The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] The way things have developed within the Anthroposophical Society makes it seem desirable to me to touch upon at least a few issues related to these matters this evening as well. It is actually never my intention to address the conditions of development, the organization, and the like of the Anthroposophical Society in lectures, since I must regard it as my task to work for anthroposophy itself, and I am happy to leave the discussions about the Society’s living conditions and factors of development to others who have taken on the leadership of the Society here and there. However, I hope to be able to speak in greater detail about the topic I might otherwise have addressed here today at the upcoming Delegates’ Assembly, and I therefore take the liberty—out of necessity, given the development of the Society’s current affairs—to say a few words to you today to supplement what I allowed myself to present here eight days ago regarding the three phases of anthroposophical development.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to speak more about what these three phases have in common—the differences between which I attempted to characterize last time, albeit only very briefly. I would like to begin by considering how something like the Anthroposophical Society actually comes into being. I believe that what I have to say may serve, for some, as a kind of aid to anthroposophical self-knowledge, particularly in preparation for the upcoming Delegates’ Assembly. Certainly, on the one hand, it is clear to anyone who can follow the development of civilization and culture in the present that the anthroposophical deepening of our life of knowledge, our ethical-practical and inner-religious life, is a necessity of our time. But on the other hand, an organization such as the Anthroposophical Society serves as a kind of vanguard for what, simply out of the necessity of the times, must continue to spread ever further. And how does this vanguard actually come into being? Everyone who has approached the Anthroposophical Society in an honest way will perhaps recognize a piece of their own destiny in what I have to say. Basically, when we look back over the one to twenty-two years of the Anthroposophical Society’s development, we certainly find that the overwhelming majority of people who come to the Anthroposophical Society are those who, in one way or another, feel dissatisfied with the intellectual, spiritual, and even outwardly practical conditions of life that surround them in the external world. Especially in the early—perhaps even better—days of the Anthroposophical Society—and I do not mean this in a negative sense, but purely as a fact—there was something akin to a kind of escape from contemporary life into another life within a human community, a community where one could also live out what one feels, from the depths of one’s own soul, to be truly worthy of a human being. This alienation from the external, intellectual, spiritual, and practical conditions of life must certainly be taken into account in the formation of the Anthroposophical Society. For those who became Anthroposophists are, after all, people who feel—first and foremost—precisely what millions upon millions of people will quite certainly feel and experience very clearly in the course of a relatively short future: It is the experience that conventional forms—which have emerged into the present from past times not at all unjustifiably, but out of historical necessity—no longer provide, of their own accord, what human beings today demand from their inner lives; they demand it for the sake of their human dignity, and they demand it because only through this demand can they be fully human.

[ 3 ] Anyone who looks at these things with an open mind—especially upon some self-examination, once they have honestly become an anthroposophist— will find that this urge to satisfy the needs of one’s soul within a particular human community—as opposed to other human communities of today—is something that springs from the very depths of the human being, something one can already sense is working its way up to the surface of the soul from the eternal sources of all humanity, precisely in our time. And that is why those who have come to anthroposophy in good faith experience this connection with an anthroposophical community as a true matter of the heart, as something about which—the more sincere they are—they tell themselves that they cannot truly exist without it. Now, however, we must also admit to ourselves that from the distinctness, from the clarity—I mean clarity in feeling, not in thinking—from which this connection to the anthroposophical community arises, we can already see how much in our present external world is unsatisfactory to the fully human. After all, a person’s honest impulse could not be drawn toward anthroposophy with such intensity if the alienation from today’s external circumstances—particularly of a spiritual nature—were not so exceptionally strong.

