The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday, I tried from a certain angle to point out the need for a structural organization of the social order. At the same time I drew attention to the fact that what in spiritual science may be termed presentation of proof consists in recognizing that these facts under discussion are supported from the most varied aspects; finally, that the degree of conviction increases in proportion to the amount of such support.

I should like to repeat briefly what has been brought forward. We are familiar with the constitution of the human being; we know that he is composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and what we call the ego. We are also aware, however, that this constitution of man is something that is, so to speak, in a state of flux. You can follow my descriptions in my books, Theosophy and Occult Science, and you will learn from them that physical, etheric, astral body and finally also the ego are not really something static. Instead, you will find that the purpose of human evolution consists in the very fact that man, throughout his repeated lives on earth, works upon these members of his organization. Thus, after a certain time, after a certain number of incarnations, he is born in such a way that it is possible to say that he normally consists, as it were, of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. Then, however, he first begins to work on his ego, continuing this work through a number of incarnations. When the ego has been strengthened, having completed a certain amount of work on itself, this work then passes over to the astral body. Again, when, with the help of the ego and through its own efforts, the astral body has in this manner completed inner work upon itself, then this activity passes over to the etheric body and finally to the physical body. Here, however, we already enter the realm of the distant future. For you know that the human being essentially retains his outer form throughout the incarnations that we trace in the first place. You also know from my Occult Science that this human form has undergone fundamental changes in the course of time and will also continue to do so in the future. These changes, these metamorphoses, are imposed upon it by the activity of the more refined members of the human organism, the astral and etheric bodies, in their work of perfecting the physical body. Ultimately, in distant future times, man's physical body, too, will assume different forms.

Now, this work that the human being performs upon the members of his organism is connected with the human environment, just as man is similarly connected since his primal beginning with his natural environment through his individual members.

We must indeed be clear about one thing. Let us take the physical body of man. It stands as a unique phenomenon within the natural order. In a way, it is lifted out of this natural order. If we are sufficiently observant of the strong differentiation existing between the human being and the various species of the animal kingdom, we cannot help but say that the human being should not simply be placed at the end of the animal kingdom as the evolution theorists would have it. He is not only a composite of all animal forms in the entire animal kingdom; he is also a composite at a higher stage. Therefore, we can class this physical body of man with nothing but itself. In all that surrounds us, in all our natural environment, we are unable to find anything that could be placed in the same category with the physical body of the human being. This human physical body, then, stands by itself (see outline on next page).

Proceeding inward, we now advance to the etheric body. Here we reach man's next and already mobile component. In a way that some of you may feel is peculiar, I have already described to you the extent of the etheric body's mobility. It has the tendency to confront the animal world in a certain way, having a particular affinity with this realm. I have said that when we confront an elephant, a donkey, a calf, or other animal shapes, our etheric body has the inner tendency to imitate the given form, to become similar to it. It is prevented from carrying this out entirely, but it has the inner tendency to assume these animal forms. It has a special kinship with them. Due to the forces concentrated in the physical body, the etheric body is prevented from realizing these tendencies, but it strives to do so. One of the first experiences of initiation is the emergence of this inner tension and urge in regard to the animal world, of wishing to become like the animals. Thus we can say that concerning his physical body the human being is not related to the animal world, but his etheric body displays a quite decided kinship with that world.

We now advance to the astral body. Here we come across a similar inner relationship to the plant world. When the astral body faces the plant kingdom, it has the tendency to become plantlike, that is, to become like the particular plant it confronts. I said to you yesterday, rather as an aid for your memory, that if we stand in front of a donkey that is eating thistles, our etheric body desires to resemble the donkey and the astral body the thistle. This is a fact. In this way, we are related to the kingdoms of nature surrounding us. With our astral body, we are related to the plant world.

Physical Body
Etheric Body: Animal World
Astral Body: Plant World
Ego:  Mineral World

As I have said, in regard to our ego we are related to the mineral world. That seems natural, for it is something inaccessible to immediate consciousness, something that we can also establish most easily in regard to ordinary consciousness. In fact, we owe the entire content of our consciousness to this kinship with the mineral world. We form the content of our consciousness essentially out of the mineral realm. I have told you that it is due to the fact that man's ego in its present condition is organized in the direction of the mineral world that we are unable through our scientific efforts to advance to an apprehension of the plant world, let alone the animal world. We are unable to lay hold of the living and continue to argue back and forth whether the living can be comprehended or not. Only people who, like Goethe, proceed from a different manner of perception can acquire an awareness of the fact that the living can, in a certain way, be entered into. In the same manner as ordinary consciousness merely traces man's kinship to the mineral world, initiation, of course, offers the possibility of tracing inwardly what takes place in the astral body in regard to the plant world, or in the etheric body regarding the animal world.

I also told you that the human being works on his ego. Throughout his repeated earth lives he develops his ego. He thus transforms the content born out of the mineral kingdom. He creates from it his science, his art, and his religion. Everything that in this way appears as the content of culture and civilization is, basically speaking, transformed mineral kingdom.

Imagine, for example, that you are looking at a Greek statue. There is, of course, no life in it. All that is circumscribed by the mineral, however, such as form and structure, has been attained by you because of your transformation and here it is an artistic transformation—of the images and sensations you have been able to receive directly into your consciousness from the mineral kingdom.

So it is with the other contents of culture. In every cultural content, insofar as it consists of art, science and religion, is expressed what the ego has achieved as work upon itself, naturally in cooperation with other humans, and what is, essentially, transformed content derived from the mineral kingdom. Whoever pursues these matters without prejudice will find that in the activity of the ego he is dealing with a transformed content won from the mineral kingdom.

By strictly defining what lives in man's social environment, we discover the following. Everything brought into being because the ego transforms the content gained from the mineral realm and forms it into a cultural life (which then exists in our midst as art, as literature, science, religious denominations or the contents of their creeds, in fact all that is essentially comprehended by means of the ego's self-transformation) defines quite clearly what we call the cultural realm of the threefold social organism. Here you have, then, the possibility of strictly defining the spiritual or cultural domain of the threefold social organism. Such a spiritual domain would not exist at all were the ego not to transform its own being so that it can work artistically, religiously and scientifically on what is derived from the mineral kingdom.

We transform our astral body, too, though not in the same conscious manner in which we transform our ego. If we survey the content of our culture, we find its most conscious component parts to be those from the spiritual domain just characterized. Only half conscious are the concepts that regulate the life between man and man (although here they have come into existence most poignantly) and comprise the life of rights and all that pertains to the sphere of rights—namely, the relationships between man and man. Anyone who cannot comprehend the difference between a concept belonging to the religious, scientific or artistic sphere with one pertaining to the sphere of rights, of the state, is without doubt not a good psychologist or observer of the soul. In a very different way do we regulate the relations, the dim awareness between people: What is my duty to the other person? What are his rights and what are mine? All these questions playing between man and man issue from a much dimmer consciousness than that which deals with science, religion and art. The realm of interplay between man and man, where matters cannot be decided by individuals as in science, art or religion, which can be determined only by human social life, by agreement and reciprocal understanding, is the realm that comprises the life of jurisprudence or the state, the sphere of rights of the threefold social organism.

We experience with an even duller consciousness a third domain that comes into existence because we transform our etheric body. This is a domain of which we acquire an awareness in a most indirect manner through all kinds of vague dietetic rules and so forth. It is a domain which we experience almost in a state of sleep and which sends its effects into full consciousness to such a slight degree that not even the relations between people can throw light on it. The domain of rights can be illuminated by the mutual agreement between people, and it constitutes a certain ideal of our social order that in the sphere of rights we have introduced full democracy where all people of legal age are equal and can secure their rights through mutual understanding. The dullness of consciousness which has as its content the transformation of the astral body suffices for the individual when he is sustained by an understanding with his fellowman. The human being must grasp science on his own; religion he must generate for himself; art he must bring forth from the wellspring of his individual being, the innermost fountain of his personality. These must proceed from the most wide awake, clearest consciousness. Here, he must rely entirely upon himself, upon his individuality. One even considers it somewhat abnormal that associations have recently cropped up from time to time in the arts. As a rule, they usually consisted only of two people, as when playwrights collaborate. Occasionally one reads in theater programs, “Popular Comedy by X. Y. and U. Z.” In most instances, however, as those familiar with this field know, it is not a proper association of two. As a rule, some elderly gentleman who in his youth had written plays, but whole talent, if such it can be called, has since evaporated, enters into an agreement with an as yet unknown young man, lets him write the drama, makes a few corrections, and has now added his name to it. Thus, the young playwright, too, has slid into the limelight. In this manner, “associations” have come about in this area, but anybody senses that this is something abnormal, for what actually belongs to the spiritual sphere must also belong entirely to the personality of an individual. By comparison, with regard to the settlement of rights, the human being is able to manage if, as an individual personality, he has the support of another individual. This, however, does not suffice in reference to a sphere into which consciousness does not really penetrate. In the etheric body where etheric processes run their course, it is not enough if man as an individual confronts another individual. Where man as an individual confronts mankind as a whole, it is necessary to form associations; it is necessary that judgments or decisions be formulated by individuals in association, hence, that individuals Pool their experiences. Deeds and accomplishments then must spring from associations, not from individual personalities Here we are referred to a life where the individual person can do nothing by himself, where he can accomplish something only when he is part of an association, and where the association enters into reciprocal relationships with another association. In short, we are directed to what really takes place within the human social community in this duller consciousness—the economic sphere of the social organism.

Thus we can say that if we look in a backward direction at what the human being represents today, in the direction of nature, we find him grounded with his etheric body in the animal world, with his astral body in the plant world, with his ego in the mineral world. He does, however, transform these existing component members of his. He transforms his etheric body; as a consequence of this, the economic sphere arises around him in the life of the human community, the economic life in which, in turn, he is grounded with his etheric body in the outer world, in the social organism. With his astral body, man is anchored in the rights sphere of the social organism; with his ego he is grounded in its cultural sphere. Thus, as human beings, we stand linked together with the three kingdoms of nature on the one side; on the other side, we are linked with the social life in accordance with the three members of the social order: the spiritual, the rights, and the economic.

Physical Body
Etheric Body: Animal World Economic Sphere
Astral Body: Plant World Rights Sphere
Ego: Mineral World Cultural Sphere

We must now proceed from the basis of a completely clear manner of conception in order to deepen still further this whole insight we have thus gained. Let us keep well in mind that the social order in its structural organization is brought about by the metamorphosis of our etheric body, astral body and ego that we carry out in successive earth lives. Looking at it in this way, we find, as it were, what man contributes on his own to the emergence of the social life by means of the structure of his organism. The social life, in turn, reacts upon the human being. Up to now we have considered the will aspect of the social life. We observed how it comes into existence, how it flows out of the configuration of human nature. Keep in mind that it is present in reality when it has flown out! So, the economic sphere flows out of the etheric body or out of the transformation of the latter; the rights sphere arises from the astral body; the spiritual or cultural sphere from the transformation of the ego. Now, these three spheres, having thus issued forth, are then realities and in turn react upon the human being. First, he produces them out of his own being; then they react upon him.

You see, we must also take into consideration this second form of human interaction. We can say of it that it is more from the aspect of cognition. What we have considered so far, namely, the manner in which the human being brings about the threefold social organism, was more from the will aspect. Now we turn more to the cognitive side, and consider what kind of impressions arise when man's environment reacts in turn on him. Then, observation shows that the spiritual sphere reacts upon the human physical body, although only to a very slight degree in the present incarnation. To be sure, it can to some extent be noted that the human being, as he develops within a certain relationship to his environment, adopts something from his environment insofar as it is the cultural sphere. If a person grows up in an artistic atmosphere, one who is sensitive to this will note it in his physiognomy. A prosaic environment will, likewise, be noticeable. However, this is only a matter of a most delicate nuance of life. For the most part, we can say that in regard to the way it is formed in this earth life, man's physical body-does not exhibit a strong influence from the spiritual environment. All the stronger is this influence in regard to the following earth lives. It is true that in our subsequent incarnations our physiognomy will bear the marked result of our spiritual environment in this life. The way we look today, the kind of physiognomy we now possess, is essentially due to the influence of the spiritual environment in which we spent our previous earth life. If one has a feeling for this—although this is possible, I might say, only in a certain general sense—one can, indeed, see in the face of a person the sort of environment in which he lived in previous earth lives. Certain discrepancies also arise from matters such as these which, at times, confront us quite emphatically in human life.

Imagine, let us say, that in regard to his former incarnation a person descends from a cultured family; he now grows up in an uncultured family. His face then bears that subtle nuance of life that I spoke of before, although, perhaps to a trifling degree. Perhaps, in his face, he strongly reveals what he brought over from his former earth life. Often, it is only in this context that one understands how it is possible that a crude fellow can sometimes have quite delicate features. The things in human life are related, indeed, in decidedly complicated ways.

Now we can say: Yes, but the human being does not take along his physical body into his next earth incarnation; after all, he discards it. This is true of the physical substance, but I should like to repeat what I said some time ago (drawing). What you actually behold as the physical body in its form is not the physical organism of man; it is the form (see drawing). Into this form, matter is merely inserted. It is absorbed by the form. The form is something absolutely spiritual, and I refer to this form when I speak of the effect of the spiritual sphere upon the physical body. What is discarded are only the material particles that are built into the form. The form man possesses is not laid aside; on the contrary, it sends it effects into the next life, especially what is developed through the agility and nimbleness of the limbs, hands and arms, feet and legs. This comes to expression in the shape of the head in the next incarnation.

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The physical organism, then, decidedly bears its traces into the next earth life, carrying them into it in accordance with the provision of the cultural sphere that surrounds it in this life.

The rights sphere, on the other hand, reacts upon the etheric body (see drawing below). After death, while the physical body—its material substance, not the form—is delivered over to the earth, the etheric body is surrendered to the cosmos and dissolves into it. What is present and active as forces in it, however, is borne across into the next earth life, or at least affects it. Actually, however, through spiritual science we can know empirically that it does so only to a very slight degree. Whereas the form of the physical body powerfully transmits its effect into the next earth incarnation and, along with it, all that it has gained from the cultural sphere surrounding the physical body, what now comes from the rights sphere in the etheric body works, first of all, upon the cosmos. This is a most important discovery made by the science of initiation.

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We live in this world. Because of the way and manner in which we have been placed into the social context of the world, we have a certain state of mind. We confront those with whom we come into contact in life with certain rights' concepts or concepts and sensations resembling the feelings of rights. This gives our soul a certain configuration. Simply speaking, let us say that I have a certain relationship to ten people in life. The one I love, the other I hate, I am indifferent to the third, I am dependent on the fourth, the fifth is dependent on me, and so on. In the most diverse ways, then, my rights and duties concerning these ten persons are outlined. All this crystallizes into a certain soul state in me, but not only in a superficial manner, for the emotional fiber of my soul is conditioned by it. This Position within the social order from the viewpoint of the rights sphere brings about a certain configuration of my etheric body, which is transmitted to the cosmos upon my death. After this body separates from me, what vibrates in my etheric body here (on earth) continues to vibrate in the cosmos, causing further reverberations.

Unfortunately, such things pass entirely unnoticed by what today is called science. Consequently, this science has no consciousness of the more intimate relationships between human life and cosmic life. The course taken by wind and weather today, hence the manner in which the rhythm of our external climate develops, is essentially the continuation of rhythms, brought about by the life of rights in the social organism of past ages.

The human being stands indeed in a certain relationship to outer reality, even the reality of nature. It is important to realize that what develops all around us as the sphere of rights is not something merely abstract, man-made, arising and again disappearing; instead, what is at first a thought content, having its being initially in the realm of rights, lives in a subsequent age of earth existence in the atmosphere, in the vibrations, in the entire configuration, and in the movements of the atmosphere.

If man understands this properly, it gives him a sense of his connection with the entire life of the earth. Only this allows him to realize how significant it is whether he develops one or another kind of political life, a good or bad life of rights. All things physical, in fact, derive originally from something given order or disorder by spirit. Spiritual science, therefore, must insist that the human being has a fully alive, conscious evolutionary connection with the cosmos.

What is it like today? In our present era of decadence we have reached the point where we apprehend nature with abstract concepts. We construct a natural science that is actually devoid of all that lives in the human being, a natural science offering a content that fundamentally is not the content of human life; and what the human being experiences within himself stands in no relationship to what is occurring outside him. This is one side of the picture.

On the other side, the human being, though completely separated, as it were, from this knowledge of nature that he develops, is supposed to advance to a sort of awareness of God, or to a consciousness of his relationship to God. Both these views will have nothing to do with each other, really cannot have anything to do with each other because of the manner in which they have evolved to the present day. Spiritual science, on the contrary, shows in concrete detail how the human being is not only connected with the whole world, but how he himself cooperates with it. Out of what arises we can Interpret the way man has lived in previous earth lives. In earlier incarnations, we founded legal systems. Now we live again. We have a certain kind of weather, wind and so forth, seasons with this or that configuration. Now we experience externally, in the atmosphere, what once upon a time we set up as the order of justice. Here, man in his consciousness grows into what surrounds him as his environment. We no longer talk here abstractly and in general of man's having a consciousness of God within him, of forming a unity with the surrounding world; here we learn to recognize in detail how this unity is constituted, how the human being is joined with the entire universe.

Just think, what would we know of the human being if we had no idea that it is the blood of his head that flows through his legs, if, therefore, insofar as it is enclosed within the skin, we did not consider the entire circulation processes in the organism? In the same way that we cannot consider the head by itself, for instance, ignoring the connection to the remaining organism, we must not consider the human being in one earth life by itself; instead, we have to focus on the cycle of metamorphosis. What at one time is a social system of rights conceived by the mind will become an order of nature at another, albeit distant, future time. With the help of spiritual science one can see how the thought-out political order of one age is connected with the atmospheric order of nature of another time.

If these views evolve in such a manner that man's sense of participation in the world, his feeling of oneness with it, is thereby intensified, then indeed will that indispensable reconciliation take place between science and religion that is absolutely necessary to the upbuilding of our social life.

Just as the rights sphere acts upon the etheric body and the cultural sphere upon the physical body, so does the economic sphere act upon the astral body, and we may say that it is just upon this innermost principle of human nature that the economic sphere acts. You must distinguish the following: The economic sphere originates from the etheric body, but when, in turn,. it reacts upon the human being, it reacts upon the astral body. The reaction is unlike that which proceeds from the human being. It is impossible merely to construe these matters schematically, for they must be derived empirically from observation. Because the economic sphere acts upon the astral body, brotherliness that should exist in the economic sphere is borne through the portal of death, for the human being takes along his astral body for a certain time. What is thus established by virtue of brotherliness in the human soul is carried through death into the spiritual world, and there continues to be effective as such. Thus, what has already been discussed by me from other points of view appears again from this particular aspect.

The economic sphere (that is to say, the manner and method by which, in associations, we form the basis for our economic decisions and actions together with our fellow men) reacts on man's astral body and shapes it. It is, in fact, this formation of the astral body, attained because of brotherliness in the economic sphere, which the human being carries through death. As an idealist or perhaps even a mystic, one ought not to hold the economic sphere in particularly low esteem, for it is just in this sphere that we can develop brotherhood, as has often been pointed out. The spiritual element that is brought into the apparently material life is the very aspect acquired by the human being for his higher realm. What we establish in the cultural or spiritual sphere we draw from the mineral kingdom; it is something that we basically carry within our predispositions that we bring with us through birth. What we implant in the economic sphere, on the other hand, is something so strongly united with the soul that we bear it with us through the portal of death.

The facts are such that we must say, yes, people believe themselves to be idealists, or mystics, and feel obliged to disdain materialism, but no one becomes an idealist by disdain of materialism. Rather, he is an idealist if he knows how to spiritualize matter. What counts is not that we confront the economic life in false abnegation, that we scorn and slight it, but that we shape the economic life so that it bears the impression of the spirit everywhere, that this economic member of the social organism becomes a sphere molded and impregnated with the spirit by man. This is what is essentially decisive for the future.

And on a small scale, as I have already mentioned, this does make itself felt through the fact that people believe they are idealistic and spiritual if they deny the spirit any material tribute and think: It is not necessary really to offer this or that sacrifice to the spirit. The spiritual is, after all, spiritual—so they say—one must esteem it highly, not drag it into the dust by giving money, of all things, as an offering for it! By that token a proper idealist would be one who says to himself, “Oh, I revere the spirit, but I keep my wallet closed and do nothing for the care of the spiritual life!” One despises matter, despises above all the worst, the most Ahrimanic form of matter, closing one's purse tightly so as to make sure that nothing can escape to sustain the life of the spirit. These are facts that in some degree are connected with the state of mind so easily arising in idealists and mystics. Matter is scorned rather than spiritualized. Where does this contempt for matter come from? It arises because today's idealists and mystics are frequently the greatest materialists, because they are so controlled by matter that they can resist it in no other way than by dreaming themselves into a contempt of it. Their contempt, however, is only imagined. They despise matter, because they themselves cannot cope with it. They are too deeply immersed in it.

We must be clearly aware that certain feelings and attitudes exist in our time that are really only masks. Many a person parading around as a mystic today is just a materialist, as I have had occasion to explain from other aspects in the last few weeks. From what I have tried to bring close to you today, it becomes apparent, above all else, how, through spiritual science, the feeling of solidarity between the human being and the world can awaken and become more and more intense. In our present time this is necessary!

Actually, man has been able to arrive at a certain point in his evolution because he did not have to contribute anything to it. In the course of earth's evolution, we have proceeded from the beginning of earthly existence itself. In the beginning of earth evolution divine spiritual beings provided for us; they incorporated into the earth's organization the soil, the climate, finally even the cultural life. You know that there were great teachers in the mystery centers whose teachers were in turn the gods themselves. Thus, nothing human had been stored up; instead, the divine had been taken over. The gods had provided for mankind everything that was at hand in good order. This has essentially vanished in our time; I have shown you this in the most varied connections. The catastrophic character of our age is connected with this dissipation of the primeval, divine content and the creation of a new content by human beings on their own. They then create this new content not merely for human life in the cultural, political and economic sphere, but also for what issues forth from these domains into the life of nature; and the future of the earth must be man's own creation, his own concern.

In regard to humanity's present mentality, therefore, the views of a person like Spengler are quite correct, unless men awaken that inner fountain which can give rise not only to creative impulses for the activities of the cultural, political and economic spheres, but which must act creatively out of these spheres for all of earth life, including the life of nature itself. For civilization will not only pass over into barbarism, as Spengler has already proven scientifically, but the whole earth will approach its doom, will never reach its goal. If only people would imbue themselves with this awareness that the future events of earth evolution depend on humanity itself! For then, out of this feeling, the powerful impulse could emerge that we need today in order to lead the obviously declining order of the world again into an ascending direction, in order to challenge the drowsy souls who refuse to see what is actually happening, in order to transform these sleepy souls into awakened ones. We need an alert humanity today. Only a watchful mankind can survey what occurs around it and know the tasks placed upon it by the course of human evolution, in regard to which present mankind is being confronted with severe tests.

In order to comprehend a number of things that have to be mentioned in connection with previously presented matters, it is necessary to recall several facts. We have seen how we are connected with our environment, with the other realms of existence. We have seen how our etheric body is directed toward the animal kingdom, the astral body toward the plant kingdom and the ego toward the mineral kingdom. We have seen how, as a result of the work which the ego performs upon itself together with others within the social order, there arises what we know as the cultural development of mankind in art, religion and science. I said yesterday that these soul contents—art, religion and science—are basically nothing else than what comes about through the work of the human ego upon itself. Thus we have here one of the examples showing the connection of the human being with social life. Art, religion and science are really, in the widest extent, the contents of the actual spirit realm of the social organism.

Then we have what comes into existence through the transformation of the astral body. As a matter of course, this transformation must be essentially more subconscious at the present stage of human evolution than what is accomplished in the spiritual realm of art, religion and science; and what grows out of the metamorphosis of the astral body is essentially what we have to designate as the rights sphere within the social organism. Then, even more subconsciously, we have what results from the transformation of the etheric body because of our living in union with our fellowmen. All that springs from this, all that men do through the transmutation of their ether body, belongs to the economic sphere of the social organism. Here then we have the connections, the relationships of the human being to what is outside him. Yesterday, too, we saw the significance of such relationships that the human being has to the life of the social order outside him. For, as we have seen, he thus actually prepares the basic natural foundation for his next life on earth. He works in a certain measure at the creation of earthly existence itself. It would indeed be desirable for as many people as possible to grasp the extraordinary importance and relevance of the present moment of human evolution.

It can be said that until this world-historical hour the evolution of humanity has, in general, rested on the providential care of the forces standing above man in the higher hierarchies. As we know, mankind achieved a certain development of the ether body during the old Indian cultural period, a certain development of the astral body during the Egypto-Chaldean time, and a development of the intellectual soul in the Greco-Latin time. Now humanity is on the point of lifting the consciousness soul from the depths of soul existence. But since the germ of what is to come must always be present in the preceding evolutionary stages, what is to be the content of the next cultural epoch—the unfoldment of the spirit-self—is already proclaiming itself; however, this development of the spirit-self must of necessity proceed from man himself.

We have passed through various earth lives. When we speak of the men of the primeval Indian time, of the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean and the Greco-Latin times, we are, in fact, speaking of ourselves; for we lived under quite different conditions in those ancient times. We lived in surroundings of animal, plant or mineral nature prepared for us at the instigation of our divine progenitors, who were the humanity on the Moon, the Sun and Saturn and who, in the pre-stages of the earth, experienced what we are experiencing today. What constitutes content upon an earlier planetary evolution remains as form for the succeeding one. We lived on what was bequeathed to us by the gods, the beings of the higher hierarchies. Now we have reached the point where the earth would dry up and wither, if man, in a sense, did not spin out a new thread of life from himself.

Just think how all this was really prepared for us. Naturally, we have a spiritual life within our social life. The people of the Occident are proud of this social life; they are proud of their art, religion and science. Human beings must distinguish, however, between the Mystery of Golgotha as a fact, and the manner in which it has been heretofore understood through concepts obtained from religion, art and science. We have comprehended the Christ according to the standard of what we possessed as spiritual content in our souls. Here in the Occident we have established something like a continuation of the old spirituality. When anyone is able objectively to enter upon the nature of the actual spiritual life of Europe and its American extension, he finds that in the end it is all an Oriental heritage. It is nothing else. Certainly, we have changed any number of things. As I have already pointed out in these lectures, the quite different world view of the Orient which, once upon a time, could magnificently grasp the causative connections between the successive earth lives of the human being, but which later in the Greek concept of the cosmos had become a shadow of itself in the fatum, in destiny—all that turned finally through the Latin Roman element into something juristic. I have indicated how this is felt when we look at Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel where Christ appears in the role of World Judge, a cosmic jurist, deciding between good and evil human beings. The world concept had become juristic. This was not so in the Oriental world view.

Then there was added what results from economic thinking. Bacon was one who actually proceeded entirely from economic thought, and all of Europe allowed itself to be taught by him. What we possess in our sciences, and what today constitutes the popular view of the world permeating all European circles, is the result of this Western economic thinking which, as I have indicated, simply did not stop with the economic sphere, but has entered the higher domains, the rights domain and even the cultural domain. If individuals like Huxley and Spencer had employed their thinking to bring order into economic relationships, they would then be in the right place. They are out of place when employing their particular kind of thinking for the purpose of creating science. Yet the whole world has imitated them.

