The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. The Spiritual and Moral Forces of Contemporary Peoples in the Light of Spiritual Science (Anthroposophy)

[ 1 ] Yesterday, I endeavored to show how, with the emergence of a worldview entirely influenced by a scientific foundation, moral human values can gradually no longer be associated in people’s consciousness with what stands before the human soul as a worldview of this kind. And it was pointed out how this definition of moral human values must once again be found in the sources of Spiritual Science knowledge. In a sense, my aim yesterday was to show how humanity, by embracing Spiritual Science, could once again attain a full awareness of its moral dignity.

[ 2 ] One can attempt to approach the same task from a different angle by conducting a Spiritual Science investigation into the essences of the peoples inhabiting the Earth today—examining the spiritual and moral forces at work within these peoples—in order to answer the question: To what extent can people today, drawing upon the various forces of their peoples, strive toward what might be called a social renewal based on an ethical and moral renewal?

[ 3 ] We, as humanity, have witnessed how external material conditions—namely, economic relationships—have gradually come to extend across almost the entire inhabited Earth. The Earth has become an economic sphere. And people were compelled, based on the knowledge they possessed, to organize this global economic sphere in a certain way: to bring the old state structures and national organisms—which had emerged from entirely different conditions—into such a relationship with one another that they could, for better or worse, be integrated into this common economic sphere, which is precisely what humanity’s modern civilization has brought about.

[ 4 ] The developments of the past five to six years show that this integration has not been possible; but so do the developments we are still in the midst of: the decline of our public life demonstrates this. One need only recall all the praise heaped upon modern civilization at the beginning of the 20th century—how people were, as it were, conducting their affairs across national and state borders at lightning speed, how the telegraph, telephones, and so on operated with tremendous, previously unimaginable speed, and how all the boundaries that had once seemed insurmountable appeared to have been overcome. And lo and behold, all of that was so ill-founded that today we find ourselves facing national borders that are as sharply sealed off as they were not long ago—and have not been for a long time. And what is most important—that which, a few centuries ago, and perhaps even well into the 19th century, was regarded as natural—the sealing off of national and state borders—we can today view only as something ethnically perverse, something perverse to humanity, as something that can have no justification in the actual circumstances of human development. And the question must arise: What has caused humanity to take such a terrible step backward?

[ 5 ] One will very soon—at least on the surface—discover the reason for this when one asks: Has the spiritual and soul life of humanity kept pace with all that has taken shape in material terms across the entire globe? We have spread the same kind of railroad transportation throughout the entire civilized world and even into the uncivilized world; we have managed to bring other modes of transportation everywhere, indeed to bring this very mode of transportation everywhere. But we have failed to bring a mutual, genuine understanding of humanity and the world to every corner of the globe. We have, so to speak, experienced the economic-material body of a unified global culture, and we have failed to imbue this economic-material body of a unified global culture with a soul, to spiritualize it. That which has taken shape across the Earth as an economically and materially unified whole has remained soulless. We must therefore ask: How do we arrive at the soul of Earth’s humanity, which strives for unity? We will not reach it any other way than by resolving to look upon the true essence of the peoples inhabiting the Earth today.

[ 6 ] Well, of course, it is not possible to go into all the details of different peoples in a short lecture; but it may be possible, based on certain typical characteristics, to sketch a picture of how people live across the earth in terms of their essence, in terms of their soul nature. And here one may say: When one looks at humanity on Earth through the lens cultivated by Spiritual Science, one sees in the Oriental regions a type of human being who has preserved an ancient culture—albeit one that has been in decline in more recent times—to this day; a type of human being whose ancestors in ancient times possessed a culture and civilization of immense height, though one that is very different from our own. We can see various peoples emerging from this Eastern type. We will not be able to go into detail about this differentiation; but the type itself can be characterized to a certain extent.

[ 7 ] Then we see a second type of person. I would like to call this the “middle type” of person—the one that has, in fact, formed the foundation of European culture, specifically Central European culture, dating back to the Greek people, and which, in a certain sense, has found its continuation in the present among the Central European peoples.

[ 8 ] And we see a third type of people, the type of Western peoples, which has found its most radical expression in the American peoples.

[ 9 ] Based on these three types, we can attempt to gain an understanding of the national entities of the Earth.