[ 4 ] But let’s turn our attention to something else. What I have discussed so far is something that could be called a reversal of human impulses of the will. When a person is born into a certain era, when they are raised within a specific era, their impulses of will initially align with the common, familiar impulses of will in their environment. The person grows up, and they grow—without much stirring within them—into the directions of will that are also the directions of will in their environment. Something must stir within them—in the depths of their heart—that takes an inner, emotional stand against the very directions of will they have adopted for a certain period of their life in accordance with the external habits of their surroundings, so that they may now turn inward the direction of will that until then had been expressed only outwardly. But when he turns it inward, this reversal of the will makes him aware of that which—especially in our present age—wells up as if from the eternal springs of the human soul: a longing to integrate oneself into the human community in a different way than is inherent in the accustomed directions of the will. And everything connected with the will is, after all, something ethical, something moral; and so, at least in terms of the impulse of will and feeling, what drives people into the Anthroposophical Society is, first and foremost, a moral impulse, an ethical impulse. And as the human being then touches his or her most sacred inner self with this ethical impulse, as he or she approaches the eternal sources of his or her soul life through this ethical impulse, the ethical impulse that drove him or her into an anthroposophical community also becomes—I would say—as it were, in its continuation, a religious impulse. And so what otherwise operates in people through their adherence to external moral precepts and legal rules, and through their adherence to habits of life—by which they grow up more or less thoughtlessly in their familiar surroundings— —that which is ethical, moral, and religious in this process of growing up—is turned inward, and it becomes a striving toward moral, ethical, and religious internalization. But the human being, with his full humanity, cannot develop a soul life consisting merely of volition and perhaps some feeling, and accept just any kind of knowledge alongside it.

[ 5 ] Those insights that we already receive today—I won’t say we absorb them with our mother’s milk, but at least by the age of six as a form of inner spiritual training that then continues ever onward—all these things that our intellect and our power of cognition take in and that must form a counterpoint to the ethical, the moral, and the religious—but a counterpoint that is in harmony and accord with these ethical, moral, and religious aspects—all these insights are by no means indifferent to the religious internalization of the anthroposophical striving. Precisely that way of life and those practices from which the anthroposophist seeks to break free morally, ethically, and religiously are, after all, the very way of life and practices that have predominantly developed within civilized humanity over the last few centuries. And in fact, even when the anthroposophist makes—and indeed must make—compromises with what constitutes external life, he still seeks to break free from what human civilization has produced over the past few centuries and what has, after all, led to the terrible catastrophe of the present. For very many who join the anthroposophical movement, this is certainly more or less instinctive, yet it is definitely present.

[ 6 ] And now let us be clear about this: What has developed over the course of the last few centuries as goals of the will and as religious impulses is, in fact, what has also given rise to the entire direction and the entire nuance of the life of knowledge in modern times. Only those who are caught up in prejudices find themselves today in the life of knowledge in such a way that they say: We have objective physics, objective mathematics, objective chemistry; we strive for objective biology, and so on. - That is a prejudice. In truth, the matter is this: what, as I said, has been instilled in people from the age of six onward is, in fact, the result of those external formations of the will and religious impulses that have taken shape over the past few centuries. But if the person who strives for anthroposophy wants to break free from these impulses of the will—and indeed from what takes place in religious forms as the culmination of moral life—then, on the other hand, he cannot help but also seek a form of knowledge that corresponds not to the world he wishes to leave behind, but to the world he seeks. This means that the anthroposophist, having turned his impulses of will inward, must also strive for a kind of knowledge that corresponds to this inward-turned will: that is, a kind of knowledge that leads away from that external science which has arisen in recent centuries within civilized regions precisely through the externalization of life. And the anthroposophist will sense how thoughtlessly he would have to turn his will around if he did not at the same time turn his knowledge around. He would have to be thoughtless if he did not say to himself: I feel alien as a human being within the way of life and life practices that have emerged, but I can feel a kinship with what has emerged as knowledge. — Nor can the knowledge that the world one seeks to flee has acquired be the satisfying knowledge for the person who is redirecting his or her impulses of will. And through this, perhaps, some may instinctively come to realize that the way of life from which they wish to escape has taken on its form and shape precisely because it believes only in what is outwardly visible and can be combined with the intellect from the visible. Therefore, the seeker turns toward that which is supersensible and invisible as the foundation of knowledge. Just as a science oriented toward materialism corresponds to an externalized way of life and way of living, so too, for the one who must regard this way of life and way of living not as fully human but as subhuman, a science that directs its belief only— I might say, on the other side of this way of life and way of living—on the external, material, and intellectually graspable. And so, after the first act in the anthroposophist’s spiritual drama was a moral-religious one, the second act emerges—though it is already present in the first as a seed: the urge toward supersensible knowledge. It emerges quite naturally that the acceptance of a message of supersensible knowledge becomes the content of an Anthroposophical Society. All that which the will experiences in this way as its destiny—all that which the quest for knowledge must acknowledge as its pursuit—coalesces within the heart and soul of the anthroposophist as a whole, as the very core of his life and humanity, and all of this together forms the totality of his outlook. And with this outlook, he then stands, first and foremost, within the Anthroposophical Society.