We can therefore say that what we possess of actual spirituality is fundamentally only an obsolete legacy of the ancient Orient. Later, legalistic, political thinking began in Greece and Rome. It would simply be nonsense to believe that this could have existed in the ancient structure of the Oriental state. The dignified patriarchal structures, of which the early Chinese constitution was a reflection, were not state formations in the sense that the European understands them. What we now possess as the rights structure did not yet exist in Orientalism. It entered into Occidental culture, faintly at first, by way of Greek thinking, and then quite strongly by way of Latin thinking. Thus we must say that our entire spiritual life basically still has a character which was inherited from what the Oriental possessed. Bear in mind, however, how I had to present this emergence of the Oriental spiritual life. It arose out of man's metabolism—out of the inner impulses of metabolism—in the Vedas, in the magnificent poetry of the Orient. It must be sought as a new outgrowth of the metabolism, just as blossom and fruit issue from the tree. Anyone who can look upon the inner relationships as they are in reality knows how to look upon the blossoms and fruit of the tree; he will observe how the sap rises up from the earth, ascends in the trunk, shoots out into the branches, turns green within the leaves, becomes varicolored in the blossoms and achieves ripeness in the fruit. This is what presents itself to our eyes. If we then note the result in our metabolic processes of what is drawn up with the substance coming from the earth and taken up into ourselves, how it is digested and burned up, how it passes over into the blood, is refined and etherized within the body, we see that it sprouts, flourishes and ripens just like the vegetative process that turns to blossoms, fruits and trees. It only changes into something else by sprouting, flourishing and ripening through the human organs; it turns into the poetic fruit of the Vedas, it becomes the philosophic fruit of the Vedanta philosophy. In the Orient, the spiritual life was considered a fruit of the earth, of the metabolism that courses through the human being, just as one looked upon the process coursing through the verdant, fruit-bearing tree. What appears in the Vedas and in Oriental poetry is intimately bound up with the essence of the earth. It is the flower of the earth. It is nonsense when men of today make our earth into a lifeless product, as geology does, for instance. For not only what arises from the earth in flower and fruit belongs to her, but also what has arisen like a philosophical fruit in the primordial epochs of mankind in the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy. Whoever wishes to see nothing but stones come into existence in or upon the earth, whoever sees her only as tillable soil, whoever views the earth as nothing but mineral substance, does not know the earth. For to her belongs also what she has borne in times past as blossom and fruit through the body of man.

Then the other age arrived, the age in which man had already emancipated himself from the earth. He was no longer connected with the earth, but only with the climate and atmosphere, in which he brought to expression his rhythmic system rather than his metabolic system. It was the age in which the mighty spiritual intuitions of antiquity were no longer manifest, but in which man's concepts of rights developed.

In the more recent age, particularly since Bacon, the human being has begun to withdraw completely into himself, to divorce himself from the earth, and to manifest what lives only within himself as mere intellect within the economic thinking of the Western world. Thus, what evolves through the human being is differentiated over the earth.

All these are matters to which we must pay attention at present. If we would pay attention to these things, we must certainly bring our soul to an inward awakening. We must seek to comprehend what spiritual science can give us. We must confess to ourselves that the time is past when, after having worked hard all week, we can simply sit down and listen to an abstract sermon about the connection of the human being with a divine world order. Those times are over; that is antiquated.

It is the duty of modern humanity to comprehend quite concretely how man's essential being is itself linked with the cosmos, how its existence is bound up with the cosmos. Only as a consequence of this comprehension will the human being understand the necessity of dividing the social life into the spiritual sphere—which is basically only a heritage from the Orient grown more and more lifeless, for our spiritual life today is dead—and the other two spheres. The old Oriental of primeval times could never have grasped what is meant when we say that we do not understand life. Today we say that we do not understand life, for we live only in the dead mineral realm, even though we do so with our ego, which the Oriental did not yet do. Precisely here, life must enter. After all, what do we mean when we strive as human beings to accord a special place and emphasis to the spiritual sphere within the social organism? What is it, after all, that we desire here?

As long as the spiritual or cultural sphere is bound up with the wholly differently constituted rights or state structure—or worse, with the economic life—so long will the single human individuality be unable to contribute to the spiritual life what this spiritual life should contain. Let us understand one another on this particular point! With the thinking habits of the present it is not an easy task to understand just what matters here. In what follows I shall attempt to make comprehensible just what needs to be grasped in this respect.

Consider, for instance, the case where the state enacts its school laws. These school laws are put through either from a despotic, tyrannical point of view or from a democratic one. How are they made? Let us put the matter quite simply. Picture to yourself three people sitting together. When three people sit down together they are “terribly clever” in an abstract sense. Three people who get together really know everything about all things; it is not much better when people come together as a party—they usually know everything about all things. One knows exactly how to set up paragraph one: how religion should be taught; paragraph two: how German or any other language should be taught; paragraph three: how arithmetic should be taught; paragraph four: how geography should be taught. Wonderful paragraphs can be worked out that should represent an ideal condition for the educational system. Then all this can be made into rules and regulations, and then put into effect. It is quite immaterial whether it is done by three or three hundred people, it will always be very clever, for people are very clever when they construct something in abstractions. Then it becomes law. It is something else, however, when, for instance, someone confronts a class of fifty real children. They have quite definite characters; they are not the wax we pretend they are, when, with great cleverness, we formulate paragraphs one, two and so forth. Children can be molded only as far as their special peculiarities and abilities allow. In addition, something else enters the picture. The teacher himself confronts the class with his particular capabilities. They, too, are limited. And one with experience knows that rules can be this good in an abstract sense (referring to larger form in drawing); the clever teacher, however, can only apply them this well (referring to the smaller form). In abstractions, everything can be figured out. In reality, however, it is a question of dealing with reality. In the educational system that is part of the spiritual sphere, the state as such can accomplish nothing but abstractions. These can be quite wonderful and outstandingly good, but leave the state out of it! Take it out of the educational system, which is a part of the spiritual sphere! Make the educational system dependent on the teachers themselves who are available at a particular time. Then it will be a reality; then it will not become a lie but something that is in accordance with the particular age. That is what is meant by working toward realities. Something else, however, takes its place: Paragraphs one, two, three, ten, fifty are all dead, and the way in which they are observed is actually something absolutely irrational. What lives through the Body of teachers and comes into existence in the living collaboration among real teachers is alive. Here you have the point where life enters into what is derived from the dead mineral. A higher sphere is reached. We bring life, illuminated life, into the spiritual sphere by resting it upon human individualities, not upon paragraphs one, two, and so on. We infuse life into the spiritual sphere; out of an ether body we permeate the spiritual sphere around us with what is derived from the living human being. In your own attitude of mind, what is otherwise dead, inanimate, a machinelike thought, turns into a living being. The spiritual sphere spreads out as something inwardly alive over the entire earth. That is what must be understood inwardly. One must feel how life streams out of an undreamed-of soul depth into the independent life of the spirit, and how we actually vivify this self-reliant spiritual life by founding it upon the human individuality.

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You see from this that what we draw forth from spiritual science for everyday life has to do most intensely with realities. One could really despair when one sees how little actual energy and enthusiasm is generated in humanity for this vivification of the spiritual sphere. One feels as though humanity were imbued by the same attitude of mind as is a person who desires to see only stillborn children brought into the world, and who does not wish the spark of life to enter the body that otherwise would come into the world dead. This is how one feels about modern mankind. Humanity sits upon a dead culture, as if stuck with pitch to comfortable seats, not willing to rise to the enthusiasm of vivifying the spiritual life. Enthusiasm is what we need above all else, for this spiritual life will not be revitalized out of its dead traditions.

Next is the rights sphere. I said that it is born out of instincts, out of half conscious instincts. This rights sphere was still something semiconscious, glimmering up into consciousness, when born out of Greek life, more particularly, out of the Latin-Roman life, and was then elaborated upon further. Now it is to be placed independently on its own democratic basis. What has developed under the impulse of the rights sphere up to now? The legal paragraphs came into being in which the individual has such a small share that I must say there has been hardly anything that has left such a bitter taste in my mouth as when I had dealings with a lawyer. This has happened repeatedly in my life. One goes to somebody who is a representative of the law, a man learned in the law. One is concerned with a specific case. One watches this lawyer go to some filing cabinet. He takes out a bundle of briefs. With much effort, he fits together what he is reading at the moment; he himself is quite detached from the matter at hand. One wishes to know how this case fits into the framework of the law. He goes to his library, takes out a certain law book, leafs through it at length, but nothing results because in reality he is entirely unacquainted with the subject. Nothing at all of a living, human connection is present in such a proceeding.

A matter of litigation once caused considerable correspondence between a lawyer and myself; I do not wish to relate the whole affair. In the end, it turned out that it was necessary to refer also to a book on international law. The case had been going on for nearly two and a half years when the good man told me that he did not have a book on international law, and I would have to procure it myself. He said, “You will have to supply me with the necessary data anyway, if I am to give you further advice!” Now, those who know me are aware that I am certainly not boastful in such matters. I am certainly not conceited, either. I obtained the book on international law, and within two hours it was clear to me just how the case stood. One need only look into matters with a healthy mind and one finds that what otherwise might be protracted over two years can be accomplished in two hours. This is how far removed the human element has come from what really exists as the system of rights, which has become entangled in what is derived from the three members in the social organism. We must return to a life that experiences what holds sway in rights in the same way we experience the external sense objects. We must be connected in a living manner with what exists as the rights body.

The true meaning of democracy is for the dead paragraphs to be humanized, and for our feelings to participate in what otherwise lies buried in the dead paragraphs. Just as life enters the spiritual sphere through what can be born out of spiritual science, so also will feeling enter into the rights sphere through what is being willed by spiritual science. What lives from man to man will then be felt.

We proceed to the third sphere—the economic sphere. We know that this takes place very much in the subconscious; that based on what he has to deal with an individual today is simply not in a position to penetrate with full consciousness into what is at hand in the economic sphere. Associations must be formed in which the experience of the one supplements the experience of another. Out of associations, out of group formations, the decisions must subsequently be made. Whereas each one of us must individually create out of ourselves what is commensurate with our talents in the spiritual sphere, what is active in the economic sphere must result from a group decision. From such group judgment, governing reason will then emerge and hold sway in the economic life.

1. spiritual life: life etheri c body
2. rights sphere: feeling astral body
3. economic-sphere reason ego

Reason will reign in the economic sphere. This means that we contribute what we have evolved in ourselves as a gift from the gods. We contribute what we have evolved as our etheric element, what we have developed in regard to feeling as astral body, and what we have evolved as reason for our ego. All this we bring to the outer world. In the economic sphere we need not yet make the contribution as individuals; therefore we do so through associations and groups. But what we have developed individually in the ego—reason—becomes something that permeates the whole economic sphere if we aim at associations in the proper manner. Hence, we carry the impulses existing in our ether body out into the social order, into the spiritual life, by enlivening the spiritual life. We carry into the rights sphere what pulsates in our astral body as feeling, and we bear into the economic sphere what lives in our ego as reason. As human beings, we have attained three things in the cosmic order: etheric body, astral body, and ego. We leave the world again with the etheric body, astral body, and ego. We yield it up to the world. We fashion the world order out of ourselves. Why should it be otherwise? Among the lower animals much is exemplified for us by the spider that spins out of herself what must come to pass. Man must indeed become a world creator, and must form out of himself what will constitute his environment in the future. We bear the future in us. I have discussed this from the most varied points of view.

Of what use is all the philosophical talk about the reality of the world? We should inform ourselves about the reality of the world by looking at the realities of the future. What is to be real in the future is borne today within us as ideality. Let us fashion the world so that it will be real. This must not live in us merely as theory; it must be a feeling in us, an innermost life impulse. Then we shall simultaneously have a cognitive relationship and a religious relationship to our environment. Out of this innermost impulse, an, too, will become something quite different in the future. It will turn into something that unites with immediate life. Our very existence will have to shape itself artistically. Without that, we will inevitably drift into the philistinism of a Lenin, a Trotsky, or a Lunatsharsky.⁸⁹ It is only the Spirit created by man out of himself that can save us from this morass; and if the life of rights is not to succumb to utter desolation, we must permeate it with feeling, and we must permeate the economic life with reason.

There was a man who looked back at the way and means the world developed and he said, “All that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real.” He, however, looked back to what the world had become through the old gods; he did not look to the future. It was Hegel, of whom I spoke here on August 27th, his 150th birthday. Today, we are at a point where the world is irrational, and where man must make it rational once more. We must realize this, and this knowledge must pass into thinking, feeling and will. There is only one social reform: People must realize what part mankind must play in the shaping of the world order.

This is what we ought to repeat to ourselves each morning and night so that we will understand anew what nonsense it is to speak of the eternity and preservation of matter. Everything surrounding us as substance will pass away. What dwells in us as ideals will replace the vacuums brought about by the destruction of matter. The ideals that live within us for the time being will occupy the empty spaces as future reality.

In this way the human being must feel a bond with the world order. In a new way he must experience Christ's words, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”⁹⁰ One who understands this utterance knows that it is a genuinely Christian saying. For Christianity starts from the destructibility of matter and external energy, whereas the recent natural scientific world outlook mocks Christianity by promulgating the conservation of matter and energy. Indeed, heaven and earth—meaning all matter—will pass away and all energy cease to be, but what forms within the soul of man and dwells in the word will be the world of the future. That is Christianity.

This newly understood Christianity must eradicate the anti-Christian attitude of the modern materialistic world outlook, which fantasizes about the conservation of things transitory—matter and energy. Things have gone so far that the tenets of Christianity, namely, eternity of the spirit and the avowal of the transitory nature of matter, are considered sheer insanity as compared to the firmly established phantasm of the conservation of matter and energy. It has gone so far that we lie when we still allege to be Christians, while we lend a hand to the dissemination of an anti-Christian world outlook. One who holds fast to modern natural science's basic views on matter would only be honest if he could recant Christianity. Above all, in reality, representatives of Christian confessions, ministers and pastors, who make their compromises with modern natural science, are inwardly quite certainly the worst enemies of Christianity. There is no other way but to begin to see these matters clearly and honestly. We must definitely speak about these things more and more in full earnestness. Without this, there will be no progress. All talk of reforms of which any number of organizations and reform movements chatter today is mere fantasy; it is only grist to the mill of those who bring about the decline. The only hope for renewal can come from grasping the living spirit, the living spirit that has to find its source in the creative human being and which, in turn, becomes the foundation for the reality of the future, not just of some ideal future, but that of the cosmic future.

In all truth, not until modern humanity accepts this metamorphosis of modern thinking with the same ardor with which world outlooks were once accepted in former times, not until then will decline transform itself into ascending progress. One wishes that what is thus being stated would not only be comprehended conveniently by concepts; one wishes that it would be grasped by the feelings and that it would pulse through the will. For, unless it is sensed and felt, unless it pulses through the will, all talk of emerging from this catastrophic age remains so much talk into the wind. Most people are unaware of the terrible way in which we are sailing into the decline that now is taking hold already of the physical environment. The physical, however, is always the consequence of the spiritual. The physical of the future will be the consequence of the spiritual we harbor in our souls today. The physical of the present is caused by the spiritual of the past, and the most recent physical conditions are brought about by the most recent past spiritual activities of mankind.

When we hear today that out of about 600 school children in Berlin an average of much more than one hundred do not have shoes and socks at present and no hope of getting them; when we are told that many more than a hundred and fifty of these 600 children have parents who cannot even purchase rations for them and who no longer receive a warm breakfast before going to school; that in the course of the last school year over a hundred of these children died of tuberculosis—just add this up for yourselves!—then, my dear friends, you have material occurrences. These physical occurrences are the external expression of the spirituality that has been nurtured in mankind during the past few centuries. One must ask today: Do people wish to go on cultivating social movements, women's movements and any number of other reforms while continuing the thoughts that have borne such fruit? Or are they willing to create and draw from a new source? This question should place itself in shining letters before our souls as we experience and feel the point in time at which we now stand.

• 89 . A.W. Lunatsharsky: 1875–1933, Russian author and politician.
• 90 . n Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 16:17.

If we make a survey of what takes place in the civilized world today, of what is present in it, we actually find—indeed, we may say this after the many explanations which have already been given—that civilization is increasingly falling into ruin. If we understand what spiritual science can tell us about the secrets of the universe, we must realize quite clearly that everything that takes place outside in the physical world has its source in the spiritual world. The causes for what takes place at any time in the historical development of mankind also lie in the spiritual world. Another truth, which cannot be called to mind too frequently, is that in the present moment of time, humanity's condition requires each individual to contribute something toward the reconstruction of culture from his own inner being. We no longer live in an age in which it suffices to believe that the gods will help. In the present time, the gods do not count on human beings recognizing them and their intentions, and much that a short time ago was not yet left to mankind is left to men's decisions today.

Such a truth must be grasped in all its gravity, and basically by each one individually. To do this it will be necessary, above all, to understand a number of things that we have outgrown. Gradually, in the course of the materialistic age, one might say that the human being has reached the point of grasping everything from a certain absolute standpoint, a standpoint, moreover, that differs according to the human being's age. When a person is twenty-five years old today, he feels called upon to judge everything. He believes that it is possible to have a final opinion about everything without undergoing any kind of development. Perhaps when he reaches the age of fifty, he may Look down with a certain sense of superiority upon his faculty of judgment twenty-five years ago. At age twenty-five, however, he will in no way feel drawn as a result of his upbringing to seek and reckon with the more mature judgment of a man of fifty.

Among the causes underlying our present chaos, the one just outlined is by no means the least important; instead, it is one of the most significant, though admittedly one that had to exercise its influence upon the whole evolution of mankind. Only by man's feeling completely emancipated in a certain sense from the whole world context; by adopting an absolute standpoint not only personally in the life between birth and death, but at any given moment of this life; by assuming the standpoint that he is able to judge everything in a sovereign manner; only because this illusion was added to the many other illusions of life—and in the merely physical world everything is in a sense illusion—the course of human development will gradually lead the single human being toward freedom.

We should bear in mind, however, the great difference between our present epoch, which sets out from this standpoint, and the past epochs in which entirely different life impulses lay at the foundation of human existence. We must pay heed to the life impulses of former times, which in turn are intended to become those of the future, to which all efforts in the present should be directed again. Indeed, such earlier life impulses must be observed. They only disappeared slowly and gradually in the course of human evolution, and we underestimate the whole tempo of modern spiritual development if we do not perceive the speed with which, in a few centuries, materialistic impulses have melted away a tremendous amount of the spirituality that once existed.

In order to gain some starting points for a real study of the present, which we shall pursue tomorrow, let's turn our minds back to, say, the best period of ancient Egyptian life. Naturally, in the life of ancient Egypt or ancient Chaldea, there certainly existed social institutions in the outer world as well. These social structures were inaugurated and implemented by certain human beings. However, these individuals did not make judgments by pursuing thoughts in their wise heads on how to come up with the best social arrangements, or by following their opinions on what might be right for the communal life of people. Instead, they turned to the initiation centers. In actual fact, the sage who was initiated into the mysteries of the universe in these centers was the actual leading advisor of the highest social rulers, who, depending on their rank and maturity, were in large part themselves initiates into the cosmic secrets. When one was supposed to make provisions concerning the affairs of the social order, one did not consult the clever human brain—in the literal sense of the word—but one consulted those who were capable of interpreting the heavenly signs. For one knew that when a stone falls to the ground this is connected with the forces of the earth; when it rains that has to do with the forces of the air—the atmosphere. If, on the other hand, human destinies should be fulfilled that are supposed to interact with each other, this has nothing to do with any natural laws that can be figured out in the above manner. It has to do with those laws that could be traced in the cosmos by means of what makes the course of the stars evident. So, the course of the stars was read in the same way we read the time of day from a clock. We do not say, “One hand of my clock is down here on the right, the other is on the left.” Rather, we say, “We know that this position indicates that the sun has set so many hours ago, and so forth.” Likewise, these individuals who could read the course of the stars said to themselves, “This or that constellation of the stars signifies to us one or the other intention on the part of those divine spiritual beings who guide and direct everything we may call human destiny.” One beheld the intentions of those accompanying spiritual beings of the cosmos by looking up to the course of the stars. One was clearly aware that not everything that man has to know reveals itself here on earth; indeed, the most important things he has to be aware of, the forces that work in his social life, reveal themselves in manifestations observable in the cosmos outside the earthly sphere. One knew that the concerns of humanity here on earth cannot be managed unless one investigates the intentions of the gods in the realm outside earth. Therefore, everything that was to be accomplished here within the social order was connected with the sphere outside the earth.

Where do we find any inclination today to investigate these great signs visible in the cosmos outside the earth, when here or there the belief arises again that some reform movement should be introduced? A far more important symptom than materialism, than anything which has arisen in the form of natural scientific materialism, is the fact that man no longer consults the cosmos outside the earth in regard to his earthly concerns. One does not become spiritual by setting up theories concerning the human being or anything in the universe; one will only become spiritual if one understands how to connect humanity's earthly concerns with the cosmos outside the earth.

In that case, however, one has to be convinced, above all, that the affairs of this world do not allow themselves to be arranged according to the judgments acquired by mere natural scientific education. Then, one has to be able to introduce into the whole civilizing education the capacity to connect the sphere transcending the earth with earthly concerns once more. Then, it was necessary, above all, to discern more clearly how this capacity was lost in the course of human evolution, and how we gradually arrived at the point of wanting to judge everything only from an earthly standpoint. Let us consider something that is now prevalent in the world, a component of social agitation.

You have all heard of the effort appearing everywhere to introduce compulsory labor—to require a person to work by means of some social order based on the legal decrees of this social order—no longer to appeal merely to what obliges man to work, namely, hunger and other motivations, but in fact to establish compulsory labor legally.

We see how, on one side, this compulsory labor is demanded by socialistic agitation. We note how, in Soviet Russia, this compulsory labor has already led to a downright rigid form, with human life taking on the aspect of life in the barracks. We also find that radical socialists enthusiastically uphold compulsory labor. We see also how the sleeping souls of the present receive news such as this, how government officials here or there have even determined to introduce compulsory labor. One reads this like any other news item, and does not pay it much attention. One rises in the morning as one usually does, eats breakfast, has lunch, goes into the country for the summer holidays, returns again and, in spite of the fact that the most important and fundamental events are taking place in the world, one behaves as one has always been accustomed to behave. Yet, mankind should not insist on clinging to old habits. Mankind should take seriously what it is that matters today, namely, having to relearn about all conditions of life. Even when we see that the demand for compulsory labor is being opposed, what are the viewpoints from which these matters are attacked? We have to admit that the opponents are as a rule not much brighter than those who advance these demands. For the most part, they will ask, “Well, can a person still find joy in his work?”—or something like that. All the reasons cited for and against the above are worth more or less the same, because they arise from the same judgments that are limited only to what takes place here between birth and death; they do not originate from a sufficient insight into life. When the spiritual scientist comes and says, “Go ahead and introduce compulsory labor, but in ten years you will have terrible results, for suicides will increase at an alarming rate,” people will view such a statement as fantasy. They will not recognize that this conclusion is derived from an inner knowledge of the relationships existing in the universe. They will not be willing to study spiritual science and to discover the basis from which one can find such a judgment justified. Instead, people will go on living as usual—some getting up in the morning, breakfasting and lunching, traveling into the country for the summer and more of the same, others sleeping away their time in some other manner, refusing to take these questions seriously. Still others will found clubs, social associations, women's associations, and so forth—things that are admittedly quite nice—but when such efforts are not connected to the actual cosmic order, they lead nowhere. Our age is much too conceited to abandon absolute standpoints which assume that, at any age, one definitely has a conclusive judgment about all things.

During these days and in the last few weeks I explained the way in which the various branches of the threefold social organism have originated in the different territories of earth evolution. I said that, fundamentally speaking, all our spiritual life is only a transformation of what originated a long time ago in the orient. But when we look into what was described on numerous occasions in the past few weeks from one aspect, and investigate it in regard to the standpoints which I have indicated just now, we find that, insofar as it referred to human destiny, all this knowledge of the Orient was deciphered from the course of the stars, from what exists outside the earth, and the Greek concept of destiny was the last ramification of such extraterrestrial wisdom.

Then came the knowledge arising from the Middle region. As we indicated, this was a more juristic knowledge; it was something that man drew more out of his own being. It was not linked with observations of the cosmos outside the earth. I told you that the higher-world outlook of the Occident has been permeated with a juristic element, how the events that run their course in humanity's development were placed under juristic concepts. Punishment is meted out by a cosmic judge just as the human judge hands down a penalty for some external misdeed. It was a juristic view, a juristic manner of conception, that permeated the entirely different form of the Oriental conceptions concerning the spiritual world.

This view of the spiritual world was connected with the fact that in the initiation centers those who were found to be sufficiently mature were initiated into the nature of that which was sent down to earth from invisible realms by what was revealed in the visible. Then, the events that were to take place on earth were guided according to the intentions of initiation. Naturally, in the case of such a knowledge it is necessary to take into consideration more than the singular standpoint of any given age, by which one believes oneself able to make an absolute judgment on all sorts of matters. From the viewpoint of initiation, the whole evolution of man must be considered, also what the human being brings into earthly existence through birth, and what can reveal itself to him when, in earthly life, he beholds a revelation of the super-sensible existence.

In recent times, something that was basically a science of the heavens has become permeated with a juristic element. This celestial science itself and its fate must be considered a little now. The sacred knowledge of the Orient was something that was cultivated in its purest form in the initiation centers perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Orient. Later on, although no longer in such pure form, it was cultivated in Egypt in a still relatively pure manner. Having become popularized in a certain sense, it was used by swindlers and conjurers on the streets of the later imperial Rome, although transformed into visible magic tricks. This is, after all, the course of world events; something that is sacred in one epoch can turn into the most unholy thing in a later age. While the highest Oriental knowledge belonged to the streets in the later imperial Roman time, juristic thinking was developing out of Romanism itself on the basis of the Tate Egyptianism, and subsequently dominated the world. In the ages that followed, but only slowly and gradually, what had once been brought down from the stars as human wisdom in the Orient grew dim and finally died out. For, even in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas⁹¹ still said, “Human destiny, all of destiny occurring in the sublunar world, is guided by the Intelligences of the stars. It is, however, by no means something inevitable for man.” So this Catholic-Christian church father of the thirteenth century does not refer to stars, to planets, merely as physical planets; instead, he speaks of the Intelligences that dwell in these planets who are the actual rulers of what should be called human destiny. What had once arisen in the Orient was really still present in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth centuries, although in its last ramifications, as an aspect of the Christian Catholic Church. It is simply a terrible misrepresentation of the present Catholic Church to withhold these matters from the faithful, so that the church can declare it a heresy, for example, to assume that the individual stars and planets are ensouled and permeated with spirit. By doing this, the Church not only denies Christianity; it even denies its last teachers who still had a more direct connection with the sources of the spiritual life than does the present age in any sense. Therefore, one must point out that it was not so very long ago that the conception was completely abandoned which still pictured the world as permeated with spirit. If people would teach the truth today concerning what still held sway in the spiritual life of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; if, following preconceived opinions, they would not distort what prevailed in those times, then even this would still have a fructifying effect for a spiritualization of the present world-view. The materialism, the natural scientific materialism, or the materialism of the mystics or theosophists, particularly the materialism of the Catholic Church, could not exist. For what is contained in the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church originated from the purest spiritual science; and this pure spiritual science beheld the spirit everywhere in the universe.

All that was beheld as spirit in the universe by the eye of the soul has been discarded. The universe became pervaded with materialism. For that reason, naturally, nothing remains except words of faith. For example, behind the Trinity, the doctrine of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, stand the most profound mysteries. On the other hand, there is nothing contained any longer in what is taught today as the dogma of the Trinity. On one side, there is the doctrine, the belief of the religious denominations, on the other side, natural science devoid of spirit. Neither can save humanity from the misery into which it has fallen. In order to render rescue possible, it is necessary that a sufficiently large number of people rouse themselves inwardly. For, particularly in the present epoch, the possibility exists in man's inner being to pick up those threads of a soul-spiritual kind which, if their power is inwardly experienced in the proper way, lead to an understanding of what can be gathered from spiritual science for an illumination of the life of nature as well as the social life. One should not wish to retain at all costs the bad habits of one's inner life, however they have developed during the past few centuries. These bad habits are based on the opinion that if one can keep quiet and be passive, the gods will eventually enter into one, reveal everything within, and mystical depth will be illuminated by an inner light, and so forth. The present age is not suited for that. It demands an inner activity of soul and spirit from the human being; it demands that man turn and look at what is trying to reveal itself within. Then, he will find under all circumstances what wishes to reveal itself within, but he must be willing to unfold such inner spiritual activity. One must not believe, however, that much can be gained by some inner pseudomystical doings; above all else, one has to trace the spirit in the external things of the world.

