The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In my last lecture I expressly emphasized that a condition constituting a paradise—if we may use the word again as I employed it then—is impossible on the physical plane. For this reason, all so-called solutions of the social problem, which purpose more or less consciously or unconsciously to bring about such a lasting paradisaical state upon the physical plane, rest necessarily upon illusions. It is in the light of this assertion that I beg you to receive the explanations I give in regard to the characteristic phenomena of the present time because there certainly exists in the actuality of our time a definite demand for the social shaping of humanity's relationships. The thing that matters is that this question shall not be made abstract, that the question shall not be taken in an absolute sense, but—as, indeed, I said to you the last time—that we shall develop on the basis of spiritual-scientific knowledge an insight into precisely what is necessary for our time. We shall now have something to say in regard to just what is necessary for today as considered in the light of the presuppositions of spiritual science.

When social problems or social demands are discussed today, what is generally most completely overlooked is the fact that the social problem cannot really be grasped at all in a manner suited to the requirements of our times without a more intimate knowledge of the being of man. No matter what social programs are thought out, no matter what ideal social conditions we may desire to bring about, if the point of departure is not an understanding of the human being as such, if the objective is not in accordance with the more intimate knowledge of man, everything will remain fruitless. I have pointed out to you that the social organization of which I have spoken, this threefold social organization that I have been impelled to present as the important demand of our time, is valid for the present age for the reason that it centers attention upon the knowledge of the human being in every single detail. This is a knowledge of man in his present nature in this actual point of time within the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. It is from this point of view that I beg you to consider all the explanations that I shall present.

The foremost consideration is the fact that such a social order as is demanded by contemporary conditions cannot be established apart from a conscious knowledge of the requirement that man shall be aware of himself in his relationship to what is social.

We may say that, of all forms of knowledge, the knowledge of the human being himself is decidedly the most difficult. Thus, in the ancient mysteries, “Know thyself” was set up as the loftiest goal for human endeavor. What is especially difficult for the human being today is the realization of all that works within him out of the cosmos, of how much is at work within him. Since man has become especially easy-going today precisely in his thinking, in his conceptions, he likes best of all to conceive of himself in the simplest way possible. But the actual truth is that man is by no means a simple being. By means of mere arbitrary conceptions nothing whatever can be accomplished concerning this reality, and in social relationships, likewise, man is by no means a simple being. Precisely in social relationships he is such a being, we might even say, as he would ardently desire not to be; he would prefer with the utmost intensity to be different from what he is. It may be said that the human being is really extraordinarily fond of himself. This cannot possibly be questioned. The human being is extraordinarily fond of himself and it is this self-love that causes man to transform self-knowledge into a source of illusions. For instance, a man prefers not to admit that he is only a half-way social being and that to the extent of the other half he is antisocial.

Now, a matter-of-fact and positive admission that man is at the same time a social and an antisocial being is a fundamental requirement for a social knowledge of humanity. A person may very well say, “I aspire to become a social being.” Indeed, he must say this, since, if he is not a social being, he simply cannot live rightly with his fellow men. Yet it is characteristic of human nature at the same time to struggle constantly in opposition to what is social, to remain continuously an antisocial being.

We have repeatedly, from the most varied points of view, considered the human being in accordance with the threefold character of his soul, according to thinking, or conceiving, feeling and willing. Today we may also thus consider him in his social relationships from this point of view. Foremost of all, we must see clearly as regards conceiving, thinking, that in this inner activity there is a source of the antisocial in the human being that is tremendously significant. Through the fact that man is a thinking being, he is antisocial. In this matter only the science of the spirit has any access to the truth of things because it is only the science of the spirit that can cast light upon the question as to how we stand in general as human beings related to other human beings.

When is the right relationship established, then, between man and man for the ordinary everyday consciousness—or, better expressed, for the ordinary everyday life? Well, when this right relationship between man and man is established, undoubtedly the social order also is then existent. But it is a curious fact—we might say unfortunately, but the one who knows says necessarily—that we develop a right relationship between man and man only in sleep. Only when we are asleep do we establish a true and straightforward relationship between man and man. The moment you turn your back on the ordinary day consciousness while you are in the state of dreamless sleep between falling asleep and waking, you are then, with regard to your thinking—and I speak now solely with regard to conceiving and thinking—a social being. The moment you awake, you begin to develop through your conceptual life, through your thinking, antisocial impulses. It is really necessary to realize how complicated human relationships in society become through the fact that a person takes the right relationship toward other persons only in sleep. I have indicated this in various ways from other points of view. I have pointed out, for example, that a person can be thoroughly chauvinistic while awake, but that, when he is asleep, he is placed actually in the midst of those persons, is associated with those persons, especially with their folk spirit, whom he hates most of all while awake. Against this fact nothing can be done. Sleep is a social leveler. But, since modern science is unwilling to know anything whatever about sleep, it will be a long time before science will accept what I have just said.

We enter through our thinking into still another antisocial stream in the waking state. Suppose you stand face to face with a person. In truth we confront all human beings only through confronting individual persons. You are a thinking human being, naturally, since you would not be human if you were not a thinking being. I am speaking now only about thinking; we shall speak later about feeling and willing. From the point of view of feeling and willing some objection might be raised, but what I am now saying is correct as regards the standpoint of conceiving. When you stand as a conceiving, thinking human being in the presence of another person, it is a strange fact that the reciprocal relationship that comes about between man and man brings into existence in your subconsciousness the tendency to be put to sleep by the other person. You are actually put to sleep in your subconsciousness by the other person. This is the normal relationship between man and man. When you come together, the one strives—and, naturally, the relationship is reciprocal—to put to sleep the subconscious of the other. What must you do, therefore, as a thinking person? (Of course, everything that I am telling you takes place in the subconscious. It is a fact even if it does not arise into ordinary consciousness.) Thus, when you come into the presence of a person, he puts you to sleep; that is, he puts your thinking to sleep, not your feeling and willing. Now, if you wish to continue to be a thinking human being, you must defend yourself inwardly against this. You must activate your thinking. You have to take defensive measures against being put to sleep. Confronting another person always means that we must force ourselves to awake; we must wake up; we must free ourselves from what this person wills to do to us.

Such things actually occur in life, and we actually comprehend life only when we view it in a spiritual-scientific way. If you speak to a person, or even if you are merely in the company of a person, this means that you must continuously keep yourself awake against his endeavor to put you to sleep in your thinking. Of course, this does not come into the ordinary consciousness, but it works within the human being. It works in him as an antisocial impulse. In a certain sense every person confronts us as an enemy of conceptual life, as an enemy of our thinking. We must defend our thinking against the other person. This requires that we are in great measure antisocial beings as regards our conceptual life, our thinking, and can become social beings only by educating ourselves. If we were not compelled constantly to practice this protection, to which we are compelled through the necessity within which we live—if we did not have to practice constantly this protection against the other person, we could be social human beings in our thinking. But, since we must practice this, it is of utmost importance for us to realize perfectly clearly that it is possible for us to become social beings, to become such through self-discipline, but that as thinking human beings we are not actually social already.

From this fact it becomes clear that no assertions whatever can be made regarding the social question without investigating the life of the soul and the fact that man is a thinking being because the social question penetrates into extremely intimate matters in human life. Whoever does not take account of the fact that man simply develops antisocial impulses when he thinks will arrive at no clarity in regard to the social problem.

During sleep things are easy for us. First of all, we are simply sleeping. There, in other words, bridges can be built connecting all men. In the waking state the other person, as he confronts us, seeks to put us to sleep in order that a bridge may be built to him, and we do the same to him. But we must protect ourselves against this. Otherwise we should simply be deprived of our thinking consciousness in our intercourse with human beings.

Thus it is not so easy to enunciate social demands since most persons who set forth social demands do not become at all conscious of the depth to which the antisocial is rooted in human nature. People are least of all inclined to state such things to themselves as self-knowledge. It might become easy for them if they would simply admit, not that they alone are antisocial beings, but that they possess this quality in common with all other persons. Even when a person admits that human beings are in general antisocial beings as thinkers, everyone, as regards himself, secretly clings to the reservation that he is an exception. Even if he does not state this fully to himself, yet there always shines dimly and secretly in his consciousness the thought that he is an exception and the others are antisocial beings as thinkers. The truth is that it becomes exceedingly difficult for people to take seriously the fact that it is not possible as a man to be something, but it is still always possible as a man to become something.

This is a fact, however, that has a special and fundamental connection with those things that can be learned in our time. It is really possible today, as one would not have been willing to do five or six years ago, to point out that certain injuries and deficiencies in human nature that have made themselves perfectly obvious exist in all parts of the world. People strive to delude themselves in regard to this necessity of becoming something. Most of all they endeavor to call attention to what they are, not to what they will to become. For instance, you will find that a great number of persons belonging within the Entente and the Americans think within the limits of what they are simply by reason of the fact that they belong to the Entente or to America. They do not need to become something. They need only to point out how different they are from the evil human beings of the Central European countries, showing how black they are, whereas they alone are white. This is something that has spread an illusion regarding human beings over vast areas of the earth and it will inevitably in the course of time bring a terrible penalty. This habit of willing to be something and not willing to become something is an element kept in the background as an opposition to the science of the spirit. The science of the spirit cannot do otherwise than to call the attention of people to the fact that it is necessary constantly to become something and that a person simply cannot be some sort of finished thing. People deceive themselves in a terrible way about themselves when they believe they can point to something absolute that determines a sort of special perfection in their case. In man everything not in the process of becoming evidences an imperfection. What I have said to you regarding the human being as thinker, and regarding the antisocial impulses begotten by him as such, has still another important aspect.

Man alternates in a way between the social and the antisocial, just as he alternates between waking and sleeping. We might even say that sleeping is social and waking is antisocial, and just as man must alternate between waking and sleeping in order to live a wholesome life, so must he alternate between the social and the antisocial. But it is just this fact that becomes conspicuous when we reflect about human life. For you see, a person may thus tend more or less toward the one or the other, just as a person may tend more or less toward sleeping or waking. There are persons who sleep beyond the normal amount. In other words, they, in the condition of a swinging pendulum in which the human being must be between sleeping and waking, simply tend toward one side of the scale. In the same way a person may cultivate within himself in greater measure either the social or the antisocial impulses. Men are in this respect differentiated individually in that one cultivates more the social and another the antisocial impulses. If we possess a knowledge of human beings in any measure, we can differentiate persons in this way.

Now, I said that there is another aspect of this matter. The antisocial in us is connected with the fact that we protect ourselves in a certain way against being put to sleep. But something else is connected with this. It makes us ill. Even if noticeable diseases do not arise from this cause—but even such noticeable diseases do often arise—yet the antisocial nature of man belongs among the causes of illness. Thus it will be easily intelligible to you that the social nature of man at the same time possesses a healing quality, something that gives life. But you see from all this how extraordinary human nature is. A person cannot heal himself by means of the social elements in his nature without in a certain way putting himself to sleep. As he tears himself away from this social element, he strengthens his thinking consciousness, but becomes antisocial. But in this way he also lames his healing forces, which are in his subconsciousness, in his organism. Thus the social and antisocial impulses present in the human being produce their effects even to the extent of determining a sound or an ill constitution of life.

One who develops a knowledge of man in this direction will be able to trace a great number of more or less genuine illnesses back to his antisocial nature. The state of illness depends, much more than is supposed, upon the antisocial nature of man, especially as regards those illnesses that are often genuine but that manifest themselves outwardly in some such thing as moodiness, in all sorts of self-torturing, torturing of others, and in the struggle to get through something disagreeable. All such things are connected with an unsound organic constitution, and they gradually develop when a person is strongly inclined toward antisocial impulses. In any case, it ought to be entirely clear that an important mystery of human life is here concealed. This mystery of life, important both for the teacher and also for man's self-education if it is known in a living and not merely theoretic way, means that a person acquires the inclination to take his own life strenuously in hand, to think about mastering the antisocial element in order to reach the mastery of it. Many persons would cure themselves not only of their moodiness but also of all kinds of ailments if they would thoroughly investigate their own antisocial impulses. But this must be done in a serious way. This must be done without self love because it is something of the utmost importance for our lives.

This is what must be said in regard to the social and the antisocial elements in the human being in reference to his conceptual life, or his thinking.

In addition, man is a feeling being, and there is something peculiar, in turn, as regards his feelings. In respect to feeling man is also not so simple as he would like to think. Feeling between two human beings, in other words, shows a most paradoxical peculiarity. Feeling has the peculiar characteristic of being inclined to give us an untrue sentiment in regard to the other person. The first inclination in the subconsciousness of a person in intercourse between human beings always consists in the fact that an untrue sentiment arises in his subconsciousness regarding the other person. In our lives we must, first of all, continually oppose this untrue sentiment. One who knows life will easily observe that those persons who are not inclined to show an interest in other persons are really critical about almost all persons—at least after a certain time. This is really a peculiarity of a great many persons. They love one person or another for a certain length of time but, when this time has passed, something is aroused in their nature and they begin in some way to be critical of the other, to hold something or other against him. Often the person himself does not know what he has against the other because these things take their course to a large extent in subconsciousness. This is due to the fact that the subconscious simply has a tendency actually to falsify the picture that we form of the other person. We must learn to know the other person more deeply, and we shall then see that we must erase falsification in the picture we have acquired of him.

Paradoxical as it may sound a good maxim to live by, even though there would have to be exceptions, would be to endeavor always to correct in some way the image of the human being that becomes fixed in our subconscious, which has the tendency to judge human beings according to sympathies and antipathies. Even life itself demands this of us. Just as life requires us to be thinking persons and we thus become antisocial, so does life—and what I am telling you is based upon facts—demand that we judge according to sympathies and antipathies. But every judgment based upon sympathies and antipathies is falsified. There is no real judgment that is correct if it is formed according to sympathies and antipathies. Since the subconscious in the feelings is governed by sympathy and antipathy, it always sketches a false picture of the other person. We simply cannot form in our subconscious a true picture of him. To be sure, we often have a picture that is too favorable, but the picture is always formed according to sympathies and antipathies, and there is nothing we can do except simply to admit this fact and to admit that, in this regard also as human beings, we simply cannot be something but can only become something. Especially as regards our relationship in feeling with other individuals we must simply lead a “waiting” life. We must not act in accordance with the image of them that presses upward out of the subconscious into consciousness, but we must endeavor to live with people, and we shall see that the social attitude evolves out of the antisocial attitude that one really always has.

For this reason it is of special importance to study the feeling life of man to the extent that it is antisocial. Whereas the thinking life is antisocial because he must protect himself against falling asleep, the feeling life is antisocial because he governs his intercourse with other persons according to sympathy and antipathy, and from the beginning injects false currents of feeling into society. What comes from people through the influence of sympathies and antipathies is certain from the beginning to interject antisocial currents of life into human society.

Paradoxical as it may sound, we might say that a social community would be possible only if people did not live in sympathies and antipathies, but in that case they would not be human beings. You see clearly from this that man is at the same time a social and antisocial being, and that what we call the “social” question requires that we enter into intimate details of his nature. If we do not do so we shall never attain to a solution of the social question for any period of time whatever.

As regards the will acting between individuals it is really striking and paradoxical to discover what a complicated being man is. You know, of course, that not only sympathies and antipathies play their roles in the relationship between individuals as regards the will—as these do also to the extent that we are feeling beings—but that here inclinations and disinclinations which pass into action also play a role. That is, sympathies and antipathies in action, in their expression, in their manifestation, play a special role. One person is related to another person according to how he is influenced by his special sympathy toward the person, the special degree of love that he brings to meet the other person. There an unconscious inspiration plays a strange role. For everything that envelops all relationships in will between people must be viewed in the light of the impelling force that underlies these volitional relationships, that is, in the light of the love that plays its role in greater or lesser degree. Indeed, individuals cause their will impulses, which are active in this way from one to the other, to be sustained by this love that is active between them.

Regarding the feeling of love, people are subject in preeminent degree to a great illusion, which requires a greater measure of correction than the ordinary sympathies and antipathies in their feelings. However strange it may seem to the ordinary consciousness, it is entirely true that the love manifesting itself between one person and another, if it is not spiritualized—and love is actually seldom spiritualized in ordinary life, even though I am not speaking merely of sexual love or love resting upon a sexual foundation, but in general of the love of one person for another—is not really love as such, but an image the person makes of love. It is generally nothing more than a terrible illusion, because the love one person believes he feels toward another is for the most part nothing but self-love. A person supposes that he loves another, but in this love really is loving himself. You see here a source of an antisocial disposition that must be the source also of a terrible self-deception. In other words, a person may suppose that he is giving himself up in an overwhelming love for another person, while he really does not love the other person at all. What he feels as a state of rapture in his own soul in association with the other person, what he experiences within himself by reason of the fact that he is in the presence of the other person, that he makes declarations of love, if you please, to the other person—this is what he really loves. In the whole thing the person loves himself as he kindles this self-love in his social relationship with the other person.

This is an important mystery in human life and it is of enormous importance. This love that a person supposes is real, but that is really only self-love, self-seeking, egoism, masked egoism—and in the great majority of cases the love that plays its role between people and is called love is only masked egoism—is the source of the greatest imaginable and the most widespread antisocial impulses. Through this self-love masked as real love, a person becomes in preeminent degree an antisocial being. He becomes an antisocial being through the fact that he buries himself within, most of all when he is unaware of it, or wishes to know nothing of it.

Thus you see that the person who speaks about social demands, especially as regards contemporary humanity, must consider fully such soul states. We must simply ask, “How shall human beings arrive at any social structure in their common life if they will not learn to understand how much self-seeking is embodied in so-called love, in the love of one's neighbor?”

Thus love can actually become an enormously strong force working in the direction of the antisocial life. It may be asserted that a person, when he is not working upon himself, when he does not undertake self-discipline, is invariably an antisocial being when he loves. Love as such, as it inheres in the nature of man, unless the person is practicing self-discipline, is predestined to be antisocial, for it is exclusive. Once more, this is no criticism. Many of the requirements of life are connected with the fact that love must be exclusive. In the very nature of things, a father will love his own son more than a strange child, but this is antisocial. If people assert, as the habit is nowadays, that man is social, this is nonsense; for man is just as strongly antisocial as he is social. Life itself makes him antisocial.

For this reason, if you imagine such a state of paradise established on earth, which can never exist but is striven for because people love the unreal always more than the real, if we think of such a state of paradise as having been established, or even such a super-paradise as Lenin, Trotsky and Kurt Eisner would have on earth, innumerable individuals would within a short time be obliged to oppose this. It would not be possible for them to remain human in it for the reason that only the social impulses would find satisfaction in such a state, and the antisocial impulses would immediately be aroused. This is just as inevitable as it is that a pendulum does not swing only toward one side. The moment we should establish a state of paradise, the antisocial impulses would necessarily be roused into action. If what Lenin, Trotsky and Kurt Eisner desire should be realized, it would be transformed into the opposite in the briefest possible time through the action of the antisocial impulses. This is simply the nature of life. It alternates between ebb and flow. If people do not understand this, they simply do not understand anything about the world. We frequently hear it said that the ideal of community life within a state is a democracy. Good! Let us assume„that the ideal of community life in a state is a democracy, but, should this be introduced anywhere, in its last phase it would inevitably bring about its own destruction. The tendency of democracy is inevitably such that, when the democrats are together, one is always endeavoring to overcome the other; the one always wishes to have his way against the other. This goes without saying. Transferred into the realm of reality, a democratic order leads to the opposite side. There is no other possibility in life. Democracies will always, after a certain length of time, die as the result of their own democratic nature. These are things that are of enormous importance for an understanding of life.

Besides, there is the additional peculiarity that the most essential characteristics of man during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch are antisocial. The consciousness that is based upon thinking must be developed during this period. For this reason this period will manifest the antisocial impulses outwardly in maximum degree and through the very nature of man. Through these antisocial impulses, he will bring about more or less distressing conditions. The reaction against the antisocial will be manifest, in turn, in the outcry in favor of socialism. It must be understood that ebb and flow always alternate.

In the last analysis, suppose that you should really socialize the community. This would bring about such conditions in the relationships between individuals that we should all simply be forever asleep. Social intercourse would be a means for going to sleep. At present you can scarcely imagine this because you will not think out in a concrete way how things would look in a so-called socialistic republic. But this socialistic republic would actually be a great place of sleep for human conceptual capacities. We can understand that there are longings for something of the kind, but longing for sleep is always present in many people. We must simply understand what the inner necessities of life are, and must not content ourselves with wishing for what suits us or is pleasing to us because the thing that a person does not possess is generally pleasing to him. What he has he generally fails to appreciate.

From these considerations we see that, when we speak about the social problem, the most important thing of all is to investigate the intimate elements in the nature of man, and to learn this human nature in such a way that we learn how social and antisocial impulses often become entangled in such knots as to create a chaos beyond clarification. This is the reason why it is so difficult to discuss the social question. This particular problem can scarcely be discussed in any way whatever unless one has the inclination really to delve down into the intimate characteristics of the human being, for example, to go into the question of why the bourgeoisie embody in themselves an antisocial impulse. The mere fact of belonging to the bourgeois class gives rise to,.antisocial impulses, because being a member of the bourgeois class means essentially that one creates a sphere in life where a peaceful existence is possible. From close investigation of this aspiration of the bourgeois, we discover that, in accordance with peculiarities of our contemporary epoch, he wishes to create for himself on an economic basis an island of life where he can pass his time in sleep so far as surrounding conditions are concerned, with the sole exception of special life habits that he has developed in accordance with his subjective antipathies or sympathies. Thus he does not crave the kind of sleep that is sought by the proletarian who is continually kept awake because his consciousness is not put to sleep on the existing economic foundation and who therefore yearns for the sleep of the social order. This is, in truth, an important psychological perception. Ownership puts a person to sleep; the necessity of struggling in life wakes one up. Being put to sleep through ownership causes a person to develop antisocial impulses because he does not crave social sleep. Continuous stimulation by the necessities of learning and existence awakens the craving to fall asleep in the social relationships.

These things must be taken into thorough consideration; otherwise we do not in the least understand the present time. Now, it may be said that, in spite of everything, our fifth post-Atlantean epoch does strive, in a certain manner, toward socialization in the form that I recently analyzed here. The things about which I have talked will come into existence either through human reason if people will adjust themselves to these things, or through cataclysms and revolutions if they will not. Man is striving toward this threefold order of society in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and it must come into existence. In short, our epoch is striving toward a certain socialization.

But this socialization is not possible, as is evident on the basis of all sorts of reflections we have presented here, unless something else accompanies it. Socialization can be related only to the external structure of society. But in this particular fifth post-Atlantean epoch such socialization can really consist only in the suppression of consciousness, of the thinking consciousness, in the suppression of antisocial human instincts. In other words, the social structure must in a certain way bring about the suppression of antisocial instincts in our conceptual life. There must be something to counterbalance this. In some way a balance must be brought about in the matter, but it can be established only provided all enslavement of thought, the mastery of the thinking of one man by another that has come from earlier epochs in which it was justified, shall be eliminated from the world with the process of socialization. This requires that the freedom of the spiritual life shall come about in the future side by side with the organizing of economic conditions. Only this freedom of the spiritual life renders it possible that we shall be so related as man to main that we shall see in another person standing before us a particular human being, not human beings in general. The program of a Woodrow Wilson speaks of human beings in general, but this generalized human being, the abstract man, does not exist. What exists is always the single, individual human being. We can become interested in him, in turn, only through our full humanity, not through mere thinking. When we Wilsonize, sketching an abstract picture of a human being, we extinguish what we should develop in the relationship of man to man.

The thing of essential importance for the future is that absolute freedom of thought must come about; socializing without this is inconceivable. Therefore, the process of socializing must be connected with the elimination of all enslavement of thought, whether this enslavement is fostered by what certain societies of the English-speaking peoples practice, which I have sufficiently described to you, or through Roman Catholicism. They are worthy of each other, and it is exceedingly important that we should see clearly the inner relationship of the two. It is extremely important that no lack of clarity shall hold sway at the present time, especially in reference to such things. You may tell a Jesuit what I have said to you regarding the peculiarity of those secret societies of the English-speaking peoples. He will be delighted to have a confirmation of the point of view he represents. But you must understand clearly that, if you wish to stand upon the basis of spiritual science, you cannot identify your objection to these secret societies with the objection manifested by the Jesuit. It is a strange fact that, in this field, people show all too little power of discriminating judgment.

I have recently called attention even in public lectures to the fact that what matters is not only what a person says but that we must always consider what sort of spirit permeates what is said. I used the example of the sentences from Woodrow Wilson and from Hermann Grimm sounding so much alike. I mention this for the reason that you will come to realize in ever increasing measure that a seeming opposition will arise on that side against the English-American secret societies just as we on our side must oppose them, but only by a seeming opposition. What has come out in the December number of the Stimmen der Zeit makes a grotesquely comical impression upon a person who sees into the actual facts because it is obvious that what must be opposed in the English-American secret societies is precisely the same thing that must be opposed in Jesuitism. They face one another as two powers, unable to exist side by side, face each other, the one battling against the other. Neither the one nor the other possesses the least real, objective interest; the interest in both cases has to do with the party, with the order.

It is especially important that we should get rid altogether of the habit of thinking only of the content and not of the standpoint from which anything is introduced 'into the world. If something that is valid for a certain epoch is introduced from a certain point of view, it may be beneficial, it may possess healing power. If introduced by another force, it may be something either utterly laughable or even injurious. This is a fact that must be considered especially at the present time. It will become ever increasingly clear that when two persons make the same statement, it is not the same thing, varying according to the background behind it. After all these testings that life has brought to us during the last three or four years, it is imperative that we shall at last really give attention to such things and really delve into them.

There is not yet much evidence of any such delving. For example, people will continue to ask how one thing or another is to be arranged, how it is to be done, in order that it shall be right. The truth is that, if you set up one thing or another here or there, but do not put persons in charge who think in accordance with the meaning of our epoch, no matter whether you make the best or the worst arrangement, the result will be injurious. The matter of real importance today is that man shall really grasp the truth that it is necessary for him to become. He cannot rest upon anything he already is, but must continue in the process of becoming. Moreover, he must understand how actually to see into reality. To do this people are extremely disinclined, as I have emphasized from the most varied points of view. In all sorts of things, and especially in regard to conditions of the times, people are so strongly inclined not actually to touch reality but to take things according to what suits them. Forming a judgment that is really objective is, naturally, not so easy as forming one that aims most directly toward easy formulation. Judgments that are objective are not readily reduced to formulas, especially when they take hold of the social, the human, or the political life, because in these fields the opposite of what is assumed is almost always true. Only when the effort is made not to form any judgment regarding such relationships, but to form pictures—in other words, when we ascend to the imaginative life—shall we take the path that is approximately right. In our epoch it is of special importance to make the effort to form pictures, not really abstract, isolated judgments. It must be pictures, too, that will open a path to socialization. Then what is required besides is that no socializing is possible unless the person becomes spiritually scientific—in other words, free on the one hand in thinking, and spiritually scientific on the other.

The underlying basis of this I have pointed out even in public lectures, for instance, the public lecture in Basel. I said that certain persons who think in a materialistic way, seeking to understand everything on the basis of evolution in the successive series of animals, say, “Well, now, in the animals we have the beginnings of social instincts; these develop in men into moralities.” But the things that became social instincts in animals are antisocial if they are lifted up to the human plane. Precisely what is social in the animal is antisocial in preeminent degree in the human being! People simply do not wish to investigate the various lines needed in the real picture of things, but form their judgments rashly. The right relationship between man and man comes about when we conceive man as a spiritual being, not when we conceive him only with regard to his animal nature; in this he is preeminently antisocial. But it is possible to conceive a man as a spiritual being only when we grasp the whole world in the light of its spiritual foundations. These three things, (social organization, freedom of thought, spiritual science) are simply inseparable one from the other. They belong together. In our fifth post-Atlantean epoch one of these cannot possibly be developed without the other. It will be especially necessary that people shall accustom themselves not to view unthinkingly such things as the fact that an antisocial nature is inherent in every individual. We might say, if we chose to express ourselves in a trivial way, that the curing of the ills of this epoch depends largely upon whether people will cease to be so intensely fond of themselves. This is the characteristic mark of the present-day person, that he is so fond of himself. If you differentiate again, he is fond of his thinking, his feeling, his willing, and when he has become attached to his thinking, he will not give it up.

A person who can truly think knows something that is by no means unimportant, that is, that he once thought wrongly in regard to everything concerning which he now thinks rightly. The truth is that we actually know correctly only what we have experienced the effect of in the soul life when we think wrongly regarding it. But people do not willingly investigate such inner states of development. It is for this reason that people have so little mutual understanding at the present time. I will give you an example. The proletariat world view, of which I have often spoken to you, maintains that the way in which men form their concepts, the entire idealogical superstructure, depends upon economic conditions, so that they form their political ideas according to their economic situations.

Anyone who can investigate such conceptions will find that this idea is in great measure justified, almost entirely justified as regards the development of the epoch since the sixteenth century. What people have been thinking since the sixteenth century is almost entirely the result of economic conditions. This is not true in an absolute sense but it is relatively justified in large measure. But this fact simply cannot penetrate such a head as that of a professor of national economics. For instance, a national economist is teaching in a university not far from here—his name is Michel—who says that this is false because it can be proven that political ideas are not formed on the basis of economic conditions, but that economic conditions are modified in special measure through political ideas. This Professor Michel then points to the continental embargo of Napoleon, by means of which certain branches of industry, let us say, were absolutely uprooted in Italy or in England and others introduced. Thus, says he, we have here a most striking example of how economic conditions were determined by political ideas, by the continental embargo. He introduces still other examples. I know that, if a hundred people read this book by Professor Michel, they will be convinced that what he says is true because it is developed with the most rigorous logic. It seems to be absolutely true but it is ridiculously false for the reason that all the examples introduced have to be treated according to the same scheme applying to the continental embargo. Certainly the continental embargo brought it about that certain industries in Italy had to be changed, but this change in industries brought about no modification whatever in the economic relationship between employer and worker. This is precisely the characteristic factor. All of this falls out as if from a sieve or a barrel without any bottom. In other words this economic theory of Professor Michel is a barrel without a bottom. Everything that he presents falls out of it as if from a barrel without a bottom, since the proletariat world view does not in the least maintain, for example, that the silk industry of Florence was not developed because of such an idea as the continental embargo, this industry having not previously existed, and on the other hand that it did not develop in England. But, in spite of the fact that the continental embargo can drive one industry to one place and another to another, nothing whatever is modified in the economic relationships between entrepreneur and worker. These are the decisive factors. Thus do such things fall out of the great course of the economic events with their idealogical superstructure, so that precisely the continental embargo in its effect fails completely to prove what Professor Michel wishes to prove.

Now, ask yourselves why such a person as Professor Michel takes up his stand upon his theory as contrasted with the proletariat way of thinking. For the simple reason that he is in love with his way of thinking and is not in the least capable of delving into the thinking of the proletariat. In other words, he falls immediately asleep. This is a latent falling asleep. The moment he ought to reflect upon proletariat thinking, he falls asleep. In this situation he can maintain his upright position only as he develops the thoughts with which he is in love.

We must investigate in this way the psychic factors. Our age is simply the epoch in which it is necessary and important to investigate psychic factors. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand what is necessary in our times and it will never be possible to reach any sort of sound judgments regarding these difficult tragic conditions. Only sound judgments can and will really guide us out of the misery of the present period. There is no occasion for pessimism in a comprehensive sense but there is every occasion for reversing our judgments. Most of all is there occasion for every individual person in greatest possible measure to reverse his judgment.

We must say that the manner in which persons utter their judgment today while sleeping, as it were, and how quickly they forget from one time to another even when the spaces of time are ever so brief, is truly remarkable. We shall certainly experience in special degree how people will forget all the phrases they have uttered in regard to justice and the necessity to battle for justice against injustice. We shall experience that most people who have spoken in this way a short time ago about “justice” will forget this and will not in the least see that, in the immediate future, by far the greatest number of those who have spoken about “justice” will be interested simply in bringing to dominance quite ordinary power. Naturally, we are not to think ill of them on this account but we ought simply to see clearly that, when a person has spoken on the one hand about right, he should not overlook the fact that the greatest outcry has to do, in the last analysis, with power and the impulse to grasp power. This is not to be held against these people, as I have said. Yet it will be unpleasant to see how those who only a short time ago were always talking about justice, will make themselves dominant. We have no reason to be surprised at this. But those who have participated, and come to agreement in all this talking ought to be astonished when they discover how completely the picture has changed! They ought at least then to become aware how strongly inclined the human being is to form his judgments according to illusions and not according to realities.

It is often difficult for a person to find his bearings within the course of world events, especially when they are considered from a higher point of view. People are so very loath to view the truth without prejudice, which often resolves certain conflicts of life only after long periods of time. They would like only too well to be guided by the reins of the cosmic powers, even though they do not admit this to themselves. It becomes especially difficult for a person to find his bearings in an unprejudiced way when he is compelled in any single incarnation to live in such a catastrophic time as the present. He likes then to ask why the gods permit such things. He does not like to ask about the necessities of life. He always has in the background a longing to have everything as comfortable as possible.

In such a time as ours, man must behold all sorts of things that are in course of preparation from chaos. Chaos is necessary for the total course of events, and he must often take up his position in the midst of the chaotic, as well as in what has been harmonized. Especially is our fifth post-Atlantean epoch such a time as causes man to pass through much that is chaotic. But this is connected with the entire characteristic, the whole nature, of this epoch. We are living at a time in which man must pass through those impelling forces in the course of evolution that set him upon his own feet and permeate him with individual consciousness. We are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul.

Now, after all that we have considered, in connection with which we have brought together a great variety of things that may be suited to make our age understandable to us, we must ask ourselves what is the most profound characteristic of the evolution of the consciousness soul in our epoch. The profoundest characteristic of this epoch is that man must become acquainted in the most profound and the most intense way with all those forces that oppose the harmonizing of humanity as a whole. For this reason a conscious knowledge of those ahrimanic and luciferic powers working against man must gradually spread. If he should not pass through these evolutionary impulses in which the luciferic and ahrimanic forces are participating, he would not arrive at the complete use of his consciousness, and thus at the development of his consciousness soul.

This integration of the consciousness soul into human nature has to be recognized as a strongly antisocial impulse. Thus we have in our epoch the peculiar fact that the manifestation of social ideals appears as a reaction against what is striving to emerge out of the innermost nature of man, a reaction against the evolution of individual consciousness. What I mean to say is that the reason we have such an outcry about the need of socializing is that the innermost nature of man, precisely in our age, is most violently opposed to this socializing. For this reason it is necessary that we should obtain a view of everything in the cosmos, in the universe, that sustains a certain relationship to man, in order that we may become aware of the relationship existing between the antisocial impulses streaming today out of the depths of human souls and the clamor for social harmonizing, working like a reaction to what streams forth from the inner nature of the human soul. It is simply necessary that we should come to see clearly that man represents in his life a state of balance between conflicting powers. Every conception characterized by the idea of mere duality—a good and an evil principle—will always fail to illuminate life. Life can be illuminated only when we represent it from the point of view of a trinity, in which one element represents a state of balance and the two others represent the opposite poles, between which the state of balance tends to move continually like a pendulum. This is the reason for the Trinity we undertake to represent in our Group¹ ; the Representative of Man balancing Ahriman and Lucifer, which is to constitute the middle point of this building.

This consciousness of a state of balance for which one strives, but that is always in danger of swinging toward the one or the other side, must become the essential element in the world conception of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. As man passes through the stage of the consciousness soul, he develops toward the spirit self. This epoch of the evolution of the consciousness soul will continue for a long time. But within reality things do not proceed in such a way that one always follows the other in a beautiful scheme. On the contrary, one is telescoped in a way into the other. While we are developing in ever stronger measure the consciousness soul, there is always waiting in the background the spirit self that will then develop during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch just as strongly as the consciousness soul during this fifth epoch. Just as strongly as the consciousness soul works antisocially in its development, will the spirit self work socially. Thus we may say that, during this epoch, man develops from the innermost impelling forces of his soul what is antisocial, but behind this something spiritually social exerts its influence. This spiritually social element that is exerting its influence in the background will appear in its essential nature when the light of the spirit self shall dawn in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. It is not surprising therefore, that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch what can enter livingly and in a well-ordered way into humanity only during the sixth epoch appears in all sorts of abstruse, extreme forms.

Man is exposed during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to the preliminary disturbing movements of what is to come during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. Everything will depend upon the acquisition of an understanding of what we must pass through during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The antisocial instincts will play a tremendous role, and they can be restrained and integrated into a true social life only in the way that I recently explained. To assist him, man shall employ the social science that is to be derived from a general spiritual science.

Behind all the many struggles, therefore, of the present time, and also of the immediate future, the social question will remain in the background because its time has not yet come. But we must repeat from all possible points of view the fact that this social formation that is demanded cannot attain to real life unless it enters into a union with two other things. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, this union will appear more or less spontaneously. During this fifth epoch, social life must be regulated through the fostering of spiritual science. Every effort to regulate social life outside the sphere of spiritual science will lead only to chaos and radicalism, bringing about unhappiness for humanity. As regards a social shaping of life, this fifth post-Atlantean epoch is dependent in preeminent degree upon the science of the spirit. Just consider what I referred to yesterday and also recently in a public lecture in Basel. Just consider that man has mastered a nature that is distributed over the whole animal kingdom. He is the conqueror of the animal nature; he bears the animal nature within him.

Naive Darwinism maintains that human morality is only the development of the social impulse among animals. The social impulses are inborn in the animal, and they become, just to the extent that they are social impulses in the animal, antisocial impulses in man. He can awaken again to a social life only when he grows above what has developed as an antisocial impulse in him out of the animal nature. This is the truth. Thus, if we wish to represent the human being schematically from this point of view, we may say that man overcomes and develops beyond animality. What is social in the animal becomes antisocial in man. But he grows into spirituality and within the spiritual he may again achieve the social for himself. At a higher stage than the one that man has reached in the epoch of the consciousness soul, where he has grown out of animality, he will gain the social element. This shines amid the chaos of this middle stage where he now is.

This must be supplemented by two other facts. When the socializing process becomes manifest as an elemental impulse as a demand within humanity, this socializing alone must always bring a curse. The socializing process can become a blessing only if it is linked with two other things that must develop during the entire course of our postAtlantean age, up to the seventh post-Atlantean epoch. This may occur only when it is linked with what may be called the free life of thought and an insight into the spiritual nature of the world lying behind the sensible nature. Socializing without a science of the spirit and without freedom of thought is an impossibility. This is simply an objective truth. But man must awaken to freedom of thought; he must make himself ripe for freedom of thought precisely during our epoch of the consciousness soul.

Why must he awake to freedom of thought?

During the course of human evolution, man has come in a certain respect to a decisive point in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Up to this fifth epoch he possessed the possibility of having the prenatal time continue its influence into the postnatal life. Let us grasp this quite clearly. Up to our epoch man has borne forces within him that are not acquired by him during the course of life but were possessed by him when, as the expression goes, he first beheld the light of the world, when he was born. These were imprinted upon him during the embryonic time. These forces that were impressed upon man during the embryonic time and that then continue to work throughout life, were possessed by man up to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Only now do we face a great crisis in the evolution of humanity through the fact that these forces can no longer be determinative; they can no longer work in such an elemental manner as hitherto. In other words, during this fifth postAtlantean epoch man will be in much greater measure exposed to the impressions of life, because forces opposing the impressions of life, which were acquired in the embryonic period before birth, are losing their sustaining power. This fact is something of enormous importance.

Only in one respect was life even prior to this time such that man could acquire something between birth and death, something that was not imprinted upon him during the embryonic time. But this was possible only because of the following facts. We explained yesterday the peculiar phenomena of sleep in relation to social life. When man is asleep, his ego and astral body are outside the physical and the etheric body. There is a different relationship between the ego and the astral body, on the one hand, and the physical and etheric bodies on the other hand during sleep from that existing in the waking state. While man is asleep, he stands in a different relationship to his physical and etheric bodies. Now, there is a certain resemblance between our sleep and our embryonic period—a resemblance, not an identity. In a certain sense, our life during the period from sleeping to waking is similar to the life that we live from conception—or actually three weeks thereafter—until birth—again similar, not identical. While we rest as an infant in the body of our mother, our life is similar to what we experience later during sleep, except that during sleep we breathe the outer air. For this reason I have to say only “similar” but not “identical.” We do not breathe the outer air when we rest in the body of the mother. We are stimulated to breathe the outer air when we are born.

Thus, in this way life during sleep is different from the embryonic life. Now hold firmly to the fact that, while the human being is sleeping, his life is in many respects similar to that of the embryonic state except that something is at work that can occur only between birth and death and not in the embryonic life. Breathing works here. The fact that man breathes the outer air causes his organism to be influenced in a certain way. But everything that influences our organism affects the totality of our life-expressions, even our psychic expression. Because we breathe, we understand the world otherwise than if we did not breathe.

Now, there was a cultural element in the evolution of humanity. We touch upon a significant mystery of human evolution when we undertake to explain this. This was the Old Testament cultural element, which was permeated in an especially profound way for its initiates by the fact that man is different, by reason of the breathing between birth and death, from the embryonic life, which is otherwise like the life of sleep. It was upon this inner knowledge of the nature of breathing that the relationship between the old Jewish initiates, the Hebrew initiates of the Old Testament, and their Jehovah God was based. The Jehovah God manifested himself, as we need only learn from the Bible, to his people. Which was the people of Jehovah? It was the people who had a peculiar relationship to this truth of breathing that I have just explained. This is the reason why precisely this people received the revelation that man became man when the breath of life was given to him.

We acquire a special understanding when this is developed on the basis of the nature of human breathing. We acquire an understanding of the life of abstract thinking, which was called in the Old Testament the life of law, an understanding of the reception of abstract thoughts. Strange as this may seem at present to materialistic thought, it is nevertheless true that the human power of creating abstractions is determined essentially by the breathing process. The fact that man can abstract, that he can conceive abstract thoughts, just as laws are abstract thoughts, is connected with his breathing process and even physiologically with his breathing process. The instrument of abstract thinking is, of course, the brain. This brain is involved in a continual rhythm synchronized with the breathing rhythm. I have already spoken here repeatedly in regard to this relationship of the brain rhythm with the breathing rhythm. I have explained to you how the brain is floating in the cerebral fluid, and how this fluid, when the air is breathed out, flows down through the spinal column and empties below into the abdominal cavity; how the fluid is pressed upward again when the air is breathed in so that a continual vibration occurs: with exhalation, a sinking of the cerebral fluid; with inhalation, an ascent of the cerebral fluid and the immersion of the brain in the cerebral fluid. The capacity of the human being to form abstractions is connected even physiologically with this rhythm of the breathing process.

