The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Karma of Materialism I

[ 1 ] I would like to try, time and again, to explore—through aphoristic additions to the ideas underlying my recent reflections—those things that can serve to reinforce the relevant convictions.

[ 2 ] In fact, only those who are able to view external events, so to speak, as a symbolic expression—however difficult that symbolic expression may be—of much deeper spiritual impulses now passing through the world will be able to truly grasp the spiritual essence of our time; impulses about which, in truth, only spiritual science can instruct us.

[ 3 ] Today I would like to begin with an interesting figure from the nineteenth century—a figure who is exceptionally compelling as a thinker because, like so many other things, this figure reflects in a unique way what is alive in our time, or rather, precisely what has, in a certain sense, died out in our time. I want to begin with the interesting thinker African Spir, who died in 1890. Not many people are familiar with the interesting thinker African Spir, who, in the mid-1860s in Leipzig, began to contemplate offering a kind of worldview to his fellow human beings; he had come into contact with Masonic circles at that time, though this contact had given him nothing of particular significance beyond superficialities. For African Spir is a unique thinker, and if we consider him even briefly—at first in the way one can consider him by delving into his writings, the most significant of which was published in 1873 and bears the title: “Thought and Reality,” one might regard him as a thinker who did not draw much from the external influences of the nineteenth century, but who expresses a unique inner essence in his thinking and his worldview. One must first regard him precisely as he presents himself when one reads his writings. African Spir arrives, so to speak—one might say intuitively—at an insight into thought that is perhaps not entirely sufficient but is nonetheless considerable. It is the nature of thought that preoccupies him. What does a person do when they think? How does a person relate to the external reality of the senses and to the inner reality of psychological experience when they think?

[ 4 ] One can truly understand thinking only when one regards it in human beings as that which does not belong at all to the external sensory world, but which, by its true existence—if I may use that word—by its true nature, belongs to the spiritual world. We already experience the spiritual world when we truly think—not merely reflect on the sensory world, but when we truly think. It is thinking that is not merely a reflection on the sensory world; it is something that can already pose the question to human beings, because when a person truly knows themselves to be a thinker, they must at the same time know themselves to be in a world that lies beyond birth and death. There is nothing more certain than this: that by thinking, a human being acts as a spiritual being, although certainly few people have a sufficient inkling of this certainty. This is what African Spir realized. And he said to himself: When I form thoughts—especially the highest thoughts of which my soul is capable—then I feel as if I were in a solid world, subject to neither space nor time. I feel as if I were in an eternal world. — African Spir brought this to his awareness. Starting from this point, he said: “But let us now look at the reality we experience when we allow nature to take its course and reflect on nature, or let us look at the reality in which people move throughout history or within social life—this world does not correspond in any way to our thoughts.” — So Spir said to himself: My thoughts lead me to recognize that they themselves, as thoughts, live in eternity. In the external world, everything is transitory. The earthly comes and goes. That does not correspond to any thought. My thinking tells me—African Spir admitted to himself—that it is necessarily rooted in the eternal, and is therefore absolute reality. — That was a certainty for him. But since the external reality we experience does not correspond to this reality of thought, this external reality is an illusion, a deception. And from this perspective—in a different way than, say, ancient Indian philosophy or certain mystics—African Spir came to tell himself: Everything we experience in space and time is an illusory world; it is, in essence, an illusion. And to reinforce this from another angle, he told himself something like the following: Human beings—indeed, all living beings—are subject to pain. But the pain that arises does not reveal itself as what it actually is, for it possesses within itself the power to overcome itself; it wants to be overcome. Pain may not wish to exist. Therefore, it cannot be truth. Therefore, it must belong to the illusory world, and that which strives within it—which, in the midst of pain, strives for freedom from pain—must be the true world. But nowhere in the outer world of illusion is there a completely painless world. Therefore, the true world is not contained at all within the outer world of illusion. Immersed in appearance, immersed in pain, lies the true world—the world of the soul. Therefore, it seems to African Spir that a person can attain inner satisfaction only by becoming aware—through his own resolve and inner drive—that he carries within himself an eternal world that reveals itself to him in thought; reveals itself to him in the constant striving to overcome pain, and in the striving for bliss. Spir says that it is not because the external world appears to him as an illusory world when he looks at it that he calls it an illusory world, but rather because he believes he can grasp the true world directly through his thought, and since the external world does not correspond to this thought, he says it is an illusion.