I have called your attention to what happened, for example, in the East, in Asia. Once upon a time, so I told you, conditions in Asia were of a kind that the human being felt his heart expand, felt his soul grow warm, when, guided by the thought of the sacred Brahman, he directed his glance to the mighty external symbol of the swastika, the hooked cross. It made his inner life unfold. This inner mood of soul meant a great deal to him. Today, when an Oriental receives an ordinary Russian 2,000 ruble note—which is not worth much, for small change will no longer do for buying anything, only thousand ruble notes—he sees on it the beautifully printed swastika. Those thousand-year-old feelings that once upon a time inwardly beheld the sacred Brahman when the eye was directed to the swastika are certainly stirring. Today, the same emotional qualities arise on seeing the 2,000 ruble note.

Do you believe that one has a spiritual view of the world if one does not look at something like that and say to oneself, “Those are the Ahrimanic powers who are at work here; herein lies a super-earthly intelligence, even though it is an Ahrimanic intelligence?” Do you believe that it suffices merely to say, “Oh, that is the external material world! We direct our glance heavenward to spiritual things; we don't pay any attention to things for which people only have words?” If you seek for the spirit, you must look for it even where it turns up in the mighty aberrations of external world evolution itself, for there you can find the starting point for other aspects.

It is the tragedy of modern civilization that people believe that only human forces are at work everywhere, forces which arise between birth and death. Actually, our world is permeated all over by super-sensible forces, spiritual powers which manifest themselves in the various events that take place. If one wishes to do something, if one tries to realize intentions so that this or that result may come about, one needs to look to those benign spiritual powers capable of working against other spiritual powers; and the spiritual powers that can oppose the others have to be born in man through his own inner activity.

In regard to all this, however, one actually does need to look up into the spiritual world. This is something that is most inconvenient to many people. This is why the great majority of people in the world find even talk of initiation science unpleasant. For there is one thing that initiation science must make clear, under all circumstances, to the human being. Man is organized, in the first place, in the direction of his intellect. Certainly, there are other aspects to his organization such as digestion, metabolism, heartbeat, breathing, and physiological processes. He bears instincts within, hence, soul entities, and so forth. In addition, he bears within him what is termed intelligence, and the present age is especially proud of this intelligence. But where does our intelligence come from? Materialism believes that our intelligence is derived from those processes that occur below in the liver, in the heart; they then become more refined and turn into the processes within the brain. These processes in the brain are just a little different from those that take place in the liver or the stomach, but these same processes produce thinking. We know that this is not so. Those processes that run their course in the brain just as those in the liver or the stomach would cause no thinking at all. Up in the brain something takes place; out of the constructive processes destructive ones are constantly developed.

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Here, not only upbuilding, but disintegrating processes are at work; matter is forever falling out into nothingness. Thus, we are not dealing with an upbuilding in the brain. Any constructive process only serves to nourish the brain, not to produce thinking. If you wish to focus on those brain processes that have something to do with thinking, and you wish to compare them to the remaining organism, you must not compare them to the constructive processes, the processes of growth, but to the processes of elimination. The brain is constantly involved in elimination, and, as I said, the processes of destruction, of disintegration, of death, are the accompanying phenomena of intelligence. If our brain were incapable of elimination, we would be unable to think. If our brain would only contain upbuilding processes, we would exist in a dull, instinctive condition; at most, we could attain to quite dir dreams. We arrive at clear thinking precisely because the brain secretes and eliminates substances. Thinking only functions parallel to processes of elimination. It is only because the human organization eliminates what is useless to it that thinking establishes itself out of the spiritual world.

Now take the thinking that has developed especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, the thinking of which modern man is so proud. It comes into being because we destroy our brain, because we bring about in it processes of disintegration, of elimination. Suppose that you are Trotsky or Lenin, traveling to Russia—transported there on orders of Ludendorff⁹² in a sealed railway carriage and escorted by Dr. Helphand⁹³ (it was such a train, going from Switzerland through Central Europe, which brought Lenin accompanied by people like Dr. Helphand to Russia under Ludendorff's protection)—suppose you are such a person and you believe that out of the processes representing intelligence—the only processes from which natural scientific thinking of the past few centuries has emerged—the social order could be developed. What kind of a social order will that turn out to be? It will be a reproduction of what takes place within the brain during the thinking processes. Do not think that what we develop without is different from what we develop within, if the only processes employed are thinking processes! If you try to establish a social order with them, it will be something destructive, just as thinking processes in the brain cause destruction—exactly the same thing. Thinking, applied to reality, destroys. One can gain insight into such matters only when one Looks into the deeper secrets of the being of man and the whole world. This is why humanity needs to pay attention to these things if any sort of valid judgment concerning public affairs is to be rendered. It does no good at all today to base discussions about any social concerns on the suppositions of the past few centuries, for they no longer hold water. It is important here to realize that completely different processes must come to pass in the human spiritual life; again, the science of initiation must step in and draw from spiritual resources what can never be gleaned from mere sources of human intelligence. A social science of the present can only emerge as a consequence of spiritual science. This can and must be grasped from its very foundation.

This is what is in fact important for modern man, namely, that he does not attain a relationship with spiritual science merely in some superficial manner, but that he learns to recognize how completely spiritual science is linked to human destiny for the future.

In order that a person can gauge something like this, a feeling must develop in the human being for what is asserting itself with profound earnestness out of the spiritual resources. For such a feeling to come about, however, much must be eliminated, above all else the generally prevailing frivolity. Recently, in a lecture that I gave for local teachers, I indicated a Symptom in which such frivolity appears today. One of our friends in London made efforts to arrange a gathering of a number of artists here in August. It was for the purpose of their becoming acquainted with our building and forming a sort of center from which the impulse could go out that is now so necessary if the building is ever to be completed. An English journalist was informed, not one from an ordinary daily paper but from a magazine that calls itself “Architect,” in other words, a publication that wishes to be taken more seriously. The journalist was even given a description in writing of what was intended. This fellow was so flippant and frivolous, however, that he wrote, “A visit to Dornach is anticipated by such and such persons. Dr. Steiner himself has promised to acquaint the visitors with what is going on there, and it is believed that ten days will suffice for this excursion. Of this time, four days will be spent on travel, and during the remaining six days, the visitors will be able to recuperate from the shock they will have experienced following their first impression of Dornach.” So, this frivolous character has no idea what he is supposed to write about, and for his penny-a-line, is only capable of making a stupid joke so that his readers can accordingly continue to maintain a frivolous mood.

Things have gone so far that the general mood of people is spoiled from the very outset, spoiled by this kind of journalist; there is no longer any question of anything being accomplished. The only thing such journalists can do is seize the opportunity to make some stupid, frivolous joke. No progress will be made if the earnestness with which such matters should be discussed is not understood. One will get no further if such matters are considered to be insignificant; if, from a certain jaded standpoint, one says, for example, “Oh, one cannot take such a journalist so seriously!” From a certain point of view, one certainly need not give much credit to such penny-a-lining, but it must be evaluated according to what effect is has in the world.

These matters are indeed serious and of such a nature that they induce us again and again to say, “This building here is intended to be a Landmark for what should take place for the sake of mankind's ascent!” To be sure, from certain quarters, no effort has been spared to make the building what it is now. Destiny, too, contributed its necessary share. It is, alter all, true that at the outset this building was erected here chiefly as the result of efforts made by the Central European countries. But when Central Europe's financial resources began to touch rock bottom, the neutral countries were ready in a most significant, commendable manner to do something for this building. Those from Central Europe who were able to do something for the building spared no effort throughout the time of the war psychosis, stirred up by hate and opposition, to maintain this site in such a manner that people from every part of the world, from all nationalities, could gather together here. This building was saved and maintained throughout all the years of chauvinism; nobody was denied the opportunity here to encounter others in a spirit of friendship, no matter what part of the world he came from. All this, however, demonstrates the impossibility of completing this building by relying on the earlier resources; it shows the necessity for efforts by those countries that are in a financially favorable position, for they are at the beginning of a period where they are not encumbered by financial disaster and are certainly in a position to do something for the building. One would hope that a message like the following will not one day spread through the world: A landmark for the dawning spiritual life was to be erected. Those people who were swept away by the cataclysmic world events and then perished left behind as a last legacy as much as they could accomplish. Those, on the other hand, who were not swept away, who could have begun the new life, did not realize what those who were doomed left for them.

• 91 . Thomas Aquinas: 1226–1274; compare Rudolf Steiner: The Redemption of Thinking, GA 74 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophie Press, 1983).
• 92 . Erich Ludendorff: 1865–1937, German general.
• 93 . Alexander Helphand, died in 1924, Russian socialist, for a time a political refugee in Germany. He played an important role in bringing about the Bolshevic revolution as well as the peace of Brest-Litovsk (1918).

Quite a number of lectures have now been given by me on the changes that must necessarily take place in our whole civilization. First and foremost, what was said in this connection was expressed in such a way as to appeal to the will of men. We now live in a cycle of humanity's evolution in which people have to discover inner activity in order to contribute their share towards the necessary change. For human soul substance will have to stream into external life, into the objectivity of external life, and human beings themselves will have to bring about what should appear. In the present cycle of human development it is no longer possible to wait passively for divine powers, far removed from man, to step in and to do something for human evolution, without the participation of man himself.

The essential thing is to be in a position to understand such things by observing the individual phenomena of social life and the life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life shall be our topic. I would like to start with a quite definite fact. Let us suppose that someone announces himself; he may, for example, send his business card with the name “Edmund Miller” printed on it. Yet, on seeing this card with the name “Edmund Miller,” it would be foolish to assume that a miller was coming, a man who grinds corn. For the person announcing himself by this name may be a contractor, or a professor, or a court advisor, and so on. It would not be justified in such a case to deduce anything from the name “Miller.” Initially, it would perhaps be better to form no thoughts whatever, but just to wait and see what kind of a person conceals himself behind the name. Or, through certain other circumstances, we may already know something about the actual person, the real living entity concealed behind this name, “Miller.”

It is clear to us in this case that it would be quite wrong to infer from his name anything about the character of the approaching individual. If a person named “Smith” announces himself we would not think that he is a smith. This shows that in regard to those words we consider proper names, we feel the need to discover, by means of something that is not inferred from the name, what or whom we are dealing with.

Well, in this respect, even proper names have undergone a certain history. A person bearing the name Smith today no longer has anything to do with a real smith; a person called Miller has nothing to do with a miller. Yet these names originally arose at a time when name-giving such as is customary today did not exist, when people in a village would remark, “The smith said,—the miller said this or did that,”—or, “I saw the miller,”—and referred to the actual smith or miller. One who has lived in villages knows that people frequently do not refer to each other by proper names but say instead that they saw the smith, or the mason, or somebody else. Therefore, the name itself originally caused people to infer from the words what lay behind them.

All words, the whole language, will undergo the same development in the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a development which in their case we can clearly survey. Nevertheless, human beings today are still almost completely caught up in the whole of language; we basically acquire all our knowledge out of language. In actual fact, the general attitude towards nearly the whole compass of language is to infer the things from their words. Now, it is convenient to do so, but human evolution follows a different course, and in regard to such things we must have the same attitude that we adopt in regard to natural phenomena. They contain objective necessity. Objective necessity also exists where the causality of nature holds sway in the sphere of life, something that is experienced by many people with abstract superficiality. It happens frequently—I have often pointed this out—that people will say, “I never intended to do or say this; I meant it quite differently; I had this or that intention with regard to this matter.” But regardless of how pronounced the child's intention is not to get burned, when it reaches into fire, it will burn itself. Concerning the things of life, intentions that do not delve into life are not decisive; at most, only those intentions that do delve into life, or, certainly, facts, and the relationships of these facts that follow natural laws, are decisive.

People must become used to this way of thinking; based on spiritual science, this is, above all, necessary in the most eminent sense. And one must also get used to the thought: “As pleasant as it might be if one could just take words as they are, it is nevertheless a fact that the objective course and laws of human evolution point in a different direction.” They indicate that man's whole conception, his whole soul life, is becoming emancipated from words. Words are gradually becoming mere gestures that simply indicate the being or thing in question, no longer designating and explaining anything fully. If spiritual-scientific descriptions are to be taken seriously, for example, then something must come about for which people are often annoyed with me, namely, that one can no longer use words in the manner that words and sentences are customarily used at present. For if one sets forth spiritual-scientific facts, one is above all presenting facts of the future; something is represented that in future time will have to become the possession of mankind. In a certain sense, one has to anticipate something that is supposed to occur in the future. What is to happen in the future must be received into one's will. Therefore, one is obliged to give spiritual-scientific descriptions in such a way that even the words point like gestures to the essential reality lying behind them. Since our ideal today concerning the reconstruction of the social order will have to be born out of spiritual science, as I explained yesterday, it is necessary that, particularly in matters of social reconstruction, we speak from the above-mentioned viewpoint. This is precisely what people did not at all wish to comprehend, for instance, in my book, Towards Social Renewal. They absolutely wanted matters presented to them in the old style, matters that cannot be described in the old style since they are part of the future. And basically, what one is being faced with here can best be made evident by the fact that almost all the questions that, up to now, have been connected by one side or another to the expositions in Towards Social Renewal always proceed totally out of the old manner of thinking. No attempt is made to find one's way into the transformed new way of thinking.

Thus we may say that, particularly in the descriptions of social relationships of the future, it must become evident that we have to develop an emancipated soul life that no longer clings merely to words. One who follows my descriptions in the various fields of spiritual science, including the recent ones into the field of social life, will find that I am always at pains to describe a matter from many different sides. As a rule, I use two sentences instead of one, because the first sentence indicates the matter from one side, the other one from the other side. This is then supposed to call forth a desire in the listener or reader to approach the matter by transcending the words and sentences, as it were. This is what must be mentioned in reference to human soul life as far as the transformation of the meaning of human language is concerned. This is an important matter. It is important for the reason that the greatest part of what occurs today in regard to confusion of one's manner of thinking and conceptions comes about for no other reason than the fact that the objective laws and impulses of human evolution already demand that we free ourselves from language. Because of their easy-going habits of thinking, however, human beings do not wish to give up clinging to language. When such a phenomenon is clearly understood, it leads to a deeper insight into the whole course of human development. Indeed, from this transformation of our language or languages, we can actually build a bridge to profound spiritual facts. Naturally, this is more the case in one language than in another. But this is then a matter of the specific treatment of a language, of the meaning of words in a language in the individualized differentiated regions of human civilization, as I have pointed out.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of human civilization and are approaching the sixth condition of development. These evolutionary conditions are not of such a nature that a clear line could be drawn between one and the other epochs; instead, one epoch, bearing its own peculiarities, passes over into the next; and long before it arises, the future one casts its shadows—one could also say its lights—into the present. One must take hold of these lights if one wishes to participate in the evolution of humanity with one's soul.

Let us try and connect what might be termed the “suprahistorical” fact, namely, that we are supposed to work our way towards the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, with another fact known to all of us. It is this: With his spirit-soul entity, the human being descends out of a spiritual world to earthly incarnation through birth or conception. On earth, he then experiences the life between birth and death; then, he passes through the gate of death, and in so doing bears his soul-spiritual being once again into that environment of life which is definitely of a spiritual and soul nature.

Now we must clearly understand—and the significance of this for the art of education, for example, has also been outlined here recently—that we bring down from the spiritual world, at least in the form of effects, what we have experienced in this spiritual world. When we move in ordinary life from one locality to another, we take with us not only our clothes but also our soul-spiritual belongings. In like manner, one brings along into this world through conception and birth the consequences and effects of what has been undergone in the spiritual world. In the period that mankind has presently lived through, concerning which we know that it began around the middle of the fifteenth century A.D., man, through his spirit-soul entity, brought along forces of the soul life devoid of images, forces containing no pictures. It is for this reason that, above all, the intellectual life has arisen and has flourished. During this period, prior to descending through conception and birth into physical existence, the human being was endowed in a sense with something lacking in capacities, lacking in images. This explains the slight inclination mankind had for developing original creations of fantasy since the middle of the fifteenth century. Human fantasy is, in truth, only a terrestrial reflection of super-earthly imagination. The Renaissance does not contradict this, for just the fact that one had to resort to a “renaissance,” not a “naissance,” clearly shows that original forces of imagination were not present, only a fantasy that required fructification from earlier periods. In short, the fact is that the human soul was permeated in a certain sense with forces that are devoid of images.

Now begins the age—and in many respects, this is the real reason for the stormy character of our times—in which the souls who descend through conception and birth into earthly life bring along for themselves images from the spiritual world. When pictures are brought along out of spiritual existence into physical life, and if salvation is to arise for the human being and his social life, they must under all circumstances be united with the astral body, whereas the element lacking images only unites with the ego. It is predominantly the unfolding of the ego which has blossomed in humanity since the fifteenth century.

Now, however, the time is beginning when man has to feel: Within me there live pictures from my prenatal existence; during my earthly life, I have to make them come alive. I cannot accomplish this merely with my ego; I must work deeper into myself, and this must reach as far as my astral body.

Now, it is generally true that humanity resists the images indwelling in the astral body, images experienced prior to conception. In a way, human beings repel what is supposed to find its way out of the depths of their being into the astral body. The dry, prosaic attitude of the present time is one of its fundamental characteristics, and there are many broadly based movements that oppose an education whose concern it would be that the forces arising from the soul and trying to make themselves felt in the astral body will actually assert themselves. There are insipid, dry people who would really like to exclude any education by means of fairy tales, legends and anything illuminated by imagination. In our Waldorf School system, we have made it our priority that the lessons and instruction of the children entering primary education will proceed from pictorial descriptions, from the life-filled presentation of images, from elements taken from legends and fairy tales. Even what the children are initially supposed to learn about the nature and processes of the animal kingdom, the plant and the mineral kingdoms, is not supposed to be expressed in a dry, matter-of-fact manner; it is supposed to be clothed in imaginative, legendary, fairy tale-like elements. For what is seated deep within the child's soul are the imaginations that have been received in the spiritual world. They seek to come to the surface. The teacher or the educator adopts the right attitude towards the child if he confronts the child with pictures. By placing images before the child's soul, there flash up from its soul those images, or, strictly speaking, those forces of pictorialized representation which have been received before birth or, let us say, prior to conception.

If these forces are suppressed, if the dry, prosaic person guides the education of the child today, he confronts the child from earliest childhood with something that is actually not at all related to the child, namely, the letters of the alphabet. For our present letters have nothing to do anymore with the letters of earlier pictorial scripts. They are really something that is alien to the child; a letter should first be drawn out of a picture, as we try to do it in the Waldorf School. The child is confronted today with something devoid of a pictorial element; the young person, on the other hand, possesses forces in his body—naturally, I am referring to the soul when I am now speaking of “body,” for after all, we also speak of the “astral body”—forces seated in his body that will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the surface in pictorial representation. What will be the result of modern mistaken education? These forces do not become lost; they spread out, gain existential ground, and invade the thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will after all. And what kind of people will come into being from that? They will be rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people who do not know what they want, because they want something that one cannot know. This is because they want something that is incompatible with any possible social order; something that they only picture to themselves, that should have entered their fantasy but did not; instead, it entered into their agitated social activities.

Therefore, we can say that people who, in an occult sense, do not have honest intentions in regard to their fellowmen, do not have the courage to admit to themselves: “If the world is in a state of revolt today, it is really heaven that is revolting.” It means the heaven that is held back in the souls of men, which then comes to the fore, not in its own form, but in its opposite—in strife and bloodshed instead of imaginations. No wonder that the individuals who destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they are doing good. For what do they sense in themselves? They feel heaven within themselves; only it assumes the form of a caricature in their soul.

This is how serious the truths are that we must comprehend today! To acknowledge the truths that matter today should be no child's play; such acknowledgment should be pervaded by the greatest earnestness. In general, it is no light task today to describe such things, for, in the first place, people do not care for them; secondly, they cling to words. Indeed, one who states that heaven is revolting in human souls is naturally taken literally by his words; people do not notice how he is trying to show that additional facts must be known, whereby the word “heaven” is related to something more than they are in the habit of connecting with the term. This is the same as not thinking of a miller who grinds corn when a “Mr. Miller” announces himself. The emancipation from language is definitely required in individual concrete cases if, in the sense that the laws of human evolution demand it, we wish truly to make progress.

Here, we see how something that comes from the life before birth pushes into the social life. One who is familiar with these relationships knows that he has to recognize something that is actually heavenly in what appears on earth in a caricature. This is in regard to the social questions, but there is something else in addition.

During the age of intellectualism, which has developed predominantly since the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings have obtained very little from their life of sleep in the form of imaginations for their waking life. Even those who have somewhat more lively dreams tend to interpret them quite rationally and intellectually. In this direction, theosophists, for example, are rational and intellectual. I could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big one, how many people have come to me in the course of time and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams! What is important here is that even those imaginations that express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated itself from the actual content. The content which we receive and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is not the true course of the dream; it really has very little to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image follows another, the way complications arise and are resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a number of different ways as a dream. One person comes and describes how he climbed a mountain; he ascended quite easily up to a certain point, then, he suddenly stood before an abyss and could not proceed. Another person relates that he was walking along a path; everything around him filled him with joy. Suddenly, when he reached a certain point in the road, a man with a #8224 came up 'to him and killed him. Here we have two completely different dream images. Yet the process concealed behind them may be exactly the same. It can express itself in one instance in the climb up the mountain and the feeling of confronting an abyss; in another instance, it can be expressed in a cheerful walk down a path until one confronts a person who intends to kill one. The content of the images is not important; it is the dramatic sequence of experiencing something that offers resistance. It is the dynamics behind the images that matters. The course taken by the forces can envelop itself in any number of images, indeed in hundreds of pictures!

We can only understand the spiritual world when we know that what appears in the physical world in the form of dreams, or what clothes itself in images from the spiritual world in such a manner that it resembles the physical world, is only an image. As long as one has the inclination, however, to interpret the images in a rationalistic, purely intellectual way, so long does one also occupy an intellectual standpoint in regard to the dream life of sleep. What matters here is that we understand this dream life of sleep as the expression of a deeper spiritual life. Then only do we comprehend it imaginatively; then we grasp the pictures as something that stands in place of the content.

Then we shall not turn against something that is beginning for the human being today, namely, making inner soul demands out of sleep in a manner similar to the demands made by the imaginations prior to birth or conception. For today we are beginning to sleep differently from the way sleep was experienced in the regular life of the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. Man brought along into the waking state little inclination for faculties that wish to experience, rather than interpret, the images.

We have now reached the point in human evolution where, out of sleep as well, we draw imaginations that seek to indwell not only our ego, where rationality reigns supreme, but also our astral body. If we work against this, we once more reject something that is trying to rise into consciousness out of the depths of the human soul; we also work against the whole course of mankind's evolution, and what matters here is that we do not oppose humanity's development but work in harmony with it. We do this in the first place by permeating our culture once again with as many elements as possible connected in some way with the spiritual world. Naturally, in regard to external life, it is important for us to imbue ourselves with what is grasped from the spiritual world; hence, that we also imbue ourselves with a true spiritual insight, to fill ourselves with something that in this physical world cannot be comprehended in terms of the physical world. The whole past epoch of human life was actually opposed to this. Consider a case that I have already mentioned a number of times.

It is true that Christianity confronts human beings in such a way that they can only grasp its essence, especially the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, if they come round to a comprehension of something super-sensible. For one must envisage that Christ, a being Who formerly had not been connected with earth evolution, united with the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and that super-sensible events took place. One must conceive of the fact that in regard to the event of Golgotha, even birth and conception differed from the way they take place in ordinary human circumstances. In short, the demand is made by Christology to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a super-sensible sense.

There is an interesting passage in a book written by a modern naturalist⁹⁴ where fulminations are uttered against the Immaculate Conception, where it is said that it is an impertinent insult to human reason to claim that an immaculate conception can occur.

Well, a modern rationalist, a purely intellectual person, can't help feeling this way. In a certain sense, what is intended out of the spiritual life is indeed an impertinent mockery of human reason. But the point is that we now live in an age where we must gradually begin to bring into waking life what has been spiritually experienced between falling asleep and waking in such a manner that our astral body can be impregnated and permeated with a pictorial element—not merely our ego, which is the seat of rationality, of intellectualism.

It is interesting that even the theology of the nineteenth century developed in such a way that it opposed Christology with rationalism, with pure intellectualism. Increasingly, modern theology felt called upon altogether to deny Christ as such, and to describe the humble man from Nazareth, the mere Jesus, as a human personality somewhat more outstanding than other human beings. One did not wish to make the effort to comprehend something super-sensible. What is to confront the human being supersensibly, what is to awaken him to the super-sensible realm, this one tried to grasp with concepts gained here in the sensory world.

A Protestant theologian,⁹⁵ with whom I once discussed this matter, told me after we had talked about it for some time, “Yes, we modern theologians should really not call ourselves Christians any longer, for we no longer have Christ. If the name ‘Jesuit’ had not been appropriated already, we should really claim it for ourselves.” This is not something that I am saying; it is something that a Protestant theologian of the modern school said to me as a confession of his own soul.

One who has insight into the whole character of our time, however, will understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with might and main to understand something that is incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain. Whoever wishes in everything to remain caught in the earthly sensory sphere would say, “The Immaculate Conception is an impertinent insult against human reason.”

One who understands the task of present-day man will say: I must accustom myself to such ideas. In that case, I must emancipate myself from the customary use of words today. When somebody by the name of Smith or Miller announces himself, I must not assume that he is coming with a hammer in hand or overalls powdered with flour. I must expect something quite different from what I might deduce from the words. Thus, I have to become used to emancipating myself from what was ingrained into the words by the merely physical life of the senses.

Today, the Mystery of Golgotha is in fact the first test for us to see whether we are willing to go along with the comprehension of something that extends beyond the physical-sensory sphere. We, therefore, can no longer content ourselves with a merely traditional, historical description of Christianity, we need instead a creative understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of spiritual science, we need inner strength of soul which, in a new way, approaches the Mystery of Golgotha and is in a position to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha as a supersensory fact. Then, having positioned the Mystery of Golgotha into the central point of human thinking and feeling, we must make a new beginning especially in regard to education, and prepare the child in such a way that it does not suppress, does not have to suppress, the imaginations that seek to arise from the depths of the soul. We must meet the imaginations halfway by making pictures of our conceptions.

This is the deeper reason why, in the last issue of Soziale Zukunft (Social Future),⁹⁶ which is a magazine dealing with education, I described education and instruction as an art in the most eminent sense. In the field of pedagogy, teachers and educators must actually proceed in the way an artist does—indeed, they must proceed in a style surpassing that of an artist. It does not do to impose abstract principles in an abstract pedagogical sense. What matters is that one penetrates the being of man, and, through this comprehension of man's nature, arrives at the point of reading from the inner human being what one has to do in each case. An artist who is creating something cannot go by abstract rules. The purpose of aesthetics is not that of establishing rules for the artists. An artist cannot even go by what he has created yesterday when he creates something today. At every moment he must endeavor to be creative and original. This is how the teacher must be, in a still higher sense. One must not say based on a certain attitude of mind: "Well, if we are looking for teachers like that, we have to wait another three to four hundred years." The only reason that we do not have such teachers as yet is because we say things like this. We can have them the very moment that we have the strong power of faith in it; but it is the strong, not the passive, power of faith that is needed here. Therefore, what is important here is that when we return from sleep, upon awakening, we truly experience in the astral body and imprint into the etheric body what the astral body experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. It can only take place through pictorializing the whole cultural life.

