The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Published in The Golden Blade, 1984. It is also known as, The Michael Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha. It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Intrinsic Secret of the Human Being.

For a true understanding of the nature of the human being we have to recognise his division into three members, each of which is, relatively speaking, self-dependent. We have within the human being the head, the organs of the breast system, and the organs of the limbs. These are of course crude expressions that are only roughly true. Under the name of limbs, for example, we have to include a good part of what is contained in the trunk. Moreover, as you will have gathered from my lectures, as well as from my book, Riddles of the Soul, there is a connection between the head of Man and his life of thought and ideation; the whole rhythmic activity in Man—roughly speaking, the breast system—is connected with the sphere of feeling; and finally the sphere of the will, which represents the essentially spiritual part of Man, goes together with the system and organisation of the limbs. Relatively speaking, these three systems of the human organism are independent one of another. Similarly, the life of ideas, the life of feeling and the life of will are each self-dependent, although at the same time they work together.

Now, as you know, we can best comprehend the difference from a spiritual point of view between these three systems when we observe them in the following way. In ordinary waking life Man is fully awake only in his head system—in all that has to do with the life of thinking and ideas. Everything connected with the life of feeling—that is, from a bodily aspect, with the rhythmic system—is a dream-life. Even in daytime the life of feeling pervades our waking life with a life of dreams. What goes on in the sphere of feeling we know indirectly through ideas, but we can never know it directly through the feelings themselves. The life of will is in still greater darkness; we have no clearer grasp of its real content than we have of the life of sleep.

A recognition of these distinctions allows us to indicate more exactly than is usually done the character and extent of the subconscious states lying below ordinary human consciousness. Subconscious ideas lie beneath the life of feeling; and still more deeply unconscious ideas lie beneath the life of will.

Now it is very important to realise that each one of the three systems contains within it thinking, feeling and willing. In the head system or the system of thought, a life of feeling and a life of will are also present; only they are much less developed than the life of ideas. Similarly, thoughts are present in the sphere of feeling, more feebly than in the sphere of the head and only coming to consciousness in a dreamlike manner.

One thing is usually quite disregarded, my dear friends, in our time of abstract science, and it is this. These subconscious members of the human being are more objective in proportion as they are less subjectively present in consciousness. What do I mean by that? I mean this. In our life of ideas, in our head life, we have processes which take place within us. On the other hand, what we experience through our rhythmic system, the processes that go on in the sphere of our feeling, are by no means our own individual property. They take place within us and yet at the same time they represent objective world-processes. This means that when you feel, you have of course an experience in yourself, but this experience is at the same time something that happens in the world and has significance there. And it is of extraordinary interest to follow up the world-processes that lie behind our life of feeling.

Suppose you experience something that affects you very deeply, Some event that moves you to joy or sorrow. Now you know that the whole of life runs its course in such a way that we can separate it into periods of about seven years in length. Roughly speaking, the first is from birth to the change of teeth, the second to the age of puberty, the third to the beginning of the twenty-first year, and so on. All these boundary lines are of course only approximate. Here then we have one division that shows itself in the course of human life.

The turning-points in the development of the human being which we arrive at by this method are clearly marked in the earlier part of life—change of teeth, and puberty—but later are more or less concealed, although they can be distinctly noted by one who knows what to look for. That which takes place in the soul and spirit of the human being about the twenty-first year of life is, for one who can observe it, just as clearly perceptible as the change at puberty is for external physiology. The division into seven-year periods holds true, in fact, for the whole course of human life.

Now let us go back to the event that makes a strong impression on our life of feeling. Suppose the event happens between the change of teeth and puberty. A very remarkable thing then takes place, which in these days of crude observation is not generally noticed. The impression made upon your feeling is there, and then gradually the vibrations of it die away in your consciousness. But something takes place in the objective world quite apart from what is in your consciousness, quite apart from any share your life of soul has in it. And this process that goes on in the objective world may be compared with the setting up of a vibratory motion. It vibrates out into the world. And the remarkable thing is that it does not go out and out endlessly into the infinite, but when it has spread itself out for a sufficient distance—when its elasticity is, so to speak, used up—it swings back and makes its appearance in the next seven-year period as an impulse that works upon your life of soul from outside. I will not say that such an event always comes back seven years later, for the lapse of time depends on the whole form and character of the individual life, but it falls into the course of the next seven-year period, although very often entirely without your notice.

Yes, my dear friends, we continually undergo experiences which strike in upon our feeling life and are the reaction of the world to an experience we had in the sphere of feeling during the previous seven-year period. An event that stirs and moves our feelings resounds again into our life of soul during the next stage of life. People do not usually remark such things, but anyone who takes a little trouble can learn to observe them, even externally.

Who of you has not at one time had the experience that someone you know well suddenly becomes dejected and out of humour? You have no idea why, but a change has come over him “out of the blue”, as we say. If you follow up the matter and have the eyes of your soul open to observe the particular way in which such a man conducts himself in life, if you can feel what is in between the words he says—or rather, what is within the words—then you will be able to go back to some earlier event that affected him deeply. And during the whole of the interval something has been going on in the world which would not have been going on if the man had not had that moving experience. The whole thing is a process which, besides being experienced by the man himself, takes place also as an absolutely objective experience outside him.

You will readily see how many opportunities there are for such things to go on outside us! They come about through our instrumentality, but they are none the less objective world-processes. These processes become involved in all that is going on among the elemental beings outside us, including such elemental beings as I described to you recently. You will remember how in another connection I brought them together with the breathing and the whole rhythmic system. Now you can see them working together with the rhythmic system indirectly through stimulation of the feelings. When we understand these things rightly, we are led to the inevitable conclusion that Man is continually creating around him as it were a great aura. And into the waves that are thus thrown up, elemental beings plunge; they mix themselves up, as it were, in the whole process and are able to influence the reaction that comes back on to Man—their power to do so, however, depending on the individual human being.

Let us picture the whole process. Something moves you deeply. You ray it out all around you. When it comes back to you, it is not unchanged; in the meantime elemental beings have concerned themselves with it, and when it works back on to you, then, together with the process outside you of which the elemental beings took hold, you receive also the influences and workings of these elemental beings. Man spreads out around him a spiritual atmosphere whereby he comes into contact with elemental beings—he and they mutually affect one another. All destiny that works itself out within the course of life is connected with these beings. For even within this life we have a kind of fulfillment of our destiny. If we have some experience today, then that experience has a significance for our later life. And this in fact is how our destiny is moulded. Elemental beings who feel attracted to us by reason of our nature, work at the shaping of our destiny. There they attain to a feeling of themselves: there they work with us and upon us.

We have here obtained an insight into the interplay between Man and his environment, and can see how spiritual forces are at work in the environment. By following this interplay, we can throw a light on many things that happen to Man in the way of destiny. An insight into these connections is nowhere within the scope of the ‘enlightened’ knowledge of our times; we can find traces of it only in traditions that have survived from earlier times, when Man lived in more elemental stages of consciousness and had more direct connection with reality. These traditions you will find sometimes very beautifully brought to expression in poems of earlier ages, where a destiny that befalls a human being is referred to the intervention of elemental beings. One of the most beautiful that has been preserved is a poem often presented to you in a Eurythmy performance. Here you can see how elemental beings from the Elf King's realm intervene in the destiny of Man. The poem runs thus:

THE ELF KING'S DAUGHTER
Sir Olaf rides from house and hall
Till late, his wedding guests to call.

There elves are dancing on the green,
Elf King's daughter amidst them is seen.

“Welcome Sir Olaf, your hand I'll take,
Come dance and join us for my sake.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may,
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
Two golden spurs I'll give to thee!

A silken sark snow white and fine—
My mother bleached it by moonshine.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
A mountain of gold I'll give to thee!”

“To a mountain of gold I'll not say nay,
But I shall not dance nor dance I may.”

“If you refuse to dance with me
Illness and pest shall follow thee.”

Over his heart she struck amain,
Never he felt such bitter pain.

Pale-faced he sat on his horse so tame—
“Go back”, she cried, “to your worthy dame.”

And when at last he reached his gate
Trembling his mother stood to wait.

“My son, my son, oh tell me true
Why is your face of deathlike hue?”

“Of deathlike hue it needs must be
For Elf King's daughter did I see.”

“My son so dear, and loved so well,
What to your bride I needs must tell?”

“Tell her that to the woods I'm bound—
To exercise my horse and hound.”

At early dawn, at break of day,
Came bride and guests in their wedding array.

They feasted and drank of wine and beer—
“Where is Sir Olaf, my bridegroom dear?”

“Sir Olaf to the woods is bound
To exercise his horse and hound!”

The bride she lifted the cloth so red
There lay Sir Olaf—and he was dead.

There you have the elemental world interweaving in the destiny of Man, at the very moment when his destiny strikes in upon him with the shock of illness and of death. Please note the words exactly. In old poems these things are not presented as they would be in poems of recent times. (Herder took these verses from an old folk-poem). Of the poems produced within present day culture we may well say that about 99 per cent are superfluous. The poems that are derived from an ancient knowledge are always to be distinguished by the fact that they are true to reality. It could not possibly have been said in this poem that she struck him on the head, or on the mouth, or on the nose, but:

Over the heart she struck him amain,
He felt therefrom a grievous pain.

In this connection it has to be an organ of the rhythmic system, hence the heart.

What I want you to note is that here you have an entirely faithful reproduction in poetry of what actually goes on around Man in such an hour of destiny. It is in fact always going on around Man, but it makes itself felt particularly strongly in connection with the phenomenon of this periodic return of experiences in the sphere of feeling. For these always come back to us in a changed form. They enter into our destiny only after they have passed through whatever the elemental beings have found to do with them. Just as we live within the external physical air or among the products of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—in the very same way do we live with the subconscious parts of our nature in spiritual spheres. In particular, with our rhythmic system we live in the spiritual sphere of the elemental beings. And in that sphere is shaped as much of our destiny as can be shaped in the course of life between birth and death.

Only because in our head we are fully awake, do we rise up at all out of this interplay with the elemental beings. In respect of our head life alone we are not involved in the realm of the elemental beings. There in our head we emerge, so to speak, above the surface of the ocean of elemental existence, in which as human beings we perpetually swim. Here then you may see how experiences can come back in the form of destiny even within the ordinary course of life, when they are related to our rhythmic system.

For the limb system, too, there is an interplay with the environment, but it is very much more complicated. Here again the events swing back; but they make a wider circuit and come back only in the next life or in one of the following earth-lives. Thus we can say that what we call our destiny or Karma need not after all be so enigmatic for us, if we look on it as only a further expansion of what can be studied in the return of experiences within a single life. For the experiences do not come back unchanged; they have undergone a very great change in the meantime.

Let me now draw your attention to a particular fact. Wherever I have lectured on education, I have always given emphasis to an important landmark in the course of life that occurs at about the ninth year. It is a turning-point that should be very carefully marked in teaching. Up to that time one's teaching about nature should be entirely of the kind where the description of nature and her processes is connected—by way of fables, legends, and so forth—with the moral life. Only at the ninth year may one begin to describe nature in a simple, elementary manner. Then the child is ripe for it. In Waldorf education the whole arrangement and treatment of subjects is derived directly and entirely from actual observation of the human being, down to the smallest details. I pointed this out in the article I wrote on the educational foundations of the Waldorf School, and I alluded there to this turning-point around the ninth year.

We may characterise this turning-point by saying that the ego-consciousness receives then a new form. The child becomes capable of taking note of external nature in a more objective way. Earlier, he unites whatever he sees in nature with his own being. Now the ego-consciousness unfolds, as you know, in the first seven-year stage of life, from about 2 – 2 ½ years of age. What happens is that it comes back in the second seven-year period, at about the ninth year. This is one of the most striking ‘returns’—this return of the ego-consciousness at about the ninth year of age. It comes back in a more spiritual form, whereas in the second or third year of life it has more of a soul character. This is only one of the events which comes back in a striking manner. The same observation can be made for less significant events.

Indeed, my dear friends, it will become urgently necessary for the future of human evolution to pay attention to these intimate things in the life of Man. An insight into such things must gradually become part of general culture. The culture and education of mankind change from epoch to epoch. We today, for example, are quite unhappy if at ten years old our children cannot read or do sums. The Romans were not so at all; they were unhappy if a child of ten did not yet know the twelve tables of the law. We for our part do not put ourselves to great trouble to make our children acquainted with the terms of the law. Our children's minds would be in a sorry plight if we did! What is thought necessary for people generally to be aware of, changes from age to age; and today we stand at the starting point of a time when the very evolution of the earth and mankind requires that these more intimate connections of Man's life of soul shall be generally recognised. Man will have to come to the point of knowing himself more exactly than has been held to be necessary hitherto. Otherwise these things will work back upon the whole disposition of human life in a most unfavourable way.

Because we do not know that something which stirs us deeply has such an origin, it does not by any means follow that nothing of the kind takes place in our life of soul. The events come back; they exercise their influence upon our life of soul. We cannot account for them. We do not attempt to bring them into our consciousness. The result is that many people today suffer a great deal from conditions of soul which they simply accept, while of course having no idea that they are to be referred to earlier experiences. Whatever concerns our feelings always comes back in some form or other. You will probably remember the typical instance I have often given. If we teach a child to pray—if, that is, we teach him to develop a prayerful mood and feeling, the effect of it will swing back into his life after many years. It swings back in the interval, but then swings out again further, and only later, after a very long time, does the feeling of prayer come back and manifest in a mood of blessing. As I have often said: No-one will be able in old age to bestow blessing upon others, merely from his presence, from the imponderable elements in his nature, if in childhood he has not learned to pray. Prayer turns into the power to bless. That is how things come back in life. And it is becoming imperative that men should understand these things.

The truth is that men's failure to comprehend these things is the cause of their inability to perceive the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. What meaning can it have for people who are caught in the toils of present day education when they hear it said: ‘After Christ had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, He united Himself with the life of earthly humanity?’ People are not ready to form any idea of their reciprocal relation to the very realm of life wherein the Christ is to be found. The influence of the Christ Impulse is not very noticeable in the concept-forming activity of our heads. As soon, however, as we look down into the unconscious, as soon as we turn our gaze downwards into the sphere of feeling and into the sphere of willing, then we live, first of all, in the sphere of elemental beings; but this sphere is interwoven for us with the Christ Impulse. By way of our rhythmic system—that is, by way of our feelings—we dive down into the realm with which the Christ has united Himself. There we come to the place where the Christ is truly to be found, quite objectively, not merely through tradition or through subjective mysticism.

Moreover, we are living now in an epoch when the events that come from this place, in the way I have just explained, are coming to have great objective significance for the life of Man. For they are beginning to exercise an unconscious influence on men's decisions, upon all that men do; and this is true, even if they struggle against it. If only we are willing to enter into this matter and understand it, we shall be able to experience the influence consciously and to reckon with it; and then we shall be able to call on the spiritual worlds around us to aid us and to work with us.

An external observation will suffice to show that in this matter we are standing at a turning-point in human evolution. I need only refer you to one fact of which I have often spoken from one or another point of view. If we look at the accustomed treatment of history, we shall see that it has not yet reached an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just recall the history of the world as it is usually set before us. A description is given of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms, of the ancient Persian and Egyptian kingdoms and of Greece and Rome, and then perhaps mention is made that the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and after that follows an account of the migrations of peoples, and so on. Some historians then carry the story up to the French Revolution or to Poincare; others to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, and so forth. But in all this fable convenue you will find no mention of the continued working of the Christ Impulse. From the point of view of history as conceived today, it is just as though the Christ Impulse had been simply struck out. It is not there.

It is remarkable how, for example, an historian such as Ranke, who was a Christian and had a true appreciation of the Christ Impulse from a subjective aspect, simply cannot bring the Christ Event into his history. He does not know what to make of it. It plays no part in his conception of history. We may truly say that for Man's knowledge of the spirit, as manifested in history, Christianity is not yet there. It is our anthroposophical spiritual science which for the first time treats history in such a way as to reckon quite positively with the necessity that in the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch the event of Golgotha should break in upon the course of historical evolution. This event is placed at the very centre of our picture of the history of Man. Yes, and we go further. Not only do we receive the event of Golgotha into our picture of the history of Man, we portray cosmic evolution also, so that the Mystery of Golgotha has place within it.

If you will study my Outline of Occult Science, you will find that we do not speak there merely of eclipses of the sun or eclipses of the moon or of explosions or eruptions in the cosmos, but we speak of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. Strange to say, while the so-called historians can find no possible way of including the Christ Event in the progress of Man, the official representatives of religion are infuriated when they hear that some kind of anthroposophical spiritual science has entered the field and speaks of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. When they hear this, they treat it as a terrible outrage. Thus you can see how little readiness there is on the part of the Churches to meet the requirements of our time, for it is essential that the Christ Event should be brought into connection with the great events of the universe.

It must be said that even theologians today often speak of the Christ just as they may speak of any other divine Being. They speak of Him very much as the Hebrews of old or the Jews today speak of their Jahve. I told you a few days ago how one could take Harnack's book, The Essence of Christianity, and substitute for the name of Christ, wherever he uses it, the general name of God, and this without altering the sense, for Harnack has no glimmering of the specific nature of Christianity. His book is page for page a description of the very opposite of the essence of Christianity. It does not treat of Christianity at all; it treats of a general Jahve teaching.

It is important to point out these things, for they are deeply connected with the necessary demands of our time. It is no vague awareness of the presence of an abstract spiritual world that is needed: the evolution of human culture requires that Man should bring into it a consciousness of the actual spiritual world in which we live with all that we feel and will and do, and out of which we raise ourselves only in so far as we think. We emerge from it only with our heads, so to speak. Indeed, an entirely new kind of world-picture is justified when the endeavour is made to permeate all our feeling and willing and doing with the Christ Impulse. Our modern astronomy and our theory of evolution have been able to develop so entirely along the lines of abstract formulae solely because the Christ Impulse has not taken hold of men inwardly, but has remained a tradition. Even where it has taken hold of men subjectively, their inner experiences have not been at the same time objective world experiences—that is, experiences where we feel an interplay between ourselves and all that is happening spiritually around us.

Here and there one sees people beginning to be very keenly aware of the need for a new impulse in the evolution of humanity. But it is with the greatest difficulty that they come to the point of resolving to take hold of the life of the spirit in its actuality. When people speak of the spirit, they always have more or less a desire to keep within the abstract.

Even the consciousness of how we stand in relation to our thoughts must change in a certain way. For, as I have repeatedly pointed out, anthroposophical spiritual science is brought forward at this present time in fulfillment of a definite purpose. It is not the result of a wish to promote enthusiasm for some sort of ideal. It springs from an insight into Man's needs at the present time. And we must again at this point relate the needs of the present day to certain powers of the soul that were present in earlier ages, when Man had a closer connection with his spiritual environment. For in earlier times the conditions of Man's life of soul were quite different.

As I have often explained to you, we cannot look for any further development of Man from sources outside himself. The impulses for the progress of human evolution must in future be called forth from within; they must proceed from our connection with the spiritual world, and we must not blind ourselves to the fact that unless something is added by our own exertion to the experiences of life, these will tend increasingly to become experiences of decline. We find ourselves already in the descending evolution of the earth, and as human beings we must lift ourselves up by our own efforts if we are to transcend the earth-evolution, for we can emerge beyond it only through our connection with the spiritual world. It is our strivings in the direction of knowledge that we shall have to feel as a power within us, enabling humanity to pass over into future stages of evolution, when the Earth dies away, even as we pass on to further stages of evolution when our body dies away and we go through the gate of death.

We pass as individual human beings through the gate of death into the spiritual world; the body dies away beneath us. So will it be one day for mankind as a whole. Mankind will evolve over into the Jupiter existence. The Earth will become a corpse. We are even now in the dying stage of its evolution. The individual human being gets wrinkles and grey hairs. For the geologist who knows how to observe correctly, the Earth bears upon her today the unmistakable signs of old age; she is dying away beneath our feet. The spiritual quest we are engaged upon today is working counter to the ageing of the Earth. Awareness of this fact must permeate our consciousness.

Earlier ages spoke from a different point of view of the close relation between their Mystery knowledge and physical health and healing. This is a truth that must now begin once more to find its way into human consciousness. All striving for knowledge must give rise to the thought: I am doing something to promote the further evolution of the whole of mankind. We shall obviously never come to this consciousness as long as we do not pay attention to the actual process that goes on around us in the way I have described. For until we recognise this, we are bound to regard everything we feel and will and do as our personal affair. We shall have no idea that it is something which takes its course outside us, as well as within.

It will be necessary also for the more exact branches of human knowledge to come to meet this extension of our thought and understanding of the world. And here allow me to refer to something that may perhaps not be fully intelligible to everyone.

The more exact domains of knowledge are by no means yet at their zenith—far from it! For example, you can find today in the exact sciences the most impossible ideas. I will select just one, which may perhaps be generally intelligible. People have usually the following trivial picture: out there somewhere is the sun, and from the sun light goes out in all directions, just as from any other source of light. And you will find that wherever people follow this diffusion of light with mathematical ideas, they will say: You see, the light spreads out and out into the infinite, and then—why then it somehow or other disappears; it gradually weakens and is lost. But this is not so. Everything that spreads out or is diffused in this way reaches a boundary, and from this boundary it swings back again; it returns to its source in a changed form. The sunlight does not go out into the infinite, but swings back on itself—not indeed as light, but as something else. None the less, it does return.

So it is in reality with every form of light. And so it is with every kind of activity. All activities and influences are subject to the law of elasticity. The elasticity in them always has its boundary or limit. And yet ideas such as I have described above are current in our so-called exact sciences; you will find them presented there today. If you were physicists, I would draw your attention to how people reckon with distance traversed and time. They call the velocity, usually denoted by ‘v’, a function of distance and time, and they arrive at the following equation: v = d/t

But, my dear friends, that is absolutely false. The velocity is not a resultant; the velocity is an elementary principle or quality that something, be it material or spiritual, bears within it. And this velocity we analyse; we split it up into distance and time. We abstract the two things out of it—space and time. Space and time, however, are not real things in themselves. Velocities, varying velocities, are real.

This observation I make for the benefit of physicists. They will understand me when I say that their theoretical knowledge of time rests in very shaky foundations. These theories would indeed not hold water if we were in a position to grasp the spiritual in its actuality.

That is the very thing required of us in the present Michael Age. It means that we must take full cognisance of the environment of Man; we must come to know the various elemental and higher beings in our environment as surely as we know of the air and water around us. These are the important things for us; and they must once again become a part of general education and culture, as they were in ancient times. People are not prepared to admit this. They will not admit that in human evolution changes occur as momentous as that which occurred, for example, at the turning-point in the middle of the 15th century. And yet it is quite possible to prove it from detailed facts.

Some Swede or Norwegian has recently written a book in which he gives many quotations from the alchemists. In particular he cites a passage where all manner of things are mentioned—mercury, antimony, and so on. And now our author, whom his book shows to be an excellent modern chemist, says he can make nothing of a certain recipe which is indicated by some alchemist. He cannot do so for the simple reason that, when a present-day chemist speaks of mercury or quicksilver, he means the external metal. But in the book from which he is quoting the words mean something quite different. They do not refer to the external metal at all, but to certain processes within the human organism, and they indicate a knowledge of the inner being of Man. They carry the sense they had for the alchemist. Certainly it is quite possible to read them as if one were reading the description of a laboratory experiment, carried out with retorts and the like—but then one gets no meaning out of it! One is bound to regard it all as nonsense. It has meaning, however, as soon as we know what was meant by the words antimony, mercury, and so forth in those times. They have, it is true, a certain application to the external minerals, but they refer paramountly to inner processes of human nature, for which one had other means of approach than those we have today. The relevant writings from before the 15th century have accordingly to be read with an understanding quite different from the way in which we approach scientific writings of later date.

Such things as these give opportunity to study even externally the far-reaching change that has occurred in Man's life of soul. For a long time now, indeed for hundreds of years, mankind has set no value on these things, but today we are living in an epoch when we must begin to place very great value on them.

My dear friends,

I must again in my introduction burden you with a small piece of news, and, since this is perhaps the last of our lectures before my departure, (although my absence will not be very long this time) I have to make this rather distasteful announcement. It is one of the results of those numerous attacks which are now occurring and is distinguished from the others which I have already imparted to you, by being perhaps of an even more vulgar nature than the others. In a publication which I believe comes from not very far away, and calls itself The Suisse-Beizique Outremer, there appears an article concerning the kernel of the social question, and begins with the words:

“What an abyss there is, when we pass from an Emile Waxweiler ¹ to a Rudolf Steiner! The first seems, at first obscure in his terminology, but his thought is of great clearness. The other develops his thoughts at a length which may perhaps prove clear to his intimate disciples but his thoughts seem to us eminently obscure. The German writer is a theosophist. It is said that he was the intimate councillor, confidant and inspirer of Wilhelm II. Out of deference we will not repeat the expression used by the ‘Rasputin’ of Wilhelm II, an expression which we have heard quoted of him.”

Now, my dear friends, first the logic, which in this case pretends to morality. Now as I have had in recent times to say many things about morality, this quotation does not fit in badly. First as to the logic which is a piece of morality. A man spreads a very vulgar rumour and says at the same time that he will not contribute to this spreading. He says he will not assert something and yet asserts it! That is the logic of many persons of the present day!

Now I should just like to bring the facts before you. Our friends will remember that, in the course of the decades since the 80’s of the previous century — of course there are some here whose memories do not extend to all these decades, but that does not matter. Some of those sitting here know that I have held many lectures, and you will know that all through that time, my only relationship to Wilhelm II was to ignore him altogether. Anything else would have been impossible. In face of the attitude which indeed not only existed in what was formerly Germany or in other countries, as far as I was concerned, it is obvious that here in this land, the subject was entirely avoided. I may just say here, because I have thought about the matter since yesterday evening, when I got the article. I have considered what my relations to this Wilhelm II really are. I have seen him once when I sat in the second row of a Berlin Theatre and he sat in one of the boxes. I was as far away from him as I am here from those sitting in the last rows. Another time I was walking down Friedrich Strasse and he was riding with his generals, with the Staff-Marshall. And then I saw him once again walking in a procession, behind the coffin of the Grand-Duchess Sophie of Saxe-Weimar. I have never spoken a single word to him, and have never been in his presence.

That is the truth, my dear friends; but today the possibility exists that the truth is not only distorted by card-players at their beer-parties and by gossips at tea-parties. That indeed has been done for a long time, but it is now done by journalists, whose papers are read today without anyone bothering as to their attitude concerning the truth. So we must put forward the question: What chance in the face of such baseless corruption, has a spiritual movement which indeed finds it necessary to say, “Wisdom lies only in the truth”, and this not from any external bragging, but feeling it as the innermost nerve of its existence. In the course of our observations of the last few weeks, my dear friends, we had again and again to point out that, if what I here call spiritual science is really to press forward into the world, it is absolutely necessary that there should be a basis of honourable, upright truthfulness, as regards what it has to say to the world. I have often drawn attention to this — that it is necessary for anyone implicated in such a spiritual scientific movement, to see that even in his most insignificant words and in the most insignificant impartations of everyday facts there prevails an absolute, literal truth. Because the present inexactitude as regards the truth in everyday life, has an inner force of growth. It grows and has a vitality of its own, and it extends to these things which can really no longer be characterised, because they transcend all measure of what is common to man, for in those human beings who in such a way multiply their culminations on paper by means of the art of printing, there is that which makes our civilisation corrupt. It is indeed true that as long as the conflict is not taken up in an earnest and upright way against everything which comes from such holes and corners, humanity will simply involve itself more deeply into those things which can be so clearly perceived today.

