The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Paths and Goals of Spiritual Science (Anthroposophy)

[ 1 ] Anyone standing outside in the neighborhood and looking at the building—dedicated to the so-called Goetheanum, a free university for Spiritual Science that aims to serve the spiritual and civilizational interests of the future—may at first be struck by the forms and the style that meet the eye. One may well have various objections to what one sees there. Those involved in the construction will certainly be able to understand such objections—that this is a preliminary attempt—provided they arise from good will. But with regard to this building, a certain question must be raised—one that is characteristic of everything that the intellectual movement, of which this building is intended to be a representative, seeks and strives for. If, in the usual way, there had been a need to erect a separate building somewhere for a certain spiritual current, for a certain kind of spiritual activity, then one would likely have turned to this or that architect, to this or that artist, and one might have discussed with them what was to take place in such a building, and then a building would have been erected in some ancient style, a Renaissance style, or some other style, in which this activity of Spiritual Science was to find its home. There would be only an external relationship between the forms within the building and around the building—which is dedicated to this activity of Spiritual Science—and the activity itself. But this could not be done, particularly with this spiritual movement. The aim here is to create an outer shell for a certain spiritual current, one that—as a whole and in every detail, even the smallest—is as if born out of the entire thinking, feeling, and willing of this spiritual movement itself. The task was to create, in the external forms down to the very smallest detail, something that is just as much an external expression of what is inwardly intended as a word or anything else intended to express the content of this spiritual movement itself. One could not turn to any pre-existing style or to any formal language handed down through history. Rather, from the very same spiritual foundation from which the content of the worldview is drawn, one had to draw forth that which appears visibly to the eye in the architectural forms. This lies not only in the innermost impulse of the Spiritual Science movement, which also calls itself anthroposophical, but in the entire way in which this movement conceives of its task, its paths, and its goals in relation to the great demands of the present-day civilized world.

[ 2 ] This spiritual movement does not seek just any abstract theory, a science that engages only the intellect; it does not seek to be something that serves solely the one-sided satisfaction of the soul’s inner interests; rather, it seeks to be something that can indeed grant satisfaction—the deepest satisfaction—to those longings of the human soul that are directed toward a worldview. But it seeks to anchor this worldview so firmly in reality that it can influence all practical life. And so what we were initially able to accomplish—the direct creation of architectural and artistic forms for our cause—is characteristic of this entire movement. Just as it has, however, intervened directly in the most practical matters—albeit only in a narrowly defined sphere that at first glance seems remote from external life—this spiritual movement seeks to chart paths and point toward goals that extend into all social matters, all moral matters, and all aspects of human coexistence conceived in the broadest sense. Those idealists who build upon this Spiritual Science are not to be unworldly idealists, but rather they are to become idealists who can allow what arises from their soul to flow directly into their practical life activities. And everything that often runs so alien to what a person thinks is to be harmonized with what lies in the innermost spiritual striving of the human being. Outward life practice should become one with that through which a person seeks moral impulses, develops social instincts, and pursues religious devotion. With such an attitude, with such a perspective, this movement in Spiritual Science remains, however, quite distant today from what is aspired to, desired, and indeed considered correct by the broadest circles of educated people today.

[ 3 ] That this must be so—and also that it is necessary for such a spiritual movement to take root in our modern civilization—becomes evident when we consider how our entire way of life, in which we find ourselves today, has in fact emerged from a confluence of the most diverse currents. Today I would like to begin by speaking of the two most significant currents in the life of our civilization. We have what we call our spiritual education, in which our religious convictions are rooted, from which our moral ideals spring, but in which our entire higher spiritual life is also rooted. We have that which enables human beings to develop their abilities and powers beyond ordinary manual labor toward a spiritual education. And alongside this, we have practical life activities, which have received such intense impetus in recent centuries. We are surrounded by a technology that, while certainly inspired by our science, has deeply penetrated social life and has transformed modern civilization in a way that would certainly have been completely incomprehensible to a person eight or nine centuries ago.