This pictorialization of the whole life of culture, this pictorialization that is demanded by the laws of humanity's evolution, will come into being when the whole spiritual life is left to the decision of those who participate in the spiritual life; when no instructions, no school regulations are laid down by a government which by its very nature stands outside the spiritual life. It is important here that the state does not hand down pedagogical regulations, school curriculums, and such like in an abstract manner. What matters is that one has human beings in an emancipated spiritual life who act out of their own free personality, and that one accomplishes with them what one can or wishes to accomplish with them.

The fact that the human being is presently beginning to bring along through conception and birth something that differs from what he brought with him since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the fact that he also brings something different with him out of sleep, both these facts demand that careful attention be given such matters, and that one really permeates oneself with the knowledge of such decisive facts. But from where can this knowledge be gained, if not from spiritual science? The external culture, today's science, certainly does not deal in any way with these matters. It ignores them; indeed, its present methods compel it to do so. I feel obliged to say that the present situation becomes most poignant when one observes the frequent and strange discrepancy between the inner requirements of humanity's evolution and the way in which people meet them. In recent times, the need has arisen to reckon with what flows into the human being from the spiritual world. Those who were intellectual, who did not reckon with what flows out of the spiritual world, made hypotheses about atoms, molecules, and the like. It was thought that bodies possessing volume point back to an atomistic formation, and so on. Out of the root causes of mankind's evolution, the need arose to grasp spiritual facts. And this instinct to grasp the spiritual expressed itself also in something, for example, like the Theosophical Society. One of its heroes is a certain Mr. Leadbeater who wrote an occult chemistry. What did he do in this book? He did something quite horrible, for he pictures the spiritual world in an atomistic sense; meaning, the materialistic manner of thinking is carried into the spiritual world.

I have recently mentioned this whole grotesque thing. Something very clever came about in the Theosophical Society. Someone wished to prove that here is one life; there is the next one (see drawing below). Now, it is so, isn't it, that something has to pass from the preceding life to the later one. One sees the body fall into decay. A proper materialist says that the body disintegrates and it is all over with man. A theosophist, however, wants another earth life to come; so, something must pass from one life to the other! The proper materialist says that all atoms unite with the earth. The theosophist also does not think in any other way than materialistically, but at the same time he tries to think “theosophically.” He wants something to pass from the first to the next life. So he says: “Of course, the atoms become one with the earth; one atom, however, remains and it passes through the whole period of existence between death and a new birth. There it appears again. This is the permanent atom.” One atom! Oh, the theosophists were especially proud then, when they discovered this “permanent” atom! They had no inkling that in this way they were carrying materialism into the spiritual world conception! Materialism induced them to believe that something—they never said what it was—of the many atoms that sink down into the ground is saved; and this fortunate, saved, permanent atom then reappears in the next incarnation. Much has been written about this permanent atom. It is nothing more than an example of the fact that something was borne into spiritual science that people could not rise above, namely, materialism. It permeates, by the way, the whole description of man, in the way it is frequently presented in the literature of the Theosophical Society. As I have often pointed out, they present the physical body as dense, the etheric body as thinner, the astral body as still thinner. Then come degrees of thinness, where even thinking and conceptions become quite thin. Yet, one is still dealing with something substantial, like mist; hence, although Buddhi and Atma are mists, they are still tangible as mists. One does not have the will power truly to discard materialism even in one's conceptual life; to pass from concepts of matter to concepts of the spirit.

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All these things prove how closely human beings are tied to the old ways of thinking. Out of such considerations, anybody who honestly wishes to acknowledge spiritual science should take up the inner challenge to test himself as to how far he has freed himself from the old materialistic concepts; or, when he turns to something spiritual, to what extent he imagines this spiritual manner in materialistic pictures, not being aware of the fact that they are just pictures.

It is always a matter of being conscious of this. For if, say, I were to draw a picture of one of you on the blackboard, the picture could mean a lot to me, if the person in question were no longer present. But if I were then to imagine that the person in the picture would shake my hand, or would speak to me, in other words, that he would be the actual person, then I would be suffering from illusions! Therefore, one may naturally sensualize the spiritual in pictures, but one must always be aware of the fact that they are nothing but pictures.

In the case of words, too, people must realize more and more clearly that language is on the way to turning the word into a gesture, and that we should go no further than to allow the word to indicate something to us that no longer is contained in the word. All words will have to take the same direction that proper names have taken.

For philosophers, I have something even better to say. Philosophers of recent times have set up any number of theories. When I say, “The child is small,” they have a concept of “small;” they have a concept of “child.” The “is,” however, the copula of the two—what does it mean? Oh, much has been written about this copula even in the philosophical sense, not just from the grammatical or philological standpoint. Everything that has been written about it suffers from the fact that this verb, “is,” no longer has the meaning of which people speak. It has already emancipated itself from its meaning and the soul content has become a different one. Thus, people in fact philosophize about something that no longer lives in the soul in an alive sense.

This is just an incidental philosophical remark which perhaps doesn't have much significance, but it is supposed to draw your attention to the fact that something that is not noticed by the outer world is by no means noticed immediately by the philosophers. Nevertheless, it is often true that the philosophers are the last to notice the things that really occur in the world, and many of our philosophical systems lag considerably behind what exists outside of themselves!

By proceeding principally from the example of language, however, I have tried to show you quite concretely how present-day human development presents itself. What actually takes place in regard to human development can really only be seen by looking at super-sensible facts. Anthropology can no longer discover what actually takes place, only anthroposophy. This is the reason why anthroposophical cultural thinking must lie at the foundation of everything that constitutes work for the progress of mankind.

• 94 . Ernest Haeckel: Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, Leipzig, 1891, p. 871.
• 95 . Max Christlieb: 1862–1916.
• 96 . In “Soziale Zukunft,” #5–7, Dornach, 1920.

After a relatively long period of time, I am able to speak to you again today. It came about because of the importance of the General Meeting convening today, and the opportunity of my current brief presence in Germany. It has certainly already occurred to you that there must be a connection between my long absence and the nature of the time in which we find ourselves. The relationship between the events of the times and the very slight activity—if it is even possible to speak of such—that I can afford, particularly for the Berlin Branch, must be obvious to you.

Before entering into the order of business for today's session, I would like to make a few preliminary remarks. First, I wish to remind you of certain words I spoke in the early spring of 1914 in a lecture cycle in Vienna, which were intended to point to what then ensued. It was then that I spoke words which have since been printed. The words I uttered at the time indicated that civilized humanity lives in a kind of social sickness, in a sort of social carcinoma or cancer; that the' whole way in which cultural, political, and economic matters are handled is such that it will undoubtedly lead to an outbreak of this creeping cancer, and that it will be bound to change from a chronic condition into an acute one. Of course, many clever people at that time took this statement, which I made out of a grief-stricken heart with regard to the immediate future, to be mere fantasy, an empty paraphrase of a pessimistic mood. At that time, the majority of people the world over naturally preferred listening to the sound of voices like the one, for example, of an official personage in the German Reichstag a short time after, who said that the relationships of the Central European governments to those of the other European countries were absolutely satisfactory, and that one could count on general lessening of tension in the near future. You may remember another remark made here in Berlin at a public session of the Reichstag—that the friendly, neighborly relations with the court at Petersburg were becoming more and more favorable, and that good relations with London existed as well, and so on. These were the words of “practical men,” while those who spoke of the spiritual world had to speak of a sickness, of a slowly growing carcinoma. Actually those who Claim to be practical men still speak the same way today, in absolutely the same way, although the results of their practicality have brought about the events of the most recent years. Such speaking continues, while what is brought forth from spiritual research and from social insight is either thrown to the winds or, as is the case in Germany, attacked. Furthermore, the worst is that what comes from spiritual research is being secretly persecuted and defamed, defamed in the worst way possible. Thus, anthroposophical spiritual science and everything connected with it today belongs among the most defamed matters in the world. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that today there already are a great number of souls who, out of the totality of the principles of spiritual science, have gained a feeling that only out of this science can arise what can save us from general disaster. One must say this today, even if foolish or malevolent people accuse one of vanity or ambition for saying such things.

I can say—and I wish to keep these introductory words brief—that the whole attitude, the whole manner of discussions that I had to take part in during the actual wartime has not been understood. With the year 1914, a time came when considerations in the ordinary sense had to cease and what was supposed to occur through words had to turn into actions. Humanity, however, is used to taking words in the sense of the journalistic style, not in the style that should enter into mankind particularly through spiritual science. Thus, many things have been misunderstood during the so called war years. Something that was of eminent importance to me was overlooked. It was probably known to most of you that before the first year of the war was over, I had a small book published, Gedanken waehrend der Zeit des Krieges (Thoughts During the Time of War).^T1 It sold out rather quickly. If one would have considered the matter from the viewpoint from which, unfortunately, things are still considered today, despite the fact that the distress has become so great, it would have been a matter of course to publish a new edition. I opposed the printing of a new edition for the simple reason that the pamphlet had not fulfilled its task. This pamphlet—you can get hold of it again insofar as it is still available—was a question addressed to the German nation. It was not intended to be received in such a way as to lead one to assume the same tone which a great many members of the Central European countries had adopted during the war, and which is common today where surreptitious, poisonous defamations are leveled against anthroposophy. Nothing at all materialized of the expectation that I had concerning this pamphlet, the understanding that I had expected. A new edition would have been meaningful only if my expectation had been realized. So, it did not appear, but disappeared from public life, and in my opinion had to disappear. The proof of the lack of understanding given by this fact had to be taken very, very seriously. This was misunderstood in the same way many other utterances have been thoroughly misunderstood, utterances that were meant to elevate and ignite people's spirit in order to bring about what should have been made to prevail directly in Central Europe, namely, a re-enlivening of the spiritual life that had been manifest around the turn of the eighteenth century. Spiritual science is basically the revitalization of this spiritual life in the form it must take in modern humanity.

Take everything that is written in the different kinds of newspapers today, in popular literature and even scientific popular writings; take what is written in Koenigsberg or in Berlin, Vienna or in Graz, in Munich or in Stuttgart, and compare it with what is written today in Paris, Rome, London, Chicago or New York—you will find a great similarity. You will find the same keynote in it, the same spirit that must be overcome. On the other hand, if we seek another similarity and compare what is written today in Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Munich, Hamburg, or Bremen with what such great minds as Herder, Goethe, Fichte and Schiller once proclaimed, then we must say that it is fundamentally different. All the declamations using quotations of sentences by Fichte or even Goethe that have taken effect, all that has been produced in this manner, resembles more what has been written in Chicago, New York, London, Paris and Rome than the spirit of Herder, Fichte, Schiller and Goethe. The tidal wave that has flooded Central European life from the West has also swept away what should have lived an in us. Nothing of the old spirit could be detected in what was prevalent in the last decades. This had to be shown to the world when the catastrophe fell upon Central Europe, and wrenched itself from my soul in the form of my “Appeal to the German Nation and the Civilized World” which I wrote then. What was connected with this could not simply be continued, as it was in the earlier form familiar to you, up till 1914.

At that time I could not appeal on the basis of something which one had to believe one could appeal to after 1918. One could not appeal to what is the proof of the decline of the general civilization—distress. Since 1918, one had to believe that the distress which had come over Central Europe would awaken the souls and make them receptive to the language intended in my “Appeal to the German People and the Civilized World.” Certainly, the fostering of the Anthroposophical Movement could not go on as before. Earlier, one had to render the service which, naturally, always has to be rendered in the Anthroposophical Movement, and which has to be rendered today as well as in all future time: to foster the eternal in the human soul, the eternal which goes beyond birth and death and points beyond the merely sensory world into the supersensory world. Now one had to wait and see whether, from among the sleeping souls of the new civilization, souls would emerge here and there who really would have some understanding of what is meant by spiritual science. One could not yet appeal on the basis of circumstances brought about by the distress. Now, however, after 1918, the time had come when a quite different prerequisite had to be placed before the spiritual eye. Mankind could have realized where it had been led by the prevalence of materialism. For what we have experienced, what we continue to experience and will experience with more impact in the future, is the external karma of materialism in the cultural, political, and economic field. It is the consequence of neglect, because people do not wish to discover in themselves the active strength to foster the spiritual life in their souls. After the publication of the Appeal to the German People, the time came when it was, above all, important to work in a positive manner towards something factual. This arose purely out of the possibilities of life. I had to grasp the first hands reaching out to me, for each moment was precious. The first to reach out to me were from Stuttgart. It was a question of protecting and nurturing what could be fostered based on the initiative of some friends there. If mankind had understood at that time what was at stake, had it not failed even under the lesson taught by distress, it would have been enough to do something like this from one center, for it could have had an exemplary effect. But what happened?

In order that you can see how these matters must be understood, I would like to touch upon something else. Before I traveled in the spring of 1919 from Switzerland to Stuttgart for the first lecture tour, a well known pacifist came to me. Although he was willing to sign my Appeal to the German People, he hesitated and asked for more information about it. He asked me, “What are you counting on in Germany?” I believe he put it like this, “You are counting on the second revolution.” This was in the spring of 1919 and people in many quarters in Germany reckoned with a second revolution after the first one in the autumn of 1918. He believed that what was supposed to come into being in the world through the Threefold Social Organism was only a kind of vehicle, a stepping stone, for the impulses of the second revolution. I said, “No! This is not at all my opinion. First, because I do not believe that those people who might bring about a second revolution in Germany will be able to develop the slightest understanding for the true meaning of the Threefold Social Organism, as long as the old leaders are still active. Secondly, because I do not at all believe in a second revolution. Rather, I believe that this second revolution will consist of a kind of chronic infirmity and will not reach an acute outbreak. What I am simply and solely counting upon is that as many souls as possible will associate themselves with what is born out of spiritual depths, souls who will accept it impartially out of the necessity of the times, quite part from the intentions of the old leaders.” So, I did not reckon with those things that many people thought I was counting on. When I then arrived in Stuttgart, it stood to reason in a certain sense that the broad masses of people were addressed first. The broad masses of the people, though also partly paralyzed by the events of the war, were those who initially wished to hear something. In my innermost soul I knew how matters stood. For I knew that as long as the leaders who remain from the old days have the party leadership and the people firmly in hand—be they leaders of the parties to the right or the left, even those of the extreme left—nothing can be done with the people. But imagine what would have happened if I would have said that I was not in favor of addressing the masses. Nobody had to believe me, but if I had not addressed them, one would have said afterwards, “If only Steiner would have turned to the broad masses, everything would have turned out differently!” When one is dealing with realities, one must also give proof by means of realities. It had first to be proven by realities that out of all the left-wing parties, defamers and phrase-mongers would rise up against what was just beginning by means of the concept of three-foldness to be comprehended by the masses of the people. We were well on the way. One could say that within a few days we had won thousands of people. But it was just this comprehension of three-foldness by the great masses of people that drove the old leaders to their defamations and phrase-mongering. So it came about that from this side, seemingly at first, the ground was pulled from under our feet.

What could be hoped for from the other side? Well, it serves no purpose in regard to these matters to cling to illusions; the one and only thing that can help us in the present is to speak the truth. A leading personality who had come up in the party that called itself, by a strange interpretation of the words, "German Democratic Party," a person who had appeared at one of the meetings held at that time, said to me, “You know, if we were in a Position to let more people capable of explaining matters in this manner speak to the broad masses, then well and good—one could go along with it. But one pair of hands is not enough and we therefore rely temporarily more on firearms, on force. For the next fifteen to twenty years, it will still be necessary to keep the masses down.” This was essentially the predominant attitude of the Bourgeoisie; the other was the activity of the proletariat.

So there really remains nothing else but to take what can be drawn out of the spiritual foundations and to represent it in such a way that more and more people can be found who will receive it into their minds. Back of this, we must have something that was born out of this insight and should have been fostered. Before the war, this building was set up on the border of Switzerland, France and Germany in order to look out from Central Europe into the wide world, in particular towards the West, and received the name it must rightfully have, the name Goetheanum. For, in regard to spiritual matters, we are facing worldwide tasks! Today, we cannot face spiritual matters as we would merely personal matters. To do that would lead us into ruin. This is the reason I had to limit my activity during recent times to southern Germany and Switzerland. Truly, I am longing for times when the horizon of my activity can widen again, but this does not depend on myself alone. It depends, above all, on the understanding that people will show toward this activity. I may perhaps find the opportunity in the next few days to point to a number of things which pretend to be “understanding” and which proceed from certain quarters, which work more in an underground manner by means of counterfeiting of letters, falsifying interviews, by defamations and lies.

For the moment, what I have said was merely mentioned in order to point out the reasons why it was necessary for us to abandon our activity in Berlin temporarily; to indicate the circumstances that made it necessary to appeal also in regard to Berlin to what must be appealed to in this age. Have we not been active anthroposophically for almost two decades over a large territory? Were we not justified in hoping that people would be found that could carry on the work independently? Well, they were found. They were found here in Berlin, too. And with the help of these friends the attempt must be made, first of all, to continue the work in Berlin. For this purpose we have gathered together here. In the General Meeting, we shall have to decide how to continue the work here in Berlin.

• T1. Contained in Aufsaetze ueber die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage; GA #24, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach.

Among the concepts of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that must work toward the future development of man's soul being in the most fruitful, the most intensive, indeed the most necessary way, will be the concept of man's prenatal existence. Let us consider for a moment what will be added in this direction to those concepts and feelings that have for so long held sway in Western humanity. When anyone professing a faith, regardless of what religious denomination, speaks today of eternity, of the immortality of the human soul, he thinks mainly of nothing but living on after death, the continued existence of the human soul. In the future, when the viewpoints of spiritual science will have taken hold of a sufficiently large number of people, one will, above all, speak of the human soul's existence before birth. One will speak of the human soul's sojourn in spiritual worlds before it descended to physical earth existence. Mainly, one will speak of what takes place before birth or before conception, just as one speaks of what happens to the human soul after death. Today, one does not sufficiently realize the significance that such mention of prenatal existence will have for the whole of human life, not only for the inner but also external life.

Let us consider for a moment what this means when we look at the growing child; when we see how, from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, the physiognomy of the face assumes its outward form from within, how various features appear, smooth themselves out or recede, and so on. As yet, we really do not realize what secrets of existence we are looking into when watching such a developing human being. How great will be the intimate ardor with which such a developing human being will be viewed when one has the underlying awareness: Before this human being was conceived and born, its soul-spiritual entity was above in soul-spiritual worlds. There, it had experiences by means of soul-Spirit organs, just as man during physical existence has experiences through his physical organs.

We can go a step further into the inner nature of the human soul and, from that standpoint, get some idea of the change of views in this regard. Take the various religious denominations that speak to people today in sermons and doctrine about eternity and the immortality of the soul based on their century-old traditions. One should not speak about these matters from a theoretical standpoint; one should speak from the standpoint of life itself. One should follow the nuances of feeling out of which flow most sermons and theological doctrines about the human soul's claim to eternity. I am not speaking about the content so much as the motives, intentions, and feelings that underlie what is being said in sermons and theological doctrine. It is a fact that, quite aside from what is true, a person can have the feeling, springing from an inner egotism of the soul, that the soul ought not to be destroyed along with the body! It is really an element of soul egotism that desires not to be destroyed. One cannot bear the event of dissolution; one thirsts for a continued existence of the human soul after death. It is this feeling of thirsting for immortality to which sermons and theological doctrines appeal. This gives the basis for what is spoken to people of various religious denominations about the eternity of the soul. One finds believers by making concessions to their hidden inner soul egotism. Actually, one tells such people something for which they thirst, the opposite of which they certainly do not wish to hear. By telling them of the continuation of life after death, one discovers the access to human faith. In no other way would one find this access to faith, if the human soul were not thirsting out of egotism for the soul's indestructibility after death.

Now we know from spiritual science that the human soul does, in fact, retain its existence after death. From the many descriptions that have been given in the course of the work in this movement, we could also see that one can speak with precision about the experiences after death based on the science of initiation.

To begin with, we will not speak about what really lies beyond death, only about the motives that underlie the preaching of the doctrine of immortality. Spiritual science cannot appeal to these motives. In fact, spiritual science will not make any appeal when it is supposed to speak of the human soul's existence prior to birth or conception, for it actually has nothing to do with the soul's egotism. As a rule, people give little thought to how they fared prior to birth or conception, as to what their experiences were before they descended into an earthly body. This leaves them more or less indifferent, and does not stimulate the same longing as does the question of life after death. An interest in this area will only be found in those in whom the desire is aroused to comprehend the human being in general, in whom exists a longing to discover that force in the human soul which, as an immortal force, actually lies at the basis of what we are in the outer physical world owing to our body. In our Western civilization, which is doomed to decline unless new forces are injected into it, we find little inclination and few concepts to which one might turn if one were to speak about this life of the human soul before birth. As you know, the churches view this teaching as heresy; they do not realize that in this they are not really teaching Christianity but Aristotelian philosophy. For when Aristotle's philosophy was included in the Church's philosophy in the Middle Ages, the doctrine of the origin, of the creation, of each individual human soul at birth, or, respectively, with the development of the human embryo in the mother's womb, gained ground increasingly in the philosophy of the Church. Thus, gradually, the belief arose that this denial of the human soul's preexistence was part of the true doctrine of the Church, of Christianity. It was not part of it. To the real practical teaching of Christianity belongs the penetration of the spiritual worlds. Penetration into the spiritual worlds cannot exist without the insight into the preexistence of the human soul.

Western civilization, however, is infected by the various creeds. Things have gone so far that we do not even have the means in our language to express what is the truth in this area. If we still adhere to a religious world concept, or to some kind of rational philosophical world view, we speak of the immortality of the human soul. In that we have this word "immortality" of the human soul, we point to the fact that with this word we actually negate only dying, not birth; for what word could we use with which we could indicate preexistence in the same way that the word "“immortality” points to postexistence? Why should we not use a word like “unbornness” which, in the face of true spiritual knowledge, has as much justification as does the word “immortality?” This can be your best evidence of what has been lost in the West directly through the activities of the various religious denominations: the truth about the being of man. This truth has been lost even in regard to language. And even insofar as language is concerned, we must bring about the awareness that the human soul is eternal, that it exists before birth as much as it exists after death. We need a word for the condition of "unbornness" just as much as for “immortality.” Now, however, when you think of an existence before birth, and turn to really sound logic, logic that makes you capable of thinking something through to its conclusion, ask yourself if you are then still capable of not speaking of repeated earth lives. Of course, if you speak only of immortality, of postexistence, you can believe: Here is one earth life, then follows an eternity of a totally different kind! Logically, you will no longer be able to do that when you speak of preexistence. For, otherwise, you would have to ask yourself: Well, how is it that I now find that the soul is not created at birth? Why should it be created somewhere along the way before birth? In short, you absolutely arrive at repeated earth lives when you speak of preexistence. It is a fundamental fact that never in earthly civilization has one come to the view of preexistence without also speaking of repeated earth lives.

But consider what it will mean for the whole approach to this earthly existence if this teaching of repeated earth lives is not to be proclaimed as a mere theory, if this view finds its way into all the feeling life and also the will life of people, if man experiences himself as a being that has descended from spiritual worlds and has embodied himself in a physical body. Then, you know that here on this earth you are a messenger of the divine spiritual world; you know that this life here is a continuation of a spiritual life. Everything that we bear in ourselves as a sense of duty, as abilities, is illuminated and energized by such an awareness, for we know that the gods have sent us down into this physical existence. Only then will this physical existence receive a task not set by itself, but set for it by the heights of heaven. This is what is special about spiritual science—it does not just speak against the intellect, it must speak to the intellect, for these matters must be comprehended. Yet, insofar as we take up the concepts derived from initiation science, these concepts penetrate the whole of our human nature; they penetrate not merely our thoughts; they penetrate feeling, our emotions; they penetrate our will and give us an awareness of the nature of our whole human condition. The manner in which one places oneself in the world in awareness of this preexistence of the human soul will be especially important for the civilization of the future. This manner will penetrate human beings with the light and with the power that is needed to struggle free from the powers of decline that otherwise will, without fail, drive civilization into barbarism at the beginning of the third millennium.

Indeed, all the segments of life take on special form when one has such an underlying view. You have often heard me speak here of the Waldorf School that was founded in Stuttgart. In teaching and education, this school is in a certain sense supposed to make practical use of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The abstract guidelines that you normally find in pedagogical textbooks, or in teaching regulations approved by the state, are by no means particularly important in the pedagogy of Waldorf School teachers. Instead, the feelings with which a teacher enters the classroom, for instance, are among the especially important things effective there. One of these feelings that is especially effective pedagogically—a feeling that every teacher is permeated with because he has been led into his calling from this aspect—is the reverence for the divine seed that, from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, is blossoming forth from within the entity that has come down from the eternal spiritual world into this physical world. The awareness, possessed by the teacher, that, through the gate of the physical body, he is dealing with a being that has descended to him out of spiritual worlds, is the basis of the deep reverence the teacher has for that human being, which, as a soul-spirit being, increasingly takes on form in the physical body. One may or may not believe it today—a teacher who has this reverence for the developing human being possesses a secret power within himself by means of which he teaches and educates quite differently from a teacher who does not have this reverence, and who believes that the human being comes into existence at the moment his physical body is released from the mother's body. For one teaches and educates not only by means of concepts and ideas. Above all, one educates with the mysterious powers and forces that pass as imponderables from teacher to child.

An example can be cited for this that can be mentioned as an especially important one. As a teacher, one may ponder over how one might give this or that child the idea of immortality. Today, of course, the usual way of thinking is that the teacher is the clever one and the child the dumb one. The clever teacher thinks: How do I teach this dumb child something of the idea of immortality? He might say to the child: Look at the chrysalis of the butterfly! Inside is the butterfly; it emerges and unfolds after the chrysalis bursts open. It is just like this in the case of the immortal soul in your body—the body bursts open. The immortal soul is just not as visible as the butterfly, but it is visible to super-sensible perception, and it flies into spiritual worlds. Certainly, one can think up something like that and teach a child the concept of immortality by means of such a comparison. In my opinion, the child will not gain much this way when the idea of immortality is taught to him by the type of teacher who is clever by today's standards. This is because he does not believe in it himself! He only thought it up. When any one of our Waldorf teachers teaches a child the idea of immortality in this way, it is quite different. For he himself believes in this picture; he is permeated with the truth that the chrysalis and the butterfly that crawls out of it were ordained by the gods to represent the picture of the human soul's immortality. He is permeated by the thought: This is the same phenomenon—the emerging butterfly on a lower level, on a higher level the soul that comes out of the body. I did not make up this picture; it has been placed into nature by the divine-spiritual powers themselves. He believes in it with the same fervor with which the child should believe, and this faith is what matters. If the teacher has this belief, then he can also secure it in the child; if he does not have it, or if he has it only as an abstract idea in himself, this idea will not have a fruitful effect. For it depends upon the feelings that flow into the classroom, upon the feelings that are kindled in our own soul out of the knowledge of preexistence.

Only if one takes seriously all that follows from preexistence will one gain an accurate concept of the connection between the human soul and the human body. If you take any handbook of knowledge concerning the soul—one calls this psychology—you find all kinds of theories on how the soul works upon the body, and so forth. You would not become very knowledgeable through these theories, for they are abstract webs of thought, and when you are finished with them you don't know much more than you did before. For, in psychology, all kinds of hypotheses are merely set forth on how the soul affects the body.

