The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Considering on this occasion the lectures which I am having to give just now in Zürich,¹ I am freshly reminded that one can hardly come into touch with the spiritual life of that city in any broad sense at present without giving some attention to what is now called analytical psychology, or psychoanalysis. And various considerations connected with this realization have decided me to introduce what I have to say today with a short enumeration of certain points in analytical psychology, in psychoanalysis. We shall link it then with further remarks.

We have often noted how important it is for the researcher in the field of anthroposophical spiritual science, to connect his considerations with what is offered by the moving forces of our own age. It may be said that all sorts of people who feel drawn to psychoanalysis today are earnestly searching for the spiritual foundations of existence, for the inner realities of the soul of man. And it may be called a curious characteristic of our own time that so many of our contemporaries are becoming aware of quite definite, and most peculiar forces in the human soul. The psychoanalysts belong to those who, simply through the impulses of the age, are forced to hit upon certain phenomena of soul life.

It is especially important also not to remain entirely oblivious of this movement, because the phenomena of which it takes cognizance are really present, and because in our own time they intrude themselves for various reasons upon the attention of human beings. Today they must become aware of such phenomena.

On the other hand it is a fact that the people who concern themselves with these things today lack the means of knowledge required for the discussion and, above all, for the understanding of them. So that we may say: psychoanalysis is a phenomenon of our time, which compels men to take account of certain soul processes, and yet causes them to undertake their consideration by inadequate methods of knowledge. This is particularly important because this investigation, by inadequate methods of knowledge, of a matter that quite obviously exists and challenges our present human cognition leads to a variety of serious errors, inimical to social life, to the further development of knowledge, and to the influence of this development of knowledge upon social life.

It may be said that even less than half-truths are, under certain circumstances, more harmful than complete errors. And what the psychoanalysts bring to light today can be regarded only as an assortment of quarter-truths.

Let us consider a few excerpts from the research magazine of the psychoanalysts. What is called psychoanalysis today had its origin in a medical case observed by a Vienna interne, a Dr. Breuer, in the eighteen-eighties. Dr. Breuer, with whom I was acquainted, was a man of extraordinarily delicate spirituality besides what he was as a physician. He was interested to a high degree in all sorts of aesthetic, and general human problems. With his intimate manner of handling disease, it was natural that one case, which came under his observation in the eighties, was particularly interesting to him.

He had to treat a woman who seemed to be suffering from a severe form of hysteria. Her hysterical symptoms consisted of an occasional paralysis of one arm, dreamy conditions of various kinds, reduction of consciousness, a deep degree of sleepiness, and besides all this, forgetfulness of the usual language of her every day life. She had always been able to speak German; it was her native language, but under the influence of her hysteria could no longer do so; she could speak and understand only English.

Breuer noticed that when this woman was in her dreamy condition she could be persuaded, by a more intimate medical treatment, to speak of a certain scene, a very trying past experience. Now I will make clear to you from the description of the case given by the Breuer school, how the woman in her half-conscious condition, sometimes artificially induced, gave the impression that her hysteria was connected with a severe illness of her father, through which he had passed a long time before. Breuer could easily hypnotize a patient, and when he had placed her under hypnosis and encouraged her to speak of it, she told of an experience she had had during her father's illness. She had helped with the nursing, and always came back to this definite experience. I will quote from the report: [The following quotations are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, Zürich, 1917.]

“On one occasion she was watching at night in great anxiety and tension, for the sick man had a high fever, and a surgeon was expected from Vienna to perform an operation. Her mother had left her for a time, and Anna (the patient) sat by the sickbed, her right arm across the back of the chair. She fell into a kind of waking dream, and saw, as if issuing from the wall, a black snake approaching, to bite her father. ...”

Men of the present day are always stricken by materialism, so we find in the report at this point the following suggestion, which is of no value whatever:

(“It is very probable that in the meadow behind the house there were a few snakes which had frightened the girl previously, and which now furnished material for the hallucination.”)

That is only an interpolated remark, to which you may attach importance, or not—it does not matter. The point is that the snake seemed to her to come out of the wall to bite her father.

“She wanted to fight off the creature, but was as if paralyzed; the right arm hanging over the back of the chair had gone to sleep and became anaesthetized and paralyzed and, as she looked at it, the fingers changed into little snakes tipped with skulls.”

All this was beside her father's sick bed.

“She probably tried to chase away the snake with the lamed right hand, and so associated the anaesthesia and lameness with the snake hallucination. When this had disappeared she wished, in her fright, to pray, but every language failed her. At last she remembered an English nursery rhyme, and could continue to think and pray in this language.”

The whole illness originated from this experience. From it there had remained the paralysis of one hand, reduction of consciousness in varying degrees, and inability to express herself in any language but English. Dr. Breuer then noticed that the condition was ameliorated whenever he had her tell this story, and he based his treatment upon this fact. By means of hypnosis he drew from her little by little all the details, and really succeeded in bringing about a marked improvement in her condition. The patient got rid of the matter, as it were, by uttering and communicating it to another.

Breuer and his collaborator Freud, in Vienna, who were both influenced, as was natural at this period, by the school of Charcot [Jean Martin Charcot, French M.D. (1825-1893).] in Paris, diagnosed this case as a psychic trauma, a psychic wound, what is called in England a “nervous shock.” The psychic shock was supposed to consist of this experience at her father's bedside, and to have had an effect upon the soul similar to that of a physical wound upon the body.

It must be noted that from the beginning Breuer conceived the whole affair as a soul illness, as a matter of the inner life. He was convinced from the beginning that no anatomical or physiological changes could have been shown, no causes, for example, such as changes in the nerves leading from the arm to the brain. He was convinced from the start that he was dealing with a fact within the soul.

They were inclined in these early days to regard these cases as induced by wounds of the soul, shocks, etc. Very soon, however, because of Dr. Freud's active interest, theories took on a different character. With Freud's further development of the subject Dr. Breuer was never fully in accord. Freud felt that the theory of soul wounds would not do, did not cover these cases, and thus far Breuer agreed with him. I will remark in parenthesis that Dr. Breuer was a very busy practicing physician, thoroughly grounded in science, an excellent pupil of Nothnagel [Hermann Nothnagel, M.D. (1841-1905).] and because of external circumstances alone never became a professor. We may well believe that if Breuer, instead of remaining one of the busiest physicians in Vienna, with little time for scientific research, had obtained a professorship and so been able to follow up this problem, it might have assumed a very different form!

But from then on Dr. Freud took especial interest in the matter. He said to himself: the theory of trauma does not explain these cases. We need to determine under what conditions such a soul wound develops. For it might be said with justice that many girls had sat beside a father's sickbed with equally deep feelings, but without producing the same results. The unscientific layman deals with such problems promptly by the extraordinarily profound explanation that one is predisposed to such symptoms while another is not. Although very “profound,” this is the most absurd solution that can be arrived at, is it not? For if you explain things that occur on the basis of predisposition, you can easily explain everything in the world. You need only say: the predisposition for a certain thing exists.

Of course serious thinkers did not concern themselves with such ideas, but sought the real conditions. And Freud believed that he had discovered them in cases like the following. You will find innumerable similar cases in the literature of the psychoanalysts today, and it may be admitted that an immense amount of material has been collected in order to decide this or that point within this field. I will describe this one case, making it as comprehensible as possible. Its absolute historical accuracy is not important to us.

There was a woman with other guests at an evening party, a gathering of friends to bid good-bye to the mistress of the house, who had become nervous and was about to leave for a health resort abroad. She was to leave on that evening, and after the party had broken up, and the hostess departed, the woman whose case we are describing was going with other supper guests along the street when a cab came around the corner behind them (not an automobile—a cab with horses), driven at a great pace. In the smaller cities people returning home at night often walk in the middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk. (I do not know if you have noticed this). As the cab rushed towards them the supper guests scattered to right and left on to the sidewalks, with the exception of this one woman whom we are considering. She ran along the street in front of the horses, and all the driver's cursing and swearing and the cracking of his whip could not deflect her. She ran until she came to a bridge where she tried to throw herself into the water in order to avoid being run over. She was rescued by passersby, and returned to her party, being thus preserved from a serious accident.

This performance was of course connected with the woman's general condition. It is due, undoubtedly, to hysteria if a person runs along the middle of the street in front of horses, and the cause of such an action had to be discovered. Freud, in this and similar cases, examined the previous life back to childhood. If, even at an early age, something happened that was not assimilated by the soul, it could create a tendency which might be released later by any sort of shock.

And in fact such an experience was found in the childhood of the woman in question. She was taken driving as a child, and the horses became frightened and ran away. The coachman could not control them, and when they reached the river bank he sprang off, ordering the child to jump too, which it did, just before the horses plunged into the river. Thus the shocking incident was there, and a certain association of horse with horse. At the moment when she realized her danger from the horses she lost control of herself, and ran frantically in front of them instead of turning aside—all this as an after-effect of the childhood experience. You see that the psychoanalysts have a scientific method, according to present-day scientific ideas. But are there not many who have some such experience in childhood without such a reaction, even with the association of horse with horse? To this single circumstance something must be added to produce a “predisposition” to run in front of horses, instead of avoiding them.

Freud continued his search, and actually found an interesting connection in this case. The woman was engaged to be married, but was in love with two men at the same time. One was the man to whom she was engaged, and she was sure that she loved him best; but she was not quite clear about that, only halfway so; she loved the other also, this other being the husband of her best friend, whose farewell supper had taken place that evening. The hostess, who was somewhat nervous, took her departure, and this woman left with the other guests, ran in front of the horses, was rescued, and brought back quite naturally into the house she had just left. Further inquiry elicited the fact that in the past there had existed a significant association between the lady and this other man, the husband of her best friend. The love affair had already taken on “certain dimensions,” let us say, which accounted for the nervousness of her friend, as you may easily imagine. The physician brought her to this point in the story, but had difficulty in persuading her to continue. She admitted at last that when she came to herself in her friend's house, and was again normal, the husband declared his love to her. Quite a “remarkable case,” as you see!

Dr. Freud went after similar cases, and his researches convinced him that the hysterical symptoms, which had been attributed to a psychic “trauma” or wound, were due instead to love, conscious or unconscious. His examination of life experiences showed that circumstances might greatly differ, indeed in the most characteristic cases, that these love stories might never have risen into the consciousness of the patient at any time.

So Freud completed what he called his neurosis theory or sexual theory. He considered that sexuality entered into all such cases. But such things are extraordinarily deceptive. To begin with, there is everywhere at the present time an inclination to call sex to your aid, for the solution of any human problem. Therefore we need not wonder that a doctor who found it to be a factor in a certain number of cases of hysteria set up such a theory.

But on the other hand, since analytical psychology is carrying on a research with inadequate tools, this is the point at which the greatest danger begins. The matter is dangerous first, because this longing for knowledge is so extremely tempting, tempting because of present circumstances, and because it may always be proved that the sex connection is more or less present. Yet the psychoanalyst Jung, who wrote Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse (see the above quotations that are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, Zürich, 1917.), Professor Jung of Zürich does not share the opinion that Freud's sexual “neurosis theory” covers these cases. He has instead another theory.

Jung noted that Freud has his opponents. Among them is a certain Adler. This Adler takes a quite different viewpoint. Just as Freud tested large numbers of cases, and settled upon sex as the original cause (you can read it all in Jung's book), so Adler approached the problem from another side, and decided that this side is more important than the one that Freud has placed in the foreground.

Adler—I will only generalize—found that there was another urge that played quite as important a role in the human being as the sexual impulse emphasized by Freud. This was the desire for power, power over one's environment, the desire for power in general. The “will to power” is even regarded by Nietzsche as a philosophical principle, and as many cases may be found to support the power-impulse theory as Freud found for his sexual theory.

One need only begin “analyzing” hysterical women to find that such cases are not at all rare. Assume for example that a woman is hysterical and has spasms—heart spasms are a favorite in such cases—as well as all sorts of other conditions. The home is stirred up, the whole environment, everything possible is done, doctors are summoned, the patient greatly pitied. In short, she exercises a tyrannical power over her environment. A reasonable person knows that in such a case there is really nothing the matter, even though such patients are aware of their condition and suffered from it. They are in reality perfectly healthy—but ill when they wish to be. You may diagnose them as well and ill at the same time. They do of course fall down when they faint in a heart spasm, but they fall as a rule on the rug, not on the bare floor! These things may be observed.

Now this subconscious lust for power leads very easily to hysterical conditions. Adler investigated the cases at his disposal from this particular standpoint, and found everywhere when hysterical symptoms appeared that somehow the lust for power had been aroused and driven into unhealthy extremes. Jung said to himself: “Oh well, one cannot say that Freud is wrong; what he observed is there, and one cannot say that Adler is wrong; what he observed is also there. So it is probably sometimes one way, and sometimes the other!”

That is quite reasonable; it is sometimes one way and sometimes another. But Jung built upon this a special theory. This theory is not uninteresting if you do not take it abstractly, simply as a theory, but see in it instead the action of our present-day impulses, especially the feebleness of our present knowledge and its inadequacy. Jung says: there are two types of people. In one type feeling is more developed, in the other thinking.

Thus an “epoch-making” discovery was made by a great scholar. It was something that any reasonable man could make for himself within his own immediate environment, for the fact that men are divided into thinking men and feeling men is sufficiently obvious. But scholarship has a different task: it must not regard anything as a layman would, and simply say: in our environment there are two types of people, feeling people and intellectuals—it must add something to that. Scholarship says in such a case: the one who feels his way into things sends out his own force into objectivity; the other draws back from an object, or halts before it and considers. The first is called the extroverted type, the other the introverted. The first would be the feeling man, the second the intellectual one. This is a learned division, is it not? ingenious, brilliant, really descriptive up to a point—that is not to be denied!

Then Jung goes on to say; In the case of the extraverted type (that of the man who lives preferably in his feelings), there exist very frequently in the subconscious mind intellectual concepts, and he finds himself in a collision between what is in his consciousness and the intellectual concepts that float about subconsciously within him. And from this collision all sorts of conditions may arise, conditions mainly characteristic of the feeling type.

In the case of those who occupy themselves more with the mind, the men of reason, the feelings remain down below, swarm in the subconscious, and come into collision with the conscious life. The conscious life cannot understand what is surging up. It is the force of the subconscious feelings, and because man is never complete, but belongs to one of these two types, circumstances may arise that cause the subconscious mind to revolt against the conscious, and may frequently lead to hysterical conditions.

Now we must say that Jung's theory is simply a paraphrase of the trivial idea of the feeling and the reasoning man, and adds nothing to the facts. But from all this you needs must realize that men of the present are at least beginning to notice all sorts of psychic peculiarities, and so concern themselves that they ask what goes on within a man who shows such symptoms. And they are at least so far along that they say to themselves: These are not due to physiological or anatomical changes. They have already outgrown bare materialism, in that they speak of psychic phenomena. So this is certainly one way in which people try to emerge from materialism, and to reach some knowledge of the soul.

It is, however, very peculiar, when you look at the subject more closely, to see into what strange paths people are led by the general inadequacy of their means of cognition. But I must emphatically point out that men do not realize into what they are being driven, and neither do their supporters, readers, and contemporaries. Thus, rightly regarded, the matter has actually a very dangerous side, because so much is not taken into consideration. In the subconscious mind itself there is a commotion, it is the theories which agitate in the subconscious. It is really strange. People set up a theory in regard to the subconscious, but their own subconsciousness is agitated by it. Jung pursues the matter as a physician, and it is important that psychological questions should be handled from that standpoint, therapeutically, and that many should be striving to carry over the matter into pedagogy. We are no longer confronted by a limited theory, but by the effort to make it into a cultural fact.

It is interesting to see how someone like Jung, who handles this matter as a physician, and has observed, treated, and apparently even cured all sorts of cases, is driven further and further. He says to himself: when such abnormal psychological symptoms are found, a search must be made in order to discover any incidents of childhood which may have made such an impression on the human soul life as to produce after-effects. That is something especially sought for in this field: after-effects of something that happened in childhood. I have cited an example which plays quite a role in the literature of psychoanalysis: the association of horse and horse.

Later, however, Jung came upon the fact that in many of the cases of genuine illness it cannot be proved, even if you go back to his earliest childhood, that the patient as an individual is suffering from any such after-effects. If you take into consideration everything with which he has come in contact, you find the conflict within the individual, but no explanation of it. So Jung was led to distinguish two subconsciousnesses: first the individual subconsciousness, concealed within the human being. If in her childhood the young woman jumped out of a carriage and received a shock, the incident has long since vanished from her consciousness, but works subconsciously. If you consider this subconscious element (made up of innumerable details), you get the personal or individual subconsciousness. This is the first of Jung's differentiations.

But the second is the superpersonal subconsciousness. He says: There are things affecting the soul life which are neither in the personality nor in the matter of the outside world, and which must be assumed therefore as present in a soul world.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to bring such soul contents into consciousness. That is supposed to be the healing method: to bring everything into consciousness. Thus the physician must undertake to extract from the patient, not only what he has experienced individually from his birth on, but also something that was not in the outside world and is of a soul nature. This has driven the psychoanalysts to say that a man experiences, not only what he goes through after his physical birth, but also all sorts of things that preceded his birth—and that all this creates disorder within him. A man who is born today experiences thus subconsciously the Oedipus Saga. He not only learns it in school; he experiences it. He experiences the Greek gods, the whole past of mankind. The evil of this consists in the fact that he experiences it subconsciously. The psychoanalyst must therefore say—and he does go so far—that the Greek child also experienced this but, since he was told about it, he experienced it consciously. Man experiences it today, but it only stirs within him—in the thoughts of the extraverted man, in the subconscious feelings of the introverted type. It growls like demons.

Now consider the necessity that confronts the psychoanalyst if he is true to his theory. He would have to take these things seriously and say simply that when a man grows up and may be made ill by his relation to that which stirs within him—a relation of which he knows nothing—that this connection must become conscious, and it must be explained to him that there is a spiritual world inhabited by different gods. For the psychoanalyst goes so far as to say that the human soul has a connection with the gods, but it is a cause of illness in that the soul knows nothing of it.

The psychoanalyst seeks all sorts of expedients, sometimes quite grotesque. Let us assume that a patient comes and displays this or that hysterical symptom, because he is afraid of a demon—let us say—a fire demon. Men of earlier periods believed in fire demons, had visions of them, knew about them. Present-day people still have connections with them (the psychoanalyst admits that), but these connections are not conscious; no one explains that there are fire demons, so they become a cause of illness.

Jung however goes so far as to assert that the gods, to whom man is unconsciously related, become angry and revenge themselves, this revenge showing itself as hysteria. Very well, it amounts then to this: such a present-day man who is mistreated by a demon in his subconscious mind, does not know that there are demons, and cannot achieve any conscious relation with them because—that is superstition! What does the poor modern man do then, if he becomes ill from this cause? He projects it outwardly, that is to say he looks up some friend whom he had liked quite well, and says: This is the one who is persecuting and abusing me! He feels this to be true, which means that he has a demon which torments him, and so projects it into another man.

Often psychoanalysts, in treating such a case, deflect this projection upon themselves. Thus it often happens that patients, in a good or evil sense, make the doctor into a god or a devil.

So you see the physician of the present day is forced to say to himself: Men are tormented by spirits, and because they are taught nothing about them, cannot take possession of them in consciousness, they become therefore tormenting spirits among themselves, project their demons outwardly, persuade one another of all sorts of demoniacal nonsense, etc. And how disastrous this is assumed to be by the psychoanalysts is shown by the following case which Jung describes. He says: “Certain of my colleagues claim that the soul energies that spring from such torment, must be deflected into another channel.” Let us turn back then to one of the elementary cases of psychoanalysis. A patient comes, whose illness was caused, according to her psychoanalytical confession, by her having been in love, many years before, with a man whom she did not get. This had remained with her. Of course she might be annoyed by a demon, but in most cases observed by the doctors it turns out that something has happened in the individual subconsciousness, which they classify separately from the super-personal subconscious. The doctors try to divert this immature fantasy or to transform it. If a love-thirsty soul can be persuaded to make use of her accumulated affections in humanitarian services, perhaps as head of a charitable institution, it may turn out well. But Jung himself says: “It is not always possible thus to divert this energy. Energies so implanted in the soul have often a certain definite potential which cannot be directed.” Very well, I have no objection to this expression, but wish only to point out that it is a translation of what the layman often discusses, and the way in which he often expresses himself. But Jung describes a case which is interesting, and a good example of the fact that these potentials cannot always be directed.

An American, a typical man of today, a self-made man, the efficient head of a business that he had built up, having devoted himself to his work and achieved a great success, thought then: I shall soon be forty-five, and have done my bit! Now I will give myself a rest. So he decided to retire, bought himself an estate with autos and tennis courts, and everything else that belonged to it, intending to live in the country, and simply to draw his dividends from the business. But when he had been for a time on his estate he ceased to play tennis or to drive his car, or to go to the theater. He took no pleasure in the gardens that were laid out, but sat in his room alone, and brooded. It hurt him there, and there, everything hurt him. Actually his head hurt, then his chest, and then his legs. He could not endure himself, ceased from laughter, was tired, strung up, had continual headache—it was horrible. There was no illness that a doctor could diagnose! It is often that way with men of the present, is it not? They are perfectly healthy, and yet ill. The doctor said: "This trouble is psychic. You have adapted yourself to business conditions, and your energies will not readily take another course. Go back to business. That is the only suggestion that I can make.” The man in question grasped this, but found that he was no longer any good at business! He was just as ill there as at home.

From this Jung rightly concludes that you cannot easily deflect energy from one potential to another, nor even turn it back again when you have failed. This man came to him for treatment. (You know many people come to Switzerland bringing such illnesses and non-illnesses!) But he could not help this American. The trouble had taken too strong a hold; it should have been handled earlier.

You see from this that the therapy of deflection has also its difficulties, and Jung himself offers this example. Important facts are met everywhere which—I now may say—will be successfully dealt with only by spiritual science or Anthroposophy, in accordance with exact knowledge. But there they are, and people notice them. The questions are there. It will be discovered that the human being is complicated, and not the simple creature presented to us by the science of the 19th century. The psychoanalyst is confronted by a remarkable fact which is quite inexplicable by the science of today. In Anthroposophy, together with the information given in my lectures, you will easily find an explanation, but I can come back to the point in case you do not find it. It may happen, for example, that someone becomes hysterically blind, that is, his blindness is an hysterical symptom. This is possible. There are hysterically blind people, who could see, yet do not—who are psychically blind. Now such people are sometimes partially cured—partially; they begin to see again, but do not see everything. Sometimes such an hysterically blind man recovers sufficient sight to see people, all but their heads! Such a half-cured person goes along the streets, and sees everyone without a head. That really occurs, and there are even stranger symptoms.

All this may be dealt with by spiritual science—anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—and in a lecture that I gave here last year you may find an explanation of the inability to see the heads of people. [Lecture given at Dörnach, August 5, 1916.] But the present psychoanalyst is faced by all these phenomena. And so much confronts him that he says to himself: It may be quite disastrous for a man to be connected with the superpersonal unconscious; but for God's sake (the psychoanalyst does not say ‘for God's sake,’ but perhaps ‘for science's sake’) do not let us take the spiritual world seriously! It does not enter their minds to consider the spiritual world seriously. Thus something very peculiar happens. Very few notice what strange phenomena appear under the influence of these things. I will call to your attention something in Jung's book Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse, [see the above quotations that are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, Zürich, 1917.] recently published, which will show you where the psychoanalyst lands today. I shall have to read you a passage.

“According to this example” (these are examples showing that a man has within him, not only the contents of his present personal life, but far-back connections with all sorts of demonic, divine, or spiritual forces, etc.)—“According to this example of the genesis of new ideas from the store of the primeval pictures”—(here he does not call them ‘gods’ but ‘primeval pictures’)—“we will take up the further description of the transference processes. We saw that the libido, in those apparently preposterous and curious fantasies, had seized upon its new object, namely the contents of the absolute unconscious.” (The absolute unconscious is the superpersonal unconscious, not the personal.) “As I have already said, the uncomprehended projection of the primeval pictures upon the physician involves a danger for the further treatment that must not be under-estimated.” (The patient transfers his demons to the doctor. That is one danger.) “The pictures contain not only the best and greatest of all that mankind has thought and felt, but also every infamous and devilish deed of which men have been capable.”

Just think! Jung has come so far as to perceive that a man has subconsciously within him all the most fiendish crimes, as well as the most beautiful of all that mankind has been able to think and feel. These people cannot be persuaded to speak of Lucifer and Ahriman, [Compare Rudolf Steiner, The Luciferic and Ahrimanic Influences in their Relation to Man, 1918, reprinted in Anthroposophie, Vol. 17, Book 2, p. 159.] but they agree upon the preceding statement, which I shall read to you once more:

“The pictures contain not only the best and greatest of all that mankind has thought and felt, but also every infamous and devilish deed of which men have been capable. If the patient cannot distinguish the personality of the physician from these projections, then every possibility of mutual understanding is lost, and the human relationship becomes hopeless. If, however, the patient avoids this Charybdis he falls into the Scylla of the introjection of these pictures, that is to say that he attributes their qualities not to the physician but to himself.” (Then he himself is the devil.) “This danger is equally serious. In projection he staggers between an extravagant and morbid adulation and a hateful contempt for his physician. In introjection he falls into a ridiculous self-deification, or a moral self-laceration. The mistake that he makes each time is in attributing to himself the contents of the absolute unconscious. So he makes himself into a god or a devil. Here lies the psychological reason why men have always needed demons, and were never able to live without gods—except a few particularly clever Western specimens of yesterday and the day before, supermen whose god being dead, have made gods of themselves, rationalistic pocket size gods with thick skulls and cold hearts.”

Thus you see, the psychoanalyst is driven to say: The human soul is so made that it needs gods, that gods are necessary to it, for it becomes ill without them. Therefore it has always had them. Men need gods. The psychoanalyst ridicules men, saying that when they lack other gods they make gods of themselves, but “rationalistic pocket size gods with thick skulls and cold hearts. The idea of God” (he says further), “is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational nature. ...”

To describe the necessity of the God-concept in these terms is as far as one can go by the methods of natural science! Man must have a God; he needs him. The psychoanalyst knows that. But let us read to the end of the sentence:

“The idea of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing to do with the question of the actual existence of God.”

When you read the complete sentence you run upon the great dilemma of the present day. The psychoanalyst proves to you that man becomes ill and useless without his God, but says that this need has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of God. And he continues:

“For this latter question” (namely, of the existence of God,) “belongs to the most stupid questions that can be framed. Man knows well enough that he cannot conceive a God, much less imagine that he really exists, or that there can be any occurrence not conditioned by natural causes.”

Now I beg of you, here you find—here you are standing at the point where you may catch at things. The things are there, knocking upon the doors of knowledge. Seekers are also there. They admit an absolute necessity, but when that necessity is stated as a serious question they consider it one of the stupidest that can be suggested.

You see, you have there one of the points in the cultural life of today from which you may note exactly what is always avoided. I can assure you that, in their examination and knowledge of the soul, these psychoanalysts are far ahead of what is offered in current psychiatry by the universities. They are not only far beyond ordinary university psychiatry and psychology, but in a certain sense they are right to look down upon this dreadful so-called science. But one may catch them in any such passage, showing as it does what mankind is actually facing in the attitude of contemporary science.

Many do not recognize this. They do not realize the force of belief in authority. There has never been such faith in authority, nor has it ever reigned so absolutely as in the subconscious mind today. One asks again and again: Just what do you do as physicians when you handle hysterical cases? You seek something in the subconscious mind that is not solved within consciousness. Yes, but you find repeatedly just such a subconscious content in the case of the theorists. If you lift it into full consciousness it turns out to be exactly what has been murmuring in the subconsciousness of the modern doctors and their patients. And all our literature is so saturated with it that you are in daily and hourly danger of imbibing it. And since it is only through spiritual science that men may become aware of these things, many take them up unknowingly, draw them into their subconsciousness, where they remain.

This psychoanalysis has at least pointed out that the reality of the soul is to be accepted as such. They do that. But the devil is everywhere at their heels; I mean that they are neither able nor willing to approach spiritual reality. Therefore you find in all sorts of places the most incredible statements. But present humanity has not the degree of attention necessary to perceive them. We should naturally expect any reader of Jung's book to fall off his chair under the table at certain sentences, but men of the present do not do that; so only think how much of it must lie in the subconsciousness of modern humanity. Yet for this very reason, because these psychoanalysts see how much there is in the subconscious—and they do see it—they look upon many things differently from other people. In his Preface Jung says something, for example, part of which is not bad.

“The psychological processes which accompany the present war, above all the incredible depravity of public opinion, the mutual calumnies, the undreamed of fury of destruction, the flood of lies, and men's inability to halt the bloody demon, are all adapted to set before the eyes of thinking humanity the problem of the restlessly slumbering, chaotic realm of the subconscious. This war has shown pitilessly to the cultured man that he is still a barbarian, and at the same time what an iron rod of correction awaits him should it again occur to him to hold his neighbor responsible for his own bad character. The psychology of the single individual corresponds to the psychology of the nations.”

And now comes a sentence which makes you wonder what to do with it.

“What the nations do is done by each individual, and so long as the individual does it the nation will do it too. Only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a change in the psychology of the nation.”

These sentences, placed side by side, show how destructively this thinking works. I ask you if it is sensible to say: “What the nations do is done by each individual?” It would be equally reasonable to ask: Could an individual do it without nations doing it too? It is nonsense, is it not, to say things like that. The unfortunate thing is that even prominent thinkers are impressed by it. And this sort of thinking is not only to become therapy, but take the lead in pedagogy. This again is founded upon the justifiable longing to introduce into pedagogy a new soul and spiritual element. Are conclusions to be accepted which were reached by entirely inadequate methods of cognition? These are nowadays the important questions.

We shall return to the matter from the standpoint of anthroposophical orientation, and throw light upon it from a broader horizon. Then we shall see that one must set about it in a much bigger way, in order to succeed with these things at all. But they must be handled concretely. The problems which as yet have been investigated only by the old, inadequate methods, must be placed in the light of anthroposophical knowledge.

Take, for example, the problem of Nietzsche. Today I will only suggest it; tomorrow we shall consider such problems more thoroughly. We know already from former lectures: [Lectures given at Dörnach, October 14, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28; November 2, 3, 4, 1917.] from 1841 to 1879 battle of spirits above; from 1879 on, the fallen spirits in the human realm. In future such and similar things must of necessity play a role whenever a human life is studied. For Nietzsche was born in 1844. For three years before he descended to earth his soul was in the spiritual realm in the midst of the spirit battle. During his boyhood Schopenhauer was still living, but died in 1860, and only after his death did Nietzsche devote himself to the study of Schopenhauer's writings. The soul of Schopenhauer cooperated from above in the spiritual world. That was the real relationship. Nietzsche was reading Schopenhauer, and while he was absorbing his writings Schopenhauer was working upon his thoughts.

But how was Schopenhauer situated in the spiritual realm? From 1860 through the years when Nietzsche was reading his books, Schopenhauer was in the midst of the spiritual battle that was still being fought out on that plane. Therefore Schopenhauer's inspiration of Nietzsche was colored by what he himself gathered from the battle of spirits in which he was involved. In 1879 these spirits were cast down from heaven upon the earth. Up to 1879 Nietzsche's spiritual development had followed very curious paths. They will be explained in the future as due to the influence of Schopenhauer and of Wagner. In my book Friedrich Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time, you may find many supporting details. Wagner had up to that time no particular influence except that he was active on earth. For Wagner was born in 1813; the battle of spirits only began in 1841. But Wagner died in 1883, and Nietzsche's spiritual development took its peculiar direction when Wagner's influence began. Wagner entered the spiritual world in 1883, when the battle of spirits was over, and the defeated spirits had been cast to earth. Nietzsche was in the midst of things when the spirits began to roam around here on earth. Wagner's post mortem influence upon Nietzsche had an entirely different object from that of Schopenhauer.

Here begin the super-personal but definite influences, not those abstract demonic ones, of which the psychoanalyst speaks. Humanity must resolve to enter this concrete spiritual world, in order to comprehend things which are obvious if only the facts are tested. In the future Nietzsche's biography will state that he was stimulated by that Richard Wagner who was born in 1813, and took part up to 1879 everything that led to the brilliant being whom I described in my book; that he had the influence of Schopenhauer from his sixteenth year, but that Schopenhauer was involved in the spiritual battle that was fought upon the super-physical plane before 1879; that he was exposed to Wagner's influence after Wagner had died and entered the spiritual world, while Nietzsche was still here below, where the spirits of darkness were ruling.

Jung considers this a fact: that Nietzsche found a demon, and projected it without upon Wagner. Oh well—projections, potentials, introverted or extraverted human types—all words for abstractions, but nothing about realities! These things are truly important. This is not agitation for an anthroposophical world-conception for which we are prejudiced. On the contrary, everything outside of anthroposophy shows how necessary this conception is for present-day humanity!

• 1. Anthroposophy and the Science of the Soul (Nov. 5), Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science (Nov. 7), Anthroposophy and Natural Science (Nov. 12), Anthroposophy and Social Science (Nov. 14).

I have designated what is called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis as an effort to gain knowledge in the soul realm by inadequate means of cognition. Perhaps nothing is so well adapted to show how, at the present time, everything urges the attainment of the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, and how on the other side, subconscious prejudices lead men to oppose a spiritually scientific consideration of the facts. Yesterday I showed you by definite examples what grotesque leaps modern erudition is obliged to take when it ventures upon soul problems, and how to detect these leaps in the mental processes of modern scholars. It was pointed out that one of the better psychoanalysts—Jung—divided patients into two classes: the thinking type, and the feeling type. From this starting point he assumed that in cases of the thinking type, subconscious feelings force their way up into consciousness and produce soul conflicts—or in the opposite type, that thoughts in the subconscious mind arise and conflict with the life of feeling.

Now it might be suggested that these things will be fought out in scientific discussion, and that we might wait until people make up their minds to overcome the subconscious prejudice against anthroposophical spiritual science. But passive waiting becomes impossible in that such things do not confine themselves to the theoretical field, but encroach upon life practice and cultural development. And psychoanalysis is not content to occupy itself with therapy alone, which might be less dubious since there seems to be little difference—I said seems—between it and other therapeutical methods; but it is trying to extend itself to pedagogy, and to become the foundation of a teaching system. This forces us to point out the dangers residing in quarter-truths in a more serious manner than would be called for by mere theoretical discussion.

Much that relates to this matter can be decided only with the passage of time, but today we shall have to enlarge the scope of our examination in order to throw light upon one aspect or another. First of all I wish to call to your attention that the facts which lie before the psychoanalyst really point to an important spiritual sphere which present-day man does not wish to enter in an accurate and correct manner, but would prefer to leave as a sort of nebulous, subconscious region. For our present sickly, materialistically infected approach, even in this domain, likes nothing better than a vague, mystical drifting among all sorts of incomplete or unexecuted concepts. We find the most grotesque, the most repulsive mysticism right in the midst of materialism, if you take mysticism to mean a desire to swim about in all sorts of nebulous thinking, without working out your world-conception into clear, sharply outlined concepts. The domain into which recognized facts are pushing the psychoanalysts is the field of extra-conscious intelligence and reasoning activity. How often I have dealt with these matters—without going into details, but merely mentioning them, since they are taken for granted by students of spiritual science. How often I have reminded you that reasoning, intellectual activity, cleverness are not confined to the human consciousness, but are everywhere, that we are surrounded by effective mental activity as we are surrounded by air, interwoven with it, and the other beings as well.

