The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] It is truly significant to observe the way in which some people—those who, through their feelings and sensibilities, at least attempt to gain insight into the current state of social affairs in the world—feel compelled today to speak about the present human condition. With regard to this significance, I would like to begin today with a few sentences from the speech Kurt Eisner gave to a gathering of Basel students shortly before his death. Perhaps some of you are already familiar with these sentences, but they are extraordinarily significant if one wishes to view certain things today in a symptomatic light. “Do I not hear,” he says, alluding to what he had said earlier, “or do I not see clearly that deep within our lives there lives that longing, striving for life, which recognizes that our life—as we must live it today—is nothing but the clear invention of some evil spirit? Imagine a great thinker who knew nothing of our time and who, say, two thousand years ago, had lived and dreamed of what the world might look like in two thousand years—even with the most vivid imagination, he could hardly have conceived of a world like the one in which we are condemned to live. In truth, the present reality is the only utopia in the world, and what we desire—what lives as a longing in our minds—is the deepest and ultimate reality; everything else is horrifying. We are merely confusing dreams with wakefulness. Our task is to shake off this old dream of our present social existence. A look at the war: Is it possible to conceive of a human reason that could devise such a thing? If this war was not what is truly called a war, then perhaps we were dreaming, and we are now awake.” So you think this man felt compelled, in his attempt to understand the present, to take refuge in the concept of a dream, to ask himself the question: Can’t what truly surrounds us now be called a bad dream rather than true reality?

[ 2 ] A curious situation arises—just consider what is so characteristic about this situation—in which a thoroughly modern person, someone who sees himself as the herald of a new era, does not generally regard external, sensory reality as a maya, a dream—as, for example, the Indian worldview does—but that such a modern mind feels compelled, by the particular events of the present, to raise the question—in whatever sense that may be—but the question nonetheless: Is this reality not, in fact, a dream? One must surely infer from the overall context of Eisner’s speech that he intended to say more than a mere platitude when he uttered the sentence that this present reality can be nothing other than something brought upon humanity by an evil spirit.

[ 3 ] Well, let us take various aspects of what has passed through our souls in the course of our anthroposophical endeavors; let us take, above all, the fact that we generally attempt not to regard external, sensory reality as the whole of reality, but to set this external, sensory reality in contrast to the supersensory reality, which alone completes this sensory reality into true, perfect reality. But let us consider, in contrast to this view—which is actually only a tiny spark in the currents of thought of the present age, while materialistic thinking fills this present age to a great extent—that, on the other hand, a man precisely like Kurt Eisner—who, from his standpoint, certainly thinks nothing of this tiny spark, or at least did not think anything of it during his physical life— as if constrained by the facts of the present, can draw no other comparison than that external reality, at least as it currently exists, is a dream. Thus, at least in the face of present reality, such a man must make a confession that can only be expressed through a comparison with the general truth of the illusory nature—the nature of unreality—of mere external, sensory reality.

[ 4 ] Let us now take a closer look at some of the thoughts that have stirred our souls in recent weeks as we have reflected on the social question. Let us turn our attention to how developments over the past few centuries have led people to deny the actual spiritual or supersensible world more and more, to the point where, to a very large extent, they are—one might say—in a sense actively engaged in this denial of the supersensible world. Certainly, you might object that from certain quarters there is still much talk about the supersensible world. The churches are still abundantly filled—if perhaps not with people, then at least with words intended to proclaim the Spirit. After all, here too, almost the entire time today and also last night, one could hear the bells ringing, which are also meant to be an expression of what asserts itself as spiritual life in the world. But alongside this, we also experience something else. We are experiencing that when an attempt is made today, in the immediate present, to listen to Christ and hear what He has to say for our time, it is precisely the adherents of the old religious communities who turn most vehemently against such a word of the Spirit. Very, very few people today want a genuine spiritual life—not merely one based on the faith of an ancient tradition, but one rooted in the immediate spiritual creativity of the present.

[ 5 ] Is it not, in contrast, actually the case that—perhaps not by an evil world spirit, but by a good world spirit—modern humanity is being compelled to reflect once more on the spiritual nature of existence, precisely because such an external, sensory reality has been imposed upon modern humanity that a modern mind must say seems like a dream, and even a great thinker two thousand years ago would not have been able to conceive of what has today become an apparent external reality?