My dear friends, we must behold in such symptoms, what is now happening in the world; therefore it is here necessary that in small things as well as in great, all that opposes a sense of truth must be fought again and again. Anyone who has the smallest idea of what is really connected today with the personality of Rasputin, knows from what baseless, vulgar quarter such calumny comes. You see, my dear friends, it is not merely from the clerical side that the attacks become more and more numerous; but also from the side of the laity, many things threaten the spiritual scientific impulse which seeks to make itself felt in civilisation. I should really like to find words that have more power than mine have had hitherto, for this reveals itself at every turn. I really want words which have more carrying-powers than mine have had hitherto, in order to fight that which opposes the spreading today of truth in the world. One would like to find more force, because unfortunately the souls of most men today are really asleep concerning what is here meant by truth, and they forget the infinite earnestness behind these matters as soon as it has been placed before them.

I want to say the following to you today, as the principal thing. I want you to try, during the next few weeks in which I shall not be able to hold lectures here, to meditate on the feeling for truth, on the attitude towards truth, on the carrying-power, momentous sense of truth, and upon the dreadfully corruptive influence of the tendency to untruth which permeates the world so intensely today. Believe me, human thoughts are real powers; and untruths, even if they prevail in tiny things, are deathly for what must be designated as the spirit furthering earthly development. In the long run one cannot help in spreading what is most to further the earth, if one has again and again, to encounter pure untruth. So I had again to say this as introduction, in order that you might be clear that this might result even perhaps in esotericism having gradually to abandon what is passing among our ranks as a spiritual scientific movement. Do not think that these words are without importance. It is necessary that each should take council earnestly with himself, and should meditate on his own attitude to the question of the carrying power of truth, as seen in small things in everyday communications — and to untruth, which may appear as a corrupt, immoral, illogical statement, as in this article. These things differ only in quantity; in quality they are fundamentally the same.

You see, what I have said in these weeks culminates in the fact that we are facing the breaking-in of a spiritual world into our present world, which is the result of that cultural development which began about the middle of the 15th century. About that time everything became different in the civilised world. That which men before that time, had brought into their consciousness, dealt more with the inner being of man’s organism. You can find in old writings, in so far as they are to be had today, expressions which are very similar to our physical, chemical expressions, as I mentioned in the last lecture. But modern chemists and physicists will not really understand the things written in such books, for the simple reason that they believe that these terms refer to external processes. These external processes are not therein described, but inner processes of man’s physical or other bodies only. Only since the time of Galileo or Giordano Bruno has man begin to turn his attention more to the external world, and today we are so far advanced that we have a natural science, which has already influenced popular thinking, and even now popular feeling. We have a natural science which speaks of man, things in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, but can in no way give explanations of the being of man himself; not even as regards his physical, bodily nature. Today man must already put this question: “How am I, as a human being, related to what is in the external kingdoms around me, to that which surrounds me in the animal, plant, mineral, in the external physical human kingdom, in the kingdom of air and water, fire, of clouds, sun, moon and stars, how am I, as man related to all that?” Now we cannot rationally answer this, unless we recapitulate some things which we have had to observe concerning man. When we consider man as he stands before us, as a being of sense and intellect we can say: “We perceive through our eyes, through our ears, through the other sense organs which, although scattered over the rest of the body, are really Head-organs; through these senses we perceive the external world. We then elaborate our perceptions of the external world through those ideas and concepts which are united with our brain as an instrument. We retain something of what we thus experience through our senses, and this is necessary to us, to our inner integrity as human beings; we retain something of what we have conceived through our so-called reasoning intelligence, we keep back our Memory-concept.”

That, my dear friends, is in short, what we have taken out of the external world; something which was brought about in us by the external world through our senses; that which we have made out of this external reception through our intelligence we retain as our Memory-concept. What then are we, with reference to the way we as human beings face the world in the manner described?

Let us start from the simple phenomenon connected with the susceptibility of our senses, which I have already pointed out a few days ago. First of all you look at a flame, then shut your eyes, and you have an after image of the flame. This after image of the flame which you carry in your eye, disappears gradually. Goethe, who always utters these things imaginatively, says that the after-image re-echoes. It re-instates the original constitution of the eye and the nerves bound up therewith, after they have been changed through the light-impression which has fallen on the eye. What transpires in this way in your sense-organs is only a simplified form of what transpires in your memory when you receive external impressions in general, when you think them over and they remain in you as Memory-concepts. The difference is only this: If you see an impression with your eyes, let us say a flame — then you have an idea, a concept of the flame, and that resounds in you, but does not last very long. But now, if you take up something with the whole man, and think it over, you can always recall it later; and this greater after-image, this memory, lasts much longer; under certain conditions it lasts throughout your whole life. Now what is the cause of that? You see, if you keep that simple after-image which you have in the eye, and which only lasts perhaps a couple of minutes or perhaps even for only part of a minute, and then sinks down into nothingness, that is only because it does not travel through your entire organism, but simply remains in one part of it. That which becomes a memory-concept, goes through a far greater part — I will tell you in a minute what part — of your total organism; it then comes into contact with your etheric body, and passes through the etheric body into the surrounding cosmic ether. When a picture not only remains as a sense image, in a single organ, but goes through a great part of your entire organism, when it inserts itself into the etheric body, going outwards into the cosmic ether, you can retain it as a memory for the entire life. It is only a question of whether the impression goes deep enough, and grasps the etheric body, which does not retain it, but carries it out into the cosmic ether, inscribes it there, engraves it therein. Do not think that when you remember a thing that this is merely a process in your inner being. When you experience something, you cannot simply write it, as it were, in your notebook, although many people do this with their experiences today, and then simply take the notebook and read them off. But that which you remember, that you inscribe in the cosmic ether; and it is the cosmic ether which evokes it again in you, like the impression of a seal on sealing-wax, when you ought to remember it. Recollection is no mere personal affair, my dear friends, it implies an understanding with the cosmos. You cannot be alone when, as an inwardly collected man, you seek to recall your experiences; for remembering or failing to remember one’s experiences creates a disturbance in the being of man.

I have often given you the following example, just think what it signifies. A man whom I knew very well and who held an important position, suddenly got the impulse to go to a railway station without any reason, and buy a ticket to distant places unknown to him, in which he had nothing whatever to do. He did all this in quite a different condition of consciousness. During that time he knew nothing of what he really was, and only came back to himself when he was in Berlin, in a workhouse. The whole intermediate time was blotted out of his consciousness, from the moment he got into the train in Darmstadt, till he found himself in Berlin. It was afterwards discovered, from the accounts of different people, that he had been in Budapest and Lemberg; and from Lemberg had travelled to Berlin, where he came back to consciousness in a workhouse. Remember his mind was in perfect order, nothing was wrong there; he knew perfectly well during the time from his start in Darmstadt to his reception in Berlin, all that has to be done, to buy railway tickets, and how to look after himself in the intervening time, and so on. But, all the time he did these things, he had no recollection of his former life; and afterwards he had no memory of his experience after leaving Darmstadt; and no recollection of the whole journey. What happened during that time could only be ascertained by outside information.

That is one instance; I could give you many such. This is merely to draw your attention to what our life would be if there were not a continuous stream of memory going through all your experiences. Just think, if there were any time, (excluding that spent in sleep which you naturally do not remember) when you as human beings would have to think of your ego as if no memory were there. That which belongs to our sense-receptivity, to our intellect, is our own personal affair; but as soon as a thing becomes memory, it is something which, although a man experiences it in his soul-life, it is also an affair of the universe, it is an arrangement with the cosmos.

Now, present day man does not know, as intensely as he should, what I have just explained as a fact; but it will have to be one of the constituent parts of the future education of man; not to regard as a personal matter thoughts which in the etheric man lead to memory, but as something for which he is responsible to the whole cosmos.

My dear friends, when I began this series of lectures (GA 194), I told you there was once a time, to which we can go back is history when, as for instance with the Greeks, there was a land-consciousness, which did not go very far. This consciousness was then transformed into an Earth-consciousness in modern times; but in the future there must enter into humanity a cosmic and universal consciousness, where man must again realise himself as a citizen of the entire cosmos, as was the case in pre-historic times. The way to this cosmic consciousness, will be to feel quite clearly and distinctly within one, the personal responsibility for the thought which can lead to recollection, to memory. What I have described to you so far belongs, as I have told you to a great part of man’s organism, but not actually to the entire man. Now in order to characterise to you what is here the case, I must indicate it in diagram [see below].

Suppose this to be the region of the senses [white], in which I include all the senses; this is also the region of the intellect. We should then come to that part of the human organism [red] which reflects — throws back the thoughts we cherish [red arrows], so that they can become memories; that part of man which contacts the objectivity of the cosmos. I have already indicated to you the parts of the human body in which man comes thus into contact with the cosmos. For instance if you follow a nerve which starts from any part of the body and goes to the spinal cord — I will draw this diagrammatically — you will find that for each such nerve there is another also (or approximately so), which again comes back, and leads somewhere else. I have often told you that the idea of there being sensory and motor nerves is nonsense.

But the important thing is this: — that, in reality, the course of each nerve springs from the circumference, and goes back to it again. But that nerve-path is somewhere broken, just like an electric wire when a spark bridges the gap. There is a kind of springing-over, a sensitive fluid from the so-called sensory nerve to the so-called motor-nerve. Now there are many such places in our spine, for instance, and other parts of the human body; and they are the places in space where man does not simply belong to himself, but belongs to the cosmos. If you connect all those places together, taking the ganglia of the sympathetic nerve-system as well, you reach the boundary. You can say that if, as it were, you divide man into halves — (this is more than the half, but let us suppose it to be) — you can halve man and observe him as a great sense-organ; regarding the taking in through the senses as a sense-receptivity, and the working-over through the intellect as a further, finer sense-activity. Further, you may consider the arising of Memory-Pictures as after-images which, however, remain permanently during the life between birth and death because memory is created by contact with the cosmic ether. Our own ether comes in contact with the cosmic ether and so there occurs transactions between us and the cosmic ether. (That is the one half of man).

The other half of man, is that which, in a sense, has the limbs as its end-organs; everything which comprises the limb-system. And as the one half ends in the sphere of the senses [plate 13, white], so the other half ends in the limbs, to which of course the feet, hands, and arms are attached. This is naturally a very rough sketch.

Now, just as I have drawn as belonging to the senses, everything which is of the nature of intelligence, so I have now to add the inner aspect of the limb-system, and that is of the nature of Will. This Will-nature is the other pole of man’s being [orange]; and between those two lie the inner boundaries which you get if you unite all the nerve-endings, and all the ganglia as I have described. Now you go somewhat beyond this boundary on the one side, regarding it as a sieve through the holes of which on the one side presses the Will, on the other the intelligence [yellow], then in the middle you get the sphere of feeling; because everything which belongs to feeling is, in reality, half Will and half intelligence. The Will wells up from below, the intelligence descends from above, and the result is feeling. In feeling there is always existing dreamily, on the one side intelligence and sleeping on the other side Will.

After we have prepared ourselves in this way, when we have seen on the one side the pole of intelligence and on the other the pole of Will, after we have seen that the physical organs above are the expression of intelligence, we can now ask: “With what in the external world does that which is now man agree?” We have learnt to know two poles, two aspects of the human being — what is there in the external world with which that harmonises; which is there in man? The answer is — nothing, nothing at all in reality. We have in the outer world a mineral, plant and animal kingdom. With none of these kingdoms does that which we find in man inwardly, and which also pertains to the body harmonise.

Now, my dear friends, you will be able here to raise a mighty objection, which is naturally very pertinent to the matter, you will say: We must consist of the same substance as this external world, for we eat these substances and thus unite ourselves with the substances of the mineral kingdom, while we salt our food, and take to ourselves other substances, in eating plants. There are also meat eaters, as you know; and they unite themselves with the substances of animals, and so on. You see, my dear friends, the belief that we really have something to do with the substances of the external world in our own body, is a terrible error. That which our body, our corporeality really does is this. It has continually to arm itself against those influences from the outer world, even against those which come through the food we eat. Of course it is terribly difficult to make this fact comprehensible to our fellowmen, for the important part of our body does not lie in our consuming nourishing foods, but in excreting them. Many things we excrete quickly, but others only in the course of seven, eight years. But nothing of what you have eaten today will be within you in eight years time. By that time everything will have been transmuted; the activity of your body consists in throwing off and not in taking in.

The fact that you have to take in food has in reality no more significance for your body, than the ground for your walking; if you had no ground under your feet you could not walk, but you, as human beings have nothing to do with the ground; it is only there to support you. Your bodily activity must encounter resistance, it must constantly push against something, and so you must continually eat, so that your bodily activity should meet resistance. Just as we would sink into the soil if the ground did not support us, so would the body’s activity sink into nothingness unless it were met by that basis which is prepared and which permeates the whole body. You do not eat in order to unite yourself with the food, but in order to be able to mediate that activity which is necessary in the excretion of the food. For our human life consists in this activity, of excreting the nourishment; and just as little as you may reckon the soil as belonging to the sole of your foot, so little should you reckon as belonging to your human nature what exists in your food, in so far as it exists in the external world — that is, if you want to think the truth. Man in his entirety is nothing but a reaction against his environment, because fundamentally he is activity through and through.

Of course, what I have now explained takes place in an altogether different way for the organs of the Senses and the Intellect, to what it does for the organs of the Will-sphere. To this extent man is a polaric being; but what exists in the outer world has not much to do with what transpires in these two poles of man’s polaric being.

We have in the outer world the plant and mineral kingdoms. Well, this mineral and plant kingdom is not in strong relationship with our own being. If we want to investigate with what this Mineral and Plant kingdom is allied, we must look into that world which we pass through before birth, before conception; that spiritual world through which we descend into the physical. If we let our gaze roam over the Plants and Minerals, we must really say: “Before my birth I was in the spiritual world. I cannot see this spiritual world through my senses; I cannot think it through my physical intellect; but this spiritual world which conceals itself from me through a kind of veil as long as I am a sense-being, reveals itself externally to me in the Plant-world and in the basis of the latter, the mineral world.” That Mineral and Plant world have far more to do with our life in the spiritual world than with our life between birth and death. Of course, not those Plants we see in our environment through our senses, which reveal themselves to us; they are the effects of those forces with which we are connected between death and rebirth. The Animal world, too, has not much to do with what we are as human beings, but has more to do with the time immediately following death, of which it manifests as external polar-opposite.

So we can say: We do not know what exists in man if we only learn the environment of man in natural science. That Science which our present-day possesses, and which it especially values, is a Science which contains nothing of man’s nature in reality. You may thoroughly know everything which is investigated according to scientific methods, yet thereby learn nothing about the being of man, because in natural science today there is contained nothing of the being of man.

Since the last four centuries popular ideas have sprung up from the popularising of the methods of natural science. Even the peasant on the land thinks along the lines of natural science, although he may clothe his thoughts in his own words. Catholicism with its dogmatic materialism today thinks in the sense of natural science; natural scientific thought dominates everything. But we have now reached the point when it has become necessary to build up the social order. Over a great part of the civilised world today — which part will grow gradually until finally it embraces the whole world — there forces its way up the desire for the construction of a new social order. Men think of a new social reconstruction.

Where do the social demands that live today in civilised humanity spring from? From the absolutely subconscious impulses of human nature. What is there to satisfy them? The results of Natural scientific thought! Today in the widest circles, this is called “social thinking”, because these results are applied to the social life of man.

So it has come about that in the East of Europe, from the result of a purely scientific materialistic thinking, a new social order is to be erected by the state. Those men whom Dr. Helphand, who calls himself Parvus,² has — following the instructions of Ludendorf and Hindenburg ³ — imported into Russia, so that they could form Bolshevism there, are the incarnation of these scientific methods. We may even say that the practical proof of what these natural scientific methods will become if put into the heads of certain social revolutionaries through the services of Helphand — for it was he who conducted that sealed wagon through Germany, under the protection of Ludendorf and Hindenburg to take these men to Bolshevism in Russia — is the incarnated method of natural science which is at home today in Russia.

My dear friends, one should not overlook the scope of these methods, I have already pointed out certain facts. There are two philosophers – very common, ordinary philosophers. The one, Avenarius,⁴ taught at the University of Zurich, a man who certainly developed an extraordinarily narrow-minded thought. The other is Ernest Mach ⁵ who taught in Prague and Vienna. I myself heard him lecture at Vienna in 1882 in the Academy of Science. He always appeared to me as the very incarnation of narrow-mindedness and rectitude. If you ask today concerning the “state philosophy” of Bolshevism, it is not an accident but an inner necessity that it should be that of Avenarius and Mach, for these things belong together; the most extreme consequences of Natural scientific methods transformed into social thinking. Therefore one must take the matter earnestly. The scientific thought first blossomed as a social flower in the East, and it will blossom further, unless the root of the matter is attacked, in the scientific materialistic life itself.

The question is this, my dear friends. A certain wave of Thinking and feeling goes through the world; this wave is stimulated by the social scientific materialistic Thinking. While this wave spreads today, it lays hold of the necessary social thinking, but there it becomes a destructive power for humanity, an absolutely destructive force in humanity. The guiding, leading circles have not had the force and power to push into human thinking a real productive spiritual wave; and therefore the materialistic wave has arisen in the social thinking of the great masses of the proletariat. And Marxism which has expressed itself so grotesquely in the last four to five years, is the social blossom and fruit of a materialistic, scientific method in social Thought. We must not fail to recognise that this is the configuration of the present civilised world, otherwise we shall sleep through the most important phenomena and symptoms of life. One is not a full human being at the present time, if one sleeps through this phenomenon.

Certain humans beings, here and there, transcend the general judgment; they already feel today to a certain extent that, if we go Thinking and feeling as we have done we cannot progress, but shall only come more and more into Chaos. Therefore cries of the following kind though they are indeed rare today, do exist. Permit me to read to you one of these appeals.

In the 31st number of the socialistic weekly paper: The New Earth in Vienna there appears an interesting article under the title Crisis in World Views by Karl Polanyi.⁶ Therein it is said that a general opposition has arisen against the capitalist economic order, together with a deviation from Marxian socialism. There still prevails today an amalgamation of socialism, and Marxism which is the vexation of all modern thinking, each step in the intellectual solution of the most burning social problems of the times is shipwrecked in the swamp of this spiritual decay. The outbreak of the World-War was the turning point for all capitalistic and therewith Marxian thought.

“The leaders of men felt clearly and the masses felt dimly, that no longer do the so-called life-interests dominate the world, but forces of quite a different kind. The general economic interests, which the imperialists followed and against which the socialists fought wind-mill battles, really showed themselves not merely as unreal, and abstract and even to empty phraseology, but also as mere economic superstition, and empty brain-spinning. It appeared clearly that it was not the actual situation itself, but the mere idea of the situation which is the real power — no matter how false an idea is — it is that and not the situation which dominates the masses. Even the concepts of material interests, however concrete and real, will only become historically effective, when raised into a belief, when the sacrifices made are not counted, and in all the irrational things done in its name the personal value alone serves as a standard for reward and justification. Our time of incredible paradoxes believes in egoism. This is to longer denied, nor whitewashed in an idealistic way. On the contrary, humanity is entering on its death in the holy name of economic life interests, which it surrounds with a halo of glory, and of a sacred egoism which it has elevated to Heaven itself. The material is elevated to the rank of the sole ideal, and therewith the materialistic world has ended its course. The capitalists have already called this idealism of the material — as the sole reality and essential — the fatherland; and the Marxists have openly called it: Socialism!”

“Utilitarian ethics, materialistic understanding of history, positivistic theory of knowledge, deterministic philosophy, in our modern atmosphere are no longer capable of life. And Marxism, as a view of life, is built upon these pillars; but its time is past!”

This is, you see, the cry of a soul, who can only see the negative side, of what is leading our time into chaos. And now comes the question, the terrible fateful question: “What is to appear in its place?” That question is put but the author quoted, and he goes on to say: “The answer to this question is not clear as regards the fate of Marxism. To upright spirits striving towards clearness, this is a disorganised Thinking. If the Sun is extinguished, one would rather find oneself in darkness than regard a will-of-the-wisp as the Sun.

“Now what is darkening the Sun for our race is a new Sun, a more radiant Sun, rising on the horizon. Freed from the nightmare of the theory of evolution, in the treadmill of which we were condemned to eternal compulsory labour, without rest or home, to pass our senseless existence in the hallucination of a distorted apprehension of history which sees in world-events not even the echo of a town-crier grown out of the idea of a clown-like determination which regards our free-will as the chance-play of force, working behind the scenes; until finally reborn from the belief in a dead mass to a belief in ourselves, we will at last find the force in ourselves to found a socialism according to ‘Justice, Freedom and Love’, and to make this a reality for mankind”.

Indeed, my dear friends, a yearning soul who realises:”We are steering towards chaos”, who even puts that fateful question: “What is to appear in its place?” and who then continues with the answer by dishing up the old phrases Justice, Freedom, Love that have become word-husks. Long enough indeed have these been preached; but the concrete path is not contained in these phrases.

“The Marxian socialism merely darkens that question of fate before which humanity stands today. It binds down the free forces of a radical solution, holds thought in the half-darkness of an out-lived world of Dogma, confuses one’s actions with dim prophecies, obscure authorities and mystic symbols. It takes away from man his free outlook.”

Agreed, “It does take away from man his free outlook,” but this is not made free through phrases. The author proceeds:

“The Church has outlived its calling by a thousand years. Marxism might outlive us, but the new spirit which is to be born to humanity out of the sorrows of this World-War, will outlive Marxism”.

“But where is this new spirit?” asks the author, who, it seems has a feeling for the nullity of our time, for that which leads to chaos. Only one of our friends, one of those who has been in our world-view for years, adds to what I have just read, a few lines. What I have just read to you comes from one who sees something new must come, but concludes by remaining with the old phrases. But our friend adds: “Herewith we see a view of the world which perceives that Marxism, as it appears today in its most logical form as Bolshevism, belongs to an old Thinking. It is only the reflection of the old Capitalistic world; it suffers just as much in its spiritual life. If it is an opponent to the latter in economic life, yet in its spiritual basis it is one with it. But in its place and in place of the modern natural scientific view, there must appear a new concept of the world, which proceeds from an Anthroposophical view of a Philosophy of Freedom.”

These are, of course, a few lines which a friend of our movement has added but it is clear to one who looks with the affairs of modern man that because things are as they are, this Anthroposophical spiritual science will seek its way, and unless one admits that the process of the disease which is going though our present life can only be healed by anthroposophical spiritual investigation, nothing can come out of the chaos. In all humility we must therefore say:”If only a few persons could be found who, to the question: What must appear in its place?” would give the answer Dr. Kolisko gave in Vienna to this Karl Polany. As long as people believe the health of our movement is to be sought in any sectarianism, they will never realise the meaning of our movement. They must first see we have to do with something which concerns the World, a cosmic affair, then they will understand the sense of our movement. Only he can be a real bearer of this World-View, who in this way not only realises its meaning but can make it the innermost impulse of his own will.

I do not want to adorn with many words what I have said in these lectures. We have not long to wait before we can continue similar discussions, but I must just say that it would satisfy a deep need of my heart, if only many of you would take those words which I said at the beginning of this lecture, in which I wanted to indicate one of the most important things of our present world-position, and during the next few weeks would lay them to heart.

We have spoken of many of the evil influences coming from the elementary world at the present time. You know that an old true perception which we can only understand aright through anthroposophy, says that at the end of the ordinary year, when Christmas time draws near, these days come in which the spiritual influences which work on man within the earthly sphere are most intense in their working. Let us seek, just at this time — a time which for centuries was so important and essential to human beings, but which in our age is only a time for bestowing suitable gifts — let us seek something corresponding to the old psychic custom. Let us seek refuge in those good spiritual powers, who still seek to gain influence on our human destiny, but can only do so if we allow the full earnestness to work in our souls, which consists of the relationship of the spiritual world with the world of man.

• 1. Emile Waxweiler (1867–1916) was a Belgian engineer and sociologist.
• 2. Alexander Helphand (1867-1924), who called himself Parvus-Helphand, was a Russian socialist and Marxist theoretician, publicist, and controversial activist in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. After World War I he played an important part in the Bolshevik revolution and in bringing about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918).
• 3. Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (1865-1937) was a German general, politician and military theorist. Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a German field marshal and statesman who led the Imperial German Army during World War I. He later became President of Germany from 1925 until his death.
• 4. Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) was a German-Swiss philosopher. He formulated the radical positivist doctrine of ‘empirical criticism’.
• 5. Ernst Mach (1838 -1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the physics of shock waves. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism.
• 6. Karl Paul Polanyi (1886-1964), was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.

Today's lecture will be episodic, a kind of interspersion into our considerations, because I would like our English friends, who will soon be going home, to be able to take as much as possible with them. Therefore I will structure this lecture in a way to be as effective as possible. Today I would like, at first historically, not so much referring to the present—that can be done tomorrow perhaps—I would like to say something about imperialism, historically, but in a spiritual-scientific sense.

Imperialism is a much discussed phenomenon recently, and discussed by those who are more or less conscious of its relationship to the total phenomena of the present time. But when such things are discussed, what is not taken into account, or at least not enough, is that we live within the historical course of events, that we stand in a very definitive historical evolutionary epoch and that we can only understand this evolutionary epoch if we know where the phenomena which surround us, in which we live, come from.

Basically, what is most effective today and what will show itself to be an even more effective imperialism in the future will be its bearer—the Anglo-American people. As far as its name is concerned, it has shown itself to be something new: economic imperialism. But most important is the fact that everything said about this economic imperialism is untrue, everything, I would say, seems to be hanging in the air, which more or less consciously leads to untruthfulness. So in order to recognize how in these times realities are completely different from what is said about them, a more profound observation of the historical course of events is necessary.

I only need to mention one item of present-day phenomena in order to characterize the public's ability to judge. We have experienced how at first in various parts of Europe and finally even in Germany, Woodrow Wilson has been glorified. Our Swiss friends know very well that while Woodrow Wilson was being glorified I always spoke out against him in the sharpest terms here in Switzerland, for what Woodrow Wilson is today, he was of course also then when he was being glorified by the whole word. (It is already being reported—although I can't say if it's the complete truth—that in America they are thinking of declaring him unfit to govern, that there are doubts about his judgment.) The public's capacity for judgment, as it zips around the world today, is sufficiently characterized by such things.