[ 10 ] Let us look toward the East. Today, figures such as Rabindranath Tagore are making their mark within Oriental civilization; his words sound so peculiar to us—partly so familiar because they touch the innermost depths of our souls, and partly so foreign because they are spoken from a completely different foundation than what must be expressed through Central and Western European culture. One feels, I would say, a humble respect for this Eastern civilization when one delves into what it has produced for the Eastern person with his full humanity. One need only examine specific examples—the Vedas, that which Indian culture has produced within the Vedanta worldview; one can delve into what Persian culture has produced; one can delve into what the Babylonian-Assyrian world has produced; everywhere one may say: Certainly, anyone who, in modern times, views these things through the lens of modern scientific inquiry will regard them in such a way that perhaps their heart will not be lifted, but rather that they will merely decipher all manner of strange, foreign things from Sanskrit, from the sacred scriptures. But the one who approaches these Eastern cultures with a whole heart and a healthy, open, and free mind will discover how wondrous it is that they point back to a primeval age of humanity, when, admittedly, the very way human beings related to the world was different from what it has become today among us and among the peoples of the West. But this instinctive way, this intuitive way of relating to the world—this dreaming about the world—if we understand it correctly, provides deep, immensely deep insights into the human being’s relationship to the world—insights that, despite all our scientific and other efforts, we in the Central and Western world have not yet attained.

[ 11 ] When we ask: What are such things based on? — I must refer you to something I have already mentioned here; I must refer you to it in order to gain any guiding principle at all through the nature of the peoples of the Earth—to what I have asserted in my book *On the Riddles of the Soul* regarding the threefold nature of the human being.

[ 12 ] I have already mentioned here how my views are based on thirty years of study, specifically what I have asserted regarding the threefold constitution of the individual human being—how this individual human being actually consists of three distinct, differently organized aspects: what might be called the nervous-sensory human being, what might be called the rhythmic human being, and what might be called the metabolic human being.

[ 13 ] These three aspects of human nature are not so distinct from one another that one can say: “Here I draw a line; here the nervous-sensory human ends, and here the rhythmic human begins.” These three aspects are interwoven. But for those who wish to distinguish them, they can be distinguished from one another; for the soul, too, points back to this threefold human being. Everything that takes place within us in our sensory perceptions and in our mental images points to the nervous-sensory human being as its instrument. Everything that relates to our feeling, everything experienced in our feeling, points back to the rhythmic human being. And it is a great error—one that will be recognized once our abstract natural science has been restored to health—to believe that the human life of feeling and emotion is directly connected to the nervous system. It is connected to the nervous system only indirectly. Just as the life of thought is directly connected to the nervous system, so too is the life of mood and feeling directly connected to breathing, to the heart’s rhythm—in short, to the rhythmic human being—and to the nervous system only insofar as we perceive the rhythm and, through it, the world of feeling. Only the mental images, the perceptions of our feelings, are mediated by the nervous system. The feelings themselves are directly connected to the rhythmic human being. And so the impulses of the will—the act of willing—are directly connected to the metabolic human being. And in turn, the thoughts arising from the will—the thoughts about our impulses of the will—are what are connected to the nervous system, not the will itself, which is directly connected to the metabolic system. I can only mention this briefly here.

[ 14 ] Something that I may today regard as an established scientific fact, even though the entire field of external science still resists this—it will, compelled by the facts themselves, have to accept this—is that what appears in the individual human being as three aspects of his being is not distributed in the same way among human beings insofar as they belong to the various peoples, whom we wish to consider today solely according to their types. For the remarkable thing is that, precisely when we look toward these Eastern peoples—namely, at the form of the Eastern peoples in ancient times, when they developed their marvelous culture—we find that these Eastern peoples were, strangely enough, organized entirely around metabolism at the very time when they developed their most spiritual culture. This was the predominant feature among the ancient Oriental peoples: the metabolism at work within them. Rhythmic activity—and especially nervous-sensory activity—took a back seat to metabolism.

[ 15 ] It comes as a surprise to the researcher in Spiritual Science when he goes back to the ancient past of the East and finds the remarkably spiritual and refined culture of the Vedanta and the Vedas, as well as everything else that has emerged from Eastern wisdom and the Eastern worldview, it surprises him that this is precisely connected with a particular refinement of metabolism and with a receding of the other aspects of human nature.