If one knows how the prenatal human being incarnates itself in a physical body, then one follows the developing human being in the child quite differently. We find that there are two stages in the developing human being. The first stage is indicated by the change of teeth around age seven. What does this change of teeth signify? It is a much more powerful change in the whole human organism than one usually believes. Today, however, one only observes these things outwardly. When people eventually accustom themselves to consider these things on the soul level in the way it can be done through spiritual science, what will they realize? They will say: Strange! Until the change of teeth the child does not really form solid, contoured concepts; to be sure, the child remembers a lot but does not retain its memories in concepts; actual intelligence does not yet appear. Just observe a child carefully and notice how, during the time when the teeth change, the faculty of actual intelligence increasingly emerges. Today one has no sense of the difference existing between a seven-year-old and a five-year old regarding the development of intelligence. If one would only observe how the soul gradually emerges after age seven—the Waldorf School teachers must observe it, for their whole teaching and education is based upon it—one would immediately understand in which direction one has to look in order to answer the question: Where was the element of intelligence that emerges after the seventh year? Where was it concealed? It was within the body; it was active in the organism. The same element that emancipates itself at age seven and turns into intelligence was within the body, was forming the body, and the culmination point of its activity of shaping the body is reached when the second teeth appear. The power that thrusts itself into being with the second teeth has been active in the whole organism. It is, however, a power that is active in the body only up to the seventh year. After that it has nothing more to do with the body; it then becomes intelligence. It already was intelligence earlier; as such, however, it was at work in the body. Look at what takes place in the child's body up until the seventh year. Next, look at what the child has as intelligence after age seven. You are looking at the same thing. Through birth, intelligence descended. At first it was not active as intelligence, as soul being; it becomes active in this way gradually after the seventh year. Here you have a concrete view of the working together of the soul with the body. Now you are able to see what was mainly at work in the human body until age seven. You do not have the foolish abstract concepts, fabricated and put into our textbooks and handbooks, concerning the interaction of body and soul. You have the concrete views of what works throughout seven years in blood and nerves, in muscles and bones, and then becomes the child's intelligence.

In this way, when one gradually penetrates into what spiritual science is able to give, one comes to know the human being in the totality of his nature, in his soul and bodily being. Now, man stands before us in a completely different way. It is strange—materialistic science aimed at knowing what matter was, and yet could not know anything, for example, of the nature of the forces that are active in the child's body until the seventh year. Now comes spiritual science and teaches how one really comes to know matter; spiritual science penetrates right into the material element. This is the tragedy of materialism—it becomes more and more abstract and no longer teaches what matter really is. What does the modern physician really know of the liver and kidney, of the stomach and lungs—that is, of the material structures? One day when the insights attained through spiritual science are applied to medicine and natural science, when something of what I tried to show in the course held in Dornach this spring⁹⁷ penetrates modern science, one will see that spirit insight is called upon to throw light even into the essence of matter, while the materialist confronts the whole world like a blind man standing before color. Material existence is just what the materialist never comes to know.

A second stage in the life of the human being is puberty; in the male sex it is marked by the change of voice, in the female by changes in the body that spread over the whole organism, not focusing on one organ as clearly as does man's change of voice. In both sexes the changes fall somewhere around the fourteenth year. Once again, this is an essential change in the organism. What is really happening there? What is different after puberty? The whole life of will of the human being is quite changed! Try to compare a nineteen year-old with a thirteen-year-old, directing your attention to the concrete life of will. The whole life of will becomes quite different; otherwise feelings of love could not enter the life of will. Again, a transformation in the soul life! When through spiritual science we investigate what is going on, we come to the following: We increasingly grow together with the outer world, especially in the time between the change of teeth and puberty; we grasp more and more of this outer world; our will becomes more and more oriented and we learn to bring it into harmony with the things and events of the external world. When one really studies the whole complex confronting us here, one finds that during this time the human being acquires for himself the will element, not from within, but through contact with the outer world. It was out of deep intuition that Goethe said, “A talent is formed in the stillness, a character in the stream of life.”⁹⁸

Talent springs from within. Character, that is, the element of will, is formed in the stream of the world, in the exchange between inner and outer forces. The human being always has to defend himself against all that comes toward him from the outer world; the inner being has to react; it has to resist what comes from the outer world. This will developing element, which approaches man through the alternating communication with the external world, is confronted by an inner force from the opposite direction. This force accumulates in the larynx of the male, in the female in other organs. This accumulation, this collision between the outer element of will and the inner will element, is expressed in the transformation of the larynx or similar organs. Here you even see the spiritual of the outer world working on the human being.

Now bring all this together with the views of spiritual science with which you are already familiar. We know that we descend from the soul-spiritual world into the physical world through conception or birth. We know, on the other hand, that with our astral body and ego we enter a spiritual world every time we go to sleep. The spiritual world, which gives us our soul, works upon the shaping of our form until the seventh year, but after that it becomes our intelligence. Now this intelligence is confronted by the will element—actually, from birth onward, but especially so at puberty, because the interchange between them takes place then. This struggle between the external will element and the inner element of intelligence; between that spirituality we sleep through—passing through it from the moment we fall asleep until we awaken—and the particular realm of the spiritual world that we went through before our birth and conception respectively; the struggle between what we have brought along and what we sleep through each night expresses itself in the development of the larynx, in the development of what occurs in the organism during puberty. A spiritual element works with another spiritual element. We go through a spiritual world between falling asleep and waking up. Concealed in this spiritual world is the will that is communicated to us; concealed in our organism is the intelligence that we bring through birth into physical existence. We can understand the human body when we experience it as an outer revelation of something taking place out of the spiritual domain.

Everywhere we look, and especially when we look upon the human being, we find that spiritual forces are the basis of the world. We only begin to understand man when we actually envision the interchange between these spiritual forces. Mankind will take up all of this in the future. Then, humanity will find it incomprehensible how a certain age could once have come to the point of saying: There is the sense world; in it work atoms, molecules, tiny particles whose collision with each ether is supposed to be brought about through certain movements of light or electricity. No, it is not the effects of atoms and molecules; spiritual forces are at work there! Behind all that is perceived by the senses, spiritual forces are at work. The dramatic reversal will be that man no longer will believe he is walking through a mist of atoms and molecules; he will be aware that with every step he is going through spiritual worlds. It is spirit worlds that dwell in him, and spirit worlds that build him up, that transform him. Just as our materialistic faith, the mere postmortem doctrine, has, in its final consequence, led us into what is now happening in the East of Europe, so the teaching of the spirit will lead us in the future into an existence truly worthy of man. But only this spirit teaching, only this, can lead to a real social reconstruction, and not until mankind comprehends this can things improve; they will only get worse and worse.

Certainly, all of you have often allowed a saying by Christ from the Gospel to pass through your souls: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.”⁹⁹ What does this word of Christ mean? It has no meaning for the person who believes in atoms and molecules because he assumes that, prior to this earth existence with its animals, plants and human beings, there was a nebulous formation, and that out of it, the sun and the planets gradually developed; then, along with the conglobulation and constant rotation, plants, animals and human beings eventually originated. Right-feeling people go along with what the famous historian Hermann Grimm¹⁰⁰ said: “Future ages will have difficulty explaining the nonsense of the Kant-Laplace theory, for a carrion bone being circled by a hungry dog is more appetizing than this theory!” This is what a person with healthy feelings says. For when we look out into the world of the senses, what is behind the colors, what is behind the sounds? Not atoms and molecules, but spiritual forces that collide with our own spiritual forces and so form the carpet of color, the network of sounds, and the sphere of warmth that spread out around us. If, then, this is what is in truth around us—I have already identified it in the eighties of the last century in my introduction to Goethe's natural-scientific writings—namely, metamorphosing sensations and behind them a spiritual world, then we shall experience what one would see if one could travel from earth to a distant star and from there look back at the earth. From there, one would not see what is in our surroundings—trees, clouds, plants and animals—one would only behold what is contained within the human skin. What you see in the star is not what the beings of this other star see, for that has no meaning for a strange star. The light that streams toward you from other stars is not a process in the external world; it is a process within the beings that inhabit these stars, just as what is within your skin becomes visible only when earth is viewed from another star. When you grasp this you will no longer say that the world came into being out of a multitude of atoms that conglobulated. Human beings form ideals; what is to become of such ideals if earth turns again into nothing but a heap of atoms? The whole moral world, all ethical, moral and religious ideas that ever arose, would be lost, forgotten and destroyed, if only matter and energy were everlasting. Energy and matter resolve themselves into sensations. The spirit that we bear within us is eternal, and this spirit also appears physically an another celestial body. What exists outside the human skin is in no way present for that other heavenly body. Therefore we can say that a certain nature surrounds us now; we are born again and again; this nature will no longer be there in the future; it will have been replaced by a different nature. Of everything that is present now, only what dwells within the human skin will still exist in future times. It was therefore out of a profound intuitive knowledge that Christ Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away!” He meant, All that you see around outside will pass away, but the words that issue from My mouth will not pass away; they will endure!

Now let us look from this point of view at the lies of today's world. We hear it proclaimed from the pulpits that the human soul is immortal; we hear it proclaimed from the universities that matter and energy are everlasting. Then come the cowardly compromisers who try to fit these two concepts together. It would only be honest if those who believe in the eternity of matter would say that there is no immortality of the soul, and if those who believe in the soul's immortality would deny the eternity of matter. They would then have to confess to the truly Christian saying, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words”—meaning, the content of my soul—“will not pass away!” The two concepts are incompatible; if people had courage, the materialistic university professors would admit that Christianity has no validity for them. Those whose task it is to proclaim Christianity would have to fight against the materialism of the universities for the sake of Christianity. The fact that this is not done, that people try to glue the two viewpoints together—this is the great lie in our time regarding life. Where the attitude of falsehood prevails, its seeds come up; the germ of lying proliferates and creeps into the other aspects of life. It has done so extensively in the course of time because men did not try to appeal along with postexistence to a knowledge that would unconditionally point to preexistence, to a life before birth. All untruthfulness of life, prevalent today in so many areas, springs from the fact that so many wished to speak only of postexistence—something that appeals merely to soul egotism, not to knowledge. The spirit of untruthfulness cannot be halted if it takes hold of the best in us, namely, our innermost conviction.

These matters can only be rightly and fully evaluated, however, in connection with the whole of human life. Throughout the Middle Ages and right into our time, one spoke only of “right” and “wrong.” Everyone, of course, believed he had hit upon the right thing and whatever did not conform with that was wrong. When people spoke of right and wrong they spoke from the standpoint of logic. Logic was the great pride of mankind. It is already hardly the case today. From America, a teaching has come that has already taken hold of philosophy and, in Germany, has assumed an especially grotesque form. This is no longer the logical teaching of true and false; it is the so-called pragmatism, the teaching of what is useful. One believes that something is true, not because one has perceived it logically, but because people like William James¹⁰¹ and others say that true and false are merely other expressions for what is useful or damaging. We notice that something is useful; therefore we say it is right; we note that something is damaging to us; therefore we consider it wrong. In Germany, this has asserted itself as the “as-if” philosophy. There actually exists a thick book on this by a certain university professor, Vaihinger,¹⁰² who taught philosophy for a long time in Halle. This “as-if” philosophy goes something like this: One does not know whether atoms or molecules exist, but it is useful to explain the world as if there were atoms. One does not know whether the good has any everlasting significance, but it is useful to explain the world as if this were so. One does not know if there is a God, but it is useful for humanity—more useful than the opposite—to view the world as if there is a God, and so on. I am only expressing this with a few paradigmatic words. This “as-if” philosophy is the German version of the American teaching that what is useful is true and what is damaging is false.

Beside these viewpoints there existed yet another in all the old cultures. In the late Greek culture, it was already no longer present, but it was still noticeable in more ancient Greek times by those who study this era not in a professorial manner but according to truth. In those times one did not say of a viewpoint in the logical sense that it was “true” or “false”; one said of it that it was “healthy” or “sick.” That signified something! Today we really talk of health or sickness only when we refer to physical man, for in ordinary life we refer to nothing any longer but him. We know that from somewhere in the cosmos come the forces that make us healthy or sick. But when we speak of soul and spirit, we no longer refer to health or sickness; for there we have changed over to abstractions, to mere theory. In the cultures of antiquity, when somebody said something that was correct, one had the feeling that this organized his spirit in a correct sense and he was healthy. When he said something that was awry and what we today abstractly call “false,” people sensed concretely that this came from a sick soul mood. “Healthy” and “sick” were terms that were applicable also to the soul; actually, above all, one felt this way about the soul. Out of this feeling originated a word about which scholars have later written long philological treatises—the word “catharsis” in Greek tragedy, a word that comes out of the Mysteries. According to Aristotle, catharsis takes place in the human soul when it watches a tragedy. Fear and compassion are stimulated in the soul, leading to a kind of crisis, to catharsis, and the human being in turn is purified by fear and pity. Thus, the process that occurs in the human soul when it looks upon a tragedy is described as a healing process occurring in the strengthened soul. There, in aesthetics, in art, you still have the concept of a curative element and of an element that causes an affliction.

We must return to this! We must once more regain the concept that what we now abstractly call “right” comes about because the soul, descending from prenatal existence, gains control over the body and organizes it so that it will submit as malleable substance to the soul forces that make it healthy. This is the truth. It is the sick soul element which comes from a soul that is unable to use its body as an apparatus, a soul that expresses itself obliquely and darkly through its body. We must once again learn to replace the concepts “true” and “false” with “healthy” and “sick.” We must again experience an inner pain that can overcome us when somebody expresses wrong views; we must again sense inner satisfaction over truth. Not until we speak equally of prenatal existence and postmortem existence, however, not until we learn to use a word like “unbornness” just as we use the word immortality, shall we feel that way. The fact that we do not feel this now shows how far we have strayed from the knowledge of that spiritual world from which the human being actually comes.

You will find that those matters I have only briefly summarized today are described in more detail in numerous published cycles of my lectures and books. From such descriptions you can realize what a change it signifies in the whole constitution of the human soul when spiritual science will be the very nerve center of human feeling; when human beings will go about in the world with an awareness of their being such as the one attainable from spiritual science. People today indulge only the egotism of the soul that wishes to cling to a postexistence; they do not want to press onward to a real comprehension of the human soul which had experiences before birth, just as it will have experiences after death. The whole, complete eternity of the human soul is only grasped by one who can not only speak of immortality but, based an insight, of “unbornness,” too. We can believe, because belief always comes from a desire for life after death. We can know of the life before birth and the life after death as two things that are inseparable. Knowledge takes in the total being of the human soul; belief is concerned only with the postmortem existence. Knowledge of the spiritual is what the human being must struggle to acquire, but this is what people today strongly resist. Real knowledge of the spiritual world can only flow out of spiritual science. Out of spiritual science will come a constitution of the human soul that is healthy, not only true, and physical healing will be a necessary consequence of spiritual healing. Then man will not view the earth in the manner of modern geology as a huge mineral globe; he will view it as a spiritual being of which he himself is a member. That is what we must work toward.

This was meant to be the first part of my observations today.¹⁰³

• 97 . Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Science and Medicine, GA 312 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1948).
• 98 . Goethe: Tasso I, 2.
• 99 . See Note #90
• 100. See Note #24
• 101. William James: 1842–1910. American psychologist and philosopher.
• 102. See Note #36
• 103. The second part is unknown.

This volume contains seventeen of the more than 6000 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) during the early part of this century. As with many of his lectures Steiner assumes a certain familiarity with his basic writings an the part of his listeners, a familiarity which can be gained by reading one or more of his introductory works. Chief among these are four books: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, An Outline of Occult Science, Theosophy, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. The readers unfamiliar with the above works might be well advised to consider first reading one or more of them before attempting this volume both as a way of increasing their appreciation and comprehension of this work and in fairness to Steiner who explains in detail how he came to his knowledge in these four volumes.

Some of the volumes of Steiner's lectures are known as cycles because they addressed a single theme and were delivered over a short period of time to the same audience. The seventeen lectures collected in this sequence do not, strictly speaking, constitute a cycle. They are strung together along a definite path stretching between the dates of August 6 to September 18, 1920; but two were delivered before a very different audience, in Berlin. Added to these lectures is an address to the General Assembly of the Berlin branch of the Anthroposophical Society.

To the careful student of Rudolf Steiner's work it may seem, however, as if these lectures indeed form a definite cycle. They transmit a powerful appeal to all those who are deeply concerned with the condition of the social fabric, irrespective of political partisanship; but who look to its cultural and philosophical basis as a means for social action and renewal.

The range of these lectures is enormous, and thereby symptomatic of Rudolf Steiner's contribution to the civilization of our time. We only need look at some of the themes of the lectures:

Spiritual science must be a knowledge of action.

The twelve senses of the human being in their relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

The science of initiation and the impulse for freedom.

Viewpoints for the forming of a healthy social judgment.

The lectures turn to profound and deeply stirring observations concerning the inherent tasks and intentions of the peoples in the West and East, and describe the diverse influences upon them through various spiritual powers. To this stream a talk is added in honor of Hegel's 150th birthday, making us aware of the pervasive, albeit mostly unconscious, influence of this thinker upon the West, and by no means only in the form in which Communism claimed him.

The lectures which follow belong perhaps to the most exciting ones we can find in Rudolf Steiner's lectures an the fundamentals for a social renewal. Like a slow-growing plant they begin to open only gradually into full significance.

The initiative to make this volume available in English arose out of a circle of people, including this writer, who have long concerned themselves with social renewal. We are a group who have chosen to live and work with handicapped people all over the world in special communities, the Camphill communities.

The social forms developed by these Camphill communities are new types of villages or related forms of communal life. In these villages we have enabled exciting relationships, new ways and new values of labor to emerge and for these strivings this volume might become a constant source of strength and encouragement. Just as there exists a curative course¹ by Rudolf Steiner which provides insight and inspiration for educators of handicapped children, so these lectures can be regarded as a source of inspiration for the whole range of activities which unfold as social therapy. The practical labor arising therefrom thus could give the right background for applying the indications given in these lectures. The lectures would then provide truly new ways of understanding the impulses and efforts of community life. They would demonstrate what it means to become free from those often highly developed thoughts which have, nevertheless, led the actions of individuals, groups and nations into catastrophic situations for several hundred years. And they still continue to do so despite increasingly desperate calls for change! But do we truly want to change? Without insights of a spiritual nature we cannot and will not attempt to change. Neither can it be expected to be an easy task or to be done by the mere acceptance of some creed.

Rudolf Steiner says in the 10th lecture:

We come closer and closer to total decline precisely because our intellectuals will not venture to construe the tasks in this world by utilizing ideas other than those gained from waking life, from what lies between birth and death.

At the same time we must be aware of the slow, though fundamental process to which we can aspire when we take seriously what Rudolf Steiner has to say at the very beginning of the 12th lecture:

One becomes acquainted with the same things from everchanging viewpoints; thus, conviction increasingly gains in strength.

This growing conviction becomes firmer, the more flexible the standpoint, the deeper and the more truthful the shift from one to another perspective is, and it brings that certainty we can see in the planetary companions of the sun as they move in their regular orbits, in that galaxy to which they belong, to which we ourselves belong. Ultimately, this is the cosmos of love and truth.

The practical-minded expert will either smile or get angry at this. What role shall such lofty sentiments play in a world of brutality, deceit and despair? In the midst of such conditions (where the practitioners of old vices and their political and power-seeking responses continue to be at work, Rudolf Steiner spoke the following, describing neither a wish nor an ethical utopia, but describing rather his sober insight into a law, that is akin to a law of nature.

This will be the healthy social relationship in the future. You can see it already today. Labor will be a free activity out of the insight into the necessity that labor has to take place. Men labor because they look at the human being and recognize that he needs labor. What was labor in the ancient world? It was a tribute; it was done because it had to be done. And what is labor today? It rests upon self-satisfaction, and that kind of enforcement which is exerted upon us by egoism. Because we are where we are, we want to be paid for our labor. We work for our own sakes, for our own wages. In the future we will labor for the sake of our fellow human beings, because they need what we can work for. This will be the reason for our work. We will clothe our fellow human beings, we will make our work available to them for what they are in need of—as a completely free activity. Wages have to be completely separated from this. A tribute was labor in the past—an offering it will be in the future. Labor has nothing to do with self-satisfaction, nothing to do with payment. If I allow my work to be dictated by the needs of my brothers with a view to what mankind really needs, then I will find myself in a free relationship to it, and my work becomes an offering for mankind. Then I shall work with all my strength, for I love mankind and put my strength at its disposal.²

Who cannot imagine the unbelieving, if not contemptuous, faces raised upon hearing this—the cynicism and impatience? For all those who at times play at intellectual games with Rudolf Steiner's indications, another paragraph of the same lecture shall be quoted. Rudolf Steiner continues:

This must become possible and will only be possible when life's requirements are separated from work. And this will indeed happen in the future—no one will be the owner of the products of his own labor. Mankind must be educated for free labor, one for all and all for one. Each one will have to act accordingly. Today, if you would found a small community in which each one throws into a communal account what he earns and each one works as best he can, then his very life's existence—his needs—will be brought about out of the communal consumption. This will cause a greater freedom than the ordering of wages according to production. When that happens we shall turn in the right direction. Today, this could flow into law, into each regulation; of course, not in absolute terms, but approximately. One could today build up factories in this way. But it will require healthy, clear and sober thinking in the sense of anthroposophy.

A deeper understanding of all this can be obtained from the present volume of lectures.

If Rudolf Steiner's printed work needs a preface or an introduction at all, it is to emphasize that it cannot be read like other books. It belongs to the type and quality of his thoughts that they have the characteristics of living things: the inherent power of growth and potential for change which lies in the unfolding of all living things. We are not accustomed to such activity with thoughts, with thinking as a force akin to doing. Yet such is the nature of Rudolf Steiner's thoughts. They appeal to an otherwise dormant participation in us and offer an invitation to social activity. No doubt, this is an unusual demand. Conceivably it can cause offense. But the request is emphasized here and with good cause.

In our time, no one can be free from grave concerns for the future, which is reaching with its tentacles right into the present. Much good will and increasing desperation is spent on finding “solutions,” on seeking, on organizing, on imploring to try different ways; ways of amelioration, of appeasement, of change with a truly human face—with few results. It would not be, then, a wasted effort to enter into the reading of these lectures with more than that intellectual scanning to which we have become accustomed, but instead to hear, almost from the first words, the intonation of a selfless voice, selfless even in search for knowledge. This voice speaks with the tone of hope and of insight and with the aspirations of all of us. Its familiarity should, in the encounter with its message, lead us securely—and far more deeply than we usually listen—to those places of the will in us which alone can bring about change and evolutionary responsibility.

Carlo Pietzner
Michaelmas 1985

• 1. Curative Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1984
• 2. These two quotations come from a public lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin an October 26, 1905. This lecture was published only recently for the first time in Beitrage zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, St. John's Time 1985, #88.

In the lectures given here during the course on history¹ several things were mentioned which, particularly at the present time, it is especially important to consider. With regard to the historical course of humanity's development, the much-debated question mentioned to begin with was whether the outstanding and leading individual personalities are the principal driving forces in this development or whether the most important things are brought about by the masses. In many circles this has always been a point of contention and the conclusions have been drawn, more from sympathy and antipathy than from real knowledge. This is one fact which, in a certain sense, I should like to mention as being very important.

Another fact which, from a look at history, I should like to mention for its importance is the following. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt² appeared with a definite declaration, stipulating that history should be treated in such a way that one would not only consider the individual facts which can be outwardly observed in the physical world but, out of an encompassing, synthesizing force, would see what is at work in the unfolding of history—which can only be found by someone who knows how to get a total view of the facts in what in a sense is a poetic way, but in fact produces a true picture. Attention was also drawn to how in the course of the nineteenth century it was precisely the opposite historical mode of thought and approach which was then particularly developed, and that it was not the ideas in history that were pursued but only a sense that was developed for the external world of facts. Attention was also drawn to the fact that, with regard to this last question, one can only come to clarity through spiritual science, because spiritual science alone can uncover the real driving forces of the historical evolution of humanity.

A spiritual science of this kind was not yet accessible to Humboldt. He spoke of ideas, but ideas indeed have no driving force [of their own]. Ideas as such are abstractions, as I mentioned here yesterday³ And anyone who might wish to find ideas as the driving forces of history would never be able to prove that ideas really do anything because they are nothing of real substantiality, and only something of substantiality can do something. Spiritual science points to real spiritual forces that are behind the sensible-physical facts, and it is in real spiritual forces such as these that the propelling forces of history lie, even though these spiritual forces will have to be expressed for human beings through ideas.

But we come to clarity concerning these things only when, from a spiritual-scientific standpoint, we look more deeply into the historical development of humanity and we will do so today in such a way that, through our considerations, certain facts come to us which, precisely for a discerning judgement of the situation of modern humanity, will prove to be of importance.

I have often mentioned⁴ that spiritual science, if it looks at history, would actually have to pursue a symptomatology; a symptomatology constituted from the fact that one is aware that behind what takes it course as the stream of physical-sensible facts lie the driving spiritual forces. But everywhere in historical development there are times when what has real being and essence (das eigentlich Wesenhafte) comes as a symptom to the surface and can be judged discerningly from the phenomena only if one has the possibility to penetrate more deeply from one's awareness of these phenomena into the depths of historical development.

I would like to clarify this by a simple diagram. Let us suppose that this is a flow of historical facts (see diagram). The driving forces lie, for ordinary observation, below the flow of these facts. And if the eye of the soul observes the flow in this way, then the real activity of the driving forces would lie beneath it (red). But there are significant points in this flow of facts. And these significant points are distinguished by the fact that what is otherwise hidden comes here to the surface. Thus we can say: Here, in a particular phenomenon, which must only be properly evaluated, it was possible to become aware of something which otherwise is at work everywhere, but which does not show itself in such a significant manifestation.

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Let us assume that this (see diagram) took place in some year of world history, let us say around 800 A.D. What was significant for Europe, let us say for Western Europe, was of course at work before this and worked on afterwards, but it did not manifest itself in such a significant way in the time before and after as it did here. If one points to a way of looking at history like this, a way which looks to significant moments, such a method would be in complete accord with Goetheanism. For Goethe wished in general that all perception of the world should be directed to significant points and then, from what could be seen from such points, the remaining content of world events be recognized. Goethe says of this⁵ that, within the abundance of facts, the important thing is to find a significant point from which the neighbouring areas can be viewed and from which much can be deciphered.

So let us take this year 800 A.D. We can point here to a fact in the history of Western European humanity which, from the point of view of the usual approach to history, might seem insignificant—which one would perhaps not find worthy of attention for what is usually called history—but which, nevertheless, for a deeper view of humanity's development, is indeed significant. Around this year there was a kind of learned theological argument between the man who was a sort of court philosopher of the Frankish realm, Alcuin,⁶ and a Greek also living at that time in the kingdom of the Franks. The Greek, who was naturally at home in the particular soul-constitution of the Greek peoples which he had inherited, had wanted to reach a discerning judgement of the principles of Christianity and had come to the concept of redemption. He put the question: To whom, in the redemption through Christ Jesus, was the ransom actually paid? He, the Greek thinker, came to the solution that the ransom had been paid to Death. Thus, in a certain sense, it was a sort of redemption theory that this Greek developed from his thoroughly Greek mode of thinking, which was now just becoming acquainted with Christianity. The ransom was paid to Death by the cosmic powers.

Alcuin, who stood at that time in that theological stream which then became the determining one for the development of the Roman Catholic Church of the West, debated in the following way about what the Greek had argued. He said: Ransom can only be paid to a being who really exists. But death has no reality, death is only the outer limit of reality, death itself is not real and, therefore, the ransom money could not have been paid to Death.

Now criticism of Alcuin's way of thinking is not what matters here. For to someone who, to a certain extent, can see through the interrelations of the facts, the view that death is not something real resembles the view which says: Cold is not something real, it is just a decrease in warmth, it is only a lesser warmth. Because the cold isn't real I won't wear a winter coat in winter because I'm not going to protect myself against something that isn't real. But we will leave that aside. We want rather to take the argument between Alcuin and the Greek purely positively and will ask what was really happening there. For it is indeed quite noticeable that it is not the concept of redemption itself that is discussed. It is not discussed in such a way that in a certain sense both personalities, the Greek and the Roman Catholic theologian, accept the same point of view, but in such a way that the Roman Catholic theologian shifts the standpoint entirely before he takes it up at all. He does not go on speaking in the way he had just done, but moves the whole problem into a completely different direction. He asks: Is death something real or not?—and objects that, indeed, death is not real.

