Search — Rudolf Steiner Archive (2024)

The theme for this evening's lecture has been requested as “The social will as a basis towards a new, scientific procedure.” I don't know exactly what the motives are for proposing this theme, but when the request came to me I found it extraordinarily lucky because it corresponds in tone to what I consider necessary with regard to the facts which the social movement has brought into the present, and is expressed far more clearly than what formerly had been discussed and negotiated regarding the social question in the course of the last decades.

It is possible to follow the development of the social movement over a long time, up to our present times and to notice how the social impulses in their aims tend more and more to the one or other side, having something sneaking into this social will, into the social mood of recent times which can seem like a wrapping of something from quite another time when superstitions ruled in the Middle ages. These superstitions appear now again when you engage yourself deeply in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” and come to the scene where Goethe allows his Wagner to create the Homunculus, the manikin who would like to be on the way to becoming a human being, developed out of the manikin. According to Goethe it depended on Middle Age superstitions to desire the creation of something out of mere theory, mere outer dry and sober facts assimilated in the human mind into something with being, something thought up which becomes alive. The impossibility of taking abstractions drawn from outer life and forming something alive with them, was Goethe's concern in particular. The Middle Ages don't rule our current thinking as such, but it appears to me as a metamorphosis, one could say, in all the impulses and instincts of many of our contemporaries who want to address the social will and allow some superstitions to dominate. One can observe the development of social life, how it has in the course of history up to the present resulted in thoughts developing out of certain principles, certain foundations which they want to accomplish, or, as you can hear from various opinions, they want it carried out themselves, which means, just as through abstract principles the Homunculus was formed, they can create something called a social organism.

Towards such a social organism there is a striving of, what one could call, the unconscious part of modern humanity. It is only necessary to make the following clear, in order to understand this. The social life of humanity as such is admittedly nothing new; it only appears to be different in more recent times. The social structure of a community is determined, in our more recent times, by the human instincts and human subconscious impulses. The most significant aspect of the rising forces of our more recent times is that humanity can no longer remain stuck on mere instinctive will impulses, that simply out of the nature of development it must prepare the form of the social structure out of a conscious will. If it is to be prepared through a conscious will, then the will needs a basis of thoughts which need to be developed in the right way. These thoughts towards its foundation would not be mere thoughts derived out of abstractions but out of reality; they would be thoughts which familiarise one's own will with the forces in natural events which weave within the world's own powers. To a certain extent one must be allied in one's own will with the creative powers of natural existence.

This is something which wide circles of humanity still need to learn. They must learn to think that they actually can't proceed if they think: ‘What must happen in order to withdraw from a social structure formed out of a life many experience as intolerable, is to replace it with a feasible social structure.’—One cannot proceed this way. One can't imagine what social illnesses are, to a certain extent. One can only apply one's best aspirations by finding it out of people themselves, how they live together in the community and bring mutual harmony in their reciprocal relationships to unfold what is necessary in these alternate lives, to establish a social structure.

After long years of studying the social question it has come to me that the basic question, which is considered today as a uniform abstract formulation, should be seen in a threefold way: the first, being like a spiritual question, the second, like a question of law and the third as an economic question. What has arisen out of the modern capitalist economic life has developed from the basis of technology and this has hypnotised people's focus in recent times only on to economic life, and have quite drawn away the awareness of the social question beside the economic question to above all also a spiritual question and a question of rights.

I'm going to allow myself to deal with the spiritual question first, not from the basis as perhaps some of you may believe the consideration of spiritual life involves me in particular, but because I am of the conviction that if the Proletarian thinkers of today become unbiased toward the spiritual aspect, in search of a solution for the social question, it can make a contribution to just those realistically orientated observers of the social question, that the spiritual aspect must take a stand first of all. To do so is to develop insight into the soul of those people touched in their real nature by the modern social movement. You need to try and recognise the will impulses of what actually lives in the socialistic orientated circles. Above all, the origins of these will impulses need to be discovered.

You see, as technology and capitalism moved into our more recent human lives, humanity branched off more and more into the so-called ruling class, away from the development in the most varied areas of Proletarianism. Between the Proletarian forces of will and the non-proletarian life today lies a gap, no one can lie about it, a gap which can hardly be bridged if not at least an attempt is made, not only with antiquated thoughts and old will impulses active in the social movement, but with new thoughts and will impulses.

In the course of time a belief has developed within the Proletariat—and one can as far as relationships go, not at all see this belief as something unfounded—a belief has formed that the socially disadvantaged class can expect nothing from the present ruling class if they build on their goodwill, their ideas and so on. There has, if I may say so, developed a deep mistrust between the individual human classes. This mistrust has come out of the origins, which up to now did not play a role in human consciousness, origins which have always been available in the subconscious. As a result, at the start of our more recent times, the bourgeois working class has met with one final important trust and they, not out of their convictions but by feeling, have been tricked out of this final important trust. You see, we are talking about the Proletarian point of view today. Many, also earlier personalities who believed they could bring the Proletarian will and thinking into an expression, actually knew nothing about the origins of these thoughts and will impulses. What comes as challenges out of life itself, living in the social movement actually stands in a remarkable contrast with the challenges and social impulses which are being considered by the Proletarians themselves. If I want to briefly express what I mean, I must say: the Proletarian, the social culture has thus come about, but within the proletarian feelings, within the social culture and the life, rules the inheritance out of just those viewpoints and concepts of life which came about at decisive moments in their historic development.

This decisive moment in the more recent historic development must surely allow the observer to notice that within this development, the newer scientific way of thinking has grown—I ask you to please take note, I don't say natural science but the newer scientific way of thinking—in such a way out of the old spiritual impulses, but that this scientific way of thinking no longer involves the same spiritual power which the old-world view had. The old-world view sent roots and spread into human impulses as the modern scientific way of thinking. The old-world view was capable of sending impulses into the soul, through the person's sensing and experiencing towards solving a stirring question: ‘What am I actually as a person in the world?’—Such a power living in the soul has not come through the modern scientific way of thinking. Obviously through a historic necessity, which is no less of a historical disaster, the old-world view positioned itself at a decisive moment in a hostile opposition towards the newer scientific way of thinking instead of allowing it to flow into a fuller friendship which it should have carried into the spiritual life of the soul. So the following facts came about.

The capitalist machine of economic order tore a number of people out of the context of their lives, out of a context in which they had stood up to then which had quite a different relationship with regards to human feelings for their sense of dignity. There existed a connection between what a person was and what he did. Just think about the relationship which clearly continued in the old crafts up to the 13th Century and still continue in remnants later. Out of this relationship a large number of people were thrown at the machine of the modern economic order. Here was no kind of relationship to elements of production; here was no possibility to establish some or other process between the people and what they were actually doing. This is how it came about that this side of human beings, who didn't invent the modern machine age, could ask: ‘What am I worth as a human being? What am I really worth?’

This question is not to be answered out of a context, of life having become overpowered and worthless, but the answer is to be found within those who were not dependent on the outer context of life. Here nothing other rose out of these classes than what the machine age and the economic ordering imposed at the same historic time: the result was the modern scientific way of thinking.

The old classes didn't need to apply this scientific way of thinking to their beliefs and to their concept of life; they only needed to apply it to their theoretical principles. They instilled in life traditional impulses inherited from origins of olden times. The Proletarians were the only ones who were torn out of all they could not identify as their concept of life which was connected to the old outlook on life. They were, through their purely outward existence, predestined to take what was new and allow it to enter their soul content. So this Proletarian is, as paradoxical as it sounds, as unbelievable as many may see it, the actual, purely scientifically orientated person.

To acknowledge the entire scope of this fact one should not only think about what one has learnt about the Proletarian Movement but one needs to be transported through one's destiny by the possibility to think with the Proletarian, with the thoughts of such people who from one or the other side became the carriers of the Proletarian Movement. One could clearly sense what follows, as it spread itself from olden times into the direct social present.

Isn't it true, you could say: ‘Yet, the scientific way of thinking still has been extensively accepted in middle-class circles.’—If you consider intelligent middle-class circles, you will think about people whose beliefs are quite scientifically orientated: yet in their feelings, in their entire life experience, they stand within relationships which are not totally determined by scientific orientation. A person can be a materialistic thinker in modern times, can call him or herself enlightened, call themselves atheists, can acknowledge it as an honest conviction, but can't renounce all the rest of their experiences out of the old connections of life which have not originated from a scientific orientation but which had emerged out of times which carried spiritual impulses—as has been sketched as a force, in the foregoing.

Purely scientific orientation itself works quite differently. I don't say, the scientist, because obviously the scientific orientation influenced quite uneducated Proletarians: but it works quite differently where it has been imposed as a view of life on to the Proletarian.

I want to clarify this by an example. For many years I shared a podium with Rosa Luxemburg who has passed away in such a tragic way. She addressed the theme of “Science and the Worker.” I need to repeatedly think how she stirred a large audience towards being aware that actually all prejudices which are in relation to human social situations are human classifications according to the old ruling classes and this is connected to representations of what old spiritual viewpoints contained. The modern Proletarian, she believed, originated not solely from angelic, divine origins but they had at one time indecently climbed around trees from animalistic origins which she had developed, on the basis that as she had followed their development, she could substantiate the conviction: a human being is the same as another human being. All previous classification was based on some or other form of prejudice.—You should not consider her formulation but what kind of force such words had on the proletarian natured soul.

Purely considering the concept, I actually meant to say: The Proletarian is completely “scientifically” orientated in his point of view in more recent times. The scientific orientation failed to fill his soul in such a way that it could answer the question: ‘What am I actually, as a human being?’

Where did the Proletarian get this point of view? What is the basis of this scientific orientation which he sometimes had to receive in such a false way? It is after all a science. He took it as the inheritance of the middle-class people. It developed out of an old viewpoint of life, from within middle-class people at the transition into the more recent machine and capitalistic age, when machines and capitalism overpowered the people.

The following which is often heard with corresponding colouring is this: within the Proletarians their spiritual life became something which can be experienced as an ideology. This is heard most often when the background of the Proletarian view of the world is dissected: art, religion, science, ethics, law and so on are ideological mirror images of the outer materialistic reality.

However, this experience that everything is like this, that spiritual life is ideological, this didn't originate from within the Proletarians, the Proletarians received it as a dowry from the bourgeoisie. This last and big belief which the Proletarians took in from the middle-class was a result of the nourishment it received, spiritual nourishment for the soul. It could well be that as it was exposed to spiritual life, as it was called out of the old relationship to the machine and introduced into the social structure, that it could only look at what had developed as knowledge about the people and the world; it could only look upon what it had received out of the bourgeoisie: through belief, dogmatically—I could call it—it acquired ideology from the bourgeoisie. It hadn't entered into the convictions but as an experience of disillusionment which it had to be if one does not look at the spiritual as something which is created out of itself, containing a higher reality, but if one looks at it is a mere ideology. Within the subconscious awareness of a large number of carriers of the social movement it wasn't known but was clearly being experienced: ‘We have met the bourgeoisie with a strong trust, we have entered into an inheritance which should have brought us the salvation of our souls and the strength to carry it though. The middle classes didn't bring this; only ideology, which has no reality and which contributes nothing towards the support of life.’

One can argue a lot whether ideology is really the basis of spiritual life, or not. It doesn't come down to that but it comes down to spiritual life being experienced by the majority as an ideology, and so the soul becomes desolate, remains empty, the centrifugal spiritual force becomes paralysed and the result is what has happened today: The stripping of the social will from belief that somehow something spiritual could have developed, somewhere rise as a centre, a real centre from which our world view or something similar can bring salvation, also in relation to the desired formation of the social movement. I would like to say: as a negative, spiritual life has been incorporated into the development of the modern Proletarian humanity above all things; as a positive, that it demands yearnings from these people. It demands soul-supporting and as an inheritance has been given the depletion of the soul.

This is something which blows and runs quietly though our entire present day social movement which can't be grasped by concepts, which in fact makes out the form of one of the branches—we got to know three—of the present day social movement. As soon as one perceives that this is so, one can correctly ask: Where has it come from and how can it be remedied? Instead of letting will be paralysed, this social will, how can it be fired up and empowered? This is a question one must ask oneself.

Now an event occurred when the spiritual life came to a decisive point which I've indicated already. The ruling class at the time was through their situation in life connected to, what we today call, the state. It has often been stressed by some individuals—I can't enter into this today due to our limited time in how true this is—it has often been stressed that modern humanity believe that what we call the state, today, has always existed in this way. That is completely untrue. What we call the state, which for example in the Hegelian world appeared as an expression of the divine itself, was basically only a product of thinking in the last four to five Centuries. The social organism of earlier times was quite different.

Just take a single fact, take the most recently appeared fact that the free schools of earlier times, which were independently built opposite the state, were filled out by state institutions, and that, to some extent, the state had become the custodian of mankind's spiritual goods. This happened due to the civil interests in the beginning of more recent times.

The state was there to let the folk grow their souls towards it; they connected all their needs to it. Out of this impulse grew a new relationship between spiritual goods and the state, made the state the custodian of the spiritual goods of mankind and demanded from those approaching the custodian that their lives be actually defined by it.

If one looks deeper into the inner weaving of the human spiritual goods then it involves not only an outer administration of the spiritual goods—the legislation regarding universities as part of the state, of schools, of folk schools becoming part of the state—but that the state is determining the content of the spiritual goods.

Certainly mathematics doesn't have a state characteristic, but other branches of our spiritual goods have their character, have sustained the unification of these spiritual goods with interests of the state in more recent times. This growing together is not without participation of becoming an ideology from the side of spiritual goods. The spiritual goods can only really protect its own true worth, which it carries within, when it can govern itself through its own forces, when out of its direct initiative can give the state what it is, when it however doesn't receive demands from the state.

Certainly there will still be many today who will see no fundamental social facts in what I've just said. They will however see that, in reality, only the ruling spirit of mankind can give laws, when this spirit is separated and stands independently from the outer state organisation. I know that kind of objections can be made against this but this is not important. What is relevant is that the spirit, in order to unfold itself properly, calls for the ability to always develop out of the direct free initiatives of the human individual.

In this way one arrives at the true form of one of the members of the modern social question, that one considers the spiritual life in the right way and see the necessity, that whatever is pushed into the structure of the state is gradually brought out again, so that it can unfold its own supporting power and then work back again, just because when it is freed, while it develops independently with the other members of the social structure, it can as a result really work on the social structure.

If one wants to talk about the practical aspects of the first member of the social question, one must say: The tendency of development for the spiritual life must be denationalized in the widest sense. If the spiritual life member should be denationalised which probably appears today as a paradox, one can speak in this way: the relationship in which a ruling individuality appears to people, who is involved in criminal or private law involving people—one can in certain psychological orientated circles still see that, but taking the thing from quite the wrong side—one so personal, the direction belongs directly to what must be considered internally as spiritual life. So I am counting all which is relevant in religious convictions, all artistic life, all which is related to private and criminal law, to move towards developing the tendency for denationalization.

Why should anyone who hears about mass regulation immediately think about violent revolution? Even in socialist circles of more recent times, people are gradually not thinking like this anymore. I also don't consider that from one day to the next, everything can be denationalized; but I think that through the social will humanity can enter into measures here and there—it must also happen here or there on a daily basis—towards a re-orientation for such a gradual detachment of the spiritual life from that of the state. You can imagine realistically what is actually meant by this.

The state we must see as something which in recent times has grown out of the ruling classes, created out of a particular soul of the middle classes becoming educated. To the state this bourgeoisie has now contributed not only spiritual life, but also what the later human development has overpowered in the social organism: namely the economic life. This economic life having been introduced into the life of the state has introduced the further nationalisation of traffic interests, post, railways and so on. This has resulted in a certain superstition towards the state, towards nationalised orientated associations. The last remainders of these beliefs are the beliefs of the socialist orientated people: that actually the salvation of a communal administration is only possible through a communal economy. Also, that is an inheritance accepted by the middle-class viewpoint and way of thinking.

Now spiritual life has been put on one side and the economy on the other side; in the middle, the state is positioned.

You can ask what will actually remain of the state? As we will soon see in what follows, the economic life couldn't tolerate being mixed into actual state life. Perhaps we can reach a clear picture of this question if we clearly envisage what the bourgeois classes found in the developing modern state. They found the stronghold of their rights in this state.

Let us now examine what the actual laws represent. I'm not thinking about criminal law or about private law as it isn't in the relation of one person to another, because I'm thinking of public law. Public law belongs, for example, to the dealings of ownership. What is property finally? Ownership is only the expression of the authorization of something which one personally and alone may possess and work on. Ownership has sprouted from a law. Everything which we see as material objects has its roots in the relationship of people to laws. Such laws have in our recent times, before the conception of our modern state, rejected the bourgeoisie earlier and everything connected to them; such laws found themselves best protected when they took on everything which referred to such laws as those from within the state itself.

So the tendency started of economic life being ever more drawn into the life of the state. The state penetrates the structure of the economic life with a number of laws. Now, these laws should in no way be taken in their future development to the state life. The social will must gradually develop towards the precise differentiation between everything comprising the life of law, what spiritual life actually is and what the economic life is.

The modern social movement makes it particularly clear that the ruling circles haven't taken anything of the life of rights from their modern state. While much has been taken out of the economic life, also out of the purely isolated economic life, and incorporated into the legal state structure, there is something which has not been incorporated into this legal structure and that is the labour of the Proletarian workers. This labour of the Proletarian workers was left within the circulation of the economic processes.

This struck most deeply into the minds of the modern Proletarians and could be made clear through Marxism and its followers—there is always the labour market just as there is a goods market. Just like goods are offered on the goods market and there is a demand for it, so you bring your labour—the only thing you own—on to the labour market, and it is only valid as goods. You are sold like goods; you stand in the more modern economic process as goods.

Through this we come to the true form of the second modern social claim. This is expressed from out of a certain subconscious sense regarding human worth; the modern Proletarian found it unbearable that his labour was bought and sold as goods on the labour market.

Certainly, the theory of the socialist thinker states: ‘It has come about through the objective laws of the economic life itself; the force of labour was placed on the market like other goods.’ This is in the awareness, perhaps even in the awareness of the Proletarians. However, in their subconscious, something else was weaving. In their subconscious the continuation of the old slavery prevailed, the old question of serfdom. In the subconscious one only saw how the entire person during the time of slavery could be bought and sold, that later somewhat less of the person was in bondage and all that was now left over was the labour of the workers. With this he allows himself to be taken completely into the economic process. This he felt was impossible, as unworthy.

From this the second social demand has come about in more recent times: disrobing labour from the characteristic of goods.

I know that still today many people think: ‘How can that be done? How else is it at all possible to organise economic life than through the remuneration of work activity, labour?’—With this you have already bought it! However, one needs to hold something up against it, which Plato and Aristotle already took as obvious and said it was evident, that there has to be slaves. So modern thinking needs to be forgiven if it finds it necessary to carry labour to the market.

Now one can't always imagine what will perhaps be a reality in the near future. Today however we must ask: How can labour be disrobed from the character of goods? It can only happen if it is drawn up in the area of a pure legal state, such a state which eliminates it from the spiritual life on the one side, as characterized earlier, and eliminated on the other side from all that belongs to, what was characterised earlier, as the economic process. If we divide the entire social organism, or we think of it as divided into three members: into an independent spiritual life, into legal life and economic life, then we have instead of Homunculus in the area of economy a real hom*o in the area of the economic life, then we have our spiritual eyes focused on the real social organism which is alive, not one made up of chemical agents.

I don't really want to enter into a game of analogy between biology and sociology—that's far from me—neither fall into the mistake of Schäffle nor Meray in his “World Mutation”; I don't want to go into all of that, it is not relevant here. What is of relevance is to see how, in a single natural human organism, three independent systems rule—I have presented this scientifically, at least as a sketch, in my last book “Riddles of the Soul”—likewise in the social organism three independently applicable systems need to be seen: the spiritual system, the judicial system—now the system of public rights, as mentioned where private and criminal law are excluded—and the actual economic system.

However, if you have between the spiritual and the economic life, the regulated state life, the regulated judicial life, then you have something which is capable of life inserted into the social organism, just as in the natural human organism you find the relatively independent systems of circulation, lung-heart system and circulation system, the heart-lung system between the head system and digestive system. Then again if it is fully developed from its own basis as merely economic—we think of a democratic administration on the basis of judicial life—if each one can equally have a say about his rights, that the only basis of ruling will be according to the relationship of one person to another, then the incorporation of labour in the economic process will be something quite different than the case is now.

You see, I'm not giving you some or other principle, or theory: this is how it must be done when the power of labour is to be disrobed from its characterisation of goods—but rather, I say to you: ‘We must place people in such a division in the social members that, through their actions, through their thoughts, through their will, a viable social organism is created.’—I don't want to offer general remedies but I only want to say how humanity must become members of the social organism in order for their healthy social will to continuously result in making the social organism capable of life. In this way I will, in place of theoretical thinking, introduce intimately related and trustworthy thoughts. What will happen if, despite economic life, there would exist a foundation which maintains and governs itself out of its own forces, and out of this purely human foundation, employment laws can be negotiated? Then something will come about which work in a similar way into the economic process as does the natural foundation of economic processes. We very clearly see these natural foundations of the economic process when we really study the economic process. They regulate the economic process in such a way that its regulation deprives a person of what he or she can do themselves, in the economic process. Isn't it so, you only have to observe the obvious?

Just take for once—I want to use radically clear examples—the fact that in certain regions, rather removed from our area, the banana is an extraordinarily important item. However, the work which involves bringing bananas to a place where they can be consumed is exceptionally little from our point of view, in comparison with products in our natural European region; bringing wheat from its point of origin right through to its point of consumption. This work which renders the bananas consumable is nothing in comparison to wheat, roughly compares it is as one to one hundred, or the relationship could be even greater than one to a hundred. So, one hundred times more effort is needed than that of bananas, to bring wheat to the point of consumption. So we can quote the biggest variables within the economic area which exist in connection with the regulation of economic life. These are not only dependent on what a person contributes: it depends on the yield of the earth, other relationships and so on; these things place themselves within the economic life as a constant factor, like people are one of the independent economic factors. This is how it can be seen from the one side.

Now consider for yourself the labour laws as quite separate on the other side from the economy, then it will, when it no longer has economic interests in the determination of working hours, in the application of labour independently contributing to an independent purely person to person interrelationship, it will create something independent of the economic life, which plays from the other side into this economic life, just like each side plays from the natural foundations of given factors.

One must orientate the formation of prices, which has actual worth in the goods market to how the natural factors work. One will in future, when the social organism should be viable, also have to address how production should take place, how the circulation of goods should take its course. When this commodity circulation does not determine remuneration, working hours and labour law, but when it is independent of commodity circulation, of the goods market, in the region of the state life, purely out of human endeavours, purely out of mere human points of view agree about the working hours, then it will be so that one commodity will cost as much as it will cost for the time needed to produce that particular work, which is however regulated through independent economic life, because economic life today for instance regulates employment so that the price of goods often has to regulate the economic process in working hours and employee-employer relationships. The opposite will appear by correctly dividing the members of the social organism.

These relationships can only be indicated today. You can see, however, that they come out of a social intention which is quite different from what has placed us into such a sad situation within world events; they come out of a social will which has not originated from some non-profitable spinning of human thoughts, spinning as one has to so that this or that is done in the right way, but they come out of thoughts which are so familiar with reality that it doesn't come to light when people in this or that relationship in this or that way become members of the social organism. Then they will, because they have become members of the social organism in a healthy way, be able to determine laws, then they will work in the right way.

One only has to have experienced how other social intentions determined relationships in real life, even in the then already conquered Austria. It was a state, but a state does not live purely as a life of laws; in a state, there lives, in quite a pronounced way, the economic life which has sprung from the interests of single human circles. Just think how the old Austrian parliament was up to the end of the nineties (1890's). Out of this parliament's representation originated relationships which played right into the catastrophe of war. This parliament consisted of the four curiae: the Chamber of Commerce, the great land owner, from the curia of the cities, markets and industrial sites and the curia of the established economic circles. These economic circles were not represented on the basis of an economic parliament but their interests determined the being of the state, therefore public laws were determined according to them. Just as it is impossible for a confessional inclined party, which the last German Reichstag was, to be created and influence institutions of the legal life of the state out of definitions, just so little is a social organism viable which is destined to determine the economic circles of the legal life. The life of rights must develop separated from that; only out of the relationship of one person to another, considered in a completely democratic manner. Then the rights life will regulate in a corresponding manner the threefold organism, with on the one side the economic life and on the other side the natural foundation of this economic life.

Within the economic life, which in turn has established representatives from the most varied fields, pure economic factors and interests would be needed. One would then have a social organism—if I might express myself according to the habits of the time—with three classes, three areas, each creating its own laws and own management. They will stand in a relationship, one could call it, as sovereign states and if they continue, they reckon with one another. That could invite complications, make the people uncomfortable; but it is the one and only way to make a healthy social organism viable in future. The economic life itself can only be determined out of its factors when only economically active interests appear from its foundation, which can only be determined through the necessary relationships between production and consumption. These relationships between production and consumption can only result in the economy from the associative basis, an associative basis as it could have been in the trade union, cooperative context. However today the trade union, cooperative context still maintains the character out of the state from which it has grown. They need to grow into the economic life, must become mere serving bodies of the economic life. Only then will the social organism develop in a healthy way.

I know that what I've been saying will appear extraordinarily radical. Whether it appears radical or not, is not important. What is important is for the social organism to be workable, that people, in their starting from the old instinctive social life moving towards the conscious social life, are permeated with impulses which come out of insight of how one needs to stand within the totality of the social organism. People today are considered uneducated if they don't know their multiplication tables; a person is considered uneducated if he does not know something he is supposed to know as education, but a person is not considered uneducated if he has no social awareness, or if his soul is within the social organism in a state of sleep. This is something which has to change fundamentally in future! It would be different if a judgement would consider that, what belongs to the most elementary schooling should include being equipped with a social will, just as much as one should be equipped with the multiplication tables. Today every person should know what three times three is. In the future, it would not appear more difficult to know the relationship between capitalism and ground rental if I want to choose something out of today's life. It should not be more difficult in future than to know that three times three is nine. However, this knowledge will become the foundation for a healthy involvement in the social organism which means a healthy social life. A healthy social life needs to be strived for.

In a healthy human consciousness, it is preparing itself, as I have said. One only has to have an inkling for what is being prepared and what strives towards revelation and form in our more recent time.

Just think back to the great ideals of the French Revolution: Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. Whoever followed these ideas in the minds of people who have in the course of time experienced it as a destiny, knows, how often they have struggled with the logic within the contradiction which exist in Freedom on the one side, which point to personal initiatives, and Equality on the other side, which should be brought about in the centralization of the state orientated social organism. This is not possible. Yet, the solution for this confounding has emerged in our more recent time. Why capitalism today has not yet understood the concept of a threefold social organism is due to the concept of a completely centralised state.

If you grasp the idea which already today appear in this intention which is expressed in the ideals of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, then it is easy to understand that it is being considered from the point of view of the threefold organised social organism. Its first member would be the spiritual life. It should be completely permeated with the idea, the principle, of freedom. Here everything should be based on the free initiatives of people and it can be so, would be most fruitful, if it is stated this way. With reference to the constitutional state, in relation to what is between the spiritual and the economic life regulated by the being of the state, the actual political system exists, which has to permeate everything regarding the equality of relationships between people. With reference to the economic life, the one and only thing which is valid is Brotherhood, social community living the outer and inner life of one person through the other.

In the economic life within the social organism, interest is the ruling factor. This interest however brings quite a specific characteristic into the economic member. Why is it apparent that basically everything comes out of economic life? It all comes down to economic life, that in the best, most appropriate manner, the economic life shows it can also be consumed. I'm talking about consumption in the narrower sense where the spiritual is excluded. Consumption can refer for instance to labour, human labour. This is felt by the modern person: becoming a mere element of consumption in terms of his labour. He even has to, like he earns interest through his labour, through spiritual production, also inherit interests through his rest, through his calm capacity for the spiritual. The human being becomes consumed in the economic life. He has to pull himself continuously out of the economic life by the other two members of the healthy social organism, if he doesn't want to be completely consumed within the economic life.

The social question is not the same in modern life as when it originated and perhaps could be solved, and was actually solved. No, the social question exists as something which has entered modern life and can no longer be avoided in the future of humanity. There will always be a social question in the future. However, this social question will not for once, not through this or that measure, be solved, but could be regulated, through the continuous intentions of people which means that those who use people in the economic process, should be regulated from the political standpoint and forever balance out the consumption with spiritual production, through the independent spiritual organism.

Whoever has seen over the last decades how the social question has developed—and it has relatively not been all that long ago that the social question has taken on its present form—whoever has observed in intimate detail how the social question has developed out of its origins, could in relation to the social intentions/will and its focus for the future form of human life, arrive at thoughts which could be characterised in the following way.

Many people, even enlightened people, don't see the social question as something existentialistic. In my youth, I became acquainted with an Austrian minister who officiated over the Bohemian-German border and made the most grotesque declaration: “The social question stops at Bodenbach.” I remember very clearly how a large group of the first social democratic miners marched past my parents' house, heading for their gathering. I noticed how the social will had come about, not as thoughts about a social movement but through the communal life of the social movement. I had to say to myself, much has to be done and many mistakes have to be made! Even with socialistically orientated thoughts of more recent times, these mistakes were quite numerous. It appears that exactly in this area people's minds developed in such a way that they didn't experience this. The mistakes became terribly widespread.

Out of such a spirit of observation I have endeavoured to speak to you tonight about the social will. You have invited me as member of a community who studies what the social intention of humanity's healing should bring in future.

Those older people, like me for example, who speak to people who through the decades can look back, know about all that had to be gone through to get to the present moment. Then again you find some things that need to be gone through, in addition also the conviction that the mistake was not fruitless, that even today when the facts are expressed often in a frightening way, people manage to be strong enough to find the way out of what the biggest part of today's humanity has experienced as unbearable.

It is in this sense that I ask you to accept what I have allowed myself to speak about this evening. The facts speak clearly in some areas. The facts also clearly say: the more people, who are still young, can now take up a true, viable social intention, the more will the human social organism be viable and efficient. Whoever wishes to speak the word, let him do so. Doctor Boos, who has given a lecture about a week ago, announced that he was willing to have discussions.

A speaker says something (stenographic details incomplete).

Dr Steiner: What you have claimed has taken on a form as a result of you not considering what must come to the fore through the relatively independent formation, on the one hand of the constitutional state and on the other, the economic life. The labour organisations which are partly production companies or consumer companies, or even could have connections between both, are only involved with economic factors which take place within the economic life itself.

The regulation of labour law is preferred by a relatively independent state. Here nothing is decided other than on a democratic basis, I call it, as relevant to the relationship of one person to another. This is why I mention this regarding the basis of the purely democratic state, that a link exists between both factors, on this basis people stand equally before the law. As a result, the mere wishes of single economic organisations will come to an end because they must balance out the democratic legal life with the interests of other circles.

So, this is just what should be processed, a remedy should be considered towards anything damaging, which would certainly develop if for instance the working hours are fixed within the organisation of the economic life. Economic organisations should only be involved with the economy itself: in other words, the regulation in the sense of labour laws. By contrast, the fixing of working hours, only underlying the state corporation, involves the relation of one person to another.

We must not forget what a great change can develop between one person and another with one-sided interests grinding it down. Self-evidently, nothing can be totally perfect in the world, but one-sided interests will be grinded down in the democratic state structure which has its basis of equality between people.

Just consider for instance what happens when a certain economic organisation is interested in a project of short duration—they will have to be comfortable with balancing this with the interests of the individuals who would suffer during this short working time. If one doesn't consider some or other subconscious force then it would—just like in a natural organism it would always in an approximately natural way result in how many men and how many women there are, which obviously is no strict natural law nor will it become one—it would also prevent something unhealthy being created when in the right way the single factors of the social organism cooperate and not develop individual small interests, which are most harmful to others.

The foundation of my way of thinking differs from many other social thinking patterns due to the latter being more abstract. Logically the one can easily be derived from the other; results flow from one logic into another. Crucial to such questions is only actual life experience. Obviously I can't prove logically—no one can—that a discrepancy of interests may enter into such a future organism, but accept that when the forces within their own circles, which are appropriate to them, can develop, then it will be a humane development. I mean, if you consider what I have wanted to present, the fixing of working time out of the purely economic process in the legal circle of the state, then this damage will be able to develop in practical areas. This is what I wanted to add.

Another speaker says something (stenographic details incomplete).

Dr Steiner: I would like to comment on the honourable previous speaker's words as follows. Understandably with every lecture it is not possible to say everything one wants to in a single lecture, and I don't know which omissions our previous honourable speaker's conclusion has been drawn from in my lecture where I gave no opinion regarding the modern worker psyche, that I don't want to take the modern labour movement into account, and so on. Every person does it in his own way. I have for many years, for example, been a teacher in the various fields of a workers' educational school and have given rise to speech exercises in political organisations. I am entitled to be aware of a large number of workers who present their speeches today, speeches they have learnt to give as a result of my speech exercises. During these speech exercises all possible kinds of questions were discussed, questions which actually were not far from the most intimate particulars of the workers' psyche. So I don't know—I had naturally no reason to place this particular practical side of my social activities and intentions out in the open, but I can't quite rightly understand out of which omissions my talk should come from what went before, that I should be so far removed from the practical labour movement.

Certainly it is obvious that within the modern social movement the worker himself should be considered. Just contemplate by yourselves, what I have been stressing the entire evening regarding how things can actually appear within the Proletarians. I have spoken about the Proletariat as such; you would have noticed if you were listening attentively, how my belief has woven my lecture into a practical presentation as to what lives in a practical way in the proletarian labour force of today.