[ 16 ] It must be said, however, that it was precisely through this refinement of metabolism that the Oriental achieved what I mean here by his refined, his highly spiritual culture. Just as the plant is rooted in the soil, drawing in the earth’s juices directly in all their primal purity; just as it attracts through its blossoms whatever is in its surroundings; just as its entire metabolism is interconnected with its natural environment and with everything it reflects—so it was with the Oriental nature of human beings in those times of Asian primordial culture. There, human beings did not merely take in the substances of their surroundings, as we do today; there, they did not breathe in the surrounding air as unconsciously as we do; there, they absorbed everything that brought about their metabolism with a primal, elemental force. There, they lived within what they took in through their metabolism. And one can say: That which then lives on in the human being through metabolism—what becomes feeling within him, what becomes thought—is just as much a natural expression of his being, arising from his metabolic relationship with his environment, as the blossoms and fruits of a tree, which one sees on the tree and which directly reflect its relationship to the environment; the tree reflects in its blossoms and fruit what lives in its environment in terms of climate, materials, and substances. The people of the Orient, however, have brought to a high bloom and a rich harvest what they have taken in from the outside. But what now emerges in the ancient Oriental primordial culture appears to us as if it were born of nature itself, as if nature itself had brought forth its own blossoms within human knowledge and human sensibility, and as if human beings were merely meant to be the conduit for what nature itself seeks to create in terms of wise and meaningful mental images of the world.

[ 17 ] What is unique about this ancient Eastern culture is that it literally provides proof: when nature itself is allowed to speak—when it is allowed to make an organ of itself within the human being—then it speaks with the highest spirituality. And this ancient Eastern culture has become the highest form of spirituality precisely because, through human beings, it is consistently what nature itself speaks. This ancient Eastern culture elevated the wisdom that can be driven by nature itself up to the level of blossoms; it elevated it to a new sensory reality. Nature reveals itself in supersensory perception. Nature does not reveal itself—as is immediately evident—through materialistic perception or a materialistic mindset; nature reveals itself through spiritual perception and a spiritual mindset. Nature does not speak of matter when it expresses its essence through human beings; nature speaks of spirit, provided that human beings do not counter it with their own perception of mere gross matter.

[ 18 ] This is the wonderful teaching that resounds from the ancient Eastern primordial culture. It once flourished in the East. In the East, theocracy also influenced outward life. These people—who were children of nature, nurtured by nature itself, rather than students of nature who developed their wisdom as trees bear fruit—spoke, when they spoke of the world, only of the divine, of the superhuman. They spoke of what is supersensory. They also applied this view of the supersensory to social life: they established their theocracies. What emerged in this type of human being within the primordial culture of Asia is what we might call the human conception of the Divine. The conception of the Divine as a spiritual entity is a legacy of those ancient Oriental times.

[ 19 ] Christianity is based on a fact. Anyone who does not see the origin of Christianity in the event at Golgotha does not truly understand Christianity. However, the situation is different when it comes to our views on this Christianity—that is, the way in which we understand it. The views that enable us to understand Christianity—if we look only at the historical aspects, without a deeper understanding of Spiritual Science—are those derived from Eastern traditions. For it was through these that people ascended to the superhuman, that they ascended to the supersensible-spiritual. Therefore, in essence, even Christianity spread from the East to the central regions of the Earth and to the western regions of the Earth.

[ 20 ] Human beings can always regard as an ideal that aspect of themselves which, in a sense, lies above what is fundamentally instilled in them by nature. The Eastern person has as an innate element that aspect which appears to be the lowest of human nature, but which, when integrated into the pristine, elemental context of nature, leads up to the highest spiritual heights; the Eastern person has integrated the metabolic system as his elemental aspect. The aspect above it is the rhythmic system. It is in this that he therefore seeks his ideal. He seeks to rise from what nature gives him to what he can attain for himself through conscious human activity. Hence, among the Eastern people, among those who strive toward an ideal, the aspiration is toward the rhythmic human being. And we see how those who, like a flower of nature, brought the Vedas, the wisdom of the Vedanta, and the most wondrous view of nature into human culture regard as their ideal a particular way of consciously ascending into spiritual worlds through the rhythmic human being. Unconsciously, they rise to the spirituality of which I have just spoken. Consciously, they elevate it to an ideal: to rise through the rhythmic human being. This means regulating one’s breathing, practicing yoga philosophy and yoga, and training and cultivating in a specific way that which is present in the rhythmic human being. The rhythmic human being is to become their ideal. That which, I might say, lies one level above the metabolic human being—that becomes the ideal for these people.