[ 6 ] In any case, such a commitment to a modern spirit compels us to form conceptions of reality that differ from those currently in vogue. I know that a large number of our anthroposophical friends have found these very conceptions of true reality—which I have highlighted today as important—somewhat difficult to grasp. But one cannot get by in life today without the willingness to turn to such challenging concepts. How do people think in a certain area today? They are handed a crystal: that is a real object. They are handed a rose plucked from the rosebush, and they also say that is a real object. They call both “real objects” in the same sense. But are both objects “real” in the same sense? Natural scientists in all lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics speak of reality in this way, calling “real” only that which is real in the same sense as the crystal and as the rose plucked from the rosebush. But isn’t there a considerable, enormous difference in that the crystal retains the forms it possesses through itself over long periods of time? The rose, once plucked from the rosebush, will lose its form after a relatively short time; it withers away. It does not possess within itself the same degree of reality that the crystal possesses. And even the rosebush, when we tear it out of the ground, no longer possesses the same degree of reality that it has when it is in the ground. This leads us to view things in the world differently than today’s superficial approach does. We must not speak of reality when we speak of a rose or a rosebush. At most, we may speak of reality by taking the entire earth into account; and the rosebush, as well as every plant on it, as a hair growing out of this reality.

[ 7 ] You can see from this that there may be things in external, sensory reality that, when removed from their foundation, are no longer real in the true sense of the word. This means that we must first search for true realities within apparent external reality—within this great illusion. Humanity today already makes such mistakes regarding reality when observing nature. But those who make such mistakes regarding reality and have become accustomed to making them over the course of many centuries—as humanity has today—will find it extremely difficult to arrive at a social way of thinking that corresponds to reality. For you see, this is the great difference between human life and nature: nature allows that which no longer possesses its full reality to wither away—the rose plucked from the rosebush. Even something that is not reality—something that is, in itself, a lie—can possess an outward appearance of reality. Yet we can realize such a thing—which has no reality in itself—as if it were real in social life. Then it need not die off immediately, but it gradually becomes a source of pain and torment for humanity, whereas only that which is felt and thought out of a full reality and implanted into the human social organism can blossom into the salvation of humanity. It is not merely a sin against the social order, but a sin against truth itself, when, for example, our current view of life still assumes—as I have said here on several occasions—that human labor can be a commodity. One can make it so in the outward, apparent reality, but such an outward, apparent reality then becomes a source of pain and suffering for the human social order and gives rise to upheavals and revolutions within the social organism.

[ 8 ] In short, what humanity currently needs to incorporate into its way of thinking is the realization that not everything that manifests itself in outward, apparent reality—as it does within certain limits—necessarily constitutes true reality; rather, it may be a “life lie.” And it is this distinction between the truth of life and the lie of life that should become deeply ingrained in the minds of people today. For the more deeply this distinction becomes ingrained in people, the more the feeling awakens in them that one must seek not what is a lie of life, but what is the truth of life—the sooner we will be able to achieve a healing of the social organism. But what must happen for this to occur?

[ 9 ] You will not, of course, be able to come to a realization of whether the reality of an external object is true or merely apparent. Imagine that a being came from a planet where conditions were different from those on Earth, such that the being had never noticed the difference between a rose growing on a rosebush and a crystal; if such a being were then presented with a crystal and a rose placed side by side, it might believe that the two were equally real. And it might then be surprised that the rose withers so quickly, while the crystal remains unchanged. Human beings on Earth are only able to make sense of this reality because they have observed things over long periods of time. But not everything can be observed in such a way that one can already discern in external reality what is true reality and what is not—as in the case of the rose—but there are things in life that necessitate our first establishing a foundation upon which to even begin to grasp true reality. What might such a foundation be, particularly for human social coexistence?

