating B can sit down and listen or read along; he only needs to let the stripe run so he can read along. B is then switched on in the path of the current that conveys the contents of the telegraph. But the content that goes from A to C has nothing to do with the processes that take place in the Morse telegraph at B. They are only perceived because the device is switched on.

Of course, if the apparatus is not switched on, one cannot perceive the processes. It is the same with the human eye. What is going on in the eye has nothing to do with seeing in terms of inner truth. The eye is only switched on to the processes. And because the eye is switched on to the processes, the I can watch the processes of seeing. But the eye is not at all what actually conveys or brings about the content of the visual processes or does something with them. It is only the receiving apparatus for the I. One could say, without running the risk of being thought paradoxical, that the human brain, which today is equipped with a somewhat thick brain, finds the following paradoxical: Our sense organ of sight has nothing to do with seeing, but everything to do with the fact that our I knows about seeing. Sensory organs, as we have them today, that is, the higher sensory organs, are not there for seeing, but rather they are there so that the I can know about seeing. I would even like to write this sentence on the board: Higher sensory organs are not there to mediate sensory processes, but rather so that an I knows about sensory processes.

We have the three so-called higher soul activities: memory, intelligence, and sensory perception and activity. The I is involved in them; it is most strongly involved in the memory with its physical body, less strongly in the intelligence, and least strongly in the sensory activity.

What I have described to you now comes from the following. Memory was not always in man as it is today. It has developed. And what was at the basis of the development of memory was an essential activity of man during the last embodiment on earth, preceding our earth, the old moon time. At that time memory was a kind of unconscious, dream-like imagination. “Dream-like imagination was memory. The fact that our bodily organization on earth has become what it has become is the living dream-like imagination, of which the soul being of man was completely filled during the old moon time, has become what is now our memory.

During the old sun time, when we had no physical body at all as we have now, when we were still those beings that I have described in my “Occult Science”, our intelligence was dormant inspiration. This dormant inspiration then developed further and is now our intelligence. But during the old Saturn, our sensory activity was quite dull intuition. Again, you can find the more precise description in my “Occult Science”. And this dull intuition has developed into our present-day sensory activity.

Now one might ask: Why do people have such a hard time grasping such extraordinarily important truths? And if someone imparts them to them, why do they resist them so much? Yes, you see, there are reasons for this in the nature of things themselves. We have had a vague intuition during the old Saturn time. This has gradually developed further and further and has become our sensory activity. But actually today we can only prove that one sensory activity has developed relatively most perfectly from the disposition of the old Saturn sensory activity, and that is hearing. Hearing had its clearest disposition in the old Saturn sphere. Vision arose somewhat later — you can read about these things in my 'Occult Science' —, mainly during the time of the sun. But from this you can already see that, while the first foundation was laid on the old Saturn time in the form of a dull intuition, later on new sense faculties are constantly being added. On the Sun, new sensory abilities were added that are not yet as developed as those from Saturn. On the Moon, new sensory abilities were added again, and on Earth itself, again. On Earth, the sense of touch was added, which is actually the most imperfect of the senses. If we were to recognize the sense of touch purely, we would still describe it today as a dull intuition in the physical body, a low, dull intuition.

It is similar with the sense of smell. There is something extraordinarily peculiar about it. I would recommend to those of you who like to do such things: pick up a psychology or physiology, especially a psychology, a soul science, as they are written today; they all write about sensory activity. What is written there about the activity of the senses — for the unprejudiced person it applies only to the sense of touch. You may remember what I said in my “Theosophy” about the relationship of the higher senses to the sense of touch, which Goethe also noted. Our learned gentlemen want to describe the senses, but they only describe that part of the senses that has arisen directly on the earth, that has received its first impulse on the earth. This applies, for example, to seeing, as when you strike your fist on the eye, you could almost say literally. Because what is described in the psychology is not seeing, but what is described would arise if you punched yourself in the eye; hence the nice theory that has emerged of the so-called specific sensory energies, which in the case of the eye does not come from seeing, but from the fact that when you strike the eye, you see all kinds of sparks. These learned gentlemen describe something that works like a fist to the eye, quite literally. And they want to understand vision through this.

One understands the activity of the senses only when one regards it in connection with what is no longer there at all: Saturn development, sun development, moon development. One understands human intelligence only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the development of the sun, the moon. One understands memory only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the old development of the moon. And from the earth, one only understands the appropriation of sensory activity, of intelligence, of memory by the I, because the I has only been incorporated into the human being during the time on earth. And the organs that have been formed in the human being during the time on earth are not there at all to convey his higher soul abilities, but to convey that these higher soul abilities reveal themselves in an I. We have eyes for an ego, ears for an ego, a nose for an ego, not a nose for smelling, which would be most correct, because it has been formed during the time on earth; but it is also no longer quite correct, because it will change during the time on earth. But we don't have eyes to see and ears to hear; we have ears so that a self can know something of what is going on in the ear, like a Morse telegraph is switched on here so that someone, not the Morse telegraph itself, can know something of what is being negotiated between A and C. By still saying today that we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and by clothing everything in this kind of language, we are talking about something that has no reality at all. We talk constantly in illusions, we talk in untruths. We do not know what we actually have our whole physical organization for. We do not have it to mediate the higher soul activities, but we have it so that the I can learn something from these higher soul activities. Our whole physical being is an image of the I. And we are constituted as we are because we are an I. In our outer form we are meant to become aware of the outer image of the I. For our body, as we now carry it, we have only received through the earth. And it is unthinkable that what the earth has not given us should be derived from the events of the earth, that the cause of it should be sought in the events of the earth.

Just as we have been able to point out that for our memory activity the old moon development is the decisive factor, because the predispositions were formed in it, and we have been able to point out that for our intelligence the old sun development is the decisive factor, because the first predispositions were formed there, and so on to Saturn activity, we must also point out that these higher soul abilities have something to do today with the beings of the higher hierarchies, and in such a way that our memory activity has something to do with the hierarchy of the Angeloi, our intelligence with the Archangeloi, our sensory activity with the Archai.

And this brings me to an important chapter of spiritual knowledge. Suppose you reflect on memory, on the ability to remember, in human self-knowledge. You say: I turn my inner organ, my soul organ, to the ability to remember. But when you look at it with full consciousness, you have to look at it in such a way that you say to yourself: In this whole activity, in this process of remembering, the Angelos lives and weaves within. Now try to remember something that happened to you yesterday, any event. You have allowed an inner soul process to unfold. In what is unfolding, and in that a yesterday's thought arises in you, a yesterday's experience reveals itself anew to you in memory, an angel is at work in it. And when you reflect intelligently - however, it must be intelligently, that is, with inner activity, not a mere brooding, not what most people call intelligent thinking, which is only the boiling of memories, where people let the memories boil out of their bodies, thinking only begins when one actively grasps the thoughts inwardly - when one develops an inner activity, then an archangel is present. And if you listen and look around, you must say: in my ears, in my eyes, there are the thrones of the archai, the spirits of time. If you ask yourself: where are the spirits of time, the archai, which rule the successive world ages of the earth? Then you should not look for them in completely unknown areas, you should look for them in the sensory organs of people. That is where they are. A decadent time, in terms of the abilities of the soul, sought the gods up there above the blue, which does not actually exist. If man asks: Where then are the spirits of time? — they sit in his eyes, in his ears, there they have their thrones.

This is illuminated from another side, which I once made clear to you by pointing out that in man himself are the localities from which the events of nature are controlled. If you have the formulas recited in certain secret societies and interpret them correctly, you will find that these formulas, handed down from very ancient times, point to truths such as the ones I have now developed before you; that man is the temple for the gods that stand above him, that is, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. He is so in the most literal sense. For if one asks: Where do the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai dwell? - I must say: In the organs of human memory, human intelligence and human sensory activity. Man is, if you speak in a real language, you have to say that, really spirit-filled, that is, filled with spirits. The Church did not want people to realize that, so at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 869 she forbade knowing or believing anything about the spiritual; she established the dogma that man consists only of body and soul. This human being is a very, very complicated creature, and if, let us say, for example, one were to stand on a distant star and observe the processes of the earth from a different point of view, the mineral kingdom would immediately disappear; it would only appear as a luminous shine. Little of the plant kingdom would be perceived, and not much of the animal kingdom either. From the outside, the individual human beings would not be perceived, but the thrones in the universe would be there and occupied by the angels, archangels and archai. And a being with the necessary ability to see from a distant star would say: The Earth is a body in space that is the dwelling place of archai, archangels and angels. In the language of the gods, this would mean that the earth is the dwelling place of the spirits of time, archangels and angels. In the everyday language of people, this means: Man has sense organs, tools of intelligence and a memory constitution. But humanity is called upon to really get to know man, to seek out the real relationship of this man to the spiritual world.

The pendulum swing of civilization has been different up to now. People have studied the chemical substances that make up food in order to find out what a person absorbs through food. The relationships between the body and the matter of food and so on have been investigated. It has been said: What is out there in the various plants or in the various animals enters the human being; sometimes it is active outside in the cabbage, sometimes in the ox, sometimes it is active inside the human being and constitutes him. — So you see an ox outside, you look at it. Then you see a human being and know that he has eaten the beefsteak that was made from this ox, and you follow the part that the beefsteak that he has eaten, which was still active in the ox outside a number of days ago, plays in the inner workings of the human being; that is the relationship between the physical and the natural world. There one follows how the beefsteak, which was sitting in the ox's loins, is later inwardly active in man.

This has now been sufficiently pursued, and from it a world view has been brewed that has caused the pendulum of the human world view to swing to one side. Now the pendulum must swing to the other side. Now we must know that the soul of man is also related to the spiritual world, to spiritual substances. And what spiritual substances are, archangels, archai, angels, they are within man, as the ox is within man when he eats his beefsteak, in his body. Today's science admits the one, the other it still laughs. But for the further development of humanity, it is necessary that man knows just as much about his relationship to the angel as he knows today about his relationship to the ox or to cabbage – I mean the physical cabbage!

We are at this turning point in time, that there is indeed a need for the development of humanity to turn to what plays out of the spirit into the soul, after we have long enough directed our attention one-sidedly to what plays out of the physical world into the bodily side of man. For the human being who begins to develop today, it is no longer enough to convey certain religious truths to him in a dogmatic and abstract way, as in the confessions of the past. Today's human being has occupied himself with reflecting on the relationship between his earthly body and the spiritual. This earthly body initially only has a relationship to the ego. We will get to know other relationships tomorrow. But that which appears in our earthly body, the constitution for the ability to remember, is related to the hierarchy of the angels. That which is embedded in this earthly body as the constitution for intelligence has relationships to the world of the archangeloi. That which manifests itself in our higher senses, namely that which arises in our higher art, has a relationship to the world of the archai, the spirits of the age. We human beings must become capable of more than just generalizing about the existence of a spiritual world; we must become capable of sensing the concrete relationships between human beings and this spiritual world. We must become capable of sensing how that which echoes within us as hearing is a series of facts that permeate our world and in which the archai are active. We must become capable of grasping that while we are thinking, we dwell in a world that is permeated and permeates the archangeloi; while we are remembering, we dwell in a world that permeates and is permeated by the angeloi; and when we become aware of our self, for which we always most fully use our body, it is a revelation of our self. Only then are we in the world in which man lives and moves. In the Greek mysteries, they still said: If you approach the Guardian of the Threshold, you learn to recognize what is in man in a higher way. This side of the threshold, you only get to know thoughts that remind you of past experiences. On the other side of the threshold, you are surrounded by the beings of the world of the angels. On this side of the threshold one learns to recognize the intelligent being; on the other side of the threshold one perceives how the archangeloi surround one. On this side of the threshold one perceives the external sensory world; on the other side of the threshold one knows how, through our eyes and ears, the spirits of the times enter and leave.

It is necessary to ensure that this awareness is awakened in man, whether he is simply related to the spiritual world by his constitution. But this must be awakened in a concrete way for the individual organs. Man must learn to feel himself in a spiritual world, whereas the world view that has reached its climax today only makes him feel that he lives in a physical world. This feeling that one lives in a physical world would have to dominate man completely if the event of Golgotha had not occurred. That man can develop back to an awareness of his spiritual relationship is due to the mystery of Golgotha. But one must seek out of one's own free inner drive what one owes to the mystery of Golgotha. Christianity presupposes freedom.

What we can know about the relationship between human beings and the spiritual world can actually have a practical effect on us. And the educational principles we want to apply at the Stuttgart Waldorf School are based on the awareness that human beings are more than just a synthesis of external natural processes. Education and teaching should be such that we are aware that within us is not only the baby that is growing physically and that, when it is weaned, gradually absorbs cabbage and oxen, but that is the soul being, in which, little by little, the beings of the higher spiritual world have a share. And by teaching in an educational way, we guide the activity of the beings of the higher hierarchies into the developing child. Man should not just learn to kneel at the altar and pray for his selfishness; man should learn to make a service out of everything he does in the world. Today, it is an urgent task to convey to people that everything they do in the world must be a service to God. But those who do not want to let people partake in these higher tasks of humanity oppose this.

Yesterday, while I was in St. Gallen trying to develop the activity and fruitfulness that can flow from spiritual knowledge in relation to the field of education, I was told that we have now reached the point where the clerical newspapers in St. Gallen have not only not included a text note for this lecture, but have not even accepted an advertisement for it, thus refusing to include an advertisement for it. This opposition is becoming more and more well organized. They understand organization on their side. I only want to make you aware of the fact that resistance to the truth becoming established in the world will become more and more pronounced. I will gradually inform you of these things. I do not want you to remain unaware of this small fact either, so that you may feel that little by little it will not be a task for sleeping souls to stand up for the Christ-Truth, but that it will increasingly become a task for waking souls. Organizations are also needed to be able to deal with the organization on the other side. We will talk about this further tomorrow.

I shall very briefly draw attention once more to what I presented to you here yesterday, because today I shall have further things to add that relate to the human being. What I had to say to you yesterday was as follows: We first turned our attention to the three faculties of the human soul that are more devoted to knowledge. We pointed out that there are essentially three cognitive faculties in the human soul: first, what is the faculty of memory, then what is intelligence, and finally what is sensory activity. Now I drew your attention to the fact that these three soul faculties can only be understood by looking at their development. In order to understand memory, which is relatively one of the more recent abilities of the human being, we must turn our gaze back to times when the Earth was not yet what it is today, when the Earth was undergoing its development as the Moon, which preceded the Earth. So that the first rudiments of what has now become our faculty of memory are to be sought in the ancient lunar period and there appeared, not as memory, but as the dream-like imagination that pervades the human being, which I have often described in other contexts. What was dream-like imagination in the ancient moon period in the beings from which man developed has become the faculty of memory in the earth period. This memory, as I have already mentioned, is more closely interwoven with the physical body than are the other cognitive faculties of the soul. Intelligence is less closely interwoven with the physical body. It is more detached from it, as I described yesterday. But to discover its first rudiments, one must go further back than the old moon time; one must go back to the old sun time and then find the first rudiment of what is present in us today as intelligence in dormant inspiration. As for that which is most divorced from our physical nature, as I explained yesterday, one must go back furthest, although one is least inclined to believe this from the materialistic point of view of our time: for sensory activity, one must go back to the old Saturn time. And one finds as the first origin of this sensory activity, both beings, from which man was later formed, a dull intuition.

Furthermore, we have seen that by carrying these three soul abilities within us, we are at the same time the hosts for beings of higher hierarchies in the organization that underlies these soul abilities. So that through the organization of our sensory activity, we are the hosts of the archai, the spirits of time. They live in our humanity. Through that which we have in us as intelligence, insofar as this intelligence is bound to the mirroring apparatus in us, which reflects back to us our concepts, our ideas, but which come from the spiritual world, and thus brings them to our consciousness, we are the hosts of the archangeloi. And through that which works in our organization and mediates our memory, we are the hosts of the angeloi. Thus we are related to the past through our cognitive abilities, and we are related to the beings of higher hierarchies through our cognitive abilities.

According to an old custom, these three abilities of man are called the upper abilities. And if I am to sketch the human being schematically for you, if I am to present the image of the human being to you as in a diagram, then I would have to draw the following as this diagram of the human being. I would have to start by drawing the faculty of sensory activity. I will try to do it like this, by making a white background (see drawing, hatched in white). I would first have to draw the sensory activity schematically in the human organization, and to get the right proportions, I would have to draw it like this (blue). The main sensory activity is, of course, developed in the head. Although the whole person is imbued with sensory activity, I would first like to draw the main sensory organization here (blue).

If I wanted to draw in the intelligence, I would have to draw it in the following way to make it visible: sensory activity more outward (blue); the intelligence (green) has its mirroring apparatus more in the brain. Deeper down, what underlies memory is already very much connected to the physical organization. In reality, memory (red) is connected to the lowest nervous organisms and to the rest of the organism. I could then create transitions between sensory activity and intelligence by drawing this (indigo) here as a transition. You know that we also have concepts and ideas that are, so to speak, of a descriptive nature. While I have to draw the sensory activity as such in blue, I would have to draw an indigo here as a transition. For the more abstract concepts I would have to draw green, and for that which is in us as memory-based concepts, I would have to draw yellow as a transition from green to red through orange. In this way, I would have to draw the human being in its organization in relation to the ability to perceive, going from the outside in. In the succession of these colors, if you imagine the organization of eyes and ears with blue nuances and that the activity of the senses passes over into the intelligence, the indigo towards the green, lightening through the yellow to the red towards the memory, you get a kind of scheme that, however, very strongly reflects the reality of what the human soul's cognitive abilities or cognitive abilities are.

Now, in human nature, everything plays together in a mess. That is what makes it so difficult for the materialistically thinking person, that in human nature everything plays together in a mess. You can't neatly separate one thing from another in space. In human nature, too, it is not so clearly defined, but if one wants to draw schematically, one can still get a relatively clear picture of all sorts of things. Thus, one can indeed see that the ability to remember is related to the ability to think through their inner properties in the same way that the color red relates to the color green; and just as green relates to blue, so does intelligence relate to the activity of the senses. Now, however, we have other abilities in the human soul, abilities that are more or less bound to physical corporeality in the strictest sense in us as earth people. Feeling belongs to these first. While memory, intelligence and sensory activity are bound to the awakening consciousness in stages, feeling is already something very 'dreamlike' in the human being. I have often explained this. While memory is something that developed in the distant past on the old moon, intelligence on the sun, sensory activity on Saturn, feeling, as we have it today, belongs to the human being on earth. It is essentially something that is bound to the human earthly organization. What we as terrestrial human beings received as an organization actually made us sentient beings in the first place. But just as memory is something that has gone beyond its first disposition and has come to a higher level of development on Earth, and if one has enough of a supersensible vision to recognize that memory is, so to speak, an old human ability, one recognizes that feeling is only present in its disposition. If we look at what the human being calls feeling today with the necessary understanding, we can see that in the future it will develop into something quite, quite different. Just as if, as an observer during the old moon time, we had looked at dreaming imagination and said to ourselves: This will later become the memory of man. In the same way, when we look at feeling today, we must say, understandingly: When the earth will no longer be, but something else will have come out of it, when the earth will have become the future Jupiter, then feeling will have become what it can become. Today, feeling in man is still only embryonic, something that exists as a germ. What it can become will only arise out of feeling. Thus, in feeling, we carry within us something that relates to what it becomes on Jupiter, just as a child in the womb relates to the human being born into the world. Our feeling is embryonic, and it will only later, during the Jupiter period, become that which will flourish as a complete, fully conscious imagination.

Another soul faculty that is tied to our organization is desire. This desire is still much more embryonic than feeling. Everything in our world of desire will only become what it is now germinating towards during the future Venusian age. Today our desires are very closely bound up with our physical organization. They will become detached. Just as our intelligence was bound during the old sun time to the physical organization of the sun, as I have described it in my “Occult Science in Outline”, so is the world of desires of man today bound to the physical organization. It will appear detached from the physical organization during the future Venus period, and it will then appear as fully conscious inspiration.

Among our soul abilities, the will is most embryonic. In the future, the will is called upon to become something very powerful, something cosmic, through which the human being will belong to the whole cosmos in the future, will be an individual being and yet will live out his individual impulses as a fact of the world. But this will only be during the volcanic age, when the will will be fully conscious intuition.

Upper abilities

Lower abilities: Social World

Thus, through our feelings, desires and will, we once again belong to the future. These abilities lie within us in that they prepare the human being for his future being. But here too we stand in a relationship with the world in which these abilities of the human being have their relationships to the environment. Just as, in relation to the spiritual environment, memory, intelligence and sensory activity are related to the angels, archangels and archai, so feeling, desire and will are related to the physical environment, but in such a way that our feeling is related to the world that surrounds us that during our time on earth it gradually consumes the mineral world. All that is the mineral world around us will disappear at the end of the earth's time, and the forces that will consume the mineral world from the human being are the forces of feeling. So we must assume a special relationship between feeling and the mineral kingdom (see diagram). We must assume a special relationship between desire and the plant kingdom. Just as there will be no mineral kingdom on Jupiter, which, as the future planet, will be the next embodiment of our Earth, because during its time on Earth feeling will have consumed the mineral kingdom, so during the Venus period there will no longer be a plant kingdom because human desire during the Jupiter period will have consumed this plant kingdom, and human will during the Venus period will have consumed the animal kingdom. And when the time of Vulcan comes, the future incarnation of Vulcan on our Earth will no longer contain the three kingdoms, but only that part of the present kingdoms that will have become of the human kingdom.

In response to what I have just told you, people may come from the present and say: I am not very interested in what I once was with my memory, with my intelligence and with my sense of being on the good old Saturn and the Sun and the Moon; I am pleased with my existence as an earth dweller, what do I care about what the things that I no longer know anything about went through on earlier planetary embodiments of our Earth? I am not interested in that! And I am certainly not interested in what will become of my feelings, which interest me very much now, on Jupiter or even on distant Venus, what will become of my desires there. These desires drive me now, but I am not yet interested in Lady Venus, because she is not present, and I am only interested in present ladies. And so, right, only with the will in such a distant, distant future!

Certainly, many people in the present feel this way, and culture is very, very much in favor of oversleeping everything that wants to assert this knowledge from the present, that they would not want to wake up to these insights. But human development will not be guided into the future without having such insights. For it is profoundly true that in the human organism, in the physical, in the soul, in the spiritual organism, everything works in confusion; but one must also be able to distinguish the things. Just as the higher abilities could be schematically recorded, from sensory activity to memory, so I can now draw in the lower abilities that are specifically formed on earth (see drawing on page 213). I must then do this in the following way: a somewhat deeper red (unfortunately I do not have the differences here) would correspond to our feeling. But this feeling extends into the intelligence, into the sensory activities everywhere, and also through the memory. I would then have to draw an actual red-violet when I draw the activity of desire. And if I wanted to draw the will as it is today, I would have to draw a blue-green. So that man is a dual being, an upper man (circle at the top), who is essentially a knower, and a lower man (circle at the bottom), who is essentially a desirer, feeling and willing regarded as the two poles of desire.

Now, in the earthly human being, what is the lower human being actually works its way into the upper human being, both the wanting and the desiring and the feeling work into the upper human being (arrow pointing up T). In other words, our sensory activity is such that we have in it everything that has gradually emerged from the dull intuition of ancient Saturn. But if we were to carry within us, through our eyes and ears, only that which comes from the dull intuition of ancient Saturn, we would be very dry beings. We would perceive the outer world as if through senses that worked automatically. We would think soberly and dryly about this outer world, and we would remember what we have experienced without warmth. That we experience what we have experienced as our own affair, that we do not merely look into our experiences with indifference and remember them, looking at our personal life like the individual stones of a kaleidoscope, is what makes our remembered thoughts, our intelligent being, our sensory perceptions, our feelings, desires and wills arise. When we look at things externally, we like them. We like them through our desire, through our feeling or through our will. When we think, we do not just think soberly and dryly, but we bring a certain enthusiasm into our ideas. We would not bring this into it if we only had what the sun has given us as intellectual power; we have this in our thinking because the earth has endowed us with will, desire and feeling, even if these are now embryonic. The same applies to the ability to remember. Those abilities that are called the lower abilities, because they are more closely connected with the body, always play a part in our higher soul abilities. Let us hold on to that for the time being. The lower soul faculties of will, desire and feeling shine through and glow in our higher soul faculties, which would place us in the world like dried-out intestines if they were only what they have become through Saturn, Sun and Moon, and we become warm, feeling human beings, even when we think. There are, however, a great many people today who strive for objectivity by throwing feeling and desire out of their intelligence; but this is either merely an illusion, if people believe that they can throw out the lower soul faculties from the activity of the senses, the intelligence and memory, or if they really throw them out – to a certain extent one can only do that – but then one becomes one's own lower self! It is only possible to a certain extent to expel the lower soul faculties from the higher ones. One can expel them, for example, by stepping onto the lectern and expounding to the foxes and other, later students all kinds of sciences. One can expel the lower, actually earthly soul faculties from the intellect. But one cannot expel them completely. If, after spending the day in philosophy, you do not enjoy your midday meal, then your intelligence is permeated by real desires and feelings, and you grumble about what your housewife has prepared, and in particular, your sense activity of taste, smell and so on. Thus, sometimes, the dry philistine exists in man, who has thrown out the lower soul faculties from his upper soul faculties, and the person who is quite capable of enthusiasm when something is over-peppered or over-salted or even burnt or otherwise not properly cooked in some way!

Our lower soul abilities must interact with our higher soul abilities. But there is actually a wave of development in humanity, precisely since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, since the middle of the 15th century, to make the activity of the senses, the intelligence, purer and ever purer, and later this will also come in relation to memory. This has not yet been affected. The aim is to liberate these faculties, indeed, the aim is that not only the characteristics I have just mentioned in the dry philistine - which only arises because this dry philistine is in fact more affected by what human nature in general does after all. But the physical part of the human being will dry up altogether, as I have already explained in an earlier observation, and will be less and less able to warm and illuminate the higher soul faculties. They will then actually become that dried-up part if they are not filled by what can come from spiritual revelation.

Indeed, we have to fertilize sensory activity, intelligence and memory in the following stages of the earth's development with what is revealed from the spiritual world, because the actual earthly gift that comes for these higher abilities as volition, desire and feeling gradually dries up. We do not merely want to disparage the stuffy philistine, as we have just done, but at the same time we want to admit that he is a pioneer of the drying up of our higher soul abilities in the future, that he already feels in his body what will affect all of humanity; only today he still rarely feels the necessity that this must be replaced by spiritual revelation. It must be replaced by spiritual revelation. Man, accustomed as he has been to experiencing the upward streaming (arrow up) of volition, desire and feeling in memory, intelligence and sense activity, must experience the revelations of the spiritual world through spiritual knowledge ( down arrow, top right), so that his sensory activity, his intelligence, his memory can be filled with that with which they are no longer filled, as our physical body withers more and more in the decadence of the earth.

Let us first of all realize that we are heading for a time when everything that man perceives through sense experience, through intelligence, through memory, must receive spiritual revelation within him so that human culture can progress. Let us now turn to the lower human faculties, which today are only present in embryonic form. These lower human faculties are those that primarily bring us into relationship with our environment. Even inwardly, they are related to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms that make up our environment. By feeling, we feel about the things in our environment; by desiring, we desire the things in our environment; by willing, we directly intervene in the active nature of our environment. We are completely immersed in our environment. And what, we ask, comes of what becomes of the feelings, desires and will of the people who live together on earth?

If you take a spiritual look at everything that is called the social world, you will see that it is entirely the result of the will, desires and feelings of the people living together. And what we experience as human beings through our feelings, what people desire from each other and from nature, and what is done out of will, that is actually the outer world. By desiring, we belong to the social order much more than we realize. We are made into desiring beings by our position in the social world, and our will intervenes everywhere in the social world in such a way that what happens in the social world happens through our will. Therefore, in what we call the social order of life, what people feel, desire and will lives an independent life. Today's Social Democratic Party says: what lives outside is the result of an economy, of economic forces, and how they develop. No, what lives outside is the objectification of the feelings, desires and will of people living together in society. That which first arises in man as feeling creates conditions that then determine the social life of man; likewise desire and even more so will. But everything in human nature is connected. The colors are drawn down there, which correspond to feeling, desire and will. The intelligent properties, the sensory activity, the actual intelligence, the memory work downwards and work out into the social world through our will (arrow down, going to the right).

If, in fact, man increasingly dries up with regard to his physical organization in the direction of the future, then little would be able to flow from the bodily organization into the social order, and sensory experience, intelligence and the individual human memory thoughts would flow into the social world without first passing through feeling, desire and will. In other words: If it were to develop in accordance with the mere organization of the earth, so that our bodily organization dries up and only sensory activity, intelligence, memory remain for us, and these are not fertilized by the spirit either, then a dry intelligence, a merely external sensory perception and merely selfish memories of the individual human beings would want to dominate social life. This would give rise, in ever further development, to what is now beginning in Russia. In Russia, a social order is now beginning to take shape in Leninism and Trotskyism that stems solely from sensory experience, intelligence and the few memories of an egotistical nature of the individual human beings. One does not yet realize that this order in Eastern Europe strives to be a purely rationalistic order, an order that is to be formed only from the cognitive abilities of man on earth, as he has emerged from the Saturn, Sun and Moon man, that everything that can be taken from the spiritual world is to be consciously excluded.

