The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Esteemed attendees! The last few years have revealed the extent of feelings of hatred and antipathy that have been able to take hold of the souls of the peoples of the earth. No one can close themselves off from the realization of what is, after all, a truth: that on the path of this hatred and this antipathy, life on earth will not be able to flourish and progress. And so, among the many different points of view that I have already had the opportunity to present to you here, it may well be permissible to speak from the standpoint of spiritual-scientific knowledge about what, according to this knowledge, can happen to humanity, or at least to all civilized humanity. Of course, knowledge is not feeling. But spiritual-scientific knowledge — and this has also been said here before — is more closely connected with the whole human being, with the innermost part of the human being, than external, abstract truths, as external sensory truths. Therefore, spiritual truths are indeed also suited to release feelings, emotions and volitional impulses in people, so that the feelings of sympathy and mutual love among the different peoples of the earth can also be strengthened from the strong inner power that can reveal itself from spiritual knowledge about the unifying of nations. And since, in the course of human development, humanity is progressing more and more from instinctive, unconscious life to conscious life, to the full, arbitrary grasp of the human task, it is already the case that for the future the vague sentimental love of one people for another will not be enough to unite the nations of the earth. There must be a conscious mutual recognition of what the essence of one people can expect from the essence of another.

In one sphere at least we can today see relatively easily how necessary it is for people all over the world to be united; we only have to look at the terrible damage to economic life today. And when we ask for the ultimate reasons why this economic life has experienced such damage, what paths of destruction it is treading, we must first of all realize that out of an indefinite urge of all mankind there is a striving, a tendency, to make the whole earth an economic area. On the other hand, however, the nations of the earth are not yet ready to develop their national self-interests to such a degree that what the individual nations can produce can become a unified economic life for the earth. As a result, the old instincts of the nations give rise to subjective points of view, whereas the new instincts demand a world-wide economy for all humanity. This is a realization that is, I would say, palpable today, and it is also emphasized again and again by leading minds of the present: that this striving for a unified world economy exists, but that until until the 20th century, the national economies and that these national economies, with their opposition to the global economy, caused the process of decline of economic life, which we are facing today.

This is only to be pointed out. That is not what we are essentially concerned with today; it is something else. We are concerned with that which is to lead the nations spiritually and mentally away from the hate and antipathy that has revealed itself so frighteningly, as we have experienced it in the course of the last five to six years. They have certainly been present for a long time, but they have manifested themselves in such a terrible way in the last five to six years. But when it comes to one nation's recognition of another, when it comes to the spiritual and psychological essence of one nation being absorbed into the spiritual and psychological essence of the other, then, ladies and gentlemen, dear audience, we cannot merely go among this other people or be led by our destiny to get to know each other as peoples in this way, so to speak, through what happens in everyday interaction between people. Traveling or living among other peoples is no more sufficient for an understanding of peoples than it is sufficient for an understanding of an individual person if I merely observe his gestures and movements. If I have a sense for such things, I could guess a lot from a person's gestures and movements about what is inside them; but I will recognize them more directly if I am able to let their language affect me, if I am able to accept from them what they want to convey to me through their own, their inner strength.

Is there a similar transmission of inner strength, of inner being, from nation to nation? It cannot be mere language or what we perceive in the everyday life of one nation from another, for all this is based only on the interaction between one person and another. Something must intervene that goes beyond mere individuality, beyond recognition and comprehension of the other being in the human being. And basically we are at a loss if we want to speak in an understandable way about a unified national character. Is there anything about a unified national character that is as sensually real as external things or external beings that could cause us to speak of such a unified national character? We can speak of the individual person, of a single entity, even if we only want to engage in sensory perception. For sensory perception, folklore is nothing more than a sum of so many individual people. But if we want to recognize folklore as something real, we cannot help but rise to something supersensible.

Indeed, for anyone who undergoes the spiritual training that has been mentioned here several times, including in recent weeks, and who develops the supersensible powers of knowledge in the human soul that otherwise slumber in everyday life, what can be described as folklore becomes a real entity, albeit a real entity of a supersensible kind. But then, when he becomes receptive to the spiritual in the world at large, then the foreign folklore reveals itself to him as a spiritual entity, as something supersensible that permeates the sensual being of people like a kind of cloud that belongs to that folklore and envelops it. Only by seeking such insights rooted in the supersensible can one penetrate the essence of a people in a way that is never possible through everyday interaction between individuals. This is what I would like to try to sketch out today, at least in a few lines: how spiritual science can begin to gain a truly deep insight into the unity of the peoples of the earth across the globe. To do this, it seems necessary to me that the individual human being himself must first be truly recognized from the sources of spiritual science.

In a lecture given in Stuttgart, I have already pointed out how my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul), which was published a few years ago, speaks of the fact that this human being, as he stands before us in everyday life, is not a unified being, but that in fact the human organization - I now mean the immediate natural human organization - is one that reveals three distinctly distinguishable links.

In the human organism, we first have everything that relates to the main organism as the center of everything that can be called the nervous-sensory organization in the individual human being. And the human being experiences his sensory perceptions and his ideas, his thoughts, his ideas through the tool of this nervous-sensory organization; a thinking human being on earth is through this nervous-sensory organization. Now, based on today's conventional natural science, we have the idea that the entire human soul-spiritual being is based on the nerve-sense organization and is, so to speak, superimposed on the rest of the organization like a parasite. This is not the case.

Please excuse me for making a personal comment, but I must say the following: Thirty years of studying human nature and being, a pursuit in which I have always sought to harmonize spiritual science with scientific knowledge, has led me to confirm this threefold structure of the natural human being. It is a common prejudice of today's natural science that the whole soul-spiritual life runs parallel to the nerve-sense life. In reality it is different. In reality, only the thinking life of the human being is connected to the nerve-sense apparatus, while the life of feeling and of sensation is connected to everything that proceeds rhythmically in the human organization. Not only indirectly, but quite directly, is the life of feeling and sensation bound to the rhythm of breathing and the rhythm of blood circulation, just as the life of thinking and perception is bound to the nerve-sense organism. And just as the life of feeling and emotion is bound to everything in the human being that originally runs rhythmically, so the life of will is bound to everything in the human being that is metabolism. Metabolism, which appears to be the lowest level of human nature, is the basis of the life of the will – and this is a process, not matter.