[ 4 ] If we now ask ourselves where our intellectual life—which does not merely dominate our secondary schools but extends its influence all the way down to our elementary schools—comes from, and where, on the other hand, our way of life, permeated by such widespread technology, comes from, we arrive at an answer that people today still give little thought to. But one need only—and we will discuss this in greater detail in the third lecture—one need only consider what, in a sense, forms the foundation of our Western civilization, namely its higher spiritual aspect; one need only look, in the broadest sense, at Christianity, and even a superficial examination of world history will lead one to say: If one considers what lives within us as Christian views and convictions—from which so much of our general spiritual views and convictions have developed, far more than people are willing to admit today—and if one seeks the origin of these convictions and views, one will ultimately arrive at the path that Christianity took from the East to the West. And one can, of course, continue to look around, guided by the insights gained in this way, and one will find that those paths which emerge when one traces our spiritual development back—those paths leading into the Latin-Roman and Greek worlds, from which our spiritual development still clearly shows itself to be a spiritual heir —that these paths ultimately lead to the particular spiritual disposition, to the particular constitution of the soul, through which, millennia ago—prehistoric millennia—our educational life, which is directed more toward the inner, toward the soul-spiritual, took its origin from the East. It is only because this educational life, this inner spiritual outlook, has changed greatly over the course of centuries and millennia that we no longer notice today how it derives its origin from what, as I said, originated millennia before Christ out of a spiritual disposition that has become entirely foreign to today’s civilized human beings. To understand this long journey, one must not merely look back to what external, document-based historiography offers; one must go beyond what this historiography can say, right back into prehistoric times. This is quite difficult for people today. For deep down, they believe that in the course of the last few centuries—perhaps only in the very last century—they have “made such magnificent progress” in spiritual matters that everything belonging to the times just referred to must be relegated to the realm of the childish and the primitive.

[ 5 ] But anyone who is able to trace the path back to the ancient culture of the Orient without being clouded by such a prejudice will see that, while civilization and intellectual development in the Orient during pre-Christian times were indeed fundamentally different, they nevertheless offered the human soul deeply profound spiritual content. It’s just that these were attained in a completely different—I would say radically different—way than what is achieved today by those who are supposed to master the material and acquire a higher intellectual education in secondary schools.

[ 6 ] Anyone who was once to acquire the higher spiritual culture of the ancient Orient had to undergo—after being chosen by the leaders and guides of the relevant educational institutions—a complete transformation of their entire human being. I am speaking of the educational institutions of this ancient Orient. They are accessible to the Spiritual Science discussed here in terms of knowledge; but if one is open-minded enough, if one possesses a certain courage of thought and insight, then one can also infer from what has been historically handed down what existed there in prehistoric times. One must speak of these educational institutions in such a way that they possessed, as in an inner unity, what appears to us today as separate entities. These educational institutions—to which everything we still carry within us today points, albeit in a substantially transformed form—were at once what we today call the church, but also what we today call the school; they were at once also what we today call art institutions. Art, science, and religion formed a unity in earlier human civilizations. And anyone who was to be developed in these educational institutions had to bring their whole being to maturity. They had to transform their entire being. They had to adopt a different form of thinking than the one that is effective in everyday life. They had to devote themselves to contemplative thinking. They had to accustom themselves to handling thought in the same way one otherwise handles only the external world. But they also had to accustom themselves to transforming their entire emotional and volitional life. Today it is difficult to form a mental image of what was actually strived for in this direction. For how do we actually think about our lives? We admit: the child—it must be developed. Its abilities and powers—the potential for which it is born with—must be developed through education. Well, yes, a child cannot educate itself; others—the adults—initially hold the view that the child must be developed in accordance with its abilities and powers. And we also shape the child differently in terms of its thinking, feeling, and willing than it is born into the world. But if we now expect a person—even after they have already developed their own will, when others are no longer guiding their development based on their own views—to continue this development, then modern people find this a strange demand; for one is supposed to be developed only as long as one cannot bring about this development through one’s own free will, cannot take it into one’s own hands. Once one attains a certain degree of freedom with regard to one’s own development, one abandons that development. This is the intellectual arrogance in which we live today. We think that the moment we are in a position to take our development into our own hands, we are already complete, and we present ourselves to the world as fully formed human beings.