A people who based things in special measure upon the breathing process was likewise the people of the abstraction process. For this reason the initiates could impart a special revelation to their people, as they perceived things in their Jehovah manner, because this revelation was completely adapted to the process of abstract thinking. This is the secret of the Old Testament revelation. Man received a wisdom that was adapted to the abstracting capacity, the capacity of abstract thinking. Jehovah wisdom is adapted to abstract thinking.

As regards this Jehovah wisdom, man is asleep in the ordinary state of consciousness. The Jehovah initiates simply received in connection with their initiation what man experiences through his breath from falling asleep until waking. Because of this fact, persons who love half-truths have often designated Jehovah as the divinity who regulates sleep. This is true also. He imparted to man that element of wisdom that he would experience if he should become as clairvoyant as the initiates became, and should experience consciously the life between falling asleep and waking. Now, this was not experienced by the ordinary consciousness in the Old Testament times, but was given to man as a revelation, so that he thus received as revelation in this Jehovah wisdom that through which they had to sleep. It was necessary to sleep through this, since otherwise the life process could not continue.

This is the essential element of the Old Testament culture. The night wisdom was revealed as Jehovah wisdom. To a certain extent—but I beg you to note that I say to a certain extent—this possibility for man was exhausted during the period when the Mystery of Golgotha drew near because this wisdom, which is in a sense the wisdom of sleep and breathing, is one-seventh of all the wisdom that man must develop in the course of his evolution. It is the wisdom of a single one of the Elohim, that is, Jehovah. The other six-sevenths could and can come to humanity only as the Christ impulse flows into mankind. We may thus say that, as Jehovah revealed himself, he revealed the wisdom of night and breathing in anticipation. The six other Elohim, constituting in their totality together with the seventh Elohim the Christ impulse, reveal all other wisdom, which comes to man between birth and death otherwise than through breathing.

Within the life of Old Testament culture man would have been entirely antisocial if Jehovah had not revealed the social element to his people in that abstract law that regulated and harmonized their life.

Now, Jehovah was able to gain complete control for himself by thrusting back the other Elohim, as I have explained to you, and dethroning them in a certain way. This caused other, lower spiritual entities to come in contact with human nature and to take possession of it. Man was exposed to these other entities, so that we have two conditions in the course of Old Testament evolution: first, the harmonizing Jehovah wisdom in what was given to the Jews as their Law, which included at the same time their social life; second, what opposed this social union, the lower entities coming close to human nature because the other Elohim were not yet given access in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. These lower entities directed their powerful attacks in an antisocial sense against the Jehovah element.

It is a peculiar fact that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the fifth decade, Jehovah ceased in a certain sense to master the opposing spirits with his influence, so that they acquired special power. Not until the course of the nineteenth century was it really necessary for the first time that the Christ impulse, which had previously been only in a preliminary stage as I have often pointed out, should really be understood. Human culture could not progress further without this impulse and it was the social element particularly that stood face to face with this important crisis. It was necessary that the Christ impulse should be understood for the future. Without an understanding of this Christ impulse, no social demand takes the direction leading to any sort of wholesome objective.

The almost twenty centuries during which Christianity has previously been disseminated were only preparatory stages for the real understanding of the Christ impulse because the Christ impulse can be understood only in the spirit. Everything happens gradually. In our critical times, when we face a crisis in regard to just those things I have called to your attention, the situation is as follows. The instinct leading toward a mere Jehovah wisdom still extends into our age as a remnant, tending toward the wisdom that depended upon what was acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only by the unconscious breathing process. The Jehovah wisdom requires a revelation in order to enter our consciousness. This sufficed up to the time when the consciousness soul had not yet evolved to a certain degree. Now, since the consciousness soul has evolved to this degree, humanity cannot get along further with Jehovah wisdom that is adapted to the breathing, but it is invariably true that an effort is made to continue to get along with something that has become insufficient according to inner necessities. Since, for the life between birth and death, what is 'connected with the breathing remains unconscious, the Jewish culture was a folk culture, not an individualized culture of humanity. It was a folk culture in which everything is related to the descent from a common tribal father. Jewish revelation is, in its essential nature, a revelation adapted to the Jewish people, because it takes account of what is acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only through an unconscious element, the breathing process.

What is the result of this fact in our critical times? The result is that those who will not become adherents of the Christ wisdom that brings into the human being the other element, acquired during the life between birth and death apart from the breathing process, wish to continue in their relationship to the Jehovah wisdom and to have humanity established only on the basis of folk cultures. The present clamor in favor of an organization consisting of individuals from mere peoples is a retarded ahrimanic demand for the establishment of such a culture, in which all the peoples represent only folk cultures, that is, Old Testament cultures. The peoples in all parts of the world are to become like the Jewish Old Testament people. This is the demand of Woodrow Wilson.

We are here touching upon a most profound mystery, which will be unveiled in the greatest variety of forms. A social element that is antisocial as regards the whole of humanity and undertakes to base the social life upon individual peoples alone is striving to come to manifestation as an ahrimanic element. The cultural impulse of the Old Testament is to be maintained in an ahrimanic form.

Thus you see things are not so simple as people suppose in thinking that it is necessary only to think out one thing or another in order to propose ideals to men. We must be able to look into reality. We must be able to say what really governs and develops its powers amid these realities. Man is faced, in fact, with the prospect of not being able any longer to base his life upon the merely unconscious or of finding it necessary to base his life upon the conscious element within life between birth and death. The unconscious depends upon the breathing process and thus inevitably upon what is connected with the breathing process, upon the blood circulation, that is, upon the line of descent, upon connections by blood, upon heredity. The culture that must come into existence cannot base the social order upon mere blood connections because these blood connections yield only one-seventh of what must be established in the culture of humanity. The other six-sevenths must be added through the Christ impulse: In the fifth epoch, one; in the sixth epoch, the second; in the seventh epoch, the third. The rest stretch out into the following periods of time. For this reason there must gradually develop in humanity what is connected with the true Christ impulse, and what is related to the mere Jehovah impulse must be superseded.

Typically, far-reaching endeavors of the Jehovah impulse will take place, for the last time, in what the proletariat understands as international socialism. In essence, this is the last stirring of the Jehovah impulse. We face the strange situation that every people will become a Jehovah people, and every people will at the same time demand the right to spread its own Jehovah cult, its own socialism, throughout the world.

These will be the two contending forces between which a balance must be found. In all that comes to manifestation as objective necessity in the course of humanity's evolution there mingles the feeling, the sentiment, of human beings who take one relation or another to the various national groups, and who work disturbingly within the objectively inevitable course of evolution. Through the Jehovah wisdom one of the seven doors to the union of humanity has been opened. A second door will be opened when it shall come to be known that what man bears with him as the physical and the etheric nature becomes ill in the course of life. Naturally, I do not refer to an acute illness, but in our fifth epoch life is identical with a gradual process of becoming ill. This has been true since the fourth epoch; it is especially true in the fifth epoch. The life process is the same thing, only gradual in its stages, as an acute illness, except that this takes a more rapid course. If, therefore, an acute illness must be cured by a specific healing process, something must enter also into human life that brings healing.

In short, the natural life of human beings, from the fifth post-Atlantean epoch on will be a sort of continual, gradual becoming ill. All influences of education and of culture must be directed to the objective of making well. In a certain way, this is the first true activation of the Christ impulse: healing. This is the special mission of Christ in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—to be the Healer, the One who heals. The other forms of the Christ impulse must remain in the background. For the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, the Christ impulse must work in the direction of seership. There the spirit self comes to development within which man cannot live without seership. In the seventh postAtlantean epoch a sort of prophetic nature will develop as the third element, since it must, indeed, pass prophetically over into an entirely new period. The other three members of the sixfold Christ Being will do their work in the following periods. Thus must the Christ impulse find its way into humanity, as the element that permeates mankind with social warmth in the course of the present and the two following cultural epochs, that is, as the healing process, the seer process and the prophetic process. This is the real living entrance of the Christ impulse. This will interpenetrate other things necessary for evolution that we have already mentioned. One door has been opened through the Jehovah wisdom, but this door became unusable in the middle of the nineteenth century. If mankind should pass through this door alone, the only result that can follow would be that all peoples would in a way develop Hebraic cultures, each in its own form. Other doors must be opened. Initiation wisdom, which will become known through a second, third, and fourth door, must be added to the wisdom that has become known through the Jehovah door. Only in this way can man grow into other connections than those that are regulated by the bonds of blood and breath.

This constitutes, in turn, the critical element of our age. It is a fact that human beings wish to preserve a regulation of the world order according to the bonds of blood, coming in an ahrimanic way out of ancient times, but that an inner necessity strives outward beyond these bonds of blood. In the future what controls the social life cannot proceed from anything having to do with kinship. On the contrary, only what the soul itself in its own free decision can experience as regulating the social order will be valid. An inner necessity will so guide men that everything that penetrates into the social order out of mere bonds of blood will be eliminated. All such things enter into manifestation at first tumultuously. In our age there must evolve spirit knowledge and freedom of thought, especially freedom of thought in the religious realm. The science of the spirit must develop for the reason that man must enter into relationship with man. But man is spirit. Man can enter into relationship with man only when the approach is from the spirit. The relationship into which men entered at earlier stages had its origin in the unconscious spirit vibrating in the blood, in accordance with Jehovah wisdom, which leads only to abstraction. That to which the men must next be led must be something grasped within the soul. The heathen peoples had their myths in pictorial form, created through atavism in ancient cultural forms. The Jewish people had its abstractions, not myths, but abstractions: the Law. This has continued its existence. This was the first elevation of the human being to the conceptual force and into the force of thought. But from humanity's present view of the matter, which is only the revival of the command, “Thou shalt make unto thyself no image,” man must revert to the capacity of the soul that can once more, and this time consciously, form images. It is only in images, in imaginations, that the social life also can be rightly established in the future. The social life could be regulated only as regards a single people in abstractions, and the regulation for a people in social relationships was that of the Old Testament. The next form of regulation of the social life will depend upon the capacity to exercise in a conscious way the same force that once existed atavistically, in unconscious or half-conscious form, in man's myth building capacity. Men would be completely filled with antisocial instincts if they should endeavor to continue disseminating mere abstract laws. They must come again by way of their world conception, to the pictorial. Out of this conscious myth creation there will arise also the possibility for the development of the social element in the intercourse of man with man.

You may look at such a sculptural form as that of our Group: the Representative of Man, Lucifer and Ahriman. There you confront for the first time what is working in the whole human being, because man is the state of balance between the luciferic and the ahrimanic. If you permeate yourself in actual life with the impulse to confront every person in such a way that you correctly see this trinity in him, then do you begin to understand him. This is an essential capacity, bearing within itself the impulse to evolve in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Thus we shall no longer pass by one another as one specter passes another, so that we form no picture of each other but merely define the other person with our abstract concepts. The truth is that we do nothing more at the present time We pass by each other as if we were specters. One specter forms the conception, “That is a nice fellow,” and the other, “That is not such a nice fellow” ... “That is a bad man” . . . “That is a good man,”—all sorts of such abstract concepts. In the intercourse of man with man we have nothing but a bundle of abstract concepts. This is the essential thing that has entered into humanity out of the Old Testament form of life: “Make unto thyself no image.” It must inevitably lead to an antisocial life if we should continue it further. What is flowing out from the innermost nature of man, striving toward realization, is that, when one individual confronts another, a picture shall stream forth in a certain way from the other person, a picture of that special form of balance manifested individually by everyone. But this requires, of course, the heightened interest that I have often described to you as the foundation of social life, which each person should take in the other person. At present we have not yet any intense interest in another person. It is for this reason that we criticize him, that we pass judgment upon him, that we form our judgments according to sympathies and antipathies and not according to the objective picture that leaps to meet us from the other.

This capacity to be mystically stimulated in a certain way as we confront another person will come to realization. It will enter as a special social impulse into human life. On the one hand, the consciousness soul is striving to come in an antisocial way to complete domination in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. On the other hand, something else is striving outward from the nature of man, that is, a capacity to form pictures of the human beings with whom we live. It is here that the social impulses arise, the social instincts. The simple fact is that these things lie at a far greater depth than is ordinarily supposed when people talk about the social and the antisocial.

Now the question may arise in your minds as to how we shall gradually attain to the capacity of causing the picture of the other person to leap to meet us. It is in life that we must gain this capacity. Jehovah capacities are given to us at birth; we evolve them in the embryonic life. The culture of the future will not make things so comfortable for people. The capacities a person must manifest will have to be developed during the course of his life. Far more concrete and definite principles must enter into education than those that are now being brought into dominance in such an utterly confused manner in today's pedagogy. It is most important of all that the instinct shall be implanted in people to look back more frequently during this life, but in the right way. What people develop at present as memories of earlier experience is marked as yet for the most part by a selfish character. If a person looks back in a more unselfish way to what he has experienced in childhood, youth, etc.—according to the age he has reached—there emerges as if out of the gray depths of the spirit various persons who have had something to do with his life in all sorts of relationships.

Look back into your life and pay less attention to what interests you in your own respectable person and much more to those figures that have come into contact with you, educating you, befriending you, assisting you, perhaps also injuring you—often injuring you in a helpful way. One thing will then become evident to you and that is how little reason a person really has to ascribe to himself what he has become. Often something important in us is due to the fact that one person or another came into contact with us at a certain age, and—perhaps, without knowing it himself, or perhaps, being fully aware of the fact—drew our attention to something or other. In a comprehensive sense, a really unselfishly conducted survey of our lives is made up of all sorts of things that do not give us occasion to immerse ourselves selfishly in our own being, to brood over ourselves egotistically, but lead us to broaden our views to include those figures who came into contact with us. Let us immerse ourselves with real love in what has come into our life. We shall often discover that what evoked an antipathy in us at a certain period is no longer so disagreeable to us when a sufficient length of time has passed because we begin to see an inner connection. The fact that we had to be affected in an unpleasant way at a certain time by one person or another might have been useful to us. We often gain more from the harm that a person does to us than from the furtherance afforded us by another. It would be advantageous to a person if he more frequently exercised such a survey of his life, and should permeate his life with the convictions flowing from his self observation. “How little occasion I really have to occupy myself with myself! How immeasurably richer my life becomes when I look back to all those who have entered my life!” In this way we free ourselves from ourselves when we carry out such an unselfish survey. We then escape from that terrible evil of our times, to which so many fall victims, of brooding over ourselves. It is so extremely necessary that we should free ourselves from this brooding over ourselves. Anyone who has once felt the power of such self-observation as I have just described will find himself far too uninteresting to spend much time brooding over his own life. Unlimited illumination is cast over this life of ours when we see it irradiated with what enters into it from the gray depths of the spirit.

But this has such a germinating power over us that we really acquire the imaginative forces necessary to confront the contemporary human being in such a way that in him the thing is manifest that appears to us only after many years in our backward survey of those figures with whom we have lived together. We thus acquire such a capacity that pictures actually come to meet us from the individuals we confront.
The cultivation of the social life, which in earlier times had its source only in the bonds of blood, does not depend so much upon any sort of socialistic programs, but upon man's becoming a spiritual-social being. He will become such a being by awakening within himself, in the manner I have described, the deeper forces that can bring to birth within him the capacity for conceiving pictorially the other human being. Otherwise, we shall always remain antisocial beings, capable of approaching others only according to our sympathies and antipathies, incapable of approaching them according to the picture that may stream forth from each person if we only develop the picture-forming forces in our intercourse with them. Precisely in the social life of humanity must the principle come into existence, “Thou shalt make for thyself an image of thy fellow man.” Then, when we form a picture of our fellow man, we enrich our own soul life; then do we bestow a treasure upon our own inner soul life with each human acquaintanceship. Then we no longer so live that A lives there, B there, C there, but A, B and C live in D; A, B and D live in C; C, D and E live in A; etc. We gain the capacity to have other human beings live in us.

But this must be acquired; it is not born in us. If we should continue simply to cultivate those characteristics that are born in us, we should continue within the limits of a mere blood culture, not the culture to which could be ascribed in the true sense of the word human brotherhood. Only when we carry the other human being within us can we really speak of human brotherhood, which has appeared thus far only in an abstract word. When we form a picture of the other person, which is implanted as a treasure in our souls, then we carry within the realm of our soul life something from him just as in the case of a bodily brother we carry around something through the common blood. This elective affinity as the basis of social life must take the place in this concrete way of the mere blood affinity. This is something that really must evolve. It must depend upon the human will to determine how brotherhood shall be awakened among men.

Human beings have hitherto been separated. They ought to become socialized in brotherhood. In order that the manifoldness shall not be lost, the innermost element in man, thought, must be able to take form individually in every single person. With Jehovah the whole folk stood in a relationship. With Christ each individual person must stand in relationship. But the fact that brotherhood will thus awaken requires that there shall be a compensation in an entirely different field, that is, through freedom of thought.

• 1. Three figures in heroic size carved in wood by Rudolf Steiner.

In the last two lectures I pointed out that the so-called social question is not so simple as it is usually supposed to be, and that it is necessary to take careful account of the complicated nature of man. We must take account of the fact that both social and antisocial impulses exist in him and must come to expression regardless of what social structure exists and what social ideas are brought to realization. As we have seen, the antisocial impulses, especially in our epoch of the consciousness soul, play a special role. In a certain way they have an educational mission in the evolution of humanity in that they cause men to stand on their own feet. They will be overcome by reason of the fact that, after the epoch of the consciousness soul, there will follow the epoch of the spirit self, already in course of preparation, whose essential mission will be to bring humanity into social unity. This will not happen, however, in such a way as is dreamed at present by people indulging in illusions, but in such a way that one person shall really know and be interested in the other as a human being. In short, he shall center his attention upon the other person so that each individual shall acquire the capacity of comprehending the other with full interest.

What comes to light today as a social demand, constitutes in a certain way a sort of skirmish or outpost action, a sort of preparation, which naturally takes a chaotic form and gives rise to many illusions and errors because it is only the germinal stage for something that will come later. These illusions and errors are due to the fact that social impulses at the present time arise in great measure from the unconscious or the subconscious, and are not clarified by spiritual knowledge of the world or of humanity. This illusory form comes especially to expression in the development of the so-called Russian revolution. It is characterized by the fact that in its present manifestation it has no right relationship to what is in course of preparation as a people in Russia for the coming sixth post-Atlantean epoch. Rather, it is brought in out of abstractions. Thus these more or less illusory ideals of the present Russian revolution are especially significant in connection with a study of this chaotic stirring within humanity in relation to something that is to come later. We may say that the especially characteristic head of this Russian revolution, Trotsky, who is typical of the abstractly thinking man, living entirely in abstraction, appears really to have not the least notion that there is a reality in such a thing as human social life. Something wholly alien to reality is thought out and is to be implanted into reality.

This is not a criticism but a mere description. The simple truth is that one of the characteristics of our times is that the inclination toward abstraction, toward a thinking alien to reality, wills also to implant within reality such principles as are simply assumed without any knowledge of the laws of this reality. These principles are considered absolutely right without regard whatsoever for complicated human life, as we study it with the help of the spiritual lying at the basis of external physical reality. But everything that is to come into existence must arise from this reality. For that reason, since in this case something so preeminently alien to reality is brought forward, including in a chaotic way all manner of impulses and instincts due to the proletariat way of thinking, great significance therefore attaches to the ideas that seek to be realized in this Russian revolution and that live in these Russian revolutionary heads of the present time.

From this point of view they are exceedingly significant. Indeed, we can see that in Russia persons with the most varied conceptions of life have taken part in a brief span of time in giving shape to the revolutionary movement. As things have been brought to a climax in Russia, the real social problem of the present age became actual under the influence of the war catastrophe. From this actuality of the problem of ownership there then developed in March 1917 the so-called February Revolution in Russia, whose essential objective was to overthrow the political powers that stood behind the system of ownership. But this purely political, externally political, form of the revolution was soon set aside in the very first stages of the revolutionary thinking by those men who are conceived, according to Trotsky's terminology, to be men of understanding. They are men who, by all sorts of speculations, clever concepts, ideas, and even clever notions transformed into concepts, wished to bring about a social structure. These revolutionaries comprised primarily those persons who had already at an earlier time taken part more or less in the forming of the social structure, the intelligentsia, the commercial people, the industrial circles, all of whom took human reason as their point of departure in the effort to bring about some sort of social formation.

Trotsky, however, considers, with a certain justification even though relative and one-sided, that these persons who wish to bring about a social structure in such a way through all sorts of speculations, with good intentions and good will, merely delay the revolution. They have no capacity whatever, are incapable of doing anything at all. You know on the basis of the reflections I have presented to you that the proletariat world view tends primarily to the judgment that nothing whatever can be accomplished by such considerations no matter how clever they are, even though they are based so completely upon the foundation laid by those persons whom Trotsky calls chatterers or tongue-waggers because they can speak so cleverly. In other words, these rational considerations are rejected by the proletariat world view out of a certain instinct, which has become gradually a definite theory in marxism. There is simply no belief that any sort of satisfactory social structure can be brought about in the future by any kind of rational considerations whatsoever. The only thing that the proletariat believes is that fruitful ideas are born only in the heads of the proletariat themselves, in the heads of these masses who own nothing, and out of the economic conditions in which the members of the proletariat live. These ideas can never be born in the bourgeoisie nor in any other class, for the reason that they inevitably think differently because of their characteristic ideas. Only within the class of the workers do ideas arise that alone can give the motive force to bring about a future social formation.

When we consider this fact, it is clear that the inevitable conclusion for such a head as that of Trotsky is that the only thing to be done is to deprive the bourgeoisie of their possessions and to lead the propertyless classes to the position of mastery. This is something that has been in a preparatory stage in 'such heads for decades, and they now wish to introduce it into Russia since the great crisis has arisen in that country. This condition was to be brought about through the so-called October Revolution, after the other parties—if we may so call them—were set aside in the seizure of power by the proletariat itself. From this point of view, which is naturally a purely abstract one and concrete only to the extent that it makes everything dependent upon a definite class of men, thus constituting a reality, the leading personalities of the Russian Revolution have guided affairs since October 1917.

Now, such a revolutionary way of thinking gives rise to certain difficulties. These difficulties follow in a particularly intense form in Russia, and it was characterized by certain special prerequisites, as you know on the basis of our spiritual-scientific discussions. These difficulties arise from the existent class formations throughout the world, only they were manifest in a particularly intense way because of Russian conditions. The first great difficulty is that the whole social and political leadership of humanity is to be given over to a class that was previously deprived of everything, and had no connection whatever with so-called culture. The proletarian, who is actually to take the steering wheel, has previously been excluded from all those impelling forces that established the existing power factor. He has hitherto never taken anything to market except his own labor, his physical capacity for handwork.

This condition exists in all countries. Thus it will come about everywhere that, to the extent that a revolution takes rise, the proletariat will at first take over the leadership as a political group. Everything, however, will continue as it was, in a certain sense. Those persons who have hitherto held administrative power will remain in their positions because they are technically trained and know their jobs. In other words, there will be no further change than that a governing board of laymen will interject itself into the whole apparatus brought over from ancient times. But the important point is that this governing board of laymen is a special type, the proletariat type, and it will be composed entirely of proletarians. Since these persons will all belong to the proletariat they will wish to make certain that the principle shall apply that holds that the controlling ideas in the future can come only out of the heads of the proletariat. This leadership cannot be subjected to such a thing as a national or a constituent assembly, because that would be a certain continuation of what existed earlier. Rather, what is to come about must constitute a radical transformation. It is not necessary first to elect; those who are to lead are there simply because they belong to the proletariat. It would not be a national constituent assembly, but the dictatorship of the proletariat.

At first, this led to the difficulty that the proletarians, as I have said, are laymen, who could merely act as overseers over those who continued the previous administration. These individuals, of course, clung to earlier interests. Thus, particularly in Russia, the proletarians ascended to the top. They previously had nothing to do with matters belonging to the state organism and were compelled to take over everyone who conducted things according to ideas corresponding to the earlier state organism. They thus brought over into the state, which was to be subjected wholly to the dictatorship of the proletariat, interests belonging to the old bourgeois state. These behave just like an enemy who, although not carrying on open warfare or a counter-revolution, yet carries over into the enemy's country everything from his country that is to work destructively upon the other. It was in this way that the proletarians who had taken over the leadership in Russia looked upon the activities of the old imperial groups as sabotage. Their first struggle was to overcome this sabotage that consisted in the effort to bring over into the regime they were seeking to establish what would really constitute the support only of the old regime. The process was the same as if a citizen of one country that had not openly begun any sort of hostility should carry poisonous materials into a foreign land to impregnate its fields so that nothing would grow there. Thus the members of the proletariat looked upon what came from these old staffs of officials as sabotage. At first their most intensely applied regulations were directed toward the mastery of this sabotage. Here they showed no restraint whatever. Everything they considered destructive they sought to root out completely, and such a person as Trotsky is really convinced that sabotage at present has already been overcome to a certain extent. Those who did anything whatever to violate the will of the people and proletariat thinking were driven out or otherwise punished.

The difficulty, however, is certainly not overcome, as Trotsky himself sees perfectly well, by merely combatting so-called sabotage. He sees that it is necessary to retain the entire body of former administrators, but that it must be made to serve the purposes fundamental to the leadership of the proletariat.

Trotsky, for instance, sees in this the first great difficulty. This is something he believes can be overcome by his abstract means, but he will be unable to do so. Illusion begins at this point, for the simple reason that Trotsky is a spirit alien to reality. This illusory element is based upon the abstract notion that it is possible to make the whole body of technical officials, of intellectual and commercial people, servants of a governing board consisting entirely of members of a dictating proletariat. It is a disbelief in the configuration of the life of soul and spirit that is manifest in this illusion. The simple truth is that, after a certain length of time, the condition will revert to just what it was previously. If the old ideas are maintained, if there is failure to realize the truth of what I have often emphasized here—that the social transformation must proceed out of new thoughts—if the old technicians, the old officials, the old generals are simply put back in their positions, if the old is simply taken over and people do not advance to meet the new, most of all through education, it must revert to what it was. In other words, such a process will not overcome conditions but will simply continue them. It is possible to overcome sabotage for a certain length of time by means of regulations applied by force, but it will raise its head again and again. If it is true that a person is dependent upon the situation in which he finds himself—and he has been dependent for three or four centuries, which is true with reference to modern history—the result will be that, if he is not freed from these relationships by means of effective thoughts that can come only from the spiritual life, he must inevitably fall back into the old habits of thinking and acting, just as surely as a cat falls on all fours.

This is a point where such thinking is revealed in its illusory character, utterly alien to reality. I might indicate many such points, but I wish to make clear to you only the special configuration of this thinking. I wish to show you by means of individual examples how this thinking betrays its utter unreality. It is not possible simply to think out one thing or another that should occur, but it is necessary to take account of these impelling forces active within reality in accordance with inherent law. If a person does not live with these, he inevitably falls prey to illusions. One of the most important illusions in the case of Trotsky is the following. Trotsky knows that through the particularly intense suppression that has been experienced by the great masses even of the present proletariat in Russia—and this term is justified—conditions had to come to a special climax among these persons. He knows that the form the revolution takes under these special conditions cannot lead to a victory. He is out of touch with reality, but not so completely out of touch as to prevent him from seeing in a rational way that it is possible to bring a new social structure into existence under the present conditions in a region which, however extensive, is limited in comparison with the whole earth. For this reason Trotsky counted upon a revolutionary movement to be brought about by the proletariat throughout the civilized world. He did not indulge in the illusion that the Russian revolution alone could be victorious. He knew that it depended upon the victory of the proletariat revolution throughout the world.

Now, the whole abstract character of Trotsky's way of conceiving things manifested itself in these ideas. Trotsky believed in the proletariat revolution over the whole earth. He believed that the war would gradually take on such a character as to bring about a sort of proletariat revolution throughout the world end that the war would be transformed into the proletariat revolution.

Now this catastrophe of war will certainly be transformed into all sorts of things. But the actuality of things has already shown conclusively that this idea of Trotsky's is out of touch with reality. It would have been true only if this war catastrophe had ended in universal exhaustion, if such a striking so-called victory—it came about in a strange way—had not been achieved by one of the parties to the war. This victory simply eliminates the hope that exhaustion might come about uniformly throughout the civilized world. What has occurred is a decisive hegemony of the Western Powers in connection with a complete subjection on the part of the Central and Eastern Powers. A complete mastery over the Central and Eastern Powers by the Western Powers is what has been established as a dominant force, and the situation could not have been otherwise. This was clear to those who saw into reality in this realm. Trotsky, however, is simply a spirit alien to reality, and he ought now to say to himself, “I have been refuted by events.” He uttered something not without basis, something brilliant in a merely abstract way of thinking when he said, “The bourgeois conception of life at the present time has no alternative but to choose between lasting war and revolution.” The thing turned out differently. The so-called victory of the Western Powers has taken place—neither lasting war nor revolution. In what is beginning in a preliminary way in the West there is no germ for any sort of proletariat revolution. On the contrary, here there is simply the shaping of the entire West into a politically organized great bourgeoisie, facing the proletariat of Central and Eastern Europe.

This is the outcome in world history. It will certainly be transformed again but at present exists. This is the real state of the case, so that Trotsky ought, therefore, to reflect in an entirely different way if he wishes today to see reality. He would have to say to himself, “Under this shaping of events, how can what I intended through the Russian revolution become victorious, since one of the most important presuppositions, the world revolution of the proletariat, will not occur?” If he is still counting today upon this world revolution, it is simply evidence of his complete isolation from reality.

At still another point the alienation from reality characterizing the thinking of such a revolutionary manifests itself in a peculiar way. Such revolutionists also have naturally always referred to Prussian-German militarism as the greatest of all evils, declaring that it must be overcome and eliminated from the world. Now the course of events has been such that Prussian-German militarism has been eliminated from the world, but the militarism of the Entente will in the near future exercise a considerable domination! Now, I do not wish in the least to speak about this, but Trotsky himself has had occasion t6raise the question, “What, then, is the most important of the immediate tasks of the Russian revolution if it wishes to maintain itself?” His answer is, “The creation of an army!” Just this is designated by Trotsky as the most important immediate task.

These things ought to receive careful attention. They need to be thoroughly seen through. Only when these things are observed and seen through does it occur to people to say, “Now, I must really look a little deeper into the impelling forces within humanity if I desire to form conceptions for myself as to what is to result from the chaos that this war catastrophe has developed.” But humanity is decidedly disinclined today to penetrate into such impelling forces, which I have described to you here from the greatest number of viewpoints as the true, the only possible, social forces. Humanity would be able to get under the surface of these things if the determination were reached simply to get a firmer hold upon the real forces dominant in man's evolution.

One extremely characteristic expression appears again and again from the minds of the Russian revolutionaries. In the main, what do these members of the proletarian dictatorship really wish? They want to make the world into a great factory interpenetrated by a kind of bank bookkeeping system extending over all groups. “We shall fit the old technicians, the old officials, even the old generals into our proletariat dictatorship,” they say, “but we must have the bookkeeping for the total economy, the factory accounting department in our own hands.” This is not surprising, because the whole movement has taken its rise in modern industry. If people would only pause to reflect that this movement has originated with the proletariat of modern industry, no one would be surprised that their way of thinking, developed in connection with what these people have seen in factories, should be applied to everything upon which they can lay their hands. This is the natural result and consequence of the failure of the bourgeoisie to pay attention to the enormous expansion of the proletariat in recent times. Even if it was inevitable that the bourgeoisie closed their eyes and calmly permitted everything to occur, it most certainly is not a matter of necessity that the still more important conditions, the impelling forces existent in the world, should continue to be unobserved. So long as these forces are not observed, it is impossible for people to become acquainted with social tasks.

Here it is necessary to know how differentiated humanity is in various parts of the world—as I said, indeed, yesterday or the day before. It is necessary to know that the people live in the West differently than those in the East and in the Middle Countries. It is not possible by means of abstract ideas, which ignore realities, to bring about any sort of social formation. The Russian revolution is certain to suffer shipwreck because of its great illusion and isolation from realities.

Such illusions can be transformed for a time into reality by people who are free beings through education, that is, free to the extent that a person who possesses the power can make use of it. But reality then eliminates illusions; it cannot use them. Reality accepts only what is in keeping with the course of this reality. We must not forget that the most important thing of all is the fact that we are living in the age of the consciousness soul development, which occurs in sharply differentiated forms throughout the world.

Let us consider the various impelling forces underlying the civilized world in the light of the most important European differentiations that come to expression through language. I have often brought to your attention the fact that the English-speaking peoples possess the real germinal potentiality for the development of the consciousness soul. It is important that we should see this clearly. This is connected with everything that happens to the world, if we may so express the matter, under the influence of the English-speaking peoples. The English people—I am by no means speaking of individual persons, but of the people—are endowed with all the impelling forces that lead to the consciousness soul. The condition is such that the trend toward the consciousness soul appears instinctively in them in a manner entirely different from that characterizing the rest of humanity. This spiritualized instinct to develop the consciousness soul exists nowhere else in the world as it does among the English people. There it is an instinct, and nowhere else is that so, even among the people of Roman descent who are united with the English-speaking peoples. The people of Roman descent constitute really successors to what actually lived in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. At that time this Roman people had the instinct for what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in special degree. Their instincts are no longer elemental in the same way. They have been rationalized, intellectualized and they appear in rhetoric, through the intellect, through the psychic life as a decorative form. They have been removed from the instinctive life. What appears among the Latin people as a folk temperament is altogether different from what appears as a folk temperament among the English people. Among the English people this trend toward the consciousness soul, this striving of the individual person to stand upon his own feet, is an instinct.

In other words, what constitutes the mission of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is rooted in the English as an instinct, as an impelling force arising instinctively from the soul of the people. Now, their position in the world is connected with this fact. This impulse is dominant within the social structure of the English-speaking peoples. It is decisive, and it can suppress other tendencies. The other tendencies, as you can see from the explanations I have offered, look toward the integration I have given of the social question, that is, the economic impulse and the impulse of spiritual production. If, however, you study the folk character of the English-speaking populations psychologically, you will see that these impulses, the economic and the spiritually productive, are wholly overshadowed by what rises from the instinctive impulse that tends toward the development of the consciousness soul.

For this reason the spheres that must shape the social life of the future take on a special coloring among the English-speaking people. The three spheres must in the future show themselves especially effective in special ways, and they must be decisive. First, politics, which must provide security. Second, the organization of work, purely material work, the economic order. Third is the system of spiritual production, to which I attribute also, as I said to you, jurisprudence and the administration of justice. These three spheres of the social structure are, as a matter of course, overshadowed by what constitutes the primary impulse in the case of any differentiated peoples. The fact that a development toward the consciousness soul works instinctively among the English-speaking people brings it to pass that among them—as history teaches in profusion—politics, one branch, take on the most conspicuous form, and the dominant position. Politics are dominated wholly by the instinctive impulse to set men on their own feet, and to develop the consciousness soul fully. The instinctive impulse drives in such a direction—and this is a mere description I am giving, and no criticism. It drives toward the result because it is instinctive and instincts are always rooted in self-seeking. Among the English-speaking peoples self-seeking and political goals simply coincide. It leads to the fact that all politics performed in an utterly naive fashion—and this does not justify attaching any blame to a politician of the English-speaking peoples—can be used by the self-seeking person to fulfill thereby the mission of the English-speaking people. It is only in this way that you will succeed in understanding the real nature of English politics, which are actually the dominant politics of the entire population of the earth. If you observe the matter, you will find that English politics are considered everywhere as ideal—the parliamentary system with its shuffling of majorities and minorities, etc. If you examine the conditions in the various parliaments as these have developed, you will see that British politics have been determinative in the political life. But, as these politics have spread in various places among differently constituted peoples, they could no longer remain the same because they are rooted, and rightly, in the self-seeking and egoism that inevitably clings to everything of an instinctive nature.

It is this that renders understanding so difficult when people try to grasp the nature of English or American politics. The nuance, which it is absolutely necessary to set clearly, is not clear at all. This is the fact that these politics must be self-seeking, and must rest upon impulses of a self-seeking character. Because of their special nature, they must rest upon self-seeking impulses. Thus, they will look upon these self-seeking impulses as something to be taken for granted, as the right and moral thing. No objection can be raised here. This is not to be attacked with criticism, but to be recognized as a necessity in world history, even a cosmic necessity. Neither can this statement be refuted, for the simple reason that anyone who undertakes to oppose it as a member of the English people will always find himself on a false path. On the basis of moral considerations, which have nothing to do with the matter, he will deny that the politics of the English people are self-seeking, but moral considerations have nothing to do with this. English politics will achieve what they bring about precisely by reason of this instinctive character.

So, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the element of power is assigned to this English-speaking population. We call to memory the three figures in Goethe's fairy tale: power; phenomenon or appearance; wisdom, knowledge. Of these three elements, power is assigned to the English-speaking people. What they accomplish politically in the world is possible by reason of the fact that one of their inherent, inborn characteristics is that they should work by way of power. To work by way of power will be accepted during the fifth postAtlantean epoch as something not subject to discussion. English politics are accepted all over the world. Of course, all the injurious effects, which, however, are always to be found in the reality belonging to the physical plane, may be sharply criticized, even by those belonging to the British Empire itself. Yet British politics are accepted. It is inherent in the evolution of our times that they are accepted, and without any reflection, without any effort to find reasons for this. Moreover, the reasons would never suffice, because it is simply a matter of immediate inevitability that the power that comes from this direction is accepted.

This is not true as regards the people of Roman descent who are united with the English-speaking peoples. They manifest in a certain way the shadow, the time shadow, of what they were during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Instincts have been transmuted into the intellectual where they are no longer so elemental. Thus, English politics are accepted as something beyond discussion. French politics are accepted only by those whom they are able to please. The French nature is loved in the world to the extent that it pleases. The English nature does not depend at all upon this. It is based upon the incontestability with which the effective politics of the present time fall to the share of the English nature, Because of this situation, however, it is also possible that precisely among the English-speaking populations, the economic life is held within limits and is subordinate to the dominant impulse toward self-seeking and power that is suitable in politics. The spiritual life also, to the extent that it belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, becomes subservient to politics. Everything enters unitedly in a certain way into the service of politics.

Thus marxism is simply wrong for the English-speaking world because it presupposes politics to be an appendage of the economic order. This is not the case among the English-speaking peoples.

The marxist social order is prevented from succeeding there, not by reason of argumentation or discussion, not because of anything that happens in the world, but through the fact that the British Empire is constructed upon a different foundation of realities from those upon which marxism and the marxist proletariat builds. This is the great contrast between the proletariat, thinking in a marxian way, and the British who work out of the instinctive life, extending the British Empire throughout the world. Success will not be attained by the banking institutions or the bookkeeping system that Trotsky wishes to introduce into Russia. It will be attained by the great banking institution, the great institution of finance, into which the English-speaking population is organized by reason of its special inherent qualities. If we investigate the manner in which an individual people is related in its particular differentiation to the three spheres of society that I have described to you as based upon reality, this can be clearly seen.

Something else must be added to this. It is extremely important. The differentiation regarding which I spoke to you goes so far that the person who does not strive to free himself from his people, but rather strives for closer union—and politics do definitely strive for such union—has entirely different experiences in connection with the Guardian of the Threshold from those of the person who strives to free himself from his people. Here I come to a point that, if you will study it thoroughly, will provide you with the basis for distinguishing between wholesome occultism that appears naturally throughout the world, without differentiation as to peoples, and the kind of occultism that enters into the political service of a people and works outward as in the case of those societies I have mentioned. You may ask, “How, then can I distinguish these?” You can distinguish them if you will give close attention to these great differentiating characteristics that I shall present to you today.

In order for anyone to attain to real occultism, thus serving the whole of humanity, he must outgrow his folk character. He must in a certain sense—here we may be permitted to use the Indian expression—become a “homeless” person; in the innermost nature of his soul he must not consider himself as belonging to any one people. He must not have impulses that serve only a single people if he desires to advance in genuine occultism. But the kind of occultism that desires to serve a single people in a limited way arrives at a special experience when confronting the Guardian of the Threshold. Thus, in the case of all those who seek for an occult development within the societies of the English-speaking peoples, what becomes manifest in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold is that they discover at the moment when they desire to cross the Threshold those forces living in the depths of human nature. These become manifest when one enters the super-sensible world and are of the same character as the destructive forces in the universe. This is what they behold in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold. When they are guided in such a society to the point of crossing the Threshold, they then become acquainted with the evil powers of disease and death, of everything that paralyzes and destroys. When the same destructive forces that cause death in nature—and they work within us also—bring about knowledge, it is this knowledge that comes to light in those societies. Most assuredly one does enter the super-sensible world, but one must pass the Guardian of the Threshold. It is necessary to pass by the Guardian of the Threshold in such a way, however, that one has the experience of learning to know death in its true form, as it dwells in us and also in outside nature.

This is due to the fact that ahrimanic powers live in external nature around us, and in it you can perceive no other than ahrimanic powers—that is, to the extent that you remain within external nature. You can come into contact with the manifestation of such powers as enter into external nature in the manner of specters. This explains the inclination of the West to spiritualism, to the seeing of such forms as really belong to the sensory physical world, and are not visible in ordinary life except under special conditions. These are the powers of death, destructive powers, ahrimanic powers. There are absolutely no other spirits within the whole broad realm of spiritualistic gatherings than ahrimanic spirits, even where the spiritualistic gatherings are genuine. They are the spirits that a person takes with him out of the sense world when he crosses the Threshold. They go with him. They pursue him thence. The person crosses the Threshold, and those who accompany him are the ahrimanic demons, which he had not previously seen but which he sees on the other side. These are the servants of death, illness, and destruction. This experience shocks the person into super-sensible knowledge and brings him into the super-sensible world.

All persons who are trained and instructed in this way for occultism have significant experiences. This is a significant experience of which I have spoken to you, but it is an experience growing out of the fact that the person does not devote himself to an occultism related to all human beings, but to a form pertaining to a single people. There is such a differentiation. If the assertion is made to you anywhere in the world that when you cross the Threshold you learn primarily the evil powers of illness and death, you may know from this statement that the occultist in question comes from the corner I have often described to you. You will know this simply on the basis of the experience he relates to you in connection with the Guardian of the Threshold.

The situation is different in connection with the German-speaking peoples. Into the German-speaking population something has also been interjected. The Latin element has been interjected into the English people in the sphere of its world power. The German-speaking people has something that does not come from the past but is like a flash of heat lightning betokening the future. The Slav element, beginning in Russia, is the future, is actually present only in its future germinal potentiality but the Slays, who have been thrust forward, are the vanguard, the heat lightning portending what is in course of preparation. They signify in some way the heat lightning of the future of the Central European German world, as the Latin element signifies the shadows of the past of the Western English-speaking world.