The feeling that teaches one to what degree of rigidity human civilization is coming, so that man will only be a walking machine, that feeling that teaches one what would become of the world if dictators like Lenin and Trotsky were left to take care of it, that feeling must come from such an understanding of the nature of human nature as we have presented to our souls during these two days. From such a realization one sees that it is simply a necessity of human nature that the upper faculties of the soul should be enlightened and warmed by spiritual revelation, lest what intelligence and sense activity and memory would become if they did not fertilize themselves with the spiritual world should flow out into social life. Man must learn to feel what holds him together with all earthly existence, and he must learn to feel, out of spiritual knowledge, what is preparing in the East and what threatens to consume all of Asia in an ever faster and faster development. Man must learn to feel this as the great and terrible disease of present-day civilization, which must be cured. And it can only be cured if it can be diagnosed in the right way.

Practising spiritual science today means seeking out the healing process of the diseased civilization. This should be felt by a sufficiently large number of people, and it should be felt very deeply and thoroughly. Without spiritual science one will not feel this. And now all the leading events are taking place without any sense of what one is actually doing. The Versailles Treaty was nothing other than the instilling of a poison of civilization, a toxic substance that must make humanity even sicker than it was before. For everything that is created without knowledge of the future conditions of life on earth is a disease-causing substance for developing humanity.

We are accustomed to accepting such things as true, spoken from the heart, from the intuitive sense. Here they are not said from such a source. Here they are derived from the knowledge of the nature of human nature. And here it can be shown that the spiritual life of human beings, of which memory, intelligence and sensory activity are the bearers, cannot continue to exist without being fertilized from the spiritual world. This is not admitted today. But why is it not admitted? It is not admitted for a historical reason. Since the middle of the 15th century, more and more of those entities have emerged that are today perceived as the actual bearers of civilization, the modern states. But these modern states can only be in the future that which - I have explained this in another context here - relates to the life of the human being between birth and death. They must not interfere in anything that relates to the spiritual world between people. In the future, people must be able to let the spiritual world into their memory, their intelligence and their sensory activity as individuals. They can only do this as individuals, only as individuals. In the future, individuals must become mediators between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and physical worlds. And people today rightly feel this, although they have almost the wrong feelings in the way they feel it, but they still feel it as something improper when currents that should only flow into individual human beings flow into so-called public state affairs. When the Russian Czar and the Russian Czarina availed themselves of the inner experiences of a Rasputin for their governmental acts, people were right to fear it, because revelations from the spiritual world may only play into the spiritual life, they may not play into the life of the state. Only that which has become our healthy reason through spiritual revelations may play a part in it. Now, Rasputin did not go as far as healthy reason, even if he did go as far as revelation.

On the other hand, in social life outside of it, only that which is connected with the lower abilities of human beings, with the abilities that develop on earth, with desires, feelings, and will, can find expression. These develop in dealings from person to person; and they develop in dealings not with abstract humanity as a whole, but only with circles that are connected by interests, by their particularly constituted desires, by their particularly constituted feelings or by the will that they must develop.

This, however, justifies the necessity for a threefold structure of public affairs. In the future, the state, which must not allow direct spiritual life to enter into its affairs at all, will not be allowed to extend to spiritual life. Spiritual life will have to have its own independent administration because it cannot progress if it does not receive spiritual revelations. A healthy State must renounce spiritual revelations. If it interferes in spiritual matters, it is only to make things as difficult as possible. The spiritual life must be separated and made independent. But the economic life cannot be connected with the life of the state either, because this economic life must be closely rooted in the communities of interests of the individual people bound together in circles of interest, in the feeling, desire and will as it develops in the associations, in the narrower communities.

In short, just as the physicist understands the complex phenomena of physical nature from the simple experiences he makes, so today one must understand from human nature with its higher abilities: memory, intelligence and sensory perceptions, its lower abilities: will, desire and feeling - that which has to happen in the development of humanity. And anyone who today, with social willpower drawn from a strong but empty self-confidence and with the tone that is called the chest tone of conviction in many people today, presents himself and develops social ideas is like someone who stands in front of a telegraph installation, has no idea about electricity and magnetism, these simple facts, and now, out of his lack of knowledge, explains a telegraph installation. The people who talk about sociology today usually talk from a spirit like that — no matter how learned it may sound to many people — like someone who has never heard of the nature of electricity and looks at a Morse code system in a telegraph station and says: “There are just tiny little riders in there, you can't see them, they ride to the other station, you just can't see any of that.” And he explains it all very neatly. This is how Marxism explains social facts, this is how our university sociologists explain social facts. Reality only emerges when one recognizes human nature. But human nature can only be recognized from within the whole cosmic order. Because memory is connected with the extraterrestrial, intelligence is connected with the extraterrestrial, sensory activity is connected with the extraterrestrial. Feeling is something that will only become what it is supposed to be after the earth no longer exists; desire and will in an even more distant future. Just as one must know the simple fact of the thermodynamics of the organism in order to be a physicist, the simple fact of acoustics, so too, in order to have a say today, and as many people as possible must have a say with regard to social facts, one must delve into the simple, elementary connections between the human being and the world, because that which is socially grounded is carried by the human being into the social order. But here, in his own being, man brings in the whole universe. That is why it is also bad for those chatterboxes who, from all sorts of old traditions, talk about man being a microcosm, a small world compared to the macrocosm, and who stick to these abstractions. Only he who knows that there were once ancestors of man as moon people who had fantastic imaginations has a real right to speak of macrocosm and microcosm. The moon has passed away, the earth has come into being. Human memory has arisen out of that which is no longer there, but which once was there. This has no earthly origin. Only the human ego and its expression, the present physical human body with its form, have an earthly origin. One must grasp this in concrete terms, otherwise one has no right to call it anything but a microcosm.

My dear friends, the decadent civilization can only be saved if it is finally realized that man must be spoken of as a cosmic being from the institutions in which philosophy is taught today as a mere sum of expressed abstractions. What has become of humanity through abstraction, through mere abstraction, appears only in symptoms in such philosophies as those of the American William James, the Englishman Spencer, the Frenchman Bergson or the German, Königsberg Kant. These abstractions conceal from humanity what it is. But the living knowledge of the spiritual, which is to be striven for through spiritual science, can bring man to self-knowledge.

More on this tomorrow.

Yesterday and the day before, I tried to explain how necessary it is for the future development of humanity that people come to a real self-knowledge, that is, to a knowledge of humanity. But how it is impossible to come to a knowledge of humanity without finding the connection of the human being with the extra-terrestrial worlds. Of all that the human being carries with him in his essential being through his journey through life, the physical organization is only the smallest part. But only this physical organization, as it is found in the human being today, is fundamentally an earthly product. That which otherwise belongs to the human being's essential being is not an earthly product in the sense that I have discussed it from a certain point of view in these two lectures.

But the present physical human organization already indicates that man as such is a being that points beyond the immediate present. Although the physical organization certainly points to the earthly, in the earthly, man's physical organization points us beyond the immediate world-historical moment into the past and into the future. Among the abilities of man, we have had to emphasize cognitive abilities: sensory activity, intelligence, memory, and we have had to emphasize feeling, desire and will: abilities that are more of a nature of desire.

Now, when we ask ourselves: What must man have in his physical organization in order to develop cognitive abilities? — we must turn our attention to the human head organization and everything connected with it. It is only in the way I explained it yesterday and the day before — but in that way — that the main organization is necessary to develop cognitive abilities for the ego, for earthly human consciousness. It is wrong to believe that the eye is the absolute creator of the visual sensation; but it is right to know that the eye is the mediator of the visual sensation for the consciousness of the I. And the same applies to the other senses, especially the higher ones.

In this way, and with many variations, the human bodily organization points to the earthly; but at the same time it points beyond the present moment, so that we can say: The human being, as we see him before us in his head organization, points to the previous earth life. Just as our intelligence points to the distant, very distant past solar life, so our present physical head organization, with the earthly nature of the cognitive abilities, that is, for the organization of the cognitive abilities towards the I-consciousness, points back to our earlier earth course. I have already pointed out what the human head actually is. You can say the following schematically: The human being consists of the head and the rest of the organization. — Let us say (see drawing), this is the present course of life (center), this is the previous course of life (left), this is the following course of life (right). So we can say: the head of our present life originated through the metamorphosis of our remaining bodily organization in the previous life, and we have lost our head from the previous life. — Of course, I do not mean the physical organization — that is obvious — but the forces, the formative forces that the physical organization really has. What we now carry in us, as the rest of the human organization, the trunk with limbs, in addition to the main organization, the carrier of the cognitive abilities for the I, will become the main organization of our future life on earth.

You already carry within you the powers that will be concentrated in the head in your later life on earth. What you accomplish today with your arms, what you accomplish with your legs, will become part of the inner organization of the head in your next life on earth. And the powers that emanate from your head in your next life on earth will become your karma, your destiny for that life. But that which will be your fate in your next life on earth will pass indirectly through the rest of your organization, through which you will enter into human life today, into your future life as a head.

If today, let us say, you behave lovingly towards another person through an earthly walk, then that is something that your extra-head organism has carried out. That will be a head power that your destiny brings about in your next earthly life. So then, our head with its abilities always points to the earlier course of earthly life, namely to the organization of the limbs. Man is subject to this great metamorphosis. His head is a metamorphosed organism from a previous incarnation, and his present trunk and especially limb organization underlies the organization of the head in the next life on earth.

This is something that must, in a sense, have practical significance in the coexistence of people. For when a person knows that he is integrated into the development of humanity, only then does he feel that he is truly standing in this earthly life, and he will understand many things that are otherwise incomprehensible. We now live, as I have often explained, in the fifth post-Atlantic period. It began in the middle of the 15th century, that is, in the middle of the 15th century, new conditions of existence were given for European civilization with its American extension, insofar as it arose later. But the consequences of these new conditions of existence have not yet occurred. The people of the civilized countries often live in habits, even in thought-habits, which correspond more to the earlier, the fourth post-Atlantic period. We have educated our intelligentsia not in the things that belong to the present, but we have had them learn Latin and Greek and so on. A Greek would have had different views in this regard. He would have looked askance at the time when Greek culture was at its zenith if his son had been taught Egyptian or Persian or something similar instead of Greek. But the time when this was still permissible, when we could still cling to the remnants of the Greco-Latin period, is past. For people born after the mid-15th century are all rebirths, in essence, of those physical human beings who lived in the Greco-Latin period. What did they bring with them, these people? The heads of the bodies they had in the Greco-Latin period. So if someone was born, let us say in the 16th or 17th century, he came into the world with a head, that is, with cognitive abilities, insofar as the head is the mediator of cognitive abilities for the sense of self, which arose from his body from the Greek-Latin period. Therefore, he still came into the world with tendencies that originated in this Greek-Latin period. But this is now partly exhausted or is in the process of being exhausted. Very soon not many people will be born with minds from that time, but more and more people will be born who had their previous embodiment in the fifth post-Atlantic period, not all of them, but many, especially those who set the tone, or at least those who, towards the end of the fourth post-Atlantic period, lived with their bodies doing completely different things than those in the prime of the fourth post-Atlantic period.

This must be taken into account if we want to consciously place ourselves in the development of humanity: you have your head from your previous incarnation and you have your body so that you can prepare a later head for the following incarnation. And the time must come when the lack of awareness of this connection with previous and subsequent incarnations is just as much a sign of stupidity in people as it would be stupidity if one did not know how old one was, if one believed that he was only born last week, although he is already an adult, or if he believed or was made to believe, when he is a ten-year-old boy, that he would always remain a ten-year-old boy, that he would not even become an old man. Today man only lives selfishly in his one life on earth. At the most, he believes that there are a number of earth lives, but it becomes faith, it does not become practical wisdom of life, as this feeling of being in between the incarnations must be; as it must become practical wisdom of life when one has reached the age of forty, that one knows that the forty-year period is the continuation of childhood and youth and is the beginning of growing old and becoming an old man. What human consciousness encompasses must expand. It will not expand in a living way if it is not fertilized by insights from spiritual science. Otherwise it remains a mere abstract belief, otherwise people will continue to say: Yes, I know, I have already been on earth countless times, and I will come back to earth countless times again. But this belief does not matter; only the living feeling of being part of the development of humanity, the feeling: With your head you are actually quite an old fellow, because that is only the fully grown body of a previous incarnation, with the rest of your physical organization you are a baby, because that will only grow into a mature head in the next incarnation – this feeling of the human being as a real duality placed in time is something that must become a part of living consciousness. And just as today one tries to determine, by means of all kinds of skull measurements and similar interesting stuff, how the individual human beings, human nations, human races differ on earth, so in the future, according to soul-spiritual knowledge, which, however, cannot be gained without such foundations as we have developed in these days, one will have to recognize the people who inhabit the earth in their differentiation. We will have to ask about the spiritual and psychological peculiarities of humanity scattered across the earth. And salvation cannot come until our university sciences in particular are completely imbued with the kind of attitude and approach that we have come to know in these days. Our universities will ride humanity into decline if they are not fertilized in all their parts by that cosmic knowledge that can only be gained today through spiritual science. Likewise, in the future, people's religious feelings must be based on what man can know about the spiritual and soul. Otherwise we will not get ahead. For if we direct our attention to the spiritual and soul life, we shall become accustomed to characterizing human groups throughout the world according to their own soul and spiritual qualities, and not merely according to their physical characteristics, as is often done in present-day anthropology. Anthroposophy must take the place of mere anthropology. But the matter has a very serious, practical side. Certain things that are happening in the present, that underlie the serious events of this present, cannot be understood at all if one does not have the opportunity to focus one's attention on the spiritual qualities of the members of humanity. And here I would like to draw attention to something that seems to me to be extraordinarily important. During these terrible war events, well-meaning people have often emphasized one thing for Europe, and actually Ernest Renan, the French writer who described the “Life of Jesus” and the apostles, emphasized this one thing for Europe as early as 1870; during this war period it has been repeated many times. Renan said that for the salvation of Europe it is absolutely necessary that a peaceful coexistence should occur between the French nation, the English state and the German people. In particular, this has often been emphasized during the war by many well-meaning and unbiased people who have not been beguiled by what was officially commanded as opinion or what was spread as opinion by people interested in this or that cause. Now one can say: the development of Europe in recent decades has been so contrary to what reasonable people must regard as a basic condition for the progress of civilization in Europe. Without this peaceful cooperation, these unbiased people said, Europe cannot continue. But this peaceful cooperation never really came about in recent years; at most, a semblance of such peaceful cooperation emerged.

Now, if we look at European conditions from the outside – but also with a mind to examine the spiritual and soul – we can see the essential differences between these three parts of humanity. We must not forget that since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period and then during the course of that part of the fifth epoch that has just expired, Europe has developed and the French nation has increasingly become a unified nation whose members felt themselves to be a unified nation. One could say that the entire spiritual life of the French nation was directed towards feeling itself to be a unified nation, towards bearing in consciousness something of the feeling: I am a Frenchman. One can study how, in the course of the centuries, what is summarized in the four words: I am a Frenchman, has gradually come about. If one is attentive to such a thing as the development of: I am a Frenchman! we must look at the parallel phenomenon within the German development. For example, the expression “I am a German” did not develop in the same way within the now defunct German Empire, nor could it always be expressed with: “I am a German”! — To say “I am a German” with full intensity “I am a German!” meant imprisonment and incarceration. It was the worst political crime. People have forgotten. The worst political crime was to feel German. Because in this Germany, the territorial principality had engulfed everything, and it was forbidden, forbidden internally as a way of thinking, to perceive the territory inhabited by Germans as a single entity. It was only in 1848 that the idea arose among some people that those who belong to the German people could somehow be regarded as a unity. But even then it was still considered something heretical, it was seen as heretical. And then it happened that actually only the people who were historically linked to the development of the German people felt it as something very intimate, that they regarded it as their intimacy. Read about how people like Herman Grimm, who really thought about and talked about such things, looked back on their own youth, which still fell in the years before the 1950s, and how they describe how they had no way of expressing the judgment of feeling, the judgment of the mind: I am a German. There is a huge difference here. But look at this huge difference inwardly. Consider the fact that, although it was a political and police crime to call yourself a German as late as the first half of the 19th century, the unified spiritual culture of Germany had long been established by then. Goetheanism, with all that belonged to it, was there; one did not read Goethe, but he had worked; one did not understand Goethe, but he had said great things for all Germans. But these “all Germans” were never allowed to admit to the outer life that they somehow belonged together. At least it could not be a thought that could lay claim to reality, that is, something lived in the German people, as in the depths of consciousness, which of course had no external political reality. In its historical development, everything that the French felt inwardly, that which constituted their unity, became an external state reality. In Germany, everything that existed in the form of external institutions was in contradiction to the inner spirituality of the German people. This is a very significant distinction that exists between Central Europe and Western Europe. If you take that and describe these things in detail, you would get the history of the 19th century. And if these details were to live in the minds of the people of Europe, who are dependent on living and feeling together, then the feelings of horror that led to today's decline would very soon come to an end. But it will not be possible to develop such feelings in an international way without considering the human being in his entirety and knowing how to look at him in terms of his knowledge and his ability to desire; for it is only by directing human consciousness to these mysteries of the human existence that one becomes aware of the need to engage in such reflections. For these reflections, which we have now undertaken, only then teach the right thing, the thing that matters. Why has the French people become such a compact mass, in which everyone feels French, as it was forbidden for the Germans to do until the German Reich of Bismarckian coloration came into being? What is the reason for this? It is because in France the old Latin-Roman nature has been preserved, the nature which I described to you here weeks ago as being that which is primarily the juridical-national nature. From Egypt, through Romanism, the national-juridical nature entered into Latin. The French nation has taken it over. No other nation on earth understands better than the French people, from their own feelings, what the legal system is and what the state is. But if one really wants to find the right way to penetrate through that, one might say, oppressive thing that the German development still has in the 19th century, this contradicting of the external state development, which made it necessary to be imprisoned if one felt German and not Prussian, not Württemberg, not Bavarian or Austrian, if one looks closely at what , and if one studies it in detail, one really does not study it in the way that the unscrupulous school tradition today inculcates in people, which has become German intellectual life from the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. One studies how Goetheanism flows into the great spirits, who are no longer even mentioned, while the spiritual antipodes are celebrated as great celebrated as great men, one studies how Goetheanism flows into people like Troxler, like Schubert and so on, then one finds out that it was precisely the lack of talent for the state, the drowsiness for the state, the danger of being imprisoned if one wanted to be a citizen of German coloration that now predestined the German people to develop a good understanding for the spiritual, for the life of the mind. It has only been repulsed for the time being by the industrial and commercial development that has taken place since the 1870s. This has thoroughly dispelled the German spirit in Germany, and, as an invasion from abroad, has taken away all that was left of German spirituality. Goetheanism has been forgotten. The fact that a mind like Leibniz's lived among the Germans, for example, is something that high school students should know better than what Cicero wrote, but they hardly know that Leibniz lived.

These are things that come into consideration and that are deeper than anything that is cited today for the differentiation of the European center from the European West. And when one speaks of the need for peace between the European center and the European West, one must be clear about the fact that the whole historical development shows that such a peace can only come about when the Germans themselves feel: they are not predisposed for the external legal state life, they are predisposed to cultivate spiritual life. But it must be made possible for them; today it is made impossible for them, today they also no longer have any responsibility for it. One must know that the actual state people is the French people, because they understand best how the individual human being feels as a citizen. Thus we have spread the spiritual life and the legal and state life over the main civilization of Europe. These things are at the same time, I might say, distributed among the peoples as gifts. And economic life, the actual field of the more recent development of humanity, has been given to the English-American people. All that belongs to the understanding of economic life has therefore found its best expression in England and America. The French understand nothing of economics; they are better as bankers. The Germans have never understood economics; they have no talent for it. And when they have tried to manage the economy in recent decades, always talking about an upswing and a “place in the sun” or something similar, it meant that they were talking about something that was completely beyond their abilities and which they were failing to grasp. Because even all that emerged as economic parliamentarism in the second half of the 19th century originated in England. Those who were good parliamentarians in the economic sense are England's disciples as far away as Hungary. If you look at the people who have best mastered the art of parliamentarism in parliaments, such as in the Austrian parliament for a while, but especially in the Hungarian parliament for a long time, and if you look at where these people have learned, then you will see: In England they have learned economic parliamentarism. — And if you ask: Where did German Social Democracy come from? — then you will find: Marx and Engels had to go to England in order to distill from English economic conditions that which was then theoretically incorporated into German intellectual life and worked through to its logical conclusion. And where are the very first roots of Leninism and Trotskyism? They are to be found in English economic ideas; except that the English will take care not to think through these economic ideas of theirs to their ultimate consequences.

Thus these three fields, which I have often said must be compatible with each other, stand in a threefold relationship: German, spiritual; French, state-legal; and English, economic. How can we find a way to achieve international cooperation? By pouring the threefold structure over all these fields. For then what one person is talented for can be passed on to the other, otherwise there is no way. This is the historical impulse. This is actually how history should be studied, especially in the 19th century.

You cannot study history if you are only taught what is taught in today's schools. This history is only there to be forgotten, because you cannot use it in life. History teaching only makes sense if you can use it in your life. But you will only develop such history teaching if you understand the whole nature of the human being. And so it is with the other branches of our higher education today. The way in which these are cultivated at universities today leads to destruction. Only the fertilization of spiritual science can lead up to a new beginning. What is to happen today has in fact already been prepared by historical circumstances. But do not think that these historical circumstances can be properly understood by anyone who does not first know enough about anthroposophy to become familiar, for example, with something like the three 'beautiful' figures (see drawing on p. 229) in their mutual relationship, or with what we developed here yesterday and the day before. For only by soaring to such thoughts can one then consider the other in its deeper essence. Otherwise one has no interest in this other, otherwise one is satisfied with what school science gives one. And if one is satisfied with what school science gives one, then one is compelled to spend one's free time on the things that today's people spend their free time on.

Such things should truly be known far and wide today, so that there would be a sufficiently large number of people who would have an understanding for these things. Because today it really can't be about anything else but finding a sufficiently large number of people who, to begin with, have an understanding for such things. Until there is a sufficient number of people who have an understanding for such things, nothing can be done with them. One cannot go directly to institutions, one cannot immediately cultivate new institutions, but it is a matter of finding as many people as possible in whose cognitive abilities these things are present, then one will be able to form institutions with these people. But then even the opposing powers will never be able to resist.

Today, one discovers something remarkable when one looks at what people think about European life, about the way in which this European life should unfold from person to person. I must always share with you the details of what is happening. Today I would like to give you just a small sample of what we have had to deal with as important matters. Mr. Ferriere, who I told you about, who spread the defamation that I was the advisor of the former German Emperor, was even called the “Rasputin” of the German Emperor and the like, has been exposed by Dr. Boos has been shown up in an “open letter”, and in a parenthesis in this letter from Dr. Boos, I also stated what I once explained here about my relationship - or rather, lack of relationship - to the German Kaiser. Now the man had to admit that he had lied. But he confesses in a very peculiar way, and this way is characteristic. I will try to reproduce the French sentences in German as clearly as possible. I am actually quite happy to reproduce them in German, because it is only through this that they acquire a certain character that I would like to give them. So, after Dr. Boos's letter, it says here:

“We [the editorial staff] have communicated the above letter from Dr. Roman Boos to our correspondent” — that is, Mr. Ferrière —, “who answers us as follows: 'The above document is typical of the psychologist. Here it shows what Latin irony becomes under Germanic eyes. Truly, these people' — he means those who have Germanic eyes — 'take everything seriously. But my readers, they, they have not been put off! My article contains jokes — de la plaisanterie — but no malice — méchancetés. And if I was badly informed — I declare this as my fault, in the conviction that my interlocutor will not hold it against me. — Elegantly, it is assumed that 'he will not hold it against me'! — 'By interlocutor, I mean the sociologist, of whom I spoke as a sociologist [Dr. Steiner], and not the signatory of the above letter, whose name I did not mention in my article [Dr. Boos]. In fact, au fait, what can you do about this affair?"

So a man is capable of apologizing with such uselessness after not just lying, but slandering in the worst possible way. But one exposes oneself to the danger of being taken 'klobig' again if one takes things so 'seriously', if one maintains that slander is not a 'plaisanterie' but a 'méchanceté'.

Then it continues, and now comes something particularly beautiful:

"At the time I wrote my article, I knew Mr. Rudolf Steiner only from his printed works. Since that time, I have come to know him through people who know him well. My opinion has changed completely, and I had prepared an article in which I express my respect for the moral significance of his personal work. I admit that the letter from M. R. Boos has somewhat cooled my ardor.

Cute, isn't it? Very cute! He would have written the most beautiful article of praise if he hadn't been given such a telling-off! But I cannot bring myself to agree that this is a characteristic of the Latin race (compare “Germanic” above), because it would be somewhat insulting if lying and slander were considered something elegant and praiseworthy in the Latin race, something that is only “plaisanterie”. It cannot be a peculiarity of the Latin race... Now the gentleman continues:

"I could answer this letter a lot of things, but what would be the use of that? - à quoi bon? - One of the Latin qualities is to be brief. I was wrong to leave the terrain of verifiable facts. I withdraw my erroneous assertions and I conclude that the rumors that are circulating, even if they come from several different sources and from people who are well informed, may be false. I take note of this.

So, firstly, the man is so naive that he believes he has to believe all the rumors that are going around, because he is only now taking note of them. But secondly – yes, one again exposes oneself to the danger of being “clunky” in one's thinking or, as Ferriere says, “Germanic”: if one tries to think such “elegant” thoughts through, it is impossible, because, one is obviously not allowed to do so, otherwise one belongs to those people of whom it is said here: “Vraiment, ces gens-là prennent tout au sérieux.” But you just can't help but wonder: so the man is taking action to ensure that people don't believe all the rumors that are going around; but if people are like him, then they are precisely the ones who spread the rumors the most into the most diverse milieus. Only, you can't look for the thought behind the words in the case of such people.

They see from such a document that it is truly not a matter of teaching such people reason. One has only to make the other public aware of what kind of disgraceful people are walking around in the world and writing articles and slandering. Because it is not at all a matter of refuting these people, but merely of rendering them harmless, because the fact that these people exist is the harm.

If nothing is done on the part of spiritual wisdom, we shall go more and more rapidly towards the time when such a mentality will spread more and more. For in the end the materialists of all colours and all environments will say more and more of those who take things spiritually: Oh, those people, yes truly, they take everything so seriously! — It will soon be serious to even speak of the spirit. It is serious, yes; but one should not be serious! As long as such an attitude spreads - and it is spreading - there will be no ground for improvement in Europe. These are the people who have made Europe what it is. But we must work to ensure that a sufficiently large number of people develop an understanding for the need for change. Today, this should really be obvious, at least to those who have in some way come into contact with humanities.

Next Friday I will speak in particular about the development of imperialism in the world, that is, I will give an episodic lecture, a historical consideration of the development of imperialism from the earliest times, from Egyptian imperialism up to today's imperialisms. I would like to give a brief overview of the historical development of imperialism.

The challenges presented by our age really have to be faced by every individual human being today. I have made it quite clear on a number of occasions that to understand the way individuals need to face those challenges we must be aware of how human evolution progresses all over the globe. The whole course of human evolution can only be clearly understood if we gain more profound insight into the powers that intervene in the course of earth evolution as a whole and also in human lives.

I have used a number of different approaches to show that as human beings we are part of an ongoing evolution that may be said to be taking its normal course. Spiritual science enables us to follow its progress over extended periods of time. I have also pointed out that there are certain powers that have different goals for mankind than the powers who desire to guide humankind in the normal course of evolution, a course during which the earth repeatedly comes to physical manifestation. Some of those powers we would call luciferic, others ahrimanic. I have spoken of this a number of times. It is necessary to take a very serious view of these things today, but our hearts and minds cannot really achieve this serious mood unless we pay proper attention to the way these luciferic and ahrimanic powers intervene directly in human lives.

As you know, a new era in human evolution started during the 15th century, very different from anything that went before. Thinking of this you will want to be aware of the many ways in which life is different in the present age, which had its beginning in the 15th century, if we compare it to the preceding age. We may say that one particular feature of the present age is that intellectual thinking has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humankind has to undergo a major process of education in the course of Earth evolution. Part of it is this training of the intellect. Human beings had to find out, as it were, how human life can be lived when the emphasis is on intellectual thinking. They could never have been raised to be truly free individuals if the intellectual principle had not become part of them. We have no clear idea today of the extent to which people differed from us before the middle of the 15th century, particularly in this respect. We tend to take the things we are given for granted, without giving them much thought. We are now generally dealing with the peoples of civilized countries who are inclined to think with the intellect, and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this. That is not the case, however, Before the middle of the 15th century people were thinking in a different way. They simply did not think in the abstract terms in which we think today. Their thinking was very much more vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them. They were much more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul. We are living very much in our thoughts, though we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of the source from which this way of thinking, the intellectual approach which we take so much for granted, has evolved. We shall have to go a long way back in human evolution to get a real understanding of the origins of this way of thinking, this intellectualism. Another question we must ask ourselves is whether anything still remains of the human activity out of which our thinking has evolved.