Thus, in soul and spirit, the human being is a threefold creature. Spiritual will, soul-based feeling, and thinking, imagining and perceiving that are organized in response to external material phenomena – these are the threefold nature of the human being in soul and spirit. These three members of the spiritual-soul human being correspond to the three members of the human physical organism: firstly, the nerve-sense apparatus, the nerve-sense mechanism; secondly, the organization that is given in the rhythmic life of blood circulation, breathing; and thirdly, the metabolic life, which, together with the other two, forms all possible processes that are present in the human organization.

But if we now consider the human being in a particular area of the earth, we see that this threefold organization is by no means the same for all people over the whole earth. This, again, is the great error in the thinking of humanity today, that one believes one can issue some kind of common, for example, social program over the whole earth and people would have to submit to such a common program, while in fact people over the earth are individualized and specialized. And anyone who wants to get to know the real human existence on earth, who really wants to learn to recognize his or her place on earth, must be able to develop love, not only for an abstract, general humanity – which would only be the idea of humanity, the dead, empty idea of humanity – but he must develop love for the individual forms of human nature in the different regions of the earth.

Of course, in the short time allotted to us, we cannot go to all the individual peoples and characterize them, but we can consider the main types of human organization on earth.

If we want to consider a characteristic type of human being that is among the oldest, we are first led to the oriental type of human being, which has been brought to manifestation in the most ancient people of the Indians and also in other oriental peoples in the most diverse ways. This oriental type of human being has one thing in common. It shows, especially in the Indian people, how the Oriental man has grown together with the earthly nature on which he grows. Now, as much as it appears to us that this Oriental man has absorbed the spiritual into his soul, into his mind, as much as we are impressed by Oriental mysticism, when we study the Oriental man with regard to his popular characteristics, we find that what so admirably reveals itself in his innermost being as the highest spirituality is, precisely in him, dependent on the experience of the will streaming within the human being, which in turn is bound up with the metabolism of the human being. As paradoxical as it may seem at first, it is precisely the high spirituality of the Oriental people, especially the Indians, that – if I may use a rough expression – “boils up” from the metabolism, the metabolism that is connected by its own essence with the processes that are of an earthly nature in the environment of these people. Out there, in the Indian countryside, out there are the trees, the fruits, there is that which glorious, admirable nature gave to man, especially in the older times, as if by itself, and he combines this with his metabolism so that what takes place in him as a metabolic process is, so to speak, the continuation of what is 'cooking' out there in the fruits on the trees, of what is weaving and living under the earth in the roots and so on. I would like to say that the metabolism of the people of the Orient has grown completely together with the growth and flourishing of the earth. That is what makes it so: because the metabolism is the carrier of the will, this will develops within the human being. But that which develops particularly in the human being, in which the human being is completely involved and through which he connects with his surroundings, does not so much enter into consciousness. Something else radiates into consciousness. And that is precisely what appears materialistically in the metabolism of the human being is experienced in the emotional and mental life of the Oriental – especially the characteristic Oriental, the Indian – but what is experienced in the metabolism of the human being is so that it is reflected in his spiritual mirror as a spiritual life.

Thus, what arises from the mind, from the thinking of the Oriental peoples, what they produce spiritually, appears to us as a spiritual product of the earth itself. When we immerse ourselves in the Vedas, which speak intensely to our soul and are illuminated by the light of the spirit, when we immerse ourselves in the instinctively astute Vedanta philosophy, in the yoga philosophy, when we delve into works such as those of Laotse, Confucius, if we have any sense at all to devote ourselves to Oriental poetry and Oriental wisdom, then we have no feeling that this wisdom flows from a personality in a special individual human way. Just as the Oriental is united with the surrounding nature through his metabolism, just as the surrounding nature continues to weave and live in him, indeed to boil and seethe, so it is when we allow his poetry, his poetic wisdom, his wisdom-filled poetry to take effect on us. It is as if the earth were speaking to itself, as if the secrets of the earth's growth were speaking to all of humanity through the mouth of the Oriental. One has the feeling that just as this Oriental man can be the interpreter of the inner spiritual secrets of the Earth itself, so no member of any other nation – no nation of the West and no nation of central Europe – can be the interpreter and interpreter of what the secrets of the Earth itself are. Indeed, if one wants to characterize the best members of oriental peoples, it is almost as if they walked on the earth and expressed in their inner experience what actually lives under the surface of the earth, what grows out of the earth from below the surface of the earth grows out of the earth and reveals itself in the blossoms and fruits of the earth. It is the case that in the spiritual and soul life of the Oriental human being, the interior of the earth is, as it were, represented in this person. Therefore, we understand that, in their entire being, Oriental people have less sense of what is presented on the earth's surface in physical phenomena, what is revealed in external sensual facts. They carry within their own human nature what leads to these phenomena and facts in the inner, subterranean forces of the earth. Therefore, they are not very interested in what is happening above the earth's surface. They are metabolic people. But we see that their metabolism manifests itself in a spiritual and soul way.

What happens when an ideal takes hold in these people? Oh, when an ideal takes hold in these people, what the Oriental wisdom teachers present to their students as a special discipline of the soul is expressed something like this: You must breathe in a certain way; you must feel your way into the rhythm of human life in this or that way. These teachers give their students instructions for a particular breathing rhythm, for a particular blood circulation rhythm. It is a peculiar thing how the Oriental wisdom teachers point their students to the principles of mind and feeling in order to lead them to higher things. The Oriental, as he is in ordinary life, especially if he belongs to the more southern Asian peoples, is organized around his metabolism. When he grasps a concrete ideal of how to become a higher human being, he develops the rhythmic system, seeking to educate voluntarily that which he must recognize as higher, not given to him by nature.