This German element itself, however, does not possess an instinctive basis for the development of the consciousness soul, but only the basis through which it can be educated to the consciousness soul. In other words, whereas in British regions the instinctive basis for the evolution of the consciousness soul is present, the German Middle European must be educated into the consciousness soul if he is to make this active within him in any way. He can achieve this only through education. So, since the epoch of the consciousness soul is at the same time the epoch of intellectuality, the German who is to bring the consciousness soul in any way into activity within himself must become an intellectual person. Thus, the German has sought his relationship to the consciousness soul primarily by way of intellectuality, not by way of the instinctive life. Therefore the tasks of the German people have been attained only by those who have taken in hand in a certain way their own self-education. The persons of mere instinct remain untouched by this inner activating of the consciousness soul and remain behind in a certain sense.

This is likewise the reason why the British people are endowed instinctively from the start for politics, whereas the Germans are a non-political people and not in the least endowed for politics. When they undertake, therefore, to pursue a political course, they run a great risk, which will become especially clear to you if you give particular attention to the fact that the Germans have taken over the task of introducing the second element into the world within the intellectual sphere. The British folk character is power. The German folk character is the appearing, the seeming, if you will, the shaping of thoughts, that which is not in a certain sense of the solid earth. In the British folk character all is of the solid earth, but just trace the intellectuality of the Germans. You may compare it with that of the Greeks, except that the Greeks gave form to the seething in accordance with its picture nature whereas the Germans have given form to the seeming especially in relation to its intellectualizing nature. In the last analysis, there is nothing more beautiful than what has been formed through Goetheanism, through Novalis, through Schelling, through all those spirits who are truly artists in thought. This makes the Germans a non-political people. If they are expected to be political, they are not equal to a person who thinks politically through his instincts.

Of the three things that are included in Goethe's fairy tale—power, seeming, knowledge—what has fallen to the lot of the Germans in the intellectual epoch is the moulding of intellectuality in the sphere of the seeming. If he is determined, nevertheless, to take hold of politics, he runs the risk of bringing into the sphere of reality what is beautiful within the formation of thoughts. This is the phenomenon, for example, of Treitschke. In reality, it will then sometimes happen that what is really beautiful in seeming, since it does not lie within the limits of its own potentialities, will become something not rightfully connected with the human being, something that may remain a mere assertion, or must make the impression of untruthfulness upon the world. The great danger, which can obviously be overcome, consists in the fact that the German not only lies when he is courteous,¹ but he may also lie when he introduces even his best talents into a field for which he does not possess inborn potentialities. He must first develop these potentialities within himself, but to do so must make a special effort.

Some years ago I said that the Englishman is something, and that the German can only become something. This constitutes the great difficulty in German culture. This is the reason why in the culture of Germany and of German Austria only single individualities stand out prominently who have taken themselves in hand, whereas the masses do not will to occupy themselves with thoughts, which are inherent in the instincts of the British peoples, but will to be controlled. It is for this reason that the population of Central Europe fell under the domination of such lust for rulership as that of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns—just because of its non-political nature, and because the German is faced by entirely different necessities if he wishes to achieve his mission. He must be educated to this mission. He must in some way be touched by what Goethe moulded into form in his Faust, that is, by the process of becoming of the human being between birth and death.

This is manifest, likewise, in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold. If an individual remains within the German folk character, and comes thus to the Guardian of the Threshold, he does not observe, as do those British societies of which I have spoken, the evil servants of illness and death. It is in thi6 way that you can draw a distinction if you give close attention to these things. He observes primarily how ahrimanic and luciferic powers, the former rushing in from the physical world and the latter rushing in from the spiritual world, are engaged in a conflict with each other. He sees how this struggle must be observed, since it is really a continuously fluctuating struggle and it is never possible to say where the victory will fall. Such a person becomes acquainted in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold with what constitutes the real basis for doubt, what is present in the world as a continuously inflamed and undecided struggle, what brings one into a state of wavering but at the same time educates one into looking at the world from the most varied points of view. This will be the special mission of the German people in spite of everything possible to the contrary. They shall take hold upon world culture from this side, even as the German people. Through its special character as a people, certain things that I shall touch upon today, for example, in the realm of knowledge, can be evolved only through the German people.

Darwinism in its materialistic coloring has arisen from the British people. This is an entirely true principle—you can read this in my book, The Riddles of Philosophy. It is an entirely true principle that organic creatures have gradually evolved from the imperfect to the more perfect, even up to man. The perfect is derived from the imperfect. This principle is absolutely true if a person observes the physical world and in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold comes upon the powers of death and destruction. But we can express this also differently; in other words, we can say that the imperfect is derived from the perfect. Read the chapter dealing with Preuss in my book, Riddles of Philosophy. We can just as well prove that the perfect existed first and that the imperfect comes into existence through decadence. In other words, that man existed first and that the other kingdoms later descended from him through decadence. This is just as correct. The situation in which a thinking person finds himself the moment he must say one thing is true and the other also true—to recognize this situation in its whole fruitful character was really granted to the German peoples alone by reason of their folk character. This is not understood at all anywhere else in the world. It is not at all understood in the world that people can argue for a long time over this question, one maintaining that the perfect beings are derived from the imperfect, as Darwin does, and the other maintaining, as Schelling does, that the imperfect beings are derived from the perfect. Both are right, but from different points of view. If we look at the spiritual process, the imperfect is derived from the perfect; if we look at the physical, the perfect is derived from the imperfect.

The whole world has been trained to be able to hold firmly to one-sided truths. The German people are tragically condemned to stupefy themselves, thus denying their own potentiality, when they linger in the presence of a one-sided truth. Should they develop their own potentialities, it will become clear to them everywhere, provided they submerge themselves to a certain depth, that no matter what assertion is made in regard to universal relationships, the opposite is also true. Only by seeing the two things together is it possible actually to see reality. We learn to recognize this truly in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold when we behold the struggle between those spirits who accompany us all the way to the Guardian of the Threshold out of the physical world and those who rush against them from the other world, from the super-sensible world. These are overlooked by those societies of which I have spoken.

Again, the situation is different in the case of the genuine Slavic-speaking population. But I have already said that the Western Slav has been interjected in a certain way into the German-speaking Middle European population. Just as the Latin element is the shadow of the past, so are the interjected Western Slays, with whom the German-speaking population toward the East is brought into contact, heat lightning indicating what is to come from the Slavic peoples in future. For this reason, they manifest in a certain directly opposite way what the Latin population among the English shows in its way. The Western Slays are also organized in the epoch of the consciousness soul for intellectuality, but they transform it into mysticism. The Germans are non-political; the Western Slavs are also non-political, but they tend toward bringing the spiritual world down into the physical world. They do this even in the present life. In this way they have a characteristic precisely opposite that, for example, of the French or the Italian. The Italians and the French, in their politics, are dependent upon the degree to which they please others. The politics of England are accepted as something beyond discussion whether it pleases or does not please. The politics of France depends upon the degree to which the French people please other persons. The effect of what they have done has been dependent upon this. At certain times they have pleased greatly. In the case of the Western Slays it is different. Their politics are dependent upon the manner in which their spiritual nature acts antipathetically upon the German-speaking population. They are dependent upon the degree to which they fail to please. If you study the destiny of the Czechs, the Poles, the Slovenes, the Serbs, the Western Slays, you will find that this is brought about by the degree to which they are antipathetic and fail to please the Middle European population. The relationship of the French or the Italian is dependent upon how they please; the relationship of the Poles, Slovenes, Czechs and Serbs is dependent upon the manner in which they fail to please. If you study history you will find this principle confirmed in a wonderful way because one is connected with the past and the other with the future.

The situation is utterly different in the case of the Slavic people of the East. They hold the germ of the future. There the situation is such that germinating spirituality is the basic characteristic, the most fundamental nature of the Slavic population. Unlike the great mass of the German population that always causes only its individualities to stand prominently among it, the Russian people are dependent upon the individuality who receives outside of the folk character the revelation that ought to be received by the people. The Russian people's culture will continue to be a culture of revelation for a long time, even to the dawning of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. The Russian in greater measure than any other person is dependent upon the seer, but he is also receptive to what the seer brings to him.

The English-speaking people are simply guided through their politics to that for which it is endowed by nature. The German-speaking people are brought by their politics to something that really does not pertain to them, something whereby they are easily led into a dark channel, into untruthfulness, especially when they surrender themselves to their instincts. This never happens, however, to those persons with the appropriate self-education who are striving toward intellectuality. They actually represent the German people. The others have simply not arrived at what constitutes the real nature of the German people and are living below that level. This is still more true of the Russian people. The Russian people are not only non-political like the Germans but anti-political. It is for this reason that British politics will be self-seeking; German politics will burgeon into a dreamy idealism, which may have nothing whatever to do with reality. I am not speaking in a moral sense here but this dreamy idealism is connected with everything untrue and theoretical, and all that comes from theorizing is untrue. Russian politics must be utterly untrue, since they are an alien element and do not belong to the Russian character. When the Russian wishes to become political on the basis of his character, he is more likely to become ill. Among the Russian people becoming “political” means becoming “ill.” It signifies taking destructive forces into oneself. The Russian is anti-political, not merely non-political. He may be overpowered by such politicians as those who were in office at the beginning of this war catastrophe, but these do not work as Russians. They work as something entirely different. The Russian, however, becomes ill when he is expected to become a politician, for he has nothing whatever to do with politics if he stands within his own folk character. He has to do with something different. He has to do with what constitutes the third element in the sense of Goethe's fairy tale, that is, with knowledge and wisdom that is to dawn upon humanity during the sixth postAtlantean epoch.

It is thus that the threefold combination is distributed: power, seeming, knowledge—West, Middle, East. This must be taken into account. Since the Russian nature becomes ill in connection with politics, even such politics as those of bolshevism can first be expected of the Russians in the crassest form, in the most radical form, because it would be possible to inoculate the Russians with something else just as well. The Russian nature is not only non-political, but anti-political.

These things become manifest in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold. What the Russian primarily perceives in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold, if he remains within his Russian nature as an occultist, is the spirits rushing toward him from the other side, the spirits rushing inward from the super-sensible. He does not see the spirits who accompany him, nor does he see the struggle between them. He sees primarily the spirits coming across from the other side, which are in a certain way full of light. He does not see death. He does not see decay. He sees what, in its sublimity, overwhelms the human being, so to speak. It puts him in danger most of all of being ever more humble and of throwing himself upon his knees in the presence of the sublime. Being blinded by what comes across is the danger in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold for the Russian who remains as an occultist among his own people.

Such things must absolutely be taken into account if we are to see actual realities. Things are actually so in the world, things actually work in this way. Abstractions do not suffice. Humanity has never succeeded by means of abstractions. In earlier periods of time humanity possessed instincts, but in the case of the English-speaking population only one instinct exists in its spiritualized form and that is the instinct to develop the consciousness soul. Everything else must be consciously acquired. This is the characteristic thing for the world, that these things must be achieved consciously. Without knowledge of the forces working in humanity regarding which we have spoken today, it is impossible even to think of being able to say anything determinative about the social element. If a person speaks of social reform without knowing the object to which this reform is to be applied, he is speaking like a blind man about colors.

It is this that gives repeated occasion for the warning that the time has actually arrived when the human being must take earnestly the duty of learning through his life and not dealing with it like a game to be played. By means of those things we develop from our inherited potentialities, we get as far in our lives as the twenty-seventh year. In future the number of years will be continually lower. You know this on the basis of earlier discussions. We need something that maintains us throughout life as human beings who are in the process of becoming and not as individuals who are finished and completed. On the basis of these things, men will obtain an insight into much that bears on the social question. They will correct much of what they possess today in the form of illusory ideas and, indeed, much must be corrected. It may well be said that the task that lies before men can be called a difficult one, but it can be mastered. Just consider for a moment the fact that you are actually sitting here, and know these things. But do not consider yourselves on that account as specially chosen. Reflect rather upon the fact that in the world outside there will be many others who will be able to understand the same things. It is by no means impossible that these ideas shall enter into human life. In other words, the hindrance is only something artificially set up. To be sure, this artificially erected hindrance is something terrible, but it must be overcome for the reason that salvation can come in no other way. May everyone in his own place do what is possible toward overcoming the difficulties in this field.

There is much that needs to be done for humanity if only we allow the seriousness of our task to fill us through and through. First, it is necessary to achieve an insight into reality; not to live one's life in dull drowsiness, nor permit humanity to live its life in dull drowsiness. As we become acquainted with individuals today we observe how little people are inclined really to go deeply into such things. We have surely experienced the last four or four and a half years! Truly it was repeatedly possible to have well-meaning, even quite intelligent, persons approach one with all kinds of programs for the future—and what programs for the future there are in the world! People think out every imaginable thing. From the very beginning, however, these things are not calculated to bring healing to humanity, but rather nothing whatever or a curse—nothing whatever if no one takes them up or a curse if people enter into them. It is necessary to resolve only one thing and that is simply to acquaint one's self with reality. One will then not suppose that he can form a union or do this or that. But people will consider themselves in duty bound to think in harmony.with this reality whatever it is they think is real. If only within our own Movement, at least, a goodly number of persons would really endeavor in the right way to permeate their soul lives with those impulses to which we have here called your attention! If they would turn their attention away from abstract fantastic ideals for human happiness, would study instead the actual tasks and impulses of our own time, and would determine their own conduct accordingly, something would really have been attained.

Now, I have wished once more from a special point of view to show you today how the social question also must be studied. A person cannot simply say, “Since I am a human being I know mathematics, and I can, therefore, build a great railway bridge.” He knows that he must first gain a knowledge of mathematics, of mechanics, of dynamics. Thus must a person learn the laws of the being of man if he wishes to have true social judgment even in the simplest matters. People are simply not identical in their natures over the whole earth, as Trotsky imagines, but are at most differentiated as groups when they belong to single peoples, or are actually individualities. On the one hand, we must learn to understand the characteristics of groups—for example, according to languages, as we considered the matter today. On the other hand, we must acquire what was brought to your attention yesterday and that is the direct understanding of one human individual by another. This is connected with everything that ought to live within us in the form of social judgment and social feeling. In other words, I have wished to acquaint you once more from a certain point of view with what may give direction to social judgment and a social feeling. I wanted to call your attention to the profound seriousness of what is called the “social question.”

• 1. An allusion to Faust II, Act 2: “Im Deutschen lueght man wenn man hoflich ist.” (In German, one lies when one is courteous.

We have been studying from many points of view the social impulses of the age, of the present day and of the future. You will have seen, among the many and varied phenomena which these impulses bring forth, that there is one apparently fundamental tendency. Characterizing it to begin with in a more external manner, we may say: True it is that the most varied phenomena emerge, and the most varied demands are being made. Social and antisocial world-conceptions make their appearance. This or that action is taken, inspired by these social or antisocial world-conceptions. But if from the vantage-point now gained we put the question: “What is it that really underlies these things? What is it that is trying to work its way out to the surface in human destinies and human evolution?” Then (as I said, externally to begin with) we may characterize it as follows:—Man wants to have a social order, he wants to give the life of mankind in society a social structure within which, in harmony with the age of the spiritual soul, he may become conscious of what he is and knows himself to be as Man—in his human dignity, in his significance and force as Man. Within the social order, he wants to find himself as Man.

Formerly, impulses that were instinctive guided man to do, to think, to feel on one thing or another. In the present age—the age of the spiritual soul, which began in the fifteenth century and will last into the third millennium A.D.—these instinctive impulses are seeking to be transformed into conscious ones. And man will only be able rightly to introduce these conscious impulses into his life if in the course of this age he becomes more and more conscious of what he as Man is and can be within the social structure—the structure of Society or of the State or whatever it may be—in which he lives.

Spiritual Science, after all, is alone able to penetrate these things clearly, in the true direction of the age of the spiritual soul. Yet they emerge—as I have already indicated—they make their appearance here and there in a more or less tumultuous form, not only in the thoughts and opinions but in the events in which the men of the present day are living. It is characteristic, for example, to see what comes to expression in a recent speech by Trotsky. If you consider what I have just said about the desire to place Man in the very center of our World-conception, such words as Trotsky uses here will make an overwhelming, shattering impression upon you. He says:—“The communist or socialist doctrine has set itself, as one of its most important tasks, to attain at length on our old sinful Earth a state of affairs when men will cease to shoot at one another. Thus it is one of the tasks of Socialism or Communism to create a social order where for the first time man will be worthy of the name. We are wont to say with Gorki that the word Man strikes a proud and lofty note, yet in reality, looking over these three and three-quarter years of bloody murder, we would fain cry out: The sound of the word ‘Man’ is shameful and contemptible.”

At all events, you here see the question:—How can man become conscious of his human being, his human worth and human strength?—placed in a tumultuous way in the very center of attention at the beginning of a political speech. And, if you observe more closely, you will meet the same phenomenon in many people. What Spiritual Science realizes in a clearer way leads a shadowy existence in many human heads. Now this is a phenomenon which we shall only understand if we consider many things in the social thinking of the 5th Post-Atlantean Age which we have not studied closely enough as yet.

Truly, infinitely much has become different—quite suddenly—different since the time of the 15th century when the fifth Post-Atlantean Age began, following as it did upon the Fourth which then came to an end. (The Fourth, as you know, had begun in the 8th century B.C.). Men only fail to notice how radically the constitution of soul in civilized mankind was changed in the transition, for example from the 13th or 14th to the 15th or 16th century. I have told you of many phenomena in the realm of Art, in the realm of Thought and in other realms of life, in which you can recognize the change. Today we will consider another aspect—an aspect which is of peculiar importance for the forces which are working themselves out in the present and in the immediate future. We may truly say: It is only since the beginning of the 5th Post-Atlantean Age that men have consciously observed the public economic and industrial life as to the way it enters into the social structure. Previously, these things, of which men think consciously to-day, came forth more or less instinctively. It is only towards the 16th century that men begin consciously to raise the question: What is the nature of the order of political economy? What is the best kind of economic order? What are the laws that underlie it? It is from considerations of this kind that the impulses of the socialistic world-conception have evolved even to our own day. Formerly these things had been ordered more or less instinctively, from man to man, from association to association, from guild to guild, corporation to corporation, and even from realm to realm. Only since the rise of the modern form of State which itself dates back, approximately, to the 16th century, do we see this conscious thinking about economic questions!

Now when you turn your attention to such a phenomenon as this, you must remember the following important fact: So long as a thing works instinctively, it works with a certain sureness. Call it what you will, the Divine Order or the order of Nature, instincts are a force that works through all the evolution of mankind with a certain sureness, unshaken by thought. Uncertainty only begins from the moment when the things of life, in whose sphere the certainty of instincts was working hitherto, begin to be penetrated by human thought and reflection, human intellect. And only gradually, having gone through many and varied errors, does man regain in a conscious way that sureness and inner certainty which, under different conditions, he had in former times by instinct.

Of course we must not make the objection: let us then rather go back to instinct! The conditions have changed and under the altered conditions instinct would no longer be the right thing. Mankind is in the course of evolution, and evolution consists in passing from instinct to conscious life with respect to all these things. The demand that we should return to the old instinct would be no wiser than if someone who had reached the age of fifty suddenly resolved to return to the age of twenty.

Thus we see the beginning of conscious thought on questions of Political Economy towards and during the 16th century. Men direct their conscious attention to things that were hitherto experienced and lived-out instinctively in the social connections of mankind.

It is interesting to bring before our souls some at least of the thoughts and conceptions which men arrived at about the social order. Thus, to begin with, the Mercantilists, as they are called, appeared on the scene with certain ideas about the economic life of society. On closer examination, their conceptions appear entirely dependent on the legal and juridical ideas which had already arisen in public life. Armed with these conceptions they tried to understand the course and evolution of trade and of modern industry in its first beginnings. The ideas of the Mercantilists are dependent above all on the study of trade. But they are also influenced by other things, influenced by the fact that the modern, more absolutist form of monarchy, with all its bureaucratic officialdom, assumed its peculiar configuration in their time. Again, their conceptions are conditioned by the fact that large quantities of precious metals were imported into Europe through the discovery of America; and that the old form of economy was now replaced by that which deals in money. Such influences as these determined the ideas of the earliest Political Economists—the Mercantilists. It is evident from the ideas that they express that their effort was to conceive public economic life and social life on the model of the old forms of private economic intercourse. And as you know, for the old private economic intercourse there were the Roman juridical ideas of legal rights. These ideas, as I said, they are now carried forward. Within the framework of these legal conceptions they simply tried to extend the laws of private economic life into the sphere of public life.

Such ideas give rise to a peculiar result, and, as I said just now, it is interesting to trace the several points to which men directed the main attention of their thoughts as time went on. As a result of their ideas, the Mercantilists said to themselves: The essential thing in the economic life of any national community is to possess as large an equivalent as possible for the commodities circulating in Trade, and produced by Industry, within the given territory. In other words, their desire was to think out a social structure whereby as much money as possible should find its way into the country for which they were concerned. They saw the prosperity of the country in the amount of money it contained. “How then can we enlarge the prosperity of the country?” (For then they thought, the prosperity of the individual would also be enlarged as much as possible.) “How can we increase the country's prosperity?” By bringing about as far as possible that inner social economic structure whereby a large amount of money will circulate within the country and very little will flow from it to other countries. As much money as possible was to be concentrated in the given country.

Against this conception there then arose another, that of the Physiocrats. The latter took their start from the idea: Economic prosperity does not in reality depend on the amount of money that is kept within the country; it depends on the amount that is produced out of the land by human labor—on the quantity of goods produced by exploiting the resources of Nature. In effect, it is only an apparent prosperity that is achieved by the circulation of goods in Trade and by the accumulation of money which does not increase the real Prosperity. Here you see arising, in two successive theories of economics, two altogether different points of view. And this is what I would beg you to observe. For one might well believe that once one had studied these things, it should be quite easy to say what it is that conditions prosperity, and what is the best form of public economic life. But when you see that the men who think about these things, who even make it their profession to do so, arrive in course of time at the very opposite conclusions, you will no longer say that it is quite so easy.

The Physiocrats, laying their main stress on the production of goods by the tillage of the soil and the exploitation of Nature generally, came to the conclusion that one ought to leave men to themselves, for they would then be impelled by free competition to elaborate as much as possible out of the Nature-basis of existence. While the Mercantilists were more concerned in erecting Customs barriers and closing the country, so as to limit the outward flow of money and increase the national prosperity by keeping the money in the country, the Physiocrats came to the opposite conclusion. According to them, free export and import from one country to another was the very thing to enhance the exploitation of the soil over the whole Earth, and accordingly, the prosperity of every single country.

Thus at the very dawn of conscious thinking on economic matters you see these opposite and conflicting thoughts arise in manifold directions. We may now go on and observe the entry of a most influential theory of political economy, one that had an extraordinarily powerful influence on legislation, and a powerful influence too on the thoughts of economists themselves. I mean the theory of Adam Smith, who placed before himself this question above all: “How should we bring about a social structure such as to develop, in the best possible way, the welfare of the individual and at the same time the welfare of the community?” I will here emphasize one characteristic point. Adam Smith arrived at the idea that an entirely individualistic development of economic life is the best thing possible. He took his start from the idea that goods, the commodities we buy and sell—constituting after all the very substance of the national economy—are in effect the result of human labor. We may put it this way. Whenever we buy a thing, the thing we buy has come into existence through the performance of human labor. The piece of goods, the commodity is, as it were, crystallized human labor. And Adam Smith thought: Just because this was the foundation of economic life, prosperity will best be brought about if we do not hinder people through any kind of legislation from producing freely. The individual will do the best for the community if he does the best for himself. Roughly speaking, this is Adam Smith's idea: We shall do the very best for all mankind if we do the very best for ourselves, for then we shall best be able to deliver the goods. It will be best both for the individual and mankind to arrange the economic life in an individualistic way and not to erect hindrances by legislation or the like.

Such, my dear friends, is the whole direction of thought in all these theories of political economy. “What is the best way of arranging the social structure?” In this connection one idea may possibly occur to you and if so it may well seem to you the most important of all. It is a question which was not really clearly seen even by the Physiocrats. In all the systems of political economy of which I have spoken hitherto, they considered what is the best way of arranging and producing the economic structure of society. But as we follow up the thoughts that here emerge, we are reminded again and again that there is also another question, namely this: What is the essential purpose of this economic life? Its object cannot merely be to distribute whatever is available. Surely it must also see to it that something shall be available; that the necessary material goods shall really be produced. The point is, after all, to produce the necessary goods from the Earth. What then is the relation of man to the goods that are to be derived from the Earth? It was Malthus who first put forward conscious thoughts upon this question, and it must be said that his thought took a line which may well cause humanity considerable misgiving. The cardinal question which Malthus brings to light, and the view which he puts forward in answer to it, are by no means quite unfounded. He says: Let us consider the increase in the human population of the Earth. He believed, as many modern people do, that the population of the Earth is always increasing. Then let us consider the increase in the food-stuffs and means-of-life that are produced. We shall obtain a certain ratio. Malthus expresses it somewhat mathematically. He says: The increase in food-stuffs will take place in arithmetical, and the increase in population in geometrical, progression. I may make it clear by a few numbers. Let us assume that the increase in the food-stuffs produced is in the ratio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then we shall have the corresponding geometrical ratio, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25. In other words, his idea is, the population will increase much faster than the available food-stuffs. Mankind in its evolution cannot escape the danger that a struggle for existence will arise, for in the last resort there will be far too many people in relation to the increase in the food-stuff. Thus he conceives the economic evolution of mankind from quite a different point of view, namely, from the aspect of the connection of man with the conditions of the Earth. He comes to the conclusion, or at least his followers come to the conclusion, that it is against the real line of evolution to practice much charity and welfare work for the poor, and the like. For by so doing we only encourage over-population, and this is harmful to the evolution of mankind. He even comes to the point of saying: Whosoever is weak in life, let us leave him unsupplied, unsupported, for it is necessary that the unfit should be weeded out. And he conceives other methods of which I will not speak at this point. I will but indicate their nature. He recommends especially the two-children system in order to counteract the natural tendency to over-population. Wars he regards as something that must necessarily arise in human evolution, because it is a tendency of nature for the population to increase far more rapidly than the means of life.

You see, it is a very pessimistic conception of the economic evolution of mankind which here appears upon the scene of history, nor can we say that much attention has been devoted in more recent times to this question: How is man connected with the Nature-basis of his economic life? In more recent times there is not even a clear consciousness that one ought to make investigations in this direction. For in the subsequent period attention was directed again and again to the social structure itself; to the way in which men should distribute what is available in order to attain the greatest possible prosperity. The question was not “How shall we derive as much as possible from the Earth?” It was more a question of distribution.

Along these lines of thought many different theories emerge, which is important to observe, since they prepare the way for the social and a socialistic thinking of the present day, which has led mankind already in a high degree into a kind of social chaos and will do so still more in the future, and from which it is essential to seek the right way of escape. One of these things I have just indicated, when I mentioned how distinctly there emerges, in Adam Smith for example, the idea: The commodity, the piece of goods that we buy, represents stored-up labor. Increasingly, as though by an inevitable process, there arose the thought: That which appears as a commodity can be regarded in no other way than as stored-up labor. This idea has dominated man to such an extent that it is one of the main motive forces in the proletarian thinking at the present time. For on the economic premises which I have characterized, there has entered the minds of the modern proletariat a keen vision of the fact that such as the economic order, such as the social structure is today, the labor-power of the worker who has no property, who can only bring the labor of his hands on to the market, is a commodity. Just as we buy any other things, so do we buy his labor-power from the proletarian worker.

Over against the question:—What am I in reality as Man?—the modern proletarian feels this as the thing that most oppresses him, and from this his social demands instinctively proceed. He does not want any part of him to be bought and sold. We may say: He appears to himself as though a man could sell his own hands and arms. This seems to him intolerable. No matter in what form the feeling finds expression, in Marxist or in revolutionary thought, or however we may call it, the underlying feeling is, “Other folk buy and sell commodities, but I am obliged to sell my labor power.”

My dear friends, it would be a simple error to object that other people too sell their labor. That is not true. In the social structures of the present day, it is really only the proletarian worker who sells his labor. For the moment [if] one is connected in any way at all with property, one ceases to sell one's labor power. Thus the bourgeois does not sell his labor, he buys and sells commodities. He may sell the products of his labor, but that is a different thing from selling one's labor. The modern proletarian has very keen and sharp ideas on these things, and if you know the thinking of the modern proletarian you will know that the significance of this concept the “proletarian laborer” is that he is one who sells his labor power. And you will know, moreover, how strongly this idea works as the real driving force in the proletarian thinking of today, from its most moderate to its most radical forms of experience. Anyone who is unable to read this out of the phenomena themselves, simply fails to understand this present time. And it is a sad thing how many people fail to understand it. It is through this that we go more and more deeply into confusion: men do not really try to understand their time.

That is the one thing. The other thing is this:—However modified by later, albeit somewhat instinctive points of view, a certain kind of thought has arisen in connection with what I have now characterized. We find this thought expressed in the idea of the Law of Wages. It is true that in the modern Proletarian thinking this idea no longer exists in the same radical form. Nevertheless we must know the form in which it was held, for instance, by Lasalle. For only then shall we perceive what exists in the present-day proletarian as a kind of residue of this idea. The so-called iron Law of Wages was clearly formulated by the economist Ricardo, and even in the middle of the last century Lasalle stood out for it with all energy. It is somewhat as follows. Under the social structure of today, with the form that Capital assumes in this social structure, he who is obliged to work as a proletarian can never receive beyond a certain maximum of wages for his labor. His wages will always fluctuate about a certain level. They cannot rise beyond it, nor can they descend beneath it. The objective facts make it necessary for a certain level of wages to be paid in the long run. The level of the worker's wages cannot rise beyond or descend below the maximum or if you will the minimum (it does not matter for the present purpose how we call it). They cannot depart from it to any considerable extent, and for the following reasons: so thought Ricardo. He says: let us assume that through some circumstance—a favorable period in Trade or the like—there would arise at any time an unusual increase in wages. What then would happen? The proletariat would suddenly receive higher wages. Their standard of life would be improved, they would attain a certain prosperity. Consequently it would be more attractive to seek for labor as a proletarian than under the preceding level of wages.

There will therefore be a larger supply of proletarian labor. Moreover, owing to their increased prosperity, the workers will multiply more quickly—and so on. In short, the supply will be increased. As a result, the laborer will be easier to obtain; and we shall therefore begin once more to underpay him. The wages will therefore fall back to their former level. Through the very rise in wages, phenomena are induced which causes them to fall again. Or let us assume that wages fall through any circumstance. Poverty and wretchedness will be the result and the supply of labor will be reduced. Workers will die more quickly, or they will get diseases. They will have fewer children. So the supply of labor power will be reduced, and this in turn will bring about an increase in wages. But the increase cannot go on essentially beyond the level of the iron law.

Of course, my dear friends, Ricardo, and Lasalle too, in propounding this iron Law of Wages, were thinking of the determination of wages in the purely economic process. Today, nay even twenty or thirty years ago, even proletarians, where one cited the iron Law of Wages in the history of economic science would reply: That is incorrect, there Ricardo and Lasalle were wrong. But this objection too is really incorrect. For Ricardo and Lasalle could only have meant that if the social structure is left to itself this iron Law of Wages will begin to work. It was just in order that it should not work, that Workers' Associations were founded and that the help and influence of the State was called into play. As a consequence the level of the Law of Wages was artificially raised. Thus whatever goes beyond the iron level is brought about by legislation or by associations or the like. The objection is therefore not really valid. You see, it all depends on the way in which we turn the thought.

Well, these things might of course be multiplied without limit. I only wanted to place them before you in order to show how the conscious thoughts of men on economic questions have gradually evolved during the age of the Spiritual Soul. The opinions of men were always dominant in the one direction or another. Some held the opinion that national prosperity would be greatest if the economic life were arranged on an individualistic basis, leaving the individual as free as possible. Others thought that this would put the weaker at a disadvantage; the weaker brethren must be supported by the assistance of the State or the association.

I should have to go on for a long time if I were to describe all the ideas that emerged as time went on. In many different regions of the Earth, i.e., of the civilized world, conceptions of political economy arose. Fundamentally speaking, it was the aim of all of them—those that I have characterized and many others—not only to study the nature of the social structure that has evolved in the world hitherto, but also to consider what is the best thing to do to the social structure in order that men may not have to live in poverty in order that they may have prosperity, and so forth. Economic science, in many of its representatives, did after all set out with the strong desire to better the economic life of the people. Utopian characters and such characters as the French Socialists Saint Simon for instance, Auguste Comte, Louis Blanc and others had this in view. Their thought was somewhat as follows: Hitherto, Society being left more or less to itself has evolved in such a way as to produce great differences between the poor and the rich, the well-to-do and the unhappy. This state of affairs must now be changed. To this end they studied the laws of economics and propounded the many varied ideas with a view to bringing about some kind of improvement. Naturally, in so doing, many of them set out entirely the idea that it should be possible to establish some kind of Paradise on Earth.

In the modern proletariat, however, the conscious thinking about the social structure assumes a special form. We have already spoken of the reason why the proletariat above all was predestined to develop these ideas. But there is one special aspect on which I now want to dwell a little further. True it is that what Karl Marx brought to expression in his book (and those which he wrote in collaboration with Engels) has been considerably modified since then. Yet the changes are small compared to the basic impulses which these thoughts contain. And though the statement only holds true in a modified form, nevertheless in general we can say: Throughout the countries of the civilized Earth, from the extreme West to Russia, the proletariat are dominated by the Marxist impulses, albeit no longer explicitly by the precise outlines of the Marxist thoughts. And the conscious thinking about the social structure appears in a quite peculiar form in this modern, Marxist, proletarian thinking.

The thoughts that we have today unfolded—those therefore which appear already in the bourgeois Political Economist since the beginning of the Age of Consciousness—are taken up into the socialist thinking, which, however, modifies and recasts them in the direction in which the worker out of the proletarian class must necessarily think them. And this is the peculiar thing:—The thought—“Within the modern capitalistic social structure, Man as a proletarian is obliged to sell his labor-power”—this thought however theoretically elaborated, becomes the driving force of proletarian thinking. And now the thought emerges: “How is it to be avoided; how is it to be made absolutely impossible for labor-power to be brought on to the market and sold like a commodity?” Needless to say this impulse is strongly influenced by the idea which is clearly formulated already in Adam Smith and others—the idea that in the commodity we but have to do with so much stored-up labor-power. It is an immensely plausible idea, and one that leads on to the logical conclusion:—“If this is so, what then can we do? If I buy a coat, the work that was done by the tailor, or whoever else took part in bringing the coat into existence, is there in the coat; it is stored-up labor.” Thus they never put the question in this way at all: “Can we separate the labor from the commodity?” But they take it as axiomatic, as an absolute matter of course, that the labor is inseparably bound up with the commodity. Hence they look for a social structure which shall make this inevitable economic fact, that the labor remains bound up with the product of the labor, as harmless as possible for the worker.

Under the influence of such ideas the belief arose that a just remuneration for labor can only be brought about in a certain sense, by making the means of production public property, i.e., by making the community itself in some way the owner of the means of production—of the machinery, the land and the means of transport and distribution. The question simply did not arise: “Can we make the commodity independent of the remuneration for labor?” but they put the question thus: “How can we bring about a just form of remuneration, assuming as an obvious axiom that the labor flows into the commodity?” That is how they put the question, and on this everything else depends. Indeed even the materialistic conception of economic science, the extreme “Materialist Conception of History” depends on this way of putting the question. I have already explained to you the materialistic conception of history, where the modern proletarian thinks: Everything that works within the civilization of mankind, all spiritual creation, all thought, all politics, in a word everything other than the economic processes themselves—is a mere super-structure, an ideology erected on the foundation of that which is worked-out economically. The economic life is the real thing. The way the human being is placed within the economic structure—this is the real thing in human life. The kind of thoughts he has result from his connections with the economic life. Thoroughly rigorous Marxists, like Franz Mehring for example, write in this fashion even about Lessing. (I only give this one example.) They ask: “What was the nature of the economic life in the second half of the 18th century? What were the methods of manufacture? What were the methods of purchase? What was the relation of the industrial life to the remainder of mankind? And as a consequence, what was the habit of men's thoughts? How did such a phenomenon as Lessing arise?” This individual personality, Lessing, with all the works that he produced, is explained out of the economic life of the second half of the 18th century! Kautsky and others like him even try to explain the appearance of Christianity from this point of view. They investigate the economic conditions at the commencement of our era. Certain conditions of production were holding sway. As a consequence, men began to unfold what these writers describe as a kind of communistic thinking, which was then christened by the name of Christ Jesus. The true, the real thing, was the economic order at the beginning of our era. Christianity is an ideology, a super-structure, a reflection as it were, of the economic order. There is nothing else than the economic order. All other things hover above it like a Fata Morgana, a mirror-image, an unreality, or at most (as I explained in earlier lectures) as something that reacts in turn upon the events of other kinds.

And now, the two things which I have described work conjointly. First there is the indignation at the fact that Man must submit to a part of himself, namely his labor-power, being treated as a commodity; and this works in conjunction with the Materialistic Conception, driving to its uttermost extreme, that the Economic is the only real thing in life.

Of course, men of today, not all, have given themselves up to this idea. But among the proletariat, millions and millions are more or less dominated by it. As to the rest, the non-proletarians, other customs have become fashionable among them in relation to these things of life. The things that are done in the proletariat are of course “not done” in the other classes. When proletarian workers have worked their eight or ten or sometimes even more than ten hours a day, they come together in the evening and discuss these questions, or they get lecturers and teachers to explain them. There are women's meetings too. Every individual one of them is seriously concerned as to the nature of the social structure, and in their way, they think about it seriously. They see to it that those who have thought about these things shall tell them their results. And so forth. In a word, they are well-informed; albeit in their own way, they are well-informed. In the next higher level of Society, which we call the bourgeoisie, you must admit this is not the case. When “the day's work is done”—let us put this phrase in inverted commas—they concern themselves with quite other things. With the proletariat they will concern themselves at most (and if they do this much, they make a great fuss about it) by letting it be played before them on the stage—dished up by some bourgeois pedant as dramatist or poet. But as to thinking any thoughts about the economic order of society, they leave this to the Professors of the Universities, that is their job, they will see to that all right! Needless to say, the people of this age are not believers in authority! Still, they swear by what the University professors have thought about these questions. What they say must of course be correct, for they are the experts, they are paid to do so by the proper authorities, they are the people appointed for the purpose.

Talking of these Professors, it is a curious school of economics that has lately been evolved. Nowadays, when they write their books, they call it the “Historic School.” They deal with the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, Socialism, Anarchism, and so on. And when they come to their own idea—well, that is the “Historic School.” They are more or less of this opinion: “However shall we arrive at any real thoughts as to how things should be done?” ... Truth to tell, they are helpless when they come to this. They cannot rouse in themselves a sufficient activity of thought: they cannot rise to ideas as to how we should set about it, to bring about a structure of society. To a comfortable bourgeois pedant like Lujo Brentano, or Schmeller, or Roscher, it simply does not occur to bring his thought into such activity. Their idea is: We must observe the phenomena just as the Natural Scientist does. Such a man then lets the phenomena take their course and studies them. He simply studies the historic evolution of mankind, or at most, the historic evolution of the ideas of men about their economic life. He describes what exists. The most he will do is, like Lujo Brentano—if he does not find it convenient to observe these things in his home country—to travel to a representative country of the economic life, to England, and make his investigations there. He will then describe what is the relationship of employer and employed in that country, and so forth. If there are rich people there he learns to know how they acquire credit, how Capital works. If there is poverty there, if there are those devoid of property, some of whom have more or less nothing to eat, he will describe it as the result of this or that circumstance. And at last such a man will say: After all, it is not the task of Science to show how things ought to evolve, but only to point out how they do evolve in fact.

Yet after all, what will become of a Science which deals with the things of practical life in this way, merely watching and observing how these things evolve? Truly it is as though I were about to train an artist and I said to him: You must go to as many artists as possible and observe—“This one paints well,” “that one paints badly,” and so on—but above all things, you yourself must do nothing at all! In such a sphere the thing becomes absurd at once. And yet, my dear friends, it is a true comparison. It is indeed enough to drive one out of one's skin—forgive the expression—when one begins to study—I cannot say what is done, but what is wasted and fooled away nowadays where they claim to apply “the scientific method” to economics and such things of life. For the result is absolutely nil, since if we go to the root of the matter, the very premises from which they start are abstract and unreal. At most there will arise from among their ranks the so-called “professional socialists” whose observation of existing things leads them to the conclusion: “Something must be done” and they then make Laws pretending to investigate or remove this or that distress.

This very helplessness has done much to bring about the present situation; and today it would be cowardice if we failed to point out the facts. Needless to say the public of today worships no authority at all. But the pretentious nonsense they believingly accept in this domain of life (and declare themselves satisfied!) is very largely to blame for the chaos that has come upon us. These are serious matters, and we must take hold of them in their true shape and form. For then, my dear friends, the question will emerge: What is it that is working still more deeply in all these things? Why has it all come about in this way? Why are such changing and wavering ideas at work in a realm of life that is of such cardinal importance to mankind?

Let us consider such an idea, illusory as it is but extraordinarily effective; let us consider the Marxist idea, however modified—it does not matter. It is in all essentials the idea of the professional minds of our time. Consider this idea: Only the economic life, only the economic structure is the real thing; everything else is ideology, super-structure, Fata Morgana. Truly, it is an extraordinary thing—this absolute unbelief in all that Man can produce by way of spiritual things, evolving out of the thoughts that have arisen since the dawn of the Age of the Spiritual Soul. Men are being diverted more and more to the things that are outwardly known, outwardly and tangibly present to their senses. All other things they flee from and avoid. The fact is that not only the social thoughts but the social feelings and in the last resort the social events of our time have evolved under the influence of this flight from the spirit, this avoidance of spiritual things. And they will continue to evolve under this influence, if the call for a true spiritual-scientific penetration of the facts is neglected.

What is the deeper underlying truth? It is this, my dear friends. We have entered into the age of the Spiritual Soul; we are in it since the 15th century. Through the very development of this age of the Spiritual Soul, through his pressing forward to the awakening of the Spiritual Soul, man is unavoidably approaching ever nearer and nearer to a point in his evolution where, through counter-instincts in his nature, he would fain take flight. It will be one of the most essential things for modern man to overcome this instinct of flight. At all costs he wants to flee from what he must none the less enter.

