The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Announcement before the lecture on the occasion of the “Free Anthroposophical University Courses”

Please allow me to say a few words before I begin my lecture. A few minutes ago I saw the newspaper that published the “Reply to Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Emil Molt and Dr. Carl Unger in Stuttgart”. The article is signed “Major General (retired) von Gleich”. I will not bother you with a detailed response to the matter, but would just like to make the following comment.

I became aware of the statement that was printed in the Stuttgarter Tagblatt and that was made by Dr. Unger and Mr. Emil Molt after it had been written and already printed in the Stuttgarter Tagblatt. I did not exert the slightest influence on this declaration and need not point out to you here that I declare myself in retrospect in complete agreement with the content and with the fact of the declaration. But the other fact is, of course, that I have not addressed any correspondence to Mr. von Gleich – printed or otherwise – and I would like to emphasize this in particular. Mr. von Gleich has the audacity to send me a reply for which there is no request. I would just like to address these words to you so that you do not believe that I sent any request or any correspondence to that Mr. von Gleich, handwritten or printed - one could assume that one could have overlooked the matter. Of course, I would not personally address anything to a person who slimes himself out - excuse the expression - like Mr. von Gleich, but would only comment on it if the person in question could somehow manage to take some part of the public by surprise, and then I would not address Mr. von Gleich, but rather the public. Regarding such jostling, as it has been perpetrated there, I am in the habit, after reading it, to do nothing more than wash my hands. I want to stick to that in the future, but I don't want to fail to point out to you that a reply has been sent here to something that did not happen. Whether it is due to a brain diseased by hatred or to something else, I for one can only understand it in such a way that I would naturally write on such a reply letter: “will not be accepted” and that only if no reply is received does it appear to me as an impertinence.

Anthroposophy and Threefolding: Their Nature and Their Defense

Dear attendees! It has not been my custom to say a special word of thanks after greetings. Today I want to do it because I really thank you very much for this greeting in the interest of the matter. Anyone who is attached to the matter I represent here may also express his thanks when he sees that it has retained its old sympathies despite the attacks it has suffered here. For almost two decades I have been giving lectures here in Stuttgart every year on the anthroposophical worldview, and in these lectures everything has been mentioned that makes it possible to form an opinion about the anthroposophical movement. More recently, I have also spoken about things that are more loosely connected with what I represent as the anthroposophical worldview: the so-called threefold social order. And I do not believe that any of the words I have spoken in the latter context have in any way violated the spirit and content of what, as I said, I have been advocating for almost two decades as an anthroposophical worldview.

Today, however, I face the outside world as if before a caricature of what I myself have to describe as the anthroposophical worldview. From all sides, I am confronted with descriptions of what this anthroposophical worldview is supposed to be. I must confess that most of these descriptions are such that I do not recognize the picture of the anthroposophical world view that I have drawn here. Everything seems so alien to me, just as what has been said in numerous personal attacks from all sides seems alien to me. It will therefore be forgiven if today I depart from the custom I have otherwise almost always observed here of speaking purely impersonally about the anthroposophical world view, and that I also take into account in a few places the personal attacks that have been made against me. But I promise you that I will not go into these things any further than they are related to the matter in hand in any direction.

First of all, dear ladies and gentlemen, I would like to talk about the origin and starting point of the anthroposophical world view. This origin and starting point lies entirely in the scientific world view of modern times. Anyone who goes through the somewhat long series of my writings will be able to see that my starting point never lies in any religious problems, even though, of course, anthroposophy, by its very nature, as we shall see, must lead to religious feeling and religious views. The starting point was not religious views, the starting point was the scientific world view that I grew into in my younger years. Anyone who grows into this scientific worldview of the present day will initially feel an extraordinary respect for what science has achieved in modern times, and above all, they will gain an even greater respect for both the experimental and observational methods of scientific research and for the training in thinking and methodical schooling that contemporary science can introduce to people. And I must confess that, for me, since I entered the natural sciences, the most valuable thing about them was this training of thought, this conscientious discipline of thinking and researching. And more than from individual results of natural science, I have always started from what natural science research brings up in you as a training in thinking. But in doing so, one thing became clearer and clearer to me. When I — and I believe that what I am about to say is sufficiently clear from my 'Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings', which appeared in the 1880s — when I repeatedly looked at what lives in the human soul in terms of yearning for the spiritual world, what views of a spiritual world live in the human soul, then the fundamental question arose for me: How can that which undoubtedly forms the great triumph of modern times, scientific research, be reconciled with these longings, with these justified impulses of the human soul?

Dear attendees! This question has brought me together with personalities in particular who, familiar with the scientific way of thinking of modern times, led a tragic inner life of the soul in dealing with the same question. An example: In my early youth, I encountered a person who, I might say, was completely infiltrated by the scientific way of thinking - a way of thinking that is fully justified in its field and points to the origin of our planet Earth, our entire world system, as a purely material primeval nebula, through whose inner forces all being has gradually formed, ultimately including man. But in man, so this personality said to himself, the processes of this concentrated nebula world took on very special forms; ideals arise in man, religious convictions, the longing arises in man to know something about that which lies beyond birth and death, because a life that only covers the period between birth and death seems so meaningless. But everything that appears in the so-called life of the soul in a human being is, as this personality put it, just smoke and fog, something that arises like a haze from what alone can be scientifically accepted. And the mental life of this personality was tragic, for it said to itself: It must be a mere deception, a mere illusion, what emerges from material life and presents itself to man as a mirage.

One may find such a way of thinking more or less justified, more or less opposed, it was there in numerous cases, and it was there in such personalities, for whom it was in vain to object: Yes, natural science on the one hand is an exact science, on the other hand the world of faith is the subjective world. Our ideals arise from this subjective world, our religious convictions arise from this subjective world. One must know the one, believe the other. There were just so many such personalities who could not do this, who said to themselves: If it is the case that the human being has arisen from what science presents to us, then ethical ideals and religious convictions are illusions. I could cite many examples along these lines. But what I want to say with it is sufficiently indicated. And so the question arose for me more and more out of life itself: Is there not a possibility, between what lives inside of man in terms of spiritual aspirations and what natural science has established, is there not a connection in between, is there not a bridge from one to the other?

And now, what offered me above all the possibility of finding such a bridge, that was not, at first, looking at inner, subjective visions; that had become clear to me from the beginning. No matter how convincingly or intensely subjective visions may present themselves to the soul, one has no right to accept them as objective on account of their subjective appearance, if one is not in a position to build a bridge from the scientifically established to the spiritual world. I have already tried to build this bridge in my “Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings”. I then devoted special attention to this in the elaboration of my small work “Truth and Science” and my larger book “The Philosophy of Freedom”.

It is quite certain that if the scientific world view alone is right, then we as human beings are the works of a necessity, then the idea of freedom is impossible, then even in this so convincing experience of our inner life, the fact that we have free will seems to stand only as a deception before our soul. And so for me the question of the justification of freedom became one of those problems, one of those riddles that occupied me intensely as a young man, and I saw that it is impossible to find a foundation for the question of freedom without a foundation for all of philosophical thinking. That was therefore the task I set myself at the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s: to find a foundation for philosophical thinking. I first put aside everything that might arise to me as visions of a spiritual world. Above all, I wanted to have a secure philosophical foundation that was in harmony with the scientific research of modern times. And starting from this point of view, I examined above all the nature of human thinking. I tried all possible ways of arriving at the answer to the question: What is human thinking essentially according to its nature?

Anyone who reads my “Philosophy of Freedom” will find how these paths to fathoming the nature of human thinking were sought. And for me it turned out that only someone who sees something in the highest expressions of this thinking that takes place independently of our physicality, of our bodily organization, can understand human thinking correctly. And I believe I succeeded in demonstrating that the processes of pure thinking in man take place independently of bodily processes. In bodily processes, natural necessities prevail. What emerges from these bodily processes in the way of dark instincts, will impulses and so on is, in a certain respect, determined by natural necessity. What a person accomplishes in his thinking ultimately turns out to be a process that takes place independently of the physical organization of the person. And I believe that through this “Philosophy of Freedom” nothing less has emerged than the supersensible nature of human thinking. And once this supersensible nature of human thinking had been recognized, then the proof was provided that in the most ordinary everyday life, when man rises to real thinking, through which he is determined by nothing other than the motives of thinking itself, then he has a supersensible element in this thinking. If he then directs his life by this thinking, develops himself in this way, is educated in this way, that he goes beyond the motives of his physical organization, beyond drives, emotions, instincts, and bases his actions on motives of pure thinking, then he may be called a free being. To explain the connection between supersensible pure thinking and freedom was my task at that time.

One can stop at this point and pursue such a train of thought merely in theory. But if such a train of thought is not pursued merely in theory, but becomes a fulfillment of one's whole life, if one sees in it a revelation of human nature itself, then one pursues it not merely in theory, but in practice. What is this practical pursuit? Well, once one has grasped the supersensible nature of thinking, one learns to recognize that the human being is capable of becoming independent of his bodily organization in a certain activity. One can now try whether, in addition to pure thinking, the human being is also capable of developing an activity that is modeled on this pure thinking. Anyone who calls the method of research that I use to underpin my anthroposophical spiritual science clairvoyance must also call ordinary pure thinking, which flows from everyday life into human consciousness and into human action, clairvoyance. I myself see no qualitative difference between pure thinking and what I call clairvoyance. My view is that through the process of pure thinking, man can first develop a practice of how to become independent of one's physical organization in one's inner processes, how to accomplish something in pure thinking in which the body has no part. In 1911, at the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna, I explained in a very philosophical way that pure thinking is something that is carried out in man without the physical organization having any part in it. And here, in a large number of lectures, I have confirmed this from the most diverse points of view.

But then, when one knows the process by which one arrives at such pure thinking, something can be developed through what true, deeper philosophy gives, which I then presented in the most diverse ways as a method of knowledge for the higher worlds in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Secret Science”. Just as pure thinking ultimately emerges from the ordinary everyday activities of the human soul, for which no special training is needed, so, by further developing this process, one can arrive at what I have called in the above-mentioned book and in the second part of my “Occult Science” the stages of higher knowledge — that is, imagination, inspiration, intuition. What is expressed in pure thinking becomes our own simply by virtue of being born; it is inherited by us in our present stage of human development. That which, in accordance with the pattern of pure thinking, can appear as imagination, inspiration, or intuition, must likewise be cultivated in the adult, just as certain abilities are cultivated naturally in the child.

If some people find it astonishing, some paradoxical, and some even curious, what I describe as methods in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” then it must be clear that when a person tries to develop an inner life within himself, he needs something other than what is available in everyday life. Therefore, other terms are needed. Anyone who penetrates the meaning of these terms without being malicious from the outset will see that the only intention of my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is to show people how to develop certain abilities that are latent, that is, dormant, in every soul: the ability to have certain images present in consciousness. The fact of the matter is that through those methods – which I will not describe again today, I have described them here very often – that through those methods, which I have described in the books mentioned, the human being makes himself capable not only of attaining such abstract concepts as are contained in pure thinking, but that he makes himself capable of presenting to his soul fully substantial, if I may use the expression, more saturated contents of consciousness, which are as full of content as otherwise only sensual impressions. What is called for here is essentially a strengthening of ordinary thinking power, and if one wishes to call it clairvoyant power, so be it. Certain exercises must be done to develop such abilities, just as certain exercises must be done by the child to develop certain abilities.

Professor Wilhelm Bruhn, who lectured on anthroposophy and related subjects in Kiel for a semester, has observed that the preparations to be made in order to arrive at such imaginative and then at an inspired knowledge are, in a certain respect, of an ethical nature, that certain ethical forces must be applied, must be trained if man is to penetrate to the knowledge of the higher worlds. And this Wilhelm Bruhn, who is an opponent of the anthroposophical world view in the strongest possible terms, emphasizes the ethical seriousness of these preparations, which is unmistakable. Bruhn alone – and I may well base myself on him here precisely because in his small work, which appeared in the collection 'Aus Natur und Geisteswelt' (From Nature and the Spiritual World), he has a kind of compendium of everything that can be said against anthroposophy – he particularly asserts that by encouraging people to develop their inner soul abilities, I am in fact leading them to initially have pictorial representations that are expressed in colors, lines or figures. This is one of the gross misunderstandings that must be corrected if Anthroposophy is not to be completely misunderstood.

In my “Theosophy” I expressly pointed out what is important here. I said: It is not important that the one who, as a spiritual researcher, seeks the way into the higher worlds, sees exactly the same thing that is described in the sensual life as yellow and red, as pointed or blunt, but rather, said: the person who has a somewhat finer perception does not simply gaze at yellow, at green, at red, but has an inner experience of the yellow, of the green, of the red. You can read about these interesting inner experiences of colors in Goethe's Theory of Colors in the chapter “Sensual-moral Effect of Colors.” When you have this experience, this particular specific experience of yellow, green, red, blue, then you know something that is purely spiritual. And you get this experience when you rise to imaginative knowledge. By soaring to imaginative knowledge, one has, as I say in my Theosophy, an experience such as one has with yellow, an experience such as one has with blue; the experience is a purely soul process. If one wants to have designations for it, then one expresses oneself in such a way that one experiences something that is illustrated by yellow, by blue, and one speaks just as little of this color yellow and blue as one speaks of a reality, as one, when one draws a triangle or a square on the blackboard, which is to depict something, confuses this triangle or square with the reality that is to be depicted.

Everything that is striven for in this anthroposophical schooling is striven for in full consciousness; nothing unconscious or subconscious prevails in it. Everything is striven for in such a way that one emulates those inner soul processes that one has acquired through mathematical schooling. In such consciousness, in such inner development of the will, one strives for that which is to lead up into the higher worlds. One simply comes to a visualization that one depicts through colors. And when one has progressed so far in a certain way that one can have a new world, a completely new world before oneself, a world that one is urged to represent by colors or by other sensualizations, then one is ripe to advance to inspired knowledge. When one develops the element of love, which is present even in ordinary life, to its highest expression as an inner soul power, then one is given the opportunity not only to have such images arising in one's consciousness, but also to be able to remove them from one's consciousness. One is not a slave to these images, nor is one a mere psychic; one is in full command of them. But just as one knows when one puts one's finger on a hot iron that one is not just dealing with the idea of the hot, but with a reality, as one can only state this through life, through the context of life, it turns out that what one experiences inwardly in this way in imaginative experience refers to an objectively spiritual reality. And if one develops the ability to love in the appropriate way, then one comes to erase these images from one's consciousness, so to speak, and then one has spiritual substance in one's pure, inner experience.

This spiritual essence, as far as it is accessible to me, I have described in my books, and at the same time I have followed the method that on the one hand, through books like my “Theosophy” and my “Secret Science”, I have described what arises from such research. And on the other hand, in such a book and in some other books, such as 'How to Know Higher Worlds', I have described exactly the path by which every human being can come to such knowledge. And I have expressly made it clear that every person can come to such realizations; but I have also made it clear that the one who handles the inner essence of pure thinking does not need schooling of the mind, but he can, when the knowledge gained by such schooling of the mind is communicated to him and he receives it without prejudice, he can receive it inwardly as a conviction, just as he receives what astronomy gives, without becoming an astronomer himself.

This, esteemed attendees, is the method for entering the spiritual world. One enters the spiritual world as into a reality, which one then knows to be a reality as that which is handed down to us by science. If we now turn back to the method of natural science, we say to ourselves: After all, we do not really apply any other method, any other inner soul activity, to the supersensible world than the one we have already applied in natural science, but adapted to things outside ourselves that can be perceived by the senses. Yes, one finally realizes that natural science has become great precisely because, I would say, the same inner training of thought was used in the first stage, which can then be applied to supersensible knowledge.

That is why I said that what interested me most about science was what emerged from it as a training in thinking. I have wrestled with such problems as those presented by Du Bois-Reymond in his “Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis” (The Limits of Natural Knowledge), where he comes to the conclusion that one can only arrive at the supersensible by going beyond science. But I have seen that one can only make such a statement as Du Bois-Reymond does here if one believes that the way in which one masters scientific facts, brings them into laws, is not already dominated by thinking, which is similar to the supersensible capacity for knowledge.

As for how the world judges such things, there are only a few hints. I must start by saying that Wilhelm Bruhn fundamentally misunderstands much of anthroposophy. He reproaches me, for example, with offering nothing more than a kind of filtered sensuality in supersensible knowledge. What I say in the passages quoted in my Theosophy and what I say in my Occult Science cannot be applied to words such as Bruhn utters. He says:

In any case, Steiner also teaches a sufficient knowledge of reality in some sensory form.

No, I have never taught that. Every such statement as Bruhn's is simply a misunderstanding of what I have always said as the most essential thing. When someone misunderstands so thoroughly, it seems understandable that he should make the strange statement: 'What I am giving as exercises to get up into the supersensible worlds is exactly the same as the spiritual exercises that Jesuit pupils have to do. Now, yet another Protestant theologian has found a similarity between what I write in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and the Jesuit spiritual exercises. But a Catholic theologian, Canon Laun, firmly rejects this and says that anyone who claims that my exercises are similar to those of the Jesuits does not know the exercises of the Jesuits.

Dear attendees! In this case, I must absolutely agree with Canon Laun, even though I do not agree with him on anything else, but what I have now explained to you in principle has truly nothing to do with the Jesuit retreats. No wonder that when something is misunderstood in the way I have indicated, people are led to believe that I am describing the content of the spiritual world as a series of cinematic images – that is how Bruhn expresses himself. Now, it is true that Whoever rises to the spiritual world, as I have described, also grasps his own spiritual soul, grasps this spiritual soul as it is as eternal. Through contemplation, he penetrates the riddles of death and immortality, for whom a scientific path to the eternal forces of that which lives in man reveals itself.

But if we consider the temporal forces that live in man between birth and death, what do we find? Well, we do not just have a consciousness of the moment. In our ordinary life, we look back to a very early point in our childhood, and we know that the human soul would be ill if one could not look back to this point in childhood in a continuous stream of memory. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that, fundamentally, we are nothing more at this moment than what we have become through our experiences, which can be brought up again through the memory stream. If one delves into one's temporal existence between birth and the present moment and reveals to oneself, not cinematically but in inner experience, the recent past of one's own self, then, if one sees through this process in the right way, it will no longer wonderful that if you now familiarize yourself with the eternal, with the immortality of the soul, which was present in all processes that preceded even our formation on earth, you can also familiarize yourself with what this eternal part of the soul has experienced. If you familiarize yourself with what the soul has experienced eternally, then you have the cosmic environment around you, just as you have your personal environment around you through ordinary memory. This supersensible ability to read is in the so-called Akashic Chronicle, that is, in what one surveys through the experiences of the soul in relation to the soul's eternal; it is nothing other than that the soul these experiences are presented and revealed, so that one's ordinary memory, which otherwise reaches back to birth – or at least to a point near birth – is expanded to cosmic vision.

That, my dear audience, people who listen to ordinary mystics cannot see through in its true essence. These ordinary mystics usually take what has been seen by others and embellish it with all kinds of nebulous things. And in this way, what I would like to call the justified rejection or even the justified caution towards everything that appears as spiritual-scientific results has also come about. Nebulous mystics have brought too much all kinds of number symbolism and the like to that which is observed just as accurately, only by applying the developed soul abilities of man, as for example in physics the rainbow or the seven-color spectrum. The true spiritual researcher, when speaking of the sevenfold human being, can only speak as one speaks of the seven-coloured rainbow, and he means nothing mysterious by it, any more than the physicist means anything mysterious when he speaks of the seven-coloured spectrum. But then come the mystics, the nebulous ones, who attach all kinds of stuff to these things; as a result, much of honest spiritual research has been discredited. And if one is forced to use the number seven or the number nine somewhere, it is resented.

You see, Bruhn, as I said, provided the compendium for the opposition. Bruhn, the Kiel professor, finds a kind of mythology in what I present and finds, affirms what he says about mythology by the fact that I have to use such numbers as 7 and 9 and the like. I find this strange in a gentleman who, for his part, admits: there is intuitive knowledge, there are intuitive truths, supersensible truths – and who now lists what he calls supersensible truths in this way, and he numbers them : 1. one's own ego, 2. the ego of others, 3. the existence of things in space, 4. events in time, 5. beauty, 6. morality, 7. the divine.

Yes, my dear audience, it does not occur to me to accuse Mr. Bruhn of some nebulous number mysticism just because he mentions seven truths. However, these truths are, I would say, very meager. And even though he admits that the content of these seven truths was attained intuitively, that is, in a way that signifies a purely inner vision, he must also admit the possibility that this path, which leads to these simple, meager truths, can perhaps be developed as a very exact path like the mathematical one, and that one can then also come to other, richer, more substantial truths. Instead, such seven truths are nailed up, and what is basically drawn from the same sources – only after these sources have first been sought in the right way – is called mythology.

In a peculiar way, one relates to what appears here as an anthroposophical worldview. Recently, a newspaper here turned to an authority so that this authority, which belongs to a neighboring university, would give an authoritative judgment on anthroposophy. Now, among the many things – and you really can't read them all – that now appear to be opposed, I just got this article and read it. I came across a passage where the author objects to my statement about supersensible facts and supersensible beings. He says that in my spiritual realm, supersensible beings move just as tables and chairs move in the physical realm! Now, ladies and gentlemen, just imagine the logic that leads to saying that tables and chairs move by themselves in physical space. I am aware of states of human life in which there is a subjective appearance of tables and chairs moving by themselves, but I do not believe that the good theologian meant to refer to such a state. Now, Bruhn also betrays himself through a similar kind of logic, but I would like to say explicitly, just so that I am not misunderstood, that the earnest way in which he approaches anthroposophy is thoroughly commendable. You have to take Bruhn seriously, so I take him seriously. But now he also says that I am clinging to the gross-sensual and that I only present the supersensible, the spiritual, as a sensual, which is why one has to object that one does not get closer to the unknown spiritual through such a method. You get just as little close to this unknown spiritual as a mountaineer – so says Bruhn – who moves away from the earth and climbs up a mountain; he may move away from what is below, but the sky is still just as far above him.

Now, my dear audience, the sky that arches above us is, as is well known, not there at all; one looks out into the infinite space of the universe. One can see from the sensualizations that these people give when they want to hit something that comes from spiritual science that their logic is in a strange way ordered. And so I would like to point out right away that it is said that in the account I give of the course of the world through supersensible knowledge, one could understand Christ in the same way as any other particularly distinguished personality, such as Socrates, Plato or Buddha. — This is simply an objective untruth compared to what I have presented in my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact”. There I showed how everything in the pre-Christian era was directed towards the mystery of Golgotha, but how nothing in the pre-Christian era can be compared with what appears in the being of Christ Jesus. I have characterized it concretely in the course of spiritual history, and I have further shown how everything that has happened since the mystery of Golgotha is thoroughly impelled by this event. I have expressly shown that anthroposophy leads to the placing of this event of Golgotha in the center of the becoming of the earth. But this is what must be taken into account, what must not and should not be criticized by simply applying quite different, alien thoughts to the same.

And so a critic like Bruhn also finds that what I present as supersensible intuitions I actually only get through my thoughts operating in some way unknown to me, that I construct them out of thoughts without knowing, however, that what then becomes an image only proceeds in the unconscious, that thus, so to speak, the intuitions are only ideas after all. In his essay on Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Bruhn says that Schiller had already objected to Goethe's Urpflanze, saying that Goethe's image of the Urpflanze was an idea and not a vision. In my books and lectures, I have often described how Goethe defended himself against Schiller's statement, and Bruhn says that I must accept the same objection. Well, I am happy to do so! But I would like to point out that such an objection arises from the fact that the objector does not recognize how imaginative knowledge, how beholding, rises from the abstract idea to something more saturated, to something more fully substantial, and only in this way can that which is still a formal element in the abstract become a visualization of higher spiritual realities.

If one misunderstands in such a way what is expressed by the spiritual science meant here, then one can also very easily come to the conclusion that this spiritual science wants to be a substitute for religion. And then one says, as Bruhn has often said, that religion must not be something that one grasps in clear recognition, but that religion must be something irrational. Bruhn expresses it, I admit, very beautifully. He says it should be a blissful enjoyment as a closeness to God and a homesickness as a distance from God. It should not be a supersensible knowledge, but it should be a touch of the divine.

Now, the error lies in the fact that anthroposophy does not want to be a substitute for religion. Religion is formed, however, through a personal relationship with the founder of the religion. This personal relationship to the founder of the religion is irrational, just as, on a smaller scale, every relationship we have with any human being is irrational. The relationship we have with any human being is something we naturally refrain from reducing to any kind of idea, however supersensible, because we would accept any tittle-tattle from him. Thus the relationship one has to the Christ Jesus is something irrational, something that should not be conceptualized, not even in supersensible concepts, but should become a fact in the inner, fully human experience alone. On the other hand, especially for those who have knowledge of nature, there is the necessity to strive for supersensible knowledge in order to have the possibility of penetrating to the soul and spiritual as something real. Once one is familiar with supersensible knowledge, one will seek to find through this supersensible knowledge that which is most valuable to one in the world. And so many people have the urge to understand that which they have as an irrational nature, which they blissfully enjoy as being close to God, which they feel homesick for as being far from God, in terms of its historical and cosmic reality. It can be understood in a philological way; this has been achieved through external science. It can also be approached through supersensible knowledge; this has been achieved through anthroposophy. The aim is not to shake people out of their irrational relationship with religion, but to seek a path of knowledge to Christ Jesus. The human being who needs it - and many people already need it today, and more and more will need it - must, on the one hand, form his view of the world of the senses and of the spirit, and on the other hand, of that which has become religiously valuable to him, in order to then find harmony between the two.

This is what tears the soul apart if one is not able to bring one's knowledge to what has become religiously valuable to one. Anthroposophy is not intended to found a religion. Anthroposophy is neither a sect nor the founding of a religion, but rather the realization of the supersensible. And since that which has embodied itself through Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha is a supersensible being, and since the event of Golgotha itself is a process in which the supersensible lives, there must be a path from supersensible knowledge to this Mystery of Golgotha. The aim is not to create a substitute for religion, but to expand our knowledge so that we can also understand what we experience religiously. This does not make religious experience more superficial, nor does it strip religious experience of its piety. Rather, it allows us to turn our inner gaze to what is religiously valuable to us in the mystery of Golgotha through contemplation, with firm inner strength.

Dearly beloved attendees, I can only give examples of what I have to say about the nature of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, and what I have to say in its defense. But just as the points I have touched on, others could be presented here if I were able to give many lectures and did not have to content myself with one lecture. Therefore, I will now move on to what has been added in recent years to what I have previously presented here over many years as the anthroposophical worldview: the idea of social threefolding.

The fact that this social threefolding exists at all can be traced back to the fact that a number of people came to me during the sad days of the war and afterwards and wanted to know my thoughts on how social life could progress from these tragic events of the war. I was asked, people came to me, ladies and gentlemen. I mention this explicitly for the reason that it is far too little seen, because usually things are presented as if I were some kind of fanatical agitator who would forcefully bring things to people. I have never done anything else in the anthroposophical worldview, except give lectures, dear attendees. I appealed to those people who wanted to come to these lectures; they came – whether they were from the aristocracy or the proletariat, they were always equally welcome to me. And those who then became my so-called followers became so because they heard me. I did not go after anyone – I would not say such a thing if I were not compelled to do so. And if anyone presents these things as if I, as a fanatical agitator, had followed one person one time and another person another time, then it must be said that I have never followed anyone with any idea. The social threefolding is even used today to cast suspicion on that aspect of the anthroposophical world view from which it actually draws its very best roots. And here I would like to come back to Bruhn, who at least is to be taken more seriously than other critics.

Bruhn says: No matter how much he may have to fight it, something like anthroposophy has its origin in the “bankruptcy of our intellectual culture”. One has to get out of this intellectual culture, and he attributes to me that I did not strive to get out of this intellectual culture in the same way as those whom I 97 as the nebulous Theosophists, but that I had gone through Goethe and Haeckel, had struggled through German idealism, that I was “occidentally” oriented, that the roots of my view would rest in “western-Germanic culture” and in “scientific training.

I am not saying this out of immodesty – you can read it in Bruhn's small writing, and you will find that this can be important to me in the face of the various hostilities that are now coming from all sides. As a young man, I was among those who, in Austria in the 1880s, had to fight a difficult battle in defense of Germanness against the other nationalities. I edited the Viennese “Deutsche Wochenschrift” for a short time. I got to know all the difficult struggles that one had to go through, especially in Austria, if one wanted to make the German character and German abilities, which are considered valuable for humanity, part of the content of the whole of human culture.

Dear attendees, I only refer to such small episodes in a spirit of urgency: when I was once asked to speak at a Bismarck Commers in Weimar, where I was in the 1890s, I concluded with the words of our Austrian poet Robert Hamerling – one only needs to know his works to know that his Germanness could not be doubted – I concluded at the time, when I spoke in Weimar, in Germany, as an Austrian at the Bismarck Commers, with the words of Hamerling: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland!”

Dearly beloved, in all my life I have never for a moment deviated from this view. And those who approached me in 1918 to ask me what Anthroposophy thought about how to proceed from there knew full well that my answer was rooted in German spirituality. I have – I make no boast of this, but in the face of the fierce attacks it must be said – I have given lectures from Bergen to Palermo, from Paris to Helsinki; I have given them everywhere in German. In May 1914 – please note the date – I gave a public lecture in Paris in German, based on German spirituality, not to a German colony but to the French. Every sentence had to be translated afterwards.