[ 10 ] Well, I have already discussed certain aspects of this foundation in my last and second-to-last lectures here. Today I would like to add a few more points. You are familiar from my writings with the descriptions I have given of the spiritual world—that world which a human being experiences between death and a new birth. You know that when one refers to this life in the supersensible, spiritual world, it is necessary to establish the relationships that prevail there from soul to soul. There, the human being is free from the body; there, the human being is not subject to the physical laws of this world of ours, which we experience between birth and death. Therefore, one speaks of what acts as a force or forces from soul to soul. Please refer to my *Theosophy* to see how, when speaking of life between death and rebirth, one must discuss the forces of sympathy and antipathy that operate from soul to soul in the world of souls. There, these forces operate entirely inwardly from soul to soul. Antipathy is directed from one soul toward another; it is tempered by sympathies. Harmonies and disharmonies arise between the innermost experiences of the souls. And this experience of the innermost essence of one soul in relation to the experience of the innermost essence of another soul is what constitutes the true nature of the supersensible world. And what a soul can experience with another here in the physical world throughout physical life—as it were, like the remnants of this supersensible realm—is merely a reflection of it.

[ 11 ] But this reflection, in turn, must be judged in the proper light. One might ask: From a social perspective, how does what we experience here between birth and death relate to the supersensible life? — Now that we have already considered the necessary threefold structure of the social organism on several occasions, our attention is first drawn to the middle member, which has been described more often: the political state itself. Those who have reflected on the political state in our time have always sought to understand what the political state actually is. But you see, people today, with their materialistic ideas, really have no proper foundation for considering such a thing. Moreover, in recent times, all sorts of things have been conflated with the modern state in accordance with the interests of the various social classes, so that one cannot simply assume that this state is a reality and not a lie of life. There is a wide gap between the view of the German philosopher Hegel and the alternative view that Fritz Mauthner, the author of a philosophical dictionary, has put forward in recent times. Hegel regards the state more or less as God made real on earth. Fritz Mauthner says that the state is a necessary evil. In other words, he regards it as an evil, albeit one that cannot be dispensed with—one that is necessary for human coexistence. These are the diametrically opposed views of two modern thinkers.

[ 12 ] Now that much of what used to take shape instinctively has entered human consciousness, people of all kinds have tried to form ideas about what the state should be like and what it should become. In turn, a wide range of nuances has emerged in these human conceptions. On the one hand, we have the meek and docile describers of the state, who do not really wish to delve into what it actually is, but still want to shape it in such a way that the people who have much to complain about it have as little as possible to say about it. And then there are the others, who want to radically transform the state so that a way of life satisfying to people can develop from it. The question arises: How, however, can one even gain an understanding of what the state actually is?

[ 13 ] Only when one looks impartially at what can develop between people in the context of the state, and compares this with what develops—as I have just described—between souls in the supersensible life, does one gain an insight into the reality of the state, into the possible reality of the state. For just as that relationship—which is built upon the fundamental forces of the human soul, namely sympathies and antipathies in the supersensible life—is the innermost aspect of the human soul, so too is that which can be established from person to person in the mere life of the political state the outermost aspect, based on law, on that in which one person faces another in the most external way. If you think this through, you will come to realize that the state is the exact opposite of the supersensible life. And this state is all the more perfect in its essence the more it is the exact opposite of the supersensible life; the less it presumes in any way to introduce anything of the supersensible life into its structure; the more it focuses solely on what concerns the outermost legal relationship of human interaction, in which all people are equal—equal before external legal statutes. One becomes ever more deeply imbued with the truth that the perfection of the state consists precisely in the fact that nothing is sought within it other than that which pertains to our life between birth and death, that which pertains to our most external relationships.

[ 14 ] But then one must ask: If the state is merely a reflection of the supersensible life in that it represents the opposite of this supersensible life, how does the supersensible intrude into the rest of our sensory life? — I recently explained this to you from a different perspective. Today, however, I would like to tell you that certain remnants remain of the antipathies that develop in the supersensible world between death and birth—residual antipathies—which we carry with us into physical existence at birth. These are counteracted in physical life by everything that finds expression in what is called spiritual life, in spiritual culture. There, people are brought together in religious communities and through other shared spiritual assets; there they are meant to create a balance for certain antipathies that have remained as residues from their pre-birth life. All of our spiritual culture is meant to be an institution in its own right here, because it is a reflection of our pre-birth life, because it, so to speak, places human beings here in the sensory world, endowed with the ability to form a kind of remedy for the residual antipathies that have remained from the supersensory world. That is why it is so appalling when people cause divisions in spiritual life instead of truly uniting, especially in spiritual life. The residual antipathies that remain from our spiritual life before birth gnaw away at the depths of the human soul and prevent what should actually be strived for from becoming reality: true spiritual harmony, true spiritual cooperation. Where such harmony should exist, sects immediately arise. These sectarian formations and divisions are still the earthly reflection of the antipathies from which all spiritual life arises—and for which it is actually meant to develop as a remedy. We must understand spiritual life as something that stands in an intimate relationship to our prenatal life, something that is, in a certain sense, already related to the supersensible life. We must therefore not fall into the temptation of establishing this spiritual cultural life as anything other than a free life outside the state—a life that is not a reflection in this sense, but rather a counter-image to the supersensible life. And we can only gain an understanding of what is truly real about the state and what is truly real about spiritual cultural life if we add the supersensible life to our sensory life. Only the two together constitute true reality, whereas mere sensory life is, in fact, nothing but a dream.