This directs us at the outset to the fact that two views are clashing here which arise out of completely different constitutions of soul. And, indeed, this is the case. The Greek continued, as it were, the direction which, in the Greek culture, had basically faded away between Plato and Aristotle. In Plato there was still something alive of the ancient wisdom of humanity; that wisdom which takes us across to the ancient Orient where, indeed, in ancient times a primal wisdom had lived but which had then fallen more and more into decadence. In Plato, if we are able to understand him properly, we find the last offshoots, if I can so call them, of this primal oriental wisdom. And then, like a rapidly developing metamorphosis, Aristotelianism sets in which, fundamentally, presents a completely different constitution of soul from the Platonic one. Aristotelianism represents a completely different element in the development of humanity from Platonism. And, if we follow Aristotelianism further, it, too, takes on different forms, different metamorphoses, but all of which have a recognizable similarity. Thus we see how Platonism lives on like an ancient heritage in this Greek who has to contend against Alcuin, and how in Alcuin, on the other hand, Aristotelianism is already present. And we are directed, by looking at these two individuals, to that fluctuation which took place on European soil between two—one cannot really say world-views—but two human constitutions of soul, one of which has its origin in ancient times in the Orient, and another, which we do not find in the Orient but which, entering in later, arose in the central regions of civilization and was first grasped by Aristotle. In Aristotle, however, this only sounds a first quiet note, for much of Greek culture was still alive in him. It develops then with particular vehemence in the Roman culture within which it had been prepared long before Aristotle, and, indeed, before Plato. So that we see how, since the eighth century BC on the Italian peninsula a particular culture, or the first hints of it, was being prepared alongside that which lived on the Greek peninsula as a sort of last offshoot of the oriental constitution of soul. And when we go into the differences between these two modes of human thought we find important historical impulses. For what is expressed in these ways of thinking went over later into the feeling life of human beings; into the configuration of human actions and so on.

Now we can ask ourselves: So what was living in that which developed in ancient times as a world-view in the Orient, and which then, like a latecomer, found its [last] offshoots in Platonism—and, indeed, still in Neoplatonism? It was a highly spiritual culture which arose from an inner perception living pre-eminently in pictures, in imaginations; but pictures not permeated by full consciousness, not yet permeated by the full I-consciousness of human beings. In the spiritual life of the ancient Orient, of which the Veda and Vedanta are the last echoes, stupendous pictures opened up of what lives in the human being as the spiritual. But it existed in a—I beg you not to misunderstand the word and not to confuse it with usual dreaming—it existed in a dreamlike, dim way, so that this soul-life was not permeated (durchwellt) and irradiated (durchstrahlt) by what lives in the human being when he becomes clearly conscious of his 'I' and his own being. The oriental was well aware that his being existed before birth, that it returns through death to the spiritual world in which it existed before birth or conception. The oriental gazed on that which passed through births and deaths. But he did not see as such that inner feeling which lives in the `I am'. It was as if it were dull and hazy, as though poured out in a broad perception of the soul (Gesamtseelenanschauung) which did not concentrate to such a point as that of the I-experience. Into what, then, did the oriental actually gaze when he possessed his instinctive perception?

One can still feel how this oriental soul-constitution was completely different from that of later humanity when, for an understanding of this and perhaps prepared through spiritual science, one sinks meditatively into those remarkable writings which are ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite.⁷ I will not go into the question of the authorship now, I have already spoken about it on a number of occasions. 'Nothingness' (das Nichts) is still spoken of there as a reality, and the existence of the external world, in the way one views it in ordinary consciousness, is simply contrasted against this [nothingness] as a different reality. This talk of nothingness then continues. In Scotus Erigena,⁸ who lived at the court of Charles the Bald, one still finds echoes of it, and we find the last echo then in the fifteenth century in Nicolas of Cusa⁹ But what was meant by the nothingness one finds in Dionysius the Areopagite and of that which the oriental spoke of as something self-evident to him? This fades then completely. What was this nothingness for the oriental? It was something real for him. He turned his gaze to the world of the senses around him, and said: This sense-world is spread out in space, flows in time, and in ordinary life world, is spread out in space, one says that what is extended in space and flows in time is something.

But what the oriental saw—that which was a reality for him, which passes through births and deaths—was not contained in the space in which the minerals are to be found, in which the plants unfold, the animals move and the human being as a physical being moves and acts. And it was also not contained in that time in which our thoughts, feelings and will-impulses occur. The oriental was fully aware that one must go beyond this space in which physical things are extended and move, and beyond this time in which our soul-forces of ordinary life are active. One must enter a completely different world; that world which, for the external existence of time and space, is a nothing but which, nevertheless, is something real. The oriental sensed something in contrast to the phenomena of the world which the European still senses at most in the realm of real numbers.

When a European has fifty francs he has something. If he spends twenty-five francs of this he still has twenty-five francs; if he then spends fifteen francs he still has ten; if he spends this he has nothing. If now he continues to spend he has five, ten, fifteen, twenty-five francs in debts. He still has nothing; but, indeed, he has something very real when, instead of simply an empty wallet, he has twenty-five or fifty francs in debts. In the real world it also signifies something very real if one has debts. There is a great difference in one's whole situation in life between having nothing and having fifty francs' worth of debts. These debts of fifty francs are forces just as influential on one's situation in life as, on the other side and in an opposite sense, are fifty francs of credit. In this area the European will probably admit to the reality of debts for, in the real world, there always has to be something there when one has debts. The debts that one has oneself may still seem a very negative amount, but for the person to whom they are owed they are a very positive amount!

So, when it is not just a matter of the individual but of the world, the opposite side of zero from the credit side is truly something very real. The oriental felt—not because he somehow speculated about it but because his perception necessitated it he felt: Here, on the one side, I experience that which cannot be observed in space or in time; something which, for the things and events of space and time, is nothing but which, nevertheless, is a reality—but a different reality.

It was only through misunderstanding that there then arose what occidental civilization gave itself up to under the leadership of Rome—the creation of the world out of nothing with `nothing' seen as absolute `zero'. In the Orient, where these things were originally conceived, the world does not arise out of nothing but out of the reality I have just indicated. And an echo of what vibrates through all the oriental way of thinking right down to Plato—the impulse of eternity of an ancient world-view—lived in the Greek who, at the court of Charlemagne, had to debate with Alcuin. And in this theologian Alcuin there lived a rejection of the spiritual life for which, in the Orient, this `nothing' was the outer form. And thus, when the Greek spoke of death, whose causes lie in the spiritual world, as something real, Alcuin could only answer: But death is nothing and therefore cannot receive ransom.

You see, the whole polarity between the ancient oriental way of thinking, reaching to Plato, and what followed later is expressed in this [one] significant moment when Alcuin debated at the court of Charlemagne with the Greek. For, what was it that had meanwhile entered in to European civilization since Plato, particularly through the spread of Romanism? There had entered that way of thinking which one has to comprehend through the fact that it is directed primarily to what the human being experiences between birth and death. And the constitution of soul which occupies itself primarily with the human being's experiences between birth and death is the logical, legal one—the logical-dialectical-legal one. The Orient had nothing of a logical, dialectical nature and, least of all, a legal one. The Occident brought logical, legal thinking so strongly into the oriental way of thinking that we ourselves find religious feeling permeated with a legalistic element. In the Sistine Chapel in Rome, painted by the master-hand of Michelangelo, we see looming towards us, Christ as judge giving judgment on the good and the evil.

A legal, dialectical element has entered into the thoughts concerning the course of the world. This was completely alien to the oriental way of thinking. There was nothing there like guilt and atonement or redemptinn. For [in this oriental way of thinking] was precisely that view of the metamorphosis through which the eternal element [in the human being] transforms itself through births and deaths. There was that which lives in the concept of karma. Later, however, everything was fixed into a way of looking at things which is actually only valid for, and can only encompass, life between birth and death. But this life between birth and death was just what had evaded the oriental. He looked far more to the core of man's being. He had little understanding for what took place between birth and death. And now, within this occidental culture, the way of thinking which comprehends primarily what takes place within the span between birth and death increased [and did so] through those forces possessed by the human being by virtue of having clothed his soul-and-spirit nature with a physical and etheric body. In this constitution, in the inner experience of the soul-and-spirit element and in the nature of this experience, which arises through the fact that one is submerged with one's soul-and-spirit nature in a physical body, comes the inner comprehension of the 'I'. This is why it happens in the Occident that the human being feels an inner urge to lay hold of his 'I' as something divine. We see this urge, to comprehend the 'I' as something divine, arise in the medieval mystics; in Eckhart, in Tauler and in others. The comprehension of the 'I' crystallizes out with full force in the Middle (or Central) culture. Thus we can distinguish between the Eastern culture—the time in which the 'I' is first experienced, but dimly—and the Middle (or Central) culture—primarily that in which the 'I' is experienced. And we see how this 'I' is experienced in the most manifold metamorphoses. First of all in that dim, dawning way in which it arises in Eckhart, Tauler and other mystics, and then more and more distinctly during the development of all that can originate out of this I-culture.

We then see how, within the I-culture of the Centre, another aspect arises. At the end of the eighteenth century something comes to the fore in Kant¹⁰ which, fundamentally, cannot be explained out of the onward flow of this I-culture. For what is it that arises through Kant? Kant looks at our perception, our apprehension (Erkennen), of nature and cannot come to terms with it. Knowledge of nature, for him, breaks down into subjective views ( Subjektivitäten); he does not penetrate as far as the 'I' despite the fact that he continually speaks of it and even, in some categories, in his perceptions of time and space, would like to encompass all nature through the 'I'. Yet he does not push through to a true experience of the 'I'. He also constructs a practical philosophy with the categorical imperative which is supposed to manifest itself out of unfathomable regions of the human soul. Here again the 'I' does not appear.

In Kant's philosophy it is strange. The full weight of dialectics, of logical-dialectical-legal thinking is there, in which everything is tending towards the 'I', but he cannot reach the point of really understanding the 'I' philosophically. There must be something preventing him here. Then comes Fichte, a pupil of Kant's, who with full force wishes his whole philosophy to well up out of the 'I' and who, through its simplicity, presents as the highest tenet of his philosophy the sentence: `I am'. And everything that is truly scientific must follow from this `I am'. One should be able, as it were, to deduce, to read from this 'I am' an entire picture of the world. Kant cannot reach the 'I am'. Fichte immediately afterwards, while still a pupil of Kant's, hurls the `I am' at him. And everyone is amazed—this is a pupil of Kant's speaking like this! And Fichte says:¹¹ As far as he can understand it, Kant, if he could really think to the end, would have to think the same as me. It is so inexplicable to Fichte that Kant thinks differently from him, that he says: If Kant would only take things to their full conclusion, he would have to think [as I do]; he too, would have to come to the 'I am'. And Fichte expresses this even more clearly by saying: I would rather take the whole of Kant's critique for a random game of ideas haphazardly thrown together than to consider it the work of a human mind, if my philosophy did not logically follow from Kant's. Kant, of course, rejects this. He wants nothing to do with the conclusions drawn by Fichte.

We now see how there follows on from Fichte what then flowered as German idealistic philosophy in Schelling and Hegel, and which provoked all the battles of which I spoke, in part, in my lectures on the limits to a knowledge of nature.¹² But we find something curious. We see how Hegel lives in a crystal-clear [mental] framework of the logical-dialectical-legal element and draws from it a world-view—but a world-view that is interested only in what occurs between birth and death. You can go through the whole of Hegel's philosophy and you will find nothing that goes beyond birth and death. It confines everything in world history, religion, art and science solely to experiences occurring between birth and death.

What then is the strange thing that happened here? Now, what came out in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel—this strongest development of the Central culture in which the 'I' came to full consciousness, to an inner experience—was still only a reaction, a last reaction to something else. For one can understand Kant only when one bears the following properly in mind. (I am coming now to yet another significant point to which a great deal can be traced). You see, Kant was still—this is clearly evident from his earlier writings—a pupil of the rationalism of the eighteenth century, which lived with genius in Leibnitz and pedantically in Wolff. One can see that for this rationalism the important thing was not to come truly to a spiritual reality. Kant therefore rejected it—this `thing in itself' as he called it—but the important thing for him was to prove. Sure proof! Kant's writings are remarkable also in this respect. He wrote his Critique of Pure Reason in which he is actually asking: `How must the world be so that things can be proved in it?' Not 'What are the realities in it?' But he actually asks: 'How must I imagine the world so that logically, dialectically, I can give proofs in it?' This is the only point he is concerned with and thus he tries in his Prologomena to give every future metaphysics which has a claim to being truly scientific, a metaphysics for what in his way of thinking can be proven: `Away with everything else! The devil take the reality of the world—just let me have the art of proving! What's it to me what reality is; if I can't prove it I shan't trouble myself over it!'

Those individuals did not, of course, think in this way who wrote books like, for example, Christian Wolff's¹³ Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Reasoned Thoughts an God, the World, and the Soul of Man, and All Things Generally). What mattered for them was to have a clean, self-contained system of proof, in the way that they see proof. Kant lived in this sphere, but there was still something there which, although an excrescence squeezed out of the world-view of the Centre, nevertheless fitted into it. But Kant had something else which makes it inexplicable how he could become Fichte's teacher. And yet he gives Fichte a stimulus, and Fichte comes back at him with the strong emphasis of the 'I am'; comes back, indeed, not with proofs—one would not look for these in Fichte—but with a fully developed inner life of soul. In Fichte there emerges, with all the force of the inner life of soul, that which, in the Wolffians and Leibnitzites, can seem insipid. Fichte constructs his philosophy, in a wealth of pure concepts, out of the 'I am'; but in him they are filled with life. So, too, are they in Schelling and in Hegel. So what then had happened with Kant who was the bridge? Now, one comes to the significant point when one traces how Kant developed. Something else became of this pupil of Wolff by virtue of the fact that the English philosopher, David Hume,¹⁴ awoke him, as Kant himself says, out of his dull dogmatic slumber. What is it that entered Kant here, which Fichte could no longer understand? There entered into Kant here—it fitted badly in his case because he was too involved with the culture of Central Europe—that which is now the culture of the West. This came to meet him in the person of David Hume and it was here that the culture of the West entered Kant. And in what does the peculiarity [of this culture] lie? In the oriental culture we find that the 'I' still lives below, dimly, in a dream-like state in the soul-experiences which express themselves, spread out, in imaginative pictures. In the Western culture we find that, in a certain sense, the 'I' is smothered (erdrückt) by the purely external phenomena (Tatsachen). The 'I' is indeed present, and is present not dimly, but bores itself into the phenomena. And here, for example, people develop a strange psychology. They do not talk here about the soul-life in the way Fichte did, who wanted to work out everything from the one point of the 'I', but they talk about thoughts which come together by association. People talk about feelings, mental pictures and sensations, and say these associate—and also will-impulses associate. One talks about the inner soul-life in terms of thoughts which associate.

Fichte speaks of the 'I'; this radiates out thoughts. In the West the 'I' is completely omitted because it is absorbed—soaked up by the thoughts and feelings which one treats as though they were independent of it, associating and separating again. And one follows the life of the soul as though mental pictures linked up and separated. Read Spencer,¹⁵ read John Stuart Mill¹⁶ read the American philosophers. When they come to talk of psychology there is this curious view that does not exclude the 'I' as in the Orient, because it is developed dimly there, but which makes full demand of the 'I'; letting it, however, sink down into the thinking, feeling and willing life of the soul. One could say: In the oriental the 'I' is still above thinking, feeling and willing; it has not yet descended to the level of thinking, feeling and willing. In the human being of the Western culture the 'I' is already below this sphere. It is below the surface of thinking, feeling and willing so that it is no longer noticed, and thinking, feeling and willing are then spoken of as independent forces.

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This is what came to Kant in the form of the philosophy of David Hume. Then the Central region of the earth's culture still set itself against this with all force in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. After them the culture of the West overwhelms everything that is there, with Darwinism and Spencerism.

One will only be able to come to an understanding of what is living in humanity's development if one investigates these deeper forces. One then finds that something developed in a natural way in the Orient which actually was purely a spiritual life. In the Central areas something developed which was dialectical-legal, which actually brought forth the idea of the State, because it is to this that it can be applied. It is such thinkers as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel who, with enormous sympathy, construct a unified image (Gebilde) of the State. But then a culture emerges in the West which proceeds from a constitution of soul in which the 'I' is absorbed, takes its course below the level of thinking, feeling and willing; and where, in the mental and feeling life, people speak of associations. If only one would apply this thinking to the economic life! That is its proper place. People went completely amiss when they started applying [this thinking] to something other than the economic life. There it is great, is of genius. And had Spencer, John Stuart Mill and David Hume applied to the institutions of the economic life what they wasted on philosophy it would have been magnificent. If the human beings living in Central Europe had limited to the State what is given them as their natural endowment, and if they had not, at the same time, also wanted thereby to include the spiritual life and the economic life, something magnificent could have come out of it. For, with what Hegel was able to think, with what Fichte was able to think, one would have been able—had one remained within the legal-political configuration which, in the threefold organism, we wish to separate out as the structure of the State¹⁷—to attain something truly great. But, because there hovered before these minds the idea that they had to create a structure for the State which included the economic life and the spiritual life, there arose only caricatures in the place of a true form for the State. And the spiritual life was anyway only a heritage of the ancient Orient. It was just that people did not know that they were still living from this heritage of the ancient East. The useful statements, for example, of Christian theology—indeed, the useful statements still within our materialistic sciences—are either the heritage of the ancient East, or a changeling of dialectical-legal thinking, or are already adopted, as was done by Spencer and Mill, from the Western culture which is particularly suited for the economic life.

Thus the spiritual thinking of the ancient Orient had been distributed over the earth, but in an instinctive way that is no longer of any use today. Because today it is decadent, it is dialectical-political thinking which was rendered obsolete by the world catastrophe [World War I]. For there was no one less suited to thinking economically than the pupils of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. When they began to create a State which, above all, was to become great through its economy, they had of necessity (selbstverständlich) to fail, for this was not what, by nature, was, endowed to them. In accordance with the historical development of humanity, spiritual thinking, political thinking and economic thinking were apportioned to the East, the Centre, and the West respectively. But we have arrived at a point of humanity's development when understanding, a common understanding, must spread equally over all humanity. How can this come about?

This can only happen out of the initiation-culture, out of the new spiritual science, which does not develop one-sidedly, but considers everything that appears in all areas as a three-foldness that has evolved of its own accord. This science must really consider the threefold aspect also in social life; in this case (as a three-foldness) encompassing the whole earth. Spiritual science, however, cannot be extended through natural abilities; it can only be spread by people accepting those who see into these things, who can really experience the spiritual sphere, the political sphere and the economic sphere as three separate areas. The unity of human beings all over the earth is due to the fact that they combine in themselves what was divided between three spheres. They themselves organize it in the social organism in such a way that it can exist in harmony before their eyes. This, however, can only follow from spiritual-scientific training. And we stand here at a point where we must say: In ancient times we see individual personalities, we see them expressing in their words what was the spirit of the time. But when we examine it closely—in the oriental culture, for example—we find that, fundamentally, there lives instinctively in the masses a constitution of soul which in a remarkable; quite natural way was in accord with what these individuals spoke.

This correspondence, however, became less and less. In our times we see the development of the opposite extreme. We see instincts arising in the masses which are the opposite of what is beneficial for humanity. We see things arising that absolutely call for the qualities that may arise in individuals who are able to penetrate the depths of spiritual science. No good will come from instincts, but only from the understanding (that Dr. Unger also spoke of here)¹⁸ which, as is often stressed, every human being can bring towards the spiritual investigator if he really opens himself to healthy human reason. Thus there will come a culture in which the single individual, with his ever-deeper penetration into the depths of the spiritual world, will be of particular importance, and in which die one who penetrates in this way will be valued, just as someone who works in some craft is valued. One does not go to the tailor to have boots made or to the shoemaker to be shaved, so why should people go to someone else for what one needs as a world-view other than to the person who is initiated into it? And it is, indeed, just this that, particularly today and in the most intense sense, is necessary for the good of human beings even though there is a reaction against it, which shows how humanity still resists what is beneficial for it. This is the terrible battle—the grave situation—in which we find ourselves.

At no other time has there been a greater need to listen carefully to what individuals know concerning one thing or another. Nor has there been a greater need for people with knowledge of specific subject areas to be active in social life—not from a belief in authority but out of common sense and out of agreement based on common sense. But, to begin with, the instincts oppose this and people believe that some sort of good can be achieved from levelling everything. This is the serious battle in which we stand. Sympathy and antipathy are of no help here, nor is living in slogans. Only a clear observation of the facts can help. For today great questions are being decided—the questions as to whether the individual or the masses have significance. In other times this was not important because the masses and the individual were in accord with one another; individuals were, in a certain sense, simply speaking for the masses. We are approaching more and more that time when the individual must find completely within himself the source of what he has to find and which he has then to put into the social life; and [what we are now seeing] is only the last resistance against this validity of the individual and an ever larger and larger number of individuals. One can see plainly how that which spiritual science shows is also proved everywhere in these significant points. We talk of associations which are necessary in the economic life, and use a particular thinking for this. This has developed in the culture of the West from letting thoughts associate. If one could take what John Stuart Mill does with logic, if one could remove those thoughts from that sphere and apply them to the economic life, they would fit there. The associations which would then come in there would be exactly those which do not fit into psychology. Even in what appears in the area of human development, spiritual science follows reality.

Thus spiritual science, if fully aware of the seriousness of the present world situation, knows what a great battle is taking place between the threefold social impulse that can come from spiritual science and that which throws itself against this threefoldness as the wave of Bolshevism, which would lead to great harm (Unheil) amongst humanity. And there is no third element other than these two. The battle has to take place between these two. People must see this! Everything else is already decadent. Whoever looks with an open mind at the conditions in which we are placed, must conclude that it is essential today to gather all our forces together so that this whole terrible Ahrimanic affair can be repulsed.

This building stands here,¹⁹ incomplete though it is for the time being. Today we cannot get from the Central countries that which for the most part, and in addition to what has come to us from the neutral states, has brought this building to this stage. We must have contributions from the countries of the former Entente. Understanding must be developed here for what is to become a unified culture containing spirit, politics and economics. For people must get away from a one:sided tendency and must follow those who also understand something of politics and economics, who do not work only in dialectics, but, also being engaged with economic impulses, have insight into the spiritual, and do not want to create states in which the State itself can run the economy. The Western peoples will have to realize that something else must evolve in addition to the special gift they will have in the future with regard to forming economic associations. The skill in forming associations has so far been applied at the wrong end, i.e. in the field of Psychology. What must evolve is understanding of the political-state element, which has other sources than the economic life, and also of the spiritual element. But at present the Central countries lie powerless, so people in the Western regions—one could not expect this of the Orient—will have to see what the Purpose of this building is! It is necessary for us to consider What must be done so that real provision is made for a new culture that should be presented everywhere in the university education of the future—here we have to show the way. In the foundation of the Waldorf Schools the culture has proved to be capable of bringing light into primary education. But for this we need the understanding support of the widest circles.

Above all we need the means. For everything which, in a higher or lower sense, is called a school, we need the frame of mind I have already tried to awaken at the opening of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart.²⁰ I said in my opening speech there: `This is one Waldorf school. It is well and good that we have it, but for itself it is nothing; it is only something if, in the next quarter of a year, we build ten such Waldorf schools and then others'. The world did not understand this, it had no money for such a thing. For it rests on the standpoint: Oh, the ideals are too lofty, too pure for us to bring dirty money to them; better to keep it in our pockets; that's the proper place for dirty money. The ideals, oh, they're too pure, one can't contaminate them with money! Of course, with purity of this kind the embodiment of ideals cannot be attained, if dirty money is not brought to them. And thus we have to consider that, up to now, we have stopped at one Waldorf school which cannot progress properly because in the autumn we found ourselves in great money difficulties. These have been obviated for the time being, but at Easter we shall be faced with them again. And then, after a comparatively short time, we will ask: Should we give up? And we shall have to give up if, before then, an understanding is not forthcoming which dips vigorously into its pockets.

It is thus a matter of awakening understanding in this respect. I don't believe that much understanding would arise if we were to say that we wanted something for the building in Dornach, or some such thing—as has been shown already. But—and one still finds understanding for this today—if one wants to create sanatoria or the like, one gets money, and as much as one wants! This is not exactly what we want—we don't want to build a host of sanatoria—we agree fully with creating them as far as they are necessary; but here it is a matter, above all, of nurturing that spiritual culture whose necessity will indeed prove itself through what this course²¹ I has attempted to accomplish. This is what I tried to suggest, to give a stimulus to what I expressed here a few days ago, in the words 'World Fellowship of Schools' (Weltschulverein).²²

Our German friends have departed but it is not a question of depending on them for this 'World Fellowship'. It depends on those who, as friends, have come here, for the most part from all possible regions of the non-German world—and who are still sitting here now—that they understand these words 'World Fellowship of Schools' because it is vital that we found school upon school in all areas of the world out of the pedagogical spirit which rules in the Waldorf School. We have to be able to extend this school until we are able to move into higher education of the kind we are hoping for here. For this, however, we have to be in a position to complete this building and everything that belongs to it, and be constantly able to support that which is necessary in order to work here; to be productive, to work on the further extension of all the separate sciences in the spirit of spiritual science.

People ask one how much money one needs for all this. One cannot say how much, because there never is an uppermost limit. And, of course, we will not be able to found a World Fellowship of Schools simply by creating a committee of twelve or fifteen or thirty people who work out nice statutes as to how a World Fellowship of Schools of this kind should work. That is all pointless. I attach no value to programmes or to statutes but only to the work of active people who work with understanding. It will be possible to establish this World Fellowship—well, we shall not be able to go to London for some time—in the Hague or some such place, if a basis can be created, and by other means if the friends who are about to go to Norway or Sweden or Holland, or any other country—England, France, America and so on—awaken in every human being whom they can reach the well-founded conviction that there has to be a World Fellowship of Schools. It ought to go through the world like wildfire that a World Fellowship must arise to provide the material means for the spiritual culture that is intended here.

If one is able in other matters, as a single individual, to convince possibly hundreds and hundreds of people, why should one not be able in a short time—for the decline is happening so quickly that we only have a short time—to have an effect on many people as a single individual, so that if one came to the Hague a few weeks later one would see how widespread was the thought that: 'The creation of a World Fellowship of Schools is necessary, it is just that there are no means for it.' What we are trying to do from Dornach is an historical necessity. One will only be able to talk of the inauguration of this World Fellowship of Schools when the idea of it already exists. It is simply utopian to set up committees and found a World Fellowship—this is pointless! But to work from person to person, and to spread quickly the realization, the well-founded realization, that it is so necessary—this is what must precede the founding. Spiritual science lives in realities. This is why it does not get involved with proposals of schemes for a founding but points to what has to happen in reality—and human beings are indeed realities—so that such a thing has some prospects.

So what is important here is that we finally learn from spiritual science how to stand in real life. I would never get involved with a simply utopian founding of the World Fellowship of Schools, but would always be of the opinion that this World Fellowship can only come about when a sufficiently large number of people are convinced of its necessity. It must be created so that what is necessary for humanity—it has already proved to be so from our course here—can happen. This World Fellowship of Schools must be created.

Please see what is meant by this Fellowship in all international life, in the right sense! I would like, in this request, to round off today what, in a very different way in our course, has spoken to humanity through those who were here and of whom we have the hope and the wish that they carry it out into the world. The World Fellowship of Schools can be the answer of the world to what was put before it like a question; a question taken from the real forces of human evolution, that is, human history. So let what can happen for the World Fellowship of Schools, in accordance with the conviction you have been able to gain here, happen! In this there rings out what I wanted to say today.

