The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] We will now gradually evaluate the ideas we have arrived at in our recent reflections. Overall, in this and the following reflections, I will be speaking to you about the nature of the True and the nature of the Good, to which I have already alluded in my previous presentations. But today, we will, so to speak, take a side look at something that emerges from the connections we have explored—something that must be of great significance to contemporary history. First of all, you have seen from the last lectures I gave here that it is quite possible to form very specific concepts and ideas about the connection between our present earthly life and our previous earthly life, as well as the earthly life that will follow ours—the one that comes after the present one. I have explained to you that our past earthly life exerts an influence on our volition—insofar as we perceive the “I” itself within our volition. And to the extent that we form the idea of the “I,” this idea—with all that it can contain—is so finely woven that it, as we know, carries over into the next earthly life—as I have told you—just as the seed that is now in a plant this year carries over into the plant’s life next year. So, in a sense, we must seek the seed for the next earthly life in everything we weave together in our thoughts, but in such a way that the fabric has, at its center, the concept of the “I,” the “I”-thought. From this you can see that, as we enter our earthly life, we come in, so to speak, with all the preconditions that come to us from our previous earthly life; but also, of course, with everything that is formed within us during the time in which the previous earthly life is, so to speak, processed between death and the new birth—that is, the birth through which we entered our present earthly life. This, I would say, is one group of ideas that we have gained.

[ 2 ] Now, let us take a great leap to another group—a set of ideas we have gained regarding the course of human life on Earth—a perspective that has culminated in what we may well call the wondrous mystery of the total lifespan of humanity in the present. We have already explained that, once the Atlantean catastrophe was over, humanity entered the first post-Atlantean epoch—the ancient Indian period—and that at that time, the human race as a whole had an average age of around the mid-fifties, 56 years, and so on. And we have also explained in more detail what this means. This means that in those days, human beings remained capable of development—just as we are now capable of development only during childhood—up until the age of 56, which they thus went through, just as we go through the parallelism between soul-spiritual and physical-bodily development in childhood, where the soul-spiritual development is linked to the unfolding the unfolding of our body, our growth, and our entire physical development, our soul-spiritual development is closely linked. Just as we experience this parallelism between psychological-spiritual and physical-bodily development, but then cease—once we have reached a certain age—to carry this connection between the psychological-spiritual and the physical-bodily as something real within us—as we have already mentioned— The soul-spiritual then becomes more independent, and we can no longer develop through what arises of its own accord. Above all, we cannot pass through the midpoint of human life—the 35th year—in dependence on the body; the body then yields nothing more. So we do not experience within ourselves at all the Rubicon that is being crossed there, and above all, we do not experience what was experienced in this first post-Atlantean period: we do not experience the entire descent, the collapse, the sclerosis, the calcification of the body, and with it the liberation of the spirit—all without any active effort on our part, as occurs through natural development. We do not live through that. But back then, people did experience it. We know that the life expectancy of humanity as a whole declined; people lived to be 55, 54, 53, 50, and so on, until, by the end of the first epoch, they were only capable of further development up to the age of 49. Then, in the Proto-Persian era, the human race went through the years from 49 to 42; in the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean period, from 42 to 35; and in the Greek-Latin period, from 35 to 28. Thus, the Greeks and Romans remained capable of development only during the period bounded by the ages of 28 and 35. And we have brought before the soul the great—I would say, the utterly incredible—mystery that, as humanity descended to the age of 33, Christ Jesus met it; that precisely in the 33rd year of life, descending from above, the Mystery of Golgotha occurs: the thirty-three-year-old Christ Jesus. This is something so wondrous that one can hardly find the words to express what the soul can feel when it is able to fully experience this mysterious truth within itself.

[ 3 ] Then the age of humanity declines; as you know, we have been living in the fifth age since the fifteenth century. It began with humanity reaching the age of 28; it is now, as such, 27 years old—that is to say, until our 27th year we are still, in some way, dependent in our soul-spiritual life on the physical-bodily, but then, through the circumstances surrounding us, we do not, so to speak, progress further through natural development; rather, if we are to progress further, we must have an inner soul impulse for this progress, and today, as I have further explained, this can come only from spiritual knowledge—from feeling and experiencing what can be known about spiritual processes, which can be properly attained only through the Christ impulse. So it is simply true that today a person—even if he were to live to be a hundred years old—if he were to rely solely on what nature and social life provide, on what the world makes of him on its own, would not grow older than 27 years under these influences. And if they live to be a hundred years old, they simply stop there and are dependent, in their further development, on what they themselves impel into their soul—something that cannot come of its own accord through the course of physical development. Thus, people today, so to speak, reach the age of 27 on their own; and this is the defining characteristic of today’s cultural development. One can only understand this current cultural development—particularly in its connection to earlier cultural stages—if one truly takes this fact, which spiritual science is able to establish, to heart.