Now, out of the same spirit, what was then called the “threefold social order” has emerged. I would like to start by quoting something, again from an opponent, so that one can see how opponents think about the threefold order, which actually does not even belong to the most serious ones, because they overlook something, although they are nevertheless trained in thinking, as for example the Jena professor Rein. To begin with, he is preaching to the converted when he says: All ideas are sterile when the concept of humanity plays a decisive role in them. I quite agree, because the abstract, nebulous, mystical concept of humanity makes no sense. Humanity consists of people, of nations, and anyone who wants to work for humanity must, of course, move out of the national and into the general human. How one can do that, everyone who has any impartiality at all should admit that one can have a definite opinion based on one's own assumptions. And now Professor Rein goes on to say that the state cannot be overcome without further ado, because the state has already developed to such an extent among us Germans that one cannot go back to earlier conditions. Again, I agree! Yes, one can even completely agree with what Rein now cites as individual state demands. He says: The state must, first of all, be responsible for the care of art and science, morality and religion. Secondly, it must advocate the equalization and reconciliation of contradictions, the cooperation of the estates and professions, of employees and employers. All this, says Rein, must work together in the state as the three limbs work together in the human organism, of which Rein says - in a discussion of threefolding - that it is also threefold.

Now, just to make it clear how the three limbs should work together in the threefold social organism, I used the comparison with the threefold human being. It never occurred to me to speak of a “tripartite division”. Just as one cannot have the head separately from the human being, one cannot have the circulatory system separately, one cannot have the metabolic system separately, so one cannot have spiritual life, economic life and legal life separately in the social organism. Just as the blood supplies everything in the human organism, so within the state there are impulses that supply everything in all three limbs. And the opinion was that the three limbs of the social organism – spiritual life, legal life, economic life – work together in the right way when they exist in relative independence, just as the three limbs of the human organism are characterized by relative independence.

What, for example, does someone like Professor Rein want, who admits all this but then says that he must nevertheless fight the threefold order? He says, for example, that the state cannot be creative, but only regulatory and controlling. So what does he demand for spiritual life? A cultural parliament! And Professor Rein imagines this cultural parliament to consist of school chambers, state school chambers and so on; he imagines it to a certain extent as self-governing. And if I examine objectively how this cultural parliament of Professor Rein differs from what I have stated as the self-government of the spiritual member of the social organism, I find no difference other than that Professor Rein - and and this is open to discussion - wants to have the parents elected to his cultural parliament, but I would like to hand over the self-administration to those who are experts in this field, to the teachers and educators themselves. I do not want a cultural parliament, but something that arises without parliamentary chatter as a proper administrative organism made up of experts.

It is indeed strange that people like Professor Rein should fight against the threefold order. I really must ask myself why Professor Rein fights against the threefold order and describes it as dangerous to the state. Well, one may well ask why he does so. For in the same article in which he does so, he says: We Germans have every need to consolidate the freedom and unity of the national state. – So says Professor Rein, and then he says: Threefolding, rightly conceived, shows the way in which this can be done – namely, to consolidate the freedom and unity of the national state. And further: This way will be especially welcome to those who aim to eliminate the political parties, together with parliamentarism, which they repeatedly present as a corrupting institution.

I asked: What does Professor Rein want more than for threefolding to fulfill this ideal task of his? I cannot find any reason why he opposes it, since he says that, properly understood, threefolding points the way for what he wants to happen. I cannot find any other explanation than the one that emerges from a few words of Professor Rein: He says that he has explained his understanding of this threefold order in the new edition of his “Ethics”, which will be published soon. I am very interested to see when this threefold division appears in his Ethics, but I could not help speaking of this threefold division earlier, since I was asked about it earlier. And it seems to me that gentlemen like Rein are only angry because I forestalled them. I cannot help that.

Now, there is one more point I must mention: I have spoken here again today - and as I said, for 15 to 16 years - about supersensible knowledge. I have not only spoken of these supersensible insights as something that is, so to speak, shot from a pistol, but I have spoken of them in such a way that I have given precise details of the paths by which one comes to such insights. And with that, everyone is given the opportunity to verify it. Anyone who wants to go this way can come to the verification. And it is therefore quite unjustified when, today, out of the thought habits of the present — the thought habits that I have to fight against in many respects — the demand arises that what I call clairvoyant knowledge should be examined in a different way than the way I have indicated. I have said in my book “Theosophy”: For everything that I present in this book, I advocate that it be presented as a fact to me, as external sensory facts are. The one who has written them down does not want to present anything that is not a fact for him in a similar sense to how an experience of the external world is a fact for the eyes and ears and the ordinary mind.

Dear attendees, through such a method, the way is to be found to create a bridge from one human inner being to another. Above all, a pedagogical path is to be sought, the pedagogical path on which we base our teaching at the Freie Waldorfschule, founded by Emil Molt and led by me, the path without which a truly free spiritual life in the three-part social organism is not possible. We must seek such a path for the child too. But such a path is far removed from today's materialistic age; it is so far removed that it seeks the path to the child in a completely different way. And this has given rise to a strange psychology of the soul, which, according to many people, should also find its way into education. Because it is no longer possible to find the way to the child's soul through inner experience, the child is to be subjected to all kinds of procedures according to the methods of experimental psychology, whereby one determines what abilities the child has, for example, from the speed with which it absorbs certain words or with which it forgets words — quite externally, as if one were experimenting on an object because one can no longer do it inwardly. This examination of abilities is applied in a particular way in that area of Europe that has reached the extreme development of social materialism in social terms; this principle of examining children externally - as one examines external apparatus - is applied in a particular way in Bolshevik Russia. This has already been officially introduced there as a method of testing children's abilities – basically a terrible procedure, an indictment of the ability of the human soul to build a bridge to a person's mental abilities. And it is quite characteristic that it is precisely Bolshevism, this destructive worldview that destroys everything human, that is advancing to this pedagogical practice.

Now there are certain people who would like to apply this method to spiritual vision as well. They demand that I or one of my students should submit to such tests as one examines external apparatus. My dear audience, I have presented to humanity for decades what is created through my methods. I have indicated the methods by which it can be tested. I have shown how people who think of such tests, such as Professor Dessoir, who now even wants to form a society for such tests, approaches the anthroposophical spiritual science that I mean. I have shown in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' how he has presented objective untruth about objective untruth about anthroposophy. Well, anyone who wants to test any kind of fortune teller, card reader or sorcerer may demand such methods. I have never presented fortune telling, sorcery or such so-called soul abilities or clairvoyance, which Professor Dessoir or Professor Oesterreich or similar people speak of, who might also want to test mathematical abilities in such an external way. I can only say: anyone who demands such tests does not understand the slightest thing about what lives in anthroposophical spiritual science. And it would not occur to me to engage in what arises from a Bolshevist attitude. No, my dear audience, people may behave as German national as they like – but they shall be recognized by their fruits! If they make such demands as these, then it is not worth discussing their Germanness with them, and I will not engage in any further discussion. I have given my answer.

Now I come to something else. And there I would have to demand that the gentleman who asked the question, “What evidence can you give for your clairvoyant abilities?” First explain who “Mr. Winter” was, by whom I was supposedly converted to anthroposophy in 1900, before he acquires the right to ask me such questions. Dear attendees, the gentleman who wants to ask me questions today once spun his audience a yarn about how I was converted to anthroposophy by lectures given by a “Mr. Winter” in Berlin in 1900. He has probably read as closely as one reads when one only reads the first words of my writing about these winter lectures. In fact, I myself gave these lectures in Berlin in the winter of 1900/1901, through which I am said to have been converted. These, my winter lectures, became “Mr. Winter's” lectures in this gentleman's mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, I further demand that my Jewishness not be mentioned again and again in any insidious allusion, after I have spoken here in sufficient detail about my family tree. And I further demand that I not be slandered by saying that I worked under the tutelage of Mr. Liebknecht. What I experienced at the beginning of this century, however, is that I was thrown out of the proletarian schools where I taught because of my representation of a spiritual conception of history by the satellites of old Liebknecht; I was thrown out of the workers' training schools because I never bought into [the materialist conception of history] and the like.

And I demand that the claim of any kind of suggestive influence or even of post-hypnotic suggestion, as it has been raised by this side, be retracted. And I further demand that the first thing to be done is to clarify what has been stated by this side about my relationship with the late Chief of Staff, Field Marshal von Moltke. My dear audience, I have no need to entertain you this evening with these matters, but I do want to say something about some of the things that have been said here. I have, as I have already said this evening, never followed anyone. I never appeared at Mr. von Moltke's house without having been invited, without having been requested to do so; and so I have been a guest at Mr. von Moltke's house almost every week since 1904. I have learned to respect Mr. von Moltke, I have learned to respect him so much that I may describe him as one of the noblest of men; I want to leave no doubt about that. I have never been to his house without having been invited. Before the outbreak of the war, I never had a conversation with Mr. von Moltke about anything military or political. Whatever was discussed arose from Mr. von Moltke's need to get to know spiritual science. That was his personal matter; I accommodated him.

I was asked to come to Berlin in the first few days of August, as I was not in Berlin when the war broke out. I refused, in anticipation of what might come from a malicious source about these things. For only once, on August 27 [correctly: 26] of 1914, was I in Koblenz, but not at headquarters, but with a family of friends. Herr von Moltke visited me there for half an hour. My dear attendees, there was truly no reason to talk about war at the time. We were in the midst of the triumphal march; it was still relatively far to the Battle of the Marne. Not a word was spoken about military or political matters during that half-hour conversation that Herr von Moltke had with me back then, certainly not at a time when he could have missed something, because the triumphal march continued even afterwards. I did not see Herr von Moltke again until October, long after the Battle of the Marne. There is no way to place anything I discussed with Herr von Moltke before his dismissal in a political or military context. But what was said between Mr. von Moltke and me is one of those personal matters that no one should allow another to prohibit; and it would be sad if we had come to a point where snooping into such matters were considered justified today. From this, the objective untruth arose that some kind of theosophical events in Luxembourg had a paralyzing effect on Mr. von Moltke's health. Mrs. von Moltke herself has now stated that this is an objective untruth. None of this really concerns me; I have no business to speak about it.

Other untrue things have come to light in connection with the threefold social order. And it will be considered justified that, after I have been personally insulted in this way – I do not usually need the word personally – after I have been personally insulted in this way, I would not find it dignified to enter into a discussion with these people before these things are not taken back – despite the fact that I am open to any other discussion.

That is why I sent a registered letter that arrived a few days ago, with “General von Gleich” as the sender, back unopened by return of post. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how individuals would behave in such a case; I know how I behave. General von Gleich then wrote an open postcard – which of course I could not return because it was put in the letterbox – in which he repeated what he had said in his letter and in which he expressly confirmed that he had received the letter I had returned. Well, my dear attendees, with my understanding of the mutual relationship between people, I cannot understand such intrusiveness.

My dear attendees, it has been said at this time, and even in a well-known German weekly magazine, that the former minister Simons is supposed to be my student, that he was inspired by me for all the horrible things he did in London. Now, it seems to me necessary to look at this matter a little more closely. Some time ago I came across an interview with a French journalist. This French journalist said that he had just had an interview with Minister Simons. Minister Simons had spoken to him about the threefold order and said that he found something agreeable in it, just as he did in the views of the Italian minister Giolitti. It seemed to me that there was something fishy about it – I had never got to know Minister Simons very well before – and for me there was only one thing, and I said it in front of many people at the time, even in public meetings, long before the accusations against Simons started here. I said that a German minister would be more likely to know about the threefold order than a French journalist. You see, perhaps out of a prejudice that comes from national backgrounds, I had more sympathy for a German minister than for a French journalist. Then, however, I was urged to talk to Mr. Simons, and lo and behold, Mr. Simons told me that he had not known about the threefold order, that the French journalist had only just told him about it. Well, then I saw Mr. Simons again when he spoke here in Stuttgart about the politics of the time. He wanted to see the Waldorf School. How this visit went has been presented here in a public announcement.

No one who is familiar with what happened at the time will be able to deny that I did anything other than be courteous to the German Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs. Politeness, especially in such a case, does not seem to me to be particularly punishable. And anyone who claims that a different relationship existed is claiming an objective untruth. In this case, however, I am not surprised at this objective untruth. For when this public notice was posted, a letter was produced that was said to have been written in Cologne and which stated that I had boasted in Cologne that I had spoken to Minister Simons here in Stuttgart about the threefold order before his London mission. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have not been to Cologne for many years, and I have not been to Cologne at all recently.

Bruno Roos: Here is the letter!

That may be. The letter can only be a forgery! And that is no wonder, because a lot of work has been done here with forged letters. I don't care what the letter says. The truth is that there was never any relationship between me and Minister Simons other than the one I have described here, and that I have not been to Cologne at all in the last few years, I don't think I've been there for four or five years. So it is a lie that I could have said anything in Cologne. Someone may read or show you a letter – if it says what appeared in the newspaper, then the content of the letter is a blatant forgery. There is no need to engage with people who use such letters to wage a fight.

Dear attendees, many other things have been brought up recently. It is late, and I will only be able to address a few of them. The aim of all these opposing arguments is to distort the essence of threefolding and to present it as questionable by slandering me. For example, there is repeated mention of certain changes that I am supposed to have undergone in my world view. Now, anyone who reads what is contained in my first “Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings” about my engagement with Haeckel will see that I was not a blind admirer of Haeckel in my entire life, but that I did struggle with it in the nineties, trying to come to terms with the things said, even in the details, by such a brilliant naturalist as Haeckel. At that time, it was around the time when Haeckel's “Welträtsel” had not yet been published, but his Altenburg speech on “Monism as a bond between religion and science” had been published. At that time, I gave a speech against this monism at the Vienna Scientific Club about my spiritual monism. And at that time I wrote an essay on ethical questions in the “Zukunft”, and it was Haeckel who approached me at that time, at the beginning of the nineties. I answered his letter and later sent him a copy of the lecture I gave on spiritual monism. Then Haeckel developed the material that became his one-sided book 'The World Riddles'. This led to a fierce battle against Haeckel, especially on the part of philosophers. And I still admit today: the one who was the greater at that time, on whose side the principal right was, was not Haeckel's opponents, it was Haeckel. And I stood up for the one who was relatively more in the right. And from this point of view one must understand what I have often said. Anyone who wants to do spiritual scientific research must be able to immerse himself in everything. This must not be just a phrase; one must also be able to immerse oneself in foreign worldviews. That was always my endeavor: to be able to be objective about foreign worldviews. This may have justified the view of those who from the outset held malicious opinions that I somehow stood in the position myself, in which I found myself; no one who cannot find themselves in foreign points of view can come to spiritual-scientific views. This reproach regarding “changes” is settled by what I presented in an issue of Das Reich, where I showed how what I represent as spiritual science grows out of my original epistemological views in a completely consistent way.

However, I only want to point out these things. It has even been claimed – and this shows how everything is dug up today that can somehow lead to the disparagement of the bearer of the threefold idea – that I was connected with an occult society that practices some evil practices. Dearly beloved, whatever I have advocated, internally or externally, is contained in what I have said in my “Theosophy”: the person who has written it down - and I must say, who has spoken it - does not want to represent anything that is not a fact for him in a similar sense to which an experience of the external world is a fact for the eye and ear and the ordinary mind. The fact that a gentleman, who later in Berlin even became the director of a larger theater, once introduced me to a person as being in need of support does not change that, and that person then received support from me for years through a kind of, I would like to say foolish, good-naturedness. No other relationship than that I supported this person, who would otherwise have had nothing to eat, has led to the assertion that worthless things, which were spoken and agreed between me and this person, have led to the assertion that I had some kind of occult relationship with this person or with an order he represented. I never had a single spiritual scientific conversation with this personality, not least because this personality understood nothing of spiritual science. And when the brazen claim is now made that I received something of the content of my spiritual science from that side, it means that one has understood nothing of what courses through my writings and my speeches.

When such things are stated, one need not be surprised if the claim has also been made that the un-German, the un-national nature of anthroposophy has been revealed in its position on the Upper Silesian question. No one who has sought advice from us in any way has been given any advice other than that those who stand in our ranks should vote for Germany when it comes to the vote. No one was ever given any other advice. What was said in addition to this was, however, that one should not only bring about this vote, but that one should bring about such a relationship for Upper Silesia as an integral country, so that it would be united internally with the German spirit. The idea was not just to call for a plebiscite, but at the same time to introduce a nuance into the agitation that would not only result in a worthless yes-saying in the face of the terrible will of the Entente, but would also lead to something being established that would show Upper Oberschlesien as a region turns out to be, which, through its inner structure, through what it can develop in terms of German spiritual impulses precisely in these difficult struggles, can, I would say, establish its inner affiliation with Germany in the germ. That, my dear attendees, I say in response to all those variously nuanced and from all sorts of dark backgrounds emerging accusations regarding the Upper Silesian question.

This question has been used particularly as a slander because one knows how it works, even by those who then added: One does not get the impression that Steiner's mother tongue is German. - Well, my dear attendees, I have not yet shown anyone outside of this room a document that I have here right now. Those who know me are aware that I do not use such documents to boast about myself or to engage in any kind of self-aggrandizement, but I may read out a sentence here from a letter I received many years ago, immediately after the publication of my first independent work, 'The Epistemology of the Goethean Worldview':

I can only say here that your struggle to gain a firm point of view between idealism and realism is extremely interesting to me, that your booklet has revealed a meaningful life of thought to me, that so many fine and pretty remarks have spoken to me from it and that the tone and style of the whole - despite some content-related suggestions for objections - has touched me sympathetically from beginning to end.

Dear attendees, I have only ever made use of this document in my thoughts when people complained about my style. I have not yet responded to it, but I have remembered that what I have read to you was written to me from Graz on January 30, 1887 by the German poet Robert Hamerling, who probably also understands something about the German style and the German mother tongue. So when the threefold social order emerged here, it was born out of German idealism, oriented towards the West, and it is born out of the longing to present to the world what has emerged from the world forces in Goethe, Schiller, in German Romanticism, in German philosophy, as a German creation, as German power.

Dear attendees, do you think it was easy to work on an eminently German construction in the northwestern corner of Switzerland during the entire war, in a highly visible location? Do you think it was easy to be labeled a Pan-German, that is, an All-German, by the French and the English throughout the entire period? That is what happened to me: across the border I am an Alldeutsche, within Germany I am an enemy of the Alldeutsche and their like-minded people, a traitor to Germanness. Well, that is how the views face each other, just as the views of the Protestant and Catholic priests face each other. Whether I give people Jesuit or anti-Jesuit exercises, both are essentially a distortion and have nothing to do with what threefolding really wants to be. It wants to bring to independent existence that which is genuine German spiritual life. Therefore, it wants the self-administration of spiritual life. In order that man may rightly relate to man, everything that can exist among equals and that can sustain the other two members of the social organism, which must shape themselves out of their own specialized activities in self-government, must unfold in the state. The threefold social organism in Germany will certainly be a vital organism, arising out of the genuine German spiritual life, and if it is only understood, it will bear its fruits. It will work in such a way that German spiritual power will become for the whole world what it can be by its very nature. Much of this German spiritual power has now been shaken, and much of it is slandered, which wants to work precisely from the deepest German essence.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, they go to great lengths in this regard. And I would like to share the latest product of such processes with you at the end. Just a few days ago, an article appeared in the Chicago Daily News with the following content:

Chicago Daily News

The Germans have a pale pink theory about losing the war. The Battle of the Marne was lost because Moltke was studying science.

By Georg Witte. Spezial Kabel: Chicago Daily News, field service. Copyright. 1921. By the Chicago Daily News Co.

Berlin, Germany, May 4. – “Anthroposophy”, a new communist theory of the pale pink variety, is directing the fortunes of Germany according to the enemies of Foreign Secretary Simon. Yesterday they came out with the confirmation that he was only a puppet in the hands of his anthroposophical directors. The Vossische Zeitung, which has continually attacked Dr. Simon during the past week, prints the following:

"Dr. Steiner, creator of a new theory.

Recently, during a meeting of opponents of the new theory, it was confirmed that the influence of Dr. Steiner, the creator of the Theosophical theory, extended as far as Wilhelmstrasse and Dr. Simons, who, before leaving for the London conference, visited Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart and also had lunch with Director Molt, the founder of the Waldorf-Astoria School, where Anthroposophy is taught.

It has also been established that Dr. Simons is in constant touch with the exponents of the new theory, who are never refused entry to his house, even at this critical time.

Was General von Moltke a victim?

The anthroposophical theory was first widely noticed when its enemies claimed that the Battle of the Marne was lost because General Moltke, the chief of staff, neglected to go to the front because he was too absorbed in studying the new theory, which completely governed all his actions. General von Gleich, who makes this accusation, describes Anthroposophy as a “very dangerous idea, destined to have a pernicious influence on both the individual and family life, undermining the authority of the state and dissolving national unity.”

Dr. Steiner's theory, according to the Vossische Zeitung, provides for a division of national strength into three parts, with a communist system under anthroposophical auspices as the ultimate goal.

Now, you see, when someone spreads such a slander that General von Moltke lost the Battle of the Marne because of anthroposophy, and then makes a weak retraction of this claim, this does not prevent this disparagement of General von Moltke's personality from crossing the ocean to America, and that as a result of this slander, General von Moltke's good name is dragged through the mud across the sea.

I also had to mention this fact here, because I was asked by a certain party whether I had inspired a writing that was written against General von Moltke by a person close to him. Just as Hofrat Seiling once became an enemy and wrote a book full of objective untruths against me – because a book by him could not be accepted by our publishing house and was returned to him – so, basically, all of General von Gleich's hostility stems from the fact that a person close to him married someone whom he probably does not consider to be his equal. I am supposed to be responsible for this fact. Well, I can only say that the lady to whom that personality married spoke to me only once, long before the marriage; if she were introduced to me today, I would first have to get to know her again. I knew so little about this connection, and so far I have not been notified of the marriage by an announcement in the papers. I believe that in those circles where such outward appearances are highly valued, one could even argue that I know nothing about this marriage at all, because it has never been objectively indicated to me. And when the writing in question was composed, it was sent to me in Dornach. But I forgot about it. And when I was asked on the telephone about this writing - there are witnesses for it - I said: I completely forgot to read this writing. - That was just before it appeared in print. I have no connection whatsoever with this writing, and I am very far from infringing on anyone's freedom.

My Philosophy of Freedom, ladies and gentlemen, is meant seriously and honestly, and therefore do not count it as immodesty on my part if I - to affirm that threefolding originated in the attitude I have described to you today, I quote here the judgment of an opponent of my Philosophy of Freedom, for ultimately the idea of threefolding rests on my Philosophy of Freedom. I will read to you at the end, because time is already so short and I do not want to bother you any longer with going into all kinds of details - perhaps this will come up in the question - I will therefore read to you at the end the judgment of a fierce opponent of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” In this judgment, it says right at the beginning:

These lines are addressed exclusively to the philosopher, not to the anthroposophist Steiner. And in the main, to his by far most important book, 'Philosophy of Freedom', which the later work 'The Riddles of Philosophy' does not come close to. It goes without saying that Steiner the person is not considered here. I count myself among Steiner's most outspoken opponents and have also publicly expressed this opposition (in my writing “The Thinker”). But the form in which the polemic against Steiner often degenerates into wild agitation is more than unpleasant. And there it must be said...

— Please do not accuse me of immodesty, here it is written:

... that a man capable of a book like “The Philosophy of Freedom” could not possibly have the small and lowly character that is made out of him. In their clarity and noble calm, Steiner's philosophical and anthroposophical writings are among the most formally noble products of our new philosophical literature.

Dear attendees, in no other situation than the one in which anthroposophy and threefolding find themselves today would I somehow bother you with reading such a passage, which might seem immodest; but today it seems to me to be a duty to point out how someone can be an opponent but at the same time a decent person.

It has been said that I do not expose myself to scientific discussions. My dear audience, take the long series of my writings; they are available to the world. It is not my fault that the internal lectures are only now beginning to appear in public. They were urgently requested, but I did not have time to review them. It is not because of the slanderous intentions that they state that they have not been reviewed by me – for my sake they could always have been published for the greatest possible public after I had reviewed them – but I really have not had the time to review them, just as I really do not have the time to deal with all the possible hostile writings that have sprung up from all sides in recent times.

After today's allusions and after what a large number of you have heard in my many lectures over the past years, allow me to say: I stand for what I stand for because, from the innermost strength of my soul, I cannot stand for anything else, and because what I stand for lives in me in such a way that I must stand for it. If it is the truth, it will work its way through despite all opposition. If it is not the truth, which is, however, quite unlikely, then it will be replaced by the truth, because that which is truth will find its way through even the greatest obstacles. But anyone who believes that they can represent the truth from any side must do so. I have always stood before you from these underground bases, I stand before you today from these underground bases, and I will work from these underground bases as long as it is granted to me. No matter how many attacks are made, I will always use honorable means against honorable opponents. But what has emerged in recent times cannot claim that it can be dealt with by means of personal vilification, because it tries to attack the cause indirectly.

But I have to think in terms of standing up for this cause. I will stand up for it. That is what I must express to you today at the end of this discussion, and I have the confidence that if what I have to advocate is the truth, it will prevail because truth itself is something spiritual, something divine, and that which must triumph over all hostile powers is, after all, divine, spiritual truth.

After the previous great unrest in the hall.

Dear attendees, after this heated discussion, I would now like to answer the questions put to me in peace.

How is it possible, if, as you quite rightly noted, our thoughts are a resultant of previous impressions in the cerebral cortex, i.e. changes in a part of our body, that one can free oneself from the influence of the body with one's thoughts, as you explained at the beginning of your lecture. Do you have the ability to free your thoughts in this way?

Now, I have already spoken quite clearly about this matter; I now want to state here some more that follows from spiritual science itself for this question. We humans have in us, in a physical sense, an ascending life and also a descending life. This, I might say two-fold current of our life is usually not sufficiently taken into account. All ascending life consists in our developing growth forces and those forces that drive the absorbed nutrients to all, even the finest, organizational links in our organism. Now, alongside these processes, which are thoroughly constructive, others take place that are destructive, so that we constantly have destructive processes within us. This too is something that can only be established through spiritual science, which is not yet sufficiently known to ordinary materialistic physiology today. Now, all those phenomena that dampen our consciousness and put us into a state of partial or complete sleep are connected with the organic anabolic processes. The processes of our thoughts now go hand in hand with the catabolic processes in our organism, and all the other mental processes, such as instinctive perceptions, perceptions of drives, which actually always put us in a down-tuned state of consciousness, are connected with the organic ascending processes; the actual life of thinking is connected with the catabolic processes. This thinking life is already so in every single person that it develops independently of the organism; there must only be a process of degradation, that is, a process of dissociation in the brain, if thinking is to take hold in us.

If you consider this, my dear audience, you will say to yourself: Our organic building processes extend as far as thinking, then they recede, and thinking is precisely tied to the organic processes limiting themselves. So one becomes free of the organic processes through thinking, and one then continues this freedom by rising from thinking to higher spiritual knowledge. It is therefore absolutely the case – as is explained in more detail in my “Philosophy of Freedom” – that thinking, when it is practiced as pure thinking, is already a clairvoyant process. Even if people do not recognize it in ordinary life, we learn to know the peculiar true nature of higher knowledge precisely when we grasp ordinary thinking in terms of its essential being.

Why were you in a neutral country during the war and not in your homeland?

Dear attendees, I have had my work in Dornach. During the war, I was really, I may say it, more in Germany here than in neutral foreign countries, and I have done what could be done by me as a job, which has been recognized from various sides, during the war. And those who want to know about it, look at the events. It is not true that I did not work for the German people during this time.

Is it true that the ideas of threefolding are partly based on extrasensory knowledge and insights gained through it? And what are these extrasensory experiences and insights?

Dear attendees, I have specifically said that the idea of threefolding has loosely connected to the anthroposophical worldview because what appears in the anthroposophical worldview is a result of supersensible knowledge. For threefolding and for everything that I have presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, one does not need clairvoyance. Look through the entire Kernpunkte and see if at any point it appeals to anything other than common sense. Any association of clairvoyance with the threefold order is pure nonsense and malicious slander.

Anyone who follows the method according to your books “Geheimwissenschaft” and “Erkenntnisse höherer Welten” and so on, you claim that he will achieve supersensory knowledge or vision. As a master of this method, I can demand of you that you can do this. And so I ask you, tell me the feeling, not the physical one, that I have gained from you through your lecture: the feeling is, I ask you, is...

The rest cannot be read. Well, what the questioner asks on this piece of paper cannot be brought out, cannot be read.

Why does a doctrine, if it is good, have to defend itself? Good never needs to defend itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, no one would be happier than I if I did not need to defend myself in any way. And to the one who asks why the good must defend itself – if he regards what I have just presented as the good – I refer him to the address of my opponents, because what one clings to with all the fibers of one's soul must, when it is attacked, be defended.

If anthroposophy has nothing to do with Buddhism and Theosophy, then why are the Sanskrit words karma, reincarnation and so on used?

Reincarnation is not a Sanskrit word. And I use the word karma only because — and not even I always use it, those who have heard my lectures often will know this — because in an old, instinctive spiritual vision, the word “karma” was used. However, I very often replace it by saying: fate as it unfolds through successive earthly lives. I do not attach any importance to these words, but they are often used by others and by myself for the reason that our modern world view is intimately connected with our coinages and therefore one often has to go a long way for the words one has to form.