And one must only remember a second thing. During the last four of five years, an enormous amount of pretty things have been talked about: the self-determination of peoples and so forth. All these things were not true, for what was behind them was something completely different, it was of course a question of power. And in order to understand what it's about, what is said, thought and judged, it is necessary to return to the realities. And when things such as imperialism are considered—“Imperial Federation League” is the official designation in England since the beginning of the twentieth century—we must realize that they are the recent products of an evolution and they go back to a remote past, and can only be explained by a true consideration of history.

We do not want to delve so deeply into the past as we could when studying the spiritual evolution of humanity, but we do want to go at least as far back as several centuries before the Christian era. We find imperialistic empires in Asia, and a subspecies of such empires in Egypt. Most characteristic of the Asiatic impulse are, for example, the historically known Persian empire and, especially, the Assyrian empire. But it is not sufficient to study this first phase of imperialism only in the last, historically known stage of the Assyrian empire, simply because the motivators dominating the Assyrian empire cannot be understood without reaching back to even earlier oriental conditions. Even in China, whose whole organization reaches so far back, the organization of recent times has changed so much that the true character of an oriental imperialism as it once existed is not recognized. However, the conditions which are known historically make it possible to see what the fundamentals are.

We cannot understand the old oriental imperialism without knowing the conscious relationship between people of a region, let's say an empire, and what we today would call the ruler or the rulers of that empire. Because of course our words for ruler or king and so forth no longer express the feelings about the ruler or the rulers. It is very difficult to understand the feelings of people in general of the third to fourth century before the Christian era because it is difficult nowadays to take account of how people felt in those ancient times about the relation of the physical world to the spiritual world. Today most people think, if they even think about a spiritual world, that it is somewhere in the distant beyond. And when the spiritual world is spoken about—and in the future it will again have to be spoken about as being present among us just as the sense world is—then what results is what has led for example to the Protestant mentality. But the essential nature of ancient times is that no distinction was made between the physical and spiritual worlds.

This is so much the case that when ancient times are referred to by people of today they can hardly imagine much consistency, for the way of thinking was so different then from what it is today. Rulers, a ruling caste, slaves, ruled people, that was reality—not something called a physical reality, but it was the reality, simultaneously the physical and the spiritual reality. And the ruler of an oriental empire—what was he? The ruler of the oriental empire was God. And for the people of those times there was no God beyond the clouds, no choir of spirits who surrounded the highest God—that view came later—but rather what we today call ministers or court jesters, somewhat disrespectfully, were beings of a divine nature. For it was obvious that because of the mystery schooling they had gone through, they had become something greater than ordinary people. They were looked up to, just as the Protestant mentality looks up to its God or certain more liberal circles look up to their invisible angels and such. Extra invisible angels or an extra super-sensible invisible God did not exist for the people of the ancient orient. Everything spiritual lived in man. In the common man lived a human soul. In those whom we would today call rulers, lived a divine soul, a God.

The concept of a really existing godly empire, which at the same time was a physical empire, is no longer taken into consideration. That a king has real divine power and dignity is considered absurd today, but was a reality in oriental imperialism.

As I mentioned, a subspecies was found in Egypt, for there we find a true transition to a later form. If we go back to the oldest form of imperialism, we find it based on the king being God who really physically appeared on earth, the son of heaven who physically appeared on earth, who was even the father of heaven. This is so paradoxical for the contemporary mind, that it seems unbelievable, but it is so. We can learn from Assyrian documents how conquests were justified. They were simply carried out. The justification was that they had to expand more and more the God's empire. When a territory was conquered and the inhabitants became subjects, then they had to worship the conqueror as their god. During those times no one thought of spreading a certain worldview. Why would it have been necessary? When the conquered people openly recognized the conqueror, followed him, then all was in order, they could believe whatever they wanted. Belief—personal opinion—wasn't touched in ancient times, nobody cared about it.

That was the first form in which imperialism appeared. The second form was when the ruler, the one who was to play a leading role, wasn't the god himself, but the god's envoy, or inspired by the god, interpenetrated with divinity.

The first imperialism is characterized by realities. When an oriental ruler of ancient times appeared before his people, it was in all his splendor, because as a god he was entitled to wear such clothes. It was the clothing of a god. That's what a god looked like. It meant nothing more than what the ruler wore was the fashion of the gods. And his paladins were not mere bureaucrats, but higher beings who accompanied him and did what they did with the power of higher beings.

Then came the time, as already mentioned, when the ruler and his paladins appeared as God's envoys, as interpenetrated with divinity, as representatives. That is very clear in Dionysus the Areopagite. Read his writings, where he describes the complete hierarchy, from the deacons, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, up to the church's whole hierarchy. How does he do this? Dionysus the Areopagite presents it as though in this earthly churchly hierarchy is mirrored what God is with his archangels and angles, super- sensibly of course. So above we have the heavenly hierarchy and below it's mirror image, the worldly hierarchy. The people of the worldly hierarchy, the deacons, archdeacons, wear certain clothes, and they perform their rituals; they are symbols. The first phase was characterized by realities, the second phase was characterized by signs, by symbols. But this has been more or less forgotten. Even Catholics understand little of the fact that the deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops are the representatives of the heavenly hierarchies. This has been mostly forgotten.

With the advancement of imperialism a division occurred, a real division. On one hand there were the leaders tending more towards being divine representatives, priestly, where the priests were kings; on the other hand the tendency towards the secular, although still by the grace of God. Basically these were the two forms: the churches and the empires.

During the first imperialism, when all was physical reality, something like this would have been unthinkable. But in the second phase of imperialism the division occurred. On one side more secular, but nevertheless representative of God, on the other side more church oriented, also representative of God. That system held until the middle ages and, I would even say, until the year 1806, but more as a shadow, retained in kings and paladins as God's representatives. The Roman Catholic Church's propagation tended more towards the priestly. But where this phenomenon of God's representative or envoy, which held through the entire middle ages, was most strongly maintained was in the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which finally disappeared in 1806. In “Holy” you have a whiff of what was divine during the ancient times on earth; “Roman” indicates the provenance, where it came from; “German Nation” was what it covered, the more secular element.

Therefore in the second phase of imperialism we no longer merely have the Church's anointed imperialism, but we have the tangled web of the divine and the secular anointed in the empires. That already began in the old Roman Empire during pre-Christian times and extended into the late Middle Ages. But this imperial Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation always had a double character. Remember that it goes back to Karl the Great. But Karl the Great was crowned by the Pope in Rome. Therewith royal dignity became a symbol, so that what existed here on the physical earth was no longer reality. The people of the Middle Ages did not worship Karl the Great and Otto I as gods, which was the case in more ancient times, but they saw in them godly representatives. And that had to be continually confirmed, for of course it became ever weaker in consciousness. But it still retained a symbolic reality, a reality of signs. These emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation went to Rome in order for the Pope to crown them. Istwan I was also crowned king of Hungary by the Pope in the year 1000. The anointment, and therefore the power, was bestowed on the world's rulers by the clergy.

It was also thought that there was justification for other peoples being incorporated into the empire. Even Dante thought that the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was justified in ruling the whole world. So the formula for imperialism is even to be found in Dante.

In fables and other lore where the events of history are crystallized in human consciousness, things are expressed from various viewpoints, not just one. We could say that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Europe the consciousness existed—not a clear one, more like a feeling—that once in ancient times in the Orient men lived on the physical earth who were themselves gods. They didn't think it was a superstition, oh no, rather they thought that such gods could no longer live on the earth because the earth had become so bad. That's been lost, what made men gods, the “Holy Grail” has been lost and now, in Central Europe, it can only be found in the way Percival found it: one seeks the way to find god within, whereas earlier god was a reality in the empire. Now the empire is merely a sum of symbols, of signs, and one must find the spirit in the symbols.

Of all the things which once existed, only remnants remain. Reality is deadened. Remnants remain, remnants of the most diverse kind. Generally, as long as things are real, definite, they later become ambiguous. And thus in Europe diversity grew from clear reality. As long as the Holy Roman Empire had meaning in human consciousness, the representative of the empire was powerful and competent enough to subdue the individual angel-symbols, the local princes, for that consciousness included the emperor's right to do so. But his right rested more or less on something ideal, which more and more lost its meaning, and the local princes remained. So we have in the Holy Roman Empire something which gradually had its inner substance squeezed out until only the exterior remained. The consciousness that earthly men were representatives of God was lost. And the expression for the fact that people no longer believed that certain individuals were representatives of God is Protestantism—protest against the idea of men as representatives of God.

If the principle of Protestantism had rigorously penetrated, no prince could have been crowned “by the Grace of God” again. But such things remained as remnants. These remnants remained until 1918, then they disappeared. These remnants, which had already lost all inner meaning, remained as outer appearances until then. The local German princes were the outer appearances; they only had meaning in those ancient times when they were symbols for an inspirational kingdom of heaven.

Other remnants remained. Not so long ago a pastoral letter was written by a Central-European bishop—perhaps he was an Archbishop. In that pastoral letter he more or less claimed that the catholic priest is more powerful than Jesus Christ for the simple reason that when the Catholic priest performs the transubstantiation at the altar, Jesus Christ must be present in the Sanctissimum, in the Host. The transubstantiation must really take place through the priest's power. It means that the action performed by the priest forces the Christ Jesus to be present on the altar. Therefore the more powerful is not the Christ Jesus, but he who performs the transubstantiation at the altar!

If we wish to understand such a thing which, as I said, appeared in a pastoral letter a few years ago, we must go back, not to the times of the second imperialism, but to the times of the first imperialism, many elements of which are retained in the Catholic Church and its institutions. Therein lies the remnant of the consciousness that those who rule on the earth are the gods, whereas the Christ Jesus is only the son of God. What was written in that pastoral letter is of course an impossibility for the Protestant mentality, just as for today it is almost impossible to believe that thousands of years ago people actually saw the ruler as God. But these are all real historical factors, real facts which played a role historically and are still present today.

These earlier realities play strongly into later events. Just look at how Mohammedanism [Islam] has spread. Certainly Mohammed never said: Mohammed is your God—as it would have been said thousands of years earlier by an oriental ruler. He limited himself to what corresponded more to the times: There is a God , and Mohammed is his prophet. In people's consciousness he was God's representative—the second phase of imperialism. The manner in which Islam spread, however, corresponded to the first phase. For Muslims have never been intolerant towards other beliefs the way some others were. The Muslims were content to defeat the others and make them their subjects, just as it was in older times when a profession of faith was not required, for it was a matter of indifference what they believed if they just recognized God.

And something also remained of the first phase of imperialism—strongly influenced by the second—in Russian despotism, in tsarism. The way in which he was recognized by his subjects goes back, at least partially, to the first phase of imperialism. It was not so much a question of what was in the consciousness of the Russian people, for the rulership of the tsars rested on the Germanic and the Mongolian elements rather than that of the Russian peasantry itself.

Now we come to the third phase of imperialism. It has been formulated since the beginning of the twentieth century, since Chamberlain and his people coined the expression “Imperial Federation League,” but the causes go back to the second half of the seventeenth century, when that great upheaval occurred in England as a result of which everywhere in the west that the Anglo-American people lived, the king, who earlier had been God, then an anointed one, became a kind of mere shadow—one cannot say a decoration exactly, but rather something more tolerated than taken seriously.

The English speaking peoples bring other preconditions to what we may call the people's will, the voting system, than, say, the French—the Latin peoples in general. The Latin peoples, especially the French, certainly carried out the revolution of the eighteenth century, but the French people today are more royal than any other. To be royal doesn't only mean to have a king at the top. Naturally a person whose head has been cut off cannot run around; but the French as a people are royal, imperialistic, without having a king. It has to do with the mood of soul. This “all are one” feeling, the national consciousness, is a real remnant of the Louis IV mentality.

But the English-speaking peoples brought other preconditions to what we may call the people's will. And little by little this became what the elected parliaments decided, and thus the third form of imperialism developed, which was formulated by Chamberlain and others. But today we want to consider this third imperialism psychologically.

The first imperialism had realities: One person was the God for the mentality of the other people. His paladins were the gods who surrounded him, sub-gods. The second form of imperialism: What was on the earth was the sign, the symbol. God acted within men. Third form of imperialism: Just as the previous evolution was from realities to signs and symbols, now the development is from symbols to platitudes.

This is an objective description of the facts, without being emotionally tinged. Since the seventeenth century what has been called the will of the people in the public life of the Anglo-American peoples in the law books—of course categorized according to classes—is no more than empty platitudes. Between what is said and reality there is not even the relation which existed between the symbol and reality. So the psychological path is this: from reality to symbol and then to platitudes—to words which have been squeezed out, dried out, empty words. This is the reality of the third imperialism: squeezed out, empty words. And nobody imagines that they are divine, at least not where they originated.

Just think about the basis of that imperialism, the ruling elements of which are empty platitudes: during the first imperialism the kings, in the second imperialism the anointed, now the empty platitudes. From majority decisions of course nothing real results, only a dominant empty platitude. The reality remains hidden. And now we come to an important factor upon which reality is based: the colonization system. Colonization played an important role in the development of this third imperialism. The “Imperial Federation League” summarizes the means of spreading imperialism to the colonies. But how do the colonies become part of the empire? Think back on real cases. Adventurers who no longer rightly fit into the empire, who are somewhat down at heel, go to the colonies, become rich, then spend their riches at home, but that doesn't make them respectable, they are still adventurers, bohemians. That's how the colonial empire is created. That is the reality behind the empty platitudes. But remnants remain. Just as symbols and empty platitudes remain as remnants of the original realities, or symbolic crowns on princes and tsars, also from the enterprises of the somewhat foul smelling colonists, realities remain. The adventurer's son is not so foul smelling, right? He already smells better. The grandson smells even better and a time comes when everything smells very good. The empty platitudes are now possessed by what smells good. The empty platitudes are now identified with the true reality. Now the state can spread its wings, it becomes the protector and everything has been made honest.

It is necessary to call things by their real names—although the names seldom describe the reality. It's necessary because only thus can we understand what tasks and what responsibilities confront humanity in these times. Only in this way is it possible to realize what a fable convenue so called history really is, meaning that history which is taught in the schools and universities. That history does not call things by their real names. On the contrary, its effect is that the names describe what is false.

What I have just described is something terrible, isn't it. But you see, it's a question of guiding the feelings towards responsibilities. Let's now consider the other side. Let's consider such an ancient empire. In people's minds it was an earthly reality; the priest-king came from the mysteries. The second was no longer earthly reality, it was symbolic. It is a long way from the godly jewelry the rulers and their paladins in the ancient oriental empires wore and the “Roter Adler” [Red Eagle] medals hung around people's necks long afterward. But that's how things evolved. It went from reality to nothing, not even a sign or symbol, but basically the expression of the empty platitude. Finally this empty platitude system, which has spread from the west to the rest of the world, has penetrated public affairs. I have even met court councilors—who anyway have little counseling to do—but what about the titular court councilors? Just an empty platitude hung on certain people and everything remains as before.

Whereas in the first phase the physical reality was thought to be spiritual, in the future this physical reality may no longer be thought of as spiritual. Nevertheless, the spiritual must be present here in the physical world. That means that spiritual reality must exist alongside physical reality. The human being must move around here within the physical reality, and recognize a spiritual reality, must speak of it as something real, super-sensible, invisible, but which exists, which must be established among us.

I have spoken about something quite terrible: about the platitude. But if the world had not become so platitude oriented, there would be no room for the introduction of a spiritual empire. Precisely because everything old has now become platitudes, a space has come into being in which the spiritual empire can enter. Especially in the west, in the Anglo-American world people will continue to speak in the usual terminology, things that come from the past. It will continue to roll on like a bowling ball. It will roll on in the words. You can find innumerable expressions especially in the west which have lost all meaning, but are still used. But not only in these expressions, but in everything described by the old words the empty platitude lives, in which there is no reality, for it has been squeezed out. That is where the spiritual, which has nothing of the old in it, can find room. The old must first become empty platitude, everything that continues to roll on in speech thrown overboard, and something completely new must enter, which can only propagate as a world of the spirit.

Only then can there be a kingdom of Christ on earth. For in that empire a reality must exist: “My kingdom is not of this world.” In the kingdom of this world, in which the kingdom of Christ will propagate, there will exist much that has not become empty platitude. But in the western world, everything originating in ancient times is destined to become platitude. Yes, in the west, in the Anglo-American world, all human tradition will become platitude. Therefore the responsibility exists to fill the empty vessel with spirit, about which can be said: “This kingdom is not of this world!” That is the great responsibility. It's not important how something came about, but what we do with what has come about. That is the situation.

Tomorrow we will speak about what can be done, for under the surface, especially in the western countries, the secret societies are most active, trying to insert the second phase of imperialism into the third. For in the Anglo-American people you have two imperialisms pushed together, the economic one of a Chamberlain and the symbolic imperialism of the secret societies, which play a very effective role, but which are kept secret from the people.

I have spoken to you about the historical origin of what today may be called imperialism, and you will have already noticed from what I said yesterday that it is essential to see how contemporary occurrences, which were once real factors in social life, are now merely leftovers from older times as far as reality is concerned. In olden times institutions and customs had their real meaning. To a certain extent they were realities. Realty has ended though. After passing through the stage of symbols, it has finally become a platitude.

In general we live in the age of platitudes. It is necessary, however, to realize that platitudes need a certain soil from which to grow, and on the other hand they are a preparation for something which is yet to come in human evolution. If the old realities had not transformed themselves into platitudes, that is, into something existing yet illusional, then the new reality could not come into being. The new could not come if for example a visible god appeared in human form as happened in the last years of the Roman empire. For the Roman emperors were, at least according to their pretensions, still gods. Nero, at least hypothetically, was a real god in human form. In the course of time such things have lost their meaning. They have passed through the stage of symbols and have become mere platitudes.

But the more things become platitudes, the more the terrain is prepared for a new reality—a spiritual life which is not derived from the sensible world, but from the super-sensible world; for a spiritual life which does not seek the divine-spiritual beings in human form, but as real, genuine beings amongst the visible people on earth. First must come the age of platitudes which must, however, be recognized as such. Then the development of a new spiritual life will be possible. In order to understand the contemporary world under such disagreeable conditions, one must direct one's attention toward the birth of a new spiritual life, fully conscious of the illusionary nature of what was formerly reality in human evolution.

It is only natural that people want to hold on to the old realities, even when they have become platitudes; for to realize that they have become platitudes causes a feeling of insecurity. They feel that there is no longer solid ground under their feet if such things have become platitudes. People love to deceive themselves, and when they recognize the deception as deception, they feel that they are adrift. They will no longer feel themselves to be adrift when they can really feel the solidity of the new spiritual life. And we live in the age when we will have to be participants in the fall of the platitude stage and will have to be participants in the rise of the [new] spiritual life. And this will be especially possible if all English-speaking peoples realize that the traditions they have preserved from olden times and of which they still speak have become platitudes, and how the reality beneath these platitudes is the economy, as I explained yesterday.

But a moment will come, a moment which is very important. At the moment when it is recognized that we are dealing with an economic life which only becomes “reputable” in the third or fourth generation and otherwise with platitudes, as I also explained yesterday. At that moment we will recognize the inanity of the human being who merely participates in physical life as though it were the only reality. This knowledge must dawn especially on the peoples of the west. The moment of realization must come when we can no longer defend all that we maintained till now. Reality for us is what we do for our stomachs and digestion. As long as we have not seen through the platitudes and recognized them for what they are, as long as we do not realize that the economy is the only reality, we will not be able to admit what it is necessary to admit. If we do realize all that, then human nature can do no other than to say: in order to be human we need a spiritual reality in addition to the physical reality of the economy.

That moment of truth must dawn. Human evolution can not advance further without this moment of truth. For the same reason that we go forward towards a new spiritual life, at present we must be immersed in the element of the platitude.

The peoples of the west have the greatest talent for this truth. All the prerequisites for the dawning of such truth is present in the peoples of the west, whereas the other European peoples have little disposition for such a truth to dawn on them with the necessary intensity. For them other conditions exist that prevent the illusions from being seen through so thoroughly, so radically, as they can be seen through by the English-speaking peoples. But once again we must keep the historical context in mind.

Consider for a moment that the various Central European tribes of Germanic origin were united since the time of Charlemagne's successors as the Holy Roman Empire, as I have already pointed out. That Holy Roman Empire was basically a network of pure symbols—all signs and symbols, which pointed to some kind of reality. It was not possible, however, to attain to full spiritual reality through the use of signs and symbols. The churches prevented it. Everything which the Middle Ages had to say about spiritual reality, and what the successors of the European confessions had to say about such a spiritual reality, had the character of the half-understood, the not-to-be-completely-understood. It had the character of colored light shining through the stained glass windows of the churches. The people recoiled when they approached the spiritual by means of the symbols; they recoiled in fear of a clear, sharp comprehension. On the contrary, they preferred to characterize the thing as being half unknown, which cannot be penetrated by knowledge.

It was also the case with social relationships. Studying the history of the Holy Roman Empire—and Swiss history is closely connected to it—we find that a lack of clarity was perpetuated from age to age. The lack of clarity in the social organism was perpetuated until finally in 1806 it became noticeable—even the Habsburgs realized it by then—that the Holy Roman Empire no longer made any sense. And the especially talented—that is negatively talented—Emperor Franz Joseph I abdicated the German crown. It lost the power to exist because no sense could be found behind the symbols. And the people of Central Europe were left with a striving in all directions, which contained but little concrete meaning.

Thus the founding of the Reich [empire] of 1870/71 with its inner contradictions. A German “empire” was created, but based on a false premise. The title “emperor” was invented. Perhaps in France under similar conditions the “empereur” would be understood, half-understood at least, because there was some substance left in the people; but in Germany a name existed which presumed that the people had a talent for mere names without meaning; that on one hand a talent for cultivating platitudes existed and on the other hand for the underlying reality of economic life. But that talent did not exist in Central Europe. And in order to understand what happened in Central Europe, history should not be studied based on abstract concepts, but on realities! We could ask the question: What happened in the German Reich between 1871 and 1914?

What people saw as happening from without was only an illusion. What was the reality? You see, with historical happenings something appears [draws on blackboard in red]; and beneath its surface something else appears [blue]. When the first thing disappears as an illusion, then the second thing, the reality, appears as its continuation.

One should not analyze, but look for the concrete reality. What developed in the German Reich during 1871 to 1914 was not apparent then, for the Reich itself was an illusion. The reality came later, it is what has been happening since November 1918; it is those who are presently in power. The fundamental character of the Wilhelmian age is Gustav Noske [Minister of War]. The fundamental character of what had been developing for decades only became apparent when the present rulers appeared. The German ex- emperor is defined by the so-called revolutionary rulers of the present. The state of affairs which existed beneath the surface in the previous decades, during which illusions were cherished, is the state of affairs which exists today in reality.

You can really study history when you seek involution in evolution, in that you look for what is happening beneath the surface. What was Russian tsarism in the 19th century in reality? What Russian tsarism was then has appeared in its reality today: Lenin and Trotsky, Bolshevism. That is the concrete reality of what was then an illusion. Tsarism was the lie that floated on the surface; but what tsarism really cultivated appeared in its true reality after tsarism itself was swept away. Lenin was nothing other than the tsar; after the tsar has been skinned what remains today is the reality: Lenin or Trotsky. And, continuing this analogy, if you were to skin people like Caprivi or Hohenlohe or Bethman Hollweg [German Chancellors from 1890 through 1917], Moske and Scheidemann [German politician in office from 1903 to 1918] and so on remain. These are the real figures; the others were mere illusions.

It is a question of not illustrating historical phenomena with abstract concepts, but of showing the historical realities. In history the definition of one fact will always be another fact, not an abstract concept. Therefore it is a question of studying realities. For we are living in an age when realities must be closely observed and revealed.

This phenomenon is particularly obvious if you study the constitution, the content of the secret societies which possess great power in the English-speaking countries, a power unsuspected by the general public. They are societies organized outwardly under very sympathetic rules, and have become ever more powerful during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

If you look back to England in 1720, you will find very few members of these secret societies. Members are usually merely tools, the really powerful people stand behind them. But there were very few members. But if we look at the statistics today, we find 488 Masonic lodges in London. Such lodges are excellent tools in the hands of the secret societies. In Great Britain there are 1,354 lodges, in the colonies and overseas 486, and then 836 lodges in the world of the so-called Royal Arch Chapter, which keeps even the external Masonic rituals secret.

It is a matter of observing the substantial content of what actually exists within these lodges, for that is what is used as tools by the groups in power. And it is also important to discern why these powerful circles have been so meaningful even until today. The real content goes back to the far past. Those who keep claiming that the contents of Freemasonry go back to the far past are not so very wrong, although the things presented as examples are often nebulous, perhaps even quackery. They go so far back that we can say that the time they started was during the first stage of imperialism when the god walked around in human form. At that time the things spoken and especially the things shown in these lodges today made some sense. Then they became symbolic. The sense is long gone. One can say that what goes on in the lodges today has almost no content. Only the symbols remain.

The symbols continued into the stage of platitudes, so that we have, especially in the English-speaking areas and the other areas dependent upon them, two layers of cultural fermentation side by side: the external, exoteric platitudes of public life, and in the secret societies the symbols, which are only kept as tradition without any attempt to reach back to their original meanings. Thereby the symbols have become platitudes in symbolic form, or symbols which are also platitudes in a different form. You have therefore the external exoteric platitudes of public life, expressed in normal human language and which are extensively used in parliaments and congresses. Then you have the use of symbols in the secret societies, whose members usually don't understand them—platitudes in symbolic form. It is important that alongside the external purely literal platitudes we also have the cultural ceremonial platitudes. For these ceremonial platitudes at least contain spiritual elements. And in the secret societies which possess a real ceremonial form, meaning those which go back to the original practices, it can happen that through their karma certain especially talented people do get to the bottom of the symbols. And sometimes a blind chicken finds a kernel of corn. Sometimes especially talented people discover the meaning of the rituals; then they are expelled from the secret society. But care is taken that they can no longer be dangerous for the secret society. For what is especially important for these societies is power, not insight. It is important for them to keep the secrets in their original form. And they posses a certain power in this traditional form. Why?

I have described for you the substantial content. But this content depends upon the people who are banded together in those societies. Just imagine how many people belong to the various lodges in the world. These people, when they enter the lodges, are confronted with the ceremonies, which are mannered as I described. But they are won for the lodges due to certain criteria. One of the most important criteria is the absolute indifference to the members' religious beliefs—although this criterion is sinned against in some cases. There are lodges, for example, which do not accept Jews. But they are ignorant of the basic principle, which is that people of all confessions are embraced, and individual beliefs are not touched. Also no attention is to be paid within the lodge to social class and other differences. In the correct lodges all are brothers, regardless of one being a lord and the other a worker—although this is also sinned against. Workers are not accepted in most lodges, only lords and others who are amenable to them. But that has nothing to do with the principle. Those who are within are totally united under the slogan: We are all brothers.

Then there are the degrees, which have nothing to do with the external social position of the members. The members are really united in a way which has nothing to do with their external social position. In our society people are divided firstly according to religion, whereas in the lodges the religions play no role. And secondly no one would claim that in the external social order men are all brothers. They are not brothers. In the lodges, however, those who belong to them are brothers.