[ 7 ] Such a view did not exist within the civilization to which I am referring here; rather, human beings continued to develop further and further. And just as what a child is capable of recognizing, feeling, and doing after undergoing a certain training represents a kind of awakening in the soul’s constitution, so too is there such an awakening for the further development that human beings can now take into their own hands. The Eastern mystery student was trained for this awakening to soul activities that were higher than the ordinary ones—in the same sense that the higher abilities of adults are superior to those of a child. And it was held that only those who had thus undergone this later awakening—in the best sense of the word—in their lives were capable of judging the highest matters of life. And one was not merely prepared there to become a person who, when reflecting or developing a certain inner feeling and sensibility, finds satisfaction in the knowledge of one’s connection to a spiritual world—no, it was not merely the capacity for a worldview that was developed there; rather, it was those abilities through which social and outwardly technical life was guided, and through which human coexistence was directed. One’s entire life was shaped there by spiritual education and development.

[ 8 ] It is so difficult for us to put ourselves in the mindset that prevailed millennia ago in the Orient at the starting point of our recent human development because our entire spiritual constitution has changed with the further development of humanity; because we have come to hold different feelings and views about life. For those people who were immersed in the spiritual development described here, it was instinctive to aspire to such a transformation of the human being. The instincts of these people were different. They tended toward such a perception of spiritual life following a certain transformation. Those who did not undergo such training themselves looked up, from their own instincts—which were also present in them—to what the trained individuals could offer them. They followed them in regard to the development of their inner spiritual life. But they also followed them in regard to the organization of social life and in regard to their participation in the life of the community.

[ 9 ] The instincts that led to such a life are just as much a product of humanity’s present-day culture as the specific soul instincts of a child are transformed in an adult. But through these instincts, in connection with what arose from those places of education that one might call mysteries, a human soul disposition emerged through which one could not help but seek the very core of the human being not here within the sphere of life that encompasses the human body, but rather this entire outlook on life led to in a sense, to rise instinctively, in the very popular consciousness, to the higher human being within the human being—to that aspect of the human being that is essentially of a spiritual-soul nature, to that aspect of the human being which, though it appears in the physical body for the time between birth and death, is in itself eternal and belongs to a spiritual world into which one instinctively gazed. Something superhuman—if I may use this term, which has become somewhat controversial due to Nietzsche’s followers—something superhuman was regarded as the essence of the human being. That which the human being looked upon as his own essence was something that transcended this ordinary human being. In this, that education was great: to seek out the human being according to his essence in a spiritual-soul aspect that finds its expression only in the physical, that reaches in from the spiritual-soul world into the whole human being, directing this human being in his most material manifestations from the spiritual-soul realm.

[ 10 ] Through many metamorphoses and transformations, what emerged as the substance of spiritual development was then elaborated in the East and, after undergoing extensive transformations, made its way to Greece. It appears there, I might say, in a filtered form. While in the earliest Greek period—which Friedrich Nietzsche called the “tragic age of the Greeks”—we can still see something of this lifting of the whole human being toward the higher human, the later Greek period saw the emergence of what, in a broader sense, can be called the dialectical, the purely intellectual nature of the human being. In a sense, the entire rich and intensely universal content of a primordial culture was filtered and filtered again and again, and in its most diluted state it made its way into our age. And so this forms one current of our life—that which ascended to the spiritual-soul human being and gave humanity a consciousness through which, in every moment of life, whether in the presence of the Giver or engaged in the dirtiest work, one felt oneself to be an outward expression of the spiritual-soul human being.

[ 11 ] In the third lecture, we will see that the Mystery of Golgotha—from which Christianity originated in its development on this Earth—stands as a fact in and of itself, one that can be understood in various ways throughout different ages. But what shaped the subsequent understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha was the cultural heritage brought over from the East. And fundamentally, everything we still draw upon today to understand Christianity is imbued with what remains of the Eastern experience—albeit in a spiritually diluted form. There is a certain peculiarity to this entire configuration of the soul, which lives on within us only in its final metamorphosis. And this peculiarity must be sought in what follows.

[ 12 ] As vast and powerful as this worldview is in terms of the ascent toward the superhuman within the human being, this Eastern civilization could never have descended to the level to which Western civilization has risen and in which it has flourished. It was able to bring forth the superhuman—the spiritual and soul-based one—but it could not bring forth anything else. This is something I have already alluded to here in other contexts. Precisely at the time when the final metamorphosis of Eastern spiritual life was already beginning to take hold in the West, the beginnings of a new spiritual life emerged—a spiritual life that has indeed produced magnificent blossoms in practical living right up to our own time, but blossoms of a completely different kind from the Eastern spiritual life just described. Let us look at these other blossoms.