[ 5 ] What actually underlies this? If one looks around—and has an eye for the subtle nuances of worldviews—one will find that this particular nuance is not otherwise present among the most diverse thinkers of the nineteenth century, nor in the milieu in which Spir lived. What could underlie such a phenomenon?

[ 6 ] If we consider the whole phenomenon from the perspective of spiritual science, we must acknowledge that by having the external sensory world around us—including the world of history in which human beings live, as well as the social world—we are on the physical plane. In thinking—that is, when we truly live in thought—we are no longer on the physical plane. Only when we think about the external sensory world do we turn toward the physical plane and deny our own nature. But when we become aware of what actually lives within thinking, we must sense that, through thinking, we live within the spiritual world. Thus, by grasping—I would say—the most abstract thing given to human beings, mere thinking, Spir sensed the decisive dividing line between the physical and the spiritual world. And, in essence, he states nothing other than this: Human beings belong to two worlds—the physical and the spiritual—and the two do not correspond with one another. As if drawing from an elemental force in nature, Spir arrives at the conclusion: There is a spiritual world. He does not state this explicitly, but by explaining that everything in the natural, historical, and social life around us is merely an illusion and does not correspond to a world that is given in thought—even if it is given to us only in abstract thought, even if not through direct perception—he establishes that these two worlds are separated from one another by a sharp boundary.

[ 7 ] If one then examines more closely the way in which Spir presents his worldview, one finds, however, that it must have been difficult for people of the nineteenth century to understand. Naturally, this is why people did not understand him. He had, I would say, concentrated solely on one aspect—namely, thinking—and presented only that part of the spiritual world, knowing nothing of the rest of the spiritual world; he merely emphasized sharply that, according to the way he experienced thinking, this spiritual world exists, and that the other world does not correspond to it. As a result, he said: We can indeed find the truth, but never in the external world. The external world is fundamentally untrue; the external world is imperfect. — And he emphasized this sharply. He felt misunderstood, even though, in his own words, he believed that this insight of his was the most significant achievement in history, for it demonstrated once and for all that there can be no truth in the external world. He found no understanding. He even resorted to a means of seeking a response: he offered a prize for anyone who could refute him. No one applied for the prize. No one attempted to refute him. He endured all the torments a thinker can endure through what is known as “silent rejection.” After living for a long time in Tübingen, then in Stuttgart, and moving to Lausanne due to his lung disease, he was buried in Geneva in 1890. His gravestone is the Gospel—a book carved in stone—bearing the opening words of the Gospel of John: “And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.” Alongside these are the words “fiat lux,” which were the last words he spoke before he passed away.

[ 8 ] One might say: African Spir’s entire philosophy is something of a hunch. And precisely when one approaches such a thinker, one senses how many people actually intuited throughout the nineteenth century that something like the science of the spirit was bound to emerge, but were prevented by the manifold circumstances of the nineteenth century from coming to this science of the spirit themselves. African Spir is precisely such a thinker. You see, if one reads only this thinker’s writings and pays no attention to his life, one is actually left somewhat puzzled—by the puzzle that arises when one asks: How does someone come to be so strangely unaware, yet so resolute in emphasizing the spiritual world through pure thought alone? How does someone come to regard himself as so spiritual, and to see himself as standing so firmly in the truth, that he simply defines the external world as untruth? The explanation lies in his life; it lies simply in the fact that he was born in Russia in 1837 and is actually named African Alexandrovich, that he is Russian—but a Russian who has been transplanted into Central Europe. A Russian who has allowed Central and Western European worldviews to influence him, and who embodies in his personality a wonderful harmony between the Russian character and the worldviews of Western and Central Europe. He actually did not learn German until he came to Leipzig in the mid-1860s, but he subsequently wrote his works in German. And when we consider that the picture of human development unfolds in such a way that, in Western Europe, the following stages are lived out through individual human beings: the soul of feeling among the South Romanic peoples, the soul of understanding or the soul of the mind among the West Romanic peoples, the soul of consciousness among the Anglo- -American peoples, the “I” among the Central European peoples, and the anticipation of the spiritual self—the spiritual self, I might say, in an embryonic state, in a seed—among the Russian peoples, the Eastern Europeans—then one can say: African Spir was born out of this being that carries within itself the anticipation of the unfolding of the spiritual self. This was already alive within him, but he expressed everything that lived within him in such a way that he clothed it in the forms of the Western European worldview.