[ 7 ] But now let us consider the situation in which the anthroposophically educated person finds himself as a result. He cannot simply abandon his outward way of life and daily practices. At first, he takes refuge in the Anthroposophical Society, but the external necessities of life remain; they cannot be abandoned in a single step or at a single stroke. And so a conflict arises in the soul of the anthroposophist between his external life and that which, as a member of the Anthroposophical Society, becomes for him an ideal of life and an ideal of knowledge. Depending on whether one or the other is of a deeper or more superficial nature, this conflict can be more or less painful, even tragic. But contained within this pain, within this tragedy, are at the same time the most valuable seeds for what must be a life of renewal in our declining civilization. After all, everything in life that unfolds into blossoming and fruitfulness is nonetheless born of pain and suffering. And perhaps the one who feels the mission of the Anthroposophical Society most deeply is the one who must experience living within this mission as his suffering, as his pain—even if the true strength in human nature can consist solely in the fact that the human being finds the inner power to rise above suffering and pain so that, in the experience of suffering and pain, the point is reached where what is painful and sorrowful becomes the very force of life, the overwhelming life force itself.

[ 8 ] And so, I would say, the path toward the Anthroposophical Society consists first in a turning of the will, then in an experience of supersensible knowledge, and finally in sharing in the destiny of the age, which becomes the destiny of one’s own soul. And one then feels oneself to be part of human evolution precisely through this reversal of the will, through this experience of the supersensible nature of all truth. It is through this sharing in the true meaning of the age that one feels oneself to be a human being in the fullest sense of the word. Essentially, anthroposophy is meant to be nothing other than that Sophia—that is, that content of consciousness, that inner experience within the human soul’s constitution, which makes a person a fully human being. The correct interpretation of the word “anthroposophy” is not “wisdom about the human being,” but rather “consciousness of one’s humanity”; that is to say, the turning of the will, the experience of knowledge, and the sharing in the destiny of the age should all aim to give the soul a direction of consciousness, a Sophia.

[ 9 ] What I have just described led to the original founding of the Anthroposophical Society. It was not actually founded; rather, it simply came into being. Something like this—which is rooted in sincere inner life—cannot be brought about through mere agitation, as people have a mental image of it. The Anthroposophical Society can only come into being when there are people who have a predisposition toward the shift in will I have described, toward such a life of knowledge and such a shared experience of the destiny of our times, and when, from somewhere, something appears that in a certain way resonates with what lives in the hearts of those who are present. But such a coming together of people is, in fact, only possible in our age—the age of the development of the soul of consciousness—and is not understood by all those who have not yet truly grasped the nature of this development. For example, even a university lecturer might make a strange claim—namely, that three people once came together to form the Central Executive Committee of the Anthroposophical Society. And that university lecturer’s brain—it is better to speak in terms of specific body parts here, since full humanity does not underlie these matters—that university lecturer’s brain concluded that one must ask: Well, who elected these three, and from where did they derive their mandate? — Well, how can anything come into being in a freer way than by three people standing up and saying: “We want this and that; whoever wants to can join us, and whoever doesn’t, well, doesn’t.” — That is certainly up to each individual. So there is nothing that takes greater account of human freedom than the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. It alone is appropriate to the age of consciousness in human evolution. But one can, of course, be a university lecturer without having reached the age of consciousness; in that case, one will not understand what, in the most eminent sense, tends toward freedom.