[ 15 ] Economic life, on the other hand, is of an entirely different nature. In economic life, one person works for another. As a rule, one person works for another because, just like the other, they find benefits in doing so. Economic life arises from needs and consists in the satisfaction of those needs—in the creation, on the physical plane, of everything that can satisfy humanity’s basic natural needs, or even the finer, yet still more instinctive, needs of the soul. Within this economic life, something develops unconsciously that in turn has an effect extending beyond death. What people do for one another out of the selfish needs of economic life develops, in its depths, the seeds of certain sympathies that must take shape in our souls in the life after death. Just as spiritual cultural life is a kind of remedy against the remnants of antipathies that we bring with us from our pre-birth life into this post-birth life, so too is what takes place in the depths of economic life permeated with the seeds of the sympathies that are to develop after death. This, in turn, is yet another perspective on how we can recognize, from the supersensible world, the necessary threefold structure of the social organism. However, such a perspective cannot be attained by anyone who does not strive to master the spiritual-scientific foundations of world knowledge. But for those who do acquire this foundation in spiritual science, the requirement that a healthy social organism must be divided into these three parts becomes increasingly self-evident, because these three parts, each in its own distinct way, have their own relationships to the supersensible reality, which, as has been said, together with the sensible reality constitutes true reality.

[ 16 ] But in recent centuries, humanity has no longer spoken of such connections within external physical existence as it unfolds in spiritual cultural life, in political life, and in economic life. It has continued to spin out the old traditions, which, however, have remained misunderstood. It has lost the habit of entering the realm of the spirit through an immediate, active inner life, in order to seek there the light that can illuminate physical reality, so that one may truly recognize this physical reality. The leading circles of humanity have, after all, set the tone for this unspiritual way of life. This has given rise to that deep chasm between the classes of people that lies at the very foundation of all life today—a chasm that people truly ought not to overlook. Perhaps I may remind you again and again of how, before July and August 1914, people—insofar as they belonged to the leading classes, the classes that had been in charge until then—praised what our civilization, as they called it, had finally achieved. They pointed out how thoughts could be transmitted at lightning speed over vast distances via telegraph and telephone, and how other marvelous achievements of modern technology had so advanced cultural and civilizational life. But this cultural and civilizational life was based precisely on the very foundation that has brought about today’s terrible catastrophes. Before July and August 1914, European statesmen—especially those in the Central European states, as can be documented—emphasized countless times: “As things stand, peace in Europe is secured for a long time to come.”—Statesmen in Central Europe, in particular, addressed their parties using precisely such phrases. I could show you speeches from as early as May 1914 in which it was stated: “Given the way relations between the states are now organized through our diplomatic ties, we have reason to believe in a lasting peace.”—In May 1914! But anyone who understood the situation at that time simply had to speak differently. Back then, in my lectures in Vienna before the war, I expressed what I have said repeatedly over the past few years: We are living within something that can only be called a human social cancer, a carcinoma of the social order. This carcinoma, this ulcer, has burst open and has become what is called the World War.

[ 17 ] Back then, of course, the saying went: “We live in a carcinoma, we live in a social ulcer”—for people, it was just a figure of speech, a cliché, because the World War didn’t come until later. For people had no idea that they were dancing on a volcano. For many, it is the same again today when one points to the other volcano—which is indeed a volcano—and which lies in what is only now emerging in the shaping of what has long been called the social question. Because people are so fond of turning a blind eye to reality, they fail to recognize within this reality the true forces that make this reality a true reality in the first place.