At the beginning of his speech, Mr. Steiner said that anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion. Why then does anthroposophy not remain neutral?

Dear attendees, I did not say that. I said: Anthroposophy, as I represent it, has arisen from natural science; it has its sources in natural science. — I said: It is not a substitute for religion. —- And I have said: It leads from the side of knowledge to that which is irrationally as a religious experience in the human soul. — And there I can say nothing other than: Just as external philology leads to the dissection of the Bible, so does a supersensible knowledge lead to the knowledge of the spiritual that underlies world development in a religious way. I did not say that anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion, I only said that it did not arise from it and that it does not want to be a substitute for religion.

Why is the neutrality of true and pure theosophy and Christianity not more sharply outlined and clearly presented?

Well, I have never lacked clarity in this respect in the various lectures I have given here, for those who are at all able to grasp the fundamentals of the anthroposophical worldview. And to anyone who demands that anthroposophy should relate to some religion in some subjective way, I can say nothing other than that, according to what I can discern, Christianity is at the center of earthly evolution , that all the other religions of antiquity are moving towards Christianity, culminating in the Mystery of Golgotha, and that everything we have in the way of civilization since then comes from the Christ impulse and is influenced by it. If someone wants a different neutrality, I cannot offer a different neutrality. It is not out of some subjective wish that I place Christianity at the center of earthly development, but out of what I believe I can support as objective knowledge.

I distinguish between what lives irrationally in man as Christianity, as a religion, and what then leads to the spiritual interpretation of the content of this religion. Anthroposophy is concerned with the latter in the sense in which I have expressed it. I will not allow myself to be influenced by the fact that non-Christians may not take kindly to my placing Christianity at the center of attention. For me, this is not a subjective fact, but an objective one. Those who disagree in any direction may be willing to go along with Anthroposophy as far as the discussion of religious questions; after that, they can leave.

But I believe I have presented the relationship between my anthroposophical worldview and the Christian religion very conscientiously in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”. And in addition to all that I have said, I will only add this: When a malicious source says that I have taken something from Anglo-Indian Theosophy, the fact is that I wrote “Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life” entirely on my own, before I had any relationship to Anglo-Indian Theosophy before I had read any book that had emerged from the Theosophical Society, I wrote my “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life” and that I was invited to give lectures to Theosophists.

I said in the lecture: I did not follow anyone; I did not follow the Theosophists either. They came to me because they wanted to hear me. I did not tell you anything that I learned from the Theosophical Society; I said what came from me, and I will defend that in the future everywhere where people want to hear it. I will not ask what views or what kind of societies prevail among those who want to hear me, but I will take it as my right to speak whenever I am wanted in any circle.

Concluding remarks after the member's lecture

Dear friends,

On several occasions at the end of such meetings, I have had to tell you some unpleasant things, and I cannot change that because there are many things that have to be brought to the attention of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, I would like to share a few samples with you – I could multiply them – from the camp that rebels against everything that comes from spiritual science.

A brochure has been published that is now being distributed not in the thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands in Germany. This brochure tells a variety of stories about contemporary life and takes the opportunity to lash out at what the anthroposophical spiritual science, with all that it entails, must introduce into contemporary spiritual life, not of its own free will, but out of a recognition of necessity, speaking from the signs of the times. Now, this brochure points out what is to be done from certain quarters in order to set up large collections in Central Europe for the radical-revolutionary parties, for Bolshevism above all. And since Central Europe is very afraid of Bolshevism and Western Europe is even more afraid of it, it is always something with which one can create the right mood today by accusing someone of something along these lines. And that is why you will find the following sentence in this brochure:

We need only recall the collections that Rathenau organized at the Zoologischer Garten station and Councillor of Commerce Hermann Bamberg in his apartment at Landgrafenstraße 12 during the Kapp Putsch. We recently heard that a confidential meeting took place in southern Germany before the last communist uprising in central Germany, in which Rathenau, Rudolf Steiner, Parvus, Oscar Cohn and about 20 rabbis participated.

Furthermore, this brochure states that a widespread organization has formed that has addressed an indictment to the appropriate authorities, to the Chief Reich Prosecutor, regarding the necessity of prosecuting the former German Reich Chancellor Fehrenbach in league with his Foreign Minister Simons. And the discussion of this application of the widespread organization to the Chief Reich Prosecutor is conducted here in such a way that it is said:

The publisher Ludwig Schroeter has also filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office regarding the latest act of high treason committed by the lawyer and former German Chancellor Fehrenbach, in league with the theosophist and follower of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, former German Foreign Minister Dr. Simons, as they laid Germany's future without reservation into the hands of the President of the United States with dog-like humility, the publisher Ludwig Schroeter has also filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office, which we will follow.

Today, things have the content of agitation, of action, and they are not to be understood as something that can only be laughed at. Then, a little pearl is added, where it is spoken about Heise's book about Freemasonry. It says:

Karl Heise has done a very diligent job in his book “Die Entente-Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg” (The Entente-Freemasonry and the World War), which was published in 1919 by Ernst Finckh in Basel. Heise is not a Freemason, but he is quite well informed. He is an enthusiastic admirer of the late Guido List and an ardent supporter of the traitor Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Kraljewic, whose nationality has still not been definitely established. The confusion of the ideas of these two theosophists with the political events makes Heise's book so difficult to understand that it is really only of value to those in the know who can easily separate the wheat from the chaff.

I would like to make it clear that I would not have shared this with you if I did not know that it is a very widespread organization that knows very well how it works through such things and also knows very well why it has these emblems: a wild boar that sticks out its tusks. That is on the title page, on the cover: a wild boar sticking out its tusk, next to it is written: “With God for Germany's resurrection”. The magazine is called “On Outposts”.

Now, my dear friends, I don't want you to think that these things stop at the Swiss borders. Outside, it has already come to the point that there is a reasonably organized defense organization that, as I mentioned eight days ago, brought together 1,400 participants at the Stuttgart Congress. Here, however, it is absolutely impossible to wake the sleeping people in any way. But I will leave it at that.

My dear friends! Before I begin my talk today, it will be necessary for me to say a few introductory words. We are experiencing a certain crisis in our Anthroposophical movement, which is becoming apparent in the ever-increasing opposition, especially in the character that this opposition is taking on. It is indeed something extremely unpleasant to talk about this antagonism, so I will not do so – or at least only in a very limited sense – but it is necessary, especially at the present time, that we become aware of the directions in which the individual endeavors within our anthroposophical movement have developed in the course of recent years.

I need only evoke the memory of those members of our movement who have been with us for a long time, those members who have participated above all in the older phase of our anthroposophical movement, which had a more esoteric character, which worked, I would say, more out of the spiritual substance itself. I would like to begin by evoking memories of the special way in which anthroposophy was disseminated to the public in those days. Its esoteric character has become particularly evident in recent times through the publication of the Munich cycle in 'Drei', which was intended to provide a forum for discussion of the contrast between the oriental and occidental spiritual views. The aim was to show how the Christ impulse has shaped the development of the occidental spiritual view in the world. And anyone who delves into what was discussed in that cycle – which is now publicly available – will be able to envision the particular way in which efforts were made at the time to bring Anthroposophy first to smaller circles and then to ever larger circles, but how the whole thing nevertheless bore a kind of unified character, which was dominated by a certain esoteric core. The fact that in recent years the anthroposophical movement in general has taken on a somewhat different character did not depend, my dear friends, on those who have to lead this anthroposophical movement in an active sense. I would like to say: what has become necessary in recent years was not something we sought; it has come to us as a demand from the outside world. Through the dissemination of anthroposophical literature – which has gradually become quite extensive – a wide variety of circles, which initially did not go along with the gradual esoteric development, have become acquainted with the anthroposophical worldview and then judged this anthroposophical worldview from the points of view that were accessible to them.

In particular, I would like to draw attention to the way in which scientific and scientific-theological circles gradually began to occupy themselves more and more with the anthroposophical worldview. As a result, anthroposophy, which can certainly take on a scientific character if it wants to, was in a sense dragged into this scientific character from the outside, and it was only natural that a number of younger co-workers with a good scientific training should now take it upon themselves to impress this scientific character on the anthroposophical movement. As a result, the public work of the anthroposophical movement, as it has emerged in recent times at congresses, university courses and so on, has taken on a completely different character than it had before. And perhaps, if that sounds a bit radical, I can describe this different character by saying — this is neither a criticism nor a praise, but simply something I want to state: When I look at some older members of the anthroposophical movement, I see that they say: We have found our way into the esoteric anthroposophical movement through the cognitive and religious needs of our hearts, insofar as it has lived out its spiritual substance; we have absorbed the character of this esotericism, even if it is, of course, in the way as it had to be lived in the public lectures of the earlier days of our anthroposophical movement, but now we hear a scientific keynote where anthroposophy is represented, which in a certain way also gradually and logically builds up the anthroposophical from the most elementary, as one is accustomed to in external science.

And so many such members would like to say: This is something that does not really interest us; in part we take it for granted, in part it only slows us down; we come much more quickly on the inner path of spiritual understanding to the insights that anthroposophy can give than if they are built up piece by piece through all sorts of thoughts and logical constructs that we don't need at all, that actually seem extremely superfluous to us and do not interest us. Why, my dear friends, should we not simply say these things as they exist in the feelings of many of our members? Today, I would say, we have these two currents — these two currents in the main. The fact that we have these two currents would actually be enough to satisfy everything that Anthroposophy must want from its own soul and everything that is demanded from outside, if it were not for another thing; and we must bring this other thing to our attention with a certain inner strength and a certain seriousness.

It is entirely possible, starting from the elementary discussions – for all discussions are elementary, and should be permeated by the forms of today's science – it is entirely possible, starting from these elementary discussions to establish anthroposophy scientifically on the basis of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, sociology and so on, in order to gradually ascend to that which is inwardly esoteric. However, to do this we would need a much larger circle of active collaborators, and above all, I would say, a work that would be dedicated solely to this. For the older members will not be able to complain that the esoteric tone of the older anthroposophical movement does not emerge at least where branch meetings are held, where what was previously practised in branch meetings with a certain esoteric character is continued. If what has been introduced into smaller circles as a certain continuation of esoteric life cannot now be continued in the appropriate way, it is not because this could not happen out of the inner forces of the anthroposophical movement, but only because the members involved have not taken it seriously enough and have treated it in such a way, especially in relation to the outside world, that they themselves have made its continuation impossible for the time being or have jeopardized it. I do not want to talk about that. But the fact that the old esoteric character has been preserved in the branch meetings can be seen from each of the branch meetings that have been held here in this place. On the other hand, the completely esoteric, which is based on science, has emerged more in our public lectures.

Today, there is an abyss between the two tendencies in our movement; there is no mediation, no bridge over this abyss. And we cannot build the bridge because we simply do not have the co-workers, and because those who are co-workers lack the time to build this bridge between what the world demands of us today – a scientific basis for anthroposophy – and what must be worked out from the esoteric. This is, of course, something that should actually be added in principle, that should be sought, but for which we still lack the time and manpower today. However, it cannot be denied that it is precisely because of this abyss that our anthroposophical movement as a whole is suffering to a certain extent, both externally and internally. For one thing, we shall always have a certain section of our members who love one aspect of it but are extremely critical of the other. Those who believe that they have the scientific character of anthroposophy in the fullest sense of the word within them often disdain that which, after all, also arises from justified reasons. And the opposite is also the case, understandably, but no less damaging to the movement as a whole. Those who can more quickly arrive at the final results find the slow path, which is already given by the demands of our time, the slow, scientific path, boring and uncomfortable and unnecessary. But quite apart from that: the fact that there is an abyss between the two currents, over which there is still no bridge today, so that I myself, for example, am obliged to maintain the scientific character as far as possible in public lectures, then to delve into the esoteric in branch lectures, means that our whole movement has something that hinders it, that does not allow it to advance in the appropriate way.

For there is something unhealthy, my dear friends, when, for example, let us say, a university course or a conference is held here or there, and then people come from outside; there are - and this There is no denying that people come who initially have no idea of what is to be given to the world through anthroposophy, what is to be given to science and also to practical life through anthroposophy. They now hear there what we are presenting today at such congresses and on such college courses, and most of them will reject it. But of course there are also those – and they are the ones who really matter, even if they are still so few in number – there are also those who already feel the seriousness and scientific character of anthroposophy, who can say to themselves: this is something that needs to be examined further. The reason for this is that they are addressed in the very forms in which all kinds of worldviews are discussed in the world today. If such a person were to come into a branch meeting in which something particularly intimate and esoteric was being discussed, and they would hear something that is completely out of context and for which they lack the prerequisites, it is quite possible that they would say: “They present this to us in public, but in their actual more intimate meetings, it is clear that they are completely insane.” You see, my dear friends, that is something that is entirely within the realm of possibility – it does not depend at all on the degree to which it is already becoming reality today. It has become a reality to a high degree because we have always had members among us who lack all sense of tact in their dealings with other people, and who throw all kinds of things at them about anthroposophy that the others then do not understand. As I said, all kinds of things happen. But it does not even depend so much on the extent to which these things become reality as on the nature of the movement itself, on what is possible within it, for its prosperity, its health and its illness depend on this. It is, of course, all too easy to fall prey to all manner of prejudices when it comes to spreading anthroposophical knowledge, because people believe that this person or that could easily be convinced of this or that. Yes, you see, I would like to tell you an example of this that I have often spoken of.

When the anthroposophical movement was still working within the theosophical movement, albeit quite independently, the chairman of a branch of the Theosophical Society once came to me. He was a very important scholar, a well-known scholar in his field; it was quite early on in the anthroposophical movement within the theosophical movement. Because I was dealing with a specialist in his field, I initially tried to touch on his subject here and there, to present to him something that could lead from his field to anthroposophy. I presented to him something about plant growth, about the plant's place in the universe, and then gradually moved on to more anthroposophically substantial things. He was not at all interested in that. And the right thing to do was to draw back at the right moment and say to oneself, when this man works as a teacher at his university, he wants to lecture in the same way as the others lecture; when he is in his botanical cabinet, he wants to instruct his students in the usual way and, with regard to how he presents himself to the world as a botanist, he wants to be left in peace: this has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. On the other hand, he immediately warmed to it when one began to speak directly of the astral body, to speak directly of the etheric body. He could have his erudition on one side of his bookkeeping, and on the other that which was given to him anthroposophically-theosophically. But it did not occur to him to want to establish any connection between the one or the other, so that it was self-evident that what was given was to be left out of the effort.

Of course, this is something that has not always been taken into account in recent times. People want to bring anthroposophy into the specialized knowledge of those people who do not want it at all, who want to get it out with all their might. Of course, there is no harm in making public what the various sciences have to say about anthroposophy, or in bringing it to those who can understand it with common sense. But time and again, we encounter the prejudice that when we discuss botany, we should invite botanists; when we discuss zoology, we should invite zoologists; and when we discuss aesthetics, we should invite aesthetes. What prevails there is a certain unworldliness. It is this unworldliness that has done us so much harm, especially in recent years, and it is this unworldliness that we should overcome. One should not think that we can spread anthroposophy indirectly through specialized learning. We should be clear about the fact that specialized learning must be forced from the outside to accept the anthroposophical – it will not do so of its own accord. This is not about slackening in our zeal and saying: so things have to be done differently. It is about seeing things in a healthy way, as they are in the world.

Exactly the same things that I have said now in relation to the scientific in anthroposophy, the same applies in relation to the social and the sociological, only that there is an even stronger tendency towards unworldliness, and we have thus ended up in the unfortunate situation that is expressed today in an opposition that is not at all interested in anthroposophy. This opposition wants something quite different, and it is regarded in a completely false way in our own midst and is therefore of course underestimated, so that the belief always finds adherents that is directed against what I have actually been saying for a long time: that one should not believe that this opposition is not spreading. It will spread, it will take on ever larger forms, and it is now on the way to actually wanting to gradually make every public activity for anthroposophy within Germany impossible. We must not be under any illusion that this endeavor already exists in a very forceful way today: to prevent all public activity for anthroposophy within Germany. It is my duty to say this, especially here, because of what has been undertaken here in recent years, and because it is impossible here to harbor illusions.

And you see, my dear friends, this gives us a picture of how we must become more and more aware of the conditions of anthroposophical life, how we must not get caught up in our favorite ideas, how we must always familiarize ourselves with the demands of the time, and how we must, above all, take the most serious approach to what is to penetrate the world through the anthroposophical movement. It has gradually become our custom to start things at many points, to do this and that and to completely forget that each individual thing only makes sense if the whole anthroposophical movement is healthy and if the necessary things are really done from each individual thing to the whole of the anthroposophical movement. And that is what is missing. Above all, there is little response to what I myself have said in the various branches, again and again and for years, especially since the movement has become more externalized. What has been said has simply not been taken seriously enough.

Above all, we must adhere to the basic facts that are peculiar to the contemporary anthroposophical movement. We must hold fast to these fundamental facts. We must realize that from the middle of the 15th century until well into the 20th century – or more precisely until the end of the 19th century – human development was primarily one that, firstly, engaged the mind, the intellect, for the progress of humanity, but secondly brought it to a certain level. The intellect has been wonderfully developed in the past centuries. But just as each individual age, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, corresponds to a particular kind of development of soul and body that does not carry over into the next stage of life, so it is with the development of humanity in general. The age that has passed is that of the intellect, of the mind. And this development of the intellect, it should not - this is in the laws of human development - go into the further progress of this development. It is so that we are now standing before the beginning of a spiritual development of mankind. That what the intellect can achieve, it has achieved for the time being; it can only be carried into the further development of mankind as it has been trained in past centuries, as an heirloom. On the other hand, human development depends on taking into account the wave of spiritual life that is flowing from the spiritual heights into the physical-sensual world in which man lives, and to replace pure intellectual development with a spiritual kind of development.

It may well be that the human race, which has so far been civilized, says to itself: We hold fast to the old mind; we hold fast to experiment and observation and to what the mind can make of them ; we reject what individuals claim: that precisely in our time a mighty wave of spiritual life is penetrating from spiritual heights into earthly life; we want to know nothing about it, we want to continue to serve the intellect. — They cannot do this, because the intellect has passed its peak, it can only be propagated; but this propagation also means that it is going into decline. Indeed, the intellect is declining; we can already see the beginning of this decline today, and can even prove it outwardly. What is the use of closing our eyes to such things? We only have to look impartially at a single phenomenon that can shed light on the matter. Look, for example, at how young people who devoted themselves to study some forty years ago, even together with their teachers, still had something of the individual in their intellectual activity. You could approach people forty years ago – they were good intellectuals, they sought to penetrate from the intellect into the sensory and spiritual world, as well as one can penetrate with the intellect. When you met them – sometimes they were quite young people – what they said was interesting in the first five minutes; individual things came out of a human personality; you said to yourself, now I am curious to hear what he will say next, and you listened with a certain satisfaction. Today, if you approach such people, young people for all I care, and you listen to them for the first five minutes – or maybe not even that long – so you listen to them at first, it turns out that their minds are already running down, like something coming out of a machine; you are not curious about what they will say next, because you can know it in advance: the machine continues to clatter on. It is as if people have become entirely mechanical; individuality has been completely lost, even in the realm of the intellect. You can't even tell the individual people apart anymore, because everyone says the same thing, especially in certain groups.

This phenomenon allows us to study the decline of the intellect in an extraordinarily clear way – quite externally, without going into the spiritual side of it. In short, the intellect has just passed its peak; it can be inherited, but it will be subject to decline, and humanity needs the reception of that spiritual life which flows from the spiritual heights into physical life on earth. This can be rejected. But if it is rejected, precisely for those people who reject it, the possibility of human progress, human culture, human civilization, ceases, and the further development of humanity must seek other peoples, other regions. That is what must be emphasized here with all sharpness, what should also be seen or heard with all sharpness. For, my dear friends, we not only live in an age of change in earthly conditions, but this change in earthly conditions is only an expression of the change taking place in the spiritual realm, which first reveals itself in the world of the senses, but which underlies this world of the senses as a spiritual realm.

Within the world that we can survey with our senses, we have the solid-earthly, the liquid-watery, the airy-gassy; we have that which lives in the warmth of the ether, and we then have the ether region. The way humanity has become, it speaks of earth, water, air and so on in a very external sense, as the senses see it, and it is not taken into account that all these effects are based on facts that take place in the solid, earthy: spiritual elemental beings and their activity. Nowhere do we have to do merely with gold, silver, granite and so on, with what is earthly; everywhere we have to do with underlying spiritual entities. The solid earth is inhabited by spiritual elemental beings. These spiritual elemental beings have been sensed in the old instinctive clairvoyance; they have been called gnomes. One need not, for the sake of poetic license, continue this designation for my sake, for the clever humanity of the present day laughs when it is said that gnomes exist, but they do exist, just as electricity, magnetism and so on do. There are also beings in the solid, earthly world that are not visible to the external senses, but they have a mind that is essentially wiser, smarter, more cunning than the human mind. One might say that in their entire being, these elemental spirits that underlie the earthly world are active minds, active cunning, active cunning, but also active logic. No matter how clever a person is in the intellectual field, he can never become as clever as these elemental spirits of the earth, not even a quarter as strong. We must realize that the intellect, as it is in us, can only ever reach a certain degree. And these elemental spirits are effective, they are there, they are truly there in the whole of the world just as much as people are.

People have brought their minds to a certain level in the age of the last few centuries. I would say that this was a time of dryness and drought for the elemental spirits that I have just described and characterized. They saw themselves, as it were, restrained in their rule by the interaction of what human beings developed as intellect. They also held back, but since the human intellect has been in decline, since that time, this intellect of the elemental spirits has been emerging in a very noticeable way into the reality of human life as well. And if people are such functioning automatons as they are today, it is because they are actually under the influence of the clever elemental spirits of the mind, which would never actually work in the very uppermost part of the mind. But in those people whom we do not want to listen to because they always say the same thing, the activity of the intellect has slipped down a little from the brain, and in these lower parts the characterized elemental spirits immediately assert themselves. They assert themselves so strongly that unsuspecting minds have opened up in recent times, imagining something like the following. They say: 'We don't know anything about this mind, which reveals this or that about the world to us; it is nothing special; there must be much, much more in the subconscious. Much comes up from the subconscious. You can no longer talk to people at all, because what you talk to them about does not reveal what is working in them as their mind. You have to analyze them, and then what has slipped down as the mind can be brought up through the analysis. In truth, all this analyzing is nothing more than a demonstration of how powerfully the cunning, the sly elemental spirits work in all sorts of hidden corners of human beings. Many minds are unsuspecting in the face of these phenomena because they themselves are suggestively influenced by the mind that has gradually become automatic, as it works in science. This is the difficulty of communication that has a real understanding of the facts in this area, in contrast to what is still powerful in many ways today, but powerful in such a way that it is simultaneously crumbling the whole of civilization.

Just as the spirits of cunning and intellect work within the solid, earthly realm, so within the watery element those spiritual entities work that are related in their whole being to human feeling, but can live this feeling in a much more intense way. We humans place ourselves before things, we place ourselves before the blooming, fragrant rose, we are in a sense delighted, enchanted by the blooming, fragrant rose. But the beings of whom I am now speaking do not place themselves before things, but they weave and live through things, they themselves then live through in the fragrance of the rose the feeling of well-being through and through, which we only have in its external effects; they live through the liquid, they live through the warming and cooling; they live in that within which emanates on its surface what we humans have in feeling. But the more people are given over to the decay of the mind, the more everything that belongs to the human emotional life in the human organism will be exposed to these spiritual beings, which have their element in the liquid; and again, the human being will be permeated in his subconscious regions by these spiritual beings.

The breathing of humanity will be influenced more and more, deep into the organization, by those entities that are more akin to the human will and that live more in the aerial element of our earthly existence. These entities are characterized above all by the fact that they exist as a multitude, as a diversity, so that one can say: their number is incalculable. Just when you approach the host of those elemental spirits that live in the solid, earthy, when you, let us say, come to a lump of the earthly – what use is it then not to express these things as they are? It must be possible to express these things as they are, even if the world then and presents it as twisted and paradoxical – when you touch such a lump, which is full of such clever, cunning creatures, they come out from all sides. You have a very small lump in your hand, but the number of creatures inside is immeasurable; it increases before the spiritual vision, everything wells up. You can start counting what you thought was a unit: 1, 2, 3, 4 - you count, you are used to counting what you otherwise have in your external life, but now you realize: If you are supposed to count these entities, their number is such that when you count: one, two, three, while you are going from one to two, it has multiplied so much that it is no longer correct. The three is already there before you have finished counting to two. Even our mental operations are not sufficient to penetrate, in terms of numbers, into the realms we are dealing with here.

Now, you see, that is the one world that is there. Today we can do wonderful chemistry and also make what is done in chemistry anthroposophical through all kinds of intellectual skills – initially quite justified – because oxygen, hydrogen, chromium, bromine, iodine, fluorine, phosphorus, carbon and so on, they are there; potassium, calcium are there, they have certain relationships to each other, certain effects on each other. We can do all that, and that is very nice. But all that we do is based on spiritual effects, on spiritual beings and their deeds. And we have to penetrate from what we consider externally, or even externally anthroposophically, to what is there as a spiritual basis. We have to penetrate to the spiritual elemental beings, we must not reject that. We must therefore be aware that if we merely continue the culture of past centuries in a rational way, even in the branches of science, we will not make any progress. We must be aware that we will only make progress if we take into account the wave of spiritual life that wants to enter our physical world everywhere and that we must meet halfway if we as humanity do not want to decline with our culture.

As soon as we ascend into the ether, we encounter the warmth ether, the light ether, the so-called chemical ether and the life ether. When we see through these ether forms with the spiritual eye, with the eye that finds the elemental beings of which I have just spoken, then we also find the elemental beings of the ether spheres. We find the beings of light, we find the beings of number, we find the beings that make life flow through the cosmos, that carry it. We find all of this. These entities have a completely different character than the entities in the lower elemental realms. I will characterize the qualities of the upper beings and the lower beings and will do so today only with number. I said that the essential feature of the lower elemental spirits is that their number is immeasurable, that we cannot keep up with the counting. The essence of the upper beings is that they all flow into one another; the beings of light still relatively little – they have a certain individuality – but the further we come to the life ether, the more we find in the beings have the endeavor to form a unity; and we begin to be no longer able to distinguish the one being from the other being, because the one being lives in the other, wants to connect with it to form a unity. A corresponding realization, which was particularly directed towards the ether, towards the spiritual aspect of the ether, therefore came to the monotheistic concept of the spirit, which reached its peak in the Old Testament Jewish monotheism. Yahweh is essentially the summary of what the various ether elemental spirits want to make of themselves by flowing together into a unity. Today's human being is not free to merely look at what lives in outer physical culture and civilization; it is incumbent upon him to see the happenings of the universe in an intensive, more comprehensive sense.

And there you can see how - if man does not grasp the spiritual that wants to flow into physical culture and physical civilization - you can see how these entities will achieve their specific goals if man does not decide to pay attention to the seething host of intellectual, sentient and volitional beings, that is, the earth, water and air beings, to the influx of all the beings that are connected with the etheric effects. Then these beings, uninfluenced by human knowledge, will go their own ways. And we can already see today, if we have an ability to observe such things, how the elemental spirits of the lower realms, of the earthly realm, of the watery and airy realms, have more or less decided to make something different out of the earth than what is suitable for human beings. These elemental spirits have decided to gradually turn human beings more or less into automatons, to turn the earth into something essentially different from what is suitable for human beings as an earthly existence. The form of the earth that I had to describe when I had to depict world evolution in the sense in which, I might say, it lay in the intentions of the beings who lived at the starting point of world evolution, these elemental beings do not want to have this form, for all these elemental beings of the lower realms would like to develop as the host of Ahriman. And as the human intellect declines and man does not develop that which he has developed as his intellect, enlightened by spirituality, so the human intellect, during its decline, is converted by the elemental spirits — who, if I may say, at their congresses know something much more intelligent than we do at our congresses, the human intellectual achievement is converted by the elemental spirits into the Ahrimanic intellectual achievement of the earth. And those elemental spirits that live in the etheric being join the luciferic beings and also want to work on this other-becoming of the earthly. I would like to say: the lower elemental spirits would harden and permeate and interweave the earthly in a different way than it should happen in favor of man; the higher elemental spirits would give that which is permeated by the lower spirits a character that would allow it to have an effect on the cosmos. But man would merely develop further in what is being worked on, I would say as a kind of vermin of this planet, which is to come into being in this way.

The only way to escape this is if humanity decides to pay attention to the fact that a spiritual wave wants to enter our earthly development, that this spiritual wave wants to guide us to feel and see the Christ impulse in the form in which it must be felt and seen in the present. This Christ impulse is, after all, most fiercely opposed by today's theology, and it is characteristic, my dear friends, that a theologian at the University of Basel, a colleague of Nietzsche, Overbeck, as a theologian in the 1870s, was led to reflect on whether today's theology — since as a professor he also had a say in the matter — is at all Christian. And in a very ingenious book, which made a very deep, if not exactly pleasant, impression on Nietzsche, Overbeck proved: There may still be much that is Christian in people's minds today, but there is certainly nothing Christian left in theology; it has certainly become unchristian. - This is how one would summarize what Overbeck presented. People are not even aware of this. They are not aware, for instance, that in a work like Harnack's Essence of Christianity, wherever Christ or Jesus appears, the name can be crossed out and simply replaced with Yahweh or Jehovah, and the meaning does not change at all. For he particularly emphasizes this meaning when he says: It is not the Son but only the Father that belongs in this Gospel; that which is called the Son is only the teaching of the Father. —That the essence of the Gospel is the message of the Son, that is the Christian element. But Harnack no longer has that; he is no longer a Christian.