[ 13 ] I would like to point out the following fact once again. As I mentioned, I have already referred to it here from other perspectives. If we look through the standard reference books today to see how many people there are on Earth, we are told that approximately 1,500 million people inhabit the Earth. But when we look at the work being done within human civilization—when we look at the workforce active in our human existence and daily life—then, strangely enough, we must say something different. We would actually have to say: the Earth functions as if it were inhabited not merely by 1,500 million people, but by 2,200 million people. For the past three to four centuries, our world of machines has functioned in such a way that it performs work that one might imagine could also be performed by human beings. We are replacing human labor with machine power. And if one converts the output of our machines into human labor—taking an eight-hour workday as the standard—one finds that the work done on Earth represents the labor of seven to eight hundred million people; that is, not actual people, but human labor, which is, however, performed by machines.

[ 14 ] This is something that is brought into human civilization by those spiritual forces that have arisen within Western humanity—those spiritual forces that could never have developed in a direct line from that inner culture of spirit and soul which had so magnificently soared upward toward the superhuman, toward the higher human being within the human being, toward the spiritual-soul human being. This culture remained at certain heights of the soul. It did not permeate what we today call practical life. It could never have brought dead metal or other materials into such a context that they operate in the midst of humanity—not, admittedly, as a superhuman, but as a subhuman, a human being who is, in fact, a homunculus compared to people of flesh and blood, a mechanism that nevertheless introduces into human culture what human beings themselves might otherwise introduce. This is the essence of our Western spiritual life. It is all the more characteristic of this Western spiritual life the further west we go, where this spiritual life has given rise to the mechanical human being, the subhuman, just as the Eastern spiritual life has given rise to the soul-spiritual human being, the superhuman.

[ 15 ] But the fact that such a thing could be created in the West is not an isolated phenomenon of civilized life. It is, after all, connected to the entire development of mental images, feeling, and thought. The people who brought this homunculus into life are, in their entire spiritual constitution, naturally oriented in a direction quite different from that of the Eastern person. One cannot understand life today unless one can grasp this contrast in all its intensity. For on the one hand, this modern human being still carries within himself the final metamorphosis of that which came to him from the East, and on the other hand, he has been absorbing for centuries that which is the very essence of Western spiritual life. A balance has not yet been achieved. Like two currents flowing separately from one another, there they stand: the current of the “superman,” albeit greatly altered, and the current of the “subhuman,” albeit still in its infancy. And modern man—the man of the present—when he becomes aware that these two currents are living side by side within his soul, suffers emotionally, spiritually, and likely even physically from the discord that arises from this. Certainly, these are things that unfold so deeply within what remains unconscious and subconscious that what rises into a person’s consciousness—not only into that, but even into their physical constitution—is something entirely different from the actual cause. Modern man finds himself nervous, finds himself dissatisfied with his circumstances. One could cite a hundred different examples of how this modern person feels a dissonance between themselves and their surroundings, and how this dissonance is also expressed in their physical health. What has been mentioned lies behind this. Behind it lies the great question: How, for the civilization of the future, do we reconcile that which has produced the “subhuman” with that which lives within us in its final phase as a legacy of a civilization that led to the spiritual-soul human?

[ 16 ] This aspect of our civilization’s forces, as I have just described to you, is what anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science seeks to place particularly before the soul. It sees as a necessary goal—one driven by the most significant demands of our time—a balance between the soul forces that have led in one direction and those that have led in the other. And it is aware of how immensely necessary and significant it is for humanity to find the paths to this goal. Instinctively, I have referred to this as the spiritual life of the East.