[ 9 ] Once the people of Eastern Europe have developed their nature in accordance with Europe, it will be utter nonsense for them to call the external physical world of facts “truth,” for they will find themselves not merely standing within it in thought, but united in spirit with the spiritual self. He will know himself to be a citizen of the spiritual world, and it will seem absurd to him to say that human beings are what the Western peoples once took to be human beings. What the Western peoples took to be human beings—what they derived from the animal kingdom in the context of evolution—he will regard as a shell. Just as the Eastern European, from his spiritual self, makes his way upward through the spiritual world toward the hierarchies, so does the Western European make his way downward toward the natural kingdom. This sense of being immersed in the spiritual world already lives as an instinct in African Spir. But this instinctive life in the spiritual world, as it now exists in Eastern Europe, does not yet have the means to express its worldview; it will only be able to express its worldview once it adopts the ideas that can be developed in spiritual science in Central Europe. Then it will be able to clothe its inner experiences in these ideas.

[ 10 ] African Spir was not yet able to frame her within the concepts of the humanities; he therefore framed her within the concepts of Spencer, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Taine—that is, he framed her within that abstract conceptual world which, in reality, is merely a reflection on the natural world, but not life within thought itself. I would like to say that what lived in an embryonic state within African Spir is as if dead within Western European culture—but so dead that one can still recognize, in the forms of its demise, what actually flowed into these forms, what died within them. That is why he is such an interesting transitional figure. That is why he so clearly demonstrates the profound inner truth—which must be emphasized again and again in spiritual science—that the European population is, in essence, like a human being whose soul has been laid out in parts. The Western peoples are divided into the feeling soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul; the Central European peoples into the I-soul; and the Eastern European peoples into a preparation for the spiritual self. One might say that a future approach to the world of history is already taking shape in our minds today. The world of history is actually presented in the present as inadequately as possible. One always presents the facts of history, but these facts, taken as such, are not the essential point. Anyone who approaches the facts of history in isolation is like a person who takes up *Faust* and describes the letters that appear page by page; but for someone who truly wants to get to know *Faust*, it is not the letters that matter, but what they come to know through the letters. Thus, a way of viewing history will eventually take hold that is just as unconcerned with the facts as reading a book is with the description of the letters—a perspective that will read into the facts what lies behind the facts of history, just as *Faust* lies behind the letters that appear on the page. Although this is a radical way of putting it, it nevertheless points to the truth. But if one views history in this way, one will understand it as a history of symptoms; then one will regard something like African Spir as a symptom of how the Eastern and Central European essences intertwine precisely in the elements of the soul.

[ 11 ] But how far removed is the present from such a view of life and history! One realizes all the more clearly what lies behind it, however, when one considers such things in a deeper context in relation to the present. No era has exploited the intellectual achievements of the first half of the nineteenth century—and a good portion of those of the second half—as ruthlessly as our own. One can speak of a forgotten tone in intellectual life in an even higher sense than I did in my book *The Riddle of Man*. The history of the nineteenth century will one day have to be completely rewritten. Herman Grimm already foresaw this when he said: “A time will come when the history of the last decades will be completely rewritten, so that those great figures who appear as such today will become mere trifles, and entirely different great figures will emerge—figures who are today regarded as forgotten.” — Anyone who sets out to study the true history of the nineteenth century will realize just what a “fable convenue” the conventional history of the nineteenth century really is. And one notices this especially when one is able to grasp the true essential power of the nineteenth century. I said: Our age has exploited the spiritual products of the nineteenth century to the point of depletion, for there have been many, many minds who remained isolated during this period, neglected by everyone, and African Spir is a prime example of this within the nineteenth century. I do not wish to speak of the general public, but it was precisely those whose professional duty it would have been to care for African Spir who neglected him. Such people then pass away; that is, they enter the spiritual world with their souls. But the things of this world have effects of which one, when considering only ordinary existence, generally has little inkling.