[ 21 ] And so we see how a priesthood, a teaching order—or, in fact, a humanity that is both at once—is emerging from the Eastern type of people, who see in this yoga training the ideal of organizing the rhythmic human being in a special way in order to attain something higher than what is achieved through the forces implanted at the elemental level.

[ 22 ] If we now look into all that we can confront in this ancient Eastern culture and see how there is an ascent toward the purest, finest spiritual realm, how a wonderful, concrete abundance truly wells up from the spiritual—for this spirituality is full of content, even if we in the West might perceive it as fantastical—we must say: What these people, who were so great in the realm described and who sought their ideal in the training of the rhythmic human being, could never attain—what is missing there—is a certain life within the law, a certain structuring into a legal community. To somehow conceive of this within the culture that produced the Vedas, the Vedanta, and the other Eastern spiritual formations—impossible! One may misjudge what is found there of this nature, no matter how much one imposes Western concepts upon it; yet an unbiased judgment must acknowledge: there is spiritual life there. Legal and economic life are instinctive; they remain instinctive. Spiritual life rises from the foundation upon which economic, legal, or political life rests; from this foundation, spiritual life emerges as the highest form of consciousness. And, when all is said and done, Westerners, for the most part, live entirely from the legacy of Orientalism in their spiritual life.

[ 23 ] We have even seen how, in a certain movement—known as theosophy—which is often confused with our movement out of malice or ignorance, this theosophical movement is now, I would say, most recently out of sheer decadence, people are once again seeking to bring a new spirituality from the East to the West—always this tendency to carry the spiritual from the East to the West. Today, it signifies the height of decadence. At the time when the East was able to provide Christianity with the necessary spiritual depth, this was a matter of course.

[ 24 ] A different picture presents itself when we consider the type of people who, I would say, appear most appealing among the ancient Greeks, but who subsequently found their continuation in Central Europe. There, we have developed the other aspect of human nature, so to speak, with elemental necessity. People generally do not realize what exists within them as a self-evident essence. The people of Central Europe do not realize that what exists within them as the primary element—in contrast to which the other aspects of human nature recede—is the rhythmic human being. All the virtues and all the vices of the Central European and of those influenced by him are based on this predominance of the rhythmic system.

[ 25 ] The rhythmic system is intrinsically linked to what human feeling is. Human feeling encompasses everything that constitutes the virtues of fortitude, the passions of courage, and so on. Everything that Tacitus, for example, describes about the ancient Germanic peoples is, at its core, a spiritual quality grounded in the rhythmic human being, just as Eastern wisdom and Eastern sensibility are grounded in metabolism. And what makes the Greeks such a unified human being—what we admire so much about them when we truly understand them—this balance ultimately rests on a balance of inhalation, exhalation, and all other rhythms that is perfectly adapted to human nature. Greek balance is, in the end, a consequence of the human system of balanced rhythms.

[ 26 ] What we see emerging in Greek art, what presents itself to us as Greek sculpture, is not something imitated from a model. What the Greek sculptor shapes is formed in such a way that he sensed within himself—as if it were a second human being—the rhythmically balanced human figure in action, and sculpted it accordingly. Or, when the figure is in motion, they depict it as in the case of Laocoön in the famous group sculpture. Everything that emerged to the Greeks as a sculptural human form is based on their sense of being within themselves, arising from the symmetry³ of the rhythmic system.

[ 27 ] And if we look, for example, at Greek tragedies—one could look at all sorts of things that express the Greek spirit—passions are meant to develop through tragedy: fear and pity. And in turn, through the very same tragedy that arouses fear and pity, this passion is to be calmed and resolved. That is catharsis. That is what the Greeks sought in drama as self-regulation, as rhythm, as a reflection of their own nature. And we hear Aristotle say that true virtue consists in not leaning toward one extreme or the other—neither toward the spiritual nor the material, neither toward the lofty nor the base—but in maintaining the middle ground. Everything that the Greeks live out as if by nature—that is the balanced human being, who is balanced through the rhythm of his life.