Regarding the accusation that I have perhaps been too one-sided in my presentation of what seems to me the fundamental meaningful fact, that the middle-class thinking methods will be conquered by the labour force, particularly by the leaders of the working class, this declaration which I have done and which I have drawn from single instances has made it clear from one side, really more accurate through the study of the workers' psyche and the entire modern labour movement.

I would like to add an example which I would like to draw your attention to. A Russian author who I know personally has recently pointed out to me in an unusual way how a philosophy adhered to by younger people in Zurich has played a big role: the Avenarius philosophy which for their part has certainly grown out of the middle-class substrate. I can hardly imagine that Avenarius considered how his philosophy would play such a role in the Russian labour movement as it is playing today. As far as I know it is strongly represented, right in Zurich, by Adler who translated the natural scientific derived philosophical conviction of Mach. Both these philosophic directions are to some extent the official philosophies of Bolshevism, of the most radical socialism. The Russian author Berdjajev said in a lecture—it is contained in the translation of a very interesting book about “Russia's political soul”—in this lecture Berdjajev has in a very clear manner worked out the political soul.

So you can give a multitude of examples; I could give you numerous examples which are similar to those which I took from the address of the deceased Rosa Luxemburg, which would prove to you that the last important heirloom, deeply interwoven with the workers movement and the middle-class life, is the scientifically orientated method of thinking. The possibility to make spiritual life into an ideology is of middle-class origin. The middle-class, if such a categorization may be made, firstly took scientifically orientated methods of thinking in the region of natural knowledge, and made it into an ideology. They did not transfer it within their class over on to scientifically orientated thinking. This latter consequence only then attracted the proletarian thinking. Certainly, proletarian thinking also drew other consequences but these consequences were drawn out of the basis which today is clearly recognisable as rooted within the middle-class' scientific method of imagination, which now created something further. The importance of this should not be misunderstood.

That which dwelled within the totality, which has developed a deep interest for the participation of the modern worker psyche in the modern labour movement, waited, I want to say, with a certain concern on the one side, but also with a certain inner satisfaction on the other side for the moment when it would appear within the modern socialist movement. What now lies in the subconscious will one day be noticed, brought into awareness and it will be said: ‘Aha, this we had in our soul's higher thinking’—if I might use this expression—‘in our soul's higher thinking, and it must come to the fore. We have the desire for our human dignity to be scientifically orientated; this is what the middle-class line of inheritance of science has now made possible. We must look for a spiritual life elsewhere.’

I believe in any case that when this moment arrives, when the entire, full longing surfaces out of a specific side of modern people only, namely the proletarian people—if it has not come into full expression in modern times—when this longing in the modern Proletariat has reached its complete education of the scientific way of thinking in their world view, with the power of old religions, when this has happened that it no longer depends on them being goods, drawn as the consequence out of the middle-class thinking methods, then one will be able to argue that the fruitful organization of social will has arrived.

To mere socialism and in its relation to what the previous honourable speaker offered, regarding the philosophy of Bergson, I believe one should not make such dogmatic statements. Understandably I don't want to discuss such philosophic questions today. The previous speaker said that Bergson was a typical representative of the bourgeois thinking methods. If this is so then socialism would have developed out of Bergson's philosophy, derived directly out of bourgeois foundations! Today one can for instance refer to Bergson's philosophy as containing many “Schopenhauer-isms” and that Bergson was much more influenced by Schopenhauer than any of you can imagine.

Now, should one want to discuss such a thing in detail, then one has to be able to argue extensively. I can't do this today but I only mention this to you because there are within the proletarian world sensitive thinkers, for instance, Mehring, Franz Mehring, who is really in many ways similar to Bergson; he characterised Schopenhauer as the representative of the most bourgeois philistinism in philosophy!

One can have different views about these things and I don't believe one should be dogmatic about it. One can have the view that Bergson is an advanced philosopher who has irrational elements within his philosophy. However, one could ask what an irrational element has to do with the social question. A Proletarian can be just as irrational as a middle-class person. I don't quite understand what this whole irrational element has to do with it. Here one already has to draw a dogmatic precondition: Bergson is the absolute example of a modern philosopher; if the Proletarians really want to think, they must become Bergsonians, not so? This involves the whole issue.

Undoubtedly there are tendencies which appear in the most varied areas of life, tendencies which focus themselves in the direction I have characterised. It would really be sad to order human life, if it is always going so straight, to go over, I would say, and always evolve it in the opposite direction from the straight one! Not so, this can't of course be the case. I would even say in the area of the judiciary, certain things are fuelled by quite psychologically orientated people. Such innumerable examples can of course be cited but it is also a secondary derivation if one doesn't really validate it but merely offers a favourite opinion. Certainly one may sympathise with things which have been said about impulses that have principles according to historic periods; but without going into the latter further—if one wants to go into all these things I will have to keep you here for a very long time—so without further examination into references I want to say the following: very many people are inwardly obstinate when one mentions threefoldness, which I spoke about today. They say three different branches which are directed and guided by different principles are not possible.

However, I haven't spoken about three different members which are directed by three different principles, but about a threefold social organism! Just consider that this threefold social organism in our time must gradually find its whole way of thinking in a corresponding way, like for instance the ancient subdivisions which you find with Plato and which were then justified. Someone once said to me after my lecture: “So we have once again a reference to Plato: the nutritionists/guardians, the fighters/auxiliaries and the producers/labourers/educational state.” Actually, what I have said is the opposite of divisions into nutrition, defence and educational states because people are not divided into classes but divisions are sought for in the social organism. We human beings will simply not be divided up! It can well be that the same person who is active in the spiritual member, is active in the judicial and even the economic member. The human being is as a result emancipated from such one-sidedness in some or other member of the social organism. It is therefore not important that people should be divided into such independent classes when a healthy social organism is developed, but that the social organism orders itself according to its own laws. That is the radical difference. Earlier, people were divided. Now, according to the way of thinking relevant to our time, the social organism will be divided by itself so that people can look at their life situation according to their needs, their relationships and abilities and how to be active in one or the other division. For instance, it will be quite possible that in future an economically active person may at the same time be a deputy in the field of the purely political state. He will then obviously make his economic interests effective in a different way as he would in relation to the field of the constitutional state. The three divisions provide the demarcation of their territories. Everything doesn't get confused and allow them to get mixed up.

It is better if the things are separated. There are of course the same human systems which are differentiated into the one or the other branch. Just as in the natural human organisation—above all I don't want to play the game of analogy but still need to mention this—there are three centralized parts: the nerve-sense system, lung-breathing system and the digestive system, there are three members in the social organism. This is something which doesn't yet belong to ordinary thinking habits, which I believe however, will be able to find its way into thinking habits and that people would not take it less thoroughly, I think, than when they only grapple with their own favourite opinion.

Dr Roman Boos: May I be permitted to refer to a question addressed to the speaker in relation to the field of criminal law? Now, when there was talk about the freedom of judges, was there also a breach against the statement that no punishment without law will be made—it seems to me this is what is meant, that criminal law as such should not be given out of free spiritual life but out of the political member, that the question possibly contains a misunderstanding with Dr Weiβ who stated that an offence is made against the principle that no punishment could be given if no specific law has not been broken. May I ask you to say more about this?

Dr Steiner: Isn't it true that in this question you obviously touch on the system of public law with the system of practical jurisdiction? What I stressed is the separating of practical judging. For this reason, I used the expression “judging,” expressly the practical judging from the general public legal life, which I thought should be central in healthy social organisms whose public political life should see to it, that a specific law will determine a procedure. That judging can't be done in the most arbitrary way is quite self-evident. However, I haven't considered such things which are abstract and in their abstraction, they are more or less obvious. Today I have also not spoken about the scope of the law but about the social organism and about the social will. Now I ask you with reference to this theme, to consider the following.

You see, I have nearly spent as much of my life in Austria as in Germany. I could get thoroughly acquainted with the Austrian life; you may believe me that it is not an impulsive assertion if I say that much of what has taken place in the so-called state recently is connected to events which during the (eighteen) seventies and eighties had resulted from deep incongruities. Don't forget that in such a state as Austria, in other fields it isn't as radically characterised, but is present in some or other form as well—particularly because in Austria the various language regions are mixed and overlap and you can for instance have the experience that a German, when he is by chance involved in some or other circuit court officiated by a Czech judge who can't speak German, is convicted by a Czech in a language he fails to understand. He doesn't know what he is convicted of and what has happened to him; all he notices is that he is led away. Just so is the reverse case when a German judge who can't speak Czech, judges a Czech who can't understand German. What I am indicating is the individual arrangement, the free formation of relationships of the judgement to the judge.

So, a state like Austria could expect great success from this. Thus, this impulse resulted in always, over the next maybe five or ten years—relationships shifted continuously—for the convicted being able to choose their judges freely.

(Gap in stenographic record)

This is not simply an object of the spiritual life, but it is foremost an object in the life of the judicial state; in that only one law is focused on, which had originated from a deed and secondly became a law of the state, already concerned with its competence; in each case it will obviously show the concerned result.

However, another question is this: when you look at things more closely you will see that all the solutions to these cases are very consequential. Today I could only give you the initial conditions; I need not talk the entire night but need to continue tomorrow again.

When we look over the history of the last few years and ask ourselves how the social problems and needs occupying the public mind for more than half a century have been dealt with, we can find only one answer. Although in the greater part of the civilized world, opportunity to carry out in practice their ideas of reconstructing social life was given to people who, after their own fashion, had devoted themselves for decades to the study of social problems, yet it must be regarded as extremely characteristic of the age that all the theories and all the views which are the result of half a century of social work from every quarter have shown themselves powerless to reconstruct the present social conditions.

Of late years, much has been destroyed and, in the eyes of all observant persons, little, or probably nothing, built up. Does not the question force itself here upon the human soul: What is the cause of this impotence of so-called advanced views, in the face of some positive task? Shortly before the great catastrophe of the World-War, in the spring of 1914, I ventured to answer this question in a short series of lectures which I delivered in Vienna before a small audience. A larger number of hearers would probably have treated what was said with ridicule. In regard to all the assumptions of the so-called experts in practical affairs as to the immediate future, I ventured to say that an exact observer of the inner life of humanity could see in the social conditions prevailing all over the civilized world something like an abscess, like a social disease, a kind of cancerous growth, which must inevitably very soon break out in a terrible manner over this world. Those practical statesmen, who were then talking of the “improvement in political relations” and the like, looked upon this as the pessimism of an idealist. But that was the utterance of a conviction gained by a study of human evolution from the point of view of spiritual science, which I will describe to you this evening. To this kind of research the building known as the Dornach Building, the Goetheanum, is dedicated. Situated in the corner of the northwest of Switzerland, this building is the outer representative of the movement whose object is the study of the spiritual science of which I speak. You will hear and read all kinds of assertions about the aims and object of this building and the meaning of the movement which it is intended to represent. And it may be said in most cases that the gossip about these things is the very opposite of the truth; mysterious nonsense, false and senseless mysticism, many varieties of obscure nonsense are attached to the work attempted by this movement in the building at Dornach representing it. It cannot be expected that anything but misunderstandings without number should still exist regarding this movement of spiritual life. In reality, the meaning of the movement is to be found in its striving with set purpose to bring about a renewal of our whole civilization, as it is expressed in art, religion, science, education, and other human activities; in fact, it may truly be said that a renewal is sorely needed from the very foundations of social life upwards. This stream of spiritual life leads us to the conviction, already indicated by me. in these lectures, that it is no longer of any use to devise net schemes for world-improvement; from its very nature, human evolution demands a transformation of thoughts and ideas, of the most intimate life of feeling of humanity itself. Such a transformation is the aim of spiritual science, as it is represented in this movement. Spiritual science stimulates the belief that the views of society, of which we have just spoken, proceed from the old habits of thought which have not kept pace with the evolution of humanity and are no longer suited to its present life. These views have been clearly proved useless in aiding the reconstruction of social life.

What we need is understanding. What is really the meaning of all the subconscious yearnings, of the demands, which have not yet penetrated into the conscious thought of our present humanity? What do they mean, above all things, with regard to art, with regard to science, religion, and education? Let us look at the new directions followed by art, especially of late! I know well that in giving the following little sketch of the development of art, I must inevitably give offence to many; indeed, what I am going to say will be taken by many as a proof of the most complete lack of understanding of the later schools of art.

If we except a few isolated, very commendable efforts of recent years, the chief characteristic in the development of modern art is that it has lost that inner impulse which should drive it to place before the world that which is felt by humanity as a pressing need. The opinion has grown more and more common that, in contemplating a work of art. we must ask: How much of the spirit and significance of outer reality does it express? How far is external nature or human life reflected in art? One need only ask, what meaning has such a criterion with respect to a “Raphael”, or a “Leonardo”, or to any other real work of art? Do we not see in such great works of art that the resemblance to the outer reality surrounding us is by no means the measure of their greatness? Do we not see the measure of their greatness in the creation of something from within that is far removed from the immediate outer reality? What worlds are those that unroll before us as we gaze at the now almost effaced picture at Milan, Leonardo's Last Supper, or when we stand before a “Raphael”? Is it not a matter of secondary importance that those painters have succeeded more or less well in depicting the laws of nature in their work? Is it not their chief aim to tell us something of a, world which we do not see when we only use our eyes, when, we perceive only with our outer senses? And do we not find more and more that the only criterion now applied in judging a, work of art, or in judging anything artistic, is whether the thing is really true, and “true” here is to be understood in the ordinary naturalistic sense of the word. Let us ask ourselves—strange as the question may appear to the holders of certain artistic views—what does an art confer on life, actually on social life, what is an art, which aspires to nothing higher, than the reproduction of a part of external reality?

At the time in which modern capitalism and modern technical science became a power, landscape painting began to be developed in the world of art. I know, of course, that landscape painting is justified, fully justified from an artistic point of view. But it is also true, that no artistically perfect landscape painting, however perfect, equals in any sense the scene lying before me, as I stand on a mountain side and contemplate Nature's: own landscape. Precisely the rise of landscape painting shows to what an extent art has taken refuge in the mere imitation of nature, which it can never equal. Art turned to landscape painting because it had lost touch with the spiritual world; it could no longer create out of the spiritual and super-sensible world., What will be the future of art, if it is inspired only by the recent impulses toward naturalistic art? Art such as this can never grow out of life, as a flower grows from its roots; it will be a luxury outside life, an object of desire for those only for whom life has no cares. Is it not comprehensible that people who are absorbed in the pressing cares of life from morning till evening, who are shut off from all culture, the object of which is the understanding of art, should feel themselves separated as by an abyss from art? Though one hardly dare to put the sentiment into words now-a-days, because to many it would stamp the speaker as a philistine, it is distinctly evident in social life that great numbers of people look on art as something remote, and unconsciously feel it to be a luxury of life, something that does not belong to every human life, and to every existence worthy of a human being, although, in truth, it brings completion to every human life worthy of the name.

Naturalistic art will always be in one sense a luxury for those whose lives are free from care, and who are able to educate themselves in that art. I felt this when I was teaching for some years in a working-men's college, where I had the opportunity of addressing the workers themselves directly in order to help them understand the socialist theories which were being instilled into their minds, to their ruin, by those who called themselves “leaders of the people.” I learnt to understand—forgive the personal remark—what it means to bring scientific knowledge from a purely human standpoint⁷ within reach of those unspoiled minds. From a longing to know something also about modern art a request was made by my students that I take them through the museums and picture galleries on Sundays. Though it was possible, of course, to explain a great deal to them, since they had themselves the desire to be educated, I knew quite well that what I said did not at all make the same impression on these minds as did the things that I had told them from the standpoint of universal humanity. I felt that it would be a cultural untruth to tell them about the luxury art of the later naturalistic school, so far removed from actual life. This on the one hand.

On the other hand, do we not see, how art has lost its connection with life? Here, too, praiseworthy endeavors have come to light in the last few decades; but these have been by no means decided enough, though much has been done in the direction of industrial art. We see how inartistic our everyday surroundings have become. Art has made an illusory progress. All the buildings around us with which we come in contact in our daily routine are as devoid of artistic beauty as possible. Practical life cannot be raised to artistic form, because art has separated itself from life. Art which merely imitates nature cannot design tables and chairs and other articles of utility in such a manner that when we see them, we at once have the feeling of something artistic. These objects must transcend nature as human life transcends itself. If art merely imitates, it fails in the shaping of practical life, and practical life thereby becomes prosaic, uninteresting and dry, because we are unable to give it an artistic form and to surround ourselves with beautiful objects in our everyday lives.

This might be further amplified. I shall only indicate the decided direction which the evolution of our art has nevertheless taken. In like manner we have moved in other domains of modern civilization. Have we not seen that science has gradually ceased to proclaim to us the foundation which lies at the base of all sense-life? Little wonder that art has not found the way out of the world of sense since science itself has lost that way. By degrees science has come to the point of merely registering the outer facts of the senses, or at most to comprise them in natural laws. Intellectualism of the most pronounced type has over-spread all modern scientific activity to an ever increasing degree, and a terrible fear prevails among scientists lest they should be unable to exclude everything but intellectualism in their research, lest something like imaginative or artistic intuitions should perchance find their way into science. It is easy to see by what is said and written on this subject by scientists themselves how great is the terror they experience at the thought that any other means than the dry, sober intellect and the investigation by sense-perception should find entrance into scientific research. In every activity which does not keep strictly to intellectual thought men do not get far enough away from cuter reality to judge it correctly. Thus the modern researcher, the modern scientist, strives to carry on his work by intellectualism only; because he believes he can by this means get away far enough from the reality to judge it, as he says, quite objectively. Here the question might perhaps be asked: Is it not possible through intellectualism to get so far away from reality that we can no longer experience it? And it is this intellectualism, above all, which has made it impossible for us to conquer reality by science, as I have already indicated in these lectures and into which I will enter more fully today.

Turning to the religious life: with what mistrust and disapproval is every attempt to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of spiritual science received by the religious communities! On what grounds? People are quite ignorant of the reason of their disapproval. From official quarters we learn of a science which is determined to keep to the mere world of the senses, and we hear that in these official quarters the claim is apparently allowed that it is only in this way that strict and true scientific knowledge can be attained. But the student of historical evolution does not view the matter in this light. To him it appears that for the last few centuries the religious bodies have more and more laid claim to he the only authority in matters relating to the spirit and soul, and have recognized as valid only those opinions which they themselves permit the people to hold. Under the influence of this claim to the monopoly of knowledge by the Church, the sciences have neglected the study of everything except the outer sense-perceptions, or at most they have attempted to penetrate into the higher regions with a few abstract conceptions. They believe they are doing this purely in the interests of exact science, and do not dream that they are influenced by the Church's pretension to the monopoly of knowledge, the knowledge of the spirit and the soul as contained in their religious creeds. What has been forbidden to the sciences for centuries, the sciences themselves now declare to be an absolute condition for the exactness of their research, for the objective truth of their work. Thus it has happened that the religious communities having failed to develop their insight into the world of soul and spirit, and having preserved the old traditions, now see in the new methods of spiritual research, in the new paths of approach to the soul and spirit, an enemy to all religion, whereas they ought to recognize in these new methods the very best friends of religion.

We shall now speak of these three regions of culture, art, science, and religion. For it is the mission of Anthroposophy or spiritual science to build up a new structure in these three regions of culture. To explain what I mean, I must indicate in a few words the vital point of spiritual science. Its premises are very different from those of science as it is commonly known today. It fully recognizes the methods of modern science, fully recognizes also the triumphs of modern science. But because spiritual science believes it understands the methods of research of modern science better than the scientists themselves, it feels compelled to take other ways for the attainment of knowledge regarding spirit and soul than those which are still regarded by large numbers of people as the only right ones. In consequence of the enormous prejudice entertained against all research into the higher worlds, great errors and misunderstandings have been spread abroad regarding the aims of the Dornach movement. That here is truly no false mysticism, nothing in any way obscure in this movement, is plainly evident in my endeavors in the beginning of the 'nineties, which formed the starting-point for the spiritual-scientific movement to which I allude, and of which the Building at Dornach is the representative. At that time I collected the material which seemed to me then most necessary for the social enlightenment of today in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Whoever reads that book will hardly accuse the spiritual science of which I speak of false mysticism; but he may see what a difference there is between the idea of human freedom contained in my book and the idea of freedom as an impulse prevalent in our modern civilization.

As an example of the latter, I might give Woodrow Wilson's idea of freedom; an extraordinary one, but very characteristic of the culture, the civilization of our age. He is honest in his demand for freedom for the political life of the present day. But what does he mean by freedom? We arrive at an understanding of his meaning when we read words like the following: ‘A ship moves freely,’ he says, ‘when it is adapted to all the forces which act upon it from the wind, from the waves, and so on. When its construction is exactly adapted to its environment, no hindrance to its progress can arise through the forces of wind or wave. Man must also he able to motive freely through life, by adapting himself to the forces with which he comes in contact in life, so that no hindrance may ever come to him from any direction.’ He also compares the life of a free human being with a part of a machine, saying: ‘We say of a part, built into a machine, that it can move freely when it has no connection with anything anywhere; and when the rest of the machine is so constructed that this part runs freely within it.’ I have just one thing to say to this; we can only speak of freedom with regard to the human being when we see in it the very opposite of such an adaptation to the environment, we can only speak of human freedom when we compare it, not with the freedom of a ship on the sea, perfectly adapted to the forces of wind and weather, but when we compare it with the freedom of a ship that can stop and turn against wind and weather, and can do so without regarding the forces to which it is adapted. That is to say, at the bottom of such an idea of freedom as this lies the whole mechanical conception of the world, yet at the present day it is considered to be the only possible one. This world-conception is the result of the mere intellectualism of modern times. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have felt compelled to take a stand against views of this kind. I know very well—forgive another personal remark—that this book has fragments of the European philosophical conception of the world, out of which it is born, still clinging to it, as a chicken sometimes retains fragments of the eggshell from which it has emerged. For the book has. of course, grown out of European philosophical world-conceptions. It was necessary to show in that book the erroneous thought in those world-conceptions. For this reason the book may appear to some to be pedantic, though this was by no means my intention. The contents are intended to work as an impulse in the immediate practice of life, so that, through the ideas developed in that book, the impulse thus generated in the human will may flow directly into human life.

For this reason, however, I was obliged to state the problem of human freedom quite differently from the usual manner of doing so wherever we turn, throughout the centuries of human evolution, the question regarding the freedom of human will and of the human being has been: Is man free, or is he not free? I was under the necessity of showing that the question in this form was wrongly framed and must be put from a different standpoint. For if we take that which modern science and modern human consciousness look upon as the real self, but which ought to be regarded as the natural self, then, certainly, that being can never he free. That self must act of inner necessity. Were man only that which he is held to be by modern science, then his idea of freedom would be the same as that of Woodrow Wilson's. But this would be no real freedom; it would be only what might be called with every single action the inevitable result of natural causes. But modern human consciousness is not much aware of the other self within the human being where the problem regarding freedom really begins. Modern human consciousness is only aware of the natural self in man; it regards him as a being subject to natural causality. But those who penetrate more deeply into the human being must reflect that man can become something more in the course of his life than that with which nature has endowed him. We first discover what the human being really is, when we recognize that one part of him is that with which he is born, and all that which he has inherited; the other part is that which he does not owe to his bodily nature, but which he can make of himself by awakening the real self slumbering within him. Because these things are true I have not asked: Is man free or not free? I have stated the question in the following way: Can man become a free being through inner development, or can he not? And the answer is: He can become free if he develops within himself that which otherwise slumbers, but can be awakened; he can only then become free. Man's freedom is not a gift of nature. Freedom belongs to that part of man which he can, and must, awaken within himself. But if the ideas contained in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity are to be further developed and applied to external social life, so that these truths may become clear to a larger circle of people, it will be necessary to build a superstructure of the truths of spiritual science on the foundation of that philosophy. It had to be shown that by taking his evolution into his own hands, man is really able to awaken a slumbering being within him. I endeavored to do this in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and in the other books which I have contributed to the literature of spiritual science. In these books I tried to show that the human being can indeed take his own evolution in hand and that only by so doing, and thus making of it something different from that to which he is born, can he rise to a real knowledge of soul and spirit. It is true that this view is considered by a large part of humanity at the present day to be a most unattractive one. For what does it presuppose? It presupposes that we attain to something like intellectual humility. But few desire this today. I will explain what I mean by this quality of intellectual humility, to which we must attain.

Suppose we give a volume of Goethe's lyric poems to a child of five. The child will certainly not treat the book as it deserves; he will tear it to pieces, or spoil it in some other way. In any case he does not know how to value such a book. But suppose the child to have grown ten or twelve years older, that he has been taught. and trained; then he will treat Goethe's lyric poems in a different manner. And yet there is no great difference externally between a child of five and one of twelve or fourteen with a book of Goethe's poems before him. The difference lies within the child. He has developed so that he knows what to do with such a volume. As the child feels towards the volume of Goethe's lyrics, so must the man feel towards nature, the cosmos, the whole universe, when he begins to think seriously of soul and spirit. He must acknowledge to himself that, in order to read and understand what is written in the book of nature and the universe, he must do his utmost to develop his inner self, just as the five-year-old child must be taught in order to understand Goethe's lyric poems. We must acknowledge with intellectual humility our impotence to penetrate the universe with understanding by means of the natural gifts with which we are born; and we must then admit that there may be ways of self-development and of unfolding the inner powers of our being to see in that which lies spread out before the senses the living spirit and the living soul. My writings to which I have referred show that it is possible to put this in practice. This must be said, because intellectualism, the fruit of evolution of the last few centuries, is no longer able to solve the riddles of life. Into one region of life, that of inanimate nature, it is able to penetrate, but it is compelled to halt before human reality, more especially social reality.

That quality which I have called intellectual humility must be the groundwork of every true modern conception of the impulse towards freedom. It must also be the groundwork of all real insight into the transformation necessary in art, religion, and science. Here intellectuality has plainly, only too plainly, shown that it can attain no real knowledge which truly perceives and attains to the things of the soul and spirit. As I leave already pointed out, it has confined itself to the outer world of the senses and to the combining and systematizing of perceptions Hence it has been unable to prevail against the pretensions of the religious bodies, which have also not attained to a new knowledge of matters pertaining to the soul and spirit, but have on this account carried into modern times an antiquated view, unsuited to the age. But one thing must be conquered, that is the fear I have already described, the fear that we might become too much involved in the objects of the senses, in our endeavors to gain a spiritual knowledge of them. It is so easy to call oneself a follower of intellectualism, because, when we occupy ourselves merely with abstract ideas, even of modern science, we are so far removed from the reality that we only view it in perspective, and there is no danger of our being in any way influenced by the reality. But with the knowledge that is meant here, which we gain for ourselves when we take our own evolution in hand, with such knowledge we must descend into the realities of life, we must plunge into the profoundest depths of our own nature, deeper than those reached by mere self-training in intellectualism. Within the bounds of intellectualism, we only reach the upper strata of our own life. If with the help of the knowledge here spoken of, we descend into the depths of our own inner nature, we find there not only thoughts and feelings, a mere reflection of the outer world, we find there happenings, facts of our inner being, from which the merely intellectual thinker would recoil in horror; but which are of the same kind as those within nature herself, of the same kind as those which happen in the world. Then, within our own nature, we learn to know the nature of the world. We cannot learn to know that life of the world if we go no further than mere abstract conceptions or the laws of nature. We must penetrate so far that our own inmost being becomes one with reality. We must not fear to approach reality; our inner development must carry us so far that we can stand firm in the presence of reality, without being consumed, or scorched, or suffocated. When we stand in the presence of reality, no longer held at a distance by the intellect, we are able to grasp the truth of things. Thus we find described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, the inner development of the human being to the stage of spiritual knowledge at which he becomes one with reality, but in such wise that, being merged in reality, he can imbibe from it knowledge which is not a distant perception by means of the intellect, but is instead saturated with reality itself and for this reason can merge with it.

You will find that one characteristic feature of the spiritual science which occupies us here is that it can plunge into reality, that it does not merely speak of an abstract spirit, but of the real, tangible spirit, living in our environment surrounding us just as the things of the sense-world surround us. Abstract observations are the fruit of modern intellectualism. Take up any new work, with the exception of pure natural science or pure philosophy, and you will find the conception of life it contains, often a would-be philosophical view, is far removed from actual life or from a real knowledge of things. Read what is said about the will in one of the newer books on psychology, and you will find that there is no profound meaning underlying the words. The ideas of those who devote themselves to such studies have not the power actually to penetrate to the core, even of nature herself. To them matter is a thing outside, because they cannot penetrate it in spirit. I should like to elucidate this by an example.

In one of my last books, Riddles of the Soul, Von Seelenraetseln, I have shown how an opinion of long standing, prevailing in natural science, must be overcome by modern spiritual science. I know how very paradoxical my words must sound to many. But it is just those truths which are able to satisfy the demands—already making themselves heard and becoming more and more insistent as time goes on—for a new kind of thought which will often appear paradoxical, when compared with all that is still looked upon as authoritative. Every modern scientist who has occupied himself with the subject maintains that there are two kinds of nerves⁸ in human and animal life (we are now only concerned with human life, one set, leading from the sense organs to the central organ, is the sensory nerves, which are stimulated by sense-perceptions, the stimulus communicating itself to the nerve center. The second kind of nerves, the so-called motor nerves, pass from the center out to the limbs. These motor-nerves enable us to use our limbs. They are said to be the nerves of volition, while the others are called the sensory nerves.

Now I have shown in my book, Riddles of the Soul, though only in outline, that there is no fundamental difference between the sensory and the so-called motor nerves or nerves of volition, and that the latter are not subject to the will. The instances brought forward to support the statement that these nerves are obedient to the will as is shown by the terrible disease of locomotor ataxia really prove the exact opposite, which can easily be shown. They, indeed, prove the truth of my contention. These so-called voluntary nerves are also sensitive nerves. While the other sensitive nerves pass from the sense organs to the central organ, so that the outer sense-perceptions may be transmitted to it, the voluntary nerves, as they are called, which do not differ from the other set, perceive that which is movement within ourselves. They are endowed with the perception of movement. There are no voluntary nerves. The will is of a purely spiritual nature, purely spirit and soul, and functions directly as spirit and soul. We use the so-called voluntary nerves, because they are the sensory nerves for the limb which is going to move and must be perceived if the will is to move it. For what reason do I give this example? Because countless treatises on the will exist at the present day, or may be read and heard, in which the will is dealt with. But the ideas developed have not the impelling power to advance to real knowledge, to press forward to the sight of will in its working. Such knowledge remains abstract and foreign to life. While such ideas are current, modern science will continue to tell us of motor nerves, of nerves of volition. Spiritual science evolves ideas regarding the will which at the same time show us the nature of the physical human nervous system. Spiritual science will penetrate the phenomena and facts of nature. Instead of remaining in regions foreign to life, it will find its way into reality. It will have the courage to permeate material things with the spirit, not to leave them outside as things apart. For spiritual science everything is spiritual. Spiritual science will be able to pierce the surface and penetrate into the social order, and will work for a reality in social life, which baffles our abstract, intellectual natural science. And thus, spiritual science will again proclaim a spiritual knowledge, a new way of penetrating into the psychic and the spiritual in the universe. It will proclaim boldly that those spiritual worlds, represented in pictures envisioned by artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, can no longer suffice for us. In accordance with the progress of human evolution, we must find a new way into the spiritual world. But if we learn to understand the spiritual world anew, if we penetrate into that world, not in the nebulous manner of pantheism, by a continual repetition of the word “spirit”, a universal, abstract, vague spirit which “must he there”: if we pierce through to the real phenomena of the spiritual world not by spiritualism, but by the development of the human forces of spirit and soul in the manner described above, then again we shall know of a spiritual world in the only way adapted to the present development of humanity. Then the mysteries of the spiritual world will reveal themselves to us, and then something will happen of which Goethe spoke. Although he was only a beginner in the things which modern spiritual science goes on developing in accordance with his own spirit, but of which he had a premonition, Goethe beautifully expressed that which will happen in the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her open secrets, experiences a profound longing for her worthiest exponent—art.” Once more will the artist receive a revelation from the spiritual world; he will then no longer be led astray in the belief that his portrayal of spiritual things in a material picture is an abstract, symbolic, lifeless allegory; he will know the living spirit and will be able to express that living spirit through material means. No longer will the perfect imitation of nature be considered the best part of a work of art, but the manifestation of that which the spirit has revealed to the artist. Once more an art will arise, filled with spirit, an art which is in no way symbolical, in no way allegorical, which also does not betray its luxurious character by attempting to rival nature, to the perfection of which it can never attain. It demonstrates its necessity, its justification, in human life by proclaiming the existence of something of which the ordinary, direct beholding of nature, naturalism, can give us no information. And even if the artist's attempt to give expression to something spiritual be but a clumsy effort, he is giving form to something which has a significance, apart from nature, because it transcends nature. He makes no bungling attempts at that which nature can do better than he. A way opens here to that art in which a beginning has been made in the external structure and the external decoration of the Goetheanum at Dornach.

The attempt has been made there to create a University of Spiritual Science for the work to be carried on within it. In all the paintings on the ceilings, the wood carvings, etc., an attempt has been made to give form to all that spiritual science reveals in that building. Hence the building itself is a natural development. No old architectural style could be followed here, because the spirit will be spoken of in a new way within it. Let us look at nature and consider the shell of a nut; the kernel within determines the form of it; in nature every sheath is formed in accordance with the requirements of the inner core. So the whole of the building at Dornach is formed in consonance with that which as music will one day resound within it; with those mystery dramas which will one day be presented there; with those revelations of spiritual science which will one day be uttered within its walls. Everything described here will echo in the wood carvings, in the pillars, and in the capitals. An art as yet only in its beginnings, which is really horn of a new spirit, altogether born of the spirit, is there represented. The artists who are working there are themselves their own severest critics. In such an undertaking one is, of course, exposed to misunderstandings; this is only natural. Objections are raised against the Dornach Building by visitors, who say: “These anthroposophists have filled their building with symbols and allegories.” Other visitors who increase in number from day to day, understand what they see here.