[ 4 ] This is connected to certain aspects of the first group of spiritual scientific truths that we have repeatedly brought before our souls today. We undergo a certain development during the time between death and a new birth. As you saw from my remarks last time, the impulses of the will from the previous incarnation are particularly active in this development. What we go through between death and a new birth—what we have, so to speak, brought with us into this life—we now live out in this life. Now, the peculiar thing here is that for a person of the present day, the interaction between the astral body and the “I”—that is, the truly soul and spirit—and the etheric body comes to a halt at the age of 27. During the time between death and a new birth, we are prepared in such a way that we can constitute and organize our new etheric body, so that the “I” and the astral body can act within this etheric body and, through it, into the physical body as well. For a person at the beginning of the Greco-Roman era—that is, around the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha—this halt, this point in time when the astral body can no longer act in a life-giving way upon the etheric body, occurred at the age of 35. Around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, it occurred at the age of 33. Now it is the 27th year of life. Thus, a person who surrenders completely to what nature itself provides today and to what flows into us from the outside—from social life— up to the age of 27—as a result of the development they underwent before their birth, or rather before their conception—keeps the etheric body so flexible that the astral body, which interacts with this etheric body, can always enliven it with new concepts, new ideas, and new feelings. We can enrich our conceptions of the world and our ideals on our own through what comes to us up to the age of 27. All of this ceases to come of its own accord at the age of 27. If it is to continue at all, it must then be stimulated by inner impulses.

[ 5 ] Many of the states that the soul of modern human beings experiences—including many feelings of dissatisfaction—are connected to this relatively early cessation of the interaction between the astral body and the etheric body, and consequently also with the physical body. In early youth, especially in the lowest regions, we experience a lively interaction between our soul—that is, the astral body—and our etheric body. Then this comes to a halt, and unless we can enliven our ideas and concepts as I described last time, we can actually only take in shadowy concepts within ourselves. For if these concepts were fully alive, they would constantly paralyze us. They would then be like a seed that constantly wanted to be a plant and grow into a full-fledged plant. Our ideas and concepts cannot do that. They must remain seeds for the next earthly life, for the next incarnation. If we do not incorporate this into our upbringing and self-discipline, we actually always want more than life can give us. And today, a relatively large number of people suffer from this “wanting more than life can give.” If we do not provide our ideas and feelings with the kind of inner impulses I described last time, life can only give us concepts that will not reach maturity until the next incarnation—concepts that are thus merely shadowy in the present incarnation. We sense this. If we were to truly grasp that we are developing the seed for the next incarnation—that is, if we were to place our lives within a larger context—then we would attain a much greater sense of life satisfaction. But this is necessary, and it is connected to something that has been emphasized time and again since Pascal, and renewed by Lessing. We seek truth, and we feel that, in a certain sense, we find satisfaction in the truth. But Lessing expressed this idea—which Pascal had already articulated in much greater detail before him—in a beautiful, paradigmatic way when he said: “If God held the full truth in one hand and the pursuit of truth in the other, He would choose the pursuit of truth.” —There is a great deal behind this. For what lies behind it is this: that, being incarnated in a human body, we must always have a sense that we never possess the full truth. For in the human body we can possess only that aspect of truth—since truth lives, after all, in concepts and ideas permeated by the “I”—which serves as a seed for the next incarnation. Therefore, what lives within us as truth must live in such a way that it remains in motion, in a state of striving. Before we entered this incarnation, we prepared our etheric body in such a way that it contained the truth. But our incarnation consists precisely in the fact that it reduces the full truth to a copy, to an image of the truth, and this image is the seed for the next incarnation.

[ 6 ] Only when we place ourselves, as individual human beings, within the context of all humanity can true satisfaction enter our souls. In practice, this satisfaction does not come unless we develop such living concepts as I demonstrated last time—unless, so to speak, we truly internalize concepts that lie beneath the surface of life, concepts that reveal to us the far-reaching connections of life. No one in the present day will find fulfillment unless they have a living interest in their environment—but an interest that seeks out the spirit and the spiritual connections within that environment. Those who wish only to brood within themselves will find nothing there other than what can be bestowed upon us today up to the age of 27, in accordance with our development between our previous death and this birth. Consequently, this age is also the one that must strive toward freedom, because human beings must find within themselves that which allows their soul to grow together with their environment—that which enables them to take an interest in this environment, but an interest that does not come merely through the senses, but rather arises from broad contexts, as I described last time.