You know that older evolutionary forces persist into later ages and continue to be present side by side with those that are normal to the age in question. This also applies to our thinking. Reminders, echoes of thinking, of an activity similar to our thinking are experienced in our dreams, when a whole world of images emerges from our night time sleep. Experience teaches us to distinguish between the world of thoughts we evolve between waking up and going to sleep and the world of dream images which we experience in an entirely passive way. If we go back to earlier times in human evolution we find that the further back we go the more does the life of the soul during waking hours come to resemble the mental activity we know in our dreams today. Present-day thinking is the fruit of later stages of evolution. During earlier stages along this path the human soul developed activities more akin to dreaming. If we follow this dreamlike activity of the human soul a long way back we find ourselves going beyond Earth evolution as we know it. We come to a time when the earth had taken a physical form in the cosmos that preceded the present one. We have got used to calling it the Old Moon evolution. Human beings were part of this as well, but in an entirely different form. During that Moon evolution, i.e. the time when the earth materialized in a form that preceded the present one, the human being, the true ancestor of modern man, was still completely etheric. His soul became active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images. The peculiar thing about this was that it related to the outer world in a way that is quite different from the soul activity we know as thinking. I would say that when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves rather isolated within the world. The world is outside us, it has its own processes. We reflect on those processes in our minds, but just when we think we are reflecting most profoundly on those external processes we actually feel ourselves entirely outside them. Indeed we often feel that we are best able to think about those external processes if we keep ourselves well isolated from them, withdrawing into ourselves. The human ancestor who was dreamy in his thinking, if I may put it like this, did not have that feeling. Developing in his way in his dreams what we develop in our way when we are thinking, he knew himself to be intimately bound up in everything he experienced with what went on in the world. We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking. Our human ancestor did have the feeling that the powers alive in a cloud were also alive in his thinking. This ancestor said—and I must translate what he said into our language, for his language was a silent one compared to ours: The powers that are alive and active in the cloud out there produce images in my mind. He saw himself no more isolated from the great universe in which the cloud revealed its essential nature than my little finger is able to think itself isolated from the rest of me. If I were to cut it off it would wither; it would no longer be my finger. The human ancestor felt that he could not exist apart from the universe that belonged to him. My little finger might well say: The blood which pulses through the whole of the body also pulses within me; the whole of my organic life is governed by the same laws as the organic life of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same as the power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. That is how the human ancestor felt himself to be closely related, intimately bound up, with the whole world.

We need to feel isolated from everything that goes on outside us in our thinking, as though the umbilical cord has been cut and we are separate from the essential origins and causes of the existing world. In ordinary life we are not aware of the pulses beating throughout the universe. Our thinking has grown abstract. Our thinking tells us nothing, as it were, of what is alive and active within it. This provides the actual potential for the freedom of human beings, a freedom where we do not feel that something is thinking in us but that we ourselves do the thinking.

The human ancestor was unable to form ideas independently of the universe as a whole. The human ancestor felt himself to be bound up with the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature. He knew that power was also wielded by entities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body, though human beings might feel that they had citizenry of the universe in common with them. The ancestor was not aware of ‘forces of nature’; he felt himself to be in communion with nature spirits. Today we may say that everything that happens in nature follows the laws of nature, and we are part of that nature. For the human ancestor who lived in a far distant past it was natural to say that everything that happened in nature outside himself happened out of will impulses of the spirits of nature. We say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to gravity, and according to the law of gravity the gravitational pull decreases at a rate that is proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. We call this a special case of a law of nature. When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

Certain spiritual powers who may be said to be involved in human evolution thus developed a relationship to human beings. This would normally cease the moment Earth evolution proper began for the human being. At that point human beings would be released from the tutelage of those spiritual powers, powers they had felt to be flowing and floating into them during the Old Moon stage. So we must ask ourselves what it was that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits with whom they had felt at one, however dimly. It happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature. In those far distant times of which I have just spoken, human beings did not yet have the mineral kingdom within them. Their organization would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs, for it did not yet include mineral elements.

To grasp this without getting caught up in preconceived notions we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom. People tend to be superficial in their thinking about such things. We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation. Then, however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone. In reality it is not the actual plant we see. A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception. Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the qualities of an image. Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organization soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom. I have a plant before me. It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom. The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces. I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not perceptible to the senses, has absorbed. That is how it is even with a plant. When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the minerals contained within them and not about the plants themselves. It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

During the Old Moon stage, then, human beings did not have this mineral inclusion. Human beings living on the present earth have been made in such a way that they need the mineral kingdom, having absorbed the mineral kingdom and its forces into them, as it were. What significance does this have for human nature? In the first place human beings acquired a mineral body for thinking in images the way they did at the earlier stage. As evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking. This happened at a relatively late state, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, having been a long time in preparation.

Modern intellectual thinking is based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them. As human beings we need a mineral body first and foremost to be able to think. The older form of thinking in images had been based on what we call the third elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought. Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function. We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities. People, even people of good will who may admit that there is more to life than is apparent to the senses, tend to stick too close to the human form. This anthropomorphism takes over whenever people try and create an image in their minds of anything that is above the human sphere. It is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Buechner¹ of being anthropomorphists. We have seen more than enough of this kind of thing. We have seen the legal way of thinking evolve in the Western world, with earthly misdeeds and crimes judged by earthly judges who impose penalties, and so on. The rewards and punishment meted out for sins, i.e. for something belonging to a sphere beyond this earth and seen more as imperfections in the Christian faith, have gradually come to look more like the proceedings in an earthly court of law. The religious ideas of the West have a great deal of human jurisprudence in them. We let the gods mete out punishments of the kind we know earthly courts of law impose. If we truly wish to get beyond the merely human we must firmly decide not to think in entirely human terms. We must think beyond anything anthropomorphic, and that indeed is what really matters in human life. That is the approach we must use if we want to see clearly that the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace. We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress. They simply do not. We have to accept that as a fact. The original intention was that they should only influence dreams within the human sphere and everything related to dreaming. In the context of today's lecture we refer to them as luciferic spirits. Their proper sphere would be everything that has to do with dreaming and anything related to this. They are not satisfied with this, however. They haunt the human way of thinking that has evolved out of their own sphere, human thinking now bound to the mineral sphere. When we allow anything that normally rules our dreams, the life of the imagination, to enter into our thinking we fall prey in our thinking to luciferic nature, to the influence of spirits that should only have influenced the old form of thinking in images that belonged to the human ancestors. They have retained their power and instead of limiting themselves to our dreaming, our life of the imagination, our creative artistic work, they are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times. Our thinking is still greatly influenced by elements coming from this source, by the luciferic principle.

It is justifiable to ask in all seriousness what powers are these that have such an influence on our thinking. These influences arise from the sphere where we human beings are still rightfully dreaming and rightfully asleep above all else. They come from the sphere of our feelings and emotions. We experience our feelings the way we normally experience dreams and we experience our will the way we experience sleep. There we are still rightly cocooned in a world which becomes a luciferic world as soon as it evolves in our thinking. We therefore will not manage our evolution as human beings properly unless we make the effort to evolve other thoughts as well, thoughts increasingly independent of mere feelings and emotions, of anything arising in us out of dreamlike inner experience even when we are fully awake. Theoretical principles will not help us achieve this, only life itself can do so. We find, however, that the mental habits humankind has acquired put up great resistance to the cultivation of mind and soul that is needed. We must be on the lookout for this resistance. We find that in the present time in particular people are not prepared to listen to anything that does not arise from their own inner prejudices, their feeling of how things should go, their personal preferences. They are not in the habit of listening to anything which in a way has been decided independently of human beings, requiring merely their consent. I should like to give you a brief example which I used on one occasion to explain to someone that there is an important difference with regard to what human beings are thinking.

Many years ago I gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany—today it is no longer in southern Germany—on the wisdom taught in the Christian faith.² —As you know, it is always necessary to limit the subject matter presented in a particular lecture and one can only speak within that context. When people hear just a single lecture, such a single lecture will impress one person in one way and another in a different way, particularly if one has been objective and dispassionate in presenting the subject. It certainly would not be possible for anyone to get an idea concerning the total philosophy that lies behind a single lecture if they just listened to that one lecture. If the wisdom taught within the Christian faith is the subject for example, it will of course be impossible to conclude from the contents of the lecture what the speaker thinks about the connection between light and electricity, say. It is therefore possible for something to happen the way it did on that occasion. I spoke about the wisdom taught within the Christian faith and two Roman Catholic priests were in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said: ‘No objection can be raised to what you have been saying’—this by the way was many years ago now—‘but we have to say that whilst it is true that we say the same thing we do say it in such a way the everybody can understand it’. My reply was: ‘Reverend fathers, surely it is like this: You or I may have some kind of inner feeling that we are speaking for everybody, but that is not the point, for that is a subjective feeling. After all it is perfectly natural—if we go entirely by our feeling I, too, must believe that I am speaking for everybody, just as you think you do; that is self-evident; otherwise we would do it differently. But we are now living in an age when our belief that something is justifiable does not count. We need to let the facts speak for themselves. We must learn to look to the facts. Subjectively you believe you are speaking for everybody. But now let me ask you about the facts. Does everybody still come to your church? That would show that you are speaking for everybody. You see, I speak to those who do not come to your church to hear you speak. My words are for those who also have the right to hear of the wisdom taught in Christianity.’ That is how we must take our orientation from what the facts have to tell.

It is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings. If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking. We would not have gone through the truly dreadful campaign of untruthfulness that has gone around the world in the last five years, the final consequence of something that has long been in preparation, if people had learned to pay rightful attention to what the facts have to tell and not to their emotions, with nationalists the worst in stirring up such emotions.

On the one hand there is the absolute necessity today to do something about our thinking and to comply even if something goes against the grain. On the other hand people dislike having to be so true to reality that one looks to the facts for guidance.

We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do no train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world. Once you have got at least to some extent into the habit of liking to hear the facts you will often suffer tortures when people of the present age want to tell you something. Very often the kind of thing you hear people say is: ‘Oh, someone said something and that was frightful, quite terrible!’ Terrible in what way? You say is was terrible but that only tells me how you felt about it. I really want to hear exactly what it was. ‘Well, it really was terrible what was said there…’ And these people simply do not understand. All the time they want to describe their subjective feelings concerning the matter, whilst you want to hear an objective report of what they actually saw. It is especially when people tell you something someone else has told them, that it is quite impossible to tell if they are simply passing on what they have heard or if they have actually looked into the matter they are talking about. This is an area where one has to remind people again and again that truthfulness concerning the knowledge to be found in supersensible spheres can only be achieved if we train ourselves as far as possible to adhere closely to the facts in the sense-perceptible world. That is the only way in which human beings can overcome the luciferic elements that stream into their thoughts—by learning to base ourselves on the facts.

On the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences, on the other to ahrimanic influences. It had to be said that thinking here on earth evolved from earlier stages of human soul life when human beings absorbed a mineral body, as it were. This mineral body is indeed the organ for the earthly way of thinking. It does however bring it predominantly into the sphere of the powers we call ahrimanic.

We can of course become aware of the need to base ourselves on the facts, on a real world that will get us out of the habit of being swayed by our subjective emotions. We must not, however, fall prey to the kind of thinking that is nothing but an inner activity arising from the mineral body. Here we come upon a truth that many people find highly unpalatable.

You know how some are idealists or spiritualists and others are materialists. There is plenty of discussion in the world as to which is the right approach, spiritualism or materialism. All these debates are of no value whatsoever for certain regions of the human organization. Human beings can develop in two ways. We can use the mineral body we have absorbed into ourselves as the instrument for our thinking, and indeed we have to use it, otherwise we would merely be dreaming. But we can also rise beyond this instrument in our thoughts; we can develop a spiritual point of view, spiritual vision. If we do this we will of course have been thinking with the aid of our material organization, but we will have used this to reach a further stage of human development, ascending to the world of the spirit as a result. On the other hand we can stop at the point where as earth beings we let our mineral body do the thinking. It is perfectly able to do so. That in fact is the danger, and materialism cannot be said to be wrong in its views, particularly where thinking is concerned. This mineral body is no mere photographic print. It is able to think for itself, though its thinking is subject to the limits of life on earth. We need to raise the experience our mineral body is able to give us into the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception.

It is therefore possible to say that it may indeed be true that human thoughts are merely something exuded by the human mineral organization. That may indeed be right, but human beings must first do it right.

Human beings have the freedom to develop on earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not get to the point where mineral inclusion leads to the development of thinking activity. Animals cannot choose to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view. Human beings are at liberty to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view; all it needs is the will to do so out of a materialistic attitude to life.

Human freedom is such that people are indeed free to make materialism come true for the human kingdom, that is, they can take a course that will lead to human beings on earth concerning themselves only with material things. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it is a matter of choice if we become materialists. If we are strong enough to bring to realization what people are told is a materialistic attitude then this attitude will be made to come true by human beings.

This influence on human beings comes from ahrimanic powers. They want to keep everything connected with Earth evolution at the point which has been reached for human beings by that very Earth evolution—that is the point of having a mineral organization. They want to make human beings perfect, but only as far as their mineral organization is concerned. The luciferic powers want to keep human beings, who now have acquired a mineral organization, at the earlier stage that was right for them before they acquired a mineral organization. So we have two powers pulling at the traces, luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic spirits want to get human beings to a point where they finally cast off their mineralized bodies and go through an evolution that has no relevance in earth life and has merely been an episode in earth life. The luciferic spirits aim for the gradual elimination of everything relating to the earth from the whole evolution of mankind. The ahrimanic spirits aim to take firm hold of this earthly, mineral aspect of human beings, isolate it from progressive evolution and let it stand on its own. That is how luciferic and ahrimanic spirits are pulling in different directions.

It is absolutely vital that having presented the large outline we now come to apply this to ordinary everyday life. We do not consider a U-shaped bar of iron to be a horse-shoe when it is in fact a magnet. In the same way we really should not consider human life to be entirely the way it may appear on the outside. If you shoe a horse with magnets you fail to realize that a magnet has more to it than a horse-shoe. Yet it happens quite often nowadays that people speak of human life exactly like someone who shoes his horse with magnets rather than with horse-shoes. People have no hesitation in speaking of positive and negative electricity in the inorganic sphere, or of positive and negative magnetism, yet they hesitate to speak of luciferic and ahrimanic elements in human life. These are just as effective in human life as positive and negative magnetism are in the inorganic sphere. It is just that the idea of positive and negative magnetism is more easily understood. It does not take as much effort to grasp it as it does to grasp the idea that there are luciferic and ahrimanic elements. That is also the reason why we shall only learn to deal with the empty talk one hears today, empty talk that turns into lies, by knowing that it is luciferic by nature.

Similarly we shall only learn to deal with everything that shows itself here and there as the materialistic point of view by knowing that it is ahrimanic by nature. In future mere external characterization will not get us anywhere when we want to understand human life; all we would be doing is talk around the subject and commit the most stupid of errors when we try and apply such ideas to real life. One thing we would not be doing is to see human life in such a way that social impulses can be gained from our knowledge of human institutions. This has a very much to do with the utter seriousness required when looking at everything connected with evolutionary trends where humankind is concerned. We cannot gain understanding of the life we are now living unless we raise our vision from earthly concerns to spheres beyond this earth. There is a particular point to this.

Looking back into earlier stages of human evolution—though not as far back as those I have spoken of earlier—people generally base themselves on such historical documents as are available. There are historians—well-known names—who say that the history of humankind is made up of everything to be found in the written records. If you start from such a definition of history, like the historian Leopold von Ranke, you will obviously arrive at a particular kind of history. The art of writing is itself part of history, however, it has evolved from something else, and in real terms one cannot do anything with this kind of definition.

We need only go back as far as Chaldean-Babylonian times, to ancient Egyptian times, and we shall find that at that period of human evolution human beings still related to the cosmos in a very different way. People today have no real idea of what it meant to connect one's life to the course of the stars, the planets, and their position relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac. These things have become an empty abstraction nowadays. Do you think a modern astrologer delving into ancient astrological writings to compile his horoscopes—if at least he does search through the old writings, and does not produce new ones; the new ones are terrible!—has even the slightest idea of the living connection which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans felt to exist between human beings and the movements and positions of the stars viewed from the earth? Everything is different today. It has to be said that an important part of human evolution since those times has been the narrowing down of human awareness to the physical world. What did those Egyptians know of the earth? It was the ground under their feet. They knew more about the heavens. They moved in the vertical in gaining their experience. The ancient Greeks did not yet go into the horizontal either; they, too, gained their experience by going vertically. The vertical came to be reduced as the horizontal started to spread. The maximum limitation human beings experienced in their knowledge of the heavens came with the great increase in knowledge of the earth that came when men sailed around the globe and found that having sailed away to the west they would return from the east. It was necessary for human understanding in the vertical direction to become obscured. Human beings had to be isolated from the universe so that they could find within themselves the only power that can lead to human freedom. Moral impulses will arise out of this human freedom in their turn.

Human beings therefore no longer relate to the spheres beyond the earth in the vertical fashion the ancient Greeks and Chaldeans did. We have had the training that only a horizontal surface can give and must now ascend again in moral, ethical terms. We must learn how human life is influenced by powers that do not show themselves in the course taken by the world that exists outside us. Those are the luciferic and ahrimanic powers.

People tend to put their minds to other things, however, and sometimes I also have to tell you something relating to our spiritual movement that takes its orientation in anthroposophy. This has accepted the task of working out of the full seriousness the time demands and listening to the language spoken from the cosmos beyond this earth, as it were, a language which tells us that we must once again come to see the way the human being is connected with the whole cosmos. Again and again, however, things make themselves heard in this work—please forgive the abrupt change of subject—which even today draw attention to some very peculiar points of view taken by people who oppose our aims of furthering the progress of mankind. Let me read you a passage from a letter that is really typical. As I said, please forgive the abrupt change of subject but we are obliged to inform you of all kinds of things that are going on at the present time with the purpose of undermining and destroying this movement which endeavours to take up the challenge of the present age.

There is someone in Norway³ who had made it his task to destroy our movement. To assure himself that he has a right to do so, this man is writing to leading figures—that is how one does these things nowadays. He wrote to a publication called Politisch-anthropologische Monatsschrift [Political Anthropological Monthly]. This journal sent him the following information: ‘Dr Steiner is a Jew of the purest water. He is connected with the Zionists, indeed associated with them, and works for the Entente.’ The editor added that they—i.e. people of this kind—'have had their eye on him for some time.’

I just wanted to tell you this in conclusion, as yet another case among the many one gets today, with a new one coming up almost daily. That is the attitude anthropologists are now taking to the efforts being made in the anthroposophical field.

• 1 . Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, German philosopher. Referring to Feuerbach's anthropomorphism, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly quoted from his book Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), e.g. in a lecture given in Dornach on 15 October 1921 (Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie, GA 207, English title Cosmosophy).
  
  Ludwig Buechner, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 2 . ‘Die Weisheitslehren des Christentums in Lichte der Theosophie’ (The wisdom taught in the Christian faith in the light of Theosophy),Colmar, 21 November 1905 (no written record in existence).
• 3 . Details not known.

It has been said on a number of occasions, and also two days ago when I presented the subject from a slightly different point of view, that it is important for us to consider the evolution of the human race in the light of spiritual science and grow aware of the gravity of the present moment. We shall then have to act out of our realization of the gravity of the situation, irrespective of our position in life.

Today I should like to add some further building stones to an edifice that seen in its entirety can show us the present-day tenor of the human mind and spirit and how we shall have to work for the further progress of humankind by taking this state of mind and spirit as our basis. To begin with let us refer to things which in the main are already known to us.

We know that the human race in its present state of civilization has by and large descended from the human race that evolved before disaster befell the continent of Atlantis. It has been said on a number of occasions that Atlantis occupied an area between present-day Europe, Africa and America that is today covered by the Atlantic Ocean. We know that under the influence of that disaster—in the course of its preparation and later as it proceeded—the peoples of that time migrated first in an eastward direction, populating Europe and then Asia as they moved on, and that the European and Asian peoples of the present day are in fact the descendants of the peoples of Atlantis. We also know that civilization then took the opposite route and people coming to colonize Europe brought civilization with them, as it were: cultural contents that had first been achieved in Asia. These then spread further from a number of centres in Europe. Thus I would say that the physical basis for modern civilization is provided by the peoples of Europe and Asia, descendants of the ancient Atlantean race that moved from the west to the east. Civilization itself however moved from east to west. These two movements can only be properly distinguished on the basis of spiritual-scientific investigation. The two are confused in conventional anthropology and it is not realized that only the culture, the civilization, has been transplanted from east to west, whilst the physical basis comes from migrations that proceeded from west to east.

People always have some relationship to the locality where they live. We relate in some way to the soil under our feet, to everything this soil produces, to the way the soil comes to expression in climatic conditions and provides a habitat. You can conclude from this—and spiritual science fully confirms it—that the peoples who went further into Asia in the course of those post-Atlantean migrations inevitably had to develop in a different way from those who had remained in Europe. In ordinary terms this means that the soil of Europe had a different effect on the descendants of the Atlanteans than the soil of Asia. In a way, we can define the difference between the populations of Asia and of Europe. The difference is that particularly during the earliest periods of post-Atlantean civilization, during the 9th, 8th, 7th and 6th millennium BC and the millennia that followed, the people of Asia adopted intellectual thinking, thinking as we know it, in a different way. This type of thinking did not fully emerge until the 15th century, as I said on the last occasion, but it was in preparation for centuries and indeed millennia before that.

This form of thinking as we know it today only developed in very recent times, assuming its true character in intellectual thinking as the soul itself became inwardly active. But the whole of our evolution, particularly in post-Atlantean times, has been tending towards this intellectual approach. It is significant that the post-Atlantean population of Asia accepted all that we may call intellectual more into its soul elements. We can say that due to local conditions the peoples of Asia were specifically predestined for the early stages of intelligence to enter into their souls. The most remarkable aspect of Asian civilization is that the soul element as such became the instrument for adopting the intellectual principle.

It was different with the people who had remained in Europe. Quite specifically the situation was that physical development, the physical organization that later on was to become the real instrument of intellectual development, evolved in such a way that even at an earlier stage it became the essential characteristic of these peoples, constituting itself in a way that was particularly suited to be the vehicle for the intellectual principle. If we therefore wish to characterize the descendants of the Atlanteans' earliest descendants, that is ourselves, we have to say that the Asian peoples got more into the habit of thinking with their souls; the Europeans got into the habit of thinking more with their bodies. That is in fact the major difference between the civilizations of Asian and Europe. If you want to show up the clear difference which exists between the kind of intelligence apparent in the Vedic writings or Vedantic philosophy and other cultural streams in Asia compared to European culture you have to say to yourselves: Asians are thinking more with their souls, Europeans more with their bodies.

The people of Asia may thus be said to have taken the intellectual element into a higher aspect of their human nature, with the result that an advanced civilization developed much earlier. This however was a civilization of the soul that had fewer abstract concepts, a culture that found its own ways to higher things, using the human soul and spirit to reach the soul and spirit of the world without resorting to abstract concepts. That is where the spiritual nature of Asian civilization lies—inasmuch as it is essentially a civilization based on soul qualities. The peoples of Asia largely left their bodies unused when it came to thinking; they merely carried their bodies with them through life on earth. The life of the mind was nurtured entirely at soul level. You cannot understand the peculiar nature of Asian culture unless you look at it from this point of view.

Europeans were basing their thinking more and more on the physical body. That is also why the foundations were more strongly laid among them than in Asia for a culture in which freedom can be the central principle. The people of Asia, endowed with intelligence at soul level, still were more part of the whole cosmic organism. The human body specifically isolates itself from the rest of the cosmic organism. Using it as the instrument for our intellectual life we become more independent, though this independence is more bound up with the body than is the case with the people of Asia who have developed intelligence within the soul principle and are consequently less independent.

As the time approached in the history of humankind that was to bring the Mystery of Golgotha, an advanced culture of soul and spirit had evolved in Asia. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had already reached its culmination and was in the early stages of decline. Do not let us deceive ourselves: European ideas do not make it easy to grasp the great culture which had grown out of the soul and spirit of the Asian peoples. When people who are thoroughly European in their way of thinking, people for whom the physical body is the instrument of thinking, want to get Europeans to appreciate Asian ideas, as Deussen⁴ has done, for example, the outcome in no way represents the contents of Asian civilization of soul and spirit, for everything alive in it has been translated into European thought. It has even happened that interpretations of certain spiritual streams in India caused a sensation in Europe—those published by von Garbe⁵ for instance, yet it was nothing more than European materialism producing a garbled translation of Asian soul and spirit culture. Publications of this kind contain a trace of the real spirit of ancient Asia. It is necessary to point this out very firmly because, as I have said before, belief in authority has reached an extreme degree and people really have nothing in them that permits them to acknowledge the validity of something, except the fact that it has been written by university professors. There is of course no real inner reason why Deussen's or Garbe's botchwork should be considered important in any way, except that there is this belief in authority in Europe which is going sadly astray. People are no longer in a position even to find any kind of inner reason; they merely believe one thing or another to be right because some outer authority says so. It does not help to avoid saying the truth about these things—even if it means making more enemies—for the gravity of the present situation absolutely demands that there shall be no compromise where certain things are concerned and that the truth must be clearly stated.

The advanced culture of the spirit in Asia was already to some extent in decline when the event of Golgotha occurred. This event of Golgotha—it cannot be sufficiently stressed—was first of all taken in and understood by minds that were the product of Asian culture. It is important to distinguish between the Mystery of Golgotha as a historical event that happened in the Near East at the beginning of Christian era and the notions people have of this Mystery of Golgotha. At the time when the event occurred, Europe did not have the capacity to grasp it fully, for it was an event that could only be grasped in soul and spirit. European civilization, however, had spread by using physical matter as its instrument. The event which occurred at the beginning of our Christian era could not be directly grasped in a civilization based on physical and material things. Asian civilization on the other hand had an intellectual life based on soul and spirit and out of this was able to find concepts with which to grasp the event of Golgotha. The event that happened in Palestine was thus poured into the conceptual world of the Orient. In that form it travelled westward through Greece and Italy and came to Europe as a tradition.

People can be given something in an external way that they cannot yet grasp in their hearts and minds. Things may come to them in the form of a tradition or through the written word. Europe initially was given the explanation, its understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, out of the oriental tradition. Christianity was understood in the light of oriental wisdom, a wisdom of soul and spirit that was truly great at a time when the Mystery of Golgotha, and the way Christ related to the whole of Earth evolution, were still perceived gnostically. It dwindled more and more as Europeans were increasingly blending their own unique characteristic into this tradition. They had to bring their particular characteristic of an intellectual life bound to the physical body into the way they saw these things. The following happened, particularly in Europe: In early times the human bodies of Europeans were very much the instrument of their kind of elementary intellectual thinking, but then this body gradually began to die. Physical evolution of European humanity until the 15th century and even to this day consisted in the physical body growing more and more dead. Our physical bodies are growing denser and denser and more and more bony. We cannot demonstrate this with the methods of ordinary anatomy and physiology, but it is true. We no longer have bodies as inwardly alive as those of people living in the 1st, 3rd and even the 10th and 11th centuries. Our European bodies of today have grown bony, paralyzed, compared to those ancient bodies that were inwardly alive. Thus you have on the one hand a tradition designed for the soul and spirit of Asian people who preserved the ecclesiastical creeds, and on the other hand a more and more European body that increasingly felt those Asian traditions to be alien and in the end no longer found itself able to take in the ideas coming from Asia.

From the middle of the 15th century onwards the influence of the bony European body has been such that in the end that old tradition only survived in empty outer phrases among religious communities. For many centuries the tradition had been so much alive that little regard was paid to the Gospels and people took their cue from life itself. As the European body came to die off people felt impelled to say: Let us cast off the old tradition; we want to put our faith only in the Word, the Word as it is written. People believe they have the Word when in fact they only have a poor translation of it. It gradually came about—though no one is willing to admit it—that really all one had was the outer shell of the Word of old that once held within it the tidings of the Mystery of Golgotha in the garb of oriental wisdom, a wisdom of soul and spirit.

This oriental wisdom is little understood by the people who generally interpret or translate the Gospels; they understand little, if any of it. The point is that it is necessary to see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light. However, unless we Europeans get beyond what a dying physical body is able to give we will be unable to do so. We must develop through spiritual science and come to grasp the spiritual world in a way where we are independent of this body. Our future salvation entirely depends on our ability to grasp the spiritual world in this way, independently of our physical bodies, going straight for the spirit. It will have to be different in essence from the oriental culture of soul and spirit, which came as though of its own accord as human beings evolved. Europeans of the present time will need to achieve it by their own efforts. They will have to nurture spiritual science. They will have to create an educational system where from the bottom rung upwards spiritual science is not presented as a theory but flows into everything we do as we teach and train the children. Spiritual science should also flow into higher education and should be alive in everything connected with art, literature and so on, everything that is our common cultural life. This European culture must provide for the nurturing of spiritual science itself. On the basis of such a spiritual science the Mystery of Golgotha will then be seen in a new light. We shall have to say that those were the old times when the Mystery of Golgotha was only interpreted in the light of the wisdom of spirit and soul that belonged to the Orient. A new wisdom will have to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in a new and living way.