The other day, the last time I spoke to you here, I said: Over the various national regions, the West, the Middle Countries, and the East, the way man approached the Guardian of the Threshold, when he enters into the spiritual world, is differentiated. Now men are moving towards the conscious experience of such things, as that these experiences can be undergone consciously when they meet the Guardian of the Threshold; and more or less instinctively they must be undergone by human beings in the course of time, during the Age of the Spiritual Soul. Men are being pressed and driven to this experience when they face the Guardian of the Threshold. It is this which works in a special, albeit external form, like an impulse, like an instinctive urge, in the men of modern time. And it is this from which they flee. They are afraid to come whither they really ought to come.

This is a very law in the modern evolution of mankind. Take what I said before as an external characterization of the modern striving. Man strives to know what he is as Man, what he is worth as Man, what is his strength and potentiality as Man. Man strives to see himself as Man, to arrive at a picture of his own Being. But we cannot arrive at a picture of Man if we are determined to remain within the world of the senses, for he is no mere physical being. In times of instinctive evolution, when one does not ask for a picture of Man, when one does not ask what is the dignity and strength of Man, one may overlook this fact—that to know Man one must transcend the world of the senses and gaze into the spiritual world. But in our age of consciousness, we must make acquaintance, at any rate in one form or another, be it only intellectually, with the super-sensible world. The same thing that the Initiate has to overcome consciously is working in our age unconsciously. Unconsciously as yet, there lives in our contemporaries, and in the men whose social thoughts I have described today, this fear of the Unknown—the Unknown which they are nonetheless being driven to observe. Fear, cowardice, lack of courage, is dominating the humanity of today. And if it is declared: “Economic life is the tangible thing which determines all other things,” this view itself has arisen simply through the fear of the invisible and the intangible. This they will not approach, they will avoid it at all costs, and so they lyingly transform it into an ideology, a Fata Morgana. The modern world-conception, my dear friends, is born of fear and terror in relation to those points which I have characterized. However outwardly courageous some of those within the stream of the modern social world-conception may show themselves to be, they are afraid of the Spiritual, which must meet them in one form or another, and in whose domain, after all, they long to know the human being. But they are afraid of it; like cowards, they recoil from it.

The things must be seen from this point of view. For the modern man must learn to know three things, inasmuch as he is led quite naturally to these three—differentiated in West, Middle and East, as I described last time. Quite naturally, in one form or another, he is led to these three things. Though only the Initiate beholds what is present in these points, yet in the course of time, every human being who seeks to penetrate and understand the social structure must feel them, sense them, receive them at least into his intellect.

In the first place the modern man must gain a clear feeling, or at least a clear intellectual conception, of those forces of the Universe which are the forces of decline and destruction. The forces to which we are fond of turning our attention (and for the very fondness, we delude ourselves about them) are of course the upbuilding forces above all others. We always want to build and build. But in the world there is not only evolution or upbuilding, there is also devolution, demolition. We ourselves bear the process of demolition within us; our evolved nervous system, our brain system, is perpetually engaged in demolition or destruction. With these forces of destruction man must make himself acquainted. With unprejudiced and open mind he must say to himself: Along the very path that unfolds in the age when the Spiritual Soul shall awaken fully, the forces of destruction are most active. When suddenly they concentrate or consolidate; then such a thing arises as in the last four and a half years. Then there appears to mankind in a concentrated form what in any case is always there. But this must not remain unconscious and instinctive: it must become a fully conscious thing, above all in the present age. The destructive forces, the forces of death, the paralyzing forces—how gladly would man turn his face away from them! But in so doing he only blinds himself. In fleeing from the destructive forces he learns not to cooperate in real evolution.

The second thing with which man must make himself acquainted and from which again he flees is this, my dear friends: In the present age of Intellectual evolution—that is to say, in the evolution of the Age of the Spiritual Soul, it is absolutely necessary for man to seek within himself as it were a new center of gravity of his own being. Instinctive evolution gave him even in his thought a center of gravity. He imagined that he stood fast on the views, the opinions, the ideas that came to him through the blood or through descent or in some other way. Henceforth man can do this no longer. He must free himself from these things on which he formerly stood so fast and firm, which arose in him instinctively. He must take his stand, as it were, at the edge of the abyss. He must feel beneath him the void of the abyss. He must find within himself the central point of his being. Man is afraid to do this, he recoils from the task.

And the third thing, my dear friends, is this: Man must learn to recognize the full power of the impulse of self-seeking, the impulse of egoism. Our age is destined to make it fully clear to man to what an extent, if he lets himself go, he is a selfish being. To overcome egoism, we must first have probed and realized all the sources of egoism that are there in human nature. Love only arises as the counterpart to self-love. We must cross the abyss of selfishness if we would learn to know that social warmth which has to penetrate the social structure of the present and the future; if we would learn to know it, above all, not only in theory but in full practice. And to approach this feeling—which the Initiate sees with fully conscious clarity, when face-to-face with the Guardian of the Threshold as he enters into the sense-world—this again fills man with fear. But there is no other way of entering into the age which must necessarily bring forth a social structure, than by a Love which is not self-love, which is a true Love for other men and interest in other men. Men feel this as a burning fire, as something that would consume them and take their own being from them, inasmuch as it deprives them of self-love, or the right to self-love. Even as they flee the super-sensible, of which they are afraid because it is to them an unknown region, so do they flee from Love, because it is to them a burning fire. And even as they bind their eyes and shut their ears to the truth of the super-sensible, when in the Marxism and in the misguided proletarian thinking of today they keep repeating that all things must be based on the tangible and the material—even as in this domain they go after the very opposite of that which lies in the real tendency of human evolution—so do they also in the realm of Love. Even in the catch-words and slogans this finds expression. They set up idealism, the very opposite of what really lies in the evolution of mankind and must be striven after.

Already in 1848, when Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto—the first and most significant declaration of the modern proletarian conception of life—was published, we find in it the words which are now printed as a motto on almost every socialistic book or pamphlet: “Proletarians of all lands, unite!” If we have but a little sense for realities, we are bound to pronounce a precise if strange and paradoxical judgment upon these words. What does it mean to say “Proletarians of all lands, unite!” It means, Work together, work with one another, be brothers, be comrades one to another! That is nothing else than Love. Let Love sway among you. Tumultuously the tendency arises—yet how does it arise?—Proletarians, you must be conscious that you are a class apart from the rest of mankind! Proletarians, hate the others who are not proletarians! Let hate be the impulse of your Union. In a strange way, wedded together, we here have Love and Hate—a striving for union out of the impulse of hatred, the very opposite of union. The people of today only fail to notice such a thing as this, because they are so far from connecting their thoughts with reality. Yet in truth this thought represents the very fear of Love, which Love, though it is striven for, is at the same time avoided, because they are afraid and recoil from it as from a consuming fire.

Only through Spiritual Science can we come to know the realities. Only through Spiritual Science can we perceive what is really working in the present time; what we must indeed perceive and recognize if we would take our place with real consciousness in this our time. It is by no means a simple matter to perceive all that is throbbing in the humanity of today. To do so, Spiritual Science is necessary. This should never be forgotten. And he alone stands rightly within this our spiritual movement, who knows how to take these things sufficiently in earnest.

My dear friends,

Today I would like to bring before you a few important considerations connected with the matters that we have now for a long time regarded as our task. When we reflect on the way in which spiritual science, as here intended, is able to consider and to give answers to the questions of life, we must above all take careful heed to the fact that this spiritual science, and indeed for that matter the whole present and the future time, makes new and different demands on man's powers of comprehension and of thought. He has to think in a different way from what he is accustomed to, in accordance with the habits of thoughts of the immediate past and of the present—especially the habits of thought arising from science and its popularization. You are well aware that all that spiritual science has to say concerning any sphere of life and hence too what it has to say on the social question, indeed especially what it has to say on the social question, is the expression of the results of research—results that have not been obtained on any merely rationalistic or abstract path, but that have been sought and found in the realm of spiritual reality. They can be understood, as we know, with the help of a sound and healthy human intelligence—they can, however, only be discovered when one rises above the ordinary consciousness, such as is comprised within rational thinking, abstract thinking, natural scientific research and so forth—rises above this ordinary consciousness to the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. What comes to light on the path of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—this it is, formulated in concepts and ideas that are capable of expression, that fills the content of the science which Anthroposophical research has to give.

We have to accustom ourselves—and this is what makes it so hard for many of our contemporaries to tread the necessary path from the usual thinking of today to the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy—we have to accustom ourselves to quite a new and different conception of wherein the finding of truth consists. Today men ask so lightly: can this or that be proven? The question is justified of course. But, my dear friends, we have also to look at the question from the standpoint of reality. If we mean: can what the spiritual researcher brings forward be proved in accordance with the conceptions and ideas that we have already acquired, in accordance with the customary ideas which we have imbibed through our education, through our everyday life?—If we mean this, we are making a great mistake; for the results of spiritual research are drawn from reality.

Let me make clear to you by a quite trivial, simple comparison, how the ordinary thinking that runs on purely abstract lines may fall into error. One thought is supposed to follow from another. The error is that if people see: As a thought it does not follow—they concluded that it must be false, while all the time from the point of view of reality it still may be perfectly true. The consequences in reality are not always the same as the consequences in mere thought; the Logic of Reality is a different thing from the Logic of Thought.

In our time, the metaphysical legalistic way of thinking has taken such hold upon men that they are wont to think that everything must be comprehended with the Logic of Thought. But that is not the case. Listen to this, for example. Take a cube measuring—let us say—30 centimeters each way. Now if someone were to say to you: “This cube, measuring 30 centimeters each way, is raised up a meter and a half above the floor”—if you were not yourself in the room where the cube is, you would be able with your pure thought-logic to say one thing: you would be able to conclude from what was said to you: The cube must be standing on something. There must be a table there of the corresponding height, for the cube can certainly not hover in the air. This, then, you can conclude even when you are not present there, even when you have no experience of it.

But now let us suppose: A ball is lying on the cube; something is lying upon it. That you cannot conclude by thinking, that you must see. You must behold it. And yet the ball, too, corresponds to reality. The reality is thus filled with things and entities that have of course a logic in themselves, a logic, however, that does not coincide with the pure thought-logic; the logic of sight is a different thinking from the logic of mere thought.

This necessitates, however, my dear friends, that we should at length learn that we cannot only call proof the so-called logical sequences to which modern thinking has grown accustomed. Unless we learn this, we shall never arrive at a true understanding of things. In the domain in which I have been speaking to you now for some weeks—in the domain of social life, of the structure of human society, many new demands result simply from the fundamental premises that I have set before you concerning the three-fold division of society which will be necessary for the future. One such result is, for example, a quite definite system of taxation. But this system of taxation, once more, can only be found by calling to our help the logic of things seen. The mere logic of thought is insufficient. It is this that makes it necessary that men should listen to those who know something of these things, for when the thing has once been said, then the healthy human intelligence, my dear friends, will always suffice; it can always corroborate and “control” what the spiritual researcher says. The healthy human understanding, however, is something very different from the logic of thought, which is developed especially through the way of thinking that is prevalent today, soaked and steeped as it is in the natural-scientific point of view. From all this you will understand that spiritual science is not intended merely to make us receive a certain collection of ideas and then think that we can handle these ideas much as we would handle information we acquire through natural science or the like. That is absolutely impossible and is not to be imagined for a moment. If we think that we are making a great mistake. Spiritual Science makes a man think in an altogether new way. It makes him comprehend the world in an altogether different way than he has done before, it makes him learn not merely to perceive other things than before, but to perceive in a new way. When you enter into spiritual science you must always bear this in mind, you must be able to ask yourself again and again: Am I learning to look at the world in a new way through my receiving of Spiritual Science—not clairvoyance but Spiritual Science—am I learning to look at the world in another way from what I have done hitherto? For indeed, my dear friends, one who regards Spiritual Science as a collection of facts, a compendium of knowledge, may well know a great deal, but if he still only thinks in the same way as he thought before, then he has not received Spiritual Science. He has only taken up Spiritual Science if the manner, the form, the structure of his thinking has changed, if in a certain respect he has become another man than he was before. And this can only come about through the might and the power of the ideas which we receive through Spiritual Science.

Now if we are to think about the social question, it is absolutely essential that this change, which can only come about through Spiritual Science, should enter our thinking, for only in this light can that be understood to which I directed your attention yesterday. Yesterday I spoke to you of the economists of the schools, the present-day exponents of the theories of economists. I pointed out to you how utterly helpless they are in the face of realities. Why are they so helpless? Because they are bent on understanding with the Natural-Scientific type of thinking something that cannot thus be understood. We shall have to make up our minds to conceive the social life, not with the kind of thinking that is brought up on Natural Science but in an altogether different way. Only then shall we be able to find fruitful social ideas—fruitful in life, capable of realization.

I have already once drawn your attention to a thing that may well have astonished one or another among you; yet it needs to be deeply thought over. I said: The logical conclusion which one will tend to draw from such and such ideas, maybe from a whole “world-conception” are by no means always identical with that which follows from such a world-conception in real life. I mean the following: A man may hold a certain number of ideas or even an entire world-conception. You may envisage this world-conception clearly according to the ideas it contains and you may then perhaps draw further conclusions from it—conclusions which you will quite rightly presume to be logical, you may imagine that such conclusions, which you can logically draw from a world-conception, must necessarily follow from it. But that is by no means the case. Life itself may draw altogether different conclusions. And you may be highly astonished to see how life draws its different conclusions. What do I mean by this? Let us assume a world-conception which appears to you highly idealistic, and—we may assume—rightly so. It contains wonderfully idealistic ideas. You yourself will probably admit only the logical conclusions of your world-conception but if you sink this into another mind, if you take into account the reality of life even where it leads you across the chasms that separate one human being from another—the following may happen: and only Spiritual Science can explain the necessity of such a sequence. You instruct your son or daughter or your pupil in your idealistic world-conception, and they afterwards become thorough scamps and rascals. It may well happen in the reality of life that rascality will follow as the consequence from your idealistic philosophy!

That of course is an extreme case, though one that might well happen in real life. I only wish to bring it home to you that other conclusions are drawn in real life than in mere thought. Hence it is that the men of today are so far removed from reality, because they do not see through such things as these; they are not really willing to bring to consciousness what was formerly done instinctively. The instincts of past ages felt clearly enough that this or that would arise from one thing or another in real life. They were by no means inclined only to presume the consequences that follow by the logical thought. The instincts themselves worked with a logic of their own. But today men have come into a kind of uncertainty, and this uncertainty will naturally grow ever greater in the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Soul unless we make the counterbalance, which is: consciously to receive into ourselves the Logic of Reality. And we do receive it the moment we earnestly consider in its own essence and process the Spiritual that lives and moves behind the realities of sense.

I will tell you a practical case to illustrate what I have just explained in a more theoretic way. It will serve at the same time to illustrate another thing, namely how far we can go wrong, if we merely look at the external symptoms. In my lecture this week, I spoke of the symptomatic method in the study of history. Altogether, the symptomatic method is a thing that we must make our own, if we would pass from the outer phenomena to the underlying Reality.

A Russian author and philosopher of the name of Berdiayeff recently wrote an interesting article on the philosophical evolution in the Russian people in the second half of the nineteenth century and until the present day. There are two remarkable things in this essay of Berdiayeff's. One is that the author takes his start from a peculiar prejudice, proving that he has no insight into those truths, with which you must by now be thoroughly familiar—I mean the truth that in the Russian East, preparing for the Sixth Post-Atlantean Age (the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Life), altogether new elements are on the point of emerging, though today they are only there in embryo. Berdiayeff being ignorant of this fact, his judgment on one point is quite incorrect. He says to himself (and as a Russian philosopher he must surely know the facts), he says: It is strange that in Russia as against the Western European civilizations we have no real sense (especially in philosophy) for what in the West they call the Truth. Russians have been much interested in the philosophy of the West, yet they have no real feeling for it inasmuch as it strives towards “The Truth.” They only take up the truths of philosophy inasmuch as they are serviceable for life, inasmuch as they are directly useful to some conception of life. The Socialist, e.g., is interested in philosophy because he imagines that this or that philosophy will provide him with a justification for his socialism. Similarly the orthodox Believer will interest himself in some philosophy, not, like a Western man because it is the Truth, but because it gives him a justification or a basis for his Orthodox Belief. And so on. Berdiayeff regards this as a great failing in the Folk-Soul of modern Russia. He says: In the West they are far in advance of us. They do not imagine that Truth must follow life; they really believe that Truth is Truth; the Truth is there, and life must take its direction from it. And Berdiayeff actually adds the extraordinary statement (albeit not extraordinary for the men of the present day, who will take it quite as a matter of course, but extraordinary for the Spiritual Scientists) he adds the statement: The Russian socialist has no right to use the expression “bourgeois science,” for bourgeois science contains the truth; it has at last established the concept of Truth, and that is a thing that cannot be refitted. It is therefore a failing on the part of the Russian Folk-Soul to believe that this Truth too can be transcended!

Berdiayeff shares this curious opinion, not only with the whole world of professors, but with all their faithful followers, to wit, the whole bourgeois of Western and Middle Europe, the aristocracy especially so, and the rest. Berdiayeff simply does not know what is now germinating in the Russian Folk Soul, which comes to expression for this very reason in a frequently tumultuous and distorted form. He does not know that in this conception of Truth from the standpoint of life, crooked as it may be today, there lies a real seed for the conception of the future. In the future it will right itself, of that we may be sure. When once what is preparing today as a germinating seed will have unfolded, I mean the directing of all human evolution towards the spiritual life, then indeed will that which men call the “Truth” today have an altogether different form. Today I have drawn your attention to some peculiar facts in this respect. This Truth, my dear friends, will among other things bring to man's consciousness what the men of today cannot realize, that the logic of facts, the logic of reality, the logic of things seen is a very different thing from the mere logic of concepts. And this transformed conception of the Truth will have some other interesting qualities. That is the one thing which you see emerging in Berdiayeff's essay. It is remarkable enough, for it shows how little such a learned author lives in the real trend and meaning of the evolution of our time, which he might well perceive in his own nation above all, but cannot recognize, laboring as he does under this prejudice.

The other thing must be considered in quite a different direction. Berdiayeff, as the whole spirit of his essay shows, witnesses the rise of Bolshevism with great discomfort. Well, in that respect, the one man or the other, according as he is a Bolshevist or the reverse, will say that Berdiayeff is right or wrong. I do not propose to dilate just now upon this question. I will describe the facts, I will not criticize. But this is the important thing: In the sixties, so says Berdiayeff, there was already the tendency to regard Truth and Philosophy as dependent on life, and at that time materialism found entry into Russia. Men believed in Materialism, because they found it useful and profitable for life. Then, in the seventies, Positivism, such as is held by Auguste Comte for example, came into vogue. And after that, other points of view, for example that of Nietzsche, found entry into Russia among the people known as the Intelligentsia. And now Berdiayeff asks the question: What kind of philosophy do we find among the Intelligentsia of the Bolsheviks? For, indeed, a certain philosophy is prevalent among them. But how this particular philosophy can go with Bolshevism, that Berdiayeff is quite at a loss to explain. He simply cannot understand how Bolshevism can regard as its own philosophy—curiously enough—the doctrine of Avenarius and Mach.

And, truth to tell, my dear friends, if you had told Avenarius and Mach that their philosophy was to be accepted by such people as the Bolsheviks, they themselves would have been still more astonished and angry than Berdiayeff. They would have been most indignant (both of them, as you know, are now dead) if they had lived to see themselves as the official philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine Avenarius, the worthy bourgeois, who of course had always assumed that he could only be understood by people who—well, who wore at any rate decent clothes, people who would never do violence to anyone in the Bolshevist manner, in short, good “respectable” people, in the sense in which one used the expression in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And it is true, if we consider only the content of the philosophy of Avenarius, we are still more at a loss to understand how it happened. For what does Avenarius think? Avenarius says: Men labor under a prejudice. They think: within, in my head, or in my soul or wherever it is, are the ideas, the perceptions, they are there subjectively; outside are the objects. But, says Avenarius, this is not correct. If I were all alone in the world, I should never arrive at the distinction between subject and object. I am led to make the distinction only through the fact that other people are there too. I alone beheld a table, I should never come to the idea that the table is out there in space and a picture of it here in my brain. I would simply have the table, and would not distinguish between subject and object. I only distinguish between them because, when I look at the table with another man, I say to myself: He sees the table, and I too perceive it. The perception is in my head too. I reflect that what he senses I am also sensing. Such are partly theoretical considerations (I will not go into them more fully, you would say: All these things do not interest us) within which Avenarius' thought lives and moves. In 1876 he wrote his book Conception of the World According to the Principle of Least Action. For on such premises as I have here explained to you, he shows how the concepts we have as human beings have no real value, but that we only create them for the sake of mental economy. According to Avenarius, the concept “Lion,” for example, or the concept that finds expression in a “Natural Law” is nothing real, nor does it refer to anything real. It is only uneconomical if in the course of my life I have seen five or six or even thirty lions and am now to conceive them each and severally. I therefore proceed in a more economical way, and make myself a single concept “Lion,” embracing all the thirty. Thus all our forming of concepts is a mere matter of subjective mental economy.

Mach holds a similar view. It was Mach of whom I told you how he once got into an omnibus where there was a mirror. As he got in, he saw a man coming in from the other side. Now the appearance of this man was highly antipathetic to him, and he said to himself: “What a weedy-looking schoolmaster.”—only then did he perceive that there was a mirror hanging there and that he had simply seen himself. Mach tells the story to indicate how little one knows oneself, even in one's external human form how little self-knowledge man has. He even tells of another occasion when he passed a shop window which acted as a mirror and thus again met himself and was quite annoyed to come across such an ugly-looking pedant.

Mach proceeded in a rather more popular fashion, but his idea is the same as that of Avenarius. He says: there are not subjective ideas on the one hand, and objective things on the other. All that exists in reality is the content of our sensations. I, to myself, am only a content of sensation, the table outside me is a content of sensation, my brain is a content of sensation. Everything is a content of sensation, and the concepts men make for themselves only exist for the purpose of economy. It was about the year 1881; I was present at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna where Mach gave his lecture on the Economy of Thought, entitled: “Thought as a Principle of the Least Action.” I must say, it made quite a terrible impression upon me, who was then a mere boy, at the very beginning of the twenties. It made a terrible impression on me when I saw that there were men so radical in their ideas, without an inkling of the fact that on the paths of thought there enters into the human soul the first beginning of a manifestation of the super-sensible, the spiritual. Here was a man who denied the reality of concepts to such an extent as to see in them the mere results of a mental activity bent upon economy.

But in Mach and Avenarius—you will not misunderstand my words—all this takes place entirely within the limit of thoroughly “respectable” thinking. We should naturally assume that these two men and all their followers are worthy folk of sound middle-class opinion, utterly removed from any even moderately radical, let alone revolutionary ideas, in practice. And now all of a sudden they have become the official Philosophers of the Bolsheviks! No one could have dreamt of such a thing. Perhaps you may read Avenarius' booklet on the “Principle of Least Action.” It may interest you, it is quite well written. But if you were to tackle his “Philosophy of Experience,” I fancy you would not get very far, you would find it appallingly dull. Written as it is in an absolutely professorial style, there is not the slightest possibility of your drawing even the least vestige of Bolshevism as a conclusion from it. You would not even derive from it a practical world-conception of the most gentle radicalism.

I am well aware, my dear friends, of the objection which those who take symptoms for realities might now bring forward against me. An easy-going, hard-and-fast Positivist, for instance, would say: The explanation is as simple as can be! The Bolshevists took their Intellectuals from Zurich. Avenarius was a professor in Zurich, and those who are now working as intellectual leaders among the Bolsheviks were his pupils. Moreover there was a University lecturer there, a pupil of Mach's Adler, the man who afterwards shot the Austrian statesman Count Stügh. Many followers of Lenin, perhaps even Lenin himself, were well-acquainted with Adler. They absorbed these ideas and carried them to Russia. It is therefore a pure coincidence.

Needless to say I am well aware that a cock-sure hard-and-fast Positivist can explain the whole thing in this way. But did I not tell you the other day how the whole poetic character of Robert Hamerling can be shown to have arisen from the unreliability of the worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, who forgot to forward Hamerling's application for a post in Budapest, as a result of which someone else got the post instead. If only Kaltenbrunner had not been so slack, Hamerling would certainly have gone as a schoolmaster to Budapest in the 1860's instead of to Trieste. Now if you consider all that Hamerling became through spending ten years of his life on the shores of the Adriatic at Trieste, you will see that his whole poetic life was a result. This was the external fact. The worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, headmaster of the Grammar School at Graz, forgot to forward his application and was therefore the occasion of Hamerling's going to Trieste. You see, these things must not be taken as realities but as symptomatic of inner things which come to expression through them.

Thus what Berdiayeff conceives in this way—that the Bolsheviks chose as their idols the worthy middle-class philosophers Avenarius and Mach—does indeed take us back to what I said at the beginning of the present lecture: The reality of life, the reality of things seen is very different from the merely logical reality. Of course you cannot deduce from Avenarius and Mach that they could have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. But, my dear friends, even what you can deduce by logic is only of importance as an external symptom. In effect, we only get at Reality by a research which goes straight for it. And in the Reality the Spiritual Beings work.

I might tell you many things which would indeed enable you to perceive it as a necessity, in reality of life, that such philosophies as that of Avenarius and Mach lead to the conclusion of the most revolutionary socialism of our time. For behind the scenes of existence it is the very same spirits who instill into men's consciousness philosophies after the style of Avenarius or Mach, and who instill once more into men's consciousness that which leads on to Bolshevism for example. Only in Logic you cannot derive the one thing from the other. But the Reality of Life performs this derivation. I beg you inscribe this deep into your hearts, for here too you will have something of what I am constantly emphasizing. It is needful to us to find the transition from the mere tangle of logical ideas, within which the people of today in their illusions imagine the realities of life to be imbued, to the true reality. If we look at the symptoms, and know how to value them, the thing does indeed become far more earnest. Here I will draw your attention to something to which another who is not a Spiritual Scientist will not pay so much attention; for he will take it more as a phrase, as something more or less indifferent. Mach, you see, who is a Positivist, and a radical one at that, comes to the idea that all things are really sensations. This doctrine, which young Adler also expounded in his lectures at Zurich, whereby he will undoubtedly have gained many adherents for himself, and for Mach and for Avenarius—this doctrine declares that everything is sensation, and that we are quite unjustified in distinguishing the physical from the psychical. The table outside us is physical and psychical in precisely the same sense as my ideas are physical and psychical: and we only have concepts for the sake of mental economy.

Now the peculiar thing in Mach was that instinctively, every now and then, he withdrew from his own world-conception—from his radical, positivist world-conception. He withdrew a little, saying to himself: These then are the results of truly modern thought. It is meaningless to say that anything exists beyond my sensation or that I should distinguish the physical and the psychical. And yet I am impelled again and again whenever I have the table before me, to speak not merely of the sensation, but to believe that there is something out there, quite physically. And again when I have an idea, a sensation or a feeling, I have not merely the perception of the phenomenon which takes place, but though by my scientific insight I realize that it is quite unjustified—still I believe that here within me is the soul, and out there is the object. I feel myself impelled again and again to make this distinction how does it come about? Mach said to himself: however does it come about that I am suddenly impelled to assume; in here is something of the soul, and out there is something external to the soul. I know that it is no true distinction, yet am I continually compelled to think something different from what my scientific insight tells me.

This is what Mach says to himself, every now and then when he withdraws a little from these things and considers them again. You will find it in his books. And he then makes a peculiar remark; he says: sometimes one has a feeling that makes one ask:—Can it be that we human beings are just being led round and round in a circle by some evil spirit? And he answers: Sometimes I really think so.

I know, my dear friends, how many people will read just such a passage, taking it as an empty phrase. Yet it is truly symptomatic. For here, every now and then, there peers over the shoulder of the human soul something that is real fact. It is indeed the Ahrimanic spirit who leads men round and round in a circle, making them think in the way of Avenarius and Mach. And at such moments Mach suddenly becomes aware of it. And it is the same Ahrimanic spirit who is working now, in the Bolshevist way of thought. Hence it is no wonder, my dear friends, that the logic of realities has produced this result. You see, however, that if we would understand the things of life, we must look into them more deeply. Truly this is of no small importance, especially for the domain of social life, today and in the near future. For the conclusions that must be drawn are not such as were drawn by Schmoller or Brentano, Wagner, Spencer, John Stuart Mill or whoever it may be. No, in the domain of social life, real conclusions must be drawn, i.e., conclusions according to the logic of realities. This is the bad thing, that in the social agitations and movements of today, and in all that they have produced, merely logical deductions—i.e., illusions—are living. Illusions have become external reality. I will give you two examples. The one is already well-known to you, you will only need to see it in the light in which I shall now place it.

The Marxian Socialists (and as I have often told you, this includes almost the whole of the proletariat today), the Marxian Socialists declare, under the influence of Marx: Economic life, economic oppositions, and the class oppositions that arise from them—these things are the true reality. Everything else is an ideological superstructure. What man thinks, what he creates in poetry and art, what he thinks about the State or about life in general, all this is a mere result of his economic mode of life. And for this reason the proletariat of today declares:—We need no National Assemblies to bring about a new social order. For in the National Assemblies there will be the bourgeois folk once more and they will have their say out of their economically-determined bourgeois minds. We have no use for that. We can only do with those who will voice the thoughts of Proletarian minds. It is they who must re-mold the world today. To this end we do not first need to summon National Assemblies. Let the few Proletarians who happen to be on top exercise a dictatorship. They have proletarian ideas, they will think the right thoughts. Not only Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, Karl Liebknecht in Berlin repudiates the National Assembly. He says: After all, it will be no more than a reassembly of the talk-shop—meaning the Reichstag, the Houses of Parliament.

What is the underlying reason, my dear friends? It is the same reason on account of which, in the main, I was driven out of the Socialist Working Men's College in Berlin sixteen years ago, as I told you recently when giving you the history of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. In that College I had to lecture among other things on scientific matters; I conducted practical lessons in public speaking. But I also had to teach History. And I taught it in the way in which I assumed, objectively, that it should be taught. This was certainly satisfying to those who were my pupils, and if it could have been continued—if it had not been brought to an artificial end—I know it would have borne good fruit. But the Social-Democratic leaders discovered that I was not teaching Marxism or the Marxian conception of history. Nay more, they discovered that I even did such curious wild things as I will now relate (which incidentally were very well-received by the workers who were my pupils). I said, for instance, on one occasion: The ordinary historian cannot make anything of the story of the seven Roman kings, they even regard it as a myth. For the succession of the seven kings, as described by Livy, shows a kind of rise and decline. Up to Marcius, the fourth, it rises to a kind of climax. Then it declines to decadence in the seventh, Tarquinius Superbus. And I explained to my pupils that we were here going back to the most ancient period in Roman evolution, the period before the Republic, and that the change to the Republic had in fact consisted in this: that the ancient atavistic spiritual regularities had passed into a kind of popular chaos; whereas, in the more ancient period, as we can see quite tangible in the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the social institutions contained a certain wisdom, discoverable by Spiritual Science. It is not for nothing that we are told how Numa Pompilius received influences from the Nymph Egeria, to order the social life. Then I explained how men did indeed receive Inspirations for the social institutions which they were to make; and how in truth it was not merely the one monarch following the other as in later times, but these things were determined according to the laws received from the Spiritual World. Hence the regularity in the succession of the Egyptian Pharaohs and even of the Roman kings, Romulus, Numa Pompilius, and so on down to Tarquinius Superbus.

Now you may take the seven principles of man which I summed up in my Theosophy and regard them one after another from a certain point of view. You will find these seven principles in the succession of the Roman kings. Here, at this present moment, I am only hinting at the fact, and among you I need do no more. Nevertheless it is a thing which, rightly expressed, can well be described as an objective truth, throwing real light on the peculiar circumstances which the ordinary materialistic historian cannot understand. Today indeed, the “genuinely scientific” historians simply regard the seven kings as non-existent, and describe them as a myth.

So you see, I really went so far as this. And in other matters, too, I spoke to them in this way. If it is done rightly, it gives the impression of answering to the realities. Still it is not the “Materialistic Conception of History.” For that would mean that we should have to investigate what were the economic conditions in ancient Roman times, what was the relation of the tillage of the soil to the breeding of cattle and to trade and the life; and how the cities were founded, and what was the economic life of the Etruscans, and how the Etruscans traded with the young Roman people; and how under the influence of these economic elements, conditions took shape under Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and so on, in succession.

You see, even this would not have been effected quite so simply. But here again the true Reality came to my assistance. Of course, such an audience did not consist merely of young people. There were many among them who had already absorbed the Proletarian thought to a considerable extent and who were well-equipped, well-armed with all these prejudices. Such people are by no means easy to convince, even when one is speaking of things remote from their domain of knowledge. On one occasion I was speaking about Art. I had described what Art is, and its influence, and suddenly from the back of the hall a lady cried out, interrupting: “Well, and Verism, isn't that Art?”

So you see, these people were not prone to take things simply on authority. It was a question of finding a way to them; not of finding the way to them by all manner of sly devices, but out of a sense of Reality and Truthfulness. And so it came about that one had to say—not only could, but had to say—“You folk are primed with ideas of the ‘Materialist Conception of History,’ which believes that all things depend on the economic conditions, and that the spiritual life is but an ideology, spreading itself out on the basis of the economic conditions, and indeed, Marx expounded these things with clear and sharp insight. But why did all this come about? Why did he describe and believe all this? Because Marx only saw the immediate and present age in which he lived. He did not go back to former ages. Marx only based himself on the historic evolution of man since the sixteenth century, and here in deed and truth there came into the evolution of mankind an epoch during which over a large part of the world the spiritual life became an expression of the economic conditions, though not exactly as Marx describes it. True, Goetheanism is not to be derived from the economic life; but Goethe was regarded even by these people as a man remote from the economic life.

Thus we might say that this was the mistake, that which held true only for a certain space of time, notably for the most recent time of all, was generalized. Indeed, only the last four centuries could be truly understood by describing them in the sense of the Materialist Conception of History.

Now this is the important thing: We must not proceed by the mere logic of concepts; for by the logic of concepts very little can be said against the carefully and strictly guarded propositions of Karl Marx. We must proceed by the logic of life, the logic of realities, the logic of things seen. If we do so, the following will be revealed. Beneath this evolution which has taken place since the 16th century in a way that can well be interpreted through the materialist conception of history—beneath this Evolution there is a deeply significant Involution. That is to say, there is something that takes its course invisibly, supersensibly, beneath what is visible to the outer senses. This is seeking to come forth to the surface, to work its way forth out of the souls of men; and it is the very opposite of Materialism. Materialism only becomes so great and works so in order that man may rear himself up against it, in order that he may find the possibility to seek the Spiritual out of the depths of his own Being during this age of the Spiritual Soul, and thus attain Self-consciousness in the Spirit. Thus the task is not, as Karl Marx believes, simply to look at the outer reality and read from it the proposition that economic life is the real basis of ideology; but the task is rather this: We must say to ourselves, the outer reality since the 16th century does not reveal the true reality. The true reality must be sought for in the spirit; we must find, above all, that social order which will counter-balance and overcome what appears outwardly or is outwardly observable since the 16th century. The age itself compels us, not merely to observe the outer processes but to discover something that can work into them as a corrective. What Marxism has turned upside down must be set right again.

It is extraordinarily important for us to know this. In this instance the logic of realities actually reverses the mere sharp-witted dialectics of Karl Marx. Alas, much water will have yet to flow down the Rhine before a sufficient number of people will realize this necessity, to find the logic of reality, the logic of things seen. Yet it is necessary—necessary above all on account of the burning social questions.

That is the one example. For the other, we may take our start from some of the things I told you yesterday. I said: It is characteristic how men have observed, ever since Ricardo, Adam Smith and the rest, that the economic order entails this consequence: That in the social life of man together, human labor-power is used like a commodity, brought on to the market like a commodity, treated like a commodity after the laws of supply and demand. As I explained yesterday, this is the very thing that excites and acts as motive impulses in the proletarian world-conception. Now one who merely thinks in the logic of concepts, observing that this is so, will say to himself: we must therefore find an economic science, a social science, a conception of social life, which reckons with this fact. We must find the best possible answer to the question: “Seeing that labor power is a commodity, how can we protect this commodity, labor power, from exploitation?” But the question is wrongly put, wrongly put not only out of theory, but out of life itself. The putting of questions wrongly is having a destructive, devastating effect in real life today. And it will continue to do so if we do not find the way to reverse it. For here once more the thing is standing on its head and must be set upright again, we must not ask: How shall we make the social structure so that man cannot be exploited, in spite of the fact that his labor power is brought on to the market like any other commodity, according to supply and demand.

For there is an inner impulse in human evolution which works in the logic of realities, although people may not express it in these words. It corresponds to reality and we can state it thus: Even the Grecian Age, the Grecian civilization which has come to mean so much for us, is only thinkable through the fact that a large proportion of the population of Greece were slaves. Slavery, therefore, was the premise of that ancient civilization which signifies so very much to us. So much that the most excellent philosopher, Plato, considered slavery altogether as a justified and necessary thing in human civilization. But the evolution of mankind goes forward. Slavery existed in antiquity and as you know, mankind began to rebel against it, quite instinctively to rebel against men being bought and sold. Today we may say it is an axiom: The whole human being can no longer be bought and sold; and where slavery still exists, we regard it as a relic of barbarism. For Plato, it was not barbarism; it went without saying that there were slaves, just as it did for every Greek who had the Platonic mind, nay every Greek who thought in terms of the state. The slave himself thought just the same, it went without saying that men could be sold, could be put on the market according to the laws of supply and demand, though of course not like mere cattle. Then, in a masked and veiled form, the thing passed over into the milder form of slavery which we call serfdom. Serfdom lasted very long, but here again mankind revolted.

And to our own time this relic has remained. The whole human being can no longer be sold, but only part of him, namely his labor-power. And today man is revolting against this too. It is only a continuation of the repudiation of slavery, if in our time it is demanded that the buying and selling of labor-power be repudiated. Hence it lies in the natural course of human evolution for this opposition to arise against labor-power being treated as a commodity, functioning as a commodity in the social structure. The question, therefore, cannot be put in this way: How shall man be protected from exploitation?—assuming as an axiomatic premise that labor-power is a commodity. This way of thinking has become habitual since Ricardo, Adam Smith and others, and is in reality included in Karl Marx and in the proletarian conception. Today it is taken as an axiom that labor-power is a commodity. All they want to do is, in spite of its being a commodity, to protect it from exploitation, or rather to protect the worker from the exploitation of his labor-power. Their whole thought moves along these lines. More or less instinctively or—as in Marx himself—not instinctively, they take it as an axiom. Notably the ordinary run of Political Economists who occupy the professional chairs assume it is an axiom from the very outset, that labor-power is to be treated, economically speaking, on the same basis as a commodity.

In these matters countless prejudices are dominating our life today: and prejudices are disastrous above all in this sphere of life. I am well aware how many there may be, even among you, who will regard it as a strange expectation, that you should spend your time in going into all these things. But we cannot possibly study the fullness of life if we are unable to think about these things. For if we cannot do so, we become the victims of all manner of absurd suggestions. How many an illustration the last four years have provided; what have they not brought forth? One could witness the most extraordinary things: I will only give you one example. Returning again and again to Germany—and in other places it was no different—every time, one found there was some new watchword, some new piece of instruction for the true patriot. Thus, the last time we went back to Germany, once more there was a new patriotic slogan: Do not pay in cash! Deal in checks as much as possible! i.e., do not let money circulate, but use checks. People were told that this was especially patriotic, for, as they thought, this was necessary in order to help win the war. No one saw through this most obvious piece of nonsense. But it was not merely said, it was propagated with a vengeance, and the most unbelievable people acted up to it—people of whom you might have supposed that they would understand the rudiments of economics—directors of factories and industrial undertakings. They too declared: pay in check and not in ready money, that is patriotic!

That fact is, it would be patriotic, but only under one assumption, namely this: you would have to calculate on each occasion how much time you saved in dealing in checks instead of ready money. True, most people cannot perform such a reckoning, but there are those who can. Then you would have to add up all the time that was saved, and come up and say: I have been paying my accounts in checks and have saved so much time, I want to spend it usefully; please give me a job! Only if you did so would it be a real saving. But of course they did not do so, nor did it ever occur to them that the thing would only have a patriotic importance on economic grounds on this assumption. Such nonsense was talked during the last four and a half years to an appalling extent. The most unbelievably dilettante propositions were realized. Impossibilities became realities, because of the utter ignorance of people—even of those who gave out such instructions—as to the real connections in this domain of life.

Now with respect to the questions I have just raised, the point is this: It must be the very aim of our investigations to find out—How shall we shape the social structure, the social life of man together, so as to loosen and free the objective commodity, the goods, the product, from the labor-power? This must be the point, my dear friends, in all our economic endeavors. The product should be brought onto the market and circulated in such a way that the labor-power is loosed and freed from it. This is the problem in economics that we must solve. If we start with the axiom that the labor-power is crystallized into the commodity and inseparable from it, we begin by eclipsing the essential problem and then we put things upside-down. We fail to notice the most important question—the question on which, in the realm of political economy, the fortunes and misfortunes of the civilized world will depend. How shall the objective commodity, the goods, the product, be loosed and severed from the labor-power, so that the latter may no longer be a commodity? For this can be done if we believe in that three-folding of the social order which I have explained to you, if we make our institutions accordingly. This is the way to separate from the labor-power of man the objective commodities, the goods, which are, after all, loosed and separated from the human being.

It must be admitted, my dear friends, that we find little understanding as yet for these things, derived as they are from the realities. In 1905 I published my essay on “Theosophy and the Social Question,” in the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis. I then drew attention to the first and foremost principle which must be maintained in order to sever the product from the labor. Here alone, I said, could we find salvation in the social question, and I emphasized that this question depends on our thinking rightly about production and consumption. Today men are thinking altogether on the lines of Production. We must change the direction of our thought. The whole question must be diverted from Production to Consumption. In detail, one had occasion to give many a piece of advice: but through the inadequate conditions and other insufficiencies, such advice could not really take effect, as one experienced—unhappily—in many cases. And it is so indeed; the men of today, through their faith in certain logical conclusions, which they mistake for real conclusions, have no sense for the need of looking at the Realities. But in the social domain above all it is only the Reality which can teach us the right way to put our questions. Of course people will say to you: Do you not see that it is necessary for labor to be done if commodities are to be produced? That is so indeed. Logically, commodities are the result of labor. But Reality is a very different thing from Logic.