[ 10 ] I know how uncomfortable it has always been for some people when, from time to time, it has become necessary to discuss such matters after all, simply because they exist. But these matters nevertheless shed light on what is necessary to ensure that the conditions for the existence of the Anthroposophical Society can be met. However, because the anthroposophist must, at first, remain within the outer world—from which he can actually escape only, at first, with his soul—a particular nuance of soul experience arises, ranging from inner suffering to tragedy, as I have already indicated. This soul experience was, of course, lived through with particular intensity during the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. But for those who joined the Anthroposophical Society later—and for those who join today—what others, I might say, went through decades ago or perhaps years ago is experienced anew time and again. And since this is rooted in the social life of the Anthroposophical Society, the Society must naturally reckon with it as one of its conditions of existence. It is only natural that, since the anthroposophical development has passed through three phases, those who are newly approaching the anthroposophical movement today have their hearts in the first phase. And many difficulties lie precisely in the fact that the leading figures of the Anthroposophical Society actually have a duty to reconcile what the three phases are side by side: the first, second, and third. They follow one another, and at the same time they exist side by side. Moreover: taken one after the other, they are in part memories, things of the past; existing side by side, they are the immediate life of the present. Therefore, what is truly necessary for anyone who wishes to contribute to the cultivation of anthroposophical life is not theoretical or doctrinal conditions, but rather a loving heart and an open mind toward the whole of anthroposophical life. Just as one can grow old by becoming grumpy in one’s soul, by going bald not only outwardly but also inwardly, by becoming wrinkled not only outwardly but also inwardly—so that one has no sense at all of bringing one’s youth vividly before one’s soul in order to relive it and experience it again and again as something immediately present— so too can one join the Anthroposophical Society in 1919 and have no sense of the burgeoning, sprouting, and original nature of the first phase of the anthroposophical movement. One must make this one’s own. Otherwise, one lacks the heart for anthroposophy; otherwise, one lacks the spirit for it. And in the cultivation of anthroposophical life—even if one otherwise looks down her nose at all doctrines and theories—one becomes a doctrinaire. That is something that harms a vibrant community, such as the Anthroposophical Society is meant to be, in the most profound sense. Now, a peculiar conflict has simply arisen in the third phase of the anthroposophical movement, beginning in 1919. I do not wish to pass ethical judgment on it today; after all, thoughtlessness is itself an impulse of the will and, fundamentally, an ethical impulse, and if something has been neglected out of thoughtlessness, if out of thoughtlessness frivolity has in many cases taken the place of firm will, then there is also something ethical and moral to be found in that. But I do not wish to speak much about that today; I would rather speak more about the conflict into which the Anthroposophical Society has thereby been drawn—a conflict that was long latent but about which we must speak quite openly today.

[ 11 ] In the early stages of anthroposophical development, it was indeed the case that the anthroposophist was, for the most part, split into two people. He was, let’s say, an office manager or something else—as we call such things today, isn’t that right?—he went about these matters, letting his impulses of will follow the paths dictated by the external conditions of life and the external practices that have developed over the last few centuries—conditions he actually flees from with the very depths of his soul. But he was caught up in it, caught up in it with his will. Let us not misunderstand: the will is intertwined with all these things in the most profound sense. The will is intertwined with what one does as an office manager from morning till night. One need not be an office manager; one might be a schoolteacher or a professor, and one might then think: but in this thinking—insofar as this thinking is present in one’s outer life—it also flows into the impulse of the will. So the will has actually remained out there, and precisely because the soul wanted to escape the direction of its own will, it entered the Anthroposophical Society with feeling and thought. Now, on the one hand, there was the person of the will, and on the other, the person of feeling and thought. Within this, some even felt extraordinarily happy; for how much did certain small sectarian circles praise themselves when they could gather together—after having, of course, engaged their “human of the will” in the most ordinary currents of life—when they could then sit down and “send out thoughts, send out good thoughts.” People formed such circles, sent out their thoughts—good thoughts—and fled from external life into a life that is not, I say, unreal, but one that exists solely in feelings and thoughts. They truly split themselves in two: one who went to the office or took the lectern, and the other who joined the anthroposophical branch and led a completely different life there. But when a number of people felt the urge to establish something life-affirming through the will, based on anthroposophical feeling and thinking, it became necessary to include the will within the totality of the human being. That is when the conflicts arose. It is relatively easy to train oneself to send out good thoughts so that someone you know is going on a mountain hike does not break their legs during that hike. But to send these positive thoughts into the will of someone who is engaged in a directly external, material activity—so that this material activity itself is permeated by something spiritual through the power of the human being—that is the difficult part. And this is precisely where much of the development of the third phase of the Anthroposophical Society failed. For there was no lack of intellect or genius—I say this quite honestly and sincerely—but there was a lack of infusing genius and intellect into the rigor and firmness of the will.

[ 12 ] Just look at the matter properly—I’d say, from the perspective of the heart; what a difference! Think about it: one has an external life with which one can be deeply dissatisfied. One can indeed be deeply dissatisfied, not only because other people torment you or because things are imperfect, but because life doesn’t make everything easy at all. Isn’t that right? Life isn’t always a soft pillow of rest. After all, to live means to work. And so here you have this life, and on the other hand, the Anthroposophical Society. So you go to the Anthroposophical Society: you carry your dissatisfaction right through the door. Once inside, as a feeling and thinking human being, you are content, because you truly have what your outer life—which rightly makes you dissatisfied—does not give you. You now have it in the Anthroposophical Society. There is even the benefit that, while thoughts would otherwise clash harshly in the world against the powerlessness of the will, they fly quite easily when one sends out good thoughts from the circles—so that people don’t break their legs on the mountain hikes. There they go quite easily, the thoughts, out into the whole world; there one can be content. That then satisfies one beyond the external life, which rightly gives one dissatisfaction.