We have spoken about these things quite often and in many respects. It is necessary, however, that they take hold of our soul from all sides. It is necessary that we come to experience a seriousness that absolutely fills our hearts and minds with the realization that new insight has to be gained into the Mystery of Golgotha. This is something that makes the seriousness that is required particularly in Central Europe even more austere.

Looking with more profound insight at what has become cultural life in the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th century particularly in Central Europe you really have to say this: The bodies of people in Central Europe were already dying, but they still were so much alive that the people were able to rise to a world of ideas more alive than ever seen before in the evolution of humankind. Nowhere else did human minds rise to abstract ideas in such a way that whilst living in these abstract ideas one was not in the sphere of death but in the sphere of life. That was achieved in Goetheanism, for instance, and by German idealist philosophers. It is not something to be found anywhere else in human evolution. It was also in a way a culmination, one merely has to get this quite clear in one's mind. People today no longer want to know how Schelling, for instance, to take just one of the Goetheanists, moved in a sphere of abstract thoughts and yet, whilst speaking in quite abstract terms, was alive in the way he moved in the sphere of abstract thoughts: as alive as people usually are when they speak of food and drink. The same applies to Fichte. This was an area of human evolution where we are especially aware of an ability to descend into the sphere of concepts and ideas in a way that was very much alive. Something quite special exists therefore for this Central European population, special in the whole context of human evolution in more recent times. They have their own characteristics that enable them in particular to take up the vocation of humankind for the present day: namely, to enter into spirituality again. These characteristics only came to be submerged beneath other things in the second half of the 19th century.

It is terribly painful to be aware of a very sleepy human being in Central Europe today walking over the graves of Lessing and Goethe and Herder and Schelling. This human being considers its role to be that of a soul asleep. If we were to pick up the thread of the writings and thoughts of those great minds, not in an external way but entering into the spirit in which they wrote, we would find the element that can raise Europe to the heights. Europe cannot be made to rise to the heights by Gospel words repeated parrot-fashion in the churches that no one understands. Europe can only be made to rise if people seek to grasp the spiritual worlds by developing further what Herder, Goethe and others have been working towards. There is however hardly any awareness of this at the present time. It is a sad sign of the times for example that in a cultural community which possesses treasures like Fichte's Goal and Purpose of the Human Being, Schelling's Bruno and Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man ⁶ —there are many more I could mention—that in such a cultural community people could follow a trend that led to the inane and superficial Americanisms of Ralph Waldo Trine ⁷ and the like. We have things that are much more sublime but we let them sleep and turn to other things.

The further we penetrate into the actual life of the mind and spirit the more it becomes apparent that something new is emerging in the life of humankind today. Central Europeans are far from understood by Western Europeans; Western Europeans are far from understood by Central Europeans, even in ordinary life. People are not aware of this, however. They think they understand each other. They do not realize that they are not communicating their thoughts. I am not referring to the way Americans and Europeans fail to communicate, but Central and Western Europeans. You come across some odd things in this respect.

The last time I was here I told you that vilification is rife not only within Germany but also outside its borders.⁸ I told you about this man Ferriére,⁹ for instance, who spread one of the strangest tales in a Swiss-Belgian journal, saying that it was of course generally known that I was ‘Rasputin’ to William II¹⁰ and had a major share in all the bad advice William II was given in those terrible days. This slanderous story came to be widely known particularly in French-speaking Switzerland and I therefore defended myself by writing down the truth of the matter, stating the bare facts. I said that I had only ever seen the former emperor briefly and from a distance, had never spoken with him at all and never sought to contact him even through others. These are the bare facts I stated in a letter to Dr Boos¹¹ who then gave Mr Ferriére the necessary set-down. The matter was published in the journal in question together with Ferriére's reply. This went more or less as follows: Once again the great difference between the Latin and the Germanic mind is demonstrated. The Germanic mind takes everything so seriously. ‘My readers’, Ferriére wrote, ‘will of course not have been deceived; they will have realized that what I wrote was intended to be plaisanterie and not méchanceté.¹² Apart from that let me state that it is possible to learn that something we may have heard from people whom we think we can believe need nevertheless not be true, even if it is a widely believed rumour. I am taking note of this.’ And so on.

That was the elegant reply the ‘Latin mind’ was able to give, with a plaisanterie concerning the Germanic mind. At least one has the satisfaction that these things have come to the fore; very often they are not even noticed.

They assume even greater significance where a more profound view is taken of the world, at the point where they relate to initiation knowledge and everything connected with this. This is a sphere where it is indeed necessary to mention these things just for once, though some people consider it highly dangerous to touch on them even today. I want to talk to you today about a matter that in the opinion of representatives of initiation knowledge, Western representatives in particular, should not be discussed.

Western representatives of initiation knowledge will tell you again and again that it simply will not do for anyone to spread initiation knowledge they have gained for themselves. You will find that when genuine initiates in the West present initiation knowledge in books available to the public they always deny having personal experience of the things of which they are writing. You will find that it is quite typical—such things have appeared particularly in America—to have a preface, that is part of the whole technique, which says the following: ‘None of these things are my own, of course, for if they were just my own I would not mention them’. Take a look, you will find this kind of thing in many documents published particularly by Western initiates. If you ask why it is done like this you will be given an answer that within certain limits is certainly true for Western initiation science. You will be told that anyone learning something directly from the spiritual world, who knows the secrets of the spiritual world, cannot tell another person that he has it from personal experience—these will be the words used to answer the question—for if he betrays the fact that he has initiation knowledge from personal experience he becomes dependent for life on the person to whom he betrayed his secret.

This attitude has its roots in the essential nature of Western initiation science. The effect is that anything to do with initiation is discussed in a very superficial way among Western initiates in their societies, and that there are indeed initiates moving around among Western humanity of whom nobody knows that they are initiates. This is an attitude that has to be overcome in the new age; it cannot hold true in Central Europe, and the spirit which must arise in Central Europe will have to fight this attitude. It will have to fight it by coming to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in the new and spiritual way I have talked about. It will have to come to understand the presence of the Christ in human life.

Here lies a major secret. The usual initiation knowledge in Western countries is far removed from Christianity; otherwise the Theosophical Society would not have excluded or caricatured the Christian faith and presented a purely oriental, pre-Christian Indian wisdom as something new. It is a peculiar characteristic of this Western initiation knowledge that its initiates only have something of their initiation if they have at least one pupil who reiterates their ideas. There is no point whatsoever in having initiation knowledge just for oneself. If your eyes look straight ahead you will not see a single object. In the same way you will not encounter your own ideas of the spirit as a Western initiate unless you can see your own ideas repeated by someone else. There are all kinds of indications of this, but it is not properly realized.

Indeed, if this is the case then it is true that someone who betrays to another person the fact that he is an initiate will be in the power of that other person for the rest of his life. The other could then refuse to serve him and say: I am not going to repeat your ideas. That implies some degree of dependence. That essentially is a characteristic of the initiation knowledge I have frequently referred to in other respects, referring to it as the dominant initiation science in the West.

There is only one way out of this dependence on one's followers and that is to be in communion with Christ, who can truly be found on earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. We are not then in communion with a human being who is not perceptible to the senses but with the first among brothers who has come among men, with the living Christ walking among us. If we are in a communion with Christ the way we had to be in communion with other persons in pre-Christian initiation, we need not be afraid to share our own wisdom with our fellow human beings. There is no other way in the present time in which original initiation wisdom can be directly communicated than by being in communion with Christ. There is no other way. A genuine initiation wisdom of the present age will have to look for such communion with Christ.

If this initiation wisdom were not there to be found we could make no progress in social understanding. It is no longer possible to evolve social ideas nowadays unless we base ourselves on initiation. Yet we have need of social ideas. A social system born wholly out of Western initiation wisdom would depend on that initiation wisdom being kept secret even at its lowest levels—certain higher levels cannot be made known today because people must have the necessary preparation. Keeping things secret in this way is not compatible however with the principle of people being equal, a principle modern Europeans and indeed the whole civilized world consider important today. So you see that exactly when it comes to initiation wisdom a colossal difference shows itself between the Central European and the Western mind. The difference becomes even more apparent in the case of initiation wisdom than in the situation where people talk above each others heads in the present time and believe humankind can be brought to an abstract uniformity. That cannot be done. Human beings are differentiated and this differentiation shows itself particularly if one takes a more profound look at initiation knowledge. This is an important subject and it will no doubt be necessary for me to explain it in more detail during the time I am here. When it comes to genuine spiritual insight one simply cannot be slipshod about things, and a lack of seriousness concerning the truth is unacceptable. It simply will not do. Truthfulness is of the essence.

• 4 . Paul Deussen, philosopher and Sanscrit scholar.
• 5 . Richard von Garbe, Sancrit scholar.
• 6 . Johann Gottlieb Fichte, German philosopher. Die Bestimmung des Menschen 1800.
  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling German philosopher. Bruno, oder über das göttliche and natürliche Prinzip der Dinge. Ein Gespräch (Bruno, or concerning the divine and natural principle of things. A dialogue).
  Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, German dramatist, poet and historian. Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (letters on aesthetic education) 1795.
• 7 . Ralph Waldo Trine, American writer.
• 8. Stuttgart, 21 December 1919. In Weltsilvester and Neujahrsgedanken GA 195. English in The Cosmic New Year. London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1938.
• 9. A. Ferrière. La loi du progres economique et la justice sociale. Suisse-Belgique Outremer juillet-aout 1919; 1: 3-4
• 10. Grigoriy Efimovich Rasputin, reputed ‘holy man’ who influenced the Tsarina and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
  TN. William II (1859–1941), third German emperor and ninth king of Prussia.
• 11. Dr Roman Boos. anthroposophical lecturer, writer in the field of social sciences. Pioneer of the Threefold Movement.
• 12. plaisamerie—joke; méchanceté—spitefulness, malice.

There are a few things I want to add to the points we have been considering. They may help to make some of the ideas on which we must base our actions more real. I am looking for ideas that are less abstract than the vast majority of ideas by which people allow themselves to be governed today. We really need such concrete ideas, for they are the only ones that enter into the realm of feeling for human beings, and therefore into real life. They are the only ideas to fire the human will and human actions.

Looking at the world today we should really consider the most striking characteristic of social life in the civilized world to be that the smaller communities of past times have given way to quite large human communities. We need not go far back in human evolution to find that social communities extended only over limited territories. The civic communities of towns formed a relative whole, and fundamentally speaking it is only now, in quite recent times, that large empires have arisen, that the empire of English-speaking peoples has come about—I have characterized this a number of times. None of us should have any illusions concerning the consequences, particularly in Central Europe. It needs the point of view of spiritual science, however, to get the right ideas about these things, ideas that fully relate to reality. The spiritual-scientific point of view makes us go back to earlier stages of human development to see that then, too, people formed certain kinds of communities, though these should not be called ‘states’—as I have said on a number of occasions—for that would cause tremendous confusion. Instead, let us find some other, more neutral term. Let us say that ‘realms’ arose. Such realms were ruled by individuals, or by particular groups. Subsequently states developed out of this, and today states are taken so much for granted that no one would think of going against them—at least in certain areas no one would go against them.

What is worse, they are so much taken for granted that people are not even inclined to think about them.

Behind this, however, lies something that unites human beings in their inner soul life with the spiritual, the divine principle, as it came to be called during different stages of earth evolution.

If we go back to prehistoric times, times that only partly extend into historical times, we find that in those prehistoric times the idea of a ruler of the realm, as we may call it—whatever words we use do not really fit those earlier ideas—was quite different from what we take it to mean today. The idea of the ruler of an earthly realm came very close to what people knew to be their idea of a god. These things inevitably must seem highly paradoxical to modern minds, though that is only because modern minds are little inclined to take serious consideration of things that existed during the past in human evolution and do not fit in with the way of thinking that has become customary in Western Europe and in its appendage, America, over the last three or four hundred years.

Of course the way a ruler of the realm was introduced to his office, at least in many empires, was very different in those early partly prehistoric times. We need only go back as far as ancient Egypt, meaning the earlier, partly prehistoric times of ancient Egypt, or as far as Chaldea, and we shall find that it was considered a matter of course that regents were prepared for their office by the forerunners of our present-day priests. People had quite concrete ideas as to how a ruler should be prepared for office by the priesthood and its institutions. They felt that with this kind of preparation the person called to be regent truly became what the Chinese, still having a faint notion of this, called the Son of Heaven. There was an awareness that someone called to rule over some region had to be made a kind of Son of Heaven. What was in people's minds was however something quite different from the one and only idea we have today when we speak of training a person or preparing them for something. You can go to great lengths to explain that one should not train people for some office or other in this world by merely implanting intellectual knowledge into their souls, but that the whole person needs to be developed; practically all our ideas today on development, education and so on tend to be abstract to an extreme degree. People have the idea that only some aspect or other of the human being should be changed or transformed to advance him in his training, his preparation for some office. No one thinks that development should be such that the individual undergoes a complete change. Above all no one thinks that something objective should enter into the soul of that individual, something that was not there before. No one has that idea. I could characterize this more or less as follows: I am talking to someone who is the product of the natural and social life of the present day. He tells me this and that, I tell him this or that. The person who speaks to me bears a name: he is the product of the usual natural and social background that people have today. The same applies to me. That is really almost the only way in which we behave towards each other nowadays, the way in which we look at each other.

In the times of which I have been speaking that would have been a very alien notion. It was above all alien to people called to hold important offices, to be leaders within the human community. The external natural background—family origins, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on—was of no real concern if the people concerned had been properly prepared for their office. The things we look for and find in present-day individuals who have been raised to the highest spheres were then of no account. People felt that if they spoke to someone who had been properly trained in this respect it was not the ordinary ego that spoke to them: i.e. an ego born in some place or another, bearing the imprint of some social background or other. Instead they felt that something was speaking to them that had been made to come down from spiritual heights to take up its abode in a human individual thanks to the preparation and training given in the mystery cult. This must of course sound incredibly strange to present-day people. It is however necessary to stop harbouring confused notions about these things and to form ideas that have their basis in truth.

The idea was that education—not all training but the training of people called to high office—should enable spirits from the higher hierarchies to speak through these individuals, using them as their instruments. Those instruments were prepared by training, so that spirits of the higher hierarchies would be able to speak through them. There was general awareness of this, particularly when the population at large came to form an opinion about the identity of their ruler. Remnants of this still survive, for instance in the title Son of Heaven for the ruler of China. That was the level of human awareness in earliest Egyptian and Chaldean times. Spiritual science has established this. To the people at large their ruler was God. Basically they had no other concept of divinity. The preparation of the ruler had been such that the outer physical form was nothing, it merely made it possible for a god to move among human beings. The earliest inhabitants of what was later to become the kingdom of Egypt quite naturally accepted the fact that they were ruled by gods who walked on earth in human form. In this respect the earliest social awareness of human beings was entirely realistic. There was no recognition of a separate world beyond, of a separate spiritual world. The spiritual world existed in the same place as the world within which people moved on earth. In this world, where human beings walked the earth, not only ordinary human individuals were walking about in physical form but also gods. The divine world was right among them, made absolute and visible under the conditions regularly created through the mystery cult. When such a ruler wanted something, decreed something, it was a god who wanted it. To the minds of earliest humankind during that partly prehistoric period it would have been pointless to question whether something decreed by their ruler should or should not happen; it was after all a ‘god’ who wanted it.

Earliest humanity thus connected the spiritual hierarchies with everything that happened on earth. Those hierarchies were there in their midst; they were not something to which one first has to ascend by some kind of spiritual, inner means. No, they were present in the mysteries as the training given to physical bodies found suitable for preparation as dwelling places for spirits of the higher hierarchies, so that these might walk among human beings and be their rulers.

This may seem strange to modern minds, but modern minds will finally have to leave behind the narrow-minded views they hold today, ideas only three or four hundred years old as we know them today, and take a wider view. We cannot develop and think ahead to the future unless we broaden the tunnel vision which has evolved in almost every sphere of life. We must expand the time horizons we survey and consider larger evolutionary time spans than present-day history normally covers.

The things of the past, things that existed in historical and prehistoric evolution, do of course give way to other things as time progresses, but in certain areas they are retained. They are often retained by becoming external, continuing in an outer form and losing their inner meaning. The awareness of the godlike nature of the ruler that was a feature of earliest imperialism still comes up here or there in the present age, except that it no longer has any meaning, since mankind progresses and does not stand still.

Not long ago a Roman Catholic bishop addressed a pastoral to his diocese¹³ in which he stated nothing more and nothing less than that a Roman Catholic priest conducting an act of worship was more powerful than Christ Jesus himself. Acting as the celebrant, the priest coerced Christ Jesus, the god of Christianity, to enter into the physical world as the priest performed the act of transubstantiation. The god might be willing or not, the act of transubstantiation forced him to take the route prescribed by the priest. It is really true that very recently a pastoral referred to the sublime power of the earth-born ‘priest god’ over the ‘inferior god’ who descended from cosmic heights and walked on the earth in the flesh of Jesus. Things like this have their origin in older times and have lost their meaning in the present age. Some people representing certain confessions know very well, of course, why they keep throwing such things into human minds. They have become just as meaningless as the words modern rulers write in albums: The king's wishes are the supreme law.¹⁴ These things have happened in our times. Humanity, fast asleep, has said nothing at all about it and still says nothing now to things going on that bode ill for humankind, things one gets used to, things one does not want to see. Today we are altogether little prepared to take note of major events in human evolution.

That was a first stage in the evolution of human empires: when the ruler was the god. This way of looking at it was still very much alive in Roman times. Whichever way you may look at Nero, as a fool or a bloodhound, for the large majority of the Roman people Nero's dreadful tyranny merely made them marvel that a god could walk on earth in such a guise. Many of the citizens of imperial Rome never doubted that the figure of Nero was that of a god.

A second stage in the evolution of empires came with the transition from a ruler who was a god to one who ruled by the grace of God. During the earliest times of human evolution on the civilized earth the ruler was God. At the second stage the ruler stood for God; he was not indwelt by the god himself but inspired by God, given special grace. Everything he did would succeed because divine power—now no longer within him but in a realm close to the earthly realm—flowed into him, inspired him, filled him, and guided him in all he did.

To describe the essential nature of such a second stage ruler we have to say that the ruler was a symbol. At the first stage the ruler was a divine spirit walking on earth. At the second stage he represented what that spirit signified; he was the sign, the symbol in which the spirit came to expression. The ruler became the image of God.

The principles governing those external social relationships also came to expression in the institutions which became established. In earliest times empires were so constituted that a number of people were governed by a divine spirit. This god would be similar to them in external appearance but utterly different inside. At the second stage we find empires where the leader or leaders represent the god or gods and are symbols for them.

At the early stage of human empires discussion as the whether the ruler, the god, was acting rightly or wrongly was beside the point. At the second stage it began to be possible to think whether something he had done was right or wrong. At the early stage everything the ruler did, thought or said was right, for he was the god. Then, at the second stage, some other spiritual sphere was felt to exist side by side with the earthly realm, one that has the god, the ruler given the grace of God, within it. The power streaming into the earthly realm, giving direction and orientation, was felt to come from that other realm. The institutions and human individuals in the earthly realm were the reflection of something streaming in from the realm of the higher hierarchies.

It is interesting to find out, for example, that Dionysius the Areopagite,¹⁵ also called the pseudo-Dionysius, who was much more genuine than orthodox science imagines, presented the right theory concerning the way human empires were ruled by divine empires so that the conditions and institutions created among humans were a symbol of what existed in the divine realm. Dionysius the Areopagite wrote that there were heavenly hierarchies behind the human hierarchies on this earth. He stated very clearly that the social structure of the priestly hierarchy here on earth, from deacons and archdeacons all the way up to bishops, ought to show that the relationship of deacon to archdeacon is the same as that of angel to archangel, and so on. The earthly hierarchy should truly reflect the heavenly hierarchy. This refers to the second stage of empires. Something was able to evolve that was to govern human ideas until quite recent times. After all there existed in Central Europe until 1806 an institution that in its title gave expression to the way the heavenly and the earthly principle were seen to be one: the Holy Roman Empire, an empire seen to be based on the power of heaven. The words ‘of German nationality’ were added [to the German title] to show that the empire was also of earthly origin. The way the title evolved it is evident that a whole empire was formed in such a way that it should be seen to be the image of a heavenly institution.

Such were also the ideas behind St Augustine's City of God and Dante's work On Monarchy.¹⁶ If only people were not so limited in their ideas they could take a wider view when reading something like Dante's work and realize that Dante, who after all must be considered a great thinker, still had ideas in the 13th and 14th centuries that are radically different from our modern ideas. If we were to take such things in historical evolution seriously we would give up those narrow ideas that do not even go back as far as Dante but are just a few hundred years old. The ideas used by people nowadays to fill their heads with illusions, wanting to understand history by merely going back as far as ancient Greece, are limited ideas. Yet it is only possible to understand the whole structure of ancient Egypt, for instance, if we know that the ancient gods still walked on earth. In the times that followed gods no longer walked on the earth, but the institutions created on earth had to be an image, a symbol, of the divine world order.

Then something arose for example like the possibility to reflect on the lawfulness of things, to reflect on such things as the fact that the human intellect can arrive at a judgement as to what is lawful and what is not—all this only became possible during the second stage of imperial development. During the earliest stage it was pointless to reflect on what was lawful and what was not. People had to look to what the ruler said, for the god lived in him, he was the god. In the second stage, human judgement could be used to determine that there is something in a spiritual realm next to our own realm that we cannot reach as physical human beings but only as human beings of soul and spirit. Then people no longer believed, as they had believed in earlier times, that the divine could unite with the whole physical human being, that a human being could indeed become a god. At most—using mystical language to define the living truth about public institutions—people believed that the human soul element could unite with the god.

Basically it is true to say that no one nowadays is able to understand the way things were said in works written and published as late as the 13th and 14th centuries unless one knows that the people of that time had quite a different awareness, a feeling that some degree of divine inspiration was alive in those who were called and trained to hold special office. Oddly enough things referring to something rather serious will often become derisory expressions at a later point in time when the evolution of humankind has progressed. Someone saying ‘God shapes the back for the burthen’ nowadays would say this more or less as a joke. Yet though it may be said today partly as a joke, in the times when empires were at their second stage of development it certainly held true and was to the forefront of people's minds. It applied not only to people but within certain limits also to what was being done. Rituals were made to be such that the actions performed in them reflected what went on in the spiritual realms. The rituals performed were spiritual events reaching across into what went on in the physical world. People very much believed the spiritual realm to be adjoining the physical realm, but they also thought that it extended across into the earthly realm and that the symbol or sign of the spiritual realm was to be found in the earthly realm.

Very gradually people ceased to believe in the validity of this. An age was to follow where this awareness of the connection between earthly and spiritual things was to fade. In the days of Wycliffe, of Huss,¹⁷ people began to dispute things which it would have been unthinkable to dispute before. They were in disagreement on the significance of transubstantiation: whether this ritual act had anything to do with what went on in spiritual worlds. When people begin to disagree about such things, old ideas are coming to an end. People no longer know what to think; yet for centuries, indeed millennia, they had known exactly what to think. It always happens that certain things normal to a particular age continue to play a role in later ages. They are then out of place, anachronistic, luciferic. That is what has happened to the great, far-reaching symbols relating to a particular age when they showed how ritual acts and the like performed on earth Were connected with divine and spiritual happenings in the world. Those symbols persisted during later ages and certain secret societies preserved them in a luciferic way. Western secret societies in particular have been preserving such ancient symbols. They are traditional in those societies, though they have lost their real content. On the one hand, then, we see certain secret societies—Freemasons, Jesuit organizations and denominational groups have arisen from these—preserving, in a way, those symbols which only had meaning in an earlier age. On the other hand we see how words preserve ideas that belonged to an earlier age in a basically luciferic way. Words used In everyday life have also lost their original substance, lost the context of a way of thinking when those words were symbols of spiritual things. For the spiritual content is gradually lost and words become empty symbols, signs without meaning.

During a third period, at a third level of empire development, there was no longer any awareness of individuals being given the grace of God, of divine elements entering into earthly events, earthly speech. The spiritual realm was now entirely in the beyond. The opposite of what had existed at the first stage of empire development now held true. During the first stage the god lived on earth, went about in human form. During the third stage one can only think of the god being present in an invisible world that is not perceptible to the senses. Everything people were able to use to express their relationship with the realm of divine spirits lost its meaning. The word ‘god’ continues to be used. When the word ‘god’ was spoken in the distant past people were looking for something that appeared in human form, walking among human beings. It is not that human beings in those very early times were materialists. Materialists only became possible once the spiritual realm had been banished beyond the sense-perceptible world. During the earliest period of human evolution the spiritual world was right there among human beings. There would have been no need for someone living in ancient Egypt during its earliest times to say: The kingdom of the divine is at hand. He would take that to be self-evident. At the time when Christ Jesus appeared among men people first had to be told: ‘The Kingdom of the gods cometh not with observation… for, behold, it is within you.¹⁸

We are now living in an age when it would be a nonsense to look to a person for anything but a straightforward development of what he was as a child, a development based on cause and effect. We live in an age when it would be sheer madness for someone to consider himself more than the straightforward further development of what was also there in his childhood. Eight thousand years ago, let us say, something was taken as a matter of course, was the general way of thinking; yet if anyone were to say the same thing today this would merely indicate that they are mad. The realities of those distant times have been reinterpreted in the modern way of thinking into that fictitious tale we call ‘history’. This spreads a veil over the radical metamorphosis we are able to discover when we consider human evolution in the light of truth. The things we often say today, things we reveal in our external life, exist because they once had relevance and were considered to be the truth. We still say things like ‘by the grace of God’—people have more or less tried to get out of the habit in recent years, but they have not succeeded very well with this—but we do not know, or pay no attention to the fact, that there was a time when this was a reality to human minds, when it was taken as a matter of course.

Here I am drawing your attention to things that give our public life its meaningless, conventional character. Things we put forward in the words we use, in our customs and indeed the way we judge issues in public life, relate to times when those words, even if they only became part of the vocabulary at a later date—they were modelled on the original language—were formed and used on quite a different basis. The words we use in public life today have been squeezed dry. With some it is immediately apparent, with others it was not apparent for a long time. In the distant past a token was hung upon a human body in magical body in magical rites, transforming it into an important magical aspect of the god walking on earth. This has become something trivial in the decorations given to people today. That is the kind of history humankind is unlikely to pursue. Not only words can become empty phrases and lose all meaning, as is the case with the most important words used in public life today; the objects hung around people's necks or pinned to their chests can show similar character in their relation to reality, like a word that is meaningless today but once had sacred meaning and substance to it.

We must realize that initially our evolution was such that an older awareness lost its substance and became empty and conventional. There can be no real new growth in our devastated public life of today unless we do so. We must look for new well-springs that will give real substance again to public life. We have no awareness of gods walking the earth in human form. We must therefore acquire the ability to recognise the spirit not in human form but in the form it has when we rise to spiritual vision. For us the gods no longer descend to sit on physical thrones. We must acquire the spiritual faculties that enable us to ascend in our vision to the thrones where gods are to be found who can only be alive to us in the spirit. We must learn to fill the abstract formulas we use with spiritual contents of our own experience. We must become able to face truths that are deeply disturbing to those who grasp them rightly. We must become able to see things as they are. Sometimes we fail to do so for periods extending over decades.

As Central Europeans we believe ourselves to be part of European civilization. What we should ask ourselves is what it is that has made our inner life, the life of our soul, so full of discord over the last fifty years or even longer. Let me say just one thing. When you look to the West you see in the first instance—we'll leave aside the rest—a nation falling into decadence, the French nation. One thing is important, however, among the French. When a member of this nation said: I am a Frenchman—this is what they have said to themselves for centuries—he said something that was in accord with the external facts; a permissible, truthful declaration made with reference to external life. Any of us who have ever talked to people who were young and German in the first half of the 19th century will be able to confirm the following. Herman Grimm¹⁹ for instance has repeatedly described what it meant, to people who were young when he was young in Germany, for someone to profess himself to be German in public life, not as an empty phrase but in reality. It would have been treason. People were Bavarians, Württembergians, Prussians, but to say ‘I am German’ would make them criminals. In the West there was a point to saying ‘I am a Frenchman’, people were permitted to be that in external life. It would have meant going to prison or being put beyond the pale in some other way if one had taken it into one's mind to say one was German, i.e. belonged to a united nation. People have forgotten about this now, but those are facts. And it is important to face up to these things. We shall not develop the right enthusiasm for such things, however, unless we fertilize our inner life by considering the great events of world history, seeing them in the right light—not that fabricated tale written in our handbooks and taught in our schools today, but the true history of the world that can be found by looking at things in the light of the spirit.