[ 12 ] Do you really believe that a thinker who has passed away like African Spir—that is, whose soul has entered the spiritual world through the gate of death—has simply vanished from this world? Do not forget that the spiritual world is not some pipe dream; just as our physical body is permeated by the soul-spiritual, so too is the entire world in which we live permeated by the soul-spiritual. This soul-spiritual is present; it lives all around us like the air. And what a thinker has produced here in the physical body through a life of intense intellectual effort has not disappeared when he has passed through the gate of death into the spiritual world. That has not disappeared. For there is something very peculiar at work here: a thinker who receives much acclaim is in a different situation than a thinker who remains solitary, such as African Spir. A thinker who has become fashionable is, in a sense, done with his thoughts once he has passed through the gate of death. A thinker like Spir is not done with his thoughts; rather, something else takes place: he guards his thoughts. And in saying this, I am telling you something very significant. These thoughts exist in the physical world, in a spiritual sense, and he guards them. And because such a thinker guards his thoughts—remaining with them, so to speak, for a certain period of time, measured in decades—the thoughts elude the people who, during this time while he guards his thoughts, live in their physical bodies.

[ 13 ] So when a thinker like African Spir dies, his thoughts remain with him, and it is not possible for another person, on their own, to so readily arrive at the thoughts that this particular thinker held. Consequently, an unconscious longing arises for such thoughts—a longing that cannot be satisfied—a state that can be described as follows: There are people whose ancestors allowed such a thinker to die alone, having neglected him. He had thoughts that should have been developed further, but he guards them, not allowing them to reach the people; people sense them as an indefinable longing, yet they cannot attain them; this gives rise to much dissatisfaction in such people. In certain eras—and especially in our own—there are people, numerous people, living with an unfulfilled longing for thoughts they cannot access, because these thoughts are guarded by thinkers who have been overlooked. We are now living in an age where this is very much the case, and where it is therefore understandable that there must be a great deal of unfulfillment, simply because in the last third of the nineteenth century such overexploitation took place, and a whole host of highly spirited thinkers lived whom the world paid no heed to.

[ 14 ] What is to be done? That, of course, is the question that really matters. Yes, you see, what needs to be done is precisely to speak of such forgotten tones in intellectual life. And when I present a thinker like African Spir to you here in a few strokes, I do so not for purely theoretical reasons, to tell you something interesting, but to draw your attention to this: Among us there is a spiritual world of real thoughts that a thinker has already cherished; but the thinker guards those thoughts. We need only cultivate a certain reverent feeling, a certain focus on the thinker himself, so that he may, in a certain sense, reveal them to us, and we may be enriched by them. That is why I like to draw attention to such forgotten thinkers in the course of my reflections, because this creates a connection to them that constitutes a reality. By sketching the image of African Spir into your souls, something is established that, in a certain sense, is meant to serve as a correction. And that is one of the tasks of spiritual science.

[ 15 ] The spiritual world is not merely something abstract, as vague pantheism would have it, but is just as concrete as the external, physical, sensory facts. One does not speak of the spiritual world by simply saying “spirit, spirit, spirit,” but by pointing to the concrete realities of the spiritual world. Among these realities, the most significant one for our time is that we can bring to life within ourselves a connection with forgotten spirits, whose fruits of thought can thus enter our souls. On the other hand, these spirits are also released from the need to continue guarding their thoughts.

[ 16 ] Thus, what we are accomplishing is a genuine act when we speak in this way and with this attitude about those spirits that have been so ruthlessly exploited, especially in recent times. And it is precisely through this that something is given to our time—or at least something could be given to our time—that it so desperately needs. For all thinking that is merely reflection, all thinking that considers nature, history, and social life in the conventional way—all such thinking is fruitless; all such thinking actually has no further purpose once it has grasped the external world; it is fruitless. That is why there are so many people today who think unproductively—because they want to think only about external realities or historical realities. Only that thinking is fruitful which takes the spiritual world as its content. A thought is like a corpse as long as it arises solely from reflection on nature or history; it becomes alive and creative only when it is filled with what flows down into it from the spiritual world through the hierarchies.