Such things are really meaningful. It is not a matter of indifference under which viewpoints people come together in communities. When people of the same confession come together in a community, then in real life it is often a community dedicated to external power—dead power. But when they come together under the viewpoint that the faith they profess is a matter of indifference, it becomes a community with particularly strong spiritual power. That is why the Catholic Church, wanting to keep people under a more or less unified faith, must always reinforce its power by political means. It has always been more powerful the less it has insisted on its creed, and less powerful the more it has insisted on creed; the less the hierarchy, Rome, has demanded adherence to creed. For in society in general to make religion the central issue results in lack of power. A community can only be powerful when it attaches no importance to individual beliefs.

This is a particularly important reality in the age of platitudes. For side by side with the public platitudes stand to some extent the esoteric platitudes of the ceremonies, of the rituals. This is the real reason for present day social confusion. One can cite some strange examples for the platitudinous nature of the times. You know that in the middle of the nineteenth century there were two opposing parties in the English parliament—the liberal Whigs and the conservative Tories. Whigs and Tories were in opposition. What kind of names were they? In the first half of the nineteenth century these names were seriously meant. The liberals were called Whigs, and no embarrassment was involved: the others were called Tories, also without embarrassment. But when these names were adopted during the dawn of the English parliament, what did they signify? The name Whigs was a cussword. When a Scottish group organized against a certain church discipline, in England they were called Whigs. And the platitude spread so far that a cussword became the group's official title. So the honorable Liberals acquired a name which was no longer a cussword. And the Tories—that name originated in Ireland. In the 17th, 18th century the papists were called Tories. Later that name, a cussword for Irish papists, became the official designation for the English conservatives. All this happened in the realm of names, in the realm of designations, in the realm of platitudes. Reality played no role here. This is of course superficial, but wherever you look you will find such things, first in the English- speaking world, then in the rest of the world, to the extent it has been infected.

But what is it that brings so many men together in the lodges under such laudable viewpoints? It doesn't really matter that there are a small number of doubtful personages as well. The principles matter. It is very meaningful that all those people come together in ceremonial platitudes, which however keep them together on a real spiritual foundation.

It is true however, that when someone is a powerful minister, say, and needs an under-secretary of state, he naturally prefers a brother Mason to someone else. It is even justified, because he knows him better and can work better with him. This kind of cooperation is justified under the circumstances in which it arose, but must cease now.

But what does it mean? It is certainly remarkable that just in the age of platitudes which reign in public life a spiritual community appears with decidedly worthy principles. The spiritual community is quite secret, not so much as concerns its possessions, but rather its internal objectives. Why is this the case? Because we are living in the age of platitudes and platitudes encourage the falsification of realities. And what happens? What is basically already in existence? An independent economy which no longer coincides with the platitudes; a spiritual life driven underground and a rights life wrapped in a toga of platitudes, which has as much meaning for the external world as jurisprudence, as the English judge dressed in his judicial finery. Just to the extent this judicial finery corresponds to reality, jurisprudence corresponds to the reality behind the scenes. A triformation in the realm of the platitude, a triformation of the untruth, but proof for the necessity of the threefold society.

You see, to want the threefold society means to replace the lie and the platitude with the truth, but the truth as reality, whereas at the present time the period has begun in which reality is not truth, but platitude. Of course one can force platitudes into spiritual life as well as civil rights, the state; but that doesn't work well in the economy. Now comes something about which I always receive objections in many public lectures. After I explain how one can achieve insight into the spiritual world by following the indications in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” after every third lecture someone stands up and says: “Yes, but how can one know that what he sees inwardly is real? There is such a thing as auto-suggestion. This whole spiritual world could be only an auto-suggestion! There is even the suggestion that when someone even thinks about lemonade he has a lemonade taste in the mouth.” I always answer that it's a matter of standing in reality. Of course the taste of lemonade can be suggested, but your thirst cannot be quenched that way. If you go sufficiently far, you will reach reality. You can have platitudes in the realm of spirituality, even in the rights-state, but platitudes in the economy do not work because you can't eat them, or at least can't be filled by them.

So actually in the age of platitudes of all the realities the only one remaining is the economy. And in the moment that illusion is recognized as illusion, that the platitude is recognized as platitude, a strong feeling of shame will arise: We humans possess reason, but we only use this reason to insure the economic basis of physical life, something which animals do without possessing reason. If with our reason we do not achieve anything except to support the economy—food and the things necessary for physical existence, then we are prostituting our reason, then we are using our reason to accomplish something which the animal does quite well without the luxury of reason. In the moment that self- knowledge dawns, that is, when the platitudes are recognized for what they are, the feeling of shame arises; and then the reversal—the awareness of the necessity for renewal of spiritual/cultural life.

This must however be prepared in the correct way—that a sufficiently large number of people see through the contemporary situation. What good does it do if people only deceive themselves as to what is real. What good does it do to believe Lloyd George [British Prime Minster 1916-1922] when one sees through the fact that everything he says is necessarily platitude? What good does it do if the whole world worshiped Woodrow Wilson, when ones sees through the fact that Wilsonian politics were platitudes? What good does it do to dwell on European conditions today based on inherited principles from the past which are no longer valid?

Symbols should also be viewed in their historical context. It should be clear that outward appearances express remarkable things. The Habsburgs, for instance, came from Alsace and passed through Switzerland always moving east. They got as far east as they would go when they became the apostolic kings of Hungary. But in this journey from west to east, the remarkable thing is that the western realities faded away in the east.

The Hohenzollerns didn't take such a long journey—only from Nuremberg to Berlin, but also from west to east. These historical signs are also real symbols which we should pay attention to. And we should pay attention to the realities beneath the platitudes of today. That is why it is impossible to find reality in public opinion today. Whoever has a sense for reality arrives at some remarkable things. When you look into the origin of things in public life that everyone in the whole world is imitating, things like Whigs and Tories, you find that they were originally cusswords, and it was necessary to take them seriously because serious names for what really existed could not be found. And that's the situation with many things nowadays. In public life we try to enclose words in a kind of mystical shroud, and don't realize it. We don't realize that we are living in the age of platitudes.

For example I know of a very interesting codex consisting of a collection of platitudes. When you open this codex you find remarkable sentences. For example: What is justice? Justice is a people's will—and so on. Yes, my dear friends, the law is the will of a people! People—but today “people” is thought to be a mere sum of individuals. But this sum is supposed to have a will. That is the kind of explanation given in the codex of platitudes. One has the impression that someone wished to enjoy the luxury of translating into platitudes everything existing in public life today. And do you know the title of this codex of platitudes? The State, and its author is Woodrow Wilson. This codex appeared in the 1890s. Now it was not Woodrow Wilson's intention to enjoy the luxury of collecting all the platitudes in one book; nevertheless it was accomplished. So little had what people think and say to do with reality that in their opinion Woodrow Wilson had compiled the sum of today's political wisdom—but which was in reality a codex of platitudes. A few years ago the platitude bug bit a German so soundly that he translated this fat book into German. I assume that it will also be translated into other languages, but I don't know.

Without seeing through these things, without observing everywhere the realities in these things, we will not get far. One doesn't advance today with small thinking. It is necessary to motivate ourselves to think big. We will discuss this further tomorrow.

When you consider what has been said here during the past two days you will see that what belongs to the essence of imperialism is that in an imperialistic community something that was felt to be part of a mission—not necessarily justified, but understandable—later continued on as an automatism, so to speak. In the history of human development things are retained—simply due to indolence—which were once justified or explicable, but no longer are.

If a community is obliged to defend itself for a period of time, then it is surely justified to create certain professions for that purpose: police and military professions. But when the danger against which defense was necessary no longer exists, the professions continue to exist. The people involved must remain. They want to continue to exercise their professions and therefore we have something which is no longer justified by the circumstances. Something develops which, although perhaps originating due to the necessity for defense, takes on an aggressive character. It is so with all empires, except the original imperialism of the first human societies, of which I spoke yesterday, in which the people's mentality considered the ruler to be a god and thus justified in expanding his domain as far as possible. This justification was no longer there in all the subsequent empires. Let us now consider once again from definite viewpoints what is apparent in the historical evolution of mankind. We find that in the oldest times the will of the individual who was seen as divine was the indisputable power factor. In public life there was in reality nothing to discuss in such empires; but this impossibility of discussion was grounded in the fact that a god in human form walked the earth as the ruler. That was, if I may say so, a secure foundation for public affairs.

Gradually all that which was based on divine will and was thus secure passed over to the second stage. In that stage the things which can be observed in physical life, be they persons, be they the persons' insignias, be they the deeds of the governing or ruling persons, it was all symbols, signs. Whereas during the first phase of imperialism here in the physical world the spirit was considered directly present, during the second stage everything physical was thought of as a reflection, as an image, as a symbol for what is not actually present in the physical world, but only illustrated by the persons and deeds in the physical world.

Such times, when the second stage appeared, was when it first occurred to people that a possibility for discussion of public affairs was possible. What we today call rights can hardly be considered as existing during the first stage. And the only political institution worth mentioning was the phenomenon of divine power exercised by physical people. In social affairs the only thing that mattered was the concrete will of a physical person. To try to judge whether this will was justified or not makes no sense. It was just there. It had to be obeyed. To discuss whether the god in human form should or should not do this or that made no sense. In fact it was not done during those times when the conditions I have described really existed. But if one only saw an image of the spiritual world in physical institutions, if one spoke of what Saint Augustine called the “City of God”—that is, the state which exists here on earth, but which is really an image of heavenly facts and personalities, then one can hold the opinion that what the person does who is a divine image is right, is a true image: someone else could object and say that it is not a true image. That's when the possibility of discussion originated. The person of today, because he is accustomed to criticize everything, to discuss everything, thinks that to criticize and discuss was always present in human history. That is not true. Discussing and criticizing are attributes of the second stage, which I have described for you. Thus began the possibility to judge on one's own, that is, to add a predicate to a subject. In the oldest forms of human expression this personal judging was not at all present in respect to public affairs. During the second stage what we call today parliament for example was in preparation; for a parliament only makes sense when it is possible to discuss public affairs. Therefore, even the most primitive form of public discourse was a characteristic of the second stage. Today we live in the third stage, insofar as the characteristic form of the western countries more or less spreads over the world. This is the stage of platitudes. This stage of platitudes, as I characterized it to you yesterday, is the one in which the inner substance has also disappeared from discussion and therefore everyone can be right, or at least think that they are right, when it can't be proved that they are wrong, because basically within the world of platitudes everything can be affirmed. Nevertheless, previous stages are always retained within the next stages. Therefore the inner impulse to imperialism exists. People observe things very superficially. When the previous German Kaiser wrote in a book that was opened out to write in: “The king's will is sublime law”—what did it mean? It meant that he expressed himself in the age of platitudes in a manner that only had meaning for the first stage. In the first stage it was really the case that the ruler's will was highest law. The concept of rights, which includes the right of free speech, and involves lawyers and courts, is essentially a characteristic of the second stage, and can only be grasped in its reality from the viewpoint of the second stage. Whoever has followed how much discussion has taken place about the origin and character of rights will have noticed that there is something shimmering in the rights concept as such, because it is applicable to the symbolic stage, where the spiritual shimmers through the material, shines, so that when only the external signs, the legal aspects and words appear, one can argue and discuss what are rights and the legal system in public discourse.

In the age of the platitudes, however, understanding of what is necessary for rights in society is completely lost: that the spiritual kingdom shines through into the physical kingdom. And then one arrives at such definitions as I described yesterday using the example of Woodrow Wilson. I will now read to you a definition of the law that Woodrow Wilson gave so you can see how this definition consists of nothing but platitudes. He said: “The law is the will of the state in respect to those citizens who are bound by it.” So the state unfolds a will! One can well imagine that someone who is embedded so strongly in abstract idealism, not to mention materialism—for they are practically the same—can claim that the state is supposed to have a will. He would have to have lost all sense of reality to even conceive of such a thing let alone write it down. But it is in the book I spoke to you about yesterday—the codex of platitudes: The State, Elements of Historical and Practical Politics.

There are other interesting things in it. Only in parenthesis I would like to draw your attention to what Wilson says in this book about the German Empire after he describes how the efforts to found it were finally successful in 1870/71. He describes this with the following sentences: “The final incentive for achievement of complete national unity was brought about by the German-French war of 1870/71. Prussia's brilliant success in this struggle, fought in the interest of German patriotism against French impertinence, caused the cool restraint of the central states towards their powerful neighbor in the northern end; they united with the rest of Germany and the German Empire was founded in the royal palace at Versailles on January 18, 1871.” The same man wrote that who a short time later in Versailles united with those whose impertinence had once been the motivation for the founding of the German Empire. Much of present day public opinion derives from the fact that people are so terribly superficial and pay no attention to the facts. If you decide to decide according to objective information, then things look quite different from what is propounded in public and accepted by thousands upon thousands of people. It wouldn't have hurt one bit if when Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in glory, praised from all sides, these remarks had been held up to him. That is what must be striven for, to take the facts into account, which means also the truth.

So the second stage is when discussion arises, which is what makes the civil rights concept possible. The third stage is when economic life is the essential reality. And yesterday we showed how this [present] age of platitudes is absolutely necessary in the course of historical evolution in order that the platitude, which is empty, can open people's eyes to the fact that the only reality is economic life and how it is therefore so necessary to propagate spirituality, the new spirituality in the world.

People have quite a skimpy idea about this new spiritual life. And it is therefore understandable that it is burdened with the most ridiculous misunderstandings. For this new spirituality must penetrate into the depths of human life. And although those secret societies, about which I spoke yesterday, only traditionally preserve the old forms, the slogan “brothers,” meaning not to let social class or an individual's religion play a part in the lodges, in a certain sense does prepare for it in the right way.

We say today—I beg you to pay special attention to this, let's take something quite banal, quite common: “The tree is green.” This is a manner of speaking which is common to the second stage of human development. Perhaps you will understand me better if you imagine that we try to paint this opinion—that “the tree is green.” You cannot paint it! There will be some white surface and green will be added, but nothing about the tree has been painted. And when something of the tree is painted which isn't green all you do is disturb the effect even more. If you try to paint “The tree is green,” you are painting something dead. The way we combine subject and predicate in our speech is only useful for our view of the dead, of the non-living in the world. As we still have no idea of how everything in the world is alive, and how to express ourselves about what is alive, we form such judgments as “The tree is green,” which presupposes that a relationship exists between something and the color green, whereas the color green is itself the creative element, the force which acts and lives. The transformation of human thinking and feeling will have to take place within the innermost life of the soul. This will take a long time to accomplish, but when it does it will affect social conditions and how people relate to each other.

Today we are only at the beginning of all this. But it is necessary to know which paths lead to the light. I have said that it is meaningful when people get together and each one's subjective beliefs play no role. And consider it from this viewpoint—really think about it—the way in which anthroposophy is described. It is not described through definitions or ordinary judgments. We try to create images, to present things from the most varied sides, and it is senseless to try and nail down something meant in a spiritual-scientific sense with a mere yes or no opinion. People today always want to do that, but it isn't possible. It happens ever more frequently—because we are growing out of the second stage and into the third—that someone asks: What is good for me in order to counter this or that difficulty in life? Advice is given. Aha! The person concerned says, so in this or that situation in life one must do this or that. They generalize. But it has only a limited meaning, for judgments given from the spiritual world always have only an individual meaning, are only applicable to one case. This way of generalizing, which we have become accustomed to in the second stage, must not continue into the third stage. People today are very much inclined to carry things over from the past into the future. One can become disinclined towards the things which are pernicious for the soul by seeing clearly what is happening.

Yesterday I indicated to you that in many respects the Catholic Church harks back to the first stage. It contains something like a sham or a shadow of the first stage of human evolution, which sometimes solidifies into a kind of spiritual imperialism, as for example in the 11th century when the Monks of Cluny really ruled over Europe more than is thought. From their ranks the powerful, imperialistic Pope Gregory VII emerged. Therefore Roman Catholic dogma enables the priest to feel greater than Christ, because he can force him to be present at the altar. This clearly shows that the institution of the Catholic Church is a relic, a shadow-image of what existed in the very first imperialism.

You know that a great enmity existed between the Catholic Church and the secret societies which used Freemasonry in the west—a certain form of Freemasonry at least—as their instrument. It would go too far in this lecture to describe in detail how this enmity has gradually increased over time. But one thing can be said, how in these secret societies the opinion is very strong that the Catholic Church is a relic of the first stage of imperialism. The Holy Roman Empire used this framework to have Charlemagne and the Otto's crowned by the pope, thereby using the imperialism of the soul as the means of mundane anointment. They took what still remained from older times and poured it into the new. Thus the imperialism of the second stage was poured into the framework of the first imperialism.

Now we have arrived at the third stage, which shows itself to be economic imperialism, especially in the west. This economic imperialism is connected to a background culture of secret societies, which are sated with empty symbols. But while it has become clear that the social constitution of the Church is a shadow-image of what once existed and no longer has meaning, it is still not understood that in the second stage the statesmen of the west still suffer under a great illusion. Woodrow Wilson would no longer speak of the will of the Church, but he speaks of the will of the State as being self-evident. But the state only had the importance attributed to it during the second stage of human development. Whereas during the oldest, the first stage the Church was all-powerful, in the second stage the state contains everything that was attributed to the Church in the first stage. Thus the economic imperialism of Great Britain and even a certain idea of freedom has been poured into the state. And those who were educated in Great Britain see in the state something that can well have a will of its own.

But we must perceive that this concept of the state must take the same road the concept of the Church has traveled. It must be realized: If we retain this concept of the state for the entire social organism, a mere rights institution, and force everything else into this rights institution, we are propagating a shadow just as the Church has propagated a shadow—recognized as such by the secret societies. There is little awareness of this though. Think of all the public affairs that people are enthusiastic about which are pressed into the concept of the political state. There are nationalists, chauvinists and so forth; everything we call nation, national , chauvinism, it's all incorporated into the framework of the state. Nationalism is added and the concept of the “nation-state” is construed. Or we may have a certain opinion about, say socialism, even radical socialism: the framework of the state is used. Instead of nationalism, socialism is incorporated. But then we have no concept; it can only be a shadow-image, as the constitution of the Church has become. In some Protestant circles the idea has arisen that the Church is only the visible institution, that the essence of religion must take root in people's hearts. But this degree of human development has not yet arrived in respect to the political state, otherwise we wouldn't be trying to squeeze all kinds of nationalisms into the political boundaries which exist as the result of the war [First World War—trans.] All this neglects to take one thing into consideration—the fact that what occurs in the historical development of humanity is life and not mechanism. And a characteristic of life is that it comes and goes. The imperialistic approach is different however. According to this approach one does not think about the future. This is part of the present-day approach to public affairs, that people have no living thoughts, only dead ones. They think: Today we instituted something, it is good, therefore it must remain forever. The feminist movement thinks like this, as do the socialists and the nationalists. We have founded something, it begins with us, everything waited for us until we became clever enough. And now we have discovered the cleverest that exists and it will continue to exist forever. It's as though I have brought up a child until he is eighteen years old and I say: I have brought him up correctly, and he will stay as he is. But he will get older, and he will also die, as does everything in the course of human evolution. Now I come to what I mention before about what must accompany the principle of indifference to one's religious beliefs and fraternity. What must accompany them is the awareness that life on earth includes death and that we are aware that the institutions we create must of necessity also cease to exist, because the death principle already resides in them and they therefore have no wish to exist forever, do not consider being permanent. Of course under the influence of the thinking characteristic of the second stage this is not possible . But if the feeling of shame of which I spoke yesterday arises, when we realize that we are living in the kingdom of platitudes under which only economic imperialism glimmers—then will we call for the spirit, invisible but real. We will call for a knowledge of the spirit, one which speaks of an invisible kingdom, a kingdom which is not of this world in which the Christ-impulse can actually gain a foothold.

This can only happen when the social order is tripartite, threefold: The economy is auto- administered, the political state is no longer the absolute, all-inclusive entity, but is exclusively concerned with rights alone, and spiritual/cultural life is truly free, meaning that here in reality a free spiritual sector can be organized. The spiritual life of humanity can only be free if it is dependent only upon itself and when all the institutions responsible for cultivating the spirit, that is, cultural life, are dependent only upon themselves.

What do we have then, when we have this tripartite organism, this social organism? We have an economy in which the living physical earth is predominant. In this sector the economic forces of the economy itself are active. I doubt anyone will think that if the economy is organized as described in my book Towards Social Renewal—Basic Issues of the Social Question some kind of super-sensible forces will be present. When we eat, when we prepare our food, when we make our clothing, it is all reality. Esthetics may be symbolically present, but the actual clothing is the reality.

When we look at the second sector of the future social organism [the rights sector], we don't have a symbolism like the second stage, where the political state constituted the totality, but we have what is valid for one person being equally valid for the other. And the third sector will be neither symbol nor platitude, but a spiritual/cultural reality. The spirit will possess the possibility of really living within humanity. The inner social order can only be built through a transition to inner truthfulness. In the age of platitudes this will be especially difficult though. For during the age of platitudes people acquire a certain ingenious cleverness, which is, however, nothing more than a play on words of the old concepts. Just consider for a moment a characteristic example. Suddenly from the imperialism of platitudes comes the idea that it would be good if the queen of England also has the title “Empress of India.” One can invent the most beautiful reasons for this, but if it didn't happen, nothing would have changed. The Emperor of Austria, who now belongs to the deposed royalty, before he was chased out carried around along with his other titles a most unusual one: Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galizia, Lodomeria, Illyia and so on. Among all these titles was also “King of Jerusalem!” The Austrian Emperor also carried, until he was no longer emperor, the title “King of Jerusalem.” It came from the crusades. It would be impossible to give a better example of meaninglessness than this. And such meaninglessness plays a much greater role than you imagine. It is a question of whether we can arise to a recognition of the present-day platitudes. It is made difficult because those who live in platitudes are the verbal representatives of the old concepts that stagger around in their brains imitating thoughts. But one can only achieve real thinking again when the inner soul-life is filled with substance and that can only come from knowledge of the spiritual world, of spiritual life. Only by being relieved by the spirit can one become a complete person, after having been constipated with platitudes. What I described yesterday as a feeling of shame will result in the call for the spirit. And the propagation of the spirit will only be possible if the spiritual/cultural sector is allowed to develop independently. Otherwise we will always have to take advantage of loopholes, as was the case with the Waldorf School because the Württemberg Province education law had such a loophole which made it possible to establish a Waldorf school only according to spiritual laws, according to spiritual principles, something which in practically no other place on earth would be possible. But one can only organize the things concerning the spiritual life from the spirit itself if the other two sectors do not interfere, if everything is taken directly from the spiritual sector itself.

At present the tendency is the reverse. But this tendency does not reckon with the fact that with every new generation a new spiritual/cultural life appears on earth. It's immaterial whether a dictatorship or a republic is established, if it is not understood that everything which appears is subject to life and must be continuously transformed, must pass through death and be formed anew, pass through metamorphoses, then all that will be accomplished is that every new generation will be revolutionary. Because only what is considered good for the present will be established. A fundamental concept for the western areas which are so mired in platitudes must be to see the social organism as something living. And one sees it as living only when it is considered in its threefold nature. It is just those whose favorable economic position allows them to spread an [economic] imperialism over practically the whole world who have the terrible responsibility of recognizing that the cultivation of a true spiritual life must be poured into this imperialism. It is ironic that an economic empire which spread over the whole world was founded on the British Isles and then when they were seeking mystical spirituality turned to those whom they had economically conquered and exploited. [India—Tr.] The obligation exists to allow one's own spiritual substance to flow into the social organism. That is the awareness which our British friends should take with them, that now, in this worldwide important historic moment, in all the world's economic institutions where English is spoken, the responsibility exists to introduce true spirituality into the exterior economic empire. It's an either/or situation: Either efforts remain exclusively oriented towards the economy—in which case the fall of earthly civilization is the inevitable result—or spirit will be poured into this economic empire, in which case what was intended for earthly evolution will be achieved. I would like to say: Every morning we should bear this in mind very seriously and all activities should be organized according to this impulse. The bell tolls with extreme urgency at present—with terrible urgency. In a certain sense we have reached the climax of platitudes. In an age when all content has been squeezed out of platitudes, content which came to humanity previously but which no longer has any meaning, we must absorb real substantial content into our psychological and social life. We must be clear about the fact that this either/or must be decided by each individual for him or her self and that each must participate in this decision with his most inner force of soul. Otherwise he does not participate in the affairs of humanity.

But the attraction for illusion is especially strong in the age of platitudes. We wish so to sweep away the seriousness of life. We avoid looking at the truth inherent in our evolution. How could people let themselves be deceived by Wilsonian ideas if they really had the intense desire for truthful clarity? It must come. The desire for truth must grow in humanity. Above all, the desire for the liberation of spiritual/cultural life must grow along with the knowledge that nobody has the right to call himself a Christian who has not grasped the saying: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

This means that the kingdom of Christ must become an invisible kingdom, a truly invisible empire, an empire of which one speaks as of invisible things. Only when spiritual science gains in importance will people speak of this empire. Not some church, not some state, not some economic empire can create this empire. Only the will of the individual who lives in a liberated spiritual/cultural life can create this empire.

It is difficult to believe that in the lands in which people are downtrodden much can be done to free spiritual life. Therefore it must be done in those lands where the people are not downtrodden politically, economically and, obviously, not spiritually downtrodden. Above all it must be realized that we have not arrived at the day when we say: Until now things have gone downhill, they will go uphill again! No, if people do not act for this objective out of the spirit, things will not go uphill again, but will continue downhill. Humanity does not live today from what it has produced—for to produce again a spiritual impulse is necessary—humanity lives today from reserves, from old reserves, and they are being used up. And it is childish and naïve to think that a low point is reached some day and things will get better then, even with our hands in our laps. That's not how it is. And I would like to see that the words spoken here kindle a fire in the hearts of those who belong to the anthroposophical movement. I would hope that the specter which perhaps haunts those who find their way to this anthroposophical movement be overcome by the spirit meant here. It is certainly true that someone who finds his way to such a movement often seeks something for himself, for his soul. Of course he can have that, but only in order to stand with his soul in the service of the whole. He should advance, certainly, for himself, but only so mankind can advance through him. I cannot say that often enough. It should be added to those things I said should be thought about every morning. If we had really taken the inner impulse of this movement seriously, we would have been much farther along. But perhaps what is done in our circles does not help advance towards the future, but is often a hindrance. We should ask ourselves why this is so. It is very important. And above all we should not think that the sharpest powers of opposition are not active from all sides against what strives for the well-being of humanity. I have already indicated to you what is being done in the world in opposition to our movement, what hostility is activated against us. I feel myself obliged to make these things known to you, so that you should never say to yourself: We have already refuted this or that. We have refuted nothing, because these opponents are not interested in the truth. They prefer to ignore as much as possible the facts and simply aim slanderous accusations from all corners.