[ 7 ] There is much at stake in these matters—and we will discuss this “much” further next time—much of what can enlighten us regarding our stance toward truth in the present, and also regarding our stance toward the good, the morally good, and the ethical in the present. Today, we should be more interested in something that can shed light on various matters—something that can be derived directly from these truths to help us understand our immediate present.

[ 8 ] The humanities scholar must, in fact, approach his truths quite differently than the natural scientist. Through your reflections over the years, you have seen that the humanities scholar arrives at his truths through imagination, inspiration, and intuition—that is, by engaging with insights that lead beyond the immediate sensory world—allowing themselves to be guided into the realm of the spiritual world, which extends beyond what we perceive with our senses, yet by which this sensory realm is everywhere governed and ruled from its spiritual foundation. Thus, spiritual science must draw its truths from the spiritual realms accessible to human cognitive faculties. Truths such as those concerning the rejuvenation of the human race, the reversal of the stages of life—as I have outlined for you, from the age of 56 down to 27— which we as people of the present can attain if we do not advance ourselves further—such truths, which cannot be found through the methods of ordinary ethnography or anthropology, must be drawn from the spiritual world. A purely historical examination of the events since the Atlantean catastrophe, conducted according to the methods of the natural sciences, would naturally be unable to reveal these connections. So these things must be drawn from the spirit. That is why—as you will understand—precisely with regard to the external world—that is, the world of nature and history, the world of natural processes and the world of social processes—the scholar of the spiritual sciences, with his truths, must approach things somewhat differently than the natural scientist. How, then, does the natural scientist actually proceed? Well, he has the facts of nature, the natural phenomena, before him; based on these, he forms his concepts and ideas. The concept, the idea, comes second. The law is what he arrives at. He thus proceeds from the fact to the law. Sensory perception lies in the middle. We perceive the facts. Then we form the idea, the natural law, and so on.

[ 9 ] The spiritual researcher will, of course, have to proceed in a similar way with regard to the spiritual world; in that respect, the research is essentially no different, but differences will nevertheless arise when it comes to the external sensory world. One first comes to know the facts by grasping them in the spiritual world. So if one wishes to seek the meaning of these spiritual facts in the external sensory world, one must search for the corresponding external facts of life afterward. One first has the spiritual given; then one seeks the sensory fact or fact of life that is explained by what one has grasped in the spirit. From the spirit, one explains what should be spiritually explained from life. For some, it is incredibly difficult to understand that, with regard to the spiritual, one must first have the law, and then the law points one to the fact. The fact, so to speak, provides confirmation of the law. Older spiritual researchers always expressed this by saying—if I am to use this academic term, which is, of course, irrelevant to the matter at hand—: The external study of nature proceeds inductively, from the fact to the concept; spiritual science must proceed deductively, from the concept to the fact. Let us take an example from this perspective that must be particularly relevant to us today.

[ 10 ] Through spiritual insight, we have discovered that, in the present day, humanity generally reaches the age of 27 through what nature and social life provide on their own. The typical person of the present day, then—one who keeps at a distance from spiritual insights—the typical person of the present day develops until the age of 27. If he is a great, a significant person—a person in whom life bubbles and works abundantly—then he will develop strongly until the age of 27; that is to say, he will become everything that a person today can develop simply by reaching the age of 27 physically—he will become all of that in terms of thinking power and in terms of the impulsiveness of action in time. He will develop the kind of will that is formed as the muscles grow and the nerves develop up to the age of 27, and so on. And then, if he is also receptive to what social life and human existence have to offer, he will develop by the age of 27 a body of ideas and ideals regarding all the social reforms one might wish to undertake. These ideas remain with him until the age of 27; by then, if I may put it that way, he will be fully imbued with them; then it stops, they remain with him, and from that point on he will want to put them into practice in life. And even if he were to live to be 100 years old—and if he is a great man, he will accomplish something profoundly significant—he will still be introducing ideas and impulses from when he was 27 into life. He will thus be a true representative of the present; he will be a person of whom one can say: This is someone whom the present had to produce as its own creation, but who refuses to keep pace with the further development of humanity if he does not absorb inner spiritual impulses—the inner spiritual impulses that lead one beyond the age of 27, where one continues to live on, just as one does with the passing years, so too with the soul. Spiritual impulses must be received. Such a person will not be able to receive them, and thus will not be able to carry them into the present. He will not be able to carry into the present anything that contains the seed for the future development of humanity. He will carry into it precisely that which is immediately characteristic of the present. And if he is a truly great man—one can, of course, be a great man even while remaining twenty-seven years old—then he will bring into the present what fully corresponds to this present in a particular field, what fits it perfectly, but which contains no seeds for the future. That is what he will bring into it.