There we can already see the effect of what happens under the influence of the higher, ethereal elemental beings, who only strive for unity, but not for the unity interwoven with the Christ impulse. We must absorb this Christ impulse within us, and we can only absorb it fruitfully if we turn to the insights that can come through the spiritual wave that wants to come in, wants to come in through many gates into our present physical earth. Those whose senses are open to it can perceive everywhere how the spiritual wants to come in and how the spiritual is only now, in our time, imparting to us the true form of the Christ, the Christ impulse and the mystery of Golgotha.

All this, however, has its strongest enmity in those who, even as theologians and philosophers - albeit speaking in terms of concepts and ideas - have become materialists, crass materialists. It is of no use today to speak in the same formulaic words about the mystery of the world as one speaks about chemical, magnetic, electrical phenomena. Our culture and civilization can only advance if we penetrate from the outside inwards to the inside, if we really have the will to look at the spiritual world in the same way as at the physical. It is remarkable how people today immediately say: Yes, we want to profess belief in the unified God and the unified spirit, but leave us alone with the many spiritual beings. The one who knows the truth in this field cannot leave them alone for the reason that there are really quite a lot of them, as I showed you with the example of earthly elemental beings, of which there are so many that one is surprised to come across any at all. In its lower realm, in the one sphere, the spiritual, where today it tends towards the Ahrimanic, is present in an immeasurable number - there it is dominated by number; in the realm where it strives towards the ethereal, towards the higher, it is dominated by the striving for unity, for union. But today there is a tendency within these realms for the many to connect with the one and for the one to connect with the many. However, this connection can only take place in the sense of the right development of humanity if humanity is willing to include these spiritual realms in the field of its knowledge and insight in the same way as that which can be seen with the senses.

And now, my dear friends, I have endeavored today to present to you, I would say, a very esoteric chapter, an esoteric chapter, but one that is at the same time connected with the most important phenomena of our time, of our present time. Today we cannot merely describe in historical terms what is happening externally; today we must also point out the facts that are taking place in the next realm – in the next realm, where the lower and higher elemental beings are preparing to take possession of the earth, to snatch it from people, through the decline of the human intellect and people's resistance to spirituality. They want to snatch it from those people to whom the Christ Impulse has been given, which went out from the Mystery of Golgotha, in order to develop the Earth with it in the sense in which it is to develop further according to the intention of those spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies who stood at the beginning of this development and who have given the Earth the direction of its development from the very beginning. Humanity must find its way into this direction, into this line.

Now, my dear friends, yet another must one day come before our soul. Every time spirituality has appeared in humanity and wanted to assert itself, the enmity of the opponents of this spirituality has also appeared. And indeed, there has always been a struggle within human development around spirituality. We see today among us how a wild fight is now beginning against that which wants to spread as an anthroposophical world view, a fight from sides that fight with means that can only be overcome if the mask is torn from their face at the right time. Not to criticize, but to draw attention to what is necessary, I would like to mention a few things. You see how much is going on today in the fight against anthroposophy by certain people, who are fighting in an outrageous, brutal, inhuman way, because they are fighting and fantasizing with lies and untruthfulness, people who actually know nothing about what they are fighting against. There has always been a struggle, my dear friends.

You see, it was many years ago that I was suspected, for example, by a certain group, of being a Jesuit emissary, that everything I do gets its impulses from the Jesuits. This accusation came from certain quarters – it was many years ago. Later came the other accusation: that what I was doing came from the Freemasons and that the Jesuits would have to oppose it with all their might. And I could mention many other sides from which the fight was waged, and the feathers with which the fight was waged – I mean the pens, because birds were not, at least not very beautiful ones – were not always dipped in the purest ink. But now a fight is beginning against which the other fight, which I have just characterized, was a really noble one. Such a fight is beginning now. And about this fight, one should have no illusions, especially not that one could somehow do something with refutations and the like. Of course, one cannot say in all details that this or that should be done, but one would like to evoke an interest in things, a compassion for things.

You see, with a personality whose name has been mentioned a lot here in Stuttgart, there is still a lot of brutal opposition. I am not saying that everything comes from there, but a lot of it is connected with it. Now, another brochure has been produced here recently against this personality on the occasion of a lecture she gave. I must always ask why such things are presented to us in private? Why are they not made known to a wider public? Why are these things, which we are dealing with, not discussed in our magazines? As I said, I do not say this in a reproachful way, but only to make a note of it. If things continue to be modern, if things continue to be done in such a way that on our side what should be done is not done, while - it is not believed, I have been saying it for years - on the other side, work is being done, and will continue to be done, in the most intensive way, with all means, in all ways - if, on our side, only when or there is a fuss, it goes without saying that individuals are doing their very best, and that is commendable, but the other side is not doing anything commendable, even those who are directly involved are twiddling their thumbs in the face of the subversive activities or at most writing philosophical treatises against them, which is of no use at all.

These things must be considered by each individual. Perhaps they will be considered when, on the other hand, it is seen how truly our physical culture is endangered by world conditions today, but how behind this physical culture there is a world that must be characterized spiritually, as I have done today, and to which we must turn when we want to talk about the fate of humanity at all. For it is not true that the fate of humanity can only be characterized by what can be perceived externally. The fate of humanity is intimately connected with those spiritual beings and their deeds that stand behind the outer nature kingdoms as the elemental kingdoms, which we must also recognize if we want to recognize how the world is run. This does not only mean that we pursue theories, but that we absorb with all our being the reality of the activity of the elemental and higher spirits, of which true spiritual science proclaims to us, just as we absorb through the external food that which maintains the processes of our physical body. Only when we know ourselves in a world of spirit as well as in the world of matter will we find the possibility of gaining the right position that we must take if Anthroposophy is to fulfill its task.

If this is not taken very seriously, then perhaps it will soon be seen in this now expanded house that the great hopes that many have placed in the anthroposophical movement cannot be fulfilled. But it can be considered! We could look up — in a living, not just theoretical, inwardly moved and enthusiastic, not just comfortable way — from what is happening on the physical plane to what is taking place in the spiritual world.

This is what I wanted to develop here today before your souls. I would just like to add: It must also be taken into account, of course, that what is now happening in the form of a noisy agitation against anthroposophy is only the outward product of the untruthful agitation that has been going on for years by the personalities behind it, who are often regarded as very spiritual. Some of the things that occur in scientific circles are, through their inherent untruthfulness and lack of will to really penetrate into the matter, have contributed their fair share to the fact that those who are driven into the fight blindfolded today, act in a somewhat unruly manner and agitate against Anthroposophy. I would like to say that those who are often regarded as “masters” have contributed their fair share to what the henchmen are doing, because the scientific fight against anthroposophy has not been fought with clean weapons either.

The Goetheanum, which has been under construction in Dornach for the past ten years, no longer stands there; the building has been lost to the work of the Anthroposophical Society, and what an appalling loss it is! One need only weigh what the Goetheanum has meant to the Society to form some idea of the enormity of that loss and of the load of grief brought upon us by the catastrophic fire of last New Year's Eve.

Until 1913, when the foundation stone of the Goetheanum was laid in Dornach, the Anthroposophical Society served as the guardian of the Anthroposophical Movement wherever it had established branches. But then the Society began to feel that it needed a central building of its own. Perhaps members here will appreciate especially keenly what the Society as a whole has lost in the building that became its home, for in Stuttgart the Society has its own building. We have been privileged to carry on our activities in it for many years, and Stuttgart members therefore know from experience what it means to work in a building of their own, conceived as a suitable setting for the Anthroposophical Movement.

Up to the time when the Anthroposophical Society felt moved to establish its center in the building at Dornach, its only way of carrying on its work—except, as has been said, in Stuttgart—was in meetings. It had to rely solely on words to convey the possibility of a connection of man with the spiritual world such as has become a necessity for present day human evolution. Of course, the medium of the spoken word will always remain the most important, significant and indispensable means to that end that is available to the Movement. But additional ways opened up to us with the building of the Goetheanum. It became possible to speak to the world at large in the purely artistic forms striven for in it. While it is true that people who lack a sense for what anthroposophy has to offer through the medium of words will also evince little feeling for the artistic forms they perceive in the Goetheanum at Dornach, it is nevertheless true that people of our time tend to find it easier to approach things with their eyes than to rouse themselves to inner activity through what they hear. The Dornach building thus vastly widened the possibility of conveying the spirituality so needed by the human race today. In its visible forms and as a visible work of art, the Goetheanum spoke of the secrets of the spiritual world to an immeasurably greater number of people than had previously been able to learn of them through spoken words. Anyone with enough goodwill to look without prejudice at the building and at the anthroposophy underlying it found in the Goetheanum proof positive that anthroposophy is not tainted with sectarianism, but rather addresses itself to the great task of the age: that of taking up and embodying in every facet of our civilization and our culture the rays of a new spiritual light now available to humankind. Perhaps it was possible for an unprejudiced person to detect a sectarian note in one or another of the many meetings held in rented lecture halls. But that became impossible for people of goodwill as they looked at the Dornach building, where every trace of symbolism or allegory was studiously avoided and the anthroposophical impulse confined itself to purest art. People had to see that anthroposophy fosters something of wide human appeal, not something strange and different, that it is trying to fructify the present in a way that has universal human meaning in every realm of modern endeavor. The Goetheanum whose ruins are now so painful to behold had become in this sense a powerful means of expressing what the true nature of the Anthroposophical Movement is. We tried to carry our intention of keeping to the universally human into every least detail of the building. We strove to achieve pure art, for such a striving is profoundly part of the anthroposophical impulse. So the Goetheanum became a means of communicating the lofty concerns of the Anthroposophical Society even to people who had no interest in the Society as such.

This is the way things were for almost ten years. But a single night sufficed to end it.

To speak these two sentences in sequence is to be plunged into feelings that defy expression. Anything that could be reported of the work and worries of the past ten years falls into insignificance beside the irreparable loss of this vital means of showing what the Anthroposophical Movement is.

Now that the Goetheanum is gone, everyone who loved it and had a real sense of what it signified longs to have it rebuilt in some form or other. But the very thought of rebuilding should remind us that ten years have passed since the building was begun, and that the Anthroposophical Movement is of a nature that attracts enemies. In these grief-stricken days we have been given a further taste of what enmity means. Yet, on the other hand, the catastrophe also brought to light what hosts of true friends the Goetheanum had made for the Anthroposophical Movement. For along with messages from members, so gratefully received by me—messages in which they wrote of their grief and anguish—there were many from individuals who, though they had remained outside the Society, wanted to express their fellow-feeling in the matter of our catastrophic loss. Much warmth toward our cause came to light on that occasion.

Indeed, it was love that built the Goetheanum, and at the end, too, it stood under the sign of love. Only a boundlessly sacrificial spirit on the part of those who, when we began building in 1913, had long been devoting themselves to the movement, made the building possible. Immeasurable sacrifices were made—material, spiritual and labor sacrifices. Many friends of the Movement joined forces in Dornach and worked together in the most selfless way imaginable to bring the building into being.

Then the terrible war broke out. But even though the building tempo slowed down considerably during those harrowing years, no breach was made in the cooperative anthroposophical spirit of the members who were working together. The Dornach building site was a place where representatives of many European nations at war with one another worked and thought and carried on together in peace and loving fellowship. Perhaps it can be said, without any intention of boasting, that the love built into this building will stand out when historians come to record the waves of hatred set in motion among civilized peoples in the war-time years. While that hate was raging elsewhere, real love prevailed in Dornach and was built into the building—love that had its origin in the spirit. The name anthroposophy bears is justified: it is not mere learning like any other. The ideas it presents and the words it uses are not meant as abstract theory. Anthroposophical ideas are not shaped in the way other kinds of learning have been shaping ideas for the past three or four centuries; words are not meant as they are elsewhere. Anthroposophical ideas are vessels fashioned by love, and man's being is spiritually summoned by the spiritual world to partake of their content. Anthroposophy must bring the light of true humanness to shine out in thoughts that bear love's imprint; knowledge is only the form in which man reflects the possibility of receiving in his heart the light of the world spirit that has come to dwell there and from that heart illumine human thought. Since anthroposophy cannot really be grasped except by the power of love, it is love-engendering when human beings take it in a way true to its own nature. That is why a place where love reigned could be built in Dornach in the very midst of raging hatreds. Words expressing anthroposophical truths are not like words spoken elswhere today; rightly conceived, they are all really reverential pleas that the spirit make itself known to men.

The building erected in Dornach was built in this reverential spirit. Love was embodied in it. That same love manifested itself in renewed sacrifice during the night of the Goetheanum fire. It was spirit transformed into love that was present there.

I cannot speak at this time of the deeper, spiritual aspects of the Goetheanum fire. I can understand someone asking questions close to his heart such as, “How could a just cosmos have failed to prevent this frightful disaster?” Nor can I deny anyone the right to ask whether the catastrophe could not have been foreseen. But these questions lead into the very depths of esoterics, and it is impossible to discuss them because there is simply no place remaining to us where they can be brought up without at once being reported to people who would forge them into weapons for use against the Anthroposophical Movement. This prevents my going into the deeper spiritual facts of the case.

But what was cast in the mould of love has called forth bitter enmity. Our misfortune has unleashed a veritable hailstorm of ridicule, contempt and hatred, and the willful distortion of truth that has always characterized so large a part of our opposition is especially typical of the situation now, with enemies creeping out of every corner and spreading deliberate untruth about the tragedy itself. Our friends present at the scene of the fire did everything in their power to save what simply could not be saved. But ill-wishers have had the bad taste to say, for example, that the fire showed up the members for what they were, that they just hung about praying for the fire to stop of itself. This is merely a small sample of the contempt and ridicule we are being subjected to in connection with the fire.

I have been warning for years that we will have to reckon with a constantly growing opposition, and that it is our foremost duty to be aware of this and to be properly vigilant. It was always painful to have to hear people say that our enemies in this or that quarter seemed to be quieting down. This sort of thing is due to people's willingness to entertain illusions, unfortunately all too prevalent among us. Let us hope that the terrible misfortune we have had to face will at least have the effect of curing members of their illusions and convincing them of the need to concentrate all the forces of their hearts and minds on advancing the Anthroposophical Movement. For now that the wish to build another Goetheanum is being expressed, we need to be particularly conscious of the fact that without a strong, energetic Anthroposophical Society in the background it would be senseless to rebuild. Rebuilding makes sense only if a self-aware, strong Anthroposophical Society, thoroughly conscious of what its responsibilities are, stands behind it.

We cannot afford to forget what the bases of such a strong Anthroposophical Society are. Let us, therefore, go on, on this solemn occasion, to consider the way a strong Anthroposophical Society, aware of its responsibilities, should be conceived in the situation we are presently facing.

Until 1918, my dear friends, the Anthroposophical Society was what I might call a vessel to contain the spiritual stream believed by leading members to be vitally needed by present day humanity. Up to that time the only additional element was what grew out of the heart of anthroposophy, out of anthroposophical thinking, feeling and will. Even though the Dornach building was everything I have just described—an expression of the Anthroposophical Movement in a much broader sense than words can ever be—its every least detail came into being out of the very heart of anthroposophy.

But anthroposophy is not the concern of a separatist group; sectarianism is abhorrent to it. This means that it is capable of making whatever springs from its center fruitful for all life's various realms. During the hard times that followed upon the temporary ending of the war in Europe, friends of the Movement saw the tragic shape of things that prevailed on every hand in the life about them, and they realized how essential new impulses were in every realm of life. Much that grew out of the Anthroposophical Movement after 1919 took on a very different character than it would have had if anthroposophy had gone on shaping its efforts as it had been doing prior to that time. It is certainly true that anthroposophy is called upon to make its influence felt in every phase of life, and most certainly in those fields where friends of the Movement, motivated by anthroposophy, have sought to be fruitfully active. But external events have somehow brought it about that much that has been undertaken did not, in fact, spring directly from an anthroposophical spirit, but was instead founded and carried on alongside and unrelated to it. So we have seen a good deal happen since 1919 which, though it cannot be called unanthroposophical, has nevertheless been carried on in another sort of spirit than would have prevailed had the Anthroposophical Movement continued to pursue the course it was following up to 1918. This is a fact of the greatest importance, and I ask you not to misunderstand me when I speak about these matters as I must, in duty bound.

I am most decidedly not referring to such appropriate undertakings as Der Kommende Tag, [DER KOMMENDE TAG. A public corporation serving economic and spiritual concerns in Stuttgart. It was to demonstrate cooperation between economic and cultural institutions. Founded in 1920 and liquidated in 1925, the enterprise became a victim of inflation and other unfavorable events.] undertakings that came into being in close connection with the Anthroposophical Movement, even though they carry on their existence as separate entities. What I shall have to say does not apply to this type of enterprise. Please, therefore, do not take my words as reflecting in the least on the standing of such undertakings in the material sphere as these, for they have every intention of proceeding along lines entirely in harmony with the Anthroposophical Movement. What I am about to say refers exclusively to the Anthroposophical Society as such, to work in and for the Society.

This Anthroposophical Movement, which is partially anchored in the Anthroposophical Society, has been able to demonstrate its universally human character especially clearly here in Stuttgart, where it has proved that it did not spring from some spiritual party program or other but had its origin rather in the full breadth of human nature. Unprejudiced people probably realize that the proof of anthroposophy's universally human character is to be found here in Stuttgart in one area in particular: the pedagogy of the Waldorf School. [The first “Free Waldorf School” according to the pedagogy of Rudolf Steiner was founded at Stuttgart in 1919. At present, there are some seventy Waldorf Schools in many countries.] The proof lies in the fact that the Waldorf School is not an institution set up to teach anthroposophy, but to solve the problem of how to teach for the best development of the whole wide range of human capacities. How can education best serve human growth? Anthroposophy must show how this problem can be solved. A sect or a party would have founded a school for teaching its views, not a school based on universally human considerations.

The universally human character striven for in the Waldorf School cannot be too strongly emphasized. One can say in a case like this that a person who is a genuine anthroposophist is not in the least concerned with the name anthroposophy; he is concerned with what it is about. But it is about universally human concerns. So when it is brought to bear on a certain goal, it can function only in the most universally human sense. Every sect or party that sets out to found a school founds a sectarian school to train up, say, Seventh Day Adventists or the like. It is contrary to the nature of anthroposophy to do this. Anthroposophy can only give rise to universally human institutions; that is what comes naturally to it. People who still treat the Anthroposophical Movement as a sect despite these facts are either unobservant or malicious, for the Waldorf School here in Stuttgart offers positive proof that anthroposophy is concerned with what is universally human.

But circles within the Society should also pay close heed to this same fact. The way the Waldorf School was founded, the whole spirit of its founding, are matters for the Society's pondering. This spirit should serve as a model in any further foundings related either to the Anthroposophical Society or to the Movement. Perhaps we may say that the Goetheanum in Dornach and the Waldorf School and its procedures show how anthroposophical activity should be carried on in all the various spheres of culture.

To make sure of not being misunderstood, let me say again that I have used Der Kommende Tag as an example of something that has its own rightness because of the way it was set up, and it is therefore not among the institutions that I will be referring to in what follows. I am going to restrict my comments to what is being done or contemplated in the way of anthroposophical activity within the Anthroposophical Movement itself. I want especially to stress that the Movement has succeeded in demonstrating in the Waldorf School that it does not work in a narrowly sectarian, egotistic spirit, but rather in a spirit so universally human that the background out of which its pupils come is no longer discernible, so universally human have they grown. It is superfluous, in the case of the Waldorf School, to ask whether its origin was anthroposophy; the only question is whether children who receive their education there are being properly educated. Anthroposophy undergoes a metamorphosis into the universally human when it is put to work. But for that to be the case, for anthroposophy to be rightly creative in the various fields, it must have an area—not for its own but for its offsprings' sake—where it is energetically fostered and where its members are fully conscious of their responsibilities to the Society. Only then can anthroposophy be a suitable parent to these many offspring in the various spheres of culture and civilization. The Society must unite human beings who feel the deepest, holiest commitment to the true fostering of anthroposophy.

This is by no means easy, though many people think it is. It is a task that has certain difficult aspects. These difficulties have shown up especially strongly here in Stuttgart too since 1919. For though on the one hand the Waldorf School has thus far preserved the truly anthroposophical character I have been discussing, we have seen just in this case on the other hand how extraordinarily difficult it is to keep the right relationship between the Anthroposophical Society as the parent, and its offspring activities. This may sound paradoxical, but if I go into more detail you will perhaps understand me also in this.

The comments I am about to make are not intended to reflect in any way on the worth of the various movements that have sprung up since 1919 in connection with anthroposophy; all I have in mind is their effect on the Society, so no one should mistake my words for value judgments. I am speaking exclusively of effects on the Society. The enterprises that I shall be referring to have not always been conceived by those responsible for them with what I might call up-to-date feeling for the spirit of the commandment, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord giveth thee.’ The moving spirits in these projects have often—indeed, usually—been members of the Anthroposophical Society. The question now arises whether these members, active in fields connected with the Society, have always kept the parental source clearly in mind, competent though they undoubtedly are in their chosen fields. Is the effect of their professional activity on the Society desirable? This is a very different question than whether the persons concerned are professionally competent. Speaking radically, I would put it thus: A person can be the most excellent Waldorf School teacher imaginable, one wholly consonant with the spirit in which the Waldorf School grew out of the Anthroposophical Movement to become a universally human undertaking. He can carry on his work as a Waldorf teacher wholly in that spirit. The school can shape itself and its work in the anthroposophical spirit all the better for not being a school to teach anthroposophy. The individual Waldorf teacher may make most excellent contributions to it without necessarily doing the right thing by the Society as a member. I am not saying that this is true in any given instance, just that it could be true. Or let us say that someone can be an able officer of Der Kommende Tag, a person with the ability to make it flourish, yet prove most inadequate to the needs of the Anthroposophical Society. But the failure to give the parent entity what it needs in order to foster all its offspring properly is cause for the greatest anxiety, for really deep worry about the Anthroposophical Movement.

My dear friends, the fact that this situation prevailed in a certain field was what forced me to speak as I did about the Movement for Religious Renewal¹ in my next-to-last lecture at the Goetheanum. I most certainly do not mean to criticize the Movement for Religious Renewal in the slightest, for it was brought into being three and a half months ago with my own cooperation and advice. It would be the most natural thing in the world for me to be profoundly delighted should it succeed. Surely no doubt can exist on this score. Nevertheless, after it had been in existence for three and a half months, I had to speak as I did at that time in Dornach, directing my comments not to the Movement for Religious Renewal but to the anthroposophists, including of course those attached to the Movement for Religious Renewal. What I had to say was, in so many words: Yes, rejoice in the child, but don't forget the mother and the care and concern due her. That care and concern are owed her by the Movement for Religious Renewal, too, but most particularly by the members of the Anthroposophical Society.

For what a thing it would be if the Society were to be slighted, if anthroposophists were to turn away from it to an offspring movement, not in the sense of saying that those of us who have grown together with the Anthroposophical Movement can be the best advisors and helpers of an offspring movement, but instead turning away from the Anthroposophical Movement of which they were members with the feeling that they have at last found what they were really looking for, something they could never have found in anthroposophy! Though there is every reason to be overjoyed at the parent's concern for the child, it must be clearly recognized that the child cannot prosper if the mother is neglected. If anthroposophists who join the Movement for Religious Renewal leave much to be desired as members of the Anthroposophical Society, we would face exactly the same situation as would have to be faced in the case of a Waldorf School teacher who, though a first-rate man in his field, contributed too little to the Society. But this is just the fate we have been experiencing since 1919, little as the fact has been noticed.

We have witnessed the well-intentioned founding of the Union for the Threefolding of the Social Organism. [UNION FOR THE THREEFOLDING OF THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. The Union had its seat in Stuttgart and published the weekly review, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus.] This Union was largely responsible for the failure to get a hearing for the threefold commonwealth in nonanthroposophical circles. What it did do was to try to hammer the threefold impulse into the Anthroposophical Movement, which was already permeated by everything basic to it, and this in a far deeper way than could ever be matched by its quite external, exoteric expression in the threefold commonwealth. We had the sad experience of seeing that some anthroposophists who worked so zealously and intensively at this task became less valuable members of the Society than they had been.

Such has been our fate for the past four years. The situation has to be described as it really is, because it will take a strong, energetic Anthroposophical Society to justify any thought of rebuilding the Goetheanum. We must remind ourselves how significant a phenomenon it was that Stuttgart was just the place where an excellent beginning was made in a wide range of activities. But to be realistic we need to ask the following question (and I beg you not to misunderstand my speaking of these basic matters on the present solemn, sad occasion).

To avoid any misunderstanding, let us return to the example of the Waldorf School. It is of the first importance to grasp the difference between spreading anthroposophy by means of words, in books and lectures, and concerning oneself with the welfare of the Anthroposophical Society as such. Theoretically, at least, it does not require a society to spread anthroposophy by means of books and lectures; anthroposophy is spread to a great extent by just these means, without any help from the Society. But the totality of what comprises anthroposophy today cannot exist without the Anthroposophical Society to contain it. One may be a first-rate Waldorf teacher and a first-rate spreader of anthroposophy by word and pen in addition, yet hold back from any real commitment to the Society and to the kind of relationships to one's fellow men that are an outgrowth of it anthroposophy. Must it not be admitted that though we have a superb Waldorf School and a faculty that performs far more brilliantly in both the described areas than one could possibly have expected, its members have withdrawn from real concern for and a real fostering of the Society? They came to Stuttgart, have been doing superlatively well what needed doing in both the areas mentioned, but have not committed themselves to serving the Anthroposophical Society; they have failed to take part in its fostering and development.

I beg you to take these words as they are meant. We have had people working energetically and with enthusiasm on the threefold commonwealth. The more active they became in this field, the less activity they devoted to the Society. Now we face the threat of seeing the same thing happen again in the case of able people in the Movement for Religious Renewal. Again, in an especially important area, resources of strength could be withheld from the Society. This is a source of deep anxiety, particularly because of the immeasurably great loss we have just suffered. It makes it necessary for me to speak to you today in the plainest language possible.

For clarity's sake and in order somewhat more adequately to characterize the way we need to work in the Society, I would like to point out another thing that I will have to describe quite differently. In the past four years, during which the Society has seen so much happen, there has been a development with two different aspects. This double way of evolving is characteristic both of the movement I have in mind and of the Society. I am referring to the student, or youth movement.

Let us recall how it began a short while ago. At the time it called itself the Anthroposophical Union for Higher Education. [ANTHROPOSOPHICAL UNION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION publicized in 1920 the two courses on Higher Education given at the Goetheanum in the fall of 1920 and spring of 1921.] It is hard to press these things into any sharply defined form, since they are alive and growing, but we can try. What were its founders (and more especially its godfather, Roman Boos), more or less consciously aiming at? Their goal was to bring the influence of anthroposophy to bear on study in the various scientific fields, to change and reform tendencies that those individuals active in the movement felt were going in the wrong direction. The movement was conceived as affecting what went on in classrooms in the sense that young people studying in them were to introduce a new spirit. That is the way the program adopted at that time should be described.

Then, a little later on in fact, quite recently—another movement made its appearance. I don't want to call it a counter-movement, but it differed from the earlier one. It appeared when, here in Stuttgart, a number of young students came together to foster a concern for universal humanness, humanness with a spiritual-pedagogical overtone. It was not their purpose to bring the influence of anthroposophy directly into classrooms, but instead into another setting entirely: into man's innermost being, into his heart, his spirit, his whole way of feeling. There was no talk, to put it radically, of giving a different tone to words used in the classroom; the point was rather that, here and there among the young, there needed to be some individuals who experience their present youth and their growing older with a different kind of feeling in their hearts because the impulse to do so springs from their innermost being. Since they were not just students but human beings as well, and were growing older as human beings do, they would carry their humanness, conceived in the universally human spirit of anthroposophy, into the classroom also. These young students were not concerned with academic problems encountered in classrooms, but with the young human beings in them. The place was the same in both instances, but the problems were different.

But the Anthroposophical Society can do its work properly only if it is broad-minded enough to be able to find its way to the innermost being of everyone who turns to it for help in his searching and his striving.

Among the various exercises to be found in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, you will discover six that are to be practiced for a certain definite period of time. One of these is the cultivation of a completely unprejudiced state of mind. Indeed, dear friends, the Anthroposophical Society as a whole needs to cultivate these six virtues, and it is essential that it strive to acquire them. It must be so broadminded that it reaches the humanness of those who turn to it, and so strong that it can meet their needs. One of the problems of the Society showed up in the fact that when I came here a short while ago and found the young people in the picture, the Society had completely withdrawn from them, making a patching up of relationships necessary.

I am speaking a bit radically, but that may help to make my meaning clearer. I wanted, in this example, to show how important it is for the Society to be able to meet life's challenges.