The facts before the psychoanalyst might easily refer to this. I quoted to you yesterday the case described by Jung in his book, Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prosesse. It had to do with a woman who, having left an evening party with other guests, was frightened by horses, ran in front of them along the street to the river where she was rescued by passers-by, brought back to the house that she had left, where she had a love scene with her host. From the standpoint of Freud or Adler the case is easily explained on the basis of the love-drive or the power-drive, but this diagnosis does not reach the vital point. Its foundation is reached only by realizing that consciousness does not exhaust the cleverness, calculation, the artfulness of what penetrates man as intelligence, and by realizing that the laws of life are not limited by the laws of consciousness.

Consider this case. We can at least raise the question: What did the woman really want, after she had been one of the party, and had seen her friend depart for the health resort? She wanted the opportunity for what actually happened, she wanted a legitimate excuse to be alone with the master of the house. Of course this had nothing to do with what was in her consciousness, what she realized and admitted. It would not have been “proper,” as we say. Something had to be brought about that need not be avowed, and we shall reach the real explanation by allowing for her subconscious, designing intelligence, of which she was herself unaware. Throughout the entire evening she had wanted to bring about a conversation with her host. If one is less clever a poor choice is made of means, if more clever a better choice. In this case it may be said that in the woman's ordinary consciousness, which admitted scruples as to what was proper or improper, allowed or not allowed, the right means could not have been chosen for the end in view. But in that which was stored below the layer of the ordinary consciousness the thought was incessantly active: I must manage a meeting with the man. I must make use of the next opportunity that presents itself in order to return to the house.

We may be sure that if the opportunity with the horses had not offered itself, supported by association with the earlier accident, she would have found some other excuse. She needed only to faint in the street, and would have been brought back to the house at once, or she would have found some other expedient. The subconsciousness looked beyond all the scruples of the ordinary consciousness, taking the attitude that “the end justifies the means,” regardless of whether they would or would not harmonize with ideas of propriety and impropriety.

In such a case we are reminded of what Nietzsche, who surmised many of these things, called the great reason in contrast with the small reason, the all-inclusive reason that does not come into consciousness, that acts below the threshold of consciousness, leading men to do many things which they do not consciously confess to themselves. Through his ordinary outer consciousness the human being is in connection first with the world of the senses, but also with the whole physical world, and with all that lives within it. To the physical world belong all the concepts of propriety, of bourgeois morality, and so forth, with which man is equipped.

In his subconsciousness man is connected with an entirely different world, of which Jung says: the soul has need of it because it is related to it, but he also says that it is foolish to inquire about its real existence. Well, it is this way: as soon as the threshold of consciousness is crossed, man and his soul are no longer in merely material surroundings or relations, but in a realm where thoughts rule, thoughts which may be very artful.

Now Jung's view is quite correct when he says that modern man, the so-called man of culture, needs particularly to be mindful of these things. For present culture has this peculiarity, that it forces down numerous impulses into the subconsciousness, which then assert themselves in such a way that irrational acts—as they are called—and irrational general conduct result. When the “power-urge” or the “love urge” are mentioned, it is because in the moment that man and his soul enter the subconscious regions they come nearer to the realm where these instincts rule; not that they are in themselves causes, but that man with his subconscious intelligence plunges into regions where these impulses are effective.

That woman would not have gone to so much exertion for anything that interested her less than her love affair. It required an especial preoccupation for her subconscious cunning to be aroused. And that the love impulse so often plays an important role is due simply to the fact that the love interest is so very common. If the psychoanalysts would only turn more of their attention in other directions, cease to concentrate upon psychoanalytic sanatoriums, where the majority of the inmates seem to me to be women—(the same reproach is cast upon anthroposophical institutions but, I think, with less justice),—if they were more experienced in other fields, which is of course sometimes the case, if there were a greater variety of cases in the sanatoriums, a more extensive knowledge might be obtained.

Let us assume that a sanatorium was equipped for giving psychiatric treatment especially to people who had become nervous or hysterical from playing the stock market. Then the existence of other things in the subconscious mind could be established with as much reason as the love-urge, introduced by Freud. Then it would be seen with what detailed cunning, and artful subconscious processes, the man acts who plays the stock market. Then, through the usual methods of elimination, sexual love would be seen to play a very small part, yet the subtleties of subconscious acuteness, of subconscious slyness, could be studied at their height. Even the lust for power could not always be designated as being the primary impulse, but altogether different instincts would be found ruling those regions, in which man submerges himself with his soul. And if in addition a sanatorium could be equipped for learned men who had become hysterical—forgive me!—it would be found that their subconscious actions seldom lead back to the love-motive. For those with any thorough knowledge of facts in this field realize that, under present conditions, scholars are seldom driven to their chosen science by “love,” but by quite different forces which would show themselves if brought to the surface by psychoanalysis. The all-inclusive fact is that the soul is led from the conscious down into the subconscious regions where man's unconquered instincts rule. He can master these only by becoming aware of them, and spiritual research alone can lift them into consciousness.

Another inconvenient truth! For of course it forces the admission, to a point far beyond what the psychoanalyst is prepared to admit, that man in his subconscious mind may be a very sly creature, far more sly than in his full consciousness. Even in this field, and with ordinary science, we may have strange experiences. There is a chapter on this subject in my book Riddles of the Soul In it I deal with the strictures upon Anthroposophy, found in a book entitled Vom Jenseits der Seele,¹ and written by that academic individual Dessoir. This second chapter of my book Riddles of the Soul will be a nice contribution to thinking people who would like to form an opinion of present scholarly ethics. You will see when you read this chapter what kind of opposition must be encountered. I will mention, of all the points therein indicated, one or two only which are not unconnected with our present theme.

This man makes all sorts of objections to this and that, founded upon passages taken from my books. In a very neat connection he tells how I distinguish consecutive periods of culture: the Indian, the old Persian, the Chaldean-Egyptian, the Graeco-Latin, and now we live in the sixth, he says, “according to Steiner.”

This forces us to refute these misstatements in a schoolmasterly manner, for it shows us the only way to get at such an individual. How does Max Dessoir come to assert, in the midst of all his other nonsense, that I said we are living in the sixth postatlantean culture period? It may be easily explained if you have any practice in the technique of philological methods. I was connected for six years and a half with the Goethe Archives in Weimar, learned there a little about the usual procedure, and could easily show, according to philological methods, how Dessoir came to attribute to me this statement regarding the sixth culture period. He had been reading my book Occult Science, an Outline, in which there is a sentence leading to a description of our present fifth postatlantean culture period. In it I say that there are long preparations and, in one section, that events taking place in the 14th and 15th centuries were prepared in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. About five lines further on I say that the sixth century was a preparation for the fifth culture period. Dessoir, reading superficially, turned back hastily as scholars do, to the place that he had noted in the margin, and confused what was said about the culture period with what had been stated further back about the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Thus he says “sixth culture period” instead of fifth because his eye had moved backward a few lines.

You see with what a grand superficiality such a person works. Here we have an example of how such “scholarship” may be philologically shown up. In this literary creation such mistakes run through the entire chapter. And while Dessoir affirms that he has studied a whole row of my books, I could prove, again philologically, which ones of mine compose this “whole row.” He had read—and but slightly understood—The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for he devotes a sentence to it that is utter nonsense. And he read Occult Science, but in such a way as to bring out the kind of stuff that I have described. He read in addition the small work The Spiritual Guidance of Man, and the little pamphlets on Reincarnation and Karma, and Blood is Quite a Special Fluid. These are all that he read, as may be shown by his comments. He read nothing else. These are our present ethics of scholarship. It is important once in a way to expose, in such a connection, the erudition of the present day. Out of the long list of my books he chooses a very small number, and founds upon them, with quite perverted thinking, his whole statement. Many of our scientists today do exactly the same thing. When they write about animals, for example, they usually have for a foundation about as much material as Professor Dessoir extracted from my books.

Quite a pretty chapter could be written from observations of Dessoir's subconscious mind. He himself, however, in a special passage in his book, permits us to take account of his subconsciousness. He relates rather grotesquely that when he is lecturing it often happens that his thoughts go on without his full conscious direction, and that only by the reaction of his audience does he recognize that his thoughts have taken a line independent of his attention. He tells that quite naively. But only think! From this fact he embarks upon extended consideration of the many peculiarities of human consciousness. I have pointed out somewhat “gently” that Dessoir thus strangely reveals himself. I said at first: It cannot be possible that he means himself. In this case he must simply be identifying himself with certain clumsy lecturers, and speaking in the first person. It would be imputing to him a good deal to suppose that he is describing himself. But he really does exactly that. Well, in the discussion of such matters many odd things must be noted.

He disposed of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by one remark, with the addition of a sentence that is Dessoirish, but did not originate with me. The whole matter is crazy. He says at the same time “Steiner's first book, the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.” This forces me to point out that this book forms the close of a ten year period of authorship, and to offer this incident as an example of academic ignorance, and ethics. I know of course that although I have shown how incorrect his statements are, people will say again and again: “Well, Dessoir has refuted Steiner.”—I know it very well. I know that it is speaking against walls to try to break through what men imagine they have long since got rid of—belief in authority!

But this chapter alone will prove the difficulties against which spiritual science must struggle because it insists upon clear, sharply outlined concepts, and concrete spiritual experiences. There is no question of logic with such an individual as Dessoir, and a lack of logic characterizes in the broadest sense our present so-called scientific literature.

These are the reasons why official learning, and official spiritual trends, even if they work themselves away from such inferiority as the university psychiatry or psychology, are not in a position to make good because they lack the smallest equipment for a genuine observation of life. So long as it is not realized how far from genuine research and from a sense for reality that really is which poses as scientific literature—I do not say, as science, but as scientific literature—and often forms the content of university and especially of popular lectures—so long as this authoritative belief is not broken through, there can be no cure. These things must be said, and are compatible with the deepest respect for real scientific thinking, and for the great achievements of natural science. That these things are applied to life in such contradictory fashion must however be recognized.

After this digression let us return to our subject. Dessoir takes the opportunity to combine objective untruth with calumny in his remark regarding the little pamphlet Spiritual Guidance of Man. He feels it to be especially irritating that I have indicated important subconscious action of spiritual impulses by showing that a child while building its brain manifests greater wisdom than it is conscious of later. A healthy science ought to take its starting point from such normal effects of the subconscious, yet it needs something in addition. If you take up the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find mention of the Secret of the Threshold. In the explanation of this “secret” it is stated that in crossing the threshold into the spiritual world a kind of separation takes place, a sort of differentiation of the three fundamental powers of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. Remember in the part dealing with the Guardian of the Threshold, the explanation that these three forces, which act together in ordinary consciousness in such a way that they can hardly be separated, become independent of each other. If I sketch them, this narrow middle section (see drawing) is the boundary between the ordinary consciousness and that region in which the soul lives in the spiritual world. Thinking, feeling, and willing must be so drawn as to show this as the range of will (red), but bordering upon the realm of feeling (green), and this in turn borders upon the realm of thinking (yellow). But if I were to indicate their direction after crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, I should have to show how thinking (yellow) becomes independent upon the one hand; feeling (green, right) separates itself from thinking, will becomes independent too (red, right), as I sketch it here diagrammatically, so that thinking, feeling, and willing spread out from one another like a fan.

You will find this described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. That these three activities, which before passing the threshold border upon each other but work separately, interact in the right way and do not come into confusion is due to the fact that the threshold has, so to speak, a certain breadth in which our

ego itself lives. If our ego acts normally, has perfect soul health, then the interaction of thinking, feeling, and willing is so regulated that they do not collide with one another, but mutually influence each other. It is the essential secret of our ego that it holds thinking, feeling, and willing beside each other, so that they can affect each other in the right way, but do not mix in any accidental fashion. Once across the threshold into the spiritual world there is no danger of this since the three faculties then separate.

Certain philosophers (such as Wundt, for example), insist that the soul must not be described as threefold because it is a unity. Wundt, too, confuses everything. The facts are that in the spiritual world thinking, feeling, and willing originate in a threefold manner, yet in the soul on earth they act as a unity. That must be taken into consideration, and if it be claimed, as recently reported, that Anthroposophy recognizes three souls though there exists but one, and that Anthroposophy has therefore no reasonable argument—then the answer must be that the unity of man is not impaired by the fact that he has two hands.

But now we are considering the relation of the ego to the soul-forces that work within it, and their action beyond the threshold of consciousness in the spiritual world. (Drawing, middle and right). An opposite condition may be brought about if the ego has been weakened in any way. Then the threshold is crossed, as it were, in the opposite direction (See drawing, left). Then thinking swerves aside (yellow, left), mingles with feeling (green, left), and willing (red, left), and confusion results. This happens if thinking is exposed in any way to the danger of not being properly confined, so that it asserts itself unwarrantably in the consciousness. Then, because the ego is not working as it should, thinking slides into the sphere of feeling or of will. Instead of working side by side, thinking mixes itself with feeling, or will, the ego being for some reason unable to exert its normal power.

This is what has happened in the cases described by the psychoanalysts as hysterical or nervous. Thinking, feeling, and willing have swung to the opposite side, away from the healthy direction that would lead them into the spiritual world. If you have any gift for testing and proving you may easily see how it comes about. Take the case of the girl sitting by the sickbed. Her strong ego-consciousness was reduced by loss of sleep and anxiety. The slightest thing might cause thinking to leave its track alongside of feeling and to run over into it. Then thought would be at once submerged in the waves of feeling, which are far stronger than the waves of thought, and the result in such a case is that the whole organism is seized by the tumult of feeling. This happens in the instant that thinking ceases to be strong enough to hold itself apart from feeling.

It is seriously demanded of the human being that he learn more and more to hold his thinking apart from the waves of feeling and will. If thinking takes hold subconsciously of the waves of feeling something abnormal results. (See drawing: at the right is the superconscious, in the middle the conscious, at the left the subconscious). This is extremely important.

Now you may readily imagine that in this modern life, when people are brought into contact with so much that they do not properly understand and cannot appraise, thoughts continually run over into feelings. But it must be remembered that thinking alone is oriented upon the physical plane; feeling is no longer confined to the physical plane, but stands in connection, by its very nature, with the spiritual plane as well. Feeling has really a connection with all the spiritual beings who must be spoken of as real. So that if a man with inadequate concepts sinks into his feeling-life, he comes into collision with the gods—if you wish to express it thus—but also with evil gods. And all these collisions occur because a man is submerged with no reliable means of knowledge. He must so submerge if he spends more time in the sphere of feeling than in the ordinary sphere of reason. In the sphere of feeling man cannot emancipate himself from his connection with the spiritual world. Even if, in this materialistic age, he does free himself in the realm of the intellect, he always enters the region of feeling with inadequate concepts, and so he must become ill.

What then is the real remedy, and how are men to be restored to health? They must be guided to concepts that reach out to include the world of feelings; that is to say that modern man must again be told of the spiritual world, and in the most comprehensive terms. Not the individually adapted therapeutic instructions of the psychoanalysts are meant, but the spiritual science which is applicable to all humanity. If the concepts of spiritual science are really accepted—for not everyone takes them in who only listens to lectures, or reads about them—but if they are really absorbed there will be no further possibility of the chaotic intermingling, in the subconscious, of the three spheres of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing, which is the basis of all the hysteria and nervousness noted by the psychoanalysts.

For this, however, a man needs the courage to approach a direct experience of the operation of spiritual worlds, the courage to recognize that we are living now in a crisis that is connected with another (the established date being 1879), another crisis with painful consequences from which we are still suffering. I told you yesterday that many things must be considered from standpoints other than the materialistic ones of our own time, and I chose Nietzsche as an illustration.

Nietzsche was born in 1844. In 1841 the battle began in the spiritual world, of which I have already spoken, and Nietzsche was for three years in the midst of it, absorbing from it all possible impulses, and bringing them down with him to earth. Richard Wagner, born in 1813, took at first no part in it. Read Nietzsche's early writings, and notice the combative tone, almost every sentence showing the after-effects of what he experienced spiritually from 1841 to 1844. It gave a definite coloring to all the writings of Nietzsche's first period.

It is further of importance—as I have also explained—that he was a lad of sixteen when Schopenhauer died, and started at that time to read his works. A real relation ensued between the soul of Schopenhauer in the spiritual world and that of Nietzsche on earth. Nietzsche read every phrase of Schopenhauer so receptively that he was penetrated by every corresponding impulse of their author. What was Schopenhauer's object? He had ascended into the spiritual world in 1860 when the battle was still raging, and wanted nothing so much as to have the power of his thoughts continued through his works. Nietzsche did carry forward Schopenhauer's thoughts, but in a peculiar way. Schopenhauer saw when he went through the gate of death that he had written his books in an epoch threatened by the oncoming spirits of darkness, and with the struggle before him of these spirits against the spirits of light, he longed to have the effects of his work continued, and formed in Nietzsche's soul the impulse to continue his thoughts. What Nietzsche received from the spiritual world at this period contrasted strikingly with what was happening upon the physical plane in his personal relations with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche's soul life was composed in this way, and his career as a writer.

The year 1879 arrived. The battle that had been going on in the spiritual realms began to be transferred to earth after the fall of the spirits of darkness. Nietzsche was exposed by his whole Karma (in which I include his relations with the spiritual world), to the danger of being driven by the spirits of darkness into evil paths. He had been inspired by the transcendent egoism of Schopenhauer to try to carry on his work. I do not mean to say that egoism is always bad. But when Wagner rose into the spiritual world in 1883 the spirits of darkness were below, so he came into an entirely different atmosphere, and he became Nietzsche's unselfish spiritual guide. He let him enter what was for him the proper channel, and allowed him to become mentally deranged at exactly the right moment, so that he never came consciously into dangerous regions. That sounds paradoxical, but it was really the unselfish way in which Wagner's soul affected Nietzsche from the purer realms above, rather than the manner in which Schopenhauer's soul acted, he being still in the midst of the battle, up in the spiritual world, between the spirits of darkness and the spirits of light. What Wagner wanted to do for Nietzsche was to protect him, so far as his Karma permitted, from the spirits of darkness, already descended upon earth.

And Nietzsche was protected to a great extent. If his last writings are read in the right spirit, eliminating the things that have sprung from strong oppositions, great thoughts will be discovered. I tried in my book Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time, to show the mighty thought impulses, detached from all his resisting impulses.

Yes, “the world is deep.” There is really some truth in Nietzsche's own saying: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day divines.” So we must never try to criticize the wide regions of the spiritual life by means of our ordinary consciousness. The wise guidance of the worlds can be understood only if we can enter into that guidance, free from egoistic thoughts, even if we can fit the development of tragic happenings into the scheme of wisdom. If you wish to look into the heart of things you will come upon many uncomfortable places.

In future whoever wishes to evaluate a life like Nietzsche's will make no progress if he describes only what happened in Nietzsche's environment on earth. Our view of life will have to extend to the spiritual world, and we shall be pushed to this necessity by the kind of phenomena that the psychoanalyst today tries to master by such inadequate means of knowledge, but never will control. Therefore human society might be driven into regions of great difficulty if it yields to psychoanalysis, particularly in the field of pedagogy.

Why should this be? Consider the fact that thinking slips down into the sphere of feeling. Now as soon as a man lives with his soul in the sphere of feeling, he is no longer in the life that is bounded by birth and death or by conception and death, but lives in the whole world, the extended world. This represents the usual life span (See drawing, a); within the realm of feeling he lives also in the period from his last death to his birth into this present life (See drawing, b); and with his will he lives even in his previous incarnation (Drawing, c).

Think of the relation to pupil or patient of an instructor who wishes to proceed by the method of psychoanalysis. When he tries to deal with soul contents which have slipped down into the realm of feeling he lays hold, not only upon the man's individual life, but upon the all-inclusive life which extends far beyond the individual. For this all-encompassing life, however, there are between men no connections that may be handled by means of mere ideas. Such connections lead instead to genuine life-relationships. This is very important. Imagine the existence of such a connection between a psychoanalytic instructor and pupil. What takes place could not be confined to the realm of ideas which are conveyed to the pupil, but real karmic connections would have to be established because one is really encroaching upon life itself. It would be tearing the individual in question out of his karma, changing the course of his karma. It will not do to handle that which extends beyond the individual in a purely individual manner. It must be treated instead in a universally human way. We are all brought together in a definite epoch, so there must be a mutual element which acts as soon as we go beyond the individual. That is to say: a patient cannot be treated by psychoanalysis, either therapeutically or educationally, as between individuals. Something universal

must enter, must enter even the general culture of the period, something which directs the soul to that which would otherwise remain subconscious; and that which draws the subconsciousness upward must become the milieu—not a transaction between individuals.

Here, you see, lies the great mistake that is being made. It has a terrific range and is of immense importance. Instead of trying to lead them to the attainable knowledge of the spiritual world which is demanded by the times, the psychoanalysts shut all the souls who show any morbid symptoms into sanatoriums, and treat each one in the individual manner. It can lead only to the forming of confused karmic connections—what takes place does not bring to light the subconscious soul content, but simply forms a karmic tie between doctor and patient because it encroaches upon the individual.

You understand: we are dealing here with real, concrete life, with which it does not do to play, which can only be mastered if nothing is striven for in this field except what is humanly universal. These things must be learned by direct relations of human beings with the spiritual world. Therefore it would be useful if people were to stop talking abstractly as Jung does, saying that a man experiences subconsciously everything that mankind has been through, even all sorts of demons. He makes them into abstract demons, not realities, by saying that it is stupid to discuss their possible existence. He makes them into abstract demons, mere thought demons that could never make a man ill. They can exist only in consciousness, and can never be subconscious. That is the point: that people who give themselves up to such theories are themselves working with so many unconscious ideas that they can never happen upon the right thing. They come instead to regard certain concepts as absolute, infallible; and I must ever repeat that when ideas begin to become absolute, men get into a blind alley, or reach a pit into which they fall with their thinking.

A man like Dr. Freud is obliged to stretch the sexual domain over the entire human being in order to make it account for every soul phenomenon. I have said to various people with psychoanalytic tendencies, whom I have met: A theory, a world-concept must be able to hold its own when you turn it upon itself, otherwise it crumbles into nothingness. The simple fallacy, if you extend it far enough, is an example. A Cretan says: All Cretans are liars. If it is said by a Cretan, and it is true, then it would be a lie, which causes the saying to annul itself. It will not do for a Cretan to say “All Cretans are liars,” expecting the sentence to pass unchallenged. That is only a sample of absolutizing. But a theory should not crumble when turned upon itself. Just as the statement that all Cretans are liars would be a lie if made by a Cretan, so does the theory of universal sexuality crumble if you test it out by applying it to the subject itself. And it is the same with other things. You can understand such a principle for a long time without applying it vigorously, in accordance with reality. But it will be one of the particular achievements of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that it cannot be turned in this manner against itself.

• 1. Beyond the Limits of the Soul. (This book has not been translated into English. Ed.)

Today I shall have something to add to what was stated yesterday. I am reminding you of something which most of you have already heard from me. When the human being passes through death the physical body remains behind within the earth-forces, the etheric body dissolves within the cosmic forces, and the human being finds his continuing life, his existence, throughout the realms which lie between death and a new birth. I said that we can follow up the formative forces within the human being himself which project from one life into the other.

We know that man is in essence a threefold being, with three independent members; I mean, in regard to the formative forces of the physical body, the physical organization. We have the system of the nerves and senses, which naturally is spread over the whole body, but is located primarily in the head; we have the rhythmic system, including the rhythm of the breath, circulation, and other rhythms; then we have the metabolic and limb organization, which we consider as one because man's movements are intimately and organically connected with his metabolism.

You know that each human being has a differently, an individually shaped head. If we consider the forces which shape the human head—of course you must not think of the physical substances, but of the formative forces, of that which gives to the head its physiognomy, its entire character, its phrenological expression—if we consider these forces, we find them to be those of the metabolic and limb system belonging to the previous incarnation which have now become form. Thus we have in the head the transformation of the earlier metabolic organism, and if we consider what we possess as a metabolic and limb system in this present incarnation, these formative forces are found to be undergoing a metamorphosis and shaping the head for our next incarnation. Therefore, if we understand the building of the human form we can, as it were, look back, through a corresponding development of the idea of metamorphosis, from the human head of today to the metabolic system of the previous incarnation; and we can look from the present metabolic system forward to the head formation of the next incarnation. [See: Guenther Wachsmuth, Reincarnation as a Phenomenon of Metamorphosis, Anthroposophie Press, New York, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London.]

This conception, which in our spiritual science and in the spiritual science of all ages plays a certain role, these truths concerning repeated earth lives remain by no means without substantiation, for whoever understands the human organism can read them directly from it. But the present trend of natural science is as far removed as possible from embarking upon the sort of investigation which would be necessary in this case. Of course one cannot escape, through the study of anatomy and physiology alone, the foolish conclusion that the liver and lungs may be investigated by the same method. One lays the liver beside the lungs upon the dissecting table and regards them as organs of equal value, since both consist of cells, and so on. In such a way one can obtain no knowledge of these things, and two organic systems which are as different from one another as the lungs and liver cannot be studied by an external comparison of their cellular configuration, as they must be according to present ideas.

If we really wish to discover the pertinent details, methods must be employed through which a conception of these things may be gained. If the methods which I have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment are sufficiently developed, then the human power of cognition is greatly strengthened. I am repeating here certain statements that I have already explained in lectures given last autumn in the Goetheanum building: Our ordinary cognition is strengthened, through which we look out with our senses at our environment, and through which we also examine our inner life, where we meet primarily our thinking, feeling, and willing. And if we broaden our knowledge to the degree possible through these exercises which have been often described, then our view of the outer world changes, and in such a way that as a first result we realize the absolute folly of speaking of atoms in the manner of present world-conceptions. What is behind sense perception, behind its qualities, behind yellow and red, behind C sharp, g, and so forth, is not vibration but spiritual essentiality. The outer world becomes ever more spiritual the further we press forward in cognition, so that we really cease to take seriously all those constructions derived from chemical or other ideas. All atomism is thoroughly driven from our minds when we broaden our knowledge of the outer world. Behind the phenomena of the senses there is a spiritual world.

If, on the other hand, through such an enlarged vision we look more deeply into our inner life there arises—not that confused mysticism which forms a justifiable transition, pointed out and explained yesterday—but there arises instead, when inner cognition is developed, a psychic knowledge of the organs. We learn really to recognize our inner organization. While our outer perception is more and more spiritualized, our inner perception is, first of all, more and more materialized. Working in this inner direction, not the nebulous mystic but the real spiritual researcher will become acquainted with each single organ. He learns to know the differentiated human organism. We attain to the spiritual world in no other manner than by this detour through the observation of our own inner materiality. Unless we learn to know lungs, liver, and so forth, we do not gain on this detour through our inner being any kind of spiritual enthusiasm which, freed of the confusion of mysticism, works towards a concrete knowledge of the inner organs.

At all events, we gain a more exact knowledge of the configuration of the soul. To begin with, we learn to give up the preconceived idea that our psychic constitution is merely an adjunct of the sensory and nervous system. Only the world of representations is correlated to the nervous system, the world of feeling not at all. The world of feeling is connected directly with the rhythmic organization; and the world of will is adjusted to the metabolic and limb system. If I will something, a corresponding activity is induced in my metabolic and limb system, the nervous system being there only in order that concepts may be formed in regard to what takes place in the will. There are no nerves of will, as I have often stated; the division of nerves into sensory nerves and nerves of will is absurd. The nerves are all of one kind, and the so-called nerves of will exist for no other purpose than the inner observation of the processes of will. They too are sensory nerves.

If we study this thoroughly we come at last to consider the human organism in its entirety. Take the lung organism, the liver organism, and so forth. Looking at them within, you reach a point when you survey, as it were, the surface of the several organs, naturally by means of spiritual sight. What exactly is this surface of the organs? It is nothing less than a reflecting apparatus for the soul life. Our perceptions, and also what we elaborate in thought are reflected upon the surface of all our inner organs; and this reflection makes known our recollections, our memory during life. Thus, after we have perceived and digested something in thought, it is mirrored upon the surface of our heart, liver, spleen, and so forth, and what is thus thrown back constitutes our memories. And with a not very extensive training you may notice how certain thoughts shine back in memory from the whole organism. Very different organs take part in this. If it is a question of remembering, let us say, very abstract conceptions, then the lung surface participates strongly. If it is a question of thoughts colored by feeling, of thoughts which have a nuance of feeling, then the surface of the liver is concerned. Thus we can describe very well, and in detail, how the various organs take part in this reflection which makes its appearance as recollection, as the power of memory.

When we concentrate upon the whole soul nature we must not say: In the nervous system alone we have the organic correlate of the soul life, for the entire human organism is the correlated organization for the life of the soul.

In this connection much knowledge, once present as instinct, has simply been lost sight of. It still exists in certain words, but people no longer realize how wisdom is preserved in words. For example, if anyone in the time of the ancient Greeks had a tendency to depression when forming his recollections, they called it hypochondria, meaning a process of cartilage-formation or ossification of the abdomen where, as a result of this rigidity, reflection was brought about in such a way as to make memory a source of depression. The entire organism is involved in these things. That is something which must be kept in our minds.

When speaking of the power of memory, I drew attention to the surface of the organs. In a certain sense everything experienced strikes the surfaces, is reflected, and that leads to recollections. But something enters the organism at the same time. In ordinary life this is transmuted, undergoes a metamorphosis, so that the organ produces a secretion. The organs having this function are mostly glandular. They have an inner secretion, which during life is changed into force. But not everything is thus transformed into organic metabolism, etc. Certain organs take up instead something which becomes latent within them, and constitutes an inner force; for example, all thoughts connected mainly with our perception of the outer world through which we form images of outer objects. The forces developed in these thoughts are, in a certain manner, stored up within the lungs.

You know that the inside of the lungs comes into activity through the metabolism, the movement of the limbs, and these forces are so transmuted that during the life between birth and death our lungs are somewhat of a reservoir of forces which are continually influenced by the metabolic-and-limb system. We find that at the time of death such forces have been stored up. The physical matter naturally falls away, but these forces are not wasted. They accompany us through death, and throughout the entire life between death and a new birth. And when we enter a new incarnation these forces which were in the lungs form our head outwardly, stamp upon it its physiognomy. That which the phrenologist, the craniologist study in the outer form of the skull would be found forecast within the lungs during the previous incarnation.

You see how definitely, from life to life, the transmutation of forces may be followed up. When this is done reincarnation will no longer be an abstract truth alone, but will be studied concretely, as one can study physical things. And spiritual science becomes valuable only when in this way we penetrate into concrete facts. If we speak only in generalities of repeated earth lives, and so forth, then these are mere words. They have meaning only if we can enter upon the single concrete facts.

If that which has been stored in the lungs is not controlled in the right way it is squeezed out, as I said yesterday, much in the same way as a sponge is squeezed out, and then, from that which should form the head only in the next incarnation, there arise mainly abnormal phenomena which are usually called coercive thoughts, or described by some other term as illusions. It is an interesting chapter of a higher physiology to study in lung cases the strange notions which arise in the patient in the advanced stages of the disease. This is connected with what I have just explained to you, with the abnormal pressing out of thoughts.

You will see undoubtedly that the thoughts which are pressed out under these conditions are coercive because they already contain the formative forces. The thoughts which we ought normally to have in consciousness should be pictures only, they must not contain a formative force, and should not coerce us. Throughout the long period between death and rebirth these thoughts do coerce us; then they are causative, formative. During earth life they must not overwhelm us; they should use their power only during the transition from one life to another. This is the point to be considered.

If you now study the liver in the manner I have just explained in regard to the lungs, you will discover that there are concentrated in the same way within the liver all the forces which in the next incarnation determine the inner disposition of the brain. Again by a detour through the metabolic organism of the present life, the forces of the liver pass over, this time not into the shape of the head, but into the inner disposition of the brain. Whether or not someone is to be an acute thinker in the next incarnation depends upon how he behaves in the present one, in order that thus, upon the detour through the metabolism there may arise within the liver definite powers. But if these are ejected during the present incarnation they lead to hallucinations or to powerful visions.

You see now concretely what I pointed out yesterday more theoretically: that these things arise, having been squeezed out of the organs, then force their way into consciousness. Out of the general hallucinatory life, which should extend from the end of one incarnation into the next, they assert themselves within a single incarnation and, in this way, make their abnormal appearance.

If you study in the same manner all that is connected with the kidneys and excretory system you will discover that they concentrate within themselves the forces which, in the following incarnation, influence the head organization preferably in the field of affective emotions. The kidneys, the organs of excretion, bring forth in preparation for the next incarnation essentially that which has to do with the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense, but by a detour through the head organization.

If these forces are squeezed out during the present incarnation they display all the nervous symptoms connected with over-excitement of the human being, inner excitement specifically, hypochondriacal symptoms, depression, in short all the conditions connected particularly with this aspect of the metabolism.

In reality everything remembered with a strong ingredient of feeling or passion is also connected with what is reflected from the kidneys. If we consider lung or liver reflections we find them to be more often memory ideas, the memories proper. If we turn to the kidney system we see what sort of lasting habits we have in this incarnation; and within the kidney system are being prepared already the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense which, by a detour through the head organization, are intended for our next incarnation.

Let us study the heart with the same idea. For spiritual-scientific research, the heart is an extraordinarily interesting organ. You know that our trivial science is inclined to treat knowledge of the heart rather lightly. It looks upon the heart as a pump which pumps the blood through the body. Nothing more absurd can be believed, for the heart has nothing to do with pumping the blood. The blood is set in motion by the full agility of the astral body and ego, and the heart's movement is only the reflex of these activities. The movement of the blood is autonomous, and the heart only brings to expression the movement caused by these forces. The heart is in fact only the organ that manifests the movement of the blood, the heart itself having no activity in relation to this blood movement. The present natural scientists become very angry if you speak of this. Many years ago, I think in 1904 or 1905, on a journey to Stockholm I explained this to a scientist, a medical man, and he was furious about the idea that the heart should not be regarded as a pump, that the blood comes into movement through its own vitality, that the heart is simply inserted in the general blood movement, participates with its beat, and so on.

Well, something is reflected from the surface of the heart which is not a matter of memory or of habit. The life processes become spiritualized when they reach the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the heart are the pangs of conscience. That is to be taken simply, entirely as the physical aspect. The pangs of conscience which radiate into our consciousness are that ingredient in our experiences which is reflected from the heart. Spiritual cognition of the heart teaches us this.

But if we look into its interior we see gathered there forces which again stem from the entire metabolic and limb organism, and because everything connected with the heart forces is spiritualized that is also spiritualized within it which has to do with our outer life and deeds. And however strange and paradoxical it may sound to anyone clever in the modern sense, the fact remains that what is thus prepared within the heart are the karmic propensities, the tendencies of our karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart is the organ which, through mediation of the limb and metabolic system, carries what we understand as karma into the next incarnation.

You see, if we learn to know this organization we learn to differentiate and recognize its connection with the complete life extending beyond birth and death. We look then into the whole structure of the human being. We cannot speak of the head in relation to metamorphoses, for the head is simply cast off, its forces having completed their activity in the present incarnation. That which, however, exists in these four main systems, in lung, kidney, liver, and heart, after making a detour through the metabolic and limb system, passes over forming our head with all its predispositions and tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of our body the forces which will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.