[ 17 ] This spiritual life was born out of the instincts of ancient people. We have inherited it. But we have inherited it in a state that has already been intellectualized; it has become ingrained in our civilization through mental images and ideas of a rather abstract nature. For we no longer possess the instincts that the former bearers of this spiritual life had. One may fantasize as much as one likes about modern humans returning to naivety, about them becoming instinctive once more. In one respect, such a demand is certainly justified. Yet naivety will express itself in a different way than it did in the past. Instinctual life will take different directions. And to demand that we become like people of earlier millennia is tantamount to demanding that an adult play like a child. No, neither can we go back to the civilization of bygone millennia to satisfy our deepest spiritual needs, nor can we—if we do not wish to fall into decadence—as Westerners cry out, “ex oriente lux”; no, we must not cry out that light comes to us from the East. For the light that is there today has likewise undergone many metamorphoses, and we certainly cannot succumb to the illusion that what can still be found somewhere in the East today represents a spirituality that could in any way fruitfully influence our civilization. It was decadence of the worst kind when a theosophical movement asserted itself out of the religious and cultural needs of the West, out of the Machine Age, which had also given rise to a mechanistic worldview incapable of satisfying human beings, it was decadence of the worst kind that people turned to the very realm that is today’s decadent Eastern successor to the spiritual life of earlier times. When people sought out Indian culture today in order to incorporate it into the theosophy of the West, it merely demonstrated how barren one had become, how the creative forces no longer sprang from one’s own spiritual life, how one could only be great within the mechanistic framework, yet could find no path of one’s own into those realms that the soul needs for its perception of the true spiritual and soul-life essence of the human being.

[ 18 ] Incidentally, this tendency is all too much at the root of life today. Do we not see how those who are dissatisfied with contemporary Christianity often ask: What was Christianity like in the past? What was early Christianity like? Let us do it again the way the early Christians did. As if we hadn’t progressed since then, as if we didn’t need a new understanding of Christianity! Oh, everywhere we see the hallmark of barrenness, of the impossibility of creating something of our own. No, that is not what anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science wants: to borrow from some ancient culture or from the present-day followers of an ancient culture.

[ 19 ] It is precisely when one grasps the concrete nature of that in which anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science is rooted that one will easily understand what has been said. You can hear how even today’s Oriental, I might say, by emulating ancient methods, seeks the path to the spiritual—seeking, through a certain breathing process, through the regulation of breathing, to develop that human constitution through which one finds the inner powers of knowledge, feeling, and will, in order to ascend into the spiritual world, where the spiritual-soul human being is to be found, where true self-knowledge lies. The Eastern person today does what the Eastern person has always done for such a path in earlier centuries and millennia: he descends from the purely intellectual life of the head into the life of the whole human being. He knows what inner organic connection exists between the way we inhale and exhale—I will speak more about this in the coming days—and the process of our mental images and thinking. But he also knows that thinking and mental images grow, as it were, out of the breathing process. And so he wishes to go back to the root of thinking—the breathing process. Through the regulation of the breathing process, he seeks the path upward into the spiritual world. We cannot follow this path. If we were to follow it, we would be sinning against our human constitution, which has become entirely different. The inner structure of our brain and nervous system is different from that from which the instinctive spiritual culture of the Orient arose. If we were to regard it as right today to devote ourselves solely to a regulated breathing process, we would be denying intellectual life. We would be denying that for which we are constituted today.

[ 20 ] In order to ascend the paths into the spiritual world, we must embark on different metamorphoses. We must no longer retreat from thinking to bodily processes such as breathing; rather, we must develop thinking itself. That is why Spiritual Science today, living at the height of its time, must speak of the cultivation of intellectual life—but not of the kind of intellectual life that is almost exclusively known today. It is precisely this intellectual life that has made us, as it were, parched, dry, and sober in regard to the whole scope of life. No matter how much certain quarters today rail against one-sided intellectualism, they offer nothing with which to truly combat this intellectualism. One senses that mere concepts—even those drawn from serious and conscientious science—leave the soul cold, so that it cannot find its way through true life. But on the other hand, one cannot find a way to steer this intellectual life in a direction that might be satisfying, precisely because one wants to avoid what Spiritual Science—as understood here—must regard as the right path for modern humanity. Modern man, once he recognizes the dryness, the sobriety, and the one-sidedness of mere intellectualism, cannot draw emotions from some—as is often said—pre-rational, primitive, elementary life in order to improve himself as an intellectual being. He cannot—I would say—seek, within a frenzied life that one does not understand, that which he wishes to superficially graft onto intellectualist civilization.