It is quite unthinkable for a present-day protestant Christian to consider that people once felt it to be true to say ‘the god walked on the earth and the ruler was the god’ and ‘there is no kingdom on this earth where gods are still to be found, for the ways in which one is made a god are in the realm where the supersensible dwells, within the Mystery’. In the early times of Egyptian history, which in part was still prehistoric, the Mystery was indeed something supersensible. It was only when the mysteries were made into churches that the church became the symbol for the supersensible.

Present-day humanity has no wish to look to the points of origin of its historical development. It lives like someone who has reached the age of forty-five and has forgotten what life was like as a boy or a girl, at most remembering back as far as his or her twenty-fifth year. Try and visualize what it would mean for the inner soul life of someone of forty-five to remember nothing that happened before the age of twenty-five. Yet that is the state of mind humankind is in now, it is the state of mind in which the people arise who are to be the leaders of humanity. Out of this state of mind something is attempted that is to give the orientation for a social system. The most important thing is that human beings come to see humanity as a living organism with a memory that should not be trodden to death, a memory reaching back to things that still have their effect in the present day, and because of the way they do take effect, literally ask for something new to be poured into them.

We merely need to strike this note a few times and we shall see that there is need for something in the present time that makes all the empty words that are flashing up all around come to nothing. It would be good if a sufficiently large number of of people were to realize how serious the present situation is, and out of this realization were to arrive at something that is really new. The sad thing is that People today have been given great tasks and yet would most of all like to sleep through those tasks. The particular task given to the anthroposophical movement for decades now has basically been to shake humanity out of its sleep, to point out that humanity needs to be given something today that truly changes the present state of soul to the same extent as the dreamer's state of soul changes to being fully awake and alive for the day, when he wakes in the morning.

This I intend to be the conclusion to the two aspects of history seen in the light of spiritual science I discussed during my present stay in this city. If only something could emerge from our anthroposophical movement that would truly fire our social ideas, filling them with warmth and energy. Social impulses are needed in the present age, that is so obvious when we look at events that we really should not fail to see it. These social impulses can only come to fruition if a new spirit is poured into human evolution. This should be realized particularly by the people who from one side or another come to join the anthroposophical movement. On the soil of this anthroposophical movement truthfulness and alertness are necessary, real alertness. Modern civilized society has got into the habit of being asleep in public life. Today people are so much asleep one might fall into severe doubt on seeing the external course followed by people in the pursuit of their affairs—were it not for the fact that one stands within spiritual life and perceives the course taken by spiritual affairs behind the Physical world. The external course people pursue in their events clearly spells it out that people fight shy of having any part in the search for truth in the phenomenal world. They are so glad they do not have to look at the events that are happening. You can see that when people are told of something happening somewhere today, they stand there on their two feet and give no indication of having heard something that is of profound significance for the way events will go. People hear of deeply significant things that must inevitably lead to ruin, to decline and fall, and they do not even feel indignation. Things are going on in the world, intentions are alive in German lands that should horrify people—yet they do not. Anyone incapable of being horrified at these things also lacks the power to develop a sense of truth.

It has to be pointed out that healthy indignation over things that are not healthy should be the source and origin of enthusiasm, of the new truths that are needed. It is actually less important to convey truths to people than it is to bring fiery energy into their lethargic nervous systems. Fiery energy is needed today, not mystical sleep. Longing for mystical peace and quiet is not of the essence today but rather dedication to the spirit. Union with the divine has to be actively sought today and not in mystical indolence and comfort.

This has to be pointed out. We must find a way of making it possible again for our minds to connect a divine principle with our outer reality. We shall only be able to do this if we consider without bias how people found their gods walking the earth in the earliest empires. We must find a way in which our human souls can walk in the spirit in spiritual worlds, that we may find gods again.

• 13. Prince-Archbishop Johann Baptist Katschthaler, Salzburg, Austria. Pastoral of 2 February 1905 entitled 'Die dem katholischen Priester gebiihrende Ehre' (The honour due to Catholic priests), reprinted in Carl Mirbt Quellen zur Geschichte des Pabst-rums and des rdmischen Katholizismus (Sources relating to the history of the papacy and of Roman Catholicism) 5. Aufl. Tubingen 1934, S. 497 ff. The passage relating to the powers of consecration is given below.
  
  ‘Honour your priests, for they have the power of consecration. Catholic priests have this wonderful power of consecration, Protestant pastors do not. This power of consecration, to make the Body of the Lord be present, with the precious Blood, with the whole of His sacred humanity and His divine nature in the Bread and the Wine—that is a great and sublime power, a truly extraordinary power! Where in heaven is a power like that of the Catholic priest to be found? Among the angels? Or does the Mother of God have it? Mary conceived Christ, the Son of God, in her womb and gave birth to Him in the stable in Bethlehem. Yes. But consider what happens during Holy Mass! Does not the same thing happen, as it were, when the priest raises his hands in blessing during the consecration? Christ is really and truly made to be present, to be reborn, as it were, in the Bread and the Wine. Mary bore her child in Bethlehem, wrapping it in swaddling clothes; a priest does the same, as it were, placing the wafer on the corporal cloth. Mary brought her child into the world just once. But see, a priest does this not once, but many hundreds and thousands of times, each time he celebrates the Mass. There, in the stable, the child which Mary gave to the world was small, capable of suffering and mortal. Here, on the altar, in the hands of the priest, we have Christ in His glory, not capable of suffering and also immortal, sitting in heaven to the right of the Father, glorious and triumphant, perfect in every regard. Do priests merely make the Body and Blood be present? No. They sacrifice, offering sacrifice to the Heavenly Father. This is the same sacrifice that Christ brought by shedding His blood on Calvary and bloodlessly at the Last Supper. There the eternal High Priest Jesus Christ sacrificed His Flesh, His Blood and His very Life to the Heavenly Father; here, at the Mass, He does the same through his representative, the Catholic priest. He ordained priests to take His place so that they might continue the same sacrifice that He had brought. He has transferred to them the authority over His sacred humanity, giving them power over His body, as it were. A Catholic priest is able not only to make Him be present on the altar, lock Him up in the tabernacle, take Him out again and give Him to the faithful to eat, he is actually able to offer Him, the Son of God become Man, as a bloodless sacrifice for the living and the dead. Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father by whom heaven and earth were created and who sustains the whole world, submits to the Catholic priests in this respect.'=’ (Italics as in the original text given by Mirbt.)
• 14. ‘Suprema lex regis voluntas’. William II (see note 10) wrote this in the Golden Book of the City of Munich. See also J. von Kiirenberg War alles falsch? Das Leben Kaiser Wi/helms II. (Was it all wrong? A life of the emperor William II. Translated into English and published in 1954, but exact English title not known), Basle-Olten 1940; German edition S. 190.
• 15. Dionysius the Areopagite (an Athenian converted by St Paul): ‘ the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies' and The hierarchy of the church,’ in Die angeblichen Schriften des Areopagiten Dionysius, übersetzt and mit Abhandlungen begleitet von J.G. V. Engelhardt (Writings ascribed to Dionyius the Areopagite, translated and provided with commentaries by J.G.V. Engelhardt), part 2, Sulzbach 1823.
• 16. Aurelius Augustinus, De Civitate Dei. libri XII.
  
  Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia.
• 17. Wycliffe, John, English reformer.
  Hus, or Huss, John, Bohemian reformer, burned when the Council of Constance condemned his and Wycliffe's writings.
• 18. TN. Luke 17:20-21. Rudolf Steiner was quoting from the Luther Bible, but saying 'gods' instead of 'God'.
• 19. Grim, Herman, Fragmente (vol. 1), Berlin & Stuttgart, S. 212: ‘For the people of today [1891], it is no longer the Wars of Liberation fought against Napoleon I that are the last important historical event in their lifetime, but the Wars of Liberation fought against Austria and France in the 1860s and 1870s. We have been a nation where children had to be taught that they would never be permitted to act freely in influencing the destinies of their country. Today, however, Germans are compelled to act in this way. Fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable to make it part of education to tell children that they would one day be citizens of a great united German Empire and that their duties towards God, the Emperor and their country would one day also consist in having to elect someone to represent them in a German Parliament, basing their choice on their personal judgement of the country's needs. Just to utter such things would have sounded like high treason and might have ruined the life of the person who uttered them.’

One particular fact, a fact we have been discussing here a number of times, is causing concern to anyone wishing to work along the lines of a spiritual science in the spirit of anthroposophy. I am referring to the fact that modern humankind is basically failing to pay attention to the powers of decline that are clearly in evidence, to powers that must inevitably take our present civilization to the edge of the abyss if they are allowed to come into effect.

Surely we have to admit to ourselves that many things are coming up from the profound depths of human nature and coming to realization; or in other words that there is a great deal going on at present. On the other hand many of our fellow citizens simply cannot make up their minds to pay proper attention to what is really going on.

It is reasonable to say that at the present time little effort is made in cultural life to take a wider point of view and pay genuine attention to the forces that shape our world. There is one school—I have characterized it a number of times over the years—that has its roots mainly among the English-speaking peoples and is rather secretive about its work. It is however extraordinarily effective. A second school is the movement that has come together because people want to take account of the instincts of the masses, instincts that are understandable and indeed also justifiable. In its extremes this movement is represented by people who have no idea of human evolution, who know nothing of the principles that mean progress for the world. Certain conditions, however,—I shall refer to these later—enable them to hold a position of authority in spite of their narrow-minded views and in spite of a natural inclination for criminal activities that is in fact quite considerable. They are of course clever people and able to be to the fore in public life nowadays because they impress people.

The third movement that has an effect in cultural life is based on particularly energetic representatives of the different confessions—confessions of all kinds—who also know very well what they want. They are the fountainhead of everything that usually comes under the heading of Jesuitism. Many people talk about Jesuitism and the like, but still large numbers of our fellow citizens are little inclined to pay proper attention to what is really going on.

To get a proper idea of current events one would have to take account of a number of things. One thing to be particularly taken into account however is connected with a fact I also mentioned in my first public lecture here.²⁰ It is the fact that when it comes to their frame of mind, particularly as regards the way they form ideas, present-day people are in many, many instances continuing in a way that was only suitable for the forming of ideas during the Middle Ages. That was a great and significant way of thinking, but it is now out of date. Some people have gone very intensely into the medieval way of developing sensibilities and forming ideas. These are the people who hold more or less socialist views, and there are many of them all over the globe. The ideas current among them come to expression above all in a belief in authority that is almost limitless. They cringe before anything that assumes authority by simply taking a strong line among them. This has made it possible for people like Lenin and Trotsky²¹ to impose their tyranny on millions of people with the help of just a few thousand. That particular movement is spreading from Eastern Europe into Asia at an incredible pace. It imposes a tyranny worse than anything seen during the worst periods of oriental tyranny.

All these things need to be considered in forming an opinion on current events. It has only been possible to give a rough outline. Basically the only opposition to these trends—and we are still thinking in terms of major forces in world history, forces shaping the world—comes from what should ideally be a truly honest, sincere and genuine spiritual-scientific movement. If we compare the interest brought to this spiritual-scientific movement with the interest those other movements have aroused within a relatively short time, and with the influence these movements have gained, we have to say that interest in this spiritual-scientific movement is as good as nil at the present time.

We do not fail to recognise of course that there are many people who go along with this spiritual-scientific movement, or at least tell themselves that they go along with it. There would be an enormous difference, however, if people really took note of the intensity with which those other three movements work for the things they want to bring to the fore, and then compared this with the intensity of Interest that there is for spiritual science. The spiritual-scientific movement is really approached in a very superficial way, superficial in the way people feel about it. The other movements on the other hand are arousing a limitless intensity of feeling.

Does anyone clearly understand—making it the centre of both heart and mind—that if spiritual science is to intervene to any serious extent in the forces that shape the world, people must first of all give recognition and proper value to initiation knowledge, or initiation science as we call it? Initiation science today also needs humanity's firm and decided interest. Many people believe they are sincerely devoted to it, yet the interest they muster is still rather superficial, subject to all kinds of unimportant considerations.

The people I have often called the real big shots in the Anglo-American movement have initiation knowledge, but certainly not for the benefit of humankind. Everything based on Jesuitism has initiation knowledge and in its own peculiar way Leninism also has initiation knowledge. Leninism knows how to put things cleverly, using rational ideas produced in the head, and there is a definite reason for this The cleverness of the human animal, the cleverness of human animal nature, is coming to the fore in human evolution through Leninism. Everything arising from human instincts, human selfishness, comes to interpretation in Leninism and Trotskyism in a form that on the surface seems very intelligent. The animal wants to work its way to the fore, to be the most intelligent of animals. All the ahrimanic powers that aim to exclude the human element, to exclude everything that is specifically human, and all the aptitudes that exist within the animal kingdom—I have often stressed this—are to become the forces that determine humanity.

Consider—and this is something else I have often stressed—the conceit shown by humans when they invented things such as linen paper, paper made from wood or the like; in short, paper of any kind. Well, wasps and similar creatures made this invention very much earlier, building their nests from the same materials as those from which we make paper. There you have human cleverness within animal nature. If you now take all the cleverness of this kind that exists within the whole animal kingdom, and imagine ahrimanic powers taking this up and making it come to life in human heads, in the heads of people who follow only their egotistical instincts, you can see that it may be true to say that Lenin, Trotsky and others are the tools of those ahrimanic powers. That is an ahrimanic initiation. It belongs to a different cosmic sphere than our own world does. It is however an initiation that also holds the potential for getting rid of human civilization on earth, getting rid of everything that has evolved by way of human civilization.

We are therefore dealing with three schools of initiation. Two are on the plane of human evolution and one is below that plane, though it is an initiation of tremendous will power, almost unlimited will power. The only thing that can bring order into all these developments, setting a goal that is worthy to be called human, is contained within genuine spiritual knowledge. A true goal and genuine sincerity will however only come from this spiritual science if it is made into something that involves the whole of our life, taking note how much empty chatter, how much conceit and inner egotism comes to expression in so much of what is usually said in its name. These things cannot be left unsaid. On the contrary, we need to discuss them over and over again. How else can we hope to give souls the power today that is needed to prevent civilization going into total decline.

Let me take a few minutes to give you a very concrete picture. Just a short time ago I read the following in a newspaper:

Religion is a fantasy that arises in human heads as a reflexive response to the way they relate to each other and to nature. It is doomed to die a natural death in the triumphant progress of a clear, scientific and naturalistic interpretation of the truth that is evolving hand in hand with the planned evolution of a new society.²²

Considering what one comes up against nowadays with regard to souls fast asleep in the present age, we may well ask ourselves how many people reading this kind of thing in a newspaper article pull up short as though stung by a viper, because a truly dreadful symptom comes to expression in those lines. People do not reflect on what would happen on this earth if these words came to realization:

Religion is a fantasy that arises in human heads as a reflexive response to the way they relate to each other and to nature. It is doomed to die a natural death in the triumphant progress of a clear, scientific and naturalistic interpretation of the truth that is evolving hand in hand with the planned evolution of a new society.

‘Religion’ does not refer here to some confession on other, nor to some religious movement that one may quite rightly consider to be wrong, nor merely to religion in the narrower sense, but to all that is moral. If the thoughts expressed in those lines were to come true the result would be that human society in every part of the globe would very rapidly become a herd of animals, animals capable of very sophisticated thought, however. If a way cannot be found now for opposition to arise against the principle that is growing in the East of Europe and spreading across into Asia at an incredible pace, civilization will be doomed. The ideals expressed in those lines would then become reality.

In the light of such impulses in world history I do not think it is Justifiable for people in some places to wish to continue with the mystical small talk within closed circles, small talk that against my Wishes has in the long run also come up in spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. Some people even consider it the ideal! I do not think it is right to continue with this in any form, totally disregarding what is demanded of us in the wider interest of humanity on this earth. It must be our will to consider those wider interests of humankind without bias. We must make an effort and become truly serious about certain basic principles—not merely in theory, using our intellect, but instinctively. Those principles have been obscured by all the confessions in Europe and America and the intention is to obscure them yet further.

We know about the virulent propaganda campaign being launched against spiritual science working towards anthroposophy, we hear the bullets whistling all around. If therefore opposition arises in some corner or another it would be a pity to give oneself up to the harmful illusion—an illusion indeed that today merits punishment—that we may ever hope to achieve anything by converting people who after all are the authorized agents of something or other that belongs to the past. We cannot and must not be opportunists or go for compromise. That should be our special meditation every morning, as it were. There have been well-meaning people who have said we should simply try and explain to people in one direction or another how we are endeavouring to bring the Christ Mystery to the world. The more we do this, the more bullets whistle around our ears from certain quarters. Nothing goes more against the grain for instance with certain Catholic or Protestant groups today than that humankind should today gain true understanding of the Christ Mystery. It is not in their interest that the true Mystery of Christ comes to be known; all they want is to hold on to the old ideas. If we had some kind of strange and peculiar creed concerning Christ they would treat us as a harmless sect, as odd characters, and not fight us with the intensity we have come to experience. Within the two schools, quite apart from the third, there are however quite a number of people who know that our aim is to speak of the Christ Mystery out of the truth, and of social order out of the triune principle. This makes them sit up and listen; it makes them say: ‘It would take the ground away from under our feet if we were to go for the truth; let us therefore vow to destroy it.’ People do not fight us because we are in error, they fight us because it is realized in certain quarters that we want the truth. There is no point is saying anything else about some of the things that go on today. The cultural movement I am speaking of has a profound interest in absolute clarity, particularly also clarity of thought.

Remember some of the things I have told you. What is the essential point when we come to see what humankind needs above all else today? The essential point is that our powers of thought—everything we have by way of ability to form ideas, except for sensory powers—have come down to us from our life before birth or life before conception. Everything we human beings are able to think we have brought into the physical world when we were born; we have brought it with us from the life we had before we were born. All the thoughts we evolve whilst we are in our physical bodies are faculties that govern the whole of our essential human nature between our last death and the birth process that brought us into our present life on earth. When we are thinking here and now, the powers of thought we use, not the thoughts, are a shadow image of something that was at work before we were born or conceived.

Try and think of what we call the forces of nature today, of what goes on in lightning and thunder, in the movement of waves, in the way clouds are formed, in the rising and setting of the sun, in wind and rain in the way the plants rise from the ground, in the way animals are conceived and born and grow. Think of all the natural processes You see all around; then think of them merely as a picture, not the reality. So, please, think of everything you have around you by way of natural forces casting its shadow somewhere or other, and of these shadows being taken up into a container and presenting themselves to us as pictures. The relationship that exists between nature as she actually is now and the reality that lies behind is similar to the relationship between life before birth and our faculties of thought in the present earth life. Just think that there you have everything that happens to your soul between death and rebirth—I am showing it in diagrammatic form—and then its shadow arises; a shadow arises of everything you have there and this shadow becomes the content of Your head, the content of your thoughts; it is your faculty of thought. What you are thinking now, those are the forces active before you were born. That is ‘nature’ in the spiritual world, if I may put it in such a paradoxical way. The evolution of humankind cannot progress unless we become aware that when we are thinking, the existence we had before birth influences our faculties of thought. Having entered into my present earth life, I am continuing the life I had before birth when I am thinking.

Who puts up the greatest opposition to this idea? The greatest opposition is put up by religious confessions that maintain more or less the following: ‘A human child is born. It pleases two people, a male and a female individual on this earth, to come together and God creates a soul in the spiritual world, a soul that then connects with what is created between two people in the act of begetting. That is how the human individual comes into being.’ This is of course very different from what I have just been saying. It is what confessions live on in our modern civilized worlds. They all teach that when two People copulate the spirit very kindly creates a soul up above, a fresh new soul; it is then sent down to unite with the physical body which has been created, and something new has come into existence. To whom do these confessions address themselves? They address themselves to terribly egotistical individuals who simply cannot bear the thought of being extinguished when they die. Yet they are able to bear the thought—for they have got used to it over the centuries, indeed soon it will be millenia—that it pleases God to create souls for human beings procreated here on earth. What their egotism does i not allow them to accept is the thought that death puts an end to it all.

Of course you all know what life after death is like. I do not need to go into it here. But let us turn our attention to something quite different. Preachers in their pulpits always need to assume that they are speaking to people who cannot bear the thought of death being the end of it all. The water they have to pour down from their pulpits—irrespective of the particular creed followed by the people who sit there below them—must make it clear to them—I mean unclear, of course—what happens after death. They have to choose words most liable to excite the egotism of people; they have to utter phrases that are fully in accord with the egotism in the souls of people.

Let us think what would happen for instance—to give a particular example—if someone were freely and in all seriousness to make certain aspects of the Roman Catholic confession his target, say the dogma that when two people copulate it must please God to send a freshly made soul down to them. What would happen if criticism were to be aimed at this? Someone going into the whole issue without prejudice would find that it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything to be found in the true Christian faith. They would find that during the Middle Ages the teachings of Aristotle infiltrated theology and that Aristotle represented these ideas on the basis of misunderstood Platonic ideas, saying that a fresh soul is created for every newly generated human body and unites with it. Something taken for granted as a fundamental tenet in Christian beliefs in fact has nothing to do with Christianity but is an Aristotelian principle.²³

Let us move on to something else. One element in religious beliefs is the dogma of eternal punishment in hell. Again, entirely an Aristotelian thought. Aristotle assumed that once a soul had been created, lived on earth and then come into the spiritual world, there was nothing it could do in the spiritual world, as he saw it, but look back for all eternity on what it had done during its one and only life on earth. Aristotle imagined that a fresh soul was created for every child, that this soul lived on earth until the individual died and then for all eternity occupied itself with the contemplation of what had happened during one life on earth. If someone had committed murder, they would have to look back on this for ever. That is where the dogma of eternal punishment in hell originated. It is a purely Aristotelian concept.

Just think, if the truth were to become known, instead of Aristotelian thoughts presented as Christian dogma, the people wishing to represent such Aristotelian ideas masquerading as Christian dogma would be scared out of their wits that people might find out about this, that People might find out that their priests were not teaching Christian Ideas from their pulpits, but Aristotelian ideas that had crept into Christian teachings.

Christian beliefs also contain an infinite number of ideas deriving from gnostic teachings. The Roman Catholic sacrifice of the Mass has infinitely much in it that derives from the Egyptian Mysteries. Many of the rites of the Catholic Church—and the Protestant, too, in many respects—contain things the origin of which must be sought in all kinds of oriental religions. All they are after is that people do not find out where these things come from. What do they feel compelled to do? They have to resort to slander! They have to say that the people who are presenting the truth today are plagiarists borrowing from oriental and gnostic teachings and so on. ‘Traubism’ is the order of the day. They come up with learned calumnies like those presented by the clergyman Professor Traub ²⁴ and all the people who parrot him. Why do people do such things? Because the truth is coming to light and they all have an interest in not letting it come to light. People will go on saying that what we are doing is taken from some source or other. They will provoke something that makes people go against gnosis and things that are part of the very fibre of their souls because they do not want it to come to light in its true form. Gnosis—one is supposed to say—is something terrible, something dreadful. Then people will ignore it, being afraid of it, and the preachers can talk about things that in fact have their origin in gnosis. It is the preachers who talk about things that originally came from gnosis, not the people who speak about what has grown in the soil of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. What they are most afraid of is that there is such a thing as pre-existence of the soul, a life of the soul before birth and also conception, that the soul has its roots in the spiritual world through all the ages that any kind of knowledge and creed among humankind might cover. For if the truth were to become known there would be no room any more for such blasphemy as that the gods are obliged to send a newly made soul from the spiritual world for every single human body, so that they might unite. All these things have their origin of course in a desire for power that is getting very strong. Behind it all are thoughts of power. It is possible to put tremendous energies into such thoughts of power simply by following certain precepts.

What is going on in Dornach at the moment, for instance? All around, almost everywhere in Switzerland, articles on anthroposophy are being published not one sentence of which is true.²⁵ The whole campaign started when an article appeared that contained twenty-three lies. For weeks now, article on article has picked up on those twenty-three lies; they have appeared almost everywhere in the Catholic press in Switzerland and not a single sentence is true. Why is this happening? It happens because the many followers of these people are brought to a certain state of mind by being told untruths, a state of mind where it is no longer possible to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.

Think of all the efforts we go to in spiritual science working towards anthroposophy to form sufficiently clear ideas; for instance, as to how far the things we become aware of in human minds, in the form of dreams, may or may not be reflecting the truth. As human beings we cannot immediately distinguish truth from falsehood when something appears in the course of a dream. The same state of mind arises for a congregation when they are told lies by people who know that those lies will be believed. The soul is brought to a state, a mood. by those lies where it becomes the willing tool of those desiring power. It is easiest to get people into your power by planting illusions in their unsuspecting minds. Articles full of lies are systematically put out with the intention of creating the kind of mood that can be created with lies. That will be the inevitable consequence of the probabilism which the Jesuits have been teaching for a long time. It is merely a final consequence.

It is of course difficult to rouse modern souls from their general torpor to stand up against such people. The day before I left we were forced to arrange for a lecture—for we must fight, of course, even if we do not want to, against the lies that come up in Dornach. Dr BooS, one of the most courageous of our young protagonists, called on everyone who had anything to say on the subject of the lecture to join in the in the discussion—it was a public lecture, of course. When no one came forward he said openly and publicly that he publicly declared the cleric who had first written those twenty-three lies, a priest called Arnet in Reinach, to be unworthy of his priestly calling, for disseminating scurrilous lies.

One cannot help oneself. And then, even when this had been said, only one individual stood up among those present, a teacher, shaking in his boots if I may put it like that, and said: ‘Just wait. There are more articles to come, and in the end you will see!’ Well, all I could say was that there had been twenty-three lies to begin with, and the truth about those twenty-three lies will without doubt never emerge, however long it takes until there is an end to the matter even if the end does not come until the end of the world. Not the least attempt has been made in everything published so far—and a respectable number of articles have already appeared—to go into those twenty-three lies.

Other things have been tried, using a strange logic. The pamphlet by the Tübingen speaker was brought into play—it actually played a large role—but the people who bring professor Traub's pamphlet into play in their articles have not properly understood what he said. They will write that this man Steiner is borrowing from all kinds of ancient writings, from the Upanishads, the Egyptian Isis Mysteries and the ‘Akashic Records’—well, I suppose the typesetter may have put that in, but on the other hand the clerical gentleman may have done so. I therefore said that it was not really my concern to correct printers' errors, but that it surely is a strange way of reading Traub's Pamphlet if immediately afterwards the reader has forgotten that not even Traub says anything so stupid as that the Akashic Records are to be found on library shelves; I said that one cannot really accuse people of borrowing from that old tome, the Akashic records, for spiritual science based in anthroposophy.

Our attackers have also gained support among liberal thinkers. Dr Boos was going great guns in a liberal paper, saying that this was a deliberate untruth, since the writer must have known that there were no Akashic Records in his library. He could not possibly have them in his library and so he ought to have known; he must have written a deliberate untruth. What did the person concerned do? He wrote that Dr Boos was evading the issue, as it was self-evident that the typesetter must have been responsible for the ‘Akashic Records’ error and not he himself. In his view the kind of sophistry that made authors responsible for that kind of printing error merely showed what kind of stable people came from.

Well, you see the kind of mentality one is dealing with. But do not underestimate it! You have to realize that it is going to be a hard fight, particularly in this direction. The aim is to prevent people from finding out about what I have been saying. What I said, first of all in the medical course, is the following: It is particularly when one is making serious efforts to determine the spiritual laws of this world, doing so on the basis of present-day life, when one tries to reach the deeper secrets of human nature by making these things one's own on the basis of present-day life, and then also finds them written in ancient works—albeit arising from an intellectual life that was more instinctive and atavistic—that one feels very humble in perceiving the greatness of the instinctive, atavistic intellect that human beings once possessed; that has been lost and must now be found again. These words were spoken in awareness of the fact that knowledge which today has to be sought within life was once instinctive wisdom given to humankind. Much of that ancient wisdom has of course survived in the religious beliefs, though it has become corrupted. Yet the people professing those beliefs want to make humankind fear that original wisdom, and when they talk about it say more or less the following: `Those dreadful people who pursue anthroposophy today are borrowing everything from that ancient wisdom'. If they went into the matter they would find that the spiritual science offered to humankind in anthroposophy is very different from anything ever borrowed from anywhere, from the Upanishads or whatever. So we had to borrow indeed from that ancient tome called the Akashic Records! To prevent people getting sight of something that belongs to the present age our enemies are letting their bullets come whistling from all around.

Let us be clear about one thing. You may feel tempted now and then to stress the good points of one thing or another. The alliance between Jesuitism and the Social Democrats which is getting closer and closer by the day is something entirely natural. There is nothing unnatural about it. The Social Democrats are equipped with the same kind of ideas as the Jesuits, only they take them the other way round. One thing, however, that differs from all else that is felt is the 'eternal nature of the human being'. This has become the teaching of egotism. It is restored to its true form when the pre-existence concept, of a human soul having a life before birth, or before conception, once again becomes the effective moral principle. The knives will come out to fight this idea. We shall only be able to progress in the world if in the first place truth has inner power. This inner power can only be effective, however, if in the second place people have the courage, however few they may be in number, to carry this truth in their souls, carry it in their souls in all seriousness, uprightness and honesty and without compromise. It is useless for us to play down the tremendous difference which exists between true Christianity and the Catholic and Protestant Aristotelianism which holds the idea that souls are created for bodies as they arise through procreation. We must not play down this difference. If we do play it down we will not even notice where the idea of power, the desire for power, has its real origins.