The human metabolism is by no means a mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a retort which modern physiology describes. You need only to take a step in walking and a certain metabolic effect is produced. The metabolism then taking place is not simply the chemical process which may be examined by means of physiology and chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a nuance of morality. And this moral nuance is in fact stored up in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation. To study the human being in his entirety means to find in him the forces which reach over beyond earth life. Our head itself is a sphere, and this form is modified only because the rest of the organism is attached to it. Our head is formed out of the cosmos. When we go through death we must, with the spiritual and soul organization which remains to us, adapt ourselves to the whole cosmos. The whole cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle of the period between two incarnations—I have called it in one of my Mystery Dramas the Midnight of Existence—up to this time, if I may so express myself, we continue to spread out into our environment and what thus goes out from us into the surrounding world gives the astral and etheric configuration for the next incarnation.

All this, coming in essence from the cosmos, is determined by the mother. Through the father and impregnation comes that which is formed in the physical body and in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Being, passes over into an entirely different world. It goes over into the world from which it can then follow the path through the paternal nature. This is an extremely important process. The period up to the Midnight Hour and the period from the Midnight Hour on—both between death and rebirth—are really very different from each other. In my Vienna lecture cycle in 1914 I pictured these experiences in their inner aspect.¹ If we look at them more from the outside, we must say: The ego is more cosmic in the first half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares within the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly through the mother. From the Midnight Hour of Existence on up to the next birth, the ego passes over into what the old Mysteries called the netherworld; and on the detour through this netherworld it passes through impregnation. There the two poles of humanity meet as it were, through mother and father, from the upper world and from the netherworld.

What I am now saying was an intrinsic portion of the Egyptian Mysteries which came out of the old instinctive knowledge, at least so far as is known to me. The Egyptian Mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they then called the upper and the lower gods, the upper and the underworld of gods; and it may be said that in the act of impregnation a polar equilibrium of the upper and the underworld of gods is brought about. The ego between death and rebirth goes first through the upper and then through the lower world. In olden times there was not the strange nuance which many connect today with upper and netherworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper as the good and the netherworld as the bad. This nuance was not originally connected with these worlds; they were simply the two polarities which had to participate in the general world creation. Humanity in the direct experience of the upper world, viewed it more as the world of light, the netherworld more as the world of gravity. Gravity and light were the two polarities when expressed exoterically, and thus you see that such things may be described concretely.

In regard to the other organs I have told you that the overflowing of organic forces may become hallucinatory life, especially that which is squeezed from the liver system. But if the heart squeezes out its contents it is really the collected forces, ejected and brought into consciousness, which call forth in the next incarnation that strange urge to live out one's karma. If we observe how karma works, it may be said that a figurative description from the human side might represent it as a kind of hunger and its assuagement.

That must be understood as follows: Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking case: A woman meets a man and begins to love him. As that is usually regarded, it is somewhat as though you were to cut out a small piece from the Sistine Madonna, for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy and gaze at it. You have a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that. You must trace it backwards. Before the woman met the man she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons why the woman went from one place to another. There is sense in it and, although it is naturally hidden in the subconscious, there is a connection throughout, and we can, by going back into childhood, follow the way. The woman in question—and this is directed at no one in particular—follows the path from the beginning which culminates in the event under discussion. The human being at birth hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is the result of such an indescript spiritual feeling of hunger. One is driven to it, as it were, by the whole self. The human being has forces within him which lead to later events, in spite of the freedom which nevertheless exists, but acts in a different field. Well, the forces which manifest in this way as hunger, leading to karmic satisfaction, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out prematurely and enter the consciousness during the present incarnation, they may create pictures which produce a stimulus, and then frenzy results.

Frenzy is nothing but the outburst in this incarnation of a karmic force intended for the subsequent incarnation. Think how differently we must accustom ourselves to look upon world events, having understood these connections. People put questions such as: Why did God create frenzy? Frenzy has plenty of good reasons for existence, but everything working in this world may appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, due in this case to Luciferic forces—everything premature in the world is brought about by Luciferic forces—this precipitate appearance of karmic forces intended for a later incarnation produces frenzy.

You see, what is to be carried over and continued in later incarnations may really be studied in the abnormalities of the present life. You may easily imagine what an important difference exists between what remains in our heart throughout our entire incarnation, and the condition it will be in after it has gone through the long development between death and rebirth, to appear then in a new life in the outer behavior of a human being.

However, if you look into your own hearts you can see pretty clearly, though of course only in latency, not in a finished picture, what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general statement: what will take effect karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the receptacle in which the karma of subsequent incarnations is stored. These are the things which must be concretely regarded if we wish to practice genuine spiritual science.

You may imagine what enormous importance these things will attain when they are studied and made a part of the general education. What does present medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not recognize the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs! And it does not know that. It does not even discover a correct connection between excitement hallucinations and the kidney system, nor of the quiet hallucinations, those which simply appear and are present as I have just explained, and are, so to say, liver hallucinations. Hallucinations which appear as though crawling on a human being so that the victim wants to brush them off come from the kidney system. These are the excitement hallucinations which have to do with the emotions and temperament. From such symptoms a much more exact diagnosis can be made than by the means in ordinary use today. And diagnoses based upon purely external evidence are very uncertain in comparison with what they would be were these things studied with the above-mentioned symptoms in mind.

Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as an inner organ or organic system, contain the compressed coercive thoughts with all that we receive and concentrate in that organ through perception of outer objects. The liver has an entirely different relation to the outer world. Because the lungs preserve the thought material they are quite differently shaped. They are more closely connected with the earth element. The liver, which conceals in particular the quietly appearing hallucinations, is connected with the element of water; and the kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, belongs to the element of air. One thinks naturally that this ought to be the case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not with it alone. On the other hand, the kidney system—as an organ -—belongs to the element of air, and the heart system to that of warmth, being entirely formed out of that element. Hence, this element which is the spiritual one is also the one which takes up the predisposition of our karma into the delicate warmth structures of the warmth organism.

Since the human being as a whole stands in a relation with the outer world, you can readily realize that the lungs have a particular relation to the outer world in connection with the earth element, and the liver in regard to the watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for diseases which originate in the lungs. (This is of course to be considered in its broadest implications.) If you take what circulates in the plant, its circulation of juices, you will have the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver. Thus a study of the reciprocal relation of the organs with the outer world offers in fact the foundation for a rational therapy.

Our present therapy is a jumble of empiric notes. One can reach a really rational therapy only by studying in this way the reciprocal relations between the domain of the human organs and the outer world. Of course the voluptuous longing for subjective mysticism must then be overcome. If the aim is to reach no farther than the well-known “little divine flame” of Meister Eckhardt, and so on; if only the outpouring of inner delight is the aim, and the beholding of beautiful images without penetrating this element to the definite configuration of the inner organs, then important therapeutic knowledge cannot be acquired. For this knowledge is gained upon the path of genuine mysticism which advances to the concrete reality of the inner human organism.

We learn, by the detour through this inner knowledge, to discern the passage through the incarnations. In just the same way, when we regard the outer world, in penetrating this carpet of the sense impressions, we attain to the spiritual. We rise into the world of the spiritual hierarchies, which we did not reach through the detour of inner mysticism. The hierarchies are found through a more profound contemplation of the outer world. Upon this path there follow results which may be first expressed by analogies; yet they are not mere analogies, for there exist deeper connections and relations.

We breathe, do we not? And I recently reckoned for you the number of inhalations during twenty-four hours. If we count eighteen breaths to the minute we have in an hour 60 x 18, and in twenty-four hours 25920 inhalations in a day and night.

Let us take another rhythm in the human being, the rhythm of day and night. When you awake in the morning you draw into your physical and etheric bodies the astral body and ego. This is also breathing. In the morning you inhale the astral body and ego, and when you fall asleep at night you exhale them again; thus one complete breath in 24 hours, in one day. That is 365 such breaths in a year. And take the average age of a human being, 72 years, and you have approximately the same result. If I had not started with 72, but somewhat lower, I should have reached the same figure. That is to say, if you take the entire earthly life of a human being, and count each single day, each falling asleep and awakening, as one breath, you have then in an entire life as many inhalations and exhalations of the astral body and ego as you have in and out breathings in 24 hours. You make in the course of your life as many in and out breathings of the astral body and ego as you make daily in your in and out breathing of air. These rhythms correspond absolutely, and show us how man is fitted into the cosmos. The life of one day from sunrise to sunset, as a single circuit, corresponds with an inner sunrise and sunset that lasts from birth to death.

You see the human being becomes a part of the whole world organism; and I should like to close these considerations by pointing out to you an idea, asking you to think about it rather thoroughly, and to make it a subject of meditation. Science today postulates a cosmic process, and within this cosmic process the earth once arose. In the end the earth, when the entropy is fulfilled, will be consumed in cosmic heat. If today we form for ourselves a concept such as the Copernican, or any modification of it, then we take into consideration only the forces which formed the earth out of the primeval nebula, and human life really becomes a sort of fifth wheel on the wagon; for the geologist and the astronomer do not consider mankind. It does not occur to them to seek in any sense within mankind itself the cause of a future world organism. The human being is everywhere present in this cosmic process, but he is the fifth wheel on the wagon. The world process takes its course, but he has nothing to do with it. Consider it in this way: the world process comes to an end, ceases, is dispersed in space. It stops, and the causes of what ensues are always within the human being himself, inside his skin; there they find their continuation.

The inception of what is now the world lies far back within man of primeval ages. It is thus in reality. The books of ancient wisdom tell us this in their own language, and the saying of Christ-Jesus points to these things: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. All that constitutes the material world is dissolved, but that which issues from the spirit and soul and is expressed in words survives the destruction of the earth and lives on into the future. The causes of the future exist within us, and need not be investigated by geologists. We should seek them among the inner forces of our organism which pass over into our next earth-life first, but then continue into other metamorphoses. Hence when you search for the future of the world you must look within man. Everything external perishes utterly.

The nineteenth century erected a barrier against this knowledge, and this barrier is called: the law of the conservation of energy. This law carries forward the forces of man's environment; but all these will dissolve and disappear. Only that which arises within humanity itself can create the future. The law of the conservation of energy is the most false imaginable. In reality its result is simply to make mankind a fifth wheel in the creative process of the cosmos. Not the statement of the law of the conservation of energy is correct, but that other saying: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. These two are in diametrical contrast; and it is simply thoughtlessness when today certain members of this or that positive denomination wish to be believers in the Bible and, at the same time, adherents of the theories of modern physics. This is sheer dishonesty which claims today to be something culturally creative. This dishonesty must be driven from the field of creative culture—which it actually opposes—if we are to emerge from these forces of decline into ascending powers.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Inner Nature of Man, Vienna, Easter 1914, six lectures.

You will recall the studies in which we have tried to establish a relationship to the different premises and assertions of modern psychoanalysis. What mattered to me in those studies was to bring clarity into the concept of the “unconscious,” to show that the way in which the concept of the “unconscious” is commonly used in psychoanalysis is essentially unfounded. As long as one is unable to go beyond this concept, a purely negative concept, one cannot say more than that psychoanalysis works with insufficient methods of cognition on an especially challenging phenomenon today. Because the psychoanalysts strive to explore the soul and spirit and, as we have observed, even pursue this soul and spirit into a social life, one must admit that we have here a point of departure that is much more significant than what official academic science is able to offer in this realm. Because analytical psychology tries to intervene in life, however, through pedagogy, therapy, and soon, most likely, social and political means, the dangers related to this matter must be regarded with great concern. The question thus arises what it is essentially that the researchers of today cannot and do not wish to reach. They recognize that there exists a soul nature beyond consciousness; they search for a soul beyond consciousness, but they cannot raise themselves to cognition of the spirit itself. Spirit can in no way be grasped through a concept of the unconscious, because an unconscious spirit is like a human being without a head. I have brought to your attention that there are people who under certain hysterical conditions walk about the streets and see in other human beings only their bodies, not their heads. It is a definite form of illness if one is unable to see a person's head. Among contemporary researchers, there are some who believe they are seeing the whole spirit. Since they represent the spirit as unconscious, however, they show immediately that they themselves have fallen prey to illusion, the illusion that there is an unconscious spirit, a spirit without consciousness, if we were to cross the threshold of consciousness, whether in the right way, as we have always described it in our spiritual scientific research, or in an ill, abnormal way, as in the cases that are usually submitted to psychoanalysts.

When one crosses the threshold of consciousness, one always enters a spiritual realm; regardless of whether one enters the subconscious or the super-conscious, one always enters a spiritual realm. This is a realm, however, in which the spirit is conscious in a certain way, is developing some form of consciousness. Where there is spirit there is also consciousness. One must only seek the conditions under which the consciousness in question exists. Through spiritual science it is possible to recognize what type of consciousness a particular spiritual being has.

A week ago the case was presented here of the lady who left a social gathering and ran in front of some horses but then was prevented from jumping into a river and was carried back to the house from which she had fled. There she was brought together with the master of the house, because in some unclear, subconscious way she was in love with this man. In this case it may not be said that the spirit, which did not belong to this lady's consciousness, this spirit that pushed and led her, is an unconscious spirit or that it is an unconscious soul quality. Indeed, it is something extremely conscious. The consciousness of this demonic spirit that led the lady back to her unlawful lover, this demon is indeed much shrewder in its consciousness than the lady is in her muddle-headedness, that is to say her consciousness. When the human being in any way crosses the threshold of his consciousness, these spirits that become active and powerful are not unconscious spirits. Such spirits become consciously active and powerful in their own right. The expression, “unconscious spirit,” as the psychoanalysts use it, has no sense whatsoever. If I were to speak merely from my own viewpoint, I could just as well say that the whole illustrious company sitting here is my unconscious if I were unfamiliar with it. Just as little may we describe as unconscious the spiritual beings that surround us and that take hold of the personality under particular conditions, as was the situation in this case that I related a week ago. They are subconscious; they are not actually grasped by the consciousness that lives directly within us, but in themselves they are fully conscious.

It is exceptionally important to know this—particularly for the task of spiritual science in our time—basically because the knowledge of a spiritual world that lies on the other side of the threshold and the knowledge of truly self-conscious individualities is not merely an achievement of today's spiritual science but is actually an ancient knowledge. In earlier times it was only known through an ancient, atavistic clairvoyance. Today one knows it through other methods; one learns to know it gradually. The knowledge of actual spirits to be found outside of human consciousness—spirits living under different conditions from human beings but standing in continuous relationship to human beings, spirits that can take hold of the human being in his thinking, feeling, and willing—this knowledge was always there. This knowledge was always considered the secret treasure of particular brotherhoods, who treated this knowledge within their circles as strictly esoteric. Why did they treat it in this way? To enlarge on this question would lead at this moment too far afield. It should be said, however, that individual brotherhoods were permeated with the earnest conviction that the majority of humanity was not sufficiently mature for this knowledge. Indeed, this was the case to a large extent. Many other brotherhoods, however, which are called brotherhoods of the left, were striving to retain this knowledge, because such knowledge, when taken possession of by a small group, would give this group power over others who did not possess such knowledge. There have always been endeavors whose aim was to secure power for certain groups over others. This could be achieved by considering a particular kind of knowledge as an esoteric possession but using it in such a way that the power over something quite different was expanded.

In our day it is particularly necessary to have real clarity in these matters. As you know—I have enlarged on this in the last lectures—since 1879 humanity has been living in a very special spiritual situation. Since 1879, extraordinarily powerful spirits of darkness have been shifted from the spiritual world into the human realm, and those people who cling to the mysteries connected with this fact and retain them wrongfully within small groups could cause everything imaginable with these secrets. Today I shall show you exactly how certain mysteries that relate to present-day development can be used in a wrongful way. You must be careful, however, to consider coherently all that I say today, which will be of a more historic nature, with what I will add tomorrow.

You all know that for a long time attention has been drawn within our anthroposophical stream to the fact that this twentieth century is one that should bring about in the evolution of humanity a special relationship to the Christ. This relationship to Christ will come about in the course of the twentieth century, and already in the first half, as you know, will begin the phenomenon that has been suggested in my first Mystery Drama, in which for a large number of people Christ in the etheric will be an actual, existing being.

We know that we actually live in the age of materialism. We know that since the middle of the nineteenth century this materialism has reached its climax. In reality, however, polarities must converge. It is exactly this climax of materialism within the evolution of humanity that must converge with the intensification in human evolution that leads to truly beholding Christ in the etheric. One can grasp that just the announcement of the mystery of beholding Christ, of this new relationship with humanity into which Christ will enter, would arouse ill-will and resistance from some human beings. These would be members of certain brotherhoods who wished to exploit the event of the twentieth century, this event of the appearance of the etheric Christ, who wished to use it for their own purposes and not allow it to become general human knowledge. There are brotherhoods, and brotherhoods always influence public opinion by allowing this or that to be publicized by such means as would be least noticed by people. There are certain occult brotherhoods who spread the message that the age of materialism has almost run its course, that in a certain way it is already past. These poor, pitiable, “clever people”—in quotation marks, of course—spread the doctrine in numerous assemblies, books, and societies that materialism has exhausted itself, that one can already grasp again something of spirit, but they can offer people nothing more than the word spirit and single phrases. These people are more or less in the service of those who have an interest in saying what is not true, that materialism has been “ruined by bad management,” as it were. This is not true; on the contrary, materialistic thinking is in the process of growing. It will thrive most when people deceive themselves by believing that they are no longer materialists. The materialistic way of thinking is in the process of increasing and will continue to increase for about four or five centuries.

It is necessary, as has been frequently emphasized here, to grasp this fact in clear consciousness, to know that it is so. Humanity will come to a true healing when one works so thoroughly in the life of spirit that one knows absolutely that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is there for the purpose of extirpating materialism from the general evolution of humanity. A more spiritual being, however, must counteract materialism. I have spoken in previous lectures about what people of the fifth post-Atlantean period must learn to meet, that is, the fully conscious struggle against evil rising up in the evolution of humanity. Just as in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch the task lay in the struggle with birth and death, so we are now facing a struggle with evil. What matters now, therefore, is to grasp spiritual teaching in full consciousness, not to cast sand into the eyes of contemporaries as if the devil of materialism did not exist. He will thrive increasingly. Those who deal with these matters in a wrongful way know about the event of the appearance of Christ as well as I do, but they deal with this event in a different way.

In order to understand this one must keep one's eyes on the following. Now that humanity has become what it has in the post-Atlantean time, the phrase that many people expound in their comfortable smugness is completely incorrect: “While we live here between birth and death, it is a matter of surrendering ourselves to life. If later, when we have passed through death, we then enter a spiritual world, that will reveal itself in good time and for that we can wait. Here we will enjoy life as if there were only a material world; if one enters a spiritual world through death, such a world will then reveal itself, if it really exists.” This attitude is about as clever as the pledge that someone makes, saying, “As truly as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” It is just about that intelligent, but it is the attitude of many who say, “It will be revealed after death how things are; meanwhile it is not at all necessary to occupy ourselves with spiritual science.”

This attitude has always been contestable, but in the post-Atlantean period in which we live it becomes especially ominous, because it has been particularly urged upon human beings by the powers of evil. When man under the present conditions of evolution passes through the portal of death, he takes with him the conditions of consciousness that he has created for himself between birth and death. The person who has occupied himself under present circumstances exclusively with materialistic ideas, concepts, and sense impressions of the material, of the sense world, condemns himself after death to live in an environment in which only concepts defined during bodily life have bearing. The human being who has absorbed spiritual ideas enters the spiritual world legitimately, but one who has rejected spiritual ideas is forced to remain in a certain sense within earthly conditions until he—and this may endure for a long time—has learned there to absorb enough spiritual concepts that he can be carried by them into the spiritual world. Whether we absorb spiritual concepts or reject them therefore determines our environment on the other side of the threshold. Many of those souls—and this must be said with compassion—who have rejected or were hindered from absorbing spiritual concepts here in life are still wandering about on earth and, though dead, remain bound to the earthly sphere. The soul of the human being, however, when no longer separated from its environment by the physical body—which can then no longer prevent the human soul from acting destructively—becomes a source of disturbance within the earthly sphere.

Let us study what I would like to characterize as the more normal situation, in which souls under present circumstances pass over into the spiritual world after death, souls who wished to know nothing at all about spiritual concepts and experiences. They become sources of disturbance, because they are retained within the earthly sphere. Only souls who here on earth have already been completely permeated by a certain relationship to the spiritual world pass through the portal of death in such a way that they can be received in the right way in the spiritual world. They will be carried away from the earthly sphere in such a way that they can spin threads to those remaining behind, threads that are continually being spun. We must be clear about this: the spiritual threads between the souls of the dead and those of us who are bound to them are not ruptured by death; they remain, are even closer, after death than they were here on earth. What I have said must be accepted as a serious, significant truth.

I am not the only one who has this knowledge; others are also aware that this is so at present. There are many, however, who exploit this truth in a terrible way. There are misguided materialists today who believe that material life is the only one, but there are also initiates who are materialists and who spread materialistic teaching through brotherhoods. You must not be misled into believing that these initiates are of the foolish opinion that there is no spirit or that the human being does not have a soul that can live independently of the body. You can be confident that one who has been truly initiated in the spiritual world would never surrender himself to the foolishness of believing in mere matter. There are many, however, who have a certain interest in encouraging the dissemination of materialism and who make all sorts of arrangements so that a large proportion of human beings believe only in materialism and are totally under its influence. There are brotherhoods that have at their head initiates who have exactly this interest in cultivating materialism and disseminating it. These materialists are well served when there is constant talk that materialism has already been overcome, for it is possible to further some causes by using words with antithetical meaning. How this is handled is often most complicated.

What is it that such initiates desire, these initiates who know quite well that the human soul is a purely spiritual being, a spiritual being fully independent of corporeality? What do these initiates desire who, in spite of knowing this, shelter and cultivate the materialistic thinking of human beings? These initiates desire that there should be as many souls as possible who here between birth and death absorb only materialistic concepts. Through this, these souls are prepared to remain in the earthly sphere. They become to a certain extent fastened to the earthly sphere. Picture to yourself that brotherhoods are established that clearly know this, that are thoroughly familiar with these circumstances. These brotherhoods prepare certain human souls so that they remain in the realm of the material. If these brotherhoods then arrange—which is quite possible through their infamous power—that these souls come after death into the region of the power-sphere of their brotherhood, then this brotherhood grows to tremendous strength. These materialists, therefore, are not materialists because they do not believe in the spirit—these initiate materialists are not so silly; they know full well the spirit's position. They induce souls to remain with matter even after death, however, in order to make use of such souls for their own purposes. From these brotherhoods, a clientele of souls is thus produced who remain within the realm of the earth. These souls of the dead have within them forces that can be guided in the most diverse ways, with which one can bring about a variety of things and by means of which one can come to special manipulations of power in relation to those who have not been initiated in these things.

This is simply an arrangement of certain brotherhoods. In this matter, one can see clearly only if one does not allow oneself to be deceived by darkness and fog, does not permit oneself to be deceived by the belief that such brotherhoods either do not exist or that their activities are harmless. They are by no means harmless; they are, in fact, extremely harmful. They say that human beings should enter more and more deeply into materialism, that they should believe, according to the thinking of such initiates, that spiritual forces exist, to be sure, but that these spiritual forces are nothing other than certain forces of nature.

Diagram 5 Click image for large view

I would like to characterize for you the ideal that such brotherhoods hold. One must exert a little effort to understand the situation. Picture for yourself, therefore, a harmless world of people who are somewhat led astray by today's prevailing materialistic concepts, who have strayed away a little from the old, established religious ideas. Picture for yourself such a harmless humanity. Perhaps we can picture it for ourselves graphically.

We imagine here the realm of such a harmless humanity (larger circle). As I said, this humanity is not completely clear about the spiritual world; led astray by materialism, they are unsure how they should conduct themselves toward the spiritual world. They are especially unclear how they should act in relation to those who have passed through the portal of death. Let us assume that the realm of such a brotherhood is here (small circle, green). This brotherhood spreads the teachings of materialism; it is concerned that people think purely materialistic thoughts. In this way the brotherhood brings about the procreation of souls who remain in the earthly sphere after death. These would become a spiritual clientele for the lodge (see drawing, orange). This means that dead people have been created who would not leave the earthly sphere but would remain on earth. If the right preparations have been made, they can be retained in the lodges. In this way, therefore, lodges have been created that contain the living as well as the dead, but dead who are related to earthly forces.

The matter is directed so that these people hold sessions in the same way as was the case with the seances held during the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, about which I have often spoken. It may then happen—and I beg you to bear this in mind—that what occurs in these seances is directed by the lodge with the help of the dead. The true intention of the masters of those lodges, however, is that the human beings should not know that they are dealing with the dead but rather should believe that they are dealing with higher forces of nature. People are made to believe that these are higher forces of nature, that psychism and the like are only higher forces of nature. The true concept of soul will be taken from them, and it will be said that, just as there is electricity, just as there is magnetism, so there are also such higher forces. The fact that these forces are derived from souls is concealed by those who are leaders in the lodge. Through this, however, these others, these harmless souls, gradually become completely dependent, dependent in their souls, upon the lodge, without realizing what is subjugating them, without realizing the source of what is actually directing them.

There is no remedy against this situation other than knowledge of it. When one knows about it, one is already protected. When one knows it to the extent that the knowledge has become an inner certainty, a real conviction, then one is protected. One must not, however, be too lazy in striving to gain knowledge of these things. It must be said, though, that it is never entirely too late. I have often brought the following to your attention: these things can become clear only gradually, and I can pull together only gradually the elements to bring you complete clarity. I have often made you aware that, in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, many brotherhoods of the West introduced spiritism experimentally to convince themselves through this test that they had gone as far with humanity as they had intended. It was a testing to see how far they were with humanity. In these seances they expected that people would say that there are higher forces of nature. Then they were disappointed, these brothers of the left, that people did not say this but rather said that in the seances spirits of the dead appear. That was a bitter disappointment for the initiates; that was exactly what they did not want, because it was just this belief in the dead that these initiates wished to take from man. Not the activity of the dead, not the activity of the forces of the dead, but this thought that the forces derive from the dead, this correct, significant thought, this was to be taken from man. The brothers see that this is a higher materialism; it is a materialism that not only denies the spirit but wishes to force the spirit into matter. They see that materialism has forms in which it can already be denied. One can say that materialism has disappeared—we are speaking already about spirit, but all of them speak about spirit in a vague way. It is very easy to be a materialist when all nature has been made into spirit in such a way that psychism emerges. What is important is that one is able to cast one's glance into the concrete spiritual world, into concrete spirituality.

Here you have the beginning of what will become more and more intense in the next five centuries. These evil brotherhoods now are limiting themselves, but they are bound to continue their activity if they are not prevented, and they can only be prevented if one overcomes laziness toward the spiritual scientific world conception.

Through these seances, therefore, these brotherhoods betray themselves, so to speak. Instead of covering themselves, they have unveiled themselves through these seances. This showed that their scheme was not really quite successful. For this reason, the impulse sprang up within these same brotherhoods to strive to discredit spiritism for a time during the 1890s. In short, you can see how deeply incisive effects can be achieved in this way with the methods of the spiritual world. What we are dealing with here is the enhancement of power, exploiting certain evolutionary conditions that must emerge in the course of humanity's evolution.

This growing materialization of human souls, this imprisonment of human souls within the earthly sphere—lodges are also in the earthly sphere—will be counteracted. If the souls therefore haunt the lodges and are to be effective there, they must be confined to the earthly. This striving, this impulse to work in the earthly sphere through the souls, is counteracted by the significant impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. This impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha is also the healing of the world against the materialization of the soul. The way taken by Christ Himself is completely outside the will and intentions of human beings. No human being, therefore, no matter how knowledgeable—also no initiate—has influence over what Christ does, which will lead, in the course of the twentieth century, to the appearance about which I have spoken and of which you will find indications in the Mystery Dramas. This depends completely upon Christ Himself. Christ will exist in the earthly sphere as an etheric being. It depends upon the human being how he establishes a relationship to Him. On the appearance of Christ Himself, therefore, no one, no initiate however mighty, has any influence. It will come. I beg that you hold firmly to this. Arrangements can be made, however, for receiving this Christ event in this way or that, for making it effective.

These brotherhoods about which I have just spoken, which wish to confine the souls of human beings to the materialistic sphere, strive for the Christ to pass unnoticed through the twentieth century, for His coming as etheric individuality to be unobserved by human beings. This striving evolves under the influence of a quite definite idea, under a definite impulse of will. These brotherhoods have the urge to conquer the sphere of influence that is to come through Christ in the twentieth century and to continue further, to conquer it for another being, about which we shall speak later in more detail. There are brotherhoods of the West who strive to battle the Christ impulse. They wish to place another individuality who has never yet appeared in the flesh but only as an etheric individuality, who is of a strong Ahrimanic nature, in place of Christ.

All these measures about which I have just spoken regarding the dead and so forth serve in the end the aim of leading human beings away from Christ, Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and of securing the rulership of the earth for another individuality. It is a real struggle, not just something that I know of as abstract concepts or whatever but a real struggle. It is a real struggle that concerns itself with placing another being in place of the Christ being in the course of human evolution for the rest of the fifth post-Atlantean period and for the sixth and seventh. It will be the task of a healthy, honest spiritual development to eradicate such strivings, which are in the true sense of the word anti-Christian, to remove them, to annihilate them. This can be achieved, however, only through clear insight. This other being whom the brotherhood wishes to substitute as ruler they will call “Christ”; they will actually designate him as the “Christ.” What will be important will be to distinguish between the true Christ, Who, when He appears, will not be an individuality incarnated in the flesh, and the being that is distinguished from the true Christ by having never yet incarnated during earthly evolution. This other being is one who has only reached etheric embodiment, and he will be put by the brotherhoods in the place of Christ, Who is to pass by unobserved.

There we have the part of the battle concerned with counterfeiting the appearance of Christ in the twentieth century. He who observes life only on the surface, above all in outer discussions about Christ and the question of Jesus and so forth, does not look into the depths. This is the fog, the fumes with which people are deceived, diverting them from the deeper things, from what is the essential issue. When theologians debate about Christ, there is always in such discussions a spiritual influence from somewhere. These people then encourage quite different aims and purposes from those in which they actually believe consciously.

This is just the danger of the concept of the unconscious, that people are driven into confusion even concerning such circumstances. These evil brotherhoods pursue their aims very consciously, but what the brotherhoods pursue consciously naturally becomes unconscious for those who have all kinds of superficial discussions and plans. One does not reach the heart of the matter, however, when one speaks about the unconscious, for this so-called unconscious is simply on the other side of the threshold of everyday consciousness. It is in that sphere in which the knowing one can unfold his plans. You see that this is essentially one side of the situation, that it is really so that a number of brotherhoods take an opposing stand, brotherhoods who wish to replace the activity of the Christ with the activity of another individuality. These brotherhoods arrange everything so that they can achieve their purpose.

Countering this are brotherhoods of the East, especially Indian brotherhoods, who wish no less significantly to interfere in the evolution of humanity. These Indian brotherhoods pursue yet another goal. They have never developed the type of esotericism through which they could ensnare the dead into their realm, into the realm of the lodges. That is far removed from their purposes; they have no interest in such things. On the other hand, they also do not wish the Mystery of the Golgotha with its impulse to take hold of the evolution of humanity. They also do not wish this. It is not, however, that they do not wish it because the dead are at their disposal, as I indicated is the case with the brotherhoods of the West. They wish to fight against the Christ, Who will enter human evolution as an etheric individuality in the course of the twentieth century, not by substituting another individuality; for that purpose they would need the dead and these they do not have. Instead they wish to divert the interest away from this Christ. They do not wish to allow Christianity to become strong, these brotherhoods of the East, especially the Indian brotherhoods. They do not wish the interest in the true Christ, Who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, to flourish, the interest in the Christ Who had only a single incarnation for three years here on earth and Who cannot appear again on earth in a physical incarnation. They do not wish to make use of the dead in their lodges but something other than what were once simply living human beings. In these Indian, Eastern lodges, a different type of being is made use of in place of the dead used by the Western lodges.

When a human being dies, he leaves behind his etheric body; it separates from him soon after death, as you know. Under normal conditions this etheric body is assimilated by the cosmos. This absorption is somewhat complicated, as I have shown you in many different ways. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, however, and even after Golgotha, particularly in the Eastern regions, something quite distinctive was possible. When the human being after death surrenders such an etheric body, certain beings are able to inhabit this etheric body; they then become etheric beings with these etheric bodies that have been laid aside by human beings. In Eastern regions, therefore, it now happens that not dead people but all kinds of demonic spirits are induced to inhabit etheric bodies laid aside by human beings. Such demonic spirits that inhabit the etheric bodies laid aside by human beings are taken into the Eastern lodges. The Western lodges thus have the dead who have been directly confined within matter; the Eastern lodges of the left have demonic spirits, spirits that do not belong to earthly evolution but who creep into earthly evolution by occupying the etheric bodies vacated by human beings.

Exoterically this phenomenon is transformed through veneration. You know that certain brotherhoods possess the art of calling forth illusions. Because people do not know how widespread illusion already is in reality, they can easily be deceived by artificially called forth illusions. It is done in this way: what one wishes to achieve is clothed in the form of veneration. Imagine that I have a tribe of people, a related clan; I have arranged ahead of time as an “evil” brother the possibility that the etheric body of an ancestor is occupied by a demonic being. I say to them that they must venerate this ancestor. The ancestor is simply the one who had laid aside his etheric body, which was then occupied by demons through the machinations of the lodge. The veneration of ancestors is thereby brought about. These ancestors who are being worshipped, however, are simply demonic beings within the etheric body of the respective ancestor.

One can divert the world conception of Eastern people from the Mystery of Golgotha by working in these ways, as they do in the Eastern lodges. Through this their purpose will be achieved, that Christ as individuality, as He is intended to pass over the earth, remains unnoticed by Eastern people and perhaps by people everywhere. They therefore do not wish to substitute a false Christ but to cause the appearance of Christ Jesus to remain unnoticed.

To a certain extent a twofold struggle is thus waged today against the Christ impulse appearing in the etheric in the course of the twentieth century. Humanity is actually inserted within this evolution. What we see happening in individual cases is essentially only a consequence of what is transpiring in the great impulses of humanity's evolution. For that reason it is sad that people will be deceived constantly when the unconscious, the so-called unconscious, is working within them—be it some receding love affair or something similar—when, in fact, impulses of extremely conscious spirituality are passing from all sides through humanity but remaining relatively unconscious if one does not trouble oneself about them in one's consciousness.

To these things you must add much more. Human beings who have been honestly concerned with the evolution of humanity have always taken into consideration such things as we have characterized, and they have undertaken what was right from their point of view. Much more than this the human being cannot or is not permitted to do.

A good sheltered place for spiritual life, an exceptionally good sheltered spot, protected against all possible illusions, was Ireland, the Irish Island during the first Christian centuries. It was truly protected from all possible illusions, more than any other region on earth. This is also the reason that so many disseminators of Christianity in the early Christian centuries originated in Ireland. These disseminators of Christianity, however, had to work with a naive humanity, because European humanity, among whom they were active, was in those days naive. They had to take this humanity in its naiveté into consideration, but as far as they themselves were concerned, they had to know and understand the great impulses of humanity. In the fourth and fifth centuries particularly, Irish initiates were active in Central Europe. They began there, and their activity consisted in preparing what was to take place in the future. To a certain extent they were under the influence of the initiate-knowledge that revealed that in the fifteenth century (1413, as you know) the fifth post-Atlantean era was to begin. They were under this influence. They also knew that they had to prepare for a completely new age, that a naive humanity must be protected for this new period. What was it that was done at that time to protect this naive humanity, to build a fence around it, as it were, to keep certain harmful influences from entering? What was done?