Now it is peculiar that the more we go from the Asian peoples to those of Europe, especially to those in the center of Europe, the more we find that in the everyday life of human beings the link of human development that we can call the rhythmic system is particularly evident. The very peoples who inhabit Central Europe, not the East, not the West, but Central Europe – and the German nation has emerged as the flower within this nation – these peoples have as their everyday characteristic that which the Indian strives for as his ideal of a higher human being. But there is a difference between something that one acquires through self-discipline and freedom and something that one has instinctively and naturally. The Central European has this in a natural way, while the Oriental must first develop it from his metabolic life, which is intimately connected with the earth. Therefore, for the European, what is an ideal for the Asian is the everyday and natural, and something else must become the ideal for him. This ideal for the European will be that which in turn is one step higher: the life of thinking, as it is connected to the nervous-sensory life.

This Central European human being - how does his striving aim at developing outwardly [in his artistic creations] that which appears to the spiritual-scientific eye to be bound precisely to the tool of rhythmic life. The Oriental has something like a rampant imagination in his artistic creations; there is really something that rises like a haze of inner earthly activity, like the mists from the water. The rhythmic, inwardly closed nature that is the essence of the life of the Central European has already been brought forth by the ancient Greek people, from whom so much has emanated for all of modern civilization, especially for that which we call the art of Europe. What the Greeks strove for is that which is expressed in the inner harmony of the earthly human being, where neither the material nor the etheric-spiritual is particularly developed, but where the middle human being is expressed. Look at the creations of oriental fantasy: they stray in either direction. It is only in Greece that the human form, artistically conceived, takes on its harmonious roundness and inner unity. This is because man in Central Europe grasps himself in the middle link of his being, in the rhythmic system. When he visualizes an ideal, it is what he strives for through inner discipline, through his dialectical logic, through his scientific education; it is the use of the organs of thought, just as it is the use of the organs connected with rhythm in the human being. Just as the Indian yogi sits and tries to organize his breathing in a spiritual way so that it carries him beyond the ordinary human being, so the Central European — in whom that which takes place in the rhythmic system, in blood circulation, in breathing, develops instinctively and makes him human — is educated out of what the life of thinking is. And these thoughts take shape, especially in the best individuals of Central Europe, to be interpreters of what man is as such. This is what strikes us when we move from delving into the artistic productions of oriental humanity to those of European humanity. In the case of oriental artistic productions, it is the case that even in the highest spiritual creations we see something like blossoms of earthly development itself; the human mouth is, as it were, only there to allow the earth to express itself. This is not the case with Central European man, even with the Greeks. Today, when Central European man follows his own nature and does not become unfaithful to himself, he expresses everything that he himself is as a human being when he wants to express the highest. He wants to be allowed to give himself to the recognition of the fact that self-knowledge of the human being is the noblest fruit of human striving. That the portrayal of humanity in the environment of man, in nature and history, is the noblest human endeavor, that is, after all, the essential thing for the Central European when he surrenders himself to his own nature and essence. Thus we see how only in Central Europe could such a wonderful idea as that which shines forth from Goethe's book on Winckelmann — I would say like the sun of newer cultural life. Where Goethe, in his book on Winckelmann, summarized everything that was alive in this prodigy in terms of higher feeling, deep thought, and strength of will as his world view, he said: “Therefore, art now enters, for by placing man at the pinnacle of nature, he again sees himself as a whole nature that has to produce a pinnacle in itself. To do this, he rises to the level of all perfection and virtue, invokes choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rises to the production of the work of art, which takes a prominent place alongside his other deeds and works.” Man, as it were, brings forth a new nature from his own spirituality. This directing of all human powers to the comprehension of man himself is what, according to folklore, is particularly emphasized in the man of Central Europe when he is true to himself; it has only receded in more recent times. But there is every reason for the Central European to reflect on how, precisely by following his very own nature, he must and should come to this appreciation and understanding and penetration of what is truly human.

But if we look at the Orient and its peoples from an even more spiritual point of view, we find that these oriental peoples develop the spirituality that creates an awareness of the connection between the human soul and the divine precisely because they are metabolic people, because, in order to be a whole nature, the human being must confront within himself that which he does not have from the elemental world, because he must confront in his own consciousness that which is opposed to his nature. And no other people on earth can touch the human heart in the same way that the Oriental can speak of the connection between man and the divine as if it were something self-evident. Therefore, when the members of other peoples of the earth subjugate and conquer the Oriental peoples, when they want to take away their peculiarities and give them their own laws and orders, they take up what the Oriental peoples have to say about the connection between man and the divine, as something that is also decisive for them. And we see especially in more recent times how the Western peoples, immersed in materialism, have resorted to such Eastern philosophers as the old Laotse, to the Chinese world view, to the Indian world view - not so much to find ideas there, but to find that fervor with which one can simply and strongly feel what man can feel in connection with the divine. One delves into Oriental literature more to have one's feelings warmed by the way in which the Oriental speaks of his connection with the Divine, and less to feel its philosophical content. Indeed, the abstract nature of Europeans sometimes thwarts these Europeans in their understanding of the Oriental.

Time and again, I have found that people who had read the sayings of Buddha, for example, with their endless repetitions, have told me that they should be published in abridged form, with each sentence only appearing once and the repetitions deleted so that the same sentence does not have to be read over and over again.