I find myself referring again and again to the pastoral issued by a Roman Catholic bishop. This document really exists. According to it the faithful must regard their priest as ranking higher than God and Christ, for each time the priest performs the consecration at the altar Christ is forced to be present by that altar, to be present in the bread and the wine which is His body and His blood. The priest therefore has greater power in the universe than a god. That is what it says in a pastoral that really exists and has also been quoted in many other pastorals. Now you may ask me if that is consistent with the abolition of the spirit by the Council of Constantinople ²⁶ in 869. The answer is yes. A Roman Catholic saying that God is more powerful than a priest would say so because people will not accept any other view nowadays. People are so much asleep in their souls that they never ask themselves: ‘What was the person ²⁷ writing to Moleschott really saying who had the nerve to say that a criminal, a liar, a murderer is a moral person only if he can be fully himself and is an immoral person if he does not bring to expression what he has in him. for this would impose restraints on his individuality, and that an inclination to murder is just as valid as other inclinations are’? Modern souls do not have the courage to say to themselves: ‘If scientists continue to teach the kind of basic philosophy that they have been teaching, the inevitable conclusion simply has to be that criminals, murderers, are just as good as someone trying to act morally, as it were. People merely lack the courage to admit this.’ When materialism had its flowering, at the time when people like Vogt, Moleschott and Büchner,²⁸ all of them courageous men, were publishing their writings, such things were admitted. The present age is too cowardly, however, to make such admissions. Nor is there sufficient courage in the sleeping souls of the present to admit to oneself: 'If you go by the spirit of those creeds and statements a priest is indeed more powerful than a god.'

The school of thought represented by spiritual science working in the spirit of anthroposophy must above all work towards clear thinking in every respect. Its message cannot be grasped if thoughts are unclear, it cannot be grasped in a vague and vaporous mysticism but only with crystal clear thoughts, thoughts which in my Philosophy of Freedom ²⁹ I have tried to show are the starting point for genuine human freedom.

We may continue our discussion of the subject when I am able to speak to you again. I hope this will be soon.

• 20. ‘Der Weg zum gesunden Denken und die Lebenslage des Gegenwartsmenschen’ (A way to develop sound thinking and people's life situation in the present day), Stuttgart 8 June 1920. Published in Geisteswissenschaft und die Lebensfordeningen der Gegenwart No. 6, Dornach 1950. To be published in Germany in GA 355. No record of translation into English.
• 21. Lenin (formerly Ulyanov), Vladimir Ilyich, Russian revolutionary.
  Trotsky. Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Russian revolutionary leader in 1917.
• 22. Basler Vonvärts of 2 June 1920. X.N. , ‘Die Politik der Sowjetregierung auf dem Gebiete der Religion’ (Soviet government policies concerning religion).
• 23. See Franz Brentano. Die Psychology des Aristoteles (The psychology of Aristotle), Mainz 1867. S. 199 ff.
• 24. Traub, Friedrich, professor at Tuebingen University, author of Rudolf Steiner als Philosoph und Theosoph (Rudolf Steiner as a philosopher and theosophist), Tuebingen 1919.
• 25. For details relating to this see Boos, Roman, ‘Aktenmäßige Darstellung der Hetze gegen das Goetheanum’ (The virulent campaign against the Goetheanum presented in documents), in Rudolf Steiner/Roman Boos: Die Hetze gegen das Goetheanum (The virulent campaign against the Goetheanum), Arlesheim 1920.
• 26. Refers to the Council's rejection of ‘trichotomy’. Rudolf Steiner referred to this on a number of occasions, e.g. in Bausteine zu einer Erkenntnis des Mysteriums von Golgatha GA 175, 1st and 2nd lectures. English translation in Cosmic and Human Metamporphoses. H. Collison ed. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1926.
• 27. Mathilde Reichardt, a lady who published a book on science and moral philosophy in the form of letters to Moleschott in 1856, is able to lay undoubted and unenviable claim to rank first among those who turn moral concepts upside down. It is the opinion of this lady that moral philosophy merely has to ask whether a human individual develops his or her inherent traits in a balanced way. Yet nature—so she says—expresses a different intent in every human individual. She therefore does not hesitate to state ‘that when someone has an inherent tendency to cheat and to steal, such a person can only be an entirely moral person if he or she is a cheat or a thief.’ ‘Someone born to be a thief has also been born with the right to live out those inherent tendencies, developing them to the full, for that is the only way in which he or she can be a strong and moral individual. And what applies to thieves also applies to all other vices, including those born to be murderers.’
  (Quoted from Jurgen Bona Meyer, Philosophische Zeitfragen, Bonn 1874, S. 323 f.)
• 28. Vogt, Carl, champion of Darwinism.
  Moleschott, Jakob, physiologist.
  Büchner, Ludwig, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 29. Die Philosophie der Freiheit (1894), GA. 4. English: The Philosophy of Freedom. M. Wilson tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.

Today's meeting provides a further opportunity for me to speak to you who are friends of the anthroposophical movement before I leave. I wish to do something which in a way is particularly close to my heart, to discuss some of the things that really need to be discussed. It is possible that most of what I have to say today is a repetition of things that have been discussed on a number of occasions from all kinds of different aspects, things now also taken into consideration in public lectures. There are reasons, however, why it is necessary for us to consider some of them once again today.

I have often stressed that it is necessary for a sufficient number of people to fully understand the following. To prevent the decline into which we have got ourselves in the civilized world from continuing into utter ruin, certain impulses must be brought into modern civilization that can only arise if spiritual science reveals the nature of the world to its fullest extent.

Materialism has come to Europe over the last three or four centuries, coming to a crest in the 19th and then tumbling over in the 20th century. It has a peculiarity that seems paradoxical, particularly if one fails to realize the true causes. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it has no possibility of recognizing the material world as it really is. I think I have already given you an example of this. The materialistic way of thinking has in more recent times given rise to an idea that is believed by a great many people, namely that the heart is a kind of pump in the human organism that pumps the blood through the organism. This idea of the human heart being a pump comes up in all kinds of variations nowadays. The facts are rather different, however, and should be seen like this: The whole of our rhythmical circulatory system is something alive. It cannot be compared with a system of channels or the like with water flowing through them, water kept circulating with the aid of a pump. Our rhythmical circulatory system, our blood system, is something alive. It is kept alive by a number of factors, the major factors being breathing, hunger, thirst and so on. These clearly function at the level of soul and spirit. Our blood system is set in motion by entirely primary causes, and the movement of the heart arises when this spiritual principle enters into the rhythm of the blood. The rhythm of the blood is the primary, living principle, and the heart is caught up in this rhythm. The facts are therefore entirely the opposite of what every professor of physiology is teaching today, with the result that it is dinned into people's heads at school and indeed from their earliest childhood.

It therefore has to be said that materialism has not even managed to get a real understanding of the physical processes relating to the heart in the human organism. The material aspect in particular is completely misunderstood. This is just one of many examples. Material things in particular have found no explanation whatsoever under the influence of materialism. The heart is not a pump. It it something we might regard more as a sense organ incorporated within the human organism to give human individuals a kind of subconscious perception of their circulation, just as the eye perceives colour in the world outside. Basically the heart is a sense organ within the circulatory system, yet exactly the opposite is taught nowadays.

This would appear to be an example of limited relevance. I can imagine some philistine saying: ‘Well, it can't do much harm if people have entirely the wrong idea about the nature of the human heart. Of course, if doctors had the wrong idea about the nature of the human heart that would be cause for general alarm. After all, it does make quite a difference in human life if doctors have the right or the wrong idea about the heart.’ But this also holds true for other things. Everything is connected with everything else in life, and because of this humankind is absolutely full of wrong ideas, completely upside-down ideas. One might well think, if one was serious about it, that being hung up on wrong ideas would cause real havoc in our thinking processes. It certainly does. Our thinking is utterly ruined because it has been dinned into us and we have become used to thinking that things are the opposite of what they really are. That is why we never acquire the habit of steady, purposeful thinking. How can our thinking grow purposeful in social life, for example, if in areas where truth should be sought above all else we are in fact going in the opposite direction?

You see, some things that are important to know are a closed book for People today. When the human organism is investigated in conventional institutes nowadays, in physiological and biological laboratories, in hospitals and similar institutions, the brain for instance is examined by analyzing it bit by bit as it presents itself to the eye. The liver is examined by the same kind of analysis. In doing so, people never consider one thing that is absolutely essential if one wishes to understand the human being: The whole of the head organization as We have it today and everything it governs is entirely different from the rest of the human organism.

Let me show you what lies behind this. You can draw it like this. I intend to lead up gradually to what I really want to say. You can say that the human being has two organs of perception, and the direction in which they perceive is approximately like this [see (a) in the diagram]. Two other directions in which we perceive show a certain relationship to these. In diagrammatic form I would draw them like this (b):

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I deliberately did not tell you where these organs are to be found in the human organism. If I draw nothing but two arrows to indicate direction (a) here, where one stretches out, as it were, to perceive, and two others here, (b), where we perceive sideways, it makes no difference at all if these are the directions in which feeling and sensation pass through my legs and these where they pass through my arms. Here we have something that is in accord. I perceive my own gravity, as it were, I stand with my two feet on the ground. I really perceive something. And I also perceive something when I stretch out my hand, stretch out my arm, even if I do not actually touch anything. I can draw it like this (a). The same drawing can also stand for something different. Imagine this is the horizontal plane. The two arrows could represent the two visual axes; I could draw the two visual axes like this. And these arrows (b) could indicate the directions of my ears. The same diagram would serve to indicate perception by the eyes and ears. On the one occasion I have the whole organism within the head, though the plane has turned through a 90° angle, on the other within the rest of the organism. There is a higher point of view where both are the same. Our two legs are merely directions in which we perceive that have become flesh. The same directions exist in a less physical form where they extend from the brain through the eyes to perceive colour. Elsewhere we perceive gravity and everything connected with it. We see our weight and we step on colour, we could say, if we were to change the two things over, entirely in organic terms, of course. I hear the blackboard chalk, I touch a C or C sharp that is sounding. The difference is merely one of degree. In the head everything has gone through a 90° angle and is less physical; the other is in the vertical plane, and is physical. In the final instance both are the same. It is only that I am aware of the way my eyes step on colours, my ears touch sounds; I know about it, it is part of my ordinary conscious life. Everything my legs see with regard to gravity and all kinds of other things that my arms hear—all these are in the subconscious sphere. Conditions belonging to the cosmic sphere are present in the subconscious. With the whole of my subconscious I have knowledge of the cosmic sphere, knowledge of the way the earth relates to other bodies in the universe, knowledge of the universal background to gravity. I hear the music of the spheres with my arms and not with my ears.

Thus we may say that we have a lower organism, as it is called, with subconscious cosmic awareness, and we have a head with early awareness; this however is a ‘conscious’ awareness. The whole of the human being is organized on the basis of these differences. Our outer form and configuration depends entirely on these differences. You know that the head we carry today is the transformed body of our previous incarnation, our previous earth life, and that the rest of our present organism will be the head in our next life. The head, then, is the rest of the organism which has undergone a transformation. It is more perfect, more finished in a way. As a result the legs have become fine visual threads extending beyond the eye and stepping on the colours in a very lively way. The arms of our former life have become so ethereal that they now extend from our ears and touch the sounds we hear.

These are concrete facts about the human being. It does not get People anywhere to know about repeated earth lives and so on. Those after all are dogmas and it makes no difference if you have the dogmas of the Catholic or Protestant church or the dogma of repeated earth lives. Real thinking only starts when you enter into concrete events, when you come to realize that looking at the human head you are looking at the transformed body of your previous earth life, and that the head you had then was the transformed body of the preceding life—you must imagine it without the head, of course. The head you see now is the transformed organism of the last life lived on earth. The rest of the organism as you see it now will be the head in the next life. Then the arms will have metamorphosed and become ears, and the legs will have become eyes. We must look at the physical world and understand it in its transformed non-physical form, our intellect must illumine the material world in this way. Then at last we shall have what humankind is much in need of today. Once the human mind has been organized so that it no longer produces the kind of folly that has been put forward as a potential social theory, particularly in the second half of the 19th century, human beings will indeed be ready to develop social ideas that can be put into effect in this world. It is necessary to gain a thorough understanding of this today. It is a serious matter when people say today: Something else will have to take the place of the science which has evolved and is so highly respected, of all the things that are generally disseminated. There can be no other way.

It is nonsense, and I also said so recently in a public lecture,³⁰ to talk about setting up adult education thinking that the same kind of work can be done there as at ordinary universities. It is the work done at the universities that has brought us to these disastrous situations, because it has become the materialistic view of a few leading personalities. This is now to be presented to the masses; that is, millions are to head for the disasters that so far have come about because the wrong lead was given by a few. Something that proved useless for a few is now to be spread among many. It is not as easy as that, however. Popular education cannot be introduced simply by teaching outside the universities what until now has been alive inside them. It would mean teaching something that is altogether unsuitable for human beings. This may sound radical, but it is absolutely essential that it is fully understood if there is to be even the least hope of the decline being halted and something new and positive developing. These are the things one wishes one could speak of in words that truly go to the heart. These concrete truths must reach as many hearts as possible. It was therefore important to me to point out in my public lectures that something has been achieved in the Waldorf School, that anthroposophy has positively influenced the history lessons in some places. I was also able to refer to the teaching of anthropology in class 5. There, too, anthroposophy was effective. Not that one would teach anthroposophy to the children—we would never think of doing such a thing—but lessons come to life if anthroposophy is the foundation, if the inspiration of anthroposophy is there in what we teach. This brings the souls of the children to life; they are quite different when this influence is there. It would be taking the easy way simply to teach anthroposophy in our schools. No, that is not what we are about, but rather to use anthroposophy to enliven the subject matter. It will of course be necessary for anthroposophy to come alive in oneself first of all, and that is something that really comes hard, to let anthroposophy come alive in human beings. Otherwise the potential is there today for all kinds of disciplines, not only in science but all kinds of disciplines in life, to have the full benefit of what life in anthroposophy is able to give.

That is a general way of looking at it. Let me go on to something specific, so that you can see the things we are considering in their proper context.

Marxist philosophy, Marxist views are widespread today. They have their most radical expression in Leninism and Trotskyism, which are destroying the world. A view of history known as ‘historical materialism’ plays a great role in Marxist philosophy, particularly the dogma of the fundamental importance of the modes and relations of production. Millions of proletarians have accepted this dogma according to which tradition, law, science, religion and so on are like smoke, like an ideology rising from the modes and relations of Production—you will find further details in my book Towards Social Renewal³¹—and that the modes and relations of production are the Only reality on which to base one's view of history.

It was very important to me on past occasions—this has to do with the feeling I have that I was really able to achieve something and create a potential basis at the Worker's Education Institute in Berlin³²—to speak in proletarian circles about the view that the modes and relations of production are the only effective element, and to present a clear picture. My aim therefore was not to teach historical materialism but the truth. That was of course also the reason why I was thrown °in, for it offended those in charge at the time just as much as the idea of a threefold social order offends people today. Authoritarian thinking and belief in authority were and still are as great in the socialist movement as in the Catholic church.

What really matters is to gain a clear understanding of social relations in this world. Real understanding of the natural threefold order of the human organism, of the way the human organism is an organism of nerves and senses, rhythmical organism and a metabolic organism, as shown in my book Von Seelenrätseln,³³ leads to a way of thinking that can also apply to social life. People of little understanding will say: ‘You are using analogy in applying the threefold order of the human body to the social organism’. This is nonsense of course. Analogy is not the method used in Towards Social Renewal. All I said was that if people succeeded in letting their thinking escape from the strait jacket put on it by modern scholarship and particularly public opinion, they would free their thinking to the extent that it will be possible to think sensible thoughts concerning social issues. The kind of thinking that puts the human brain side by side with the liver, examining everything as though it were of the same substance, will never come to sensible conclusions.

Using external analogies we might say: The social organism is threefold by nature and so is the human organism. The head is the organ of mind and intellect; it should therefore be compared with the cultural and intellectual life in the threefold organism. The rhythmical system establishes harmony between different functions in the action of the heart, in respiration—that would be the rights sphere in the social organism. Metabolism, the most physical, material aspect—something mystics tend to look down on to some extent, though they say they also have to eat and drink--would be compared to the sphere of economics.

This is definitely not the case, however. I have repeatedly pointed out on other occasions that in reality things are very different than mere analogy would make them to be. It cannot be said, for instance, that summer is comparable to the waking state for the earth and winter to a state of sleep. The reality is different. In summer the earth is asleep, in winter it is awake. I have gone into this in detail.

The same applies if we consider the real situation in comparing the social and the human organism. The economic sphere of the social organism actually compares to the activities of the human head. As to the sphere of rights, the legal sphere, people were quite rightly comparing this, the middle realm, with rhythmical activities in the human organism. The life of mind and intellect however has to be compared with the metabolism. This means that economic life has to be compared with the organs that serve the mind and intellect, and the cultural and intellectual sphere of the social organism with the metabolic organs. There is no way round this. Economic life is the head of the social organism; cultural life is the stomach, liver and spleen of the social organism but not of the individual human being. It is of course too much of an effort for anyone whose thinking is in a strait-jacket to make distinction between social life and the life of an individual person.

Again the essential point is that spiritual science prepares us to see things as they really are and not to produce analogies and elaborate symbolism. We will then arrive at important conclusions. We shall find, for example, that we can say: But in that case economic life, if it really is the head in the social organism, will have to live on the rest of the organism, just as the head does in the human organism. In that case we cannot say morality, religious life and the search for knowledge are ideological elements arising from economic life. Quite the contrary, in fact. Economic life is dependent on cultural life, on the metabolism of the social organism, just as the human head depends on respiration, on stomach, liver and spleen. We then come to see that economic life arises out of cultural and religious life. If we did not have a stomach we could not have a head. Of course we also could not have a stomach if we did not have a head, but it is the head after all that is fed by the stomach, and in the same way economic life is fed by cultural life and not the other way round. The socialist theories that now threaten to spread through the whole of the civilized world are therefore quite erroneous, a dreadful superstition. No one has thought to look for the truth in recent centuries; on a purely emotional basis everyone has been promulgating the kind of truth their class and point of view suggested to them. Now at last it is realized that it is a total delusion to see historical evolution as the product of the modes and relations of production. The idea is now to compare the actual facts and not to talk in analogies. Now a realistic view is taken and it is realized that if the stomach is undermined in the human organism, the head will suffer. In the same way there can be no sound metabolism in the social organism and economic life must fall into decline if morality, religious life and intelligent thought are undermined in the social organism. Nothing in fact depends on economic life; primarily everything depends on the views, the ideas, the cultural life of humankind.

The head is always dying—I have spoken of this in other lectures—and we only maintain the head organism because it is constantly dying and the rest of the organism rebels against this. The same applies in the sphere of economics. Economic life is constantly bringing death and decay into the progress of history; rather than generating everything else it brings about the death of everything. This element of death constantly has to be counterbalanced by what the cultural organism is able to produce. The situation is therefore exactly the other way round. Anyone speaking in materialistic terms and saying economic life is the basis for progress is not speaking the truth. The truth is that economic life is the basis of something that is always dying in stages, and the mind and spirit have to make up for this dying process. To proceed the way people are now proceeding in Russia is to help the world to its death. The only possible outcome of proceeding in this way is to help the world to its death, for the simple reason that the laws of death are inherent in the things that are being done there.

You can see the eminent social importance of these things. We have now been working in anthroposophy for twenty years, and all the time I have tried to make it utterly clear and apparent in all kinds of lectures that what matters to us is not the cultivation of a philosophy full of inner self-gratification, a kind of spiritual snobbery, but to develop the most important impulse that is needed in the present age.

I wanted to present this to you again today in a slightly different form in connection with a number of things that can help us understand the essential nature of the human being. It is important that those who call themselves friends of the anthroposophical movement clearly perceive the connection between this anthroposophical movement and other events as we know them.

The ideas put forward by myself and other friends are often seriously distorted. It is therefore difficult to speak freely to such a large audience, even if it is anthroposophical. As there is no immediate opportunity, however, to discuss these things at a more intimate level and yet it is necessary to speak of them, let me draw your attention to a few things. We must be aware, particularly here in Stuttgart, that the anthroposophical movement we have now had for twenty Years has indeed reached a new stage. If we are serious about the movement this means we have accepted the obligation to follow this change, to adapt to this change. You must properly understand that because our friends Molt, Kühn, Unger, Leinhas³⁴ and others have attempted to take the anthroposophical approach to its practical conclusion something has happened that concerns us all. It concerns us all and we must take account of it in everything we say and do. The fact is—and let us be very clear about this—that until then the anthroposophical movement was a current in the life of the mind and spirit. Such things continue on their way, cliques and closed groups, however objectionable, that go by personal and heaven knows what other interests, may form; a spiritual movement may even proceed by the agency of privy councillors like Max Seiling.³⁵ One does of course have to approach it properly in view of what is called for, but for as long as it is a purely spiritual or cultural movement it can be ignored. Now, however, three things have grown out of this spiritual movement.

The first followed the appeal I made last year.³⁶ It now forms part of the struggling threefold movement, the Association for a Threefold Social Organism. This has not yet been able to get anywhere near the real objectives. What the appeal had to say has in a sense met with rejection, and it would be a good thing to be fully aware that there has been this rejection, that only very little of what was intended has come to fruition.

This does of course mean that I have many requests made to me. The idea has come up in Dornach, for example, of issuing a further appeal that would make it known internationally what Dornach means to the world. I had to explain to our friends that in the ordinary life outside that is now heading for a breakdown, appeal usually follows appeal, programme on programme. We cannot do this if we work out of anthroposophy. It is important to realize that, in a way, it is not at all healthy if something is undertaken that does not come off. It is important to make a careful assessment of the chances of success, and not just do what comes to mind but only the things that have a chance of success. This is why I then said—it is important and I must ask you to consider it carefully—that I would not dream of making a similar appeal again, for what has happened to the first appeal should not happen a second time. It was possible to let the appeal for a Cultural Council³⁷ go out, for that was not my work, but we must be very clear that things are getting a great deal more serious than people are inclined to think if something like the anthroposophical movement stands behind them.

Three things have now evolved out of the anthroposophical movement, in a way, each of them quite distinct. A threefold order following that appeal—we will have to work at it, for it partly meets with rejection; secondly the Waldorf School;³⁸ thirdly the financial, commercial and industrial enterprise called Der Kommende Tag (Dawn of Tomorrow).³⁹

Coming to Stuttgart in the past, when we only had the anthroPosophical movement—I am referring only to Stuttgart—I would spend three or four days here and you know how many personal interviews I managed. These things have had some effect, as is now becoming apparent. It was not without significance that whatever had happened in the meantime—people will understand what I mean if they want to—could be put to rights again in those personal interviews. Events could then proceed until the next time. Now the position is such that following those outer developments one has to attend meetings from morning till night, and indeed well into the night, and there is no question of continuing in the ways we got used to when we were only an anthroposophical movement. Now there are many people who feel that it is a nuisance that things are no longer the way they were. It is necessary, however, to look at all the changes and really say to oneself: Things have changed since the spring of last year and this will have to be taken into account.

The situation cannot remain as it is, but a united effort must be made to see that it does not remain this way. It cannot remain as it is because everything that is done—be it for the Waldorf School or the Kommende Tag—has its basis in spiritual work. Without the spiritual work that has been done and must continue to be done there is no point to it all. The spiritual work must give form, vigour and content to the whole. To continue the way we are going would mean that the institutions which have now been established would swallow up the original spiritual movement. We would be taking away the original basis. Nothing growing out of the anthroposophical movement should be allowed to swallow up the movement as such.

You see, these are serious matters we have to discuss today, and I think at least some of you will understand what I mean. Things will not be different unless we accept it as a reality that anthroposophical work has been done for many years, for decades. This work must be seen as something real.

I would ask you also to consider the following. There is much conflict in the world, but where is most of this conflict to be found? It takes a certain form and people fail to notice, but most of it takes place in the sphere of spiritual endeavour. There is no end to the conflict within the body we call the anthroposophical movement, for example. When our movement evolved out of older practices—it was necessary to start from these, you know the reasons—that is, when many people familiar with the old theosophical practices joined our movement, I had the feeling that a gentleman, who at the time was particularly vehement in his defense of the line we were following, would very soon be in conflict with various other people. Conflict is likely to be particularly bad in this sphere. In fact I always made it quite clear that the gentleman in question, a theosophist of the purest Water, would not only come in conflict with others, but that his right side and his left would be involved in a desperate struggle. People Will find that the left side of this individual will have the most dreadful quarrel with his right side.

It will of course be necessary to develop the other extreme, where the conflicts that constantly arise are overcome. Such conflicts are due to the very nature of spiritual movements, because they all aim to develop the human individuality. The other pole, the other extreme, of human understanding, must be there as well; it is the pole of human understanding where it is possible to enter into a human individual, to go deeply into the life impulses of another person, and so on. It must be possible for the Kommende Tag and the Waldorf School we are now running to be given a sound moral basis by the anthroposophical movement here in Stuttgart, the moral basis that is the work of decades, or at least should have been such. That has to be the foundation, for it is the only way in which we can go ahead and restore the balance between a life consisting of meetings and the necessary spiritual work which after all should be the basis. We cannot achieve this, of course, if things go on all the time where one is told, for instance, that dreadful things have been going on again, with someone causing trouble all the time, someone upsetting all the rest. Well, that may be so. To date—and on this visit such things have come up again countless times—I have not been able, however, to pursue such an affair to the point where the second person, when approached, told the same story as the first. When it came to the fifth or sixth person, I would hear the absolute opposite of what the first had told me. I do not want to criticize, to apportion praise or blame, really, not even the latter, but that is how it is. What is needed, particularly among anthroposophists, and I have said this on many occasions, is an absolute and unerring feeling for the truth. It is very difficult to continue working in all these areas unless there is a basis of truth, of genuine, immediate truth. If there is this basis of genuine truth, surely it must happen that when something comes up and one pursues the matter further a fifth or sixth person would still present the same facts. Yet it happens that I am told about something ‘dreadful’ and everybody I ask tells me something different. I cannot, of course, apply the things I have from other sources to external life; I have said this many times. It is not a question of whether I know about it, know who is right and who is wrong. The question is whether the first says the same as the sixth or seventh. What I know has nothing to do with it. As a rule I do not allow people to pull the wool over my eyes, and that is not why I ask people. The reasons are quite different. As a rule it does not interest me very much what people tell me. The point is that I hear what the first person says and then the seventh, only to find on many occasions that one person says one thing and the seventh says the opposite. It evidently follows that one of the two things cannot be true. It seems to me that this does follow.

In outer physical life which for this very reason is going into a decline people have always wanted to shut their eyes to the function, the crucial significance, of untruths. Even unintentional untruths are destructive in their effects. In spiritual science working towards anthroposophy it is absolutely essential to realize that an untruth in the life of mind and spirit is the same as a devastating bomb in physical life. It is a devastating force, an instrument of destruction, and this in very real terms. It would certainly be possible to do important and fruitful work in the spiritual sphere again, in spite of the many new developments, providing these things are given some attention—objective attention, however, not subjective attention.

You know I do not normally go in for tirades; it is not my habit to moralize. Just for once, however, I really must discuss the facts that have become very obvious at this time, because the situation is serious. We are looking at undertakings that must not fail, that will have to succeed, and there can be no question of any kind of failure; we have to say today that they shall succeed. They must not however swallow up the original anthroposophical movement, and this means that everybody must do his share to ensure that the moral foundation established in the work of many years really exists. Everybody must do his part. It is really necessary for everybody to to their part.

It saddens my heart that I am unable to respond to almost all the many requests that are made to me. I had to keep refusing to help my friends because time cannot be used twice, and meetings go on not only from morning till night, but even well into the night. Quite obviously I cannot use the same time to talk to individuals. The membership in the widest sense must come to its senses and get rid of the things that play a role in all aspects of life here, the kind of thing I have just been mentioning. Every single member must reflect and see that here in this very place these things have to be done away With Unless this is done—and these things are connected—it will not be possible to find the time to do real fundamental spiritual work. Everything arising out of anthroposophy will succeed. Yet unless some things change the original spiritual movement will be swallowed up. The will impulses of those who consider themselves the bearers of this spiritual movement would then lead to a new materialism, as the original spiritual movement will have been aborted. The spirit needs to be nurtured or it will die. Materialism does not arise of its own accord; you cannot create materialism, just as you cannot create a corpse. A corpse is produced when the soul leaves the organism. In the same way everything created here on a spiritual basis, out of something that has soul, will become entirely material unless there is a genuine desire to nurture the spirit. It means that above all the moral and ethical basis which we have been able to establish is given careful attention. It is necessary above all to ensure that we do not become subject to illusion, that we do not think it is enough to accept Certain views just because they are easy to accept. We must look at life without flinching.