Evolution was guided first by well-instructed and then by honest groups in such a way that gradually all ocean journeys were suppressed, journeys that in past times had been made from Northern lands to America. It was thus arranged that whereas in past times boats would cross from Norway to America for certain purposes (I shall say more about this another time), this knowledge of America would be completely forgotten by the European population, so that the connection with America was gradually obliterated. In the fifteenth century nothing was known of America by European humanity. The development was directed particularly from Rome so that for definite reasons the connection with America was gradually lost, because European humanity had to be sheltered from American influences. Especially involved in this process of protecting European humanity from American influences were just these monks from Ireland who as Irish initiates had spread Christianity over the European continent.

In ancient times quite definite influences were brought from America; in the age when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, however, matters were arranged so that European humanity was uninfluenced by America, knew absolutely nothing about it, lived in the belief that America did not exist. Only after the fifth post-Atlantean period had begun was America again discovered, as is familiar history. One of the truths with which you are most likely familiar is that what is learned in schools as history is many times a “fable convenue.” That America was discovered for the first time in 1492 is such a convenient fable. It was only rediscovered. It was merely that for a period the connections were cleverly concealed, as had to occur. It is again important, however, to know what the situation was, to know the true history. True history is that Europe was fenced in for a time and was carefully protected against certain influences that were not to come to Europe.

Such things show you how significant it is not to accept the so-called unconscious as an unconscious but rather as something that is extremely conscious and takes place beyond the threshold of everyday human consciousness. It is indeed important for a larger portion of humanity to learn about certain mysteries. I have therefore done as much as it is possible to do now in public lectures in Zurich. In Zurich, as you may know, I have gone at times as far as to explain to people the extent to which historical life is not grasped by human beings with the ordinary consciousness but is in reality dreamt, how the content of history is in reality dreamt by human beings. Only when people become conscious of this will health come to these concepts.

These are things through which one gradually awakens consciousness. The phenomena, the facts that will come about, will show us the truth of these things. One must only be sure not to overlook them. Human beings go blindly and slumbering through the facts; they also go blindly and slumbering through such tragic catastrophes as the present one. These are things that I would like to impress upon your hearts, today more historically. Tomorrow I shall speak about these things more explicitly.

I would like to add one more picture to these things. First, you have seen from the discussion what a tremendous distinction there is between East and West in the evolution of humanity. Second, I ask you to consider the following. You see, the psychoanalyst speaks about the subconscious, about the subconscious life of the soul, and so on. It is not so important to speak about such an indefinite concept of these things, but it is necessary to grasp what is truly beyond the threshold of consciousness. What is there? Much is certainly to be found down there under the threshold of consciousness. For itself, however, what lies down there is extremely conscious. One must come to understand what kind of conscious spirituality exists beyond the threshold of consciousness. One must speak of conscious spirituality beyond the threshold of consciousness, not unconscious spirituality. We must become clear that man has much about which he knows nothing in his ordinary consciousness. It would put the human being in a terrible position if he had to know in his ordinary consciousness all that goes on within him. Just consider how he would be able to go about eating and drinking if he were to acquaint himself exactly with all the physiological and biological processes that take place from the ingesting of food onward, and so on. All this takes place in the unconscious. There are spiritual forces at work everywhere, even in the purely physiological. Man cannot wait with eating and drinking, however, until he has learned what is really going on within him. So much goes on within man! For man, a large portion, by far the largest portion, of his being is unconscious, or to say it better, subconscious.

The strange thing is that this subconscious that we carry within us is taken hold of by another being under all circumstances. This means that we are not only a fusion of body, soul, and spirit, carrying within us through the world our soul, which is independent of our body; shortly before birth another being takes possession of the subconscious portions of the human being. This being is there, this subconscious being that accompanies man the entire way between birth and death. Somewhat before birth it enters man and accompanies him. One can also characterize this being as one that permeates man in those parts that do not come into his ordinary consciousness: it is a very intelligent being and possessed of a will that is akin to the forces of nature; in its will it is much more closely related to the forces of nature than is man. I must emphasize the peculiarity, however, that this being would suffer extraordinarily if under present conditions it were to experience death with man. Under present conditions this being cannot experience death with man. It thus disappears shortly before death; it must always save itself. It always has the urge, however, to arrange the life of the human being in such a way that it can overcome death. It would be dreadful for the evolution of the human being, however, if this being that has taken such possession of man should also be able to conquer death, if it could die with man and in this way enter the spiritual worlds that man enters after death. It must always take its leave of man before he enters the spiritual world after death. In some cases this is very difficult for this being, and all sorts of complications arise.

This is the situation: this being that holds sway completely in the subconscious is extremely dependent upon the earth as a whole organism. The earth is not at all the being described by geologists, mineralogists, and paleontologists; this earth is a fully living being. Man sees only its skeleton, because the geologist, mineralogist, and paleontologist describe only its mineral nature that is the earth's skeleton. If you knew only this much, you would know about as much as if you were to enter this room and, through some special arrangement of your capacities for sight, could see nothing of this honored company but the bones, the skeletal system. Imagine if one entered through the door and on these chairs sat nothing but skeletons (not that you necessarily would have nothing but bones—that I do not expect of you—but we will assume that man has the capacity to see only bones; he would be fitted out with some kind of X-ray machine). This is just what geology sees of the earth; it sees only the skeleton. This earth, however, not only consists of skeleton but is a living organism, and this earth sends from its center to every point on the surface, to every territory, special forces. Picture for yourself the surface of the earth (see drawing):

Diagram 6 Click image for large view

Here is the Eastern region, there the Western region, to take it only on a large scale. The forces that are transmitted from the earth are something that belong to the life organism of the earth. Depending on whether a human being lives on this or that spot on earth, his soul, this immortal soul, does not come directly in contact with these forces but only indirectly—the immortal soul of man is relatively independent of earthly conditions. The soul is only artificially dependent upon earthly conditions, as was shown today. By the circuitous path through this other being, however, this being that takes possession of man before birth and must leave him again before death, these various forces work particularly strongly. These forces are active in racial types and geographic differentiations in human beings. It is thus this “double,” which man bears within him, upon whom the geographic and other differentiations particularly exert their influences.

This is extremely significant, and we will see tomorrow in which way this double is influenced from various points of the earth and what the resulting consequences are. I have already mentioned that it is necessary for you to consider what I have said today with what will come tomorrow, because the one can hardly be understood without the other. We must now try to absorb into ourselves such concepts as become even more serious when related to the total reality, to that reality in which the human soul lives with its entire being. This reality metamorphoses itself in various ways, but how it is metamorphosed depends greatly upon man. Two significant metamorphoses that are possible become clear when one is aware of how human souls, depending upon whether they absorb materialistic or spiritual concepts between birth and death, imprison themselves on earth or come into the right spheres. In these matters increasing clarity must prevail in our concepts. We will then find increasingly the right relationship to the entire world. This will not occur in an abstract spiritual movement, but rather it must lie within us, in a concretely comprehended spiritual movement that reckons with the spiritual life of a number of individualities.

It is truly satisfying for me that such discussions—discussions that are also particularly significant for those among us who no longer belong to the physical plane but have passed through the portal of death, remaining our faithful members—that such discussions as these are fostered here as a reality, that they bring us ever closer to our departed friends.

We are now cultivating studies that I have associated with a striving for knowledge that is streaming in, without there yet being the adequate methods to achieve this knowledge. This has led us to distant historical perspectives, in relation to which I beg you to consider the following. With these things—as was also the case in what I said in my last visit with the same intention, from the same impulse—we are dealing with reports of actual events, not with some theory or system of ideas but with reports of facts. It is just this point that we must bear in mind, because otherwise it will be difficult to reach understanding of these things. It is not a matter of my developing historical laws or ideas for you but of presenting facts that relate to the intentions and purposes of certain personalities who are allied in brotherhoods. They are also allied with other beings who influence such brotherhoods, whose influence is sought by these brotherhoods. These beings are not human beings incarnated in the flesh but are beings that incarnate themselves in the spiritual world. It is necessary to bear this in mind, especially regarding such information as I gave yesterday, because with these brotherhoods we are dealing to a certain extent with different factions. You could recognize this already in last year's discussion. At that time I drew your attention to the fact that within such brotherhoods we are dealing with a faction that insists on absolute secrecy regarding certain higher truths. Opposed to them, with various shadings in between, are members of other brotherhoods who contend that, particularly since the middle of the nineteenth century, certain truths must be revealed to humanity, carefully and appropriately, even if to begin with only those truths whose revelation is most necessary. In addition to these main factions there are other groups with different nuances. From this you can see that what is intended, what is planted by such brotherhoods as an impulse into the evolution of humanity, often becomes subject to compromise.

These brotherhoods, who were familiar with the spiritual impulses effective in humanity's evolution, saw the approach of a significant event at the beginning of the 1840s, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century. This event was the struggle between certain spirits and higher spirits, the struggle that culminated in 1879 when certain angelic spirits, spirits of darkness, fell prey to the event that is represented symbolically by Michael conquering the dragon. When the brotherhoods felt the approach of this event, they had to take a stand, they had to ask themselves what could be done. Those members of the brotherhoods who wished above all to take into account the demands of the time were, to some degree, filled with the best intentions. It was they who undertook the erroneous impulse that wished to take into account the materialism of the time. It was they who thought it preferable to bring to the human beings who wished to know things only on the physical path something of the spiritual world; this would be communicated directly in the materialistic way of this physical path. The intentions were thus good when spiritism was thrust by them into the world in the 1840s.

At the time of this struggle, a time in which, as I have indicated, the spirit of criticism was to reign on earth—the intellect directed purely to the outer world—it was necessary to instill into the human being at least an experience, a feeling, that there is a spiritual world surrounding man. As compromises arise, so this compromise also arose. Members of these brotherhoods who maintained an attitude that totally rejected the revelation of certain spiritual truths to humanity saw themselves as being beaten by the majority, as it were, and had to consent to it. Wherever one is dealing with a group, and the will of the group prevails, one has to do with compromises. As is natural in outer life, however, if something is decided within a group, something is expected from the decision not only by those who have set things in motion for their own purposes; those who originally opposed the decision also expect this or that once the decision is made.

Well-meaning, spiritual members of the brotherhood thus held the erroneous attitude that by the use of mediums people could be convinced of the existence of a spiritual world around them. It would then be possible, they believed, to impart to man higher truths on the basis of this conviction. This might have occurred if what these well-meaning members of the brotherhood had surmised would occur had actually taken place, if what these mediums had brought to light had been presented as though one were dealing with the spiritual world around us. Something completely different took place, as I pointed out yesterday. What came to light through the mediums was interpreted by the people who took part in the seances as coming from the dead. What was revealed through spiritism was therefore essentially a disappointment for all. Those who had allowed themselves to be overruled were naturally most distressed that in the seances, at times rightfully, there could be talk about manifestations of the spirits of the departed. The well-meaning, progressive initiates did not at all expect that there would be talk about the dead. They expected that the universal elementary world would be mentioned. They were therefore also disappointed.

Such things are carefully followed by those who are initiated in a certain way. We have, in addition to the aforementioned members of brotherhoods, members of other brotherhoods, or at times portions of the same brotherhood in which minorities—and sometimes also majorities—could form.

We must take heed of other initiates, those who are called within the brotherhoods the “brothers of the left,” that is, those who exploit everything that is embodied as an impulse in human evolution as a means for power. It is self-evident that these brothers of the left also expected all sorts of things to come to light through spiritism. I explained yesterday that it was mostly such brothers of the left who made the arrangements for the use of the souls of dead human beings. For them it was of compelling interest what would come out of these seances. They gradually took over the whole field. The well-meaning initiates gradually lost all interest in spiritism; they felt in a certain way ashamed, because those who had been against the spiritism from the beginning told them it could have been known from the beginning that nothing could come out of spiritism now. Through this, spiritism came into the sphere of power, so to speak, of the brothers of the left. I spoke yesterday about such brothers of the left, who felt disappointed because they saw that, through the spiritism that they themselves had set into motion, could be revealed what they wished above all things would not emerge. Since the participants believed themselves influenced by the dead, it was possible in the seances to reveal through messages from the dead what certain brothers of the left were doing with the souls of the departed. In these seances, exactly those souls could manifest themselves who had been misused to a certain degree by the brothers of the left.

You must take into consideration that with these messages we are not dealing with theories but are relating facts that can be traced to individualities. When these individualities are united in brotherhoods, one individuality can expect one thing, while another expects something different from one and the same matter. It is not possible to speak about actualities in the spiritual world; it is impossible to seek there anything but a working out of the impulses of the individualities. What one does and what another does contradicts itself even as in life. When theories are spoken of, the ground for contradiction may not be broken. When one speaks of facts, however, then just because facts are spoken of, it will frequently be shown that these facts agree just as little in the spiritual world as the actions of human beings do here on the physical plane. I therefore beg you always to consider that it is impossible, when one speaks about these things, to speak about realities if one does not speak about individual facts. It is these with which we are concerned. It thus becomes necessary to keep the individual streams apart, to peel them apart.

This is connected, however, with a very significant matter that one must bring above all to one's consciousness if one wishes in the present to arrive at some sort of satisfying world conception. What I am saying is of prime importance, and although it is something abstract, we must lead this fact once before our souls.

If man wishes to build for himself a world conception, he rightly strives toward harmonizing the individual parts. This he does out of a certain habit, out of a habit that is most justified, because it is related to all that through many centuries has been humanity's dearest treasure of soul and spirit, to monotheism. What is encountered in the world as experience one wishes to lead back to an undivided foundation of the world. This is well justified, though not in the way that we usually believe it to be justified. It is justified in a completely different way, about which we will speak next time. Today I would like to lead before your soul only what is of principal importance.

One who approaches the world with the expectation that everything must explain itself without contradiction, as if it arose from an undivided foundation of the world, will experience many disappointments when he faces the world and its experiences in an unprejudiced way. It is traditional for the human being to treat all that he perceives in the world according to a pastoral world conception, in which everything is led back to the undivided, divine, primordial foundation; everything stems from God and therefore must be understandable as a unity.

This is not the case now, however. What surrounds us in the world as experience does not stem from the undivided primordial foundation. Rather it stems from spiritual individualities different from one another. Different individualities work together in all that surrounds us in the world as experience. This is how it is above all. We will speak next time about other ways of justifying monotheism, but this is how it is above all. We must think of individualities as being to a certain degree—actually to a high degree—independent of one another as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world. One cannot then require that what appears be accountable by an undivided principle. Imagine that this, schematically represented, is some experience (as far as I am concerned it could be the experiences from 1913–1918).

Diagram 7 Click image for large view

The experiences of human beings continue naturally in both directions. The historian is always tempted to assume an undivided principle in this whole process. This is not the case, however. As soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world—which can be crossed from either above or below (see drawing, red), it is one and the same—various individualities work together in influencing these events that are relatively independent of each other (see drawing, arrows). If you do not take this into consideration, if you assume everywhere an undivided foundation of the world, you will never understand these events. Only when you take into consideration what is to a certain degree the ebb and flow of events, the varied individualities who work with or against one another, only then will you understand these things in the right way.

This matter is indeed connected with the deepest mysteries of human evolution. Only the monotheistic feeling has veiled this fact for centuries or millennia, but one must consider it. If one wishes to progress today, therefore, with questions of a world conception, above all one must not confuse logic with an abstract lack of contradiction. An abstract lack of contradiction cannot exist in a world in which individualities are working together independently of one another. A striving for conformity will therefore always lead to an impoverishment of concepts; the concepts will no longer be able to encompass the full reality. Only when these concepts are able to take hold of this world full of contradictions, which is the true reality, will they be able to encompass the full reality.

What man has before him as a realm of nature materializes in a remarkable way. Different individualities also work together in all that man calls nature and includes in natural science on the one hand and nature worship, aesthetics of nature, etc., on the other hand. In the present evolutionary cycle of humanity, however, a fortunate arrangement has been found for human beings through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world: man can grasp nature with concepts that relate him to an undivided guidance, because only what is dependent upon an undivided guidance can approach the human being as experience from nature through sense perception. Behind the tapestry of nature lies something quite different, which is influenced from a totally different direction. This is blocked out, however, when man perceives nature. What man calls nature is consequently an undivided system, but only because it has been sifted. When we perceive through our senses, nature is, as it were, sifted for us. Everything that is contradictory in it is sifted out, and nature is transmitted to us as an undivided system. At the moment when we cross the threshold, however, and perceive the reality, bringing clarification into nature—the elemental spirits or influences upon human souls that could also be regulated by nature—one is no longer in a position to speak about nature as an undivided system. Rather one must become clear that we are dealing with influences of individualities who are either struggling with one another or supporting and strengthening one another.

In the elementary world we find spirits of earth, gnome-like beings; spirits of water, undine-like beings; spirits of air, sylph-like beings; and spirits of fire, salamander-like beings. They are all there. They are not there, however, to form a unified regiment. It is not like that. These various realms—gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders—are in a certain way independent. They do not work only as the rank and file from a single system, but they fight with one another. Their intentions have nothing to do with each other to begin with, but what then arises evolves through the most diverse working together of intentions. If one is familiar with the intentions one can see in what appears before us perhaps a working together of fire spirits and undines. One must never believe, however, that behind these beings stands someone who gives them a certain command. This is not the case. This idea is widespread today, and philosophers such as Wilhelm Wundt (about whom Fritz Mauthner unjustifiably said, “Authority by his publisher's grace,” though he was the authority for almost the whole world before the war) aim to gather together as a unity all that lives in the human soul, the life of thinking, life of feeling, and life of willing. They say that the soul is a unity and therefore everything must belong to a unity, to a common system. This is not so, however, and those strong contradictions so full of significance in human life, which analytical psychology has discovered, would not emerge unless our life of thinking beyond the threshold were not to lead us back to quite different regions where other individualities influence our life of thinking, our life of feeling, and our life of willing.

It is so curious! You see, if this is the human being (see drawing) and we have within the human being the life of thinking, life of feeling, and life of willing (see drawing, T, F, W), a systematizer like Wundt would not picture anything but that it is all a system. Meanwhile the life of thinking leads to one world (W1), the life of feeling leads into another world (W2), and the life of willing into yet another world (W3).

Diagram 8 Click image for large view

The human soul is there exactly for the purpose of forming a unity of what in the pre-human, momentarily pre-human world, was a three-foldness.

All these things must be taken into account as soon as we concern ourselves with the impulses for the historic evolution of humanity, these impulses that will be embodied in this historic evolution.

I have mentioned in the course of these studies that every era in the post-Atlantean age has its particular task. I have characterized in general the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period, indicating that it is humanity's task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world. We have frequently discussed what this means. It cannot be otherwise than that forces that appear at the wrong place appear as evil. They can be conquered for humanity, however, through the exertions of human beings in the fifth post-Atlantean period, so that with these forces of evil something good for the future of the evolution of the whole world is in the position to unfold. For this reason, the task for the fifth post-Atlantean period is a particularly difficult one. As you see, a great many temptations face humanity. When the powers of evil gradually appear, it is natural that man is more likely under the circumstances to give in to this evil in all realms, rather than taking up the struggle to allow what appears to him as evil to be put in the service of the good in world evolution. Yet this must happen: the evil must to a certain degree be placed at the service of the good in world evolution. Without this, it would be impossible to enter the sixth post-Atlantean period, which will have a completely different task. It will have the task of allowing humanity to live above all in a continuous contemplation of the spiritual world, of spiritual impulses, in spite of the fact that it is still connected with the earth. Just this task in the fifth post-Atlantean period, that of opposing evil, is connected with the new possibility of a certain kind of personal darkening for humanity.

We know that since the year 1879 the spirits of darkness who are closest to human beings, the spirits belonging to the kingdom of the angeloi, wander about within the human kingdom, because they were thrown out of the spiritual world into the human kingdom and now exist within human impulses, are working through human impulses. I have said that, exactly because of this, beings that are close to man work in an invisible way among human beings, and man is held back from recognizing the spiritual with the intellect through the play of forces of evil. This is again bound up with the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period, because precisely through this many opportunities are given to the fifth post-Atlantean period to lend itself to dark illusions and the like. Man must accustom himself to a certain extent in this period to grasping the spiritual with his intellect. The spiritual will already have been revealed. Because the spirits of darkness were overcome in 1879, more and more spiritual wisdom can flow down from the spiritual worlds. Only if the spirits of darkness had remained above in the spiritual kingdom would they have become a hindrance to this flow. This flow of spiritual wisdom they henceforth cannot hinder, but they can cause confusion and could darken souls. We have often described which opportunities for darkening are exploited. We have already mentioned what arrangements are made to prevent the human being from receiving the spiritual life.

Naturally, all of this cannot give rise to wailing or something of that sort but should strengthen the force and energy of the human soul to approach the spiritual. If in this fifth post-Atlantean period man can achieve what can be achieved through embodying the forces of evil in a good sense, then at the same time something tremendous will be achieved; then this fifth post-Atlantean period will know something for human evolution out of greater ideas than any other post-Atlantean period, yes, than any other period of earthly evolution. Christ appeared, for example, in the fourth post-Atlantean period through the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, however, can make this mystery its own through the human intellect. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, human beings could grasp that they possessed something in the Christ impulse that would lead them as souls beyond death. This became sufficiently clear through Pauline Christianity.

Something still more significant, however, will enter the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in which human souls will recognize that they have in Christ the helper to transform the forces of evil into good. One thing is bound up with this characteristic of the fifth post-Atlantean period, however, one thing that one should inscribe anew every day within the soul. It should never be forgotten, although man is especially inclined to forget this, that man must be a fighter for the spiritual in this fifth post-Atlantean time. He must experience that his forces will weaken if he does not continually hold them in check for the conquest of the spiritual world. Man is given his freedom to the highest degree in this fifth post-Atlantean period! He must endure this. To a certain extent the idea of human freedom must be the testing ground for all that meets man in the fifth post-Atlantean period. If the forces of man should weaken, everything could take a turn for the worse. Man is not in the position in this period to be led like a child. There are certain brotherhoods, however, which hold as their ideal to lead human beings like children as they were still being led in the third post-Atlantean period and in the fourth. These brotherhoods are therefore not doing what is right—they are not doing at all what should be done for the evolution of humanity: to direct human beings toward the spiritual world in such a way that acceptance or rejection of the spiritual world is left to the freedom of the human being.

This must be kept in mind continually by anyone who speaks of the spiritual world in this fifth post-Atlantean period. For this reason certain things in this period can only be said, but the saying is just as important as something else was important in another era. I will give you an example. In our time the communication of truths or, if I may express it trivially, the lecturing about truths, is most important. After that, people should find their direction in freedom. One should not go any further than the lecture, the communication of truths; the rest should follow in free resolve, follow as things follow that one makes as resolves from the impulses of the physical plane. This relates also to things that to a certain extent can only be directed and guided from the spiritual world. We shall understand this better if we enter into individual examples. In the fourth post-Atlantean period it was still so that other things came into consideration than the mere word, the mere communication. What came into consideration? Let us take a definite case: the island Ireland, as we call it today, has particular characteristics. This island distinguishes itself from the rest of the earth in certain ways. Each realm of the earth differs from the others through certain characteristics; that is nothing special. I will emphasize today only the relatively strong distinction between Ireland and the other regions of the earth. In the evolution of the earth, as we have seen in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, (see Note 3) one can go back in time, and various influences, various occurrences, confirm what can be gathered as facts from the spiritual world. You know from Occult Science what things existed when we refer back to what was called the Lemurian time, what has developed since the Lemurian time, how the various things have evolved. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that the whole earth must essentially be regarded as an organism from within which stream different forces upon the inhabitants of different territories. This out-streaming has a special influence upon the double, to which I called your attention yesterday. In past times, the human beings who were familiar with Ireland brought the particular characteristics of Ireland to expression in fairy tales and legends. I would like to point out that an esoteric legend was known that expressed the essence of Ireland in relation to the earthly organism. It was said that humanity was once cast out of paradise because in paradise Lucifer had misled humanity, which was then scattered across the rest of the world. The rest of the world, however, had already been there at the time when humanity was cast out of paradise. One therefore distinguishes—so it is said in this fairy tale, in this legendary representation—between the paradise with Lucifer in it and the rest of the earth into which humanity was expelled. It is different with Ireland, however; it does not belong in the same sense to the rest of the earth, because before Lucifer had set foot in paradise a likeness of paradise had formed itself upon the earth, and this likeness has become Ireland.

You should well understand that Ireland is therefore that bit of earth that had no part of Lucifer, to which Lucifer had no relationship. That which had to be separated from paradise so that the earthly likeness of paradise could arise would have hindered Lucifer from entering paradise. Ireland thus was conceived according to this legend as a separation of those portions of paradise that would have hindered Lucifer from entering paradise. Only after Ireland had been separated from paradise could Lucifer enter paradise.

This esoteric legend that I have presented in a very incomplete way is something very beautiful. It was for many people an explanation for the unique task of Ireland throughout the centuries. In the first Mystery Drama that I have written, you find what is so often told, how the Christianizing of Europe originated with the Irish monks. When St. Patrick introduced Christianity into Ireland the situation was such that Christianity led there to the highest devoutness. It gives new meaning to the legend about which I just spoke that Ireland—called Ierne by the Greeks and Ivernia by the Romans—was called the Isle of the Saints in those times in which the forces of European Christianity originated in their best impulses directly from Ireland, from Irish people who had been lovingly initiated into Christianity. It was called this because of the great devoutness that reigned within their Christian cloisters. This is connected with the fact that these territorial forces, about which I have spoken, ascending from the earth and taking hold of the human double, are at their very best on the island of Ireland.

You will say that in that case the best human beings must be in Ireland. Yes, this is so, but not in the world. Into every region other people wander and have descendants, etc. It is not so, therefore, that man is merely the product of the bit of earth on which he stands. It can very well be that the forces ascending from the earth oppose the character of the human beings there. One must not confuse what really develops within the human being with the characteristics of the earthly organism in a definite territory. Then one would simply open oneself again to the world of illusion.

What I have just suggested, however, that Ireland is a special land, we are able to say today. From this should emerge a factor, among many factors, that could lead today in a fruitful way to social and political ideas. One must take such factors into account. What I have just said about Ireland is a factor, and one must reckon with such factors. One must gather everything together, to be created into a science of the forming of human conditions on earth. Until this comes about no true healing can come into the arrangement of public affairs. What can be communicated from the spiritual world must flow into the regulations that one encounters. For this reason I have said in public lectures that it is important that everyone concerned with public affairs—statesmen and so on—should acquaint himself with these things. Through this alone can public servants master reality. They will not do it, or at least they have not done so up to now, but it is a necessity nevertheless.

In accordance with the tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean period, emphasis must be put today on speaking out, on communication, because before what has been said can become deed, resolves must be made as they are determined by the impulses of the physical plane. This was different in former times; then one could act differently.

At a definite moment in time in the third post-Atlantean era a certain brotherhood made arrangements to send a large number of colonists from Asia Minor to the island of Ireland. At that time colonists settled there from the same realm in Asia from which later the philosopher Thales originated. You may read in my Riddles of Philosophy (see Note 9) about the philosophy of Thales. Thales came from the same region, although later; he was born, of course, only in the fourth post-Atlantean period. Earlier, however, out of the same milieu, out of the whole spiritual substance from which later the philosopher Thales originated, the initiates had sent colonists to Ireland. Why? Because they were familiar with the characteristics of a realm of the earth such as Ireland. They knew what was indicated in the esoteric legend about which I have spoken to you. They knew that the forces ascending from the earth through the soil of the Irish island worked in such a way upon human beings that man was influenced little in the direction of intellectualism, little in the direction of egoism, little in the direction of the capacity to make resolves. The initiates who sent colonists there knew this full well, and they selected people who, through their particular karmic predisposition, seemed suited to be exposed to just these influences of Ireland. Today there are still descendants in Ireland of that old population who were at that time transplanted from Asia Minor and who were to develop in such a way that not the least intellectuality, not the least intellect, not the least capacity for making resolves, should develop but instead special qualities of the feeling (Gemuet) soul.

Through this was prepared far in advance what took place in Ireland as that glorious evolution of Christianity, the peaceful spreading of Christianity from which streamed the Christianizing of Europe. This was prepared far in advance. The countrymen of the later Thales sent people there who proved themselves equipped to become monks and who could work there in the way I indicated. Such things were often done in ancient times, and when you find historic colonizations described in exoteric history by today's unintelligent historians (who have, however, much intelligence—intelligence can be found in the streets today) you must always understand that in such colonizations lay a deep-seated wisdom that was directed and guided by considering always what was to take place in the future, by taking into account at that time the characteristics of earthly evolution.

This was another way of bringing spiritual wisdom into the world. This should not be done today, however, by just anyone who takes the proper path; it would be wrong simply to prescribe something for people against their will in order to partition the earth; rather one should proceed in such a way that people are told the truth so that they may guide themselves accordingly.

You see, therefore, that this was an essential progression from the third, fourth, to the fifth post-Atlantean period. One should keep this matter clearly in view and recognize how this impulse toward freedom must pull itself through all that rules over the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is exactly against the freedom of human feeling (Gemuet) that the antagonist conspires, the antagonist who, as I told you, is like a double accompanying man from some time before birth to death but who must abandon man just before he dies. If one is under this influence that works directly with the double, all sorts of things might emerge that can appear already in the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not suitable for this period, however, to give man the full possibility of achieving his task. This task consists in the struggle against evil, of transforming evil into good.

Just think what lies behind all the things into which man in the fifth post-Atlantean period has been placed. The individual facts must be illuminated in the right way. They must be understood, for wherever the double works intensely, one works against the essential tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period. In this fifth post-Atlantean period, humanity has not come far enough to evaluate the facts correctly. Especially during these past three sad years, humanity has not been at all ready to assess the facts in a correct way.

Let us take a fact, however, that is seemingly far afield from what I have discussed today. This is the fact that I wish to present to you: in a large iron factory, 10,000 tons of molten iron are to be loaded onto trains. For this work a definite number of workmen naturally would have to be engaged. Seventy-five men must do the work, and it emerged that each one could load twelve and a half tons a day; thus from seventy-five men each, twelve and a half tons per day. There was one man, Taylor, who put more emphasis on the double than on what must be won for humanity in the sense of progress, on what must be won for the human spirit in the fifth post-Atlantean period. This man first asked the factory owners if they did not believe that a single man could load much more than twelve and a half tons per day. The factory owners supposed that a workman could load at most eighteen tons. Then Taylor said, “We shall experiment.” Taylor began to experiment with the workmen. The machine standard was applied through this to human social life. These experiments were to be done on human beings. He tested to see whether it was really so, as the practical factory owners said, that a man could load at most eighteen tons a day. He arranged for rest periods, which he calculated according to physiology; men in these intervals would recoup as many forces as they had exerted. Naturally it turned out that under these conditions the results differed from one workman to another. Then he worked with arithmetic means. You know that it does not matter if one uses arithmetic means in mechanics, but with human beings one cannot employ arithmetic means, because each man has his justification for existence. Taylor employed arithmetic means, however: he selected those workers who recovered completely during these rational pauses and he granted them such pauses. The others, who were unable to regain their forces during these rest periods, were simply discarded. It was discovered by experimenting with people in this way that the selected ones, those selected when they completely recuperated in the pauses, could each load forty-seven and a half tons.

He applied the mechanics of Darwin's theory to the life of workers: away with the unfit, the fit chosen by selection! The fit are those who, fully exploiting the pauses, could load not a maximum of eighteen tons, as had been assumed earlier, but rather forty-seven and a half tons. In this way, the workman could also be satisfied, because immense savings were made and the wages for each workman could be raised by sixty per cent. The chosen ones are thus made, those most fit in the struggle for existence, who have been chosen in this way through selection; one has very satisfied people in addition. The unfit may die of starvation, however!

This is the beginning of a principle! Such matters are observed little, because they are not illuminated with larger perspectives; one must always illuminate such matters with larger perspectives. Today it is only erroneous ideas of natural science that are applied to human life. The impulse remains, however, and the impulse will then be applied to the esoteric truths that will come in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Darwinism contains no esoteric truths, but its application would lead to great monstrosities, this application of the Darwinian view to direct experimentation with human beings. When esoteric truths are added to this, however, as they will have to be revealed in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean era, an unbelievable power over human beings will certainly be gained in this way, through always selecting the fit. It is not only that the fit will be selected, however, but the striving for a certain esoteric invention to make the fit always more fit, through which a tremendous exploitation of power could be achieved, would oppose precisely the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Regarding the relationships that I have just presented to you, I wished to show only the beginnings of intentions that encompass the future and to show the need to have these things illuminated from higher perspectives. Next time it will be our task to point to the three or four great truths to which the fifth post-Atlantean period must arrive. It will then be shown how these truths can be misused if they are not applied in the sense of the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period but when instead the demands of the double are fulfilled. It is these demands of the double that are supported by the brotherhoods that wish to set another being in the place of the Christ.

Today I would like to connect and amplify individual observations that we have made in the course of our studies with this or that detail. If you follow the times attentively, you will have been able to notice here and there that, in the thoughts, experiences, and impulses that in the past man felt had “brought him so wonderfully far,” he can no longer find what can help him reach into the future. Yesterday, one of our members pressed into my hands last week's issue of the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated November 21, 1917. In that journal is an article by a very learned gentleman—it must have been a very learned gentleman, because he had in front of his name not only the title Doctor of Philosophy but also the title Doctor of Theology, and in addition there is also Professor. He is thus Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy. He is therefore, of course, a very clever man! He has written an article that deals with all sorts of contemporary spiritual needs. In the course of this article there is a section that is expressed in the following way: “The experience of being that lies behind things has no need of pious consecration or religious estimation, because it is in itself religion. Here it is not a matter of the feeling and comprehension of one's own individual values but of the great Irrational that is hidden behind all existence. He who touches it so that the divine spark leaps across undergoes an experience that has primary character, the ‘primeval experience.’ To experience this, along with all that is moved by the same stream of life, endows him with, to use a word beloved in modern times, a cosmic feeling for life.”

Forgive me, dear friends. I am not reading this to arouse within you some particularly lofty mental pictures to correspond with these washed-out sentences but rather to lead before you a symbol of our time. “A cosmic religiosity is in the process of growing among us, and the extent of the longing for it is shown by the perceptible growth of the theosophical movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses.” It is indeed difficult to stagger over all these washed-out concepts, but is it not nevertheless true that as a symbol of our time this is quite peculiar? Further on he says, “In this cosmic piety, it is not a question of mysticism that begins with rejection of the world . . .” etc.

One cannot conceive of anything clever in these sentences! Since the Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy represents it, however, one must naturally consider it as something clever. Otherwise one would perceive it as something that is brought falteringly to expression in an unclear tirade, reminding one of the learned gentleman who can no longer continue on the path on which he has traveled and who feels obliged to point to something that is there, something that apparently seems to him not completely hopeless. One should not be at all delighted with these utterances; such things must not lull us into slumber just because we notice that from some direction someone has again observed that something lies behind the spiritual scientific movement. That would indeed be very harmful, because those who make these remarks are often the same ones who feel satisfied with such utterances, who do not go further. They even point with these washed-out things to an event that will enter the world, and this would thereby belong precisely to those who are altogether too comfortable to become involved in something that requires earnest study of spiritual science. This event must really break in and take hold of human feeling (Gemuet) if what is bound up with reality is to flow into the time-stream of evolution so that healing forces are able to rise from it. It is naturally easier to speak of the “surging waves” and of “cosmic feelings” than to enter seriously into the things that are demanded by the signs of the time and that must be made known to humanity. For this reason it seems to me necessary to say things here that have been stated previously in public lectures but that will be spoken of further, now with a strong emphasis on the difference between what is worn out, what is no longer capable of life, which has led to these catastrophic times, and what must really take hold of the human soul if any progress is to be made.