When we immerse ourselves in the inner nature and essence of the peoples of the earth, we find this individual essence so different that we have to say to ourselves: the comprehensively human does not actually come to light through any single person, not through the members of any single people, it only comes to light through all of humanity. And if you, human being, want to recognize what you are as a whole human being, then travel through the peculiarities of the individual peoples of the earth. Take in everything that you cannot have yourself, only then will you become a whole human being. You have it within you; just pay attention to what is within you. What is a revelation in the other person, you do not have; you have to seek it in him. But you have a need for it. You feel that, and you know that when you find in the other person what is great and unique about him, it simply affects you. Then it is a need that you cannot be without what you receive from him, because it corresponds to your inner spiritual and soul desire. The potential for becoming a whole human being is already in everyone, but we must find fulfillment by passing through the peculiarities of the nature of the different peoples as they are spread across the earth. And if we come to this spiritual, we can say to ourselves, in the Orient it is that the human being is able to express the connection between the human being and the divine as something self-evident in greatness.

But today, covered as if by a layer that must be removed, by a layer of misunderstanding, we find something highly peculiar within Central European nationality, within Central European folklore. Let us look at all our great philosophers, who, in addition to what they have thought about nature and God and man, have all, I would say, equally produced something: There is hardly a great German philosopher who has not delved with all his intensity into the question: What is the law that governs from person to person? The search for the law, whether buried or misunderstood, is precisely a peculiarity of Central European nationality. And anyone who does not recognize this does not understand this Central European nationality, and will not find the enthusiasm to find his way back from present-day materialism, which stems from something completely different, to that which actually characterizes this Central European nationality, this true Germanness, this genuine German peculiarity and essence.

Just as the Oriental man, by presenting his spiritual life as a flower or fruit of the earth, becomes the interpreter of the earth, so the German becomes the interpreter of himself. He questions himself. By doing this, he stands before every other human being as an equal, and thus for him the most burning question becomes the question of right. Not the adoption of Roman law, but the investigation of the nature of right - this comes to us from Fichte, from Hegel, from Schelling, wherever German thought penetrates into the depths of the world's being. And finally, what we encounter in the abstract pursuit of the legal question in Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, in Humboldt, is basically the same in the concrete as when Goethe seeks in all his ways the expression and representation of true human nature, closed in all directions and harmoniously complete. In this respect, I would say that Goethe is the representative of the Central European essence, the representative of the Central European, the German people. In this respect, the Oriental of the earth is like the Central European in his self-awareness. And if we go to the west of Europe and even further, to where his nature presents itself in a broader and more characteristically expressive way, to America, if we go to the character of this true Occidental, then we find that his natural being is given precisely in abstract thinking. The Westerner is primarily a head person; the Oriental is a heart person, the one who experiences the process of metabolism in the heart; the Central European is a breathing person, who is in rhythmic relationship with the outside world through his rhythm. If I may use an image that was used by the - as I believe - extraordinarily ingenious Rabindranath Tagore, the ingenious Oriental, I would like to say: Tagore compares the Westerner, the Occidental, the head person, with an intellectual giraffe - he loves him, one does not need to have any kind of antipathy when making such a characterization. He compares him to a spiritual giraffe because one has the feeling - and this is truly depicted spiritually - that the head is far removed from the rest of the body, a long neck separates the head from the rest of the body, a head that then alone comprehends in abstract terms what the world presents to it, that absorbs everything in abstract form, in such abstraction that Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points emerged. And it is a long way before these abstract concepts, these empty words, these shells of concepts and ideas find their way to the heart, to the lungs, to the respiratory system, before they find their way to those places through which they can become feelings, through which they can pass into the will. We have the human being whose characteristic feature is what I would call the system of thinking. What the Central European strives for as his ideal, what he wants to achieve in freedom, that is what the Westerner, namely the American, does not strive for in freedom; it is given to him instinctively. He is an abstract being - instinctively. And it is quite a different matter whether you have something instinctively or whether you have acquired it. When you acquire something, you have a completely different connection with your human nature; it is quite different when you have to conquer it in freedom than when it is instinctively given to you by nature.

And there lies a great danger. For you see, while the Indian can strive in his yoga philosophy for the rhythmic system, and the Central European can strive for the system of thinking, the Westerner would have to go beyond the “spiritual giraffe” if he was not to lose his humanity. It is indeed incumbent upon Western humanity to do what I recently said quite openly to an assembly in which Westerners themselves were present: it is incumbent upon them to do what must be characterized as the great responsibility that Western humanity in particular has at the present time. Western nature, Western nationality will lose itself in nothingness if it strives beyond the system of thought, if it strives into the void or into empty spiritualism and seeks the soul there where it finds a soul-nothing. Here lies the danger, but also the responsibility: the danger of falling into spiritual vanity by striving beyond what is naturally given to man, and the responsibility of ascending to real spiritual science – if one does not want to lead to the downfall of humanity through one's world domination.

For Central European humanity, on the other hand, it will be a healthy, humane striving in freedom that leads one upwards into spirituality and brings one to spiritual science.

I would like to say that the peoples of Central Europe have it as a sacred duty – because it is in their nature – to ascend the spiritual ladder to spiritual knowledge. But they achieve something by rising from their rhythm and breathing system to the thinking system, which is still in the human realm. For the Western peoples, there is a danger that they will go beyond the human, especially when they form an ideal for themselves - hence all the sectarian and similar Western endeavors that deny the universal human. In this respect, it is still not clearly seen in the present.

While in the Oriental, whose metabolic system is turned towards the earth, a spiritual work on nature's paths comes to light, in the man of the West, who has above all developed the thinking system, the view of the sensory world comes to light. In the Oriental, it is as if that which is below the earth's surface is at work in him; in the Westerner, it is as if he would only see what is above the earth's surface, what he can see of facts from what happens on earth through the sun, moon and stars, through air and water. The organization of thinking cannot be explained by what happens in this environment. In a previous lecture here, I explained how what is spiritual in man cannot be explained by the environment. The Oriental, through what emerged as the blood of the spirit of the earth through his own humanity, also knew that he, as a human being, as that which lives spiritually in him, is a member of the whole cosmos, a member not only of the earth, but of the whole cosmos. The Westerner, who particularly develops the thinking system, has no other option left to him by modern natural science than to calculate this cosmos using mathematical and mechanical formulas. So there is the region to which the Westerner must acknowledge that his soul comes from it, to which he must acknowledge that he, as a thinking human being, could not be there if his region of origin were not cosmic. To this region he must say: I have no other science for it than the dry, sober mathematics. - What flows into the Oriental's own human existence is ingrained in him like the earth itself. What he reveals as his poetic wisdom is like an earthly blossom. What the Central European must recognize as his humanity is the same thing that reveals itself in man through man himself; there man stands face to face with himself.