Now the characteristic of the building is that it does not contain a single symbol or allegory; in the work attempted here the spirit has flowed into the immediate artistic form. That which is expressed here has nothing of symbolism, nothing of allegory, but everything is something in its own form. Up to the present we have only been able to build a covering for a spiritual center of work; for external social conditions do not yet permit us to erect a railway station or even a bank building. For reasons, which may perhaps be easily comprehensible to you, we have not yet been able to find the style of a modern bank or of a modern department store; but they must also he found. Above all things, the way must be found along these lines to an artistic shaping of actual practical life.

Just think of the social importance of art, even for our daily bread; for the preparation of bread depends on the manner in which people think and feel.

It is a matter of great and social significance to men, that everything by which they are immediately surrounded in life should take on an artistic form; that every spoon, every glass, should have a form well adapted to its use, instead of a form chosen at random to serve the purpose; that one should see at a glance, from its form, what service a thing performs in life, and at the same time recognize its beauty. Then for the first time large numbers of people will feel spiritual life to be a vital necessity, when spiritual life and practical life are brought into direct connection with each other. As spiritual science is able to throw light on the nature of matter, as I have shown in the example of the sensory and motor nerves, so will art, born of spiritual science, attain to the power of giving direct form to every chair, every table, to every man-created object.

Since it is plainly evident that the gravest prejudices and misunderstandings come from the churches, we may ask: What is the position finally reached by the religious creeds? If they have any justification at all, they must have a connection by their very nature with the spiritual world. But they have preserved into our period of time old traditions of these worlds, grown out of very different conditions of the human soul. Spiritual science strives to advance to the spiritual world, in accordance with the new mode of thought, with the new life of the soul. Should this be condemned by the religious sentiment of humanity, if it understands itself aright? Is such a thing possible? Never! What is the real aim of religious sentiment and of all religious work? Certainly not the proclamation of theories and dogmas pertaining to the higher worlds. The aim of all religious work should be to give all men an opportunity to look up with reverence to higher worlds. The work of religion is to inculcate reverence for the super-sensible. Human nature needs this reverence. It needs to look up in reverence to the sublime in the spiritual worlds. If human nature is denied the present mode of entrance, then, of course, the old way must still be kept open. But since this way is no longer suited to the thoughts of our day, it must be enforced, its recognition must be imposed by authority. Hence the external character of religious teaching as applied to modern human nature. An antiquated outlook on the higher worlds is imposed by the religious teachers.

Let us suppose that there are communities in which an understanding exists of the true nature of religion consisting in reverence for spiritual things. Must it not be to the highest interest of, such communities that their members should develop a living knowledge of the unseen world? Will not those whose souls contain a vision of the super-sensible, whose knowledge gives them a familiarity with those worlds be the most likely to reverence them? Since the middle of the fifteenth century human evolution has taken the line of development of the individuality, of the personality. To expect of anyone today that he should attain a vision or an understanding of the higher worlds on authority, or in any other way than by the force of his own individuality or personality, is to expect of him something which is against his nature. If he is allowed freedom of thought with respect to his knowledge of the super-sensible he will unite with his fellow-men in order that reverence for the spiritual world, which everyone recognizes in his own personal way, may be encouraged in the community. When men have attained freedom of thought to approach knowledge of the spiritual world through their own individuality, then the common service of the higher worlds, true religion, will flourish.

This will show itself especially in the conception of the Christ Himself. This conception was very different in earlier centuries from that even of many theologians of the later centuries, especially of the nineteenth. How greatly has humanity fallen away from the perception of the true super-sensible nature of the Christ, who lived in the man Jesus! How far is it removed from the understanding of that union of a super-sensible being with a human body, through the Mystery of Golgotha, in order that the earth in its development might have a deeper meaning! That union of the super-sensible with the things of the senses, which was consummated in the Mystery of Golgotha, how little has it been understood even by theologians of a certain type in recent times! The man of Nazareth has been designated “the simple man of Nazareth”, the conception of religion has become more and more materialistic. Since no one was able to find a way into the higher worlds, suited to modern humanity, the super-sensible path to the Christ-Being was lost. Many who now believe that they are in communion with the Christ, only believe this. They do not dream how little their thought of Christ and their words concerning Him correspond to the experiences of those who draw near to the great Mystery of Humanity with a spiritual knowledge that is suited to our time.

It must be said that spiritual science makes absolutely no pretension of founding a new religion. It is a science, a source of knowledge; but we ought to recognize in it the means for a rejuvenescence of the religious life of humanity. As it can rejuvenate science and art, so can it also renew religious life, the very great importance of which must lie apparent to anyone who can appreciate the extreme gravity of the social future. Much, very much has been said recently on the subject of education, yet it must be acknowledged that a large part of the discussion does not touch the chief problem. I endeavored to deal with this problem in a series of educational lectures which I was asked to deliver to the teachers who are to form the staff of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded last September [1919], in conformity with ideas underlying the Threefold Social Order.

At the foundation of the school I not only endeavored to give shape to externals, corresponding to the requirements and the impulse of the Threefold Order; I also strove to present pedagogy and didactics to the teaching-staff of this new kind of school in such a light that the human being would be educated to face life and be able to bring about a social future in accordance with certain unconquerable instincts in human nature. It is evident that the old-fashioned system of normal training, with its stereotyped rules and methods of teaching, must be superseded. It is true nowadays that many people agree that the individuality of the pupil ought to be taken into account in teaching. All sorts of rules are produced for the proper consideration of the child's individuality. But the pedagogy of the future will not be a normal science; it will be a true art, the art of developing the human being. It will rest upon a knowledge of the whole man. The teacher of the future will know that in the human being before him, who carries on development from birth through all the years of life, a spirit and soul element is working through the organs out to the surface. From the first year of school, he will see how every year new forces evolve from the depths of the child's nature. No abstract normal training can confirm this sight; only a living perception of human nature itself. Much has been said of late on the subject of instruction through observation and, within certain limits, this kind of tuition is justified. But there are things which cannot be communicated through external observation, yet which must be communicated to the growing child; but they can only be so communicated when the teacher, the educator, is animated by a true understanding of the growing human being, when he is able to see the inner growth of the child as it changes with every succeeding year; when he knows what the inner nature of the human being requires in the seventh, ninth, and twelfth years of his life. For only when education is carried on in accordance with nature, can the child grow strong for the battle of life. One comes in contact with many shattered lives at the present day, many who do not know what to make of life, to whom it has nothing to offer. There are many more people who suffer from such disrupted lives than is commonly known. What is the reason.? It is because the teacher is unable to take note of important laws of the evolving human being. I will give only one instance of what I mean. How very often do we hear well-meaning teachers say emphatically that one should develop in the child a clear understanding of what is being offered him as mental food. The result of this method in practice is banality, triviality! The teacher descends artificially to the understanding of the child, and that manner of teaching has already become instinctive. If it is persisted in, and the child is trained in this false clarity of understanding, what is overlooked? A teacher of this kind does not know what it means to a man, say thirty-five years of age, who looks back to his childhood and remembers: “My teacher told me such and such a thing when I was nine or ten years old; I believed it because I looked up with reverence to the authority of my teacher, and because there was a living force in his personality through which I was impressed by his words. Now, looking back, I find that his words have lived on in me; now I can understand them.” A marvellous light is shed on life by such an event, when through inner development we can look back in our thirty-fifth year at the lessons we have learnt out of love for our teacher which we could not understand at the time. That light, which is a force in life, is lost when the teacher descends to the banality of the object-lesson, which is praised as an ideal method. The teacher must know what forces should be developed in the child, in order that the forces which are already in his nature, may remain with him throughout his life. Then the child need not merely recall to memory what he learnt between his seventh and fifteenth years; what he then learnt is renewed again and again, and wears a new aspect in each successive stage of life. What the child learnt is renewed at every later epoch of life.

The foregoing is an effort to place before you an idea of the fundamental character of a system of pedagogy which, if followed, may truly grow into an art; by its practice the human being may take his place in life and find himself equal to all the demands of the social future. However much people may vaunt their social ideals, there are few who are at all capable of surveying life as a whole. But in the carrying out of social ideals, a wide outlook on life is indispensable. People speak, for instance, of transferring the means of production to the ownership of the community and believe that by withdrawing them from the administration of the individual human being, much would be accomplished. I have already spoken on this point, and will go into the subject again more thoroughly in the following lectures. But assuming for a moment that it is possible to transfer the means of production to the ownership of the community at once, do you suppose that the community of the next generation would still own them? No! For even if the means of production were transmitted to the next generation, it would be done without taking into account the fact that this next generation would develop new and fruitful forces, which would transform the whole system of production, and thus render the old means useless. If we have any idea of molding social life. we must take part in life in its fullness, in all its phases. From a conception of man as a being composed of body, soul, and spirit, and from a real understanding of body, soul, and spirit, a new art of education will arise, an art which may truly be regarded as a necessity in social life.

Arising from this way of thinking, something has developed within the spiritual movement, centered at Dornach, which has to a great extent met with misunderstanding. There are a number of persons who have learnt in the course of years to think not unfavorably of our spiritual-scientific movement. But when we recently began, in Zurich and elsewhere, to give representations of the art known as eurythmy, an art springing naturally out of spiritual science itself, but, as we are fully aware, as yet only in its infancy, people began to exclaim that after all, spiritual science cannot be worth much, for to introduce such antics as an accompaniment to spiritual science only shows that the latter is completely crazy. In such a matter as this, people do not consider how paradoxical anything must appear which works towards reconstituting the world on the basis of spiritual science. This art of eurythmy is a social art in the best sense; for its aim is, above all things, to communicate to us the mysteries of human nature. It uses the capacities for movement latent in the human being, bringing to expression these movements in a manner to be explained at the next representation of the eurythmic art. I will only mention here that eurythmy is a true art; for it reveals the deepest secrets of human art itself by bringing to evidence a true speech, a visible speech expressed by the whole human being. But beside the mere movements of the body, founder on physiological science and a study of the structure of the human form, eurythmy presents to us at the same time a capacity of movement through which man, ensouled and inspired, yields himself up to movement. The purely physiological, gymnastic exercises of our materialistic age may also be taught to children, and they are now taught in the Waldorf School of which I have spoken. Ensouled movement, however, actually employs the whole being, while gymnastics on physiological, merely material lines employs only a part of the whole nature of the human being, and therefore, unless supplemented by eurythmy, allows much to degenerate in the growing human being Out of the depths of human nature spiritual life in a new form must enter into the most important branches of life.

It will be my task in the next few days to show how external life may really be given a new form in the present and for the future, when the impulse for the change comes from such a new spirit. Many people of all sorts, noteworthy people, feel today the necessity of understanding spiritually the modern pressing demands of social life. It is painful to see the number of people who are still asleep as regards these demands, and the many others who approach them in a confused way as agitators. We find faint indications of a feeling that none of the mere superficial programs can be of any use without a change of thought, of ideas, a new mode of learning from the spirit. But in many cases how superficial is the expression of that longing for a new spirit! We may say that the yearning for a new spirit is dimly and imperceptibly felt here and there in remarkable men, who most certainly have no idea of that which the Dornach Building represents in the outer world. But the expression of a longing for this new spirit can be heard. I will give one out of many examples of this.

In addition to the numerous memoirs published in connection with the disaster of the World War just ended, those of the Austrian Statesman, Czernin, will soon appear. This book promises to be extremely interesting. It is difficult to express what I wish to say without the risk of being misunderstood; I mean that it is interesting, because Czernin was a good deal less pretentious than the others who up to now have given expression to their opinions on the War, and he should therefore be leniently judged. In this book of Czernin's we may read something like the following passage:

‘The War continues, though in another form. I believe that coming generations will not call this great drama which has held the world in thrall for five years, the World-War; they will call it the world-revolution and they will know that the world-revolution only began with the World-War. Neither the Peace of Versailles nor that of St. Germain will create a lasting effect. This peace contains within it the destructive germ of death. The conflicts which shake Europe are not yet on the wane. As in a mighty earthquake, the subterranean rumbling still goes on. Now here, now there, the earth will continue to open and hurl fire towards heaven. Again and again events of elemental vehemence will sweep over the lands, bringing destruction in their train, till everything has been swept away, reminiscent of the madness of this War. Slowly, out of: unspeakable sacrifice, a new world will be born. Coming generations will look back to our times as to a long, terrible dream. But the darkest night is followed by the dawn. Generations have sunk into graves, murdered, starved, victims of disease. Millions have died in the effort to annihilate, to destroy, their hearts filled, with hatred and murder. But other generations will arise, and with them a new spirit. They will build up, what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. It is an eternal law in the circuit of life that resurrection follows death. Happy those who are called upon to cooperate as soldiers of labor in the work of rebuilding the world.’

Even this man speaks of a new spirit, but this new spirit is only a shadowy conception, a dim presentiment in heads like his. In order that this new spirit may take hold of the hearts, of the minds, of the souls of men in a really concrete form, the spiritual science and the art of education of which I wished to speak today in connection with human evolution, will labor for the social future of humanity.

• 7. or a deeper understanding of this, the reader is referred to Rudolf Steiner's The Story of My Life, page 274:

  “It is my impression that if the workers' movement had been followed with interest by a greater number of unprejudiced persons, and if the proletariat had been dealt with understandingly, this movement would have developed quite differently. But we have left the people to live in their own class, and we have lived in ours. The conceptions of each class of men held by the others were merely theoretical. There was discussion of wages when strikes and the like forced it; and all sorts of welfare movements were established. These latter were exceedingly creditable.

  “But the submerging of these world-stirring questions into a spiritual sphere was wholly lacking. And yet only this could have taken from the movement its destructive forces.”

  >We offer this quotation in order to show that the many remarks made by Rudolf Steiner in these lectures, characterizing the proletarian movement and its Marxian ideology, should not give the impression that he was hostile toward the proletariat. Quite the contrary was the case. His untiring efforts in 1919 and later were deeply concerned with the need of establishing a mutual understanding between the two classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—which were fighting one another for political power.

  In 1919, when the workers were in power in Central Europe—in Russia since 1917—Rudolf Steiner continued this effort by offering a cultural, instead of a political-economic viewpoint. In doing this, he found it necessary for an understanding of the problem to make clear to the proletariat the nature of the destructive forces at work in their midst, embodied in an erroneous materialistic ideology. It must be emphatically stressed, too, that Rudolf Steiner made it clear that the same destructive forces were at work with an equal degree of fatality in the egotistic and unintelligent attitude of the members of the other class—the bourgeoisie—toward life and its world problems.

• 8. The original statement about the nature of the nerves can be found in the appendix of Rudolf Steiner's previously mentioned book, The Riddles of the Soul, (Von Seelenraetseln, Riddle of the Soul (1996).

  This most important statement shows how Anthroposophy solves the crucial problem of modern physiology and psychology, that is to say, it explains the relation between body and soul. The reader will learn that the human body functions in a threefold way, or one may say, there are three systems of organic activity: (a) the nervous system, including the senses; (b) the metabolic system, in connection with the limb-system; and (c) the rhythmic system, i. e., blood circulation and breathing.

  The important discovery made by Rudolf Steiner reveals the fact that the human soul in her entirety is not limited to a mere relationship with the nervous system, for this is only one of her several special functions, manifest in thinking, in so far as this activity depends on sense perception. Another function of the soul—feeling—is supported by the bodily rhythmic system, and a third soul function—willing—finds its bodily counterpart in the metabolic system. All this means that the human soul, as a whole, with her three functions is connected with the bodily organism as a whole. She functions through three systems which are intimately interwoven and mutually interplaying.

  Rudolf Steiner's statement shows further that by devoting herself to a certain training, the soul is able to detach herself, bond by bond, from the connection with the body and to turn her perceptions with transformed thinking, feeling, and willing toward the spiritual world.

  It must be emphasized, however, that the discovery of the threefold physiological and mental organism of man did not lead Rudolf Steiner to develop forthwith the idea of the three-fold social organism. The threefold structure of the body-social was discovered by him through independent research without taking the human organism into account. To quote the words of Rudolf Steiner:

  “The present comparison is not an attempt to take some natural science truth and transplant it into the social system. Its object is quite different: namely, to use the human body as an object lesson for training human thought and feeling to a sense of what organic life requires, and then to apply this perceptive sense to the body social.” (The Threefold Commonwealth.)

  >Bernhard Behrens.

It is my task at this time to explain certain matters directly related to practical life and to the outer existence of mankind in general. This is to some extent an interlude in our present studies, in order to bring out the quality which Spiritual Science in our time must above all possess—that of immediate relation to real life. We shall presently come to those parts of our subject which deal more with the inner life of man. All in all, this is the focus and aim of our present studies: On the foundations of Spiritual Science, to gain an idea of the individual man's position in practical life, even in his calling or profession. I would entitle the whole of this course of lectures (including the last three or four) ‘The Karma of Vocation.’ But it is necessary first to gain a broader basis; I must explain some other things, connected with our question in a wider sense.

As we have already seen, what man achieves for the world—no matter in what profession—is connected, intimately, even with the farthest cosmic future of mankind; it cannot be set aside as mere prosaic toil. Man enters into the social order of life in a certain way. His Karma impels him to some particular calling. While we are speaking of this question, no calling need be thought inherently prosaic or poetic. For we now know that what man does within the social order, is the first seed of something, which is not only of significance for our Earth, but will go on and on evolving when the Earth passes through the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan states. A living grasp of our several callings, a recognition of simple and straightforward human life in its significance, can be brought home to us most intensely through these spiritual studies. For it is the task of our spiritual-scientific movement not only to provide euphonious theories, but to bring to our souls that which will tend to place us rightly into life according to the Spirit of our Time—each in his place. Therefore, our Truths are always such as to be strong enough, for life itself really to be judged and understood through them. We will not just enthuse in a multitude of pleasing, comforting ideas; we will receive ideas which can carry and sustain us throughout life.

If you will remember something I have often emphasised, you will see how this spiritual-scientific movement tends to bring near to our souls what is of real significance for life. I have often pointed to an important fact of life; and if those whose task lies in the sphere of learning are not too obtuse, it may well be that this fact will play an important part in Science comparatively soon. Nowadays there is much emphasis on Heredity and all that is connected with it in man's life. Repeating as they generally do, like parrots, the scientific world-conception of to-day, educationists, when they speak of the choice of callings, will also tell us of the inherited qualities which the teacher must take into account if he wishes to pass judgment on the questions that so frequently arise as to the future calling of a young person who is about to enter into life. But the question of heredity is generally treated, nowadays, only in this wise:—Children, they say, inherit certain characteristics from their parents or earlier ancestors. And in this connection they are generally thinking more or less of physical heredity—that which is entirely contained in the physical line. For the external scientists of to-day cannot yet take the step of recognising the repeated earthly lives of man—the carrying-over of human qualities from former incarnations.

They talk of heredity; but they will only gain a right idea of the question of heredity when they consider it in conjunction with what you may already know, even if you only understand the content of the booklet on Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy Human life runs its course in this way: There is a first section, approximately to the seventh year—to the change of teeth; a second, lasting until the fourteenth year; a third, until the twenty-first; and so on. (For instance, there is another period until the twenty-eighth year.) You will find some further details in a booklet reproducing the content of my recent lecture at Liestal, where I pointed out once more, from another standpoint, these truths of human evolution between birth and death and its division into seven-year periods. Broadly speaking, as you know, the physical body is to some extent inwardly perfected between birth and the change of teeth, the etheric from then onward to the time of puberty, and afterwards the astral body.

Let us to-day consider this time of puberty, which takes its course from about the fourteenth to the sixteenth year. (It varies, as you know, with climate, nationality, etc.) At this time the human being becomes ripe to bring descendants into life. The study of this period is therefore immensely important—especially for a natural-scientific theory of heredity. For up to this time the human being must have developed all those qualities which make him able—out of himself—to convey such qualities to his descendants. He cannot wait until a later time for the development of these faculties. In a subordinate sense, no doubt, characteristics subsequently acquired can also be transmitted to the descendants; but speaking in the sense of natural science, man is undoubtedly so organised that at the age of fourteen to sixteen he becomes completely ripe for inheritance. We cannot therefore say that the main qualities which enter into his development after this time of life are of any great significance for the question of heredity. Natural Science will therefore have to find out the reasons why man ceases, from this moment onward, to develop in himself foundations of heredity. In the animal the thing is different. Throughout its life, the animal does not essentially get beyond this point of time. This is what we must really comprehend.

Without entering further into many things which would have to be considered in this connection, I wish to say at once what really underlies this matter from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Take now the moment of birth. Before it, we have a long period of time which man spends in the spiritual life between death and a new birth. There, the processes take place which I have so often described in outline in a certain way. Naturally, all that takes place in that time between death and a new birth influences the human being. But above all, that which takes place in the spiritual between death and a new birth contains much that is related to the development of the bodily nature between birth and the age of fourteen to sixteen. What man works out, on Earth, very largely in his unconsciousness, this above all he works out between death and a new birth from the standpoint of a higher consciousness. Here upon Earth, man looks through his eyes and other senses upon the mineral, plant and animal world. ... When he is in the spiritual world with the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and Exusiai, ... and with those human beings who have also passed through the gate of death and who in some way can be near to his soul, then, looking downward, his attention is directed above all to that which is connected with the life of humanity during this time. And from thence, as I have explained even in exoteric lectures, all that which underlies heredity is likewise determined. And as you know from an earlier lecture, the result of the past vocational life also emerges like a relic of the processes between death and a new birth—appearing physiognomically as it were, in the gestures and in the whole inherited tendencies too. In the human being at this time of life—even in the way he walks and moves his hands and in other respects deports himself—you can see the result of his vocational life in the last incarnation. Then comes the period from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, which is to some extent in opposition to the preceding one. During this period, the hereditary impulses cannot work on in the same way, for as we have seen, the point of time at which man has these impulses fully developed is already passed. External science takes no account of such questions; but it will have to do so, unless it wishes to be void of all reality.

Now this is also the point of time when man is led by vague unconscious impulses towards his new calling; and into this, the processes which lie between death and a new birth do not work nearly so much. For in this epoch the impulses of his former incarnation are especially at work. When circ*mstances work so as to drive him into this or that calling, the human being believes—and others around him too believe—that outer circ*mstances alone are in reality bringing it about. But the outer circ*mstances are subconsciously connected with what is living in the human soul—living in it directly from the conditions of the former incarnation. Observe the difference: In the preceding period—from the seventh to the fourteenth year—our former incarnation, fertilised by what takes place between death and a new birth, goes into our bodily organisation, making it the image of our former calling. But in the following period the impulses no longer work into us—no longer impress their gestures on us—but lead us along the paths of life to our new calling.

See what an infinitely fruitful thought will arise from these considerations, for the whole educational system of the future. If only our outer worldly culture could make up its mind to reckon with repeated lives on Earth instead of setting up fanciful theories—theories which cannot but be fanciful, because they do not reckon with the true reality but with a fragment of it—with the realities which are immediate and present between birth and death.

Here we can gain an outlook, of what untold importance it will be for Spiritual Science to enter into those circles which have to do with the human being's education and development, and with the influences which are brought to bear upon the life of man in the external social order. Of course we are here looking out upon wide perspectives,—but they have very much to do with the reality. For in the evolution of the world, chaos does not prevail. Order prevails—or, if it be disorder, even so it will always be explicable out of the spiritual life. He, therefore, who knows the laws connected with repeated lives on Earth, can meet life in a very different way with his advice and active help. He can say things and institute things, connected with the real course of life.

You must remember, in a certain sense everything in the world is cyclic. We know the great cycles of post-Atlantean time: the Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Latin, our own, and that which will follow it. The souls of men return in each of these cycles—more than once, or in some cases only once. But life on this Earth is not only cyclic in this all-embracing sense. It is also cyclic in the sense that certain conditions can be determined if we are able rightly to understand those that preceded them. For instance, if someone understands what was spiritually at work in the first centuries of Christian evolution—say, from the third to the seventh century A.D.—if he knows these spiritual impulses, then he can also understand what social needs can be at work in our time. There is a cyclic evolution, and if a man is destined to place himself into this cyclic evolution in a certain way, we make him unhappy if we advise him to behave differently. Now in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch men will have to place themselves into life more and more consciously. Therefore a knowledge of these laws will also have to emerge increasingly. It must be made possible for a man to see himself in real connection with all that is going on in his environment. It is not only that we should learn to choose the right callings for our children; but that we ourselves should be able to develop the right thoughts as to our own relation to the world, no matter where in life we may be placed. For as you know, thoughts are realities. In future it will matter more and more what a man thinks about his connection with all that is going on in the world around him—in the evolution of the Spirit of the Time. In these matters, more and more consciousness will have to take hold of the human soul.

Remember how I tried to characterise the streams of life that arose with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I showed how there arose throughout the Western regions that stream which rather tends to make the human being a Bourgeois. (For so we called it, choosing a comprehensive and, as it were, approximate term). Bourgeoisdom has come to expression in Western Europe and in America. With this ideal of the Bourgeois we then contrasted the Eastern goal. (It is only a goal for the present: it is not so clearly expressed, for the Western culture is comparatively more advanced than the Eastern.) What is the Eastern goal? It is the ideal of the Pilgrim. These two ideals—Bourgeois and Pilgrim—stand over against each other. Unless we realise how much this signifies for life, we cannot possibly enter into that understanding of life which is dawning more and more. The people of former centuries and millennia—they could confront life without conscious understanding. For they were guided by the Divine-spiritual powers. We must approach life with conscious understanding—increasingly, the more we develop into the future which is now at hand.

Such things as I just now explained to you—the two streams, one of which is based on heredity and the other on salvation, liberation,—such things must be thoroughly understood if we would claim any judgment upon the life of present time. For these things force themselves upon us. It is not merely my statement; it can be said out of the realities of the time, for it has been felt and to some extent even known for a long time past by those who have confronted life not sleepily and obtusely but with full, wide-awake attention. I have already spoken of this peculiarity of our time: there are many human beings in our time who have a real feeling for the things which are emerging, but are unable (remember what I told you about Jaurès)—unable to rise to an understanding of reincarnation and Karma. Unable to take hold either of individual Karma or of World-Karma, they cannot penetrate what they so well perceive.

In many places in modern history, we find human beings who had an open eye for what was happening, though they could never rise to the point of explaining things from the standpoint of repeated earthly lives;—nay more, though they themselves, just because they could not accept repeated earthly lives, largely contributed to bring about the very things they criticised so sharply. That indeed is characteristic of the men of to-day, even of those who see most clearly. They criticise existing things, while they themselves are working to bring about the very things they judge so truly. So do unconscious impulses play into our human life.

Take for instance a man who saw many things with extreme clarity; a man who clearly observed the life around him, notably his own particular surroundings. I refer to John Stuart Mill, the famous English philosopher,—born in 1806 and died in 1873. Many people of our time regard him as the renewer or essential continuer of Logic; but he also developed social insight, far-reaching social ideas. He turned his attention to the social evolution of that world especially, with which he was familiar in his own environment. And he wanted to find an answer to the question, which for him assumed a tragic form: Into what harbour are we steering? What is the tendency and ultimate goal of that social character which has been stamped, to begin with, upon the life of the nineteenth century? The type of humanity, said Mill, which the nineteenth century developed, is essentially the Bourgeois. Wherein does the Bourgeois differ from the earlier types of humanity which evolved in the course of ages? He asked himself this question, and he replied, The Bourgeois differs in this respect: In former times the individual was of far greater importance. (I am clothing it now rather in our ideas; John Stuart Mill expressed practically the same in other words.) Through the man of former time, a stronger individuality was speaking; one felt the active rising of the soul beyond the immediate and outward physical realities. The Bourgeois type tends to reduce everything to a dead level—tends to equalise all men in the social order. And what is the upshot of this equalising process? Not the equalising in greatness of the human soul, but in nonentity,—so says John Stuart Mill. And he outlines a human future for this fifth post-Atlantean age. Human beings, in their social life together, will more and more become the mincemeat of Bourgeois nonentity. He felt this as a tragical conclusion.

Men feel such things in different ways, however, according as they are born out of the Western or the Eastern culture. The Russian thinker Herzen made himself thoroughly familiar with these observations by John Stuart Mill, but in his soul the thing worked differently. While the Western thinker describes this perspective of Bourgeoisdom with a certain nonchalance, the Eastern suffers terribly to think that Europe—as Mill and Herzen even said—should be steering towards a kind of Chinese state. Both Mill and Herzen (as you may see from Herzen's book, published in 1864)—the one with a more Eastern, the other with a more Western colouring,—regard what has arisen in China as a stage already attained, compared to which Europe is only tending in the same direction—tending to a new China, a senile civilisation where men are the mere mincemeat of Bourgeois nonentity. A narrowing of intellect will come, says John Stuart Mill,—a narrowing of intellect and vigour, a wearing down of individuality; in a word, all that will tend to a dead level,—a constant flattening of life, greater and greater superficiality, to the exclusion of the all-embracing human interests. So says John Stuart Mill, and Herzen only confirms it with a more tragic feeling: reduction of all things to the interests of the ledger, mercantile Bourgeois prosperity. Thus, in the 1860's, John Stuart Mill and Herzen! Mill, speaking in the first place of his own country, declares: England is on the way to become a modern China! Herzen replies: Not only England but all Europe! As you may see from Herzen's work of 1864, Herzen and Mill at that time were more or less agreed as to what Herzen thus expresses: If an un-awaited resurrection does not occur,—leading to a re-birth of human personality, giving it strength to overcome this Bourgeoisie,—Europe despite its noble ancestry and Christianity will become a modern China.

These words were spoken in 1864. But Herzen had no opportunity to reckon with repeated earthly lives and Karma. Such a perception, therefore, he could only receive in deepest tragedy, and he expressed it thus: We are not the doctors, we are the pains of our time. Conglomerated mediocrity—that is the state we are approaching. (It can perhaps better be expressed by the English term which Herzen and Mill employed—‘conglomerated mediocrity’—than by any German words.) And Herzen says, out of deep tragical feeling: The time will come in Europe, when modern scientific realism will have gone so far that men will no longer seriously believe in anything belonging to the other world—the super-sensible. People will say that the only goal we have to follow is in the outer physical realities. Men will be sacrificed for these realities, nor will there be any other perspective than that the human beings sacrificed are the mere bridge for those who follow after them. Thus will the individual be sacrificed to the polyp-state of the future.

Such words were really spoken at that time. Europe, says Herzen, has only one difficulty in becoming very rapidly a modern China, and that is Christianity. Christianity cannot so easily be overcome. But he still sees no hopeful outlook, for he finds even Christianity made flat and superficial—superficial in the Revolution, and the Revolution, he says, made still further superficial in the middle-class Liberalism of the 19th century—conglomerated mediocrity! ... Looking to what was said by Mill, and mindful of the downfall of ancient Rome, Herzen declares: I see the unavoidable breakdown of old Europe. At the portals of the old world (meaning Europe) there stands no Catilina, but only death.

There is another author, who learned very much from Mill and Herzen,—I refer to the contemporary Russian writer Merejkowsky. He, too, sees clearly many things that are there around him in the present time. But he cannot make up his mind to receive the sustaining ideas of Spiritual Science. Merejkowsky says, not without justification, The sceptre of former ages has been replaced by the yard-rule, the bible by the ledger, and the altar by the counter.

But the fault is, these things are merely criticized. For as you know, it is inevitable for the yard-rule, the ledger and the counter to play the part they actually play in this fifth post-Atlantean age. It must be so. It is according to an unavoidable World-Karma. The point is not to criticize or to condemn, but to pour into this world of yard-rule, counter and ledger the Spirit which alone can grapple with them,—that is, the Spirit of Spiritual Science.

These things are very serious. I want to let you feel, as I always do on such occasions: I am not setting forth what I myself happen to want to say. What I express, is said in agreement with those men who have observed life openly and un-asleep. Views and opinions everyone can have, but the question is: How do we stand in our time with our opinions, how are they rooted in the soil of our time? Can we confirm them by the facts? Our age is assuming a certain character,—a character clearly perceived by those who want to see. We cannot give to our age any character we like; that is out of the question. We must see how the spiritual evolution of mankind progresses, from cycle to cycle.

As I have told you, there are occult societies who have knowledge of these things out of old tradition—out of the ancient atavistic secret doctrine. And as you also know from former lectures, these societies, notably in the West—(but Eastern people have become their followers)—have assumed an impure character. That does not prevent them from preserving certain secrets of existence. But they preserve them in a way which is not allowable in our time. He above all, who, obedient to the spiritual message of the time, communicates that part of Spiritual Science which is now being made public according to the true spirit of our age,—he above all encounters opposition. Opposition which undoubtedly often proceeds from unclean sources. For the opposition is guided and directed everywhere by spiritual powers; that we must not forget.

So we can understand it, if opposition arises on all hands precisely to that form of Spiritual Science which has to live within our movement. These thing's are so easy to manipulate nowadays. Time and again they declare: ‘It must not be; it is not allowable for such a science to be created for wider circles.’ And then they summon up all kinds of powers which have the public ear to-day, so as to render Spiritual Science harmless. University Professors go from country to country proclaiming themselves in duty bound to stand up against my Spiritual Science above all, because—as they say—our time must concentrate on the Reality (meaning that Reality which they alone can see) and not on these things which divert men from it.

There is sometimes no little method in such attacks. Anyone who is not blind, can see how they select the right places according to the political constellations; the places where they think their reputations as Professors will be most effective, or where they think they will best be able to heave us out of the saddle. They think they will make most headway by choosing the right places and using the right words, (I mean not inherently right, but according to the passions of today).