[ 11 ] How, then, might we imagine such a person in the present day—such a typical person? How might we picture him? You see, now we are making our way down from the intellectual grasp of an idea into reality; now we are descending. We are, as it were, seeking out where this exists in reality. Now let us try to find where such a person might stand, where he might be, where he might, so to speak, encounter us sensually in social life. This could be in the present, according to present-day circumstances. How, then, would such a person have to position himself within the present? He would have to position himself within the present in such a way that, first of all, the 27th year is naturally a pivotal point in his life, a particularly significant point, but such a point that, as it were, from the age of twenty-seven onward, he is positioned in life in such a way that he can bring precisely that twenty-seventh year into life—nothing more and nothing less—so that everything is arranged in his social standing in such a way that he can carry this out, yet without the shortcomings of being unable to move forward becoming all too apparent right away. He would therefore, so to speak, need the opportunity to be able to remain, in a fruitful way, at the age of 27. For if he were to be 27 years old with his ideas and impulses and subsequently mean nothing special in the social world—well, then he would turn 28, 29, and he would, as it were, have something dead within him. If he were then to find himself in special social circumstances at the ages of 30 or 31, he would carry into his 28th, 30th, and 31st years that which had in the meantime become dead, that which had stagnated; he would not fully carry the 27th year with him, and he would not be a full representative of our time. Yes, within our current circumstances, we could therefore imagine that where much-vaunted “normal” conditions for contemporary life now exist—that is, in democratically governed states—such a man might be elected to parliament at the age of 27, for there he has every opportunity to enter into a social context that, in a sense, signifies a conclusion. For if he enters Parliament as a prominent figure at the age of 27 and becomes active there, he commits himself, so to speak, to life: that is how he is perceived; he cannot change course in various ways—he has committed himself. Thus, from the age of 27 onward, he will truly carry into life what he has developed within himself up to that point. If he is later—the pros and cons of which Central Europeans now wish to explore—appointed from Parliament to a ministerial post, this will not be as significant a turning point as his entry into Parliament; rather, as a minister, he will put into practice what he brought to Parliament when he first entered at the age of 27. So you could say: The most typical person of the present day with regard to social and political life would be someone who was elected to a parliament at the age of 27—specifically, a democratic parliament that also gives such a person the opportunity to fully express his or her 27-year-old impulses in the social sphere.

[ 12 ] But we may have to place other demands on such a representative as well. In our time, there are forces at work that hinder the free development of the human being—that development in which what nature itself provides is allowed to unfold. When someone becomes a high school student in the conventional sense, things already go awry with what nature is meant to provide on its own. If they then go through any academic program in the standard way of today, things go even more awry; they are pushed in a one-sided direction. But let us consider a representative example—a person who brings into their twenty-seventh year what comes naturally, who has undergone a youth development as unimpeded as possible, unhindered by the norms of the present, up to the age of twenty-seven. So that the scholar of the humanities, if he were to seek a person who truly embodies the present with all its twenty-seven-year-old qualities and with the will to to reject it entirely—to approach something that embodies development for the future, would seek out a person who possesses all these qualities and experiences these life circumstances—which I myself, from the perspective of spiritual science, have—call it, if you will: constructed—or, as the spiritual scientist would say, deduced. And if such a person were to exist in the present, the existence of such a person would explain an immense amount to us, for we would understand that this person is here to truly exemplify humanity’s “twenty-seventh year”—to make it a full reality—that people, at some point, must, so to speak, stop at the age of 27 and, in a rough sense, let the seeds for the future wither away.

[ 13 ] Well, is there such a person who embodies precisely the qualities and the spirit of the times that make him a typical representative of the present? Yes, such a person exists, and that is Lloyd George. Everything I have deduced here from a spiritual-scientific perspective applies to him. Now, from this perspective—having, so to speak, taken the path not through external observation but from above, from the spirit—consider the life of this Lloyd George: Born in 1863, orphaned at an early age—you are familiar, of course, with the outline of his life—he went to live with his uncle, who was a shoemaker and preacher in Wales, of Celtic descent, and thus possessed a lively inner vitality, especially during his youth. With his uncle, the shoemaker who was also a preacher, constantly before him, he himself strove toward the ideal of the preacher, but was unable to become one—thus not even constrained by these templates and norms, because the sect to which his uncle belonged was not allowed to employ a salaried pastor; instead, everyone had to practice a trade and preach freely. The boy becomes a fervent admirer of independence. He doesn’t have enough money to always have shoes bought for him; he runs around barefoot, goes through all the stages of a poor boy’s life, and grows up—not attending school regularly, not receiving a formal education— He does not pursue a formal education, but rather absorbs what life itself offers him; nor does he follow a conventional path to a legal career, but at the age of sixteen simply joins a law office, where he distinguishes himself through his sound judgment and becomes a solicitor at the age of 27. Thus, not through academic education, but through practical experience—from what life itself offers to people today—he matures, schooled by life. Equipped by life, too, with all the impulses that oppose any privilege conferred by birth or social standing. He tips his hat with a certain fury to the local landowner, his superior, whom he must encounter several times a day.