In the Westerner, the most valuable thing is precisely that which man does not have from the earthly, but what he has from the cosmic. But he has no other means of recognizing this cosmic, this supernatural, than through calculation or through the equally dry spectral analysis and the like, or through equally dry hypotheses. Therefore, the Westerner seeks what the Oriental seeks out of his innermost nature as an expression of his connection with the divine, what the Central European seeks as an expression of the human in the Goethean full human being or in the legal human being, who is equal to all other human beings. And what the Westerner means when he speaks of law, what he characterizes as spirit, is so developed in him that it rises like the flower of economic life alone. Therefore it was quite natural that Karl Marx from Germany, where he could have learned to recognize man in a humanistic, Goethean way if he had been gifted for it, had to go to the West, to England, to look beyond man, to look beyond what is truly human and be led to believe that what man can recognize is nothing more than an ideology, something that arises from economic life. This is not an absolute truth, but it is in fact rooted in the nature of Western man, just as it is rooted in the nature of Oriental man, to look at nature as a secondary planet of the human being and to speak of the connection of the human soul with the divine as something that is actually taken for granted. That is why it is precisely with so many Westerners, who have a need to look towards the divine, that the longing arises – when they seek to extend their conquest over the Oriental peoples – to take from these peoples what they have to say about the connection of human nature with the divine, because in people, as I said before, the full human being at least lies as a need.

And so we see – and we could also extend this to smaller peoples, to individual peoples, but we can only stick to the typical – we see that actually the whole complete human being is not expressed in the members of one people. We see that this whole complete human being lies in us only as a need and that therefore this need should grow in us into love for all human beings, especially for that human being that we do not have, that we can only acquire by devotedly seeking the knowledge of that being that lives in other peoples on earth, in order to connect it with our own people.

That was the kind of internationalism that prevailed in the Goethean era. That was the kind of internationalism that was so imbued with beautiful arguments as, for example, those of Wilhelm von Humboldt on “The Limits of the Effectiveness of the State”. This is the striving for cosmopolitanism, which ennobles and elevates the essence of one's own people by absorbing everything that can be acquired through love for all other peoples, and which seeks to understand one's own people by absorbing everything that can be found in other peoples of the earth that is ideal and great and beautiful. That is why, in Germany's period of intellectual splendor, what was born out of rhythmic life was reborn from what the seeking German found in all other peoples at that time, in the noblest cosmopolitanism. How did Herder go in his search to all peoples; how did he seek to unravel the deepest essence of all peoples of the earth! How he was imbued with the idea that at the bottom of our individual, carnal existence, there lives a great, mighty, other soul, which, however, can only be found if we are able to pour ourselves out over all peoples.

One has only to contrast what appeared at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries as the basis for greatness in Central Europe with what is preached today as internationalism, not throbbing through the world, but rather preached through the world to seduce humanity as Marxism – Marxism, which only believes in human thinking and which, even in a more or less weakened form, no longer has any idea of how all of humanity is differentiated across the earth, which believes that an abstraction can be imposed on humanity, on the human being. Marxism is not a first dawn, it is a last sunset, a last sunset because it lacks all aspiration towards real internationalism, which always [by absorbing what can be acquired through love for all other peoples] elevates the essence of one's own nationality. This internationalism, which appears in Marxism and in all that has been formed from it, is the result of a one-sided, impractical system of thought that is merely fixated on the sensual world and does not penetrate to the level of nationality. True internationalism, on the other hand, arises from that love that goes out to all peoples, in order to ignite the light that can be received by all peoples, in order to, through the deeds, feelings, creations of one's own people, to place their own people in the great choir of the peoples of the earth in such a way that they contribute to the full understanding of the peoples, an understanding that can only unite the peoples of the earth out of real, essential, mutual knowledge.

Now, my dear attendees, I wanted to speak today about what can unite the peoples of the earth out of knowledge. I did not want to speak of other things, which may be more programmatic, so to speak, or are the subject of spiritual science itself. I wanted to speak of that which, as a spiritual-scientific insight, is stimulated in the spiritual researcher through his other, spiritual research, about the possible, loving coexistence of people on earth. One can certainly characterize from the most diverse points of view what is necessary for the future of humanity. One can certainly speak of this and that impulse. But one must also recognize that to all that can be said in the socio-political, legal-state, and educational fields, there must be added - as illuminating all of this - that consolation , that spiritual consolation that can come from such insights as have been attempted today, I would like to hint at in a more cursory sketch than to give something comprehensive. And this consolation can come from insights that relate to the possible rhythm of human historical life, which we will get to know from a spiritual scientific point of view the day after tomorrow: that what has lived through history shows how it is embedded in our immediate present.

Today's reflection should show you how it is possible that a wave of international love for people and nations can develop out of the recognition of the unifying force, just as new wave crests arise from wave troughs. It is possible. But we live in an age in which what is possible must be consciously and deliberately striven for by people in freedom. Man must face the fact that the conditions of unity among the peoples of the earth must be recognized, so that each individual, out of his knowledge, can contribute to the wave of hatred being followed by the wave of human love. For only out of this human love can that which hatred has destroyed be healed. If people do not want love, then destruction will remain. This is the terrible alternative confronting the soul of the discerning man today. He who truly senses this dreadfulness says to himself: The souls must not sleep, otherwise it could happen that the healing wave of love cannot arise from the wave of hatred due to the powerlessness of the soul-sleep of the people.