I would like to read part of a letter to you which arrived recently from Oslo. “One of our anthroposophical friends works in a so-called people's college in Oslo together with a certain Schirmer. This Mr. Schirmer is in a certain sense quite a proficient teacher, but is also a fanatical racist and a sworn anti-Semite. At a people's meeting where three of us gave lectures about the Threefold Society, he talked against us, or rather against Dr. Steiner's Towards Social Renewal, although without much success. The guy has a certain influence in teachers' circles and he works in his own way in the sense of the social triformation in the school insofar as he is for freedom, but on the other hand he works against the social triformation and Dr. Steiner for the simple reason that he suspects that Dr. Steiner is a Jew. That is perhaps not so bad. We must expect and overcome more serious opposition. But now he has received confirmation of his suspicion. He turned to an ‘authority,’ namely the editor of the political anthropological monthly, Berlin-Steglitz. This purely anti-Semitic magazine wrote to him that Dr. Steiner is a Jew through and through. He is associated with the Zionists. And the editor added that they, the anti-Semites, have had their eye on you [Dr Steiner] for a long time. Mr. Schirmer also says that a persecution of the Jews is beginning now in Germany, and that all the Jews on the anti-Semites' blacklist should be simply shot down or, as they say, rendered harmless.” and so on.

You see, this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism as such, that's only on the face of it. They choose slogans in these situations, with which they try to accomplish as much as possible with people who listen to slogans. But such things clearly indicate what most people don't want to see, what they want to ignore more and more. It is today much more serious that you think, and we should not ignore the seriousness of the times, but should realize that we are only at the beginning of these things which are opposed to everything that is intended to advance human progress. And that we should never, without neglecting our responsibilities, divert our attention from what is a radical evil within humanity, what manifests as a radical evil within humanity. The worst that can happen today is paying attention to mere slogans and platitudes, and believing that outdated concepts somehow have roots in human reality today—if we do not initiate a new reality from the sources of the spirit itself.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to tell you today, first of all to all of you, but especially to those whose visit has pleased us greatly—especially to our English friends, so that when they return to their own country, where it will be so important, they will have something on which to base their activities. You will have seen that I have not spoken in favor or against anyone, nor have I flattered anyone. I only speak here in order to say the truth. I have known theosophists who when they speak to members of a foreign nation begin to talk about what an honor it is to be able to spread the teachings about the spiritual life in a nation which has accumulated so much glory. Such things cannot be said to you here. But I believe that you have come here to hear the truth and I think that I have best served you by really trying to tell the unvarnished truth. You will have learned during your trip that telling the truth nowadays is not a comfortable thing, for the truth calls forth opposition now more than ever. Do not be afraid of opposition, for they are one and the same: to have enemies and to tell the truth. And we will understand each other best when our mutual understanding is based on the desire to hear the unvarnished truth. Before I leave for Germany, this is what I wanted to say to you today, and especially to our English friends.

From the reflections that were made here before my departure, and even from the, I would like to say, basic text of the public lectures, it can be seen that the science of initiation is, so to speak, “read” from the meaning of human developmental history, how one must intervene, absolutely must intervene in outer life, in all that is to be known and undertaken in outer life. If we are not able to fully absorb ourselves in this truth today, then we are asleep to the real demands of the time. This sleep with regard to the real demands of the time is indeed the case with most people of the present. We must be clear about the fact that the present poses questions to humanity that cannot be answered otherwise than from the science of initiation. It is not merely a matter of the fact that a Science of Initiation has always existed in the evolution of humanity, that at all times there have been initiates, as it were, into the events and the forces of existence. the point is that there are also such initiates today into the reasons for events and into the forces of existence; but only very few people have a proper idea of how this matter stands in more detail. And actually, people of the present would not want that at all. They actually shrink back from what can be called the necessity of the intervention of initiated science into the consciousness of the time. One can only get an idea of the seriousness of the situation by observing the differentiation of this matter throughout the civilized world. Because things are quite different in the East, they are quite different in the West. And anyone today who believes that they can get by with absolute judgments that are supposed to apply to everything is not living in reality, but is actually living in an abstract world. But it is necessary that things be looked at again and again from different points of view, so that at least some people may be impelled to realize the seriousness of the times.

If we first look at the West, preferably at the world of the English-speaking population, then today public opinion and what flows from public opinion for external events, for events within this English-speaking population is not merely dependent on what - I want to express myself quite decidedly today - the uninitiated dream and hold up as ideals in life. Particularly in the English-speaking population, there is a huge contrast between what appears in public consciousness as ideas and what those who are truly initiated into the events of world history mean behind the scenes of world history.

For if we take the general consciousness as it expresses itself in these parts of the civilized world, in the best endeavors, in the best public publications, we can say that there is a kind of ideal of a certain humanity, of humanity working towards a certain humanity, towards uniting human endeavors under the aspect of humanity, of the establishment of institutions that place themselves in the service of humanity. We want to disregard all the murky, lying waters that abound; we want to see what is best in public life that comes from the uninitiated. This is a certain striving to bring people together from the point of view of humanity. Behind this external striving stands the knowledge of the initiates, the knowledge of the leading initiates. And without the public knowing this, without the public having the opportunity to gain sufficient knowledge of the facts, the judgments and the guiding forces of certain initiated circles flow into public opinion and into the course of events that depends on it, into external action.

Here and there some society or other may arise with fine programs and beautiful ideals. People may be dripping with idealism. But they live with it without knowing it, not only in what they talk about, but there are ways and means of allowing all these things to be penetrated by what one wants to penetrate from a certain side, from the side of the initiates. And so it came about that in the last third of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century – we will stop at these things for the time being and not go back further – well-meaning people who were uninitiated but dreamed of all kinds of beautiful ideals joined together to in societies, but that behind this hustle and bustle are initiates, those initiates who in the eighties - as I said, we don't want to go back further - of the 19th century spoke of the fact that a world war had to come, which above all had to give the southern and eastern European states a completely different face.

If you are able to follow what has been taught and spoken within the circles of initiates in this field, then you know that the things that have poured over the civilized world in the last five years as terrible, dreadful things have been predicted with great certainty. All these things were no secret to the initiates of the English-speaking population, and the following discrepancy runs through all the discussions: on the one hand, beautiful exoteric ideals, the ideal of humanity with the real belief in this ideal of humanity in the most diverse forms on the part of the uninitiated uninitiated; on the other hand, the doctrine, the conscious, strictly held doctrine that everything that is Romanesque, everything that is Central European culture, must disappear from modern civilization, and that what the culture of the English-speaking population is must predominate and achieve world domination.

When these things are said now, they carry much more weight than if they had been said twenty years ago, for the simple reason that twenty years ago one could say to the people who said it: Well, you hear the grass growing. Today one can point out that a large part of what has been said within the circles of the initiated has actually been realized.

I speak as cautiously as possible so as not to deviate in any way from the presentation of the purely factual. But this presentation of the purely factual is something that is extremely uncomfortable for the majority of people in the present day. They would like to cast it off, they do not want to let it approach them. In the present time, there is something so very soul-satisfying about cultivating nationalism in this or that way, about speaking of the League of Nations, about the re-establishment of ancient sacred national institutions, and so on. The fact that we are currently in the midst of a terrible human crisis is something that people today absolutely do not want to know.

Now, with a few words, we have pointed out the discrepancy between what the uninitiated in the West know and what, unbeknownst to them, is throbbing in their decisions. One can only really know how one is integrated as a human being into what is happening if one makes an effort to get to know what is there in the world, if one does not let oneself be driven and pushed, but if one tries to find ways and means that really make freedom of will possible.

And if we look towards the East: throughout the whole of the East there is also this dichotomy between the initiated and the uninitiated. What do the uninitiated say? — These uninitiated people in the East speak in a way similar to Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore is a wonderful idealist of the East, a person who has extraordinarily far-reaching ideals. Everything he expresses outwardly is beautiful. But everything that comes from Tagore is the speech of an uninitiated person. Those who are initiated in the Orient speak differently, or rather, according to the old custom of the Orient: they do not speak at all. They have other ways of bringing what they actually want into effect, into social effect. They want to ensure that world domination is not sought from any particular side, because they are clear about it – they believe they are clear about it – that if there is still any kind of domination on earth, it can only be that of English-American humanity. But they do not want that. Therefore, they actually want to make civilization disappear from the earth. They are, after all, very familiar with the spiritual world and are convinced that humanity will be better off if it withdraws from subsequent earthly incarnations. They therefore want to work to ensure that people avoid the following incarnations. For these initiates of the Orient, the results of Leninism will have nothing frightening about them, because these initiates of the Orient say to themselves: If these institutions of Leninism spread more and more over the earth, it is the surest way to destroy earthly civilization. But this will be to the advantage of precisely those people who, through their previous incarnation, have provided themselves with the opportunity to continue living without the earth.

When such things are spoken of to Europeans, they consider them to be paradoxical. Within the circles of Oriental initiates, these things are spoken of in the same way that a European speaks without understanding of the fact that pea soup tastes different from rice soup; for them, these are realities that need not lie outside the realm of everyday discussion. If we consider the state of the present-day civilized world and really want to understand it, we must not forget that these things, from East and West, have an effect on our present civilization. And in the present time, one can only work for human progress with a complete sense of these influences on the course of human evolution. The outer life as it presents itself, is it an imprint of what people believe exoterically, what people think, who allow themselves to be controlled only by the science of the uninitiated?

For anyone who seriously wants to study this question, I recommend simply choosing a period of eight days in May or June of the year 1914 and reading newspaper articles and books from May or June 1914, and ask himself how much spirit of reality he finds in them, that is, how much knowledge he finds that what sprouted within civilized humanity in August then broke out in this civilized humanity. The uninitiated had never dreamed of such things! Nor do the uninitiated today dream of what is actually going on. But the events of external life are not a reflection of the knowledge of the uninitiated. There is a great discrepancy between what people think and what really happens in life. This discrepancy should be brought home to oneself and the question should be answered appropriately: How much do the uninitiated really know today about life, about what dominates life?

People talk about life. They create theories and ideals and programs, but without knowing life. And when something arises that is shaped out of life, people do not recognize it, they consider it to be a theory or an absurdity or something of the sort. The influences of the West and the East have a completely different meaning for life. This different meaning plays a blatant role in our lives for those who can observe such things. If what is considered theory, program, or social belief in the West were to rule life, nothing would come of it, absolutely nothing. That there is a Western civilization, that Western life can develop institutions at all, does not stem from the fact that Western life has such ideas as Spencer or Darwin or others, more socially minded people have; because in reality nothing can be done with all these exoteric theories and views. That life goes on, that life does not stand still, is due solely to the fact that old traditional instincts live in the English-speaking population and that life is guided by these instincts, not by theories. The theories are only a decoration, through which one speaks fine words about life. What governs life are the instincts that are driven from the unconscious of the soul to the surface. This is something that must be observed and recognized in all seriousness.

And if we go to the East, let us start this East at the Rhine, because very soon life from the Rhine eastwards will become more and more similar to the East. Let us take a look at what is present in the East. First consider it historically: through Germany, through Russia, even through the Near East. If you look at it historically in Germany, you will find something extraordinarily strange. You will find that these Germans had minds like Goethe, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, like Herder, but that in reality they know nothing about it, that they have had such minds. Within Germany, civilization was the property of a small intellectual aristocracy. This civilization never took root in the broader circles. Goethe remained an unknown figure to broader German circles, even after 1862. I say 1862 because before that, it was very difficult to find Goethe's works in Germany. They were not yet free, and the Cottas made sure that they could not be easily found. Since then they have been free to print. They are read, but they have never penetrated into the real spiritual life of something like a German nation. Therefore, it already begins with the Germans having an instinctive insecurity to the highest degree. Those intensely intervening spiritual powers, which radiate from a Herder, a Goethe, a Fichte, these certain life instincts are confronted by an insecurity of instinct that can be called in the highest degree such, an insecurity of instinct for the reason that in these areas the instincts have not remained conservative. In the West they have remained more conservative. Here they have not remained conservative, but they have not been renewed either, they have not been imbued with what the spiritual substance could have given them.

This is even more noticeable in the actual European East. Just think of the role played by the so-called Orthodox religion in this European East, how it has influenced public institutions, how it has lived an external life and how it has meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to souls. The preservation of this Eastern Orthodoxy, which has long since exhausted its content, means that human souls have been pushed into the uncertainty of life. Anyone who has met Russians in Western Europe was, of course, deeply touched by the peculiar relationship that these people had, on the one hand, to the general human condition and, on the other, to this Orthodox religion. Like souls who fled from the Orthodox religion many centuries ago, who still wore the trappings and memories of this Orthodox religion and who believed that this Orthodox religion could still be something for them, so these people, who could not even imagine how much they had fled from this Orthodox religion, appear to one. This is what characterizes the Russian soul. And so the uncertainty of instinct, of not being inwardly held by instincts, has been poured out on the European East. The peculiarly soft nature that has been poured out on the Russian people is ultimately connected to this uncertainty of instinct.

The whole of Asian humanity can become prey to the European conquerors today, or in the next few decades, because those who are initiated there do not care at all that the general humanity will become prey to the conquerors. For the members of this general humanity will all the more likely acquire a taste for withdrawing from earthly life and leaving the earth for the next incarnation.

We are caught up in these forces. And today it only makes sense to talk about life if one's words are imbued with the awareness that it is precisely the case in life today that one must assume that those forces must be released from human souls that do not go in one direction or the other, but that go towards a real renewal of science and initiation. Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again how the modern human being must steer a course between extreme intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other.

Our life passes in this conflict between an ever more and more intensifying and overwhelming intellectualism and an emotionalism that seeks the impulses of existence by plunging into the wildest, most animalistic drives of human life. Intellectualism is that aspect of spiritual life that has developed out of what has grown since the 15th century. But this intellectual life is shadowy, this intellectual life is thin, this intellectual life is full of empty phrases. Because this intellectual life is thin and shadowy, the forces that work in this intellectual life are determined not by the truly spiritual, but by the instincts, the drives, the animal in humanity. Today, humanity does not have the strength to use its shadowy intellectual ideas to impel the instincts and thereby spiritualize them. And so, in every moment of his life, the modern man is fundamentally divided with regard to his soul.

Just suppose you are judgmental of your fellow human beings. In that case, you are being intellectualistic. Whenever a person today criticizes his fellow human beings in the present, he becomes intellectualistic. If he is to work together with them in a social community, he becomes emotional; then he becomes so that he lets himself be controlled by animal instincts. Everything that we seek in our life's work, we gradually immerse in the animalistic-instinctive; everything that we seek in our life's judgments, even if it extends to our fellow human beings, we immerse in the intellectualistic. People of the present are not at all aware of this dichotomy in their souls. They do not even notice how they are quite different when they judge their fellow human beings, and then when they are supposed to act together with their fellow human beings.

But the intellectual life is going overboard. The intellectual life strives beyond all realities. The intellectual life is one that, as such, does not really attach any particular importance to earthly conditions. With the intellectual life, it is the case that one works out beautiful moral principles in the midst of a social order in which people are servants, in which they are enslaved. I have mentioned this here several times in the past. Today, I would also like to remind you once again of the inquiry that was launched in England in the mid-19th century into the conditions of coal mine workers, which revealed, among many other problems, that children as young as nine, 11, and 13 were sent down the coal shafts before sunrise were sent down into the coal shafts before sunrise every week, and then were brought up after sunset, so that the poor children never saw sunlight except on Sundays, and so had to develop underground, under conditions that I will spare you the description of; because there too, strange things would be told. But with the coals that were brought to light in this way, people then entertained themselves in mirrored rooms about charity, about universal love of one's fellow man without distinction of race, nation, class, and so on.

This is the extreme of intellectual life. Nowhere do the doors to reality open. One floats with one's intellect beyond humanity. A spirit of reality is only that which, in everything one thinks, knows how what one thinks is connected with what is happening in the world outside. It is the task of spiritual science to awaken this sense of reality in humanity again. It is from such a background that what I recently said in Basel must be publicly repeated more often today: over the centuries, the religious denominations have established a monopoly on everything that can be said about soul and spirit (spirit was abolished in the year 869, after all). People who researched nature externally were not allowed to seek the spirit in nature. And it must be said that, from this point of view, the extremely clever Jesuits, for example, have created the most perfect picture of a world view; when natural scientists become naturalists, there is nothing of spirit in their natural science! If someone takes what a Jesuit writes about nature seriously, then of course he becomes a materialist under the present-day spirit of the age. Today one must distinguish between what is theoretically correct and what is really essential. Theoretically correct is that the Jesuits advocate a spiritual world view. What is really essential is that the Jesuits spread materialism! — It was theoretically correct that Newton, in addition to his mechanistic world view, always doffed his hat when he uttered the word “God”. What is really essential is that the mechanistic materialism of a later time emerged from Newton's mechanistic world view. For it is not what one means theoretically that is decisive, but what lies in the laws of reality. And the intellectualistic world view never provides laws of the world. This intellectualistic world view ultimately leads to complete Luciferianism. It actually Luciferianizes the world.

Alongside this intellectualism, we have emotionalism in the present day, life from the instincts, from the animalistic, in the way I have described it. This instinctual life, this animalistic life, actually dominates public life at the moment when man is inclined to live, when he no longer needs only to judge. One can judge that it is shameful, for example, to treat the people in the mines in such and such a way. One can judge that. But one has mining shares! By cutting the coupons, it is oneself who tortures people in this way, one just does not notice it. This is more than a symbol of life, because that is how our life goes. People think on the one hand and act on the other. But they do not realize the huge discrepancy between the one and the other.

This situation is largely due to people's complacency towards all opportunities that provide us with insights into life. Today, people want to be a “good person” in life without striving to really get to know this life. But you can't really live today without getting to know life.

This world war arose from the fact that the people who were, and in some cases still are, the so-called “rulers” were very far removed from life. Some are still in their places, namely.

But what could more clearly show the complete lack of understanding of people for life, on which so much depends, has arrived in the last decades than those of our culture, of our civilization so clearly speaking “memoirs”, which are now piling up. Every week one, initially from the defeated powers, the others will follow, publishes his memoirs. This shows quite clearly how right was the judgment of the one who said: One would not believe with how little understanding the world is ruled. But the consequences of such assumptions are not readily drawn by the people of the present. For these people of the present, for example, do not want to see that there can be no social feeling and social knowledge without a real knowledge of the world. It is still possible to establish zoology without knowledge of the world, because animals are organized by their physical organization for a specific activity, for a specific functioning. What is characteristic of man is precisely that his organization is open to what he is to take up from knowledge of the world. And so there can be no social knowledge without it being based on knowledge of the world. You can never build a real social science without knowing that everything that man has to strive for through his inner being is a result of the whole evolution, which you can find in my “Occult Science in Outline , up to the present development of the earth, and that everything that the man of the present day absorbs through the social community is a germ for that which is to happen further with the development of the earth.

One cannot understand social life without understanding the world in general. It is impossible for people today to intervene in public life with programs or ideas or ideals without laying a spiritual foundation for this intervention; for what is lacking everywhere is a soul that is moved by what really matters.

We are experiencing strange things. The outstanding German socialist theorist Karl Kautsky has now also written a book: “How the World War Came About”. He begins by discussing the question of guilt. On the first pages, Kautsky makes a remarkable confession. I would like to preface the following. I would like to say that Kautsky is one of those who, in the last few decades, have used every means at their disposal to hammer party doctrine and party discipline into the proletariat, to hammer the doctrine into people's heads that it is not individuals who are responsible for world events, but, for example, capitalism. And so you will not find the word 'capitalists' everywhere, but the word 'capitalism'. With such party doctrines one can agitate, one can found parties, one can find effective hammers for the minds of men, so that such doctrines become creeds. As soon as one is compelled to intervene, I will not say in the work at all, but only to judge reality, the whole doctrine goes out of the window! Now, when Kautsky writes about the guilty parties, what does he do? He would have to leave his whole book unwritten if he wanted to continue his old litanies of capitalism. So what does he do? On the first page, he makes a confession, a strange confession, which I will only quote to you with a few words from his book: “You cannot present capitalism as the only culprit. For capitalism is nothing but an abstraction, which is derived from the observation of numerous individual phenomena and which is an indispensable tool in the quest to explore these in their lawful contexts. But you can't fight an abstraction, except theoretically; but not practically. In practice, we can only fight individual phenomena... certain institutions and persons as the bearers of certain social functions.

Now the socialist theorist is only faced with the fact that he is not even supposed to intervene constructively in social life, but only to judge social life in one respect, and now capitalism is suddenly an abstraction. He only just comes up with it! At the moment when the same Karl Kautsky would take it as an occasion to discuss the realistic idea of threefolding, capitalism would again march up in military organization, not as an abstraction but as something highly real! One does not even notice the difference between what is derived from a real observation of life as a social concept and what is derived from general abstract thinking or even abstract feeling.

Insight is what the modern man must seek as a means of protection against the illusionism into which he must fall through the extreme intellectualism. So today I approached you from a certain side to draw your attention to important things of the present. I will continue to develop and expand these things tomorrow and the day after.

In order to make the transition from yesterday's cultural-historical consideration to the perspectives I will be moving on to tomorrow, today I will insert a kind of episode that may seem a little far-fetched to you, but which must be included, even if it is a rather difficult consideration.

Two forces intervene in human life that appear mysterious within that life and demand to be understood, for they actually fall outside the usual course of life. One is the fact that man is capable of illusion, that man can indulge in illusions. The other is that man can fall prey to evil. The effect of illusion and the effect of evil in life are certainly among the greatest riddles of this life.

Now, on various occasions, I have already taken the opportunity to point out the mystery that exists in relation to these two facts of life. The mystery that exists here is only such that one's thinking falls out of the usual channels. And all that one has to think about in relation to illusion and in relation to evil in life is related to the problem, to the riddle of illness and death, which, after all, are actually only not felt by man - like all these riddles - in their full depth because man has become accustomed to having illusions, evil, illness and death in life. But these things should be found incomprehensible by anyone who assumes a materialistic view of life. In particular, the materialistically minded person should ask himself again and again: How is it possible to reconcile that deviation from the usual course of natural laws in life, that deviation that appears in illness and death? For the laws of nature, which are supposed to work through the organisms, undoubtedly express themselves in the normal, healthy course of life. But illness and death intervene abnormally in the course of life.

In order to develop health in the whole world-view of civilized humanity, which has become sick, one will gradually have to realize that illness and death, evil and illusion, can only be understood from the point of view of a spiritual world-view. Man, as he stands as an expression of the facts of the world as he knows them, must be clear about the fact that his development is not possible if only those natural facts that he can immediately grasp play a role in this development, if he has no part in anything other than what today's science is talking about. For just consider the following from the point of view of common sense. Imagine: the vital, the life forces in you become more alive than they are in the so-called normal state, more alive, for example, in fever, more alive than you are able to control them. In all these cases, in which you do not come up, do not gain the upper hand over the natural forces at work in you, consciousness ceases, or at least consciousness enters into an abnormal state.

Anyone who looks at life impartially must say to themselves: having life and having consciousness are two entirely different things. Having consciousness depends on one's having sovereignty over life. When life becomes overgrown, when life becomes feverish and one loses control over this life, then it is impossible to continue to have consciousness in the right way. But it follows directly from this that what arouses life in the organism and what are the life forces in the organism cannot be the forces of consciousness at the same time. If we survey the development of humanity as it has taken place in the cosmos, you know that this earth consciousness, which we usually have in mind when we speak of human consciousness, and which we also want to consider first today, only arose in the course of time; that this earth consciousness was preceded by other, less bright states of consciousness. I have often pointed out to you how this, our earthly planet, was preceded by a planetary embodiment, which we call the lunar embodiment of the earth. In those days, when the human being was connected with this planetary moon condition, man had only a kind of dream consciousness. But he was also - you only need to read about it in my “Occult Science in Outline” - much, much more than today permeated by vital forces.

And if we go further back to even earlier planetary embodiments of our Earth, we find more and more life processes in the human being. The human being lives the life of the whole cosmos. But we find no consciousness behind the consciousness of the moon other than that of our dreamless sleep, that is, from an earthly point of view, no consciousness at all.

Through these states, in which man was, as it were, more alive, but in which he could not have earthly consciousness because of this liveliness, he developed through to this earthly consciousness. And we have already spoken about what this earthly consciousness depends on. It depends on the fact that, as today's physiology does not yet sufficiently take into account, in our head, in our mind, processes take place that, if they extended over the whole body, would have to bring us death continuously, every moment. Our nerve-sense processes are processes that are entirely equivalent to what happens in our organism when it is a corpse. Only as long as we are alive is this continuous dying of our nervous-sensory organism paralyzed, compensated for by the other life processes in our organism. We have to be awakened to life from our trunk and limb organism at every moment, so to speak. For if our organization were to follow only the forces of our head, we would continually die or be suited to dying.

You see, it is necessary that the process of dying, the process of destruction, plays a part in human life. Without this process of destruction playing a part in the human organization, the human being would not be able to develop towards brightness of consciousness. These things must be recognized as necessities of cosmic evolution. And basically it is foolish for people to think: God is almighty, He could have arranged things differently. — That would be more or less the same as saying: God is almighty, He can also make a triangle with four corners. What is at issue here is a law of absolute necessity. The development of consciousness is not possible without the integration of the principle of death into the human organization. But now, insofar as we live in the earthly organization, insofar as we are earthly beings, we are completely integrated into this earthly organization, into this earthly existence. In a sense, the laws of earthly existence permeate our organism. Here it is necessary to distinguish between those cosmic laws that are the actual laws of the earth and those cosmic laws that cannot be regarded as earthly laws in the true sense. It is a rather difficult subject that is touched upon here. Let us imagine, schematically, that we are dealing with the earth, the sun, and many other things in the so-called universe; everything that lives and works in it is connected with everything else. But something has to be left out if it is to be possible to say that everything that lives and works in it is connected with everything else. We have to leave out everything for which our moon is the center.

We actually live cosmically in two spheres of the world, which do indeed interact with each other, but which are essentially different from each other. What belongs to the sun and the earth in terms of the active forces is connected, and everything that belongs to the active forces of the moon has, so to speak, been inserted into that. I should actually have to draw it like this: Earth (E), Sun (S), and many other things.

I draw the apparent movement of the earth and the sun (1). I would then have to draw the moon. If this is the sphere of the moon (2) and this is the sphere of the sun (1), I would now have to push the two into each other (3), so that they coincide spatially but are two entities in terms of their inner forces, not directly united with each other.

And we humans live in this duality. Everything that belongs to the moon is a remnant, a relic - you can read more about this in my “Geheimwissenschaft” - of the old lunar state, does not belong to what the earth has become in its normal progress. This piece, which belongs to the moon, has remained behind like a foreign body, has embedded itself, and we partake of both.

For anyone who truly wants to understand the nature of the world, it is essential to be aware of the independence of the earth-sun and moon. Because something extraordinarily important is connected with this, something so important that not only does present-day science have no idea about it, but it most likely considers it the greatest folly when it hears about it.