With the old wisdom by which human beings have reached the present, thousands of congresses can be held—world congresses and national congresses, and whatever—thousands of societies can be founded, but one must be clear that these thousands of congresses, thousands of societies, will not be effective unless the spiritual life-blood of the science of the spirit flows through them. What man is lacking today is the courage to enter into the real exploration of the spiritual world. It sounds strange, but it must be said that all that is needed to begin with is to circulate to a broad public, for example, the small brochure, Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. Something new would be achieved through this in calling forth knowledge of man's connection with the cosmic order. Attention is drawn precisely to such knowledge in this brochure. Concrete attention is drawn to the way in which the earth annually alters its conditions of consciousness and the like. What is said in this lecture and in this brochure is said with particularly full consideration of the needs of our time. To receive this would be of greater significance than all the wishy-washy talk of “cosmic feeling” and of entering some sort of “surging waves,” or what have you. I have only quoted these things to you, because to reword them is impossible for me, as they are too senseless in their formulation.

One is not hindered, of course, by being attentive to these things, because they are important and essential. What I wish to draw to your attention is that we must not “mystify” ourselves, that we must be clear. Utter clarity is necessary if we wish to work for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I wish to point out once again that what is essential for humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean period is to enter into a special treatment of great issues of life that have been obscured in a certain way through the wisdom of the past. I have already pointed this out to you. One great issue of life can be characterized in the following way: an attempt will have to be made to place the spiritual etheric in the service of outer practical life. I have brought to your attention that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to solve the problem of how human moods, the motions of human moods, allow themselves to be translated into wave motions on machines, how man must be brought into connection with what must become more and more mechanical. For that reason I called your attention a week ago to how superficially this mechanizing will be accepted by a certain portion of the surface of the earth. I presented an example to show how, following the American way of thinking, an attempt was made to extend the mechanical over human life itself. I presented the example of the pauses that were to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer tons, up to fifty tons could be loaded by a number of workmen. For this one need only carry the Darwinian principle of selection actually into life.

In such situations the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution.

I have deliberately drawn attention often, even in public lectures, to the fact that the consciousness of the human being is connected with the forces of disintegration. On two occasions I have said in public lectures in Basel that within our nervous system we are dying. These forces, these forces of dying away, will become more and more powerful. The bond will be established between these forces dying within man, which are related to the electric, magnetic forces, and the outer mechanical forces. Man will to a certain extent become his intentions, he will be able to direct his thoughts into the mechanical forces. Hitherto undiscovered forces within human nature will be discovered, forces that will work on outer electric and magnetic forces. The first problem is to bring together human beings with the mechanical, which will have to prevail increasingly in the future. The second problem consists in calling upon the help of the spiritual circumstances. This can only be done, however, when the time is ripe and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way. The time must come, however, when the spiritual forces are made mobile enough to master life in relation to illness and death. Medicine will become spiritualized, intensely spiritualized. Of all these things, caricatures are being made from certain directions, but these caricatures show only what really must come.

Again it is a question of whether this problem is attacked from the same direction to which I pointed regarding the other problem, in an outer egotistical or group-egotistical way.

The third problem is to introduce human thoughts into the actual evolution of the human species, in birth and education. I have pointed out that conferences have already been held on how in the future a materialistic science would be founded regarding conception and the relationships between man and woman. All these things indicate to us that something most significant is in the process of evolving. It is still easy today to say, “Why is it that people who know about these things in the right sense do not apply them?” In the future it will become clear just what is involved in this application and which forces are still actively hindering the foundation of large-scale spiritualized medicine or spiritualized national economy. No more can be accomplished today than to talk about these things, until people have enough understanding of them, people who are inclined to accept them in a selfless way. Today many people believe that they are able to do this, but many circumstances of life hinder what they are able to do. These life circumstances can be overcome in the right way only when a deeper and deeper understanding gains ground and when there is willingness to renounce, at least for a time, the immediate, practical application of these things on a larger scale.

These things have all developed in such a way that one can say that little has been retained of what was once hidden behind the ancient, atavistic strivings until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is much talk today about the ancient alchemy. The proceedings of the procreation of Homunculus are also recalled at times, and so on, but what is spoken of here is for the most part groundless. If one once understood what can be said in connection with the Homunculus scene in Goethe's Faust, one would be better informed about these things, because what is essential is that, from the sixteenth century on, a fog has been spread over these things; they have receded in human consciousness.

The law that governs these things is the same as the law that regulates within the human being the rhythmical alternation of waking and sleeping. Just as man cannot rise above sleep, so, in regard to spiritual evolution, he cannot disregard the sleeping of spiritual science that has marked the centuries since the sixteenth century. It was necessary for humanity to sleep through the spiritual for a time in order that it could appear again in another form. One must comprehend such necessities, but one must also not allow oneself to be depressed by them. For this reason one must be very clear that the time of awakening has come and that one must take an active part in this awakening, that events often hurry ahead of knowledge and one will not understand the events that take place around us unless one accustoms oneself to knowledge.

I have repeatedly pointed out to you that certain egotistical groups are striving esoterically, and their influence is active in the ways that I have often indicated in these studies. First of all, it was necessary that a certain knowledge should recede within humanity, a knowledge that is designated today with such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, and so on. This knowledge had to recede, fall into a sleep, so that man would no longer have the possibility of drawing what pertains to the soul out of observation of nature but would have to become more dependent on himself. Through this he would awaken the forces within him, for it was necessary that certain things appear first in abstract form and later take on again concrete, spiritual form.

Three ideas have gradually arisen in the course of evolving during the last centuries, ideas which, in the way they have entered human life, are essentially abstract. Kant has named them falsely, while Goethe has named them correctly. These three ideas Kant called God, freedom, and immortality; Goethe called them correctly God, virtue, and immortality. When one sees the things that are hidden behind these three words, it is clear that they are exactly the same as what modern man views more abstractly but that were viewed more concretely until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the ancient atavistic sense they were also viewed more materially. They experimented in the ancient way, indeed, they sought at that time with alchemical experiments to observe the processes that showed the working of God in process. They tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Behind all these things is hidden something concrete. This Philosopher's Stone was to present human beings with the possibility of becoming virtuous, but it was thought of more materially. It was to lead human beings to experience immortality, to put them into a certain relationship to the universe, through which they would experience within themselves what goes beyond birth and death. All these washed out ideas with which one seeks today to grasp the ancient things no longer coincide with what was intended at that time. These things have become simply abstract, and modern humanity speaks from abstract ideas. They have wished to understand God through abstract theology; virtue is also regarded as something purely abstract. The more abstract the idea, the better modern humanity likes to use it in speaking about these things, even immortality. One speculates about what could be immortal in man. I spoke about this in my first Basel lecture, saying that the science that occupies itself today philosophically with questions about immortality is a starved science, an undernourished science. This is only another form of expression for abstract thinking in which such matters are pursued.

Certain brotherhoods in the West, however, have still preserved a relationship to the old traditions and have tried to apply them in a corresponding way, to place them in the service of a certain group egoism. It is really necessary for these things to be pointed out. Naturally, when these things are spoken of in public, from this comer of the West, in exoteric literature, then God, virtue or freedom, and immortality are also talked about in an abstract way. It is only in the circle of the initiates that it is known that all of this is only speculation, that these are all abstractions. For themselves, they seek what is being striven for in the abstract formulas of God, virtue, and immortality in something much more concrete, and for this reason, these words are translated for the initiates in their respective schools. God is translated as gold, and one seeks behind the mystery to come to what can be described as the mystery of gold. Gold, representing what is sun-like within the earth's crust, is indeed something within which is imbedded a most significant mystery. In fact, gold stands materially in the same relationship to other substances as within thinking the thought of God stands to other thoughts. It only matters in which way this mystery is understood.

This relates to the egotistical group exploitation of the mystery of birth. One is striving to wrestle here with real cosmic understanding. Modern man has completely replaced this cosmic understanding with a terrestrial understanding. When man today wishes to examine, for example, how the embryo in animals and man develops, he examines with a microscope what exists precisely in the place on earth onto which he has cast his microscopic eye; he regards this as what is to be examined. It cannot be a matter only of this, however. It will be discovered—and certain circles are coming close to this in their discoveries—that the active forces are not in what one meets with the microscopic eye but are rather within what streams in from the cosmos, from the constellations in the cosmos. When an embryo arises, it arises because into the living being in which the embryo is being formed are working forces from all directions of the cosmos, cosmic forces. When a fertilization takes place, what will develop out of the fertilization is dependent upon which cosmic forces are active.

Diagram 9 Click image for large view

There is one thing that will come to be understood today that is not yet understood. Today one looks at some living being, let us say a chicken. When in this living being a new embryo arises, the biologist examines how, so to speak, out of this chicken the egg grows. He examines the forces that are supposed to allow the egg to grow out of the chicken. This is a piece of nonsense. The egg does not at all grow out of the hen; the hen is only the foundation; the forces work out of the cosmos, forces that produce the egg on the ground that has been prepared within the hen. When the biologist today works with his microscope, he believes that what he sees in the microscopic field also includes the forces on which what he sees depends. What he sees there, however, is subject to the forces of the stars that work together in a certain constellation, and when one discovers the cosmic here, one will discover the truth, the reality: it is the universe that conjures the egg from the hen.

All of this, however, is connected above all with the mystery of the sun and, observed from the earth, with the mystery of gold. Today I am offering a kind of programmatic indication; in the course of time these things will become clearer.

In the same schools about which we are speaking, virtue is not called virtue but is simply called health, and one endeavors to acquaint oneself with those cosmic constellations that have a connection with the health and illness of human beings. Through acquainting oneself with the cosmic constellations, however, one learns to know the individual substances that lie on the surface of the earth, the juices and so on, that are connected with health and illness. From certain directions, a more material form of the science of health is increasingly being developed, one that rests, however, on a spiritual foundation.

The notion will also spread from this direction that man becomes good not by learning all sorts of ethical principles, through which man can become good, but rather by, let us say, taking copper under a certain constellation of stars or arsenic under another. You can imagine how these things could be exploited for power by groups of egotistically inclined people. It is only necessary to withhold this knowledge from others who are then unable to participate, and one has the best method of ruling over great masses of people. One does not need to speak about these things at all; one need only introduce, for example, some new delicacy. Then one can seek a market for this new delicacy, which has been tinged appropriately, and thus bring about what is necessary, if these things are comprehended materialistically. One must be clear that in all matter there are hidden spiritual workings. Only one who knows in the true sense that there is nothing really material but only the spiritual will penetrate beyond the mysteries of life.

Likewise, the attempt will be made from this direction to bring the problem of immortality into materialistic channels. This problem of immortality can be led into materialistic channels in the same way, by exploitation of cosmic constellations. One does not, of course, attain through this what is often speculated as being immortality, but one attains a different immortality. One prepares oneself—so long as it is impossible to influence the physical body to prolong life artificially—to undergo soul experiences that will enable one to remain in the lodge of a brotherhood even after death, to help there with the forces that one has at one's disposal. Immortality is simply called prolonging life in these circles.

You can see outer signs of all these things. I do not know whether some of you have noticed the book that for a time provoked a sensation, a book that also came from the West bearing the title, The Disturbance of Dying (Der Unfug des Sterbens). These things all move in this direction. They are only the beginning. What has gone further than the beginning is carefully preserved for the group egotism, is kept very esoteric. These things are actually possible, however, if one brings them into materialistic channels, if one makes the abstract ideas of God, virtue, and immortality into concrete ideas of gold, health, and prolonging life, if one exploits in a group-egotistical sense what I presented to you as the great problems of the fifth post-Atlantean times. What is called in a washed-out way “cosmic feeling” by Professor, Doctor of Theology, Doctor of Philosophy, is presented by many—and unfortunately by many in an egotistical sense—as cosmic knowledge. While science for centuries has beheld only processes occurring on earth, has rejected all study of what is approaching as the most important extraterrestrial occurrence, it will be precisely in the fifth post-Atlantean time that exploitation will be considered of the forces penetrating in from the cosmos. Just as it is now of special importance for the regular professor of biology possibly to have a much-enlarged microscope, possibly to use much more exact laboratory methods, so in the future, when science has become spiritualized, what will matter will be whether one carries out a certain process in the morning, evening, or at noon, or whether one allows what one did in the morning to be somehow further influenced by active factors of the evening, or whether the cosmic influence from morning until evening is excluded, paralyzed. In the future such processes will prove themselves to be necessary; they also will take place. Naturally much water will run over the dam until the materialistically oriented university chairs, laboratories, and so on, are handed over to the spiritual scientists, but this exchange must take place if humanity is not to come completely into decadence. This laboratory work will have to be replaced by work in which, for example—when it is a matter of the good that is to be attained in the future—certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day; the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening, and this is preserved rhythmically until it is morning again. The processes are conducted in such a manner that certain cosmic workings are always interrupted during the day, and the cosmic processes of morning and evening are studied. To achieve this, manifold arrangements will be necessary.

You can gather from this that when one is not in a position to participate publicly in what happens, one can only talk about these things. From the same direction that wishes to put gold, health, and prolonging life in place of God, virtue, and immortality, the effort is made not to work with the processes of morning and evening but with something totally different. I called to your attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ appearing in the etheric.

Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.) From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth's magnetism, one can penetrate the mystery of the earth's magnetism and can bring about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!

From the direction of the East, it is a matter of strengthening what I have already explained: the in-streaming and actively working beings from the opposing sides of the cosmos are placed at the service of earthly existence. A great struggle will arise in the future. Human science will move toward the cosmic. Human science will attempt to move toward the cosmic but in different ways. It will be the task of the good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces that, through the working together of two cosmic streams, are able to arise on the earth. These two cosmic streams will be those of Pisces and Virgo. It will be most important to discover the mystery of how what works out of the cosmos in the direction of Pisces as a force of the sun combines with what works in the direction of Virgo. The good will be that one will discover how, from the two directions of the cosmos, morning and evening forces can be placed at the service of humanity: on the one side from the direction of Pisces and on the other side from the direction of Virgo.

Diagram 10 Click image for large view

Those who seek to achieve everything through the dualism of polarity, through positive and negative forces, will not concern themselves with these forces. The spiritual mysteries that allow the spirituality to stream forth from the cosmos—with help from the twofold forces of magnetism, from the positive and negative—emerge in the universe from Gemini; these are the forces of midday. It was known already in antiquity that this had something to do with the cosmos, and it is known even today by exoteric scientists that, behind Gemini in the Zodiac, positive and negative magnetism are hidden in some way. An attempt will be made to paralyze what is to be won through the revelation of the duality in the cosmos, to paralyze it in a materialistic, egotistical way through the forces that stream toward humanity especially from Gemini and can be put completely at the service of the double. With other brotherhoods, which above all wish to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha, it is a matter of exploiting the twofold nature of the human being. This twofold nature of the human being, which has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period just as man did, contains the human being but also, within the human being, the lower animal nature. Man is to a certain extent really a centaur; he contains this lower, bestial, astral nature. His humanity is somehow mounted upon this astral beast. Through this cooperation of the twofold nature within the human being there is also a dualism of forces. It is this dualism of forces that will be used more by the egotistical brotherhoods of the Eastern, Indian stream in order also to mislead Eastern Europe, which has the task of preparing the sixth post-Atlantean period. For this, forces from Sagittarius are put to use.

The question standing before humanity is whether to master for itself the forces of the cosmos in a doubly wrong way or simply to master them in the right way. This will give a real renewal to astrology, which was atavistic in its ancient form and would not be able to continue in this form. There will be a struggle among the knowledgeable ones in the cosmos. Some will bring about the use of the morning and evening processes, as I indicated; in the West, the midday process will be preferable, excluding the morning and evening processes; and in the East the midnight processes will be used. Substances will no longer be prepared according to forces of chemical attraction and repulsion; it will be known that different substances will be produced depending upon whether they are prepared with morning and evening processes or with midday or midnight processes. It will be known that such substances work in a totally different way upon the three-foldness of God, virtue, and immortality—gold, health, and prolonging life. From the cooperation of what comes from Pisces and Virgo one will not be able to bring about anything harmful. Through this one will achieve what in a certain sense loosens the mechanism of life from the human being but will in no way found any form of rulership and power of one group over another. The cosmic forces that are called forth from this direction will beget strange machines but only ones that will relieve the human being from work, because they will have within them a certain force of intelligence. A cosmically oriented spiritual science will have to concern itself so that all the great temptations that will emanate from these mechanized beasts, which man creates himself, will not exert a harmful influence upon the human being.

To all of this the following must be added: it is necessary for human beings to prepare themselves by not taking realities for illusions, really entering into a spiritual conception of the world, into a spiritual comprehension of the world. What is important is to see things as they are. One can only see things as they are, however, when one is in the position of applying to reality the concepts, the ideas, that emerge from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The dead will actively participate for the remainder of earthly existence. How they will participate is what matters. Here, above all, the great distinction will appear. Through man's conduct on earth, the participation of the dead will be guided from a good direction in such a way that the impulses of the dead to work will be able to originate from themselves, impulses taken from the spiritual world that the dead are experiencing after death.

Opposing this will be many endeavors to lead the dead in an artificial way into human existence. By the circuitous route through Gemini, the dead will be led into human life in such a way that human vibrations will reverberate in a definite way, will continue to vibrate within the mechanical performance of the machine. The cosmos will bring motion to the machines through the circuitous route that I have just indicated.

For that reason, it is important that nothing inappropriate be applied when these problems appear; only elementary forces that are part of nature should be applied. One will have to renounce introducing inappropriate forces into mechanical life. From the occult sphere one must refuse to harness human beings themselves into mechanical factory work, a practice through which the Darwinian theory of selection is used for the determination of the work force, as I presented to you as an example last time.

I make all these suggestions, which naturally cannot exhaust the subject in such a short time, because I think that you will meditate further upon these things, that you will seek to build a bridge between your own life experiences and these things, above all those life experiences that can be won today in these difficult times. You will see how many things will become clear to you when you observe them in the light that can come to you through such ideas. In our time, we are not really concerned with forces and constellations of forces confronting one another, the sorts of things about which one is constantly speaking in outer, exoteric life, but with entirely different things. Some intend actually to cast a kind of veil over the true impulses that are involved. There are bound to be certain human forces at work to save something for themselves. What is there to be saved? Certain human forces are at work to defend impulses that were justified until the French Revolution and were even defended by certain esoteric schools; they are being defended now in the form of an Ahrimanic/Luciferic retardation, being defended so as to maintain a social order that humanity believes has been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

There are mainly two powers that stand in opposition to each other: the representatives of the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the representatives of the new age. It is quite clear that a large number of people instinctively are representatives of the impulses of the new era. The representatives of the old impulses—still of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries—must therefore be harnessed to these forces by artificial means, to forces emanating from certain group-egotistical brotherhoods. The most effective principle in the new age to extend power over as many people as one needs is the economic principle, the principle of economic dependency. That is only the tool, however. What is involved here is something entirely different. What is involved is something that you can deduce from all my suggestions. The economic principle is bound up with all that is involved in making a large number of human beings from all over the earth into an army for these principles.

These are the things that oppose each other. The one points essentially to what is fighting at present in the world: in the West, a rigid, ironclad principle of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries, which makes itself noticeable by clothing itself in the phrases of revolution, the phrases of democracy, a principle that assumes a mask and has the urge to gain in this way as much power as possible. It helps this endeavor when as few people as possible exert themselves to see things as they are, when they allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again in this realm by maya, by the maya that one can express with these words: there is a war today between the Entente and the Central Powers. There is nothing at all like this in reality. We are concerned here with entirely different things that exist behind this maya as the true realities. The struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers is only maya, is only illusion. One can see what stands side by side in the struggle if one looks behind these things, illuminating them in the way that I, for certain reasons, have only suggested. One must at least endeavor not to accept illusions for realities, because then the illusion will gradually dissolve, in so far as it must be dissolved. One must endeavor today above all to consider the things as they present themselves to truly unprejudiced thinking.

If you consider in a coherent way all that I have developed here, then a seemingly incidental remark that I made in the course of these lectures will not seem to you to be merely incidental. When I quoted a certain remark that Mephistopheles made in confronting Faust, “I see that you know the devil”—he would definitely not have said this about Woodrow Wilson—it was no incidental remark. It is something that should illuminate the situation! One must really study these things without antipathy and sympathy; one must be able to study them objectively. One must be able above all to reflect today about the significance of constellations in something that is at work and the significance of individual strength, because behind individual strength often lies something completely different from what lies behind the mere constellation. Think for a moment upon the problem, “How much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if this brain were not sitting in the Presidential chair of the United States?” Assume that this brain were in a different constellation: there it would show its individual strength! It all depends upon the constellation.

I will now speak abstractly and radically—I will not, of course, characterize the aforementioned case; it would never occur to me to do that in such a neutral country—but independent of that there is a very important insight in relation to the question, for example, about the brain. Does it have value because it is actually illuminated and made active by a particular spiritual soul force—does it thereby have a spiritual weight in the sense that I have spoken in these studies of spiritual weight—or does this brain actually have no more value than would show if one laid it on a scale and on the other side placed a weight? In the moment in which one penetrates beyond the mysteries I presented to you last time concerning the double, one arrives at the point (and I am not speaking of something unreal) of bringing value to the brain, which before had value only as a mass on the scale, because one is capable, if the brain is to be revived, of allowing it to be revived merely by the double.

All these things strike human beings today as being grotesque. What seems to them grotesque, however, must come to be something self-evident if these things are to flow into a healthy stream from an unhealthy one. And what use is it if one only chatters about them constantly? You must accept the idea that all this wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “the extent of the longing for it” or “the movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses,” and so on, does nothing but spread a fog over things that must come into the world only in clarity. They can be effective only in clarity, and they must be carried in clarity above all as practical, moral-ethical impulses in humanity.

I can only make single suggestions. I leave it to your own meditation to build on these realms further. These things are in many respects aphoristic, but you will have the possibility of gathering a great deal from such a summary as this picture of the Zodiac if you truly use it as the substance of meditation.

Roman Boos: Before Dr. Steiner's lecture on the problems of threefolding, I would just like to make the announcement that there will be an opportunity to ask questions after the lecture. I would kindly ask you to make use of this opportunity and ask any questions that arise in relation to these problems of threefolding.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It is not out of any personal or social arbitrariness that from this Goetheanum, or rather from the spiritual movement, of which this Goetheanum is to be the representative, a stimulus is also going out in the newer time with regard to the social question of the present and the near future. It is an inner necessity that, out of the seriousness with which the spiritual affairs of humanity are to be treated here, suggestions must also flow about the most important, that is, the social problems of the present and the immediate future of humanity.

Now, the suggestions that come from here have often been misunderstood in the strangest way. And by pointing out some of the principles of the social question that arise from here, I would like to take this opportunity to clear up misunderstandings either immediately in the discussions or afterwards, by linking them to questions.

When we look at the social question today, it is basically a misunderstanding that is actually quite old. The fact is that this social question was not seen in its true form during the period when it first began to arise most vehemently and when it developed most intensively. It only really emerged in its true form after the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, or perhaps during it. Before that, people had basically come to terms with it, talking about the social question from a wide range of party standpoints, or from one or other understanding – but mostly very limited understandings – that had been developed for this question, trying out this or that means of providing information, this or that institution, which were supposed to provide a remedy for one or other of the ills that arose in the course of the social movement. But a real, in-depth understanding of what is actually at stake in what we call the social question has not emerged in recent decades; it has not emerged since the middle of the nineteenth century, when it should have emerged. Today it turns out that this social question cannot be tackled without considering it as a human question, as a question of the life of our entire social existence within European and American civilization. And as long as we do not find a way to understand this [social] question as a human question, we will not arrive at views or institutions that can be of any significant help in finding a solution to this question that is as humane as possible.

There has been a lot of talk about the social question for a long time, and it must be said that at present people do not really have any idea of how this question has been in people's minds in the last decades of the nineteenth century, or how it has affected people's lives. It is the case that today people think relatively briefly, that they only see what is immediately in front of them, and that they are not given the opportunity to see larger connections. One does not, my dear audience, come to an understanding of this social question without seeing the larger context.

Now, the deficiency that is being pointed out here is actually present in all our current education. It is also present in the way in which our current education has taken hold of people from the most diverse social classes through the particular development of the civilized world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spiritual science, as it is to proceed from this building here in Dornach, is not meant to be merely an uplifting of the human soul to spiritual worlds, nor is it meant to be merely the bringing of knowledge related to the spiritual world. Rather, it is meant to permeate all human activity with the fruits that can be obtained from this spiritual science. And now, in public lectures, I have emphasized for two decades that the most important thing in this spiritual science is not what one absorbs in terms of content – it is important, but it is not the most important thing, it is, so to speak, the precondition, but it is not the thing to stop at. It is not the most important thing to absorb the knowledge that the human being consists of these and those physical and spiritual elements, and that, from a spiritual point of view, human life proceeds in such and such a way. Rather, the most important thing is to progress from this spiritual-scientific foundation of human knowledge to something very much alive. That is how one must think of this progress. If one hears about the insights of spiritual science, if one reads about it – one can already read a lot about this spiritual science in numerous works of an authoritative literature – if one reads and hears about what it presents, one is forced to think quite differently from what one has been accustomed to thinking in the last three to four centuries. Everyone must feel that: If you want to understand what is offered here as spiritual science, you have to acquire different ideas, different concepts, from those that have been common today and for some time. But by acquiring these other thoughts, these other concepts, our thinking first becomes much more agile. Because the immobility of thinking is a hallmark of newer education. Thinking becomes much more agile. In order to even begin to grasp the larger contexts presented by anthroposophy, one must absorb more comprehensive concepts and, above all, concepts that do not get stuck in the details. So, to a certain extent, one first trains one's thinking to take in larger life scales. One also makes one's thinking more agile.

That this is so is actually corroborated by an external circumstance, ladies and gentlemen. You can hear time and again, when public anthroposophical lectures are given and the illustrious gentlemen of journalism deign to write something about them, you can always hear again: “In the hall there was mainly a female audience” — whereby the esteemed ladies present are not always paid compliments with regard to their spiritual and other constitutions. But in a sense it is not always untrue that the audience at such lectures is mainly an “audience of women”. But perhaps there is another side to this than is usually meant when this is raised as an accusation against the spiritual science movement; perhaps one could also say what I have often said in response to this statement, which is meant as an accusation: Yes, why are the men not there? They could come just as easily as the ladies, and perhaps it is not exactly because of the humanities that these men are not there, because after all - as you will admit, you usually cannot talk to those who are not there!

Now there is also an inner reason for this, and here I must ask you to really take what I have to say sine ira and without emotion. I am never pleased that – forgive me – the majority of the audience usually consists of ladies. I would very much like it – the ladies may not see this as any kind of allusion to anything – I would very much like it if, so to speak, every lady could have her gentleman at the lecture. But that is not the case, and it is not just an external reason, but there are deeper reasons.

You see, our entire modern education is basically a male education. How long has it been since women were able to participate in a certain way in what the educational means of modern times have to offer? Our entire civilization is more or less a male civilization. This was something I was confronted with very strongly in all the discussions in which I, for example, had to confront people like Gabriele Reuter with the fact that, yes, the women's movement can basically only have any significant impact on the entire social life of modern times if women do not simply enter into what is, after all, only a male education in our time. What would ultimately be the result if women all put on tails, trousers and top hats? They would just be going along with the men's tastelessness. But basically the same thing has happened in the intellectual sphere! Women have not brought what was in them into modern life, but have conformed, they have donned the intellectual trousers, that is, they have become the same kind of doctors as men have become , they have become lawyers or philologists just as men have become lawyers or philologists, and they are now even striving to become theologians just as men have become theologians – they have simply put on the intellectual trousers. It is the case that one must say: the women's movement will only become something when women contribute their special element – I do not mean the feminine at all now, but the special element – to our intellectual civilization, which comes from the fact that – well, I will express myself drastically, although it not always meant to be so drastic — that their brains are not constricted in Spanish boots, which come from the various faculties of the present day as well; for men's brains have been trained in these Spanish boots for centuries. They have become those thoughts that cannot overlook any great connections, that are above all immobile, rigid, and that can only view something like spiritual science, because it demands longer thoughts, as something fantastic. Thus women, protected by their naivety, come to the anthroposophical lectures through the fact that the false boot element of male education has not yet entered their brains. They come because, if I may express myself figuratively, their brains have remained even softer. It can still absorb more than the male brain. This is also a deeper reason. So I do not want to compliment the ladies that they have the better brain; they just have the one that is less deformed. I do not want to pay the ladies a compliment either, that they understand anthroposophy better because they are ladies, but only that they understand it better because they judge from the heart and have learned less of what one has been accustomed to learning in the last four centuries.

Spiritual science consciously opposes the education of the last four centuries and simply demands more comprehensive thoughts, which initially also make the imagination more agile, but from the imagination they make the whole person more agile. So it can be said that someone who has undergone training in spiritual science will more easily see through a reality, including its economic context, than someone who has only emerged from the education of the last few centuries.

I have already pointed out how little this education of the last few centuries was suited to looking at the essentials of the matter. I have pointed out how, in a certain period of the nineteenth century, the gold standard was introduced in place of the previous bimetallism. Those who advocated the gold standard claimed everywhere – you can read about it in the most diverse parliamentary reports – that free trade would be established through the gold standard. The customs barriers of the various countries would fall. Well, there is no doubt that if these tariff barriers had fallen, we would be in a different position today. But not only have the tariff barriers not fallen, anyone crossing borders today knows that many other barriers have been erected. None of the predictions of learned economists and practitioners of life have come true as a result of the gold standard, of monometallism. None of it has materialized; everywhere the opposite has happened: customs barriers have been erected. That means that the esteemed practitioners in all areas of life have been thoroughly mistaken; they have not foreseen anything of how reality works. What has come to light on a large scale – in business life – has come to light on a small scale everywhere and is still coming to light everywhere. What is meant by an overview of circumstances has not been taught to people. What could be learned in the highest schools did not result in an education of the human soul for an overview of the larger contexts of practical life.

But please do not think that I consider all the practitioners or the learned economists who have stated what I have just indicated to be fools. On the contrary, I find that the people who spoke in the European parliaments and wrote in the European newspapers, especially in the 1960s and 1950s, were very clever people. Very clever people predicted the wrong things, because you couldn't predict anything right under the circumstances that existed. Because, my dear attendees, cleverness doesn't help you if you can't gain life experience through that cleverness. And the conditions as they were in industrialism, in commercialism, they just offered only the possibility to see the next; they did not offer the possibility to also tie the most clever thoughts to that which lives in reality. One had become accustomed to seeing through the microscope in science, to magnifying the smallest, so that one would not have to judge something larger. This has trained people to see the smallest relationships. This is only a comparison, an analogy, but the analogy is valid.

Spiritual science, therefore, does not want to consider as important that which can be learned as content, but it wants to consider as most important the education that a person acquires through the thoughts that he must make if he wants to understand spiritual science. And that is why there is an inner necessity for this spiritual science to be applied today in the practical areas of life, because it aims to develop the kind of education that enables people to look clearly and without illusion at the practical areas of life.

And so we can say: because people were not able to look at the social question from such a broader perspective, they have not really seen it for what it is. Today, after the catastrophe of the war, we can actually see: all the discussions that have been held, all the fine theories that have been put forward, they are actually for nothing, they basically lead nowhere; because it is not at all about the wickedness of institutions; it is not at all about that, not in the big picture, of course it is in the details, but not to the extent that the illusionary theories of socialists and anti-socialists would have us believe. We are not dealing with something remotely similar to the antagonism between capital and labor – on which entire broad theories are built. No, we are dealing with something completely different. We are dealing with the fact that feelings and urges have grown in broad masses of the population of civilized humanity that have been ignored for decades and that should be understood. One should humanly understand what is surging up. One should ask oneself: What are the natures of the people who today demand revolution or something else, who today aspire to political power or the like? How did this come about in these human souls? One should look at what is a social question as a human question, then one could gain ideas about how to deal with what is before us. Again and again, the question was not: What are the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat made of? Rather, the question was: What are the living conditions of the broad masses of the proletariat, since the proletarians themselves, under the influence of bourgeois education, formed only concepts that had actually been trained in the economic science of the bourgeoisie. We do not have anything at all in today's general world education that realistically captures the social situation.

It can be said, ladies and gentlemen: The thing that weighs most heavily on the heart of anyone who is truly concerned about the social question today is that so few want to see clearly and distinctly the guilt that the leading circles have incurred in modern times, a real guilt, truly not so much in the sphere of external economic life as in the sphere of educational life, in the sphere of intellectual life. We have seen a whole new class emerge in the last few centuries. We have had this new class alongside us; we have seen how this new class has a completely new language for soul development that we have not looked at. We have continued to speak the old language of tradition in the educational life of the leading circles. No effort was made to bridge the gap between the leading classes and the classes that emerged in the proletariat. No real interest was paid to what was emerging in humanity as a human question. At most, institutions and facilities were set up to provide for the broad masses in the sense of the old-oriented charity, to provide for stomachs, clothing and housing, and so on. But no thought was given to the fact that it had become necessary to achieve a world view in which all people of the modern age could come together in understanding. Today we have the fruits. You read today in the newspapers of the proletariat, full of omissions about everything that has come from the leading, from the formerly leading classes. They read that actually all the thinking about capitalism in earlier times, you read that all that is useless, that a completely different spirit must come, the spirit of the great masses, the spirit that rises out of the great masses like smoke out of a chimney. The most abominable abstraction has become the idol of the broad masses of the proletariat; an indefinite spirit that is supposed to arise from the totality.

Two questions can be asked; one that must be answered from a deeper understanding of history, which says again and again that the spirit, if it is to work in life, must go through personalities, that a spirit never flies around without working through personalities. But the other question - it can be asked very specifically today. First, a practical realization of what can be meant in social terms has gone out from Dornach and from our friends in Stuttgart.

You know that our friends Molt, Unger, Kühn, Leinhas and others have joined forces in Stuttgart to translate into practical life what can come from Dornach in social terms. We then – I will of course omit the details – we then began to work in about April 1919. Of course, such work – where one is not dealing with wax figures but with the living humanity of the present – can only be done step by step, with exact consideration of the real conditions. And it may be said that, in particular, in the first 14 days of our work at that time, everything actually went quite well. To a certain extent, what had to be achieved was achieved: winning broader sections of the proletariat over to reasonable social ideas. If something else had been achieved at the time, namely to win broader circles of the bourgeoisie, the leading class, for these ideas, namely to win over those who were then leading, then something that could have been fruitful would certainly have happened. But the broader circles of the bourgeoisie basically failed at first because they did not know that they were dealing with a human issue. At the time, I said to many people in Stuttgart who could have been in a position to understand such things: Yes, you see, the fact that you and I are talking about social theories can certainly have a good theoretical and later also a practical value, but that is not what matters now. What matters is that we can do something, that we can bring together people who can really do something together. To do that, it is necessary, for example, to speak to the workers in a way that they can understand, so that you first have the workers. I even said: if you don't like some of the things that have to be said in the language of the proletariat to the proletariat, it doesn't matter at first, but what matters is that you bring people together. Just have the patience to bring people together.