He who sees through this will absorb the knowledge that can come to him from the spiritual contemplation of the relationships between nations. He will absorb this knowledge into his feelings; he will develop love for humanity from it. He will absorb it into his will; he will develop deeds for humanity from it. And he will say to himself: The development of the times itself, everything that presents itself so frighteningly, so paralyzing in the present, that presents itself to our soul as a duty: to take together what has revealed itself in the very latest times, right up to the present, as splintering in humanity, to take together everything that can unite humanity in love. To seek this loving unity, this unifying love, is not just a feeling that can arise voluntarily in us, but it appears to those who see through the conditions of the present as the greatest human duty of our present age.

Dear attendees! Thoughts and spiritual struggles, which relatively recently were the concern of a few people who set themselves apart through their special education, must necessarily become a general concern for the whole of humanity today. I took the liberty of speaking here the day before yesterday about such a general matter, which used to be more or less a matter for the thoughts of a few individuals, about the process of developing a relationship with the peculiarities of the individual peoples living across the earth. Today I would like to speak of another such matter; I would like to speak of what is to become, under the influence of our humanity that necessarily strives for the new, what can be called history, the development history of humanity in the broadest sense of the word.

When, quite recently, the question of how we should actually relate to human history was still more or less a matter for scholars, the excellent art writer, art thinker and art observer Herman Grimm, whom I have often mentioned in these lectures, made a statement that is extremely significant in a certain respect for the evaluation of our current historical view. Herman Grimm says that, in wanting to characterize what is often regarded as history today, namely as history, humanity feels today that it is carrying far too much ballast with it.

Even though we must certainly admire what has been revealed to us in the last few decades through all kinds of excavations and discoveries of external documents of humanity, we must still say that the accumulated material, the material accumulated in notes in history, today lacks the great points of view in the historical view of humanity. And it is these great aspects alone that can give history a value for life. For when has history had any value for human beings? It only has value for us if what can be thought in it, what can be observed in it in terms of the destinies and achievements of past human beings, can yield a result for our own soul, something that warms our own hearts, so that from this warmed heart forces can develop that are suitable for placing us in the right position in life. In this respect, we must say that we are carrying a ballast in our current historical consideration and that the great perspectives that we need today in relation to the most pressing needs of contemporary humanity are missing.

Not as if historical consideration of earlier times did not have such great perspectives in its own way. Not that we cannot appreciate what it meant for young men and women to become acquainted with the great historical figures of antiquity and to emulate them, to fulfill the saying used by the poet: “Each must choose his hero, whom he works his way up to Olympus after.” But the way in which such individual figures are chosen as role models, and the things that have been tried and tested by them are incorporated into one's own will, depends on living in a time in which living admiration could flourish for personalities and for legal or state or ecclesiastical formations that flourished in those times from which we are now gone. To put it somewhat radically, one could say: How can young people today warm to Alexander the Great in the same way as in the past, since they have become more or less indifferent to something that Alexander the Great himself regarded as his ideal? In earlier times, a large mass of humanity had to look to individuals who took care of the affairs of this humanity within extensive empires, which they founded by conquering, so that history in the old form with its broad perspectives could have an effect on this humanity, namely on the will of people.

That is indeed the most significant fact of modern history: that the members of the broad masses of humanity must participate in all public life, that everything that bears the human face wants to come and regard the affairs of humanity as its own affairs. That is what is ultimately flooding our present as a justified democratic spirit. People are taking part in the great public affairs of life, which have become more or less indifferent to what inspired the members of earlier ages. Above all, because the spiritual interests of humanity have spread democratically across all people, the necessity arises to come to a new way of looking at history. And for those who really let the events of the present have an effect on them, especially for those who can truly feel the hardship of the present time, among the many other ideological or ideal questions, among the great spiritual questions of the present, there is the question: How can we, already in the child and then in the young person, bring the contemplation of our ancestors to such an effect, to such an experience, that the will can be steeled, that the orientation in life can be clarified precisely through the influence of a historical contemplation? In this way, what interests us as human beings in the first place – the spirit in the developmental history of our own earthly race – is interwoven with the big questions of education, pedagogy, didactics, and so basically everything is interwoven with the big social question of the present. And the point is that, as was said the day before yesterday and in last week's lectures, we live in the age of intellectualism, the age in which reason plays a major role in the ordering of human affairs. This human intellect, in its soberness and dryness, has not been suitable for writing history in such a way that it can truly become what it must become in the sense of what has just been said, if it is to retain the right value for humanity. It is precisely here that spiritual science believes it can do its part, including in the reformation of historical perspective.

Spiritual science assumes that insights can be gained by intensifying the inner life of the human being. What our knowledge and our other human abilities are in ordinary life, these are to be developed through spiritual science into a higher vision and an elevated soul life stimulated by this vision. These abilities are to be developed in the same way that the abilities of a child develop from a lower level to the abilities of an adult human being; the abilities dormant within the human being are to spring up from within. A strengthened thinking, a will that has been subjected to strict self-discipline, should bring forth, from the depths of the human being, powers of knowledge and insight that can look into those spiritual depths of the world and of human existence, of which they [without these abilities] can at most have an inkling.

That is the peculiar thing about this spiritual knowledge, as it is meant here, that it takes hold of the whole human being. If we can say that, with its striving for clarity, intellectual knowledge, which has become so great in the last three to four centuries, not only dominates our cognitive life but also our practical life, if we can say that it is primarily something that claims the human head, the purely intellectual realm of man, we must say that spiritual science strives no less for full clarity, for inner logic, for concepts full of light, but that these concepts, because they arise from previously practiced thinking and previously practiced will of the human being, draw on the forces of the whole human being. It would be a great mistake to believe that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to draw from dark feelings, that this spiritual science wants to have anything in common with all the nebulous, mystical currents with which it is so easily confused. No, its path should be such that it gains clear ideas and insights about the spiritual that are of the kind that are only ever clearly and precisely striven for in natural science. But these ideas should arise out of such a development of the life of the human soul that, in spite of their clarity and exactness, they fill the whole human being with their power and take hold of the whole human being. While we are not usually involved with our feelings when we recognize the laws of the world as formulated by modern science, and while these scientific laws give rise to little impulse for the will, it can be said that that what is recognized in the field of spiritual science about the world's interconnections really does course through the human being's soul and transforms him, that it pours into the will so that the person can orient himself and integrate himself into the practice of life, so that he can do the individual thing in accordance with the great mission of the human being on earth.