I have explained this to our friends again and again from another aspect. Look at the thought of the Darwinian Materialists. I remember vividly the first occasion—it was in the Munich group—when I tried to make this clear to our friends. Imagine a real, thorough-going follower of Haeckel. He thinks that man has arisen from an apelike beast. Well, let him as a scientist form the concept of an ape-like animal and then let him form the concept of Man. If as yet no man existed and he only had the concept of the ape-like animal, he would certainly never be able to “catch,” out of this concept of the animal, the concept Man. He only believes what [in?] the ape-like creature, because the one proceeded out of the other in reality. Thus in real life men do after all distinguish between the logic of pure concepts and ideas and the logic of things seen. But this distinction must be applied through and through; otherwise we shall never gain an answer to the social and political questions, such as is necessary for the present and the immediate future. If we will not turn to that realistic thinking which I have explained to you once more today, we shall never come to the Goetheanic principle in public life. And that the Goetheanic principle shall enter into the world, this we desired to signalize by erecting, upon this hill, a “Goetheanum.”

In humorous vein, I would advise you to read the huge advertisement that appeared on the last page of today Basler Nachrichten, calling on everyone to do all in his power for the greatest day in world-history which is now about to dawn, by founding a “Wilsoneanum.” True, as yet, it is only an advertisement, and I only mention it in a jocular spirit. Nevertheless, in the souls of men, to say the least of it, the “Wilsoneanum” is being founded pretty intensely at the present moment.

As I said a short while ago, it has indeed a certain meaning that there is now a Goetheanum standing here. I called it a piece of “negative cowardice.” The opposite of cowardice was to come to expression in this action. And it is indeed the case, my dear friends, events are coming in the future—though this advertisement is only an amusing prelude—events are coming which will seem to justify this prophetic action which is being made out of the spirit of a certain world-conception. Though we need not take the half-page advertisement for a “Wilsoneanum” seriously, it is well for us to know that Wilsoniana will indeed be founded. Therefore a Goetheanum was to stand here as a kind of protest in advance.

My dear friends,

In part of yesterday's lecture I took my start from an essay by Berdiayeff, an essay based on the prejudice which we might describe as an unqualified belief in modern science and learning. This essay, however, also records a remarkable fact, intelligible only through the contrast between the logic of the intellect (which is of course the logic of modern science) and the logic of realities. Berdiayeff points out that Bolshevism has appointed Avenarius, Mach and other noted positivists, so to speak, as its official philosophers. I may add explicitly that this essay was written as long ago as 1908. It is a remarkable thing—intelligible only on our spiritual-scientific basis—to find in the work of this Russian author a judgment (no matter what our attitude to these things may be), most in agreement with the present time, or perhaps I should rather say, a judgment still applicable to the present time. And it may be worthwhile for you to know that Mach and Avenarius were already spoken of as official philosophers of the Bolsheviks at a time when—I hope I am making no undue presumptions—when a considerable number possibly even of this audience had not the remotest idea what Bolshevism is. For a large part of mankind in Western and Middle Europe have only been aware of the existence of Bolshevism for a very short time, whereas in fact it is a very old phenomenon.

I now want to add something more to the studies we have recently pursued. I was anxious above all to show you how the social impulses of the present time are to be judged and considered in the light of Spiritual Science. One thing we emphasized especially:—We must not give ourselves up to the simple belief that the social impulses are to be conceived in a uniform way over the whole world. It will cloud and mislead all our thoughts and judgments about the social question if we do not take into account that human communities throughout the civilized world are differentiated. We must avoid the error into which men fall when they say, of the social question, “This or that holds good; human society must be ordered thus and thus!” Rather must we put this question thus:—What is the nature of the forces in Eastern Humanity; what is the nature of the forces in Western Humanity; and what is the nature in the Humanity living the midst between the two? What is the nature in each case of the forces leading to the social demands of the age? We have already characterized in manifold ways, both from the external symptoms and from the inner occult standpoint, the nature of this differentiation between Western Humanity, Middle Humanity, and Eastern Humanity; and observe that in the latter we include the European East, namely Russia. We have already characterized how these differentiations are to be conceived. Without a knowledge of them it is altogether impossible to think fruitfully about the social question.

Now let us ask ourselves (we have often touched upon this question, but today we will bring out certain other details),—let us ask ourselves what is the fundamental quality of soul, the fundamental and decisive quality which is brought out in the age that began in the fifteenth century and that will last, as I told you, on into the third millennium? This fundamental quality which has scarcely yet shown itself in its true form, but only in its first beginning—the fundamental quality which is evolving and will evolve ever more and more—is that of human Intelligence—Intelligence as a property of the soul. Thus in the course of this epoch man will more and more be called upon to judge about all things out of his own Intelligence and notably about social, scientific and religious matters, for indeed, the religious, the scientific, and the social impulses do in a certain sense exhaustively describe the range of human life.

Now perhaps this conception of the Intelligent being of Man, which we must necessarily awaken in ourselves, will come to you more easily if you realize the following. Of the fourth Post-Atlantean Age it cannot be said in the same sense as of the present time, that man as a personality wished to establish himself purely on the ground of the intelligence. I brought this out very clearly in my book The Riddles of Philosophy in regard to philosophic thought. In the fourth Post-Atlantean Age, ending in the fifteenth century A.D., it was not necessary for man to make use of the intelligence in a personal way. With their perceptions of the environment, with their other relationships in life to the world, the concepts, the ideas, that is to say the intelligent element, also flowed into the human being just as colors and sounds enter the human being in perception. Notably for the Greeks, the intelligent-content was a Perception; and it was so also for the Romans.

For the man of modern time, since the fifteenth century, the outcome of intellectual activity can no longer be a perception. The intellectual element is left out of the world of perceptions. Man no longer receives the concepts and ideas at one and the same time with the perceptions. It is an entire error to imagine that this great change did not take place at the turn of the fifteenth century. This kind of error, this inability to distinguish, has indeed been perceived by some people even in the ordinary outer life. Thus a European, as we can easily realize, is apt to see all Japanese exactly alike. Although they are just as different from one another as Europeans are, yet he does not distinguish them. So too, modern learning does not distinguish between the several epochs, but imagines them all alike. But that is not the case. On the contrary, a mighty change took place, for instance at the turn of the fifteenth century when men ceased to perceive the concepts at one and the same time with the perception;—when they began really to have to work for their concepts. For the man of the present day has to bring forth, elaborate, the concepts out of his own personality. We are only in the initial states of it. It will become more and more so.

Now the man of the West, the Middle and the East are in the highest degree differentiated, especially in regard to this development of the intelligence. And since the theoretic demands of the Proletariat today, as is natural in the fifth Post-Atlantean Age, the Age of the Spiritual Soul,—since these demands are brought forward as intelligent demands, it is necessary to consider the relationships and differentiations of the intelligent being of the human soul over the face of the earth. It is necessary to consider it also in relation to the social impulses.

The significance of these things is underestimated because they still work today so largely in the subconscious. Man with his easy-going thought is not anxious to make clear distinctions in clear consciousness. But every man has an inner man within him, raying forth into his consciousness only to a certain extent. And this inner man makes very clear and sharp distinctions, distinctions for example as between the Western Man, the Middle Man, and the Eastern Man, according to his point of view, according as to whether he himself is a Western, a Middle, or an Eastern Man.

I am not now referring to the single individuality as such, I mean that in man which belongs to his nationality. I beg you always to observe this distinction. Of course the single individual rises out of the national element. Of course there are men today in whom the national element works scarcely at all. There are those who systematically try to be pure human beings without letting the national quality determine them. But insofar as it does work in them, it comes to expression in the varied ways which we have already characterized in these lectures. Today we will consider it once more from certain points of view and in relation to the social question.

In effect, whenever the social question emerges, when anything emerges which depends not only on the individual human being but on the community, the qualities of the Nation, Folk or People will always come into account. The member, let us say, of the British Nation or the member of the German People or the inhabitant of the Russian Earth (I purposely distinguish them just in this way), these three as individuals may, if you will, have just the same judgments. But the English, the German and the Russian political or social structure cannot be the same. They must be differentiated. For here the community comes into account. We are, therefore, calling into question not so much the individual relationship of man to man, but that which works from people to people, or differentiates the one nation from another. Again and again I must sharply emphasize this fact, for partly with good intentions and partly out of malice these things which I bring forward are again and again misunderstood.

Take one thing for example. I beg you to take these things “sine ira” quite objectively. They are not meant as criticizing but only as an indication of the facts. I beg you therefore to take them without any sympathies or antipathies. Let us consider a man of Mid-Europe, who observe[s] the life of the English-speaking people and on the other side the life of the Russian-speaking people; he observes them as they come to expression in the characteristic ways of thinking of these peoples—once more then, not of the individual human beings but of the peoples as such. Consciously, the Middle European may pass all kinds of judgments. Needless to say, nowadays a man will say this or that according to public opinion, which is always equivalent to private indolence.

That may be so, but the inner man, the inner Mid-European man, looking to the West, to the English-speaking people, and contemplating the nation as it expressed itself politically and socially—though he need not bring it to his consciousness at all—will always pass the judgment, “Philistines!” And when he looks across to Russia, he will say “Bohemians!” Of course that is somewhat radically spoken. And he himself will hear from left and right the answer:—“You may call us Philistines, you may call us Bohemians, but you—you are a Pedant!” Certainly that may be so, that again is judging from another point of view. But these things are more of a reality than one imagines, and they must be derived from the very depths of human evolution.

Now the peculiar thing is this. Within the English-speaking population the Intelligence is instinctive. It works instinctively. It is a new instinct that has arisen in the evolution of mankind; the instinct to think intelligently. The very thing the spiritual soul will have to educate, the Intelligence, is practiced instinctively by the English-speaking people. The English people has a native talent for the instinctive exercise of the intelligence.

The Russian people differs from the English as the North Pole from the South (or I might even say as the North Pole from the Equator), with respect to this impulse of the intelligent being in man. In Middle Europe, as I have said before now, men do not have the intelligence instinctively; they must be brought up to it. The intelligence must be trained and developed in them. That is the tremendous difference. In England and America the intelligence is instinctive. It has all the qualities of an instinct. In Mid-Europe nothing of intelligence is born in one. One must be trained brought up to it. It must be grasped in the becoming, in the development of man. In Russia it is so, that men even argue with one another as to what the intelligence really is (I could refer to many manifestations of this in literature; you must not think that I construct these things myself).

According to many statements by Russians with real insight, what they call the intelligence is something quite different from what is called so in Mid-Europe, let alone in England. In Russia an intelligent man is not one who has studied this and that. Whom do we call here the Intellectuals (for this will surely have some relation to the intelligence)? We call the “Intellectuals” those who have studied, who have made this or that subject their own, and have thus trained themselves in thought. As I said, in Western Europe and America the Intelligence is even a native quality, born in them. But we shall not permit ourselves to exclude from the Intelligentsia the businessman, the civil servant, or a member of any one of the liberal professions. But the Russian will do so most decidedly. He will not so easily reckon as a “man of intelligence” a businessman, a civil servant, or a member of one of the liberal professions. No, among the Russians a man of Intelligence must be a man who is awake, who has attained a certain self-consciousness. The civil servant who has studied much, who even has a judgment on many things, need not be an enlightened man. But the workman who thinks about his connection with the social order, who is awake as to his relation to Society, he is a man of Intelligence. In Russia it is very significant; one is even obliged to apply the word intelligence in quite a different sense. For, you see, whereas in the West the intelligence is instinctive, born in one, and in the Middle one is trained to it, or at any rate it is evolved in one, in the East it is treated as something that is certainly not born in one—nor can one merely be trained to it. It is not to be evolved quite as easily as that. It is something that awakens from out of a certain depth within the human soul. Man awakens to intelligence. This fact has been observed especially by certain members of the “Cadet Party,” who say that this faith in enlightenment of “awakening” is the very reason why a certain arrogance and conceit is to be found in the intelligentsia of Russia, despite all their other qualities of humility.

The fact is that this intelligence in Russia has a very special part to play in the evolution of mankind. If you do not let yourselves be deceived, if you do not give yourselves up to illusions of external symptoms, but go to the heart of the matter, then—however insignificant the Russians' intelligence may appear to you in this or that Russian according to your Western of Mid-European ideas, you will recognize the following. You will say:—“This intelligence is being preserved and guarded from all instinctive qualities.” Such indeed is the idea of the Russian; the intelligence must not be corrupted by any kind of human instinct, nor must we imagine that anything worth mentioning has been attained with all the intellectuality to which we train and educate ourselves. The Russian—unconsciously, needless to say—wants to preserve and keep the intelligence until the coming of the sixth Post-Atlantean Age, which is his age. So that when that time comes, he shall not reach down with his intelligence into human instincts, but carry it upward into the region where the Spirit-Self will blossom forth. Whereas the English-speaking people let the intelligence sink down into the instincts, the Russian desires above all to preserve and protect it. At all costs he will not let it go down into the instincts. He wants to nurse and cherish it, little as it may be today, so as to keep it for the coming Age, when the Spirit-Self—the purely spiritual—shall become permeated with it.

When we regard the matter thus in its foundations, my dear friends, then even such a thing as with unbiased judgment we must criticize root and branch, will appear as arising out of a certain necessity in human evolution.

As I said, Russians themselves—Russians with insight who characterize these things—discover quite rightly that the Russian intelligence has a two-fold basis which lies inherent in its evolution. Namely it has received the configuration, the character it has today, through the fact that the Russian who has evolved intelligence and who claims to be a wide-awake and enlightened man, has been suppressed by the power of the police. He has had to defend himself, to the point of martyrdom, against the violence of the police. As I said, we may well condemn this; but we must also reach a clear and unclouded judgment. The specific character of this Russian Intelligence, seeking to preserve itself for future spiritual impulses of mankind, is absolutely conditioned on the one hand by the police suppression by which it has been tortured and persecuted. And on the other hand, in a perfectly natural way—as Russian authors themselves bring out again and again—this Russian intelligence (just because it wants to preserve itself for future ages), is today a thing remote from the world. It does not easily come to grips with life. It is directed to quite other things than are immediately pulsating through the world. We may say therefore that in this respect too the Russian life of Soul is the very opposite of what we find in the English-speaking population. In the West, we may say, the intelligence is police-protected; in the East it is challenged and persecuted by the police. One man may prefer the one, another may prefer the other alternative. The point here is simply to characterize the facts. In the West, as I said, the intelligence is protected, its peculiar character is meant to flow into the outer life; it has to be inherent everywhere in the social structure. In the West it is the proper thing for men to take part through their intelligence in the social structure and the like. In Russia, no matter whether it be by the Czar or Lenin, the intelligence is suppressed by the police, and will continue so for a long time to come. Indeed, perhaps the very nerve and strength of it lies in the fact that it is suppressed by the police. We can put these things together, my dear friends, in a pretty epigrammatic way, and yet correctly. One can say, for instance—In Russia the intelligence is persecuted; in Mid-Europe it is tamed; and in the West it is born tame.

If we make this division, this differentiating, then—strange as the words may sound—we are hitting the nail on the head. In England and America, with respect to the Constitution, with respect to external politics, nay even with respect to the social structure, the intelligence is “born” tame. In Mid-Europe it is tamed. In the East where it would like to run about at random, it is persecuted.

These are the things that must be seen if we would see realities instead of entering into them in a merely chaotic way which can never lead to any real insight.

Now the point is this: On the one hand human beings are differentiated in this way, notably with regard to the intelligence, inasmuch as the Nation or Folk is working in them. They are differentiated as I have indicated often and in different directions, and am indicating again from a certain point of view today. On the other hand while, in the age of the Spiritual Soul this differentiation must be clearly seen, we must find at the same time the possibility to transcend it. There are two ways to transcend these things in real life. In the first place by learning to know them. So long as we only declaim from general abstract points of view that this or that is the true social standpoint, so long as we have no knowledge of the differentiations of mankind, all our talk is valueless. Insight into these things, that is the one thing of importance. The other is that we should still be able in a certain way to rise out of these things with human consciousness and experience. In practice we must reckon with the differentiations. We must not imagine that men are the same over the whole earth, or that the social question can be solved in the same way over the whole Earth. We must know that the social question has to be solved in different ways. Out of the impulses in the different peoples it is seeking to solve itself in different ways.

But this, my dear friends, is only possible on a foundation such as is provided here, by Spiritual Science. For if you have some more or less chaotic—or even harmonious and consistent—social idea, how can you apply it, my dear friends? You can only apply it one-sidedly. You may have the most beautiful ideas, capable of absolute proof, so that you cannot but believe that all men, all the Earth over are to be made happy and prosperous by their means. Indeed it is the very misfortune of our times that it generally has such an idea in mind. Who is there that thinks differently in our time when he confronts his audience and speaks of his political or social ideas? It is always in this style: “Social conditions are to be ordered thus and thus throughout the Earth, and with the ideas I am thinking out the whole of mankind will prosper.” This is the way men think today and indeed, on the foundations of our present habits of thought, it is scarcely possible for them to think in any other way.

But if you take the social impulse derived from Spiritual Science, which I explained to you a short while ago, you will see it has quite a different character. In fact it breaks with this habit of thought of our time. I said, the point is not to have some uniform social ideal, but to investigate what is seeking to realize itself. Then I drew your attention to a three-fold membering of social life, which has hitherto been gathered up chaotically into the one-fold State. Today you will always see one Cabinet, one Parliament. Indeed, it seems an ideal for the people of today to gather everything together chaotically into a single Parliament. But as I said, the reality of things is tending to hold apart what is here being concentrated into one. The spiritual life (including judicial—I do not mean general administration, but the administration of civil and criminal law) constitutes one member by itself. The economic life a second member; and the life that regulates the two, constitutes the third—general administration, public security, and the like. These three should confront one another just as independent States do today. They should deal with one another through their representatives, ordering their mutual relationships, but in themselves they should enjoy independent sovereignty.

Let what I am saying be reviewed and criticized and utterly condemned. One will be criticizing not a theory but something that will be actualized in the next forty or fifty years. And this three-folding alone will make it possible for you to reckon once more with the differentiations of mankind. For if you only have a one-fold State you must force it upon all humanity, as though you would put the same coat on a small, a medium, and a very tall man (take the magnitude only for the sake of illustration, I do not mean to describe the nations as great or small). But in this three-foldness there is an inherent universality. For the social structure of the West will take shape in such a way that the life of administration, the constitution, the general regulation of public life, public security in the widest sense, will preponderate. The other two will be to some extent subordinate, dependent on this one. In other regions of the Earth, it will be again different. Once more, one of the three will predominate and the other two will be more or less subordinate. With a threefold conception you have the possibility to find, in your own view of things, the differentiation of realities. A unitary idea you must extend over the whole Earth, but of a thing inherently threefold you can say: “In the West the one is predominant; in the Middle the second is predominant; and in the East the third is predominant.” Thus what you find as the ideal of the social structure will be differentiated over the face of the Earth. This is the fundamental difference of the view, here presented out of Spiritual Science, from other views. This view is applicable to realities from the very outset, because it can be differentiated within itself and applied in a differentiated way to the realities of life. Such is the difference between an abstract and a concrete view of things. An abstract theory consists of so many concepts of which one believes that happiness will come. A concrete view is one of which one knows: It in itself is such that the one can grow and develop in the one case, the second in another, the third in a third. The first or second or third will be applicable to the corresponding outer conditions. This is what distinguishes a view of realities from all dogmatism. Dogmatism swears by dogmas, and dogmas can only maintain their sway by tyrannizing over realities. A conception of reality is like the reality itself; it is inherently a living thing. Like the human or any other organism it is mobile and alive, not fixed and rigid.

So is a real conception inherently living, growing or developing, now in one direction, now in another. This difference of a conception of reality from dogmatism—this you must understand, my dear friends, for it will help you most of all to change the habits of thought within you, which change is so badly needed by the men of today and from which they are yet so far removed—far more than they know.

Moreover what I am now telling you is connected in its deepest being with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. You see, for the ordinary science of today man himself is a unity. The anatomist, the physiologist studies the brain, the sense organs, nerves, liver, spleen and heart. For him they are organs placed in a single unitary organism. We do not do so. We distinguish the head man, or nerves-and-senses man, from the chest man, or man of breathing and blood circulation, and lastly from the metabolic man, or man of the extremities, or as we might also say muscular man. We distinguish, as you know, a threefold man who lives in the world. Just because it does not hold fast abstractly to the one-fold man, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science discovers that social organism in which man as a three-fold being is contained. For, my dear friends, the guiding thread is always the Anthroposophical membering of man. After all, these three members themselves are, more or less, the outer symbols of his being which man carries with him. For he himself is rooted in all the worlds. We shall find in this three-folding of man once more a guiding thread to envisage the differentiation of humanity over the Earth.

Now that I shall speak plainly about these things I beg you once more to take them sine ire, for I am merely describing. I am not criticizing nor am I saying anything to detract from the one side or to find favor with the other side in any way. Let us begin with the Russian man, the Eastern European man. We simply cannot study him if we only have in mind the present-day anatomy, physiology or psychology. We can only study him if we bear in mind the threefold man, whose nature I have indicated in broad outlines in my book The Riddles of the Soul. For if we consider the peculiar characteristics of the Russian Soul, and generally of the Russian people of today—I beg you to observe once more, the Russian people of today—then we shall have to say: In Russia (may our Russian friends forgive me, but it is true) in Russia the head man is at home. Let our Russian friends forgive me, for they themselves do not believe it, but they are making a mistake. They no doubt will say: In Russia the heart-man is at home, and the head, of all things, is not so prominent. But you can only make such a statement if you do not study Spiritual Science properly. For the Russian head-culture appears predominantly as a culture of the heart, just because—if I may put it tritely—the Russian has his heart in his head. That is to say, his heart works so strongly that it works up towards his head, crosses his whole Intelligence, permeates everything. It is the working of the heart upon the head, upon the concepts and ideas, which configures the heart upon the head, upon the concepts and ideas, which configures the whole of the East-European culture.

And once more, I pray that the mid-European will not take offence, but it simply is so: Their essential characteristic—and this describes the whole of the mid-European culture—is that their head is perpetually falling into their chest, while on the other hand the abdomen or the extremities are perpetually being drawn up into the heart. That is the essential thing in mid-European man. Hence it is so frightfully hard for him to find his bearings, for he is neither at the one end nor at the other. I described this when I said recently that at the Guardian of the Threshold the mid-European man experiences above all a wavering, a tottering uncertainty and doubt.

Once again, may our West European friends not be offended with me (for I see you are already guessing what is left for them) their culture is paramountly an abdominal, a muscular culture. That is their peculiarity—in the nation, not in the single man as such. All that proceeds from the culture of the muscles works strongly even into the head. Hence the instinctive quality of their intelligence. Hence too it is there that we find the origin of muscular culture in the modern sense—games, sports, athletics and so forth. Indeed, all that I am saying—you will find its evidence everywhere in external life if only you are willing, if only you are prepared to look at the facts objectively. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science will only give you the guiding thread to observe the facts of life. In the Russian it is so that his heart fumes up into his head. In the English-speaking people the abdomen fumes up into the head—but not only so, the head reacts in turn upon the power body and directs it. It is very important to consider these things. We need not always express them so radically as we do in our own circle, my dear friends. After all, here we understand one another; we have after all a certain measure of good will one to another. We know how to take these things objectively, not with sympathies and antipathies.

Thus you see, we must envisage the threefold man; we must really know that man is a threefold being, a being after the pattern of the Trinity even when we are studying his physiological and psychological differentiations. And this is the essential thing; men must have an interest in one another not merely as the parson preaches it, but a real interest holding sway between man and man, which can after all only be founded on a real insight. It remains as empty abstraction if you say: “I love all men.” To enter into the other human beings with understanding, that is the thing needful, likewise it is necessary to enter into the different communities of men with understanding, to have a true judgment about them and about their social structure. And this can only be the case when one knows the threefold nature of man. Unless you know what is the predominant bodily feature in a community of men, you cannot really know them. To gain a real insight you must have some guiding thread, otherwise you will confuse and muddle things together. That is the point. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is a thing that reckons with reality. Hence it is a thing that men often find unpleasant, for as a result of certain prejudice men do not want to be seen through, not even in private life. They find it dreadfully unpleasant to be seen through. We may almost say that of any ten men, at least nine will be your enemies if you really see through them. In one way or another they will become your enemies. Men do not like being seen through, even when it happens in the light that is communicated here, my dear friends, so that it may serve to enhance the love of humanity. For the abstract love of humanity (I have often used this comparison), is like the warmth that the stove ought to develop. You talk to it so: “You are a stove. It is your duty as a stove to warm the room.” But if you do not stoke it, all your moral talk is useless. So it is with all the Sunday afternoon addresses. However much you preach at men “love and love again,” if you do not provide the fuel whereby men and communities of men are known and understood, all your preaching is worthless. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is fuel to kindle the right interest of man in man—the real development of human love. Even the historic facts, symptomatically as I unfolded them here a short while ago, the important historic facts underlying the social impulses of today—even these, my dear friends, can only be brought home to human insight from the standpoint of a conception of realities.

Bear in mind all that we have already said of the differentiations of the Western, the Middle, and the Eastern World. It will flow into your souls still more abundantly if with its help you now observe these worlds with understanding. And then perhaps we may ask: How is it—apart from what we have already said—how is it that the Russian intelligence can preserve itself for future time? It needs, as it were, a greater strength to protect the intelligence from the encroaching instincts and the like than it requires to exercise the native instinctive intelligence. It needs a greater strength. And this too has been attained by certain arrangements, if I may call them so, in the evolution of Occidental Humanity. Take only this one circumstance.

Russia has in many respects been held aloof from the currents and movements of civilized life that have taken their course in the West. I once described to you from another point of view this damming up, this congestion of a civilization of former ages towards the East. See for instance how the division of the Church took place in the ninth century and was completed in the tenth. An earlier form of Christianity was driven back towards the East, there to remain stationary and conservative. Thus we may say: A certain condition, which was spread over the whole of Christendom in early centuries, has been driven Eastward and has there remained stationary. Meanwhile the West has continued to evolve its Christianity. Thus something was pushed back towards the East. That on the one side, while on the other side, into the same East, something was pushed forward—namely the Tartar element and all that came from Asia, from Eastward of the Russian East. All this is only an expression of the fact that on the Russian earth earlier forces of humanity have been congested and have received into themselves the human element that came from Asia—in a more youthful condition than the West European humanity.

Or again, consider the mid-European civilization in its dependence on Protestantism—a dependence far greater than is generally thought. At bottom the whole civilization of mid-Europe is configured out of the impulse of Protestantism. I do not mean this or that religious creed, I mean the impulse of Protestantism. Protestantism itself, for one who regards things from a higher vantage point is but a symptom. The essential thing is the spiritual impulse that is working in it. Take all the science and scholarship that is carried on in Middle Europe, the whole form of its development is influenced by Protestantism. Without Protestantism the mid-European culture is utterly unthinkable.

Now what appears so predominant at one place is present differently, in a different relationship to life, at another. It is as I showed you just now when I spoke of the social tasks of Anthroposophy which must be applied in differentiated ways. What has Protestantism been in Middle Europe? One might say that Protestantism gave the first impetus to man's supporting himself on his own Intelligent Being. The mid-European intelligence, of which I said that it has to be trained and educated, is very closely connected with Protestantism. Even the Catholic action which has arisen against Protestantism is, rightly considered, Protestant in character, except when it happens to proceed from the Jesuits, who have consciously, deliberately held back the impulse that came through Protestantism. This inner impulse working through Protestantism works, if I may put it so, in its purest essence in mid-Europe. For how did it work in Western Europe? Study the historic facts in the proper symptomatic way and you will find:—the working of Protestantism in Western Europe and in America corresponds as a matter of course to the inborn Intelligent Instinct. Indeed it comes to expression more in the political than in the religious life. It works itself out as a perfect matter of course. It permeates everything. It does not need a special statement or constitution. Albeit here and there reformist hearts were kindled into flame, it does not need to bring forth so shattering a Reformation as took place in Middle Europe. In the West it is there as a matter of course. At this point we might even say: The modern Western man is born as a Protestant. The Mid-European discusses and argues as a Protestant. In Middle Europe, Protestantism above all calls forth all the discussions about the things of intelligence. Here it is not inborn. And the Russian—as a Russian—absolutely rejects Protestantism; he will have nothing to do with it. Indeed, as a Russian he simply cannot do with it. Russianism and Protestantism are incompatibles.

What I am now saying comes to expression not only in the religious confessions—no, not by any means. It comes to expression in the receiving of every kind of cultural impulse. Take Marxism for example. You can trace its course in the Western countries. There it is received from the very outset as a straightforward protest against the old conditions of property and the like. In the Middle Countries there has to be much discussion on those things, and much argument and bickering and doubt, much useless talk. All this arises out of the character of the Middle Countries. And in Eastern Europe Marxism takes on the strangest forms. There it must first be completely transformed. Take the Marxism of Eastern Europe, you will find it permeated, tinged through and through by the spirit of Russian Orthodoxy. Not in its ideas, but in the way the Russian relates himself to it, Marxism in Russia bears the stamp of Orthodox Faith.

All this, my dear friends, is only to draw your attention to the need of looking beyond the externals and seeing the true inwardness of things. Much will be gained if you accustom yourselves to see in relation to many things of life—the words as they are used today are to a great extent “disused coinage.”

What people think according to the customary usage of words is never really in accordance with reality: we must everywhere look deeper. Protestantism, for instance, defined in the usual way according to present-day habits of thought, no longer expresses a reality. We must conceive it in such a way as to recognize how it appears in Marxism, or in politics generally, or even in science. Then we shall have something that accords with the reality. So radically is it necessary for us to strive to get beyond the mere semblance of words and concepts, and to take hold of real life. Everything depends on this, my dear friends; and on this, above all, depends the right conception of the most important impulse of the present time, which is the social impulse. On this depends a true judgment of the facts of our time. Just because men are so unaccustomed to look at the realities, they judge of the conditions of our time in such distorted ways. Because they are so far removed from real conceptions, they keep on asking about guilt and innocence in relation to the recent war-catastrophe; whereas this question about guilt and innocence as such has not the slightest meaning. I told you here some considerable time ago how these things lay inherent in world-impulses. Just as the map which I sketched before you here is being realized in fact today, so are the other things too on the point of realization. They will indeed be realized, precisely as they were here described, my dear friends. We must have a sense for the reality and not adhere to the empty husks of words. True, the latter must often be used for purposes of description, but we must not adhere to them, must not stop short at them. Thus we must also see from a standpoint of reality the judgment, formed by the Entente and the Americans, which is now being passed upon the Middle Countries. I have already said: When this catastrophe of War began, I heard from many quarters criticisms “root and branch” of what the Middle Countries were then doing. Today the people who were criticizing them then are heard far less in criticism of what in truth is a policy of violence, and all the rest of it. Truth to tell, there would be sufficient cause for a similarly harsh judgment in this case. I think I have never spoken to protect any personalities; I have simply characterized the facts and conditions. Hence it is absolutely not my task, in any way to defend personalities whose characters have been unveiled in the most recent time. But, my dear friends, whether the unqualified deification of Wilsonism for example, and of all that is connected with it, lies less inherent in the tendency to some form of idolatry than the Ludendorff-worship which they evolved in the Middle Countries (and which I described as a special chapter in social psychiatry)—that is a question, after all, which would have to be decided with great care. We cannot pass it over quite so lightly.

Considering the matter, however, from another point of view I once said to you here, my dear friends, that when one person rails at another, and says hard things, the cause is not always—indeed in the rarest cases—to be found in the other person. He may of course be a bad sort; but this badness of his is, for anyone who observes reality objectively, the thing that least of all calls forth the abuse. No, for the most part the cause of the abuse is a need to abuse. And this need of abuse seeks an object, it wants to let itself go. And it seeks to bring its thoughts into such a form that they appear to be justified in the soul of the abusing party. So it is often in the individual intercourse of men with one another. But in the large affairs of the world it is no different; only here we must bear in mind that there are also deeper reasons. You see, it is perfectly intelligible and natural for people in the Entente and American countries now to criticize and condemn root and branch not only individual potentates but the whole population of the Middle Countries, and to say all manner of things in this direction. We can well understand it for, my dear friends, what would the policy of the Entente countries in these weeks look like, if the people [in] those countries were to say: “The people in the Middle Countries are not so bad after all, at bottom they are only human beings, they need only develop the better aspects of their nature, then they are quite alright.” Yes, if they were to say that, it would agree very badly with the policy they are now pursuing. In the world, my dear friends, one must say the things that justify one's action.

We must know how things proceed out of realities. That is a deeper way of seeing things. It goes without saying that the entire public opinion of the Entente Countries is as it is, not because it is true but in order to justify their own attitude; just as it often happens when one man rails against another, he does so, not because the man he rails against is such or such, but because he has a need to rail against something and wants to let it out. Yes it really is necessary to see things differently than men are wont to see them. And this is the whole point: to take hold of Spiritual Science in the inmost foundations of one's soul is in many respects a very different thing from what is conceived, even by many who call themselves adherents of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Outwardly, abstractly considered—and we come now to a different chapter—one might believe that the socialism, the social demands of the present day proceed from social impulses. I described the other day how man oscillates between social and anti-social impulses or instincts. An abstract thinker would take it as a matter of course that the socialist proletarian of the present time is a product of social impulses. For it is proper, is it not, to define the social by the social. But it is not true, my dear friends. One who considers the proletarian socialism of the present day in its reality knows well that socialism as it appears in the Marxism of today is an anti-social phenomenon, a product of anti-social impulses. Such is the difference between abstract definition, abstract thinking, and realistic thinking. Ask yourselves: What is the driving force in those who are seeking to realize socialism in the direction to which I am referring? Are they being driven by social instincts? No, by anti-social instincts. I showed it yesterday even by external indications, by the inner structure of their formula: Proletarians of all lands, unite! That is to say: Feel hatred against other classes in order that you may feel the bond that shall unite you! There you have one of the anti-social impulses. And we might adduce very many anti-social impulses if we studied the social psychology of the present day. Such is the difference between the way of thought that is arising and evolving—that must arise and evolve and that is to be helped on by Spiritual Science—and all that lies in the current habits of thought of today.

Hence, too, the Anthroposophical standpoint which must be put forward in relation to the social question meets as yet with so much opposition. For people cannot think in accordance with realities. Above all, they cannot think in a differentiated way; and if any one does think in this way, they frequently believe that he is contradicting himself.

Important questions of the present day will only be solved by realistic thinking. I will tell you one such question, relating to what we have already spoken of. I said: the thing that is rumbling especially in proletarian minds and that constitutes a motive force in them is this: the ancient slavery has been replaced by the modern enslavement of labor, inasmuch as in the present social structure, labor is a commodity from the labor power. Indeed the threefold social structure of which I have told you already contains the impulse to free the commodity from human labor. For this threefold ordering will entail, not logical conclusions, but conclusions in reality, in the reality of things seen.

Now this question, my dear friends, is followed by another, an absolutely burning question at the present moment. You know, one of the fundamental demands of proletarian materialism with its Marxist coloring, is the socialization or nationalization of the means of production. The means of production are to be made communal property, and this would only be the beginning of communal property in general: in the land, for instance, and so forth. It is a part of the programme of the Russian Soviet Republic, which I explained to you, to socialize, or nationalize the means of production and the land. Now at this point we come to the most important subsidiary social question. Today the tendency of proletarian thinking is to make things communal property. But, my dear friends, for the most important social impulses, it makes no difference at all whether an individual or an association or the community as such is the owner. To anyone who is able to study the realities, this is clearly revealed. In relation to the individual worker, the community will be an employer or captain of industry, not a whit less bad than the individual employer. This lies in the nature of the case, it is like a law of Nature. People only fail to see it, and hence they are misled. For the real question is this: Shall all men become owners of property. That would happen, if, instead of having communal property (I cannot here explain the technique, but it is perfectly feasible), the individuals—every one of them—owned property in a just way, according to the given opportunities in any territory. Shall all become property owners? Or shall all become proletarians? That is the alternative. The proletarian thinking of the present day wants to make all men proletarians, so that the community alone would be the employer. But if we can see the reality, the very opposite will be the outcome. The three-foldness of the social structure can never be attained by making all men proletarians. The tendency of the threefold structure must really be to attain the freedom of the individual in respect of body, soul and spirit. That is not to be attained by all men becoming proletarians, but is to be attained—for every individual—if all men possess a certain basis of property.

The second thing that must be attained is a regulation of social conditions, such that before the law or constitution, before the government in fact, all men are equal: Liberty in spiritual matters; Equality in the State (for if you will, one third may continue to be called so); and Fraternity in relation to the economic life. I know well-written books which rightly emphasize that the three ideals, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity contradict one another; it is true, Equality decidedly contradicts Liberty. Very clever writers said this even in 1848 or even earlier. If we muddle everything together these things contradict one another. There must be Liberty in the spiritual and judicial domain, the domain of religion, education and jurisprudence. There must be Equality in the administration, in the government, the services of public security. There must be Fraternity in the economic domain. In the economic domain we have property, which must however be correspondingly developed in the future. In the domain of public security and administration we must have Equity or Right. In the domain of spiritual life and jurisprudence we must have Liberty. When divided into a trinity, these things are not in contradiction with one another. For here the things that contradict one another in thought are still in accordance with reality, because in the reality they are distributed to the different domains. The mere thought burrows for contradictions; but the reality lives in contradictions. We cannot grasp the reality if we cannot grasp the contradictions, follow them and deal with them in our thoughts.

So you see, Spiritual Science as here intended certainly has something to say to the most important questions of the time. Perhaps, my dear friends, a few of you will yet realize this fact, and realize moreover that the whole way we think about this Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy should be influenced by the consciousness of its relation to the more important requirements of our time.

This indeed is closely connected with the way in which, as I personally for instance must conceive, this Anthroposophical Spiritual Science movement should take its stand in the spiritual life of our time. Of course it cannot be attained all at once that our contemporaries should see these things rightly. Do not believe, my dear friends (anyone who knows me will certainly not believe), that I say these things out of any personal foolishness or vanity; but I am compelled again and again by the necessity of the facts to characterize what happens in one direction or another. It is really so—and I have shown it you on many an occasion—I myself am not at all inclined to overestimate what I can do and claim to do. I know the limitations. I am well aware of many things of which one person or another may have no inkling that I am aware. But for those who to some extent can judge me rightly in this direction, I may perhaps say how earnestly I would desire one thing (the word “desire” is not quite right, but I have no other). It is this, my dear friends, that there should be a certain sense of discrimination between what is intended here, and other things with which it is so frequently confused. How many there are still today, who seeing here or there this or that occult society—or society that calls itself occult—will not discriminate it as healthy human understanding can discriminate it, from what is here to be found. For, imperfect as it may be, here there is at least the real striving to reckon with the consciousness of the age. Look on the other hand at all the other things that are frequently considered as occult or similar movements. How do they reckon with the consciousness of the time? Look at all the Masons of low and high degree, look at all the different religious communities, this is just the antiquated thing about them, they are unable really to reckon with the consciousness of our time. Where else do we find people speaking out of the real foundations? Where do we find them speaking on the burning questions of the time in a way that really enters into modern life, that is adapted to the realities? From all the rituals and instructions of the one or the other Masonic or religious community, you will not be able to discover these things. This is what I would desire: a real sense of discrimination.

I admit, my dear friends, it is made more difficult, because owing to the historical circumstances which I once described to you, this Society was confused in the beginning with the Theosophical or with all manner of other Societies. Outwardly considered, it may have been a mistake; karmically it was justified. It would have been more worldly-wise if this Anthroposophical Society, standing entirely upon its own ground, had been founded without any relation to other societies. Outwardly conceived, it would certainly have been more wise. For all this philistinism, the bourgeoisdom of the Theosophical Society and all the antiquated stuff would not have flowed into it. Not that it has flowed into Anthroposophy; it has not. But it has entered into the life and habits of the Society. If only Anthroposophy lived rightly in our Society—which it does not do—this Society could, in a certain sense at least, be a perfect example to characterize one-third of the social structure which flows from Anthroposophy itself. I mean the spiritual third, even including the juridical sphere. For, my dear friends, the principle of human rights which should hold sway from individual to individual—this should really go without saying among Anthroposophists. I always feel it as the sharpest and bitterest breach with the spirit which should develop amongst us, when one member speaks of another in such a way that he goes outside to complain or to accuse. Here too the consciousness of right, insofar as it is included in the one third of the social structure, should develop. But we have a long way to go yet to gain an Anthroposophical Society such as is really intended, containing what it might contain out of the impulses of Anthroposophy. First of all, my dear friends, we must evolve the ear for inner truth which so few people have today. Because this sense of discrimination which should really come from without fails so to come, it is necessary for me now and then to point to the distinctive features from one point of view or another. And today, especially with regard to certain things, I would say this; What lives through me myself in this Anthroposophical Movement is distinguished from other things in one essential respect. I have always worked according to the principle which I stated in the preface to the first edition of my Theosophy, namely that I communicate nothing else than what I can communicate from my own personal experience. I communicate nothing else than what I from my own personal experience can stand for. Here at this place there is no appealing to authorities such as is cultivated so much in other quarters.

This, my dear friends, entails a certain consequence. I may truly say that the spiritual stream which is guided through the Anthroposophical Movement depends upon no other stream. It depends alone on the spirituality that is flowing through the time. Hence I am under no obligation—I beg you to take this in all earnestness—I am under obligation to no one to keep silence about anything of which I myself consider that it ought to be spoken about in our time. For one who is obliged to no man for his spiritual treasure, there is no rule of silence.

That will already give you a basis for distinguishing this movement from others. For if anyone should ever say that that which is proclaimed in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is proclaimed in any other way than in the sense of what was said in my Theosophy, namely that I myself am answering for it purely out of my own experience—if anyone should ever say this, then, if you will, he may not know the facts, or he has frequently been absent, or he has only seen them from outside. But whether it be from malice or otherwise, he is proclaiming the untruth. He, on the other hand, who says something else, let us say he alleges some “past” or a connection of this spiritual movement with another, knowing all the time the facts and circumstances here among us—he is telling lies. That is the point, my dear friends. He will either be telling the untruth through ignorance of the facts, or, knowing well the facts he will be lying. And in effect, these alternatives include all the opponents of this movement.

Hence I must emphasize again and again; I have only to keep silence concerning those things of which I knew that they cannot yet be communicated to mankind owing to its immaturity. But there is nothing on which I must keep silence in connection with anyone to whom any vow has been made, or for any such reason. Never has anything flowed into this movement that came from another side. Spiritually, this movement was never dependent on any other. The connections were always only of an external character. Perhaps, my dear friends, the time will come that you will see that it is well to remember that I sometimes say things in advance, which only afterwards become apparent in their right connection. If you have the good-will, the time may come when it will serve you well to remember the sense in which the spiritual treasure that must flow through the Anthroposophical Movement is being cultivated here.