[ 21 ] That is why anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science seeks, through the deliberate development of the soul, that which modern human beings actually yearn for in order to truly satisfy their souls. I have described in detail in the second part of my *Secret Science*, in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, and in other writings of mine how this path should be followed in a manner appropriate to Westerners. In principle, I wish only to suggest that the aim is to take control of one’s soul life in such a way as to avoid developing mental images, notions, and ideas that reach into the highest realms—that is, to avoid developing the life of thought one-sidedly, but rather to train the soul so that the most vivid feelings are connected with the very thoughts that arise, combine, and separate. While today the one-sided intellectualist is detached in his life of thought—yet also allows this life of thought to wander into the realms of science, which are alien to life, or into other realms, and otherwise lives his life thoughtlessly—what anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science calls “practice” seeks to delve deeply into thinking, but to develop feeling through this deepening of thought, so that one can rejoice, become angry, hate, and love what one merely thinks—just as one hates and loves people, just as one becomes angry at external events—so that a whole inner life blossoms, blossoms with the same vitality as external life. The books mentioned above are intended to bear witness to the fact that this can be done systematically.

[ 22 ] But then, when a person seeks out such paths, when he truly develops those powers of cognition, feeling, and will that otherwise lie dormant within him—that is, when he takes charge of his development not from the body, as in ancient Eastern culture through a regulated breathing process, but from the soul and the spirit— then he finds the path into the spiritual world. And what forces does he employ? He employs the very forces through which his civilization has grown great. He employs the forces he also used when he built his machines, when he developed his mechanistic Copernican, Galilean, Keplerian, and Newtonian astronomical views. Whatever acuity of mental image develops within the machines from our spirit and soul, whatever lives in our astronomy and chemistry, whatever lies in our social life—all of this is cultivated. The Oriental did not possess this at all. He could not have extended his soul life to these soul forces. He had to turn to the breathing of the body in order to tread the path of knowledge. We must begin where we begin in our outer, practical life. We must start from the very same soul and spiritual forces that live in our mechanistic culture—the one that has produced seven to eight hundred million “subhumans.” We must shape a new Orient—that is, a vision of the Higher, the Eternal, and the immortal human being—out of the most sensual, the most mechanical, and that which proves to be the path to the subhuman in our Western civilization.

[ 23 ] However, modern people do not find everything about what seeks to establish itself within modern civilization appealing. For this modern person demands that the child be allowed to develop, since the child cannot yet make decisions about its own development. The moment they are supposed to make the decision themselves, they no longer engage with the process of development; that’s the end of it; they let themselves be elected to the city council or to parliament, because, after all, they know everything. They know it all. They no longer need to delve into the development of the abilities through which they come to know something. One becomes a critic of everything once one has become aware of one’s own arbitrariness, once others alone are no longer allowed to meddle with regard to development. This modern human being must seek the path to ascend once again to those heights where one finds the spiritual-soul human being.

[ 24 ] Now, the fact is that, for the time being, the inner drive to seek out this spiritual-soul human being and to embark on the path to these insights is still one of great self-sacrifice, for this path demands a life that is, admittedly, marked by pain and suffering—a life that not everyone must walk today, not everyone can walk, nor does everyone need to walk. But just as not everyone can become a chemist, yet the results of chemistry can be useful to all people; just as not everyone can become an astronomer, yet the results of astronomy can resonate within every soul—so too, there may be few spiritual researchers, but the results of this spiritual research can—as I have often said here—be understood with ordinary, sound common sense. The few spiritual researchers can share their spiritual visions, and common sense will grasp them. But that is precisely what people deny today. They come and say: What you spiritual researchers tell us may be beautiful fantasies; but we analyze it logically, we do not accept it, because it does not reveal itself to our human reason. We have not yet developed ourselves to the point of higher perception.

[ 25 ] One certainly learns some very strange things in this field. Another brochure has just been published about what I, as an anthroposophically oriented worldview, am supposed to represent to humanity today. There is a man—who is, well, a “university professor”—who, while rebuking me as a philosopher and, as he puts it, a theosophist, says: “Yes, this Steiner claims that one must also become a chemist to understand chemical matters, and a physicist to understand physical matters; one can grant him that.” But now it is very strange how this gentleman behaves. He says: Everyone can agree that chemists claim this or that, because if he himself becomes a chemist, he will see that it is true; anyone can agree with what physicists claim, because if one becomes a physicist oneself, one will see that what physicists say is correct. But in order to understand what Spiritual Science says, one would have to develop special abilities.