These things, however, are all of them part of a larger whole. Nothing is more feared, nothing is more anathematised in certain quarters, than the possibility that a number of people might discover something of the real character of life in our time. For in those quarters especially, where the aforesaid occult brotherhoods exist, they have the deepest interest in keeping people in the dark, as to the things which are connected with the real laws of life. If one keeps people in the dark, one can work among them most effectively oneself. One can no longer work effectively when they begin to know how they are really standing in the present time. That is a danger for those who want to fish in clouded waters,—who want to keep their esoteric knowledge to themselves and apply it so as to mould men in their social relationships in the way they want to have them.

There are members of occult brotherhoods to-day, fully convinced within their brotherhoods that spiritual powers everywhere prevail in our surroundings, and that a bond exists between the living and the dead. Within their occult brotherhoods they speak in no other terms than of the real laws of the Spiritual World,—those laws of which we in our Spiritual Science possess a part which must be made public to-day. They speak of all these things, inasmuch as they have received them from old atavistic tradition. Thereupon, they will write newspaper articles against the very same things, branding them as medieval superstitions. Often they are the very same people, who in the occult societies cultivate Spiritual Science as a traditional doctrine, and in the public journals write against it, characterising it as ‘medieval superstition,’ ‘outworn mysticism’ and the like. They think it right that they should keep this knowledge to themselves, while other men remain stupid, ignorant of the principles by which they are being led and guided. (Of course there are also many very peculiar members of occult brotherhoods, who know about as much of the world as they can reach with the ends of their noses. They too join in the chorus, saying how impossible it is to make public in our time ‘the content of the Mysteries.’)

But there are many ways of keeping people befogged. Just as Spiritual Science gives us certain ideas and concepts as a true key to find our entry into the Spiritual World (I mentioned this in the Liestal and in other public lectures) so one can find certain concepts wherewith to ‘have on toast’ that part of the population which cannot abide the complete flattening of the intellect by the Natural Scientific outlook, whereof Mill and Herzen speak. It is always possible to form concepts in a certain manner. If only people knew how concepts are formed in public life to-day, in order to prepare the souls of men for what one wants! Many a man, if he knew this, would presently bestir himself to approach true spiritual science, which tells of these things in a honest and upright way. To-day I will not refer to all manner of lofty concepts which are being proclaimed to men as high ideals, not with the object of their attaining what these ideals imply, but with an altogether different purpose. I will not speak of that to-day, but will make clear by a simple example how easy it is to ‘have on toast’ people who feel a certain need to satisfy their mystic longings.

I will choose the silliest example I can. Someone might say: Number, even by the Pythagoreans of old, was held to contain the secrets of the World-order. Much is contained in the relationships of number. Take for instance these two sets of numbers. Nicholas II. of Russia—he was

born in the year	1868
came to the throne in	1894
has reigned for	22 years
and is now	48 years old
Add up the numbers:	3832
Halve it and we get:	1916,—

the most important year of the War. A very occult relationship of numbers; for now take George V. of England:

He was born in the year	1865,
his reign began in	1910;
he has reigned for	6 years
and he is	51 years old
Add up the numbers:	3832
Halve it:	1916.

How intimately the destinies of these two coincide! See how great a part the Pythagorean laws of Number are playing in the world! But that is not all, for there is Poincaré:

He was born in	1860,
he reigned since	1913.
That is,	3 years
and he is	56 years old
Add up the numbers:	3832.
Halve it:	1916.

See how the Numbers correspond among the three Allies!

One of the silliest examples, of course, for if I were now to step down and ask one of the ladies—needless to say, I shall not do so—when she was born, since when she has been a member of the Anthroposophical Society, how old she is (of course, I shall ask no such question), and how many years she has been in the Society, and if I were then to add up the numbers and halve the sum, I should get the very same number—exactly the same. An ideal example! Assume, for instance, some lady or gentleman, X. or Y,

was born in	1870,
joined the A.S. in	1912
has been in it for	4 years,
and is now	46 years old.
Add up:	3832,
Halve it:	1916.

A very silly example, no doubt. But I can assure you, many things, in which such ‘Mysteries of Number’ are sought out, depend upon no more than this. They are only a little less obvious. And it is just as easy in other spheres to put concepts together so as to throw sand in people's eyes. You only need skilfully choose your paths and not let people know what lies behind it. Even in the example I have just given, many people fall into the trap. How deeply significant, that destiny should choose the year 1916! But if we had reckoned it for 1914 it would have come out just as well. The fateful year for the three Allies would have coincided with the outbreak of the War. Any number can be put together on the same principle. Many a thing that is construed to-day—only out of somewhat different foundations of thought—is no more profound than this. Only, when it is a little more hidden, people do not see through it. If plenty of words are added—‘profound,’ ‘cosmic,’ ‘abysmal depths’ and so on,—and especially if all manner of numerical relations are adduced, one can gain countless followers and make it appear that one is speaking out of very special depths of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, there is something more in the methods chosen by certain people to throw sand in other people's eyes. Such and such ideas are proclaimed in this quarter or that, and certain statements are then added. The origin lies in some occult association which wishes to attain a certain purpose. One only need know the ways and means that are adopted.

Such things should become impossible in future; and to this end a number of people must develop, not the narrow, limited intelligence and vigour to which Mill refers, but the sustaining intelligence and vigour of life which come from Spiritual Science. This Science will fertilise our human intellect and energy of life. Then only shall we face the facts of life, in such a way that we cannot be deceived.

You see, it is not unconnected with these things:—There was a certain fear and horror when from the European East to the West there shone across the strange phenomenon of such an individuality as Blavatsky, who appeared as it were from the blue sky. (For her appearance made itself felt, long before it was fulfilled.) I have often pointed out how important this really was for the whole course of the nineteenth century. She appeared at the very moment when the conflict raged most furiously between the so-called ‘esotericists’ and the so-called ‘progressive’ occultists. It was the reactionarists who in this connection called themselves the esotericists. Those who wanted to keep everything from the world—those who wanted to keep all the occult secrets for themselves—called themselves ‘esotericists.’ They applied the word with this meaning. Into the midst of this conflict, the life of Blavatsky fell; and through her peculiar constitution—for immense forces were working out of her subconsciousness—there was a danger that the spiritual secrets might be revealed. People might discover something in the true and real sense; such was the danger. Beneath this danger they lived from 1840 onward—practically since Blavatsky was born, since her early childhood. And ever since that time, efforts were made so to arrange things as to enlist Blavatsky in the service of the Western Occult Brotherhoods. Had this succeeded, only what the Western brotherhoods considered suitable and in their interests would have emerged. But it all took a strange turn. I have told you how the ‘Grand Orient’ first made efforts to get hold of her. But she made conditions which could not be fulfilled. The effort failed. Thereupon she made a great deal of trouble for an American, Western brotherhood; for with her temperament, she constantly boiled over and eluded them,—escaped from what they wanted of her. Thereupon she was expelled, and they knew of no other resource than to condemn her to a kind of occult imprisonment and so bring her into an Indian occult brotherhood whose pursuit of occultism they considered harmless for the so-called Western brotherhoods, because it went along their lines. For they said to themselves: What if all manner of things are brought to light from Indian sources, that will not greatly disturb our circles. Most of the occultists who were working with serious occultism in those quarters said: What, after all, will emerge, now that we have surrounded Blavatsky with all the pictures which shut her off from a real knowledge of the Spiritual World! She will only absorb such things as may happily unite at their tea-parties so many old maids of both sexes (I am really quoting!) She will not greatly disturb our circles.

In reality, things only became unpleasant when our stream emerged, which took things in real earnest, giving access to the sources of a real Spiritual World. Here you will see how deep-seated were the foundations of the conflicts which resulted. For in fact there was something in Blavatsky of those impulses which must come from the Eastern World, and, moreover, there was a certain necessity for a kind of synthesis with the Western world. But the point was this:—In recent times they had fallen more and more in the pursuit of certain purposes and aims, which, as I indicated once before, were not the purposes of truth alone,—purposes which they pursued in the way I recently described to you. Of a truth, these were sometimes quite other aims than those of truth alone!

You must consider this:—If one knows how the cycles of humanity take their course,—if one knows what character the world to-day must have according to its Archai, this or that having prevailed in former times, each at its proper place in evolution,—if one is cognisant of these things, then one can work in a certain way. If on the one hand one possesses traditional Occult Science, while on the other hand in public journals and in public life one attacks the same Occult Science as mere medieval superstition, then indeed one can work in muddy waters and attain important objects,—whatever it may be that one desires to attain. For things in the world are connected, only people need not always know what the connection is. For many human beings, the connection can take place in the unconscious.

We must be able to turn our gaze, as I said before, in the right directions. Much depends on this. We must look to the right places. Often something quite insignificant will appear there; but the insignificant, seen in the right connection, often explains far more than is explained by what would seem important or significant. For in many things in the world it is indeed as Hamlet says of good and evil: Nothing in itself is good or evil, but man makes it so in thought. So it is with many other things. A thing is important not by virtue of what it appears to be, directly, in the outer Maya—in the great illusion. Things are only recognised in their true significance when we unite them with the right concepts. I will give you an example from the most recent times in Europe, without thereby wishing to encroach on any party or political tendency.

People to-day are fond of thinking at short range, and so there may be those who in their thought refer the outbreak of the present War in Europe to the murder of the heir apparent, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I do not say that that is wrong, I do not say that there is not some truth in it. They can explain certain events by referring them back to that assassination, which took place in July, 1914. But there may also be those who point out that it was printed in a Western journal in January, 1913, that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be murdered in the near future for the good of European humanity.

We can go back, that is to say, to the actual murder; but we can also go back to what was printed in a Western paper already in January, 1913, namely, the statement that he would be murdered.

Or again, we can go back to the murder of Jaurès on the eve of the war, which, as I indicated recently, will in all probability never be fully cleared up. But we can also go back further, and point to the time to which I just referred. Almost as far back as the other saying—that is to say, in the year 1913,—we can find this statement:—If the conditions in Europe should lead to war, Jaurès will be the first to die. We can look up a certain so-called occult almanac, which was sold for 40 francs. Here in this almanac, which, destined for the year 1913, must have been printed in 1912, we can read the following: In Austria, the man of whom it is commonly supposed that he will rule, will not come to the throne, but in his stead a young man, of whom it is not yet supposed that he will rule after the old Emperor. This was printed in a so-called occult almanac for 1913,—printed therefore already in the autumn of 1912. And in the same almanac for 1914 (printed, therefore, in 1913), the same remark was repeated. Evidently, in 1913, the attempted assassination had failed. In all these things the connections will be exposed, once people see things clearly. I mean the connection between what is there in the external reality, and what is brewed in unclean, hidden waves beneath. Some men will begin to recognise the threads that run from public life into this or that brotherhood. And they will recognise moreover, how foolish it is of other brotherhoods still to declaim, even to-day, that certain Truths of the Mysteries must be preserved in silence. These people may be quite innocent; for they are children, albeit they may be old members of this or that Masonic order for example, claiming also to have occult sources. They may be quite innocent. Nevertheless, they too assist the gloom and darkness which are prevailing among men.

I recently chose the example of a very ‘enlightened’ pastor and professor. I pointed out especially the discontinuity prevailing in his thought. (I mentioned it quite briefly here, and dealt with it further at St. Gall and Zurich.) He too, it must be admitted belongs to an occult brotherhood. But he is not one of those who work unfavourably, save by his limitations. For in their occult brotherhood they do acquire a certain limitation. They are purposely kept in a certain narrow sphere. This too, some heads of occult brotherhoods make it their task to bring about.

Above all, it is necessary for people to open their eyes. But our eyes must first learn to see. And we can only learn to see if we allow the direction of our sight to be guided by the understanding we have first received of the Spiritual World. These people always reckon upon qualities on which one seldom calculates in vain in human affairs. Thus, as I mentioned once before, they tried to put me off the track on one occasion. At the time when Alcyone was nominated, I also could have been nominated in a certain way. Thereby, all that pulses and flows through our movement could have been nicely swept out of the world,—if I had let myself in for what was suggested to me pretty strongly: I was to be nominated as the reincarnated St. John! In certain quarters they would then have undertaken to proclaim: Alcyone is so and so; and he—he is the reincarnated St. John. Then the whole movement would not have had to undergo what afterwards ensued.

Vanity, needless to say, is one of many things that make men stupid. Catch people's vanity, and you can attain much, especially if you also know the ways and means of joining certain concepts. As I said before, it was done in the Theosophical Society, but in a too amateurish way. The others do it more skilfully,—more in accordance with realities. One cannot do much to the purpose if one has to reckon with a personality like Annie Besant, who herself is full of passions, and under whom those who were near her heaved many a bitter sigh. One need only know the sighs of those who were in Annie Besant's environment for years, their sighs and their anxieties: what situation would she not bring them into through the fact that she, too, had now been caught in the aura of a certain Indian occultism. For in this connection she had brought with her some strange qualities, coming from strange foundations,—qualities which proved highly inconvenient to a number of people in the Theosophical Society. Many people (men especially) sighed bitterly when they had tried again and again to bring Annie Besant into a sensible line. And there were women too, who sighed, but they subjected themselves time and again. They wanted to cultivate Theosophy in the way that is customary in those circles. But they pursued it in such a way, that it also became—in the theosophical domain—rather like ‘conglomerated mediocrity.’ They tried to carry what John Stuart Mill describes as conglomerated mediocrity, into the pursuit of Spiritual Science. I myself experienced it. A missionary of the Theosophical Society was working in a town belonging to the Section of which I was General Secretary. I went there to give lectures; indeed, I was invited by the said missionary. But when I arrived there, she said to me: We will gradually learn to do without the lectures. After all, they are of no real use. We must arrange afternoon tea-parties and invite the people. They will learn to know each other at afternoon tea—and, she opined, especially over the bread-and-butter. But the lectures (and she said all this with a certain gesture of deprecation)—the lectures will in time grow less and less important. She too, one must say, was wrapped in a regular veil from certain quarters; and indeed there are many such, who. work as missionaries and often do not know what wires they are pulled by. Sometimes not even wires are necessary; very thin cords or even strings are sufficient. Truly, it is piteous, to see how the most sacred and solemn affairs of mankind are sometimes treated.

Now they were especially afraid of this: What would happen if Blavatsky remained sound and healthy, and yet brought to light that which was there in the depths of her nature? Then, they thought, the situation might become very dangerous even politically, owing to her special constitution and her peculiar connection with her own, Russian nationality. So they made a very special effort to eliminate—to put out of action—the object of their fears. And indeed, if what was living in Blavatsky had been able to come forth effectively already at that time (beginning in the 1860's and 70's) many things would have taken a different course—things with respect to which people like Mill and Herzen saw quite truly. But alas, Ahrimanic powers succeeded at that time in eliminating or side-tracking many things. Well, we shall presently see how our own Spiritual Science may yet be treated under the present sorrowful conditions. Those who can recognise its significance for the great tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch will think rightly about it. For it is really true, this Spiritual Science reckons only with the interests of pure humanity. You, by this time, should be in a position to know that this is so, and to perceive the true distinctions. Take for instance the way we have frequently discussed Goethe's Faust, and even presented it on the stage. One need have absolutely no national motives in the background, to present Goethe's Faust to mankind in its occult depths. On the other hand I leave it to you to judge, whether or no one need have national motives in the background, and very peculiar ones at that,—to do as Maeterlinck did recently: to represent Goethe and Schiller and Lessing as ‘mediocre minds’ and write long articles upon their mediocrity, for which articles one gains the support of the great newspapers in the world to-day. Whether or no there are national motives behind such an action, I leave to you to judge. (Nay, perhaps there are motives far deeper than merely national ones.)

But I will ask you now to place two things side by side. I have told you in these lectures of a book recently written by the Chinese author Ku Hung Ming—a work of genius in some respects. In this book Ku Hung Ming explains that it is the only salvation for the Europeans at the present time to turn to Chinese culture. For, says Ku Hung Ming, the Europeans will then be able to replace their worthless ‘charters of liberty’ by the ‘charters of faithfulness’ which can only come out of the Chinese spirit. Ku Hung Ming is a brilliant and incisive thinker, and he confirms at this point what was long ago foreboded by John Stuart Mill and Herzen; confirms it, moreover, out of a deep knowledge of the Chinese culture. Not only so; we find the same foreboding in a thinker who came forward, not as a philologist or schoolmaster or theologian, but as a man of practical affairs. I refer to Max Eyth, of whom I spoke the other day, who was a business man to begin with, passed through several other callings and had a real knowledge of life.

Ku Hung Ming describes the Chinese life and culture, and from his graphic descriptions we can gain a vivid idea of what it is. And we get this impression: How right were John Stuart Mill and Herzen (you need only read Herzen's work of 1864)—how right were they when they described the doctrines of Confucius and Laotze as the final and logical consequence which must result if Europe is taken hold of by the so-called positive realism, born of the conglomerated mediocrity of Bourgeois nonentity. For the logical conclusion of what is pursued in our Universities to-day and passes thence into the people as the modern World-conception, is the Chinese spirit; with the sole difference that the latter found its way to this conclusion, out of an earlier history and civilisation, 600 years before the Christian Era. Ku Hung Ming clearly outlines what the Chinese spirit is. Mill and Herzen described the path which is being trodden by that civilisation of Europe which will only take its stand on external, positivist realism. There you have it from both sides at once: from the one side, the prophecy that the Chinese spirit will take hold of Europe, and from the other side the dictum that the Chinese spirit is Europe's only salvation.

Maybe there is yet a third side! I may perhaps raise this very question now at the conclusion of this lecture: What if there be yet a third side, where they may find it very convenient and in their interest that a Chinaman of all people should now be giving the Europeans good advice, to choose the only possible salvation? What if it were no mere matter of chance that the teaching of Ku Hung Ming, of all people, should now be thrown into Europe?—a teaching, however brilliant from the Chinese standpoint, well enough adapted to confuse those who do not receive it with clear and open minds—minds awakened by Spiritual Science. A teaching, I repeat, only too well adapted to confuse men, and, maybe, to lead them in the very direction in which one wants them to go,—into a Chinese state. John Stuart Mill and Herzen recognised quite truly how the sails are set, by certain occult brotherhoods, in this direction. They really want a Chinese system. For the intentions of certain brotherhoods can most readily be instilled into a Chinese Europe. Why should it not be according to the will of such a brotherhood that a Chinaman of all people should now be advising Europe to lend an ear to all the good that might come to them out of the Chinese spirit? May they not well expect that even the most ‘enlightened’ will be carried away by the good advices which a Chinaman can give, now that in Europe herself they no longer know which way to turn?

I have told you how important is this Chinese book. But I also feel obliged (from the standpoint which must always be maintained in our Spiritual Science) to draw your attention to this fact: Such publications as the book—or rather, books—of Ku Hung Ming (for two have already appeared) should be followed with attention, but one should also know that there are definite purposes behind them—far-reaching purposes. We do wrong not to make ourselves acquainted with them, but we do equally wrong to be ‘taken in’ by them. And it is especially important to observe with care and attention all that sets itself up to-day as mysticism or occultism, arising frequently from very cloudy sources. Those who will bear in mind what I have frequently set forth, will certainly endeavour to see truly in these matters. For the modern world stands in the midst of many other streams. And the question is whether individuals have the goodwill to see clearly and openly.

For instance we must be able to appreciate the difference between the stream we have already mentioned and a certain other stream, which to this day possesses far more power than is commonly imagined. I mean the stream proceeding from certain Roman Catholic sources, behind which there are often real principles of Initiation, though, needless to say, those who are brought out into the world from this quarter are led by the leading-strings. Let us now contrast what may well be contrasted: On the one hand the Roman Church, and on the other hand those Occult Brotherhoods of which I spoke—the Roman Church which works in the way that is well known to you, and on the other hand the Brotherhoods, which, needless to say, attack the Roman Church to the knife. Yet they themselves go to such lengths as I described: While they possess the occult knowledge and make use of it, in public they stigmatise it as ‘medieval superstition,’ in order to keep men in the stream which they desire,—in order to make use of them. Contrast with this the Roman Church. You need only take such an event as the Encyclica of the 8th December, 1864, where the standpoint of the Roman Church concerning freedom of conscience and of religious ceremonies is proclaimed ex cathedra. The principles of freedom which are commonly believed are quoted and condemned somewhat in this fashion:—Some people say, Freedom of conscience and religious ceremony is the right of every man. That is delirium—madness, in other words. It is madness, delirium, for an orthodox Catholic—following the Roman see—to claim freedom of conscience and religious ceremony!

That is the one stream. The other finds it preferable not to say such things, but to do things whereby the freedom of conscience—and, above all, the freedom of individual conviction, the placing of individual convictions, into the general life of mankind,—shall be effectively annulled. There you have two contrasting movements—movements which are very important in the present time, and on which much depends.

Considerations such as these at the close of the present lecture, are given with a definite purpose, so that those who stand within our spiritual-scientific movement may resolve within their souls not to be among the sleepy ones, but to be among those who try to see life as it is. You are not a spiritual scientist by merely receiving the knowledge of Spiritual Science and believing in it. You are only a true spiritual scientist when the spiritual-scientific truths transform you into a man who sees clearly and has the will to observe with attention what is going on around him,—to observe it in the right way and at the right points in life, so as to gain a true judgment of the position into which he himself is placed in the world. This, too, is necessary, if we would speak in a fruitful way about the ‘Karma of Vocation.’

These studies we shall presently continue. Then will the necessary light be thrown on what belongs more to the every-day life—the immediate human life of the individual—the Karma of Vocation.

In my first lecture, I drew your attention to the essence of anthroposophical spiritual science. I mentioned how methods have been sought in spiritual science that enable the spiritual investigator to penetrate a supersensible world with the same clarity as natural science penetrates the outer, sense-perceptible world with the sense organs and the intellect, which systematizes and interprets the results of sensory impressions. I described these methods in my last lecture. And I emphasized that, in addition to today’s ordinary science, another science exists. This uses spiritual methods and, by its path of research and the inner experiences unfolding along it, furnishes full proof of our being surrounded by a supersensible world, just as, in the ordinary state of consciousness, we are surrounded by the sense world. I would now like to return to a prior point, elaborated during the last lecture, that, at least to a certain extent, will form the basis of what I have to say today.

The anthroposophical science of the spirit, referred to here, is not at all opposed to what has become—over the last three or four centuries—the natural-scientific world-view. As I already pointed out, this spiritual science is opposed only to viewpoints that do not take into account the results of modern natural science and thereby become more or less dilettantish. Spiritual science wishes to be an extension or continuation of natural-scientific thinking. Only, this spiritual-scientific continuation allows a person to acquire the kind of knowledge that can answer the deepest longings in the minds and the souls of modern human beings. Thus, through spiritual science, one really comes to know human beings.

Not so long ago, modern science, in a way fully recognized by spiritual science, gave us a wonderful survey of the gradual development of living organisms right up to human beings. And yet, when all is said and done, the human being stands there only as the end product of evolution.

Biology speaks of certain muscles that are found both in human beings and in various animal species. We also know that a human being has a certain number of bones and that this number corresponds with the bones of the higher animals. Altogether, we have grown accustomed to explaining the emergence of the entire bone structure of higher animals and human beings as a development from a lower stage to a higher one. But we have no idea of the essential characteristics that are uniquely and exclusively human. Anyone willing to look at the situation without prejudice has to admit the fact that we are ignorant of what constitutes a human being. In general, natural phenomena and all living organisms are scrupulously investigated up to and including hom*o sapiens, and the conclusion is then drawn that human beings are encompassed by what is to be found in external nature. But, generally, there is no really adequate idea of what is essentially human.

In ordinary, practical life, we find a similar situation, very much as a result of natural-scientific thinking and knowledge. We find its effects overshadowing modern life, causing a great deal of perplexity and distress. The consequence of not knowing the essential nature of human beings becomes all too obvious in what is usually referred to as the social question. Millions of people who belong to what is called the proletariat, whom the traditional religions and confessions have abandoned, believe that reality is no longer to be found in the human soul, but only in the material aspects of life, in the processes of production within the outer economic sphere. Morality, religion, science, and art, as cultivated by humanity throughout the ages, are regarded as nothing more than a kind of ideological superstructure, built on a solid material or even economic material substructure. The moral and cultural aspects of life appear almost as a kind of vapor, rising from the only reality—material reality. Here, again, what is truly the human soul and spirit—what is psychical-spiritual in human beings—has been eliminated.

Not to be able to reach knowledge of the human being and, consequently, to be debarred from beholding and experiencing the truth of human nature, and from bringing down human ideals into will impulses in the social sphere—these seem to be the characteristic features of modern times.

Anthroposophical spiritual science, on the other hand, is only too aware of what needs to be accomplished in this direction for the sake of the deepest, yet often unconscious, longing of the souls of some of the best of our contemporaries. It is to be accomplished, first, by true knowledge of the human being and, second, by an inner sense of fulfillment strong enough to enable one to carry into public life truly social impulses arising in the soul. For, without these impulses arising from the depths of our humanity, even the best of outer practical arrangements will not lead to what in the widest circles is regarded as unrealizable, but toward which many people are striving nevertheless, namely to a dignified human existence.

The path leading into the spiritual world as I described it here a few days ago could easily be understood as something that estranges one from life rather than leading one to the two weighty questions that I have put before you once again today. For this reason, it was of paramount importance that anthroposophical spiritual science be practiced in the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Despite the unfinished state of the building, spiritual science has the possibility of pursuing practical activities there, demonstrating how knowledge of human nature and human faculties can enter into the practical sphere of life.

One of the most important practical activities is surely education of the young.

Those who work in the field of educating children are basically dealing with what will enter the world with the next generation, and this means a very great deal. Raising and educating children are a direct way to work into the near future. In its quest for a method of understanding human nature, anthroposophical spiritual science finds itself able to understand the human being in its becoming—the child—in a wide, comprehensive manner. From such comprehensive knowledge of the growing child, spiritual science seeks to create a real art of education. For what spiritual science can provide in understanding and penetration of human nature does not end in abstractions or theories, but eventually develops into an artistic comprehension, first of the human form and then of the potential of the human soul and spirit. It is all very well to maintain that science demands what is often called a sober working with objective concepts. But, ladies and gentlemen, what if the whole world, if nature, did not work with such concepts at all? What if it were to scorn our wish to restrict its creativity to the kind of natural law into which we try to confine it? What if the creativity of the world were to elude our sober, merely external grasp and our rather lightweight logical concepts? We can certainly make our demands, but whether by doing so we will attain real knowledge depends on whether nature works and creates according to them.

At any rate, more recent scientific attitudes have failed to recognize the essence of human nature because they have failed to consider the following. In her upward climb, at each successive step of the evolutionary ladder—from the mineral kingdom, through the plant and animal kingdoms, to the human kingdom—nature’s creativity increasingly escapes our intellectual grasp and sober logic, forcing us to approach her workings more and more artistically. What ultimately lives in a human being is open to many interpretations and shows manifold aspects. And because spiritual science, in its own way, seeks the inner harmony between knowledge, religious depth, and artistic creativity, it is in a position to survey rightly—that is, spiritually—the enigmatic, admirable creation that is a human being and how it is placed in the world.

Last time, I spoke of how it is possible to look with scientific accuracy into the world where human beings live before they descend into physical existence at conception or birth. I indicated how, with mathematical clarity, the human spirit and soul, descending from the spiritual worlds, place themselves before the spiritual eyes of the anthroposophical investigator, showing themselves to be at work on the interior of the future earthly body and drawing only material substances from the stream of heredity bequeathed by previous generations.

Anyone who talks about such things today is quickly judged inconsistent. And yet the methods pursued by spiritual science are much the same as those employed by natural science. The main difference is that the work entailed in the various branches of natural science is done in the appropriate laboratories, clinics, or astronomical observatories, whereas the science of the spirit approaches human nature directly in order to observe it as methodically as a natural scientist observes whatever might belong to his or her particular field of study. In the latter case, however, the situation is more straightforward for it is easier to make one’s observations and to search for underlying laws in natural science than in spiritual science.

As a first step, I would like to draw your attention to what one can observe in a growing human being in a truly natural-scientific way. Of course, in the case of spiritual science, we must include in our observations the gradual development of the human being through several different life periods. One of those periods extends from birth to the change of the teeth; that is, until about the seventh year. To recognize a kind of nodal point around the seventh year might easily create the impression of an inclination toward mysticism which is not, however, the case. The following observations have as little to do with mysticism as the distinction between the seven colors of the rainbow has. They are simply an outcome of objective, scientific observation of the growing child. Even from a physical point of view, it is evident that a powerful change occurs when, in about a child’s seventh year, forces from within drive the second teeth out of the organism. This event does not recur, indicating that some kind of conclusion has been reached.

What is going on becomes clearer when we do not restrict our observations to the physical or change-of-teeth aspect of this seventh year, but extend them to parallel developments occurring alongside the physical changes. In this case, if we are capable of observing at all, we will see how a child’s entire soul life undergoes a gradual change during this period. We can observe how the child, who previously could form only blurred and indistinct concepts, now begins to form more sharply contoured concepts—how it is only now in fact that the child begins to form proper concepts at all. Furthermore, we notice how quite a different kind of memory is now unfolding. Formerly, when younger, the child might often have displayed signs of an excellent memory. That memory, however, was entirely natural and instinctive. Whereas there was before no need for any special effort in the act of remembering, the child who has passed this watershed must now make a mental effort to remember past events clearly. In short, it becomes obvious that, with the change of teeth around the seventh year, a child begins to be active in the realm of mental imagery, in forming simple thoughts, and in the sphere of conscious will activity.

But what is actually happening here? Where had this force been that we can now observe in the child’s soul and spirit, forming more clearly-defined mental images and thoughts? Where was that force before the child’s milk teeth were shed? This is the kind of question that remains unasked by our contemporary theorizing psychologists.

When physicists observe in a physical process an increase of warmth that is not due to external causes, they explain this phenomenon by the concept of “latent heat becoming liberated.” This implies that the heat that emerges must have existed previously within the substance itself. A similar kind of thinking must also be applied in the case of human life. Where were those forces of soul and spirit before they emerged in the child after the seventh year? They were latent in the child’s physical organism. They were active in its organic growth, in its organic structuring, until, with the pushing out of the second teeth, a kind of climax was reached, indicating the conclusion of this first period of growth, so particularly active during the child’s early years. Psychology today is quite abstract. People cogitate on the relationship of soul to body, and devise the most remarkable and grandiloquent hypotheses. Empty phrases, however, will not lead to an art of education. Spiritual science, for its part, shows that what we see emerging cognitively in a child after the seventh year was actively engaged in its inner organism before the second dentition. It shows that what appears in a child’s soul after the change of teeth was active before as an organic force that has now become liberated.

In a similar way, a true spiritual researcher observes in a concrete manner—not abstractly—the entire course of human life. To illustrate that concrete manner of observation, let us now consider a well-known and specific childhood phenomenon. Let us look at children at play, at children’s games. If we can do so without preconception and with dedicated interest in the growing human being, we know—although every game has a certain form and shares common, characteristic features—that, whatever the game, each child will play it with his or her own individual style. Now those who raise or educate young children can, to a certain extent, influence or guide how a child plays according to the child’s own nature. Also, depending on our pedagogical skills, we can try to steer our children’s play into more purposeful directions. And, if we pay attention to all this, we can clearly discriminate between the various individual styles of playing until the child reaches an age when they are no longer so clearly identifiable. Once a child enters school and other interests are crowding in, however, it becomes more difficult to see the future consequences of his or her characteristic style of playing. Nevertheless, if we do not observe superficially and, realizing that the course of life represents a whole, extend the range of our observations to span the entire earthly life, we might discover the following.

Around twenty-four or twenty-five—that is, when young adults must find their links with the outer world, and when they must fit themselves into the social fabric of the wider community—there will be those who prove themselves more skillful than others in dealing with all aspects and details of their tasks. Now, careful observation will reveal that the way in which people in their twenties adapt themselves to outer conditions of life, with greater or lesser skill, is a direct consequence of their play activity during early childhood.

Certain rivers, whose sources may be clearly traced, disappear below the earth’s surface during their course, only to resurface at a later stage. We can compare this phenomenon with certain faculties in human life. The faculty of playing, so prominent in a young child, is particularly well developed during the first years of life. It then vanishes into the deeper regions of the soul to resurface during the twenties, transmuted into an aptitude for finding one’s way in the world. Just think: by guiding the play of young children, we, as educators, are directly intervening in the happiness or unhappiness, the future destiny, of young people in their twenties!

Such insights greatly sharpen our sense of responsibility as educators. They also stimulate the desire to work toward a genuine art of education. Tight-fitting, narrow concepts cannot reach the core of human nature. To do so, a wide and comprehensive view is needed. Such a view can be gained if we recognize that such interconnections as I have mentioned affect human life. It will also make us realize that we must distinguish between definite life periods in human development, the first of which extends from birth to the change of teeth and has a character all its own.

At this point, I should mention that those who choose to become teachers or educators through anthroposophical spiritual science are filled with the consciousness that a message from the spiritual world is actually present in what they meet in such enigmatic and wondrous ways in the developing human being, the child. Such teachers observe the child with its initially indeterminate features, noticing how they gradually assume more definite forms. They see how children’s movements and life stirrings are undefined to begin with and how directness and purpose then increasingly enter their actions from the depths of their souls. Those who have prepared themselves to become teachers and educators through anthroposophical spiritual science are aware that something actually descending from the spiritual worlds lives in the way the features of a child’s face change from day to day, week to week, and year to year, gradually evolving into a distinct physiognomy. And they know too that something spiritual is descending in what is working through the lively movements of a child’s hands and in what, quite magically, enters into a child’s way of speaking.

To learn to recognize this activity of the spiritual world, which is so different from that of the physical world; to meet the child as an educator with such an inner attitude and mood as I have described: this means that we see in the vocation of teaching a source of healing. This vocation could be expressed as follows: The spiritual worlds have entrusted a human soul into my care. I have been called upon to assist in solving the riddles that this child poses. By means of a deepened knowledge of the human being—transformed into a real art, the art of education—it is my task to show this child the way into life.