[ 13 ] Well, and now the Anthroposophical Society comes along and establishes things in which one’s will is involved. One shouldn’t just be an office manager out there and then go to the Anthroposophical Society and be dissatisfied with one’s role as an office manager out there—I’m not saying one should complain, although that might happen too—but rather, one should have both aspects within the Society, and one should live within it not with a sense of dissatisfaction but with a sense of satisfaction. This is necessary if the Anthroposophical Society is to move from words to action, and that is what it has sought to do since 1919. And then something very peculiar arises, something that can perhaps only be observed within the Anthroposophical Society: this peculiarity arises that one no longer knows what to do with that measure of dissatisfaction that one would still like to have. After all, one cannot very well blame the Anthroposophical Society itself for making one dissatisfied! But it doesn’t stop there; one ends up doing just that anyway, attributing the reasons for one’s dissatisfaction to the Society. Yet what should arise here is precisely that inner stage of human development that truly leads from thought and feeling to will. And if the anthroposophical path is followed correctly, then this stage is reached; then one progresses from thought and feeling to the will. Throughout what is said in *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, you will see that no development of thought is sought there that does not simultaneously involve a development of the will.

[ 14 ] But modern humanity actually suffers from two evils—the very two evils that must be overcome within the Anthroposophical Society. One is the fear of the supersensible, for it is this fear, this dread of the supersensible, that—though unacknowledged—underlies all opposition to the anthroposophical movement. In reality, there is a kind of aversion to water among the opponents. You know, of course, that this aversion to water also manifests itself impulsively in another form, and so it is no surprise that the aversion to water I am referring to now sometimes expresses itself in a furious manner. Sometimes, incidentally, these things are harmless. For some people today, anthroposophy is a good way to write books with which they can earn a living or through which they can get their names listed in a book catalog, because people need topics, and not everyone has them—they have to take them from the outside world. So sometimes the motives behind these things are more harmless than one might think. It is only in their effects that they are not harmless enough.

[ 15 ] What humanity has today, on the one hand, is a fear of supernatural knowledge; it transforms this into a mask, into the logic of research. This logic of research, with its limits on knowledge, is in reality nothing other than the direct legacy of the ancient Fall; except that the ancients understood their Fall to mean that one must rise above sin. In the post-Scholastic era, knowledge is still thoroughly corroded by the belief in the Fall. Whereas in the past, in the moral realm, the Fall was understood to mean that human beings are evil by nature and must transcend their nature, in the intellectual realm this is expressed as the idea that human beings cannot attain the supersensible within the given realm—that they cannot transcend themselves. The fact that he is willing to acknowledge this limit of knowledge is nothing other than a legacy of the Fall; the only difference is that in better times people strove to transcend sin, whereas the arrogant modern man wishes to remain in the sin of knowledge, virtually declaring: “I do not wish to transcend sin; I love the devil; I wish at least to love him.”