• 1 . These were the lectures given by Dr Karl Heyer on 14, 15 and 16 October 1920, during the first course of the School of Anthroposophy at the Goetheanum with the theme: 'The Science of History and History from the Viewpoint of Anthroposophy' ('Anthroposophische Betrachtungen Ober die Geschichtswissenschaft und aus der Geschichte'). These are printed in Kultur und Erziehung (the third volume of the Courses of the School of Anthroposophy), Stuttgart, 1921.
• 2 . See Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835): Über die Aufgabe des Geschiclztsschreibens (The Task of the Historian) in Volume IV of Humboldt's Works published by Leitzman, Berlin 1905 (see pages 35-56). Some relevant passages taken from these are as follows:
  
  "The business of the historian, in the last but simplest analysis, is to portray the striving of an idea to attain existence in reality. For it is not always that it succeeds in this at the first attempt; and it is not so rare that the idea degenerates because it is unable to master in a pure way the matter counteracting it."
  
  "The truth of everything that happens lies in the addition of the above-mentioned invisible part of every fact, and thus the history writer must add this to the events. Seen from this angle he is self-acting and even creative—not, indeed, by producing what does not already exist, but by forming out of his own inner strength that which, as it is in reality, he could not perceive through mere receptivity. In different ways, but just like the poet, he must in himself transform the scattered fragments into a whole."
  
  "It may seem dubious to allow the realm of the history writer and that of the poet to meet, even at only one point. But the activity of both is undeniably related. For if the historian, like the poet, can achieve truth in his presentation of past events only by completing and linking the incomplete and disjointed elements of direct observation, then he does so, like the poet, only through imagination. Because, however, he places imagination subordinate to experience and the fathoming of reality, there is a difference here which cancels out all danger. Imagination does not work, at this lower position, as pure imagination, and is therefore more properly called an intuitive faculty and a talent for finding links."
  
  "Of necessity, therefore, the historian too, must strive; not, like the poet, to give his material over to the dominion of the form of necessity but to hold steadily in consciousness the ideas which are its laws, because, permeated only by, these, he can then find their trace in the pure research of the real in its reality."
  
  "The historian encompasses all the threads of earthly activity and all varieties of supersensible ideas; the sum-total of existence, more or less, is the object of his work and he must therefore also follow all avenues of the mind and spirit. Speculation, experience and poetry, however, are not separate, opposed and mutually-limiting activities of the mind, but different planes of its radiance."
  
  "Apart from the fact that history, like every scientific activity, serves many subsidiary purposes, work on history is no less a free art, complete in itself, than philosophy and poetry."
  
  "Just as philosophy strives for the first foundation of things, and art for the ideal of beauty, so history strives for a picture of human destiny in faithful truth, living abundance and pure clarity that are perceived by the warm inner-being [of the historian] in such a way that his personal views, feelings and demands are lost and dissolved away. It is the final purpose of the history-writer to awaken and nourish this mood, which, however, he only attains when he pursues for his fellow human beings the simple presentation of past events with conscientious faithfulness."
• 3 . See the final words of Rudolf Steiner, on 16 October 1920, after the close of the first course of the Anthroposophical School, in Die Kunst der Rezitation and Deklamation (First Edition) Dornach, 1928, page 118.
• 4 . See i>Geschictliche Symptomatologie (GA 185), nine lectures given in Dornach in 1918, only two of which are translated in From Symptom to Reality in Modern History.
• 5 . See Bedeutende Fordnis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort in Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited and with a commentary by Rudolf Steiner in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur, Volume II, page 34 (GA lb). Goethe says here:
  
  "I do not rest until I find a significant point from which a great deal can be deduced or, rather, which of its own will brings forth a great deal and presents this to me, and which I then, with attention and receptivity, work on further faithfully and carefully. If, in my experience, I find some phenomenon which I cannot deduce, I simply let it lie as a problem; and I have found, in my long life, this way of doing things to be very beneficial. For when I was not able for a long time to unravel the origin or connection of some phenomenon but had to put it to one side, I found that, years later, it all suddenly became clear in the most beautiful way."
• 6 . Alcuin (also Alhuin or Alchwin, i.e. 'Friend of the Temple') was rector of the monastery school at York around 735 to 804. In 782 he followed the summons of Charlemagne and took on the headship of the court school. He encouraged the sciences in the monasteries and raised to the central seat of the sciences the monastery school of St Martin at Tours, which he founded and whose Abbot he became in 796.
  
  The debate with the Greek is described in Karl Werner's book Alcuin and sein Jahrhundert (Alcuin and His Century) Vienna 1881, Chapter 11. page 166, as follows:
  
  Thus Charlemagne once wanted to know from Alcuin what should be made of the view of a Greek scholar, who presumably was a member of a Byzantine legation at Charlemagne's court, who had expressed the opinion to the emperor that Christ had paid the expiation for our sins to death. Alcuin found this manner of expression and the idea behind it to be inadmissible, for Christ was not—death's debtor and could not become so—the price of our redemption was paid by Christ to our divine Father, to whom, in dying, He commended His soul. Death [so Alcuin argued] is in no way a reality of being and substance but, to his way of thinking, was something purely negative, the mere absence or 'Carence' (Church Latin: the interval before benefits become available) of life; it is nothing existing in itself, and thus cannot receive anything, no payment can be paid to it. On the contrary, in the person of Christ, death itself, which God did not create, became the ransom for our debt and won life for us thereby, which He Himself gives us in His saviour power.'
• 7 . Rudolf Steiner drew attention at different times to the fact that the content of the writings of 533 A.D., attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, do indeed stem from the person of this name mentioned in The Acts of the Apostles 17, 34. See the lectures on 17 and 25 March 1907 in Christianity Began as a Religion and Festivals of the Seasons respectively.
• 8 . Johannes Scotus Erigena (c. 810–877) translator of the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin (see note 7).
• 9 . Nicolaus of Cusa (or Kures) (1401–1464), cardinal.
• 10. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): Critique of Pure Reason, 1781; Prolegemena, 1783.
• 11. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) Erste und zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre und Verstwh einer neuen Darstellung der Wiyenschaftslehre (First and Second Introduction into the Doctrine of Knowledge and an Attempt at a New Presentation of the doctrine of Knowledge).
• 12. Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis (Limits to a Knowledge of Nature (GA 322)—eight lectures given during the first course (Hochschulkurs) of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, 27 September to 3 October 1920 (GA 322).
• 13. Baron Christian von Wolff, philosopher and mathematician, Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, 1719.
• 14. David Hume (1711–1776), philosopher.
• 15. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), philosopher.
• 16. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), philosopher.
• 17. Towards Social Renewal, 1919, (GA 23).
• 18. In the third week of the first course (of the School of Spiritual Science), Dr Carl Unger (1822–1929) gave lectures under the title of 'Rudolf Steiner's Works'. These six lectures, edited by Unger, can be found in Volume I of Carl Unger's Writings, Stuttgart, 1964.
• 19. The first Goetheanum building, begun in 1913, was already put into use in 1920, although still under construction supervised by Rudolf Steiner and with the interior not yet finished. On New Year's Eve 1922–3 it was destroyed by fire.
• 20. The Free Waldorf School was founded in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919 by Dr Emil Molt for the children, to begin with, of the employees of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. The school was under the supervision of Rudolf Steiner who appointed the teachers and gave the preparatory seminar courses.
• 21. The first anthroposophical course of the Free School for Spiritual Science took place at the Goetheanum from 26 September to 16 October 1920. See also notes 1,3,12, and 18.
• 22. i.e., a form of international support body for Waldorf Schools. Rudolf Steiner suggested the founding of a World Fellowship of Schools during an assembly of teachers on 16 October 1920. There is no available transcript of this talk.

The fifteenth century ushered in an era for the civilized humanity of the Northern Hemisphere, in which the human individuality began to develop more and more in full I-consciousness. The forces which elaborate this I-consciousness will grow increasingly stronger and all the phenomena of life—of life in the broadest sense—will take place in the sign of this development of the individuality. This, however, means that what comes from the spiritual world and plays into our physical world will take such a course that, in humanity as a whole, the individual element of the human being will take on greater importance. For it is not simply a matter of individual human beings thinking in an egotistical way, 'we are individuals': it is rather a matter of the whole development of humanity taking such a course that the individual human element can work into it.

Every age, every epoch, that we can trace in the course of human evolution developed some particular quality, just as now it is that of individuality. These characteristics are impressed into human evolution through the particular action of spiritual powers working into the physical life of humanity on earth. But precisely because of the separateness that we see in the individual human being today when the individuality is developing—when I-consciousness is developing fully, when the consciousness-soul is, as it were, giving itself contour, becoming integrated in itself—the special characteristics of this epoch are not directed from the spiritual world as they were in earlier epochs, and very exceptional things are making their appearance within humanity's evolution. And the human being who, through the development of his individuality is being increasingly educated for freedom, must also take up a conscious stand more and more to what results from this. Above all it is essential that a social life take shape, but a social life which, from our point of view, must have deep inner foundations. This must take shape despite the fact that the strong egoistical forces of the consciousness-soul, which are opposed to a social life, are emerging ever more strongly from the depths of existence. On the one side we have the strong egoistical forces of the consciousness-soul and, on the other, the all-the-greater necessity of founding a social life consciously. And we must take a conscious stand towards everything that can foster this social living together. We have shown in the past,¹ and from the most varied points of view, how differently the human beings of the West, the European Centre, and of the East are placed in the whole course of human evolution. We have pointed to different things that are peculiar to the human beings of the East, Central Europe and the West. And we want now to turn to a phenomenon that can already show us externally how these differentes within humanity express themselves in the civilized world.

We know that, under the influence of our modern scientific way of thinking about social life, a certain view of life has been developed. This comes to expression particularly strongly in the broad masses of the proletariat which has come into being in our technological age, our intellectual age. I have presented all this, insofar as it touches the social question, in the first part of my Towards Social Renewal (Kernpunkt der sociale Frage). Today I want only to indicate the diversity of views among the broad masses of humanity concerning the social question. We have, clearly differentiated, the social views of, let us say, the proletariat, which then, however, colour other strata of the population. We have, distinct from that of other peoples, the conception of life held in die West, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In these countries, under the influence of the modern technology and industry, there has also developed among the broad masses that materialistic concept of life which has often been characterized here. This arose side by side with materialism or was directly produced through the materialism of other classes. This socialist conception of life, however, developed in such a way that it stands entirely under the aegis of economic strife, for it is permeated by economic concepts, thoughts and struggles that are little penetrated by the struggle for a philosophy of life (Lebensanschauungskämpfen). This is the characteristic stamp of what is going on in the socialist world of the Anglo-Saxon West. And because the actual character of modern public life as a whole has hitherto been the economic life, it was from the economic conditions of the Anglo-Saxon proletariat that the impulses of socialism arose.

The impulses coming to expression in the Great Strike movement are significant precisely as a characteristic of what is taking shape in this respect in the West. Even if it seems that the discrepancies which are there could be settled, it only seems so, for such settlements would not be real; very significant effects will issue from the deeper forces playing in these conflicts. And although, by virtue of the whole make-up of the West, no genuine philosophies or concepts of life (Lebensauffassung), develop from these impulses, we can nevertheless dearly perceive how the views of life which do develop, and which have developed in recent times, have taken their incentive from the impulses present there [in the West].

In fact, Karl Marx,² who was born in Central Europe and was nurtured in the Central European stream of thought, had to go to England in order to absorb the practical impulses (Lebensimpulse) which had developed there. He, however, transformed them into a theory, into a conception of life. And Marxism as a theory of life has found little external expression in the West. Where it has come to external expression, however, is in Central Europe. In the aims of the social democracy there, it has taken on fully the nature of a philosophy. What in the West are economic impulses leading to economic conflict, were diverted and fixed into legal-political concepts which lived then in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century as Marxist ideology and took hold of the broad masses of the population. It also found its way into the areas stretching towards the East, to those parts of Europe which begin to take on the character of the East. But here again it expressed itself in another form. Economic in the West; political in the Centre; and in the East it assumes a distinctly religious character. A distortion exists, which occurred with the inundation of the East through Peter the Great³ —,and now Lenin⁴ and Trotsky.⁵ This arises because the Bolshevism making itself felt there is in fact a foreign import. If it were not for that distinction it would be far more evident that, even now, Bolshevism has a strong religious element which, however, is completely materialistic. It works through earlier religious impulses and will continue to do so. And it is precisely in this that its terrible aspect will show itself throughout all Asia, because it works with all the fervour of a religious impulse. The social impulse in the West is economic, in Central Europe is political, and works with a religious fervour eastwards from Russia over into Asia. Over and against these impulses which move through the development of humanity there is a great deal that is utterly unimportant. And anyone who does not see, in the most intense sense, something of symptomatic importance in such things as the present [1920] strike of the British miners simply has no understanding at all of the foment of deeper forces in the whole of our present development.

All this, however, which can be described externally in this way, has deeper causes—causes which lie ultimately in the spiritual world. The more recent life of humanity can only be understood if one understands this differentiation—a differentiation into the Western economic element, the Central European political-legal one, and the religious element—the spiritual element in the East which takes on a religious character but is actually the momentum of a decadent spirituality that still finds expression in the East. This shows itself so strongly that one must say: It is natural for the West—and this is carried out thoroughly by it—to have everything of an economic nature; purely economic aspirations can have no success in the Centre because all economic aims there assume a political character. The great outer failure in Eastern Europe has come about because, through the tradition of Peter the Great, what arises out of a spiritual-religious impulse, i.e. Pan-slavism or Slavophilism, has taken on a political character. Behind this political character, which has produced all the dreadful things that have developed in the European East and has set its characteristic stamp on all the aspirations of the East since Peter the Great, there is, fundamentally, always the spiritual tendency of Byzantium, that is spiritual Byzantine religiosity, and so on. The individual phenomena of history become comprehensible only if they can be seen in this light. One can say: To a certain extent, everything that is still in Europe—also towards the West, even into France—can be reckoned as belonging to the European Centre, for what is characteristic of the West is actually Anglo-Saxon. And, in its basic instincts, this 'Anglo-Saxondom' moves completely with the impulses that have arisen naturally within human development in the last three or four centuries. It was thus precisely in the West that these impulses could best bring about the development of all that was then forced upon the social life through the modern scientific way of thinking and all its achievements. This way of thinking and its achievements, together with the inherent nature of Anglo-Saxondom, was the foundation for the world dominion of the Anglo-Saxon. The brilliant rise of commerce, trade and industry which has come out of modern science, everything which led to the great colonizations, has arisen, in fact, through the confluence of the natural-scientific mode of thought and the character of Anglo-Saxondom. And this was sensed deep down in the instincts of die West.

One can actually point to a significant moment of modern historical development, to the year 1651, when the ingenious Cromwell with his Navigation Act⁶ brought about that configuration in English navigation and in all English trade which was the foundation for everything in the West which later arose. One can also point to how, for outwardly inexplicable reasons, French merchant shipping suffered its greatest decline just as Napoleon's star was in the ascendant. What takes place in the West takes place out of the forces lying in the actual direction of humanity's development. It takes place out of a completely economic way of thinking, out of the impulses of economic ideas. This is why everything which comes from Central Europe and is conceived not out of economic points of view, but out of political-legal-militaristic ones must succumb to them. We have a crude example of how, based an a political-military standpoint, Napoleon, with his 'Continental System',⁷ tried to counteract from the European continent everything that had resulted from Cromwell's Navigation Act. This Navigation Act was conceived and created entirely out of economic instincts. Napoleon's 'Continental System' at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a political conception. But a political conception is something that projects from earlier times into the modern age—it is antiquated, is actually an anachronism. This is why this political conception could be no match for the modern conception from which the Navigation Act arose. On the other hand, in the West where thinking follows the lines of economics in the sense of the new age, political affairs, even if they take an unfavourable course, do not fundamentally.

Consider the fact that from Europe France colonized North America. She lost these colonies to England. The colonies freed themselves again. The first, the French colonization in the eighteenth century, was a political act and bore no fruit. The English colonization in North America was entirely out of economic impulses. The political element could be destroyed—North America freed itself and the political connection no longer existed. But the economic connections remained intact.

Thus are things linked in human evolution. And we can safely say that history also shows that when two do the same thing it is in fact not the same. When Cromwell, at the right time and out of economic impulses, created his Navigation Act—which, for the other powers, was extraordinarily tyrannical and even, one could say, brutal—this arose nevertheless from an economic thinking. When, in modern times, Tirpitz⁸ created the German navy and merchant fleet it was conceived politically, purely politically and without any economic impulse—in fact, against all economic instincts. Today it has been wiped off the face of the earth because it was planned and conceived contrary to the course of human evolution. And thus it could be shown, with regard to all individual phenomena, how this, let us say historical threefoldness, really does exist; in the East, but in a decadent form today, something which points back to ancient times of Eastern evolution and has a spiritual character; in the Centre something which today is also antiquated and always, to a greater or lesser extent, takes an the form of the political-legal-militaristic; in the West the State is really only a decoration, the political has no real significance—what preponderates here is economic thinking. Whereas Germany has gone to pieces because the State has absorbed the economy, because industry and commerce have submerged and bowed down under the power of the State, we see in the West how the State is sucked up by the economic life and everything is flooded by the economic life. This, viewed externally, is the differentiation covering the modern civilized world.

But what one can view in this way externally is, after all, basically brought to the visible surface only from the underlying depths of the spiritual world. Everything in the spiritual development of modern times is designed towards setting up the individuality—the individuality in the West in a Western way, in an economic way; the individuality of the Centre in the already antiquated political-militaristic way; the individuality of the East in an antiquated way, in accordance with the ancient spirituality that is now completely decadent. This has to be borne by the spiritual world, and it is borne by the fact that both in the West and the East—we shall consider only these two regions for the time being—a peculiar and deeply significant phenomenon is appearing. And it is this: very many people—at least relatively many—are being born who do not follow the regular course of reincarnation.

You see, this is why it is so difficult to speak about such a problem as reincarnation, because one cannot speak about it in the abstract sense that is so popular nowadays. For it is a problem pointing indeed to something that is a significant reality in the evolution of humanity, but it can have exceptions. And we see how both in the East and the West—we shall have to speak of the Centre in later lectures—people are born whom we cannot regard in such a way that we can say: There lives in this person, in the completely usual way, an individuality that was there in an earlier life, and then again in a subsequent earlier life, and which will be there in a later life and again in a still later life. Such reincarnations form the regular course of human evolution, but there are exceptions. What confronts us as a human being in human form does not always have to be as it outwardly appears. The outer appearance can, in fact, be just appearance. It is possible for us to confront human beings in human form who only appear to be human beings of the kind that are subject to repeated lives on earth. In reality these are human bodies with a physical, etheric and astral body—but there are other beings incarnated here, beings who use these people in order to work through them. There are in fact a large number of people, for example in the West, who are not simply reincarnated human beings but are the bearers of beings who have taken an extremely premature path of development and who should only appear in the form of humanity at a later stage of their evolution. Now these beings do not make use of the whole human organism but use chiefly the metabolic system of these Western human beings. Of the three members of the human nature they use the metabolic system and do so in such a way that, through these human beings, they work into the physical world. For one who can observe life with a certain accuracy, people of this kind even show outwardly that this is how it is with them. Thus, for example, a large number of those individuals who belong to Anglo-Saxon secret societies and who have great influence—we have spoken on a number of occasions in past years of the roll of these secret societies⁹ —are actually the bearers of premature existences of this kind which, through the metabolic system of certain people, work into the world and seek out a field of action through human bodies and do not live in normal regular incarnations. The leading personalities of certain sects are of this nature, and the overwhelming majority of a very widespread sect that has a great following in the West is made up of individuals of this kind. In this way a completely different spirituality is working into present-day human beings and it will be an essential task to be able to take up a stand towards life from this point of view.

One should not think in an abstract way that everywhere and without exception human beings are subject to repeated lives on earth. This would mean that we do not attribute to external semblance the quality of semblance. To face the truth means even in cases like these, to seek truth; to seek reality where outer appearance is so deceptive that beings other than human beings are incorporated in human form, in a part of the human being, namely in the metabolic system. But they also work in the trunk, in the rhythmic system and in the sensory-nervous system. There are in fact three kinds of beings of this nature who incarnate in this way through the metabolic system of different people of the West.

The first kind of beings are beings that have a particular attraction to what, in a sense, are the elemental forces of the earth; that have an inclination towards, a feeling for the elemental forces of the earth and are thus able to sense how, in any particular place, colonization could be carried out in accordance with the conditions of the climate and any other conditions of the earth, or how a trading connection can be established there, and so on.

The second kind of spirits of this nature are those that set themselves the task within their sphere of action of suppressing consciousness of self, of preventing full consciousness of the consciousness-soul from emerging, and thus produce in other people around them, amongst whom something like this spreads like an epidemic, a certain desire not to call themselves to account concerning the real motives behind their actions. One could say that such an utterly untrue report, or such an utterly untrue document, as the one by the Oxford professors that has been published in the last few days¹⁰—such an utterly, even absurdly, untruthful document—must be accounted to the pupilship of this untruthful element which does not wish to look into the real impulses, but glosses over them; uses beautiful words, and all the while there is beneath it nothing, basically, but untruthful impulses. I am not suggesting here that these Oxford professors—who are probably perfectly upright men in themselves (I do not impute strong Ahrimanic impulses to them)—are themselves bearers of such premature beings; but the pupilship to such beings lies within them. These [second kind of] beings, therefore, incarnate through the rhythmic system of certain people in the West.

The third kind of beings that work in the West are those which make it their task to cause the individual abilities in the human being to be forgotten—those abilities which we bring with us from the spiritual worlds when, through conception and birth, we come into physical existence—and to turn human beings more or less into a stereotyped replica of their nation. This is what this third kind of being gives itself as its special task: to prevent the human being from coming to individual spirituality.

So, while the first kind of beings had an affinity with the elemental nature of the ground of the earth, of the climate and so on, the second kind has a particular tendency to breed a certain superficial, untruthful element, and the third type of being the tendency to root out individual abilities and to turn people more or less into a stereotype, a copy of their nation, their race. This last class of beings incarnates in the West through the head system, through the sensory-nervous system. Thus we have here, observed from different angles, the characteristic of the Western world. We have characterized it, if I may put it so, by getting to know a fairly large number of people who are scattered in secret societies, in sects and the like, but whose humanity is constituted in the fact that it is not simply a matter of repeated incarnations, but the incarnation, in a way, of beings who in their development are prematurely here an the earth and who, therefore, attract particular followers or radiate like an epidemic their own exceptional qualities onto other human beings. These three different types of beings do indeed work through human beings and we understand human character only if we know what I have just related—if we know that what lives in public life cannot be simply explained superficially but has to be explained in terms of the intrusion of spiritual forces of this kind.

The appearance in Western human beings of these three kinds of forces, of beings at this particular stage of development, is encouraged by the fact that it is given to the West to develop a specifically economic way of thinking. The economic life is, as it were, the ground and soil from which something like this can spring up. And what then, in total, is the task these beings have set themselves?

They have set themselves the task of keeping life as a whole restricted to the mere life of economics. They seek gradually to root out everything else—everything of the spiritual life which even where it is most active, has shrunk into the abstractness of Puritanism—to root out spiritual life, to chip away the political life and to absorb everything into the life of economics. In the West the people who come into the world in this way are the real enemies and opponents of the threefold impulse. The beings of the first type prevent die emergence of an economic life that stands as an independent entity alongside the political-legal and spiritual facets of the social organism. The beings of the second type, who make superficiality, phrase-mongering and untruthfulness their task, seek to prevent the establishing, alongside the economic life, of an independent democratic life of the State. And the third kind of being those that suppress the individual abilities of the human being and do not want the human being to be anything other than a kind of stereotype of his race, his nation—work against the emancipation and independence of the spiritual life.

Thus in the West there are such forces which work in this way against the impulse of the threefold social organism. And anyone who, in a deeper sense, wishes to work for the spread of this threefold impulse must be aware that he has also to take into account spiritual factors like these that are present in human evolution. Indeed the powers on which one must call when one wants to bring something new into the development of humanity are faced not only with the things that any hard-headed philistine notices but also with things that are only laid open to a spiritual knowledge. What use is it when people of today regard this as superstition and do not want to hear that such spiritual beings intrude through human beings? They are nevertheless there, these spiritual beings! And anyone who does not merely want to go through life with a sleeping soul, but with a fully awake soul, can observe the influences of these beings everywhere. If only, from the presence of the effects, people would allow themselves to be convinced a little of the existence of the causes!

This is the characteristic we find when looking towards the West. The West takes on this form because it lives completely in the most fundamental expression of the present epoch—in economic concepts, economic thinking.

The East had once a grand and lofty life of spirit. All spirituality—with the exception of what is striven for in Anthroposophy and is trying to give itself new form—all spirituality of the civilized world is, in actual fact, a legacy of the East. But the real glory of this religious-spiritual life was present in the East only in ancient times. And today the Eastern human being, even in Russia, finds himself in a strange disharmony because on the one hand he still lives in the ancient spiritual element of his heritage and, on the other, there is also working in him that which comes out of the present epoch of human development; namely the training towards becoming an individuality. This brings about a situation such that, in the East, there is a strong decadence in humanity; that, in a sense, the human being cannot become a full human being; that hard on the heels of this Eastern human being, as far west as Russia, is the spiritual heritage of ancient times. And this has the effect that when today the consciousness of this Eastern human being is lowered, when he is in a condition of sleep or dreaming, or in some kind of mediumistic trance state which is so very frequent in the East, he is then, indeed, not entirely impregnated by another being as in the West, but this being works into his soul nature; these beings, as it were, appear to him. Whereas in the West it is premature beings of three kinds that are at work (which I have ennumerated), in the East it is retarded beings, beings that have remained behind from an earlier evolutionary stage of perfection and who now appear to human beings of the East in a mediumistic state, in dreams, or simply during sleep, so that the human being in a waking state then bears within him the inspirations of such beings; is inspired during the day by the after-effects of beings of this kind who come over him during the night.

And here again there are three types of beings working in the East who likewise have a great influence. Whereas in the West one has to draw attention to individual human beings through whom these beings incarnate, in the East one must point to a kind of hierarchy that can appear to the most varied people. Again it is three types of beings; not, however, beings that incarnate through people but beings that appear to people and also inspire them during sleep at night.

The first type of these beings prevents the human being from taking full possession of his physical body, hinders him from finding a connection with the economic element, with the public conditions of the present-day in general. These are the beings who seek in the East to hold back the economic life as it is needed in the threefold social order.

The second type of beings are those that produce over-individualization—a kind of, if I may put it so paradoxically, unegoistic egoism. This is all the more subtle in the way it is so frequently found in people, particularly of the East, who fancifully attribute to themselves all possible selflessness—a selflessness which, however, is in fact a particularly subtle form of self-seeking, a particulary subtle egoism. They want to be absolutely good, they want to be as good as it is ever possible to be. This, too, is an egoistic sentiment. This is something that can be called, paradoxically, an unegoistic egoism, an egoism arising from an imagined selflessness.

The third type of being that appears, in the way described, to human beings of the East are those beings that hold back the spiritual life from the earth; that spread, as it were, a dull mystical atmosphere over human beings, as can be found so frequently today, particularly in the East. And again, these three types of spiritual beings, which work down from the spiritual world and do not incarnate into human beings, are the enemies of the threefold social organism. In this way the threefold impulse is hemmed in from the spiritual side in the East and from the human side, as described, in the West. Thus we see here the spiritual foundations underlying the differen-tiation.