There was really very little understanding of the fact that the modern social question is a human question. And so it could happen that one day the so-called leaders of the proletariat noticed – it is always the worst when the leaders of any party or class or religious community notice that followers are being acquired among their flock; that is always the most dangerous thing, actually. They are not very interested in things if you talk cabbage and don't win any followers. But when people realized: Yes, something is happening here, they appeared on the scene, and it soon became clear that through all the foolish warming up of old socialist theories and Marxism that could be done, it was done, people were persuaded that one did not mean well by them, but that one was also something of a disguised capitalist or at least a capitalist servant. In short, a few leading personalities appeared on the scene, and the masses quickly evaporated. This is something that teaches in a very concrete sense that the spirit is not something that comes out of the masses and flies around, but by showing us that the Stuttgart workers are more Catholic in their method of obeying than have ever been Roman Catholics, one could see that all this is a fuss, a phrase about the “spirit” that comes “from the masses,” that even today the masses, as they have always done, follow a few bellwethers. Not only does history teach this, but experience also teaches it. Because it would have been [therefore] a matter of undermining the ground - I say it quite sincerely - undermining the ground of the leaders. Until one admits to oneself that nothing can get better if the leaders do not get away from this leadership of the broad masses, who have emerged from the circumstances of the last decades, things will not get better. That is the crux of the matter. Therefore, one had to – and in this respect we too have made mistakes – one had to approach the masses directly, leaving out everything that the leaders did. It is a question of humanity, and it has basically arisen as a question of humanity, and it has been noticed here and there: it is not a matter of achieving individual institutions, but of achieving a world view and conception of life through which a bridge can be created between the people who emerged as the leading class from the old world order and those who are digging so wildly in the proletariat. But that is the strangest thing: those people who have seen something have always been like preachers in the wilderness. One can indeed make the strangest experiences through appropriate retrospectives.

When I wrote my first appeal, which was then published as an appendix to my “Key Points of the Social Question” and which so many people signed, some people were furious about it because I pointed out how the last decades, especially in Germany, were not at all suitable for setting and solving realistic tasks; and even today I still receive angry letters from “well-meaning” people about this first appeal. And yet, these people are all unaware of the facts. Facts are only reflected in something like the following.

V[iktor] Alim&] Huber wrote the following in a magazine in 1869 – I ask you to take note of the year, I choose this year and this quote quite deliberately because what was written here predates the reestablishment of the German Reich – Huber wrote the following in a magazine published in Stuttgart in 1869, for example, by first pointing out how the labor question arose , how the social question shines in through the windows; after he has explained how one should try, as he calls it, to create some alleviation of the contradictions that are bound to arise through the “corporation route”, through the route of appropriate union; after he – in 1869, my esteemed audience – after he has said: If the spirit that has been developed so far in view of the social question is further developed, the time will come when the military state will reveal this question in a terrible way as “to be or not to be”. These words appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper in 1869! I would like to know how many people have thought about this, now or after the so-called German revolution, where the words “to be or not to be” were used again and again, how many people have considered that a somewhat more clairvoyant person had already written this in 1869, at a time when people were confronted with completely different facts than they are today. The man wrote, after he had dealt with such things:

Here, too, we are ultimately referred to a reform, strengthening and multiplication of all institutions and means of social education of the people at all, but here in particular at the higher levels, as an indispensable condition of social reforms.

The man realized that it is a matter of spreading a particular intellectual life, which, however, did not yet exist at the time. But an understanding of intellectual life could have grown out of such foundations if people had listened to such people at all in the frenzy of the following decades. And this man spoke even more precisely in 1869:

It goes without saying that this cannot be the case without a fundamental change in the spirit of our universities, and all the more so the less one

— namely at the universities —

have any inkling or even understanding of this need and this profession.

Now, my dear attendees, while the man said in 1869: It must begin at the universities, something else must be introduced into the lecture halls, because it is far removed from the spirit must take hold in humanity if improvement is to occur –; while the man said this in 1869, today the people who “mean well” come and say: So we are founding adult education centers! That is to say, we take what has been concocted at the universities, cook it in somewhat more favorable preparations that it may benefit the masses, and administer the same stuff in smaller doses. What does that really mean? What it really means is that what was no good when the leading classes did it, now carried into the broad masses, should be good. The issue is not that we carry what has been taught further into the broad masses, but that we replace what has been taught and has brought us into the catastrophe with what is emphasized here, what is taken as a starting point here: we must first find the kind of spiritual culture that leads to the adult education center. We will not find this if we do not make an effort to find our way out of materialistic science and into spiritual science. What comes from the old science is what the leaders of the proletarians have learned, what the Trotskys, Lenins and so on have learned. This has led to what these people preach to the proletarians, what they set up. That, that is sufficiently widespread. That is the kind of thing you can't do anything with. What we need is what comes from spiritual science. It is not something that tells people, for example in the social sphere: let us set it up like this and like that, militarize work, and then a paradise will arise on earth! You will not find such a sentence in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. In the 'Key Points of the Social Question' you will find this as a starting point: We want to have a possible social and viable social organism, that is, we do not want an earthly paradise, such a thing is perhaps quite impossible. It is not at all a question of whether one should strive for this or that, because of course people strive for something higher when they are offered something; because what one has once striven for as the highest is immediately the lowest in the next moment. What is important is not to promise people heaven on earth, but to study how the social organism becomes viable, how it can best be brought to life. Then it may turn out that not all of people's wishes can be fulfilled, but an especially ingenious person might say – I have known such people, I have met many a freeloader in my long life – it might occur to people, for example, could occur to people to say: It is a highly inappropriate arrangement that beings move on two legs, it could all be arranged differently; this physical human organism, there is so much that is inappropriate, and so on, and so on. There could well be specially designed heads that could imagine the human organism very differently from how it is. Of course, the imagination would not be a realistic one. But there are people like that, I have met them. Of course, there are also people who promise others paradise on earth. But that is no proof that it is possible to realize what people promise and in which they find understanding, because, of course, you only have to promise people what they want and desire, then you will find understanding in broad circles more easily than if you only talk about what is possible, if you only talk about what the social question can really achieve. That is what the “key issues of the social question” are all about.

That is why, because only this can be spoken of, we have arrived at the threefold social organism, which seems utopian only to those who look at it superficially, because wherever you look at life, if you are not blinded by preconceived theories, you will see that the main structure of our present-day intellectual life, so-called intellectual life, has been built up and promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened – has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has has been promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened, it was a necessity, today we can go beyond it – that the unified state has shaped this intellectual life by taking over the schools. It educates its people as it needs them. It educates theologians as it needs them, it educates lawyers, doctors, as it needs them. Switzerland, for example, needs doctors who have only been educated in Switzerland, at Swiss faculties, because a doctor educated a few hours away cannot practice medicine in Switzerland; and it is the same with philologists, it is the same with everyone. The state, when it has control of education, must of course impose its point of view.

Now imagine, instead of such a state education, an education system that is completely self-governing, an education system that, from the lowest to the highest schools, has as administrators those who are actively involved in this spiritual — the teacher teaching only enough to have free some hours in which he can devote himself to the administration of the educational system; no one else is involved in this administration of the educational system except those who are actively involved. No corporate body has a say in it, no parliament; for what is to be said regarding the training for intellectual life requires specialized training and expertise, requires certain abilities and could only be trained if intellectual life stands on its own ground. As soon as something that arises from majority opinion or from the average view is decreed as law and then passes over into the administrative sphere, the sphere of spiritual education must wither away. And there is an inner connection between the materialistic type of our modern spiritual life and the nationalization of that spiritual life.

You see, you can experience special things there. People cannot always see immediately if they are not familiar with spiritual science, which shows itself through itself, through its entire being: what must be striven for through it can only be striven for in free spiritual life ; it can only be striven for if it comes solely from the personalities, if it is only as good and as bad as the personalities of an age can make it, if one does not succumb to the illusion that There are laws that prescribe how teaching should be done. What use are laws! It depends on the teachers, on the real, concrete teaching personalities; it depends on the people who are involved in teaching, in the spiritual realm, that they also manage this at the same time. If we were to hypothetically assume the sad case that in an age, in a generation, there were only stupid teachers, then this generation would have to be educated in a stupid way. That would still be better than having good laws for the teaching system, and these good laws being treated even worse than when stupidity springs from within the human being. In the spiritual sphere it is necessary that what happens should come out of the abilities of the human being, for in this way it will always be the best conceivable for a given age. That is what matters. That is why it is not immediately apparent that this freedom, this emancipation of spiritual life as one of the links in the social organism, is a necessity. It may happen that very well-meaning, very clever people raise the objection – it comes up again and again – let us say, for example, it is someone, I will say now, in State X – so as not to offend anyone – it is someone in State X, and they are told that it is necessary, the threefold social order, the freedom of spiritual life. He will perhaps say the following: Yes, in the other state Y, Z and so on, it is already as you say, but with us in X, there, there we notice nothing of the dependence of teaching on the government, on the state powers; with us, the education system is not disturbed by the state powers.

Yes, my dear attendees, I would like to say: That is precisely the problem, that people say so, because by saying so, they no longer realize how dependent they are. They are so dependent that their dependence appears to them as freedom. Only dependence goes through their heads. They approve of everything that is put into their heads, and because they obediently follow the state's orders as a matter of course, they do not feel in the least confused by them. They do not even realize what the matter is. That is perhaps the very worst of all, that especially in the intellectual field, but especially in the educational field, it has already come to such a pass that people no longer feel at all how they are dependent, that they glorify this dependence as freedom. Of course, if someone thinks like the pastor who had just preached a sermon and in which he explained that, according to the wisdom of the world, man is best built, a hunchback was waiting for him at the church exit and asked the pastor: “Yes, Reverend, can you tell me that I am also best built?” He replied: “For a hunchback, you are built very well indeed.” Yes, you see, when we speak of freedom of thought to people who perceive dependency as freedom, they tell us: “Yes, we have complete freedom!” That is the one link in the threefold social organism, the free spiritual life.

Just as little as spiritual life can tolerate the schematic classification of the democratic state, in the least because democracy can only lead to the manifestation of average opinions, and average opinions are most intolerable in the free development of intellectual life, just as little as intellectual life tolerates the schematic principle of the state, just as little does economic life. Economic life can only be based on real conditions, just as intellectual life can only be based on human abilities. Spiritual life must work in the way that is possible from the talents of the people of an age; economic life must work in such a way that it can develop fully in this economic life, with expertise, professional competence and involvement in a branch of economic life, so that others who have to do with this branch of the economy can have confidence in those who are involved in it. This means that economic life is only possible if it is built on associative lines, if it is built in such a way that what belongs together in economic life joins together, that economic circles - be they professional circles or circles that face each other, such as production circles, consumption circles, and so on - join together in such a way that they are associated.

Of course, not every circle can be associated in every circle; but it is possible for the whole economic life to be associated in an indirect way. But because the individual economic circles are associated with each other in this way [see blackboard drawing, p. 596], the person who is in any association stands [opposite another] and can gain from the circumstances he faces, through contracts or similar, what is necessary to have the basis for a proper economy. You can never organize economic life, but only associate it. You cannot organize how the individual professions should work and so on from a central location, as Lenin and Trotsky wanted to do, but you can only, by having the professional associations, try to bring them into such economic associations that one supports the other, that one gains trust for one's work from what one learns from the other.

To look at the circumstances realistically is so terribly far from the people of the present. Oh, what irony of facts we are experiencing in our time! We have seen, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that in certain states the blessing of militarism has been pronounced by parliaments, that no one but at most smaller parties has raised objections. It is decades behind us. We have seen, especially during this war, that those who have the least understanding of the situation have once again let loose their decrees out of anti-militarism!

It does not matter at all whether one was right or not, but rather that one knows why one can be right, that one knows the circumstances. And we have seen that today in socialist Germany, for example, a thunderstorm is brewing over militarism, and we see a man who now, in a legislative assembly, says, “Militarism has not only had dark sides, but militarism has brought great benefits to humanity. We have seen how those who went to war learned how to organize; and when they came back, we found that the people who had gone through the school of this war were the best people to organize work in the factories in a military sense. We have experienced that we have obtained a correct hierarchy of people through the training of this war, in that the people of this war have learned to work systematically and to subordinate themselves. We have come to understand the victory of the military order for social life.” – And just a few weeks ago, this man continued in this vein! Who was it? Trotsky in Moscow, justifying the militarization of Russian labor!

Yes, one would like to ask in the face of such things: Is there really no spark of alertness left in humanity today, when it does not look at this stark contradiction of life? Should life go on when these stark contradictions are part of this life? The point is really that, for example, in these 'key points of the social question', nothing else is striven for than that which can arise – it is clearly emphasized at one point in detail – which can arise precisely out of the present institutions. If the people who are involved in these current institutions only begin to set themselves the goal of what the meaning of threefolding is, then one can work in the spirit of threefolding everywhere, if one sets oneself the goal of threefolding, if you know that it can only be a matter of achieving, on the one hand, a free spiritual life, as I have characterized it, and, on the other hand, an economic life that works only out of economic necessities.

You see, it has even become possible to have people together in Stuttgart for a few weeks with whom one could talk about the next requirements of a non-state, free economic life. Not just once, but many times, I said to the people there: Those who will now be called upon to work on this free organization of economic life will soon, when the going gets tough, see that they cannot stop at socialist phrases, at Marxism and so on, but that they will have to work from the specific demands of economic life, and each in his own place; the plant manager, the labor manager, as well as the proletarian, they will have to work, each from his own place, from the point of view of economic life itself. This will bring to light completely different questions than those that are usually raised today, and especially those raised by practice. Just now, people were beginning to realize that, among many other things, it is necessary, for example, to figure out how a certain article in a certain economic area must have a very specific price, a very specific price range, and that the institutions must be set up in such a way that a certain price range is available. I showed people how to achieve these price ranges through arrangements, not through things like, for example, the monetary theorists with their statistics, with their state office, which is all utopian, but how to achieve it through the actual social structure, through what arises from the interaction of the associations. What is the practice today? Today it is practice that something becomes more expensive due to certain circumstances. More pay is demanded, or there is a strike. Because more pay is demanded, other things become more expensive, of course, and then more pay is demanded again. And so what is most important must be taken into account: a certain price level, that which is considered the most trivial by our social circumstances. Today, most people view any price increase with indifference, even if it is ruinous for our lives as human beings.

We were just about to enter into the practicalities, and we cannot make any further progress, ladies and gentlemen, unless as many people as possible develop an understanding of the specific issues. What do you expect to achieve with people who understand nothing of what needs to be done, who only understand what their agitators tell them? Do you think you can bring about a new economic order with them? You can only bring about a new economic order with those who have first gained an understanding of the demands of life itself. Everything else that the “key points of the social question” for a free economic life demand is already contained in this. For what individuals have spoken of, where it has been recognized – and after all, it must be said: the idea of threefolding, a part of it, is recognized – that is even made into an objection by theorists; people always come to me and say: Yes, what you are saying is already wanted here and there! I can only say to people: I would love it most of all if everything I say were already wanted. I am not at all striving to say something new, but rather what follows reasonably from the circumstances!

But that is the essential thing, that the details are demanded here or there, but that it is a matter of summarizing these very details. It is the big picture that is at stake. That is why spiritual science must intervene, because it educates in the big lines. It is right that here and there understanding arises for this or that, but then one must have the opportunity to bring it to bear. And so it also becomes clear to individuals how nonsensical it is when, for example, a judgment is to be made about an issue that should interest industry. Now, in the branches that have been nationalized, judgments are made by the state central representation or the like. That is, a majority of people make judgments that can, under certain circumstances, overrule that small minority who actually understand something about the matter; apart from everything else that is being developed in terms of reciprocity and so on, about which individual, namely western states, provide wonderful opportunities for study, as do southern states. Therefore, some have suggested: Well, we must have parliament, we must have the unified state; so at least for economic life we need industrial committees, professional representations in parliament. Yes, but what matters is that these professional representatives in parliament can first of all really assert for themselves what can then be decided from professional association to professional association, what is necessary; not that everything is mixed up again in one parliament, so that perhaps what is to be decided for this group is decided by the others, who have no say in it. Sometimes one has experienced very strange things in relation to majorities, for example in Austria, which is of course the “model state” for the downfall of the state. Because this Austrian state, one has seen it perish – I lived there for three decades – one has seen it perish if one has seen with open eyes what was actually going on there. In this Austrian state, there was a time when they wanted to revise the existing school law. They wanted to replace the existing school law with a reactionary one. This school law would have been rejected by a minority if conditions had been normal. The only way to achieve a majority was to get the Poles to vote with the other people in favor of this reactionary school law. The Poles had to form a majority with the other reactionaries. The Poles said at the time: “All right, we'll form a majority with you, we'll make the bad school law with you, but our Galicia must be exempted from this bad school law!” So the people came together in the common parliament. There was one community, the Polish delegation, that worked with the others to give the countries of the others, those who did not want it, a school law from which they exempted their own country. Krass stood out in particular at the time. But how could this not be the case in many other areas in a parliament like the Austrian one, which actually only had economic representatives? Because, you see, when a minister in Austria, Giskra, said at about the same time as Huber [in Stuttgart] set out his views: “There are no social issues, they stop at Bodenbach” – this has been discussed several times – people in this country were dreaming of a new era. Dreams came that a new era was needed and that a parliament had to be set up. So they set up the parliament based on four curiae: the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial centers, the curia of the rural communities and the curia of the chambers of commerce – which, due to their special nature, were all economic cooperatives, all economic communities. They then formed the parliament, which made Austrian laws, fabricated rights. It is quite natural that a majority could not be formed by the representatives of the chambers of commerce and the large landowners, and that they made laws that were in their interests, not laws that would have emerged from what has been dawning more and more in humanity in modern times from the feeling of democracy. It is precisely those who take democracy seriously who must separate economic life and intellectual life, which cannot be based on democracy at all, but which arise from factual and specialized knowledge. They must separate economic life and intellectual life must separate economic life and intellectual life from what is legal life in the broadest sense, which can only develop when the mature human being opposes the other mature human being as an equal in parliament. But then only that which concerns every mature human being in relation to every other mature human being as an equal may be decided in this parliament. And the question must always be: it cannot be a matter of professional committees being formed in a democratic parliament and then the decisions being brought about by majority vote, but rather that what is the future action in economic life should emerge from negotiations, from the direct negotiations of economic associations, that which develops out of the essence of economic life itself.

What appears as the threefold social order is not a theory at all, it is not a program at all. I have experienced enough programs. In the 1880s, I used to drink my black coffee after dinner at the Viennese writers' café, the so-called Café Griensteidl. In addition to writers and authors of all sizes, poets, painters and sculptors – each was a great talent, which everyone else denied – social reformers and Marxists also met there. Viktor Adler was always there too. There you could experience the programs at noon and in the evening and at midnight in the most diverse forms. Everyone always knew what was best, and everyone thought the world would become a paradise when their social program was implemented. The opposite of all this program-making is what is striven for by the threefold social organism. Put in a simple formula — what does it actually mean? It means that there are three distinct and separate spheres of interest in the social life of humanity. One of these is the spiritual life. No one has the right to claim that they know how this spiritual life can best be administered; no one has the right to say: I prescribe a program for this spiritual life. If you are grounded in reality, as you are in spiritual science, you will not say this. But one does say: Let this spiritual life be administered by the people who are called to do so, who are actively involved in it, then you can spare yourself your program; then the right thing will come about through what life brings forth. The point is not to set out programs for the threefold social order, but to point out how people must find themselves in life so that from week to week, from year to year, the best arises in life itself. And in the same way, it is a matter of giving economic life a form such that, through economic activity, that which must arise again and again arises. For you see, the most absurd thing of all is to draw up social programs that are supposed to apply forever. Because the social question arises once and for all, but it cannot be solved overnight. The social question is a certain kind of living condition, it is a human question, and the only way to solve it is to organize life in such a way that it is continuously resolved, so that from week to week, from year to year, from decade to decade, there are always people who can bring about what can solve the social questions. The social question cannot be solved all at once, but must be solved continually throughout life. But for this it is necessary that this life should be such that the people who are called to solve it develop out of this life.

Apart from economic and spiritual questions, there are still those that simply arise between people who have come of age. These are decided democratically. They are the legal questions in the broadest sense. That is what life itself demands: that is, we must not formulate a program or develop a theory, but we must reflect on how people should live together so that life can be shaped. Today we cannot discuss whether it is already too late for European civilization, or whether there is still time for people to come together in this way. But we should keep saying to ourselves: the social question has not been grasped in its true form because the essential thing has never been expressed at all, because it was always believed that programs had to be found or institutions had to be devised, whereas it would have been necessary to communicate in such a way that humanity would have formed common interests where life demands common interests. If economic life is, of course, to stand on its own feet today – we cannot demand that tomorrow the people who are inside, who are now full of liberal, socialist or conservative ideas, should judge from the point of view of economic requirements. In the 1950s and 1960s, this would have been possible to a high degree. Today, far too much confused stuff has entered people's heads. But that is not for us to decide; instead, we muster the will to ensure that the right thing happens even today. But we should keep an eye on how, by diverting attention to completely different areas instead of coming together in the face of aligned interests, we have to divert things to completely different areas. Let us assume, hypothetically at first – which, of course, is a hypothesis today – that people, regardless of whether they are supervisors or employees, are fully involved in economic life and have been accustomed to deciding economic issues based on economic facts for some time. Then, even if it took a generation, a commonality of interests would have formed, which must exist, for example, when those who are producers have to work together. The worker and the foreman both have the same interest, if only the same interests are cultivated. The worker and the foreman do not have different interests with regard to, for example, remuneration; they have the same interests. But in order for their feelings to be fulfilled by these same interests, they have to oversee economic life. You can only oversee it if you can learn about one association by having something to do with the next association, which in turn has something to do with the next one [and so on], so that a network of relationships of trust is formed. You can only learn what the true interest is in this way. Instead, true interests are carried out of all this. The people who are work managers stand there [in the blackboard drawing: filled circles

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These things are found difficult to understand. Those who find them difficult to understand say: Yes, it is not clear. Yes, my dear audience, this is just life, and what is from life requires that those who want to understand it look at life. But today people no longer look at life, today they look at their prejudices. One person has acquired his prejudices from Marx, another from the liberal or social-democratic leaders, a third from the pastor, and so on and so forth. Today they only look at what is theory, what they only call practice. And so today one senses something of what individual people have actually felt for a long time.

You see, something strange happened to me. I gave a lecture in Stuttgart and also here in various places in Switzerland, in which I said, based on the matter: Today, instead of an original spiritual life, we have a phrase that is very close to the lie; instead of a real legal life, we have only convention. Something similar could perhaps still happen in relation to these things. But now I have spoken about the third area, about the economic, and I have said: in the economic sphere we do not have a real practice of life, not that which grows out of economic conditions, but mere routine. Now you think that is what I said, and today I read – namely, only today I read this Huber, really, I am not trying to pin something on you that is not true, I really read him today – and there I read in this Huber – he has invented certain corporate interests, I read in this Huber: “But where in our empire?” — says the 1869 in Stuttgart —, “where are the men who can make these arrangements?” And then he continues and says: “Least of all do we find them among practitioners, among those who call themselves practitioners, because today nothing but routine prevails there.” And – he says – we would need at least ten [men]. “But when I look around,” he says, “I want to exempt his majesty right away (he is, as people were then, loyal, a very loyal gentleman), but since he is out of the question anyway, not only are there not ten, but around the steps of the throne and everywhere outside there is not even one.”

I don't know, I couldn't quickly examine the extent to which the man was right for the year [18]69; but in our present circumstances, one has every reason to seek out those who at least have a heart and mind for studying and responding to the real circumstances. That is what is at stake today. We need people who recognize that a renewal of intellectual life and a reorganization of economic life on its own foundations are absolutely necessary. We need this because we have to relieve the state, which then forms the third link of the threefold social organism with its legal and related relationships. Everything in more detail can be found in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. We need this third link, which throws the others to the left and right; in short, we need the structure of the social organism from which a structure of the human being can emerge that is suited to the difficult, extraordinarily complicated and difficult conditions of the present, which will become even more complicated and difficult in the near future.

That is why I wanted to draw attention to this again today: that an impulse in the social sphere does not come from Dornach here with a spiritual-scientific movement through an arbitrary act, not through the arbitrariness of an individual [person] and not through the arbitrariness of the Anthroposophical Society, because it is actually true what individual people have repeatedly and repeatedly come to realize in recent decades: Things can only improve if we undertake a fundamental transformation of our entire spiritual life. But this transformation must not remain a mere theoretical demand, it must not be expressed only in idealistic terms, it must not shrink back from really presenting to the world a spirit such as has not been known before. Many people today can talk about the spirit. But it is not a matter of talking about the spirit, but of giving positive, concrete spirit. Positive, concrete spirit must be creative, creatively also in economic life. The time must be considered over when people said: Economic life is external, the spiritual world is not involved in it, it is found precisely when one departs from economic life, when one leaves the coarse material, when one ascends to the spiritual in higher regions. The time when people spoke in this way, that is the time that brought about rivers of blood in Europe. And the people who still speak from their pulpits today: 'Return to the old Christianity!' — to them we must say again and again: If we return to you, we can indeed start again — with the things that finally led us to 1914. It is a matter of having the courage to really present the new spirit to people. But then we must also be serious about it. Today, people approach us and say, 'So, what is being done in Dornach in the economic sphere?' Let us say, for example, that someone who is involved in economic life in America says, 'It's all very well to be working on the economy in Dornach; if they know how to do it, they should tell us.' This would imply that we are demanding a program. But here we are not working with programs, with things that are alien to life, but here we are seeking to create life. Therefore, no one can demand of us that we find a program to be implemented by this or that American bank, but here it is a matter of creating a center of life that is a real, living center around which people must organize themselves. Therefore, the American bankers must be told: It does not depend on you working out your program through your bank, which is given to you from here; but it depends on you centering what you do around Dornach, that you seek union with Dornach. Because it is not about issuing lifeless programs, but about creating a real center that must create as such. Here one cannot merely study; from here one should work.

The essential thing is that everything that comes from here is seen as life, not as theory, not as thought, not as idea. Therefore, those who go to Dornach or to the Waldorf School to see how things are done, how they themselves can do it, will not get it right. Rather, those who understand: Here a beginning has been made, here a start has been made. One must work together with that with which the start has been made, not with a theory but with life. In working together, ladies and gentlemen, we can find ourselves with all the people of the civilized world today - but in living together.

We must once and for all make it clear that the spirit does not live in empty thoughts, not in abstractions. And because we want to assert here that the spirit does not live in abstractions, that the spirit is a living thing, we cannot satisfy the person who only wanted to seek out what abstract thoughts are, which could now be realized in any way , but we can only satisfy those who understand that we must work together in the sense in which it is characterized, as it is suggested - but not programmatized - in the “Key Points of the Social Question” and the next issue of “The Future”. Not just lecturing from here that the mind is a living thing, but the living mind should be sought. We will see whether there is enough understanding in the world for the fact that the living spirit, not the abstract spirit, must be sought, that we must seek for an improvement of the future, for a true construction not just any abstract idea, but [that we must seek] the living spirit. (Lively applause.)

Discussion

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, is there perhaps someone here who has a question to ask orally or something to say? Two questions have been submitted in writing (about the “threefold state”; question of whether a school association should have a say in the free spiritual life of the “threefold state”).

Now, esteemed attendees, sometimes it is necessary for me to become a terrible pedant, which I otherwise abhor, for the sake of the matter! The state is conceived of as one of the three limbs of the threefold social organism, and it is actually impossible to say: the threefold state. It can be tolerated for the sake of expediency, but attention must also be drawn to such things from time to time. I am saying this because the question here explicitly mentions “the threefold state”.

Now, questions are understandably asked from the present consciousness, and that is ultimately quite right. But if you want to look at life, you have to realize that life is a process of becoming, and that some things that are desirable may only happen after a long time, but that, if the courage is there, they may also happen relatively quickly. And so one must also consider the questions a little, must consider that questions are asked from the circumstances of the present, perhaps even from the very close circumstances of the future, but in a form that can no longer be asked. Not this question, in particular. Because, believe me, it will be a matter of the spiritual life being administered by those who are alive in it. Those who are truly alive in it will naturally have to ensure that all that can in any way be favorable to their decisions is fully incorporated into them. Now imagine that I am a primary school teacher and a child enters the first class at the Waldorf School. It would be perfectly natural for the school to proceed in the same way as a sensible doctor would, who, when a case of illness arises, does not make a snap judgment but familiarizes himself with the biography of the patient. You have to get to know and read the biography when you get a schoolchild in order to know what the child has been through so far. The best way to get to know the child is, of course, to talk to the mother, although the father should not be left out completely. But here only the mothers are asked. Take just one small point from what I said today about the free spiritual life. Take seriously the fact that this free spiritual life will bring to fruition all those factors that make this free spiritual life possible. What follows from this? It follows inevitably that mothers will be drawn into it. This is self-evident! But we should not want to transfer to the free spiritual life what has so terribly emerged bit by bit in the old spiritual life. When something occurred somewhere, no matter how trivial, you could hear everywhere: Yes, a law should be made. People had nothing else on their minds but: a law should be made. A law should be made for everything! So I took the liberty of saying in a lecture in Nuremberg: What is the ideal of the modern person? And I characterized this there in such a way that I said: Man actually only wishes nowadays that he is always accompanied in his life by a policeman on his left and a doctor on his right; so that he has the doctor for the time of illness, and the policeman or another faculty takes care of the other half of life. That is precisely what we want to achieve with such a social organism: to enable people to take care of themselves, to produce, as a matter of course, what is needed for the laws that the philistines want everywhere. I know that today people usually say in such a case: Yes, but people are not yet mature enough for that. For me, this and many other things are precisely the reason why, when someone tells me: People are not yet mature enough for that, I answer that two things result from this; firstly, that he considers himself mature, and secondly, that he is certainly not mature when he thinks that he understands this, but that the others are not yet mature for it, that he is therefore judging from a subconscious self-knowledge that is not alive in his consciousness. It is not a matter of waiting for people to mature, because we can wait until the end of the days on earth, but rather of seizing the moment and then waiting to see what happens under the circumstances. When people mature, some questions simply resolve themselves out of the circumstances.

The other question that has been asked here is: “Can any of the forms of association that are common today, a labor cooperative or an individual company, be considered particularly suitable as a starting point for the associative form?”

Now, my dear attendees, consider life in its becoming again. Consider it in such a way that it is constantly transforming itself, just like the organism itself, until a certain degree of stationarity is initially achieved in one area or another, then remains for a period of time, and then dies off. You will find it already hinted at in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. What we have today should initially be the starting point. It cannot be any different. Today we have joint-stock companies; indeed, we even set them up. We have set one up in Stuttgart. So we set them up ourselves, are in the process of setting one up here, as humanities scholars. We are building everywhere on what already exists. We are not talking about some utopian fantasy, but want to build on what already exists. Then we might have all sorts of associations emerging from what already exists: cooperatives, joint-stock companies, I don't know what all, and we are only looking for the associations. [See blackboard drawing, p. 597]

But the fact that these associations enter associative life means that they change again, and that the joint-stock companies will take on a different form when associative life awakens. The cooperatives will also take on a different form. It does not matter - suppose there were a corporation here that was abominable, it would also associate. By itself it is abominable; but by being placed in the network of association, it is constantly influenced, gradually carried along by what arises from associating, and in time becomes something quite different, or perishes. For us, it is not a matter of abolishing something, but of accepting things as they are. And if something is bad, then it naturally perishes. But to abolish something through laws can never be the issue.

That is what weighs most today, that healthy thoughts must first enter human souls! You see, I would like to say this, although it was already hinted at in the lecture: the fact is that what hurts most today is that for a long time no effort has been made to build the bridge across the gulf between the classes. What concern did they have for the fate of the proletariat during the long decades of the second half of the nineteenth century? Basically, they watched what was happening; they didn't care much about it, except that they sometimes heard in larger cities that people said: There's a house again where they're having thicker shutters made because they're afraid something will break out soon! – At most, people were concerned about such things in this way. But no one sought to create a vibrant life that would have been the basis for understanding.

In my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future,” you will find an indication of how the worker in each factory should actually be led through the entire process of production, introduced to the knowledge of the raw products, and made familiar with the path the product takes, so that he has a common interest with the plant manager and takes an interest in it. Today, of course, this is still very difficult, and even if it is aspired to, it cannot be achieved overnight! It is still very difficult today for the very reason that you can experience being in a company and getting along very well with one or two workers; you get along very well with them. But when it comes to making a decision, they say to you: Yes, but I can't have the same opinion, I have to have the opinion that my union dictates to me. That's just how people are today. But why have they become like that? They have become like that because in the leading circles, where leadership should have remained, there was no desire to get to know the world. Yes, they said they wanted to get to know it, they gradually did something out of their ideas. But the one who has gotten to know it knows even more about the things.

From the years when I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School, which was basically a Social Democratic institution, I could see how the plant managers knew absolutely nothing about what was going on among the workers, and I could see how they were not interested in it either. What I am saying now may be seen as an exaggeration, because one is in the same case as the one who says that laws should... [illegible in shorthand] and so on, and so on. The states may want to stifle intellectual life, but here in X we feel no such oppression. Just as they closed their eyes there, closed for decades to what was actually coming! At most, they locked people up. But what matters is that a person really gets to know life. And that is still missing today to the utmost degree. That is one thing I would like to say in response to such questions.

From what is said, one can tell everywhere that people only know a small circle. That will change. Just consider what I said in response to...; the people were not stupid at all: here he comes and asks, and the arguments that were put forward were very clever; but they could not know anything about what is explained when one is inside a factory. Through the associations that arise more and more, where one is in a lively exchange, where one does not have to check first, but where one knows how far trust can be placed in things, one's own experience teaches what can be learned. That is what you need for your judgment. Until now, you could only judge according to prejudices and therefore judged by the by. And economic experience is given by those principles of association that I spoke of in my “key points”. That is what matters.

Does anyone still have a question?

Emil Molt, Stuttgart: I don't know whether it is allowed, whether there is still time to ask a few questions, because I don't know whether here in Dornach there is a rule that when social questions are discussed there is neither time nor clocks; but for us in Stuttgart it is the case that we can really talk without time. I would now like to tie in with what has just been said.

Especially if you are a working person involved in the threefold order, then it weighs heavily on your soul, especially in recent times, that you have had so few points of attack to implement the threefold order in reality. Last year, as has also been mentioned this evening, we tried to to put the threefolding into practice through the proletariat, and in doing so, we did not, however, disregard the fact that bourgeois circles, above all among these circles, should also become acquainted with the matter. The success has been described this evening. The parties have withdrawn their sheep, and the employers have rejected us from the start. Our work continued. Something left over from working with the proletariat is always like this: the proletarian side in particular is still showing us the judgments that, for example, all the meetings that have now been held by associations, parties and so on are so terribly boring and full of empty phrases. We are told this by the proletariat in particular, that it was a different time, when Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart still had something to tell us about the issues, about the social issues.

But we do find that the proletariat in general is not sufficiently mature to fully grasp the core issues. And we find, on the other hand, that the business community simply makes it impossible by dismissing anyone who works intensively in this direction as a Spartacist or Bolshevik.