[ 14 ] And what happens? In 1890—Lloyd George was born in 1863, so in 1890 he was 27 years old—following the death of a member of Parliament, he was nominated as the opposing candidate against the man he detested because he had to greet him every day, because he had distinguished himself through a series of impassioned speeches that burned like fire into people’s souls, speeches that argued that Wales must free itself from England’s stranglehold, that the Celtic nation must experience a new revival, and that, above all, the Church must never be organizationally linked to the state but must stand free from it. Because he had distinguished himself in this way, he won a seat in Parliament in 1890 by a narrow majority—at the age of 27! Life had taught him, through direct experience, what was necessary for his time. He brought that insight into Parliament. For two months, the twenty-seven-year-old observed everything without saying a word. But with his eyes—which always took on a slightly converging gaze and could then sparkle—and with his hand behind his ear to listen as intently as possible, he spent two months taking in everything the situation had to offer. And from that point on, he became a feared orator in Parliament. People who had previously viewed their opponents with a certain indifference, with English composure—such as Churchill or Chamberlain—became furious when Lloyd George stood before them as an opponent, for, as an uneducated man with no academic credentials, he possessed a forceful dialectic and a sarcastic manner of rebuffing anyone, no matter how highly regarded they might be. He was closest to Gladstone, yet even Gladstone had to endure much from Lloyd George—his sarcasm, the incisiveness and precision of the dialectic with which Lloyd George knew how to present himself at every opportunity. Here we see the hallmark of a man schooled by life: versatility. People who have not been schooled by life become one-sided, knowing only about this or that. Lloyd George knew about everything and spoke in such a way that even the most distinguished people he attacked would fly into a rage and become agitated, whereas before they had sat there with typical English composure.

[ 15 ] It is therefore particularly interesting to view this great man as a representative of the present, to study the one who embodies the spirit of the Celts in his twenty-seven-year-old character—that is, who lives out this twenty-seven-year-old character with the full force of the Celtic spirit. His most highly regarded speeches were those in which he bitingly denounced the Boer War—the “utter infamy,” as he always called it, the “utter vileness” of the South African War—which he brought home to Parliament in ever-new and fresh words. And he appeared fearless—fearless in the Celtic spirit—so much so that once, after a speech, he was struck so hard on the head with a club that he sank to the ground. On another occasion, a police officer had to give him his uniform so that he could be led out through a back door, because people said that Lloyd George was going to speak on a certain subject, and they feared what he might say. A man like him had truly never existed before in the context of English politics as they were back in the 1890s! A sharp critic well into the twentieth century. Of course, under reactionary governments, he was merely a critic. But when the first liberal Campbell-Bannerman cabinet came to power at the beginning of the twentieth century, people said to themselves: Yes, it would all be well and good to govern liberally, but what to do with Lloyd George? What do you do in such a case—Central Europe is now seeking to gain a more precise understanding of such matters, as you may have heard—what do you do in such a case in democratic countries? You bring the person in question into the cabinet by giving him a portfolio that you believe he knows nothing about. That is what the Campbell-Bannerman cabinet did with Lloyd George. They gave Lloyd George—precisely him, who had never had the opportunity to deal with trade—the trade portfolio. Lloyd George held the trade portfolio from 1905 onward. Lloyd George was a self-made man, a man shaped by life, not an academic. What was the result? He became one of the most outstanding trade ministers England has ever had.