[ 17 ] But you see, this connecting with the spiritual world through thought—that is not in keeping with our times; our times actually shun it. Our age takes immense pride in the cultivation of “true science,” which has finally arrived after humanity had remained at a childlike stage for so long. With this true science—especially where, emerging from the natural sciences, science is supposed to develop into a worldview—strange things have come to pass. This science really could not make proper use of thinking as such, for it dissects the human being, arriving at marvelous insights into the structure of the brain and the like, into human functions and so on, but thinking is not present in any of this. Consequently, thinking as such has gradually become something for this science—oh, one might even say: something it perceives as a kind of specter that it fears. For this reason, modern science particularly detests thinkers who have thought deeply, whose worldview is rooted in thought—such as Hegel, Schelling, Jakob Böhme, and other mystics. Yes, these people have thought—so the modern natural scientist tells himself—but there one is in a state of uncertainty. He feels so uneasy when he is supposed to step out of the world that African Spir calls an illusory world, a world of deception. He feels uneasy about thinking. But now he cannot establish science unless he thinks after all. This is a dilemma. It led one of these gentlemen—who felt himself to be a particularly prominent representative of modern scientific rigor—to make the following statement at a naturalists’ conference, a statement that, when writing the history of the second half of the nineteenth century, ought to be inscribed above it like a kind of motto, like something that characterizes it profoundly. The gentleman in question said: “We physicians must admit that even exact, rigorous science—like any educated person—cannot do without thinking entirely.” — And this was said in the nineteenth century at a serious gathering of natural scientists! The statement is made with regret: that one cannot entirely do without thinking—not as a physician, and certainly not as an educated person. So this thinking is actually something quite fateful. It immediately plunges one into uncertainty the moment one approaches it, yet one cannot entirely do without it!

[ 18 ] Such people feel something quite special about the spiritual world intruding into their lives. They fear thinking simply because they sense that the spiritual world intrudes into their thoughts. But they don’t want that, because the spiritual world—well, it doesn’t even exist! You probably remember how I explained to you what transformation will take place in the nature of genius in the course of evolution. In any case, that discussion must have made you aware at the time that one can only view genius in its true essence if one assumes that the spirit acts more strongly through genius than through the non-genius. When a genius is making mechanical inventions, people today are willing to tolerate it, but otherwise they also have a desire to project their aversion to the spirit onto the genius, so to speak. And in a rather interesting essay by a naturalist about a genius, you’ll find a very curious sentence. After the naturalist has argued that a genius is actually half-sick, half-mad, he goes so far as to say: “Let us all thank God that we are not geniuses!”

[ 19 ] Yes, one must regard these things as symptoms of our time. One must regard them as symptoms, for they do, after all, express the character of our time very well. People tend to simply turn up their noses at these things or otherwise overlook them—at most, laugh at them—because they fail to grasp their full depth; they fail to see that the misery of our time is connected to these things, and they refuse to recognize how little inclination people in our time have to promote order in this world through a connection with the spiritual world. In a sense, they allow the connection with the spiritual world to wither away; but in doing so, they also lose their connection with the external world, for then they can only perceive the shell of the external world. This is also why, in our time—and I am drawing attention to a significant phenomenon here—something so terrible comes to light precisely where human thoughts, when they exist, are supposed to connect with external reality. The consequence of this is that external reality follows its own course—including insofar as human beings shape that reality—and while human thoughts can be quite beautiful—those of some people, of course—the external world, insofar as human beings act within it, is of such a nature that it does not wish to accept thoughts at all; it is inaccessible to thoughts. Thus we see that it has gradually come to pass that individual people may have beautiful thoughts, but that these beautiful thoughts lead a life of their own, and external reality also leads a life of its own. There is a terrible discrepancy between what is going on in the minds of some people today and what is happening in the reality surrounding them—a disharmony greater than at any time in the past.

[ 20 ] People always think they’re exaggerating when they bring up such things. They’re not exaggerating; rather, they have to say such things because they are simply true and must be recognized as simple truths. You notice this everywhere you turn. It’s just that you can’t make the sensation strong enough to truly feel what is actually being said.