Such deepened knowledge of human nature reveals that, in the first period of life, a child is what I would like to call an “imitating” being. (You will find a more detailed account of this characteristic feature in my booklet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.) Descending from the spiritual world, the child brings to outer expression—like an echo from the spiritual world—the last experiences undergone there. As anthroposophists, when we educate our children, we are aware that the way in which children imitate their surroundings is childish and primitive. They copy what is done before them with their movements. They learn to speak entirely and only through imitation. And, until they lose their milk teeth, they also imitate what happens morally in their environment.

What lies behind all of this can be rightly understood only with the help of spiritual science. Before conception or birth, a child lives in the spiritual world, the same spiritual world that can be known and consciously experienced if we strengthen the power of memory and develop the power of love in the ways I described during our last meeting. In that spiritual world, the relationship of one being to another is not one in which they confront one another outwardly; rather, each being is capable of living right into another—objectively, yet full of love. Children then bring this relationship of spiritual beings to one another down to earth. It is like a resonant echo of the spiritual world. We can observe here how children become creatures of imitation, how everything they learn and make their own during these first seven years, they learn through imitation. Any genuine art of education must fully respect this principle of imitation—otherwise, it is all too easy to misjudge our children’s behavior.

To illustrate this point, let me give you an example, just one of hundreds that could be chosen. The father of a boy, aged about five, once came to me and told me that a very sad thing had happened; namely, that his boy had been stealing. I suggested that we begin by carefully examining whether in fact the child had really stolen. The father told me that the boy had taken money from the drawer where his wife kept it and had then bought candy with it, which he shared with other children in the street. I asked the father what usually happened with the money kept in the drawer. He replied that the boy’s mother took the amount of money needed for the household that day out of her drawer every morning. Hearing this, I could reassure him that his boy had not stolen at all. I said, “The child is five years old. This means that he is still fully in the stage of imitation. Therefore, it is only good and proper that he should do what he sees done in his environment. His mother takes money out of the drawer every day, and so he naturally copies her. This is not stealing but merely behavior appropriate to the fundamental principle of a child’s development during the first seven-year period.”

A real teacher must know these things. During the first seven years of life, one cannot guide and direct a child by reprimands, nor by moral commands. During this period, one must guide a child by one’s own deeds and by setting an example. But there are of course imponderables to be reckoned with in human as in outer nature. We guide a child not only with external deeds, but also with inner thoughts and feelings. If children enjoy the company of grown-ups who never allow unworthy thoughts or feelings to enter into their lives, something noble and good could become of them. On the other hand, if adults allow themselves mean, ignoble thoughts or feelings when they are around young people, believing that such thoughts or feelings do not matter since everyone is safely ensheathed within an individual bodily structure, they are mistaken, for such things do work on children. Imponderables are at work.

Such imponderables also manifest themselves in the second period of life, which begins after the change of teeth—when the child enters school—and lasts until the age of puberty, around fourteen. When we were working out the fundamentals of a truly spiritual-scientific, spiritually artistic pedagogy for the Waldorf school in Stuttgart—founded by Emil Molt and directed by myself—we had to make a special study of this transition from the first life period, that of imitation, to the second period, from the change of teeth to puberty. For all teaching, education, and upbringing at the Waldorf School is to be based entirely upon anthroposophical insight into human nature. And because children change from the stage of imitation into quite a different stage—I shall say more about this presently—we had to make a special effort to study this time of transition.

During the second period, leading up to puberty, imitation alone no longer suffices to form the faculties, the child’s whole being. A new impulse now emerges from the depths of the child’s soul. The child now wishes to regard the teacher as a figure of undisputed authority. Today, when everything goes under the banner of democracy, the demand is easily made that schools, too, should be “democratized.” There are even those who would do away with the distinction between teacher and pupil altogether, advocating “community schools,” or whatever name these bright ideas are given. Such ideas are a consequence of party-political attitudes, not knowledge of human nature. But educational questions should not be judged from partisan positions; they should be judged only on their own merits. And, if you do this, you will find that, between second dentition and puberty, a child is no longer obliged to imitate, but now has a deep desire to learn what is right or wrong, good or evil, from a beloved and naturally respected authority figure.

Happy are those who throughout their lives can remember such childhood authorities and can say of themselves, “I had a teacher. When I went to visit her, opening the door to her room, I already felt full of awe. To me, it was perfectly natural that my teacher was the source of everything good and true.” Such things are not subject to argument on social or any other grounds. What is important is to gain the insight into human nature so that one can say, “Just as a young child’s urge to play, which manifests in individually different ways, resurfaces as more or less skill in fitting into life when the young person is in his or her twenties, so another, similar transformation also occurs regarding a child’s reverence for the teacher as a figure of authority. That is, only if faith in the authority of the adults in charge develops fully between the ages of approximately seven and fifteen will the right sense of freedom develop later, when the feeling for freedom must be the basis for all social life.”

People cannot become free as adults unless they found as children support in the natural authority of adults. Likewise, only those who during the first period of life are allowed to pass through the process of adjusting themselves to their environment through the inborn desire to imitate can be motivated as adults to take a loving interest in the social sphere. This ability to adjust based on imitation does not last; what is needed in later life is a social awareness, the development of which depends on how far educators of children under seven can become worthy models of imitation. We need people today who are able to place themselves into life with a genuine sense of freedom. They are those who were able to look up to their educators and teachers as persons of authority during the time between their second dentition and puberty.

If one has stated publicly—as I already did in my book Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, published in 1892—that the sense of freedom and the feeling for freedom are the basic facts of social life, one is hardly likely to speak against freedom and democracy. But, just because of this positive attitude towards freedom, one must also acknowledge that the practice of education as an art depends on the sense of authority, developed by the child during the second period of life. During this same period, the child also has to make a gradual transition from living in mental images—or pictures—to a more intellectual approach, a process that moves through and beyond another important turning point.

A true art of education must be able to penetrate such important issues.

The turning point to be discussed now occurs around a child’s ninth year—but sometimes not before the tenth or even the eleventh year. When our teachers recognize that a child is passing this point, they accompany the change with an appropriate change in pedagogy. In early childhood, a child learns to speak, gradually learning to refer to itself as “I”. Up to the ninth year, however, the distinction between the child’s “I” and the surrounding world is still rather undefined. Those who can observe things carefully recognize that the period when a child learns to differentiate between self and surroundings—approximately between the ninth and the eleventh years—is critical. It is a time when the child is actually crossing a Rubicon. The way in which the teachers respond to this change is of greatest importance for a child’s future life. Teachers must have the right feeling for what is happening. They must realize that the child no longer experiences itself as an organic part of its environment—as a finger might experience itself as a part of the body if it had its own consciousness—but as a separate, independent entity. If they do so and respond in the right way as teachers, they can create a source of lasting joy and vitality in life. But if they fail to respond rightly, they open the way to barren and weary lives for their pupils later on. It is important to realize that, prior to this significant change, the child still lives in a world of pictures so closely related to its own nature that, unable to appreciate the difference between self and environment, it merges into its surroundings. Therefore, in assisting a child to establish its relationship to the world at this stage, a teacher must use a pictorial approach.

We receive the children into our school from their parental homes. Today, we live in an age when writing and reading have produced conventional symbols no longer bearing any direct inner relationship to the human being. Compare the abstract letters of our alphabet with the picture writing used in ages past. What was fixed into written forms in ancient times still bore a resemblance to people’s mental images. But writing nowadays has become quite abstract. If we introduce children directly to these abstract letters in reading and writing lessons, we introduce them to something alien to their nature, or at least something inappropriate for six-, seven-, or eight-year olds. For this reason, we use a different method in our Waldorf school.

Instead of beginning with the letters of the alphabet, we engage our young pupils in artistic activity by letting them paint and draw; that is, work with colors and forms. In this activity, not only the head is engaged—which would have a very harmful effect—but the child’s entire being is involved. We then let the actual letters emerge out of these color-filled forms. This is how our Waldorf pupils learn writing. They learn writing first. And only afterward do they learn to read, for printed letters are even more abstract than our handwritten ones. In other words, only gradually do we develop the abstract element, so necessary today, from the artistic element which is more closely allied to life. We proceed similarly in other subjects, too. And we work in this way toward a living, artistic pedagogy that makes it possible to reach the very soul of the child. As for the nature of what we usually think of as plant, mineral, and so forth, this can be fruitfully taught only after the child has passed the turning point just characterized and can differentiate itself from its surroundings.

Working along these lines, it might well happen that some of our pupils learn to read and write later than pupils in other schools. But this is no drawback. On the contrary, it is even an advantage. Of course, it is quite possible to teach young children reading and writing by rote and get them to rattle off what is put before their eyes, but it is also possible to deaden something in them by doing this, and anything killed during childhood remains dead for the rest of one’s life. The opposite is equally true. What we allow to live and what we wake into life is the very stuff that will blossom and give life vitality. To nurture this process, surely, is the task of a real educator.

You will doubtless have heard of those educational ideas already published during the nineteenth century that emphasize the importance of activating a child’s individuality. We are told that, instead of cramming children with knowledge, we should bring out their inherent gifts and abilities. Certainly, no one would wish to denigrate such great geniuses of education. Important things have certainly been said by the science of education. On the other hand, though one can listen carefully to its abstract demands, such as that the individuality of the child should be developed, positive results will be achieved only if one is able to observe, day by day, how a child’s individuality actually unfolds. One must know how, during the first seven years, the principle of imitation rules the day; how, during the following period from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the principle of authority predominates; and how this latter principle is twinned with the child’s gradual transition from mental imagery—which is essentially of a pictorial or symbolic nature and based on memory—to the forming of concepts by the awakening intellect: a process that begins in the eleventh to twelfth year. If we can observe all of this and learn from a spiritual-scientific and artistic way of observing how to respond as a teacher, we shall achieve much more than if we attempt to follow an abstract aim, such as educating a child out of its individuality. Spiritual science does not create abstractions, it does not make fixed demands; rather, it looks toward what can be developed into an art through spiritual perceptiveness and a comprehensive, sharpened sense of observation.

Last time, I was able to describe only briefly the kind of knowledge of the human being given by spiritual science that can form a basis for dealing with such practical matters as education. The pressing demands of society show clearly enough the need for such knowledge today. By complementing the outer, material aspects of life with supersensible and spiritual insights, spiritual science or anthroposophy leads us from a generally unreal, abstract concept of life to a concrete practical reality. According to this view, human beings occupy a central position in the universe. Such realistic understanding of human nature and human activities is what is needed today. Let me reinforce this point with a characteristic example.

Imagine that we wanted to convey a simple religious concept—for instance, the concept of the immortality of the human soul—to a class of young children. If we approach the subject pictorially, we can do this before a child’s ninth year. For example, we can say, “Look at the butterfly’s chrysalis. Its hard shell cracks open and the butterfly flutters out into the air. A similar thing happens when a human being dies. The immortal soul dwells in the body. But, when death breaks it open, just as the butterfly flies from the chrysalis into the air, so the soul flies away from the dead body into the heavenly world, only the human soul remains invisible.”

When we study such an example from the point of view of a living art of education, we come face to face with life’s imponderables. A teacher might have chosen such a comparison by reasoning somewhat as follows: “I am the one who knows, for I am much older than the child. I have thought out this picture of the caterpillar and the butterfly because of the child’s ignorance and immaturity. As someone of superior intelligence, I have made the child believe something in which I myself do not believe. In fact, from my own point of view, it was only a silly little story, invented solely for the purpose of getting the child to understand the concept of the immortality of the soul.” If this is a teacher’s attitude, he or she will achieve but little. Although to say this might sound paradoxical in our materialistic age, it is nevertheless true: if teachers are insincere, their words do not carry much weight.

To return to our example. If Waldorf teachers had chosen this comparison for their classes, the situation, though outwardly similar, would have been very different. For they would not have used it—nor, for that matter, any other picture or simile—unless they were convinced of its inherent truth. A Waldorf teacher, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual researcher, would not feel, “I am the intelligent adult who makes up a story for the children’s benefit,” but rather: “The eternal beings and powers, acting as the spiritual in nature, have placed before my eyes a picture of the immortal human soul, objectively, in the form of the emerging butterfly. Believing in the truth of this picture with every fibre of my being, and bringing it to my pupils through my own conviction, I will awaken in them a truly religious concept. What matters is not so much what I, as teacher, say to the child, but what I am and what my heartfelt attitude is.” These are the kinds of things that must be taken more and more seriously in the art of education.

You will also understand when I tell you that visitors to our Waldorf school, who come to see the school in action and to observe lessons, cannot see the whole. It is almost as if, for instance, you cut a small piece out of a Rembrandt painting, believing that you could gain an overall impression of the whole picture through it. Such a thing is not possible when an impulse is conceived and practiced as a comprehensive whole—as the Waldorf school is—and when it is rooted in the totality of anthroposophical spiritual science.

You might have been wondering which kind of people would make good teachers in such a school. They are people whose entire lives have been molded by the spiritual knowledge of which I spoke last time. The best way of learning to know the Waldorf school and of becoming familiar with its underlying principles is by gaining knowledge of anthroposophical spiritual science itself at least as a first step. A few short visits in order to observe lessons will hardly convey an adequate impression of Waldorf pedagogy.

Plain speaking in such matters is essential, because it points toward the character of the new spirit that, flowing from the High School of Spiritual Science centered in Dornach, is to enter all practical spheres of life—social, artistic, educational, and so forth.

If you consider thoroughly all that I have been telling you, you will no longer think it strange that those who enter more deeply into the spirit underlying this art of education find it absolutely essential to place themselves firmly upon the ground of a free spiritual life. Because education has become dependent on the state on the one hand and on the economic sphere on the other, there is a tendency for it to become abstract and programmatic. Those who believe in the anthroposophical way of life must insist on a free and independent cultural-spiritual life. This represents one of the three branches of the threefold social order about which I wrote in my book The Threefold Commonwealth.

One of the demands that must be made for spiritual life—something that is not at all utopian, that may be begun any day—is that those actively engaged in spiritual life (and this means, above all, those involved in its most important public domain; namely, education) should also be entrusted with all administrative matters, and this in a broad and comprehensive way.

The maximum number of lessons to be taught—plus the hours spent on other educational commitments—should allow teachers sufficient time for regular meetings, in both smaller and larger groups, to deal with administrative matters. However, only practicing teachers—not former teachers now holding state positions or retired teachers—should be called on to care for this side of education. For what has to be administered in each particular school—as in all institutions belonging to the spiritual-cultural life—should be only a continuation of what is being taught, of what forms the content of every word spoken and every deed performed in the classroom. Rules and regulations must not be imposed from outside the school. In spiritual life, autonomy, self-administration, is essential.

I am well aware that people who like to form logical “quickly tailored” concepts, as well as others who, somewhat superficially, favor a more historical perspective, will readily object to these ideas. But in order to recognize the necessity of making spiritual- cultural life into a free and independent member of the social organism, one really must be acquainted with its inherent nature. Anyone who has been a teacher at a working-class adult education center for several years—as I was in the school founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, thereby gaining first-hand experience of the social question—knows only too well that this is not merely a matter of improving external arrangements or of dealing with dissatisfaction caused by unjust outer conditions. As I say, if one has taught in such circles, one knows that one word comes up repeatedly in proletarian circles, but extends far beyond proletarian life, namely, the word “ideology,” the meaning of which is set out in the first chapter of The Threefold Commonwealth. Now, what is hidden behind this?

Long ago, in the ancient East, people spoke of the great illusion or “maya.” According to this view—already decadent today and hence unsuited to our Western ways—maya refers to the external sensory world which offers us only semblance or outer appearance. To ancient sages, true reality of being—the reality that sustained human beings—lived and grew in the soul. All else, all that the outer senses beheld, was only maya.

We live today in an age that expresses—especially in its most radical philosophies—a total reversal of this ancient view. For most people today true reality resides in outer, physical nature and in the processes of production, while what can be found inwardly in the human soul as morality, art, religion, knowledge is maya, illusion. If we want to translate the word maya correctly, we must translate it as “ideology.” For modern humanity, all other translations fail. But ideology refers to exactly the opposite of what maya was for the ancient oriental. The widest circles of the population today call maya what the ancient oriental called the sole reality. And this reversal of the word’s meaning is of great significance for life today.

I have known people of the leading classes who lived under the influence of the philosophy that gave rise to ideology. I have learned to know the perplexity of people who reasoned thus: if we trust what natural science tells us, the entire origin of the cosmos can be traced to a primeval nebula. According to these theories, all of the different species of nature began during this stage. At that time, too, human beings densified out of the nebula. And, while this process continued, something not unlike soap bubbles unfolded in the human soul. According to natural science, what rises in the human soul as ethics, religion, science or art, does not represent reality. Indeed, if we look toward the end of earthly evolution as it is presented by science, all that is offered is the prospect of an immense cemetery. On earth, death would follow, due either to general glaciation, or to total annihilation by heat. In either case, the result would be a great cemetery for all human ideals—for everything considered to be the essence of human values and the most important aspect of human existence. If we are honest in accepting what natural science tells us—such people had to conclude—then all that remains is only a final extinction of all forms of existence.

I have witnessed the sense of tragedy and the deep-seated pain in the souls of such materialistically minded members of today’s leading circles, who could not escape the logical conclusions of the natural-scientific outlook and who were consequently forced to look on all that is most precious in the human beings as mere illusion. In many people, I have seen this pessimism, which was a result of their honest pursuit of the natural-scientific conception of the world.

This attitude took a special form in the materialism of the working class. There, everything of a spiritual nature is generally looked upon as a kind of a superstructure, as mere smoke or fog; in a word, as “ideology”. And what enters and affects the soul condition of modern people in this way is the actual source of the contemporary anti-social sentiment—however many other reasons might be constantly invented and published. They amount only to a form of self deception. It is the influence of this attitude which is the real origin of the dreadful catastrophes that are dawning—undreamt of by most people—in the whole East. So far, they have started in Russia, where they have already assumed devastating proportions. They will assume even greater dimensions unless steps are taken to replace an ideology by a living grasp of the spirit.

Anthroposophical spiritual science gives us not only ideas and concepts of something real but also ideas and concepts by which we know that we are not just thinking about something filled with spirit. Spiritual science gives us the living spirit itself, not just spirit in the form of thoughts. It shows human beings as beings filled with living spirit—just like the ancient religions. Like the ancient religions, the message of spiritual science is not just “you will know something,” but “you will know something, and divine wisdom will thereby live in you. As blood pulses in you, so by true knowing will divine powers too pulse in you.” Spiritual science, as represented in Dornach, wishes to bring to humanity precisely such knowledge and spiritual life.

To do so, we need the support of our contemporaries. Working in small ways will not lead to appropriate achievements. What is needed is work on a large scale. Spiritual science is free from sectarianism. It has the will to carry out the great tasks of our times, including those in the practical spheres of life. But to bring this about, spiritual science must be understood in a living way by contemporary society. It is not enough to open a few schools here and there, modeled on the Waldorf school, as some people wish. This is not the way forward, for it will not lead to greater freedom in spiritual life.

Often, I have had to suffer the painful experience of witnessing the conduct of certain people who, because of their distrust in orthodox, materialistic medicine, approached me, trying to tempt me into quackery. They wanted to be cured by creeping through the back door, as it were. I have experienced it to the point of revulsion. There was, for instance, a Prussian government official, who publicly supported materialistic medicine in parliament, granting it sole rights, only to enter by the back door to be treated by the very people whom he had opposed most violently in parliament.

The Anthroposophical Society—which could, from a certain point of view, be justly described as willing to make sacrifices and whose members have dedicated themselves to the cultivation of anthroposophical spiritual science—seeks a powerful impetus, capable of affecting and working into the world at large. What is at issue today is nothing less than the following—that a true spiritual life, such as our present society needs, can be created only by those interested in it, which fundamentally includes everyone, many of whom have children, and that these must bring about the right conditions in which children can mature into free human beings so that those children, in turn, can create an existence worthy of humanity. As far as spiritual- cultural life is concerned, everyone is an interested party and should do his or her share to work for what the future will provide in the form of spiritual-cultural life.

Thus, what I would like to call “a world school movement,” based on the ideas I have put forward today, should meet with approval in the widest quarters. What really ought to happen is that all those who can clearly see the need for a free spiritual-cultural life should unite to form an international world school movement. An association of that kind would offer a stronger and more-living impetus for uniting nations than many other associations being founded these days on the basis of old and abstract principles. Such a union of nations, spiritually implied in a world school movement, could be instrumental in uniting peoples all over the globe by their participation in this great task. The modern state school system superseded the old denominational schools relatively recently. It was good and right that this happened. And yet, what was a blessing at the time when the state took this step would cease to be one if state-controlled education were to become permanent; for then, inevitably, education would become the servant of the state. The state can train theologians, lawyers, or other professionals to become its civil servants, but if the spiritual life is to be granted full independence, all persons in a teaching capacity must be responsible solely to the spiritual world, to which they can look up in the light of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

A world school movement, as I envisage it, would have to be founded on an entirely international basis by all who understand the meaning of a truly free spiritual life and what our human future demands in social questions. Gradually, such a world school movement would give birth to the general opinion that schools must be granted independence from the state and that the teachers in each school must be given the freedom to deal with that school’s own administration. We must not be narrow minded or pedantic in these matters, as many are who doubt that enough parents would send their children to such schools. That is the wrong kind of thinking. One must be clear that freedom from state interference in education will be the call of the future. Even if there are objections from some parents, ways and means will have to be found for getting children to attend school without coercion by the state. Instead of opposing the founding of independent schools because of dissenting parents, ways and means will have to be found of helping free schools to come into existence despite possible opposition or criticisms—which must then be overcome in an appropriate way. I am convinced that the founding of a world school movement is of the greatest importance for the social development of humanity. Far and wide, it will awaken a sense for a real and practical free spiritual life. Once such a mood becomes universal, there will be no need to open Waldorf schools tucked away in obscure corners and existing at the mercy of governments, but governments will be forced into recognizing them fully and refraining from any interference, as long as these schools are truly founded in a free spiritual life.

What I have said so far about freedom in the cultural-spiritual sphere of life—namely that it has to create its own forms of existence—applies equally to the social sphere known by spiritual science as the sphere of economic life. Just as the sphere of cultural spiritual life must be formed on the basis of the capacities of every individual, so too must economic life be formed on the basis of its own principles, different though these are. Fundamentally, such economic principles derive from the fact that, in economics, a judgment made by an individual cannot be translated directly into deeds, into economic actions. In the cultural-spiritual sphere, we recognize that human souls strive for wholeness, for inner harmony. Teachers and educators must take that wholeness into account. They approach a child with that wholeness as their aim. In the economic sphere, on the other hand, we can be competent in a professional sense only in narrower, more specialized areas. In economics, therefore, it is only when we join together with people working in other areas that something fruitful may be achieved. In other words, just as free spiritual-cultural life emerged as one member of the threefold social organism, so likewise must economic life, based upon the associative principle, arise as another, independent member of this same threefold organism. In the future, economic life will be run on a basis quite different from what we are used to out of the past.

Economic life today is organized entirely according to past practices, for there is no other yardstick for earnings and profits. Indeed, people are not yet ready to contemplate a change in the economic system which is still entirely motivated by profit. I would like to clarify this by an example that, though perhaps not yet representing purely and simply the economic sphere, nevertheless has its economic aspects. It shows how the associative principle can be put into practice in the material realm.

There is, as you know, the Anthroposophical Society. It might well be that there are many people who are not particularly fond of it and regard it as sectarian, which it certainly is not. Or they may be under the impression that it dabbles in nebulous mysticism, which again is not the case. Rather, it devotes itself to the cultivation of anthroposophical spiritual science. Many years ago, this Society founded the Philosophic- Anthroposophic Publishing Company in Berlin. To be exact, two people who were in harmony with the Anthroposophical Society’s mode of thinking founded it. This publishing company, however, does not work as other profit-making companies, which are the offspring of modern economic thinking, do. And how do these profit-making enterprises work? They print books. This means that so and so many people have to be employed for processing paper; so and so many compositors, printers, bookbinders; and so on. But now I ask you to look at those strange and peculiar products that make their appearance every year and which are called “crabs” in the book trade. These are newly printed books, which have not been purchased by the book sellers and which, consequently, at the next Easter Fair wander back to the publishers to be pulped. Here we have a case where wares have been put on the market, the production of which had occupied a whole host of workers, but all to no avail.

Such unnecessary and purposeless expenditure of labor represents one important aspect of the social question. Nowadays, because one prefers to live with phrases rather than an objective understanding, there is too much talk about “unearned income.” It would be better to look at the situation more realistically, for similar situations arise in all branches of our external, material life. Until now, the Philosophic-Anthroposophic Publishing Company has not printed one single copy in vain. At most, there are a few books that were printed out of courtesy to our members. That was our conscious motive; they were printed as a kind of offering to those members. Otherwise there was always a demand for whatever we printed. Our books always sold out quickly and nothing was printed unnecessarily. Not a single worker’s time was wasted and no useless labor was performed within the social framework. A similar situation could be achieved in the whole economic sphere if one organized cooperation between consumers who have an understanding of needs and demands in a particular domain, traders who trade in certain products, and last, the actual producers. Consumers, traders, and producers would form an association whose main task would be the fixing of prices. Such associations would have to determine their own size; if they grew too large, they would no longer be cost effective. Such associations could then unite to form larger associations. They could expand into what might be called global or world-economic associations—for the characteristic feature of recent economics is its expansion of economies into a world economy.

A great deal more would have to be said to give an adequate account of what I can indicate here only in principle. I must, however, say that the concept of associative life implies nothing organizational. In fact, although I come from Germany (and have lived there frequently even though my main sphere of activity is now Dornach, Switzerland) the mere word “organization” produces a thoroughly distasteful effect in me. “Organization” implies an ordering from above, from a center. This is something that economic life cannot tolerate. Because the Middle-European states, penned in between the West and the East, were trying to plan their economies, they were actually working against a healthy form of economic life. The associative principle which must be striven for in economics leaves industry, as also industrial cooperatives, to their own devices. It only links them together according to levels of production and consumption regulated by the activity of the administrators of the various associations. This is done through free agreements among single individuals or various associations.

A more detailed description of this subject can be found in my book The Threefold Commonwealth, or in other of my writings, such as The Renewal of the Social Organism, which is supplementary to The Threefold Commonwealth.

Thus, in order to meet the needs of our times, anthroposophical spiritual science, based on practical life experience, calls for two independent members of the social organism—a free spiritual life and an associative economic life. Those two are essential in the eyes of anyone seriously and honestly concerned about one of the fundamental longings in the hearts of our contemporaries; namely, the longing for democracy.

Dear friends, I spent the first half of my life in Austria—thirty years—and have seen with my own eyes what it means not to take seriously society’s heartfelt demand for democracy. In the 1860s, the call for parliamentarianism was heard in Austria, too. But because it could not bring about the right social conditions, this land of political experimentation was the first to go under in the last great World War. A parliament was formed. But how was it constituted? It was composed of four assemblies: landowners, the chamber of commerce, the department of towns, markets and industrial areas, and, finally, the assembly of country parishes. In other words, only economic interests were represented. There were thus four departments, each dealing with various aspects of the national economy. Together, they constituted the Austrian Parliament, where they were supposed to come to decisions regarding political and legal matters as well as matters pertaining to general affairs of the state. This means that all decisions, reached by majority vote, represented only economic interests. Such majorities, however, can never make fruitful contributions to the social development of humanity. Nor are they the outcome of any expert knowledge. Truly, the call for democracy, for human freedom, demands honesty.

At the same time, however, one must also be clear that only certain issues are suitable for parliamentary procedures, and that democracy is appropriate only when the issues treated lie within the areas of responsibility of each person of voting age. Thus, between free spiritual life on one side and associative economic life on the other, the sphere of democracy becomes the third member of the threefold social organism. This democratic sphere represents the political sphere of rights within the social organism. Here each individual meets the other on equal terms. For instance, in such questions as the number of working hours and the rights of workers in general, each person of age must be considered competent to judge.

Let us move toward a future in which questions of cultural and spiritual life are decided freely and entirely within their own sphere, a future in which freedom in education is striven for so that schools can work out of the spirit and, consequently, produce skillful, practical people. Then, practical schools, too, will develop from such a free spiritual life. Let us move toward a future in which spiritual life is allowed to work within its own sphere and in which the powers of the state are limited to what lies within the areas of responsibility of each person of voting age; a future in which economic life is structured according to the principle of associations, where judgments are made collectively on the strength of the various members’ expertise and where agreements are made with others who are experts in their fields. If we approach the future with these aims in mind, we shall move toward a situation that will be very different from what many people, unable to adapt themselves to new conditions, imagine today.

There will be many who believe that a nebulous kind of cultural spiritual life, alienated from ordinary life, emanates from Dornach. But such is not the case at all. However absurd it may sound, according to the spirit prevailing in Dornach, no one can be a proper philosopher who does not also know how to chop wood or dig potatoes. In short, according to this spirit, one cannot be a philosopher if one cannot turn a hand to tasks requiring at least a modicum of practical skill. Spiritual science does not estrange people from practical life; on the contrary, it helps them develop skills in coping with life. It is not abstract. It is a reality, penetrating human beings with real strength. It therefore not only increases people’s thinking activity, it also makes them generally more skillful. At the same time, spiritual science is intimately connected to a sense of inner dignity and morality; that is, to morality, religion, and art. Visitors to the Goetheanum can convince themselves of this—although the building is not finished yet by any means. Indeed, in order to bring it even into its present state, people with an understanding for the impulse it embodies have already made many sacrifices. The Goetheanum is not a result of our employing the services of an architect and a builder to erect a building in a more or less conventional style—be it in Gothic, Renaissance, or any other style. The living quality of the science of the spirit spoken of here could not have tolerated that. Spiritual science had to evolve its own style in keeping with its own nature. This manifests in the various artistic forms. Just as the same growth forces that produce a nut’s kernel also form its shell—for the shell can be formed only by the same principle as also works in the kernel—so the outer shell of our building, the center of what is being willed in Dornach, can arise only from the same spiritual sources from which all of the teaching and researching in Dornach also flows. The words spoken there and the results of research conducted there all proceed from the same sources as the artistic forms of the building’s pillars and the paintings inside the cupolas. All of the sculpture, architectural design, and painting—and these are not empty symbolism or allegories—arise from the same spiritual impulses that underlie all of the teaching and researching. And, because all this is part of the one cultural-spiritual life that we hope to quicken in the human being, the third, religious element, is closely linked to the arts and to science, forming a unity with them.

In other words, what we are striving for as spiritual science—as it enters into the practical spheres of life as the “threefolding” (or tripartition) of the social organism—brings to realization the three great ideals that resound from the eighteenth century in such a heart-rending, spirit-awakening way. I refer to the threefold call to humanity: freedom, equality, brotherhood. Learned people in the nineteenth century pointed out repeatedly that it was impossible for those three ideals to be put into practice simultaneously under any one state or government. Such was their considered opinion and, from their point of view, justifiably so. But the apparent incongruity rests on false premises. Freedom, equality, and brotherhood do resound to us from the eighteenth century as the three great and justly-claimed ideals. The source of misunderstanding is the tacit assumption that the state must be given sole prerogative in matters pertaining to all three spheres of society. The thought never occurred that, in accord with its own nature, such a monolithic state should be membered into three social organisms: the free spiritual organism; the organism representing the sphere of politics and rights, built on equality; and the organism of the economic sphere, built on the principle of association.

Objections have been raised against these views by people who expect to be taken seriously in social questions and who maintain that, by demanding a tripartition of society, I seek to destroy its unity. But the unity of the human organism is not destroyed because it naturally consists of three parts. Nor is the unity of the human being disturbed because the blood, as it circulates rhythmically through the body, is sustained by a part of the organism different from the one in which the nerves are centered. Likewise, the unity of the social organism is enhanced rather than disturbed by recognition of its threefold nature (if the human head, apart from sending forth the nerves, would also have to produce the blood, then the unity of the human organism would certainly be destroyed). All of this is explained in much greater detail in my book Riddles of the Soul.

I would like to conclude these considerations about spiritual science and its practical application in social life by pointing out that, although the three great ideals of humanity—liberty, equality, fraternity—are not realizable within the framework of an all-powerful state monopoly—where any attempted implementation would be founded upon illusion—they can nevertheless penetrate human life in the form of a threefold ordering of society. Here, the following order would prevail: full freedom in the cultural-spiritual sphere; equality in the realm where each person of voting age shares in democratic rights and responsibilities on equal terms with fellow citizens of voting age; and brotherhood in the economic sphere which will be realized by means of the principle of associations. Unity will not be destroyed by this ordering, for every human being stands in all three spheres, forming a living link toward unity.

Basically, one may consider the meaning of world evolution to reside in the fact that the particular ways of its working and its underlying forces culminate in the human being as the apex of the entire world organism. Just as the forces of nature and the entire cosmos—the macrocosm—are to be found again on a minute scale in the microcosm, in the threefold human being, so the great ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity—must come together again in the social organism. But this must not be brought about by external or abstract means: it must proceed in accordance with reality, so that these three ideals can work in harmony with the human nature in its integral unity. As free individuals, every human being can share in the free spiritual life to which all belong. Sharing equal rights with our fellow citizens, we can all participate in the democratic life of the state, based on the principle of equality. Finally, by participating in economic life, we share in the brotherhood of all human beings.

Liberty in the cultural spiritual sphere; equality in political life and the sphere of rights; fraternity in economic life. These three working together harmoniously will lead to the healing and further evolution of humanity—to new resources in the struggle against the forces of decline.

A combination of these three in a genuine social organism, a concurrence of freedom, equality, and brotherhood in integral human nature—this appears to be the magical password for the future of humanity.