[ 16 ] After a relatively brief period of study—which included trips to Hamburg, Antwerp, and Spain to examine trade conditions there—he set about drafting a patent law that has been a blessing for the country. He was equally successful in passing a law to regulate the Port of London—a law that had already driven many trade ministers before him to despair. He managed to get it passed in a way that satisfied everyone. He also succeeded in resolving a railway crisis that had become very acute at the time. In short, he proved himself to be an exceptional trade minister. Then came the replacement of the Campbell-Bannerman Liberal cabinet by the Asquith-Grey cabinet. Of course, Lloyd George had to be in the cabinet! But by then everyone was already convinced: Lloyd George is a man who can do anything. As the true representative of his time, he was given the most important post: he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. So Lloyd George was now Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[ 17 ] Now just imagine: with all the 27-year-old spirit he retained, with all the emotions of his Celtic heritage, with all the emotions he absorbed from always having to greet the landlord as a barefoot boy—who, incidentally, later failed to win re-election by a narrow margin— with all the emotions directed against everything called privilege and the like—for he did not grow old; he remained what he had been until the age of 27—with all of that, Lloyd George now became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Until then, England had had a veritable panacea for all financial matters: this was what was called tariff legislation. Tax legislation was, in fact, tariff legislation, and this consisted in taxing everything that was privileged as little as possible, and in promoting pauperism to the highest degree through the entire tariff system. One might say that if one were to look for the origin of the method of vilification that certain English newspapers are now employing against the Germans—if one were to look for a precedent that has been thoroughly established—it was back then, when Lloyd George first came forward with his entirely new draft budget. Back then, the English journalists set a precedent by lambasting Lloyd George and his impossible budget. He was accused of every conceivable thing—accusations that have only recently reached a new height in the very area I just mentioned to you. And the man faced the fiercest opposition in Parliament itself, where he always sat in such a way that his lips gradually curled into a certain sarcasm—constantly, yet with his hand behind his ear and his eyes slightly narrowed but radiant, with absolute calm and confidence. For this man, as a human being, had placed himself squarely in the present moment. There had been finance ministers before him—budget-makers who concocted budgets bearing this or that name—but Lloyd George’s budget was so distinctive that in England it was simply called the “Lloyd George Budget.” That is how deeply this man had grown out of the present and how fully he embodied it. And for him, life itself was his only school. He gathered everything that could be gleaned from the tax experiences of America, France, and Germany, and sought to put it to use. Thus, even in his own studies—his studies carried out in the midst of life, not behind books but rooted in what society itself offers in the present—he remained grounded. Very interesting, really, quite remarkable! But now consider this: the man felt so at home in his present circumstances that one year, when he had to present the final budget, he had a certain deficit. Never before had anyone dealt with a deficit in any other way than by providing for its coverage—that is, by including a line item to cover it. Lloyd George said: “Yes, there is a deficit, but we’ll leave it as is; we won’t allocate anything to cover it, because what I’ve done will cause the various sectors that have benefited from it to prosper so much that we’ll simply cover the deficit in due course through this prosperity in the various sectors of life.” So this man also knew how to live with life. He also believed in life because he felt firmly anchored in it. And here’s the main point: Many people believe in life, but they stop believing when things start to go wrong. And the situation I just mentioned—it did go wrong. The deficit was left unaddressed; a provision wasn’t set aside—it went wrong. Things simply didn’t prosper the way he had predicted purely out of faith. But he remained calm; he was firmly anchored in the life of the present. And what happened? Three of his greatest, his wealthiest enemies died. They were his most powerful opponents because he had shaped the tax law in such a way that the English nobility called him a thief; that was one of the epithets they hurled at him. Well, three of his most powerful enemies died. But he had already raised the inheritance tax so high that—call it a coincidence if you will—enough had to be paid from the estates of his most powerful enemies to cover the deficit.

[ 18 ] It was strange how, little by little, the tide began to turn, as it were, and how people gradually began to praise Lloyd George. After all, a person truly lives through the way his relationship with nature—both within himself and with his surroundings—takes shape, and one cannot imagine anything that fits together better than the twenty-seven-year-old who remains forever young and humanity at twenty-seven. When one is so in harmony—when one has reached the age of 28, 29, and so on, and has thus presented his 1909 budget—he was, of course, actually already older by then; but according to the theories I have established, he was still 27 years old—if one is in such harmony with what surrounds one in humanity, and has the strength to live through this harmony, then one also gains the strength to live life to the fullest. And so it happened time and again that—because, of course, Lloyd George, who introduced reforms in all areas over which he had influence, reforms that were all aimed at combating pauperism and certain other issues that were truly social ills of the worst kind in England—he was met with hostility. At times he had to listen to speeches for ten hours straight and intervene time and again; the most powerful men in Parliament—if they wore a monocle—would lose their composure, ranting and raving. Lloyd George remained calm, responding for ten hours if necessary, his dialectical quick wit and sarcasm hitting the mark every time. And so, in this way, he had pushed through laws that had a profound, profound impact on social life: a pension law and similar laws—laws that had a salutary effect and that effectively combated alcoholism. Thus, as a representative of the present, this man stood alone—I might say, with his shoulders alone—against all that was unrepresentative.