[ 26 ] But that is exactly what I am saying. Just as a person must become a chemist to form an opinion about chemistry, and just as a person must become a physicist to form an opinion about physics, so too must a person become a scholar of Spiritual Science to form an opinion about Spiritual Science. But now, continuing his text, that strange—perhaps he isn’t strange at all—university professor says: The point is not that what Steiner claims can only be justified to people trained in Spiritual Science, but that it must be justifiable to me! That is to say, it must be justifiable to someone who not only has no clue about it but also has no desire to learn anything about it.

[ 27 ] However, this is a kind of “common sense”—in quotation marks—that is not sufficient to understand what Spiritual Science has to offer. Unbiased common sense will grasp it. Yes, people may well think about these things quite differently in the future than is customary in many circles today. The world is there. Philosophers have always argued about the world. Well, philosophers must surely possess common sense. And one can even say, if one is open-minded: philosophy is better than its reputation. But philosophers argue. And if one is open-minded, one can even acknowledge a certain acumen in the realm of philosophy on the part of someone who says the opposite of what another person is just putting forward—again, out of a certain acumen. Indeed, if one is unbiased in this area, one comes to form a very curious judgment about common sense. It exists. People generally speak from this common sense. But it is not at all suited to understanding the world; otherwise, philosophers would have no need to argue. This ordinary common sense does not seem at all suited to grasping the world as it appears externally to the senses. Try it for yourself to see if it grasps what Spiritual Science has to say, and you will see: the path will open up so that you will understand precisely that. It is mere nonsense—not even just a prejudice—to say: “Spiritual Science scientists also claim different things; one says this, another says that.” People say this without knowing the facts. Once one becomes acquainted with the facts, one will no longer make such a claim.

[ 28 ] However, certain prejudices—and especially certain preconceptions—will have to be overcome if the anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science referred to here is to find its place in modern life. But it will have to do so. For a way will have to be found to connect the two spiritual currents I have outlined for you today. We cannot become reactionaries in order to return to earlier forms of spiritual development. We must engage with what the age of natural science and mechanistic thought has brought forth. But we must spiritualize the forces that have produced a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Giordano Bruno, a Röntgen, a Becquerel, and so on right up to our own day—we must spiritualize these forces to such an extent that, through the very same forces of the human soul with which we build machines, we may also ascend to the knowledge of the spiritual-soul human being. Then we will no longer merely speak of the spirit; then we will be able to give substance to the striving for the spirit.

[ 29 ] This is what troubles the deeper observer of contemporary civilization so much: that people today speak a great deal about the spirit, but give no substance to this talk about the spirit. This gives rise, on the one hand, to worldviews, and on the other hand, to a way of life that is inorganically linked to these worldviews—just as our worldview, shaped by the Spiritual Science, would appear out of place in a house built in an old architectural style. Our spiritual-scientific worldview seeks to live in architectural forms born of itself. It should—and can—create in such a way that it is able to permeate external material life down to the technical details and social interconnections. Then this Spiritual Science will be able to become the bearer of a civilization that finds the right paths to the goals that have been outlined today. Then it will be this Spiritual Science that will no longer allow that way of life to flourish—the one about which one might say: “Well, yes, some individuals are striving toward the spirit again; they demand that the person who works hard in the factory no longer merely work in the factory, but that he have enough time left over to devote himself to the spirit as well.” Oh, no, Spiritual Science does not merely demand that one must work in the factory and, upon closing the door behind oneself, step out of the factory to find spiritual life there. No, Spiritual Science demands the opposite: that when one opens the factory door to go to work, one carries the spirit into it, so that every machine is imbued with that which also lifts the worldview to the highest heights of knowledge, to the immortal. Spiritual Science does not seek to leave time unclaimed for the spirit, but rather to imbue all time with what human beings can find as the content of their spirit.