Today I will have to say a few things about more recent historical developments from the point of view of the spiritual science which we are considering in these lectures. It will be necessary to take as read some of the things I said in the earlier lectures. Essentially this will be the only precondition. Something else which I will not be able to repeat, time being limited, in so far as it applies today is that along the lines I tried to give in the first lecture, this science of the spirit can confirm that human beings, striving with their powers of soul, must come to recognize a supersensible world, and that a specific training of these powers of soul—I have characterized this at least in principle—will enable human beings to gain insight into the facts pertaining to this supersensible world.

It is now a matter of applying these fundamental truths of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science to one of the most significant fields in human life, the field of history. I will, of course, have to limit myself to what is of most immediate concern to us, the historical evolution of humanity in more recent times. People who do not look far into the development of human civilization take history to be a very old field of study. The truth is, however, that history really only came to life just before the second half of the 18th century, arising from beginnings that could not yet be called history. And in the sense in which we are accustomed to think of history, having learned this at school, namely that history serves to study the laws that govern the evolution of the human race in the course of time—in this sense history is really only a child of the 19th century.

The study of history arose from the interest that people have always shown in other people and their destinies, in so far as those other people and their destinies had a connection with one’s own life, being on the periphery of one’s personal life experience. We might say it is a straight line from the family records that people use to inform themselves on their own nation and native land, and ultimately the efforts made to gain insight into the laws that govern the evolution of humanity as a whole. It is significant that the study of history, which before was always within the above-mentioned narrow confines, thus came to be extended to the whole of humanity. It has only been in the recent times which we intend to consider here that a wholly general, human interest in the evolution of humanity as a whole arose from the more or less narrowly defined interest shown by people.

This alone will show anyone who is prepared to see that human beings showing pure interest in other human beings as such is essentially of recent origin. Now the situation is such that exactly because history arises from people’s interest in people, an obstacle arises when history is supposed to rise to a higher level where insight is gained into the laws that govern human evolution. For here history is very easily taken into an abyss that at some time or other has threatened every kind of scientific study. The natural-scientific approach has almost completely overcome this in more recent times, but it will often and quite unconsciously influence the way people look at history. We may call it the anthropomorphic view. It arises because something found in the human being himself is taken out into the world and the phenomena which present themselves in the world. The most obvious, happily overcome in natural science, is that a person finds that when he achieves something he has been following a purpose, an aim. People are therefore inclined to look at anything that happens in the natural world, and also at historical developments, by looking for purposive actions in the same sense as one finds them in the inner human being, that is, in oneself.

Natural science has grown great in the more recent sense exactly because efforts are made not to take an anthropomorphic view, though this is in many respects unconscious. Goethe was justified in saying that people do not know how anthropomorphic they are.¹¹¹ In the case of history, however, there is the special temptation to see the things which we find in ourselves also in historical developments outside, for we are trying to consider something that is human. We overcome the obstacle—which existed to a greater or lesser degree for the most hardworking thinkers of recent times when they wanted to establish a kind of philosophy of history—basically only by going beyond the narrow limits set to human nature even as we consider the human being himself. Those limits are set because human beings act according to something that is immediately subjective, according to such aims as are possible in their inner life between birth and death.

If you overcome an inner nature that relies on the senses, with the life of the soul bound to it between birth and death, by rising higher and going beyond the senses, you can take the discoveries made in supersensible study of the human being out into historical evolution. For human beings go beyond themselves when they rise to their supersensible nature, and they can then no longer be anthropomorphic in the study of history, for they are no longer so in the way they look at their own essential nature. By just making efforts to overcome a particular obstacle to seeing the world clearly, we are thus taken beyond ourselves into the supersensible sphere.

If we are thus equipped to approach historical evolution with the powers that take us into the supersensible world, the facts of historical life appear in a completely new light, purely because one sees them in the light of the supersensible sphere. In this new light you ask yourself: What is the real situation? Have certain facts that have been recorded so that we find them in our usual history books truly had such a close connection with the human being as they are often said to have, with the view expressed that the human being, as he stands before us, is a product of historical development, a product of the past? However, if we ask these questions only in the light of supersensible insight, we soon discover, on turning our attention to historical events, how little people are able to say with the impulses of the lives in which they find themselves at the present time, for example: This or that is connected with this or that historical event in the past. Just as natural science, if pursued consistently, takes us beyond itself, so does the study of history take us to the point where we have to say: In a sense, the historical events are falling apart. We cannot just speak of cause and effect in the usual sense, considering the present as though it were due to the influence of the past, certainly where this contains whatever may be found in the world perceptible through the senses. We can only see history truly if we connect the human being with the supersensible and do not look in historical facts for anything they appear to be on the surface but for something that initially is only given as revelation—a supersensible process in world events, with human beings involved in it.

Then history becomes something other than a study of consecutive events. It becomes a symptomatology, as I’d like to call it. We then consider individual events not just the way they present in the life perceived through the senses but as symptoms that allow us to penetrate into a supersensible process behind them that goes beyond history itself. It will then also no longer be possible to seek absolute completeness in the usual way—anyone who has been working with historical material in some area or other will know that such completeness can never be achieved. Instead you will try to take the facts that can be discovered, regarding them as symptoms, and penetrate into the great spiritual scheme of things that lies behind them.

Taking this road you will soon find yourself compelled to abandon the old distinctions we know from our schooldays, where the study of recent history begins with all kinds of reflections on the journeys of discovery and the importance of discovering America, or on inventions and the like. Instead you feel compelled to say: Where can a point be found—if we start from the present time and go back in historical evolution—where a major change came in the course of human evolution, with new ways of life and new conditions for life?

People who like to take the easy way in looking at the world often tend to say that one thing simply arises from another that went before, and that there are no significant changes or turning points. They will even quote the soothing words: Nature does not take leaps.¹¹² But just look at the natural world and the leaps that are made! A plant will first develop green leaves and later transform them into petals of different colours—a leap. And such leaps exist everywhere in the natural world, refuting common prejudice that people find comfortable.

Even a superficial look will in fact show that in the European world, the 15th century brought a major change in all ways of life. A change came in the characteristic state of soul humanity had had until then, and in the way humanity made this inner state of soul into external historical actions. With regard to symptomatology, we can point to something of a landmark at an earlier time, an important turning point in the historical life of more recent humanity. This was when the French forced the Pope to move his residence from Rome to Avignon in 1303.¹¹³ Almost at the same time the order of the Templars, a very special community that had a strange relationship to the Church, was destroyed by the French government, its properties being confiscated.¹¹⁴

Those events were turning points in more recent historical evolution because they showed that people were going against something that for centuries had been characteristic of the whole civilized world. This characteristic was reflected in the strange hostilities between central European imperialism and the Popes, as well as the mutually supportive alliances that resulted from them. All those hostilities were in the light of a quite specific fact. The peoples throughout the civilized world of that time were not divided into groups such as national and other groups the way they came to be in later times, for beyond any such division reigned something that people had in common; we can only say that a universal idea reigned in the human race, influencing people’s actions, and on the one side this came from the Roman papacy, which felt itself to be something that brought people together. Medieval imperialism was equally universal, except that it was often fighting that universal community.

The element that came with the turning point of which I spoke goes against this way of holding people together. The kind of cohesion which existed through the Middle Ages, with people feeling themselves to be part of a great whole, was for centuries based on certain unconscious impulses that dwelt in human beings. The leaders knew them and used them in bringing people together. They addressed a particular sum total of unconscious powers of soul in bringing people together from the above-mentioned points of view in the civilized world of that time. The event at Avignon created breaches, perceptible breaches in that cohesion. We can sense that a new element thus had to come into the constitution, into the state of soul, of occidental humanity.

We also see that the forces at work in the European West had for a long time been affected by an event that had come from the East like a force of nature. I only need to mention everything that started with the Mongolian hordes, and the migrations from East to West, from Asia to Europe, that followed. Both were turning points, and at the dawn of the 15th century they gave Europe and its people the structure of community life. Despite all attempts to preserve the past, this structure was different from the earlier one, when it depended on unconscious impulses. Humanity found it increasingly necessary to be consciously aware also in areas where they were previously given cohesion on the basis of unconscious impulses.

Something highly significant happened with these changes in the West of Europe, especially in areas where people had until then be used, more or less so but significantly, to find cohesion through that universal idea, universal impulse, which I have been characterizing. We see something completely new arise in those areas. The national element came to take over from the old, more spiritual element of the Catholic Church in providing cohesion. We see England and France become a new kind of nation-states, setting a pattern, as it were.

Let us try and consider the way in which the new element was taken particularly into those areas of Western Europe. Initially the two countries were united until the movement arose in the 15th century which we may also call a turning point, in 1428, when in a certain direction a dividing wall came between England and France. This came to expression in the events that happened around Joan of Arc.¹¹⁵ The seed was then sown for the mutual independence of France and England; before that there had been a degree of connection between them. This is a tremendously significant phenomenon. For we shall see many things grow from this differentiation, which only came at that time, in the 15th century, things that will again prove symptomatic in the further evolution of history.

Another change came when a kind of national feeling, at the time preparing the way for an independent feeling of being Italian, developed in Italy from the very element which had led to the papacy being so powerful in that country, overshadowing all such national and similar groupings. Letting the eye roam across Europe we also see ourselves—I can only refer to these things briefly here—coming closer to the time when a major struggle arose between central and more or less eastern parts of Europe, the Germanic and Slavonic cultures. We see how the power of the Hapsburgs arose from the struggles in those regions, with the Slavs attacking, and Slav and Germanic cultures mingling. We also see highly individual structures, which before that had not emerged in such a way from the universal impulses, now with individual views and individual purpose. From the 13th to the 15th centuries, city states flourished throughout the occidental civilization of that time.

Again, once national aspirations had become differentiated and France and England were separate, we see long periods of civil war in England leading to the parliamentary system, as the world was to know it, being the goal of a social structure that arose from mutual understanding among individual people.

These, then, are not all, but some of the symptoms from more recent history. I merely have to add that as the groups formed from those impulses everywhere in Europe, there slowly arose in the East, still only in its early beginnings, from struggles that had to lead to its emergence, what later was to be the Russian structure. A strange structure. Seen from Europe it evolved in such a way that to our feeling it will always be a riddle. The most important impulses living within that structure were not really sentiently perceived but welded together, I would say, from something that had survived through all kinds of migrations—passing through Byzantium, arising from a certain metamorphosis of Roman Catholic life; something had come together that arose from what had sprouted forth as the blood of the Slavonic and Norman cultures. In ways that are familiar enough to you, it took in much of the Asiatic inner attitude of soul, a state of soul—I am now referring to the best parts of it—that through millennia had turned away from anything immediately coming through the senses and towards great mystic approaches, hoping to penetrate into a supersensible world with which the sensual life of human beings is connected.

If we take these and perhaps also many other symptoms of more recent historical development and truly consider them from the point of view of the issues considered earlier, a characteristic emerges clearly from these symptoms. We come to perceive it if we ask ourselves: How does the element that comes to expression in these symptoms inwardly differ from anything which in earlier centuries and millennia showed itself in a similar way in a historical evolution of humanity that was more at an unconscious level? We need to consider these things without any sympathy or antipathy, in a wholly objective way. It is only then that we will discover the characteristic element in the phenomena we are considering.

It is strange, when we ask ourselves: What do all these symptoms—for instance those I have given as examples today—have in common if we compare them with earlier impulses that came into historical evolution? I won’t speak of the fruitful way, for example, in which Christianity came into the world in a positive way, creating something new for the soul. I won’t speak of this, but only of the kind of impulses that were, for example, often given in ancient Greek life, when a new impulse would simply be given as though produced from inmost human nature. This would then come into its own in a completely new configuration of reality; or the way it was given, let us say, to Roman civilization in the days of Augustus. None of the impulses that come now are of that kind. The most evident impulse we see, for example, is the national one, based not on national cohesion—as one often sees it identified today and considered to be a state cohesion—but on the national element in so far as it bases on natural principles deep down in human nature. We see it as an impulse that people take up without having produced it inside. A person is French or English on account of his nature. And when in establishing the historical configuration he refers to his nationality he is not referring to something produced in his mind and spirit, but something he has simply accepted from outside.

If we compare the national principle as it has come up in history with those earlier impulses, we discover that all the impulses which we have seen coming to humanity in Greek and in Roman Latin times were infinitely much closer to the productive side in human nature. What came there was retained and preserved. When one takes up something new in more recent history, this is something one is not producing oneself, something which comes to the human being from outside.

Having attempted to gain our orientation more from the outer progress of more recent European history, we’ll now attempt to penetrate to the inner aspects. Within the soul’s inner state, we see a very similar onrush in the inner state of soul against the universal impulse that had counted on the unconscious, an impulse given through the ages. We see the onrush of Huss in the 15th century, Wiclif even before him, and then Luther and later Calvin. We see something human beings want to give, to put into history much more than anything that went before, when it was thought of in more universal ways; this is something individual, welling up from human nature itself. Strangely, however, we also see how in discussion, everything is always related to what went before. What is new is that the human being was referred to his own nature. Decide for yourself what the nature of the eucharist is. Decide for yourself on your attitude to your priest, do not let it be forced on you through a universal impulse coming from outside.

Yet when we consider the subject of the discussion, the dogma of the eucharist that had earlier been produced into humanity, had existed for centuries in history, or in human life altogether. Nothing new was being produced from the soul and given over to historical life, but the old was produced and preserved, everything that was there without human beings contributing anything. All that happened then was that the human being entered into a new relationship to it.

In following this inner process in European development we see infinitely much of the old torn apart, changed, metamorphosed in the onrush against the universal impulse that had reigned before. We can see it exactly from the way knighthood scattered and vanished. The whole of its inner state of soul—you only have to study the crusades—was connected with the universal impulse. Again we can refer to a turning point that will provide the orientation for everything else that happened. This was the battle of Murton in 1476, towards the end of the 15th century, fought against knighthood connected with the universal impulse. We may see it as representative of a struggle that happened in many places.¹¹⁶

We also find a change in the ecclesiastical authority in connection with all this. This ecclesiastical authority had assumed a strange form, and you can find this characterized in any work on history. During this time and because of the onrush, a need was felt for inner regeneration and improvement. The onrush against it really made the Church itself change many things internally. Yet we see everywhere how the element that had raised the Church up in the course of human evolution, having spread it in form of a universal impulse, was to be given a new relationship to each individual human being. We see this happening all over Europe. We see how the English Church made itself independent. We see how in central Europe growing independence joined forces with political powers. We see how everywhere the individual and personal rose against the universal, in other words how something that the human mind was to make its own raged against an earlier inner human nature that had been more unconscious or subconscious, and we see what followed from this in historical terms.

Counter forces did, of course, also arise, like the counter reformation against the reformation. But if we study the symptomatology, the struggles this caused immediately show something of the greatest importance with regard to more recent history. We see the Thirty Years’ War arise from everything that happened in connection with the symptoms I have characterized. Studying the Thirty Years’ War,¹¹⁷ we discover something strange. It arose from opposition arising among the confessions in Europe. It began with all the impulses connected with religious struggles, and it ended as a purely political phenomenon. It turned into something completely different as it progressed. If we now ask ourselves how its evolution looks to us with regard to the confessions which then existed in Europe, we find that in 1648 people were exactly where they had been in 1618. The whole 30 years really changed nothing of any significance as regards the relationship between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and so on. All this remained as before. However, in the course of that war quite different powers intervened, and this gave the European national structures a completely different configuration.

If you study the Thirty Years’ War in this way you will be truly convinced that we cannot see history as something that follows as an effect connected with what went before and call the latter the cause. Nothing that came from the Thirty Years’ War was genuinely connected as effect with anything we can call cause in the true sense. Studying the evolution we see how events happening on the outside can only be a symptom for something that happens deeper down. This is particularly evident in the case of the Thirty Years’ War. But what did happen? It was the western countries and above all France which advanced as a result of the events that came in the course of that war, and not its causes. The consequences of the Thirty Years’ War later led to the whole regal glory of France. We see how the royal power of France shone out over Europe in the time that followed.

Then again, something arose in the womb of what was evolving there, taking the old national impulse forward in a most eminent sense. This new element went far beyond anything merely national; it broke the national idea apart, as it were. Individual, personal nature arose, later to come into its own in the French Revolution. The human individual, standing by himself, wanted to emancipate from the compulsion of a community that had not arisen from some productive impulse but been taken up into the human state of soul from nature, from the world surrounding humanity. Again, in looking at the symptomatology, we see how Napoleon then arose, quite inorganically we might say, without any evident motivation. He was the executor, as it were, of the French Revolution’s will and testament. At the same time we also see a strange, a great and tremendous turning point arise. This significant turning point in more recent history came on 21 October 1805, when the battle of Trafalgar prevented Napoleon from extending his tentacles across to England. Something which earlier had only been potential, the separation between England and the Continent, was then made complete.

We can now let things that are generally known pass quickly before the inner eye. We find that parliamentary life going in the direction of liberalism evolved further in an independent England. We see a more tumultuous evolution in France during the 19th century. Then, however, we see emerge in a new form, symptomatic and shining out over what is really happening at the foundations of European history, how the European west and centre needed to come to grips in the 1850s with something that was like a dark riddle in the European east, with the Russian configuration that had arisen. This was like a question posed with regard to European development. We then see certain ideas gaining strength in the 19th century, other ideas going against them, and how ideas of the one kind or the other became impulses in historical development. We see how everything was building up in the 19th century towards the storm which then broke in 1848.¹¹⁸ And we see evolve from all this the social movement that was later to be so comprehensive and today has a profound influence on human evolution. We see how one especially noteworthy event came among everything that evolved in the 19th century, something the people of Europe were able to observe quite profoundly. Out of the glory that had arisen with France becoming a national state, a kind of demand or claim arose and continued to spread.

Let us not put values on things here. We do not follow them with sympathy or antipathy, but quite objectively. We see how out of the relationship between developments in west and east something arose that was considered an insoluble problem—insoluble for Europe at least for the time being—by people who had the necessary insight at the time, irrespective of the attitude they took to it, to whether it should happen or not. We can even completely leave aside the question as to whether Alsace was occupied by the French originally or later by the Germans, but the Alsatian question, as it is known today, evolved out of European life.

If you study history, and especially things said by people with insight at the time in question, you will know that even then they foresaw conflicts arising from this, conflicts that were really insoluble in either direction because they had to do with all the difficult questions concerning the European east. Those questions arose because the European west—the Crimean War¹¹⁹ was symptomatic of this—was forced to come to grips with the European east, which was behind all the phenomena like an enigma. We should really consider and feel it to be extraordinarily significant, especially in these days, that something which appears insoluble is given in the way in which central Europe must face up to western Europe because of a question which under specific historical conditions may be asked to be solved in one way or another, a question that has arisen from the national impulse emerging in France but cannot be solved in national terms.

I could give you many more symptoms apparent in recent history, but I only want to mention just one thing which enters deeply into the whole of human evolution in recent times. Although the connections cannot always be clearly seen, I want to refer to the emergence of the more recent scientific way of thinking. I have characterized its significance from other points of view in my earlier lectures here. The scientific way of thinking is evolving. What does it do? It makes the human being stand on his own. It is exactly this thinking which separates the individual out from the community. It is in many respects also the driving impulse in all the other things I have mentioned. This modern scientific way of thinking has something in it which strangely does betray the significance which it has in more recent history.

Two kinds of problems arise. Let me show you the one by referring to a fact. This is that in 1830 a friend found Goethe in a state of sheer excitement. Asked what was the matter, Goethe said: The news coming from France are overwhelming; the world is in flames; something new is beginning to emerge. Soret, the friend to whom Goethe said these words, did of course think he was speaking of the 1830 revolutions. ‘No,’ said Goethe, ‘I am not talking about that but about the revolution which is taking place between the two scientists Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire.’¹²⁰ Cuvier held the view that all life forms in the natural world exist side by side and each had to be taken on its own. Saint- Hilaire was looking for a common type in the organic forms, he set the whole of organic life in motion, so that one could only get an overview in this state of flux if one looked at nature itself in an immediately productive spirit, experiencing the spirit to be as much in flux as nature itself. Goethe sensed something in Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that ultimately, when taken from seed to fruit, will be the supersensible concepts of natural phenomena which I characterized here the day before yesterday.

Initially, however, the world was overshadowed by everything that came with the other way of looking at nature, where the human being is taken out of any living, immediate relationship to the phenomena of nature. This approach, which has not been taken hold of by the impulse of which Goethe spoke, gives insight into the part of nature that is nonliving, into the dying element, where nature dissolves, and this is connected with the element that is mortal in us, as I characterized it the day before yesterday.

The study of nature from which Goethe turned away is such that it can only work with the gradual process of decay in nature. Efforts are then made to rise to something that cannot be shown by these means but only by supersensible vision, and those are the symptoms of ascent, of growth, of being born and thriving. But, though this does again sound paradoxical, this approach to nature, which really focuses on whatever is dead within living nature, cast its deep shadows on the whole of modern social life. Essentially it created a new universal impulse for humanity in more recent times, but this is a universal impulse against which the human being himself as an individual must rebel all the time, for it takes him out of nature, so that he must look for the real whole over and over again. The knowledge gained puts him outside. He needs to look for the real whole again in something other than the area in which he seeks such knowledge. The result is dualism in the way the human being relates to his environment and hence also in life. This natural science flows into modern industrial life which supports the whole of modern civilization; its influence is highly significant.

With the impulses we considered earlier, for instance the national impulse, we saw that old tradition was preserved and no new productive element introduced into life. With the riddle of the European east we see how a nation remarkably stimulated to be productive in the spirit ties itself up so that it truly cannot be productive, although it has the potential to be highly productive, truly tying itself up in the most extreme bonds of the old Byzantine Church community. Old things are thus preserved. We see how with the views from natural science that are poured out over modern humanity something universal is created, something universal which also does not consider anything the human being produces out of himself, but exactly the knowledge that is gained in cutting things off from himself, knowledge concerning decay in natural phenomena. This can also only be brought into civilization in the sphere of industry, with the natural element killed off.

Initially by not being productive in the old sense, humanity has been gaining the full conscious awareness which began to develop in the 15th century. Earlier, they maintained their connection with nature and the world at a subconscious level rather than in full conscious awareness. In addition to preservation of old things we see a process of educating the human race in more recent times which is given out of something new but nevertheless is along the lines of the old. The principles developed for industry only seem to arise from productive ideas. For those productive ideas do not arise as independent green plants in the human soul—the supersensible, if it is to be sought, must arise as an independent plant in the human soul—but from calm contemplation of objective natural phenomena.

We see how an event that has had a significant influence on more recent developments is particularly connected with this modern industry, for it is now becoming apparent that modern industry develops progressively in our times and that colonization also gains significance; for colonial and colonizing life is closely bound up with the element that enters into industry through natural science.

Let us now take a general view of what all these symptoms are more or less telling us. We see that anything which has come up as something new since the 15th century has not come from productive human nature. Looking at these things we find it necessary to take a wider view of historical evolution and to acknowledge—supersensible insight makes us acknowledge this—that there is not only ascent in this human life, not only what in abstract terms is usually called progress, but that ascending, sprouting and shooting life goes hand in hand with a descending life. Life is bound up with a principle that is all the time leading to death.

When we consider an individual human life, birth, growth and development are presented separately from dying and decay. But it only seems like that. When we consider life in the outside world, developments that have come particularly in more recent history show that dying, descending and ascending development are immediately next to one another and influence one another. We see that descending evolution, which is the evolution that takes historical death into itself, had great significance actually for the beginning of this more recent period in history which began in the 15th century, doing so initially for several centuries and right into our own time. The life of decay, of death, has greater significance than ascending, sprouting and shooting life. We see how the mind of modern man as it evolves is connected with the element in him which is mortal, and how he is able to sense that the element which drives him towards death is also the element that helps him to advance in knowledge. Whilst sprouting, shooting life lulls him as if in dreams, we can see that the spiritual soul is evolving from the more unconscious state of soul which humanity developed from the 8th century BC until the 15th century AD, and that it has influenced the history of more recent times. We see that there is need, for a first education towards developing this spiritual soul, that symptoms of decay, of dying life take effect particularly also in human civilization. We cannot understand more recent historical life unless we are able to develop the thought—in spite of all admiration, in spit of all the good will and recognition that has to be given for the great, tremendous achievement of modern industry, of modern national impulses—that descending life moving towards the death of historical evolution must be present in it all, and that an ascending, sprouting and shooting life must be born into this descending life.

This has caused people of more recent times who have insight to develop something we might call a pessimistic view of civilization. Thus Schopenhauer¹²¹ looked at more recent historical developments. In spite of all the achievements they seemed rather trivial to him. The only thing Schopenhauer appreciated was anything that could be achieved in the minds of single individuals. Pessimists are themselves mere symptoms in recent historical development, but they have a feeling that the greatest and most significant element in that development which we are used to seeing as a characteristic of more recent historical evolution has been the death impulse entering into it.

What has been the consequence? Something we may call tragedy coming into the historical life of more recent times. Promotion of the impulses that we may consider to have been partly traditional and partly coming from natural scientific views is a matter of course. All this is such that we have to say to ourselves: We must encourage it, we must take it up, it is a necessity of our more recent history; human beings absolutely must make it part of developments in world history, but it must of necessity also lead to its own decline and death in everything that arises, that is achieved in this field. The tragedy is that something has to be encouraged and considered an achievement of which one knows that in creating it one is creating something that must at the same time also decay. We actually start the decay as we create it.

Anyone who thinks that the events arising in more recent historical development from the impulses I mentioned can stand on their own, is like someone who thinks a woman can give birth without conception, without the one principle being connected with the other. The element arising from those impulses presents as something one-sided that needs something to come from another side if it is to survive. Within itself there is only the power to die. Let us take everything that has come with modern industry and social relationships in more recent times, be they commercial or other kinds of connections. Let us take all this—on its own, seen in accord with its own impulse, it is infertile and always leads to its own death, I would say in rhythms. We have to realize that we need to look at it in such a way that we say: For the sake of something else, this dying element has to enter into our modern world as an achievement.

What is this something else? Well, we have seen that the strange thing I hinted at shows itself as we follow more recent history with its sequence of what we consider to be different symptoms. On the one hand we see the spiritual soul come into flower from the 15th century onwards, and this happens exactly because of the unproductive principle. On the other hand we have seen this spiritual soul grow great in that initially the stimulus for the productive element was withdrawn from its environs, so that it took its guidance from the principle that was all the time leading to a dying process in civilization. This has made the human being independent. The outside world does not stimulate something in us that has productive life but all the time something that bears the seed of the dying process in the insights gained. The human being grows up in his individual and conscious natural development in a way where the outside world does not raise him for life, nor to something that will take him higher, but is all the time preventing anything intended to take him higher. As a result, the human being stands by himself.

Looking at the situation purely in the light of supersensible insight, we see that this inner life of the human being, with the movement towards the spiritual soul from the 15th century onwards, also has something that corresponds to it on the outside. This could not emerge in the early centuries but shows itself immediately if without bias we consider the human heart and mind in the present time when it has once again gained an inclination towards a supersensible life. Many are, of course, still unconscious of this, but this inclination towards a supersensible life now exists for very many people. Someone working with the science of the spirit with an anthroposophical orientation knows that the principle of dying which developed in the outer material civilization of recent times was only of a passing nature and that we are at a great turning point in time which will bring a new revelation of the supersensible to human beings from outside, this time not through nature but stimulated in the way I have shown when I spoke on anthroposophically orientated spiritual science.

We see it approaching everywhere, this new revelation of the supersensible. It will now be gained in a different way from earlier times when human beings were connected with nature unconsciously, through their instincts, finding in nature itself the principles that also held true for the soul and which they could also introduce into social and historical life. A productive, supersensible life will develop that goes beyond anything which this study of nature and the old impulses in more recent historical developments are able to give. It will be revealed from the world of the spirit. And if we look particularly at the terrible catastrophe that has arisen in our time—what is it, seen in the genuine light of truth, but something in which elements that are dying crowd together?

Much will die within this catastrophic life. Anything that has the principle of dying within it in the way I have characterized will die more quickly. No reason for pessimism, even if there is reason for pain with all the things that can come to us from watching and being involved in this catastrophe. There is no reason to be pessimistic about civilization if we consider life in the light of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. For it is apparent now in one point in recent historical evolution around the globe that the dying process which otherwise is distributed across material life comes powerfully together. This gives more recent events their tragic note. At the same time it shows us that everything that comes into the world in the way I have characterized earlier must be fruitless and needs to be made fruitful with what we receive out of the supersensible.

Anyone who considers the principle which makes the development of the spiritual soul complete and the new revelations from the supersensible with an open mind will raise his head, however much it may be bowed down in pain over the things that are happening now, and say to himself: It is the first flush of dawn for something that must come and will trigger the impulse in humanity to turn towards the supersensible. All the suffering and pain over the present collapse would be in vain, and so would be all the feelings, the justifiable pain felt by those who see this collapse, if these feelings could not take us forward to the realization that as with everything in nature that is destined to die, so with this dying, too, something new is arising. However, the new development will only be possible if humanity has the will to take up the principle that will make things fruitful, a principle revealed to us from the supersensible world.

The spiritual soul has evolved. Nature must now no longer give us unconsciously the things we introduce into the world of social and historical development. Humanity of our time must now also consciously receive, willingly receive, the new kind of supersensible revelation that comes to the spiritual soul if this spiritual soul wills it. It is exactly when we consider the tragedy of modern life without prejudice that the redeeming impulse reveals itself on the other side. It reveals itself in that we feel the need to acknowledge the revelation of a new supersensible element which now also has to be there for the spiritual soul.

We thus see through the symptoms and perceive what humanity is going to be and what is to be revealed to humanity out of the universe. In Graeco-Latin times, which began in the 8th century before the Christian era and came to an end in the 15th century, the inner life was still bound up with outward physical life. This led to the great achievements of Greek and Roman times that were passed on to the Middle Ages. In the 15th century evolution took a great leap as the powers of conscious awareness began to evolve what we may call the spiritual soul. We are now in this stage of evolution. We see that for a true science of history human beings must take up the principles that are revealed behind the symptoms. We must have the courage to admit, however, that death is all around us as much as life, and that death is necessary so that new life may come. It has also been necessary for death to be overwhelming for a time, so that human beings might all the more develop the powers of the spiritual soul. When no more is given to us from outside, we feel the need to look inside for the spirit, the supersensible principle.

Some may of course object and say: Well, where are those people, how many of them are there? Not many have developed their powers of soul so that they are able to point to the supersensible world. We certainly have to admit that there are only few of them today. Their numbers will grow apace; but it is not a matter of how many find their way to the supersensible sphere which is needed to make the sensual fruitful. What matters is that one does not have to take the road to supersensible insight oneself, for, quite apart from how and for what you estimate the individual who provides the fruits of the supersensible, once they have been uttered, once they have been cast into human culture, they can be understood with the understanding that is perfectly common in the age of the spiritual soul. People can largely understand everything brought to them from the sphere of the supersensible, unless they create obstacles for themselves with prejudices which they then find insurmountable.

There is, however, one thing which is needed. Just consider that with the view of history I have outlined one finds it necessary to admit to oneself, in insight, as it were, and in full awareness, that what has to be done—what is a necessity of the age and will be a necessity more and more—is at the same time something that is all the time also dying. It does take some courage to acknowledge that one has to be active so that that active principle may perish and be the soil for the Father principle of the spiritual, supersensible sphere. It does need such courage for all supersensible insight. Fear of supersensible insight prevents many people from entering into it. There is one field at least where in more recent times we face the immediate necessity to develop such courage if we want to be at all considered for human development. This is the field of history. Those who know something of supersensible insight always speak of crossing the threshold, and of a guardian of the threshold.¹²² They speak of crossing the threshold because one has to abandon many things that seemed to be absolutely solid ground before one crossed the threshold in finding one’s way into the supersensible world. Unconsciously people feel it is a relief not to have to cross the threshold. Yet something that had to be done at a particular time for historical development is becoming more and more of a necessity. And this is again part of the inner progress of historical development from the 15th century onwards. It is becoming more and more of a necessity to say to oneself: You are actively involved in the creation of processes of dying, processes of decay. You need to devote yourself to these processes of decay, and this will bring your inner power to life; it is exactly because of this that you will be able to come close to the supersensible. You must abandon what you used to consider a foundation in mind and spirit before, cross the threshold to the supersensible world, losing the ground under your feet, as it were. And in its place you must find within you the firm focal point where you can maintain yourself even in the face of what in sensual terms has no ground.

The human being needs to find a new focus for the whole of his inner life. Historical necessity will make us look for this focus more and more in future. The fact that we thus gain insight will not change things. We are, as it were, facing the process of dying—in the sense I mean here. The fact that we admit it is a dying process will not change it. But it is exactly by this that one must feel driven to try and fructify the living principle that is the counter force. For the situation is like this: Inscribed above the search for supersensible insights there has always been the great, tremendous demand: ‘Know yourself.’¹²³ And it is still the demand made on human beings who are seekers. Seeking to gain this insight today people can only do so by rising to worlds that can take them beyond finite existence. Above all, impelled by the necessities of human evolution, they will have to admit to themselves with regard to historical life in more recent times, that the spiritual soul is a goal that has been implanted with regard to more recent history, to know themselves more and more. In coming to know themselves, they are facing the necessity of going beyond themselves. In going beyond themselves, perceiving his supersensible nature within their sensual nature, they also come to the supersensible that is active in history, with external facts merely symbols for it. We will only have a history that is fruitful for life if we look for the supersensible behind the symptoms, just as we do behind the phenomena of nature.

The look we have taken at history has shown that more recent developments impose trials on human beings, the trial where they must consider descending as well as ascending life, involution as well as evolution. With supersensible insight into history people will find this gaining of insight to be a great trial for the soul for they must cross the threshold and find a new focus in the inner life of the soul, so that in having gone through the trial they will have the strength to go through the other trials that life will present more and more out of historical events as they move towards the future. We may say, however, that human beings only grow strong and robust and truly fit for life by going through trials. Fear of insight should not prevent people from entering into the trials. Instead, courage to gain insight should make them prepared to accept these trials. They will develop those trials on the road to insight into powers that will also guide them to be active human beings who are involved in evolution and fruitful in the course of history.