Nevertheless there is a touchstone for anyone who is willing to distinguish this Anthroposophical Movement from other movements. There is a touchstone available today for such a movement and it is threefold. First: such a movement must show itself equal to the scientific and intellectual requirements of the time. Go through all the literature that I have produced; however imperfect in this or that detail, you will see everywhere the earnest effort to create a movement drawing not on old antiquated sources, but thoroughly at home in the scientific methods of the present time and working in full harmony with the present scientific consciousness. That is the one thing. The second is this: that such a movement has something really vital to say on the life-questions of the present time, for instance on the social question. What other movements have to say in this direction—try to compare it in its antiquatedness, in its remoteness from reality, with what this movement has to say. The third part of the touchstone is this: that such a movement can consciously explain the different religious needs of mankind to themselves—can explain them and clarify them. That is to say, it combines enlightenment concerning the religious needs of mankind with a full and actual acquaintance with realities.

Herein already, my dear friends, you can distinguish this movement from all those which provide after all no more than Sunday afternoon addresses, which can well achieve the feat of giving moral sermons and the like, but in face of the real ideas working in the present social structure, are remote from the world. A science of realities in our time must be able to speak on labor and capital and credit and the land, and all these things of the present day—in a word, on the shaping of social life—even as it can speak on the relation of man to the Divine Being, on the love of his neighbor and so forth. This is what mankind has left undone so long; to find the real connections, from the highest realms down to the immediate and concrete tasks and processes of life. This is what Theology and Theosophy in their various forms in our time have left undone and what a certain occult movement too has left undone. They talk from above downwards till they reach the point where they can say to men: Be good!—and so on in like fashion. But they are unfruitful, they are sterile, when it comes to really taking hold of the burning questions of the time. External science and scholarship can speak of these immediate things of life, but they speak in a way that is remote from realities. I showed you yesterday how estranged they are from actual life. After all, how many people are there today who know what capital is, what it is in reality? True, they know: When they have so much money in a safe that it is so much capital. But that is not to know what capital is. To know what capital is, is to know how the regulation of the social structure works with respect to certain things and persons. Just as for the single human being we must learn to know, anthroposophically, the relationships that obtain in the cycle of the blood that rhythmically regulates man's life, so must we know what is pulsating in the most varied ways in social life. But, my dear friends, present-day physiology is not even able materialistically to solve the most important questions, for they can only be solved by anthroposophical insight into the threefold man.

What, for instance, does present-day science know on one immensely important question, namely this: Purely materialistically speaking—what does thought or ideation depend on? What does the will depend on? In a certain direction? I can speak of these things today because, as I said before on another point, I have investigated them for thirty to thirty-five years. Ideation depends upon the fact that man has within him, in the course of the circulation of his blood, carbonic acid which is not yet breathed out. When carbonic acid not yet breathed out is circulating inside him, there you have the material counterpart, the material correlate of Thought. And when there is oxygen in man—oxygen not yet converted into carbonic acid, oxygen that is still on the way to transformation into carbonic acid; there, in a certain direction, you have the material correlate of the Will. Where oxygen pulsates in man—oxygen not yet entirely transformed, but fulfilling certain functions—there is the Will materially at work. And where inside the human body there is carbonic acid, not quite elaborated to the point of expulsion or out-breathing, there you have the material foundation for a Thought-form. But as to how these two poles, the Thought-pole, which we may also call the carbonic acid pole, and the Will-pole which we may also call the oxygen pole—as to how they are regulated, only a science of realities can tell. Nowhere in the books of today will you find such a truth as I have just expressed.

Because men do not train their thinking with respect to a reality like this, therefore they also fail to train it with respect to what is necessary for the man of today in the social structure. But this will have to come, my dear friends, it is necessary for our time. The social question must be made to include the question of how man, as a soul and spirit being, stands within the social structure.

All these things have been left undone. Think how different it would be if in this or that establishment the individual worker were placed, even in soul and spirit, into the whole process which the commodity he makes undergoes in the world; if he understood how he stands within the social structure through the fact that he produces just this commodity. But this can only be realized if there holds sway a real interest from man to man, so much so that in course of time there will be no true adult man or woman unable to master the most important social concepts in a real way. The time must come—it is a social need—when a man will know what capital and credit, what ready-money and checks are in their real economic effects—and these things can be known; they are not difficult, they need only be rightly attacked by those who have to teach them. The time will come when every man must know these things, just as one knows today that soup is eaten not with a fork but with a spoon. Anyone who ate his soup with a fork would be behaving ridiculously, would he not? That the man or woman who is ignorant of these other things is behaving ridiculously too—this must become the public opinion.

Then, my dear friends, the most important impulse of the present time—the social impulse—will be placed on a very different foundation.

My dear friends,

In our studies here during the last few weeks we have considered from most varied points of view the great social demand of our age. We have tried to see this requirement of the age against a spiritual-scientific background. In this way alone is it possible for us to gain a true and clear direction, realizing all that lies hidden beneath the outward demand. I shall return to this subject again tomorrow. Today I will insert a kind of interlude, continuing to some extent what we touched upon the other day, and showing how the Spiritual Science which is here represented will relate itself to the inner state of consciousness of our own time and of the near future.

At the end of the last lecture I gave you a few of the main points in this connection. I said: Anyone who has the will to apply that healthy human intelligence which has in fact evolved up till our time, in testing what is brought forward in anthroposophical Spiritual Science, will find this Spiritual Science really able to reckon with the scientific conscience, and with the whole way of thinking of the present age. And this appears so especially when we consider the social questions.

Whenever we deal with one subject or another in this Spiritual Science, we are therefore always in a position to point out that everything that is here brought forward can be subsequently tested, by anyone who wishes to do so, with the thinking—and notably with the scientific thinking—of the present time. We may even go so far as to say that a large number of the attacks to which this Spiritual Science is exposed are due to the very fact that it lends itself so evidently to subsequent corroboration by the scientific conscience of the present and of the near future. This is a fact unpleasant and uncomfortable to many people. Opposition arises just because these things are in agreement with all the scientific requirements of our age. For there is a certain antipathy in many heads, and notably in many hearts, against a spiritual knowledge of this kind. To many people it is inconvenient that something of this kind should arise, capable in all its branches of being subsequently tested and confirmed by the scientific standard of our time. But at the same time, this Spiritual Science reckons with an inner spiritual fact in human evolution at the present time, to wit, that beginning in our time, and more and more distinctly towards the future, new revelations are breaking through the veil of world-phenomena and world events. For a long time mankind has lived in ideas according purely to the senses. Whatever mankind possessed, over and above these ideas, consisted in the last resort of ancient revelations handed down from a time when they had still been endowed with an atavistic clairvoyance—when Wisdom-treasures entered into mankind by quite another path than they will enter in the future. From the Wisdom-treasures corresponding to the ages of the past, one thing and another was preserved; and this was the only wisdom which mankind possessed, and it is so to this day for many people. Indeed, it is so for the Natural Scientists of the present time. If we look more closely we shall find that it is so. But the time is long past when there was any direct and elemental Revelation of such Wisdom-treasures. A certain dimness and darkness entered the earthly evolution of mankind. Direct spiritual revelations ceased. Now, however, a time is beginning when new Revelations are breaking through into the spiritual horizon of mankind—through the veil of outward events. Hence there must be a renewal of many things in our time; in this connection especially we may point to the most important earthly event of all, the Mystery of Golgotha. True it is that the Mystery of Golgotha first gave earthly evolution its real meaning. In soul and spirit, the Earth planet would not be what it is if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place upon it. But, my dear friends, it is one thing to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha as a real event that took place, and it is another to speak of the doctrines, the so-called Christian doctrines, that have held sway about it through the centuries. Anyone who fails to see this difference will scarcely find his way into the fundamental requirements of our time.

You may take a thing of ordinary life for comparison. An event that takes place before your eyes is one thing; and what is narrated by two or three people who witnessed it is quite another. That is a familiar fact. So it is, though in a higher, spiritual sense, in this case. Nothing else has become known to man about it through the course of the centuries. But all that has been said about this spiritual event (for such is the Mystery of Golgotha, even though it took place on the physical plane) has still been said from the standpoint of an ancient Wisdom. Even the Gospels, as you may know from my Christianity as Mystical Fact, are written from the standpoint of an ancient Wisdom. That is to say: Men had certain conceptions, derived from ancient Mysteries. More generally speaking, they had certain ideas inherited from very ancient times. In the language of these ideas they clothed what had taken place on Golgotha. Now these ideas belonged to the atavistic period of humanity. To be understood at all, the Mystery of Golgotha had to be clothed in such language. But we today are living in a time when that spiritual way of looking out on the world, which was quite right in ancient times, has become antiquated. New revelations of a spiritual kind are breaking in upon us, albeit men are not yet willing to admit them. The new revelations will gradually become equal in value to the old atavistic conceptions. Hence if we would do justice to the requirements of the age we must be able to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha as a spiritual fact, in the language of the new conceptions. The Christian conceptions too will have to reckon with what is now entering into the evolution of mankind. For Christianity would otherwise remain a collection of ancient, traditional ideas. All that is living in the human being today as the living demands of the age, would pine and die away and find no nourishment if it had to content itself with the old traditional ideas. This is the fundamental requirement to which anthroposophical Spiritual Science wishes to do justice; the new revelations of the Spirit must be made intelligible, and the greatest event on Earth—the Mystery of Golgotha—must be stated in terms of these new revelations.

Now it may be asked—and the question is exceedingly important:—Who are the Beings of the Spiritual World who stand behind the revelations that are breaking newly into human history through the veil of outward phenomena? You know, my dear friends, the succession of the Hierarchies as I have described them in my writings. You know, therefore, how the so-called “Spirits of Personality” stand within the Hierarchies, within the order of the Spiritual Beings. The Spirits of Personality are one stage lower in the hierarchical order than those other Spirits among whom Jahve, for example, is included—namely, the so-called Spirits of Form.

The fact is this:—To the revelations which have come to humanity through the Spirits of Form hitherto, the revelations of the Spirits of Personality are now about to be added, albeit this is taking place as yet only in a preparatory way, not with the mighty power with which the Spirits of Form revealed themselves. If we would seek for a word to describe what the Spirits of Form really are, we can hold to the good old word “Creators.” The Biblical word “Creator” very nearly circumscribes all that we must associate with the Spirits of Form when we bear in mind their influence on man from ancient Lemurian times until today, and on into the future. (For their actions will by no means cease; they will only have to perform them as it were upon another plane.)

Bearing in mind all that we know from Spiritual Science in this direction, we can call the Spirits of Form creative Spirits. To them above all, man as he is, as earthly man, owes his existence. Now hitherto the Spirits of Personality were not creative Spirits. They were Spirits who ordered various matters, working from the spiritual realms. You may read about their activities in my Occult Science. But the time is now beginning when they will have to play their part creatively, in human evolution to begin with. Subsequently, they will also have to play a creative part in the other kingdoms. Evolution does indeed take place among the Hierarchies. The Spirits of Personality are rising to a creative activity. Indeed this points us to a very important secret in the evolution of mankind. Anyone who seeks to comprehend the evolution of mankind, not in the customary, superficial Nature-study of today, but with inner spiritual, scientific impulses of seership, knows that since the beginning of the fifth Post-Atlantean age (of which we have spoken recently from so many points of view) something has begun to die out in man. And with this death—this gradual maiming of something in our human nature—all our progress even in soul and spirit is fundamentally connected.

We, my dear friends, are no longer living human beings, if I may put it bluntly, in the same sense as were the human beings of centuries or thousands of years ago. They had a stronger inner vitality, a stronger force proceeding simply from their bodily nature. In ordinary life man is only aware of death when it appears in its most radical form, in the cessation of earthly life. But as you know from your studies of Spiritual Science, something is continually dying in us, and if this were not so we should have no consciousness. Consciousness is connected with the death of something in our nature. Now this death-process is stronger within us than it was in the first centuries A.D. or in the pre-Christian centuries. That in man which proceeded from the Spirits of Form as the creative Spirits, is beginning to die, if I may put it so, with some intensity a new creative principle must now be instilled into human nature—a creative principle which must now take its start from the Spiritual. The fact is that from our age onwards, creative forces are coming towards us out of the Spirit provided we ourselves do not resist their entry. These are creative forces Spiritual Science seeks to understand. In thought and spiritual vision it seeks to take hold of that which is penetrating towards us from worlds, whose spiritual impulses did not hitherto flow into human evolution. In thought and vision it seeks to take hold of what is entering as a new spiritual essence into the evolution of the age. Such is the Spiritual Science which is oriented in the truly modern sense. It does not come forward like a “programme”—scientific, learned or of whatever kind. No! It comes forward at this moment because the heavens are sending new revelations down to men, and these have to be understood.

Anyone who fails to understand in this sense the task of anthroposophical Spiritual Science would have nothing at all to say if it did not have to herald and proclaim new things—things only now breaking in upon us, revealing themselves from the heavens to mankind.

What then is it that is revealing itself through the veil of phenomena? It is the expression of a new creative principle, brought into the world by the Spirits of Personality. In this connection we must recognize it as the essential characteristic of our age (which began in the fifteenth century A.D.) to develop impulses of personality. The personality, if I may use this trite expression, wants to stand on its own feet, does so more and more as we go forward into the third millennium, when other impulses for the fulfillment of personality will enter in.

Consider carefully, my dear friends, what I have just told you. There, coming towards humanity, is the new revelation from the Spirits of Light, the Spirits of Personality. But over against this, especially since the beginning of the fifth Post-Atlantean age, there stand certain Spirits of Darkness. For as soon as we look behind the veil of the phenomena we see at once how certain ranks of spiritual Beings are confronted by other ones, opposing ones. On the one hand we turn our gaze to the Spirits of Personality revealing themselves as I described them just now; on the other hand we see over against them certain Spirits of Darkness, making themselves manifest, Spirits whose interest it is not to allow that which is to come—the new revelation of the Spirits of Personality—to become effective in mankind. These new Spirits of Darkness find an opportunity to realize their intentions in a certain phenomenon of modern life which I mentioned a few weeks ago, a phenomenon which is unfortunately far too little heeded by present-day mankind.

If in our time we ask, how many men are there on Earth?—the answer generally is: Approximately fifteen hundred millions. The logical consequence would be that only so much work is done by these fifteen hundred millions. But that is not the case. On the contrary, since the beginning of the fifth Post-Atlantean age a new possibility has arisen; for today, beside the fifteen hundred millions of men on Earth of which we generally speak, there are five hundred millions more, reckoned in terms of labor-power.

Through the machines it is so. And if all the machine labor of today were done by men, there would have to be five hundred million men to do it.

You see therefore that human labor on Earth has found, so to speak, a substitute. Something is here that works like human beings and yet does not consist of human beings in flesh and blood. This fact is extremely important for the evolution of mankind, and it is connected with other facts in the evolution of the present time. The five hundred million men who are really not there as men of flesh and blood—all the work that is done by the machines just as though men were doing it—all this machine work gives opportunity for the Spirits of Darkness to realize themselves within our human evolution. And these very Spirits of Darkness are the opponents of the Spirits of Personality who bring with them the new revelations of the heavens breaking in upon us with a new clairvoyance, while on the other hand, arising out of the sub-earthly realms, we have the embodiment provided for the adversaries. For these very adversaries are demonic Spirits, Spirits of Darkness, who can now actualize themselves—albeit not through human beings of flesh and blood; they live and move among us none the less, inasmuch as human forces are being replaced by mechanisms, by machines.

This too lies at the basis of all disharmony in the social life of our time. Not only so, my dear friends, it lies also at the basis of certain errors, certain aberrations of human thinking in our time, which in their turn provide once more the starting-point for social aberrations. For in the course of the last few centuries, human thinking has in a certain respect adapted itself to the mechanistic order. It is permeated, impregnated by conceptions adapted purely to a mechanistic order. In many spheres of natural science—but not only there, in many spheres of actual life, of the social and socialistic life of today—no other ideas are applied than those that are of use to understand the working of machines, but they are really useless for all that goes beyond machines and mechanism. And yet, my dear friends, in the world of manifestation everything has a twofold aspect, and you must not therefore conclude that the mechanistic ideas have slunk into human evolution as an evil thing that ought to be avoided. No, that would be altogether wrong. Dangerous as these ideas are because they give certain Spirits of Darkness the opportunity to arise against the Spirits of Personality who are revealing themselves today; dangerous, above all, as is the mechanistic order from which these ideas are derived, yet on the other hand the very thinking which takes its start from mechanistic ideas is beneficial. For this, my dear friends, is the task of modern time:—Our powers of soul must be equipped with the ideas that live in modern scientific thought and altogether in modern thought. This is the necessary task of modern time. We must permeate ourselves with these ideas and then place them in the service of the new revelation of the heavens. In other words, the mechanical ideas have taught mankind to think in these mechanical conceptions. The ideas of former times always had vaguer outlines. Anyone who traces spiritual history through the course of time will know that it is so. Even when we study keen thinkers like Plato, we find that their concepts have vague, undefined outlines. Man has only been able to educate himself to think in sharp outlines of thought by falling into the one-sided habit of conceiving the world mechanically. These one-sided, mechanical ideas are exceedingly poor in world-content; for at bottom they contain no more than what is dead. Yet they are a remarkable means of education, and this, indeed, we can observe in our time. The truth is that nowadays, only those can think in really sharp outlines who have made certain ideas of Natural Science their own. All other people think more or less vaguely.

Thus mankind has passed through a certain education in sharply outlined thinking. But from this point onward it is necessary to turn to the new revelation of the Spirit, and to conceive the spiritual worlds with the same clarity with which we have grown accustomed to conceive the world of Natural Science. This is what the modern intellectual conscience requires, nor will mankind be able to dispense with this. Without this, mankind will never be able to solve the all-important questions that will arise in the present and in the near future. Clear and sharp thinking trained in the modern, scientific ideas and then applied to the spiritual world as it reveals itself anew; such is the configuration, fundamentally speaking, of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Such is the character which anthroposophical Spiritual Science wants to have, therefore it reckons with the most necessary requirements of our time. Moreover, for this very reason, it is able to descend from spiritual heights, to grasp what is necessary to the everyday life of man. My dear friends, we must again and again repeat that Spiritual Science wishes to bring new help to human work and human tasks of outer life.

Of the old traditions, things that have come down to us from former times, you may take, for instance, the various religious faiths. True, they still suffice for a number of people in our time; they suffice in fact for those who desire a certain “edification.” Out of the heart of the old religious confessions such people are told about the Divine Kingdoms of Heaven; they are told about what lies hidden behind the veil of sense-phenomena, and they descend thus far:—they preach to men telling them that they should be good, that they should love one another, and so forth. The religious faiths come down into the everyday life just far enough to voice certain moral requirements.

On the other side, men try to gain a vision of the demands of everyday life, which constitutes as it were the other pole of life. They try to gain knowledge of Nature. Well, as you know, it is only in the rarest cases that the parsons or preachers in their Sunday afternoon addresses proclaim Botany or Zoology to mankind from the realms of higher revelation. What they proclaim about the Heavenly Kingdoms does not reach down to Earth. But not only in matters of Science; for other things, too, the immediate demands which surround us every hour, every minute—information is sought in what I called just now “the other pole of life;” hence, there has arisen at this pole a kind of natural scientific thinking concerning the social demands of our time. Think, my dear friends, how the thoughts that men conceive about the needs of everyday life, and the things the parsons proclaim out of the Kingdom of Heaven—think how these two stand outwardly side by side. They are two different worlds; they have no point of contact. Men want to work (or so we may assume), want to have thoughts about their work; and then, when their work is done, they want to hear what there is to be said about Death and Immortality and things Divine. But these are two distinct and separated realms. They do not realize the need to unite them. They want to think about money, capital, credit, labor-power, etc., from one side, and about etherical [ethereal?] ideals from the other side. They do not summon the force of thought to speak out of the sources of what is said about the Spirit, about the life of everyday affairs where God, or the gods, are revealed after all no less than in the other realms. This is the great evil of the present time; this, above all, we must clearly see if we would understand why the present catastrophic time has broken in upon mankind. We need once more a Science which, while speaking of the highest things of the Divine, is able to enter simultaneously into the needs of everyday. For otherwise the needs of everyday will remain in that chaotic order in which you see the Lenins and the Trotskys in our time; while the doctrines which proclaim the secrets of Heaven remain unfruitful for external life, however much they may warm the selfish inner feeling of the heart.

In the future this must not be so. In the future men must not have Sunday afternoon addresses in which they try to get beyond the everyday, seeking mere “edification” or warmth and comfort for their selfish religious needs, and then go out again into the everyday which they regard in a God-empty way, conceiving it not spiritually but with inadequate and superficial thought. The demands which our time is making of us lie indeed within the spiritual realm; and order will not come into our time till men admit that these things which I have now characterized must be taken into account.

A host of other important impulses of our time must be seen in this connection. We are standing in the very midst—not at the end, but I say with full consciousness, in the very midst—of a time of conflict, a time when chaotic events are taking place in human evolution, events from which as I have often said, men ought to learn. Alas! There are so many who have learnt nothing yet from the events of the last four and a half years, whose thinking is still the very same in form as it was four and a half years ago. Events are taking place, my dear friends, which reveal outward humanity—or the life of outward humanity—in conflict and in warfare. True, there was conflict in other epochs of time as well, but the conflict in our epoch has its own peculiar character of which we become aware when we look not merely on the surface but in the depths. For there we see that many things are taking place in the outer world which should really be going on in the inner life of men. You will readily believe that the receiving of the new revelations from the heavens must go hand in hand with a deepened inwardness of human nature. This deepened inwardness will bring with it certain inner conflicts into the souls of men. But the prospect of inner conflicts for the human soul must not give us pessimistic feelings. For it is only out of their conflicts of the soul that men will grow strong toward the future. The man of today who is not yet prepared for this desires his parsons, the representatives of his religious faith, somehow to cloud his vision of what is nonetheless already there subconsciously in his own soul. Let them but warm his soul, let them comfort him, telling him beautiful things of what the Divine Beneficence intends for man—without man doing anything with real activity himself! My dear friends, in the near future the gods will intend for man that alone for which man himself will lend a hand. Man must pass through inner conflicts of the soul, conflicts that will strengthen him. We have not to look towards a future more comfortable than the past or the present. Specious ideals—which in reality are nothing but modern narcotics—are not the truth. They are more Wilsonism. To speak of ushering in an altogether new age by twice seven points (I know not if the number be mystically intended; if so it is mystical in a bad sense)—that, my dear friends, is a strange form of modern superstition.

For the future, my dear friends, things will by no means be more comfortable in the outer life. For the remainder of earthly evolution mankind will yet have to shoulder far greater discomforts than they dream of yet. Nevertheless, they will shoulder them, for they will be strengthened by inner conflicts of soul—every individual man in his own soul. Looking through the veil of outward phenomena, we behold not a world in which the gods sleep a sleep of legendary peace, each in his bed, or lead a peaceful, happy life such as men have dreamed of—which is indeed none other than a form of laziness!

No! It is not so. When we pierce the veil of phenomena we behold a life of Divine Spiritual, Hierarchical labor; the thing that strikes us first is the great battle which is taking place behind the scene of the physical world of sense—the battle between Wisdom and Love. And man is placed in the midst of this battle. For a long time he has been unconscious of it, in future he must take part more and more consciously in this conflict which is taking place in the world between Wisdom and Love. For Man himself shall be the outcome when Wisdom and Love beat like an eternal pendulum, now towards the side of Wisdom and now towards the side of Love. Only through the rhythmic swinging of the pendulum, not through a sleepy peace, will the future shape itself aright.

In ancient, atavistic times, and hitherto, this battle between Wisdom and Love was being waged in the subconscious depths of the human soul. Down in the depths, my dear friends, where the unconscious instincts are pulsating, there stands the Spirit of Wisdom against the Spirit of Love, and the Spirit of Love against the Spirit of Wisdom. But from our time onward—from the time of evolution of the Spiritual Soul of Consciousness—all this is rising into the conscious life. Man must fight this battle out within himself. Stronger and stronger become the forces which play in human nature on the foundation of this inner conflict of the soul. Today, however, men are still resisting this inner evolution. They divine its coming but they are afraid of it; they have not the courage for this inner conflict. All that is written in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment is meant to lead men to fight this inner battle out victoriously. But people find it inconvenient; they shrink in fear; they have not the courage to go through the inner fight. And this, my dear friends, is a characteristic phenomenon of our time. Men will not go through this inner fight; they flee from it; they do not want it yet. And because they will not have it inwardly, it is projected outward. In one of the Mystery Plays I hinted at this fact. This passage, as you know, was written long before the outbreak of the present world-catastrophe of war, but the latter still bears witness to its truth. In it I showed how all the outer conflicts of today are conflicts which have been thrust out of the inner life of man. Conflicts in other ages had a different character, for all these things are changing and undergoing metamorphosis. Now this is what must come: men must receive into their inner life the battles which they now believe themselves obliged to fight externally. A battlefield in the inner life of human souls will be the remedy, the healing for what appears today among men so ruinously. Not till this inner battlefield enters the souls of men can the dread catastrophe which has come among them today be brought to rest. For the outward conflict is simply that which men project outside themselves, because they are unwilling to bring it into their own inner life. All other aspects are a mere semblance; this is the reality.

Here, my dear friends, once more we have a circumstance with which anthroposophical Spiritual Science reckons. It reckons with it inasmuch as it does not merely absorb some antiquated, ancient doctrines, but seeks to bring among men what is making itself felt in the spirit of the present time and of the future—the new revelations from the Heavens. This distinction we must see, otherwise we shall continue to confuse the Spiritual Science here intended with other things to which it by no means belongs. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science cannot be proclaimed in the same way as many things today which in reality belong to the past. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science must speak to the full, clear consciousness of mankind. But in the very moment when we say this we wound the vanity of many people. Do not the people of today believe that they possess extraordinarily clear and enlightened thoughts? Yet in reality they need only look and see what they are doing, especially in spiritual matters, and they would find that their “clear and enlightened thought” is not much to be proud of. The social problem—if you will, the war-problem—of the present time can be solved in no other way than by clear thoughts trained in the way of modern thinking, and then directed to the Spiritual World that reveals itself anew, the world that is coming to us from the good Spirits of Personality. Because this Spiritual Science is so new in this respect, therefore it has for its opponents all those who will not summon up the activity to penetrate into this inner activity of soul; good-will is essentially required.

You see, the very nerve of this Spiritual Science is different from that of earlier spiritual revelations. As I have often said, people in our time who desire knowledge of the secrets of existence will often turn to some antiquated volume containing the teachings of old, atavistic clairvoyance. How blissful many a person is today if he comes across some old book which—unrelated to the modern, scientific consciousness—claims to give information about those things which are essentially unknown to the people of today, but which were known in olden times to those who spoke, for example, of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur. Needless to say, my dear friends, sublime and venerable truths are contained in these antiquated books; but there is evolution in the world, and what was good for former epochs is not good for our own. Former epochs were able to take possession in their own way of what is clothed in such words as “Salt,” “Mercury,” and “Sulphur.” The present time must seek for something new. Spiritual Beings are bringing a new gift towards it, for the healing of mankind. Therefore this new thing must not be left unheeded. And it must be of quite a different kind from the old. There is a fundamental difference between the New and the Old. The Old brought forth a magnificent understanding of the Wisdom of the Universe—an understanding of all that is outside Man. Even the ancient Wisdom-treasure that came down to such spirits as Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme was an understanding of the Universe—deep and penetrating. This understanding of the Universe was then applied in order to understand Man too. Man himself was conceived in terms of the Universe. That is the fundamental character of the ancient Wisdom. How the Spiritual revealed itself in external Nature—how Spiritual Beings in their varied stages revealed themselves through the different elements—all this was seen and understood by the atavistic clairvoyance in a way that is no longer possible to man today. And this was then applied to Man. In great and all-embracing Nature they recognized first of all the life of Planets and Stars, and then the elemental life that lives through the elements—through “Salt,” “Mercury,” and “Sulphur.” Thereafter they could ask themselves: How does all this appear in Man? Beginning from the Universe they came to Man.

This is no longer the way for man to find his further evolution in the present and in the near future. Even Jacob Boehme could still speak of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur. We must speak differently; we must take the opposite path, the path of the future. We take our start from Man; we understand first Man, then go on from this understanding of Man to an understanding of the Universe. This is the path I took, for a certain domain of knowledge, in my Occult Science. This is the path which must be taken altogether in the future. We speak not of “Salt;” we speak of that which lives as the retrogressive element of evolution in the human organism—in the nerves and senses system. We understand the nerves and senses system as a descending, retrogressive development. The man of ancient times looked out into external Nature and beheld all that is brought about in the element of “Salt.” Thus he beheld in the world outside what we behold when we contemplate the life of nerves and senses from the standpoint of our Spiritual Science. To understand the outer Universe, the man of olden times beheld in it the world of “Mercury.” We look into the human organism and we find the Rhythm. For all the rhythmic life, as we have often said, is that in man which outwardly is “Mercury.” We look to Man, we look for an understanding of Man, and from this starting point, an understanding of the Universe.

Such is the mighty revelation according to which we have to live in our conception of all spiritual things. In the ancient revelation which proceeded from an understanding of the Universe to an understanding of Man—all the old religions and traditions had their source. They are preserved to this day in antiquated systems, but they can no longer be fruitful for mankind, save by way of historic study, when they enable us to feel this ancient Wisdom with true reverence. In the last resort even the religious faiths of today have the same source. But we are at the beginning of the New, i.e., of the understanding of Man which must expand into an understanding of the world.

Such must be the new path, my dear friends, and it is connected with many things. Take one example:—the way in which we have attempted this building of the Goetheanum. You know how sharply I have said on one occasion or another: It is a calumny to speak of this building as representing symbolically this or that truth. Though indeed in many cases it is not badly meant, nevertheless it is an objective calumny, and after all, those who do not understand our building ought not to speak of it. Look for a symbol in this building—you will not find a single one. Nowhere will you find one. The attempt has been made to create—directly out of the spiritual world—not anything symbolic, but the spiritual Reality itself, insofar as it has hitherto been able to reveal itself. Symbolism is the language in which mankind was spoken to in former times. It lies inherent in the very progress of human evolution, that the old vision through symbols, which worked upon the instincts, should be raised into the full consciousness, where the Reality—the spiritual Reality—is seen.

But this vision of the Reality of the Spirit requires a certain spiritual activity. The contemplation of symbols enabled men to fall asleep, as it were. Thus, as I told you recently, there are freemasons nowadays who say they are very glad that their symbols are not explained to them, for everyone can then think what he likes—a liberty which most of them interpret by thinking nothing at all, and letting the symbols work on them unconsciously. All this has remained over from olden times, and must be transformed into the new way. Symbolism, as you know, plays no essential part in what is here called Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. For in this science we must speak a new language, in a certain sense. Even if, from time to time, we have referred to one symbol or another, these symbols were only borrowed, as it were, to exemplify this or that, or to bring out the agreement between the truths newly discovered which are to serve the new humanity, and those that still survive in an antiquated form from times long past.

Now it lies inherent as it were (what I say will lead us back again tomorrow to our studies of the social life)—it lies inherent in human nature that men invariably rebel at first against what appears as a new thing. And those who consider themselves, so to speak, the guardians and protectors of the old are the greatest resisters. Hence the new, anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science finds its predestined center of opposition among those who look upon themselves as guardians of the old traditions. But this cannot prevent it from going forward on its way which is the necessary and natural way for modern humanity.

There are a certain number of you, my dear friends, who know that in our circles too we have by no means hesitated to set forth the life of symbolism and ritual that has remained from olden times. But we have always done so in a very different spirit. Generally the greatest value is attached, in an antiquated spirit, to the symbolism and ritual itself. To maintain the continuity of human evolution, it is still necessary to establish a connection, as it were, with symbolism and ritual. But in our circles symbolism and ritual have never been presented in any other way than as something that should lead us to the spiritual reality itself and to its immediate incorporation into the living values of our time. Hence it is just in anthroposophical Spiritual Science that we find the explanation of many, nay, in fact, of all the principles of ritual and symbolism, from the past.

We can show by them how mankind received by other paths a Wisdom which in our time is antiquated and out of date. This Wisdom brought man, in a certain sense, into an unfree condition. Today we must set out on new paths of Wisdom. These new paths are inconvenient to many people, and most of all to those who are only anxious to preserve the old and lull mankind to sleep in the old Wisdom-treasures. It is useless to say to a man of forty: “You can become intelligent; you can regain the faculty to learn, but to this end you must return to the age of twenty!” True, if he could return to the age of twenty, he would be capable of learning. But it is impossible. Humanity cannot be screwed back to a former stage. We cannot recommend them to do what was only right and normal for former epochs of the Earth. Yet this is the very thing which many adherents of religious communities and of certain other societies are desirous of spreading in our time. Thus the Old is set up in opposition to that which is really seeking to come among mankind and which alone can lead to its salvation. Therein lies much of what is leading to the catastrophic events of our time.

It is immensely important, my dear friends, to bear this in mind. To be able to be, in the deepest sense of the word, a man who unites himself with that which the new revelations of the Heavens are wanting from the Earth—this is the thing that matters. And if the outer exoteric problems of mankind are not to suffer shipwreck, we simply must have a Spiritual Science in our time, equipped with concepts strong and penetrating enough to bring to consciousness even in the everyday life what is moving the souls of men all the Earth over—albeit in the differentiated ways which I have described.

In future it will no longer do to live on the one hand in the everyday life, conceiving it as a life profane and poor in spiritual content, thereafter to withdraw into the Church or Masonic Temple, letting the two worlds be altogether separate, so that the Church or Masonic Temple has no idea how the outer social life should be ordered, while on the other hand the social life goes on its way without the help of what is striving in the inner life of men, and is kept in the subconsciousness of man by ritual and symbols. In future it will be necessary to speak to the consciousness of men. This fact alone is more important than all our sympathies and antipathies with the old or with the new. For that which must be done must be done out of real insight—it must not proceed from our sympathies and antipathies

You see, my dear friends, the central nerve in the comprehension of the spiritual world today is this: All that comes to us from ancient times must be “inwarded.” The outward must become inward. For it is thereby raised into full human consciousness as something no less holy than it was in former times. This tendency must take place in the modern evolution of mankind. This tendency alone, my dear friends, is the true Christianity of the twentieth century. Against it—against the intentions that are here indicated—all who would merely preserve the Old quite naturally stand opposed. A large proportion of mankind is attached with certain habits of thought and feeling to the Old. They find it more comfortable, for it does not demand a conscious understanding. People find Spiritual Science inconvenient. For they are called upon to understand it, and it can only be understood by making use of healthy, wide-awake, human intelligence, but people would rather not understand. In many respects nowadays there is a striving not for understanding but for non-understanding. Hence it will go on for a long time:—Spiritual Science, such as is here intended, will meet with opposition after opposition. Many of these oppositions are quite well meant, but even they can frequently reverse into the very opposite of a good meaning. And above all, as I have often told you, my dear friends, this Spiritual Science, which wants to tell humanity of highest spiritual things while speaking openly and freely in modern terms of thought, time and again there will arise in opposition those who adhere to the old tendencies—those who incline to the old creeds and Churches, or to ancient Masonic or similar societies of whatsoever kind. These are the natural opponents. as it were. We can understand this opposition, for in this sphere, too, clear understanding is the only right and true aim of Spiritual Science. Here too, there must be no dark and cloudy non-understanding. Indeed modern anthroposophical Spiritual Science need not appeal at all as forming a Society in the old sense of the word, nor need it occasion any surprise that it does not. It has no need to adopt the methods that were taken and are still being taken by the old secret Societies. These old methods are the very ones of which modern humanity is wanting to rid itself. In outer exoteric spheres there is much talk today of getting rid of secret diplomacy—and rightly so, as I believe, altogether rightly. Anyone who has studied history in these domains knows that this very secret diplomacy is none other than the last remains of the methods and ideas of the old secret Societies. Many another thing will have to be transcended. It is strange, my dear friends, what misunderstandings one can experience in this sphere. As you are well aware, I have written an Occult Science. A man whom I have often mentioned to you sent me a manuscript about this Occult Science which began somewhat as follows:—“There can be no such thing as an ‘Occult Science,’ for a Science must necessarily be public. It is a misuse of terms to speak of ‘Occult Science.’ ”—That, of course, is perfect nonsense. For when we speak of “Natural Science” we do not mean a science that is natural but a science of Nature, which has to be achieved of course by mental work. So it is when we speak of Occult Science, we do not mean a science that is perpetually hidden. There is such a thing as a published “Occult Science,” namely, a science of those things which may be called intimate or occult. It is simply an absurd way of picking up words. Nor need we imagine that with the mere publication everything is given. Many a thing which has been exoterically spoken will remain esoteric for a long time yet. Indeed, my dear friends, there are many exoteric books which you can buy anywhere today which are very esoteric for many people (for the sake of politeness I will not say “for most!”). Many a little volume which you can buy for a few pence in a popular edition will represent for a large number of people something extremely esoteric. That therefore is not the point, the thing that matters is the kind of inner union which the human soul has, or is ready to enter into, with these things.

That, my dear friends, is only in parenthesis. The point I really wish to make is that the old and antiquated motif of secrecy must be replaced by something altogether different. The life of Spiritual Science in mankind will indeed be different from what has frequently been cultivated by secret societies and leagues of one kind of another. These “secret” societies can of course be seen through, to the very bottom of their souls; they are by no means secret nowadays for anyone who cares to go into such matters. Nevertheless they maintain the principle of secrecy in a wrongful way. They uphold it in their customs, manner, and conduct. And that is more important than many another aspect. You, all of you, are aware that there are secret societies of one kind or another—Societies arising out of religious faiths, Societies, too, of other kinds—which instruct their members to shape the intercourse of man to man in a special way, and by mysterious methods to carry this or that element into the life of men. Well, my dear friends, it is quite natural that in course of time the most varied shades and colorings of such secret Societies have arisen. Frequently they are at war with one another to the knife, and without doubt they now and then contain features which can justly be attacked. Be that as it may! The thing that lives in a society of human beings who adhere to anthroposophical Spiritual Science does not require to be defended by any such means as are sometimes needed to defend what is connected with secret Societies and with their secret usages. There is absolutely no need to defend by any special art or artifice that which emerges in the anthroposophical Spiritual Movement. I can tell you the very simplest method of defending it. No one need do any more for its defense than to tell the truth and to refrain from lying. Whoever tells the truth about anthroposophical Spiritual Science (and after all, it is the duty of every man to speak the truth)—he is defending it. That I know; this statement can be made. Other defense is necessary for anthroposophical Spiritual Science. For it is the obvious duty of every human being to repudiate what is untrue.

Herein I have drawn your attention to a most important point, for it concerns the very principle of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. This Spiritual Science does not proceed by any tortuous paths. It speaks to man in the same spirit in which Science speaks during our time. Only within the scientific customs of our time it tells what—if I may use the word—the heavens are now and henceforth revealing to mankind. This must be clearly seen, my dear friends, for it implies that Spiritual Science as such, and not the life of the Society, is placed in the foreground. It places the objective truths in the foreground, making the life of the Society only the vehicle to hear them.

A week ago I said that it is necessary to distinguish clearly between anthroposophical Spiritual Science and other things. We must be fully conscious of the distinction, otherwise we shall fall short of a most important element in the present evolution of mankind, and this we must not do, if we honestly wish to devote ourselves to the most needful impulses—these impulses which can bring healing into the catastrophes of the present and of the near future.

One would fain give oneself up to this hope, my dear friends, that a new way of judgment might be found among us—a new power of discrimination for what is now obliged to enter as a quite new thing into the evolution of mankind. We must not confound the antiquated things with that which is endeavoring, out of the fundamental demands of earthly evolution, to bring forth in the present and in the near future what must be brought forward, so that all that which has arisen under the influence of the old things may be replaced by the new.

Take only this one thing: the old Christianity has had nearly 2000 years to evolve. In the first centuries A.D. it was different from what it is today, as everybody knows who studies it. And what Christianity shall now become—that again must be different. Study the last four and a half years: you may take them as an example which shows how the past relics—not of Christianity itself but of a certain Christian conception—have stood the test, or rather, have failed to stand the test in this catastrophic time. So long as we remain in abstract generalizations we can say what we like. That is the characteristic of abstract world-conceptions. They can clothe anything they like in their abstract formulae. It is a very different matter when we come to concepts and ideas such as I explained to you recently; the fundamental Social idea of the future, the three-fold idea—this idea is adapted, as I showed last Sunday, to the reality itself. It is capable of manifold configuration, it expands over the realities of life, for it is adapted to them. With an abstract idea you can no doubt comprise all things; but in relation to a real idea, my dear friends, you can speak as I myself have done to many people to whom I have explained the threefold conception, albeit not as one who is convinced of his own dogmatic system and says: “This is what you must accept, or else everything will go wrong.” Where real ideas are concerned, there can be no such thing as that. I spoke to them quite differently; I said: “You need not believe in these ideas as dogmas at all. Set to work anywhere in the world of reality, and you will see; whenever you introduce these ideas into the world of reality, it will be mastered with their help. Perhaps, when you have done—or even when you have only worked on a small portion of the reality with these ideas—the outcome will be quite different.” I should not be at all surprised if in the execution of these ideas insofar as they refer to the realities, not the one stone were left upon another of the indications originally given. If we do not proceed dogmatically, then we do not hold fast to our programmes like so many people do when they elaborate statutes and programmes for Societies. We only point out what is already seeking to take shape in the reality itself. This, then, is applicable in the reality. Set to work, and it may well be that ideas will emerge quite different from those which were at first set forth. This is the very characteristic of ideas which are true to reality; they change with life itself and life is changing continually. It is not a question of having fine ideas, but ideas according to the reality. These ideas we cannot and should not express in abstract terms; we should try to express them so that they are living and enter livingly into the reality of life. Naturally, then, they are most liable to be attacked by those who love abstractions. This too, my dear friends, is new in anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In Anthroposophy we do not only think new things, but we think in a new way. That is why so many people cannot approach it, they cannot get into this “thinking in a new way.” Yet this is the thing that matters; in this new thinking, we may say, the thought dives down into the reality and we live with the reality. You can prove anything you like with abstractions; with an abstraction, be it even of a God, you can declare as a good and loyal monarchist subject: “The King is appointed by the grace of God.” The present moment has its own teaching, for now he is in turn deposed by the grace of God! With your abstractions you can include the black and the white under the same abstraction. With your abstractions you can say that God is leading to battle the armies of the one side and of the other.