Now let us turn our attention to another matter. For quite some time past, able members of the Society have been at work in the most varied branches of scientific endeavor. I am truly speaking with the greatest inner and outer restraint when I say that we have absolutely top-notch scientists who are not being given the appreciation they deserve from us. They have taken on the responsibility of developing the various branches of science within the Society. In the Society's beginning phase it had to approach people purely as human beings. It simply could not branch out into a whole range of different fields; it had to limit itself to speaking to people from its innermost heart, as one human being speaks to another. Its task was first to win a certain terrain for itself in the world of human hearts before going on to cultivate any other field. Then, since anthroposophy has the capacity to fructify every aspect of culture and civilization, scientists appeared as a matter of course in the Society and were active in their fields. But again, my dear friends, it is possible for a member to be a first-rate scientist and yet ignore the Society's basic needs. A scientist can apply anthroposophical insights to chemistry and physics and the like in the most admirable way and still be a poor anthroposophist. We have seen how able scientists in these very fields have withdrawn all their strength from the parent society, that they have not helped nurture the Society as such. People who, in a simple and direct way, seek anthroposophy in the Society are sometimes disturbed to hear, in the way these scientists still speak with an undertone reminiscent of the chemical or physical fields they come from, for though chemistry, physics, biology and jurisprudence are still connected by a thread with the universally human, the connection has become remote indeed. The essential thing is not to forget the parent. If the Society had not fostered pure anthroposophy in its innermost heart for one and a half decades, the scientists would have found no place in it to do their work. Anthroposophy provided them with what they needed. Now they should consider how much their help is needed in so fostering the Society that some return is made to it for what anthroposophy has contributed to their sciences.

This will perhaps help us to look more closely at what has been going on in a wide range of activities and then to admit a fact that, though it may sound trivial, is actually anything but that. Since 1919, anthroposophy has given birth to many children, but the children have been exceedingly neglectful of their mother.

Now we have to face the frightful disaster of the fire that has left us looking, broken-hearted, at the Goetheanum ruins there in Dornach. We are also confronted by an Anthroposophical Society that, though its roster of members has recently grown a great deal longer, lacks inner stability and itself therefore somewhat resembles a ruin. Of course, we can go on holding branch meetings and hearing about anthroposophy, but everything we now have can be wiped out by our enemies in no time at all if we are not more thoughtful about the problems I have laid before you today.

So my words today have had to be the words of pain and sorrow. This has been a different occasion than those previously held here. But the events I have described and everything that has gone with them force me to end this address in words of sorrow and pain as profoundly justified as my expression of gratitude to those whose hearts and hands helped build the Goetheanum and tried to help at the fire. They are as called for, these expressions of pain, as is the recognition of everything heart-warming that our members far and near have lately been demonstrating. Their purpose is not to blame or criticize anyone, but to challenge us to search our consciences, to become aware of our responsibilities. They are not intended to make people feel depressed, but rather to summon up those forces of heart and spirit that will enable us to go on as a society, as the Anthroposophical Society. We should not let ourselves turn into groups of educators, religious renewers, scientists, groups of the young, the old, the middle-aged. We must be an anthroposophical community conscious of the sources that nourish it and all its offspring. This is something of which we must be keenly aware. Though the Dornach flames have seared our very hearts, may they also steer us to the realization that we need above all else to work together anthroposophically. Let me express this wish to you today, my dear friends, for the special fields too would lose the source of their strength if they were unmindful of their parent. We will certainly have to admit that, due to the difficulties inherent in such relationships, the parent has often been forgotten by just those of her offspring who were most obviously her progeny. But despite the fearful enmity we face, we can perhaps accomplish something if we change our ways before it is too late, as it soon may be. We must realize that we are going to have to work anthroposophically in the Anthroposophical Society, and that our chief common task is to forge a connection between man and that radiant spiritual light from heavenly worlds that seeks him out at the present moment of his evolution. This is the consciousness and this the task to which, while there is still time, we need to be steeled by the Dornach fire whose flames we feel in our very hearts.

Let us bring this about, dear friends! But let me ask you to take with all due weight as well what I have had to say to you today with a sore heart. May my words call forth the strength to work, the will to work, the will to pull together in the Anthroposophical Movement especially. Nobody should take personally the statement that he has been an outstanding contributor to the work of Der Kommende Tag, the Waldorf School faculty, the Movement for Religious Renewal, and so on. May everybody—those both in and outside special fields, the old, the young, the middle-aged—be mindful of the parent society that has brought forth and nurtured them all and in which, as a member of the Society, every specialist must join forces with everybody else. Specialization has flourished far too strongly in our midst, only to decline again because the parent was not kept sufficiently in mind. May the Dornach fire kindle our will to strengthen ourselves to serve the Anthroposophical Society and to work sincerely together with clear purpose!

• 1. MOVEMENT FOR RELIGIOUS RENEWAL. The Christian Community with its center at Stuttgart. The next to last lecture at the Goetheanum on December 30, 1922, is contained in the book, Man and the World of Stars, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1963.

A week ago I commented here on the grievous event of the Goetheanum fire and other current concerns of the Anthroposophical Society. Today I planned to speak about purely anthroposophical matters, but I find it necessary to say a few introductory words about Society problems. I was able to attend at least the second part of yesterday's meeting, and saw how easy it is to misunderstand matters involving the nature of the Society such as were brought up by me last week. It is not a moment too soon to correct these misconceptions. My introductory remarks tonight will nevertheless still have to do with an anthroposophical view of life and perhaps on that account prove worthwhile to this or that listener.

I am mainly interested in going on with yesterday's discussion about judgment-forming in the Society. A challenge was issued, quite independently of anything I said, to the effect that every member should form his own independent judgments about matters affecting the Society. Now of course nothing could be truer. But we need to concern ourselves with the fact that when a challenge of this kind is presented one has to consider the whole context of what is under discussion, no matter how right the isolated statement may be in itself nor how fully I agree with it in principle. Something can be perfectly true but it may not necessarily apply in a given instance. Every truth can be presented as true in itself, but it is colored by the context in which it is brought up, and in the wrong place it can lead to the gravest misconceptions.

Now the point of view on judgment-forming was expressed in connection with my lecture of December 30th last in Dornach, in which I discussed the relationship of the Anthroposophical Society to the Movement for Religious Renewal. The comment was made that members should make their own judgments and not be influenced by mine. Of course they should! But in the form in which this advice was presented, it was and is profoundly at odds with the state of mind that comes from a real grasp of anthroposophy. For the anthroposophical world conception is not based on merely exchanging the view of things prevailing today for a different view similarly arrived at. As becomes evident in the whole posture of anthroposophy, it is not enough to think differently about all sorts of things, but—far more importantly—to think these different thoughts in a different way, to feel them with a different attitude of soul. Anthroposophy requires that thinking and feeling be utterly transformed, not just changed as to content.

Anyone inclined to test the great majority of my lectures in this respect will find that I keep strictly to what I have just expressed, and that it lies in the very nature of an anthroposophical view of the world to present things in such a way that hearers are left wholly free to form their own judgments. If you go through most of my lectures, including those on subjects such as that treated in the lecture of December 30, 1922, you will find their chief content to be simply facts, that they present facts, either those of super-sensible realms, of the world of the senses, or of history, and that their presentation is such that the reader can always draw his own conclusions about them, completely uninfluenced by me. Indeed, one of the lecture cycles held in Dornach even carries the sub-title, “Presentation of Facts on which to base Conclusions,” or the like. Since this is the case, the results are such as to remove any justification for saying that people were told what to think. For one person will draw one conclusion from my lectures, another a quite different one, and each thinks his is the right view of the matter. Each could be right from where he stands, because I never try to pre-determine the outcome, but simply to provide facts on which conclusions can be based. I thus deliberately expose myself to the danger that a series of facts I am presenting can be quite variously interpreted. For my interest is solely in communicating facts, and anybody who wants to look into the matter will find that the only time I express a judgment is when something needs to be corrected or refuted.

This has to be the case. A world view such as that based on anthroposophy must always be keenly conscious of the time context to which it belongs. We are now living in the age of consciousness soul development, a condition of soul wherein the all-important thing is for individuals to draw their own conclusions and learn to give facts an unprejudiced hearing, so that they can then make fully conscious judgments. The style of my presentations springs from an awareness that man has entered upon the development of the conscious soul. This accounts, as I said, for the varying conclusions that can be drawn from my words. I try to present the facts as clearly as possible. But there is never any question of “should” or “shouldn't.” Anthroposophy is there to communicate truth, not to propagandize. This has often been emphasized as, for example, in my refusal to take sides about vegetarianism. When I describe what effects a vegetarian diet has on people and what the effects of meat-eating are, I do so merely to present the facts, to make the truth known. In the age of the consciousness soul, anyone really acquainted with the facts of any case can confidently be left free to form his own judgments. It is essential to an anthroposophical view of things to be really clear on this point.

So, taking my style from the Anthroposophical Society rather than from the Movement for Religious Renewal, I tried in my lecture at Dornach on December 30, 1922, to show what the relationship between the two groups is. On that occasion I followed my general rule of merely presenting facts, and anyone who reads the lecture of that date will see this to be true. What action to take was a matter left to everyone's free weighing. The lecture makes this clear, and I expressed myself on the subject here a week ago as plainly as could be.

The matter of context has to be taken into consideration if one is to make really responsible assertions of an anthroposophical nature. One cannot make the remark that people should form their judgments independently of Steiner at utterances based in the strictest sense on anthroposophy. For except when Steiner is refuting or having to correct a statement, his hearers are even being forced by the way he puts things to form their own judgments; they are given no chance to adopt his.

An overall view of things anthroposophical is far better served by emphasizing this than by what some were emphasizing here yesterday, and the inappropriateness of what was said could encourage many seeds of misunderstanding. It is exceedingly important that I state this here, because it is a matter of anthroposophical principle.

There is a further matter to consider. In forming independent judgments it is not enough to be sure they are one's own. One must be equally sure, before expressing them, that one has taken all the pertinent facts into consideration. Anybody can draw his own conclusions. The point is to arrive at the correct ones when a sufficient overview of the facts of the case permits it or when facts that obviously do not apply have been discarded. I must therefore emphasize—and I bring up these introductory problems in duty bound, not because I have the least desire to do so—that what was said yesterday about all kinds of reports about the Movement for Religious Renewal having been carried to Dornach, so that my words could have been influenced and my opinions shaped thereby, is simply incorrect. The lecture in question was completely unrelated to any such reports, as fair-minded reviewers will see for themselves.

A third item was brought up in connection with my lecture, namely, that one faction was having chances to be heard while the other had none. If I am not mistaken, the Waldorf School faculty was named as a case in point, because I meet regularly with it. The truth is, however, that the matter had never even been discussed with the Waldorf faculty up to the time of giving the lecture. Here again is an example of a judgment made in ignorance of the facts. It might easily be thought that, since I meet frequently with the Waldorf faculty, there had been frequent discussions of the matter. But pedagogical matters naturally form the agenda of such meetings; anthroposophical gossip definitely has no share in them.

As I said, I stress these things in duty bound because they have to do with the nature of anthroposophical work, and we are at the point of at least trying to put that work on a healthy basis in the Society. Of course I was able, right after the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal, to hand over to appropriate persons the task of giving the Society all the necessary information about it; I didn't have to do this myself. That was apparent to anyone who heard the closing words I spoke on the occasion of launching the Movement for Religious Renewal. It is always a terrible thing for me to be forced to break off communicating facts in order to say the kind of things that I was compelled to say yesterday. But as things are now, the whole weight of everything connected with anthroposophical activities is burdening my soul, and unless something really adequate is done to clear up just those misunderstandings that are escaping notice because they are not as crassly evident as others, our anthroposophical work cannot progress. But the work must progress; otherwise, we would obviously have to leave the situation of the Goetheanum as it is. Resuming work on it depends entirely on strengthening the Society and freeing it of misunderstandings that sap its very lifeblood.

That lifeblood is sapped when, for example, no attention is paid to the principle involved in speaking of ethics in the sense required by the Spirit of the Time for the age of the developing consciousness soul and delineated by me in the Philosophy of Freedom. At the time I wrote it, I did not exactly relish exposing myself to the reproaches certain to issue from narrow-minded quarters because of my repudiation of authoritarian ethics. But every sentence I set down was formulated in the way I am always at pains to do, taking the greatest care to leave the reader free, even in relation to the development of thought and feeling under discussion in the book mentioned. So I must point out how out of place it is to bring up the question of a lecture like that of December 30, 1922, influencing the conclusions drawn by members of the Anthroposophical Society. There might be many other occasions where such a question could be raised. But it creates misunderstandings to raise it in connection with the lecture referred to, and to do so disregards the fact of my sacred concern to avoid influencing people's judgment by what I say on the subject of vitally important aspects of activities within the Society.

So I have again expressed my intention of formulating what I have to say in such a way that nobody's judgment can be influenced. It is therefore unnecessary to warn those who attend my lectures to preserve their freedom of judgment.

Now let me continue in the spirit of my previous comments and go on to consider how a spiritual-scientific judgment is arrived at. I am speaking now of judgments that express spiritual-scientific truths.

It can give one a strange feeling to observe how little aware people are of the seriousness with which the communication of spiritual truths is weighted. All one has to do to form and express judgments about things of the everyday world of the senses is to practice observation or logic at a given moment. Observation and logic are perfectly adequate bases for forming judgments about sense-derived and historical data. In the realm of spiritual science, however, they are not adequate. There, it is not enough to deal just once with forming a particular judgment. What is required is something quite different, something I shall call here a twofold re-casting of a judgment. This re-casting usually takes more than a short period of time; indeed, the period tends to be quite a long one. Let us say that one forms some judgment or other on the basis of methods you are familiar with from descriptions given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and in the second part of An Outline Of Occult Science. Following these procedures, one arrives at this or that conclusion about spiritual beings or processes. At this point one is obligated to keep this conclusion to oneself and not to express it. Indeed, one is even obligated to regard it simply as a neutral fact which, for the time being, one neither accepts nor rejects. Then, perhaps even years later, one comes to the point of undertaking the first re-casting of this judgment in one's own soul life; one deepens and in many respects even transforms it. Even though the content of the judgment may remain the same after its re-casting, it will have taken on a different nuance, a nuance of inner participation, perhaps, or of the warmth one has spent on it. In any case, it will incorporate itself in the life of the soul quite differently after this first re-casting than on the previous occasion, and one will then have the feeling of having separated oneself in some way from the judgment. If it has taken a matter of years to accomplish the first re-casting, one cannot, of course, have been turning the judgment over in one's mind every minute of the time. The judgment naturally disappears into the unconscious, where it carries on a life of its own quite independently of the ego. It has to have this independent life. One must stay away from it and let it live all to itself. Thus the ego element is eliminated from the judgment, which is then turned over to an objective faculty in oneself. When one first makes an observation and draws a logical conclusion from it, the ego is invariably involved. But when—possibly after a lapse of several years—a judgment is re-cast for the first time, one has the distinct experience of its emerging from the soul's depths to confront one like any other fact of the surrounding world. All this time it was out of sight. Now one comes across it again, one re-discovers it, and it seems to be saying, “The first time you formed me imperfectly, or even incorrectly, but now I have corrected myself.”

This is the judgment the true spiritual scientist seeks, the kind that develops its own life in the human soul. It takes a lot of patience to re-cast it because, as I have said, the process of re-casting can take years, and the conscientiousness that spiritual science demands means keeping silent while letting things speak.

But now, my dear friends, after re-casting a judgment in this way and experiencing its emergence out of an objective realm, one has the strong feeling that it occupies a place somewhere in oneself despite its objective recovery. So one can still feel that, in view of the responsibility one has to let the thing speak while remaining silent oneself, one should not express this kind of judgment on a spiritual-scientific matter. One therefore waits again, and perhaps again for years, for the second re-casting. As a result, one arrives at a third form of the judgment, and one will find a significant difference between the process that went on in the period between the first forming of the judgment and its first re-casting and the process it underwent between the first and second re-casting. One notices that it was comparatively easy to recall the judgment in the first time-interval described, while in the second it is extremely difficult to summon it up again, into such soul-depths has it descended, depths into which the easy judgments gleaned from the outer world never descend. Re-cast judgments of the kind I mean sink to the deepest levels of the soul, and one finds out what a struggle it costs to recall such a re-cast judgment between its first and second re-casting. By judgment I mean here an overview of the whole area covered by the fact in cases where the facts are of a spiritual-scientific nature. When one then arrives at the third form of the judgment, one knows that the judgment has been in the realm of the thing or process under study. In the period between its first forming and first re-casting it remained within one's own being, but in the second such interval it plunged into the realm of the objective spiritual fact or being. One sees that in its third shape the thing or being itself gives back the judgment in the form of a certain outlook one now has. Only now does one feel equal to communicating this view or judgment of a spiritual-scientific fact. The communication is made only after completing this twofold re-casting and thus arriving at the certainty that one's first view of the matter has pursued a path directly to the facts of the case and returned again. Indeed, a judgment of super-sensible things that is to find valid expression must be sent to the realm where the relevant facts or beings dwell.

No one with a right approach to presentations of basic and significant spiritual-scientific facts will find this hard to understand. Of course, a person who reads lecture cycles just as he would a modern novel will not notice from the way it is presented that the all-important thing, the real proof, lies in this twofold re-casting of a judgment. He will then call such a statement a mere assertion, not a proof at all. But the only proof of spiritual facts is experience, experience conscientiously come by and based on a twofold re-casting of judgments. Spiritual things can be proved only by experiencing them. This does not hold true of understanding them, however. Anyone with a healthy mind can understand any adequate presentation. But to be adequate, it has to have supplied that healthy mind with all the pertinent data, so pertinently arranged that the very manner of the presentation convinces of the truth of a given conclusion.

It makes a strange impression to have people come and say that spiritual-scientific truths ought to be as susceptible of proof as assertions about facts observed in the sense world. A person who makes such a demand shows that he is unfamiliar with the difference between perception of things spiritual and ordinary experience on the physical or historical level. Individuals who acquaint themselves with anthroposophy will notice that the single truths it presents fit into the picture of anthroposophy as a whole, and that this whole in turn supports the further single truths they hear. These further truths then illuminate things heard in the past. An increasing familiarity with anthroposophy is thus constant growth in experiencing its truth. The truth of a mathematical statement can be discerned in a flash, but it is correspondingly lifeless. Anthroposophical truth is a living thing. Conviction cannot be arrived at in a single moment; it is alive, and goes on growing. Conviction about anthroposophy might be compared to a baby just starting out in life, uncertain at first, scarcely more than a belief. But the more one learns, the more certain one's conviction becomes. This growing-up of anthroposophical conviction is actually proof of its inner aliveness.

We see here, furthermore, that what one thinks and feels about the concerns of anthroposophy is not only different from what one thinks and feels in other areas today, but that one must think differently, feel differently, take a different approach than is usual elsewhere. This different approach or attitude is basic to an understanding of anthroposophy, and it forms the basis for an anthroposophical fructification of all the various fields of life and learning.

This fact will have to be kept particularly clearly in mind by scientists coming into the movement. They should not only make it their goal as scientists to develop a different picture of the world than that striven for by external science, but should also be aware that their chief responsibility consists in bringing an anthroposophical frame of mind and an inner aliveness to bear on the various scientific fields they enter. This would keep them from resorting to polemics against other types of science, and instead help them to proceed in the direction of developing aspects of those sciences that would remain undeveloped without anthroposophy. I must stress this in a time of crisis for our Society, a crisis due in no small measure to the way scientists have been conducting themselves in it.

I must add here that the battle over atomism that the journal Die Drei [DIE DREI: an anthroposophical journal.] has been waging can only mean the death of fruitful scientific exchange. This debate should not be carried on with resort to the same kind of thinking practiced by opponents and with a failure to see that in certain vital points their assertions are correct. The all-important thing is to realize that physics is just that field of science that has brought out facts quite ideally suited to serving as the foundation of an anthroposophical outlook, provided one takes physics just as it is, without polemics. As we have seen in the polemical debate in “Die Drei,” polemics unrelieved by an anthroposophical approach can only lead to unfruitfulness.

I had a further reason for stressing this: I want to make it fully clear as a matter of principle that everything that is done in the name of anthroposophy cannot be laid at my door! I respect people's freedom. But when harmful things happen I must be allowed to exercise my own judgment about bringing them up. Complete independence must be the rule in anthroposophical concerns, not opportunism. Least desirable of all is the comradely spirit so frequently met with in discussions about scientific questions.

Now, my dear friends, as I often point out, we have to be clear when we are presenting anthroposophy that we are now living in the age of consciousness soul development. In other words, rational and intellectual capacities have become the most outstanding aspects of man's present state of soul. Ever since the time of Anaxagoras, a philosopher of ancient Greece, we have been sifting every judgment, even those based on external observation, through our intellectuality. If you examine the rationalistic science of today, particularly mathematics, which is the most rationalistic of all, and consider the rationalistic working over of empirical data by the other sciences, you will form some idea of the actual thought-content of our time. This thought-content, to which even the youngest children are exposed in modern schools, made its appearance at a fairly definite point in human evolution. We can pinpoint it in the first third of the fifteenth century, for it was then that this intellectuality appeared on the scene in unmistakable form. In earlier times people thought more in pictures even when they were dealing with scientific subject matter, and these pictures expressed the growth forces inherent in the things they thought about. They did not think in abstractions such as come so naturally to us today.

But these abstract concepts educate our souls to the pure thinking described in my The Philosophy of Freedom. It is they that enable us to become free beings. Before people were able to think in abstractions they were not free, self-determined souls. One can develop into a free being only by keeping the inner man free of influences from outside, by developing a capacity to lay hold on moral impulses with the aid of pure thinking, as described in the The Philosophy of Freedom. Pure thoughts are not reality, they are pictures, and pictures exercise no sort of compulsion on us. They leave us free to determine our own actions.

So, on the one hand, mankind evolved to the level of abstract thinking, on the other to freedom. This has often been discussed here from several other angles.

Let us now consider how things stood with man before earthly evolution brought him to a capacity for abstract thoughts, and so to freedom. The humanity incarnated on the earth in earlier periods was incapable of abstract thinking. This was true of ancient Greece, not to mention still earlier periods. The people living in those early days thought entirely in pictures, and were therefore not as yet endowed with the inner sense of freedom that became theirs when they attained the capacity for pure (that is, abstract) thinking. Abstract thoughts leave us cold. But the moral capacity given us by abstract thought makes us intensely warm, for it represents the very peak of human dignity.

What was the situation before abstract thought with its accompaniment of freedom was conferred on man? Well, you know that when man passes through the gates of death and casts off his physical body, he still retains his etheric body for a few days thereafter and sees his whole life, all the way back to the moment of his first memory, spread out before him in mighty pictures, in an undetailed, comprehensive and harmonious panorama. This tableau of his life confronts a person for several days after he has died.

That is the way it is today, my dear friends. But in the time when people living on earth still possessed a picture consciousness, their experience immediately after death was that of a rational, logical view of the world such as human beings have today, but which those who lived in earlier times did not have in the period between birth and death.

This is a fact that proves a signal aid in understanding human nature. An experience that people of ancient as well as somewhat later periods of history had only after death, that is, a short looking back in abstract thoughts and an impulse to freedom, which then remained with them during their lives between death and rebirth, came, in the course of evolution, to be instead an experience that they had during life on earth. This constant pressing through of super-sensible experience into earthly experience is one of the great secrets of existence. The capacity for abstraction and freedom that presently extends into earthly life was something that came into an earlier humanity's possession only after death in the form of the looking back I have described; whereas nowadays, human beings living on the earth possess rationality, intellectuality and freedom, exchanging these after death for a mere picture consciousness in their reviewing of their lives. There is a constant passing over of this kind going on, with the concretely super-sensible thrusting itself into sense experience.

You can see from this example how anthroposophy obtains the facts it speaks of from observation of the spiritual, and how subjectivity has no chance to color its treatment of a fact. But once we arrive at these facts, do they not affect our feelings and work on our will impulses? Could it ever be said of anthroposophy that it is merely theory? How theoretical it would sound to say merely that modern man is ruled by freedom and abstraction! But how richly saturated with artistic feeling and religious content such a statement becomes when we realize that what gives us modern human beings freedom in our earthly experience and a capacity for abstraction is something that comes to us here on earth from the heavenly worlds we enter after death, but that makes its way to us in a direction exactly counter to the one we take to enter them! We go out through the gates of death into spiritual realms. Our freedom and capacity for abstraction come to us as a divine gift, given to the earth world by the spiritual. This imbues us with a feeling for what we are as human beings, making us warmly aware not only of the fact that we are bearers of a spiritual element, but of the source whence that element derives. We look on death with the realization that what lies beyond it was experienced by people of an earlier time in a way that has now been carried over into the modern experiencing of people here on earth.

The fact that this heavenly element, intellectuality and freedom, has been thus translated into earthly capacity makes it necessary to look up to the divine in a different way from that of earlier ages. The Mystery of Golgotha made it possible to look up in this new way. The fact that Christ came to live on earth enables him to hallow elements of heavenly origin that might otherwise tempt man to arrogance and similar attitudes. We are living in a period that calls on us to recognize that our loftiest modern capacities, the capacity for freedom and pure concepts, must be permeated by the Christ impulse. Christianity has not reached its ultimate perfection. It is great just because the various evolutionary impulses of the human race must gradually be saturated by the Christ impulse. Man must learn to think pure thoughts with Christ, to achieve freedom with Christ, because he will otherwise not have that relationship to the super-sensible world that enables him to perceive correctly what it gives him. Studying ourselves as modern human beings, we realize that the super-sensible penetrates into earthly life through the gates of death in a direction directly counter to that that we take on dying. We go one way as human beings. The world goes the opposite way. With the descent of Christ, the spiritual sun enters from spiritual heights into the earth realm, in order that the human element that has made its way from the super-sensible to the sense world come together with the cosmic element that has taken the same path, in order that man find his way to the spirit of the cosmos. He can orient himself rightly in the world only if the spirit within him finds the spirit outside him. The spirit that an older humanity found living in the world beyond death can be rightly laid hold upon by people living on the earth today only if they are irradiated by the Christ, who descended to earth from that same world whence rationality and intellectuality and freedom made their way into the experience of incarnated human beings.

So we may say that anthroposophy begins in every case at the scientific level, calls art to the enlivening of its concepts, and ends in a religious deepening. It begins with what the head can grasp, takes on all the life and color of which words are capable, and ends in warmth that suffuses and reassures the heart, so that man's soul can at all times feel itself in the spirit, its true home. We must learn, on the anthroposophical path, to start with knowledge, then to lift ourselves to the level of artistry, and to end in the warmth of religious feeling.

The present rejects this way of doing things, and that is why anthroposophy has enemies. These enemies have many strange qualities. I have been talking of such serious matters today that I don't want to end on a serious note, although these matters are a good deal more serious than is generally realized. But we should often consider what a contrast exists between the seriousness of genuine anthroposophical striving and the ideas about it entertained by a good many of our fellow men. Some of them are absolutely grotesque, though others would strike us as simply droll were it not for the fact that we have to put up a defense against them. Sometimes I also find it necessary to turn my own spotlight on the outer world, with everyone free to make of it what he will. So I am going to close today's weighty discussion with a comment that is not to be taken too weightily.

A little while ago, our friend Dr. Wachsmuth brought me in Dornach a rude pamphlet not only attacking anthroposophy, but making me and those close to me its special targets. He said at the time that he wasn't leaving the book with me because it would be insulting even to assume that I would read such a particularly crude piece of invention. I didn't see the book again. Dr. Wachsmuth took it away with him, and I gave it no further thought.

Yesterday I traveled through Freiburg, accompanied by Frau Dr. Steiner and Herr Leinhas. We stopped off for refreshments and were sitting at a restaurant table. Two men were seated at the adjoining one. One of them had a rather bulging briefcase and other such accoutrements. We took no special notice of these people, and they left shortly before we did. After their departure the waiter brought me a book, saying that one of the gentlemen had asked him to give it to me. Herr Leinhas asked who the men were, and was told that one of them was Werner von der Schulenburg. On the book's flyleaf stood the words, “With the author's compliments.”

You see, my dear friends, what can happen. Perhaps this will give you some idea what a conception of tact—not to mention other qualities—exists nowadays among those who parade their enmity.

I have found it quite impossible lately to pay much attention to my enemies. Anyone who has been following my recent activities will have seen how occupied I have been presenting new truths to add to the old. This takes time, which one cannot afford to let anyone interrupt and waste, no matter how savage the attacks become.

I have described to you today how much is involved in arriving at anthroposophical truths. If the Society becomes fully conscious of this, it will find some of the strength it needs for its current reorganization. That, my dear friends, is a vital need. Please do not take it amiss that I have harped on this theme so insistently today.

In view of the deliberations that have been going on here with reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society as their object, I would like to shape today's lecture in a way that may help my hearers form independent judgments in these decisive days. To this end I shall be speaking somewhat more briefly and aphoristically than I usually do when discussing aspects of anthroposophy, and shall confine myself to commenting on the third phase of our anthroposophical work. This evening I will speak for the same reason on the subject of the three phases of the Anthroposophical Movement.

We often hear references being made these days to the great change that came over Western spiritual life when Copernicus substituted his new picture of the heavens for the one previously held. If one were to try to state just what the nature of this change was, it might be put as follows. In earlier times man thought of the earth realm as the object of his study and the chief concern of learning, with little or no attention being paid to the heavenly bodies circling overhead.