[ 21 ] Consider the following case—one that could be multiplied a thousandfold: In 1909, in Russia, two people were discussing relations between Russia and Central Europe, in 1909, immediately following the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conversation took place at the very time when tensions in Russia were running incredibly high—tensions that were actually aimed, even back then, at bringing about that terrible situation that eventually came to pass in 1914. For it hung by a thread; had it not been for that, the war that broke out in 1914 would have broken out as early as 1909. It was certainly not up to certain circles in Russia that it did not break out back then. One must simply look these facts squarely in the face. Two men—a Croat and a Russian—were thus discussing at that time the relationship between Russia and Austria in particular. The conversation led to the point where, after the two had discussed all possibilities for sensibly organizing relations between Central and Eastern Europe, the Russian summarized his view in these words: “A war between Russia and Austria-Germany would not only be the most inhumane thing, but also the most senseless.” These words—“A war between Russia and Austria-Germany would not only be the most inhumane, but also the most senseless”—were the summary of rational thoughts on the social structure of Central and Eastern Europe. In other words, they were words spoken not merely out of emotion or sentiment, but out of what I would call wise reason. One need only mention the name of the Russian who spoke these words in 1909 to find confirmation of what was just explained; for this Russian, who rejected war in this way—a war that in 1909 would have turned out no differently than it did in 1914—is Lwow, the man who later became the first prime minister of the first revolutionary Russian government, that is, the man around whom all these events unfolded that constitute Europe’s present misery.

[ 22 ] Just imagine the event we are facing! We see external events unfolding, and we see people right in the thick of them, acting while thinking in a completely different way! There are people caught up in these events who think quite rationally, but the events are overwhelming them. Why are these events overwhelming them? Because they have failed to connect their thoughts with the spiritual element. Those thoughts that are not connected to the spiritual element are not effective in the world. Only those thoughts are effective in the world that are connected to the spiritual in the world. Is it not, after all, practically a dogma today—even if it is not expressed in so many words—that anyone who is active in external socio-political life must not, in fact, be counted among the thinkers! It is a mistake if such a person is capable of developing thoughts. For a person who develops thoughts is regarded as impractical, someone who understands nothing of reality. Whereas only true thoughts can influence reality—and never those thoughts that come from those whom we today consider to be a match for reality. Or is it really reasonable that a person who is particularly skilled at fishing should be chosen as a great politician, rather than one who can think? *Flyfishing* is the title of the book Sir Edward Grey wrote about fishing—“Flyfishing,” or fly fishing—and that was, in essence, what filled his entire soul. I have mentioned this before: A fellow minister of his once said, not without reason: “Grey is so terribly focused because he never has a thought of his own that can distract him from his concentration, but always takes in whatever others feed him.”—This fellow minister was probably right. So those who are well-versed in fly fishing are, according to the views of our time, supposed to be well-versed in politics; but it is considered a mistake for anyone to have their own thoughts. Yet it is precisely this view that has foundered in our day, that has proven to be untenable. For it has led to everything I have repeatedly discussed, and am discussing again today.

[ 23 ] Let’s be clear about this: What is regarded today as capable of establishing political science and the art of statecraft is incapable of doing so. Why is that? When we reflect on the world—and our age wants nothing but to reflect; that is all it desires—what I called many years ago—you can read about it in my book *Goethe’s Worldview* — I called “fanaticism of facts”; even more years ago, in my introduction to Goethe’s Scientific Writings in Kürschner’s *Nationalliteratur*, I called it “dogmatism of experience.” Those who develop a mode of thinking that consists merely of pondering natural phenomena, historical events, or external social life—they develop thoughts that are purely Ahrimanic. Therefore, they need not be incorrect, but they are Ahrimanic. Ahrimanic forces must exist in the world. The entire content of natural science is Ahrimanic. It is only stripped of its Ahrimanic nature when it is enlivened, when thinking detaches itself from mere reflection, when it becomes creative thinking, when it is permeated and infused by that which lives in the spiritual worlds. If one wishes to formulate social laws or legal laws and relies on mere reflection, one is in fact relying solely on the Ahrimanic. But wherever the Ahrimanic is present where it should not be, it leads to the destruction of that in which it lives; to withering away, to dissolution. The salvation of our time can arise only when, precisely in relation to everything that is meant to enrich social life—legal life, political life—thoughts that stand in a living connection with the spiritual world come into play. But few people are willing to believe this today. For what would these people then have to believe? One notices that when one speaks to people today about the spirit, they resist. What they are then conscious of does not mean much, but what lives in the subconscious and the unconscious means quite a great deal. For what lives in the subconscious is, in fact, an unconscious guilty conscience—a genuine guilty conscience. People do not want to admit to themselves that they are thinking dead thoughts, Ahrimanic thoughts. And that is why they do not allow their thoughts to go that far. For the moment one lifts one’s thinking to a living grasp of the spiritual world, at that very moment one must become aware that one is thinking Ahrimanic thoughts. But people fear this. It is fear that prevents people today from rising from mere reflection to productive thinking, which can exist only when it is inspired—even if unconsciously—by the spiritual worlds.