We always ask ourselves: What can be done, especially now, not only to get the threefold order into people's heads, but above all to introduce it into practice? And here I would like to, because the question is actually always coming up again and again, especially now that in Germany [...] is such a way that employers would rather cling to big capitalism than to implement social progress, and on the other hand, the trend is so strongly to the right that we have to take that into account. They have a completely different view of things. In these times, people who dedicate their entire being to the threefold order are repeatedly shaken by the question: What has to happen to implement the threefold order of the social organism before it is too late, before it is impossible, before civil wars and economic chaos occur? In this regard, the one who is asking the question feels a particularly heavy burden on his soul from posing this question, and he would be grateful for an answer.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have understood the question correctly, it is this: How is it possible today to introduce anything practical at all into the world in the field of threefolding, given the resistance that is ultimately brought from all sides to the threefolding of the social organism?

This question is, of course, the one that weighs on one. But on the other hand, this question is based on a completely different one that must not be ignored. That is precisely the question: how do you approach something in a truly living way? And I have basically already hinted at something in answer to this question very quietly between the lines in the lecture, by saying: Of course we have also made mistakes. And that is true. We have not yet grown out of the child's shoes in the practice of the threefold social organism. For example, I want to draw attention to the following.

If you want to have a living effect, if you want to promote something in life, then it is important to really work out of life and try to understand life. Now, the situation today is that when one speaks before a proletarian assembly, one has the choice of either speaking in the language of the proletarians about what is ultimately for the good of the proletarians, developing it out of the ideas that the proletarians have. And I have always tried to do that. Or you can do the other: you talk from a general theory, you say this and that must happen – then you are thrown out the door! Because the proletariat today is very quick to make its decision.

Now, that actually never happened in Stuttgart, that we were thrown out the door; but something else happened. You see, I naturally spoke in such a way everywhere that I was not thrown out the door, because I would not have considered it very beneficial – I don't just mean because of the small abrasions that can happen, but because then you can't achieve anything, right, you can't achieve anything from outside the door! I didn't speak in such a way that you were thrown out the door. But then it is known that I said this or that in this or that meeting. Then I spoke to someone who was even a minister, and to him I said in all my innocence: Just wait and see what comes of it. It's not about throwing things in people's faces that make them angry, but about getting people to work with you.

So we wait until we are ready to work together. Then what must be the arithmetic mean of one opinion and the other, will perhaps emerge, or the others will be converted to your opinion, and so on. But we have to work from life.

And I was inclined to do that too! So you just face things like that. You get angry when you hear that something has been said somewhere that only differs in form from what you are used to hearing; and in this regard, you see, we really have made mistakes. For example, I gave a lecture to the workers at the Daimler factory that could only have had a favorable effect if it had been understood in this way – it was spoken for the workers at the Daimler factory, it was spoken in their language.

Well, unfortunately it is the custom in our circles that it is always demanded, and it cannot be resisted, that everything that is spoken in front of any audience should now be printed with skin and hair and should also be readable for everyone else out of context.

Yes, my dear attendees, that is simply not on! And you should realize that it is not on. It is not possible for something like that to happen. We should refrain from broadcasting what I say to a particular audience to the whole world lock, stock and barrel, because it can only be understood in context. Therefore, I understand very well that I received a letter from Nuremberg from a bourgeois pastor who, of course, could not think the way a worker at the Daimler factory can think now, for example. It may happen that people come together when they really work. But it is quite natural that he was angry about the lecture at the Daimler factory, that it is so and must be so! But it is really not about me giving a lecture to excite the delight of a Nuremberg bourgeois pastor, but about working in a lively way, about bringing the proletariat to where it should be for its own good, in cooperation with the other circles, someday.

That is what we want to put into practice. It must be clearly understood that we are not speaking theoretically here, but as life demands, never taking anything for granted that misses the truth, but saying what life demands.

But now, I would say, everything of this kind must not be schematized. It would also be wrong to schematize it. Suppose I were to give a lecture here on Thomism, on Thomas Aquinas, and a socialist were to come who had never heard of the context. Well, he would naturally be furious about it. There is no way to prevent him from becoming angry at the public lecture. But the practical work must nevertheless be done differently than we have done it so far. One has to understand that there is differentiation in life. And so it is important that we first really agree on this preliminary question: How do we get together a number, a sufficiently large number of people – we don't have that yet – who really show that things have now reached the point where it can be seen that people no longer even speak a language that can be understood by each other, and that one must rise above what is spoken on the one side and on the other side on the party sides. Above all, we must work to spread our views, and only when we have a sufficiently large number of people will we be in a position to introduce our views further into contemporary universal life.

It is the same with all things that depend on willpower. You can see that life can only give you opportunities to become pessimistic from day to day. But one must will optimistically; one must will in such a way that what one sets out to do will happen. After all, free human will does not consist of always saying, “This cannot happen and that cannot happen”; rather, it is a matter of knowing what one wills and working in the direction of that will. And that is the only thing we can really do in the first instance, each in our own place. Then an extraordinary amount will happen; there is an objective difficulty in putting the threefold order into practice as a whole.

You see, my “Key Points of the Social Question” have grown out of decades of observation of European life in all its aspects. They have grown entirely out of practical life. And I am convinced that if the practitioners were to take them up, it would be best to reach an understanding. The reason why no agreement can be reached is not that the practitioners have not got into the habit of checking what is said on the basis of practice, but because they say: reform ideas in a book! Books contain theories, so it is a theory. People do not read the book. If they read and study it, they would see that it is different from other books. So this objective difficulty is a factor. Unlike all other similar books, this book, 'The Core of the Social Question', is a book of life. It is the product of decades of observation; there is nothing invented in it. Therefore, it does not come across in such a way that one could say it is easy to understand, like a newspaper article. But I would never want to admit that this book, for example, cannot be made understandable to everyone in serious work. I think it is also the case with this book that I found that theater directors always said: Yes, we won't get an audience with this play, we have to give other plays - which they imagined should get an audience. I have had the most extraordinary experiences there. For example, I met a theater director who was talked into a play; he gave it a try, and he was completely convinced, he only did it out of complaisance. And one evening he did it – and it was a failure. He bet his wife, who had a different opinion, he bet her the entire royalties that were coming to him. The wife bet him that if the play went well, she would get the royalties. Well, the man lost his bet, the play became one of the best-visited plays. So he said in his theater language: At the theater, you can fake everything, you can fake criticism, you can fake approval, you can fake everything, just not the box office. You can't fake the box office. At least it doesn't help if you fake the box office.

This is basically how it is when you say that something cannot be made understandable. It can be made understandable if you just find the right way of doing it. And I can't really go into the question of why it was said in Stuttgart that the evenings were interesting back then when I was there and then they became boring; but I would like to bring this matter into what I would call a direction of will. It is really not a matter of brooding over why things are the way they are, but of trying to find ways and means to make things understandable, to make things popular, and above all, not to harbor illusions. It is no different than that we first need a sufficiently large number of people who understand our ideas; then it will work. But we must never sit back and do nothing; we just have to work. And I believe we will find understanding if we do not shut the door on ourselves too easily by acting not out of life but out of our prejudices. We must not throw every theory in everyone's face, but we must speak to everyone in their language; not because we think they are more stupid than we are, but because it is sometimes difficult for us to speak in their language when they are cleverer than we are; but even then we should try to speak in their language, even if they are much cleverer than we are in their field.

Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop and maintain a real life practice for the promotion of the threefold social organism.

Emil Molt: Perhaps I can correct something about the boring evenings that were party meetings. The proletarians have learned to see that party meetings in particular are full of the most outrageous nonsense, and that it was different in the old days at the trade union building than it is now, when we still organized lectures for the public.

Rudolf Steiner: I just wanted to say that I understood that the evenings back then were interesting and that afterwards the party line was followed, of course not by our people. That's not what I meant, but what I meant was that it doesn't help us if people realize that they have got to know something better. It does speak well for the people when they realize this, but it does not help us if they do not follow us. We only have an influence on them if they put into practice what they have decided. Don't you agree, you see, with us the meetings were interesting. But they don't go to us, but to the others. This just goes to show that, above all, it must be considered how people are like a flock of sheep, how they simply follow their leaders, no matter whether they talk boring stuff or not. They also vote for their leaders when it comes to something, and they follow the training. And we have no illusions about this. It is no use just holding interesting meetings for the people; it only helps if we manage to throw out the leaders and lead the people. That is the experience. Of course, it takes time, and many other things are needed; but here too we have made mistakes, we have negotiated too much with the leaders. We should not have done that. Because we should have been clear about it from the very beginning: the people do not want to understand us and cannot understand us. And so it is in many different ways that we should and want to first acquire the full practice of life.

So I beg you not to think that I meant that our meetings have become boring; rather, I meant that this judgment is of no help to us. What good does it do to enter into a discussion about a judgment that is unfruitful in people? It doesn't help at all.

You see, I knew a Catholic priest very well. He often walked with me – I was still at school – for almost an hour, the way I had to make from school to home. In that place, there were often Jesuit sermons. And the pastor talked with me, even though I was still quite young, actually quite sincerely. I said to him at the time, out of all naivety: Yes, Reverend, how is it that you don't preach the sermons yourself? You only need to do that for the same community every Sunday. Why do you bring the Jesuits over for that? That's not necessary. - He replied: That's right, but it is necessary to talk the cabbage into people; only in this way are they good. And I won't talk it into them myself, they can't ask me to!

So what use is it for a person to understand something if they act differently because of the social structure in which they live! That is precisely what we have to come to, to understand life without illusion, completely soberly, even though we aspire to the highest heights of spiritual life. - I don't know if I have answered the question exhaustively.

Emil Molt: Certainly, Doctor.

Rudolf Steiner: Is there anything else that needs to be asked? Emil Molt: I have already pointed out that in Stuttgart it was not the custom to go home so soon after meeting someone.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, here there seems to be a tendency to

go home and go to bed. So I bid you all good night.

Dear attendees! When I published my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Near Future” in the spring of 1919, the public life of the West was somewhat different from what it is today. It should actually be made perfectly clear how fast the pace of current events is. We should realize how much the configuration of Western civilization has changed again in the last two years. In the spring of 1919, there was sufficient reason to hope that a sufficiently large number of people would unite in the belief that spiritual impulses could counteract the forces of social decline. The terrible experiences of the war years lay behind the Western world's humanity. These terrible experiences, which at the time many people felt were incomparable in the historical life of humanity. And from these terrible experiences had emerged the opinion that something very drastic had to be done, something that had to be brought about from the depths of intellectual life, so that the forces of decline could be paralyzed in an appropriate way and humanity could be brought out of the rising forces through work.

One would like to say: After only a few months, one could see that this opinion, which was very much present in the broadest circles, had actually receded considerably. Therefore, in February, March, April and May of 1919, one could have believed that by asserting such ideas, as they were presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as they were summarized in my appeal “To the German People and to the World of Culture,” one could have believed that by putting forward such ideas one could reach those people who held the opinion just characterized. It was not necessary to cherish the arrogant opinion that the right ideas had been hit upon if they were put forward in this way. It was enough to believe that the ideas had been honestly drawn from the depths of existence, from the legitimate depths of of existence, such ideas had been brought up, and then one could believe that from the experiences that had just arisen, a sufficiently large number of people would be found to support the whole ductus, the whole will of such ideas, with understanding and energy.

One could see how very soon people again believed that humanity would be helped by first gluing together these or those old impulses that had been torn apart. One could see how the energy that had been noticeable for a while back then was gradually paralyzed and so on. At that time, in the spring of 1919, what I called “The Threefold Social Organism” had to be thrown into the situation, as it were. As I said, it might need to be corrected, as always, but it had to be thrown into the situation because it arose out of two presuppositions.

The first prerequisite is an historical one, a spiritual-historical one, one that is gained from observing the course of human development as it emerges from the spiritual-historical observation that is carried out here as anthroposophical.

The other prerequisite arose from decades of observation of the impulses that were striving from the undergrounds of spiritual, state-political and economic life everywhere towards the surface. The second prerequisite arose from the observation of what actually wanted to be realized, to which one should only help to realize, from this observation, from the directly practical observation of the three different formations of life. The first premise was not theoretical either. The purpose of spiritual science, as it is here, is to lead to full reality. Therefore, all its considerations, including those on the development of humanity, are imbued with a sense of reality. Who could not recognize the democratic principle by an unbiased observation of that which has asserted itself more and more intensely in the emergence of modern humanity?

I do not need to define this democratic principle. Of course, one person understands one thing by it and another person something else. But in general, one has a sense of what has been emerging in recent history as the democratic principle, the principle that man, simply by being man, must assert within the social community, that as much as the judgment of the individual human being is worth, this judgment must also mean in social events. This urge for democracy had been there for a long time, expressed through the most diverse movements and convulsions of the newer historical life of Western humanity, with its American offshoot.

But on the other hand, it could be seen that this democratic life cannot actually be realized in all respects. And it becomes apparent to the unbiased observer of human society that there is only one area of social life that can truly become democratic, and that is the political-state area. But the political-state area, if it wants to become democratic, can only include those matters on which every person who has come of age is capable of judgment. And if you think practically, you can clearly define the area of social life that can be subject to the judgment of every person who has come of age. On the other hand, there are two areas that simply cannot be democratized because they can only develop if they develop in terms of the expertise and specialist knowledge of the people, of the individual human individuality. This is, on the one hand, the entire area of intellectual life, namely that area of intellectual life that is actually public, the area of teaching and education, and, on the other hand, that of economic life.

Spiritual life and its main component, the system of teaching and education, can only develop properly if it arises from the professional judgment and expertise of the individuals active in this field and is also administered, administered in complete independence. Not every person who has come of age can judge in this area. Therefore, in this area there can be no such thing as a democratic constitution and democratic administration. Nor can there be democratic constitution and democratic administration in the field of economic life.

In this connection I should like to call attention to a fact which may be multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold by the experiences of life, a fact which has taken place in modern times. About the middle of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it, the question of the gold standard, the actual gold standard, became particularly pressing, I might say. And one can make a very interesting observation if one considers everything that was said for and against the gold standard by very clever people in parliaments, trading companies, associations of entrepreneurs, industrial associations of entrepreneurs, and so on, up to the second half of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it. I do not mean any irony when I say that in those days a huge amount of cleverness was raised for and against the gold standard. And in particular, a conclusion-type played a major role back then, namely that if one really came to this unified gold currency, then the pursuit of free trade and the realization of free trade would prevail everywhere. Free trade will finally triumph.

You can tell, my dear audience, when you read what was said at the time, what was said at the time, it is really clever, it was not said by stupid people, but it was said by extraordinarily clever people. But reality soon said the opposite. Reality has shown that everywhere the gold standard has led to efforts to establish protective tariff systems and to close the individual national borders. That is to say, the cleverest people, those people who, out of their industrial cleverness, said the most sensible things, had to be taught by reality that, in line with reality, the opposite should have been said! As I said, I am not being ironic when I speak of “cleverness”; I mean it quite seriously. For this fact - and it could be multiplied a hundredfold - points us in many directions. What does it point us to? That in the economic field the individual cannot be decisive at all, that he can only be decisive if his judgment coincides with that of others who, in turn, are experienced and skilled in another area of economic life, that is to say, that the individual with his judgment has only one value within the association.

And so we have two areas: the spiritual area of teaching and education, which must be placed in the power of the individual human individuality; and the economic area, which must be placed in the power of the association, the association of the appropriate cooperation of the individual economic sectors, of production, consumption, and the circulation of goods. The proper form of interaction that results from all of this, from the judgment within the associations, must shape economic life. So that we have three links, not parts; by speaking of the tripartite division of the social organism, one has given rise to many misunderstandings; one cannot speak of the three-part human being either, one cannot divide the human being into head, trunk, limbs and metabolism, whereas the human being really consists of these three parts; so one cannot speak of the three of the social organism, but only of the threefold social organism, because these three members should not go their own way, as it were, the head, the circulation system - the rhythmic one - and the metabolism system can go their own way, but precisely because of their relative independence, they also work together in the most economical and rational way. If you take this threefold social order seriously, you can be honest as a democrat, because then you can really implement democracy in the area where it should be implemented, in the area of state and political affairs, where the mature human being faces the mature human being, and where only that which can be judged by a mature human being is decided and administered. It is entirely possible to find the detailed, concrete form of how to work towards this threefold social organism.

However, you see, conditions have become so unnatural in this respect that sometimes, even back in the spring of 1919, when the threefold social organism was taken much more seriously than it is today, sometimes you had to give strange answers. In one country, for example, where a so-called Ministry of Labor had been set up, I was asked by the Minister of Labor: “Yes, but if the social organism is to be threefolded, where do I actually belong?” He meant as Minister of Labor. Well, if you think about the necessities very concretely, the Ministry of Labor is a hybrid between economic life and political life. That is why I said to the minister in question: Yes, unfortunately for you, you have to be cut in half. - Like the brave Swabian who was not afraid and cut the Turk in half, so a half labor minister should have fallen out of our unnatural present circumstances on both the left and the right. But it is precisely these things that prove how things are, and how everything is mixed up, confounded.

And so we have to say: the necessity of the threefold social order arose out of the historical, spiritual-scientific observation of the emergence of democracy. If we observe the quite radical change that occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century, we can also see that that experiences are now possible that could lead people to take such a thing seriously and understand it. One could also say that it was basically only the final consequence of what had already emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in the call for liberty, equality and fraternity. This appeal for liberty, equality and fraternity, which emerged from the French Revolution, is such that it cuts deep into the hearts of all unbiased people, that it must be taken for granted, that it must be striven for. But anyone who is even slightly familiar with the cultural-political literature of the nineteenth century knows how much has been said – and again not by stupid people, but by very clever ones – against these three ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

Just read the extraordinary multi-volume work of the very talented Magyar [Eötvös] from the 1850s, and you will see how it is proved in a very subtle philosophical that the idea of equality cannot be realized alongside [the idea of] freedom, and that, in turn, the idea of fraternity cannot be realized alongside the idea of absolute equality, and so on. It must be said: what is being put forward here is clever. One sees at last that these very ideas, in the course of the historical development of mankind, well up from the underground to the surface as something quite justified, but that nevertheless the whole of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were still under the sway of the suggestion of the unitary state. This suggestion of the unitary state was so great that people worked more and more, especially in Central Europe and also over Western Europe, with the exception of England, to shape the unitary state more and more intensively in terms of its agents. One was under the suggestion of the omnipotence of the unitary state, which had to extend over everything. And into that one could not then fit the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

If we recognize that this unified state is striving towards threefold order, then we also very soon realize that spiritual life is striving towards freedom, state and political life towards equality of all mature human beings, and economic life towards true brotherhood in associations, and from there out into all of life.

As soon as one has the idea of threefolding, one also has the agent for realizing freedom, equality and fraternity. Now, of course, there have been many people, my dear audience, who, when they heard something like the threefolding of the social organism, spoke of utopia. But it is not utopian. Just as it emerged from a spiritual-scientific-historical observation, on the other hand, it emerged from a practical observation of life itself, and it is simply not true that this threefold social order would be about imposing over humanity, which has become somewhat chaotic, but rather it is a matter of the fact that for the person who understands this threefold social order, it can be tackled from every single point of life. You can start anywhere, and then the individual beginnings will flow together into a whole by themselves. This is how we started with the threefold social order in the realm of spiritual life.

We started at our Stuttgart Waldorf School, because it is just a school like any other, but a school that has been created out of a truly free spiritual life, I want to mention it first. However, it is difficult to get through today, especially with views on the school system. In this regard, one also experiences strange things. I recently read an article in a magazine that was somewhat critical of the 'National Assembly' that took place in the city of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar, after the so-called German Revolution; of course I have nothing against criticizing this National Assembly, because basically one can say: it is really hardly an exaggeration to describe this national chatter – parliamentarism always has something to do with a chattering association or talkativeness, doesn't it, the special way of talking together! I have nothing against holding up a proper image of this National Assembly. But something strange was said. It was said that this Weimar National Assembly had actually only caused havoc in all areas of public life – with the exception of a single area where it had delivered something useful, namely in the area of schools, through the creation of the so-called primary school, the so-called unified school, and so on.

Now, this essay is based on nothing more than the fact that it is easier to see what nonsense the “Weimar National Assembly” has inaugurated in other areas of life than in the field of education, where everyone can prattle on for a very long time before the nonsense is noticed.

Now, when our “Freie Waldorfschule” was founded in Stuttgart, it was important that the spiritual life itself should be the foundation and soil with its own requirements, from which teaching and education are derived here. Of course, anthroposophical spiritual science is the source of the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf School. I gave the seminar course for the teachers of this Waldorf School based on anthroposophical spiritual science before the opening of the Waldorf School. But this Waldorf School was not misused to instill dogmatic anthroposophy into children in a school of world view. The founding of the Waldorf School was quite the opposite of this. The aim of the Waldorf School was to apply a pedagogy and didactics in which anthroposophical spiritual science can be practically demonstrated right down to the skill of the fingers; from the application of pedagogy and didactics and from what one did, one wanted to show the fruits of anthroposophical feeling and thinking, not by instilling any dogmas. That is why they almost, I would even say radically, refrained from making the Waldorf school a school of world view. That is why religious education was separated from the other subjects. Religious education for Catholic children was entrusted to the Catholic priest, and for Protestant children to the Protestant pastor.

And then, in the course of the school's effectiveness, it became apparent that there was a large number of children, dissident children, who did not attend any lessons, neither Catholic nor Protestant. What should be done with these children?

Initially, the children's group at the Waldorf School was made up of the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory; after all, it was our friend Emil Molt in Stuttgart who founded this Waldorf School, and initially the children were “the children of workers” at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Now, there were a great many parents who did not want to send their children to any of the religious lessons; but they felt that their children should not grow up without religion, without being introduced to spiritual things. And so we were obliged to set up a kind of anthroposophical free religious education alongside the other lessons, which we then also developed in terms of pedagogy and didactics, and which now stands as a third one, on an equal footing with the other two.

The Protestant religion teachers in particular had to state that they feared that the children would run away from them and run over to the anthroposophical religious education, didn't they? But as I said, it was precisely in this treatment of the religious education questions that it should be shown how far the Waldorf School is from wanting to be a school of world view.

On the other hand, anthroposophical spiritual science is able to answer the question: What are the forces that have taken on physical form in the child after it has descended from the spiritual world, and what are the forces that are particularly active in the child up to the year in which the teeth change, around the age of seven?

They are mainly powers of imitation, and everything that is to be brought to the child at this age must be achieved through a certain study of these childlike powers of imitation.

Other powers then emerge from the background of the child's mind around the seventh year. One has to take these powers into account. One then sees how one has to approach reading, writing and so on; from what one knew from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a pedagogy and didactics were formed, a real art of education that works towards not introducing reading and writing to children in an abstract way, but in such a way that reading and writing are brought out of a certain artistic, holistic humanity.

Between the ages of six, seven and nine, teaching is such that nothing abstract, nothing that engages the mere head, the mere intellect, is presented to the child. Our mere numbers and letter signs engage the mere intellect if they are not taken from the full activity of the human being. And so it was particularly important for this childhood age to have a great deal of light shed on it through anthroposophical observation of human development. The corresponding pedagogy and didactics were based on this.

Between the ages of nine and ten, there is an important point in a child's development that must be taken into account by educators and teachers. Something occurs that usually goes unnoticed. Before that, the child hardly differs from his or her surroundings. It is best to teach the child in a way that appeals as little as possible to its sense of self. But between the ages of nine and ten, something breaks into the child's mind, the main development of which lasts only a short time. One must be grown to observe what is happening in the child's development, because sometimes it depends on a few days to find the right words, the right encouragement for the child, to bring the right thing forward in the right way.

And so it is important to know what human nature wants every year, every week. And so you bring the child up, and we have developed this pedagogy and didactics to bring the child up to the age of 13, 14, 15, where something completely different occurs in child development.

Eight days ago, I was obliged to ensure in an evening course for teachers that our so-called tenth class could now be opened in the appropriate way. This is the class that children enter when they have reached sexual maturity, or, as we say in anthroposophical spiritual science, at the age when the childlike astrality, the astral body, as we say, the actual spiritual-soul body, is born. This requires a very special deepening into this important age. And in opening this class, the pedagogical-didactic maxim had to be found again to guide young people into this age.

You see, you have to feel the full weight of the age on your soul in a certain way if you really want to practice contemporary pedagogy and didactics in this way. Because you have seen it: in the last few decades – I would say it is an international affair – the so-called youth movement has emerged in the most diverse forms. What did this youth movement mean? The young suddenly demanded something completely new and were aware that the old could not give them what they were demanding. The wanderer instinct and so on, as they are all called, have become known to people.

Now this youth movement has clearly shown that the old were no longer able to be the right authority for the young. The young no longer expected what had previously been expected of the young by the old, and a terrible yearning went through the young. I would like to say: In this yearning, however mistaken and nebulous it was in certain respects, the call for a new pedagogy and didactics is clearly expressed. There is no need to [see] whether something that comes up with such elementary power from the depths of life, whether it is more or less right or wrong, but you only have to look at it in its actuality, then it can already prove this or that to you. In particular, anyone who has seen the latest phase of these youth movements, which have only emerged in recent years, must admit that this youth movement first expressed itself in such a way that the nebulous, chaotic urge of one person to join another emerged. I would like to say – the young lived out their lives in packs, in cliques. Then suddenly a strange turn occurred, only in the last few years and especially among the best members of this youth movement a colossal turn occurred. They got tired of connecting one to the other in small cliques. And those who had previously had a strong urge to join one another in small cliques began to feel a kind of disgust for being together. A certain hermit-like behavior asserted itself, youthful hermit-like behavior. They closed themselves off, they encapsulated themselves, the young people. A complete turnaround has taken place. This is also deeply significant. And again, it is not a Central European, but an international issue that has taken hold of all possible youth groups in the civilized world today. It is a matter of the necessity today to provide for spiritual life from the very depths of all of life.

Something like this should be created by the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which, I would like to say, was also created out of social circumstances. All the blustering about the unified school, which arises from all kinds of enmity and antipathy and sympathy, is of course immediately lost in the objective when one teaches and educates out of the nature of the human being. There, of course, people are taught and educated uniformly. But the matter is brought into being appropriately, not out of political proposals or antipathies and ranklings and räsonnements. The fruitful further development of humanity depends on this, that out of the factual the factual be founded.

But to achieve something like this, to really have teachers who can approach young people in such a way with such a pedagogy and didactics, you need a free spiritual life, because you have to be able to use the full power of the teachers. My dear attendees, many a person has thought for a long time, especially in times of liberal ideas, when freedom has been so greatly undermined, many a person has thought: we need programs, we need comprehensive ideas. Many programs have been devised about the best way to teach, especially about curricula.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when you put five, six, twelve not particularly clever people together – forgive this somewhat delicate or undelicate allusion – when so and so many people sit down and let their abstract minds , then they come up with the most ideal programs, all of it perfect; Clause I, the teacher has to teach this in class, Clause II, the teacher has to treat the students in such and such a way, Clause III, this or that has to happen. For the eighth year, this is how it has to be done, and so on. In the greatest perfection, paragraph I to x, everything can be presented in this way, and you can get an ideal program out of it, with the average intellectual predisposition of the twelve people who sat down together. Not much is needed to define anything in abstracto. Only because these people have the urge to disagree, we have received not one, but many programs. There are programs and cleverness buzzing through the world. When would there have been more programs and cleverness – whereby the word “cleverness” is not even used ironically – buzzing through the world than precisely in the nineteenth century.

But you see, that is not what matters, what matters is what happens in reality. What matters is real, practical life. Well, we have indeed gradually entered into strange realms of abstraction. Today, people even think about very strange theories in theory. For example, they think about the fact that if they travel from point A to point B at ordinary speed, and a cannon is fired at point A and another cannon is fired at point B, they will hear the cannon that was fired later than the one that was fired earlier. But if they move faster and faster, the interval changes; and then they work out that if they move at the speed of sound, they even hear the one cannon that is fired later at the same time. And if they move faster than the speed of sound, they even hear the cannon that is fired later earlier than the one that is fired earlier!

Now, you see, that may seem quite correct in theory, and there is nothing to be said against it. But someone who thinks in a spiritual sense, thinks realistically, not just logically, has something to object to, because that is only one way to get to the truth, and he wants to think realistically, and then he also has to imagine what such a person would look like who would now move faster than sound. Einstein even calculated what a clock would look like if it were to fly out into space at the speed of light and then come back again. Theoretically, all this can be done, and of course it is all theoretically correct. It has been much admired. But just imagine what the clock would look like when it comes back, or what a person would look like if he were to move at the speed of sound! One thing is certain: one would not be able to judge the differences in the speed of sound, because the human being would have to become sound himself. This would lead one to the conclusion that one cannot help but let concrete reality flow into one's soul, not abstract theory. Only then are we on the right path to truth. But then we also realize that a dozen people can work out very beautiful programs. But a dozen teachers can only realize what lies within the power of these teachers. And the most beautiful ideals have no value at all compared to what really lives in people. Therefore, what is to be achieved must be taken from the reality of the human being. You simply have to create this school republic out of the individual personalities of the teachers, you must not want more than the teachers can achieve, who you can put in their place. You have to take the specific teachers into account, and the school program emerges from this specific teaching staff. But this is only possible in a free spiritual life, in a spiritual life such as is striven for in the threefold social organism, where the individual human being is actually directly confronted with the spiritual world, and feels responsible for what he has to achieve in the field of spiritual life, directly responsible to the spiritual world, not to the school inspector, or through him to the minister of education and so on, but directly to the powers of the spiritual world. For an education and training system such as I have just described can only be developed if one does not merely have an abstract, intellectual spiritual life, but a real spiritual life, when it is the spirit itself that reigns on earth through the deeds of men, when one appeals to the living spirit, not merely to concepts and ideas, not merely to the intellectual and the intellectualizing. But you can only bring it out, bring it forth, this living spiritual life, this active spirit, from the individual human personalities themselves. From the teacher of the lowest elementary school class up to the teacher of the highest school system, each one is integrated into the independent spiritual organism, so that each one can only follow himself, and has so much teaching to do that he still has time to perform administrative tasks, so that everything that is administered is done by those who are still teaching, who really still teach, not by those who have retired or been taken out of the school system. The administration of the school system is the responsibility of those who are still actively teaching. There would be no authority, people say. No, that is precisely where the true authority of spiritual life would be found, namely, the self-evident authority. In no other field can authority arise except that which arises of its own accord. I would like to know how authority can fail to arise when someone really has the will to do something beneficial and knows that someone else can give them advice, then it will come, and then the one who can give the advice will have the self-evident authority.

I have the task of running the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Each teacher is independent in his or her class. The person who does something in class does so on his or her own initiative. The opinion has never been expressed that I have ever ordered anyone to do anything at the Waldorf School. On the other hand, everyone seeks advice on all kinds of matters, and there is a unified spirit in this Waldorf School. The authority is there, as a matter of course. And one could see it grow, this self-evident authority, on the spirit of the Waldorf School in the last two years since this Waldorf School has existed. One could start in this school, which started two years ago with not quite 200 children, which now has over 500 children, who are once again facing difficulties because they do not want to increase the size of the classes, the lower four classes, there should only be as many children admitted as were there before the Elementary School Law was passed. Recently, however, it has become clear that parents will not put up with this. Now, [in] this Waldorf School, there is a place where you can actually realize in a certain area what you can know from the free spiritual life. Sometimes one has strange experiences there, which I perhaps, for easily understandable reasons, in so far as they arise from the interaction, in the social interaction that we do not, however, let into the teaching, with the official life, about which I I prefer not to make any comments on now; but it is already possible to see how the individual things that lie in this threefolding of the social organism can be tackled from the practical, concrete point of view, and how one does not have to deal with some utopia.

Likewise, this can be done in other areas of spiritual life. And in fact, the anthroposophical worldview will not impose itself dogmatically, but will prove its right to exist through its viability. Because, my dear audience, one should not believe at all that someone who writes something like 'The Key Points of the Social Question' from such a basis, from a realistic basis, is thinking of anything utopian. There is no question of that, not even in the choice of expressions: threefold social order. In recent years, when many people have made the threefold order into a sect, which of course it was certainly not meant to be by me, I have had to experience it again and again, especially in Germany: how is it to be organized? How this, how that? It is really quite bad when, even in the post-war period, you are always confronted with the word “organize,” and especially when you call something you would like to see realized an organism, and you still hear the words: “organize, organize”; you organize where there is something mechanical; an organism is precisely there so that you cannot organize it. You cannot organize the organic. That must appear as an organism. Where you want to organize something, you only have the [inorganic] at hand. You cannot organize an organism. You have to let it become.

You can see the thoroughly misunderstood nature of things when such things occur. And so the threefold structure of the social organism is based on the fact that things must form, that one only has to develop the formative forces, that the threefold social organism must arise. Therefore, it cannot be described in the abstract. Especially those who have spoken of utopia would actually always like to have utopias. When speaking of such things, one can hear it asked, well: what then will be the position regarding ownership of a sewing machine in the threefolded social organism? This question has been asked here at this place, and so on.

Now, my dear attendees, a free spiritual life is only possible under the condition of a real spiritual life. Once, when I was talking about such things in a Swiss city, a university teacher replied to me: Yes, but we already have the freedom of the spiritual life, because in all state constitutions it says: Science and its teaching are free. But, ladies and gentlemen, the point is that science, which is free, should only be there as a free science. If, from the outset, science is raised in such a way that people are trained who are suitable for this or that office, and who are taught the program of their office, then you can safely decree that science and its teaching are free. If science itself is enslaved, then enslaved science naturally feels very free when it is allowed to develop as a slave.

And so it was often replied: In such and such a country, the state does not interfere in schools at all. That is the worst thing to say, because then you no longer notice it, and that is much worse than when you notice it and rebel against it, than when you no longer even notice how what flows in is only based on state principles arising without factual or specialized knowledge from the incorrect democratic, when one no longer even notices what should arise from the abilities for each new generation, what the human being still brings with him from the spiritual world by entering into physical existence through birth. We simply need teachers and educators who stand with holy reverence before the child and say to themselves: something from the spiritual world has been entrusted to me in this child, which I have to fathom and solve as a mystery. I must inquire what message from the spiritual world they have given him. Knowledge of the spiritual world must be alive in teaching and education; this spiritual world must be real in teaching and education. When the coming generation is tyrannized by that which is already there, by the living generation, then the spiritual life is made unfree. And to a large extent, the question of teaching and education in a free spiritual life is a question of teachers, the question of finding the right teachers, those who stand before the growing children as I have just characterized it.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I wanted to use a few strokes, which of course must always remain fragmentary, to point out how the free spiritual life is to be thought of in the threefold social organism. As I said at the beginning of my talk, today we are actually facing a different time from that in the spring, in the spring of 1919. At that time one could believe that there would really be a sufficiently large number of people who would support the realization of the threefold social order. Today one would be out of touch with the times if one had the same faith as one had then. Threefolding must not become a sect either, something that one can believe in and advocate everywhere and at all times, theoretically as one's opinion. Today it is quite clear, however heavy-heartedly one has to admit it, that within European civilization the people who actually do the economic work have no sense of progress, no insight into real needs, that one is preaching to deaf ears if one wants to work into economic life with reasonable foundations. Today it is clear that one can present individual productive examples to the world, as we tried to do in “The Coming Day” and “Futurum”. These examples will exist as individual white ravens, they will be careful to survive, and they will fulfill the expectations placed on them, at least as individuals. But today we cannot speak of the fact that one comes across an insight in general economic life in order to be able to grasp such things with such ideas, as one could still believe in the first urge of human experiences and results in 1919. In the meantime, people have become accustomed to glossing over the old declining forces. They are still downward forces, after all, and the collapse is still coming. They have only decided to delay the collapse a little, to let everything slide, so that they do not have to expend the energy to move forward to new ideas. And humanity is largely asleep and does not notice how the downward forces are actually raging, and how, with each quarter, civilized humanity is drawing closer to this decline. People would much rather face the convulsions and terrible upheavals that lie in wait for the future in the present if they cannot warm to ideas in the immediate present that could be properly extracted from reality in a calm development, which will nevertheless be needed in the future.