[ 19 ] Now, if we want to fully understand this matter, we must take another fundamental truth into account. We must realize that, as a people at a particularly advanced stage of development, we possessed the etheric body for humanity in the first, the primordial Indian period; then the sensory body in the primordial Persian period; the sensory soul in the Egyptian-Chaldean period; and the intellectual or emotional soul in the Greek-Latin period; we possess the consciousness soul. But all other peoples are not, in the present epoch, in the same position as the English, who, among the peoples of the earth, are specifically constituted for the consciousness soul. We know that the soul of feeling is developed by the Italian-Spanish peoples, the soul of reason or emotion by the French peoples, the soul of consciousness by the English, the “I” by us in Central Europe, and the spiritual self is being prepared by the Russians. So the English are, in a sense, the representatives of the materialistic present, which is connected to the development of the consciousness soul. Lloyd George, in turn, is intimately connected—I would say he is predestined in every respect to be representative of the present. Twenty-seven years old—a twenty-seven-year-old among the English people—that is truly remarkable! Therefore, what he said was indeed spoken not only from the general development of humanity in the present—if one understands it in such a way that one does not wish to take it further, but rather wishes to impose upon the present, with bull-like strength, precisely what it currently possesses—but also by a representative Englishman. In other words, the English national soul, expressed by a representative figure of the present!

[ 20 ] He had been active in this way since 1890, when he was 27 years old. Traces of Lloyd George can be found throughout the social developments that took place in England. It is therefore no surprise that, especially in the years leading up to the war, he warned that the English should not be swayed by those who, like war-mongers, constantly told the English that the Germans were planning to invade England; they should not believe such things, and they should not give up half a penny for armaments out of every penny that flows to the state. This was spoken entirely from the perspective of the Englishman and the representative citizen. It was also spoken entirely from the perspective of the twenty-seven-year-old’s ideal. For the other matters were all reminiscences of other ideals, from other stages of human life. The man spoke of his immediate present—the immediate, non-warlike present to which the English people had just arrived. There are three steps, he said, leading to ruin; one must guard against these three steps. He drummed this into the people’s minds again and again. The first step toward ruin is protective tariffs, the second is armaments, and the third is war! That was Lloyd George’s motto: ruin is brought about first by protective tariffs, second by armaments, and third by war. Now just think: this man, who was also enthusiastic about the truly abstract, twenty-seven-year-old ideal of the World Court, this man, so to speak, set the tone during England’s liberal era for everything that liberal England was able to achieve through liberalism—precisely through a representative figure. Well, in addition to everything I have just explained to you regarding Lloyd George, there is the fact that he is the quintessential representative of the twenty-seven-year-old ideal. Therefore, he will embody all of this in precisely the right way—along with everything I have told you so far—for what is representative of Englishness, for what is good for Englishness, and through which Englishness can be of benefit to the world. But he is unable to move forward with his advancing years. It is in the sense of what I have explained that he remains at the age of twenty-seven. So if something arises that operates from other stages of human life, he is immediately thrown off balance, for he has no connection to it. How could he—who rejects what life does not give of its own accord—have a connection to that which comes from other corners of human development? And this is connected to what is an absolute truth for anyone who looks behind the scenes of world history today—even if this truth is so little recognized: that which lives on the surface of the English people, of their national character—that which “Englishness” as such sought—Lloyd George is the representative of that. And above all, this is what is meant by the words: “First, protective tariffs; second, armaments; third, war—these lead to ruin”; that is to say, it did not want war. For, even though the war was not essentially prevented by England—that is, it was brought about—it is nevertheless true that it was brought about by forces that we must regard as nothing less than occult forces, which we must view as those who pulled the strings of the ruling men. I would like to say that we can point to the moments when these occult forces intervened, when these occult forces took the rulers—or those who appeared to be rulers—by the strings. Those who waged the war from England stand behind those who are named as statesmen. And they act on impulses that are truly not the product of a twenty-seven-year-old’s mind, but rather stem from ancient traditions of humanity, arising from the most thorough knowledge of the forces at work among the peoples of Europe, from an understanding of all the ways in which the various peoples, the various individuals, and the various governments can be strong or weak—from precise, intimate knowledge, but from an understanding that has flowed through centuries via entirely secret channels, and which also lives in secrecy, for those who possessed it were the ones who pulled the strings of the others. A man like Grey, a man like Asquith, were in truth merely puppets who, until early August 1914, believed that no war would come to England, that they would do everything in their power to prevent war, and who suddenly found themselves pulled and pushed by occult forces. In the face of these forces—which have their origins in personalities entirely different from those whose names are mentioned—in the face of these forces that operated from entirely different stages of human life, because they operated out of ancient traditions and placed these ancient traditions in the service of English selfishness—in the face of these impulses, even Lloyd George, who remains 27 years old, is nothing more than a puppet. And that which is at work under the influence of these forces will be a wave that will sweep over England as well, beyond Lloyd George—who is a great man, but who is, after all, merely a representative, a representative of the present. Whereas behind the impulses that underlie England’s involvement in this war lies a precise understanding of the impulses of the European peoples and states—so that anyone who knew what was going on in England also knew that everything now prevailing as a catchphrase had already prevailed as an idea that was bound to be realized in the 1880s and 1890s.