[ 18 ] You see, that is why it is so difficult to make people today truly understand what is so necessary: the concept of the three parts of a healthy social organism, and the need to work toward this threefold structure. How, then, does this way of thinking—which finds expression in the call for this threefold division—differ from other ways of thinking? You see, other ways of thinking actually start from the premise of figuring out what the best social world order might be, and how one should actually go about ensuring that people arrive at the best social world order. Notice the difference from the way of thinking that underlies this threefold division of the social organism. This threefold division does not start by asking: What is the best arrangement within the social organism? — Rather, it addresses reality: How should we structure human beings themselves so that they are freely placed within the social organism and can work together in such a way that the right outcome is achieved? — This way of thinking does not appeal to principles, theories, or social dogmas; rather, it appeals to human beings. It says: Place people within the three parts of the social organism, and then these people will determine what social order should be. — This way of thinking appeals to real human beings, not to abstract theories or abstract social dogmas.

[ 19 ] If a person lived alone, he would never develop human language. Human language can only arise within a social community. A person who lives alone also does not develop a social way of thinking, social feelings, or social instincts. Social life can only be developed within the right kind of community.

[ 20 ] However, there is much to contradict the idea that this is happening today. For it is precisely because materialism has risen in recent centuries that human beings have distanced themselves from true reality. They have become estranged from true reality. They have become lonely within themselves. And those who have become the loneliest are those who have been torn from life and are connected to nothing but the barren machine—the factory on the one hand and soulless capitalism on the other. Human souls have become desolate. But from this desolation of the soul emerges that which can come forth from the individual, personal human being. What can come forth from this individual, personal human being are inner thoughts, inner visions of the supersensible world, and also visions that explain the outer, sensory natural world to us. But it is precisely when we become truly lonely, when we are left entirely to our own devices, that this is the best state of mind for everything that knowledge is meant to develop for the individual human being in his or her relationship with the natural and spiritual worlds. Opposed to this is what is meant to develop as social thinking. Only those who consider this can correctly judge the significant historical moment in which we now find ourselves. At some point in the course of world history, human beings had to become so lonely that they would seek to develop a spiritual life out of the loneliness of their souls. The loneliest were the great thinkers, who lived at seemingly entirely abstract heights and who, in their abstractions, sought only the path to the supersensible world.

[ 21 ] But of course, human beings must not only seek the path to the supersensible world and to nature; they must also seek the path from their thoughts to social life. But since social life cannot be developed in solitude, but only through genuine shared experience with other people, the solitary individual of modern times was not truly suited to developing social thinking. Precisely when he sought to give full expression to his inner life, what he drew from within became antisocial; it did not become social thinking. Thus we live amid the most contradictory phenomena. People’s modern inclinations and longings are the unfolding of spiritual powers that are oriented toward solitude and are led astray by the overwhelming Ahrimanic materialism.

[ 22 ] One really realizes the significance of this fact when one asks a question that is frightening to many people today. One can ask people: What do you call Bolshevik? — Lenin, Trotsky, people then say. Well, I know of a third Bolshevik—who, admittedly, does not live in the present day—and this third person is none other than the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. You will have heard many things, and absorbed many ideas, about Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s ideal, spiritual way of thinking. You will have given little thought to the kind of person Fichte actually was, and will be familiar with the views he set forth in his *Closed Commercial State*, which anyone can buy for a very reasonable price in the Reclam Library. Read how Fichte conceives of the distribution of people’s goods and their social order, and then compare what Fichte sets forth there with what Trotsky or Lenin write, and you will discover a remarkable similarity. Then you will surely become hesitant about merely superficially presenting and condemning these ideas, and you will be tempted to ask: What is actually underlying this? — If you then examine this more closely, if you try to understand what lies at the root of it, you will arrive at the following: You investigate the particular intellectual orientation found among the most radical people today; you engage with it, perhaps specifically examining the minds of Trotsky and Lenin—their particular way of thinking, their thought patterns—and you then ask yourself: How did such people come to be conceivable? — The answer you receive is: They are conceivable, on the one hand, in a different social order, and conceivable in our social order, which has developed for centuries under the light—or rather, under the darkness, the gloom—of materialism. — Suppose Lenin and Trotsky had developed within a different social order. What might they have become, had they developed their intellectual faculties in an entirely different way? Deep mystics! For what lives within such souls could, in a religious atmosphere, for example, become the deepest mysticism. In the atmosphere of modern materialism, it becomes what it presents itself as.