[ 30 ] Well, people today are often crying out for spiritual guidance. A book on socialism has just been published—it contains all sorts of heartfelt and sometimes even sensible views—by Robert Wilbrandt, the professor at the University of Tübingen. It makes the point: Yes, but we won’t get anywhere with socialism unless we find the new spirit, the new soul. So on the last pages of the book, there is a cry for the spirit, for the soul! However, if one leads such a man, such a personality, to the place where the spirit is to be given substance—where one does not merely speak of the spirit and the soul in the abstract, where one speaks of spiritual and soulful content just as natural science speaks of natural content—then that personality shies away; he lacks the courage to profess a commitment to a truly substantive spirit. And so we see this in many people. They cry out for the spirit. But when the spirit then seeks real content, they fail to come forward. They remain content with merely pointing to an abstract union of human souls with the spiritual. This is precisely what anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science seeks as a path: the path to real spiritual content, to a real spiritual world, which it seeks as a goal arising from our own organic powers of cognition: to develop the two currents—Orientalism and Occidentalism—which are merely inorganically fused within us, into a striving that, out of our own striving, finds the path both down into the realm of mechanism and up into the highest spirituality.

[ 31 ] As for the further discussion of this topic, which I will present tomorrow and the day after tomorrow—when I will also be able to elaborate on certain points more fully than I could today in this introduction—I would like to conclude today by simply offering the following preliminary remark. The call for a new spirituality resonates today in many hearts and minds, and in a certain sense, people already sense that our misfortune—which has manifested itself so terribly, so horribly over the past five years—is connected, in the external world, to the fact that our spirit has reached a dead end. That a wall must be broken through in order to move forward in spirit. There is a sense that we cannot make progress in social, political, or technical matters without a new spirit. A man who may not always have played a wholly beneficial role, but who may nevertheless have played a wiser one than some of his colleagues among the “statesmen”—I put that in quotation marks when I speak of statesmen today—in recent years, has now also—since statesmen and generals do, after all, write their war memoirs these days—has now also written his war memoirs. They conclude with the following words:

[ 32 ] “The war continues, albeit in a different form. I believe that future generations will not even call the great drama that has dominated the world for the past five years a world war, but rather a world revolution...”

[ 33 ] That is what Czernin, the Austrian statesman, says. So at least one person already sees how things are connected, even if only to a very limited extent. And he continues:

[ 34 ] “... and will come to realize that this world revolution has only just begun with the World War. Neither Versailles nor Saint-Germain will create a lasting peace. Within this peace lies the corrosive seed of death. The convulsions shaking Europe are not yet subsiding. Just as with a violent earthquake, the subterranean rumbling continues. Again and again, the earth will split open—here and there—and hurl fire toward the sky; again and again, events of elemental nature and elemental power will sweep devastatingly across the lands. Until everything that reminds us of the madness of this war and the French peace has been swept away.

[ 35 ] Slowly, amid unspeakable torment, a new world will be born. Future generations will look back on our time as if it were a long, evil dream, but even the darkest night is eventually followed by day. Generations have been laid to rest, murdered, starved to death, or succumbed to disease. Millions have died in the pursuit of destruction and ruin, with hatred and murder in their hearts.

[ 36 ] But other generations will arise, and with them a new spirit. They will rebuild what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. This, too, is an eternal law in the cycle of life: that death is followed by resurrection.

[ 37 ] “Blessed are those who will be called upon to help build the new world as soldiers of labor.”

[ 38 ] Here, too, the call for a new spirit arises from the limited statesmanlike mindset of the old era. Well, this call for a new spirit need only be understood and take root in people’s souls with sufficient truth and seriousness. For even the most external aspects of life are connected to the most internal; the most external material events are linked to the most internal spiritual experiences. And when we look at how the spirit—which reached its peak at the beginning of the 20th century—has played out in the events of recent years, we will understand that the call for a new spiritual life must arise. Anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science wishes to have its paths and goals linked to the building of the world through this new spiritual life, just as those spiritual endeavors that oppose it are clearly linked to the terrible events of recent years.

[ 39 ] Just recently, I read a remarkable lecture that was given in the Baltic States—note the date—on May 1, 1918. This lecture by a physicist, delivered on May 1, 1918, concludes with the following words: The World War has shown, after all, that the intellectual endeavors of the present, the scientific work of the present, are still too isolated. The World War—as this physicist puts it, more or less—has taught us that in the future, the work carried out in scientific laboratories must be in an inner, organic connection, in a continuous inner exchange of ideas, with the work carried out in the general staffs. We must strive for the closest possible alliance—so says this physicist—between science and the General Staff. In this, he sees the salvation of the future!

[ 40 ] As we can see, the science of the past can even regard alliances formed between itself and the most destructive forces of humanity as an ideal. Anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science seeks to forge an alliance between its spiritual aspirations and all the truly constructive forces of human civilization.