Every human being, as he undergoes embryonic development, does not undergo this development merely by following the forces that are unleashed in the mother's body through fertilization. If you want to be made to believe something like that, it's the same as saying: Here I have a magnetic needle that points in a certain direction, so it has the forces within itself. — That wouldn't occur to any physicist. Every physicist says: the earth is also a large magnet, and it attracts one end of the compass needle, and the other end attracts the other point. It is quite possible to talk about the fact that what is closed in itself is dependent in its activity, in its effectiveness, in its position on the larger whole. Only when the human being develops in the mother's womb, one would like to throw everything into this mother's womb that is organizing, while the cosmic forces are at work, from the cosmos, the forces shape the human being. And so it is that the human head organization, everything that is connected with his nerve-sense apparatus, is connected with the lunar forces, and the rest of the organization with the solar forces. And so we human beings become a contradictory being in life. We become a lunar being as a head human being, and a solar being as the rest of the human being. But here the matter becomes quite complicated. If you do not look closely here, you will immediately introduce a tangle of misunderstandings into the matter.

In so far as man is a being with a head, he is a being with a moon, that is to say, the forces of the moon are organized into his head. In so far as he is the rest of the organization, he is a being with a sun, that is to say, the forces of the sun are organized into the rest of his being.

But this means that the head, when the human being is awake and facing the world, is particularly receptive to everything that comes from the sun. The human being absorbs sunlight through the eye when it falls on objects. The head, the nerve-sense apparatus, is a moon creation; but what it receives is precisely the solar element. And in the rest of his organization, the human being is a solar being, that is, he is organized as a solar being. But what, in so far as he develops on earth, has an effect on him, is all lunar.

So you can say: Man, as a being with a head, is a moon vessel that absorbs the currents of the sun. Man, as the rest of the organization, is a sun being that absorbs the currents of the moon forces.

You see from this: if you do not look closely, if you do not grasp things exactly, but seek convenient concepts, then you will not get by. For someone may come and say: Man is a lunar being as a head being, as a being of the head. — The other says: That is not true, he is a solar being, because the solar processes take place in him. Both are correct. One must only become acquainted with the way in which these things interact. I have often said that reality is not so easy for us to grasp that a few pinned-down concepts would suffice to grasp this reality; rather, it is the case that one must make a little effort to form only those concepts that approximately correspond to this reality. In man himself, the lunar and solar natures interact in two ways. And all that takes place as life processes cannot be understood if man is not understood in this ambivalent connection with the cosmos.

One of the most important matters of the present should be for today - if she feels right - tormented humanity the realization: How did we lose the old, known in the atavistic clairvoyance of humanity concepts, and how are we only at the beginning of Copernicanism, of Galileism! - The ancient Egyptians, so man should say, he knew the man as a member of the whole cosmos. But for this Egyptian, this cosmos was much more highly organized than man himself. Today, man looks out into the cosmos and sees a great machine that he calculates with his mathematical formulas. For him, the planets move around the fixed stars just as if one wanted to calculate that the arms and legs of a human being move according to mathematical laws! In all that is in the cosmos and in which man is included, in all that lives organization - soul and spirit. And without considering the soul and spirituality of the cosmos, one cannot understand anything about human life, which is included in this soul and this spirituality of the cosmos.

So, I would say, we live in the lunar sphere. But with us in this lunar sphere lives everything that is Luciferic. And in a roundabout way, through our head organization, it is precisely the Luciferic that enables us to make this head organization suitable for the solar aspect of our earthly existence. And the Luciferic permeates our head organization. But it is as foreign to the earthly as the moon itself with its sphere. Just as little as our nervous-sensory apparatus is organized out of the same forces as our heart, lungs and stomach are organized out of, just as little is it organized out of our earthly-spiritual-soul what our Luciferic forces are. These are poured into us with the moonlight.

Few people know much about the influence of the moon on earthly life, except what poets sing of moonlit nights of magic and love. We know of the affinity of those flights of fancy with the moonlight that plays into the love life, when it is the higher love life, the romantic love life. But this is only the most shadowy part of what comes from the moon. Not only the imaginative element that plays out between lovers on moonlit, magical nights plays into our ordinary existence from this lunar sphere, but deeper forces play in from this sphere, forces that detach themselves from everyday life, from that which binds people to the earth, just as lovemaking in the moonlit nights of enchantment usually detaches itself from philistine everyday life. And the extreme, the way it plays out, as if coming from this completely alien sphere to the earthly, is the power of illusion that man can develop. If this sphere of the moon's power would not come into us, we would not be capable of illusion as human beings.

But then we would also not be able to detach ourselves from the vital, from the organizational life of our organism, and we would not be able to ascend to that brightness of consciousness that is necessary for us as human beings. In order to ascend to this brightness of consciousness, it is necessary that we are able to live in images that are completely detached from the everyday organism. But then we ourselves must hold them together with the everyday organism. Then it is within our power to hold together what plays through our head with this everyday organism, not to let the illusions tear themselves away from reality, but to relate them to reality in the right way. In order for us to be able to develop concepts that are free of sensuality in the world at all, we must also be capable of illusion. It is simply a necessity that the human being be capable of illusion. And this ability to illusion is also connected with the possibility for man not to be in a feverish or unconscious state all the time, that is, to ascend to clear consciousness. If he lets go the reins, if he does not remain master of the illusion but the illusion becomes master over him, then this is only a necessary accompaniment to the fact that we must be able to illusion.

Thus I have first shown you the capacity for illusion in man from the cosmic-humanistic point of view, according to its origin, and have pointed you to a point in the world view where that which we call natural necessity and that which we call inner human activity converge, while both fall apart for the mechanistic view commonly held today.

But now the other sphere. You may have noticed that I have made a small retouch, and since you are probably extremely attentive, you will have mentally reproached me for making a kind of retouch. I said first: the earth-sun sphere and the moon sphere are interwoven. — Afterwards I spoke of the sun sphere. I was also right in a certain sense. For that which has an effect on the nerve-sense organization, also from the earth, is always a solar effect. Even the illuminated surfaces of objects are only sunlight reflected back. And so everything that plays into our lives, even if it comes from the earth, insofar as it plays into our conscious lives, is a solar effect. But not everything. I could only omit it so far. It is correct that everything you process in your consciousness at first is connected with the sun. But the fact that you have a weight when you stand on the scales is an effect of the earth. But in truth, the solar sphere, that is, what I have so far been allowed to describe as a unified sphere, is in turn differentiated within itself. The earth is a certain inclusion in this earth-sun sphere. And this earth, by being a kind of inclusion in the earth-sun sphere, has an effect on what comes to us from the sun. It does not allow us to be pure sun beings. Again, as far as this point is concerned, one must not see the cosmos merely as a mechanism, but must consider it in its soulfulness and spiritualization.

Man, being part of the terrestrial solar sphere, follows in his subconscious forces more the actual forces of the earth. In his conscious activities, he follows what the sun sends to the earth. But when we examine what is heavy, that which is connected with everything that gives us a certain heaviness when we stand on the scales, it is not just the gravitation that Newton described, but at the same time it is everything that we experience as playing into our moral life. With the sun, it is really as the poet says: It shines on the good and the bad alike. It is indifferent to it. But if we examine the earth from a spiritual scientific point of view, we find that it is not indifferent. The earth is the expression of certain forces that want to stand out from our entire planetary system. Like the moon, which has crept in, the earth wants to 'slip away'. It wants out; it wants to become independent. We human beings would lack something very definite if we did not live under the influence of these earth forces that want to become independent: we would not have the sense of independence. If you were able to rush with the elements without being pulled down by the heaviness of the earth, you would never come to independence. Only by being constantly drawn to the earth – if I may use this expression, but as the expression of a fact, not a theory – does independence develop. And that is what this enclosure in the earth-sun sphere is for, to give us independence.

You may now object again, as you probably already have in your mind: Isn't it the same with animals? No, it is not the same. For the animal's head is attached to a horizontal backbone; the human head, with its full weight, is attached to the rest of the organism. That makes the difference. That is why man has this sense of independence, why man is harnessed in a completely different way into the forces of the earth and the sun than the animal.

We can only approach questions such as the ones we are dealing with here by asking, in effect, the alternative: What would become of us humans if we were left only to the influence of the earth, to the influence of the moon? What would become of us humans if we were left only to the influence of the sun? If we were left only to the influence of the sun, we would be a kind of angel, but stupid. Not that I want to say that angels are stupid. Angels are clever enough; but we would be a kind of angel, but not clever like angels, but stupid. Because we lack a sense of independence. We would only be links in the organization of the cosmos. That we are independent, we owe to our earthly existence. But if we were only under the influence of the earth, if the sun did not affect us, what would we be? Beasts, predators, beings that develop the wildest instincts.

Here you have one of the points where you can really look deeply into the constitution of the universe, because you have to say to yourself: that which is at work in the universe cannot be effective from just one side. For if it were effective from just one side, it would have to be at one radical extreme. If we were only under the influence of the earth, this earthly influence would develop the wildest instincts in us. The flames of our wild instincts would flare up. But if the influence of the earth did not work, we would never become independent beings. It must be there, otherwise we would never become independent beings. We must have the possibility of being wild animals in order to become independent beings. But so that we do not become wild animals, the influence of the earth must be counteracted by the influence of the sun, must paralyze it. That is what happens. And as this is happening, you can see the origin of evil. It simply arises from the fact that we are harnessed into earthly existence. So that on the one hand we are indeed exposed to a radical extreme, the earthly extreme, which, if it were the only influence acting on us, would make us evil beings, would fill us only with illusions.

The solar principle works from the cosmos into both. The solar principle makes it possible for us to develop in such a way that we do not fall prey to illusion. And the solar principle makes it possible for us to develop in such a way that we do not fall prey to evil. Under the illusion lies the possibility of becoming intelligent human beings. If it were not for that which makes us capable of illusion, we would never become intelligent human beings. Expressed cosmically: If we were not creatures of the moon, we would not be capable of illusion on the one hand, nor of intelligence on the other. If we were not subject to the earth and its forces, we would not be exposed to the possibility of evil on the one hand; but at the same time we would be condemned not to develop independence in life.

You see how man must have the possibility, in order to be intelligent, to have illusions. He had illusions for a long time. Then his will came, which was only born into his soul's constitution over time, and he could make the illusion the expression of his own being, he could become a liar. For the lie, objectively speaking, apart from man, is the same as the illusion. Only that which does not correspond to reality is arbitrarily set in opposition to reality by man in the case of the lie.

Thus, that which works into man from the lunar sphere is at the same time the creator, the creator being of his intelligence, and at the same time the creator being of his mendacity. In ancient times, people understood this and formed proverbs out of truths. We Germans, when we see the moon like this, say that it can be added to to make a - the moon waxes. If we see the moon like this, we say that it can be added to a – the moon is waxing. – If we go back to French, which is the legacy of the Romance languages, we have to say of the waning moon: La lune décroît, from décroître. Here the moon does not say what it is doing; it says the opposite. This moon has only just begun to tell the truth for the Germans. Hence the Latin saying: The moon is a liar. But this saying also has its esoteric side; for the forces that come from the moon are at the same time the forces of the human lying nature, and the saying: The moon is a liar has a very, very deep background, as you have now seen. It was only when civilization arose in the 15th century that the moon began to tell the truth in terms of its appearance for certain languages, just as materialism generally tells the truth in terms of its appearance. But in terms of its inner being, the moon is now truly a liar.

I am telling you this merely for mnemonic purposes, so that you remember this profound, cosmic-human truth. And you see, the best thing we humans have, our independence, is inwardly connected with evil. The best thing we humans have, our intelligence, is inwardly connected with the ability to create illusions, with the possibility of error. And we humans must also be capable of development. We must have the opportunity not to stand still. We could not be capable of development if we were not called upon to create something new on the basis of what has been destroyed. This means that we must carry within us illness and the possibility of death so that we can develop within us the forces for further development.

These extraordinarily important truths have been completely covered up, completely buried, by the worldviews of recent centuries. For today, when science extends to anything other than mathematics and mechanics, it is only called that which takes place on earth. From outside the earth, only mathematically and mechanically tangible laws have an effect. Humanity will first have to understand again that completely different forces are at work in this universe, in which the moon goes its way, in which the stars go their way, than mere mechanically and mathematically calculable impulses. And when you consider that the most mundane thing in us is an effect of the cosmos, that the most mundane thing cannot be understood without man considering himself as an effect of the cosmos, how then do you want to pour fruitful thoughts into that which is to permeate human life as a world view? Today man is isolated from the world. He has no inkling of his connection with the world. And he would like to found a social existence and does not even know with whom, because he has no idea what he is.

Yes, until the questions enter into the human soul: How little we know about the world under the influence of the last few centuries, how much we need to know! — no salvation will come into all social endeavors. Wherever it is possible to say mechanical-mathematical somewhere, people of the present still dare to construct connections. They know that all kinds of things are associated with the periods of sunspots, such as plagues and the like on Earth. There are some places where people want to link earthly existence to cosmic events. That everything that takes place in earthly existence is a result of the cosmos, people today would like to deny that, they would not want to think about that. The things that take place on earth among people can never be understood if they are not understood cosmically. And man can never find effective ideas for his work on earth if he does not imbue these effective ideas with the consciousness of his belonging to the cosmos.

Today, one has a bitter feeling when one only looks at what is actually happening historically. If you have a wall here and see all kinds of shadowy figures scurrying across it, you will investigate where these shadowy figures come from. If you see the events of the last five to six years passing over the earth's surface, you do not investigate, even though these are also only the projections, the shadows, of what is happening in the cosmos as a whole. And the big questions that are playing out today between the different areas of the earth can only be understood if the understanding is imbued with cosmic ideality.

Today I read an article in which it is hoped that the British government will find the right impetus to create order between what is happening in Russia and what is happening in the Western countries. They want to develop something in the middle, in the devastated Germany. These hopes will not be fulfilled, for everything that speaks out of such a spirit, that waits for the insights of those who create out of the old, leads to nothing.

The only thing that is fruitful for the future today is that which creates out of something completely new. Only when humanity wakes up to see this will it be the beginning of the salvation of much damage in the development of humanity.

What I presented here yesterday seems to be something very remote. Nevertheless, anyone who really wants to form ideas about what is spiritually and socially necessary in our time must also familiarize themselves with such ideas. Our thinking and feeling, our whole human nature must be imbued with feelings that arise from such ideas. I will briefly summarize what, so to speak, formed the main focus of yesterday's discussions. It is that which we already knew from other, more abstract points of view, namely that the human being has essentially a twofold organization; we could also say a threefold one, but today we want to consider the third, the middle link, less.

First there is the organization of the head, the nerve-sense organization, and then there is the organization of the rest of the human being. For the convenience-seeking thoughts of the present day, such a thing is difficult to grasp because people today want to know everything neatly, almost spatially, divided up. When one speaks of the head organization and the organization of the rest of the human being, people prefer to imagine: the head up to the neck and then the rest of the human being. Of course, this is not how things are meant. What is meant is that in a certain respect the whole person is the head, only that being the head, being the head, is most clearly expressed in the head. And the whole person is also a trunk and limbs person, only that being a trunk and limbs is most clearly expressed in the trunk and the limbs. The senses are, as it were, distributed throughout the whole human being; but inasmuch as they are distributed throughout the whole human being, we count them as belonging to the organization of the head, because those senses that are localized in the head are the most highly developed senses. |

From these indications you will understand how I actually mean the cited structure of the human being. But now we have seen that not only is there a necessity for this structure that comes from inner forces and processes in the human being, but that in fact the human being is integrated into the cosmos in a different way as a head-human being and in a different way as a trunk-and-limb-human being. Our head is, so to speak, the most advanced; but it actually belongs – and this is shown not only by occult knowledge but also by embryology when it is really considered rationally – our head organization does not belong to the earthly and solar sphere, but to the lunar sphere. The forces that are inwardly active in our head organization are lunar forces. And in the rest of our organization, the forces of the earth and sun are active.

The whole evolution of humanity on earth is connected with this essence of man. And now the time has come to see how to take a step forward, which depends on how we can set our human organization in motion. In human evolution on earth, what has taken place in the life of the human spirit and soul, let us say up to the Mystery of Golgotha, is of primary importance. That is the great turning-point in the whole of human evolution on earth. And if we exclude from all that has developed up to the Mystery of Golgotha the ancient Hebrew, the ancient Jewish evolution, we can say that what has developed up to that point bears a thoroughly unified character.

The ancient pagan culture, which, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”, starts from the mysteries of antiquity in the most diverse ways, has a unifying character in a certain respect. What is this unifying character? This unifying character consists in the fact that there is an original wisdom of humanity, that an original revelation has actually taken place all over the earth. Why could this primal revelation take place? It could take place because in the early days of the development of the earth, the human head, if I may put it that way, had not yet progressed as far as it has in our time or as it had already done by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the sense I explained to you yesterday, it was still alive. He was still imbued with the possibility of having dreams that were not connected with what is given only by earthly experience. He was able to evoke in himself what man had in ancient dream experiences, when consciousness was still more dimmed than it is in our time.

All this was used by the revealers of ancient times to guide humanity, so to speak, to the point of development at which it was to be at the dawn of the Mystery of Golgotha. What was revealed there and could be received by humanity through the organization just characterized to you, was such that, compared to what today's humanity knows, there was a comprehensive body of wisdom in primeval times that decreased more and more. We would not be satisfied with this body of wisdom today, because in many cases it was only the content of old atavistic clairvoyant dream images. Today we want to have correct, clear ideas, but we have not yet come very far in these clear, bright ideas.

An ancient wisdom had been poured out over mankind. From this wisdom much was said about the beings that rule nature, about the forces that rule nature, but very little about man himself. Man had not yet come to his earthly consciousness. He was still, as it were, entirely led by the hand of higher powers. He could become wise, but self-awareness had not yet dawned. The Apollonian saying: “Know thyself” is like a yearning placed in humanity, like something that was called out into the future by the leading minds of Greece. A wisdom was there that dealt with nature, but also with the nature of the cosmos. The ancient Hebrew revelation was placed into this life of humanity. If you consider the ancient Hebrew revelation, it has a certain peculiarity. It differs completely from the pagan wisdom revelations that spread around it. It disdained, so to speak, to contain the wisdom of nature and the universe. Basically, it contained only one thing about nature and the universe: God created it with man, and man has to serve God in the world. The whole ancient Hebrew revelation is geared towards the goal of showing man how he can serve his God Yahweh. What is appealed to in this ancient Hebrew revelation? — That which is not appealed to is found in the ancient pagan revelation: the organization of the head, which could still evoke memories of the ancient moon time. This could not be appealed to in the Hebrew revelation. It had to be appealed to in the rest of the human organization. But remember what I said yesterday: This remaining organization of the human being can understand and absorb precisely because it is solar, that which comes from the moon. What comes from the moon is that which, in the extreme, leads to illusions, to that which can reveal itself within the human being. But that is the content of the ancient Hebrew revelation. At first it is only about the human being. In this ancient Hebrew revelation, the human being is at the center.

But in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, man had not yet been led to self-awareness, to self-knowledge. A path had to be sought that was actually a detour. And that was through Jewish nationality. Therefore, the Jewish religion is not primarily a religion of humanity. It does not address the individual human being, but the entire Hebrew nation. It is a national religion. It speaks of the human being, but only indirectly, through the people.

Two things were in existence when the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in the evolution of the Earth: the dying embers of ancient pagan wisdom and humanity's consciousness in the form of the consciousness of a people. Into this was placed the Mystery of Golgotha. It could only be grasped with what was already there. One must distinguish between the fact of the Mystery and the means of comprehending and feeling it. The heathen could only grasp it with the remnants of their world-wisdom. The Jews could only grasp it with what had been revealed. And so it was grasped at first. The remnant of the old wisdom showed itself in the Gnostic view of the event of Golgotha. That which was due to Jewish revelation became more and more the content of the Catholic understanding, the Roman Catholic understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And now, in order to grasp anything at all of the Mystery of Golgotha, the detour had to be made through these two world currents.

The following became evident, however. The old pagan wisdom, because it was a dying ember, because its origin lay far back, increasingly lost the ability to be grasped by people. People became far too lazy to pass on the gnosticized wisdom about the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the thinnest remnants of the old pagan world view remained. This is one current.

The Jewish proclamation was fresher and more intense. But it had no worldly wisdom. It spoke only of man and of commandments for man. It placed man at the center of the world view. It was passed on in the churches of the Occident. The last remnants of pagan wisdom, the origin of which was no longer recognized, remained as concepts for what is now scientific experience. With the last remnants of ancient pagan wisdom, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus grasped the new world experiences that were available. It is no wonder that this gradually became very unsatisfactory. All that had been achieved was the application of the last abstract remnants of ancient pagan wisdom to the knowledge gained through the new means of natural science. And there was no bridge from what was known about man from Jewish revelation to this wisdom. And so it went on, and so it continued to be lived in until our days. On the one hand, we have a science that works only with the very last remnants of the ancient pagan wisdom and that cannot of itself find a way to understand the human being. This lack of understanding culminated in the 19th century in the decision to dispense with any attempt to understand the human being as such and to comprehend only that which appears when one regards the human being as the final consequence of the animal series. The ideal of this science, working with the last remnants of paganism, was not to understand man, but to understand the highest animal and call that man.

That which followed from Jewish revelation gradually lost the possibility of saying anything about nature from what it had to say about man. Try to take on the theology as it has developed, and see if you can find anything in it that could give a satisfactory explanation for today's consciousness of even the simplest natural processes. Of course, moral considerations can be linked from this tradition to natural processes. But today's sense of time is not satisfied with the moral consideration that God allowed an earthquake to occur in Messina to punish people, and theology has gradually become incapable of bridging the gap between what the gods work and what occurs and breaks out in nature. In many respects it is therefore a mere phrase, while our natural science has material upon material before it in a grandiose way, which contains infinite secrets but does not know what to do with them because it lacks the concepts to connect the things with each other. It was out of this conflict that the whole of modern consciousness developed, that something like agnosticism developed, for example, for which it became the hallmark of an enlightened mind when he could say to himself: Man is incapable of knowing anything about the essence of things. He is simply not organized to know anything about the essence of things.

What is deeply present in people as a longing must fight against such a view. It fights in what man wants to know about the world, it fights in the external social order. And one must realize how to make progress because in certain things our ideas are still in the distant past. What did Jewish revelation bring forth? The most characteristic of what it has produced is national Jewish politics. This national Jewish politics, after it had exerted its influence on Romanism, has taken its path into the most recent times. And the most influential nations of the present day, what do they strive for in the political field? — To pursue national politics! But that is ancient Hebrew politics. In our public life we have not yet advanced as far as Christianity. We are still in the Old Testament. And it is the task of the present time to advance as far as Christianity in the sphere of public life. It will not advance unless it is supported on the other side by scientific progress in the field of Christianity. But for this it is necessary to really get to know man.

Take, for example, my “Occult Science”. There is much talk about cosmic evolution, about the evolution of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, that people who are very clever today are either frightened or made to smile or annoyed. If you take a closer look at my “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science), you will find that what is given there as knowledge of the world is at the same time knowledge of man. For man is actually everywhere in all knowledge of the world. What was developed by man in Saturn time and then further developed, how the other beings have joined, that is considered. You cannot separate knowledge of the world and knowledge of man.

But in the present day, this is a Christian demand from the point of view of the field of knowledge. It is also a Christian demand from the social point of view that we learn to disregard all other human contexts and to aim solely at the human being itself. From the point of view of the phrase, these things have been fantasized about for a long time, but from the point of view of reality, little has been done so far. From the standpoint of reality, the national connections in which the human being is largely and completely submerged today still exist as overwhelming forces in the political life of the world. What must take the place of these national connections is a relationship built on the perception of what the human being is, from person to person across the whole civilized earth. But to establish such a relationship requires a certain inner strength of spirit, a certain inner strength of the human soul. And if we ask ourselves: Has the human being actually become stronger in soul in the so-called blessed 19th century? — then, wherever we look, if we are sincere and honest, we find everywhere: in terms of the intensity of our concepts and ideals, the human being has not become stronger, but weaker. Those who know me will know how such a statement is meant.

I may insert a personal remark here. It is now decades since I was in Vienna in a conversation with a man who has since made a great name for himself as a historian. We were talking about the development of Germany. The man was of the abstract view, which he expressed at the time as follows: Well, this German development, it is there and it will continue in the way it is there. — I said: That is an abstraction, it is not something that is taken from reality. It seems to me something like someone saying: Here is a plant, it has already borne fruit, now new flowers will come, then again fruits, then again flowers, and it will continue to grow like this. When the plant has reached the stage of blossoming and fruit formation, one cannot say: it will continue as it is. Something new, a new plant, can indeed arise from the seed that came from the blossom; but one must not imagine that the old plant emerges again from the blossom in a new form and that it continues as it was. I said: That which is the substance, the essence of the German being, has reached its bloom and fruit in the time of Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Hegel. That is a high point. It cannot simply be continued. Since then we have been in decadence, since then we have been in a descending movement. I expressed these ideas at the time. As you can imagine, I received little understanding; for people had already entered the period when such ideas were too intense to be grasped by the human soul, and I had to think how it was quite different until the middle of the 19th century. For example, in the development of the Germans there was a man, Gervinus, who wrote a history of literature. One can have much against him; in the whole writing of this history of literature there is an enormous radicalism. It ends with the death of Goethe, and it denies the following generations the ability to continue to write in the old style, as if new blossoms were growing out of the leaves of the plant. At that time, people were still radical enough to say: with Goethe it is over; if you want to develop further, you have to look for new approaches! Gervinus could not give them, but he concluded the old, he made a line under it.

Of course, many beautiful things have been written in German since then, but they are epigonistic. They do not contain the essence that flows in Herder, Goethe, Schiller, not the philosophical essence, the Hegel-Schelling essence, the Fichte essence. The only thing is that Hamerling, in terms of his maturity, has introduced a new tone into his “Homunculus”, but it has become a satire.

Even then, the demands were already there to grasp something new, to develop a real sense for a new approach to the whole new civilization. This call for a new approach should resound throughout the world today. For it is only from this that any hope of salvation for the future development of humanity can be hoped for. Everything that does not connect with the feelings of the individual human being must be eradicated. You can see an outward sign of this in the way old ideas are being dragged out again today. In order to say something in the present, old ideas are being drawn upon. In one of the present leading spirits of Central Europe, one finds an outlook that is truly spoken out of this decadent sense of time, and which shows what humanity cannot hold on to today. This man asks: How do we come to a moral life again? He sees

In the last five years, the decrepitude of the old morality has become apparent, and lies have triumphed among all nations. The old Hebrew policy of Yahweh has gripped all nations to such an extent that one might think that there was a Judaism in Palestine at that time, and now all nations would like to pursue a policy for themselves that is similar to the one the Jews pursued in Palestine. They would all like to become like that, they would all like to pursue world politics to the exclusion of the achievements of Christianity. The content is missing. Therefore, one resorts to things that actually have no content. Instead of looking for new sources of morality from spiritual, new, fruitful views, one asks: Where are the sources of a new morality? - and gives the following answer: Power is an indispensable means to create good. Therefore, if you do not already possess it, you should strive for the power that is necessary to achieve the good in each case. - You want to have a good thing in the world and are given the good advice: seek the power to achieve the good. - The second reason for the new ethic is: with the power you have, you can create the good. Therefore, one should use power everywhere to achieve the good.