[ 23 ] Take Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s *Closed Commercial State*: it represents the social ideal of a man who truly sought, in the most intense way, to pursue the highest paths of knowledge, and who developed a way of thinking that was constantly oriented toward the supersensible world. But when he sought to spin a social ideal out of his own mind, it was indeed a pure construct of the human heart; yet precisely what enables us to attain the highest ideals of knowledge through an inner path is what renders us, when we seek to apply it to social life, incapable of developing a social way of thinking. In such a spiritual being as Fichte developed, only the individual can forge his own path. Social thinking must be developed within the human community. And the thinker’s main task is then to point out how the social organism might be structured so that people interact in the right way to establish the social within the social itself. That is why I do not prescribe to you—or to people today—that private ownership of the means of production or communal ownership of the means of production should be organized in one way or another; rather, I must say: Work toward structuring the social organism into its three parts; then even that which is subject to the influence of capital will be administered from the spiritual realm and imbued with its legal life by the political state. Then legal life and spiritual life will flow together with economic life in an orderly manner. And then that socialization will take place which, time and again, will channel—based on certain legal concepts—that which has been acquired beyond one’s own consumption into the spiritual organization. It flows back to the spiritual organization.

[ 24 ] Today, this system exists only in the realm of intellectual property, where no one notices it. One can no longer protect one’s intellectual property for one’s descendants beyond a certain period—at most thirty years after one’s death—after which it becomes public property. One should bear in mind that this can serve as a model for the return—not only of that which is created through individual human powers, but also of that which exists within the capitalist order—to the social organism. The only question then is: into which parts? Into the part that can properly manage the individual spiritual and other individual powers of human beings: into the spiritual organism. People will do this if they are properly integrated into the social organism. This presupposes this way of thinking.

[ 25 ] I would imagine that these things are done differently in every century: there are no absolute rules governing them. But our age has become accustomed to judging everything from a materialistic point of view, and as a result, we no longer see anything in its proper light. I have now discussed on several occasions how, in modern times, labor has become a commodity. The standard employment contract does not help in this regard, because it assumes that labor is a commodity, and it is concluded regarding the work that the worker is to perform for the employer. A healthy relationship can only be established if the contract is not concluded regarding the work at all, if the work is defined as a legal relationship by the political state, and if the contract is concluded regarding the distribution of the produced goods between those who perform physical labor and those who perform intellectual labor. However, the contract can be concluded only regarding the goods produced, not regarding the relationship between labor and the employer. Only in this way can the matter be placed on a sound footing.

[ 26 ] But people now ask: Where do the ills in social life that are inherent in capitalism come from? — They say: They stem from the economic order of capitalism. But no harm can come from this economic order itself; rather, the harm arises, first, from the fact that we have no real labor law that protects workers appropriately, and second, from the fact that we fail to realize how we are living a lie—how the worker is being deprived of his share. But what is the basis for this deprivation? Not the economic order, but the fact that the social order itself actually creates the possibility that the entrepreneur’s individual abilities are not shared with the worker in the proper way. When it comes to goods, they must be shared, for they are produced jointly by the intellectual and physical workers. But what does it mean to use one’s individual abilities to take something from another person that one should not take from them? It means to deceive them, to take advantage of them! One need only look at these circumstances with a healthy and unbiased eye to realize: the problem lies not in capitalism, but in the misuse of intellectual abilities. Therein lies the connection to the spiritual world. First, restore the spiritual organization to health so that spiritual abilities no longer develop in a way that takes advantage of those who must work; then you will restore the social organism to health. What matters is being able to see what is right in every situation.