[ 16 ] That is one side of the coin. The other side is—despite certain expressions of will, which are in fact often mere masks—the weakness of will and inner paralysis of will in modern human beings. And I would like to say that these two fateful characteristics of modern civilization and culture must be overcome, particularly in the context of the anthroposophical way of life. And if the anthroposophical way of life is to become a practical reality, then it is precisely necessary that the practice of life be born out of fearless insight and a strong will. But this presupposes that one learns to live with the world in an anthroposophical way. Previously, one learned to live anthroposophically, first and foremost, by fleeing the world. But one must also learn to live with the world in an anthroposophical way, carrying the anthroposophical impulse out into the world, into everyday life, and into ordinary life practice. One must therefore truly reunite the human being—whom one has divided into an anthroposophist and a practitioner—into a unified human being. And this can never, ever be achieved if, wherever anthroposophical life takes root, it takes the form of a life as if one were actually enclosed, surrounded by high fortress walls over which one does not look out. This must be overcome within the Anthroposophical Society. We must cultivate an open-eyed awareness of what is happening in our surroundings, in the rest of the world; then we will also arrive at the right impulses of will. But precisely at a time when anthroposophy as such has entered its third phase—I described this to you last time as well—the Anthroposophical Society has in many ways lagged behind anthroposophical life, having fallen behind precisely because the will could not keep pace. Because it was necessary to bring together the leading figures who had previously been active here and there for the various founding efforts, it often turned out that someone who could have been an excellent Waldorf school teacher—who had acquired the perspective of a Waldorf school teacher—became a poor anthroposophist. There is not the slightest objection to the individual institution; the Waldorf School is now recognized worldwide, not just by its immediate surroundings; one may well say, in all modesty: rightly, no objection is raised against the individual institution, or at least the criticism belongs on an entirely different page. One can indeed be an excellent Waldorf school teacher and a poor anthroposophist; one can be an excellent worker in any other enterprise and a poor anthroposophist. But that is precisely the point: that all these individual endeavors have grown out of the fertile soil of anthroposophy, and one must remain mindful that, above all, one must truly remain an anthroposophist—that one must not deny this core, must not deny it as a Waldorf school teacher, must not deny it as a contributor to *Der Kommende Tag*, must not deny it as a researcher, must not deny it as a physician—that one must never, even remotely, entertain the thought of saying: “I have no time for general anthroposophical matters.” Otherwise, although there might be life in each of these endeavors for a time—because anthroposophy as such truly contains and can impart life—this life could not be sustained in the long run. It would dry up, even for the individual endeavors.

[ 17 ] An unobjective opposition, characterized by the fact that it seeks everywhere not to address the substance of anthroposophy, but instead asks: “How was anthroposophy arrived at? What’s the deal with clairvoyance? How does this work? How does that work? Do they drink coffee or milk or the like?”—aside from these matters, which have nothing to do with the subject itself, but which, in many cases—don’t you agree?—form the basis of the gossip—if one is intent on destroying anthroposophy, one resorts to slander; and then even such phenomena emerge that are now common in the world—phenomena that were actually impossible until very recently, when civilization had not yet reached its lowest point, but which have become possible today! I do not wish to go into all this in detail, but would rather leave that to others, for whom the fate of the Anthroposophical Society must also be a matter close to their hearts. But I wanted to speak to you about these things today, since I have once again had the opportunity—or, I might also say, the inconvenience—to be here. From the standpoint of the work in Dornach, it is an inconvenience; from the standpoint of the work here, it is a joyful opportunity—things always have two sides. My presence is very much needed in Dornach; but since I was able to speak with you once again today, to my deep satisfaction, I would like to say: This is what is necessary now: that we learn to feel and sense in an anthroposophical way, that we learn to feel anthroposophy pulsating in our hearts. This cannot happen in mystical obscurity; it can only happen in full clarity. For anthroposophy can withstand the light. Other things in the world that might seem similar simply cannot withstand the light; they can only endure the darkness of sectarianism. Anthroposophy can withstand the full light; it can step into the full light with the heart, with the deepest warmth of the heart, and has no need to shy away from this full light. The baseless personal slanders—and this goes so far that one sometimes cannot even recognize the personal element in them—can certainly be exposed for what they are. But in the face of honest opposition, anthroposophy can always engage with whatever is possible on the basis of an objective discussion. But an objective discussion requires that one engage with the methods of knowledge of anthroposophy. And if someone wishes to engage in an objective discussion, they cannot do so until they have engaged with these methods of knowledge. In terms of the mind, the heart, and common sense, anyone can embrace anthroposophy. Those who, from the outset, refuse on principle to engage with its methods of knowledge—who do not know what those methods entail—cannot discuss anthroposophy. Experimenting and combining experiments require no inner development; they require only external training, which anyone can do. But those who can do only this should not seek to discuss anthroposophy if they are not willing to engage with its methods of knowledge. Yet this, in turn, is rejected by today’s complacent people, who dogmatically portray human beings as already perfect and want to know nothing at all about development. But neither truth nor goodness reveals itself to a person unless they contribute to it out of their innermost freedom. If one knows what impulses are necessary within the Anthroposophical Society to stand within it with a right heart, to conduct its affairs with a right heart, and if one knows how to correctly assess the motives of its opponents, then—provided one has good will—one will muster the strength that is necessary today if we are to navigate healthily through what was as well as in the will of the Anthroposophical Society itself.