[ 28 ] And we see this interplay of the rhythmic system continuing into Hellenism, into Goetheanism, and into what has taken place as a recent resurgence of spiritual life in Central Europe; we see it particularly in the figure of Goethe.

[ 29 ] Just as the Oriental, through nature’s expression of his metabolic system, placed the highest spirituality before himself, so to speak, so too did the rhythmic system—which brings about true balance in human beings—place the human being himself before himself. And one cannot really imagine a more beautiful mental image of this need to present human beings in their balance, derived from the rhythms of their lives, than Goethe’s book on Winckelmann, in which Goethe weaves into this work everything he has to say about the balanced human being. In this book one finds such beautiful expressions as: “When nature has reached its pinnacle in man, and man takes in all that is in his surroundings—order, harmony, measure, and meaning—he feels himself once again within himself as a whole nature and rises to the creation of the work of art.” Or: “When nature has reached its pinnacle in man, it would—if it could understand itself—rejoice and admire this pinnacle of its becoming and being.”

[ 30 ] And one might say that when such mature words—words that are so utterly imbued with cultural maturity—are spoken, they are an expression of the entire national essence that underlies them.

[ 31 ] And when Schiller wrote that letter to Goethe in the early 1890s: “I have long observed the course of your nature. You take all of nature as a whole in order to construct the human being from its individual components.” You construct the human being out of intuition. You could actually have done this perfectly only if you had been born a Greek, or at least an Italian. — This portrayal of man drawn from the depths of human nature, this placing of man before humanity—just as the Oriental places the divine before the world, just as nature itself, so to speak, places its essence before the world—this placing of man before humanity: that is the essence of the Mediterranean type of man. For him, what lies just beyond becomes the ideal.

[ 32 ] What the nervous-sensory human being is becomes the ideal for him. Therefore, from these central regions, we perceive—with a certain unconsciousness, just as the Oriental unconsciously asserts his spirituality through his metabolism—we perceive, from within the rhythm, that which is self-evident culture asserting itself. In contrast, however, we see the striving toward the idea, the striving toward idealism, emerging as the ideal. And what is already emerging in Greek culture is precisely what constitutes the idealism of thought in Plato and Aristotle.

[ 33 ] Once again, this emerges in the worldviews of German idealism: in the entire Central European idealism of worldviews, the ideal of spirituality arises from the nervous-sensory human being, just as the ideal of yoga arises in the East. And there we see how economic organization remains instinctive—truly instinctive—while a second element emerges, one that was still instinctive in the East but is now entering into consciousness: this is reflection, contemplation on the legal nature of human social coexistence.

[ 34 ] And so we see the legal nature of social coexistence developing precisely in the central regions, based on the model of the central peoples. The peoples of the East developed a spiritual dimension in ancient times. It then fell into decline. And even when we hear Rabindranath Tagore speak today, it is like a sound from a distant, bygone era: beautiful, refined, but we cannot believe that it still exists. And indeed, it does not exist. It is, I would say, a cozy abstraction. It speaks deeply to us, but it does not actually speak of a present reality. Since this spirituality has also fallen into decadence in the East, humanity retains, in a sense, a legacy of the original Eastern culture in its inclination toward spiritual life.

[ 35 ] Added to this is what human beings have to say about one another, and what they have to observe about one another. And this has come about through the middle class. There, human beings stand before themselves. In the East, human beings stand before the superhuman, and moral ideas spring forth from the world of the superhuman.

[ 36 ] Rabindranath Tagore has repeatedly emphasized, even today, that the culture of the East is founded above all on morality—on all moral qualities—while he accuses Western and American culture of being built on mechanism—on technical mechanism and political state mechanism—and of being devoid of moral ideas. And it is true that in the East, a wealth of moral ideas springs forth from the worldview—which arises, as we have described, from the spiritual world. And, when it comes down to it, we are actually still living today from these moral ideas. For Western materialism—as was made sufficiently clear in yesterday’s lecture—has not produced any moral ideas as such. Moral ideas are an ancient legacy, for they flow into the human soul only when that soul is connected to the spiritual world.