But first you have to have the good, you have to recognize the good first! To speak in this way is the opposite of what must spread through the spiritual science meant here in modern human civilization. Because it is not about basing something on power. You can only found something on power if you combine groups of people. If one person is to face another, you cannot found anything on power, but only on that which develops in the person so that he has value. Man must work to develop a value by which he accomplishes things for man, and at the same time he must develop a receptivity to recognize such human value.

That is the only possible basis for any morality of the future: developing human value and the ability to recognize human value. To put it in other words, this means: All morality must be built on real trust! — Because one did not want to penetrate to such views, one could not understand the moral demands contained in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. There is a reasoned justification for a so-called individualistic morality, and it is built on the idea that if what can be developed is developed in each individual human being, there is no need for legislation, but rather one can wait and see what people will do in their mutual dealings. And I had to say to many people at the time: Just look, when we walk down the street, one person going this way and the other that, do we need legislation to make us step aside for each other? That one goes to the left and the other to the right is done out of the demands of existence, which one reasonably recognizes. — Thus one acts morally when all the things that lie within the human being are truly developed. Without this there is no morality of the future.

But this is the only morality that will really be built upon a newly grasped Christianity. It must be built upon this: Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me. The Christ has come into the human race so that every single human being may recognize the value of his fellow man. And when people treat each other in the world in this way, the foundation for a new morality is laid. But only from our present point of view is the Mystery of Golgotha newly understood. This Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. It must be understood by each world-age in a new form. Not the teachings that are there are the decisive ones; they must change from age to age. The decisive thing is that the Mystery of Golgotha has happened once. For the creeds of the present day, it is becoming more and more apparent that they are becoming increasingly indifferent to the Mystery of Golgotha. They do not attach any importance to it being understood in terms of contemporary consciousness; they only attach importance to their teachings being propagated. But these teachings will be incapable of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha. And so today we already have a branch of theology that no longer speaks of the Christ at all, but only of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the “simple man” who walked in Palestine, a kind of Socrates. And then one cannot understand why those who speak of this Christ speak of him as the center of human development. Such are the serious issues facing the present age. And it is precisely this seriousness that must be recognized. But it will be necessary to work in harmony on the one hand with the scientific field and on the other with the social field. After all, things do converge. I believe that today the orthodox university graduate will be surprised if, for example, he is asked to accept that botany must become “Christian”. But it must become Christian, that is to say, the spirit that has seized humanity through the mind must also work its way into botany. And a few socialist-minded people, but only a few, only individual parts of this socialist-minded mass, talk about the fact that Christian sentiment - one then speaks of original Christian sentiment - must take hold in the mutual behavior of people. Nevertheless, no special value is placed on permeating social ideas with the Christian principle.

There is, of course, also a third variant; but the point is that we learn, on the one hand, to find the Christ in the world and, on the other hand, to ignite within us the ability to understand this Christ. What must work together in the great as well as in the particular in social life is the development of a certain human value and the development of the ability to recognize this human value trustingly and to act accordingly in the relationship between people!

In the 19th century, when people had the least understanding of how a new spirit was needed to grasp anew the mystery of Golgotha, they spoke of practical Christianity because they had become as impractical as possible with regard to Christianity. Now that the events of the past few years in the development of humanity have passed by, it would certainly be necessary for as many people as possible to realize how a new spiritual revelation actually wants to enter into human development and how it must be grasped by people. As long as we continue to pledge our entire spiritual life to external powers, to state powers or whatever else the world has, there will be no possibility for this spiritual life to really take in the spiritual revelation that wants to enter humanity. For this it is necessary that spiritual life really be put on its own feet, as is demanded in our threefold social order, that it develop out of its own impulses. Out of these own impulses, science will be imbued with spiritual methods, and the spiritual methods developed for science will ignite the power to morally permeate social life with what is spiritual. We must learn to actualize and actualize spiritual things in our social work and in the social life of people. But to do that, we must go beyond what we have to call empty words today. We live a spiritual life in empty words, in phrases. Today you can experience someone saying beautiful things that you may like in terms of content; if you get closer to them, you will find their soul empty of spiritual content. Why? Because nowadays you can pick up empty phrases anywhere. You don't need to be connected to the buzz of empty words in human life. There is no other way to find the connection with the spirit again than to first seek the guide, so that the human soul can truly reach the spirit on its own, but this guide cannot be found in any other way than by seeking him with the conviction that man can become what can become in the world today only by not remaining with what is present in him in the way of inheritance, of blood forces, but by developing something in himself that goes beyond what is merely inherited, beyond what is merely taken from the outer world. Today we are born into a world with certain predispositions; these predispositions are developed in school, but in such a way that only the traditions that have been handed down are used as a stimulus for this development. We must come to know that there is a hidden germ in every human being that is not there through mere inheritance, nor through what is included in education today as a stimulus. We must have the faith that there is something in every human being today that can only be awakened through spiritual forces and through the conviction of the existence of spiritual forces within him. From what is being educated and lived by today, only the consciousness of Yahweh can be experienced. Christ consciousness can only be awakened when one has faith not only in the development of the human being, but in the transformation of the human being, when one has faith that something will come of the human being that is not inherent in him simply because he has inherited a body from his ancestors, but that is seated within him because he has gone through earlier earthly lives in earlier human world cycles. At that time, however, the principle of inheritance predominated and shone forth in the human being, which came over from repeated previous earthly lives. Now the inherited qualities have become weak, and those characteristics in man become ever stronger, which come over from the earlier incarnations not with the blood, but with the soul.

This can be taken over into consciousness. And when it lives in the consciousness of one person, that person encounters another with quite different feelings than people usually have today.

Thus, although it is a very extensive subject and I may have stumbled over my words, I have tried to explain something of what must enter into our human development as an elementary necessity. When this demand arises in life, it still encounters the most serious prejudices in life today. It is fought against. And I have had to tell you about some of the fighting against what is being striven for with the anthroposophically oriented world view that is meant here, in recent times. I would like to mention just two more things in this direction today. Recently I read to you the letter of our friend Dr. Stein, which refreshingly showed how we had to confront a churchman whose helper, when he was shown Bible passages that sounded somewhat anthroposophical, even ventured the confession: “Then Christ is wrong - in his opinion!” So it is not he, the churchman, who is wrong, but Christ! When I came to Stuttgart, I was informed that all kinds of judgments had been registered from our circles about how it was so harsh to confront an old gentleman, who had even read my writings, in such a way. One must show consideration for, first of all, secondly, thirdly... Unfortunately, this is still widespread in our ranks, that precisely when it comes to taking a serious stand on any point, those people who would most like to keep our movement in a sectarian light will stab us in the back. That is one thing I must mention.

The other thing is that I have to familiarize you with the accusation that has now been made in the German press, the murky sources of which – and I am explicitly mentioning this here – I know very well, and where it is fairly unimportant what because the people who spread such things are not concerned with awakening belief in the things they spread, but only with fabricating something that can disparage an inconvenient personality or current trend. So, despite the not very enlightened hall, I will read these “unenlightened” remarks, which are now circulating in part of the press:

"The theosophist Steiner as a stooge of the Entente. - The “Mannheimer Generalanzeiger” reports from Berlin: Theosoph Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences a following of several million men and women” - - I expressly note: this sentence, which will be extraordinarily evidential for anyone who somehow looks into the affairs of the present, and in the time to come, when such attacks will intensify considerably, one will see why such attacks said, among other false things, “founded the League for the Threefold Social Organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a strange and repulsive political agitation. The learns the following from Dresden: “From reliable information, it is unequivocally clear,” - I ask you to take note of the tone — “that the League for Tripartite Division is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for the purpose of extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the veracity of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proven by the passage of a letter in which it says: “Accusations of theft are to be refrained from, since untruthfulness is easier to prove here. Likewise, one should not make accusations that are too incredible, such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, the fact that every sentence, every word – forgive me for using the expression in this context – is a “first-told” lie, that is quite obvious. But these things are fabricated in the present. They prove that what comes from the school of thought represented here is taken seriously enough to consider these malicious means necessary at all. You can be sure: small sectarian movements, that is, those that are supposed to be small in number, are not bombarded with such things. One would only wish – and I also expressed this in the article sent the day before yesterday for our next but one “Dreigliederungs” issue – that the number of naive people would become smaller and smaller, who still believe that by refuting such things, they are helping the people who are working today out of the murky sources that are at issue here. They are not interested in refutations; for they are not concerned with even touching the truth, but they fight with every means against all that is to move in as a new spirit in humanity. They follow the forces by which they are possessed.

I had to give you this example for the reason that a sense of the seriousness that should actually prevail among all those who find themselves somehow seriously inclined towards what is stated here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should be evoked little by little. One would really like to find words that our current worn-out language hardly has to awaken this seriousness in souls. But the souls are often paralyzed. Nothing that is necessary will penetrate them, if time is not to lead into complete decadence. You cannot continue to manage in the old way. Nor should we call 'ideals' what we take from the old currents. We should become more and more aware that a complete new beginning in human development is necessary.

Today I shall discuss once more the law of human development in the post-Atlantean age, for the reason that I shall have to link various comments to this law in the next few days. An understanding of the significant demands of the present and the near future cannot take hold in the consciousness of people, which is so necessary in our time, if there is no keen understanding of the way in which people have arrived at the current point of view of the development of civilization. Since the time of the great Atlantean catastrophe, humanity has undergone a soul development that can only be understood from a spiritual-scientific point of view. When we consider this age of the great Atlantic catastrophe, we do not come back as far as the present scientific interpretation of human development would like to go back with humanity, but we come back to the times that are geologically referred to as the Ice Age, in which great upheavals are also assumed by external science for the areas that we today call the areas of civilized Europe. We are going back to about the 8th or 9th millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and indeed always referred to the ancient Indian cultural epoch as the first great cultural epoch that emerged in the post-Atlantic civilization after the Atlantic catastrophe. We need to focus our attention on the fact that the nature of the soul of people in those ancient times was essentially different from that of later times, especially from our own time. From the spiritual-scientific point of view, it is significant to look at the development of the soul of human beings. The development of the outer body and the development of material cultural contexts can only be understood if one really penetrates the development of the soul.

If we now consider the two millennia that, beginning in the 8th and 9th millennia, make up the ancient Indian age, we encounter a humanity that developed under completely different conditions from what is generally known as the development of humanity today. In particular, as I have often said, it must be borne in mind that today's human being undergoes a development in such a way that his physical-bodily development goes hand in hand with his soul-spiritual development, but that today the human being actually only undergoes this development in the first decades of life. In the first decade of life, there is the important physical transition that we describe as the change of teeth around the seventh year, which we can parallel with important mental and spiritual processes. Then, again, there is a profound intervention in the physical development of the present human being, which in turn affects the mental and spiritual development, with sexual maturity in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then, as is still clearly evident for today's human being, there is a certain connection between the spiritual-soul and the physical development well into the twenties. It is less abrupt, less distinct than in the periods around the seventh, around the fourteenth year, but still clearly perceptible to a precise observer.

In such parallelism between physical development and spiritual development, humanity was in the primeval Indian period up to the age of fifty-five, well into the sixth decade of life. One was so dependent on what was happening in the body, in terms of mind and soul, at the same time. Even in old age, people experienced the same kinds of changes as they do today when their teeth change, when they reach sexual maturity, and so on. So, a person's physical life extended into their sixties, the fifties. And I have pointed out what this actually means for a person's life. One became a person, let us say, at the age of thirty; as a person of thirty, one said to oneself: I will also reach the age of forty, fifty years; then, purely through my physical development, I will be mature in front of the world in a completely different way than I am now. One lived towards old age even in the higher decades of life, as one actually only lives towards old age as a child today. One grew and matured well into the highest decades of life. And one had the awareness that the older one became, the more things of the world became clear to one, the more one's soul life was filled, one might say, from the unknown depths of world existence. One still had such epochs in development even in old age, just as one now has the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

This changed, of course, in that this parallelism between physical and spiritual development increasingly receded. In the next cultural period, in ancient Persian, as I have called it in my “Occult Science in Outline”, this was only the case until the beginning of the 1950s or even until the end of the 1940s. And in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, this was only the case until the beginning of the forties; and in the period in which the Greek-Latin culture, which is still important for us today, spread, people were capable of development until the beginning of the thirties. Man felt young in Greece until the beginning of the thirties. And he said to himself that something would grow with him when he reached his thirties. Today, with the onset of our thirties, we are already dried-up mummies if we only look at our physical development. Today we stop making sense at a much earlier stage of physical development.

But all this is connected with other aspects of human development. The first period after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the primeval Indian period, had people who, to a high degree, participated in the entire life of the universe, who, in particular, participated in the life of the universe through their head experiences. We only know about the universe what is explored in observatories through telescopes and what is calculated by astronomers. In primeval India, man felt the course of the stars in his head. He not only experienced earthly nature in spring, summer, autumn and winter, but he also experienced cosmic events, he experienced the age of, say, a certain Sirius constellation, and so on. What was later calculated in an elaborate astrological way was experienced in the human being, just as today we experience satiety after a meal or hunger when we are expecting a meal. The course of the sun and the stars in one's own head was thus experienced.

The consequence of this was that man at that time did not feel at all as mere citizens of the earth, but as belonging to a supermundane world, which is merely transferred to earth. He felt as a wanderer during a short pilgrimage over the earth. He felt a certain kinship with what is extraterrestrial.

This already changed in the second post-Atlantean period. It became the case that people felt less the life of the universe, but more everything that, I would like to say, relates to the nature of illumination, to the light of the universe. The people of the ancient Persian period experienced day and night differently. They really felt themselves to be still present in the universe in the time between falling asleep and waking up. This time had a real content for them, whereas today it only means something like a hole in the conscious life of a person. After all, a kind of co-experience of the universe still existed. So that we can say: to the same extent that the physical-bodily ability to develop is shifted from the higher decades of life into the lower ones, to the same extent does the coexistence of the human being with the universe cease.

We can therefore say (see the overview): in the first post-Atlantean, primeval Indian period, we experience the physical and bodily up to the years from forty-eight or forty-nine to fifty-six, and even beyond. In the second, the primeval Persian period, from the forty-second to the forty-ninth year of life, we still have developmental moments in the physical development of the human being that can be compared to our second dentition or sexual maturity and the like. In the third period, which we are accustomed to call the Egyptian-Chaldean period, we have such bodily developmental moments from the age of thirty-five to forty-two. And in what we are accustomed to consider the Greek period, in the fourth post-Atlantean, Greek-Latin period, this development goes from the age of twenty-eight to the age of thirty-five.

If you take note of this, you will say to yourself: The developmental capacity of man is declining more and more. And with this decline of the developmental capacity of man, the gates to the co-experience of universal events are, as it were, closing for him. If you want to remember it, do not write it down, but remember it, we can say: the first period ranges from 8167 to 5567 BC; the second from 5567 to 2907 BC; the third from 2907 to 747 BC; the fourth the Greek period from 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha to 1413 AD after the Mystery of Golgotha; and then our fifth period begins, the time when we remain approximately capable of development only from the age of twenty-one to twenty-eight. That begins in 1413 and that is the period in which we live. And if we want to be precise, we have to say: the present human being remains capable of development until the twenty-seventh year. It is then that he begins, so to speak, to emancipate himself in his soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily. Emancipation from the physical-bodily is therefore something that occurs more and more. You can see from this that the time will come when human beings will only be capable of development up to the age of fourteen, when the age of sexual maturity will cease to have any significance in human development.

This is a period of time that will most certainly occur. No matter how long geologists calculate for the development of humanity on earth, for the development of the physical humanity of the earth, this physical humanity on earth will not develop longer than until the moment when this upper age limit is pushed down to the fourteenth, thirteenth year of age. Because from that point on, the physical humanity on earth will no longer be able to develop. Women will no longer bear children. Then the physical humanity on earth will have come to an end. I once said: The calculations that geologists commonly make are all based on a certain error. Today, one can calculate geological periods of time according to the way in which river mud is deposited or how much mud the Niagara River carries and similar things, and then “determine” what kind of flora and fauna existed on Earth so many years ago. These calculations are all made in much the same way as if one were to calculate today what changes, say, have taken place in the stomach over the last ten years and then calculate what the stomach looked like 150 years ago. And just as geologists today can calculate what the earth will look like millions of years from now, so we can calculate what the stomach looked like three hundred years ago. Only, the earth will no longer be there in millions of years, just as the physical man was no longer there three hundred years ago when his stomach supposedly looked a certain way. According to the physical laws on which these scientific works are based, it is of course possible to calculate quite correctly, but what one calculates is no more “correct” than one can calculate what a human stomach looked like three hundred years ago. These things that I am mentioning are rejected by exact science today. But that which really is, that which is factual, cannot be found by this exact science. Because you can calculate for a long time what the earth will look like after a hundred thousand years, what people will be like and the like: people will no longer exist on earth!

These are things that should already force us to build a bridge to spiritual scientific considerations. For only in this way can insights arise into the real development of man and insights into certain necessities that are to be included in this human consciousness. Now it may not be difficult for you to see that in older times man, so to speak, simply by being a physical human being, experienced certain revelations, revelations that one can only experience if one remains physically capable of development until a certain age. In ancient Persia and ancient India, the brain was soft and flexible and plastic well into one's fifties. It was so plastic that today it is only so in early youth. Simply through this plastic brain one received revelations that one cannot receive when one is still a child, but only when the body remains plastic well into old age. Our mummified brain, which has already dried up by the age of thirty, cannot achieve these revelations through the old natural path. This results in the necessity for the emancipated spiritual soul to acquire content in a different, purely spiritual way.

This means that it is eminently necessary for you to turn to spiritual life in our time. Because at the age of thirty-five, we have reached the half-way point of life, and from there it goes downhill. Anything that can only be achieved in the descending half will not be achieved by today's man by himself. If he does nothing to achieve it in any other way than through his physical development, it does not come to him at all. From such insights, one should understand how necessary it is for today's human being to turn to spiritual science.

Whatever external social structures people have created so far have arisen entirely under the influence of the old plastic body. But now the age has dawned in which these old structures are becoming decrepit and in which something new can only be created if it is created out of the spirit. This is already evident today, even if one only follows external events. But one only understands external events if one follows them in connection with the spirit. I would like to draw your attention to a topic that seems quite distant from the one we have just discussed. As I have often mentioned, disreputable generals and statesmen are now writing their memoirs. Among those who have written their memoirs, there is relatively one of the best, most interesting of frivolous and cynical people, who has guided Austrian history for a certain period of time, Czernin. He has also written his memoirs. I am not exaggerating when I say that he is one of the best memoirists, for I must also call him a frivolous and cynical superficialist. But his memoirs are still among the most interesting.

There is an interesting passage in which Czernin discusses what could have prevented or brought about this world war catastrophe. He discusses it as an Austrian and says: This Austria, it was destroyed by the world war. But it would have been destroyed even without the world war, because it was ripe to be destroyed. It could no longer exist. It was rotten inside. — He even expresses himself somewhat dramatically by saying: We had to go under anyway, we could only choose our method of death. We could not choose anything other than the method of death. We chose the worst one. Well, something better has not been understood. Perhaps another would have been slower, less painful. — That is how he expresses himself.

This is basically a very true apercu, because this Austria was a state structure, put together according to the intentions of the imagination, which still came from an old time. Even if they did not, I would like to say, grow any more in the brains, they were still there, luciferically. Today people see how these old structures are beginning to become decrepit and die off. People would only see clearly if they saw the inner reasons, the reasons of the times, for the dying off of these structures. But no one sees anything until the structure in question has catastrophically perished. What it would be about for a person who is truly at the cutting edge of his time would be not just coming up with all kinds of social ideas and taking the old state structures, as if these old state structures, these old state frameworks could be taken at all. They cannot. One must realize that the old concept of the state has ceased to have any meaning, that something else must take its place: the threefold social organism. This threefold social organism will create its own state boundaries; the old ones have lost their inner coherence.

But people today are simply asleep. They go along with what is happening catastrophically. But people do not want to look at the inner motivating forces of existence. They will only decide if they learn to really understand things from a spiritual-scientific point of view. Then, through a truly spiritual understanding of existence, a bridge will also be built between the understanding of the purely natural and the social. For in the last analysis both fields have laws that are connected with each other. Only if we look at the present time from this point of view will we gain the necessary insight into what is really going on today. We must decide to say: Today, if a person wants to do something for the ascending development of humanity, he must not be satisfied with what comes to him from outside, because only up to the age of twenty-seven does something come to him. After that, he mummifies; after that, the soul and spirit must draw its strength from the spiritual world.

A person who only develops out of what the outside world brings to him is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven. You can take the following idea as eminently correct: if today most people who advance to so-called higher positions still undergo all kinds of grammar school or similar education, then this twenty-seven-year limit is somewhat shifted because something comes into people from old traditions, which they absorb from them. But if someone grows out of our present life, truly as a self-made man, and then reaches the age of twenty-seven without having imbued this self-made man nature with a grammar school education in the usual sense and the then at twenty-seven he can be so far advanced that he is steeped in everything that applies only to the present of the earth today, that gives no possibility of development into the future, and that must find its conclusion in the present. For if anyone is to have something in his soul that gives a power of development towards the future, then he must have it from the spirit. So today, when someone turns twenty-seven, he is, so to speak, educated only through humanity, through what naturally comes to him through physical development. He will understand the present, and the present will understand him. But for what he understands, for what is understood of him, evolution could actually proceed in such a way that it perishes tomorrow through a gigantic cataclysm on earth, for his soul would contain no further ferment for further development. Just such a man, who would be a self-made man, who would have been exposed to what is received from the outside today, who would then have finished at the age of twenty-seven and become a member of parliament for my sake, then soon a minister and so on, would be the most characteristic expression of the present.

The man who is the most characteristic example of the present is Lloyd George. He is the most absolute expression of the present. If you study his biography, you will find that he is the person who embodies everything that a person can achieve through his physical and spiritual development up to the age of twenty-seven. But since he rejects everything that does not come of itself, that is won from the spiritual world, he can never become older than twenty-seven years. He is certainly much older today in terms of his counted years, but in reality he is twenty-seven years old. And so today there are many of us who stop at these twenty-seven years because they do not absorb anything from the spiritual world. The fact that one gets gray hair, that one shows other signs of age, does not matter. Today you can be twenty-seven years old even if you are a seventy-year-old man according to the years counted, and you can be the French Prime Minister and be called Clemenceau. That is the secret of the development of humanity: growing old is not connected with the number of years, but today, if someone really wants to grow old, they have to do so by developing spiritually. It is therefore no coincidence that it was Lloyd George who set the tone for the world, especially in the decisive events. For the keynote for the present age, which is so fundamentally maternal, had to be given by someone who reached the age of twenty-seven in the most characteristic, the most typical way and did not go beyond these twenty-seven years. He became a member of parliament at precisely this age and developed all these things with great genius. Today, one does not get to know the world by merely looking at it as the ideas that float on the surface of so-called civilization today suggest. One only gets to know the world by really looking at it from the inside out in the way just indicated.

We human beings are given two things for our development: I would like to say the shell and the content. The old people of the first, second, and third periods were given not only the physical development but also the spiritual. The members of the higher hierarchies still lived in the physical shells. We develop our bodies only in such a way that we have the forces of the spirits of form in our human forms, the spirit of the time in our etheric body, archangelic beings in our astral body, and angelic beings in our I. But it does not go any further, for we must consciously and voluntarily ascend to that which the human being of ancient times simply approached with the development of his body. And one does not get to know the moral development of humanity without really taking such things into consideration. People today write history exactly as the blind would write of color. They write only external phrases that have no content. From these empty, superficial phrases party programs and social programs are then constructed, and so-called ideals arise, ideals which are used as a basis for social action. Today one cannot achieve anything socially without taking into account the driving forces of human evolution. A sense of the times is necessary today. But it can only be gained from spiritual foundations.

How strangely such an understanding of the times is often perceived can be seen from outward things. When people want to rise above the everyday, they often do all kinds of things. For example, some time ago, when people no longer knew what kind of trivialities of civilization to start, all kinds of “Olympic Games” were to be held before the war catastrophe. Yes, the Olympic Games were for the Greeks. Our age has gone beyond the Greeks by so many centuries. We no longer have the state of soul and body that the Greeks had. We must find something that is appropriate for our state of soul and body. We only show the impotence of our spirit, the complete emptiness of soul content, when we want to regurgitate the old over and over again. The Olympic Games were only possible for those human beings who had retained their capacity for development until the age of thirty-three. To simply renew things that were once there for the benefit of humanity is no different than for someone who has turned thirty-five to suddenly decide that they want to behave like a fifteen-year-old boy. That is roughly how it was when the ideal of the Olympic Games emerged.

This inner search for understanding based on the spiritual foundations of development is what must be striven for unconditionally from our present time onwards. For the old connections from which people have worked until now have become rotten and brittle. A snail's shell will indeed hold together for a while even after the snail is dead. In the same way the old states, which had arisen out of quite different shells, out of quite different conceptions, have held their own. But it is imperative that today new social formations should really develop out of the renewed life of human thinking. The great dying out of the old social structures, which began in the East and has taken hold of Central Europe, will continue! But it would be good if it were understood and if people would think less about raising the old empires and more about facing the real conditions of the present and creating new social structures out of these real conditions of the present.

On the whole, it must be said that spiritual science requires people to develop a little less complacency with regard to the soul than people are inclined to have today. People today are already so unaware of the driving forces of evolution that they are immersed in. It was interesting for me to see how a member of our Society wrote about the style of The Core of the Social Question in the last issue of the Dreigliederungs-Zeitung. Many people have talked all sorts of nonsense about this style of the “Key Points of the Social Question”: difficult to understand, convoluted sentences, and the like. It is quite good that someone has finally said that this book is intended to be a call for the renewal of humanity, that it should not be a sleeping pill for those who want to have a pleasant read.

Today, people, by wanting to be consistent, unite the most disparate. You can go among the so-called people today, that will demand a popular presentation. Perhaps the most popular presentation will be demanded by those who feel most free-spirited. They will find a closed style boring, these people. Where does this striving for so-called popular presentation come from? If only people would consider it just once, they would more easily move away from such judgments as are often heard. For what many people hostile to the church today demand as popularity in style is nothing other than a result of the presentation that certain representatives of the faiths sought in order to keep people as stupid as possible. In their Sunday afternoon sermons they gave them, as far as possible, only what was as clear as daylight, and this was also clear as daylight for those who wanted to stay awake during the sermons. The furthest limit of hearing sermons is, of course, the old lady who always slept during the sermon and who was taken to task for it. She said: Well, what does a person have in this world if they no longer have that little bit of church sleep! The difference in level from this state of drowsiness to popular presentation is not very great. It has essentially arisen from the fact that people have not been allowed to develop a certain free and lively way of thinking. What people have become accustomed to when listening to sermons is what the anti-church Social Democrats demand today as a popular presentation. Such are the circumstances. People today find the style of the “Core Points” difficult, which would have them reject any sense of confession; but the fact that they find the style difficult stems from the fact that these people have been educated by the “watery clarity” of Sunday afternoon sermons. This is also something that people must learn through spiritual science: to look at events impartially. People would prefer to be mistaken about the laws of development.