And so we can say that there is little hope to be placed in economic life today. People will have to be forced to take up the new ideas, through their own need, through the effect of the forces of decline. But in the spiritual life we must work unstintingly to develop the free spiritual life as a member of the threefold organism. This is what must not flag, what must be cultivated unconditionally, because the time in which we live is such that people's souls are becoming emptier and emptier, more and more desolate. They are too lazy to admit this to themselves today, but we are heading for terrible times in terms of people's mental state, which will also be reflected in their physical condition.

I have spoken of this often, including in public lectures. The spiritual life must save us through to the times when reasonable people will also see something on the economic front. It is necessary that this spiritual life be cultivated in its freedom wherever it can be cultivated. Anthroposophical soil is the best soil imaginable for this, because then work must be done out of complete freedom. For what needs to be worked out is not yet there. And since it is spirit, it can only be worked out through freedom. And so, especially in the near future, anthroposophical striving and true social striving will increasingly coincide. And we will have to face the souls with the fact that the economic will have to lag behind, that the spiritual simply has to go ahead today.

This is also shown by the qualities of our opponents; in Central Europe, a strange, well-organized opposition is now asserting itself. This well-organized opposition had already worked its way up to the point that at the time, on printed slips of paper distributed to all the people in this packed, largest Stuttgart hall, it was written, not only in allusions, but quite clearly, that it was actually my fault that the Battle of Marnesch was lost in 1914, and that Minister Simons in England has done poorly in recent times. It was not just in innuendo, but it was written on the slips of paper in a very crude way! You could see how it is here with widely extended parties that do not want to admit what has actually happened, that need scapegoats because it no longer works to say that the stab in the back, with which one first wanted to cover up a really eminently lost war, a war that was lost by every trick in the book, they wanted to cover that up with the 'stab in the back'; now they wanted to cover up the absolute incompetence of anyone who has ever led an army, of Ludendorffism, that's what they want to cover up. Today they want to make great geniuses out of people who are quite incapable. A cultural life steeped in lies is a cultural life in decline.

And the situation is no different in the West, no different in America. There, everything is a little more pronounced, where defeat makes things stand out more sharply. Everywhere we need to extract a real, a true, a free spiritual life from the corruption of humanity, which is suffocating in lies and untruthfulness today. For this is identical with truth, and this is at the same time identical with a striving that is in keeping with reality. Therefore, even if there is little prospect of success today, we may still believe that a sufficiently large number of people can warm to a full understanding of the idea of threefolding. Those who can muster the necessary enthusiasm and courage for a free spiritual life will help the threefold social organism to get back on its feet. Then a truly free spiritual life will become a reality. If it becomes a reality in people's hearts, in their powers and in their actions, then the threefold social organism will most certainly follow of its own accord out of the necessity, out of the need of the time. (Lively applause!)

Discussion

Question: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Rudolf Steiner: The question that was asked here first is: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Well, firstly, it is not quite clear to me how someone can be without influence on public institutions. Unless he is in prison or in some other place where he can hardly move, he is actually always subject to a certain influence on public institutions. The outside world ensures that one is never completely without influence on public institutions; one has to pay taxes and so on, so one always has some influence on public institutions. So the question cannot really be put that way.

But then, if perhaps what is meant is: How can one work in the sense of the threefold social order, when one perhaps does not have the opportunity to speak, to speak freely somehow, when one does not have the opportunity to be, let's say, a member of parliament or something similar, how can one work in the sense of the threefold social order of the social organism? Then you have to say: Well, this impulse for threefolding is something very concrete. And that is why you can actually only talk about it in concrete examples. You see, I want to say the following, for example. There are institutions everywhere in the sense of nationalization, partial or more or less extensive nationalization - let's say, of medical matters, of nursing. Now, it has happened time and again that good people – who, in their own opinion, are “good” followers of our philosophy – come and say that they would like to have this or that remedy, and so on! So they would actually like to encourage quackery and to violate the law! They can be won over for that, those people! They don't need to have any influence on public institutions, but when they lack something, they don't recognize - perhaps with more or less justification - the state-recognized doctor and want to cure somehow from behind. I have even known ministers who appeared in public parliament to speak out against quackery and for the protection of the medical profession by law, and afterwards, when they themselves became ill, or anyone else became ill, they turned to someone who was not a state-recognized doctor! It is terribly difficult to persuade people to really join those movements that simply correspond to the introduction of such institutions, which are necessary if one wants to have a free spiritual life, or in general, if one wants that which one professes! Many such examples could be cited, where everyone, in their place, by not being afraid to speak out wherever it is possible for them, takes a stand against what they recognize as evil. If you recognize the state protection of medicine as an absurdity, then speak up for it! Or, ladies and gentlemen, is it not an absurdity that over there, across the border, at Leopoldshöhe, there must be a different art of healing than here just a few steps away? But a doctor who is licensed over there is not allowed to help here. If you give in to reason, you will immediately see the matter as an absurdity. But if, let us say, for example, you are a member of the Federal Council or something similar, then you do not see this absurdity! And if you do see it, then you do not find it opportune to represent it. But if one person finds another, there will eventually be enough people to really come to reason. And instead of asking: How can an ordinary person, who has no part in public affairs, become active in the spirit of threefolding, do what one finds in every step and turn of life, in order to carry it out in the spirit of threefolding. Then one will see that every hour, every day, one finds opportunities to become active in the spirit of threefolding.

Question: In Holland, the constitutional ban on official Catholic processions is now to be lifted, which is causing quite a stir. Would this actually be a question of the free spiritual life or also of the public legal life? Rudolf Steiner: With some questions it is so with the threefold social organism, although the idea is quite right, of course: How does the blood of the chest or the head come to play this or that role in the migraine? The blood simply circulates, and so one cannot say that the blood of the chest organism is different from the blood of the head, but one can only speak of the blood in general. And so it is not easy to categorize things again. The threefold social organism is precisely manifested in the fact that things cannot be categorized. However, one does experience very strange things. In recent years I have always had to speak of the three-part human organism, the sensory organism, the rhythmic organism and the metabolic-limb organism, and in recent years a great deal has been done by myself and our medical and scientific friends to develop this idea of the three-part human being. But recently a book was written by someone called Kurt Leese, I believe. He has now, because I said that things should not be put together in boxes, but that the whole human being is head, nevertheless the human being is mainly head in the head, the whole human being is head. Things go into each other. The head is also taken care of and dependent on the limbs. Things all go into each other. Kurt Leese can no longer think this. He can only think of three if it is nicely next to each other, but he cannot think it when it goes into each other. He says: It's a shocking idea.

But we will have to get used to such shocks, even in the tripartite social organism, if we are to imagine, through the effect of abstractions, what a clock looks like when it flies away at the speed of sunlight and returns after years, is difficult to verify for a variety of reasons: firstly, because of the nature of the clock; secondly, because of the person who would then have to check it when the clock returns, and so on. So the present is not shocked at all by such ideas of the abstract. But it is shocked when something that is in line with reality is placed before it. So it is necessary not to press things so much that one now asks: Is this a matter of the free spiritual life or of the legal life? One can say: If one begins to prohibit any expressions or revelations of the spiritual life at all, to make legal provisions about it, then one is on a slippery slope with regard to the spiritual life. I must say, you see, with regard to those institutions, that I once showed you here – those who were there – a peculiar document, the document that was once issued as a patent in 1847, I believe, in Switzerland, where it says: It was through the power of the Almighty that the brave Swiss general Dufour succeeded in expelling the Jesuits from the country. Then it is explained in more detail. Today, in free Switzerland, it seems a little strange that the eradication of the Jesuits is attributed to the grace of God and the power that God has given! But it is preserved that way; I had the document photographed because it is so beautiful. I will show the photograph again on occasion. It is, after all, quite good to occasionally bring things home to people face to face. But even with regard to Jesuitism, I am not in favor of combating it by law. Those who want to fight it should fight it with intellectual weapons. One should not spare oneself the inconvenience of having to fight against everything intellectual with intellectual weapons, not by making laws. Laws can be made with majority decisions. One does not need to say that the majority is always nonsense, because then reality, social reality, would always be nonsense. Now, as I said, one does not need to go that far, but in any case one cannot say that the majority is always wisdom. And laws can be made in a democratic state, especially with majority decisions. But certain things just cannot be done by majority vote. They have to live out. And so everything that is regarded as the erring spiritual must also live out. Therefore, one must say: It is a matter of freedom and not of compulsion when efforts are made to reintroduce the banned Catholic processions and to lift the bans against Catholic processions. The only remedy is to show that these processions are not reasonable, and to educate people to this effect, so that they do not take part in them; then they will stop of their own accord! This is the only remedy in spiritual life, just as one can teach a person good taste and he will do the right thing of his own accord, but not by passing laws against it.

That is what a free spiritual life must demand. The one who has to resort to laws in the spiritual realm is on the path that I once described in Nuremberg in 1908 in a lecture cycle, where I said - it is not said without significance, using strong inks, but these strong inks should characterize adequately – I said at the time: Actually, today's humanity no longer strives to go out on the street without a doctor on the right and a police officer on the left, the doctor for physical protection, the police officer, well, for protection in materialistic times, yes, for physicality too! That has gradually become the ideal. I have heard many things in my life, but time and again I had to shrink back a little inside when I heard, with increasing frequency, over and over again: “That should be prohibited by law.” That had gradually become an awfully common saying – instead of taking the trouble to teach people good taste themselves, so that these things would stop of themselves – 'it should be banned by law', 'by majority decision' or something like that should be done. That is the one thing that must be asserted in principle. Therefore, all prohibitions against processions and the like should be lifted, and things should be allowed to run their course. Then spiritual life will also be able to express itself freely

It is absolutely essential that stupidity, folly and evil be conquered by cleverness and kindness, that ugliness be conquered by beauty, and that nothing be legally eradicated in the realm of spiritual life.

Question of the youth movement: The speaker explains that the individual members of the youth movements want and need to experience truth and reality; the economic sphere seems to them to be the area where everyone has a say, where everyone should be active and engaged. Later, the individual often withdraws again to reflect or simply to get away from society. It is almost impossible to reach a solution. Soon it is the economic that provides a value system; there is no recognition of the state or the political, but everything is conditioned by the economic. Individuals are diverted from their spiritual nature by economic life - or they withdraw into solitude].

Rudolf Steiner: In essence, the Lord has characterized what I have already said in the lecture: the phenomena of the youth movements of recent decades. But it would not be entirely correct to stop at this phenomenon of the youth movement. I have already found some understanding among members of this youth movement when I have struck what lives in the deeper foundations of the whole development of time. I had to say to some members of the youth movement, to which you yourself seem to belong and know very well: Yes, the year 1899, for example, is an extraordinarily important one for the development of humanity as a whole, and in particular for the development of Western civilization. And anyone who has an eye for such things knows how fundamentally different those people are who either lived through their childhood before 1899 was around, so they were a few years or ten years old, or those people who, let's say, were even born later, so they are hardly in their twenties now, and those people who were born before 90 and so on. At the bottom of their souls, very important things were going on, I would say, from the very source of existence, and that is connected with the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, gates to the supersensible world were opened for the first time in the Western world. It was no longer possible, let us say, in the 1880s, to lead a different life, even with a powerful urge for the spiritual life; the Nietzschean life is more or less that life, which one must present as one that has become ill from the decline of Western culture because it could not find what it was looking for: the spiritual basis in everything phenomenal, in everything external, in everything sensual. The life of Nietzsche is therefore extraordinarily interesting to study from this point of view. He participates in Schopenhauerism, becomes ill from Schopenhauerism; he participates in historicism, becomes ill from historicism; he participates in Wagnerism, becomes ill from Wagnerism. He participates in naturalism, in positivism, becomes ill from it. He participates in the Darwinian molding of the idea of humanity, becomes ill from it, and so on, and so on. Instead of the idea of repeated earthly lives, he comes to the idea of the return of the same, becomes ill from it. Nietzsche could not help but fall ill from his urge for the supernatural world. It was simply not possible to achieve this directly and fundamentally at the end of the nineteenth century or before the end of the nineteenth century. The gates have opened, and today we cannot help but turn to the revelations of the spiritual world if we want to achieve an inwardly satisfied existence. Speaking of nature in the way that was justified in the 1880s is no longer justified today. Today we can point out how there was a current of opinion favoring an 'ignorabimus', how a naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, spoke of 'ignorabimus', how Ranke, the historian, by seeking to present history as an event with the exception of the Christ event; that this comes from the primal forces, that history does not belong there - so 'ignorabimus'. Today we cannot do that. Today we are on the threshold of the supersensible world wanting to enter, and it is only the dull reluctance that is still bracing itself against the acceptance of a spiritual world view. And what is rumbling in the youth, that is the deeper thing, that is rumbling inside. And therefore, no matter how much individual members of the youth movement may say, “We do not want the abstract, we want the emotional,” they will still have to realize: What spiritual science in anthroposophy wants to be is precisely not something abstract, it is the full human being, it is what comes out of the whole human being, it is what expresses itself as art and as religion and as science, and it is the point at which the whole, full human being can come to his inner realization. And today we are only suffering from the fact that economic routine does not want to take leave of economic reason and that we must first begin to work on the recovery of spiritual life, until the unreasonableness of economic life must follow through necessity. And I am convinced that something good and right will come out of the youth movement, just as I do not despair when people keep saying, for my sake, that they cannot distinguish between expressionism and a windmill, a towel just pulled out of the water and hung up to dry, or a human portrait, say, for example, a boot heel. Of course, sometimes you can't distinguish that with the expressionists, but nevertheless, there are approaches to something in it, which, if it is refined in the most diverse places where it appears, will lead to that in which spiritual science, as it is represented here, only wants to be a guide and a leader and to work from the very most elementary.

But of course, sometimes you experience the fact that, despite the fact that you mean it to be so concrete, the opposite is held against you. I just want to say that last as a joke. The day before yesterday I had a lecture in Zurich. I spoke with slides about this building here. Then afterwards, one of the audience stood up and said: Yes, why do we need such a building, why do we need a Christ's head and Christ at all, why do we need it today? I was walking on the street this afternoon, there was a very drunk person, I followed him, and I joined him. This is a temple of God, this is a real temple and we do not need built temples. — On this occasion, I only regretted that no friendly spirit was found to find the right door with the person in question. But in view of the unnatural conditions of the present time, one may meet people who do not mean, as I say, that we should not build temples, but who mean that we should follow drunkards. They really want to work from the elementary, and they deserve, so to speak, to have spiritual science brought to their full understanding, because they can understand it. For the youth movement is connected with a very great change that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and that is actually based not only on superficial historical forces but on profound cosmic forces.

On the occasion of the course “Anthroposophy and Scientific Disciplines”

Roman Boos will give a lecture on “Anthroposophy and Jurisprudence” as part of the course “Anthroposophy and Specialized Sciences”. In connection with his lecture, he will ask Rudolf Steiner a question.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without paralyzing or killing the principle of codification, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we visualize this structuring of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? — Not in a mere analogy, I mean — but in a similar way to the way in which we should visualize the organic threefold structure in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality sets out to describe the human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe, in a truly selfless way, the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already literally within one's grasp. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken in the most diverse ways about threefolding, the objection was raised that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law comes to have content when it is supposed to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned several times today, they understand the law in such a way that, on the one hand, they only recognize a kind of formalism. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas manage their own affairs.

If we think realistically – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the realm of the spirit already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think realistically and practically, then in the free spiritual life it is not legal impulses that come into question at all, but impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living reciprocity, which will certainly have the peculiarity that, because life is alive and cannot be harnessed to norms, these determinations must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child turns forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. In the case of land, for example, it is not a matter of establishing such codified law, but rather of a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the two other characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flow, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. That is what must be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships.

Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary consequence when individual personalities act in an anti-social manner against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a practical and real way. I must say that the much-vaunted jurisprudence has not even managed to achieve a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, 'Das Recht in der Strafe' (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction gives a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses and all the others. Above all, Laistner shows that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and this is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life, for example, by entering his house or his thoughts and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: He has entered my sphere of life, and thus I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or over my own thoughts, so now I also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him has been conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for the fact that he has entered my sphere. That is the only thing that could be found in legal thinking about the justification for punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, these are secondary questions.

But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something here that continually prevents us from having really sharply defined concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social relations that are already full of all kinds of lack of clarity about life. It presupposes, in fact, the right that first an organism is present and through the organism living movement and thus a circulation is present - just as it presupposes the heart that first other organs are there so that it can function. The legal institution is, so to speak, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things develop; it presupposes that other forces are already there. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that no clearly defined legal system can exist. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for legal concepts to be formed publicly, which are then flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was very good that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.

Emil Leinhas opens the meeting. Various speakers then take the floor, including Emil Grosheintz. Finally, Rudolf Steiner answers some of the questions raised.

Rudolf Steiner: So a number of questions have been asked. We can continue the discussion afterwards. I can take up some of the questions that have been asked here and would like to come back to the last one, the one from Dr. Grosheintz.

It is understandable that, especially in recent decades, efforts have repeatedly emerged from various social ideas to determine how much work humanity [as a whole] has to do if humanity is to make progress with this amount of work. Naturally, labor would be best utilized economically if only as much labor were performed as is necessary for what humanity wants to consume. And it is indeed very difficult to provide more than rough estimates of these things. But in various circles in which efforts have been made to get to the bottom of this question – it is not particularly easy – it has been possible to form an idea of how much manual labor, that is, simple human labor, is being squandered in the present. Of course, it is not possible to know for sure if one approaches the question not in a dilettantish but in a proper manner, but we can at least say the following for a part of human labor, for physical labor. If we assume that everyone would perform physical work according to their physical abilities, then it would be necessary for every person within the civilized world – excluding the “savages” – to work about 2½ to 3 hours a day. This means that if every person works physically about 2½ to 3 hours a day, the necessary labor for humanity would be provided. Of course, this is only an approximate principle to give a general direction, because in practice it turns out that some people have to work more physically and others less. For example, someone who has to do particularly intellectual work may not be burdened with physical labor; then someone else will have to work more. But if you compare that with the amount of physical labor that is done today, then it can be said that by far the greatest part of humanity has to work so long that much more is expended in labor than would actually have to be expended, probably — and again this is an approximation — five to six times as much physical labor. So you see how much human labor is actually wasted today due to the inefficiency that exists. Much more than one might think is wasted. This is what would come about today through the [realization of the] threefold social order and what those who have no practical sense are so reluctant to accept.

How little people today have a practical sense is evident at every turn, particularly in the judgments that are brought to bear on the impulse of the threefold social organism. What is not at all willing to be understood is that today, in the face of what is going under, it is necessary to develop new spiritual forces; and because it is not understood, these spiritual forces must today, I would say, penetrate through the cracks of the social order if they are to be effective at all. For no cultivation of the spirit can arise from that which a state can order and organize. It is a complete illusion to believe that any cultivation of the spirit can arise from state administration. All state decrees regarding intellectual life are partly a desire for recognition and partly commercial profiteering, and what is then actually achieved intellectually is achieved despite these decrees. Roughly speaking, if there are still children learning something today, they do not learn because of the state, but in spite of the state, because a great deal can still be done in schools against the school laws. And what happens in the sense of the school laws does not develop the spiritual forces, but hinders spiritual development. In a free spiritual life, on the other hand, the forces of human beings would first be revealed, above all by the fact that people who have been educated in such a free spiritual life and then introduced to legal and economic life would really have an overview of the individual areas of life, would be able to act economically and would be able to organize that which cannot be organized today. Today, one can indeed despair when one sees, for all I care, how businesses are organized. Anyone who can think a little and is forced to follow the way in which business is conducted will immediately see that in these cases ten times the amount of energy is wasted because there is nowhere enough will to contract and combine the forces economically, but because one approaches things as broadly as possible. Above all, it is a matter of really recognizing the people who work together through associative life – one must first recognize them if one wants to establish economic life. It is only through the threefold social organism that this economy becomes possible, and the waste of resources will gradually cease.

Some questions – especially those that have been put to me here – show how difficult it actually is for people to find their way into a way of thinking that is completely in line with reality, as it underlies the impulse of the threefold social order. You see, people today are actually as if they did not stand with their feet on the ground at all, but as if they were constantly hovering above reality and stretching their heads up so that they feel as little of reality as possible. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore used a very apt image for today's Western European cultural man, comparing him to a giraffe, whose head extends far above its body and detaches itself from the rest of the human being. And so it happens that one cannot imagine how this impulse of the threefold social order is derived from a real life practice and how it can never depend on doing any kind of purely theoretical foolishness in these areas.

I would like to say this in advance when I now read the following question to you:

Could a form be conceived within the three-fold social organism that would be suitable for absorbing the feelings of that part of the people who, by the nature of their character, voluntarily submit to and trust a monarchical principle?

Were not the ideas of the threefold social organism first offered to the old regime?

Well, I would have to give a lecture if I were to answer the question appropriately. I will only hint at a few things: “Could a form be imagined within the threefolded social organism that would be suitable for absorbing the feelings of that part of the people who, by nature, voluntarily submit to and trust a monarchical principle?” I would like to know how much of the content of this sentence is taken from true, realistic thinking! If one wants to follow the impulse of the threefold social order, then one must think practically, that is, realistically. Now, of course, one must take something concrete. Let us take the former German Reich. Let us take the last decades of this former German Reich, of these people who “out of their feelings or out of their nature voluntarily bring subordination and trust to a monarchical principle”. I would like to ask you: where did they exist? Of course, there were those who, in the upper reaches of their intellect, gave themselves over to some illusions in this regard. But take the “monarchical principle” of the former German Reich: who ruled there? Wilhelm II, perhaps? He really could not govern, but it was more a matter of the fact that there was a certain military caste that maintained the fiction that this Wilhelm II meant something - he was, after all, only a figurant with theatrical and comical airs, who comically paraded all sorts of stuff in the world. It was a kind of theater play, maintained by a military caste, which did not act out of mere “nature” and “voluntary subordination and trust,” but out of something quite different, out of all kinds of old habits, conveniences, out of the belief that it just had to be that way - a belief that was not, however, deeply rooted in the human breast. So this whole thing lay, and it was held more than that it really ruled. That has become apparent in the last week of July 1914. I have only hinted at this in my “Key Points” by saying that everything had come to naught. But it is thoroughly grounded in the facts. Then, in addition to what came out of the military chests, this comedy was held together in the last decades by the even more disgusting nature of big industry and big business, which added up and which, from a completely internal point of view, was based on dishonest impulses and thus maintained this monarchical principle.

Now let us again take a single specific moment from which we can see what is actually meant in reality, apart from the conventional lies that maintain something like this out of people's prejudices – which is called the “monarchical principle”. On a certain day in 1917 – you all know it – Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was dismissed as German Chancellor. If you follow this dismissal down to the last detail, you will find who dismissed this man – this man who, of course, played an almost monarchical role in this ill-fated Germany for quite a long time before and after. Who actually dismissed Theobald von Bethmann? You see, it was the fat Mr. Erzberger – and not Wilhelm II, who did not play the slightest role in this. Very few people know what actually happened back then, what fat Mr. Erzberger actually did, how he actually exercised monarchical power in those days, because very few people actually care about what is really going on, but let themselves be lulled by all sorts of things.

When one reflects on something like the “principle of monarchy”, then one must start with the concrete facts, and then one must be clear about what reality consists of, whether it is monarchism or not. Do you think that in today's England, that personality reigns who, in the pictures we get to see, does not really make a very intelligent impression and who is always referred to in government decrees as “His British Majesty's Government”? No, look at England today, and see how the whole country is following Lloyd George and how he is actually exercising monarchical power. Please look at how things are in the so-called republics, see how things are really quite different from the way people believe them to be according to clichéd words and caricatured concepts. But it is essential that, if truth is to take the place of lies, questions must be asked from the basis of reality. Therefore, when speaking of the threefold social organism, the question cannot truly be raised: Would any Lloyd George with monarchical airs be conceivable? The threefold social order says something very definite about its three members: spiritual life, legal life and economic life. The things will already arise; just as the other people in such an organism get the position appropriate to their abilities, so will there also be “monarchs”.

But it seems as if the crux of the question lies in the last few lines: “Were the ideas of threefolding offered for the first time to the old regime?” Yes, but to whom should they have been offered? They had to be offered to those who could do something. What would have come of it is another matter. The point was to look for people from all over who could base what they did on the impulse of threefolding. Yes, what use would it have been, for example, when the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was in prospect, to somehow shout out to the world in those days: abstract principle! What use would it have been; it would not even have been possible. The point would have been to incorporate the threefolding idea into the actual deeds of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk; the point would have been to conclude this peace in such a way that it would have been concluded under the influence of this impulse.

My dear attendees, it was shortly after the Peace of Brest-Litovsk that I came to Berlin and spoke to a gentleman who was in many ways Ludendorff's right-hand man. At that time, it was already clear to those who could know such things what devastation the entire peace agreement of Brest-Litovsk would cause. Furthermore, it was clear that a major spring offensive would begin in the spring.

And I traveled to Berlin via Karlsruhe. It was in January. At that time, it was well known that if there was a crash in former Germany, Prince Max of Baden would become Chancellor of the Reich. I also spoke with Prince Max of Baden in January about the threefold

of the social organism, because it would have been a matter of the power of the impulses of the threefold social organism naturally having an effect on the directly concrete, real facts. Before the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a long time before, when there was truly still enough time, I put forward the whole idea of the threefold social organism to Mr. von Kühlmann in such a way that I made it clear: From America come the crazy ideas and proposals and crazy ideas, the crazy Fourteen Points, which are absolutely abstract and will lead the world into nothingness, and the only thing that could really be done from the European side would be to counter this with this great world program of the threefold social order.

I would have liked to have seen, my dear audience, what it would have meant in those days if someone in an authoritative position had had the courage to counter the zero program of the West with a real, substantial, real-political program, such as the impulses of the threefold social organism! And even if some people to whom I presented the matter said: “Well, write a pamphlet or a book about it!” – [So I had to answer:] ”What really matters is not whether things are published, but how they enter the world of facts.

Now, the conversation I had with Mr. von Kühlmann – the content of which can still be proven today, because the gentleman who was with me is still alive, thank God, and hopefully will be for a long time. The conversation ended with Mr. von Kühlmann telling me in his own way: I am just a limited soul. Mr. von Kühlmann meant, of course, that he also has other statesmen around him and that he is limited in his resolutions; but I thought of a different interpretation of this saying.

Well, I came to Berlin in the spring, and spoke with a gentleman who, as I said, was very close to Ludendorff, and I wanted to make clear what an absurdity it is to undertake the spring offensive, which he spoke of at the time as one was allowed to speak about it. I said: Of course one cannot and must not interfere in strategic matters if one is not a military man, but I am proceeding from all the preconditions that do not play any part in strategy. I assume that Ludendorff achieves everything he can possibly imagine achieving, or if all of Ludendorff's ideas are not achieved, then if he does not achieve them, the effect of the unfortunate war is still the same. At the time, it was possible to clearly show that the effect would have to be exactly the same; and that is what happened later; it is the case now. Then the Lord said to me, although I was constantly afraid that he would return to his chair, from which he had jumped up, he was so nervous: What do you want? Kühlmann had the threefold order in his pocket, and with it in his pocket he went to Brest-Litovsk. Our politicians are nothing, our politicians are zeros. We military have no other obligation than to fight, to fight. We know nothing else!

You see, in the old days things were really offered to the old regime first – it is not a matter of coming up with ideas out of the blue, but really of looking for ways in which they can be realized. Then, ladies and gentlemen, there was the time when I only had access to those parts of the world where it gradually became a rather impractical question to ask how one should behave towards monarchs and what one could do there in regarding the threefold order – other areas are not initially available to me; I am not yet allowed into pseudo-monarchical England, hyper-monarchical America and thoroughly republican-monarchical France, and so on. Those who are grounded in reality will truly not continue to discuss the highly impractical question of how one should behave towards the monarchical principle, because this monarchical principle will not be able to dominate in any way, it will sit in completely obscure corners and will certainly not necessitate a serious discussion in the near future - on the contrary, today completely different things are in need of discussion.

And I only ask you, dear readers, to read my essay on “Shadow Coups” in the threefolding newspaper, in which I tried to show how unnecessary the agitation of the more left-wing pages was against the whole Kapp comedy. Because ultimately, the way things were at the time, the left was no better than the right, and it didn't matter which side was doing the absurd. Now it is a matter of seeking reality only and exclusively, of bringing the threefold order into as many minds as possible, so that they can then carry the threefold order idea. That is the only reality. It may take a very long time if adversity does not shorten it. But more care will have to be taken to bring this threefold order idea into the minds of those who are capable of it. That it has not yet taken root in the minds of the leading figures is shown, for example, by the fact that on the German side, even in Spa, those who are still regarded as leaders are still those who were also regarded as leaders in the past and in whose heads the idea of threefolding certainly does not enter. So you see, it is really not a matter of wasting thought on asking such unrealistic questions, but it is really a matter of working in the spirit of the threefolding idea, so that this threefolding idea enters as many minds as possible. The question today is not whether we should think about how people voluntarily submit, not even to a monarch, but to a monarchical principle, placing their trust in it and so on; whether or not we think about it seems to me to be a matter of indifference. It is completely unnecessary to devote oneself to such false thoughts when one is really dealing with something that wants to work entirely out of reality. I will only touch on the other questions very briefly, as this closing statement has undoubtedly taken too long already:

Will it be possible to have associations without spiritual research? Is it possible to recognize whether someone will develop an invention after years or whether he is just a botcher?

Now, you see, these questions are not based on a proper examination of what the associations will be. Of course, the difficulties that lie in human nature will always be there. The pure belief that one can build earthly paradises is erroneous. Certain difficulties will, of course, always be there. But the decision as to whether or not an invention has any prospects of success must be made by the individual, today as much as in the future. The only difference is that today the individual is dependent on himself or on some traditions. If associations are present, however, he is connected with everything that is associated and what can come out of the people connected with him through their associations. So the judgment that has to be made about such things is essentially supported and carried by the fact that people are connected through associations.

Recently, I have often used an example to show how one can be a very clever person today without coming to a judgment about the capacity of this or that. I then gave the example that there have been people in all kinds of parliaments, educated in practice, who, from the mid-19th century onwards, advocated the gold standard by claiming and substantiating that the gold standard would lead to free trade and thus to such a configuration of trade that they imagined it would be particularly favorable for international human relations. The opposite has occurred: the gold standard has led everywhere to the system of protective tariffs. I have said that I do not claim that the people who predicted that the gold standard would lead to free trade were all stupid, even though it has led everywhere to protective tariffs. For the most part, they were very, very clever people. Read the parliamentary speeches that were delivered in large numbers in the most diverse parliaments about the gold standard, and you will see that very clever things were said about the gold standard. But the whole mechanism of public economic life was individualized, and the individual was not in a position to see the bigger picture. No matter how clever he was, he was not in a position to gain his own experience.

This experience can only come from being part of the whole fabric of associations, from knowing who knows something about this, who knows something about that, yes, who knows anything at all as an individual - not just because the person concerned has been appointed from some position, but because you have dealt with him in the fabric of associations in so-and-so many cases. The connecting element of this associative fabric is something that must arise out of trust. And so one can say: there is no either/or at all in life. But what makes it difficult for people today to recognize whether something that is invented will bear fruit in human life will, to a large extent, be lost in associative life. One must think of things in the big picture. It is truly disheartening when someone says to you, “Well, I agree; everything must become new, everything must take on different forms, and you tell me what these different forms should be.” But then tell me, what will my grocery store look like when these new forms are in place? Yes, my dear audience, it might perhaps be necessary to tell him that such a shop would no longer exist in that form. Then, of course, he would be quite dissatisfied with the answer. The threefold order is concerned everywhere with something that can be tackled directly every day and that will progress as quickly as the people capable of doing so are available. It could happen very quickly.

Only, if you want to tackle it practically, you cannot ask:

Where does a device begin to be a means of production, for example a sewing machine? Does it become a means of production only when I no longer use it just for my own use, and am I then no longer allowed to use it as something for myself?

Yes, my dear audience, when such big questions are at stake as they are today, you really cannot take the answer from a very limited circle; that is impossible. I guarantee you that when the threefold social order is realized, you will have a relationship to your sewing machine that is satisfying. For one usually does not even consider that the sewing machine and the like, for all I care hair combs or the like, can indeed be means of production, because means of production is everything that enables me to carry out my profession. So, you cannot limit the concept of means of production in that way. What it is about is that one should not think so narrowly at all. Just think about it, here is a church, here is the second church - I am choosing an example that is common in Catholicism. Let us assume that Father N lives here (he is drawn on the board). This priest says mass every day, says vespers on Sundays and so on; that is when he puts on his vestments. These vestments that he puts on as vestments all belong to the church. If the pastor N. is transferred, for example from church A to church B, he does not take any of the chasubles with him; it all stays with church A. And there, in church B, he again puts on the chasubles that belong to that church, if one can speak of “belonging”, but you know what I mean.

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When it comes to chasubles, you have a completely different relationship to the things associated with the profession than you do to a sewing machine or typewriter that you take with you when you travel from one place to another. I am not saying that the same order should be introduced for the sewing machine in the future as applies to chasubles. As you can see, there are various possibilities for getting what you need to do your work. So we should not think narrowly when it comes to the great issues of the world today. We should not let our concern for our sewing machine confuse our thinking about the threefold social order. The third question is even stranger:

What happens when someone does not want to step down, when they can no longer manage the means of production themselves? Or, if they do not want to step down, will they be forced out? Who will be able to see through it and tell them that they should leave?

Well, these are such terribly abstract questions that they do not arise for anyone who sees the course of events in the reality of the threefold social order. Read my “Key Points”; in the reality of the threefold social order there are innumerable means of forcing someone to resign. And besides, one must only bear in mind that with the threefold social order – and this is the essential point – the whole relationship of the human being to society changes. One thinks, doesn't one: How will it happen at all, that one now appoints one's successor? One should not ask such questions, which are so far removed from reality. One must ask such questions in a very concrete way, based on the experience of the facts. Let us say that someone becomes incapable, incapable due to mental deficiency, and due to this mental deficiency he reaches the point where he can no longer manage any business. Now, in most cases, someone who sees that he is reaching the point of mental deficiency and can no longer find his way around will hire someone to help him. Then the succession will already emerge from this relationship. If the situation is not as I have described, then in real life quite different, but always quite specific circumstances will arise. So if someone does not want to go, life will show him that he must. Because the one who is not capable will no longer find anyone who wants to work with him, and he will then no longer be able to run his business profitably.

So things turn out quite differently in real life than in theory. And that is why it is important to approach things with realistic thinking that puts oneself in the position of real, practical life. If you hear people talking about such things at a socialist meeting today, you will hear all sorts of things being said, because no one is talking about reality. And how could the proletariat, which had been allowed to grow up in this way, without anyone taking an interest in it, which had been put to the machine, which had not got to know real life, real connections, how could the proletariat have an understanding of anything other than completely unworldly theories? But that is the problem: the world has ended because of such unworldly theories, and no new structure is emerging. That is the problem: we must use every possible means to point to reality and grasp everything from reality. That is what matters.