[ 37 ] In Mediterranean culture: the individual stands before himself; he inherits moral ideas. Legal concepts emerge, regulating human relationships in such a way that the individual stands opposed to the individual in social coexistence. One might say: By coming to an understanding of his own essence, man is led to ask: How do I follow what constitutes a moral ideal? A need arises in man that the Oriental did not have—especially not at the very time when his intellectual and spiritual culture flowed most purely into his being. Within this entire culture of the East—especially the further back we go into ancient times—the word and the essence of freedom have no meaning. Human beings are a part of the world order; they are integrated into the world order. Freedom is something that, fundamentally speaking, makes no sense. One cannot speak of it. For the commandments of moral life, which are linked to the conception of the divine-spiritual, have such an effect on the human being—as he contemplates them from within his own spirituality—that he naturally puts them into practice. He feels no human relationship to them. Just as he must eat, so he feels that he must obey the commandments, provided he recognizes them.

[ 38 ] That which, as a matter of course, springs forth from the spiritual world in ancient Eastern wisdom—though it no longer springs forth in the declining culture of the East—becomes an issue at that moment in world history when human beings stand face to face, when Mediterranean culture makes its appearance. And this will become a matter of particular significance when the culture—the true cultural orientation—of the Western peoples emerges. This is the third type.

[ 39 ] Just as the Oriental was originally predisposed to a metabolic way of life, and the Mediterranean person to a rhythmic way of life, so is the Westerner predisposed to a nervous-sensory way of life. And anyone can also trace the highest achievements that have developed in spiritual and material, inner and outer civilization in Western Europe and America — with the exception of the Romance peoples, who have taken a completely different path, having inherited the legacy of the ancient Latin peoples, who do not represent in this purity what is essentially Western European or Western in general —, when we look at the other Western populations, we see that this is the population in which the nerve-sensory human being predominates: This “nervous-sensory human,” who has produced the type capable of comprehending everything through concepts, mental images, and ideas, who focuses particularly on the abstract, who focuses on that which does not place “humanity” before “the individual” as with the Central European, nor does it place the “superhuman” before “the individual” as with the Oriental, but rather places “nature” before “the individual.”

[ 40 ] This is what is peculiar: if one ascends through the natural organization to the level of the nervous-sensory human being, then external nature stands before the human being. Just imagine what an absurdity it would be for an Eastern person to ask whether he is in any way connected to the animal realm in a purely materialistic sense. Precisely because he is the metabolic human being, he looks directly upon the spiritual world, the supersensible world. The Westerner does not have this direct perception of the spiritual world. He has reflection on the spiritual world; he has abstraction. For him, whatever stands before him—even if it is the human being himself—becomes, for him, nature outside of humanity. For Goethe, human stands opposed to human, and he seeks to understand the human being. Schiller says: “It is he who seeks to construct the whole human being from all the details of nature.”—But it is the human being that Goethe seeks to construct; and, fundamentally, he seeks to understand nature only so that he may ultimately perceive the human being everywhere within nature.

[ 41 ] Among Westerners—among those who are driven by their nerves and senses—Darwinism arises in the form in which the 19th century experienced it. There, the human being is not the primary focus; there, the idea of the human being fades, as it were; there, one knows nothing more about the human being as such; there, the human being becomes the highest animal. There, the animal kingdom is studied; there, all the forces at play within this animal kingdom are studied. It is not humanity that is understood, but rather the highest animal. And humanity is regarded merely as the highest animal. The human aspect recedes into the background. In its place, however, there is the most pronounced sense of natural understanding, that wonderful immersion in the details of everything that constitutes the evolutionary perspective—as seen, for example, in Darwinism.

[ 42 ] From an Eastern perspective, something even remotely resembling Darwin’s *On the Origin of Species* could never have emerged. Nor could Goethe ever have written anything like that. What he did write—I have tried time and again to explain—is of an entirely different nature. It is not Darwinism in the later sense; it is something distinct from it.

[ 43 ] But because this Western type of human being is the “nervous-sensory” human, this gives rise—I would say, in a regressive development—to the ideal of knowledge of nature, the ideal of material knowledge, and immersion in the material world.

[ 44 ] And, fundamentally, it is the Western way of thinking that has taken root in Central and Eastern Europe for a long time. For what has grown out of the very soil of Central Europe itself is a continuation of Hellenism. What has grown out of Russia’s own Russian essence is, in fact, a continuation of ancient Orientalism; but what modern 19th-century culture has increasingly become is that which stems from the Western “nervous-sensory” human being.