[ 24 ] Therefore, we see that in our time, behind all other forms of misery, there lies yet another, entirely different one. Nothing less than the struggle against the Spirit itself exists in our time—and will increasingly seek to assert itself, originating from certain circles. This struggle against the spirit is, in our time, promoted in the most eminent sense by what one might call the spirit of the age. I must say, it is quite difficult to speak about such matters as those we are now addressing; but on the other hand, it is also not enough merely to point to these things without calling them by their true names. For in the world, one cannot really say that anything is absolutely good or absolutely bad or evil; rather, it all depends on one’s point of view. Everywhere, it is a matter of recognizing things in such a way that one can say: In their proper place and in their proper context, they are good. If they are removed from their proper context, then they are simply no longer good. And because people today are so quick to dogmatize and absolutize things, one is very easily misunderstood in a discussion such as the one I have in mind; one is very easily perceived as if one were trying to be a kind of critic of the times—a person who criticizes the times themselves. That is not at all what I want to be; I merely wish to point out the facts.

[ 25 ] A tendency away from the spirit and toward the Ahrimanic—that is, toward a spirit as well, but one that has died, where matter alone reveals itself to human beings—such a striving is alive in our time. Life, however, is immensely differentiated and is becoming ever more and more differentiated. And we could cite many examples in the present that, through the differentiation of individual social conditions, would draw our attention to the impulses that are actually at work today—the very impulses we are in the midst of. I would like to mention two such impulses of our time to begin with.

[ 26 ] One impulse is that which lives in people who are primarily connected to the land. We need only look to the East to see how people there are becoming more and more connected to the land. If we go further west, we find these conditions more fully developed—Central Europeans, in fact, have undergone a breakneck development in this very direction over the past few decades, moving from attachment to the land to emancipation from it—and we are entering more and more into conditions of emancipation from the land. Rural people live in harmony with the land, while city dwellers emancipate themselves from it; rural people become farmers, and city dwellers become industrialists. The terms “farmer” and “industrialist” have taken on a completely different meaning in our decade than in earlier times. Yes, it is indeed difficult to analyze such things, because one tends to treat them as absolute. But that is not the intention; rather, the aim is to characterize these phenomena. Both currents exist in human development, and we are all right in the midst of them. For whether we pursue this or that, we are connected—in one way or another—to one of these currents of human development. Both currents in human development—certainly, in and of themselves they are good—but under the influence of the impulses we face today, they degenerate. The agrarian degenerates into a refusal to rise up to the spirit, remaining below the spirit, becoming entangled with what is not yet spirit, and preventing the spirit from unfolding. The industrialist degenerates in the opposite direction; he loses touch with the spirit’s mastery of nature. He immerses himself in mere abstraction, in mere abstract concepts, in diluted concepts. In our time, the agrarian is in danger of suffocating because the world into which he immerses himself has too little spirit. The industrialist faces the opposite danger: he lives, so to speak—if I may use a physical analogy—like someone living in air that is too thin. Thus he lives in a diluted spirit, in an abstract spirit, in concepts that no longer have any connection to any reality.

[ 27 ] These are the dark sides, especially in our time, of agrarian life on the one hand and industrial life on the other. That is why we see that the farmer today very easily becomes an enemy of the spirit. Since one cannot stand still without participating in progress, one flees from the spirit, remains within nature, and descends into nature. One then comes into contact with those demons that truly turn one into a hater of the spirit, and comes into contact with the very demons of Ahriman, and then develops worldview concepts that are entirely permeated by Ahrimanic demonology.