In recent times the heavenly bodies have come to assume a great deal more importance than they used to be accorded. Indeed, the earth came to be thought of as a mere grain of dust in the universe, and man felt himself to be living on a tiny speck of an earth quite insignificant by contrast with the rest of the cosmos and its countless thousand worlds. But if you will permit me to give just a sketch of this matter for the sake of characterizing the third phase of our Anthroposophical Movement, it must be pointed out that by reducing the earth to a mere grain of dust on the one hand, man also lost the possibility on the other of arriving at valid judgments about the rest of the universe other than those based on such physical and more recent chemical concepts as may apply. Research that goes beyond this and devotes itself to a study of soul and spiritual aspects of the universe is ignored. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the whole stance of modern learning. Man loses the possibility of seeing what he calls his soul and spirit as in any way connected with what rays down to us from the starry world. You can judge from certain passages in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, how intent anthroposophy is on creating a renewed understanding of the fact that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. Anthroposophy aims at re-creating the possibility of knowing the cosmos as spirit.

In this quest anthroposophy encounters a serious obstacle on its path, an obstacle that I am going to describe without reservation.

People come forward, quite rightly proclaiming anthroposophy with great enthusiasm. But they emphasize that what they are proclaiming is a doctrine based not on their own experience but on that of a spiritual investigator. This makes for instant conflict with the way of thinking prevailing in present day civilization, which condemns anyone who advances views based on authority. Such condemnation would disappear if people only realized that the findings of spiritual research recognized by anthroposophy can be arrived at with the use of various methods suited to various ways of investigation, but that once they are obtained, these results can readily be grasped by any truly unprejudiced mentality. But findings acceptable to all truly unprejudiced mentalities can be made and still not lead to fruitful results unless those presenting anthroposophical material do so with attitudes required for anthroposophical presentations that are not always prevailing.

Let me be explicit. Let me refer to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, published about thirty years ago, and recall my description in its pages of a special kind of thinking that is different from that generally recognized as thinking today. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature, or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at the hand of nature, thoughts that, indeed, he has only recently developed the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh century, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of it—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did the Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader as he read to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relation to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing at the moment of awakening that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color-filled, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily motions to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, The Riddle of Man, where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thoughts. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit have on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking.) One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as a result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person; it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life-element of its thinking, and the thinking left to it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there, seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, though in that book I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works because matters like these have to be gradually developed, one finds that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into formerly passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we will. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily matter comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes a part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belong to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side given its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them, for it belongs to a different world than that that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see, but the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our will leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a grain-of-dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we re-discover elements in the universe that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its suffusion with will, and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the universe and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my more recent lectures have concerned themselves with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read, speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!

Now I want to try to improve the present state of things by speaking briefly about the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. A start was made with the presentation of anthroposophy about two decades ago. I say two decades, but it was definitely already there in seed form in such writings as my Philosophy of Freedom and works on Goethe's world conception. But the presentation of anthroposophy as such began two decades ago. You will see from what I am about to say that it did begin to be presented as anthroposophy at that time.

When, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, I gave my first Berlin lectures (those printed under the title, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age), I was invited by the Theosophical Society to participate in its work. I myself did not seek out the Theosophical Society. People who belonged to it thought that what I was saying in my lectures, purely in pursuit of my own path of knowledge, was something they too would like to hear. I saw that the theosophists wanted to listen to what was being presented, and my attitude about it was that I would always address any audience interested in hearing me. Though my previous comments on the Theosophical Society had not always been exactly friendly and continued in the same vein afterwards, I saw no reason to refuse its invitation to lay before it material that had been given me for presentation by the spiritual world. That I presented it as anthroposophy is clear from the fact that at the very moment when the German section of the Theosophical Society was being founded, I was independently holding a lecture cycle [From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. History of Human Evolution Based on the World Conception of the Orient up to the Present, or Anthroposophy, 1902–3. No manuscript of these lectures is available.] not only about anthroposophy but with the name anthroposophy included in the title. The founding of the German section of the Theosophical Society and my lecture cycle on anthroposophy took place simultaneously. The aim, right from the beginning, was to present pure anthroposophy.

That was the start of the first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement. It was first exemplified in those members of the German section who were ready to absorb anthroposophy, and further groups of theosophists joined them.

During this first phase, the Anthroposophical Society led an embryonic existence within the Theosophical Society. It grew, as I say, within the Theosophical Society, but developed nevertheless as the Anthroposophical Society. In this first phase it had a special mission, that of counterposing the spirituality of Western civilization, centered in the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Theosophical Society's course, which was based on a traditional acceptance of ancient Oriental wisdom.

This first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement lasted until 1908 or 1909. Anyone who goes back over the history of the Movement can easily see for himself how definitely all the findings made on the score of prenatal existence, reincarnation and the like—findings made on the basis of direct experience in the present, not of ancient traditions handed down through the ages—were oriented around that evolutionary development in man's life on earth that centered in the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse. The Gospels were worked through, along with a great deal else. By the time it became possible for the Anthroposophical Movement to make the transition over into artistic forms of revelation, as was done with the presentation of my mystery plays, the content of anthroposophy had been worked out and related to its central core, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time when the Theosophical Society was sidetracked into a strange development. Since it had no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it committed the absurdity, among others, of proclaiming to the world that a certain young man of the present was the reincarnated Christ. Certainly no serious person could have tolerated any such nonsense; it appeared ridiculous in Western eyes. But anthroposophy had been developed as part of Western civilization, with the result that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared in a wholly new light in anthroposophical teaching. This led to the differences with the Theosophical Society that culminated in the virtual expulsion of all the anthroposophists. They didn't mind that because it didn't change anthroposophy in any way. I myself had never presented anything but anthroposophy to those interested in hearing about it, and that includes the period during which anthroposophy was outwardly contained by the Theosophical Society.

Then the second phase of the Anthroposophical Movement began. This phase was built on a foundation that already included the most important teachings about destiny, repeated earth-lives, and the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual illumination fully keyed to present day civilization. It included interpretations of the Gospels that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present.

The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917, was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels. You need only consider such examples as my lecture cycles of that period, one held in Christiania in 1910 on the European folk souls, the other at Prague in 1911 on the subject of occult physiology, and you will see that anthroposophy's second phase was devoted to working out its relationship to the sciences and practical concerns of the day. The cycles mentioned are just two examples; the overall aim was to find the way to relate to modern science and practice.

During this second phase of the Society's life, everything centered around the goal of finding a number of people whose inner attitude was such that they were able to listen to what anthroposophy was saying. More and more such people were found. All that was necessary was for people to come together in a state of soul genuinely open to anthroposophy. That laid the foundation for an anthroposophical community of sorts. The task became one of simply meeting the interest of these people who, in the course of modern man's inner evolution, had reached the point where they could bring some understanding to anthroposophy. They had to be given what they needed for their soul development. It was just a matter of presenting anthroposophy, and it was not a matter of any great concern whether the people who found their way to anthroposophy during the Society's first two phases foregathered in sect-like little groups or came to public lectures and the like. What was important was to base absolutely everything on a foundation of honestly researched knowledge, and then to go ahead and present it. It was quite possible to do this satisfactorily in the kind of Anthroposophical Society that had been developing.

Another aspect of the second phase was the further development of the artistic element. About halfway through it, the plan to build the Goetheanum took shape. A trend that began with the Mystery Plays was thus carried into the realms of architecture, sculpture and painting. Then eurythmy, the elements of which I have often characterized in my introductory talks at performances, was brought into the picture. All this came into existence from sources to which access is gained on the path sketched in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sketched in sufficient detail, however, to be understood and followed by anyone really desirous of taking that path.

This second phase of the Society's life was made especially difficult by the outbreak of the frightful war that then overran Europe and modern civilization. It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period, when mistrust and hatred were flooding the entire civilized world. The fact that the Goetheanum was located in a neutral country in a time when borders were closed often made it hard to reach. But the reasons for believing in the sincerity of anthroposophical efforts were more firmly founded on fact, even during the war, than any reasons for mistrusting it afterwards. It can truly be said that the war period brought no real disruption of the work; it continued on. As I have already mentioned, a large number of individuals from many different European countries confronting one another in hate and enmity on the battlefields worked together in a peaceful and anthroposophical spirit on the Goetheanum, which we have now lost in the terrible disaster of the fire.

Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number of individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through. The Threefold Movement, later called the Union for Free Spiritual Life, the Union for Higher Education, and so on, had to be undertaken with the clear intention of putting one's whole being irrevocably behind them. It was no longer possible, in the third phase, to rest content with the simple presentation of anthroposophy and merely to foregather with people whose inner search had led them to it. Instead, a number of individuals wanted to undertake this or that project, and they did so. This created all kinds of groupings in addition to the original purely anthroposophical community.

One of them was the scientific movement. It was built on the foundation of relationships of anthroposophy to science that had been established during the second phase. Scientists made their appearance in our midst. They had the task of giving modern science what anthroposophy had to offer. But there should have been a continuation of what I had begun in the way of building relationships to contemporary science. Perhaps I may remind you of lectures I gave during the second phase of the Movement. I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics into anthroposophy. I did the same thing in the case of other aspects of learning. This attitude, this way of relating, should have continued to prevail. If that had happened, the result would have been a different development of scientific activity than the one we have been witnessing during this third phase. Most importantly, we would have been saved from what I described at the earlier meeting as fruitless argumentation and polemics. Then we would presently be faced with a positive task, and could say that anthroposophy does indeed have a contribution to make to science, that it can help science go forward along a certain path, and in what specific way that can be accomplished. The outcome would have been a different attitude toward science than that evidenced in a recent issue of Die Drei, indeed in several issues that I looked over in connection with the cycle of lectures on science given by me last Christmastide in Dornach. I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in such unfruitful polemics. I say this not for the sake of criticizing but to point out what the task of the scientists in the Society is.

Something of the same kind ought to be happening in other respects as well. Let us take a case in point; I called attention to it on the occasion of my last lecture here.

In the third phase of the Movement, we saw the Union for Higher Education come into being. It had an excellent program. But somebody should have stayed with it and put all of himself behind it, made himself fully responsible for it. My only responsibility was for anthroposophy itself. So when someone else starts an independent enterprise founded on anthroposophy, that project becomes his responsibility. In the case I am discussing, nobody stayed with that responsibility, though I had called attention to the necessity of doing so at the time the program was being drawn up. I said that programs of this kind should be started only if an iron determination exists to carry them through; otherwise, they ought never to be launched. In this case it was the group guiding the Society that failed to stay behind it.

What was the outcome? The outcome was that a number of young people from the student movement, motivated by an intense longing for true anthroposophy but unable to find what they were looking for in the Society, sought out the living source of anthroposophy. They said expressly that they wanted to know the artistic aspects of anthroposophy as well as the others. They approached Frau Dr. Steiner with the intention of being helped by recitation and declamation to experience what I might call the anthroposophical swing of things.

Another development was taking place alongside this one, my dear friends. In the third phase of the Movement, the spiritual worlds were being described in the way I described them at the beginning of my lecture today when I gave a short sketch of a certain matter from the standpoint of purely spiritual contemplation, from a level where it is possible to show how one develops a different consciousness and thereby gains access to the spiritual world. The first and second phases were concerned with relating the Movement to the Mystery of Golgotha, to science, to the practical conduct of life. The third phase added the direct portrayal of spiritual realms. Anyone who has kept up with the efforts that were made during these three phases in Dornach and here too, for example, anyone with a real feeling for the advance represented by the third phase over the first and second phases, anyone aware to what extent it has been possible in recent years to spread anthroposophy beyond the boundaries of Central Europe, will notice that we are concerned with bringing into being a really new third phase in direct continuation and further development of the first two phases. Had we not entered the third phase, it would not really have been possible to develop the Waldorf School pedagogy, which is based on taking man's eternal as well as temporal nature into account.

Now please compare the discussions of yesterday and the week before with what I have just been saying in the interests of frank speaking and without the least intention of criticizing anyone, and ask yourselves what changes these three phases of our work have effected in the Society. Would not these same discussions, identical as to content, have been just as conceivable sixteen or eighteen years ago as they are today, when we have two decades of anthroposophical work behind us? Does it not seem as though we were back at the founding of the Society?

I repeat that I have no desire to criticize anybody. But the Anthroposophical Society can amount to something only if it is made the nurturing ground of everything that anthroposophy is working to achieve, and only if our scientists, to take an example, always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics.

Teachers have a similar task, and, to a special degree, people engaged in practical life. For their functions are of the kind that draws the heaviest fire against anthroposophy, which, despite its special potential for practicality, is most viciously attacked as being impractical.

So the Society is presently faced with the necessity of being more than a mere onlooker at really anthroposophical work going on elsewhere, more than just the founder of other enterprises that it fails to provide with truly anthroposophical zeal and enthusiasm. It needs to focus consciously on anthroposophical work. This is a completely positive statement of its mission, which needs only be worked out in detail. If this positive task is not undertaken, the Anthroposophical Society can only do anthroposophy more and more harm in the world's regard. How many enemies has the Threefold Movement not created for the Anthroposophical Movement with its failure to understand how to relate itself to anthroposophy! Instead, it made compromise after compromise, until people in certain quarters began to despise anthroposophy. We have seen similar things happen elsewhere. As I said in my first lecture here, we must realize that anthroposophy is the parent of this movement. That fact should be recognized. If it had been, a right relationship to the Movement for Religious Renewal, which I helped launch, would have resulted. Instead, everything in that area has also gone amiss. I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that takes us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

Please do not take offense at my speaking to you as I have today, my dear friends. I had to do it. As I said in Dornach on January 6th last, the Anthroposophical Society is good; it is capable of listening receptively to even the sharpest parts of my characterization. But the guiding elements in the Society must become aware that if the Society is to earn its name in future, they must make themselves responsible for keeping it the conscious carrier of the work. The conflicts that have broken out will end at the moment when the need for such a consciousness is clearly and adequately recognized in a spirit of goodwill. But there has to be goodwill for that need to be brought out into the open and any fruitless criticism dropped. Furthermore, there is no use giving oneself up to comfortable illusions, making compromises in adjustments between one movement and another, only to end up again in the same old jog-trot. It is time to be absolutely serious about anthroposophical work, and all the single movements must work together to achieve this goal. We cannot rest content to have a separate Waldorf School movement, a separate Movement for Religious Renewal, a separate Movement for Free Spiritual Life. Each will flourish only if all feel that they belong to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I am sure that everyone truly concerned for the Movement is saying the same thing in his heart. That is the reason I allowed myself to express it as sharply as I did today. Most of you were already aware of the need for a clear statement that could lead to the establishment of the consciousness I have described as so essential.

The Movement has now gone through three phases, during the last of which anthroposophy has been neglected in favor of various offspring movements. It must be re-discovered as the living spiritual movement demanded by modern civilized life and, most especially, by modern hearts. Please take my words as meant to serve that purpose. If they have sounded sharp, please consider them the more sincerely offered. They were intended not as an invitation to any further caustic deliberations but as a challenge to join in a Movement guided by a true heart for anthroposophy.

The development of conditions in the Anthroposophical Society makes it seem desirable to touch on at least a few of them again tonight. It was really never my intention to use lecture time to go into such matters as organizational and developmental aspects of the Society, for I see it as my task to work for pure anthroposophy, and I gladly leave everything related to the life and development of the Society to others who have assumed responsibility for it at the various places. But I hope to be able, at the delegates' meeting that will soon be held, to discuss at greater length the subject originally intended for presentation today. In view of the need evidenced by the way the Society's current concerns are going, you will perhaps allow me to make a few comments complementing what I said a week ago about the three phases of anthroposophical development.

Today, I want to bring out those aspects of the three phases that all three share in common; last week I concentrated, even though sketchily, on their differences.

I would like to start by discussing how a society like ours comes into being. I believe that what I am about to say could serve many a listener as a means to self-knowledge and thus prove a good preparation for the delegates' meeting.

It is certainly clear to anybody who keeps up with the way civilization and culture are presently developing that the times themselves demand the deepening of knowledge, the ethical practice, the inner religious life that anthroposophy has to offer. On the other hand, however, a society such as ours has to act as a vanguard in an ever wider disseminating of those elements that are so needed under the conditions that prevail today.

How is such a vanguard created? Everybody who has sought out the Anthroposophical Society from honest motives will probably recognize a piece of his own destiny in what I am about to describe.

If we look back over the twenty-one or twenty-two years of the Society's development, we will certainly discover that by far the greater number of those who approach the Society do so out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the spiritual, psychological and practical conditions they find surrounding them in life today. In the early days of the Society, which, when considered factually and not critically, might even be called its better days, something was taking place that almost amounted to flight from the life of the present into a different kind of life built on human community, a community where people could live in a way they felt in their souls to be in keeping with their dignity as human beings. This alienation from the spiritual, psychic and practical situation prevailing in the life around them must be taken into account as a factor in the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. For those who became anthroposophists were the first people to feel what millions and millions of others will be feeling keenly indeed in a not too distant future, that older forms have come down into the present from by-gone days in which they were not only fully justified but the product of historical necessity, but that they no longer provide what modern man's inner life requires and the dignity of full humanness demands.

Anyone who has a really open mind about these things and has come to anthroposophy in honest seeking will find, if he practices self-observation, that this drive to satisfy his soul needs in a special community rather than in just any other present day group of human beings is something that springs from the innermost core of his humanity, something he feels to be a special phenomenon of the present moment working its way to the surface of his soul from the eternal sources of all humanness. Those who have come honestly to anthroposophy therefore feel the need to belong to an anthroposophical community to be a real and deep concern of their hearts, something they cannot really do without if they are honest. But we must admit, too, that the very clarity (clarity of feeling, not of thought) with which people seek belonging in the anthroposophical community shows how little able the outer world presently is to satisfy a longing for full humanness. People would not feel so urgently impelled to seek anthroposophy if the soul's feeling of alienation from conditions existing in the world today had not become so particularly intense.

But let us go on and consider something else. What I have been describing thus far might be called a reversing of human will impulses. A person is born into a certain period and educated to be a man of his time. The result is that his will impulses simply coincide with those of all the rest of the human world around him. He grows up, and as he does so he grows without any great inner stirrings into the will tendencies of the surrounding population. It takes a deeply experienced inner revulsion against these habitual will impulses that he has adopted from the outside world to turn this erstwhile external will inward. When he does so, this reversing of the direction of his will causes him to notice the longing, experienced so keenly in our time, that wells up as though from eternal wellsprings, impelling him to seek a different belonging to the community of men than lay in the previous direction of his will.

Now everything that has to do with the will is intrinsically ethical and moral. The impulse that drives a person into the Anthroposophical Society is thus, in its will and feeling aspects at least, an ethical-moral impulse. Since this ethical impulse that has brought him into the Anthroposophical Society stirs him in his innermost holy of holies as it carries him to the eternal wellsprings of his soul life, it goes on to develop into a religious impulse. What otherwise lives itself out simply as a matter of response to externally imposed laws and traditional mores and as habits more or less thoughtlessly adopted from the life around one, in other words, everything of an ethical, moral, religious nature that had developed in the course of one's growing up, now turns inward and becomes a striving to make one's ethical-moral and religious being a full inner reality. But it is not consistent with full human stature for a person to couple his life of will and—to some extent at least—his life of feeling with the acceptance of just any haphazard type of knowledge.

The kind of knowledge that we may not, perhaps, absorb with our mother's milk, but are certainly receiving as inner soul training by the time we are six, and go on receiving—all these things that our minds in their learning capacity take in, confront the ethical, moral and religious elements in us as their polar opposite, though one perfectly harmonious and consistent with them. But they are by no means an inconsiderable item for a person who seeks to bring a religious deepening into his anthroposophical striving. The kind of life and practice that civilized man has developed in recent centuries is just exactly the kind from which an anthroposophist longs to free his moral, ethical and religious nature. Even if he makes compromises with the life about him, as indeed he must, his real desire is to escape from what the civilization of recent centuries has produced, leading as it has directly to the catastrophic present. It may be that this desire exists only as an instinct in many of those who seek out the Anthroposophical Movement, but it is definitely present.

Now let us recognize the fact that the factors accounting for the development of the religious and will impulses of recent centuries are the very same ones responsible for the direction and whole nuance of the modern life of learning. Only a victim of prejudice could believe and say that the modern way of knowledge has produced objective physics, objective mathematics, objective chemistry, that it is working toward an objective science of biology, and so on. That is pure prejudice. The real truth is that what we have had drummed into us from about our sixth year onward is the product of externally influenced will and religious impulses that have evolved during recent centuries. But when a person seeking anthroposophy wants to escape from these will impulses and from the religious forms in which man's moral life finds its highest expression, he cannot help asking at the same time for a way of knowledge in keeping not with the world he wants to leave behind but with the new world of his seeking. Since he has turned his will impulses inward, he must, in other words, strive for the kind of knowledge that corresponds to his in-turned will, that takes him ever further away from the externalized science that has been an outgrowth of the externalizing of all life in the civilized world in the past few centuries. An anthroposophist feels that he would have to be inconsequential and reverse the direction of his will again if he were not to change the direction of his knowledge. He would have to be a quite unthinking person to say, “I feel my humanity alien to the kind of life and practice that past centuries have brought us, but I feel quite at home with the knowledge they produced.” The kind of learning that the world he wants to escape from has acquired can never satisfy a person with an in-turned will. Many an individual may come to realize purely instinctively that the life and practice he longs to flee received their present form from the fact that man believes only in what his eyes see and what his mind makes of his physical observations. Seekers therefore turn to the invisible super-sensible realm as the basis of knowledge. Externalized forms of life and practice are outgrowths of a materialistic science, and a person impelled to regard these forms as subhuman rather than as fully human cannot feel suited by a science based on an exclusive belief in the external and material and what the mind concludes about them.

After the first act in the soul drama of the anthroposophist, the moral-religious act, there comes a second, one already contained in seed form in the first. It consists in a compulsion to seek super-sensible knowledge. That the Anthroposophical Society builds its content on knowledge received from super-sensible worlds is something that comes about quite of itself. Everything that the will thus experiences as its destiny, everything that the striving for insight recognizes as its seeking, is fused into one indivisible whole in the heart and soul of an anthroposophist; it is the very core of his life and his humanity. As such it shapes and colors his whole attitude, the state of soul in which he takes his place in the Society.

But now let us weigh the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and practice. He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but life's outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a single step or with one stroke. So his soul is caught and divided between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical Society. A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth or superficiality of the individual. But this very pain, this tragedy, contains the most precious seeds of the new, constructive life that has to be built up in the midst of our decaying culture. For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit is an outgrowth of pain and suffering. It is perhaps just those individuals with the deepest sense of the Society's mission who have to have the most personal experience of pain and suffering as they take on that mission, though it is also true that real human strength can only be developed by rising above suffering and making it a living force, the source of one's power to overcome.

The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one's will; secondly, in experiencing super-sensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one's time to a point where it becomes one's personal destiny. One feels oneself sharing mankind's evolution in the act of reversing one's will and experiencing the super-sensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time's true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness. The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”

What I have been describing here are the factors that brought the Anthroposophical Society into being. The Society wasn't really founded; it just came about. You cannot carry on a pre-conceived campaign to found a thing that is developing out of some genuine inner reality. An Anthroposophical Society could come into being only because there were people predisposed to the reversal of their wills, to the living knowledge, to the participation in the time's destiny that I have just characterized, and because something then made its appearance from some quarter that was able to meet what lived as those needs in those specific hearts. But such a coming together of human beings could take place only in our age, the age of the consciousness soul, and those who do not as yet rightly conceive the nature of the consciousness soul cannot understand this development. An example was provided by a university don who made the curious statement that three people once joined forces and formed the executive committee of the Anthroposophical Society. This donnish brain (it is better to be specific about what part of him was involved, since there can be no question in his case of fully developed humanness), this brain ferreted out the necessity of asking who selected them and authorized them to do such a thing. Well, what freer way could there possibly be for a thing to start than for three people to turn up and announce that they have such and such a purpose, and anyone who wants to join them in pursuing it is welcome, and if someone doesn't, why, that's all right too? Everyone was certainly left perfectly free. Nothing could have shown more respect for freedom than the way the Anthroposophical Society came into being. It corresponds exactly to the developmental level of the consciousness soul period. But one can perfectly well be a university don without having entered the consciousness soul age, and in that case will have no understanding for matters intimately allied to freedom.

I know how uncomfortable it makes some people when things of this kind have to be dealt with for the simple reason that they are there confronting us. They throw light, however, on the question of what must be done to provide the Society with what it needs to go on living. But since anthroposophists have to keep on being part of the world around them and can escape from it on the soul level only, they become prone to the special nuance of soul experience that I have been describing and that can run the gamut of inner suffering to the point of actual tragedy. Soul experience of this kind played a particularly weighty role in the coming into being of the Anthroposophical Society. Not only this: it is constantly being re-lived in the case of everyone who has since sought out the society. The Society naturally has to reckon with this common element, which is so deeply rooted in its social life, as with one of the lasting conditions of its existence.

It is natural, too, that in an evolution that has gone through three phases, newcomers to the Movement should find themselves in the first phase with their feeling life. Many a difficulty stems from the fact that the Society's leaders have the duty of reconciling the three co-existing phases with one another. For they go on side by side even though they developed in succession. Furthermore, in their aspect as past stages in a sequence, they belong to the past, and are hence memories, whereas in their simultaneous aspect they are presently still being lived. A theoretical or doctrinaire approach is therefore out of place in this situation. What those who want to help foster anthroposophical life need instead is loving hearts and eyes opened to the totality of that life. Just as growing old can mean developing a crochety disposition, becoming inwardly as well as outwardly wrinkled and bald-headed, losing all feeling for recalling one's young days vividly enough to make them seem immediate experience, so too is it possible to enter the Society as late as, say, 1919 and fail to sense the fresh, new, burgeoning, sprouting life of the Movement's first phase. This is a capacity one must work to develop. Otherwise, the right heart and feeling are missing in one's relation to anthroposophy, with the result that though one may scorn and look down upon doctrines and theories in other spheres of life, one's efforts to foster anthroposophical life cannot help becoming doctrinaire. This does serious damage to a thing as alive as an Anthroposophical Society ought to be.

Now, a curious kind of conflict arose during the third phase of the Movement. It began in 1919. I am not going to judge it from an ethical standpoint at the moment, although thoughtlessness is indeed a will impulse of sorts, and hence a question of ethics. When something is left undone, due to thoughtlessness, and that same thoughtlessness leads to a lot of fiddling around where a firm will is what is really needed, one can surely see that an ethical-moral element is involved. But I am not as much interested in going into that aspect of the subject today as I am in discussing the conflict into which it plunged the Society, a long-latent conflict. It must be brought out into the open and frankly discussed.

In the first phases of anthroposophical development, there was a tendency for the anthroposophist to split into two people. One part was, say, an office manager, who did what he had to do in that capacity. He poured his will into channels formed by the way things have developed in modern external life and practice during the past few centuries, channels from which his innermost soul longed to escape. But he was caught in them, caught with his will.

Now let us be perfectly clear about the will's intense involvement in all such pursuits. From one end of the day to the other, the will is involved in every single thing one does as an office manager or whatever. If one happens to be a schoolmaster or a professor instead of an office manager and is therefore more involved in thinking, that thinking also flows into one's will impulses, insofar as it has bearing on external life. In other words, one's will really remains connected with things outside oneself. It is just because the soul wants to escape from the direction the will is taking that it enters the Anthroposophical Society with its thought and feeling. So the man of will ends up in one place, the man of thought and feeling in another. Of course, this made some people happy indeed, for many a little sectarian group thought it a most praiseworthy undertaking to meet and “send out good thoughts” at the end of a day spent exerting its members' wills in the most ordinary channels. People formed groups of this sort and sent out good thoughts, escaping from their outer lives into a life that, while I cannot call it unreal, consisted exclusively of thoughts and feelings. Each individual split himself in two, one part going to an office or a classroom, the other attending an anthroposophical meeting where he led an entirely different kind of life. But when a number of anthroposophically thinking and feeling people were moved to apply their wills to the establishing of anthroposophical enterprises capable of full and vigorous life, they had to include those wills in the total human equipment needed for the job. That was the origin of the conflicts that broke out. It is comparatively easy to train oneself to send out good thoughts intended to keep a friend on a mountain climb from breaking his legs. It is much harder to pour good thoughts so strongly into a will engaged in some external, material activity that matter itself becomes imbued with spirit as a result of one's having thus exerted one's humanness. Many an undertaking has suffered shipwreck because of an inability to do that, during the Society's third phase of development. There was no shortage of fine intelligences and geniuses—I say this very sincerely—but the intelligence and genius available were not sufficiently applied to stiffening and strengthening the wills involved.

If you look at the matter from the standpoint of the heart, what a difference you see! Think how dissatisfied the heart is with one's external life! One feels dissatisfied not only because other people are so mean and everything falls so short of perfection, but because life itself doesn't always make things easy for us. You'll agree that it isn't invariably a featherbed. Living means work. Here one has this hard life on the one hand, and on the other the Anthroposophical Society. One enters the Society laden with all one's dissatisfaction. As a thinking and feeling person one finds satisfaction there because one is receiving something that is not available in the outer life one is justifiably so dissatisfied with. One finds satisfaction in the Anthroposophical Society. There is even the advantage there that one's thoughts, which in other situations are so circumscribed by will's impotence, take wing quite easily when one sits in a circle sending out good thoughts to keep the legs of friends on mountain climbs from getting broken. Thoughts fly easily to every part of the world, and are thus very satisfying. They make up for one's external life, which is always causing one such justifiable dissatisfaction.