It is really very bad for people to say things like: ‘The threefold order is a good thing; we must take it up.’ Feeling rather good about it they will say: ‘I am getting something organized and it is very much in accord with the threefold order; aren't I good! It makes me really feel good getting something organized that is a nucleus of threefoldness’. Licking your lips morally speaking, full of inner self gratification—you may feel like this when you are doing such things, but it does not mean that you have a sense of reality. The threefold idea is true to reality because it requires genuine effort to bring it to realization. Many people's ideas are however so unrealistic that the idea of threefoldness goes against the grain with them. The first and most essential thing is for this idea to be taken up by a sufficiently large number of people. We must have the necessary sense of reality and practical common sense.

Eight days ago I had to speak here in Stuttgart about the consequences the threefold order has for the management of landed property.⁴⁰ I said that the threefold order obviously aims to achieve a situation where social exchange, social conditions relating to landed property, are such that land cannot be bought and sold like other goods That is entirely based on reality; to say the opposite would be unrealistic. I had to discuss the subject on a day when I actually got here late because we had been going round the countryside all day trying to buy land. If we have a sense of reality we cannot base ourselves on the threefold order and say: ‘I must be good; I am forming a nucleus for the threefold order.’ No, it has to be accepted, and there can be no illusions, that in a certain respect the only possible way in which we can work for a threefold order is by working on the most important aspect, not basing our work on the immediate present.

It is not a question of morally licking our lips as we say that we follow a particular idea. This would make it unfruitful and abstract. It is a question of really seeing the reality, seeing what is necessary. This is the difference between people whose approach is utopian and dogmatic and those who take a practical view. The latter will take an idea as far as it can go, but they are not unworldly people living for some private pleasure; they take hold of the reality. We really only give ourselves up to illusion for our own private pleasure. This must be realized. It is also necessary to realize that many other things go in the same direction. I am sorry, it could not be helped. There were quite a number of things that I could have talked about on this last occasion before my departure. I might have drawn your attention to many things that were put to me more or less in passing, things that do have an effect on the fruitful activities. One of the main problems with those fruitful activities is that there is a constant need to have endless discussions on matters that should be dealt with in half an hour, because things are thrown into the pool that really should not be there. If you have sound thinking habits—and those are the habits we must acquire if spiritual science as it is presented here is to come about—and then find yourself—I am not speaking theoretically—right in the middle of what is nowadays called business practice, the best way of defining what goes on is that people kill as much time as possible, that time is wasted. There are practical people today who boast of being busy all day long. If they did not waste so much time, their work, which let us say takes ten hours, could be easily done in one hour. Time is killed particularly in what is called active life today. This killing of time causes thoughts to be drawn out. Entering into practical life as it goes on today one really gets the feeling that one is in a noodle factory where thoughts that ought to be concentrated are drawn out, pulled apart like strudel or noodle dough; everything is pulled well apart. It is dreadful to come across those spread-apart thoughts that are cultivated in practical life. If you wanted to use thoughts like these to get a clear understanding of the world, of the things I have spoken of today by way of an introduction, you would not get anywhere. All this ‘strudel-dough thinking’ has arisen in the process of killing time. Thoughts that ought to be concentrated, for that is the only way for them to be effective, simply come to nothing by being drawn out. Something which functions properly at a certain density will of course be useless once it has become thin and worn. Many of the things that play a large role in modern economics are quite useless when it comes to making world affairs progress. Our particular task would thus be to grow concise in our thinking also with regard to practical things, and not to kill time. However, time still has to be killed these days, unless the anthroposophical movement, which after all supports our enterprises, becomes what it ought to be: A movement based on truth in every respect, a movement where all untruth eliminates itself because we have no use for it and because it would immediately show itself to be what it is.

This is what I wanted to say to you today. It is not addressed to anyone in particular. Please do not continue to go around saying that I was aiming at one thing or another in particular. I wanted to give you a clear picture of the facts as they are in general. The world situation is serious today and the things that have been going on among us here in Stuttgart really reflect the serious situation that exists for the whole of civilization. The things that haunt us in our community here can teach us a lot about the things that haunt the world as a whole.

I do not wish to hurt anyone's feelings. Nor do I want to moralize, to preach at you. The intention has been to discuss the things that have been obvious to the eye and to the soul on so many occasions over the last two weeks.

• 30. ‘Die Erziehung und der Unterricht gegenüber der Weltlage der Gegenwart’ (Education and teaching in the light of the present world situation), Stuttgart 10 June 1920. Published in Geisteswissenschaft und die Lebensforderungen der Gegenwart 6, Dornach 1950. To be published in GA 335. No record of translation into English.
• 31. Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (1919) GA 23. English translation: Towards Social Renewal. F.T. Smith tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.
• 32. See Rudolf Steiner's Mein Lebensgang (1923–25) GA. 28. English translation: Rudolf Steiner: An Autobiography. R. Stebbing tr. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977.
• 33. Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the soul) (1917) GA. 21. Parts translated into English in The Case for Anthroposophy. Owen Barfield tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.
• 34. Molt, Emil, see ref. 37.
  
  Kühn, Hans, writer and publisher.
  
  Unger, Carl, grad. engineer, owner of machine tool works, member of Council of the German Anthroposophical Society from 1905, lecturer and writer. Shot by a mentally sick individual in Nuremberg in 1929.
  
  Leinhas, Emil, businessman, managing director of Der Kommende Tag AG (see ref. 39), writer.
• 35. Seiling, Max, first a follower then an opponent of Rudolf Steiner. Bore the title Privy Councillor.
  
  TN. Rudolf Steiner used word-play here, calling Hofrat (Privy Councillor) Seiling an Un-Rat. The word Unrat means garbage, refuse, ordure.
• 36. An das deutsche Volk und an die Kultunvelt! (Appeal to the German nation and the civilized world), pamphlet, 1919, reprinted a.o. in Towards Social Renewal (ref. 31).
• 37. Appeal to establish a Council for Culture. Whitsun 1919, signed by many well-known figures in cultural life.
• 38. Waldorf School: intergrated primary and secondary school established by Emil Molt in 1919 for the children of workers in the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory and the general public. This was done under the guidance of Rudolf Steiner who also appointed the teachers and himself gave the preparatory teachers' seminars.
• 39. Der Konunende Tag, Aktiengesellschaft zur F6rderung wirtschaftlicher and geistiger Werte (join-stock company for the promotion of economic and cultural values), established in Stuttgart in March 1920. Rudolf Steiner was Chairman of the Board until 1923. The company became a victim of post-war inflation in Germany and had to be dissolved in 1925.
• 40. Stuttgart 16 June 1920; published in Landwirtschafi und Industrie/Neuordnung des Bodenrechtes als soziale Forderung der Gegenwart (Agriculture and industry/New proposals for land ownership as a social requirement for the present age); quoted from the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner, Roman Boos ed., Stuttgart 1957, S. 84 ff. (to be published in GA 335). No record of translation into English.

There has been a basic theme to everything we have been considering here in recent times. Again and again the point has been made that when any work is undertaken or any proposal made in connection with the anthroposophical movement proper regard must be paid to the gravity of the present situation. In principle everything I have said so far has been in accord with that basic theme. It should also help more and more of our members to come to feel this in their souls. We will continue along these lines. Today I want above all to refer to something that can help us to find the right inner attitude, as it were, to the spiritual-scientific movement that has anthroposophy for its goal.

There has now been scientific evidence that Western culture is in a decline—you know about the book by Oswald Spengler.⁴¹ How do people regard the search for truth within this culture, irrespective of the degree to which they even admit to this? People who imagine they have both feet firmly on the ground, considering themselves to be eminently practical people, regard the search for the truth as something theoretical and not as a real deed accomplished by the soul. It is essential for us today to come to the realization that the search for truth is a deed accomplished by the human soul. We must come to realize that when we gain insight this is no mere theory, no individual point of view, but an actual deed infused with will impulses, a deed in the total context of the evolution of the earth and of humankind.

To begin with let me use a more methodological approach to show the way recognition of the truth must be seen as a deed, using a fact from cultural history as an example. I have frequently spoken of two streams going in opposite directions in the life of the human soul. One of these is the abstract mystical stream, the other the abstract materialistic stream. The latter has developed with the evolution of science over the last three or four centuries. Basically it has entered into all areas that play a role today in the progress of human evolution. The traditional religious creeds hardly play a role in the real progress of human evolution the way they are presented nowadays. They could however play a role in furthering the decline of Western culture.

It if were a matter, for instance, of bringing Spengler's idea of the decline of the West to full realization, the traditional religious faiths officially represented by the Jesuits, by positive Protestantism and so on, would be able to do their part. They would be of no account, however, for progressive evolution. As I have said on a number of occasions, the materialistic stream is clearly in evidence even in people who themselves are quite unaware of this. Characteristically, and it is something we must keep in mind, even the theosophical school was affected by materialism in certain areas when it went by the title ‘theosophical school’. The descriptions given of the human etheric and astral bodies in those circles, where these bodies were merely said to be more subtle forms of matter, with people imagining some kind of mist or cloud, surely were nothing more or less than materialism in spiritual guise. Spiritism is of course materialism most heavily disguised as something spiritual, for it speaks of the spirit when in fact its aims are merely to prove the material existence of the spirit, to present it in material form. Materialism has eaten its way into everything spread about by way of popular literature, above all in popular books and journals where people are informed as to what is ‘true’; it is present in everything that is spread about like this, irrespective of whether it comes from Catholic or Protestant sources. This materialism on the one hand relates to the progress made in culture. It must be taken into account and taken positively into consideration. Traditional historical elements like the religious confessions must of course attack anything that is new; they must fight intensely against anything that is new. This, however, does not have to be taken into serious account when we form our ideas of the present, for it goes in the direction of decline. Materialism on the other hand produces the very things we ought to know about in the present time, though they are of course presented in a materialistic way, in materialistic interpretation. If we wish to share in the work that brings progress in cultural and intellectual life we must know what materialistic anatomy, materialistic physiology, materialistic biology and the sociology of the present age have brought to light. We must be fully informed about these things and out of this very knowledge gain the power to transform materialistic knowledge, the materialistic way of thinking, into spiritual knowledge. It is therefore of definite value in the present time to give full consideration to what materialism has to offer. We cannot transform, say, the Catholic philosophy of the Middle Ages the way some people imagine. This can only be transformed with the aid of Thomism, as I have shown in Dornach,⁴² though it then transforms itself. Materialism can be metamorphosed into an inner spiritual life. Anthroposophists therefore have no reason at all to despise the things that materialism has to give. We have to reckon with materialism. Anthroposophy cannot be evolved out of a blue haze, it must be evolved by people who are alive in and part of modern life, a life that in the first instance is a materialistic one.

The moment we wish to see materialism in the light of the true progress of humankind we must develop a particular basic feeling, the very feeling that many people of the present age, and above all academics of the present age, do not have. This is the feeling that everything immediately around us in the world we perceive with the senses, everything our eyes see, our ears hear and so on, is not real and that we should not look for reality in that direction. We must develop the feeling that it is utterly mistaken to look for atoms and molecules in the world we perceive around us and to consider them to be real, or even commemorative coin. Some scientists are particularly proud to say that they do not take atoms and molecules to be real but use them as ideograms, ideal points in space. It is immaterial, however, if you assume atoms to be physical or ideal points. What matters is whether you take a living comprehension of spiritual entities as your starting point or whether you consider the idea of such living comprehension an abomination and base yourself entirely on what may be gained in the material world. This applies also to atoms seen as points where forces are located. As soon as you base yourself on atomistic ideas you find yourself in a materialism that must lead to doom. We can only deal properly with the world we perceive through the senses if we treat it as a phenomenon, as a form of manifestation. Matter is not even present in the things we perceive through the senses. We must therefore develop the feeling—we can do this thanks to the findings reported in the anthroposophical literature—that when we use our eyes and look out at the whole starry firmament, the cloud formations, the contents of the three kingdoms (mineral, plant and animal) and also the fourth kingdom, the human kingdom, we must not look for anything material in the things that come to us through sensory perception. Matter is not behind any of them! All we perceive are phenomena like the phenomenon of the rainbow, for example, though they may appear more solid than a rainbow. No one should consider a rainbow to have some kind of outer reality—like a solid bridge with its span in seven colours—but see it only as a phenomenon. In the same way we should regard all the things we encounter through our senses as phenomena, however solid they may appear. A rock crystal can of course be taken hold of, whilst in the case of the rainbow we could not take hold of anything. Yet although it may affect our sense of touch, it should still be called a phenomenon. We must not allow our fantasy to create some kind of physical reality, in spite of the view of nature that is generally taken today, a view that is following the wrong path. The 'physical' phenomena we come across therefore are definitely not material phenomena, are not the reality of matter. They are mere phenomena; they come and go out of another reality that we cannot comprehend unless we are able to conceive of it in the spirit. That is the feeling we must evolve—not to look for matter in the outer world.

The real goal of anthroposophical development is missed above all by people who despise outer materiality, people who say: ‘The things we perceive in an outer way are mere matter; we must rise above such things!’ That is quite wrong. The things we perceive outside are not material, we cannot look to them to find the world of matter. We simply do not find matter in the world that impresses itself on the senses. You will come to see this if you read what our anthroposophical literature has to say, and take it in the right spirit.

You then need to develop this feeling further. Here we come to aspects that people find highly uncomfortable today because they come very close to the experience we know can be had with the Guardian of the Threshold. They are uncomfortable; yet unless we enter into them we will make no progress in inner development. We have to go through inevitable discomfort if we are to get from theory to reality. The search for truth must be based on facts. Anyone who thinks matter can be found in the world which we call the material world—the world we perceive with the senses—is mistaken, and the error involves more than mere theory. There are people who think that because others say it is 'matter' it really is matter; this kind of word-cleverness is in vogue nowadays. If anyone thinks it is enough just to say: ‘It Is wrong to look for matter in the world we perceive with the senses’, they cannot be said to be speaking out of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. Spiritual science does not consist in correcting other people's theories. Spiritual science must make the search for truth a deed. It must be a search for knowledge based on strong will impulses, that is, it must enter into the facts even where it merely makes definitions or explains things. And this is where the situation gets uncomfortable.

It is easy to say to someone that they are wrong in thinking that matter is to be found within the outside world, which we perceive with the senses, and to tell them to change their views. That is just talking theory. To accept theories, to oppose theories, to correct them—all that is theoretical talk. Spiritual science cannot in all reality be satisfied with this. The essential thing is to develop our sensibilities to a point where we perceive that someone caught up in materialistic views of the material world has a thoroughly unhealthy organism. We must progress from purely logical definition to a definition that takes hold of realities, in this case the constitution of the human individual. We must become convinced that it is not merely wrong logic to say that matter is to be found in the world we perceive with the senses, but that anyone who considers that what his senses perceive is physical substance is truly on the road to constitutional feeblemindedness. We must perceive that it is sickness to be materialistic in that sense.

We want our ideas to take hold of reality. We cannot do so whilst we continue to think in theories. Everybody supposes that they only need to have good instruction to change their views. Spiritual science always demands that we are alive as we develop and that we restore ourselves to health where we have been materialistic in the above sense, since a departure from the right way means sickness, the road to feeblemindedness.

At this point things come very close to the insights to be gained in meeting the Guardian of the Threshold. When we encounter the Guardian of the Threshold and thus enter into worlds other than the physical world--worlds that add something new to the physical world—all theory comes to an end, the intellectual mists clear and reality begins, with every word saturated with reality. Then we can no longer say that someone is expressing correct or incorrect views. We have to say that they express their views out of a sick or a healthy mind. Then we encounter reality. Nor can we say that someone should correct their views. Instead we must say: ‘If you are on the road to sickness, to feeblemindedness, you must change course and develop a strong, healthy mind again.’ You see it is not enough to correct the so-called philosophies that spread their mists about. For anyone wishing to become a spiritual scientist it is essential to go through a change that is a very real process, and not to be satisfied with something that is intellectual, logical or theoretical. The gravity of the present situation is such that the pathological nature of an intellectual view of the world must be vividly apparent to us.

An attempt has been made to outline one particular aspect, to characterize in the light of reality the materialistic aspect of our cultural life today. The other aspect, the polar opposite of this, is the mystical approach. Mysticism is the refuge of many people who are dissatisfied With materialism. They find that materialism is not right and therefore feel they must follow a different philosophy, a different path in their search for truth than the paths followed by materialism. People then try to develop by following an inner path and to find the spirit along that path. I have frequently spoken of mysticism as a spiritual stream that has the same right to exist in its one-sidedness as materialism has, providing one perceives this one-sidedness. I have spoken of mysticism as a kind of reaction against the materialism which has developed in the American and European civilizations over the last centuries. I have referred to this a number of times, also in the pamphlet published during the war that was also sent to the men at the front.⁴³ This mystical stream must be considered in more detail, again without any of the theorizing that is so common. When it comes to mysticism, people think that by withdrawing from outer life and entering deeply into their inner life they will find the spark of which Meister Eckhart spoke.⁴⁴ They think they will come upon the revelation of the true spirit that cannot be found in the outer material world. Mystics do however tend to be real materialists. Taking the opposite route, mystics mostly are harsh people and out-and-out materialists. They start to shout as soon as the material world is mentioned, considering themselves superior to such things—as has often been said, they feel they are above such things. The point however is that we must not merely theorize but go into the reality. The point is that we must look for the reality behind those mystical endeavours. It is important to realize what comes to life in us when we become mystics, what is active in us when we become mystics. You can find out about it from the anthroposophical literature. We have to say that this is the very soil where physical matter is to be found. We find materiality active in us when we become mystics. Consider even the most sublime mystic—what is he bringing into play in his soul? He brings into play things that boil and bubble in his metabolism, however refined and subtle this metabolism may be. Matter as such is to be found within the human skin, and not in the outside world that impresses us through the senses. We come upon physical matter when we allow things ignited in the metabolism to arise within us. Look at the way Meister Eckhart spoke of God with such depth and conviction. He actually told how he had scrupulously brought to awareness what was bubbling and boiling in his metabolism. It seemed to him to work towards the central heart and there to become transformed into something that could be perceived as a spark of the divine self in the human being. That is the small flame metabolism ignites in the heart.

The true nature of physical matter is thus found by following the path of mysticism. The genuine fruits of Goetheanism must be raised to a higher philosophy of life. In the same way we must clearly understand that the fruits of mysticism must be considered to gain an interpretation of activity in the material sphere. We do not discover material processes in our chemical laboratories. When a chemist is at work in the laboratory, the processes taking place in the retort are external phenomena, just as a rainbow is an external phenomenon. That, too, is phenomenon and has no real materiality to it. We learn about real materiality when we see the bubbling and boiling of the processes that go on inside our skin ignite the way a stearin candle ignites to burn with a flame. That is where materiality has to be sought, and we only see mysticism in its right light when we realize that all the inner experiences mysticism provides in its one-sideness are material effects; true materiality is to be sought in there. We must not look for physical matter by analyzing chemical processes. We must look for physical matter in every organic form that goes through its complex chemism and physiology inside the human skin. Mysticism gives us the solution to the riddle of physical matter. Mysticism however only gives us the solution to the riddle of physical matter. We must not reinterpret the inner materiality of the human organism to the effect, for instance, that when we see a burning candle we say: 'That cannot be the fruit of something inherent in the candle. There is a tiny spirit inside that candle and this spirit produces the flame.' That would be nonsense of course. It is also nonsense to look for the reality of the spirit in the experiences of a mystic.

It is necessary to arrive at a very definite idea, even if this is difficult. This is a threshold truth. We do not get far with what can be achieved in mysticism, for there we are dealing with phenomena that are like opiates, we are given up to our egotistical desires that allow themselves to be defined as anything but the materialistic aspects of our own inner processes. The bewildering multitude of phenomena surrounding us in the world of the senses does not allow us to go so far as to realize that in fact none of it has any materiality. Let us consider what we are actually seeing when we look at a distant planet, say, or a fixed star out there in space. What are we actually seeing? We do not see the green plant cover of the ground, the cloud formations, brown or grey earth and so on that we see around us on this earth. The stars and even the moon are too far distant for that. Everything that lives out there on those alien heavenly bodies has an inner aspect, has material processes that have been transformed. What we see through the telescope are the material processes active in the highest form of existence on the star in question. In the same way, if that other star, let us say the moon, were to look at us through a telescope, would it see our plants, animals and so on? No, the earth is far too far away for that. Pointing a telescope at the earth the moon would be looking into your stomachs, hearts and so on. That is the content which shines forth into the cosmos. The human kingdom is the highest on earth and because of this someone looking from outside would see what goes on inside human skins. When these things which are visible to distant stars become ignited in our own inner awareness they are the things mystics experience.

So you see that anyone seriously devoted to the anthroposophical view will have to penetrate this second, equally uncomfortable threshold truth that it is mysticism which teaches us what matter is on earth. We cannot know anything about even the simplest of earthly forces if we merely look at the outside world. Just open a book on physics. You know it discusses gravitation, earthly gravity. It always includes the comment, however, that it is impossible to know the true nature of gravity. People are in fact rather pleased with themselves when they explain that the essential nature of gravity is not known.

How can we get to know the nature of the force that makes the chalk fall down when I let go of it? The force called gravity can be understood as follows. At a certain point in life, perhaps after the thirtieth year or even earlier—it depends on how kindly destiny deals with us—we can make a discovery when we observe ourselves in the light of spiritual science, rather than by the usual methods of observation. The methods of spiritual science do to some extent introduce us to the methods of genuine self-observation. About the thirty-second year, therefore, we can make a discovery. Observing ourselves not in the abstract way of mystics but genuinely, we shall achieve genuine self-observation; for instance by noting that living from the thirty-fifth to the fortieth year, say, we have changed at the organic level. Some will note that their hair has turned grey; it also happens nowadays that men grow bald. We find we have changed. Unless however we have gained the ability to observe ourselves we shall have no experience of these changes, we shall not have inward experience of what happens with these changes. The experience can be gained if people apply to themselves what it says in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.⁴⁵ From about the thirty-second year onwards we have the experience that the body has to be carried differently, that it becomes heavier. That is our inward experience of gravity, of gravitation. It has to be experienced inwardly.

None of the wishy-washy things talked about in mysticism are as important as a concrete fact like this, the inner experience of growing heavier. You cannot gain this experience if some person stands here and lets a stone drop from his hand. You do not observe the gravitational pull by watching a stone drop, for stones have no real materiality. You must observe yourself, this time looking not into space but into time, that is, the way you experience things before and after. We must progress from experience in space to experience in time Things never to be found in the world of the senses must be gained through inward experience. They are the second element belonging to reality.

Experiencing the outer world of the senses we have truth but no knowledge. Experiencing inwardly in a abstract mystical way we have merely knowledge and no truth, for we are under an illusion concerning the basic phenomenon of inner life; inward experience being the flickering flames of material processes. Anyone looking for materiality in the outside world is interpreting the world in an ahrimanic way. Someone else may merely look for truth in an abstract way within himself; he or she is interpreting the world in a luciferic way. Genuine spiritual science in the light of anthroposophy holds the balance between the two, with truth and knowledge interweaving. We must look for truth at one extreme and knowledge at the other and become aware that living realities become polar opposites when knowledge is brought into truth and truth into knowledge. Then the search for truth becomes a real deed. Then something is happening. We are not merely producing logical definitions or correcting our views, but something is happening when human beings endeavour to gain inner experience of knowledge and look for the truth outside them, endeavouring also to let each enter into the other.

This has to be understood in the present age. The present age must understand that human beings must hold the balance between the two extremes, between the ahrimanic and the luciferic poles. People always tend to go in one direction. In the Trinity Group⁴⁶ in Dornach the luciferic element is above and the ahrimanic below. The Christ is in the middle, holding the balance. These things can be presented as ideas, can be made into the essence of ideas. They then become truth and knowledge. It is also possible to represent them in art, but then we have to forget about mere ideas and seek to find them—in line, in form, in configuration. Then it becomes the Trinity Group in Dornach, for instance. The whole is of the spirit, however.

Mysticism is one-sided and so is materialism. We must know that the two have to be interwoven and we must be alive in our doing' knowing that the true inwardness of the human being is to be found in being alive in one's doing. Our age wants to be one-sided and embrace materialism and this means that it is indeed on the road to feeblemindedness. I have shown that we must not be content with theories but must know in truth and reality that materialism shows itself to be what it is—a road to feeblemindedness—as soon as we meet the Guardian of the Threshold. We must aim for a state of health, and not merely disprove things in order to arrive at something else. The opposite extreme is abstract mysticism. We should be able to develop the feeling that in reality it is the road to infantilism—to put it bluntly, to childishness—a condition appropriate only for small infants. A child as yet untouched by the world, living entirely in physical materiality, in the processes of its physical organs, is exactly the type of the mystic, though the mystic will have the same experiences at a later stage than a child. They will of course feel different, those experiences, but an infant also experiences this concentration of organic activity in the heart. Sensing this concentration it will kick its legs in the air and wave its arms about and we can see how this peripheral activity is the opposite to the concentration of activity in the heart. If people remain childish all their lives, if they are too lazy to take in the things that only materialism can give, they reject outer materiality; it means nothing to them, they see it as something low that must be overcome. And then they kick their legs in the air and in doing so produce their mysticism. That is the threshold truth, the unpalatable threshold truth. Everything that is abstract and mystical, inducing a feeling of self-gratification when people concern themselves with mysticism nowadays, with things that make them lick their lips when they appear in print, though in reality they are the equivalent of kicking one's legs in the air in one's thoughts—all that is infantile. It has to be clearly understood that whereas materialism leads to feeblemindedness, abstract mysticism leads to infantilism, to childishness. True life is found when we find the balance, the equilibrium, between materialism and mysticism.

Again it is rather difficult to do this, and things really get uncomfortable. When you want to balance the scales you must not despise anything that is present in excess on one side and upsetting the balance. You must really try to put into both scales what is needed to maintain equilibrium. In the same way you should not despise anything that takes you into the sphere of matter, saying to yourself that it will cause feeblemindedness. Quite the contrary: anyone wishing to enter into things must step boldly into reality, saying to himself: 'I will have to follow the path that would lead to feeblemindedness if I were one-sided in my pursuit; but I am armed against it. I am also armed against remaining one-sidedly on the other path; I retain what is necessary from childhood days but do not remain a child.' That is how the balance must be sought between materialism and mysticism. That is a true sense of life. The sense of life holds the balance between feeblemindedness and childishness. Anyone who cannot be bothered to see these things clearly will not be able to enter into reality. People Only grow feebleminded if they fail to note that normal people have to overcome feeblemindedness day by day, hour by hour. Feeblemindedness is a constant threat and we only remain human by remaining childish, i.e. inspired. Anyone holding on to childishness in the right measure is a genius. We are geniuses only to the extent to which we have held on to childishness into our thirties; but this childishness must be properly counterbalanced. Thus we have to say that we are all in danger—how shall I put it—of becoming geniuses or remaining childish infants. It could go one way or the other.

As soon as we come close to threshold truths, our ordinary ways of expressing ourselves no longer work; things that normally are quite separate blend into each other at this point. All words acquire a different meaning, and we might say—it would be quite amusing to represent this in a painting or sculpture—‘Here is the threshold of the spiritual world, with one individual on one side and one on the other; one is active in the spiritual sphere, the other in the material world, and they are yelling at each other. The one who is in the spiritual world yells: “Childishness!” The other yells across from the material world “Sheer genius!” ’Just as a tree looks different when seen from another point of view so things look different depending on whether we look at them from the spiritual point of view or out of materialism. From the spiritual point of view the genius of someone who has retained the ways of a child, forming ideas in play, has to be called childishness, we must see it as childishness when we are on the spiritual side. Childishness is regarded in a different way from that point of view. There we know that human beings descend from the spiritual world, that they come to live in a physical body; we see that a child is still lacking in skills, is still undeveloped, but we also see the most sublime spirituality alive in that child.

It has caused considerable annoyance to some people—that numskull Dessoir,⁴⁷ for example—that in a small work I published. Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity,⁴⁸ I have shown that the wisdom involved in giving shape and form to the brain of a child is far greater than the wisdom human individuals are able to produce in later life. Numskulls like Dessoir cannot grasp this. For them, the full range of wisdom is what they write in their books. The thing is, however, that when we say 'childishness' from the spiritual point of view we perceive how the human spirit has descended as a ray of the divine spirit, and that it was fully developed when it did so. It entered into a human body that was still undeveloped, taking hold of it, working it, with the result that after just a few months the brain has become something different, and the whole body is something different in the seventh and fourteenth year of life, and so on. Childishness is not a term of abuse, therefore, for childishness is seen to be the descent of the spirit into the physical world, a first taking hold of the body, a stage where one is still a child, still in a human condition where the head has not yet been cleared of the spirit. That will happen as the rest of the body develops, for this develops fastest, whilst the head contains far more spirit. That is the image we have when we speak of childishness from the spiritual point of view. The head of a child is full of spirit and—this is an unpalatable truth—as we get older the spirit gets less and less, our heads become more and more petrified. A child still has a great deal of the spirit. This gradually evaporates. I may be permitted to use the term 'evaporate' in the sense that the spirit evaporates from the head down into the rest of the organism. So you see I am speaking of something most sublime when I speak of childishness as it is seen from beyond the threshold. If I speak of childishness from the earthly point of view it means that one has failed to progress. The language of the earth and that of heaven are different, alas, and it is part of the tragedy of our age that people do not even want to understand the language of heaven. Since it has become customary to speak in the most earthly terms possible from the pulpit it is no longer possible for people to understand the language of heaven.