[ 28 ] If one develops into a person who is completely absorbed in industrial life and in the abstract nature of concepts that follows from it, one arrives at a kind of—though not in the Nietzschean sense—superhumanity; that is, one enters the Luciferic world. Ahriman delivers one into the hands of the Luciferic forces, and one imbues one’s strength and concepts with Luciferic emotions. Agriculturalists very easily take on a brutal quality; industrial concepts very easily take on an abstract, reckless quality. These are very real, concrete phenomena of our time.

[ 29 ] All these things are serious, and they show us that one can truly understand the present only by drawing on concepts derived from spiritual science. People must live together, but they can do so only if they smooth out their one-sidedness and find a common ground. Certainly, there must be farmers as well as industrialists, but because it was foreseen at the time the Gospels were written that people would differentiate themselves, the Gospel of Luke was written with farmers in mind, and the Gospel of Matthew with industrialists in mind. But we should not limit ourselves to just the Gospel of Luke or just the Gospel of Matthew; rather, we should allow them all to take effect within us. “Smart” people—and I put “smart” in quotation marks—find contradictions between the Gospels because they do not pay attention to the perspectives from which the Gospels were written—that, for example, the writer of the Gospel of Luke wrote while feeling in his soul what was unfolding in agrarian life at that time, and that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew wrote while feeling in his soul what was unfolding in the souls of those belonging to industrial life. The fact that things contradict one another in reality but complement one another in their contradictions, and that we must seek this complementarity—that is what matters. But this search for mutual complementarity is not possible if one remains trapped in one-sidedness. A person very quickly becomes like what surrounds them—the environment in which they live—if they do not seek to connect with that which dwells in no single individual; and that is the communal spiritual essence that permeates everyone, but which can truly be found today only in spiritual science. Not only is it true what Hartmann once said as a very apt observation: “When you come to an Alpine region and look at the ox and the farmer standing next to it—there isn’t such a great difference in their physiognomy”—this is expressed in radical terms and is very hurtful, but one knows what was meant by it. On the other hand, because people in our time flee from the spirit so much, an intimate kinship arises between the soul’s configuration of individual human beings and the environment in which those people live. Anyone who can observe life knows quite precisely how a farmer’s concepts are derived from his interaction with the land and agricultural labor, and how an industrialist’s concepts have arisen from his engagement with industrial labor. The way a farmer or industrialist thinks about politics or religion: their concepts are agrarian or industrial. The concepts of people who are so terribly dependent today on their external physical environment must be dissolved into what spiritual science can radiate out among humanity.

[ 30 ] A thinker like African Spir felt this particularly keenly. For when he says, “Everything external is an illusion, a deception”—this stems from the fact that he sensed, through his self-perception of his inner being, how human beings themselves become illusions in their inner spiritual experience, how they are no longer truth at all because they merge with what is external illusion. How could anything emerge from the illusion in which the soul lives that might develop for the healing of humanity? How could people avoid clashing with one another in such a terrible way, as is currently the case, if they become completely entangled in the very things that cause these clashes?

[ 31 ] If we want to be spiritual scientists—not merely in name or out of a few vague feelings, but in the deepest sense of the word—we must view life precisely through the means that spiritual science provides us today. Nowhere today does one see life being viewed in its true form, because everywhere people flee from the spirit and seek to bring life to development from what is non-spiritual. What good is it if one generally holds within oneself, as an abstract truth, what spiritual science teaches, yet when observing external life, one is a completely different person and does not apply what spiritual science offers us? It is not merely a matter of knowing that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an “I,” and that there are Ahriman and Lucifer; rather, what matters is that we can use these terms—“Ahrimanic” and “Luciferic”—in a truly scientific sense, just as a physicist can use the terms “positive” and “negative” electricity when examining these phenomena.

[ 32 ] We look at life, and for us the terms “agrarian” and “industrialist” are not merely abstract concepts; rather, they come to life from within our thinking as we imbue them with the concepts of “Luciferic” and “Ahrimanic,” just as we have just done. Certainly, one treads on thin ice with such characterizations, and people today do not like to hear such things, but people must get used to hearing the truth. Until they get used to hearing the truth, no salvation will come to our troubled times. The understanding of human life is already intimately connected with what is to bring salvation and healing to the evils of our time.