[ 27 ] In order to be able to see what is right, human beings need a guiding principle. Today, the time has come when true guiding principles can only arise from spiritual life. Therefore, the turn toward this spiritual life must become a serious one. And it must be emphasized again and again that it is not enough today to simply keep pointing out that people should once more believe in the spirit. Oh, many prophets are now beginning to speak of the necessity of faith in the spirit! But it is not enough for people merely to say: To achieve a healing from the current unhealthy conditions, it is necessary for people to turn away from materialism and back toward the spirit. — No, mere belief in the spirit brings no healing today. No matter how celebrated the prophets may be, they can go around the countries saying over and over again: Modern life has made people superficial; they must become more inward. — No matter how many prophets say: “Christ has so far been present only in private life; he must now enter public life”—such things accomplish absolutely nothing today. For today it is not a matter of merely believing in the spirit, but rather of being so filled with the spirit that the spirit is transferred through us into external material reality. What matters today is not telling people, “Believe in the Spirit,” but rather speaking of a Spirit that truly overcomes material reality and that truly shows how the social organism should be structured. For the lack of spirituality today does not stem from people’s failure to believe in the Spirit, but from their inability to relate to the Spirit in such a way that the Spirit can intervene in matter in real life. Disbelief in the spirit does not stem from merely denying belief in the spirit, but it can also stem from assuming that matter is purely material and devoid of spirit. How many people are there today who see something extraordinarily noble precisely in the fact that they say: “Oh, that is merely external, material life; it has nothing spiritual about it; one must withdraw from it; one must turn away from external, material life toward the abstract life of the spirit.” — There is material reality; there one cashes in one’s coupons, then one sits down in the meditation room and drifts off into the spiritual world. Beautiful dual currents of life, neatly separated from one another! That is not what matters today. What matters today is that the spirit become so strong in human minds that this spirit not only speaks of the way in which a person is spiritually gifted or redeemed, but that the spirit penetrates into what we wish to do in external, material reality—that we introduce the spirit and allow it to flow into this external, material reality. It comes very naturally to people to speak habitually about the spirit. And in this regard, some people can find themselves in a strange self-contradiction. Anzengruber’s dramatic character—the man who denies God and reinforces this especially by saying: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist”—this figure of the man who contradicts himself in this way exists today, though not as blatantly as Anzengruber’s dramatic character, but it is by no means a rarity. For people speak in this vein very frequently today: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!”

[ 28 ] All of this includes the admonition not to rely on mere faith in the Spirit, but above all to try to find the Spirit in such a way that the Spirit strengthens us to see through even external, material reality. Then, in fact, people will stop saying “Spirit, Spirit, Spirit” in every sentence. But then, through the way they view things, people will demonstrate that they are observing them with the Spirit. What matters today is that one observes things with the Spirit, not that one merely talks about the Spirit all the time. This must be understood so that anthroposophical spiritual science is not constantly confused with all that talk about the Spirit, which is still so popular today. Time and again, whenever a Sunday afternoon preacher of the secular sort speaks here or there—albeit in a more refined style—people say, “He’s speaking entirely in the spirit of anthroposophy.” Yet he is usually saying the exact opposite! This is precisely what we must pay close attention to. That is what matters.

[ 29 ] Anyone who recognizes this will not be far from realizing that precisely such a well-intentioned statement—I would say, one spoken as if out of a premonition of a tragic death—such as the one I read to you by Kurt Eisner, is particularly valuable precisely because it strikes one as the confession of a human being: I do not, in fact, seriously believe in the supernatural; at least, I do not wish to turn to the supernatural while I am alive. Yet those who have spoken of the supernatural have always said: Sensory reality here is only half of reality; it is like a dream. And I must look into the form that this sensory reality has taken in contemporary social life, and there it strikes me very much as a dream. It is such that one must say that this reality is the clear invention of some evil spirit. —

[ 30 ] Certainly a remarkable confession. But could it not also be otherwise? Could not that which reveals present reality to people in such a tragic, such a terrible way be the education of a sound mind—enabling one to seek, from what appears to be a terrible nightmare, the true reality composed of the sensible and the supersensible? One need not view the present with utter pessimism; one can also draw strength from it to find a kind of justification for this existence. But then one must never remain confined to the sensory realm; one must find the path from the sensory into the supersensory. Anyone who does not wish to seek this path would truly be short-sighted today if they did not say to themselves: This reality is like the invention of an evil spirit! — But those who develop within themselves the will to rise from this reality to a spiritual reality will also be able to speak of an education imparted by a good spirit. And despite everything we see today, we may still be convinced that people will find a way out of the tragic fate of the present. But of course, the clear sign must be heeded: to contribute to social healing.

[ 31 ] I wanted to add that today in connection with what I said recently.