Above all, energy in the life of the soul is what is needed most urgently for the future development of humanity. And in this respect, we are living in an extraordinarily difficult time today. Last Sunday, here, while “Egyptian darkness” prevailed in the hall, I pointed out the many efforts that are being made against our spiritual science in particular. But it is not at all uncommon for a decisive, firm thinking about it to be resented, one might say, in our ranks. This must be clearly stated for the reason that the kind of defamatory campaigns against author-oriented spiritual science and what it socially entails are only just beginning. Again and again, we are confronted with the pernicious demand that when someone is slandered, the old man or whoever it is, sometimes a young man, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young one, should be treated as gently as possible. They say: above all, anyone who slanders should be treated as gently as possible in our ranks; you should first befriend people who spread slander! – That is not what matters today! Anyone who understands the times should realize that. Today it is not a matter of dealing with people who spread slander throughout the world, but rather of characterizing these people to others, of having nothing to do with them, of treating them as people whom one does not want to let approach oneself, and of educating others in an appropriate way about what kind of individuals they are in the world. That is what matters today! — For today we are facing serious moments of development, and today looking through one's fingers is the very worst thing that can happen in the service of humanity. It is more convenient to look through one's fingers than to grasp sharply what is at stake here.

Above all, we must be clear about the fact that a real understanding of the social task of the present is only possible from the spirit. But in addition, of course, much else must first be brought about, I would say. On the one hand, there is our science, which needs a complete renewal. We can no longer do anything with the old science. We must have the opportunity to truly penetrate the spirit of nature. We must have the opportunity to really grasp science, medicine, biology in general in a spiritual way, then we can really develop fruitful thoughts for social thinking with the education that is undergone in this way. Otherwise we will continue to want to create something new with the old buzzwords. But that is precisely what is leading us so powerfully down into the abyss. Humanity must ascend, but it must do so out of a spiritual renewal. And anyone who will not resolve to look at the old in such a way that it is really seen by him as old will simply not be able to work with humanity for its progress.

I have, of course, developed this before you in the most diverse variations. Today I wanted to point out how humanity is actually becoming younger and younger in relation to its age, which I have discussed several times before. The ancient Indians lived well into their fifties, then the Persians lived into their forties, the Egyptians and Chaldeans lived into their thirties, and the Greeks lived into their thirties. We do not grow old in this way. We still drag ourselves along if we do not inwardly enliven ourselves spiritually, but we do not grow old. For in the old ages, to grow old meant at the same time to become wiser through that which the human being developed bodily-physically. Today's people, by growing old, merely become old, they do not become wiser; they become mummies. They only become wise when they fill the mummies inwardly with something. The Egyptians mummified their dead. Contemporary people have no need to become mummies at all, for they already walk around as mummies and are only not mummies when the spiritual is grasped in the living, immediate present; then the mummy is enlivened. But it is necessary for present-day humanity that the mummies be brought to life. Otherwise we will continue to have those world associations in which all kinds of sounds come from mummified human beings. These associations are called 'parties'. But what came from the mummified human beings gradually became purely Ahrimanic voices, and these brought about the catastrophe of the last few years. That is the other side of the coin, that is the very serious side of the matter. If, from the present time onwards, man does not begin to fill his mummy with spiritual content, it will be filled by the whisperings of Ahriman. Then the human mummies will walk around, but the Ahrimanic demons will speak out of them. They can only be prevented from populating the earth if people decide to seek their living connection with the spiritual world. Yes, the matter is very, very serious. To pursue spiritual science today is at the same time to expel the Ahrimanic spirit from humanity, to prevent humanity from being possessed by Ahrimanic spiritual forces.

Yesterday I tried to characterize the nature of the moment in human evolution at which we find ourselves. I tried to show you how, in the course of human evolution, humanity has now arrived at a point where it is absolutely dependent on what we call the science of initiation. This means that it is necessary, firstly, for the branches of knowledge of human cultural life to be permeated by this science of initiation, but secondly also for social thinking and social feeling to be permeated by those feelings and perceptions that result for the human soul from consciousness: there is a spiritual revelation, a supersensible revelation – one need only turn to it.

One can be convinced that many people come and say: Yes, but history has been conscientiously studied, and what is supposed to result from spiritual science about the character of the present period, and how it has developed from the preceding ones, is not spoken of in history.

Yes, it does not speak of it because, uninfluenced by real spiritual knowledge, it does not ask about its real impulses and forces. In order to know what speaks through history, one must first understand how to ask history in the right way.

Now, the three successive post-Atlantean periods, the primeval Indian, the primeval Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, are such that, in the sense sense, humanity has become younger and younger, that is to say, in the second period it did not remain capable of development into those years in which it was still capable of development in the first period, and so on. In the Graeco-Latin period, that is to say, in the period that began in the 8th century BC and ended in the 15th century, it was the case that human beings remained capable of development until the beginning of their thirties. When this period closed in the 15th century, human beings were clearly capable of development until well beyond the twenty-eighth year. Today, as we have emphasized, the ability to develop only extends to the twenty-seventh year and will descend more and more.

Now, simply due to their physical and bodily constitution, human beings can only come into contact with the spiritual world from their thirties onwards. Do not misunderstand me! Of course, if he turns to spiritual science, he can come into contact with the spiritual world earlier, even today; but if man, through his own development, which is bound to the physical body, is to receive spiritual forces from the universe, this can only happen if he remains capable of development well into his thirties. He does not. Therefore, from our point of view, there can be no question of human development progressing by natural means. It can only progress if humanity is fertilized by the science of initiation.

Now, as I have already indicated in one of the previous lectures, there are initiates in areas of Western civilization, especially in Anglo-American areas. But the peculiar thing about these initiates is that, from their point of view, they only intend to promote as a science of initiation that which British-American world domination can gradually bring about on earth. However strange it may sound, it is so. And it may be said that every single assertion that comes from this side bears a stamp that the knowledgeable person can recognize as being true. Above all, the various ways in which the science of initiation is handled in Western countries point to all these things.

You have seen that, within certain limits, certain truths of initiation are not withheld here. And if you look through what has been presented to you over the years, you will find in it, if you really follow things unsleeping, a whole series of important initiatory truths that are suitable for bringing not just a part of humanity, but all of humanity across the earth, beyond the current crisis and towards a real further development. But you will always find people, especially among Western initiates, who disapprove of and condemn the fact that so much of what has been communicated here is being made public today. This is due to a distorted conception of the science of initiation. In order to make you understand this distorted conception, I must first say the following.

The science of initiation always addresses the individual human being. Even if it speaks to a group of people, it is in reality addressing the individual human being. One cannot present the true science of initiation in the way it used to be presented to people in the past. The Catholic Church, for example, transplanted this kind of thing into the present day, and not only the Catholic Church, but certain political parties also still use the same method today. The way they worked was to use, if I may put it this way, the mass psyche, to appeal to what is instilled in a community of people in a certain, I would say hypnotic, way. You know that, as a rule, if you only use the appropriate means, you can teach a crowd things more easily than you can teach each individual to whom you wanted to speak. There is some truth to such mass hypnosis.

These methods, which are quite effective, cannot be used by a true wisdom of initiation. It must speak as though addressing each individual person and appeal to the powers of persuasion of each individual person. The way of speaking which the science of initiation, which today stands at the height of human development, must make use of, has not yet existed. Therefore, the way in which, for example, I speak here and in my books is still an abomination to some people today, because the way of speaking strictly adheres to the rule of appealing only to the power of persuasion of the individual individuality.

This also gives us an important social principle, which I have already mentioned in another context in recent days and which you will find systematically and in principle implemented in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. If you only want to appeal to the individual with ethical, moral impulses, then you cannot want to organize from general abstractions, then you cannot group people together like herd animals in order to give them some kind of common directive, but then one can only appeal to the individual and then wait for the right thing to happen in the whole, because each individual, in his standing in the whole, wants the right thing.

The social morality of the future cannot be based on any other principle than this principle of general human behavior. When I published my “Philosophy of Freedom”, for example, a review appeared in the “Athenaeum” in which it was said that such a view leads to a theoretical anarchism. But it only leads to anarchism if we do not succeed in making people into real people, that is, if people absolutely want to be subhuman, if they absolutely want to be kept together under such aspects as the members of a group of animals are kept together. Lions are held together as lions by their very shape, hyenas too, dogs too; but the development of humanity is such that in the future groups of people should not be organized either by blood ties or by ideological ties like flocks of sheep, but that what arises from the interaction of people should actually happen out of the power of individualities.

A few days ago I used a comparison here that may sound a little grotesque, but which I believe can shed light on the whole matter. I do not know whether there are not also people who would find it particularly liberating if they saw inscriptions everywhere: Decree of such and such an authority: The one who walks in this direction must give way to the other who walks in the other direction. Even in populous cities, people generally still get along with each other on the street, they pass each other; out of their reason, out of what they have as an impulse within them, they do not constantly push each other away. Humanity is moving towards this ideal. That it does not recognize this is its misfortune. It is important to have the directives of one's actions within oneself, even in important matters, so that the other can rely on them, without a common law that trains them to behave in such a way that the other can exist alongside them.

This work towards individuality is what is connected with the most important impulses of human development. Human individuality can never be brought to bear on something like this if it can only be conveyed through the current knowledge of nature or the current social science or the current social motives. Man only comes to such an individuality as I have just spoken of when a mass of thoughts is awakened in him that comes from the science of initiation. Only through his relation to the supersensible is man imbued with such thoughts as will make him a free individuality, but which can also function in the social order with the greatest possible freedom. Everything depends on humanity opening its heart and mind to what comes from the science of initiation.

Great trust must become the most important social motive of the future. People must be able to rely on each other. Otherwise things will not move forward. What I have told you now seems obvious to anyone who is serious about the whole of humanity, if they are sufficiently initiated into supersensible things, to the extent that they must say: either this happens or humanity goes into the abyss. There is no third way.

You can say that you cannot imagine that a social order is based on general trust. To that one can only answer: Fine, if you cannot imagine it, then you just have to imagine: Humanity must go into the swamp. – These things are serious, and they must be taken seriously as such.

To a certain degree of abstraction, the initiates of Western countries also know this. But they say the following: We have the science of initiation to a certain degree, we could publish it. They would, however, only publish a science of initiation that leads to the goals I have indicated; we are also now moving in an area that is just as applicable to the true science of initiation as it is to the one-sided one. The initiates of Western countries can therefore say: We have the science of initiation; we can publish it, but the fact is that it is only addressed to the individual. Now the great fear begins for these people, the terrible fear. They say, 'Yes, if we only speak to individuals in the future, then we will unleash a fight of everyone against everyone, because then people are not organized, then we rely on general trust, then people will enter into the fight of everyone against everyone. This fear stands before people. Therefore, they want to keep the most important truths of initiation, I would say, in the darkroom and let humanity walk towards the future in an apparent light, but asleep.

These things are indeed very topical, since the mid-19th century, when the peak of materialism in modern civilization was reached and since then people have had to ask themselves: How far do we go with the science of initiation? — They have not dared to communicate a real science of initiation to humanity beyond certain smaller circles until now.

Now, a certain education that humanity has undergone must not be allowed to break down, but it is already breaking down today thanks to a completely misguided theology. You can follow this education if you do not study that fable convenue which is usually called “history”, but if you study real history. Today, people do not really know how what is designated by certain words has changed over time. People talk about Catholicism, about emperorship, about aristocracy, about bourgeoisie, and believe that if they find the same words in the fourteenth century, they mean approximately the same thing, perhaps only a little nuance is different. As long as we do not realize that what Catholicism, emperorship, bourgeoisie and aristocracy meant in the 14th century has nothing at all in common with what we mean by these words today, we do not understand history. We must be quite clear about how the state of mind of human beings has really changed a great deal over the course of a few centuries.

What was it, then, that, until the 15th century, and in its after-effects even further, was the basis of what worked from general human education into the consciousness of the souls of the civilized world? All this was based on the fact that, during these centuries, human beings were able to assimilate supersensuous knowledge into their imaginative life, not in the way it is to be assimilated now through spiritual science, but in the way they were able to assimilate it at that time, according to their still atavistic states of consciousness. A fundamental fact filled human souls. It was the fundamental fact that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. In the way people thought at that time, they knew that the Christ-Being had descended from supermundane heights, had been embodied in the man Jesus of Nazareth, and that something had happened in the Mystery of Golgotha that could not have happened according to ordinary laws discoverable by the knowledge of nature. The concepts and ideas that people had of the Mystery of Golgotha had such ideas and such conceptions that went beyond the earthly sphere.

Such conceptions create very different thought forms than the ideas that the average person has today. The thoughts that people have today do not extend into the supersensible life at all. Thoughts that people formed with such a connection to the mystery of Golgotha, as I have just characterized it, were suitable for evoking thought forms that had a reality in the supersensible. Therefore, one can also characterize the present moment in time by saying that humanity has gradually lost the ability to form such thought forms that have a meaning in the supersensible. Thus, one cannot create social orders on Earth that will advance it. Therefore, everything that has been introduced into humanity in the way of social ideas since about the sixteenth century bears the character that can be described as follows: We encounter social institutions according to the thought forms that are the thought forms of modern times. All such social institutions are destined to break down. They have no inner power of further development. That is even the secret of the newer development. No matter how willingly people may create social institutions on the basis of the external world-building that has taken place since the 16th century, all these social institutions carry the seed of death within them as they arise, because they are not connected to thought-forms that have a reality in the supersensible. As long as there are no people in the present who understand this, there is no point in talking about social progress at all. It is not a matter of deriving social ideas in an abstract way, perhaps out of some spiritual web of thought. That is not important at all. In my “Key Points of the Social Question”, for example, there is no long chapter about spiritual science from which social laws are then deduced, but reality itself draws attention to what has to happen. What matters is not that one deduces the social life from some spiritual web or other, but that one is oneself imbued with such thoughts, which are rooted in the supersensible. For it is this state of being imbued that makes it possible for everything one thinks to have a reality in the supersensible.

It is a paradox, but the following is quite true: Imagine a person, I will say a “statesman” - a word that is currently said in quotation marks - who says all sorts of clever things, that is, things that people today call clever, but has never established a connection with the supersensible world. What he says, if realized in reality, would bear the germ of death. Another speaks. If one does not know that he is engaged in spiritual science, one does not even need to notice it from his speech; he just talks about things in a slightly different way. From what he says about social issues, for example, one does not even need to notice that he is engaged in spiritual science, but the fact that he is engaged in spiritual science gives his ideas the real impulse.

So the point is that today it is not enough to have an abstract logic, but that one must speak reality. Because today we are already at a stage in the development of humanity that, let's say, a journalist can write the most beautiful things that people admire because they say: Yes, when I read this, it is pure spiritual science! That is not the point! Today it is no longer about the wording, but about the basis of the soul, from which something like this comes. It is about what the human being carries within himself as substance!

If I am to draw a comparison from a completely different field, then let it be the one I have often used before: there are poets today who write poetry with extraordinary ease, who make beautiful verses that one can admire. Nevertheless, the same also applies: today, ninety-nine percent of poetry is overdone. But there are others whose verses are like a stammer; but these verses, which sound like a stammer, can come from a genuine human, that is, spiritual, source, while those that one admires because the languages are so simple that any fool can create something admirable out of language can be worthless sound.

Today it is absolutely necessary to go beyond the mere wording to the motive, that is, not to remain in the abstract, not to read according to the wording, but to place oneself in full life and judge the phenomena from the standpoint of life. And so it is a matter of spiritual science, as it is meant here, above all, having to have a fertilizing effect on the various branches of life, otherwise what must happen will not happen.

When two people talk to each other, they communicate through language. But in relatively recent times, language was quite different from what it is today. Today, when we communicate through language, we actually become more or less a slave to language. In the past, people learned a great deal through the genius of language, and they did not actually think very much themselves; they let language do the thinking for them. This only worked until the period I described to you yesterday. Today, people only get ahead if they can emancipate themselves from language with their thinking and feeling. Language today runs, as it were, like a mechanism in which we stand, and instead of us, Ahriman actually lives more and more in the development of language. Ahriman actually speaks today when people speak. And little by little people have to get used to understanding each other from something quite different than from the mere wording of languages. One must go much deeper into life in order to understand another person today than in the age when the wings of language still contained what people had exchanged with each other. Today this is no longer contained in the wings of language. Today one can basically be a person completely empty of real knowledge. But the fact that language – every civilized language today – has gradually developed sentence forms, sentences, and even entire theories that already lie in the language, you just need to change what is in the language a little, then you have something seemingly created by itself, in reality you have basically just mixed up a little what was already there.

It would be very easy today, as grotesque as it may sound to you, to do the following experiment. Take the pronouncements of good bourgeois professors, philosophy professors, natural science professors and the like, who are only slightly inclined towards materialism, towards one side or the other, take what these people have said over the past few decades, in the second half of the 19th century, and with a little rethinking, the following can be easily achieved. Take, I mean, any concoction of a fairly brave philosopher, a brave dozen philosophers from the second half of the 19th century, who has expressed himself on this or that social thing, you can now take away certain adjectives and replace them with others that are in another sentence. You can turn things around a bit – and out of it comes the life philosophy of Mr. Trotsky! In order to be a Trotskyist with a Weltanschauung today, one does not need to be able to think for oneself at all, but only to let language think within oneself in the way I have just described. But because language has emancipated itself from them in a certain way, it is not people who are at work here, but Ahrimanic powers in human culture.

What I have told you now can be experienced. One only has to have the inner soul eyes open to such things. For those who work not with words but with thoughts, language today is a truly dreadful instrument. It is indeed not easy for those who work with thoughts to write today. Because if you want to write a sentence, it will not do so because so and so many people have written similar sentences. The sentence always wants to form itself out of the collective psyche, but you must first become its enemy in order to truly shape what is in your soul into a sentence. Anyone who works for the public today and cannot feel this hostility of language always runs the risk of abandoning themselves to the thinking of language and devising beautiful programs out of language.

The necessity of enforcing one's thoughts must begin today with the struggle against language. Nothing is more dangerous than for a person to allow themselves to be carried by language, in the sense of: This is how you express it, that is how you express it. — Because by having a stereotyped way of expressing things, by being able to say: you can only say it that way – you actually go with the usual flow of speech and do not work from the original thought.

Our schools are terrible in this respect. The schoolmasters, who actually correct every seemingly clumsy but at least original thought in terms of convention, commit great crimes in school. One should search for every awkward but substantially individual sentence that any boy or girl writes at school. One should use it to start discussions at school and not use the cursed red ink to replace what comes out of youthful individuality with convention. For today it is most important to look at what comes out of youthful individualities. Perhaps it will reveal itself in a way that we do not always find comfortable, that we easily see as flawed. If one wanted to correct Goethe's youthful letters with the eye of a high school teacher, then many things would have to be corrected! The Austrian poet Robert Hamerling received the worst grade in the “German essay” in his teaching examination! And there is still some truth to what Hebbel wrote in his diary, as I have often mentioned: he wanted to write a drama with the motif that a high school teacher of the higher grades in particular has a student who is the reincarnation of Plato, with whom he reads Plato in class; then the teacher finds that this “reincarnation of Plato” does not understand the slightest thing about Plato! The poet Friedrich Hebbel noted down this motif for a drama that was then not carried out. But there is some truth to it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that at all times, seduced by the remaining Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, people have resisted the normal progress of humanity. Today we are faced with the necessity of having to seek something completely new from spiritual life in order to save humanity. It is no wonder that people are violently opposed to all kinds of logical absurdities and immorality. And so, for a long time now, I have always had to talk about my own situation as a kind of prologue to our reflections.

About a week ago I told you about the defamatory and mean way in which a large number of German newspapers are currently reporting things that are known to be their source, but which could turn against everything that comes from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the related social issues. It is a very direct example, I might say, of what is happening “at the house” itself, how strongly the opposing forces are stirring. But there is a certain reason why I would like to characterize this matter for you in somewhat more detail today. To this end, I would like to draw attention once more to what has happened. It has come about that a defamatory report suddenly appeared in a number of German newspapers, which can be summarized in the following sentences. I have already read these sentences. However, we should bear them in mind once more, for they are actually worthy of being remembered as a characteristic example of certain cultural phenomena of the present day:

"Rudolf Steiner as political informer. The well-known Theosophical charlatan Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences millions of men and women, founded a league for the threefold social organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a very strange and repulsive political agitation. We learn the following about this from Dresden: “It is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – please note this sentence, “it is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – “that the League for Threefold Order is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the accuracy of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proved by the passage of a letter which says: “Accusations of theft are to be avoided because it is easier to prove that they are untrue. Similarly, one should not make incredible accusations such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, of course, this most slanderous and most mendacious story, sentence by sentence, is going through a series of German newspapers! One can be amazed at the most diverse things in it, but let us single out one fact. There is talk of letters that are said to have been written and that are referred to as authentic documents. In the issue of “Dreigliederung” that has not yet appeared, I expressly pointed out that I am well aware of the dubious sources from which such things originate. Now, however, I will read you a charming document from which you will see what the authentic foundations are for those people who spread such things into the world.

After this flood of meanness had subsided, and after I had received confirmation from various other sides of what I had known anyway about the murky sources, I received the following letter from a friend. This letter only reached me now, but it was written – I ask you to bear this in mind – before these newspaper articles appeared. So what this letter contains has been established before the newspaper articles appeared. I ask you to bear this fact in mind. This letter states:

So you see, there are factories for forging letters! These letters really do circulate. It continues:

"The second letter makes the following suggestion: Since there are still many officers in the army who are monarchists, it would be absolutely necessary to neutralize them by the following shameless means. The members of the troop to which the officer in question belonged during the campaign should be searched for people who, under oath, are to testify to as many of the person's crimes as possible. It is also stated in more detail that these would only have to be credible offenses, not rape, infanticide, and similar things. This record of sins should then be transmitted by a Mr. Grelling” - that is the only name mentioned in the letter - ‘to the Entente, and they would then demand the immediate extradition of the persons concerned.’

Both letters were read by the person concerned with his own eyes.

So this is the letter referred to in the newspaper article, the letter that is probably circulating in countless copies and that is addressed to this and that office in Berlin! So first the letters are forged, fabricated, then the newspaper articles are made up. This is the method of fighting!

I would like to know if other things are needed to make it clear that it is necessary to wake up today! — From what has happened in recent years, a moral ground for humanity has emerged, which was rooted in the impossibilities that had already preceded it, and which is producing such flowers.

It is no longer acceptable to continue sleeping when we know the depths of the swamp we are in. It could easily be, if these things were not talked about openly, that there would still be people in our ranks who would say, for example: Shouldn't we rather write to all the fine gentlemen who forge letters and then use the forged letters to fabricate newspaper articles in order to change their minds? Today it is really a matter of opening our eyes and seeing what kind of people are walking around among us, people whom we would soil ourselves if we got seriously involved with them. These things must not be overlooked; this must be said again and again. The connections must be pointed out. Do you think that it can be with impunity that, for example, in those Jesuit publications, in which the false statements that I have already mentioned to you are printed, the story has been circulated for years that I am a runaway priest, and then simply to take back such a thing with the words: This is something that one heard, “but which could not be substantiated”? Do you think that one has the right to say to such a Jesuit priest: You have taken back what you spread? No, one has to say to him: You have violated your duty in the most irresponsible way by spreading a thing unchecked, and your retraction means nothing at all. Today, morality must be taken seriously by those people who still understand something about morality. During the past five years, we have heard almost nothing but lies from all over the civilized world, and we are still living under the effects of the lie. It is necessary to face these things seriously.

Here you can clearly see an example of how things are. When things are not brought home to us through karma, so that the individual is at the same time completely decisive for the general, then there will always be people who want to vote for compromises, who, for example, treat a Ferriere still as a human being, with whom one engages on equal terms, while he belongs to the scum of the human race, by writing something unscrupulously, which he accepts without verification. These things are no longer acceptable today for a person who wants to stand on sound ground.

If I did not have this example of the origin of a matter at hand, it would not be so easy to believe me that there are now factories for forging letters, on the basis of which “they” then treat people in public as they did in this newspaper article.

But that happens today over and over again, and a large part of what you read consists of nothing other than the blossoms of this moral swamp. Today it is simply part of a healthy, serious and honest world view to know these things and to treat them accordingly. Today people are not allowed to make compromises with people who work with defamation in this way. For it cannot be justified by saying: One must be benevolent towards all people — love towards all people! — Love towards such people means extreme unkindness towards those who are slandered, who are distorted. It is a matter of knowing where to direct one's love. For loving the crime can never lead to the recovery of humanity. That such things would come could be foreseen. But it could be foreseen not only from the way certain quarters have been working. You only have to open the Jesuit literature that has been unleashed since the Church's condemnation of the anthroposophical writings in July 1919. You only have to look at the people who write and examine their approach to the truth, and you will naturally see everything that ultimately leads into such swamps. I do not want to talk today about the very murky sources, which I know very well and through whose acquaintance I also know how all these things are connected and how they are just the beginning.

I only wish that as few people as possible would be naive enough to believe that refutations could achieve anything. For these people, it is not about asserting this or that, but only about asserting something juicy, whereby they disparage others. These people could not care less about what they assert.

But not only that we have to take into account the fact that today we have numerous such people among us who work in this way, but also that we have to take into account the fact that for decades now, due to drowsiness, we have had a broad tolerance among the general public for this kind of thing, a reluctance to look at how public opinion is actually made today. But that is the most important part of what can lead to improvement. As long as people of the caliber of the Jesuit Zimmermann or the university professor Dessoir are not treated in the appropriate way, there can be no recovery. The people who stand opposite them and do not give them the right treatment are even more guilty than these individuals. For these individuals conduct their business in these matters, albeit in such a dirty way as Professor Dessoir. I characterized this to you some time ago. But it is a matter of finally waking up. Because a Dessoir book or a Zimmermann critique leads straight to these swamps, which I was able to characterize for you. I had to mention this not only with the intention of showing the symptoms of the forces that are effective in our time to suppress every legitimate spiritual aspiration, And so I would also like to mention the fact that I was recently given an article here that was supposedly intended for the Brockhaus Conversations Encyclopedia, for which the infamous Dessoir — infamous only with us! — was supposed to write articles about anthroposophy; at the same time that he had these articles of mine written by an intermediary, he was writing his book, this disgrace. But now consider the case that this article would lie here in our local archives! It would later be found there as an article that is said to come from me. So someone might say: Yes, Steiner copied the article in the archives from Dessoir's article in the encyclopedia and claimed it for himself! - Such blossoms can be driven when one is not awake! First one's things can be stolen by literary thieves, and then they can appear in such a way somewhere that not the one who made them but the one who stole them is considered the author and the one who is the author is considered the thief!

The moral question must be approached today from many sides; but it will not be approached profitably by anyone who does not stand on the ground of a sound spiritual science. That is what I wanted to share with you in the appendix to today's lecture, based on contemporary history.