We still have to add to this what is hostile to the threefolding in the European Centre so that, from a spiritual point of view, we gradually gain an idea of how one must equip oneself in order that the opposing powers—whether from the spiritual world, as in the East, or from human beings, as in the West, or from the Centre of Europe, in a way which I shall relate tomorrow—can be met by the threefold idea with an impulse that is of the greatest conceivable importance for humanity's evolution. And in order to know how one must act with regard to these things one must be equipped with an armour of thoughts.

• 1 . See Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit—In geänderter Zeitlage, twelve lectures, Dornach and Bern 1918, (GA 186).
• 2 . Karl Marx (1818–1883), founder of scientific capitalism.
• 3 . Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar of Russia.
• 4 . Lenin, actually Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924).
• 5 . Trotsky, actually Leib Bronstein (1879–1940).
• 6 . Cromwell's Magna Charta Maritima strengthened the position of the English fleet by decreeing that foreign goods could be imported only on English ships or ships of the country of origin. This measure struck a blow primarily at the Dutch hegemony in international carrying trade.
• 7 . Napoleon's decree from Berlin on 21 November 1806 imposed the strictest blockade of the British Isles by closing the entire Continent to trade and commerce with England.
• 8 . Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930), German Admiral of the the Fleet and statesman, creator of the German naval fleet.
• 9 . See, et al., the lectures from 20 to 22 January 1917, Das Geheimnis des Lebens nach dem Tode in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit, Zweiter Teil, twelve lectures, Dornach 1917, (GA 174); Individuelle Geistwesen und ihr Wirken in der Seek des Menschen, nine lectures in different cities, 1917, (GA 178); and Die okkulte Bewegung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert and ihre Beziehung zur Welikultur, thirteen lectures, Dornach 1915, (GA 254).
• 10. In October 1920, professors and doctors of Oxford University sent an appeal to the professors of art and science in Germany and Austria, in order, as it says there, '...to remove the bitter enmity that has arisen under the influence of patriotism...' and to find a reconciliation through the 'brotherly feelings of study'—article entitled Die Völkeruersühnung (The Reconciliation of Peoples) in the Basel Nationalzeitung of 20 October 1920.

Yesterday I drew attention again, but from a different point of view to the one we have taken for some time in the past, to the differentiation that exists among the peoples of the present civilized world. I indicated how the individualization of the human being in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is guided by spiritual beings: how, on the one side, certain beings interfere through individuals of the West—beings that have progressed in an irregular way, that are more advanced than humanity, but for their own interests incarnate into human beings in order to work against the true impulse of the present, the impulse of the threefolding of the social organism.

I also drew attention to how, in a different way, we find in the East that certain beings, that had their real significance in the far distant past, but wish now to work into and to influence human lives, assert themselves; not, indeed, through human beings themselves, but by appearing to them. We spoke of how these beings influence Eastern human beings, be it more or less consciously, by virtue of the particular soul-configuration of the people living in the Orient; by working as imaginations into the consciousness of certain human beings of the East—perhaps by working during sleep into the human 'I' and astral body—and then asserting themselves, without the people realizing it, in the after-effects during waking. And in this way they bring in everything they wish to pit against the normal progress of humanity in the East. Thus we can say: For a long time in the West a kind of earth-boundness has, in a certain sense, been prepared in such human beings as I described yesterday, who are dispersed there, and who take leading positions, particularly in sects and in secret societies and the like. In the East there are also certain leading personalities who, under the influence of beings from the past who appear to them in imaginations, put into practice in present cultural development what these beings introduce. If one wants to understand how the human beings of the European Centre are wedged in, as it were, between the West and the East one must look more closely into the underlying spiritual conditions and at everything in the physical-sense world that expresses itself out of these spiritual conditions.

I have drawn your attention, from the most varied points of view, to how the life of the ancient Orient was, in the main, a spiritual life; how the human being of the ancient Orient had a highly developed spiritual life that flowed from a direct perception of the spiritual worlds; how this spiritual life then lived on as a heritage; how it existed in Greece, primarily as artistic beauty but also as a certain insight; and how already in Greece there mingled in with it what then became Aristotelianism, what was already intellectual, dialectical thinking. So what came from oriental wisdom penetrated then into Western civilization, and, with the exception of what stems from natural science and what can stem from the modern anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science, everything that exists in Western civilization as spiritual life is basically an inheritance from the ancient Orient. But this spiritual life is, in fact, completely decadent. This spiritual life is of such a nature that it lacks strength, lacks impetus. The human being is, to be sure, guided to the spiritual world through it, but can no longer find a link between what he believes about the spiritual world and what happens here on earth. This shows itself most strongly in Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, in which a faith, completely estranged from the world, has secured itself a place alongside worldly activities. It is directed towards entirely abstract spiritual regions, and basically does not take the trouble to confront and come to terms with the external physical world of the senses.

In the Orient even completely worldly aspirations—aspirations of the social life—take on such a spiritual character that they have the appearance of religious movements. And the momentum of Bolshevism in the East, for example, is to be traced to the fact that it is actually conceived by the people of the East, even by the Russian people, as a religious movement. The impetus of this social movement in the East lies not so much in the abstract concepts of Marxism, but essentially in the fact that its bearers are regarded as new Saviours, as the continuers so to speak, of earlier religious-spiritual striving and life.

From the Roman culture, and even already from the Hellenistic culture there developed, as we know, what took hold of the human beings of the Centre most of all—the dialectical element, the element of political-legal-militaristic thinking. And one can only understand the role played by what then developed out of the Roman culture when one considers at first that all three branches of human experience—the experience of the spiritual, the experience of economics, the experience of the civic-political in which Rome developed to particular splendour and in which the Roman Empire arose—were mixed up and at cross-purposes in much the same way that is the case today over basically the whole civilized world. Rome ended in complete decadence, brought about essentially by the fact that in the Roman Empire the untenable situation arose which always arises when these three human activities—spiritual life, political life and economic life—get mixed up chaotically with one another. It can truly be said that the Roman Empire and particularly the Byzantine Empire were a kind of symbol of the decay of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Roman epoch. We need only consider that of 107 Eastern Roman Emperors only 34 died in their beds! The others were either poisoned or maimed and died in prison, or left prison to join monasteries or the like. And out of the decline of the Roman world in Southern Europe developed something which then streamed northwards in three branches (see diagram).

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Here, to begin with, we have the Western branch. I shall not go today into the historical details of what developed throughout the Middle Ages out of the older development of humanity, but I should like to draw your attention to a few things. The characteristic phenomenon of Western development, of development in the more southerly Western regions to begin with, is that Roman culture spreads as a sum-total of people towards Spain, over present-day France, and also over a part of Britain. These were Roman people who developed in this direction. But all this was interpenetrated by what entered into these Roman peoples through the migrations of Germanic tribes of various kinds.

And here we find a singular phenomenon. We find that Germanic peoples force their way into the Roman element and that something then arises there which can only be characterized by saying: Human beings of Germanic nature penetrated into the Roman element. Rome as such, the Roman human being, went under. But what remained of the Roman culture—what took shape, that is, through the intersection of these two lines (see diagram) and formed the Spanish, the French and also a part of the British population—is essentially Germanic blood overlain by the Roman language-element. It can only really be understood by looking at it in this way. This human being, as regards his soul-configuration, his direction of perceiving, feeling and willing, is descended from what, as the Germanic element, moved in the stream of the migrations from East to West. But it is a peculiarity of this Germanic element that when it comes up against a foreign language element—and there is always a culture embodied in a language—it dissolves into it, assumes it. It grows into this foreign language as though, if I may put it so, into a garment of civilization. What lives in the West of Europe as the Latin race has, fundamentally, nothing in it of Latin blood. But it, has grown into what, embodied in the language, has streamed up to it there. For it lay in the nature of the Latin, of the Roman, element to assert itself beyond the purely human in the course of world evolution. This is why the concept of one's will and testament first arose in Rome—the assertion of egoism beyond death. The wish to extend one's will beyond death led to the concept of the will and testament. Thus, too, the continuance of the language worked an beyond the continuance of the human element in the people.

And other things, too, were preserved apart from the language. Thus, in this stream here (see diagram), there was preserved for the West the ancient traditions of the different secret societies, (the significance of which I have frequently referred to in the course of the past years). These are traditions stemming from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, from the Graeco-Roman times, which, to be sure, are borrowings from the East—from manuscripts—but have passed thoroughly through the Roman, the Latin, culture. Thus, in a certain respect, in so far as Western humanity is submerged in the Roman language-element that has endured beyond the actual Roman people, one finds the human being in the cloak of a foreign civilization. One also has the human being in a foreign cloak in as much as in the ancient Mystery truths—which have become abstract and which, in the ceremonies and ritual of the Western societies, have become more or less empty forms—one has something in which the human element is submerged and which is capable of touching it.

Now, if other conditions are particularly favourable, then this situation [of the human being being penetrated from without by everything that arises from language] provides a foothold for beings of the kind I described yesterday, enabling them to incarnate into the human being. But particularly favourable for this incarnating process is the Anglo-Saxon element. This is because it was a thoroughly Germanic people that moved across to the West and because the Germanic element has been strongly preserved in these human beings who have permeated themselves to a lesser degree with the Roman element than have those whom we call the Latin peoples. Thus there is a far more malleable balance present here in the Anglo-Saxon race, and because of this those beings which incarnate here have far greater freedom of action, far greater room to move in as it were. In the Latin countries proper they would be extremely constricted. Above all, however, one must be clear that what can then manifest in individual, personalities depends an configurations of folk psychology such as these. Although Puritanism certainly represented an abstract sphere of belief, this freer element was pre-eminently suited to adopting and Anglo-Saxon developing natural-scientific thinking and to forming a concept of the world and of life based upon it. The whole humanity of the human being, certainly, is not engaged here—only part of man's being is engaged through the incorporation of languages, through the incorporation of other elements of the human being—which makes it possible for such beings as I described yesterday to incarnate in these people.

Let me state expressly that what I am talking about at the moment concerns only certain single individuals who are scattered amongst the mass of other human beings. It does not refer to nations; it does not refer to the vast masses of people but only to single individuals who, however, have an extraordinarily strong position of leadership in those regions I have mentioned. What is primarily taken hold of in the West by these beings, who then secure for the human body in which they incarnate a certain position of leadership, is the body and soul—not the spirit to which less attention is paid.

Where, for example, does the whole magnificent but one-sided elaboration of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution come from?¹ It comes from the fact that, in Charles Darwin, body and soul, and not the spirit, were particularly dominant. He, therefore, also considers the human being only according to body and soul and ignores the spirit and that which lives into the soul from the spirit. Anyone who looks without prejudice at the results of Darwin's research will understand that something was present there which was unwilling to consider the human being from the aspect of his spirit. 'Spirit' was only taken from more recent science—which is international. But what coloured his whole conception of the human being was the emphasis put on body and soul and the disregard for the spirit. In fact, the most faithful pupils of the Ecumenical Council of 869² were the people of the West. Initially they left the spirit out of consideration, taking body and soul in the way they are represented particularly in Darwin's descriptions and simply put an artificial head on top as spirit, in the materialistic way of thinking that arises out of science. And because people were ashamed, as it were, to make a universal religion out of natural science, there remained, as an external appendage, leading an abstract existence of its own, what lived on as Puritanism and the like but which had no connection with the real world culture. We see how here, in a certain sense, body and soul are overwhelmed by an abstract scientific spirit which we can clearly observe even into the present.

But let us suppose that something else happened. Let us suppose that what lives on in language—what lives on in the spiritual world of forms of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—were to be stronger. What would arise then? There would arise a strong fanatical rejection of the modern spirit; and rather than emphasizing that an 'artificial head' of natural-scientific concepts be superimposed on the bodily-soul element, the old traditions would be superimposed: in fact only the physical and the soul element would really be cultivated. We could then imagine that, in such a crude way, some individual might work on everything that is only body and soul and devise a doctrine that wished only to consider body and soul; which outwardly did not use science for this but rather the external part of a revelation from an earlier time carried over into a later one. And then we have Jesuitism, we have Ignatius of Loyola.³ We may say that, just as minds like Darwin arose of necessity from Anglo-Saxondom, so from later Romanism there arose Ignatius of Loyola.

The characteristic of the human beings of the West, of whom we have to speak here, is that through them those spiritual beings I described yesterday make themselves felt in the world. In the East this is different. A different stream moves towards the East (see diagram). But we will first look at something that goes out from ancient Rome as a second stream—which does not carry the language but which carries the whole trend of the soul-constitution, the trend of thought. The language goes more to the West and, through this we get all the phenomena of which I have just spoken. The direction of thought, on the other hand, moves more towards the centre of Europe. But it unites there with what lies there with the essential Germanic element; namely, a certain wish to be one with the language. But it is possible to maintain this wish to be one with the language only as long as the people who live in that language remain together. When the Goths, the Vandals and so on moved westwards they were immersed in the Latin element. This 'being one with the language' only remained in the centre of Europe. This means that in Central Europe the language is indeed not bound particularly strongly to human beings but is nevertheless bound more strongly than was the case in the Roman people, who are now lost but who have passed their language on. The Germanic people would not be able to pass on their language. The Germanic people have their language as something living in them and would never be able to leave it behind as a heritage. This language can only continue to live as long as it is bound together with the human being. This is connected with the whole nature of the human constitution of those peoples who have gradually asserted themselves in the centre of Europe. This has the effect that human beings came to the fore in Central Europe who were not suitable for such beings to incarnate into, as was the case in the West. But they could nevertheless be taken hold of. It was quite possible for the beings of the three types I described yesterday to assert themselves in the leaders of the people of Central Europe. But this also makes it possible for those people to be accessible to the phenomena which appear to the people of the Orient as imaginations. But in the people of the Centre these imaginations remain so pale during the day that they appear only as concepts, as ideas. The same applies also to what has its origin in those beings who incarnate in human beings and who play such a great role in individuals of the West. They cannot have the same effect here, but nevertheless give the whole human being a certain tendency. It is particularly the case in human beings of the Centre that over the course of centuries it was barely possible for any individual who attained to any sort of significance to save himself from the embodiment of the spirits of the West on the one side, and from the spirits of the East on the other. This always caused a kind of schism in these people.

To describe these human beings [of the Centre] in their true nature we can say: When they were awake there was working in them something of the attacks of the spirits of the West which influenced their desires, their instincts, lived in their will, and crippled it. When these individuals slept, when the astral body and the 'I' were separated, beings asserted themselves in them of the kind that often worked unconsciously on human beings of the Orient, appearing in imaginations. And one only needs to choose a highly characteristic personality from the civilization of the Centre and one will be able to touch—almost, as it were, with one's bare hands—the fact that this is as I have described it. One only needs to take Goethe. Take everything that lived in Goethe from the attacks of the spirits of the West that asserted themselves in his will, that surged particularly in the young Goethe and which one senses strongly when one reads the scenes, which gushed from Goethe in his youth, of Faust or The Wandering Jew. And then you see how, on the other hand, Goethe reached calm inner clarity—for the element of the Orient that tends merely to the spirit and soul was mastered in him, was permeated with this will element. You see how in old age he turns, in Part Two of Faust, more towards imaginations. But a cleft is nevertheless there. It is difficult to find a bridge between the style of Part One of Faust and the style of Part Two.

And look at the living Goethe himself, who grows from the impulses of the West; who, as it were, is tormented by the spirits of the West and who, as a young man, comforts himself with what after all also contains a great deal of the West: the Gothic style. But here there emerges a striving towards the spirits of the past, to those spirits which were at work in Greece—and also, most especially, in the Gothic style—but which nonetheless were basically the successors of those spirits which once inspired the oriental at the time when he came to his great ancient wisdom. And coming to the 1780s we see how he can no longer bear the spirits of the West, how they torment him. And he tries to balance this by moving to the South in order to absorb there what can come from the other side. This is just what gives the leading personalities of the Centre—and the other human beings, of course, follow these leaders—their characteristic stamp. The human beings of the Centre were thereby particularly prepared for the coming to prominence of the one thing that is important for the whole evolution of humanity. One can observe this best in a mind such as Hegel. If you take Hegel's philosophy, you find—I have often mentioned this here—that this philosophy develops in every respect towards the spirit. Yet nowhere in Hegel do you find anything which goes beyond the physical-sense life. Instead of a real teaching on the spirit you find logical dialectics as the first part of his philosophy. His philosophy of nature is merely a sum of abstractions of what lives in the human being himself; and you find what is supposed to be treated by psychology presented in the third part of Hegel's philosophy. But what comes out of it is nothing other than what the human being lives through between birth and death, which is then compressed into history. Nowhere in Hegel is it a matter of the eternal in the human being entering into an existence before birth or after death. Nor can its justification be found anywhere.

This is the one thing that the human beings, the most outstanding human beings, of the Centre give weight to: the fact that the human being, as he lives here between birth and death, consists of body, soul and spirit. For the human beings of the sense-world—for our physical world—soul and spirit should be made manifest by these people of the Centre.

As soon as we move to the East we find that soul and spirit predominate, just as, in the West, it is primarily body and soul. Thus, this rising up to imaginations is natural and, even if they do not come to consciousness, they nevertheless still work into the consciousness. The whole disposition Anlage) of thinking in the human being of the East is such that it tends towards imaginations: even if, at times, these imaginations are taken hold of in abstract concepts, as in Soloviev.⁴

And a third branch extends from Rome towards the North and into the East via Byzantium (see diagram). What was together, though chaotically, in Rome now divides to a certain extent into three separate branches. It diverges and moves to the West where a new element of economics establishes itself as something especially appropriate for the new age, finding dose affinity with natural science. It moves also to the East and progresses from the ancient primal wisdom into decadence. There develops that which is the spiritual, in religious form. All this happens, of course, in parallel. And towards the Centre there develops what is political-militaristic, civic-judicial, which also naturally spreads into different areas. But we must keep the characteristic branches in mind.

The further eastward we go, the more do we see how the people of the East are not bound up with their language in the same way that the Germanic peoples are. The Germanic peoples really live in their language as long as they have it. Just study the strange course of the Germanic humanity of Central Europe. Look at the two branches of Germanic population which moved, for example, towards Hungary into the Zipser region; as Swabians down into the Banat; as Siebenbürger Saxons towards Transylvania. In all these places it is, if I may put it so, rather like a fading away of the actual language element. Everywhere these people allow themselves to be absorbed by the [foreign] language into which they merge. It would be a most interesting ethnological study to see how, in a relatively short time during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the German element in the area around Vienna has withdrawn, has been swamped. This would be tangibly apparent if one looked at this matter with understanding. One saw how the German element evolved into the Magyar in an artificial way and into the Slavonic in a natural way.

In the East the human being is intimately bound up with his language. There the spirit-soul element lives in the language. This is often disregarded. The human being of the West lives in language in a completely different way—in a radically different way—from the human being of the East. The human being of the West lives in his language as though in a garment; the human being of the East lives in his language as though in himself. This is why the human being of the West could adopt the natural-scientific view of life, could pour it into his language, which is only a vessel. The scientific world-view of the West will never find a foothold in the Orient because it simply cannot get into the oriental languages. The languages of the Orient reject it; they do not adopt the world-view of science. You can sense this if you let the—albeit rather coquettish—writings of Rabindranath Tagore⁵ work on you. Even though, in Tagore, it is all permeated with coquetry, one nevertheless sees how the whole nature of his existence consists in an experience of the forceful impact of the Western world-view, and then, through living in the language, an immediate rejection of it.

The human being of the Centre was thrown into all this. He had to take in everything he experienced in the West but did not absorb it as deeply as the Westerner; he suffused it with what also came from the East. Hence the more malleable equilibrium in the Centre; but hence also the inner strife, the duality in the individualization of the souls of human beings of the Centre. The striving to find a harmony, a balancing out of this duality—which is so classicially, so magnificently, portrayed in Schiller's Letters an Aesthetic Education in which two driving forces that are to be united—that of Nature and that of Reason—points clearly to this duality. But one can point to something much deeper. You see, when one looks to the West one finds primarily a certain inclination in the whole people to adopt the natural-scientific way of thinking, which is so exceptionally suited to the economic life. I have shown you how this scientific way of thinking has entered even into psychology. It has been adopted there completely. And it is there that Puritanism lived like an abstract appendage (Einschlag), like something that has nothing to do with real outer life—something that one locks away, as it were, in one's soul house—something one does not allow to be touched by outer culture.

The nature of what is developing in the West is such that we can say: There is a tendency here to take into oneself everything that is accessible to human reason in as much as this is bound to body and soul. Everything else—Puritanism—is only the Sunday coat of what is the body, what is accessible to reason. Hence the deism—that squeezed lemon of a religious world-view—in which there is nothing more of God than the fairy tale of a generalized, completely abstract, cosmic first cause. Reason, bound to body and soul, is what is asserting itself here.

If you go to the East there is no understanding at all for a rationality of this kind. This already begins in Russia. For, has the Russian any understanding at all for what is called rational in the West? Let us be under no illusion here. The Russian has not the slightest understanding for what, in the West, one calls rationality. The Russian is open to what one could call revelation. Fundamentally, he takes up as the content of his soul everything that comes to him by virtue of a kind of revelation. Reason—even when he says the word, copying it from Western human beings—is something of which he understands nothing; that is, he does not feel in this word what Western people feel. But what can be felt when one speaks of revelations, of the descent of truths from the supersensible worlds into human beings—this he understands well. Through the nature of what is spoken of in the West—and Puritanism is indeed good proof of this—one sees that there is by nature not the slightest understanding for what one must refer to as the relation of the Russian—and even more so of the oriental, of the Asiatic human being—of the relation in general of the human being to the spiritual world. In the West there is not the slightest understanding for this. For this is something quite different from what is given through reason. It is something which, going out from the spirit, takes hold of the human being and permeates him in a living way.

And in the human being of Central Europe the situation is this: as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch was approaching—around the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries (it came then in the fifteenth century)—the outstanding spirits of Central Europe were faced with an immense question, a question that was set them as human beings placed between West and East—a West that pulled them towards reason and an East that pulled them towards revelation. Just study later Scholasticism, the brilliant age of medieval spiritual development, from this point of view. Just study, from this standpoint, such spirits as Albertus Magnus,⁶ Thomas Aquinas,⁷ Duns Scotus⁸ and so on. Compare them with such spirits as Roger Bacon⁹ —I mean the elder, who was more orientated towards the West—and you will see that a great question arose for the spirits of later Central-European Scholasticism, from the working together of what pressed from the West as reason and what pressed in from the East as revelation. This pressure came, on the one hand, from those spirits who wished to take hold of the human body and soul through the will and from those spirits, on the other hand, who, in the East, wished to take hold of spirit and soul through imaginations. It is from this that the tenet of Scholastic teaching arose that both were valid: reason on the one side and revelation on the other. Reason for everything on the earth which can be acquired through the senses and revelation for the supersensible truths which can be drawn only from the Bible and from the traditions of Christianity. One comprehends the Christian Scholasticism of the Middle Ages when one perceives its most outstanding spirits as being those in whom reason from the West and revelation from the East came together. Both influences were working in the human being and in the Middle Ages people could only bring them together by feeling the split, the duality in themselves.

In that place high up in the small cupola,¹⁰ where the Germanic element is meant to be shown with its dualism, you see the elements of this duality clashing against one another in the red-yellow and the black-brown—the red-yellow of revelation and the black-brown of reason. You see there, felt in colour, revealed through colour, what has inspired and worked through different human cultures and has thus come to the human being.

Thus we could say that what we have now, spread over the civilized world, is taken hold of in the West by economic life—the element that has actually arisen only in modern times. For economic life was never such a topical question in earlier epochs as it is today. It is actually appropriate to our times. In contrast, matters of state and politics are already fading. And what was founded in the last third of the nineteenth century as the German Empire took into itself just this fading element of ancient Rome and fell to pieces because of it. This was already so at the beginning in the way it was structured but even more so in the way it then developed. Fundamentally, this German Empire was nothing but a continuation of the civic-judicial, the political element, which excelled in organizing everything—indeed, had great geniuses of organization. But it wanted to also take over the economic life without having economic thinking. For everything that the economy did in this Empire wanted more and more to creep under the umbrella of the State. Militarism, for example, which basically orginated in France and also in Switzerland but which had quite different forms, was 'politicized' (verstaatlicht), as it were, in Central Europe. Central Europe could therefore take up neither an economic life nor a spiritual life truly alive in itself and arising out of its own roots. The anti-spirituality that has been organized in Central Europe in recent times is of the most terrible kind! We see everything pertaining to the spiritual life becoming more and more part of a political State. And so it came about that in Central Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century there was not a single individual left who wrote about history or similar things except as a 'party-political man'. Everything which came out of the universities was not objective history but party-wisdom, distinctly politically coloured. And even more decadent is the spiritual life which originates in very ancient times in the Orient. It mingled with the deluge from the West, from the Centre, in the measures of Peter the Great with the native spirituality that was already in a state of decadence, expressing itself in Pan-Slavism, in Slavophilism. And it led finally to the creation of the present conditions from which a new spirit wishes to arise, for the old is completely decadent.

Thus we see, spread out over the world, a new economy, jurisprudence and political life coming to an end, and a spiritual life which has come to an end.

In the West we see how the political element has been completely absorbed by the economy and that the spiritual element, if one disregards the unreality of Puritanism, exists only in the form of natural science. In the Centre we have had an already aging State which tried to absorb both economy and spiritual life and was therefore unable to survive. And in the East we have nothing but—the dying spirit of ancient times which the West tries to galvanize through all manner of measures. No matter whether tried by Peter the Great or by Lenin, what wishes to come from the West galvanizes the corpse of the Eastern spirit. Salvation lies in clearly seeing that a new spirit must permeate humanity.

This new spirit, which cannot be found in the Orient but only in the Occident, must put economic life, political life and spiritual life side by side, quite distinct from one another. Then the economic life of the West, for which the West is particularly organized through its natural qualities, can be complemented by the political and the spiritual life. Then the Centre can take up beside its political life—which will be improved through quite different principles than were there in the past if it is anthroposophically-oriented—an economic and spiritual life. And then the Orient can be re-fructified. The Orient will understand the spiritual life that blossoms in the Occident only if one introduces it in the right way. As soon as artificial barriers are no longer created, which do not allow the movement of the truly anthroposophically-oriented spiritual life of the Occident; as soon as this is allowed to cross into the Orient, it will be understood there, even if it enters at first through such coquettish spirits as Rabindranath Tagore or others. The point is that natural science as such is rejected by the Orient. But that science which is illumined by true spirituality, which we have wanted to present here in our courses of the Free School of Spiritual Science, will also be taken up in the Orient with great eagerness. The Orient will then have a great deal of understanding for an independent spiritual life. And it will also take up an independent civic-political life and an independent economic life which it will be able to run in independence. Thus, in this threefold form of the social organism, there is a fulfillment of that which, from a rational but at the same time also spiritual view, represents the development of the European and Asiatic world since the decline of Rome.

• 1 . Charles Darwin (1809–1882).
• 2 . In the year 869, the 8th Ecumenical Council of Constantinople under Pope Hadrian II, decreed, against Photios, that the human being has a rational and intellectual soul—unam animam rationabilem et intellectualem—so that it was no longer permitted to speak of a separate spiritual principle in the human being. The spiritual was henceforth seen more as a quality of the soul.
• 3 . Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuit Order in 1534.
• 4 . Vladimir Sergeyevich Soloviev (1853–1900), Russian philosopher and poet.
• 5 . Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Indian philosopher and poet.
• 6 . Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), Scholastic philosopher, called 'Doctor Universalis'.
• 7 . Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Scholastic and pupil of Albertus Magnus; called Doctor Angelicus. Canonized in 1323.
• 8 . Johannes Duns Scotus (1266–1294), Scholastic.
• 9 . Roger Bacon (1214–1294), Franciscan, taught at Oxford University.
• 10. In the first Goetheanum. A presentation of the individual motifs of the small cupola can be found in Der Baugedanhe des Goetheanum (The Architectural Concept of the Goetheanum), Dornach, 1952.