[ 45 ] Thus, one must consider the three types of human beings, from which, in turn, the various peoples have differentiated themselves. Thus, one must become aware of how, indeed, the most spiritual spirituality was instinctively present in the primordial humanity of the East; how the warm-hearted conception of humanity was present in Greek civilization and showed only a faint echo at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries in Central European culture, which came to light in Goetheanism; and how we stand under the influence of the nervous-sensory culture, and how we must think from within it. As such, it certainly does not directly produce any moral ideals. Does it therefore have no moral value? Yesterday I presented you with examples of the moral worldview of people who think naturalistically, from which one might conclude that this newer naturalism indeed has no moral value at all. That is not the case. Certainly, it has no moral content. Its moral content is an ancient legacy and must be an ancient legacy. But it does have moral value. What moral value does it have? It has the moral value that human beings form a view of nature as a worldview that, precisely, does not provide them with any moral ideas. As the Oriental immersed himself in his environment, he acquired moral ideas along with his view of nature. And just as he followed nature as a natural being, he followed the moral and spiritual world as a moral being.

[ 46 ] The Mediterranean man places humanity before himself. He came to understand the image of humanity by looking out into the world. But at the same time, I would say, the moral idea became abstracted. It had to assert itself as a legacy. Yet humanity still felt the warmth of this moral idea. And essentially, much of the religious life of that era, in which the Mediterranean peoples set the tone, was this warm feeling of the moral world order. Man only feels abandoned and alone in the face of his moral sensibilities when he is surrounded by an image of nature devoid of morality. There, man looks out into the world in which he stands as a natural being, to which he belongs as a natural being. It offers him nothing moral. If he desires morality, he must draw it forth from the wellspring of his innermost being. He stands there before a world that offers him no guidance. He must seek that guidance himself. Freedom has no meaning in the original Eastern spiritual culture. Freedom derives its meaning from naturalism. This materialism, which arises from the nervous-sensory nature of Western peoples, has moral significance. This culture demands that human beings become conscious of their freedom and give birth to their morality from within themselves. If one were to remain with mere naturalism—which was already the conclusion of yesterday’s reflections here—one would, like those figures whose statements I cited yesterday, trample morality into the ground. But if we had not passed through this dangerous stage of human development—where morality is called into question, where morality is entrusted to the freedom of human decision-making—humanity could not have developed toward freedom! This is the meaning of human development, from a spiritual primordial culture to the material culture of the West, which is particularly oriented toward economic life, which has essentially brought a utilitarian ethic to the surface, but which must give human beings the consciousness of freedom with regard to the actual moral impulse.

[ 47 ] We gain a basis for considering the differences among peoples when we start from these three types of human beings. But we will never arrive at a characterization of humanity in its entirety—which we need today for human beings—if we take only what emerges from these one-sided views.

[ 48 ] One can learn from such a perspective that when a person, coming from any local culture—no matter how large that culture may be—develops what is innate within them, the result is one-sidedness. The wondrous primordial culture—a one-sidedness; Western culture with its materialism—a one-sidedness.

[ 49 ] All of this gives a mental image of how one-sided the values are that exist within individual nations. Therefore, modern human beings—who now recognize that a uniform culture of the soul, not merely a material and economic one, must flourish across the entire Earth—must develop spiritual and moral ideas from foundations other than those of “nationalism.” Humanity is predisposed to this, for it brings these one-sided gifts to life in its various nations. But the individual must transcend the national. He transcends the national only when he does not use any national heritage to establish anything other than what belongs to that heritage, but rather when he is able to shape universal humanity from within that heritage.

[ 50 ] I attempted to lay the ethical foundation for this worldview in my book, *Philosophy of Freedom*, which was first published in the early 1990s. There, an attempt was made to show people the path to freedom and, at the same time, to morality, so that nothing in this book can be found that stems solely from a one-sided, ethnocentric perspective. Everything is conceived in such a way that people from the East can think of it just as people from the West and from the Mediterranean region do. There is absolutely no distinction based on ethnicity in it at all.