Now along comes the Anthroposophical Society and itself starts projects that call for the inclusion of the will. So now one not only has to be an office manager in the outer world, though with an Anthroposophical Society to flee to and to look back from at one's unsatisfactory life outside—a life one may, on occasion, complain about there; one now faces both kinds of life within the Society, and is expected to live them there in a satisfied rather than dissatisfied state of mind!

But this was inevitable if the Society wanted to go farther and engage in actual deeds. Beginning in 1919 it did want to do that.

Then something strange happened, something that could probably happen only in the Anthroposophical Society, namely, that people no longer knew what to do with their share of dissatisfaction, which everyone naturally wants to go on having. For one can hardly accuse the Society of making one dissatisfied. But that attitude doesn't last. In the long run people do ascribe their dissatisfaction to it. What they ought to do instead is to achieve the stage of inner development that progresses from thoughts and feelings to will, and one does achieve just that on a rightly travelled anthroposophical path. If you look in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, you will see that nowhere is there a recommendation for developing thought that does not include aspects that bear on will development.

But modern humanity suffers from two evils, both of which must be overcome in the Society. One is fear of the super-sensible. This unadmitted fear accounts for every enemy the Anthroposophical Movement has. Our enemies really suffer from something that resembles a fear of water. You know, of course, that a fear of water can express itself in another, violently compulsive form, and so we need not be surprised if the kind I am referring to sometimes vents itself in a sort of phobia. Sometimes, of course, it can be comparatively harmless. Some people find anthroposophy a rewarding subject to write about; these books bring in money and appear on book lists. There must be themes to write about, and not everybody has one inside him, so it has to be borrowed from the world outside. The motives in such cases are sometimes more harmless than one might suppose. But their effects are not equally harmless.

Fear of super-sensible knowledge, then, is one characteristic of the human race. But that fear is made to wear the mask of the scientific approach, and the scientific approach, with the limits to knowledge it accepts, is in direct line of inheritance from man's ancient Fall into error. The only difference is that the ancients conceived the Fall as something man ought to overcome. The post-scholastic period is still haunted by a belief in the Fall. But whereas an earlier, moralistic view of it held that man was born evil and must overcome his nature, the intellectualistic view holds that man cannot gain access to the super-sensible with his mind or change his nature. Man's willingness to accept limits to knowledge is actually an inheritance from the Fall he suffered. In better days he at least tried to overcome error. But conceited modern man not only wants to retain his fallen status; he is actually intent on staying fallen and loving the devil, or at least trying to love him.

That is the first of the two evils. The second is the weakness, the inner paralysis that afflicts modern human wills, despite their seeming activity, which is often nothing more than pretense. I must add that both these ominous characteristics of modern civilization and culture are qualities that anthroposophical life must overcome. If this anthroposophical life is to develop in a practical direction, everything it undertakes must be born of fearless knowledge and a really strong will. This presupposes learning to live with the world in a truly anthroposophical way. People used to learn to live anthroposophically by fleeing the world. But they will have to learn to live anthroposophically with the world and to carry the anthroposophical impulse into everyday life and practice. That means making one single whole again of the person hitherto split into an anthroposophist and a practical man. But this cannot be done so long as a life lived shut away from the world as though by towering fortress walls that one cannot see over is mistaken for an anthroposophical life. This sort of thing cannot go on in the Society. We should keep our eyes wide open to everything that is happening in the world around us, that will imbue us with the right will impulses. But as I said the last time, the Society has not kept pace with anthroposophical life during the third phase of anthroposophy, and the will element is what has failed to do so. We have had to call away individuals who formerly guided activities in the various branches and assign them tasks in connection with this or that new enterprise, with the frequent result that a person who made an able Waldorf School teacher became a poor anthroposophist. (This is not meant as a criticism of any of our institutions. The Waldorf School is highly regarded by the world at large, not just by circles close to it, and it can be stated in all modesty that no reason exists to complain about any of the various institutions, or if there is, it is on an entirely different score than that of ability.) It is possible to be both a first-rate Waldorf teacher and a poor anthroposophist, and the same thing is true of able workers in the other enterprises. The point is, though, that all the various enterprises are outgrowths of anthroposophy. This must be kept firmly in mind. Being a real anthroposophist is the all-important thing. Waldorf teachers, workers at Der Kommende Tag, scientists, medical men and other such specialists simply must not turn their backs on the anthroposophical source or take the attitude that there is no time left from their work for anthroposophical concerns of a general nature. Otherwise, though these enterprises may continue to flourish for a while, due to the fact that anthroposophy itself is full of life and passes it on to its offspring, that life cannot be maintained indefinitely, and the offspring movements too would eventually die for lack of it.

We are dealing with enemies who will not meet us on objective ground. It is characteristic of them that they avoid coming to grips with what anthroposophy itself is, and instead ask questions like, “How are anthroposophical facts discovered?” or “What is this clairvoyance?” or “Does so and so drink coffee or milk?” and other such matters that have no bearing on the subject, though they are what is most talked about. But enemies intent on destroying anthroposophy resort to slander, and samples of it have been turning up of late in phenomena that would have been quite unthinkable just a short while ago, before civilization reached its lowest ebb. Now, however, they have become possible. I don't want to go into the specifics; that can be left to others who presumably also feel real heart's concern for the fate of anthroposophy. But since I was able to be with you here today I wanted to bring up these problems. From the standpoint of the work in Dornach it was not an opportune moment for me to leave, however happily opportune it was to be here; there are always two sides to everything. I was needed in Dornach, but since I could have the deep satisfaction of talking with you here again today, let me just add this. What is most needed now is to learn to feel anthroposophically, to feel anthroposophy living in our very hearts. That can happen only in a state of fullest clarity, not of mystical becloudedness. Anthroposophy can stand exposure to the light. Other movements that claim they are similar cannot endure light; they feel at home in the darkness of sectarianism. But anthroposophy can stand light in all its fulness; far from shrinking from exposure to it, anthroposophy enters into the light with all its heart, with its innermost heart's warmth. Unfounded personal slander, which sometimes goes so far that the persons attacked are unrecognizable, can be branded for what it is. Where enmity is an honest thing, anthroposophy can always reply on an objective basis. Objective debate, however, requires going into the question of methods that lead to anthroposophical knowledge. No objective discussion is possible without satisfying that requirement. Anybody with a heart and a healthy mind can take in anthroposophy, but discussions about it have to be based on studying its methods and getting to understand how its knowledge is derived. Experimentation and deduction do not call for inner development; they merely require a training that can be given anybody. A person with no further background is in no position to carry on a debate about anthroposophy without undergoing training in its methods.

But the easy-going people of our time are not about to let themselves in for any such training. They cling to the dogma that man has reached perfection, and they don't want to hear a word about developing. But neither goodness nor truth are accessible to man unless he acts in the very core of his free being to open up the way to them. Those who realize what impulses are essential to sharing with one's heart in the life and guidance of the Anthroposophical Society and who know how to assess its enemies' motives will, if they have sufficient goodwill, also find the strength needed to bring through to a wholesome conclusion these concerns with which, it was stated before I began this talk, the Society itself is also eager to deal.

Today I want to point once again to an ideal associated with the Goetheanum, which we have just had the great misfortune of losing. My purpose in referring to it again is to make sure that correct thinking prevails on the score of a step about to be taken in Stuttgart in the next few days, a step in the direction of making a new life in the Anthroposophical Society. Whatever anthroposophy brings forth must be built on a solid foundation of enthusiasm, and we can create the right enthusiasm only by keeping oriented to that ideal that every anthroposophical heart should be cherishing and that is great enough to unite all the Society's members in its warmth.

It cannot be denied that enthusiasm for this ideal of anthroposophical cooperation has dwindled somewhat during the three successive phases of anthroposophical development, though the ideal itself remains. As we stand grieving beside the ruins of the building that brought that anthroposophical ideal to eloquent external expression, it becomes the more important that we join forces in the right common feeling toward it. Shared feeling will lead to shared thoughts and beget a strength much needed in view of the constantly increasing enmity that confronts us. Therefore, instead of continuing to discuss matters that have been the focus of my lectures of the past several weeks, you will perhaps allow me to recall an outstanding memory that has a connection with the Goetheanum and is well-suited to restoring the kind of relationships between members that we need in the Anthroposophical Society. For to hold common ideals enkindles the love that every single anthroposophist should be feeling for his fellow members and that can be relied on to dissipate any hard feelings that members of the Society could be harboring against any others, even if only in their thoughts about them.

You may remember that when we started the first High School course at the Goetheanum, I gave a short introductory talk stressing the fact that what people were accomplishing there represented a new kind of striving whereby art, science and religion were to be united in a truly universal sense.

What was being striven for at the Goetheanum, what its forms and colors were meant to convey, was an ideal, a scientific, artistic and religious ideal. It should be the more deeply graven on our hearts now that it can no longer speak to us through outer forms and colors. That will perhaps be brought about if we continue to do as we have been doing these past few weeks in regard to other subjects under study and enquire how earlier periods of human evolution went about pursuing a scientific, artistic and religious ideal.

If we look back at the tremendous, lofty spiritual life of the ancient Orient, we come to a time when the spiritual content of everything revered by these Oriental peoples was immediate revelation to them—a time when they had no doubt whatsoever that the things their senses perceived were mere tracings in matter of divine realities that had been revealed to a visionary capacity none the less real to them for its dreamlike quality.

That way of beholding, instinctive though it was, was at one time such that people in certain specific states of consciousness could perceive spiritual beings in the universe in all their immediate reality, just as with their bodily senses they perceived things and creatures of the three natural kingdoms. The Oriental of an older time was just as convinced by immediate perception of the existence of the divine-spiritual beings connected with the human race as he was of the existence of his fellow men.

This was the source of his inner religious certainty, which differed in no way from his certainty concerning things in nature round about him. He saw his god, and could therefore believe in his existence just as firmly as he believed in the existence of a stone, a plant, clouds or rivers. What modern science dubs animism, picturing the ancients relying on poetic fantasy to endow nature with a living spiritual element, is an invention of childish dilettantism. The fact is that people beheld spiritual beings in the same way they beheld the world of nature and the senses.

This was, as I said, the source of the certainty in their religious life. But it was equally the source they drew on for artistic creation. The spiritual appeared to them in concrete form. They were familiar with the shapes and colors assumed by spiritual elements. They could bring their perception of the spiritual to material expression. They took such building materials as were available, the materials of sculpture and of the other arts, and applied such techniques as they had to express what was spiritually revealed to them.

The reverence they felt in inner soul relationships to their gods was the content of their religious life. When they imprinted on matter what they had beheld in the spirit, that was felt to be their art. But the techniques and the physical materials at their disposal for expressing what they thus beheld fell far short of their actual visions.

We come upon a period in the evolution of the ancient Orient when the divine-spiritual—or, as Goethe called it, the sensible-super-sensible—that man beheld was exceedingly lofty and gloriously beautiful. People's feelings and fantasy were powerfully stirred by their perception of it. But because techniques for dealing with material media were still so rudimentary, artistic creations of the period were but primitive symbolical or allegorical expressions of the far greater beauty human beings perceived with spiritual eyes. An artist of those ancient times describing his work with the feeling-nuance we have today would have said, “What the spirit reveals to me is beautiful, but I can bring only a weak reflection of it to expression in my clay or wood or other media.”

Artists in those days were people who beheld the spiritual in all its beauty and passed on their vision in sense perceptible form to others who could not behold it for themselves. These latter were convinced that when an artist embodied what he saw spiritually in his symbolical or allegorical forms, these forms enabled them, too, to find their way into the world beyond the earth, a world that a person had to enter to experience his full dignity as a human being.

This relationship to the divine-spiritual was so immediate, so real, so concrete that people felt that the thoughts they had were a gift of the gods, who were as present to them as their fellow men. They expressed it thus, “When I talk with human beings, we speak words that sound on the air. When I talk with the gods, they tell me thoughts that I hear only inside me. Words expressed in sounds are human words. Words expressed in thoughts are communications from the gods.”

When human beings had thoughts, they did not believe them to be products of their own soul activity. They believed that they were hearing thoughts whispered to them by divinities. When they perceived with their ears, they said they heard people. When they heard with their souls, when their perception was of thoughts, they said they heard spiritual beings. Knowledge that lived in idea form was thus communication from divine sources in the experiencing of ancient peoples, perception of the Logos as it spoke directly through the gods to men.

We can say, then, that men's beholding of the gods became the inner life of the religious ideal. Their symbolical-allegorical expression of divine forms through the various media was the life underlying the ideal of art. In their re-telling of what the gods had told them lived the ideal of science. These three ideals merged into one in ancient Oriental times, for they were at bottom one and the same.

In the first ideal, men looked up to divine revelation. Their whole soul life was completely suffused with religious feeling. Science and art were the two realms in which the gods shared mankind's life on earth. The artist engaged in creative activity felt that his god was guiding his hand, poets felt their utterance being formed by gods. “Sing to me, Muse, of the anger of the great Peleid, Achilles.” It was not the poet speaking; it was, he felt, the Muse speaking in him, and that was the fact. The abstract modern view, which attributes such statements to poetic license, is a grotesque piece of the childish nonsense so rampant today. Those who adopt it do not know how truly Goethe spoke when he said, “What you call the spirit of the times is just your own spirit with the times reflected in it.”

If we now turn our attention from the way the threefold ideal of religion, art and science lived in ancient Oriental man to consider how it was expressed by the Greeks and the Romans who were such a bare, prosaic copy of them, we find these three ideals in a further form of development. The divine-spiritual that had revealed itself to man from shining heights above was felt by the Greeks to be speaking directly through human beings. Religious life attached itself much more closely to the human, in the sense that a Greek not only experienced his inner life, but his very form, as god-permeated, god-suffused. He no longer looked up to shining heights above him; he looked at the marvellous shape of man. He no longer had the ancient Oriental's direct contemplation of divinity; his beholding was only a weak shadow of it. But anyone who can really enter into Greek poetry, art and philosophy perceives the basic feeling the Greek had, which led him to say that earthly man was more than just a composite of the material elements that his senses perceived in the external world; he saw in him a proof of the existence of divinity. This man of earth whom the Greek could not regard as of earthly origin was for him living proof that Zeus, that Athene ruled in spiritual worlds.

So we see the Greeks looking upon the human form and man's developing inner life as sublime proof of the gods' governance. They could picture their gods as human because they still had such a profound experience of the divine in man.

It was one thing for the Greek to picture his gods as human beings and quite another for modern man to conceive a divine man under the influence of a degraded anthropomorphism. For to the Greek, man was still a living proof of his divine origin. The Greeks felt that no such thing as man could exist if the world were not permeated through and through by the divine.

Religion played a vital part in conceiving man. A person was revered not for what he had made of himself, but just because he was a human being. It was not his everyday achievements or an ambitious earthly striving to excel that inspired reverence; it was what had come with him as his humanness into life on earth. The reverence accorded him enlarged to reverence for the divine-spiritual world.

The artistic ideal entertained by the Greeks was, on the one hand, a product of their feeling for the divine-spiritual element they embodied and to which their presence on earth testified. On the other hand, they had a strong sense—unknown to the ancient Oriental—of the laws governing the physical world of nature, the laws of consonance and dissonance, of volume, of the inertia or the supporting capacity of various earth materials. Where the Oriental handled his media awkwardly and was unable to go beyond a crudely symbolical-allegorical treatment of the spiritual reality that overwhelmed and overflowed him, so that the spiritual fact he was trying to give expression to in some work of art was always far more glorious and grand than the awkward representation of it, the Greek's striving was to embody all the fulness of his spiritual experience in the physical medium he had by this time learned to handle.

The Greeks never allowed a column to be any thicker than it had to be to carry the weight it was intended to support. They would not have permitted themselves to represent anything of a spiritual nature in the awkward manner characteristic of ancient Oriental art; the physical laws involved had to have been perfectly mastered. Spirit and matter had to be united in a balanced union. There is as much of spirit as of material lawfulness in a Greek temple, and a statue embodies as much of the spiritual element as the expressiveness of the material allows. Homer's verses flow in a way that directly manifests the flowing of divine speech in the human. The poet felt as he shaped his words that he had to let the laws of language itself be his guide to the achieving of perfect control over every aspect of his utterance. Nothing could be left in the awkward, stammering form typical of ancient Oriental hymns. It had to be expressed in a way that did full justice to the spirit. The goal, in other words, was so fully to master the physical laws inherent in the artistic medium employed that every last vestige of what the spirit had revealed was made manifest in sense perceptible form.

The Greeks' feeling that man was evidence of divine creation was matched by their feeling that works of art, like temples and statues, also had to bear witness to divine governance, though that was now conceived as acting through the agency of human fantasy. Looking at a temple, one could see that its builder had so mastered all the laws of his medium that every least detail of their application reflected what he had experienced in his intercourse with the gods.

The earliest Greek tragedies were plays in which the dramatis personae represented spiritual beings such as Apollo and Dionysos, with the chorus an echo of sorts, an echo of the divine that ruled in nature. Tragedies were intended to bring to expression through human beings as an adequate medium events transpiring in the spiritual world. But this was not conceived as in ancient Oriental times, when man had, as it were, to look up into a higher realm than that where the work of art stood. Instead, it was thought of as taking place on the level on which the tragedy was being enacted, making it possible to experience in every gesture, every word, every recitativ of the chorus how a spiritual element was pouring itself into sense perceptible forms beautifully adapted to it. This constituted the Greek ideal of art.

And the scientific ideal? The Greek no longer felt as livingly as the Oriental had that the gods were speaking to him in ideas and thoughts. He already had some inkling of the fact that effort was attached to thinking. But he still felt thoughts to be as real as sense perceptions, just as he felt earthly human beings with their human forms and inner life to be walking evidence of divinity. He perceived his thoughts in the same way that he perceived red or blue, C # or G, and he perceived them in the outer world in the same way that eyes and ears receive sense impressions. This meant that he no longer experienced the speaking of the Logos quite as concretely as the Oriental did. The Greeks did not compose Vedas, of which the Orientals had felt that the gods gave them the ideas they expressed. The Greek knew that he had to work out his thoughts, just as someone knows that he has to use his eyes and look about him if he wants to see the surrounding world. But he still knew that the thoughts he developed were divine thoughts impressed into nature. A thought was therefore earthly proof of the gods' speaking. Whereas the Oriental still heard that speaking, the Greek discerned the human quality of language, but saw in it direct earthly proof of the existence of divine speech.

To the Greeks, science was thus also like a divine gift, something obviously despatched to earth by the spirit, exactly as man with his divine outer form and inner experiencing had been sent here. So we see how the religious, artistic and scientific ideal changed in the course of humanity's evolution from the Oriental to the Greek culture.

In our epoch, which, as I have often explained, began in the first third of the fifteenth century, Western man's development has again reached a point where he is confronted with the necessity of bringing forth new forms of the venerable, sacred ideals of religion, art and science. This development was what I had in mind when we were launching the first High School course at the Goetheanum. I wanted to make it clear that the Goetheanum stood there because the inner laws of human evolution require that the religious, artistic and scientific ideals be clothed in magnificent new forms transcending even those of Greece.

That is why one feels so overwhelmed by grief as one's eye falls on ruins where a building should be standing and indicating in its every form and line and color the new shape that the three great ideals should be assuming as they emerge from the innermost soul of an evolving humanity. Grief and sorrow are the only emotions left to us as we contemplate the site that was meant to speak so eloquently of the renewal of man's three great ideals. Ruins occupy it, leaving us only one possibility, that of cherishing in our hearts everything we hoped to realize there. For while another building might conceivably be erected in its place, it would certainly not be the one we have lost. In other words, it will never again be possible for a building to express what the old Goetheanum expressed.

That is why everything the Goetheanum was intended to contribute to the three great ideals of the human race should be the more deeply graven on our hearts. In our day we cannot say with the clairvoyant Oriental of an older time that the divine-spiritual confronts us in all its shining immediacy as do the creatures of the sense world, or that the deeds of the gods are as present to our soul perception as any sense perceptible acts that may be performed in the external world in everyday living. But when we quicken our inquiry into man and nature with the living quality with which anthroposophical thinking and feeling endow such studies, we see the world for the cosmos, or the universe clothed in a different form than that in which the Greeks beheld it.

When a Greek made nature the object of his study or contemplated human beings moving about in the world of the senses, he had the feeling that where a spring welled up or a mountain thrust its cloud-crowned peak into the sky, when the sun came up in the rosy brilliance of the dawn or a rainbow spanned the heavens, there the spirit spoke in these phenomena. The Greeks beheld nature in a way that enabled them to feel the presence of the spirit in it. Their contemplation of nature really satisfied them; what they saw there satisfied every facet of their beings.

I have often emphasized how justifiably people speak of an advance in natural science, and anthroposophy is in a unique position to recognize the real significance of the scientific progress of recent centuries. I have often stressed this. Anthroposophy is far from wanting to denigrate or to criticize science and scientific inquiry; it honors all truly sincere study. In the course of recent centuries, my dear friends, people have indeed learned an enormous amount about nature. If one goes more deeply into what has been learned, the study of nature leads, as I have often stated from this platform, to insight into man's repeated earth lives, insight into the transformation of nature. One gets a preview of the future, when man will bring to new forms of life what his senses and his soul and spirit are experiencing in the present moment.

If one undertakes a suitably deeper study of nature, one's total outlook on it becomes different from that that the Greeks had. It might be said that they saw nature as a fully matured being from which the glory of the spiritual worlds shone out. Modern man is no longer able to look upon nature in this light. If we survey everything we have come to know and feel about nature's creations as a result of making use of our many excellent devices and instruments, we see nature rather as harboring seed forces, as bearing in its womb something that can come to maturity only in a distant future.

The Greek saw every plant as an organism that had already reached a perfect stage for the reason that the god of the species lived in each single specimen. Nowadays we regard plants as something that nature has to bring to still higher stages. Everywhere we look we see seed elements. Every phenomenon we encounter in this unfinished nature, so pregnant with future possibilities, causes us to feel that a divine element reigns over nature and must continue to do so to ensure its progressing from an embryonic to an eventually perfect stage.

We have learned to look much more precisely at nature. The Greek saw the bird where we see the egg. He saw the finished stage of things; we, their beginnings. The person who feels his whole heart and soul thrill to the seed aspects, the seed possibilities in nature, is the man who has the right outlook on it.

That is the other side of modern natural science. Anyone who starts looking through microscopes and telescopes with a religious attitude will find seed stages everywhere. The exactness characteristic of the modern way of studying nature allows us to see it as everywhere creative, everywhere hastening toward the future. That creates the new religious idea.

Of course, only a person with a feeling for the seed potentialities that each individual will live out in other, quite different earthly and cosmic lives to come can develop the religious ideal I am describing.

The Greeks saw in man the composite of everything there was in the cosmos of his own period. The ancient Orientals saw in man the composite of the whole cosmic past. Today, we sense seeds of the future in human beings. That gives the new religious ideal its modern coloring.

Now let us go on to consider the new ideal of art. What do we find when we subject nature and its forms to a deeper, life-attuned study, refusing to call a halt at externalities and abstract ideas? My dear friends, you saw what we find before your very eyes in the capitals of our Goetheanum pillars and in the architrave motifs that crowned them. None of this was the result of observing nature; it was the product of experiencing with it. Nature brings forth forms, but these could just as well be others. Nature is always challenging us to change, to metamorphose its forms. A person who merely observes nature from the outside copies its forms and falls into naturalism. A person who experiences nature, who doesn't just look at the shapes and colors of plants, who really has an inner experience of them, finds a different form slipping out of every plant and stone and animal for him to embody in his medium. The Greek method, which aimed at completely expressing the spirit through a masterly handling of the medium, is not our method. Our way is to enter so deeply into nature's forms that one can bring them to further, independent metamorphosis. We do not resort to the symbolical-allegorical Oriental treatment or strive for the Greek's technical mastery of a medium. Our method is so to handle every line and color in the work of art that it strives toward the divine. The Oriental employed symbolism and allegory to express the divine, which rayed out like an aura from his works, rayed out and welled over and submerged them, speaking much more eloquently than the forms did. We moderns must create works where in the form element speaks more eloquently than nature itself does, yet speaks in a manner so akin to it that every line and color becomes nature's prayer to the divine. In our coming to grips with nature we develop forms wherein nature itself worships divinity. We speak to nature in artistic terms.

In reality, every plant, every tree has the desire to look up in prayer to the divine. This can be seen in a plant's or a tree's physiognomy. But plants and trees do not dispose over a sufficient capacity to express this. It is there as a potential, however, and if we bring it out, if we embody in our architectural and sculptural media the inner life of trees and plants and clouds and stones as that life lives in their lines and colors, then nature speaks to the gods through our works of art. We discover the Logos in the world of nature. A higher nature than that surrounding us reveals itself in art, a higher nature that, in its own entirely natural way, releases the Logos to stream upward to divine-spiritual worlds.

In Oriental works of art the Logos streamed downward, finding only stammering expression in human media. Our art forms must be true speech forms, voicing what nature itself would say if it could live out its potential. That is the new artistic ideal that comes to stand beside the religious ideal that looks at nature from the standpoint of its seed endowment.

The third is our scientific ideal. That is no longer based on the feeling the Orientals had that thoughts are something whispered straight into human souls by gods. Nor can it have kinship with the Greek ideal, which felt thoughts to be inner witnesses to the divine. Nowadays we have to exert purely human forces, work in a purely human way, to develop thoughts. But once we have made the effort and achieved thoughts free of any taint of egotism, self-seeking, subjective emotionality or partisan spirit such as colors thoughts with prejudiced opinions, once we have exerted ourselves as human beings to experience thoughts in the form they themselves want to assume, we no longer regard ourselves as the creators and shapers of our thoughts, but merely as the inner scene of action where they live out their own nature. Then we feel the largeness of these sefless and unprejudiced thoughts that seem to be our own creations, and are surprised to find that they are worthy of depicting the divine; we discover afterwards that thoughts that take shape in our own hearts are worthy of depicting the divine. First, we discover the thought, and afterwards we find that the thought is nothing less than the Logos! While you were selflessly letting the thought form itself in you, your selflessness made it possible for a god to be the creator of that thought. Where the Oriental felt thought to be revelation and where the Greek found it proof of divine reality, we feel it to be living discovery: we have the thought, and afterwards it tells us that it was permitted to express divinity. That is our scientific ideal.

Here we stand, then, in the ongoing evolution of the human race, realizing what point we have reached in it. We know, as we look at the human head with the ears at the side, at the larynx and the distorted shoulder blades, that we must be able to do more than just contemplate them. If we succeed in transforming these shapes of nature, a single form emerges from a further development of the shoulder blades and a growing-together of the ears and larynx: a Luciferic form, composed of chest and head, wings, larynx and ears.

We reach the point of perceiving the artistic element in nature, the element that endows its forms with life, allowing a higher life of form to emerge than that found in nature itself.

But this also puts us in the position of being able to trace nature's own activity in the metamorphoses whereby it transforms the human being, and we are able to apply this same artistry in the pedagogical-didactic field. We bring this same creative artistry to pedagogical work with children, who are constantly changing. For we have learned it at hand of an art that we recognize to be the Logos-producing nature-beyond-nature. We learn it from springs that are more than springs, for they commune with the gods. We learn it from trees that are more than trees; for where the latter achieve only a stammering movement of their branches, the former disclose themselves to modern artistic fantasy in forms that point to the gods with gesturings of branch and crown. We learn it from the cosmos as we metamorphose its forms and re-shape them, as we tried to do in our Goetheanum. All these studies teach us how to work from day to day with children to help support the process that daily re-shapes, re-creates them. This enables us to bring artistry into the schooling of the human race, and the same holds true in other areas.

That is the light in which the three great ideals of humanity—the religious ideal, the artistic ideal, the scientific ideal—appear, re-enlivened, to the contemplating soul of the anthroposophist. The forms of the Goetheanum were intended to fill him with enthusiasm for experiencing these lofty ideals in their new aspect. Now we must quietly engrave them on our hearts. But they must be made a source of enthusiasm in us. As we acquire that enthusiasm and are lifted toward the divine in our experiencing of the three ideals, earth's highest ideal develops in us. The Gospel says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself, and God above all.” Another way of putting it is, “If one looks upon the divine in the light of the present day aspect of the three ideals, as a modern human being must, one learns to love the divine.” For one feels that one's humanness depends on devoting oneself with all the love at one's command to the three ideals. But then one feels oneself united with every other individual who is able to do likewise and offer up the same love. One learns to love the divine above all else, and, in loving God, to love one's neighbor as oneself. That keeps any hard feelings from developing.

That is what can unite and make a single entity of the separate members of the Society. That is the present need. We have had the experience of going through a phase in the Society in which anthroposophy was poured into separate channels, such as pedagogy and other practical concerns, into artistic activities, and so on. Now we need to pull together. We have first-rate Waldorf School teachers and other professionals. Everyone who is giving of his best at a special post needs to find a way to bring the sources of anthroposophical life to ever fresh flowing. That is what is needed now.