In the striving for reality which lies at the very foundation of anthroposophical Spiritual Science, the point is to replace such abstract life and abstract talk—ruinous as it is for life itself—by true thinking, which accords with the reality, and by a way of speaking which lovingly dives down into the reality of life, and speaks out of the reality itself. We need a thinking which not only thinks different things, but differently than heretofore. Such thinking strives towards the ideal of “not I, but Christ in me,” after the words of St. Paul. For Christ himself sought for the harmony between the outer-human and the inner-human. This must become an ideal in all our human striving.

My dear friends,

Once again there comes to life in our hearts the verse that has resounded through the centuries, of the Divine Mysteries manifesting in the Heights and of the peace on Earth for men of good-will. And at this moment I imagine, especially in our time, the question will arise within our hearts: What then does mankind need, over the whole Earth's round, for the prospering of earthly evolution and of that peace of which the Gospel tells? Well, my dear friends, we have been speaking for weeks past of what is needful to mankind all the Earth over, especially in this our time—questionable as it is and so fraught with questions. And if we would gather up into a single sentence what has been passing through our souls in recent weeks—then we may say: It is necessary for men to strive ever more and more for a full mutual understanding.

This quest of a true mutual understanding among men coincides with what we explained yesterday as to the fundamental impulse underlying what we here call Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science strives for an insight into those things which can only be seen by spiritual vision in the world and in the evolution of the world. What is it that shall come to birth in human souls through this cosmic understanding? It is the true—not the apparent and illusory, but the true content of the social demands of the present time, and it consists in calling forth mutual understanding among men. We must strive for this understanding of humanity over the whole Earth—strive for it on the one hand with sincerity and on the other hand with strength. And this can only be done today with an active spiritual life, I mean a spiritual life which does not merely wish to devote itself to the world passively, but seeks to be inwardly active, partaking in the inner impulses of all existence and so arriving at an understanding of the world and man. Yesterday I told you, we are living in an age when new revelations of the Spirit are penetrating through the veil of outward phenomena. We cannot take this truth too earnestly. For he alone who takes it in full earnest will prove equal to the task which our age requires, of every single human being who claims to be awake in life.

If you will think back over many things which we have considered in the last few weeks, you will realize that this understanding of man over the whole Earth cannot be attained so easily as many people think. We have tried to throw light on the peculiarities of the groupings of peoples in the Western and Eastern regions of the Earth and in the Middle. Without letting sympathies or antipathies come into play in the very least, we have tried to understand what are the deepest characteristics of the peoples of the West, the Middle and the East respectively. Why did we do so? To take an example, we pointed out that our age is characterized especially by the development of intellectuality, and that in the Western—especially the English-speaking—peoples, this intellectuality comes to expression in such a way that it acts, as it were, instinctively. Whereas in the Middle peoples, intellect does not work instinctively—in fact, to begin with, it is not innate in them at all; they must acquire it by education. This, we showed, is a very significant difference between the peoples of the West and of the Middle. Thereafter we pointed to the peoples of the East and we said: There, the evolution of intellect comes to expression in such a way that, to begin with, the Eastern peoples actually recoil from it. They are loath to awaken this intellectuality to life within them; they want to preserve it for the knowledge of the Spirit-Self in the future. We pointed to other differentiations also, over the earth. Today let us ask ourselves: Why do we indicate these differentiations? Why do we seek from our point of view to characterize the different groups of people over the Earth? We do so, my dear friends, because in future the mere “Love one-another” will no longer suffice. In future, men will only attain mutual understanding as to their several tasks over the whole Earth if they know what is working in one or in another territory of the Earth. They must be able to look consciously at the several characteristics of the different groups of people. Once we can rise to the inner feeling, which is indeed essential to such understanding, this understanding will indeed be brought about. The feeling to which I refer, my dear friends, is this; the moment we begin to characterize human beings all the Earth over in this way, we must rid ourselves of the impulse to judge and value in the way we judge and value an individual human being as to his moral qualities. In seeking to characterize the nations it simply will not do to judge of their worth as we do in the case of a single human being. It is the very essence of the evolution of the individual human beings on Earth, that man develops the moral qualities as an individual being. Morality can only be evolved by the individual, not by groups of human beings. It would be the worst of illusions if we continued to believe that groups of human beings—or, as one likes to call them nowadays, nations—can enter into a like relationship to one another as man to man. One who can understand concretely what groups of human beings (nations, too, therefore) are in reality, will see the nations guided, as you know from our lecture cycle on the Folk Souls, by those Beings of the Hierarchies whom we call Archangels. He will never ascribe to the mutual relationship of nations that which he must see in the relation of one human being to another. What the nations are, they are in face of the Divine Beings. Here there arises a very different valuation from that which obtains as between man and man. It is for this very reason that man becomes an individual in the course of his evolution. He wrests himself free from the mere folk or nation, so that he may enter fully into what we call the moral order of the world. This moral order of the world is a concern of the individual man.

Such things must be understood by real spiritual knowledge. The true progress of Christianity itself in our time consists in this. I said the other day: We are living in a time when the Spirits of Personality rise in a sense to creative activity. They become Creators. This is exceedingly important, for inasmuch as they become Creator-Spirits there penetrates through the veil of phenomena what we described yesterday as a new revelation. The Spirits of Personality, therefore, are taking on the character of Creators. They become different in a sense from what they were before. They in their being take on a character like that which certain other Spirits (the Spirits of Form) possessed, for earthly evolution, since Lemurian times. This means that in a certain sense man will henceforth confront an altogether changed world-picture. We must become conscious of this, for this is the great thing in our time. Man is beginning to confront an altogether changed world picture, one that comes forth—to use a Goethean expression—out of the gray depths of the Spirit. If we look back with Spiritual Science into the historic evolution of mankind—we may look back into pre-Christian times—the farther we go back, the more we find that men possessed in an old instinctive way an extensive cosmic knowledge, which inspires us with all the greater reverence the more we learn to know it. For the seer it becomes a fact that at the outset of earthly evolution an immense Wisdom was poured out as it were over the earthly life of man. In course of time this Wisdom gradually filtered away. And strange as it may sound, my dear friends, yet it is true, it had reached a kind of zero level at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha came with a blessing to mankind. During that time all that humanity had known in former ages fell into a kind of chaos in the consciousness of man. Those who have understanding of these matters express themselves with perfect agreement on this fact. During that time, they say, the evolution into which man is woven had reached once more the point of utter ignorance. Yet into this gray ignorance which overlay mankind there fell the greatest earthly revelation—the Mystery of Golgotha—the starting point of new knowledge, new revelations for humanity.

Nevertheless, through many centuries, as concerns man himself, the dark gray ignorance persisted in a sense. It does enlighten us, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, if, looking back on the last two thousand years, we ask ourselves with understanding: What, after all, did men produce out of themselves during these last two thousand years? All they possessed by way of Wisdom (independent of the Mystery of Golgotha) was old tradition—inheritance from old traditions. Let us understand one another aright. Needless to say, I will not say humanity has had no Wisdom at all during the last two thousand years, nor will I cast aspersions on the Wisdom which they had. The point is this: The Wisdom that was present in the old pre-Christian times—whose relics are still observable in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha—this Wisdom was seen, albeit instinctively, seen in the Spirit of the olden times. Now however they had lost the power of relating themselves, with independent spiritual vision, to the content of the cosmic Wisdom. What had existed in olden times was preserved, as it were, in a historic memory. Even the Mystery of Golgotha, as I said yesterday, was clothed in the old Wisdom, expressed in the conceptions of the old-remembered Wisdom.

All this went on through many centuries. An advance-guard—albeit only an advance guard—for a renewed penetration of man into Cosmic Wisdom emerged in the mode of thought of modern Natural Science. True, to begin with it emerges in an apparently godless form; yet it is so. It is something which man seeks to acquire by his own activity of soul. Have I not often emphasized that for the future men must learn to regard the spiritual world anthroposophically, even [as], since Copernicus, they have regarded the purely mechanical, external order of Nature? To learn to behold the Divine just as men learned to behold the outer mechanical aspect of the universe since Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—this is the task that must permeate us if we would come to a true understanding of our time.

Of course there are many things against this true understanding of our time. Towards such understanding, as you know, such things are necessary as are said for instance in my book on Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment where we have shown what ways the soul must take to penetrate into the spiritual world even as Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno sought to penetrate the outward mechanical order of Nature. Those who have no deeper understanding for human aspirations may well be astonished that the most vigorous opposition arises out of the spirit of the old religious faiths (if we may call them so) against this endeavor to show what ways the human soul must take to find the spiritual world. It is especially so when the old spirit appears in the form of Jesuitism.

Among the many stupid accusations which have appeared in three articles in the Stimmen der Zeit this year, the following also occurs: “The Church,” they say, “forbids this treatment of the human soul to find the paths into the spiritual world.” My dear friends, for many a modern believer in authority this may sound like something new; but they fail to remember that the very same Church also forbade the researches of Copernicus and Galileo! The Church dealt with external scientific research in exactly the same way. We need not therefore wonder if it metes out the same treatment to the inner researches of spiritual science. It is only remaining true to its old habits. Even as the Catholic Church rebelled until 1827 against the Copernican doctrine, so it rebels against the conscious penetration into the spiritual world. This penetration into the spiritual worlds is no mere talking in abstractions; it is something real and concrete. It means that we transcend in fact once more the state of dark, gray ignorance and penetrate with knowledge into the underlying spiritual content of the world. Was it not also part of this gray ignorance that man looked out upon the world and saw the nations—the groups of human beings—and spoke of them as of a formless chaos. They spoke of the peoples of the West, of the Middle and of the East, but they did not distinguish nor characterize them. At best they knew that the leaders of the nations were Archangeloi, but they did not strive really to know the specific characters of the several nations—of the Archangeloi themselves. This belongs to the new revelation:—we must now observe and understand how the several Archangeloi are working over the face of the Earth. And this will be a real enrichment of man's consciousness all the Earth over. Through the very inability to rise from the dead level of gray ignorance to real differentiation, the gulf has been brought about which I described yesterday, between the subject of the Sunday sermons and what is regarded as the business of everyday life in the outer world. Within the sphere of the religious faiths they talk about the Divine World and its relation to mankind, but all this talking proves too feeble to penetrate the life and business of men on Earth. It can say no more to them than “Love one another,” which is about as sensible as if I were to say to the stove: Warm the room, that is your duty as a stove. Such teaching has not power really to take hold of the hearts of man. They cannot unite their knowledge of everyday affairs with what is brought down to them in this way as abstract precepts, customs, dogmas about the spiritual world. This gulf is there, my dear friends, and the religious faiths would only like to hold it fast.

The strangest flowers spring from the presence of this gulf and from the conscious desire to maintain it. The Jesuits, for instance, object to anthroposophical Spiritual Science because it looks for something in the human being which is capable of inner evolution so as to lead man to the Divine. To do so, they say, is heretical, for the Church teaches us and forbids us to say anything different from this—that God in His Being has nothing to do with the world, nay more, that in substantial identity He has nothing to do with the soul of man. He who declares that the soul of man bears something of the Divine Being within it in any respect whatever, is for the Catholic Church—as conceived by the Jesuits—a heretic.

Into such statements is instilled the inmost tendency of that Church, which is not to let the human beings reach to the Divine but to shut them off from it. Dogma itself assumes a form such as to prevent man from reaching the Divine. No wonder, therefore, since they have not been permitted to reach to the Divine, if in the fifth Post-Atlantean age (which had to bring the Spiritual Soul, once and for all) World-knowledge has become not a Divine but a pure Ahrimanic knowledge. For that which is recognized as Natural Science today is a purely Ahrimanic achievement. We have often characterized it thus. Strange, that the Catholic Church should prefer the Ahrimanic Natural Science to the anthroposophical; for the Ahrimanic Natural Science is no longer considered heretical today, while the anthroposophical Natural Science is anathematized.

A truly enlightened man of today needs to be clear about these things. He must recognize that the same thing must now need to be undertaken on the path of the Spirit as has hitherto been undertaken on the path of Nature. Only so can the path of Nature be saved from its aberration into a purely Ahrimanic realm. It has already suffered this aberration, because in fact the path of the Spirit could only be added to it at a later stage. But from now onwards and for the future of mankind, the path of the Spirit must be added to it, so that Natural Science may be lifted again to its Divine Spiritual height; so that the life in which we live between birth and death be reunited with the life of which the science of the Spirit has to tell, namely that life in which we live in the time between death and a new birth. Yet this will only happen in our time if we have the will really to understand this life all the Earth over, to understand it as it works in man himself.

Moreover we can only understand the single human being if we understand the character of human groupings. Only so shall we be enabled to see into the true reality.

Not long ago I drew your attention to a strange fact which may well surprise many people. I will repeat it briefly. You know that here in Switzerland there lived a worthy philosopher, Avenarius, who undoubtedly regarded himself as a good, law-abiding bourgeois citizen; who did not think himself in the remotest degree a revolutionary. He founded a school of thought written in so difficult a language that very few people can read it. Moreover, writing a rather more popular language, but in a similar sense, there lived a philosopher in Vienna and in Prague—Ernst Mach, who equally regarded himself as a good law-abiding citizen. Truly, neither of them has a vein of revolution in them. Yet the fact is, these two philosophers have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks have adopted them as their State Philosophers—so we may put it, if we do not misunderstand the expression. True, Avenarius and Mach would turn in their graves if they were to discover that they are now looked up to by the Bolsheviks as their State Philosophers. As I said on the former occasion, we only do not understand such a phenomenon because we confine ourselves to abstract logic instead of holding fast to the logic of realities, the logic of facts, the logic of things seen. Though you may think that this lies far afield from your point of view, I will nevertheless refer to it again from another aspect. In particular, I will mention one point in the philosophy of Avenarius which may help us to answer the interesting questions: How could it be that Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks? The very fact is after all significant enough of the utter confusion of our time.

Avenarius, you see, raises various questions. If we spoke in his technical language—of “introjections” and the like, of all the purely epistemological concepts he evolved—we should be speaking a pretty unintelligible language for most people. Yet in this unintelligible language he raises a question which is after all very interesting from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Avenarius asks: If a man were all alone in the world, would he still speak of the distinction between that which is in his own soul and that which is outside in the world? Would he still distinguish the subjective and the objective? Richard Avenarius is clever enough to declare: We are only tempted to speak of the difference between “subjective” and “objective” through the fact that we are not alone in the world. When we stand face to face with another man, we assume that that which we carry in our brains—of a table or of any other object—is in him too. By projecting into his brain the same picture which we carry in ourselves, the whole thing acquires a picture-like character, and this leads us to distinguish the things in our soul from the things outside—the things that we confront. Avenarius opines that if there were not other people outside us in the world we should not speak of the differences between that which is in our own soul and that which is outside us. We should regard ourselves as one with the things, merged with the things of the world. We should not distinguish ourselves from the world.

We may truly say, my dear friends, from a certain point of view Avenarius is right in his assertion, but from another point of view appallingly mistaken. It is indeed of some importance that in the course of our earliest childhood (though in our conscious memory we know nothing of that time) we came into touch with human beings. Our whole ideation—our whole way of thinking—was influenced by this. It is quite true, things would be very different if we had not come into touch with others; but they would not be as Avenarius supposes. He who can apprehend the underlying facts by spiritual vision arrives at the real truth. Our whole world-picture would indeed be different if at the time in life when we cannot yet think consciously we did not meet with other human beings. But this is the curious thing, my dear friends. The different world-picture which we then should have would contain the spiritual Beings who underlie the world. It would not be as Avenarius supposes. Incidentally, what a dreadful abstraction! We should not fail to distinguish ourselves from the world if we were alone in the world and there were no other human beings. Behind the minerals and plants (for there would have to be no animals, they too would disturb the world-picture by their presence) we should perceive the Divine-Spiritual World. In other words, my dear friends, our living-together with other men is the reason why, in the ordinary way of life, we do not perceive the spiritual world behind the plants and minerals. Our fellow-men place themselves before this spiritual world and hide it from us. Think what this means! At the cost of not perceiving the Divine world of the Hierarchies, we acquire all that comes to us through our living together with other men on the physical Earth. Our fellow-men place themselves before the world of the Gods and hide it from us, as it were. Naturally, Avenarius was unaware of this, hence he carried the question in an entirely wrong direction. He imagined that if no human being were there we should see ourselves unseparated from the world—should not distinguish ourselves from the world. The truth is we should distinguish ourselves—not indeed from other men or from plants and minerals—but from the Gods whom we should then have all round us. That is the truth.

If you consider this you will realize what is very important to realize in our time. Strange to say, it is in many respects our destiny today! Precisely the most penetrating spirits of our time will often touch on the most vital questions—yet always so as to lead them in the most wrong direction, so as to lead away from the perception of the Spirit. It would indeed be difficult to lead away from the perception of the Spirit more radically than Avenarius does. His philosophy is extremely sharp-witted—written with all the refinement of professorial language—and it is therefore well-adapted to lead men away from the Spirit in a state of sleep. And when men are led asleep away from the Spirit they regard this leading away from the Spirit as a necessity—a kind of mathematical necessity. So long as they do not observe that they are being led away from the Spirit, they take it all as scientifically proven. That is the one thing, my dear friends.

Here we have a philosopher (and much the same could be said of Mach) the inmost nerve of whose thought is to found a system which shall lead man radically away from the Spirit. In Bolshevism, my dear friends, the intention is to found a social order to the exclusion of all things spiritual—to group mankind in their social life so that the Spiritual plays no part in it at all. That is the real inner connection of the two, and it makes itself connection of the two, and it makes itself felt in the logic of facts. Not for a mere external reason but by a deep inner kinship, Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks.

You see, it is quite possible—with judgments that are prevalent today—to stand more or less fixedly before these things in blank astonishment. How do the Bolsheviks come to have Avenarius and Mach as State Philosophers? For us however it is possible even now to see the real inner connections. Only to do so, we must look for the underlying spiritual facts, as we have done in this instance, where we perceive how it would be in reality if man [were] alone on the physical Earth without any other men. There are many facts and phenomena entering into our life today—especially in the mutual relationships of men—which paralyze men's minds to contemplate, because they can gain no understanding of them without Spiritual Science. I have just given an instance from the spiritual life; quite everyday facts, however, might also be mentioned in this way.

Do not imagine that it was so in all ages. Such phenomena also existed in ancient times, but they were instinctively intelligible to men—intelligible by the old instinctive clairvoyance. Then, through the long gray period of ignorance, such phenomena were absent from the mutual intercourse of men. Now they are making their appearance once more. Not that the souls of men are evolving; the world is evolving. The world itself is changing, and it reveals its change to begin with in the mutual intercourse of men. In the next epoch it will also reveal the change in the relation of man to the other kingdoms of Nature. Life will remain unintelligible to men, in the present and in the immediate future, so long as they are unwilling to consider it through Spiritual Science. Illusion after illusion will take hold of the soul, if man will not have recourse to the spiritual-scientific concepts. There are some here present to whom at the outbreak of the present War-catastrophe I repeated one thing again and again. It is quite possible, I said, to write of the so-called world-historic facts of the last few centuries according to the records in the archives—by looking up the records and writing histories in the style of Ranks of the rest. But of the outbreak of this War-catastrophe it is impossible to write so. However much they delve into the archives, if they do not observe what was the mood of soul of those who were concerned in the outbreak of this War, and how this mood of soul gave entry for the Ahrimanic powers into the Earth's affairs, and how thereby the causes of this War-catastrophe came from an Ahrimanic side—if, in a word, they are willing to observe the starting-point of this catastrophe with Spiritual Science, it will remain forever dark. This War-catastrophe, my dear friends, is a real challenge to mankind, to learn from it. Much can be learned from what happened during the last four or five years as a consequence of the preceding events. Above all things, we should learn to put certain questions, not so one-sidedly as heretofore, but in keeping with the real needs of the time.

As I have often said, we have no reason to comfort ourselves too lightly about the misfortunes of our time, still less to shut our eyes to them. But we have also no reason to be pessimistic. Only consider the following. We can say to ourselves: immense and terrible events have taken place in the last four or five years over the Earth. And yet, what is the essential thing in all these terrors? It is what human souls have experienced through them. That is the essential thing—what human souls have experienced through these events, with respect to their soul's evolution, needless to say throughout all Earth-existence. Seen in this light, a question fraught with deep significance emerges. The question is strange and paradoxical, but so only because it is fraught with such deep meaning, unaccustomed to our everyday thought. Could we really desire that mankind should have lived on without any such catastrophe, in the way they had grown accustomed to live until the year 1914? Can we really say that that would have been desirable? In putting this question I may be permitted once again to point to what I said before the outbreak of this War, in my lecture cycle at Vienna (April 1914, Cycle XXXII). I said: If we really see what is living in the world of man today, the mutual relationship of men, their social life, appears to us like a social carcinoma—a cancerous growth—eating its way through mankind. Men had only shut their eyes to this carcinoma of the social commonweal. They were unwilling to look the real facts in the face. No one who sees things at their deepest could say that it would have been good for mankind to go on in that way. For on the lines which I have indicated they would have gone more and more downhill, farther and farther from the Spirit. And as to those to whom we look with souls full of pain—the millions who have been swept away from the physical plane by this dread catastrophe and who are now living on as souls—they it is who ponder most of all how different now their situation is, inasmuch as they are spending the rest of their life in the spiritual world; how different it would have been if their Karma had still kept them on the physical Earth.

Sub specie aeterni—from the aspect of eternity—things after all appear quite different, and this must not be left unsaid. Only on the other hand we must not take these things lightly or superficially. True as it is, it is infinitely sad that this catastrophe has taken place, yet it is no less true, my dear friends; by this very catastrophe man has been preserved from an appalling downfall into materialism and utilitarianism. And though it does not yet show itself today, yet it will show itself—above all in the Middle Countries and the East, where, in place of an order that had been imbued with materialism, a state of chaos is now developing. Truly we cannot refer to this chaos without an undertone of pain and suffering. I mean the social chaos which has overcome the Middle and Eastern countries, and that shows outwardly little prospect of transforming into any kind of harmony. And yet there is another aspect. Wherever this chaos exists, the world in the near future will give men very, very little through the purely physical plane. The blessings of the physical plane will truly not be great in the Middle and the Eastern countries. Of all that can be given to man so that he feels his life sustained by external powers—of this there will be precious little. Man will have to take hold of himself in his own soul in order to stand fast, and in the very act of doing so he will be able to set forth along the path into the spiritual world. He will resolve to go towards the Spirit, whence alone the salvation of the future can come. This, my dear friends, will be the essential thing for the future. Our outer bodily existence will, as it were, be slipping away from us. The outer bodily nature, as I said yesterday, will no longer be so sound and healthy as in times past; it has more death in it than it had in bygone ages. The content of the World-riddle is not to be found with that with which our bodily nature is connected; no, we must rise into the spiritual world to find the necessary impulse, and also the impulse which we need for the social order. This insight will arise when men are able to find as little as possible in the physical world. For the physical world itself will only be able to assume a form of harmony when it seeks for this form out of the spiritual life.

The Bible, my dear friends, in its first pages, does not tell us that is was Lucifer or Ahriman who drove man out of Paradise; it was the Jahve—God Himself who did so. And as we know, this very expulsion from paradise signifies man's becoming free—the conscious experience of freedom by mankind. The possibility, the seed of freedom, was given by the expulsion from Paradise. Is it then contrary to the Biblical wisdom if we say: Once more, it was Divine Wisdom which drove men out of the present age that was leading them down into materialism and utilitarianism, thus planting seeds, which, spiritually taken hold of, can really help the world. It sounds to us out of the painful depths of the last four-and-a-half years: “Spiritual life is wishing to reveal itself through the veil of the outward phenomena; men shall learn through misfortune to turn their eyes to these revelations of the Spirit, and it will be for their salvation.”

This too is a language which will seem paradoxical to many a modern man and yet, it is the language which Christ Himself is guiding us to speak. Today it lies inherent in the very progress of Christianity to grasp the Christian truths in a new way. This can only be done if they are taken hold of spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha, my dear friends, is a spiritual event which has entered into the evolution of the Earth. It can only be fully understood by a spiritual way of knowledge. As in the last resort it was through misfortune that mankind found the Christ, we too shall have to seek through our misfortune for the Christ through the new way of comprehension.

I admit, my dear friends, this is no ordinary comfort. Yet if we are ready to put all trivialities aside in the deeper sense of the word it is after all no little comfort, nay perhaps, it is the only comfort in our time, worthy of the dignity of man. It is not the kind of comfort which says to man: Only wait, and without your cooperation all the divine things will be vouchsafed to you! Rather does it say: Make use of your own forces, and you will find that the God is speaking and abounding in your souls. Then, through this God, you will also find the God in the great Universe, and—which is the most important—you yourselves will be able to work in communion with Him. We must depart from the mere passive attitude to super-sensible knowledge. Man must bestir himself within to find himself, and as he does so, recognize himself as part of the World-Order. Let the religious faiths rebel, which want to make things nice and comfortable for lulling a man's spirit to sleep in clouds of incense (I speak figuratively) so that he may then find his way to the Divine passively and without active cooperation on his part. Let them rebel however much against the call that now springs forth out of the spiritual worlds!—“Man shall now look for his true worth in inner spiritual activity—in the active inner development of spiritual life!”

This, my dear friends, must be; and it must be so especially if we are to reckon with the social demands of our time. I have said so already in these weeks. We are living—at any rate, a great part of our educated humanity are living—from the achievements of Greek culture; but we do not always remember how these achievements, by which we live, were created. Greek civilization was unfolded on a basis of slavery. A great proportion of mankind had to live as slaves in order to bring about at all what we now feel as the blessings of Greek culture. Let us face the fact fully and clearly. All that Greek Art, Greek learning signifies—all this and many other things arose on the foundation of slavery. Then, my dear friends, we shall ask ourselves with renewed intensity: What is it that has brought about the inner change? We today no longer think as did the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who took slavery as an absolute matter of course. At that time it went without saying, even for the wisest of men, that nine-tenths of mankind must live as slaves. For us today it no longer goes without saying. On the contrary, we regard it as an offence against the dignity of man that anyone should think so. What was it then that brought it about for Western humanity—this radical change in men's way of thought? It was Christianity which freed men from slavery and led them to recognize, at least in principle, that all men are equal before God, as to their soul. For this was the principle which uprooted slavery out of the social order of mankind. But as we know—for we must refer to it again and again from many points of view—one thing has been left behind until our day. It is that of which I told you that it is the salient point in the consciousness of the modern working man. One thing has been left behind, namely the possibility—in our social order—for a part of the human being to be bought as a commodity and sold by himself as a commodity. Moreover it is a part of man that takes its course in his very body. The salient point of the social question—the perpetual irritant, the thing that continually incites—is the fact that human labor-power can be paid for. This too creates at the very foundations of all our social order the character of Egoism. For egoism cannot but prevail in the social (I say once more, in the social order—please understand me aright) if to obtain what he requires for his own needs a man must get his labor paid for. He is obliged to earn for himself.

This is the next and necessary stage—after the overcoming of slavery—it must be made impossible for any man's labor to be a commodity. This is the true salient point of the social question, and it is this which the new Christianity will solve. In recent lectures I have told you something of the solving of the social question. For that three-folding of the social order, of which I told you there, sets free the commodity from the labor-power of man. In future, men will only buy and sell commodities—outer objects, things separate from man himself—which (as I wrote already in my essay on Theosophy and the Social Question which appeared in 1905) one man will work for another from motives of brotherly love.

It may be a long way to go to attain this end. Yet this and this alone will solve the social question. Whoever will not believe today that this must come about in the world-order is like a man who would have said, at the time of the origin of Christianity: “Slaves there must always be.” Even as he would have been wrong at that time, so likewise today the man is wrong who says: “Labor must always be paid for.” At that time it seems unimaginable that a certain number of men should not be slaves. Not even Plato or Aristotle could conceive it. Today the cleverest of men cannot conceive a social order wherein Labor would have quite another value—quite another meaning than of being paid for. Needless to say, even then the product will proceed from the labor, but the product alone will be able to be bought and sold. Socially, this very fact will be the salvation of men.

To realize these things it is indeed necessary to have the knowledge of spiritual vision, the logic of things seen. Without it humanity will not go forward. The logic of spiritual vision is the fuel to create what must arise among mankind in future, namely that human love which springs from the understanding between man and man. Strange as it sounds, my dear friends, today, when all manner of atavistic remnants are still there in men in one way or another—today everything is still regarded with sympathies and antipathies. So it is, for instance, when we explain such distinctions as I here did a little while ago. I said that of the three members of human nature the Western peoples are called especially to develop the abdominal nature, the Middle peoples the heart-nature and the Eastern peoples the head nature. Nowadays, such things are nearly always treated as judgments of relative value, in one way or another. At least, somewhere inside him every man still has a little pigeon-hole where he does so. Such valuation must absolutely cease, for this very vision of the differentiations of mankind over the whole Earth's sphere will become the basis of sympathetic, understanding love. From understanding, not from ignorance, true human love—reaching over the whole Earth—will spring, during this age of the Spiritual Soul. Then will men know, over the whole Earth, how to find themselves in Christ. Christ is no concern of one nation or another. He concerns all mankind; but to recognize this, many an illusion must first give way.

Men must be able to raise themselves, to look without illusions into the true nature of things. Today, in many spheres of life, they are unwilling to do so. And yet, I know I am speaking in the spirit of the true Christmas peace in placing the following paradox before you. My dear friends, you know well that I am not speaking of the individual human beings but of the nations as a whole when I refer to these differentiations. It is so easy to misunderstand these things unless one has good will. As I have pointed out so often, the single human individuality who grows out of the nation is not intended; only nations as such. I beg you to bear this in mind when I now say the following:—

You see, my dear friends, let us consider the one or other of the judgments which have been passed during the last four years on the countries, or States, of the Middle of Europe. I can thoroughly understand such feelings. I do not want to say anything in the least against those who are filled with enthusiasm for the Entente. Far be it from me—everyone has his opinion, and that is justified from a certain point of view. But, my dear friends, suppose we now look away from the opinion which prevailed in the past few years and consider its prolongation in the present time. Then after all, perhaps we may find something rather hard for understanding. For we may ask ourselves: Is it necessary for the judgments which were passed, while the potentates of the middle countries held the reins of power, to be continued now? Nay is it necessary to do all that one can—and by the most refined of methods—so as to be able to prolong these judgments? Is it necessary? Is it equally explicable? Superficially considered, it is certainly not so easy to explain as many such things were before. More deeply considered however, it is still explicable, my dear friends. More deeply considered we can understand it—albeit not out of the character of the individuals (for the individuals themselves in Western countries will want to bring about a healing of these matters). Those, however, whose judgments merely spring from their respective nationalities, or rather, national prejudices—they have in their subconsciousness something which we may characterize as follows:—

Some weeks ago I explained that in our conception of the world and notably our way of thinking at the present time much that belongs to the Old Testament is still alive, while the essential nerve of Christianity has only entered to a slight extent as yet. Now it is characteristic of Jahve-worship that it concerns all those things to which we do not bring ourselves up between our birth and death, but which are given to us as an inheritance—i.e., the things which lie inherent in our blood, which in the normal course only have influence on us while we sleep, while we ourselves are outside the body. This Jahve-conception still lives and throbs in our time to a very large extent, and it can only rise into the Christ-conception if we turn in this intellectualistic age with all our power to the conquest of the spiritual world, not through birth, not through what is inspired into us with our birth, but through our own self-education in this life. Now by nature the West is not predestined to pass from the service of Jahve to that of Christ. Such predestination only begins in the Middle of Europe and goes towards the East. This applies once more, needless to say, not to the individual but to the nation. Hence, my dear friends, the characteristic form of Wilsonian thought, steeped as it is entirely in Old Testament conceptions. However much it may deny the fact, the form of thought stands out as though it would fain exterminate what is trying spiritually to emerge in the Middle Countries and in the East. Hence it is outwardly so hard to understand. Under all manner of pretexts, these people still prolong the same hostile spirit, though they have swept away what they professed they wanted to sweep away, and only the peoples themselves are left, against whom—so they assured us—they had no ill intentions. They do so because in reality they are resisting what has arisen in spiritual evolution in the Middle Countries and in the East during the last few centuries, which, nonetheless, is necessary to mankind. Subconsciously, they want to expunge it. They do not want to enter into these things.

We are now living in a most important crisis of the world. I have often heard people ask; how is it that the men of the West especially the English and the French—have such a dreadful hatred of the Germans? There is a very simple answer, my dear friends, and yet it is an exhaustive answer. Man always sees himself differently (especially himself as member of a nationality) than he sees his fellow men. I can assure you, my dear friends, such thoughts as Mach had when he got into the bus or walked along the street are very often there in the subconscious lives of men. You know how Mach himself relates the story. Once, very tired, he got into a bus and did not notice that there was a mirror on the side opposite the door. Someone else, he thought, got in at the same time from the other side, and he said to himself: What a horrid old schoolmaster that is! He knew himself very little in his outward person and when he saw himself he did not like it at all.

Now, my dear friends, observe the spiritual history of Middle Europe—not in its more intimate features but as a whole. Down to Lessing, far down into the last third of the 18th century, the Germans took pains to be like the French. You could see it in everything. From a certain moment onward (approximately in the 12th century) till far beyond the middle of the 18th century, the Germans endeavored to be like the French—to behave in such a way that they also might become Frenchmen. What the French could not see in themselves—or, if they saw it, were inclined to rate it highly—all this they hated with a dreadful hatred when they saw it in the imitation. Unconsciously, man does indeed practice a strange form of self-knowledge. At bottom, in their deepest being, the Germans were never hated by the French. The French only hated themselves when they saw their mirrored image in the German soul.

Since then a very remarkable English influence has arisen, the extent of which is by no means adequately realized. The English naturally see themselves just as little as Mach did; but they notice themselves well enough when they see themselves in this mirrored image which has entered so strongly into the German soul since the 18th century. It is the Englishman whom they now judge in the German. There is the simple psychological solution, my dear friends. If the world-crisis had not arisen, this state of affairs would have gone on for a long time, and we should have a great mixture, as it were a broth, out of which single individualities would nevertheless have arisen, possessing the intimate qualities of the true German. Now, however, out of the world-crisis, chaos and misfortune will cause to arise what must arise: that which was always present, though under the power of the West it was unable to unfold. These are the real facts. There is no ground for pessimism, even in Middle Europe. We must only dive to the deeper foundations which underlie the process of evolution.

My dear friends, what the Entente Powers are doing today may appear thus, or thus. It matters very little how it appears, for at the bottom of their hearts they are wanting what is quite impossible. They are wanting to prevent the rise of something which absolutely must unfold in the Middle of Europe and in the East, for it is connected with the spiritual progress of mankind; it cannot be prevented. But it must also call forth this, my dear friends:—If man is to take the future of the Earth in earnest he must truly have faith in the Spirit; only out of the power of the Spirit will there come what must come, even for the solving of the burning social needs of our time. In the machine age it was necessary for these 50 million invisible human beings—that is to say, human beings visible as machines—to arise, so that men might gradually learn to feel that they must not be paid like machines are paid. And it was also necessary for this appalling catastrophe to arise, wherein the machine age has celebrated its greatest triumphs. Out of this catastrophe man will begin to unfold his real strength, and as he does so, he will gain a certain power once more to unite himself with the Divine and Spiritual. If we may now compare what many people have rightly called the most appalling event in the Earth's history with the beginning of Earth-evolution we may say: just as it was no mere misfortune for men to be driven out of Paradise, so too it is no mere misfortune that such a catastrophe has overtaken mankind.

In the end, my dear friends, the most valuable truths are paradoxes today, as I have often pointed out, we may well say: Men were so infamous as to nail to the Cross the greatest Being Who ever appeared on the Earth—Jesus Christ. They killed Him. We may well say that it was infamous of them. And yet this Death, my dear friends, is the very content of Christianity; for through this Death there took place what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Without it there would be no Christianity. This Death is the good fortune of men; this Death is the abounding strength of earthly man. So paradoxical are things in their reality. For on the one hand we may say: how infamous it was of men to nail Christ to the Cross; and yet, with this Death—this nailing to the Cross—the greatest event on Earth is brought about. A misfortune is not always merely a misfortune; often it is the starting-point for the achievement of human greatness and of human strength.

The mood of the present time is not likely, perhaps, to create in many people that depth of inner feeling of which legends and sagas speak when they refer to the Christmas Holy Nights, when the soul that is prepared for it is able to have some experience of the spiritual world. You know one such impressive legend from the performances given here, that of Olaf &Åsteson. Many similar things point to Christmas time in the same way.

It is clear, not only to a more thoughtful student of the human heart, but to anyone who observes in the external world the general spirit of our time, that a Christmas mood, a Christmas impulse, must now be sought anew by mankind. What lives in the celebration of Christmas, in the thought of Christmas, must take hold of the human soul in a new way. Just think, dear friends—in order to realize the broader aspects of our contemporary religious and spiritual mood—how little inclination there is at this time to contemplate the Christ as such, to direct the eyes of the soul to Him.

People often believe they are speaking about the Christ, and yet you will find they have made hardly any distinction between Christ and God the Father except in name. While it is true that for many believers the Christ still stands at the center of their religious creed and that beside Him all else of a divine nature loses its luster, nevertheless we have seen for some time now the rise of a theology that has really lost the Christ, that speaks of a God in general even when Christ is meant. The specific quality that is essential when the human heart looks up to Christ needs to be found again. And perhaps the most worthy celebration of the Christmas Festival at this time is actually to inscribe in our souls how mankind can find the Christ again. Many historical facts of the evolution of mankind will first have to be considered—in the spiritual scientific sense—if a true impulse is to be reawakened that will lead human souls to Christ.

The Christmas Festival can not only remind us, as is intended, of the entrance of Jesus into earth life, but it can also point to the birth of Christianity itself, the entrance of Christianity into the course of earth evolution. And so let us today direct our spiritual vision primarily to what might be called the Christmas of Christianity itself, the entrance, the birth, of Christianity within the sphere of the earth. The external facts are known, of course, but our knowledge of them needs to be intensified.

Christianity came into the world in the person of Christ Jesus, into the midst of the adherents of the Old Testament. We can observe the phenomena that occurred among these people when Christianity was born. We see how they were externally divided into two separate currents, that of the Pharisees and that of the Sadducees. It is necessary to view all these things henceforth in a new light. When we consider the general course of development of an individual or of humanity itself—indeed, the course of the entire earth—this will become increasingly clear to us if we conceive it as a continual balancing between luciferic and ahrimanic forces. But that is merely the designation we use; there has always existed among the deeper natures of humanity a consciousness of the actual existence of Lucifer and Ahriman and of the condition of balance between them. Fundamentally, the contrast of the Pharisaic element and the Sadducean element in the ancient Hebrew evolution was nothing else than the contrast of ahrimanic and luciferic elements. Jesus, coming into external earth life, entered the balancing stream. He entered earthly existence at that place for which the most important designation up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was that Solomon's Temple had been built there. In a certain sense we can only understand the nature of Solomon's Temple if we are able to perceive it in contrast to the Christianity then being born. It is well-known how quickly after Christianity came into being Solomon's Temple was destroyed, so far as external existence is concerned. This memorial of the earlier evolution out of which the spirituality of Christianity arose was destined to exist no longer at the place from which that spirituality streamed forth. The nature of Solomon's Temple and the nature of Christianity present a strong contrast. Solomon's Temple embraced in marvelous, magnificent, sometimes gigantic symbols all that was contained in the world conception of the Old Testament. It was an image of the entire universe so far as this could be represented by the ancient world conception, in its conformity to law, in its inner structure, in its permeation by divine-spiritual beings. It was nonetheless an image of the universe that in a certain sense and in one direction was extraordinarily one-sided. That is to say, the Temple was a spatial image of the universe, an image that made use of spatial forms and spatial relations to express the mysteries of the universe. But for those who viewed it in the spirit of the Old Testament, its symbolism was endowed with life.

We see, on the one hand, in the Judaism of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the externalization of what had been given to humanity through the Old Testament; on the other hand, we see in the symbolism of Solomon's Temple the means of deepening the life of Old Testament humanity. It might be said that what has flowed into the entire Old Testament revelation came to expression in these two directions: one outward, exoteric, in the Judaism of the Pharisees and Sadducees; the other esoteric, through what was represented in the mysterious symbols of Solomon's Temple. And from this exotericism and esotericism sprang what became Christianity.

This Christianity was at first, at the time of its birth, unknown to the world at large, to that world in which lived the spirituality of the humanity of that time, namely, the Greek world. Within the expanding Roman empire in which the Mystery of Golgotha was being prepared through the birth of Jesus, it was not known what a momentous Event had taken place among the Jewish people. Nothing was known of the significant Event that constitutes the meaning of the earth. Nevertheless, although the humanity of that time allowed it to pass unnoticed outwardly, the most sublime Event of our earth evolution, inwardly the Christianity that was coming into being was connected with what was then considered the whole world.

In what ways, dear friends, was it connected? The meaning that Christmas conceals is revealed later in the Easter conception. What then is the important aspect of Easter that really intensifies the meaning of Christmas? It is the contemplation of the Savior of mankind Who died on the cross: the cross with the dead God. The intention and the deed originated in humanity: to put to death the God Who had appeared in their midst. The profound magnitude, the full power, of this thought should again enter into human souls. Contemplation of the deed by which the God Who appeared on earth was killed by men: this should be put into language by which it can be understood. Let us try to do this, at least from one point of view.

When we look upon the Mystery of Golgotha, we find it to be a great world-historical confluence of spiritual streams that had been present in the ancient Mysteries. (You know this from my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact.) What had taken place in the ancient Mysteries as the sacrificial rite, the rite of initiation, what had taken place in the temple with, one might say, limited importance, was now set out on the great stage of world history; it now took place in the realm of our entire earth existence. In a certain sense, the initiation of humanity itself was brought out of the temples and presented as historical event before the whole world.

Now let us ask: what were the thoughts of someone permitted to take part in the initiation rites of the ancient Mysteries—when these still possessed their true significance? Through his preparatory instruction such a person knew with certainty that what is directly apparent in the external world of the senses, and what can be comprehended by the human intellect, is a world of mere phenomena, a world of appearance. He knew that what a human being experiences immediately in his environment during his waking hours between birth and death is only the outer view, the phenomenal display, of an inner reality, and that in ordinary life this inner reality is concealed. In the Mystery rite itself such a person sought true reality in what streamed to him, as it were, from the depths of existence, in what could be drawn out and separated from the merely phenomenal, illusory existence. Someone who took part in the ancient Mysteries could always say to himself: When I walk through the world and see external nature, it is illusion. When I experience this or that in the world, it is illusion. When I do any kind of work for the world, it is illusion. But when I am permitted to take part in the holy acts of the Mysteries in the Temple, then something happens that is truth, not illusion. Something is drawn forth, so to speak, out of the illusory existence of the world and transformed into a sacramental act; and this act contains exact truth in contrast to the illusion.