It then can easily happen, when one has something to say within a certain context—expressing it out of that context, of course, and having prepared the way before saying the words that come from beyond the threshold, words to the effect that the entities of the spiritual world evaporate downwards—that the following may occur. Let me present a picture to you of something that really happened. It may happen, then, that someone writes: ‘Steiner says things evaporate in a downward and not an upward direction.’ Some professor of anatomy⁴⁹ gets hold of this and reads it out to an audience which he himself has prepared by asking them to bring children's trumpets and rattles when someone is going to talk about genuine anthroposophy. So a lecture on anthroposophy is given. Then the professor has the word and reads out something like this, having somehow got hold of it, and the students use the trumpets and rattles they have brought along to produce the kind of scientific argument that has become customary in those circles. This is something that really happened in Goettingen the other day. Have a look at the supplement to the recent issue of our Threefold Order journal.⁵⁰ You will find it there.

These are serious times in which we live and on Friday I want to continue in the vein in which I started today, when I characterized the true face of materialism for you on the one side and that of mysticism on the other. I will then show you what we are called on to do. We are not called today to gather in sectarian groups, but to come alive and intervene in what goes on in life, bringing anthroposophical impulses into the world of the present cultural life. If we understand what the present age asks of us we cannot remain one-sided materialists or mystics, we must take the road to reality. I have tried to characterize this in the pamphlet. Mr Molt took the trouble to put into print for the men at the front, so that they might learn something of the anthroposophical spirit. We must always keep In mind that these are serious times in which we live and that we shall only feel able to cope if we are open to the approach of something that properly speaking cannot even be given a name, using the old forms of speech, but imposes the necessity to find new forms of speech if the truth of our age is to be found. The search for knowledge must go beyond mere rumination, it must become an active deed. Then humankind will not slither into the doom of the Western world, for we shall find the upward path again. As long as materialism continues to use the symbols of childishness—those trumpets and rattles—to rebut anthroposophy, and mysticism makes use of materialism, dressing up utterly material processes as something spiritual, we shall slither into the doom of the Western world at full tilt. It is not a question of ruminating but of really doing something.

• 41. Spengler, Oswald, German historic writer. Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West, C.F. Atkinson tr.) Munich, vol. 1, 1918, vol. 2, 1922.
• 42. Die Philosophie des Thomas von Aquino. 3 lectures given in Dornach on 22-24 May 1920. GA 74. English translation: The Redemption of Thinking. A.P. Shepherd, M.R. Nicoll tr. London: Hodder & Stoughton 1956.
• 43. Durch den Geist zur Wirklichkeits-Erkenntnis der Menschenrätsel: Philosophie und Anthroposophie. Vier Marchen (aus den Mysteriendramen). Anthroposophisicher Seelenkalender. Der Seelen Erwachen, 7. und 8. Bild. [Discovering the reality of the riddles of human nature through the spirit. Philosophy and Anthroposophy. Four tales (from the Mystery Plays). Calendar of the Soul. The Soul's Awakening, scenes 7 and 8]. Berlin 1918.
• 44. TN. Eckhart, Johannes, known as Meister Eckhart, German mystic.
• 45. Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? 1904. GA 10. English translation: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. G. Metaxa tr., D.S. Osmond, C. Davy rev. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1976.
• 46. Trinity Group: a sculpture in wood generally referred to as the Group Sculpture at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. It shows the Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman.
• 47. Dessoir, Max. Vom Jenseits der Seele. Die Geheimwissenschaften in kritischer Betrachtung (From the beyond of the soul. A critical assessment of the occult sciences). S. 254 ff. Stuttgart 1917.
• 48. Die geistige Fahrung des Menschen und der Menschheit, 1910. GA 15. English translation: The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity. H.B. Monges tr. New York: Anthroposophical Press 1970.
• 49. Prof. Hugo Fuchs, Goettingen. See also Rudolf Steiner, ‘Ein paar Worte zum Fuchs-Angriff’ (A few words on the attack made by Fuchs), in Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus 2. Jahrg. Nr. 5 (Aug. 1920); reprinted in Aufsätze zur Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus and zur Zeitlage 1915-1921 GA 24.
• 50. Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus 2. Jahrg. Nr. 4, Beilage (Juli 1920).

Today I shall have to continue with some of the topics I discussed the last time I was here. It is particularly important, indeed necessary, to stress the connection between what I have said before and what I wish to add today. I have explained that the road to spiritual science calls for recognition to be given to two facts. One fact is that it is impossible to imagine that matter, physical substance, can be found to the outer world of our human environment. This can be clearly understood on the basis of many different things that can be learned through spiritual science. Our eyes behold the outside world, our ears hear the outside world, and we come to understand nature in a way when we use the intellect to combine the things we see, hear and Perceive with the other senses. We then think we know something about outer nature. Yet we are in error if we think and believe some form of science will help us to find physical matter and the laws pertaining to it in that outer nature. Materialism was in error not because it was speaking of physical matter but because materialists thought they could find physical matter and the laws of physical matter, its infrastructure and essential nature, in the outside world. People saying they do not want to know about the outside world because it is a material world, and that they want to follow the inner mystical path to a world of the spirit, are therefore materialists just as much as people who simply interpret the outside world in materialistic terms. Their search along the path of mysticism shows that in their view, too, Physical matter is to be found in the outside world. The people of more recent times are in error when they look for the essential nature of matter in the outside world. To put things right essentially means that we must no longer look for the nature of matter in the outside world and be very clear in our minds that however far we extend our sensory perceptions we shall never discover the nature of matter and its infrastructure, its laws. It has to be understood that all that exists in the outside world is Maya. It is the world of phenomena. Look as we may we shall never find anything material in that outside world.

On the other hand we must grasp a second, quite different fact. It is that the nature of matter, which materialism is erroneously looking for in the outside world, may be found within ourselves. We shall find it particularly if we become one-sided, abstract mystics. The contents of a certain mysticism coming to our awareness—experiences we think we are having—are nothing but the flame, I would say, that is lit within us by processes involving our physical organs. Considering the mysticism of Tauler and of Meister Eckhart, one is right in thinking that these men had a special faculty for experiencing these things and interpreting the physical matter in their bodies when the flame of awareness was ignited. They found the material world through mysticism. Until we know that external observation reveals only the world of phenomena, Maya, and that inward observation reveals only physical matter and its flame, we cannot get a clear, true picture of the nature of the world and the way human beings relate to this world. Physical matter is not to be found by applying science to the outside world, it must be sought within us, through mysticism. There we shall find its laws. The essential nature of gravity is not to be found with the aid of Atwood's machine.⁵¹ Instead we can try—in our thirty-second year, or perhaps at another time in our lives—to become inwardly aware of gravity, so that we know from inner experience what it really means to experience gravity. Concrete inner experience should show us that between the thirtieth and fortieth year we grow heavier and heavier inside. We can gain inner experience of a property of matter that merely comes to expression in mystical experiences. I have tried to demonstrate the essential point by saying that anyone finding himself in the midst of the chaos of the planet, the way modern scientists do, cannot get a clear idea concerning these things. We see the plants, the animals, the cloud cover; we see the glittering light of the stars, we see rivers, hills and valleys and so on. Yet if someone were to observe the earth from Mars, for instance, none of these would matter. An inhabitant of the planet Mars observing the earth through some instrument or other—we may well imagine, and it would be in accord with the truth, though in a different way, that those who inhabit Mars have the kind of organization that enables them to observe the earth—would perceive nothing of the cloud formations, rivers and mountains we see, nothing of the phenomena relating to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. He would only perceive what goes on inside the skin of the human beings living on earth. Everything else would vanish before the eye of an inhabitant of Mars. He would perceive only what goes on inwardly in the organic life of human beings and for him that would be the material world of the earth. When we grow aware of a mystical element within us it is not what many mystics think it is but the flame that is cooked inside us. That is the place where we can find out about the physical matter of the earth. This form of self-perception takes us into the sphere of matter and of energy, an area where the people of the Western world have arrived at exactly the opposite view over the last centuries.

This gives an indication of the extent to which we have to change our thinking if the decline is to become an upward movement again. People think they are materialists or idealists or spiritualists because they follow a particular philosophy. That is not the case. We are far from being spiritualists when we say we contemplate the inner and not the outer life. It could indeed happen that someone is concentrating on his inner life and exactly by doing so comes to observe matter; the way it turns into a flame inside us. To find the right path it will be necessary to grasp what I mean, and to do so with the right inner attitude. The outer world as we perceive it with the senses offers only phenomena; it does not reveal the root and origin of the phenomena. Their root and origin lies inside our own skins. Anything we see outside should be regarded in the same way as we regard a rainbow. Anyone who believes a rainbow to be more than merely a phenomenon, thinking it to be something material spanning the heavens, is taking the wrong view. In the same way we are in error If, due to the fact that our sense of touch is also involved when we perceive the world around us, we believe we are surrounded by material things and not mere phenomena. The only difference compared to a rainbow is that other senses are also involved. Materiality cannot be found there, however, just as it does not exist in a rainbow. Everything outside us is phenomenon. The root and origin of the phenomena therefore is inside the human skin. The processes that carry the affairs of the earth from one age to another take place inside the human skin.

It may seem highly improbable and paradoxical to modern minds but it is nevertheless true that the phenomena which surround us today, and the laws apparent in these phenomena, are not the outer consequence of material events that occurred three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. They are the consequence of what went on inside the bodies of Egyptians, of Chaldeans and others three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. Those inner events have become outer ones. The outside world of those times has vanished, disappeared. Human bodies hold the germ for a future that may be reckoned in thousands of years. It is possible to see this by considering the natural phenomena of today, drawing a conclusion that may be bold but nevertheless revealing. People talk about the properties of the element radium. To someone able to perceive the reality of the spirit this sometimes sounds like children talking about something adult minds have long since come to understand on the basis of different facts. Modern physicists know that the radium which existed on the earth's surface up to AD 140 has since disappeared and no longer is radium. The radium that is found today has only formed since AD 140. Physicists are actually teaching this now. These things present themselves to human minds to force them, as it were, finally to give up the erroneous ways of thinking which had to be pursued for centuries for the sake of human freedom.

All this shows that it is necessary to consider the things spiritual science working towards anthroposophy presents to human minds in a totally different way from the way we usually look at things. It is necessary to abandon mere theory and consider the reality: to progress at all levels from abstract intellectual knowledge to active perceptiveness, to doing things, really doing something in relation to the world. As I have said before—but it is essential to make this point with real forcefulness—people think that some are materialists nowadays and others are spiritualists. A spiritualist will say: ‘He's a materialist and has to be opposed because it is not true that the soul is the product of physical matter. What the materialist says is wrong and we have done enough when we have refuted his arguments. The materialist is in error and therefore must be opposed.’ That is not the point, however. It is not a question of logic, of theories. Yet people always think spiritual science is all theory. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy always bases itself on reality, sometimes of course seeking it in the place where it is to be truly found: in the true realm of the spirit. People who look to the outside world and seek to find matter everywhere by the methods now used in molecular and atomic theory—it makes no difference if they see matter as point sources of energy or as tiny building stones—are not merely subject to an error in logic that can be refuted. True spiritual science has nothing to do with purely theoretical concepts. It is concerned with reality. Anyone looking for more than phenomena in the outside world Is on the road not only to logical error but to organic illness affecting the whole of his person. We should not say that to follow this road Is an error in logic. We should say that anyone searching for truth In that direction is on the road to organic illness, on the road to feeblemindedness. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy often has to change theoretical views into views that relate to reality. The search for clarity of ideas and concepts has nothing to do with merely agreeing or disagreeing with the views of others; it has to do with sickness and health, very real things in our lives. It therefore has to be said that a seeker who looks to phenomena for more than mere phenomena, for physical matter, is on the road to feeblemindedness, to organic illness. This is entirely within the sphere of reality.

In the same way we cannot simply oppose people who look to find abstract spirituality within themselves. Someone looking for the spirit by following the path of mere one-sided inner mysticism, failing to realize that when he comes to see through the tissue of this mysticism it is materiality he finds, is on the way to becoming infantile, to developing an organic illness taking the form of childishness. (I have given it the name that may well be given when one perceives this from beyond the threshold.) If we call this the threshold from the Physical to the non-physical world, with the Guardian of the Threshold standing there, the quality we call inspiration, or genius, on this side may justifiably be called childishness on the other side of the threshold. Childishness goes the wrong way in the physical world if it persists throughout life. Genius on the other hand means that a certain childlike quality persists in the background throughout life. Genius is achieved when we are able to retain into ripe old age a quality of soul that normally belongs to childhood. This is seen in its true form from beyond the threshold. If however that childlike soul quality persists one-sidedly into subsequent life stages, then this element, which in its rightful place in the human sphere is genius, becomes childishness instead. Once again we see that purely logical ideas must be replaced with ideas relating to reality as soon as we enter the sphere of spiritual science. They must be replaced with concepts that not merely change our views but produce inner organic changes.

Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is a very serious matter. The seriousness of it is not given full recognition when people approach the work of spiritual science with their ordinary mental attitudes. They want to agree or disagree the way they usually do in the outside world; they want to continue in their habitual ways as they approach spiritual science. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy can however only be taught by speaking in the terms of the world beyond. There words have entirely different meanings. Gravity, which exerts a downward pull here on earth, exerts an upward pull in that world. In the spiritual world we have to speak of what draws us down in a way that makes it the exact opposite. It is not surprising then that anyone taking spiritual science seriously is, to begin with, completely misunderstood by people who want to proceed in the customary way—a way that was inevitable in the age of materialism—when they approach spiritual science. The inevitable result is that things like those I dared to put to you yesterday are misunderstood.

Someone presenting his own views in opposition to Oswald Spengler would simply refute him. A spiritual scientist finds himself obliged not to refute Spengler's view in the usual way. He has to assume points of view rather than follow a rigid line; he will have to say that Oswald Spengler speaks from a different point of view, one that offers no prospects for the immediate future. We do justice to such phenomena if we do not simply refute them but show the genius that is in them, speaking with inner concern about the things one would like to see overcome. Spiritual science has much more to do with the way in which we deal with these things than with bald statements, with the kind of mystical platitude that the person who produces it even believes to be a particularly inspired truth. We have to consider these things, for we are moving into an age where we have to get beyond the mere contents of intellectual life. This is something I want to stress over and over again: we must get beyond the mere content of intellectual life.

Going just by the content, even a fool would find it relatively easy to refute Oswald Spengler's ideas. That is by no means difficult, but it is not what matters. What matters is to establish the concrete reality of Spengler's work and show how it can be overcome in a real and concrete way. In future the essential point in characterizing a person Will be more and more to consider what they are actually saying rather than to respond in sympathy or antipathy to what he or she has to say. We should not consider whether certain contents please or displeases us, but whether there is a spiritual quality to them. It is more important for the overall outcome of world evolution that there is someone who is an inspired materialist, a genius in representing materialism, for that calls for a brilliant mind whilst it often needs very little intelligence to represent platitudinous mysticism. A platitudinous mystic may on occasion do more to make the world materialistic than an inspired materialist. It is the quality of mind that matters. Recognition of this fact will count for much more in future than the actual content. This is something we have to learn. We must not seek for the spirit as though it were a system of logic; we must look for its reality. Let me ask you this. Would it not be possible for You to see that more of the spirit is alive in an inspired materialist than in a spiritualist full of platitudes? These are the things spiritual science working towards anthroposophy must come to see clearly. It is the reality of the spirit that matters, not the abstract statements made by one person or another. People fail to realize how important it is to consider realities and not theories!

Some of the things we see in ordinary life simply must be considered from the point of view of spiritual science today if we are to get them clear in our minds. Consider the parties which have formed in public life in our everyday world. Let us first of all consider the ordinary political parties. You know that the most miserable, sterile cliches are to be found in party politics. Yet to some extent we are all part of this, willy-nilly, unless we want to withdraw completely from public life or perhaps cannot have a vote because we are stateless and have not been given the right to vote anywhere. Everybody who has the right to vote is forced to support one line or another, i.e. to work along party lines. Parties are a fact of life. They go back to better times, to the English see-saw system when there was the Conservative Party on one side and the Liberal Party on the other. It may be said that all the parties that now exist are different combinations of those two shades. Sometimes the liberal element which is to the left takes on some colour from conservatism on the right, and conservatism is coloured with liberalism from the left, as in the case of the Social Democrats, or conservatism turns radical, as we have seen in the present time. All in all it can be said that the conservative-liberal seesaw is the pattern on which all our parties are based. That is the picture one gets when looking at this in an outer way. The most dreadful things are happening in those party organizations—everybody would admit this. The thing exists, however, and the question is why it exists. What does it rally represent? What in fact are parties?

Everything that presents itself in the physical world is an image of the non-physical world. What is it that exists in the non-physical world with the result that in the physical world we have parties as an image of it? The matter can only be properly understood if we grasp the conditions which apply when we go across the threshold to the spiritual world. There we arrive at something very different, at the real nature of things. Here in the physical world we are idealists, sceptics, realists, spiritualists or any other kind of -ists. We are something that can be summed up in a manifesto, as a political or sociological system. In short, we are something-ists. We base ourselves on an abstract notion, for parties always base themselves on manifestos, systems and the like, i.e. on abstract notions. As soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world we are no longer dealing in mere logic and abstract notions, we are dealing with realities. It is merely that this is not usually taken seriously. You cannot give your allegiance to a party programme when you have gone past the Guardian of the Threshold, you can only hold to the essential spirit of things, for there everything has to do with the essential spirit. You can merely hold to a spirit of the higher hierarchies and say: That is the one I follow, the one I unite with. Let others present their affairs in their own way, I am uniting with that one, I take his side. The term 'to side with one or another' achieves very real significance then; it is no longer merely abstract. Being human we are inclined to say that as soon as we look beyond the threshold we find three essential spirits: the Christ, Ahriman and Lucifer. It is of course possible to prepare oneself carefully to gain comprehension of the spiritual world and then to say: I choose Christ's party, or Ahriman's or Lucifer's Party. It is however also possible to obscure the issue, being badly Prepared, and choose Ahriman but call him Christ. We follow a spiritual entity, however—everything is of the essence beyond the threshold! We are always dealing with realities there, not with anything by way of a programme or system.

These words I say to characterize the relationship of the human being to the non-physical world are weighty words. In one particular respect it is not yet possible to say the final word on the subject, because that would be too provocative. Very few people on this earth however are aware that basically it is an illusion to follow party lines, to accept the abstract notions of parties. There is no reality to it and when we begin to follow something that is real we must in fact follow something that lies in the spiritual world beyond the threshold. There is however one party that may immediately be characterized as being well aware of this secret and indeed acting upon it. This was said in public in the course of lectures given at Karlsruhe in 1911⁵² and has brought me the hatred of the party in question. These are the Jesuits. They know very well that to follow a party programme—forgive me for using a term commonly used in Germany—is nonsense. One follows a spiritual entity in the non-physical world! That is why their exercises start with the Jesuit having to visualize the spirit whom he is to follow in the Society of Jesus, forming a military corporation for him. When I say that the last word cannot yet be said, I want to hold back concerning the nature of what is called 'Jesus' there. The point is to show that Jesuitism forms a party that follows a spiritual entity and that Jesuits are very well aware that to follow some party or other that goes no further than a programme to be followed in the physical world is a nonsense. The effectiveness of the Society of Jesus is due to the fact that it trains its followers to be the soldiers of a spiritual entity. The do not say this is right and this is wrong. They say: ‘It is part of the mission of the spiritual entity I am following; I shall defend it. I shall oppose anything that is not part of the Mission of the spiritual entity I am following, even if it is logically defensible; it is just as possible to defend what Lucifer and Ahriman are about as it is to defend the things Christ is about. There are exactly three logical defenses and they are all equally valid.’

We therefore have the strange phenomenon that the Jesuits are of course aware that anthroposophy is taking a spiritual line that is wholly defensible and yet they oppose it. They know full well that logical argument is no effective opposition, for it merely means playing with logic. They know that they are facing an adversary in this battle of minds and they will use all available means. It is therefore pointless to join battle by refuting the refutations of the Jesuits. They know exactly what objections we can raise; the fact that they know them and consider them to be fair makes no difference, however, for they follow another spirit than the one anthroposophy must now follow for the weal of humankind. As soon as one is in the realm of the spirit it is reality that counts. What counts is that one really gets a clear understanding of the spiritual paths, using the whole human being in arriving at such understanding—which certainly can be achieved with healthy common sense nowadays—and not the human dwarf who tends to be the end product of the kind of educational establishments we have today.

The parties which exist in physical life are therefore caricatures of something that rightfully exists in the spiritual world. That is what is so difficult about it. Things appearing in the physical world may be a reflection of something of genuine significance in the spiritual world. In the physical world it is pernicious and abominable, because every world has its own laws, and today we face the growing necessity to work our way up into the spiritual world again. The first stage consists of caricatures of spiritual life appearing in physical life; of people setting up party banners and following party idols when in fact they should be giving their allegiance to spiritual entities. It is truth and reality when it occurs in the non-physical world, and a lie and illusion when it occurs here in the physical world. You see I am not using empty words when I tell you that what matters is to transform purely theoretical things into the reality whenever we wish to speak of the truths that exist beyond the threshold.

Mere refutation of materialism will not achieve anything, because the situation is like this where the human being is concerned: In their whole make-up human beings are really spirit and soul. This element of spirit and soul exists even before we are conceived, before we are born. It has evolved out of our previous earth incarnation; it has gone through the spiritual world. It now assumes flesh, creating a physical Image of itself that consists of nervous system, skeletal system, blood system. So we now have two things: the human being in soul and spirit and the human being of flesh and bone that is its image. When we are thinking the usual abstract thoughts, what is it that thinks in us? Not the human being of soul and spirit. It is particularly when we think abstract thoughts, above all using earthly logic, that the Physical brain in us is thinking. It is important to know that when materialists say that the brain does the thinking they are quite correct as far as abstract thoughts ar concerned. The physical brain is an image of the spiritual brain, and this image creates an image, abstract thinking being merely an image. It may thus be said that when it comes to abstract ideas the physical brain does the thinking.

This is simply a special case of what I have said before. Materialism has merely found out that the brain is thinking the thoughts that from the middle of the 15th century onwards have become standard in Western civilization. The materialism presented by Moleschott, Buechner and that fat man Vogt cannot be simply refuted by saying it is wrong. It is quite appropriate for human beings who, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, have turned more and more to mere materialism. Human beings of the Western world are in the process of becoming beings that think only with the physical brain. The prophets of such physical brain thinking, Moleschott and Buechner, merely stated what Western humankind was going to be. They were wrong only in so far as they applied this to humankind as a whole. What they said applies only to people living after the middle of the 15th century, and in their case it does apply. People have got used to thinking only with their brains; it is the common way of thinking nowadays. Everything to be found in our ordinary literature, in the whole of modern science, is material thinking, is that kind of thinking. The materialists are quite right, and we could say that Buechner and Vogt would have been unfair to their colleagues if they had said that they thought with the spirit. That is not the case; they think merely with their brains. This cannot be argued against, and it has to be recognized that the road to materiality is not merely a false philosophy but something with a very real effect. That is also the reason why, when something like spiritual science working towards anthroposophy appears on the scene, those people will say: ‘These are thoughts beyond comprehension; they cannot be grasped.’ Well, they want to think with their brains: the thoughts of spiritual science are however thought with a soul and spirit element that has torn itself away from the brain. People must make efforts to tear their soul and spirit away from the brain with the help of thoughts that have been produced in this way; they must think those thoughts through. People must make an effort to think those thoughts through, to use the opportunity that still exists of tearing the element of soul and spirit away from the physical aspect of the brain. This element is on the way to being chained to the physical brain. People must tear themselves free. It is not a question therefore of right views and wrong views but of a process. The thoughts of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy are given to the world in the hope that people who are still capable of handling the old faculty of tearing themselves away that lies in them, will indeed make use of it and try and understand thoughts that are independent of the physical body, so that their souls may grow free of the body. It is therefore a question of having the will to understand anthroposophy; anthroposophy is intended to tear the element of spirit and soul away from the physical body. Our mission therefore is not merely to refute views that are wrong; but we must face the fact that very many people want to slither into them, want to be sheer matter and want to think, use their will and feel out of matter. We want to give spiritual science working towards anthroposophy to the world as something real, so that spirit and soul may be torn away from matter. The aim is to prevent the possibility of people losing their spirit and soul, for they now run the risk of slithering entirely into the ahrimanic sphere. People face the risk of losing soul and spirit and of losing themselves as human beings when the material world vanishes into nothingness, as I have described on an earlier occasion.

It is not a question therefore of replacing the old with the new, but to become active in the search for truth. This saves the soul from slithering into mere materiality; it saves the spirit and soul element from slithering into the ahrimanic sphere, where egoity would be lost. It is not a question therefore of refuting materialism, but of saving humankind from materialism coming true. Materialism is in the process of developing into something that is true rather than false. When People say that materialism is wrong they are not talking about what really matters. No, we have to say that materialism is coming to be more and more right; in our present culture it is coming to be more and more right. We may well find that by the beginning of the 3rd millenium humankind will have developed in such a way that materialism is the correct view. It is not a question of refuting materialism, for it is in the process of becoming right. It is a question of making it not right, because it is on the way to becoming a fact and no longer merely a wrong theory.

Certain people are trying to ignore these things. They want to make It as easy as possible for others, telling them to see how wrong materialism is and inviting them to turn to an abstract mysticism that Will give them everything they need. We could take up such abstract mysticism, but that would encourage materialism to become real and not mere theory. We do not have to overcome materialism because it is wrong, using words that remain theory; we have to overcome it because it is right and we must fight against it being the right thing. This puts another face on things, and this is also where we find ourselves in the reality of the spiritual world—not with theories, but with a living approach to the truth that in the cosmic scheme of things is an active deed. People find it unpalatable to have to listen to such things, yet that is the light in which everything should be regarded, even individual events. Believe me, the old methods of combat are finished with; everything that could be the habitual way in the past Is now finished. We must consider things in the light of the spirit.

What is conservatism? What is liberalism? Here on earth they are caricatures of the spiritual world. Conservatives are followers of Ahriman, liberals of Lucifer. Having passed the Guardian of the Threshold one can see how the whole of conservatism is running after Ahriman and the whole of liberalism after Lucifer. That may seem peculiar to the sophisticated people of today. It is however because this seems so peculiar that spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is so difficult to understand. We shall never understand spiritual science by merely thinking it; we shall only come to understand it if every one of its concepts makes us suffer and rejoice, when we feel lifted up and cast down, when we want to despair over a word, or think we shall be redeemed because of a word, when we see destiny at work in what normally appears as a shadowy theory just as we see it at work in things that are done in the outside world, when what spiritual science working towards anthroposophy has to say goes beyond being mere words and becomes reality. Then, when the inner impulse alive in this spiritual science is understood and felt, it will be rightly seen why things that for a time were maintained as mere theory, because people first had to come to know about them, must now become reality, why we have to be serious about the reality that lives in the words of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. It will be seen that the necessity arises in our age to make the substantial essence of those words come to reality.

It is still the case that what is really intended with such a Waldorf School is not at all seen in the light of reality, that it is far too little considered in the sense which I have tried to characterize for you. Believe me, this is not to touch your hearts, nor to gain a little more support. Things have been said that had to be said now because humankind must know them. That is why I have said the things I have been saying. I merely wish that the opportunity would arise to say these things to a sufficiently large number of people, so that these people develop an inner impulsiveness where they take words as realities and do not merely listen in the belief that one is speaking theories.

This is what I have wanted to put to you on these two occasions. It will have to happen that outer events follow not on the external contents of spiritual science as it is presented, but out of inner impulses. Fighters like the Jesuits know very well what many followers of anthroposophy still fail to realize: that spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is a reality. Since they have come to realize this—they have done so for some time now, from about 1906 or 1907—since they have come to realize it they are opposing this spiritual science with increasing vigour. Many anthroposophists have no idea of the methods that are used, the sheer ingenuity, because there is a refusal to be really sure in one's mind of the seriousness of the situation. Words will only evoke a little bit of the things one really wishes people to take to heart; I have tried, however, to present just a little of it to you on these two occasions. If we reflect on what has been said, if we progress from reflection to feeling, to letting it become part of the whole of our being, there will be an end to abstract mysticism and to modern science. It will become the essential inner nature of the human being, it will be the power that releases spirit and soul again from physical matter, it will overcome a materialism that unfortunately is not wrong but is indeed true.

• 51. Atwood, George. English mathematician, invented a machine to illustrate the motion of a body falling under the action of gravity.
• 52. Von Jesus zu Christus GA 131. English translation: From Jesus to Christ. H. Collison tr., C. Davy rev. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973.