Since that is our need, since the leading anthroposophists need to prove their awareness of the present necessity of re-enlivening the Anthroposophical Society, we have arranged a meeting on these matters. It is to take place in Stuttgart in the next few days. Those who mean well by the Society should be cherishing the warmest hopes for what will come of that occasion. For only if the individuals present there can develop the right tone, a tone ringing with true, energetic enthusiasm for the three great love-engendering ideals, only if the energy and content of the words they speak guarantee this, can there be hope of the Anthroposophical Society achieving its goal. For what eventuates there will set the tone for the turn things will take in wider circles of the Society.

I will know, too, what my own course must be after seeing what comes of the Stuttgart conference. Great expectations hang on it. I ask all of you who cannot make the journey to Stuttgart to be with us in supporting thoughts. It is a momentous occasion that calls for participation and wholesomely based, energetic effort on behalf of the great ideals so essential to modern humanity. We are informed of them not by any arbitrary account set down by human hand, but in that script graven by the whole course of evolution, the whole import of man's earthly development, which declares itself to us every bit as plainly as does the sun to waking human beings.

Let us set about kindling this enthusiasm in our souls; then it will become deeds. And deeds are essential.

The background mood out of which I shall be addressing you today is not the same as that that prevailed on earlier occasions when I was privileged to speak here. Since New Year's Eve 1922, that mood is conditioned by the dreadful picture of the burning Goetheanum. The pain and suffering that picture inevitably causes anyone who loved the Goetheanum because of its connection with anthroposophy are such that no words can possibly describe them.

There might seem to be some justification for feeling that a movement as intent on spiritual things as ours is has no real reason to grieve over the loss of a material expression of its being. But that does not apply in the case of the Goetheanum we have lost. It was not an arbitrary building for our work. During its erection, a process that went on for almost ten years, I often had occasion to explain that a structure that might suitably have housed some other spiritual or similar movement would not have been appropriate for our Anthroposophical Movement. For, as I have often said, we are not just a spiritual movement, which, as its membership increased, found itself with a number of people in its ranks who wanted to build it a home in some conventional style or other. The point here was that anthroposophy is built on a spiritual foundation that is not one-sidedly religious or scientific or artistic. It is an all-embracing movement, intent on demonstrating every aspect of mankind's great ideals: the moral-religious, the artistic, and the scientific ideals. There could, therefore, be no question of erecting any arbitrary type of building for the Anthroposophical Movement. Its design had to come from the same source from which anthroposophical ideas receive their shaping as an expression of the spiritual perspective gained on the anthroposophical path of knowledge, and it had to be carried out in artistic harmony with that outlook. For almost ten years many friends worked side by side with me trying to incorporate and demonstrate in every single line, in every architectural and sculptural form, every choice of color, what was flowing from the wellsprings of anthroposophical investigation, anthroposophical life, anthroposophical intention. That was all incorporated there, and the building was intimately associated with the artistic and scientific striving in the Movement. Friends who attended eurythmy performances in the Goetheanum will surely have felt how, for example, the architectural forms and decoration of the auditorium harmonized with and responded to eurythmic movement. It was even possible to have the feeling that the movements of the performers on the stage there were born of those architectural and plastic forms. If one stood on the podium speaking from the heart in a truly anthroposophical spirit, every line and form responded and chimed in with what one was saying. That was our goal there. It was, of course, a first attempt, but such was our goal, and it could be sensed. That is why those who worked on the Goetheanum at Dornach have the sensation that the very feelings they put into their efforts went up in the flames of New Year's Eve. It was just this intimate connection of anthroposophical feeling and will with the Goetheanum forms—forms that were artistically shaped by and for spiritual contemplation and that can never find a substitute in any thought forms or words—that makes our grief at the loss we have suffered so immeasurably deep.

All this ought to become part of the memories of those who grew to love the Goetheanum and to feel the intimate connection with it just described. We must, in a sense, build a monument to it in our hearts in memory form. Even though the very intimacy of our connection with it is the reason why we are now shelterless, we must seek the more intensively for a shelter in our hearts that will replace the one we have lost, We must try with every means at our disposal to rebuild in our hearts, for all eternity, this building that has been lost as an external source of artistic stimulation. But the terrible flame into which all the lesser flames of New Year's Eve were drawn is there in the background of every effort yet to be made in the field of anthroposophy. Though living, spiritual anthroposophy came to no harm in the fire, a great deal of work that we had been trying to accomplish for anthroposophy in the present day world was brought to naught.

I do believe, though, that if what we experienced on that occasion becomes properly rooted in our members' hearts, the grief and pain we suffered can be turned into strength to support us in everything we are called upon to accomplish for anthroposophy in the near future. It is often the case in life that when a group of people find themselves faced by a common disaster, they are united by it in a way that gives them strength and energy to go on together in effective common action. Experience, not grey theories or abstract thoughts, should be the source on which we draw for the strength needed for our anthroposophical work.

My dear friends, I want to add these comments to those I will be making in connection with the theme I have had to choose for this conference, to a description of the conditions that must prevail in anthroposophical community building. I would like to include them not only because they are graven on my heart, but because they point to a fact on which we would do well to focus our attention in these coming days. A great deal of sacrifice and devotion went into the work on the Goetheanum. The impulses from which that sacrifice and devotion sprang have always been there to count on in the two decades of our work, wherever anthroposophy really lived. They were born of hearts filled with enthusiasm for anthroposophy, and the Goetheanum was the product of deeds done by anthroposophically-minded individuals. Though, for a variety of reasons, we are thinking—are having to think—today about how to regenerate the Society, we should not forget on the other hand that the Society has been in existence for two decades; that a considerable number of people have undergone experiences of destiny in their common work and effort; that the Society is not something that can be founded all over again. For history, real history, history that has been lived and experienced, cannot be erased. We cannot begin something now that began twenty years ago. We must guard against any such misconceptions as these as we proceed with our current deliberations. Anyone who has found his way into the Society over the years certainly sees plenty to find fault with in it, and is justified in doing so. Many a true and weighty word has already been uttered here on that score. But we must still take into account the fact that the Society has been effective and done things. There are certainly people enough in the Society who can express the weight of their grief and sorrow in the words, “We have suffered a common loss in our beloved Goetheanum.”

It makes a difference whether a person joined the Society in 1917 or later, and whether one's relation to it is such that these grief-stricken words issue from long and deep experience in it. That should influence our deliberations. It will do much to tone down the feelings that some of our friends had good reason to express here. I heard someone say (and I certainly felt the justice of the remark), “After what I have listened to here I will go home unable to continue speaking of anthroposophy as I used to when I was still full of illusions.” Part of what that sentence conveys will disappear if one considers how much those individuals who have been anthroposophists for two decades have gone through together, and how much they have had to suffer with each other recently, because that suffering is the product of a long life in the Anthroposophical Society. The load of worry we are presently carrying cannot wipe out all that human experience; it remains with us. It would still be there even if events here were to take a much worse turn than they have taken thus far. Are we to forget the depths for the surface? That must not be allowed to happen in a spiritual movement born of the depths of human hearts and souls. What has come into being as the Anthroposophical Movement cannot rightly be called sunless. Even the sun sometimes suffers eclipse.

Of course, this should not prevent our dealing with the situation confronting this assemblage in a way that enables us to provide anthroposophy once again with a proper vehicle in the form of a real Anthroposophical Society. But our success in that depends entirely on creating the right atmosphere.

It will, of course, be impossible for me to cover the whole situation today. But in the two lectures I am to give I shall try to touch on as much of what needs to be said as I possibly can. Some things will have to be left out. But I do want to stress two matters in particular. Those are the pressing need for community building in the Society and the symptomatic event of the entrance into the Anthroposophical Movement of the exceedingly gratifying youth movement. But in anthroposophical matters we have to develop a rather different outlook than prevails elsewhere. We would not have taken our stand on ground that means so much to many people if we could not see things in a different light than that in which the modern world habitually views them.

Community building! It is particularly noteworthy that the community building ideal should be making its appearance in our day. It is the product of a deep, elemental feeling found in many human souls today, the product of a sense of definite relationship between person and person that includes an impulse to joint activity.

A while ago, a number of young theologians came to me. They were preparing to enter the ministry. They were intent above all else on a renewing of religion, on a renewal permeated through and through by the true Christ force, such as to be able to take hold of many people of the period in the way they long to be taken hold of but cannot be by the traditional confessions as they are today. I had to bring up something that seemed to me to have vital import for the development of such a movement. I said that a suitable method of community building must be found. What I had in mind was to develop a religious and pastoral element capable of really uniting people. I told these friends who had come to me that religious community could not be effectively built with abstract words, the usual kind of sermon, and the meagre remnants of a divine service, which are all that most contemporary churches have to offer. The prevailing intellectualistic trend that is increasingly taking over the religious field has had the effect of saturating a great many present day sermons with a rationalistic, intellectualistic element. This does not give people anything that could unite them. On the contrary, it divides and isolates them, and the social community is reduced to atoms. This must be easy to see for anyone who realizes that the single individual can develop rationalistic and intellectualistic values all by himself. Simply attaining a certain cultural level enables an individual to acquire increasingly perfect intellectual equipment without depending on anyone else. One can think alone and develop logic alone; in fact, one can do it all the better for being by oneself. When one engages in purely logical thinking, one feels a need to withdraw from the world to the greatest possible extent, to withdraw from people. But the tendency to want to get off by oneself is not the only one man has. My effort today to throw light on what it is in the heart's depths that searches for community is called for by the fact that we are living in a time when human nature must go on to develop the consciousness soul, must become ever more conscious.

Becoming more conscious is not the same thing as becoming more intellectualistic. It means outgrowing a merely instinctual way of experiencing. But it is just in presenting anthroposophy that every attempt should be made to portray what has thus been raised to a clear, conscious level in all its elemental aliveness, to offer it in so living a form that it seems like people's own naive experiencing and feeling. We must make sure that we do this.

Now there is one kind of community in human life that everyone over the entire globe is aware of, and it shows that community is something built into humankind. It is a type of community to which a lot of attention is being given in modern cultural and even political and economic life, and this in an often harmful way. But there is a lesson of sorts to be learned from it, though a primitive one.

In a child's early years it is introduced into a human community that is absolutely real, concrete and human, a community without which one could not exist. I am referring to the community of human speech. Speech is the form of community that we might say nature presents to our contemplation. Speech—and especially our mother tongue—is built into our whole being at a time when the child's etheric body is not yet born, and it is our first experience of the community building element. We can lay it to the rationalism of our age that though people nowadays have some feeling for languages and nationality and conceive folk groups in relation to the language they speak, they do so from the political-agitational standpoint, without paying any heed to deep and intimate underlying soul configurations, to the tremendous aspects of destiny and karma attached to a language and to the spirit behind it, all of which are the real and intrinsic reason why human beings cry out for community. What would become of us if we passed one another by without hearing resounding in the other's words the same life of soul that we ourselves put into those same words when we use them? If everybody were to practice just a little bit of self-knowledge, we would be able to form an adequate picture, which I cannot take the time to develop now, of all we owe to language as the foundation of a first, primitive building of community.

But there is a community building element still deeper than language, though we encounter it more rarely. On a certain level, human language is indeed something that unites people in community life, but it does not penetrate to the deepest levels of soul life. At certain moments of our life on earth we can become aware of another community building element that transcends that of language. A person feels it when his destiny brings him together again with others whom he knew as children. Let us take an ideal example. Someone finds himself in later life—in his forties or fifties, say—in the company of several companions of his youth or childhood whom he has not seen for decades but with whom he spent the period between his tenth and twentieth years. Let us assume that good relationships prevailed among them, fruitful, loving relationships. Now imagine what it means for these individuals to share the experience of having their souls stirred by common memories of their youthful life together. Memories lie deeper than experiences on the language level. Souls sound more intimately in unison when they are linked by the pure soul language of memories, even though the community experience they thus share may be quite brief. As everyone knows from such experiences, it is certainly not just the single memories that are summoned up to reverberate in the souls of those present that stir such intimate soul-depths in them; it is something quite else. It is not the concrete content of the particular memories recalled. An absolutely indefinite yet at the same time very definite communal experiencing is going on in these human souls. A resurrection is taking place, with the countless details of what these companions experienced together now melting into a single totality, and what each contributes as he enters into the others' recollections with them is the element that awakens the capacity to experience that totality.

That is how it is in life on earth. As a result of pursuing this fact of soul life into the spiritual realm, I had to tell the theological friends who had come to me for the purpose described that if true community were to come of the work of religious renewal, there would have to be a new form of worship, a new cultus, suited to the age we live in. Shared experience of the cultus is something that quite of its own nature calls forth the community building element in human souls. The Movement for Religious Renewal understood this and accepted the cultus. I believe that Dr. Rittelmeyer spoke weighty words when he said from this platform that such a development of community could conceivably become one of the greatest threats to the Anthroposophical Society that the Movement for Religious Renewal could present. For the cultus contains a tremendously significant community building element. It unites human beings with one another. What is it in this cultus that unites them, that can make a commonality out of separate individuals atomized by intellectuality and logic, and that most certainly will create commonality? For that is surely what Dr. Rittelmeyer had in mind, that this is the means of building community. Since community, however, is also a goal of the Anthroposophical Society, the Society will have to find its own way of building it if the Movement for Religious Renewal is not to pose a threat to it from that angle.

Now what is the secret of the community building element in the cultus developed for the Movement for Religious Renewal with that specific end in view?

Everything that comes to expression in the various forms of worship, either as ceremonial acts or words, is a reflection, a picturing of real experiences, not earth experiences, of course, but real experiences in the world through which man makes his way before he is born; in other words, experiences of the second half of his path between death and rebirth. That is the part of the cosmos he passes through from the midnight hour of life after death to the moment when he descends again into life on earth. In the realm thus traversed are found the beings, the scenes, the events faithfully reflected in all true forms of worship. What is it, then, that a person is experiencing in the cultus in common with others whom some karma or other has brought together with him? For karma is so intricately woven that we may ascribe all encounters with our fellow men to its agency. He is experiencing cosmic memories of pre-earthly existence with them. They come to the surface in the soul's subconscious depths. Before we descended to earth, we and these others lived through a cosmic lifetime in a world that reappears before us in the cultus. That is a tremendous tie. It does more than just convey pictures; it carries super-sensible forces into the sense world. But the forces it conveys are forces that concern man intimately; they are bound up with the most intimate background experiences of the human soul. The cultus derives its binding power from the fact that it conveys spiritual forces from the spiritual world to earth and presents supernatural realities to the contemplation of human beings living on the earth. There is no such reality for man to contemplate in rationalistic talks that have the effect of making him forget the spiritual world, forget it even in subconscious soul depths. In the cultus he has it right there before him in a living, power-pervaded picture that is more than a mere symbol. Nor is this picture a dead image; it carries real power, because it places before man scenes that were part of his spiritual environment before he was incarnated in an earthly body. The community creating power of the cultus derives from the fact that it is a shared, comprehensive memory of spiritual experiences.

The Anthroposophical Society also needs just such a force to foster community within it. But the ground this springs from need not be the same for the Anthroposophical Movement as for the Movement for Religious Renewal. The one by no means excludes the other, however; the two can co-exist in fullest harmony provided the relationship between them is rightly felt.

But that can be the case only if we acquire some understanding for a further community building element that can be introduced into human life. Memory, transposed into the spiritual realm, rays out to us from the form the cultus takes. The cultus speaks to greater depths than those of intellect: it speaks to man's inwardness. For at bottom the soul really does understand the speech of the spirit, even though that speech may not be fully consciously perceived in present day earth life.

Now, in order to grasp the further element that must come to play a corresponding role in the Anthroposophical Society, you will not only have to contemplate the secrets of language and memory in their relationship to community building; you will also have to consider another aspect of human life. Let us study the condition in which we find a dreaming person and compare it with that of someone going about his daytime activities wide awake.

The dream world may indeed be beautiful, sublime, rich in pictures and in significance. Nevertheless, it isolates people here on earth. A dreaming person is alone with his dreams. He lies there asleep and dreaming, perhaps in the midst of others awake or asleep, the content of whose inner worlds remains completely unrelated to what is going on in his dream consciousness. A person is isolated in his dream world, and even more so in the world of sleep. But the moment we awake we begin to take some part in communal life. The space we and those around us occupy is the same space; the feeling and impressions they have of it are the same we have. We wake at hand of our immediate surroundings to the same inner life another wakes to. In waking out of the isolation of our dreams we awaken, up to a certain point at least, into the community of our fellowmen, simply as a result of the way we are related to the world around us. We cease being completely to ourselves, shut in and encapsulated, as we were when absorbed in our dream world, though our dreams may have been beautiful, sublime, significant. But how do we awaken? We awaken through the impact of the outer world, through its light and tones and warmth. We awaken in response to all the various impressions that the sense world makes on us. But we also wake up in ordinary everyday life in the encounter with the external aspects of other human beings, with their natural aspects. We wake up to everyday life in the encounter with the natural world. It wakes us out of our isolation and introduces us into a community of sorts. We have not yet wakened up as human beings by meeting our fellow men and by what goes on in their innermost beings. That is the secret of everyday life. We wake up in response to light and tone and perhaps also to the words someone speaks in the exercise of his natural endowment, words spoken from within outward. In ordinary everyday life we do not wake up in the encounter with what is going on in the depths of his soul or spirit, we wake up in the encounter with his natural aspects.

The latter constitutes the third awakening, or at least a third condition of soul life. We awaken from the first into the second through nature's impact. We awaken from the second into the third at the call of the soul-spiritual element in our fellowmen. But we must first learn to hear that call. Just as a person wakes up through the natural world surrounding him in the right way in everyday life, so do we wake up rightly at a higher level in the encounter with the soul-spirit of our fellowmen as we sensed light and tone on awakening to everyday life. We can see the most beautiful pictures and have the most sublime experiences in our isolated dream consciousness, but we will scarcely be able to read, for example, unless highly abnormal conditions prevail. We are not in a relationship to the outer world that would make such things possible. We are also unable to understand the spiritual world, no matter how many beautiful ideas we may have garnered from anthroposophy or how much we may have grasped theoretically about such matters as etheric and astral bodies. We begin to develop an understanding for the spiritual world only when we wake up in the encounter with the soul-spiritual element in our fellowmen. That is where the first true understanding of anthroposophy sets in. Yes, it is indeed necessary to base our understanding of anthroposophy on what can be called a waking up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of another person.

The strength needed to achieve this awakening can be created by implanting spiritual idealism in human communities. We talk a lot about idealism these days, but it has become a threadbare thing in the culture and civilization of the present. For true idealism exists only where man reverses the direction he takes when, in presenting the cultus, he brings the spiritual world down to earth; when, in other words, he consciously makes himself capable of lifting to the super-sensible-spiritual, the ideal level, what he has seen and learned and understood on the earthly level. We bring the supernatural down into a power-permeated picture when we celebrate the ritual of the cultus. We lift ourselves and our soul life to the super-sensible level when our experiences in the physical world are experienced so spiritually and idealistically that we come to feel we have experienced them in the super-sensible world itself and that what we perceive here in the sense world suddenly comes all alive on being lifted to the ideal level. It comes alive when properly permeated with our wills and feeling. When we ray will through our inner being and infuse it with enthusiasm, we carry our idealized sense experience in a direction exactly opposite to that taken when we embody the super-sensible in the ritual of the cultus. Whether the anthroposophical community be large or small, we can achieve what I am characterizing when, infusing living power into the spiritual ideas we form, we put ourselves in a position actually to experience something of that awakening element, something that doesn't stop at idealizing our sense experience and leaving it at the stage of an abstract thought, but that endows the ideal with a higher life as we live into it and make it the counterpart of the cultus by raising it from the physical to the super-sensible level. We can achieve it in our life of feeling by taking care to imbue everything we do for anthroposophy with thoroughly spiritualized feeling. We do this when, for instance, we feel that the very doorway we reverently enter on our way to an anthroposophical assemblage is consecrated by the common anthroposophical purpose being served in the room it leads to, no matter how mundane the setting. We must be able to feel that everybody joining with us in a communal reception of anthroposophy has the same attitude. It is not enough to have a deep abstract conviction of this; it must be inwardly experienced, so that we do not just sit in a room where anthroposophy is being pursued, a group of so and so many individuals taking in what is being read or spoken and having our own thoughts about it. A real spiritual being must be present in a room where anthroposophy is being carried on, and this as a direct result of the way anthroposophical ideas are being absorbed. Divine powers are present in sense perceptible form in the cultus celebrated on the physical plane. Our hearts and souls and attitudes must learn similarly to invoke the presence of a real spiritual being in a room where anthroposophy is being talked of. We must so attune our speaking, our feeling, our thinking, our impulses of will to a spiritual purpose, avoiding the pitfall of the abstract, that we can feel a real spiritual being hovering there above us, looking on and listening. We should divine a super-sensible presence, invoked by our pursuit of anthroposophy. Then each single anthroposophical activity can begin to be a realizing of the super-sensible.

If you study primitive communities, you will find another communal element in addition to language. Language has its seat in the upper part of man. But taking the whole man into consideration, you will find that common blood is what links members of primitive communities. Blood ties make for community. But what lives there in the blood is the folk soul or folk spirit, and this is not present in the same way among people who have developed freedom. A common spiritual element once entered groups with common blood ties, working from below upward. Wherever common blood flows in the veins of a number of people, there we can discern the presence of a group soul.

A real community spirit is similarly attracted by our common experiencing when we study anthroposophy together, though it is obviously not a group soul active in the bloodstream. If we are able to sense this, we can form true communities.

We must make anthroposophy real by learning to be aware in anthroposophical community life that where people join in anthroposophical tasks together, there they experience their first awakening in the encounter with the soul-spiritual element in their fellows. Human beings wake up in the mutual encounter with other human beings. As each one has new experiences between his encounters with these others, and has grown a little, these awakenings take place in an ever new way as people go on meeting. The awakenings undergo a burgeoning development.

When you have discovered the possibility that human souls wake up in the encounter with human souls, and human spirits wake up in the encounter with human spirits, and go to anthroposophical groups with a living awareness that only now have you come awake and only now begin to grow together into an understanding of anthroposophy, and on the basis of that understanding take anthroposophical ideas into an awakened soul rather than into an everyday soul asleep to higher things, then the true spirit of community descends upon the place where you are working. Is truth involved when we talk of the super-sensible world, yet are unable to rise to awareness of a spiritual presence and of this reversed cultus? We are firmly grounded in our understanding of things of the spirit only when we do not rest content with abstract spiritual concepts and a capacity to express them theoretically, but instead grow into a sure belief that higher beings are present with us in a community of spirit when we engage in spiritual study. No external measures can bring about anthroposophical community building. You have to call it forth from the profoundest depths of human consciousness.

I have described part of the path that leads to that goal, and tomorrow we will follow it further. Descriptions of this kind are intended to show that the most important thing for any further development of the Anthroposophical Society is that it become absorbed in a true grasp of anthroposophy. If we have that grasp, it leads not only to spiritual ideas but to community with the spirit, and an awareness of community with the spiritual world is itself a community building force. Karmically preordained communities will then spring up as an outcome of true anthroposophical awareness. No external measures for achieving that can be indicated, and a person who offers any such is a charlatan.

Now these matters have been understood to some degree during the two decades of anthroposophy's development, and quite a good many members have also understood them in a spiritual sense. I will perhaps return to this subject and discuss it more fully tomorrow when I continue with these reflections and go on to point out a further goal. For now, I would like to add just a few words on matters that may have been occupying you after hearing my description of the spiritual bases of anthroposophical community life. On the one hand, things in the Anthroposophical Movement are really such as to necessitate my describing them as I have done. The Anthroposophical Society may present this or that appearance in a given phase. But anthroposophy is independent of anthroposophical societies and can be found independently of them. It can be found in a special way when one human being learns to wake up in the encounter with another and out of such awakening the forming of communities occurs. For one undergoes ever fresh awakenings through those with whom one finds oneself foregathered, and that is what holds such groups together. Inner, spiritual realities are at work here.

These matters must be increasingly understood in the Anthroposophical Society. Every consideration brought up in connection with the Society's welfare ought really to be pervaded with forces intimately related to anthroposophy itself.

It was deeply satisfying to me, after spending weeks attending larger and smaller conclaves where preparations were being made for these delegates' meetings, and listening there to debates reminiscent of the ordinary, everyday kind of rationalistic considerations in which parliaments and clubs engage, to go to an assemblage of young people, a meeting of young academicians. They, too, were pondering what ought to be done. For a while the talk was about external matters. But as time passed, it changed, all unaware, into a truly anthroposophical discussion. Matters that first appeared in an everyday light took on aspects that made anything but an anthroposophical treatment impossible.

It would be ideal if, instead of dragging in anthroposophical theories in an artificial, sentimental, nebulous way, as has so often happened, a down-to-earth course were to be pursued. Taking life's ordinary concerns as a starting point, the discussion should lead to the conclusion that unless anthroposophy were called upon, no one would know any longer how to go about studying such subjects as physics and chemistry. This spirit could serve to guide us.

But no solution will be found by tomorrow evening if things go on as they have up to this point; they can only lead to a state of tremendous, tragic chaos. The most important thing is to avoid any sentimental dragging in of all sorts of matters, and instead fill our hearts with anthroposophical impulses, conceived in full clarity.

As things are now, I see two parties, two separate groups of human beings sitting in this room, neither of which in the least understands the other, neither of which is able to take the first small step toward mutual understanding. Why is this the case? It is because what one side is saying issues inevitably from the experience of two whole decades, as I explained briefly earlier today, and the other side takes no interest whatsoever in that experience. I say this not in criticism, but in a spirit of concerned pleading. There have been occasions in the past when well-meaning people, in their own way genuinely enthusiastic about anthroposophy, have simply cut across our deliberations with such comments as, “What possible interest can these reports have for us when they keep on being served up at a moment when the important thing is that people unacquainted with the great dangers the Society faces want to learn about them?” Here, on the one side, we see an elemental, natural interest in the life of the Anthroposophical Society, a life that may have certain familial characteristics, but that has the good aspects of the familial as well. On the other side we find no interest in that life, and instead just a general conception of an Anthroposophical Society.

As things stand today, both points of view are justified, so justified that unless we can quickly develop a wholly different form of discussion, the best thing we could do (I am just expressing my opinion, for the decision will have to be made by the Society) would be to leave the old Society as it is and found a union of free anthroposophical communities for those who want something entirely different. Then each party could carry on in the way that suits it. We would have the old Society on the one side, and on the other a loose but closely related confederation of free communities. The two societies could work out ways of living together. It would be better to solve the problem this way than to continue on in the hopeless situation that would present itself tomorrow evening if the discussion were to go on as it has thus far. So I ask you to put on the agenda the further question whether you would not prefer to avoid the false situation that would develop from keeping the two groups welded together, regardless of whether things stay as they have been or undergo some modification. If the situation remains as it is, with each side failing to understand the other, let us go ahead and set up the two suggested groups within the one movement. I say this with an anxious, a very anxious heart; for surely no one will deny that I understand what it is to feel concern for our anthroposophical undertaking and know what it means to love it. But it is better to have two devoted sisters, each going her own way and united only by a common ideal, than to settle for something that would again lead in short order to a state of chaos.

My dear friends, you simply must not let yourselves overlook the fact that it is the various single enterprises that are causing our troubles. That should have been worked out in clearest detail. I am certainly not stating that the last Central Executive Committee accomplished a great deal more, materially, than the one before it, not any more, that is, than I accomplished when I was similarly active at the center in my role as General Secretary. But that is not the question. The real question is: What should have happened, anthroposophically speaking, after all the various enterprises were started here in Stuttgart? This will have to be answered. We cannot at this point dissolve what has been brought into being. Once these enterprises exist, we must find out how to keep them flourishing. But if we fail, as we have in the past four years, to learn how to go about this in an anthroposophical spirit, if we introduce enterprises as foreign bodies into the Anthroposophical Movement, as we have done, these institutions that have been in existence since 1919 will ruin the whole Anthroposophical Movement. They will ruin any Central Executive Committee, no matter what name it is given.

We should therefore keep our discussions objective and impersonal, and try to reach some clarity on what form the Society ought to take, now that it embraces all these institutions, and among them one as wonderful as the Waldorf School. Not a single word has yet been spoken on this subject, for those who are most familiar with what is going on in Stuttgart have thus far kept fairly silent. I would particularly like to hear what the two members of the Central Executive Committee would say to this. [The members of the Central Executive Committee were Ernst Uehli, Emil Leinhas, Dr. Carl Unger.] (I am not including Herr Leinhas, the third member, as he was the only one who helped me in a problematical situation and who continues to help. Indeed, for his sake I hardly like to see him go on devoting himself to the Central Executive Committee, ideally fitted for it though he is.) It is not a question of these two gentlemen defending themselves, but simply of saying what they think about the future shaping of the Anthroposophical Society, which is capable of amalgamating the enterprises that have been in existence since 1919; otherwise, it would have been an irresponsible deed to launch them. We cannot leave it at that, now that they exist.

These are very, very serious questions. We have to deal with them and discuss them objectively and impersonally. I meant what I said objectively, not as an attack on any member or members of the Central Executive Committee. Nobody is being disparaged, but in my opinion these problems, thus again sharply enunciated by me, had to be brought up. If the two proposed societies are to be established, the group that would be a continuation of the old Anthroposophical Society could make itself responsible for the projects the Society has undertaken, and the other group, that feels no interest in them, could pursue a more narrowly anthroposophical path.

This is what I wanted to put before you in a brief sketch. Tomorrow at twelve I shall speak in detail about matters of business.