[ 21 ] Anyone who knew what those people were saying—those who were truly speaking about the future of politics in England, who were speaking from an occult understanding of the evolution of the European nations—knew that they were saying this: The Russian Empire will collapse under the weight of its own system of rule so that the Russian people may live. By the end of the 1880s, the formula for what unfolded in March 1917 as the Russian Revolution was already in place, and the threads by which it was steered and guided were also there. But only that small circle knew this—a circle that, through its secret activities, had grown older, just as Lloyd George himself had. All the events in the Balkans were shaped by those we might call “the shadowy figures behind the scenes.” It is simply fate that such things must be experienced. For when something entirely different intervened from England—something contrary to the true English spirit, which was already represented by Lloyd George—Lloyd George, who, as long as he remained true to himself, had seen from his deepest convictions the ruin of humanity in protective tariffs, armaments, and war, became a puppet of those pulling the strings from behind the scenes—Minister of Munitions! He retained only his competence. He became an efficient Minister of Munitions. The man who had spoken out against armaments out of his deepest conviction managed to ensure that England would be armed just as the others are.

[ 22 ] Here we see the encounter between the representative of the present—who remains twenty-seven years old—and the dark forces that may lie behind him, forces that can overturn even the deepest-rooted convictions, because that which lives solely here within sensory life is always directed by the spiritual, and can therefore also be directed by a spirit acting in the interest of some group’s selfishness. There have perhaps been few cases in the world in which convictions have been so completely turned on their head as Lloyd George’s conviction has been reversed by the forces now standing behind him. Why? Because these convictions are absolutely rooted in what has been prepared for the present moment within the twenty-seven-year cycle. As long as the twenty-seven-year-old phase of the individual human personality was at work within twenty-seven-year-old humanity, they were in complete harmony; but the moment something else emerged—something based on ancient studies and ancient wisdom—it was thrown off balance precisely because it was rooted only in the present.

[ 23 ] An interesting connection, an incredibly interesting connection! A connection that, I believe, explains quite a bit to us about current events—one that leads us beyond judging based on sympathy and antipathy, but rather enables us to form a judgment about what is happening based on facts and the course of human development. For when one knows how the events unfolding are rooted in the entire course of human development, only then does one understand the gravity of certain events. But one also understands how necessary it is to look into what is happening behind the scenes of external world history. Indeed, up until the 28th year of human history—that is, up until the fifteenth century—humanity was allowed to develop in such a way that people did not engage with the guiding spiritual impulses upon which history depends. Today it is necessary for people to become acquainted with what is at work—that which truly acts as impulses beneath the surface. And this is particularly necessary for us in Central Europe. For one must first come to know the enemy in all his powers if one wishes to protect oneself against him in the right way. We need insight into what is taking place. But there is no other way to truly look into the depths of humanity’s present development than through the laws that spiritual science explains to us regarding this development. We can understand our time—right down to the level of individual human beings—only if we can understand it from a spiritual perspective.

[ 24 ] How is it that a figure as enigmatic as Lloyd George happens to be standing right here? This question must be answered, for one must know what one is dealing with. But today, one can only come to know an individual—even if he is representative of humanity—through spiritual science. Everything about this Lloyd George will be interesting, just as everything about him has been interesting so far. Every step he has taken since 1890 has been interesting. It was interesting to see how he remained in the background at the outbreak of the war, how he was brought to the forefront, and how he has now become a sort of axis around which so much in the world revolves—even the other twenty-seven-year-old, Wilson, revolves around him. And it is interesting how Lloyd George’s inner nature was bound to fail in the face of spiritual—albeit questionable—forces and powers. And it will be interesting to see how Lloyd George will one day be overthrown, and what his future will hold. Let us wait and see.