If one understands correctly what is at stake here – I have often characterized the details of how man arrives at such knowledge, especially here in these lectures – then one will easily be able to see the following.

When we first consider the individual human body, we actually do so only by observing the present. If we observe the human limbs, in an amateurish or scientific way, as the human body presents itself, we actually consider it as something that is present, even if this human body carries within itself the traces of its own past. We pay little attention to what this body retains from the past, no matter how scientifically we look at a human body. When we move on to the ordinary life of the soul, things are different. We do not just look at what is present in the person, but as human beings we look into our own past, almost to the point of birth. There we summarize everything we have experienced in our memory, which is the main thing. We must know that we would be mentally ill if we could not properly expand our memory of our experiences. We extend our interest from the present moment to our immediate past. Indeed, we extend it in another way by wanting to gain from this past the impulses and the strength of the past for our work in the future. We connect the past and the future with the present. Thus, a certain ascent in our approach can already be seen in ordinary life, when we ascend from the contemplation of the bodily to the experiences of the soul.

If we now progress within this soul and develop in such a way that we master thinking, come from thinking to beholding, from will to inner spiritual experience, then something completely different emerges. If we survey, as it were, our own few decades that we have to cover here as an earthly human being, by looking at our individual earthly development from childhood to adulthood – surveying our existence in our ordinary soul life – a new element of our whole being enters our inner being, our own past enters our memory. If we extend our concept of the human being through spiritual knowledge, if we develop beyond ordinary earthly knowledge to the point where we can see spiritually, then the context of the developmental history of the whole of humanity enters our view. However paradoxical

However paradoxical this may appear to many people today, it must be said: much will depend on our ability to see through how the human being - by simply inwardly taking hold of his entire humanity, his strength and his power of knowledge - becomes one with all humanity. In this way, what we can research through external documents about history is supplemented by what we can recognize inwardly through our knowledge thus acquired: our connection with all humanity, as a member of which we then feel truly included.

And here lies the path, which I can only sketch out today: to ascend spiritually to a comprehensive historical point of view, which can then lead us like a red thread through the developmental history of humanity. In the natural sciences, which in recent times, and with a certain justification, also include the physical body of man, we speak of the so-called biogenetic law. It has become famous in connection with the study of descent in modern times. I need only characterize it here in a few words. It states that, while developing as an embryo in the mother's womb before birth, man repeatedly goes through all the stages of development that can be observed in the individual animal forms. Development begins with man being similar to lower animals, in that he has the form of a fish. He then develops through higher animal forms until he gradually takes on the human form that sees the light of day. It is said that: The development of man is a repetition of the physical forms similar to animals that man has gone through before he has taken on his present human form. The development that a person undergoes from conception to birth is a brief repetition of what the human being has undergone in the course of, as they say, millions of years of development. An attempt has now been made to tie in with this scientific result, which I do not want to discuss here, by means of an external intellectual consideration, for that is what it is. Attempts have also been made to consider the spiritual and soul life, the history of the human being, in a similar way. The aim is to consider that which develops as culture in the present, that which characterizes the human being of the present as a civilized human being, as a human being with a certain education, in connection with the past, just as one considers embryonic development in connection with the past. And it has even come about that people want to investigate how the original cultures, so to speak, in the childhood of man, gain their special repetitive expression, how then, when man grows up, he repeats later cultures and so on, until he - after repeating the earlier epochs from birth through childhood - develops into what he actually is now as a person living in this time.

Spiritual science enables a certain self-knowledge of the human being precisely by the fact that one gains a more intimate knowledge of the human being through his spiritual exercises, through the strengthening of the soul forces, because in this way one can look more closely at the human course of life, as it presents itself to us or to others, than is possible with today's superficiality or than one tries to do in today's spiritual science or the like. And then it turns out that when a person advances to the possibility of true self-knowledge through spiritual science, they actually gain something different through this self-knowledge than is usually assumed today. This self-knowledge through spiritual science actually provides a lot of astonishing information about childhood; even if not exactly [with the methods of natural science], but from this spiritual science there is a lot of extraordinarily important information to be said about the periods of childhood. But this is precisely what is needed to renew pedagogy: a precise and honest application of ordinary human abilities. If we follow spiritual scientific principles here, we will be able to understand the developing child and become a proper teacher and educator of this child, even if we have not acquired direct insight ourselves. One can be a capable teacher in the sense of spiritual science, if one only has the honest will to respond intimately to the development of the human in the child, even without being able to see.

But with regard to the older stages of individual human life, it is not so. What is essential here is only really realized when one strengthens one's cognitive abilities as can be done within spiritual science. Then one notices that from about the 30th year of human life onwards, inner abilities are already present in a person, but hardly hinted at; one notices that they emerge intimately into the soul life from unknown depths , but that they initially express themselves so weakly in ordinary life that one cannot properly handle them - they are so weak that they are drowned out by what is rushing in through the external affairs of the world. One must observe quite intimately in order to see what continually seeks to emerge in the soul-life of man in advanced years and appears not like its original form, but as if it were the echo of something quite different from what it is now. And if you watch more closely, you will discover something quite remarkable through spiritual observation: if you want to look at the natural foundations of the human being in their connection with the prehistoric forms that the human being has gone through, then you have to look at the embryonic development, at the developmental epoch of the human being that precedes childhood; you have to go to the beginning of life. But if one wants to observe the historical development of humanity, then one must look at the final years of individual human development. Then we must look at the intimate abilities that now flit through the soul as if they cannot properly come out. They are just as much rudiments, intimations of something that has gone before and is historically past, as the hinting forms of embryonic development in the womb today are of what has gone before in developmental history. To understand the natural development of the human being, one must go to the beginning of life; for historical development, one must acquire the ability to see the end of human life by sharpening one's powers of perception through spiritual science.