Questions and answers

Following the lecture given in Zurich on 17 October 1918

The suggestion has been made that 1 should briefly say something about one particular phenomenon in more recent history that is particularly relevant to human life, and that is the evolution of speech and language. This could, of course, be another whole lecture if I were to treat the subject exhaustively. I would, however, like to take up the suggestion, apart from anything else because I would indeed like to draw your attention to the fact that anthroposophically orientated spiritual science in the sense of which I have been speaking truly is such that it does not owe its existence to a sudden idea that came like a shot, nor is it made up of sudden flashes of insight. No, if you study the literature you’ll find that this anthroposophically orientated spiritual science gathers what it has to say from the whole breadth of observation, the whole range of phenomena in the world.

Of course, when one has to cover vast areas in an hour—and I am sorry that it always takes longer than this anyhow—the impression inevitably arises that one is moving in abstract regions; on the other hand the intention is not to convince anyone, but merely to encourage them to take this further, for then people will see that this science of the spirit is based on careful, conscientious and methodical investigation, serious research, more so than in any other kind of scientific endeavour.

It is interesting to consider the principles which I have been characterizing in general terms today in a single phenomenon such as the development of human speech and language. When we say anything today, we do not usually consider the fact that talking is actually at every moment forcing us to be inaccurate. Fritz Mauthner has written three volumes as well as a dictionary of philosophy to show that everything we produce in philosophy and science is based on language and that the language is imprecise. Because of this, he says, we can really never have a body of true knowledge.¹²⁴

Well, when it comes to the science of the spirit this is, of course, a foolish thing to say, even in three volumes. It is, however, significant to consider the partial phenomenon that lies behind this. Going back in the development of language we find—unlike the superficial anthropological linguistics where the means are inadequate—that the further back we go, human beings were progressively more closely connected with anything their speech expressed, inwardly so, and again instinctively and unconsciously. Human beings are gradually also separating from the things that lie in their own inherent nature, just as they are from the outside world of nature.

Thus they also cease to be so closely connected with their speech. Speech thus becomes something external. A marked dualism arises between the thoughts that live in us—and some do not even have them any more, because they remain in the sphere of language—and the words that are spoken. If we do not give ourselves to illusion at the point in human evolution where we are today, in the age of the spiritual soul, we need to take a real look at the way language has already separated from the human being. It is really only proper names relating to a single individual that are truly appropriate to that individual. As soon as we use general terms, be they adjectives, nouns, or whatever, they are imprecise about what they are meant to tell us. They are abstract, they are like generalities. We will only understand the relationship between language and human life rightly if we take it really as gesture; if we know: just as I point to something in a direct, living way when I point to it with my finger, so I also point in a kind of gesture at the entity to which the sounds of speech refer when I produce sounds, using my larynx. To take speech as gesture, this is what matters. In earlier times, people had a vague feeling, I would say it was instinctive and lay in the subconscious, as to how their inner life was connected with sound in a kind of gesture. They did not confuse their experiences in inner life with the things brought to expression in speech.

We ourselves have tried to develop endeavours in this direction in a field of spiritual science, using the element of gesture to make speech visible. This is in the art we call eurythmy. Efforts are made to get the whole human being moving, and express in gesture—in the movements of the limbs, movements of the human form in space, the movements in groups and relationships between individuals—what is otherwise expressed in gesture, though not perceived as gesture, through the human larynx and its neighbouring organs. We call this art of movement, something new which has to come to humanity, eurythmy. We had intended to follow this lecture here in Zurich with a eurythmy performance. This had to be put off for another time, for we were given permission to give these lectures, in what is now a difficult time,¹²⁵ but not to give a eurythmy performance. The intention was to show how the whole human being becomes a larynx, as it were. In becoming aware of what speech is, we come to something that is particularly important, fundamentally important, for life in the present and future.

Nothing happens more frequently in human life today but that someone makes a statement of some kind, as I am doing with regard to the science of the spirit, for instance, and then someone else will come along and say: ‘I have read this before,’ showing you something which at least in parts has exactly the same wording. I could give you striking examples of this, but will give just one which I found illustrated the situation perfectly.

One thing I truly endeavour to do is to apply all the things that demand consideration in spiritual science to life and thus enter into the true impulses in life. For a long time I have thus been reflecting on the whole way of thinking, the whole attitude of thought, shown by Woodrow Wilson.¹²⁶ I found it interesting to study especially his essays on historical method, the study of history and American historical life. He plays such a major role in present-day life that one has to get to know him—this is what someone would say who does not want to sleep through current events but observe them with his senses wide awake. I have come to admire the magnificent way, truly apt in an American way, in which Woodrow Wilson presents the evolution of the American nation, this advance from the American east to the American west, with American life emerging in a quite specific way, that came only once people had advanced from east to west. Woodrow Wilson characteristically speaks of everything that went before as mere appendage to European life. This uprooting and overcoming of nature, overcoming the native population of the American west, this specific way of making history, which shows some similarity to what has happened in human life generally yet also differs in quite specific ways—this is magnificently presented. It is therefore also interesting to see how Woodrow Wilson develops his method of history.

I looked at the descriptions he gave of his own method of history and found something quite peculiar. Sentences come from this man, who is wholly and entirely American, that seemed to me to almost word for word in agreement with sentences written by a completely different person, someone who truly arose from an entirely different approach to life and way of thinking. Statements Woodrow Wilson made in his essay on the methodology for history that bore such excellent fruit for him, could be transposed word for word into essays by Herman Grimm, who is entirely within the Goethean development of our time, and out of this development presents as a truly Central European mind. We might say that you need only take sentences from Herman Grimm’s essays and transpose them, or include sentences by Woodrow Wilson in Herman Grimm’s essays, and you would not see any great difference in the wording.

What we learn from such things—to put it in ordinary words, though I want to say something highly significant in this way—is that when two people say the same thing, even using the same words, it is not the same. We have to learn from this that it is necessary to enter not only into the wording, which comes from speech, but the into whole person. This will reveal the specific differences between Herman Grimm and Woodrow Wilson. You will find that with Herman Grimm, every single sentence is worked out with the spiritual soul wholly present. The progression one finds in Herman Grimm’s spirited essay where he writes about historical method and the contemplation of history is truly such that one sees him progress from sentence to sentence through an inner struggle in his soul, so that nothing remains unconscious and everything is brought to conscious awareness. All the time one sees this inner progression in the soul.¹²⁷

Looking across at what we see in the case of Woodrow Wilson, we see how the statements arise from subconscious depths of the soul, as though out of the human being as such rather than inner activity. I don’t mean anything bad by this, but I would like to say, if I may be paradoxical about it, that with Herman Grimm I always feel that in the region of wholly conscious inner life, all the life of the soul proceeds as statement follows statement; with Woodrow Wilson I feel he is as if possessed by something that lies within himself and lets his own truths shine up in his own inner life. As I said, I do not mean anything sympathetic or antipathetic by this, merely something I want to characterize. It is given to him from the depths of his own soul. So we find, and it is truly evident, that even if the wording is the same, two people are saying the same thing yet it is not the same. We only discover what lies behind it if we learn to go not by the wording but by what arises from the whole way the person presents himself in life.

You see, modern humanity must learn to overcome the general habit of judging anything that is presented only on its content. We will have to learn that the content is not really what matters. When I speak about the science of the spirit, I do not focus on the way I formulate my sentences, on the content, but what matters is that something which has truly been projected from the supersensible world flows into what I say. Considering the How more important than the What, so that one can sense, or feel, that these things are said out of the supersensible world. This is what matters.

This is how we must altogether learn in a way in the present time in contrast to ordinary life. A paper, or a journal, may say the nicest things—people can say the most beautiful things today, for ‘beautiful ideas’ and ‘nice things’ are commonplace today—but it is not the words which matter but the inner attitude from which they arise, so that we look through the statements and the words to symptoms, to the human being. We need to penetrate language and wording as if they were a veil and thus come closer to the human being himself again. We are made aware of this in more recent developments in language, for here the human being’s inmost nature, his spiritual soul, has become separate from speech and language. Out of ourselves, therefore, the necessity arises to consider not just the words, but see through them to the human soul, doing so in every possible direction and way.

It will, however, be necessary to overcome something else if one wants to go on in this direction. People are still used to abstract notions today, to going by the immediate content in what I might call an uninspired, middle-class way. When someone speaks of an ideal, however beautifully formulated, we need to be aware that this is something that is a hundred a penny today, for the ideas have been given form. You can put all kinds of ideas to people and nations today, and they will be formed. It will depend on where they come from, where they truly arise in the inmost soul, in the soul region. Life will be tremendously enriched if we are in a position to see it like this.

Perhaps I may also be permitted to say something personal. You see I am often presented with people’s poetical productions. All kinds of people produce them nowadays. Among them are some that are perfect in form, beautifully expressing something or other, and others that seem awkwardly phrased, bumpy or indeed primitive, having problems with the language. Someone taking a point of view that is not yet modern will of course delight in the beauty of the language, especially if the forms are perfect. He will not—not yet today—feel that Emanuel Geibel¹²⁸ was right in saying that his verses would have a public for as long as there were young girls. They are beautiful, polished, and will have a public even among those who believe Wildenbnich¹²⁹ or similar people to be poets—and there are many of these as well.

Today, however, a different view is taken. This is also the case with other arts, but I am here talking about language. There are poets today whose verses make us stumble; you may have problems with the awkward words, but there is a new impulse in them. This is something we must feel! We must be able to see through the veil of the language and see the inner superficiality reflected in polished verse. For polished poems, beautiful poems, much more beautiful than Goethe’s poems, are a hundred a penny today; there it is the language itself which is producing the poetry. But a new inner life springing directly from the source of all life—this is something one must look for. It sometimes comes to expression exactly by having to battle with the language, so that we might say it has only got as far as being a stammer. Such ‘stammers’ may, however, be preferable for us to something that is perfect in itself but only reflects superficiality of soul. There was an occasion where I was given some verses. We needed verses, because we had to make a translation from another language. Very beautiful verses. I grew angry about them and wrote bad verse myself. I am aware that as poetry they are much poorer in quality. I knew, however, that in that case it was a necessity to express what needed to be expressed in a language that may perhaps seem rough and bumpy if one was drawing on the source spring of life that had to be sought in that case. I certainly do not overestimate what I undertook to do; but I also do not overestimate the polished verse I was given at the time.

The human being seeking through speech and language in the age of the spiritual soul—this is something which becomes life practice when we truly consider the life of language. Today I have therefore also tried to speak in a way where I did not deal with spiritual science in every sentence, always wanting to prove the supersensible, and instead tried to put this into the How of looking at history. And I think this is also the important thing, that one does not only call someone a true spiritual scientist whose every fifth word is ‘spirit’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual world’, believing in the suggestive effect of this, but someone who shows in the way he looks at the world, even in completely outer terms, by the way in which he presents things, that the inner guide, who takes us from thought to thought, from view to view, from impulse to impulse—that this guide is the spirit. If it is the spirit we need not keep on chirping the word all the time.

Here you can see how one can substantiate in speech and language something which I might also present in an extensive lecture.

• 111. Sprüche in Prosa. See note 10.
• 112. Nature non facit saltus. First in Fournier, Varietés historiques et litteraires, 1613, IX, 247, then in Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur I’entendement humain, 1756, preface and IV ch. 16, and in Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica, 1751, No. 77.
• 113. At the request of Philipp IV, Pope Boniface VIII was taken prisoner at Anagni on 7 September 1303. He died soon after. The French pope Clement V did not go to Italy but resided in Avignon from 1309. The Papal Court had its seat there from 1309 until 1377.
• 114. The Order of the Templars, established in 1119 for the protection of the Sacred Tomb in Jerusalem and the pilgrims who visited it, was accused of heresy by French Kind Philip IV who wanted them suppressed and their property appropriated. The Papacy, then wholly under the French influence in Avignon, acceded to this. Following inquisition and torture, the Order was suppressed in 1312. The remaining Templars who had been arrested in 1307 were burned.
• 115. In the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, Orleans was under siege by the English in 1428. It was relieved in April 1429 by a small army led by Joan of Arc.
• 116. The attack by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was successfully beaten off by the Swiss at Grandson and Murten. Charles was killed in the decisive battle of Nancy in 1477.
• 117. 1618-1648, power struggle between kings of France and Habsburg rulers of Holy Roman Empire and Spain, with added overtones of conflict between Calvinism and post-Tridentine Catholicism. Other powers that became involved included German principalities, Sweden, Denmark and Transylvania. [Tr.]
• 118. Revolution broke out in many European countries in 1848—France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and other areas. In England this was reflected in a final outburst of Chartist agitation [Tr.].
• 119. Britain and France fought Russia in 1854-6, originally because the Russians had successfully fought the Turks in the Black Sea region. European peace was under threat.
• 120. The talk between Goethe and Frédéric Jean Soret took place on 2 August 1830. Conflict between Etienne Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier had started in February that year at the Paris Academy. Goethe had above all studied Saint-Hilaire’s writings, publishing a review entitled ‘Principes de Philosophic zoologique’ in 1830/32. In Goethe’s scientific writings. See note 10.
• 121. See note 33.
• 122. See also Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (GA 10); tr. G. Metaxa; Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1993; chapter on the guardian of the threshold.
• 123. Words of Solon or Chilon on the Apollo Temple at Delphi.
• 124. Mauthner, F. Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 Bde, Stuttgart 1901-1903. Wörterbuch der Philosophy, see note 27.
• 125. An influenza epidemic had led to a partial ban on gatherings.
• 126. See note 88.
• 127. It has not been possible to establish exactly which essay this was. See notes 44 and 46, however.
• 128. Geibel, Emanuel (1815–1884), German poet and dramatist.
• 129. Wildenbruch, Ernst von (1845–1909), German writer and dramatist, wrote patriotic poems during the Hohenzollem empire.

Spiritual scientific findings concerning rights and moral and social forms of life

You will have seen from the three lectures I have given here to characterize the way anthroposophically orientated spiritual science relates to three different fields of human endeavour in the sciences, that with this spiritual science it is above all important to develop ideas that relate to the reality of things and make it possible to enter into the fullness of real life in order to gain knowledge of that real world. We may say—and this will have been evident from the whole tenor of my lectures—that for a relatively long period in the evolution of human science, concepts in accord with reality have only been gained in the field of natural science that is based on the evidence of the senses. In some respects these concepts are exemplary scientific achievements. However, with regard to reality they only go as far as lifeless nature—I think it is reasonable to say this. Lifeless nature exists not only where it is immediately apparent to the senses but also as a mineral element in the life forms and mind-endowed entities that live in the physical world. In modern science, people have a grasp of things that is exemplary. I think we have very clear evidence of this in the applications of natural science in human life, applications that have been perfected and are tremendously successful. When concepts are applied to human life we can, under certain conditions, see how far they are in accord with reality. A watch cannot be constructed if one has the wrong concepts of mechanics and physics; it would soon tell us that the wrong concepts have been used.

This is not the case with all areas of life, and especially in the areas we are going to consider today, reality does not always immediately make it clear if we are dealing with concepts that are in accord with it, if they have been gained on the basis of reality or not.

In the field of natural science it is relatively safe to use concepts that are not in accord with the truth, for they will show themselves to be erroneous or inadequate for as long as one stays within the field of natural science, that is, theoretical discussion which may then also be put into practice. However, when it comes to social life, the life of human communities in any form, we have to consider not only how to gain concepts but also how to bring these to realization. Under present-day conditions there are spheres of life where inadequate concepts can indeed be introduced. The inadequacies of the ideas, notions, reactions and so on will then show themselves; but in some respect people living entirely with a natural scientific bias will be helpless in face of the consequences of such concepts. In a sense it would be reasonable to say that the tragic events which have now come upon the human race are essentially connected—more than one would think, and more so than can be even hinted at in one brief lecture—with the fact that for long periods of time people did not know how to develop concepts that were in accord with reality, concepts that could be used to encompass the facts of real life. These facts of real life have become too much to handle for humanity today. In many ways the inadequate ideas humanity developed in the course of centuries are being reduced to absurdity in a most terrible way in these tragic events.

We discover what really lies behind this if—let us now take a view that is different from those taken in the previous lectures—we first of all look at the way attempts have been made again and again in recent times to establish a general human philosophy on the basis of natural science, the way people have tried to introduce natural scientific thinking, so exemplary in its own sphere—let me repeat this over and over again—to all spheres of human life—psychology, education, politics, social studies, history, and so on.

Anyone who knows about developments in this direction will know the efforts people who think in the natural scientific way have made to apply the ideas and concepts they have evolved in natural science to all the above spheres of life. Proof of this is available in hundreds of ways, but let me just give some characteristic details. They may go some way back, but 1 think we can say that the trend they reflect has continued to this day and has indeed been growing.

Someone who in my view is an outstanding scientist spoke at two scientific gatherings in 1874 and 1875 on the sphere of rights, issues concerning morality and law, and human social relationships. In the course of those lectures he said some highly characteristic things. He actually claimed that anyone who in terms of modern scientific education has the necessary maturity ought to demand that the natural scientific way of thinking should be made part of people’s general awareness, like a kind of catechism. The inner responses, needs and will impulses arising in human beings as the basis of their social aspirations would thus have to be closely connected as time goes on with a purely natural-scientific view of the world that would be spreading more and more. This is what Professor Benedikt said at the 48th science congress.⁸⁰ He said the scientific view of the world needed to gain the breadth, depth and clarity to create a catechism that would govern the cultural and ethical life of the nation. It is his ideal, therefore, that everything in social life that speaks out of the cultural, heart-felt and will-related needs of people should be a reflection of natural-scientific ideas!

With regard to psychology, the same scientist said that it, too, had become a natural science since it followed physics and chemistry in casting off the ballast of metaphysics and no longer took hypotheses for its premises that were unfathomable for our present-day organization.

Many scientists—including Oscar Hertwig, whom I mentioned the day before yesterday, Naegeli and many others—emphasize again and again that natural science can only work effectively in its own field. The scientific ideas that are developed are such, however, that the way in which they are developed, as it were, prevents humanity from searching and striving for other spheres of reality than those that can at best be reached with natural science. I have quoted things people said some time ago, but if we were to quote today’s speakers we would find that they are entirely in the same spirit.

It is reasonable to quote Benedikt, who is a criminal anthropologist, for although he wants to take the purely scientific point of view also in looking at social life, he still has so much purely naive conceptual material in him which is in accord with reality that much of what he says—really going against his own theoretical theses—does truly extend into the reality of the world. On the whole, however, one may say that this tendency or inclination to develop a whole philosophy based on natural-scientific concepts, which are excellent in their own field, has gradually produced a quite specific philosophy, and one might almost get oneself a bad name by actually putting the philosophy that has developed out of this tendency into words. Today someone may do excellent work in his field, and if he then establishes a philosophy he extends knowledge which in its own field is indeed excellent to the whole world, and above all also to areas of which he in fact knows nothing. We can certainly say therefore that we have an excellent science today and its contents relate to things which people understand thoroughly. But then there are also philosophies which generally speaking are about things people do not understand at all!

This is certainly not without significance when it comes to the sphere of social life. Here man himself is the reality factor. Human beings are in these social spheres and anything they do is indeed such that anything that lives in their philosophy of life does enter into their impulses and into the social structures and the way in which people live together. This is why the kind of things were created which I referred to briefly at the beginning today.

In what I am saying today, I want again, as in the first three talks, base myself more on individual aspects of real life, on findings made in what I call spiritual investigation. I hope that with the aid of these I will be able to show how we should approach the fields of social studies in spiritual research.

A particular problem arises for modern people who have scientific knowledge, and whose life of ideas is based entirely on scientific training, when they approach the sphere of social life and immediately have to consider a fundamental concept, which is the concept of human freedom. This concept, which doubtless has many nuances, has in some respect become a cross that has to be borne in modern thinking about the world. For on the one hand it is extraordinarily difficult to understand the social structure of today without having clarity with regard to the concept of freedom. On the other hand, however, someone who is thinking in the natural scientific way, in the thinking habits of our time, will hardly know what to do with the concept of freedom. We know that disputes concerning this concept go back a long way and that there have always been two factions, though the nuance has varied—the ‘determinists’ who assumed that all human actions are in a way predetermined, in a more naturalistic or some other way, so that a person only does things under an unknown yet existing compulsion or causality; then there were the ‘indeterminists’ who denied this and concentrated more on subjective reality, that is, on what human beings experience inwardly as they develop their conscious awareness, and who maintained that genuinely free human actions were independent of such fixed predetermination which would exclude the concept of freedom.

Considering the way in which natural science has developed so far it is truly impossible to make something of the concept of freedom in that science. Anyone who makes a training in natural science the basis for establishing a sociology will be forced, in many respects, to take the wrong view of that concept of freedom and produce a structure for life that takes no account of the concept of freedom, ascribing everything to particular causes that lie either outside or inside the human being. In some respects such an approach is easy, for it allows one in a way to determine the social structure from the beginning. It is easier to reckon with human actions if they are predetermined than if one must expect a spirit of freedom in the human being to play a role.

It would be wrong to present as a concept of freedom some kind of visionary concepts, vague mystical ideas that would tend to be more or less the opposite of what modern natural science has to offer. We have to realize that a science of the spirit is only justifiable if it does not go against the true meaning of progress in natural science. Because of this, I must again start today by relating the fundamental concept in developing social life, which is the concept of freedom, to such natural scientific ideas as can be gained with the help of the science of the spirit.

According to the customary natural scientific concepts, human beings depend for their actions on the peculiarities of their organization. These are themselves investigated, as I have shown the last time, by applying the law of conservation of energy like a formula to the inner life, and this leads to the concept of freedom being excluded. If it is true that human beings are only able to develop energies and powers by transforming things they have taken in, then it will, of course, be impossible for the soul to develop any energies and powers of its own—which would be the requirement if freedom were to become a reality.

In the science of the spirit it is, however, evident that it is absolutely necessary to put the whole of the knowledge gained in the natural sciences on a new basis in this particular area. Admirable factual discoveries have been made in the natural sciences, as I have also said in the preceding lectures. But concepts and ideas about nature are so narrowly defined that it is not possible to have a comprehensive view of those discoveries. In the last lecture I referred to the way in which the science of the spirit makes it possible to relate the whole sphere of the human soul and spirit to the whole sphere of the living body, and that it then emerges that we need to relate the actual life of ideas to the life of the nerves, the life of feeling to the ramifications and to anything depending on the breathing rhythm, and the life of the will to metabolism.

If, for a starting point, we take the natural scientific view of the relationship between the life of ideas in the human soul and the life of the nerves, someone familiar with modern scientific ideas will have to say: ‘Processes occur in the life of the nerves; they are the causes of parallel processes in the life of ideas.’ Since there has to be a process in the nerves—and by definition this has its causal origin in the whole organism—for every idea-forming process in the soul, the corresponding process in the mind cannot be free, seeing that the process in the nerves is apparently the result of causal conditions existing in the organism. It thus has to be subject to the same necessity as the corresponding process in the nerves.

That is still the view taken today. It will not be like this in future, seen from the natural scientific point of view! People will then look with very different eyes at certain new approaches that have already been developed in natural scientific research. It will however mean that the directions to be taken in research are indicated out of the science of the spirit, for this alone can make it possible to throw a truly comprehensive light on the findings made in natural science.

The strange thing the spiritual investigator finds is that the life of our nerves relates in a quite specific way to the corresponding rest of the organism. We have to say it is like this: In the life of the nerves the organism destroys itself in a specific way, it is not built up in it. And in the life of the nerves—if we take it as pure life in the nerves, not nutritional life in the nervous system—the first processes to be considered are not growth or development processes, but processes of involution, of destruction.

One is easily misunderstood in this area, for it is still completely new today. And in one short lecture it is difficult to bring in all the concepts that will prevent such misunderstanding. So I simply have to accept the danger of being misunderstood. What I can say is that the life of the nerves as such proceeds in a way that is completely different from all the other organic processes that serve growth, reproduction and the like. The latter mean development in the ascent. This includes the development of cells, the cell division processes we can observe in reproduction and growth processes, as something side by side with cells that are still in the life of reproduction, or at least a degree of partial reproduction. When the human organisation—it is similar for the animal organization, but this is only of minor interest to us today—extends into the life of the nerves, it partly dies off in that life of the nerves. Going into the life of the nerves, developing processes are broken down. We may thus say that even from a purely natural scientific point of view it is evident—and the life of the red blood cells runs to some degree parallel to the life of the nerves—that division processes come to a stop as they enter into nerve cells and red blood cells. This is wholly factual evidence of something which a conscious mind with vision is able to perceive: that the nerve cannot have part in anything that is in any way productive, but that the nerve inwardly brings life to a halt, so that life comes to an end where the nerve branches.

By having a nervous system, we are, as it were, bearing death in us at the organic level. To compare what is really going on in the life of the nerves with something else in the organism, I’d have to say, strange though it may sound: ‘The unconscious processes in the life of the nerves cannot be compared with the process, for example, which happens when someone has taken in food and this food is processed in the organism for constructive development. No, the actual process in the nerves—as a process in the nerves, and not a nerve nutrition process—can be compared to what happens in the organism when it breaks down its tissues because of hunger.’ It is thus a destructive and not a constructive process which extends into the nervous system.

Nothing of any kind can emerge or result directly from this nervous system. This nervous system represents a process that has been stopped, a process that shows itself in progress in the cell life of reproductive cells and growth cells. There it is progressive; in the neural organs it is stopped. In reality, therefore, the life of the nerves merely provides the basis, the soil, on which something else may spread.

The principle which spreads on top of this life of the nerves, extending over this life of the nerves, is the life of ideas—initially stimulated by the outer senses—entering into the life of the nerves. It is only if we understand that the nerves are not the reason for forming ideas but merely provide a basis by having destroyed organic life, that we understand that the principle which develops on the basis of this life of nerves is something foreign to the life of nerves itself.

The mind and soul principle developing on the basis of a life in the nerves which is destroying itself is so foreign to it that we may say: It really is just as when I walk along a road and leave my footprints behind me. Someone following those footprints should not derive the shapes he sees in my footprints from any kind of forces in the soil itself, coming, as it were, from inside the soil to produce my footprints. Every expression of inner life may be seen in the nervous system, like my footprints in the soil, yet it would be wrong to explain the life of mind and soul as something inwardly ‘arising from the nervous system’. The life in mind and soul leaves tracks in the prepared soil, a soil that has been prepared by ‘forgoing’ the possibility of the nerve continuing its own productivity, if I may put it like this in symbolic terms.

Perceptive vision also shows the life in mind and spirit which thus develops on a basis of destruction, of a dying process in the human being, to be connected with organic life, initially the life of nerves; but in such a way that this life of nerves provides only the conditions, the soil, something which has to be there to provide the basis on which it can be active in this place. Seen from the outside, the principle which is active here may seem to arise from the nervous system, to be bound to the nervous system, but this life in soul and spirit is as independent of the nervous system as a child is of his parents when he develops independent inner activity, though the parents are, of course, the soil or basis on which the child must develop. Just as we may see the parents as the cause of the child if we look at this from outside, and just as the child is wholly free in developing his individual spirit and we cannot say that when the child develops independence there is not an activity in him which is in no way connected with his parents, we have to say in exactly the same way that the principle which is coming alive and developing in terms of mind and spirit becomes independent of the soil which it needs to thrive.

I am just referring briefly here to a system of ideas that will develop further in the course of time—the science of the spirit is only in its beginnings now—by taking certain ideas from natural science to their highest extreme. Those very ideas from natural science will not lead to the exclusion of human freedom but to a way of explaining and understanding freedom actually in natural scientific terms, for they will make people observe not only constructive and progressive processes in the organism but also those that are destructive, paralysing themselves in themselves. They will show that if the element of soul and spirit is to arise, the organic principle cannot continue in a straight line of development and so produce something non-physical. No, as the non-physical, spiritual principle begins to come into existence, this organic principle must first prepare the soil by destroying itself, breaking itself down, within itself.

When the ideas of constructive development, which are the only ones to be considered nowadays, have ideas about destructive development added to them, this will bring tremendous advances in the natural scientific approach. A bridge will be built that needs to be built because natural science must not be shut out today—a bridge from nature as it is understood to the sphere of social life which still needs to be understood.

A natural science that is incomplete prevents us from developing the concepts needed for the sphere of social life; once it is completed, its inner sterling character, inner greatness, will help us to establish the right kind of sociology.

I have thus presented, albeit briefly, the fundamental concept of social life, the concept of freedom. This has been set out fully in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, published in 1894, and the inner reasons given there accord fully with what I have now shown in a more natural scientific way. This is also evident from what I have written in my book The Riddle of Man⁸¹ which appeared almost two years ago. Let us now continue our consideration of the connection between man’s life in spirit and soul and other spheres of existence.

The last time and today I referred briefly to the way in which this element of mind, spirit and soul is connected—as life of ideas with the life of the nerves, as life of feeling with life in the breathing rhythm, and as life of will with metabolic life. This only shows the connection in one aspect, however. Just as natural science will one day, when it has perfected itself in this direction, relate the threefold soul as a whole—as I have shown—to the whole bodily human organism, so will spiritual science be able to look for the connections of the human mind and soul with this spiritual principle, that is, in the other direction.

On the one hand, the life of ideas has its bodily foundation in the life of the nerves, on the other it is connected with the world of the spirit, a world to which it belongs. This world, with which the life of ideas is also connected, can only be discerned through perceptive vision. It is perceived by a mind that has reached the first level of this vision, which I have called imaginative perception, or perception in images. This is gained out of the soul itself, like the opening of an inner eye. I characterized this in my first lecture.

As the life of ideas relates to the life of nerves in the body, which is its physical foundation, so it also arises from the realm of the spirit, a purely non-physical world that is seen to be a real world when we come to observe this reality with that vision in images. This real world is not contained within the sense-perceptible world. It is, as it were, the first world that goes beyond the senses, bordering directly on our own.

Here one finds that the relationship which the human being has to the world around him, as he is aware of it in his mind, is only part of his total relationship to the world; anything we have in our conscious awareness is a segment of the reality in which we are. Below this level of awareness lies another relationship to the surrounding world, to the natural world and the world of the spirit. Even the connection between our life of ideas and the life of the nerves in the body has been pushed below the threshold of conscious awareness and can only be brought up from there with an effort if one wishes to characterize it the way I have done today. On the other hand the relationship of our life of ideas to the spiritual world which we can only perceive in images is also such that it does not enter into our ordinary conscious awareness, though it does enter into human reality.

In the human mind we have first of all everything that has been stimulated by the senses and by the rational mind which is bound to the senses; this is the usual content of the conscious mind. Below this, however, lies a sum total of processes that initially do not come to ordinary awareness, but arise as a spiritual principle, which can only be perceived in images; this plays into our soul nature just as sounds, colours, smells and so on play into the everyday life of our souls. Ordinary conscious awareness thus rises, as it were, from another sphere which itself can only be brought to conscious awareness if we are able to perceive in images. The fact that people do not know of these things does not mean that they do not exist in reality. Moving through the world we bear the content of our ordinary conscious awareness with us; we also bear with us everything that comes from the ‘imaginative’ spiritual world, as I’ll call it for the moment.

It is of tremendous importance, especially at the present time, to understand that the human being relates to the world around him in this way. A field for research—I am far from underestimating this field, I appreciate its significance—and there was every reason for it to come up at the present time, has indeed come up at the present time. It is like a powerful pointer to man’s relationship to the world around him which I have just characterized as the spiritual world of images, a relationship that is only little known so far. It is a feature of our present time that much comes to human awareness that can really only be encompassed with the means of insight given through the science of the spirit. Humanity is called upon to perceive these things today in that one’s nose is rubbed in them, to put it plainly, with life taking a course where people cannot avoid seeing them. Yet modern people still cannot overcome their reluctance to tackle this with the means for insight provided by the science of the spirit. They therefore try to use the means of ordinary natural science or concepts developed in relation to other things to approach areas which today literally cry out for investigation.

The field I am referring to is that of analytical psychology, also called psychoanalysis, which is, of course, particularly well known in this city.⁸² What makes it remarkable is that a field opens up to challenge the investigator that lies outside our ordinary conscious awareness; it must refer to something that lies below the threshold of that awareness. People are, however, trying to work with what I may call inadequate tools in this field. As they endeavour to apply these inadequate tools also in practice—only therapeutically and educationally, to begin with, perhaps, but perhaps also pastorally—we have to say that the matter has more than theoretical significance. I am, of course, not in a position to discuss the whole field of psychoanalysis. That would need many lectures.⁸³ Let me, however, refer to some of the principles, some of the real aspects in this context. Psychoanalysis is a field where investigation and social life meet in a point, as happens also in other fields of this kind which we’ll be considering today.

Above all, and as you are no doubt aware, analytical psychology essentially has to do with bringing ‘lost’ memories back to mind for therapeutic purposes. The thesis is that the psyche contains certain elements that do not come to conscious awareness. It is then widely assumed that these memories have gone down into the unconscious or the like, and efforts are made to go and cast light below the threshold of consciousness by using the ordinary memory concept and enter into regions not illuminated by our ordinary consciousness.

Now I did already mention in these lectures that the science of the spirit has the task of illuminating the human memory process in a very major way. Again it will not be possible, of course, to avoid all the misunderstandings that can arise with such a brief review of the subject. I have heard it said, for example—several times, not just once—that psychoanalysis was really on the same road as the science of the spirit which I represent; it was only that psychoanalysts took some things in a symbolic way, whilst I took things which those enlightened psychoanalysts considered to be symbolic to be realities. That is a grotesque misapprehension, and you cannot characterize the relationship of psychoanalysis to the science of the spirit in a worse way than by saying that.