[ 51 ] There is a kind of self-evident theme running throughout the entire book: that a person is not yet a fully realized human being as long as they identify as a member of a human distinction—a nation, a people—and that they become a fully realized human being only when they outgrow this distinction. Certainly, a person is Russian, a person is English, a person is French; but the Frenchman, the Russian, the Englishman is not a human being as such—rather, a person must outgrow his or her national identity. This is precisely what a truly understanding examination of this national identity reveals.

[ 52 ] But then one comes to the conclusion that morality must be based on human individuality. And if one bases it on human individuality, one arrives at what morality must be founded upon in social life: In social life, morality must be based on the trust that one individual can have in another. This trust must be possible. Education must work toward this end—the kind of education that alone can bring about an improvement in our social conditions.

[ 53 ] In certain circles, it is repeatedly and constantly claimed that only coercion, only power, and only organization can bring order to the human social organism. No, organization will never bring about order; rather, the social organism can flourish only to the extent that one person can trust others, and to the extent that morality is anchored in human individuality.

[ 54 ] “Ethical individualism” was the term used to describe what I attempted to establish in my *Philosophy of Freedom*—“ethical individualism” because, in fact, what appears as ethics, what appears as a moral idea, must arise from the individuality of each person.

[ 55 ] But now comes the important part. Yesterday I read you a passage from a person who corresponded with the materialist Moleschott. It says: Moral impulses are present in every human being, and therefore differ in each person. — You see, that is materialism. The true insight is exactly the opposite. It is true that the ethical foundation is present in every human individual. But in the highest sense, it is a marvel to us that it is the same in every human individual; it is not some kind of predetermined equality, not an organized equality, but a given equality that exists among human beings. And time and again, we approach each person anew to work together with them in trust to establish moral impulses.

[ 56 ] This is what makes ethical individualism—when properly understood, when conceived as the true act of human freedom—at the same time a universal ethic, and what gives us hope that we will arrive at a state as moral human beings where we will find it just as unacceptable—as when we encounter one another on the street— find it right for one person to bump into another as they pass by—we naturally step aside to avoid each other—so too, when that human consciousness, of which I spoke to you yesterday and the day before, takes hold of people from the foundations of the Spiritual Science, it will generate such a feeling, such a way of thinking in people that what lives morally among them will become as self-evident as the fact that people do not bump into one another when passing by. If we live side by side as human beings in this way, we will be able to understand one another, no matter what circumstances we encounter in life; we can bring morality out of human nature itself. This shows how—beginning with the spiritually-oriented primeval times of the East, through human feeling at the center of the Earth, through human abstraction, through human understanding of the world, and through understanding both the world and nature—this is the path to finally enabling human beings to truly grasp freedom.

[ 57 ] But only if he rediscovers morality from the foundations of Spiritual Science. In the East, it was provided by the content of moral ideas, which, however, still operate through human beings as if by a natural necessity. The content of morality was cast out of this natural necessity. Humanity stood, so to speak, morally naked before nature, morally bare before nature. Humanity must give birth to morality anew within itself, within its individuality. It will give birth to it anew only if it can do so from the rediscovered spiritual essence of its innermost being.

[ 58 ] This is what Spiritual Science and spiritual insight seek: to give birth to a moral will that can truly bring about our social advancement. Spiritual Science seeks this because it believes it must recognize that this is particularly necessary for humanity today and in the near future—that social healing can arise only from spiritual healing.

[ 59 ] In yesterday’s and the day before yesterday’s remarks, you heard a great deal about how shameful the attacks directed against the Spiritual Science often are today. I could tell you much more about this, but I do not wish to do so at this moment. However, I would like to say this in conclusion today: no matter how the attacks may manifest themselves, even if they were capable of destroying the efforts currently being made in the field of Spiritual Science at this moment in world history, Spiritual Science would still have to arise anew! For its hope is not grounded in the subjective will of an individual or a few people, or even a sect; no, its hope is grounded in the fact that humanity, with regard to its most spiritual and important concerns of the present and the near future, needs the Spiritual Science and everything that is vitally connected to it. This is what the hopes of Spiritual Science count on—that Spiritual Science will flourish because humanity needs it, just as humanity demands a renewal of spiritual life. This may perhaps be trampled underfoot for the moment by malice or ignorance. In the long run, however, it cannot be overcome. For what humanity will need will come to pass—no matter how dreadful, malicious, or misguided its opponents may be—and what is meant to happen for the good of humanity will happen, because it must happen for inner, spiritual-divine reasons.