If we wish to be quite clear concerning this view of the Mysteries, we must compare it to the view prevailing today in our materialistic age. We must understand that all that is called reality today in this age of materialism was regarded as illusion in the conceptions belonging to the Mysteries; while, for example, the sacramental act performed as the initiation rite, which most people today consider “fantastic”, was esteemed by those acquainted with the Mysteries as the only reality in life. Such an act, therefore, was not performed at random, but at certain times when it was believed that something of the true nature of things might push through the phenomena of outer life and, as it were, be captured through the act. It has often been mentioned that one such important rite consisted in showing the sacrifice of the God, the death of the God, and His resurrection after three days. This pointed to the fact that to someone who penetrates more deeply into the external world, death can reveal the true nature of this world, that reality must be sought beyond death.

Think of all this entering human souls from the content of the Mysteries at the beginning of our Christian era, expressing the most important fact in world phenomena! Someone in that era pondering on the course of our earth evolution would have been able to say: “In ancient times it was possible for man to learn something about the divine-spiritual world through atavistic initiation science. It was formerly revealed to man out of earth evolution itself. That time is now past. The time has come when nothing more can be drawn from the content of this world to guide us to the divine-spiritual world. This world has lost its divine-spiritual life.” That is what such a soul would have said. Where must one look for the meaning of evolution for earth-humanity? Where was the real meaning of the earth at the time when Christianity came into being? Where was the expression of what was willed in man's innermost being at that time? At Golgotha on the cross. It was Death! What formerly had gushed forth from earth evolution for human salvation, was itself dead. To the soul that penetrated more deeply into cosmic reality, an earth impulse, the most profound of all earth impulses, was given at the time of the birth of Christianity, in the contemplation of the dead God.

Only when experienced in this way does the full magnitude appear of the matter with which we are here concerned. The ancient world conception, the ancient world-wisdom had flowed into Solomon's Temple; but it no longer held anything of what had made it great. Something new had to enter world evolution. And so in the course of time the destruction of Solomon's Temple and the rise, the birth, of Christianity exactly coincided. Solomon's Temple: a spatial symbolic image of the content of the cosmos; Christianity, comprehended as a time-phenomenon: a new image of the cosmos. Christianity is not something that appears as a spatial image, as in the case of Solomon's Temple; one only understands Christianity if one grasps it in images of time. One must see that earth evolution proceeded as far as the Mystery of Golgotha; then the Mystery of Golgotha intervened; then, through the Christ pouring Himself into humanity, evolution moves on in this way or that. Its deeper content is not to be equated in the remotest degree with anything appearing in spatial images, not even in the gigantic, magnificent spatial images of Solomon's Temple. Nevertheless, Solomon's Temple, as also the inner aspect of Pharisaic and Sadducean life, contained the soul of the world consciousness of that time. The soul of the world consciousness two thousands years ago was to be found in Old Testament Judaism. Into this soul was laid the seed of Christianity, a new seed that, while growing out of all that may be expressed in space, can only be expressed in time. The becoming following the existing: that is the inner relation of Christianity that was then being born to the soul element of the world of that time, to Judaism that was embodied in Solomon's Temple, which later collapsed. Christianity was born into the soul of ancient Judaism.

As Christianity sought the soul in Judaism, so it sought the spirit in Hellenism. The Gospels themselves, as transmitted to the world (I refer only to what has been handed down), have in the main passed through the Greek spirit. The thoughts through which the world could think Christianity are the spiritual wisdom of Greece. The first apologia of the Church Fathers appeared in the Greek tongue. Just as Christianity was born into the soul that for the humanity of that time lived in Judaism, so it was born into the spirit provided by Hellenism.

Romanism furnished the body. It was Romanism that at that time could provide an external organization for concepts of empire. Judaism soul, Hellenism spirit, Romanism body—body, of course, in the sense that the social structure of humanity is body. Romanism is in reality the forming of external inclinations and institutions; the thoughts concerning external institutions live within them. It is the corporeal element in historical existence, the corporeal element in historical development. Just as Christianity was born into the soul of Judaism and into the spirit of Hellenism, so it was born into the body of the Roman Empire. Superficial people even think that everything contained in Christianity can be explained out of Judaism, Hellenism and Romanism. In the same way, indeed, that materialistic natural scientists believe that everything in a human being is inherited from parents, grandparents, etc., ignoring the fact that the soul comes from spiritual regions and only puts on the body as a garment: so these superficial people like to say that Christianity consists of what in actual fact it has only put on as an outer garment. The essence of Christianity entered the world, of course, with Christ Jesus Himself; but this Christianity was born into the Jewish soul, into the Greek spirit, and into the body of the Roman Empire. That, in a sense, is the birth of Christianity itself, viewed in the light of Christmas thought.

It is important not to accept these facts as mere external theories, but to relate them deeply to our thought of Christmas, to learn what their significance really is in relation to the newborn Impulse that is now entering world evolution with the Spirits of Personality—as I explained here recently.³ Indeed, dear friends, anything new that purposes to enter into the course of world evolution must first struggle through what remains of the old. This is precisely the mystery of world-becoming, that on the one hand there is a normal, progressive evolution; on the other hand, retarded luciferic and ahrimanic forces interfere with it and modify it, but also in a certain sense support it as it advances. I have often called attention to the fact that we cannot escape this ahrimanic-luciferic force; we must look straight at it calmly, and face it consciously. On no account must we simply submit to these things unconsciously. From world impulses shadows remain behind that continue to have an effect even after something new has come into existence; but their luciferic and ahrimanic character must be recognized. This ahrimanic-luciferic element must accompany evolution, but it must not be accepted in an absolute sense; its luciferic- ahrimanic character must be perceived. Something shadowlike has remained behind from Solomon's Temple, something shadow-like also from Hellenism, and something shadow-like from the Roman Empire. Nearly two thousand years ago it was self-evident that from these three—soul, spirit, and body—Christianity was born. But soul, spirit, and body could not immediately disappear; they remained in a certain way as after-effects. Now is the time when this fact must be clearly understood and when the completely unique character of the Christ Impulse itself must be realized.

A shadow remains behind from the most important extract of the esoteric Old Testament, from the Mystery of Solomon's Temple; a shadow remains from Hellenism; also one from the Roman Empire. We must learn to distinguish the shadows from the light. It will be mankind's task from this present time into the immediate future to differentiate between the shadows and the light in the right way.

We see the shadow of the Roman Empire in Roman Catholicism. This is not Christianity; it is the shadow of the ancient Roman Empire into which Christianity had to be born. In its forms there continues to live what had to be built up at that time as a framework for Christianity. But we must learn—humanity must learn—to distinguish the shadow of the old Roman Empire from Christianity. The essence of Christianity is not to be found in the organization of the Catholic Church, or indeed of any of the Christian churches. One sees in their hierarchical aspect what existed and developed in the Roman Empire from Romulus to the Emperor Augustus. The illusion arises only because Christianity was born into this body.

In this sense Solomon's Temple has also remained as a shadow. The Mysteries of Solomon's Temple have—with a few exceptions—been completely absorbed into the Masonic and other secret societies of the present time. As the Roman Church is the shadow of the ancient Roman Empire, so what continues to exist in these societies—however strongly they assert to the contrary, even to the extent of excluding Jews—is the shadow of ancient Judaism, the shadow of the esoteric Jehovah-worship. Again the shadow must be distinguished from the light. Just as the shadow expressed in the perpetuation of the Roman Empire in the Catholic Church, in the churches generally, must be distinguished from the light shining in Christianity, so the element into which Christianity had to be born as soul must be distinguished from the shadow that continues to work in societies founded on symbolism that is reminiscent of Solomon's Temple.

These things must be recognized. They must be looked at in the right way. And they must be illuminated in our time by the new revelations of which we have been speaking during these days.

The Greek spirit into which Christianity had to be born—in spite of all the beauty of Hellenism, in spite of its esthetic and other important content, in spite of the influence it has upon us—has left its shadow as the modern world conception of the cultured humanity that has brought this fearful catastrophe⁴ upon mankind. When Hellenism existed with its world conception, it was something different. Everything, dear friends, is right in its own time. If something is taken in an absolute sense, and carried on after it has become antiquated, it then becomes the shadow of itself. And the shadow is not the light; it may change suddenly into the opposite of the real thing. Aristotelianism still shows something of the greatness of ancient Greece. Aristotle in modern raiment is materialism. Christianity was born into the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, the Roman body; but the three have left their shadows behind. The challenge sounds through our time, like the call of an angel's trumpet, to perceive the true facts, to look through the shadows to the light.

Truly, anyone who ponders over this present moment in time, who considers impartially, without prejudice, what has brought about the fearful, distressing events of recent years, surely cannot help wondering whether some sort of light can be sought that would shine into the darknesses of earth in a different way from those lights which most people still wish to regard as the only ones. One should find the will to look for a way through the shadows to the light. For the shadows will assert themselves. They will become effective through people who perhaps have endured little themselves of the great suffering of humanity at the present time, who have no sympathy, or very little, for the terrible agony that has flashed through the world, agony that is itself proof that many of the thoughts which have appeared were destined to be shipwrecked. One who tries to examine with deeper understanding what is really not difficult to see today, one who has the resolute will to look without prejudice at what is happening today among men, will feel an impulse to seek the light. He should attach some importance to this impulse in his soul, not listen to those who—depending on the place they occupy—wish only to defend one of the ancient shadows, but listen to his own soul; it will speak clearly enough if only he does not let its voice drown under the external assertions of the shadows.

If today one looks compassionately at what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen, one will be able to see a strange figure standing before men: a distortion of the truly human form, in garments woven of shadows, a figure uniting in itself in its thoughts, sensations, feelings, and will-impulses what has put humanity on a wrong track and gives every promise of taking it farther on the wrong track. Deep within what is happening outwardly dwell those three shadow-thoughts that have been described.

Whoever learns to see that figure in garments woven of shadows, has prepared himself in the right way to look at something else: to look at the tree that can illuminate even today's darkness with its lights. Whoever is pure in heart and does not allow himself to be misled by the threefold shadow-existence—antiquated symbolism, antiquated ecclesiasticism, antiquated materialistic science—will see what wills to shine in the darkness as a real Christmas tree, and lying beneath it the Christ-Jesus Child, illuminated anew by the Christmas light. This is the real aim of our anthroposophically-oriented science of the spirit: to seek the Christmas light, so that the Jesus Child, Who entered the world first to work and then to be understood, may gradually be understood; to illuminate in a modest way the greatest of all events in earth existence. This is the goal of our anthroposophical spiritual science within the religious currents of humanity. People will not understand the light that this spiritual science wants to recognize as its Christmas light unless they have the will really to penetrate the threefold shadow-existence of our time. The times are serious. And whoever lacks the will to take them seriously will perhaps not be able in this incarnation to see what should truly be perceptible at this time to every human being of good will, there for the healing of the many wounds that otherwise mankind will still have to suffer. People of good will should take notice of what may be seen when the anthroposophical science of the spirit enkindles the Christmas light. The light is truly small, and he who professes it remains humble. He does not wish to extol it to the world as something special, for he knows that now it appears small and insignificant, and many men and many generations must still come, to help what now burns dimly to become brighter. But even though the light is weak, it shines on something whose effect within human earthly evolution is not weak, something that is working powerfully as the deepest meaning of human evolution. The light illumines what we may call the birth of Christianity, the Christmas of Christianity. Along with the Easter meaning of anthroposophical spiritual science may this its Christmas meaning be understood. May many, many souls look forward in this spirit to the profound experience of the Christmas Holy Nights. They will then be able to feel that already a call is sounding through the world to contemplate the appearance of Jesus, who awaited here on earth that moment when He was to meet death, in order in His spirit-life after death to give a new meaning to mankind and to earth evolution.

My dear friends, let us feel something of this Christmas mood that is to enter our souls from spiritual science! I would like at this moment to begin Christmas solemnly, by expressing the wish—as my soul's innermost holy Christmas greeting—that you may experience the mood of consecration that wills to receive the new Christ-revelation. I assume that you too are beginning Christmas with that earnestness of which I endeavored to speak today, an earnestness appropriate to the present condition of the world. In this spirit, my dear friends, I wish you with all my heart a holy, solemn Christmas!

• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 20 Dec. 1918, Die Soziale Grundfordentng unserer Zeit/in Geanderter Zeitlage, GA 186 (Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1979).
• 4. World War I.

When I made some suggestions last Sunday for a renewal of our Christmas thinking, I spoke of the real, inner human being who comes from the spiritual world and unites with the body that is given to him from the stream of heredity. I described how this human being, when he enters the life he is to experience between birth and death, enters it with a certain sense of equality. I said that someone who observes a child with understanding will notice how he does not yet know of the distinctions that exist in the human social structure, due to all the relationships into which men's karma leads them. I said that if we observe clearly and without prejudice the forces residing in certain capacities and talents, even in genius, we shall be compelled to ascribe these in large measure to the impulses which affect mankind through the hereditary stream; that when such impulses appear clearly in the natural course of that stream, we must call them luciferic. Moreover, in our present epoch these impulses will only be fitted into the social structure properly if we recognize them as luciferic, if we are educated to strip off the luciferic element and, in a certain sense, to offer upon the altar of Christ what nature has bestowed upon us—in order to transform it.

There are two opposite points of view: one is concerned with the differences occurring in mankind through heredity and conditions of birth; the other with the fact that the real kernel of a man's being holds within it at the beginning of his earthly life the essential impulse for equality. This shows that the human being is only observed correctly when he is observed through the course of his whole life, when his development in time is really taken into account. We have pointed out in another connection that the developmental motif changes in the course of life. You will also find reference to this in an article I wrote called “The Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in Human Life,” where it is shown that the luciferic influence plays a certain role in the first half of life, the ahrirnanic in the second half; that both these impulses are active throughout life, but in different ways.

Along with the idea of equality, other ideas have recently been forced into prominence in a tumultuous fashion, in a certain sense precipitating what should have been a tranquil development in the future. They have been set beside the idea of equality, but they should really be worked out slowly in human evolution if they are to contribute to the well-being of humanity and not to disaster. They can only be rightly understood and their significance for life rightly estimated if they are given their proper place in the sequence of a man's life.

Side by side with the idea of equality, the idea of freedom resounds through the modern world. I spoke to you about the idea of freedom some time ago in connection with the new edition of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. We are therefore able to appreciate the full importance and range of this impulse in relation to the innermost kernel of man's being. Perhaps some of you know that it has frequently been necessary, from questions here and there, to point to the entirely unique character of the conception of freedom as it i is delineated in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. There is a certain fact that I have always found necessary to emphasize in this connection, namely, that the various modern philosophical conceptions of freedom have made the mistake (if you want to call it a mistake) of putting the question thus: Is the human being free or not free? Can we ascribe free will to man? or may we only say that he stands within a kind of absolute natural necessity, and out of this necessity accomplishes his deeds and the resolves of his will? This way of putting the question is incorrect. There is no “either-or.” One cannot say, man is either free or unfree. One has to say, man is in the process of development from unfreedom to freedom. And the way the impulse for freedom is conceived in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, shows you that man is becoming ever freer, that he is extricating himself from necessity, that more and more impulses are growing in him that make it possible for him to be a free being within the rest of the world order.

Thus the impulse for equality has its greater intensity at birth—even though not in consciousness, since the latter is not yet developed—and it then decreases. That is to say, the impulse for equality has a descending development. We may make a diagram thus:

At birth we find the height of the impulse for equality, and it moves in a descending curve. With the impulse for freedom the reverse is true. Freedom moves in an ascending curve and has its culmination at death. By that I do not mean to say that man reaches the summit of a freely-acting being when he passes through the gate of death; but relatively, with regard to human life, a man develops the impulse for freedom increasingly up to the moment of death, and he has achieved relatively the greatest possibility of becoming free at the moment he enters the spiritual world through the gate of death. That is to say: while at birth he brings with him out of the spiritual world the sense of equality which then declines during the course of physical life, it is just during his physical lifetime that he develops the impulse toward freedom, and he then enters the spiritual world through the gate of death with the largest measure of this impulse for freedom that he could attain in the course of his physical life.

You see again how one-sidedly the human being is often observed. One fails to take into account the time element in his being. He is spoken of in general terms, in abstracto, because people are not inclined today to consider realities. But man is not a static being; he is an evolving being. The more he develops and the more he makes it possible to develop, so much the more does he fulfill his true task here in the course of physical life. People who are inflexible, who are disinclined to undergo development, accomplish little of their real earthly mission. What you were yesterday you no longer are today, and what you are today you will no longer be tomorrow. These are indeed slight shades of differences; but happy is he in whom they exist at all—for standing still is ahrimanic! There should be shades of difference. No day should pass in a man's life without his receiving at least one thought that alters his nature a little, that enables him to develop instead of merely to exist. Thus we recognize man's true nature—not when we insist in an absolute sense that mankind has the right to freedom and equality in this world—but only when we know that the impulse for equality reaches its culmination at the beginning of life, and the impulse toward freedom at the end. We unravel the complexity of human development in the course of life here on earth only when we take such things into consideration. One cannot simply look abstractly at the whole man and say: he has the right to find freedom, equality, and so forth, within the social structure. These things must be brought to people's attention again through spiritual science, for they have been ignored by the recent developments that move toward abstract ideas and materialism.

The third impulse, fraternity, has its culmination, in a certain sense, in the middle of life. Its curve rises and then falls. (See diagram.) In the middle of life, when the human being is in his least rigid condition—that is, when he is vacillating in the relation of soul to body—then it is that he has the strongest tendency to develop brotherliness. He does not always do so, but at this time he has the predisposition to do so. The strongest prerequisites for the development of fraternity exist in middle life.

Thus these three impulses are distributed over an entire lifetime. In the times we are approaching it will be necessary for our understanding of other men, and also—as a matter of course—for our so-called self-knowledge, that we take such matters into account. We cannot arrive at correct ideas about community life unless we know how these impulses are distributed in the course of life. In a certain sense we Will be unable to live our lives usefully unless we are willing to gain this knowledge; for we will not know exactly what relation a young man bears to an old man, or an older person
to one in middle life, unless we keep in mind the special configuration of these inner impulses.

But now let us connect all this with lectures⁵ I gave here earlier about the whole human race gradually becoming younger. Perhaps you recall that I explained how the particular dependence of soul development upon the physical organism that a human being has today only during his very earliest years was experienced in ancient times up to old age. (We are speaking now only of post-Atlantean epochs.) I said that in the ancient Indian cultural epoch man was dependent upon his so-called physical development into his fifties, in the way that he is now dependent only in the earliest years. Now in the first years of life man is dependent upon his physical development. We know the kind of break the change of teeth causes, then puberty, and so on. In these early years we see a distinct parallel in the development of soul and of body; then this ceases, vanishes. I pointed out that in older cultural epochs of our post-Atlantean period that was not the case. The possibility of receiving wisdom from nature simply through being a human being—lofty wisdom which was venerated among the ancient Indians, and could still be venerated among the ancient Persians—that possibility existed because the conditions were not the same as they are now. Now a man becomes a finished product in his twenties; he is then no longer dependent upon his physical organism. Starting from his twenties, it gives him nothing more. This was not the case in ancient times. In ancient times the physical organism itself gave wisdom to man's soul into his fifties. It was possible for him in the second half of life, even without special occult training, to extract the forces from his physical organism in an elemental way, and thus attain a certain wisdom and a certain development of will. I pointed to the significance of this for the ancient Indian and Persian epochs, even for the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, when it was possible to say to a boy or girl, or young man or young woman: “When you are old you may expect that something will come into your life, will be bestowed upon you simply by your having become old, because one continues to develop up to the time of death.” Age was looked up to with reverence , because a man said to himself: With old age something will enter my life that I cannot know or cannot will while I am still young. That gave a certain structure to the entire social life which only ceased when during the Greco-Latin epoch this point of time fell back into the middle years of human life. In the ancient Indian civilization man was capable of development up to his fifties. Then during the ancient Persian epoch mankind grew younger: that is, the age of the human race, the capacity for development, fell back to the end of a man's forties. During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch it came between the thirty-fifth and the forty-second year. During the Greco-Latin epoch he was only capable of development up to a point of time between the twenty-eighth and the thirty-fifth year. When the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, he had this capability up to the thirty-third year. This is the wonderful fact we discover in the history of mankind's evolution: that the age of Christ Jesus when he passed through death on Golgotha coincides with the age to which humanity had fallen back at that time.

We pointed out that humanity is still becoming younger and younger; that is, the age at which it is no longer capable of development continues to decrease. This is significant, for example, when today a man enters public life at the particular age at which humanity now stands—twenty-seven years—without having received anything beside what he took in from the outside up to his twenty-seventh year. I mentioned that in this sense Lloyd-George⁶ is the representative man of our time. He entered public life at twenty-seven years. This had far-reaching consequences, which you can of course discover by reading his biography. These facts enable one to understand world conditions from within.

Now what strikes you as the most important fact when you connect what we have just been indicating—the increasing youthfulness of the human race—with the thoughts we have brought before our souls in these last days in relation to Christmas? The state of our development since the Mystery of Golgotha is this, that starting from our thirtieth year we can really gain nothing from our own organism, from what is bestowed upon us by nature. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, we would be going about here on earth after our 30th year saying to ourselves: Actually we live in the true sense only up to our thirty-second or thirty-third year at most. Up to that time our organism makes it possible for us to live; then we might just as well die. For from the course of nature, from the elemental occurrences of nature, we can gain nothing more for our soul development through the impulses of our organism. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, the earth would be filled with human beings lamenting thus: Of what use to me is life after my thirty-third year? Up to that time my organism can give me something. After that I might just as well be dead. I really go about here on earth like a living corpse. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, many people would feel that they are going about on earth like living corpses. But the Mystery of Golgotha, dear friends, has still to be made fruitful. We should not merely receive the Impulse of Golgotha unconsciously, as people now do: we should receive it consciously, in such a manner that through it we may remain youthful up to old age. And it can indeed keep us healthy and youthful if we receive it consciously in the right way. We shall then ' be conscious of its enlivening effect upon our life. This is important!

Thus you see that the Mystery of Golgotha can be regarded as something intensely alive during the course of our earthly life. I said earlier that people are most predisposed to brotherliness in the middle of life—around the thirty-third year, but they do not always develop it. You have the reason for this in what I just said. Those who fail to develop brotherliness, who lack something of brotherliness, simply are too little permeated by the Christ. Since the human being begins to die, in a certain sense, in middle age from the forces of nature, he cannot properly develop the impulse, the instinct, of brotherliness—and still less the impulse toward freedom, which is taken up so little today—unless he brings to life within himself thoughts that come directly from the Christ Impulse. When we turn to the Christ Impulse, it enkindles brotherliness in us directly. To the degree to which a man feels the necessity for brotherliness, he is permeated by Christ.

One is also unable alone to develop the impulse for freedom to full strength during the remainder of one's earthly life. (In future periods of evolution this will be different.) Something entered our earth evolution as human being and flowed forth at the death of Christ Jesus to unite Itself with the earthly evolution of humanity. Therefore Christ is the One who also leads present-day mankind to freedom. We become free in Christ when we are able to grasp the fact that the Christ could really not have become older, could not have lived longer, in a physical body than up to the age of thirty-three years. Suppose hypothetically that He had lived longer: then He would have lived on in a physical body into the years when according to our present earth evolution this body is destined for death. The Christ would have taken up the forces of death. Had he lived to be forty years old, He would have experienced the forces of death in His body. These He would not have wished to experience. He could only have wished to experience those forces that are still the freshening forces for a human being. He was active up to His thirty-third year, to the middle of life; as the Christ He enkindled brotherliness. Then He caused the spirit to flow into human evolution: He gave over to the Holy Spirit what was henceforth to be within the power of man. Through this Holy Spirit, this health-giving Spirit, a human being develops to freedom toward the end of his life. Thus is the Christ Impulse integrated into the concrete life of humanity.

This permeation of man's inner being by the Christ Principle must be incorporated into human knowledge as a new Christmas thought. Mankind must know that we bring equality with us out of the spiritual world. It comes, one might say, from God the Father, and is given to us to bring to earth. Then brotherliness reaches its proper culmination only through the help of the Son. And through the Christ united with the Spirit we can develop the impulse for freedom as we draw near to death.

This activity of the Christ Impulse in the concrete shaping of humanity is something that from now on must be accepted consciously by human souls. This alone will be really health-giving when people's demands for refashioning the social structure become more and more urgent and passionate. In this social structure there live children, youths, middle-aged and old people; and a social structure that embraces them all can only be achieved when it is realized that human beings are not simply abstract Man. The five-year-old child is Man, the twenty-year-old youth, the twenty-year-old young woman, the forty-year-old man—at the present time to undertake an actual observation of human beings, which would result in a consciousness of humanity in the concrete, human beings as they really are. When they are looked at concretely, the abstraction Man-Man-Man has no reality whatsoever. There can only be the fact of a specific human being of a specific age with specific impulses. Knowledge of Man must be acquired, but it can only be acquired by studying the development of the essential living kernel of the human being as he progresses from birth to death. That must come, my dear friends. And probably people will not be inclined to receive such things into their consciousness until they are again able to take a retrospective view of the evolution of mankind.

Yesterday I drew your attention to something that entered human evolution with Christianity. Christianity was born out of the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, and the Roman body. These were the sheaths, so to speak, of Christianity. But within Christianity is the living Ego, and this can be separately observed when we look back to the birth of Christianity. For the external historian this birth of Christianity has become very chaotic. What is usually written today about the early centuries of Christianity, whether from a Roman Catholic or a Protestant point of view, is very confused wisdom. The essence of much that existed in those first Christian centuries is either entirely forgotten by present theologians or else it has become, may I say, an abomination for them. Just read and observe the strange convulsions of intellectualism—they almost become a kind of intellectual epilepsy—when people have to describe what lived in the first centuries of Christianity as the Gnosis.⁷ It is considered a sort of devil, this Gnosis, something so demonic that it should absolutely not be admitted into human life. And when such a theologian or other official representative of this or that denomination can accuse anthroposophy of having something in common with gnosticism, he believes he has made the worst possible charge.

Underlying all this is the fact that in the earliest centuries of Christianity gnosticism did indeed penetrate the spiritual life of European humanity—so far as this was of importance for the civilization of that time—and, moreover, much more significantly than is now supposed. There exists on the one hand, not the slightest idea of what this Gnosis actually was; on the other hand, I might say, there is a mysterious fear of it. To most of the present-day official representatives of any religious denomination the Gnosis is something horrible. But it can of course be looked at without sympathy or antipathy, purely objectively. Then it would best be studied from a spiritual scientific standpoint, for external history has little to offer. Western ecclesiastical development took care that all external remains of the Gnosis were properly eradicated, root and branch. There is very little left, as you know—only the Pistis Sophia and the like—and that gives only a vague idea of it. Otherwise the only passages from the Gnosis that are known are those refuted by the Church Fathers. That means really that the Gnosis is only known from the writings of opponents, while anything that might have given some idea of it from an external, historical point of view has been thoroughly rooted out.

An intellectual study of the development of Western theology would make people more critical on this point as well—but such study is rare. It would show them, for instance, that Christian dogma must surely have its foundation in something quite different from caprice or the like. Actually, it is all rooted in the Gnosis. But its living force has been stripped away and abstract thoughts, concepts, the mere hulls are left, so that one no longer recognizes in the doctrines their living origin. Nevertheless, it is really the Gnosis. If you study the Gnosis as far as it can be studied with spiritual scientific methods, you will find a certain light is thrown upon the few things that have been left to history by the opponents of gnosticism. And you will probably realize that this Gnosis points to the very widespread and concrete atavistic-clairvoyant world conception of ancient times. There were considerable remnants of this in the first post-Atlantean epoch, less in the second. In the third epoch the final remnants were worked upon and appeared as gnosticism in a remarkable system of concepts, concepts that are extraordinarily figurative. Anyone who studies gnosticism from this standpoint, who is able to go back, even just historically, to the meager remnants—they are brought to light more abundantly in the pagan Gnosis than in Christian literature—will find that, as a matter of fact, this Gnosis contained wonderful treasures of wisdom relating to a world with which people of our present age refuse to have any connection. So it is not at all surprising that even well-intentioned people can make little of the ancient Gnosis.

Well-intentioned people? I mean, for instance, people like Professor Jeremias of Leipzig, who would indeed be willing to study these things. But he can form no mental picture of what these ancient concepts refer to—when, for example, mention is made of a spiritual being Jaldabaoth, who is supposed with a sort of arrogance to have declared himself ruler of the world, then to have been reprimanded by his mother, and so on. Even from what has been historically preserved, such mighty images radiate to us as the following: Jaldabaoth said, “I am God the Father; there is no one above me.” And his mother answered, “Do not lie! Above thee is the Father of all, the first Man, and the Son of Man.” Then—it is further related—Jaldabaoth called his six co-workers and they said, “Let us make man in our image.” Such imaginations, quite self-explanatory, were numerous and extensive in what existed as the Gnosis. In the Old Testament we find only remnants of this pictorial wisdom preserved by Jewish tradition. It lived especially in the Orient, whence its rays reached the West; and only in the third or fourth century did these begin to fade in the West. But then there were still some after-effects among the Waldenses and Cathars⁸ that finally died out.

People of our time can hardly imagine the condition of the souls living in civilized Europe during the first Christian centuries, in whom there lived not merely mental pictures like those of present-day Roman Catholics, but in a supreme degree vivid, unmistakable echoes of this mighty world-picture of the Gnosis. What we see when we look back at those souls is vastly different from what we find in books that have been written about these centuries by ecclesiastical and secular theologians and other scholars. In the books there is nothing of all that lived in those great and powerful imaginative pictures describing a world of which, as I have said, people of our time have no conception. That is why a man possessing present-day scholarship can do nothing with such concepts—for instance, with Jaldabaoth, his mother, the six co-workers, and so on. He does not know what to do with them. They are words, word-husks; what they refer to, he does not know. Still less does he know how the people of that earlier age ever came to form such concepts. A modern person can only say, “Well, of course, the ancient Orientals had lively imaginations; they developed all that fantasy.” We ourselves must marvel that such a person has not the slightest idea how little imagination a primitive human being has, what a minor role it plays, for instance, among peasants. In this respect the mythologists have done wonders! They have invented the stories of simple people transforming the drifting clouds, the wind driving the clouds, and so on, into all sorts of beings. They have no idea how the earlier humanity to whom they attribute all this were really constituted in their souls, that they were as far removed as could possibly be from such poetic fashioning. The fantasy really exists in the circles of the mythologists, the scholars who think out such things. That is the real fantasy!

What people suppose to have been the origin of mythology is pure error. They do not know today to what its words and concepts refer. Certain, may I say, clear hints concerning their interpretation are therefore no longer given any serious attention. Plato pointed very precisely to the fact that a human being living here in a physical body has remembrance of something experienced in the spiritual world before this physical life. But present-day philosophers can make nothing of this Platonic memory-knowledge; for them it is something that Plato too had imagined. In reality, Plato still knew with certainty that the Greek soul was predisposed to unfold in itself what it had experienced in the spiritual world before birth, though it still possessed only the last residue of this ability. Anyone who between birth and death perceives only by means of his physical body and who works over his perceptions with a present-day intellect, cannot grant any rational meaning to observations that have not even been made in a physical body but were made between death and a new birth. Before birth human beings were in a world in which they could speak of Jaldabaoth who rose up in pride, whose mother admonished him, who summoned the six co-workers. That is a reality for the human being between death and a new birth, just as plants, animals, minerals, and other human beings are realities for him here in this world, about which he speaks when he is confined in a physical body. The Gnosis contained what was brought into this physical world at birth; and it was possible to a certain extent up to the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, that is, up to the eighth century before the Christian era, for human beings to bring very much with them from the time they had spent between death and a new birth. What was brought in those epochs from the spiritual world and clothed in concepts, in ideas, is the Gnosis. It continued to exist in the Greco-Latin epoch, but it was no longer directly perceived; it was a heritage existing now as ideas. Its origin was known only to select spirits such as Plato, in a lesser degree to Aristotle also. Socrates knew of it too, and indeed paid for this knowledge with his death.

Now what were the conditions in this Greco-Latin age in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? Only meager recollections of time before birth could now be brought over into life, but something was brought over, and in this Greek period it was still distinct. People today are inordinately proud of their power of thinking, but actually they can grasp very little with it. The thinking power that the Greeks developed was of a different nature. When the Greeks entered earthly life through birth, the images of their experiences before birth were lost; but the thinking force that they had used before birth to give an intelligent meaning to the images still remained. Greek thinking differed completely from our so-called normal thinking, for the Greek thinking was the result of pondering over imaginations that had been experienced before birth. Of the imaginations themselves little was recalled; the essential thing that remained was the discernment that had helped a person before birth to find his way in the world about which imaginations had been formed. The waning of this thinking power was the important factor in the development of the fourth post-Atlantean period, which continued, as you know, into the fifteenth century of the Christian era.

Now in this fifth epoch the power to think must again be developed, out of our earthly culture. Slowly, haltingly, we must develop it out of the scientific world view. Today we are at the beginning of it. During the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, from 747 B.C. to 1413 A.D.—the Event of Golgotha lies between—there was a continual decrease of thinking power. Only in the fifteenth century did it begin slowly to rise again; by the third millennium it will once more have reached a considerable height. Of our present-day power of thought mankind need not be especially proud; it has declined. The thinking power, still highly developed, that was the heritage of the Greeks shaped the thoughts with which the gnostic pictures were set in order and mastered. Although the pictures were no longer as clear as they had been for the Egyptians or the Babylonians, for example, the thinking power was still there. But it gradually faded. That is the extraordinary way things worked together in the earliest Christian centuries.

The Mystery of Golgotha breaks upon the world. Christianity is born. The waning thinking power, still very active in the Orient but also reaching over into Greece, tried to understand this event. The Romans had little understanding of it. This thinking power tried to understand the Event of Golgotha from the standpoint of the thinking used before birth, the thinking of the spiritual world. And now something significant occurred: this gnostic thinking came face to face with the Mystery of Golgotha. Now let us consider the gnostic teachings about the Mystery of Golgotha, which are such an abomination to present-day, especially Christian, theologians. Much is to be found in them from the ancient atavistic teachings, or from teachings that are permeated by the ancient thought-force; and many significant and impressive things are said in them about the Christ that today are termed heretical, shockingly heretical. Gradually this power of gnostic thought declined. We still see it in Manes⁹ in the third century, and we still see it as it passes over to the Cathars—downright heretics from the Catholic point of view: a great, forceful, grandiose interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha. This ebbed away, strangely enough, in the early centuries, and people were little inclined to apply any effort toward an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. These two things, you see, were engaged in a struggle: the gnostic teaching, wishing to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha through powerful spiritual thinking; and the other teaching, that reckoned with what was to come, when thought would no longer have power, when it would lack the penetration needed to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, when it would be abstract and unfruitful. The Mystery of Golgotha, a cosmic mystery, was reduced to hardly more than a few sentences at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, telling of the Logos, of His entrance into the world and His destiny in the world, using as few concepts as possible; for what had to be taken into account was the decreasing thinking power.

Thus the gnostic interpretation of Christianity gradually died out, and a different conception of it arose, using as few concepts as possible. But of course the one passed over into the other: concepts like the dogma of the Trinity were taken over from gnostic ideas and reduced to abstractions, mere husks of concepts.The really vital fact is this, that an inspired gnostic interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha was engaged in a struggle with the other explanation, which worked with as few concepts as possible, estimating what humanity would be like by the fifteenth century with the ancient, hereditary, acute thinking power declining more and more. It was also reckoning that this would eventually have to be acquired again, in elementary fashion, through the scientific observation of nature. You can study it step by step. You can even perceive it as an inner soul-struggle if you observe St. Augustine,¹⁰ who in his youth became acquainted with gnostic Manichaeism, but could not digest that and so turned away to so-called “simplicity,” forming primitive concepts. These became more and more primitive. Even so, in Augustine there appeared the first dawning light of what had again to be acquired: knowledge starting from man, from the concrete human being. In ancient gnostic times one had tried to reach the human being by starting from the world. Now, henceforth, the start must be made from man: knowledge of the world must be acquired from knowledge of the human being. This must be the direction we take in the future. I explained this here some time ago and tried to point to the first dawning light in humanity. One finds it, for instance, in the Confessions of St. Augustine—but it was still thoroughly chaotic. The essential fact is that humanity became more and more incapable of taking in what streamed to it from the spiritual world, what had existed among the ancients as imaginative wisdom and then was active in the Gnosis, what had evoked the power of acute thinking that still existed among the Greeks. Thus the Greek wisdom, even though reduced to abstract concepts, still provided the ideas that allowed some understanding of the spiritual world. This then ceased; nothing of the spiritual world could any longer be understood through those dying ideas.

A man of the present day can easily feel that the Greek ideas are in fact applicable to something entirely different from that to which they were applied. This is a peculiarity of Hellenism. The Greeks still had the ideas but no longer the imaginations. Especially in Aristotle this is very striking. It is very singular. You know there are whole libraries about Aristotle, and everything concerning him is interpreted differently. People even dispute whether he accepted reincarnation or pre-existence. This has all come about because his words can be interpreted in various ways. It is because he worked with a system of concepts applicable to a supersensible world but he no longer had any perception of that world. Plato had much more understanding of it; therefore his system of concepts could be worked out better in that sense. Aristotle was already involved in abstract concepts and could no longer see that to which his thought-forms referred. It is a peculiar fact that in the early centuries there was a struggle between a conception of the Mystery of Golgotha that illuminated it with the light of the supersensible world, and the fanaticism that then developed to refute this. Not everyone saw through these things, but some did. Those who did see through them did not face them honestly. A primitive interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha, an interpretation that was rabid about using only a few concepts, led to fanaticism.

Thus we see that supersensible thinking was eliminated more and more from the Christian world conception, from every world conception. It faded away and ceased. We can follow from century to century how the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to people as something tremendously significant that had entered earth evolution, and yet how the possibility of their comprehending it with any system of concepts vanished—or of comprehending the world cosmically at all. Look at that work from the ninth century, De Divisione Naturae by Scotus Erigena.¹¹ It still contains pictures of a world evolution, even though the pictures are abstract. Scotus Erigena indicates very beautifully four stages of a world evolution, but throughout with inadequate concepts. We can see that he is unable to spread out his net of concepts and make intelligible, plausible, what he wishes to gather together. Everywhere, one might say, the threads of his concepts break. It is very interesting that this becomes more noticeable from century to century, so that finally the lowest point in the spinning of concept-threads was reached in the fifteenth century. Then an ascent began again, but it did not get beyond the most elementary stage. It is interesting that on the one hand people cherished the Mystery of Golgotha and turned to it with their hearts, but declared that they could not understand it. Gradually there was a general feeling that it could not be understood. On the other hand the study of nature began at the very time when concepts vanished. Observation of nature entered the life of that time, but there were no concepts for actually grasping the phenomena that were being observed.

It is characteristic of this period, at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, halfway through the Middle Ages, that there were insufficient concepts both for the budding observation of nature and for the revelations of saving truths. Think how it was with Scholasticism in this respect: it had religious revelations, but no concepts out of the culture of the time that would enable it to work over these religious revelations. It had to employ Aristotelianism; this had to be revived. The Scholastics went back to Hellenism, to Aristotle, to find concepts with which to penetrate the religious revelations; and they elaborated these with the Greek intellect because the culture of their own time had no intellect of its own—if I may use such a paradox. So the very people who worked the most honestly, the Scholastics, did not use the intellect of their time, because there was none, none that belonged to their culture. It was characteristic of the period from the tenth to the fifteenth century that the most honest of the Scholastics made use of the ancient Aristotelian concepts to explain natural phenomena; they also employed them to formulate religious revelations. Only thereafter did there rise again, as from hoary depths of spirit, an independent mode of thinking—not very far developed, even to this day—the thinking of Copernicus and Galileo. This must be further developed in order to rise once more to supersensible regions.

Thus we are able to look into the soul, into the ego, so to speak, of Christianity, which had merely clothed itself with the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, and the Roman body. This ego of Christianity had to take into account the dying-out of supersensible understanding, and therefore had to permit the comprehensive gnostic wisdom to shrink, as it were—one may even say, to shrink to the few words at the beginning of the Gospel of John. For the evolution of Christianity consists essentially of the victory of the words of St. John's Gospel over the content of the Gnosis. Then, of course, everything passed over into fanaticism, and gnosticism was exterminated, root and branch.

All these things are linked to the birth of Christianity. We must take them into consideration if we want to receive a real impulse for the consciousness of humanity that must be developed anew, and an impulse for the new Christmas thought. We must come again to a kind of knowledge that relates to the supersensible. To that end we must understand the supersensible force working into the being of man, so that we may be able to extend it to the cosmos. We must acquire anthroposophy, knowledge of the human being, which will be able to engender cosmic feeling again. That is the way. In ancient times man could survey the world, because he entered his body at birth with memories of the time before birth. This world, which is a likeness of the spiritual world, was an answer to questions he brought with him into this life. Now the human being confronts this world bringing nothing with him, and he must work with primitive concepts like those, for instance, of contemporary science. But he must work his way up again; he must now start from the human being and rise to the cosmos. Knowledge of the cosmos must be born in the human being. This too belongs to a conception of Christmas that must be developed in the present epoch, in order that it may be fruitful in the future.

• 5. Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 11 Jan. 1918, Ancient Myths, Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution, GA 180 (Vancouver, Steiner Book Centre, 1971).
• 6. David Lloyd-George: 1863–1945. British statesman. Elected to Parliament 1890; Prime Minister during World War I. One of the “Big Four” statesmen at Paris Peace Conference 1919.
• 7. Gnosis: esoteric knowledge in Greco-Latin world of the 2nd century A.D.
• 8. Waldenses and Cathars: heretical Christian sects in western Europe, 12th and 13th centuries. They joined the Reformation movement during the 16th century.
• 9. Manes: 216–274 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Nurnberg, 25 June 1908, Apocalypse of St. John, GA 104 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
• 10. Augustine: 354–430 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 22 May 1920, The Redemption of Thinking, GA 74 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 11. Scotus Erigena: 810–877 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1973).