To understand this we need to take another look at the nature of the memory process. Let me emphasize once again that the process of forming ideas, the activity of doing so, is something which in the inner life of man essentially relates only to the present. An idea as such never goes down to some unconscious level of the mind, just as a mirror image seen when passing a mirror will not settle down somewhere so that it may come up again the next time you pass the mirror. The coming up of an idea is a phenomenon that begins and ends in the present moment. And anyone thinking that memory consists in there ‘having been’ an idea which ‘comes up’ again, may well be an excellent Herbartian psychologist, or a psychologist in some other direction, but is not basing himself on a genuinely observed fact.

What we have here is something entirely different. The world in which we live is filled not only with the sensory perceptions that enter into our present life of ideas through eye or ear. This whole world—and that of course also means the natural world—is based on a world that has to be perceived in images, a world which initially does not come to conscious awareness. The contents of this world of images act parallel to my momentary life of ideas: as I form an idea, letting these momentary processes take their course in me, another process runs parallel to them, with a current of unconscious life moving through my soul. This parallel process causes inner tracks to be left—I could characterize these in all detail, but have to limit myself to brief indications here—and these are observed when memory arises later.

When memory arises, therefore, it is not a matter of an old idea, which might have been stored somewhere, being brought back again. Instead we look inwards at tracks left in a parallel process. Memory is a process of perception directed inwards.

The human soul is capable of many things at an unconscious level which it is not able to do consciously in ordinary life. To compare the process that occurs when a ‘forgotten’ event ‘comes back to mind’, doing so in very general terms—let me emphasize this: in very general terms—with something else, I would say that it is quite similar to sensory perception using the outer senses. The difference is that with the latter I recreate my perceptions in temporary images that only exist for the moment. Anything I recreate from memory is a specific form of inner perception. Within myself, I perceive the residue of the parallel process; this has remained stationary. As a crude analogy, recall is a process in which the soul reads at a later time something that had gone parallel to the forming of an idea. The soul has this ability, at an unconscious level, to read in itself what had been developing when I formed an idea. I did not know this at the time, for the idea blocked it out. Now it is recalled. Instead of having a sensory perception of something on the outside, I perceive my own inner process. That is the real situation.

I am fully aware that a fanatical psychoanalyst—none of them see themselves as fanatical, of course, and I know this, too—will say that he has no problem in agreeing to this explanation of memory. But in fact he’ll never do so when considering these things in practice. Anyone who knows the literature will know that it is never done and that this is in fact the source of countless errors. For people do not know that it is not a matter of past ideas that linger somewhere in the unconscious, but concerns a process that can only be understood if we understand the way in which an imaginative world plays into our world in a process that runs parallel to the life of forming ideas.

The first significant errors arise because a wrongly understood memory process forms the theoretical basis and is applied in practice in analytical psychology. When we penetrate to the real process of remembering, there can be no question of looking for elements in the soul which psychoanalysts consider to be pathological in memories that linger somewhere. It is a matter of perceiving how the patient relates to a real, objective world of non-physical processes, which he is, however, adopting in an abnormal way. This makes a huge difference, something which we must of course think through in every possible aspect.

Psychoanalysts who apply their natural scientific training one-sidedly in an important sphere of real life also fall into another kind of error. They use dream images for psychological diagnosis in a way that cannot be justified in the face of genuine observation. We need genuine observation and concepts that relate to reality so that we may enter into this strange, mysterious world of dreams in the right way. This is only done if we know that human beings have their roots not only in the environment in which they live with their ordinary conscious minds but—even in the life of ideas, as we have seen, and later we’ll also see some other things—in a world of spirit. Our ordinary conscious awareness comes to an end when we sleep, but that connection with the world that remains at a subconscious level does not come to an end.

There is a process—I cannot characterize it in detail, time being short—in which the special conditions pertaining in sleep cause the things we live through in connection with our spiritual environment to be clothed in symbolic dream images. The content of those dream images is quite immaterial. The same process—the relationship of the human being to his spiritual surroundings—may appear as a particular sequence of symbolic images for one individual and as a different one for another. Anyone with the necessary knowledge in this field knows that typical unconscious processes in the psyche assume the garb of widely differing reminiscences of life in all kinds of different people, and that the content of the dream does not matter. You only come to realize what lies behind this if you train yourself to ignore the content of the dream completely and consider instead what I’d call the inner dynamic of the dream. It is a question of whether a foundation is first laid with a particular dream image, then tension is created and then an evolution, or whether the sequence is different, starting with tension which is then followed by resolution.

It needs a great deal of preparation before one can consider the evolution of a dream, the whole drama of it, wholly leaving aside the content of the images. To understand dreams one must be able to do something that would be like seeing a play and taking an interest in the scenes only in so far as one perceives the writer behind it and the ups and downs of his inner experience. We must stop wanting to grasp dreams by abstract interpretation of their symbolism. We need to be able to enter into the inner drama of the dream, the inner context, quite apart from the symbolism, the content of the images. Only then will we realize how the soul relates to its spiritual surroundings. These cannot be seen in the dream images which someone who does not have vision in images uses for reality under the abnormal conditions of sleep, but only through awareness in images. The drama that lies beyond the dream images can only be understood if we have imaginative awareness.

As you are probably aware, research in analytical psychology also extends—and in a way this is most praiseworthy—to mythology. Many interesting things have been discovered, and other things that are enough to make your hair stand on end. I won’t go into detail, but it is important to see that individual scientists still work in such a way today that they one-sidedly develop a limited area, taking no account of scientific discoveries that have already been made, though these can often throw much more light on the matter than one is able to do oneself.

An old friend of mine who died quite some time ago wrote a very good book on mythology. He was Ludwig Laistner.⁸⁴ After going right round the world, as it were, with regard to the origin of myths, he showed in a very interesting way that if you want to understand myths it is not at all important to consider the content, that is, what they tell—doing so in one way in one place and in a different way in another—or the actual images of those myths; no, in that case, too, it is important to let the dramatic events come to light that come to expression in the different mythological images. Laistner also considered the connection between mythological images and the dream world, doing so in a way that was still elementary but nevertheless correct. His studies therefore provided an excellent basis for connecting research into dreams with the investigation of myths. If in mythology, too, people were aware that it is merely images that come across into dream consciousness from the creative sphere of myths, images which arbitrarily, I would say, represent the actual process, that would be a much more intelligent way of working. As it is, people working in analytical psychology—and I do fully recognize their importance and that they work with the best and truly honest good will—attempt things that must be askew and one-sided because their means are inadequate.

There is very little inclination to go really deeply into things, and to get help from spiritual life to understand reality in terms that relate to reality. More recent research in psychoanalysis did, apart from the ordinary concept of memory and the kind of dreams that have their origin in individual life, also involve taking account of a ‘super-individual unconscious’,⁸⁵ as it is called. At this point, however, a research method pursued with such inadequate means has led to a most peculiar result. There is a feeling—and we have to be thankful that such a feeling at least exists—that this inner life of the human psyche is connected with a life of the spirit that lies outside it; however, there is nothing one can do to perceive this connection in real terms. I honestly don’t want to find fault with these scientists, and I greatly respect their courage, for in a present world which is so full of prejudice it needs real courage to speak of such things; but it has to be pointed out—especially because these things also enter into practical considerations—that there is a way of overcoming such one-sidedness.

Jung, a scientist of great merit who lives here in Zurich, has taken refuge, as it were, in trans-individual, super-individual unconscious spirit and soul contents. According to him the human soul relates not only to memories which the individual has somehow stored or the like, but also to things that lie outside its individual nature. An excellent, bold idea—to relate this life in the human psyche not only by the means of the body but also in itself to soul qualities in the outside world; it certainly merit's recognition. The same man does, however, ascribe what happens in the soul in this way to a kind of memory again, even if it is super-individual. You cannot get away from the concept of mneme, or memory, though we can’t really speak of memory any longer when we go beyond the individual element. Jung puts it like this: you come to see that ‘archetypal images' live in the soul, images of the myths evolved among the ancient Greeks—archetypes, to use Jacob Burckhardt’s term. Jung says, significantly, that everything humanity and not only the individual person has gone through may be active in the soul; and as we do not know of this in ordinary conscious awareness, this rages and rises up unconsciously against the conscious mind, and you get the strange phenomena that show themselves today as hysterical and other conditions. Everything humanity has ever known of the divine and also of devilish things rises up again, Jung says in his latest book; people know nothing about it, but it is active in them.

Now it is highly interesting to look at an investigation done with inadequate means, taking a characteristic instance. This scientist has come to say, in an extraordinarily significant way that when people do not consciously establish a connection with a divine world in their souls, this connection is created in their subconscious, even though they know nothing about it. The gods live in the subconscious, below the threshold of conscious awareness. And a content of which they know nothing in their conscious minds may come to expression in that they ‘project’ it, as the term goes, on to their physician or another person. Thus a memory of some devilry may be active in the subconscious but not come to conscious awareness; it rages inside, however; the individual must rid himself of it; he transfers it to some other person. The other person is made into a devil; this may be the physician, or, if he does not manage to do this, the individual does it to himself.

From this point of view it is most interesting to see how a scientist comes to his conclusions about these things. Let us look at one of the latest books on psychoanalysis, The Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Gustav Jung.⁸⁶ He writes that the idea of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational kind. Jung deserves great merit for acknowledging this, for it means that for once recognition is given to the nature of the human subconscious as being such that people establish connections with a divine world in their subconscious. The author then goes on to say that this idea of God has absolutely nothing to do with the question as to the existence of God. This last question, he says, is one of the most stupid questions anyone may ask.

We are not concerned with the scientist’s own view of the idea of God. He may be a very devout person. What concerns us here is what lives in the scientist’s own subconscious life of ideas, if I may use that term. Inadequate means of research mean no less than that one says to oneself: The human soul has to establish relationships to the gods below the threshold of consciousness; but it has to make these relationships such that they have nothing to do with the existence of God. It means that the soul must of necessity content itself with a purely illusory relationship; yet this is eminently essential to it, for without this it will be sick. This is of tremendous import, something we should not underestimate! I have merely indicated how inadequate the means are with which people are working in a quite extensive field.

I’ll now continue my description of the human being and the way he needs to relate to his social environment. The life of feelings—not now the life of ideas, but the life of feelings—has its physical counterpart in the breathing rhythm, as I said, and on the other hand also relates to spiritual contents. The element in the spirit which corresponds to the life of feelings the way the life of the breathing rhythm does at the physical level, can only be penetrated, being a spiritual content, a content of spiritual entities, spiritual powers, with an ‘inspired’ mind, as I have called it in these lectures.

This inspired mind opens up not only the spiritual content that fills our existence from birth, or let us say conception, until death, one also comes to see things that go across birth and death and have to do with our life between death and rebirth, that is, of a spirit that is alive even when the human being no longer has this physical body.

Whereas the human being gains a basis for this physical body through physical heredity, the principle which is born out of the inspired world, creates its physical expression in the breathing rhythm. But into this life of feeling—whereas initially only elements coming between birth and death play into the life of ideas which the human being knows in his ordinary conscious awareness—enters everything by way of powers and impulses that has been active during the time from the last death to the present birth. This will be active again between this death and a new birth. The core of the human being’s eternal reality plays into this life of feeling.

The third thing to be noted is that the human being’s life of will relates on the one hand really to the lowest functions in the human organism, to metabolism, something which in the widest sense comes to expression in hunger and thirst. On the other hand it relates in the spirit to the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world, which I have mentioned on several occasions in these lectures. We thus do indeed have a complete reversal of the situation.

Initially the life of ideas is subconsciously in touch with the world of images, and with the life of nerves in its other aspect. In a world that projects beyond our personal life in a body as the core of our reality, the life of feeling goes towards the spiritual side. And the life of will, which comes to physical expression whenever there is a will impulse in some metabolic process, and therefore in the lowest processes in the organism, is on the spiritual side connected with the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world.

We have to enter into this region if we want to investigate ‘repeated lives on earth’, as they are called. Impulses that go from one life on earth to another cannot be grasped in images, let alone in our ordinary conscious awareness, and not even with inspired consciousness. This needs intuitive awareness. Impulses from earlier lives on earth enter into our life. Impulses from this life will enter into later lives on earth. The only possible character our investigations can have at this point is one of having developed a sense for real intuitions, not the wishy-washy kind of which we speak in ordinary life.

The complete conscious mind thus perceives the complete human being as he lives in soul and spirit in three ways—in ideas, feelings and will impulses, all of which rise up and go down again. For he has his basis in three ways in a living physical body and takes his origin in the world of the spirit. The science of the spirit takes us to the eternal in man not in any speculative or hypothetical way, but by showing how the conscious mind must develop if it is to behold the eternal core of the human being who develops in successive lives on earth.

This complete human being—not an abstract human being presented in natural science or by naturalists in an empty, abstract set of ideas that do not hold the whole of reality—this complete human being is part of a social life. Our ordinary conscious mind is able to understand the natural world outside in so far as it is not organic but something in the lifeless, mechanical sphere—in modern science this is often the only thing considered to have validity and be worth considering. This level of the mind is not able, however, to find concepts that are wholly viable when it comes to social life if they have evolved in the pattern used in everyday thinking. The secret of social life is that it does not develop according to the concepts we have in our ordinary thinking but does so outside the sphere of the conscious mind, in impulses that can only be grasped with the higher levels of conscious awareness of which I have spoken.

This insight can throw light on many things which in our present social life must inevitably end in absurdity because the concepts people want to apply to it do not relate to reality. So there we are today, with concepts gained from an education based on natural scientific ideas, and we want to be creative in social life. But this social life needs additional concepts that differ from those we have in our ordinary thinking—just as the subconscious life of the psyche presenting in psychoanalysis also calls for additional concepts.

In the first place three areas in social communities need to have light thrown on them through anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. I’ll only be able to give a rough outline, for the science of the spirit is still in its beginnings and many things still need to be investigated. I will thus merely characterize the general nature of the strands we have to see running from spiritual scientific insights to insight into social life.

Three spheres of social life may be seen. The first sphere where what I have been characterizing just now applies, is the sphere of economics. We know that economic laws live in our social structure, and that we need to know these laws. Anyone involved in legislation or government and anyone who runs any kind of firm which is after all part of the social structure in life as a whole must work with the laws of economics.

The economic structure, as it exists in real terms, cannot be grasped if we apply only the concepts gained in the natural scientific way of thinking, concepts that govern practically the whole of people’s thinking today. The impulses that are active in economic life are entirely different from those in the natural world, and that includes human nature. In basic human nature, our view rests on questions of need, for example. Issues concerning the meeting of needs are the basis of our external economic order. To gain genuine insight into a social community with its economic structure I need to perceive how depending on the geographical and other conditions the means are available to meet human needs. For the individual we start from the question of needs, but to consider the economy we must start from the opposite side. Then we do not consider what people need but what is available to people in a given area as community life develops. This is just a brief indication. Many things would need to be said if we wanted to consider the economic structure in its entirety. Yet the economic structure of a country or community, which is really an organism, cannot be dealt with by using concepts taken from ordinary natural science.

That may lead to some very strange things! Here it is reasonable to say something in particular because I am truly not just referring to it in the light of current events. People might object that I have been influenced by these current events, but that is not the case. What I am going to say now is something I spoke of in a course of lectures I gave in Helsingfors before the present war started.⁸⁷ My reasons for referring to it now have therefore nothing at all to do with the war. I need to say this in advance, so that there shall be no misunderstanding.

At that time in Helsingfors—that is, before the war—I showed how we can go astray if we want to grasp the social structure of human communities wholly with natural scientific ideas. For my example I chose someone who falls into this error to the greatest degree—Woodrow Wilson.⁸⁸ I referred to the strange way in which Woodrow Wilson—academic thinking had in this case advanced to statesmanship—said that if one considers the days of Newtonism, when a more mechanical view was taken of the whole world, one can see that the mechanical ideas which Newton and others had made current had also entered into people’s ideas of the state, their ideas of social life. It is wrong, however, to consider social life in such a narrow way, said Woodrow Wilson; we have to do it differently today and apply Darwinian ideas to social life. He was thus doing the same thing, only with the ideas that are now current in natural science.

Yet Darwinian ideas are of as little use in understanding social structures as were Newtonian ones. As we have heard, not all Darwinian ideas are actually applicable in organic life. This remained at a subconscious level for Wilson, however, and he did not realize that he was making the very mistake which he had identified and censured just before.

Here we have an outstanding example of people unable to realize that they are working with inadequate tools that will not cope with reality when they try to master and understand social life today. Such a situation, where the tools are inadequate even as people make world history, is something we come across wherever we go. And if people were able to see through what is happening here, they would be able to see deeply into the deeper causes of the phrase mongering that goes on at present, reasons that are generally not apparent to the world today.

Economic structures cannot be understood if we use natural scientific concepts—whether gained from Darwinism or Newtonism—for these only apply to the facts of nature. Instead, we must move on to other concepts.

I can only characterize these other concepts by saying that they must rest on if not perhaps a clear idea, then at least a feeling of entering wholly into the social structure, so that ideas come up that belong to life in images. It needs the help of image-based ideas to get a picture of a real social structure that exists in one place or another. Otherwise we only get abstractions of no value that have no substance to them.

We no longer create myths today. But the power to create myths was an impulse in the human soul that went beyond everyday reality. Today, people must take the same inner impulse which our forebears used to create myths; they created, if I may put it like this, images of a spiritual reality out of powers of imagination that related to that reality; we must have ideas in images of economic systems. We cannot create myths, but need to be able to see the geographical and other situations of the terrain together with the given character of people, the needs of people, in such a way that they are seen together with the same power that was formerly used to create myths, a power that is alive and active in the spiritual sphere as the power to form images and which is also reflected in the economic structure.

A second sphere in social life is the moral structure and the moral impulse that lives in a totality. Again we go down into all kinds of unconscious spheres to investigate the impulses revealed in human moral aspirations—moral in the widest possible sense. Anyone wishing to intervene in this, be it as a statesman, be it as a parliamentarian, or also as the head of some firm who wants to take a leading role, will only understand the structure if he is able to master it with concepts that have at least a basis in insights gained through inspiration.

This is even more necessary today than people tend to think; intervening in this social aspect in so far as moral impulses are involved. These moral impulses need to be studied truthfully and in real terms, just as the impulses of organic life cannot be invented but have to be studied by considering the organism itself. If people were to think up concepts about lion nature, cat nature, or hedgehog nature, if you will, the way they think up concepts in thinking up Marxism today, or other socialist theories, and failed to study nature in reality, and if they were to construct purely a-priori concepts of animal nature, they would arrive at strange theories about the animal organization.

The important point is that the social organism also has to be studied in absolutely real terms where moral principles in the widest sense are involved. The forces of need that human beings bring into play—they, too, are moral powers in the wider sense—can only be mastered if we investigate the real social organism on the basis of ideas that have their roots in the inspired world, even if these ideas are only dimly apparent. Today we are still a long way away from such a way of thinking!

In the science of the spirit one comes to study the nature of the impulses that live among the people in Central Europe, Western Europe or Eastern Europe in real terms and in detail. One comes to see in very real terms how the different inner impulses arising from the social organism are just as real and well-founded as the impulses that arise from the physical organism. One comes to see that the way nations live together is also connected with these impulses that can be studied from deep down. In the science of the spirit one finds that the structure of the soul differs greatly between the West and the East of Europe, and one comes to know that such a structure must become part of the whole of European life. Let me remind you that I have been talking about the different soul structures that underlie European social life for decades, speaking out of purely spiritual scientific ideas.⁸⁹ The discoveries made in the science of the spirit are confirmed by people with empirical knowledge who know the reality of life. Look in yesterday’s and today’s issues of the Nene Zürcher Zeitung [major Swiss paper] for what is said there about the soul of the Russian people and Russian ideals, taking a Dostoevskyan view.⁹⁰ There you have complete proof—I can only refer you to this, time being too short for a detailed description—in observations made in an outer way of a result arising very evidently from something that has been put forward for years in the science of the spirit.

You then come to study social impulses and energies in real life. As it is impossible to master life with concepts far removed from reality, this life gets on top of people. They no longer know how to encompass life with concepts as abstract as those used in the sphere of natural science. These prove inadequate in the social sphere. This life, which is surging and billowing deeper down and has not been grasped in conscious awareness, has therefore brought about the catastrophic events we are now going through in such a terrible way.

A third sphere we meet in social life is the one we call the life of rights. Essentially the social structure of any body is made up of economic life, moral life and the life of rights. All these terms must be taken in the spiritual sense, however. Economic life can only be studied in a real sense if we think in images; moral life and its true content can only be studied with the help of inspired ideas; the life of rights can only be understood with the help of intuitive ideas, and these, too, must be gained from full and absolute reality.

We can thus see how the insights sought into nonphysical aspects with the science of the spirit apply to different spheres of social life. In the field of education, too, which essentially is part of the social sphere, fruitful concepts will only arise if we are able to develop image-based concepts so that we may see life which is as yet unformed in images that arise in us—not in the abstract terms that are so common in education today but on the basis of genuine vision in images—and also guide it on that basis.

The life of rights, concepts in the sphere of rights—just think how much has been written and said about this in recent times. Basically, however, people have no really clear idea of even the simplest concepts in the sphere of rights. Here, too, we merely need to consider the efforts of people who want to work entirely out of a training in the natural sciences, Fritz Mauthner, for instance, author of the highly interesting dictionary of philosophy.⁹¹ Read the entry on law, penal law or, in short, everything connected with this, and you’ll see that he dissolves all known ideas and concepts, and also existing institutions, showing that there is no possibility whatsoever, nor ability, to put anything in their place. It will only be possible to put something in their place if people look for what they are seeking in the structure of rights in the world that is the very foundation of social structures, a world open only to intuitive perception.

Here in Zurich I am able to refer to a work in which the author, Dr Roman Boos, has made a start with looking at the sphere of rights in this way.⁹² An excellent beginning has been made in basing real issues in the sphere of rights on the situations pertaining to the structure of rights and the social structure and arriving at realistic ideas concerning individual details in the sphere of rights. Study such a work and you will see what is meant when we demand that social life as a life of rights should be studied in a realistic and not an abstract way, developing our ideas about it in real terms, encompassing it with concepts that relate to reality. It is of course harder to do than if we construct utopian programmes and utopian government structures. For it means that the whole human being has to be considered and one must truly have a sense of what is real.

I have made the concept of freedom the fundamental one in order to show that although we are looking for laws pertaining to the world of the spirit, the concept of freedom is wholly valid in the science of the spirit. It will not be easy, however, to study these things in real terms. For we then come above all to realize the complexity of reality, which cannot be encompassed in one-sided concepts that are like stakes put in the ground here or there. One realizes that as soon as we go beyond the individual person we must encompass this reality in concepts that are like the concepts used in the science of the spirit which I have described in these lectures.

Let me give you a powerful example. People like to live with biased ideas, concepts gained in their habitual way of thinking. When the first railway was built in Central Europe, a body of medical men—learned people, therefore—was also consulted. This has been documented, though it may sound like a children’s tale. The doctors found that no railway should be built, since it would cause damage to people’s nervous systems. And if people insisted after all on having railways, one should at least put high board fences on either side of the railway lines so that people would not get concussion when a train went past.⁹³ This expert opinion from the first half of the 19th century was based on the habitual way of thinking at that time. Today we may find it easy to laugh about such a biased opinion; for those learned gentlemen were, of course, wrong. Developments have overtaken them. Progress will overtake many things which ‘esteemed gentlemen’ consider to be right.

There is, however, another question, strange though it may seem. Were those learned gentlemen simply wrong? It only seems so. They were certainly wrong in one respect, but they were not simply wrong. Anyone who has a feeling for the more subtle things in the development of human nature will know that the development of railways does in a strange way relate to the development of some phenomena of nervousness which people suffer at present. Such a person will know that whilst it may not be as radical as those learned gentlemen put it, the trend of their opinion was partly right. Anyone who truly has a feeling for the differentiated nature of life, for the difference between our life today and life at the turn of the 18th to 19th century will know that railways did cause nervousness, so that the learned doctors were right in some respect.

The idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which is still applicable to some natural event or some natural human phenomenon, does not apply when it comes to the social structure. Here it is necessary for a person to develop a faculty for more comprehensive ideas by training his inner abilities in a wholly different way. Those ideas need to encompass a social life that goes far beyond anything which one-sidedly abstract ideas taken from natural science—and they have to be abstract—are able to encompass.

Time being short, I have of course only been able to give brief indications that the sphere of social science, of economics, of social morality in the widest sense, law and everything connected with it, will only be mastered when people overcome the laziness which is such an obstacle today. For essentially it is laziness and a fear of genuine ways that lead to insight which prevent people from looking at the world in the light of spiritual science.

In spite of being permitted to give a course of four lectures, I have of course only been able to refer briefly to some things. I am fully aware that I could only give some initial ideas. It also was merely my intention to make the connection to the individual sciences known today in form of initial ideas. I know that many objections can be raised, and am thoroughly familiar with the objections that may be raised. Anyone who bases himself on the science of the spirit must always raise all possible objections for himself at every step, for it is only by measuring his insights against the objections that one truly develops from the depths of the soul the potential vision in the spirit that can cope with reality.

Yet though I am aware how imperfect the ideas I have presented have been—it would need many weeks to give all the details which I was able merely to refer to briefly as results—perhaps I may think after all that I have given some idea in at least one direction, and that is that spiritual science has nothing to do with stirring things up because one has some abstract ideal or other. It is a field of research which the progress of human evolution actually demands at this time. Someone who is working in this field of investigation and truly understands its impulses will know that it is exactly the areas that are demanded in the present time—like the field of psychoanalysis of which I spoke—which show, if truly penetrated, that they can in fact only come fully into their own if illuminated by what we are here calling spiritual science with an anthroposophical orientation. I wanted to show that this is not something dependent on sudden whims or vague mysticism but is pursued in all seriousness by people who are serious investigators, at least in their intentions. I therefore presented a number instances to show that current scientific thinking can gain a great deal from the science of the spirit which we have today.

I do not believe this science of the spirit to be something completely new. We need go back no further than Goethe to find the elementary beginnings in his theory of metamorphosis. These merely need to be developed further in the science of the spirit—though not with abstract, logical scientific hypotheses. They need to be developed in a way that is full of life.

As I myself have been working with the further development of the Goethean approach for more than 30 years, I privately like to refer to the approach called spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation as Goethe’s approach taken further. If it were entirely my own choice, I’d like to call the building in Dornach which is dedicated to this approach a Goetheanum,⁹⁴ to indicate that this spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation is not something new suddenly emerging into the light of day as something arbitrarily developed from a single case but something which the spirit of our age is calling for and also the spirit of human evolution as a whole.

It is my belief that people who have gone along with the spirit in human evolution have in their best endeavours at all times pointed to the principle which must today show itself as the fruits and flowers of scientific endeavour so that genuine, serious insight into the life of the spirit may be established. This must be done with the same seriousness and integrity which has also be brought to the development of natural science in recent centuries and especially in more recent times, a science which those working in the science of the spirit do not reject or denigrate.

My aim in giving these lectures has not been to fight other sciences or go against them in any way, but to show—as I said in my introduction—that I appreciate them. I believe they are great not only in what they are today but also in what may still develop. In my view it shows greater appreciation of natural scientific and other modern ways of thinking if one does not merely stay at the point where one is, but believes that if we enter wholly into everything that is good in the different fields of science, this will not only permit the logical development of some philosophy or other which then does not take us further than what already exists in its basic premises, but will be able to bring forth something that is alive. Spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation wants to be something which thus has life and is not merely based on logical conclusions.

Questions and answers

From the question and answer session⁹⁵ which followed the lecture given in Zurich on 14 November 1917

Question. How does the lecturer explain the process of forgetting?

Well, this is something that can be dealt with briefly. The process of forgetting essentially is due to the fact that the process I referred to as running parallel to the forming of ideas and on which memory depends has a phase of ascent and one of descent. To be more easily understood I might mention that a process which is not the same, but exemplifies the process we are considering, was something Goethe called the ‘fading away of sensory perceptions’. This fading away of sensory perceptions—when a sensory perception has come to an end, the effect of it is still there but fading—is not the process on which forgetting is based, but it helps to clarify the situation. It is exemplary, as it were, of the whole process which occurs there. Let me emphasize that I see this as a process which is mental and physical and not physiological, though it does extend into the physiological aspect. You will find more details about this in my books. But this process, too, has a phase when the effect dies down, and that is the basis of forgetting. The ascending phase is the basis of remembering, and the descending phase of forgetting. The process of forgetting is not all that surprising, I would say, if one takes the view of remembering which I have been presenting.

Question. What does it mean if someone never dreams, or is never aware of his dreams? How should we consider this phenomenon in psychological and anthroposophical terms respectively, that is, how does such a person differ from others in mind and spirit?

This is quite a problematical issue. It is easy for people to say that they never dream, but it is not really the case. What we have here is a certain weakness relating to the subconscious processes that give rise to dreaming. This weakness means a person is unable to bring up from the subconscious what is meant to be read from this subconscious, as I put it metaphorically. Everyone dreams. But just as there are other weaknesses, so some people are in a condition where it is impossible to bring their dreams up to conscious awareness. This weakness should not, however, be regarded the way we may regard an organic weakness, say. It can easily arise if the mind is outstanding in some other area. Thus we are told that Lessing never dreamt. In his case this would have been due to the fact that his was an eminently critical mind. By concentrating his powers as strongly as we know him to have done, thus using them in one aspect of his inner nature, Lessing weakened them in another area. We therefore should not see this weakness as something really bad; it may have to do with strengths in other areas.

To interpret such a thing ‘psychologically’ and ‘anthroposophically’ is, of course, one and the same thing for a spiritual scientist. It cannot even be said that someone with a certain weakness in bringing dreams to mind would also have a weakness, for example, relating to processes that are part of imaginative perception. This need not be the case at all. Someone may not have much of a gift for what is ordinarily called dreaming, and yet develop powers of imaginative perception and so on by using the methods I have given in my books, especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. It may be the case that when he now uses his powers specifically for imaginative perception of the world, in full conscious awareness, to look into the world of the spirit—we might say clairvoyant insight if the term can be used without prejudice—this may actually suppress ordinary dreaming, though the reverse may also be the case.

I know a great number of people who use the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds in their souls and experience a transformation in the life of dreams, which is also described in the book. Ordinary dream life is vague in its contents. It changes strangely under the influence of awakening imaginative perception.

The inability to bring dreams to mind thus points to nothing more than a partial weakness in someone’s nature, and this should be regarded in the same way as when someone has strong muscles in another sphere, and someone else’s muscles are weaker. It is something that lies entirely in the nuances of the way in which people are constituted.

• 80. Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920). Zur Psychophysik der Moral mid des Rechts. Zwei Vortraege gehalten in der 47. und 48. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher. Wien 1875.
• 81. See note 3.
• 82. See note 79.
• 83. Rudolf Steiner had given two lectures on anthroposophy and psychoanalysis in Dornach on 10 and 11 November 1917: Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology’ (from GA 178), tr. M. Laird-Brown; Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1990.
• 84. Laistner, Ludwig (1845–1896). Das Raetsel der Sphinx, Grundzüge einer Mythengeschichte, Berlin 1889. See the Rudolf Steiner’s story of his life (GA 28, various translations), chapter 15.
• 85. See Jung, C. G., Psychology of the Unconscious Chapter 5.
• 86. Ibid.
• 87. The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita (GA 146). about Wilson in the 5th lecture, on 1 June 1913.
• 88. Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow (1856–1924), 28th President of the USA 1913-1921. In The New Freedom, in a chapter on the meaning of progress, he wrote that a government was not a machine but a living entity. It was subject not to the theory of the universe but to that of organic life. It was elucidated by Darwin and not Newton. He went on to say that live political constitutions had to be Darwinian in structure and in the way they were used.
• 89. See e.g. Steiner R. The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls (GA 121); tr. A. H. Parker; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.
• 90. This was a review of a volume of Dostoevsky’s political writings which had been published by Piper & Co. in Munich in 1917. It appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 13 November (No. 2134) and 14 November 1917 (No. 2141). The review presents Dostoevsky as someone who took the Slavophile movement to its perfection in Russia, decisively demanding that people ‘turn away from St Petersburg’ and that Russian culture should again have its focus in ‘Moscow’—turning away from Western decadent intellectual thinking and concentrating once more on the thinking of the Russian ‘people’ ...
• 91. Wörterbuch der Philosophy, 1. Bd., München & Leipzig 1910.
• 92. Boos, Roman (1889–1952), social scientist. Active representative of anthroposophy and the threefold commonwealth impulse. His treatise on a labour contract was published by Duncker und Humblot in Munich and Leipzig in 1910.
• 93. The expert opinion of the Royal Bavarian College of Medicine has not survived; its original existence is therefore disputed by some. Reference to it is however made in Hagen, Rudolf, Die erste deutsche Eisenbahn, 1885, p. 45, and in Kemmerich, Max, Kultur- Kuriosa, Munich 1909, p. 282 & 295. Kemmerich was unable to give an ‘authentic source’, but spoke of a ‘sufficiently well-known fact’.
• 94. In a public lecture which Rudolf Steiner gave in Basle on 18 October 1917, he said for the first time that he would like to call the ‘St John’s Building’ in Dornach the ‘Goetheanum’. ‘... Most of all—providing it is not misunderstood—I would like to call the world view which thus arises in a scientific way after the sources from which it has arisen for myself, calling it Goetheanism. In the same way I would greatly prefer to call the building out there in Domach, which is dedicated to this world view, the ‘Goetheanum’, providing this does not lead to misunderstanding upon misunderstanding.’ Published in German in Freiheit—Unsterblichkeit—Soziales Leben (GA 72).
• 95. Some of the questions did not relate directly to the subject and have therefore been omitted.