If one seeks to penetrate what, I would like to say, appears like a faint afterglow in today's humanity, when one has passed the thirties, then one learns to recognize in these shadows, which flit across the soul life, what makes one understand the other, which resonates from times long past in the development of humanity. One then looks at what is called prehistoric cultures, yes, one even sharpens one's view for the prehistoric, which has only recorded its last echo in the historical; one lets one's gaze wander back from the Vedanta philosophy of the Indians, from the Vedas, to that from which they have descended, must have descended, for they do not show themselves as original products, but as final results, and one learns to recognize the basis of that remarkable element of power that has permeated ancient Indian culture, this first dawn of an earth culture. One finds a relationship between what lives shadowy in human age and what lived in humanity in youthful freshness at that time and cared for the culture of primeval times. We gradually learn to recognize the spiritual reversal of the basic biogenetic law in nature. We learn to recognize how, in those ancient times, to which one must go back if one wants to understand the developmental history of humanity, the human being retained the physical ability to develop into old age, with which a spiritual-soul ability to develop was connected. Today, we take an important leap in our childhood, also for our soul life, around the seventh year, when the teeth change; an important developmental period of a child's life is completed. The body undergoes a metamorphosis, and the soul and spiritual development accompanies this metamorphosis. And again, when sexual maturity occurs, the body undergoes a metamorphosis, but the soul and spiritual development of the person also accompanies this physical metamorphosis. What the person develops spiritually and soulfully in these stages of life is simply because the body also undergoes this development. Then, for us human beings, the possibility of perceiving such transformations soon disappears, and of even admitting such transformations. Although it is very clear that we are still undergoing a transformation at the beginning of our twenties, it is already more intimate, but still clearly present. But the transformation that occurs at the end of our twenties, and even more so those that occur later, are actually only present in shadowy form. And only the person whose view is sharpened through spiritual science notices how these shadows of transformation arise, those transformations that were, however, present in full clarity in earlier stages of human development. Just as today only children experience the transition through the change of teeth and through sexual maturity both physically and spiritually, and as we, being natural human beings, undergo a spiritual-mental development at the same time and feel united as a whole human being, in our development – while later our soul-spiritual separates and goes its own way – man in earlier developmental epochs of the earth has clearly undergone spiritual-soul metamorphoses that went hand in hand with the physical.

And once we have grasped this, once we have grasped how the human being of the first historical period that we can follow lived entirely in his body on earth, how he experienced what was in his body into the highest age, then we understand that such a completely different language is spoken in the oldest documents that speak of the historical development of humanity. Then we also understand the freshness with which wisdom comes to us in these old documents. Then we understand how something poetic was poured out at that time over that which we today produce only in abstract philosophy; then we understand how a Confucius produces the highest sayings of wisdom when we know that what we only experience in childhood was also experienced in those ages when the hair was already beginning to turn grey. Even then, man still experienced his physical self. He did not just speak from a more abstract soul and spirit, he spoke from the heart about the most abstract matters of humanity. That is what flows towards us not only from the scriptures, but also from what has been handed down and overheard from the public affairs of this primeval humanity.

And when we look back, we feel that we are a link in this whole human development, this development of humanity. We feel what it must have meant that in those times, although man grew old, he remained a child and experienced everything as a child, which today is experienced soberly, in a mature way. One understands how the whole inner life of the soul had a different coloring in those days; one understands that the way people lived together was such that the childlike, the youthful human being looked up to the old human being differently than we can today. For the young person could say to themselves: When I myself grow old, something will well up from within me that one can only experience when one grows old; one can look forward to growing old, because this growing old gives one a joy that one must grow old to experience. And one could also look up to old age in a different way, as if one believed that old age only makes the sober abstract exterior - as one usually thinks about old age today. The whole position of the human being in the world becomes different as a result. And we understand the whole character of ancient times inwardly, not just outwardly dryly, when we empathize with the first times of human development. We then learn to understand how there was an initial period of human development in which man lived in his body in such a way that he felt his physical development period at the same time as a spiritual-soul fact, just as we today only feel when we experience the spiritual-soul as such. But man then also felt himself to be in complete harmony with nature. Man in those ancient times was not yet placed in a position to despise, undervalue or overestimate anything material, because for him everything spiritual was still revealed in the material. He ate and drank, but in what he took in as food and drink, spiritual things were revealed to him. He knew not only the material. He could, by taking the fruit from the tree, in the enjoyment of the fruit, say to himself: Through the blossom, in the whole growth, in the power of the tree, the Godhead is at work; it gives me the fruit; the Godhead is directly related to me in that I enter into a spiritual-bodily relationship with the world.

Thus did the human being of the first epoch on earth feel connected to nature, to other people, and to the spiritual, economically, legally, and spiritually. He felt God to be present on earth, he felt God in everything that revealed itself to him physically – for he did not yet know a spiritual experience separate from materiality. Everything that presented itself to him in an earthly, sensual way, he also experienced spiritually; he based his institutions on what revealed itself to him as divine. The institutions, if one could study them today with an external historical perspective — one can only do so with spiritual science — the institutions that people encountered at that time, one can only describe them as theophanies. They can only be described by saying that through everything that man experienced inwardly, he and his environment were spiritual, and what happened in economic life was only a reflection of the spiritual, like a shadow image of the spiritual. It is quite wrong for this spiritual-scientific consideration to look at a primeval humanity that would have lived on the earth somewhat like animals and would have lived out of animal instincts, like better apes. Spiritual science makes it clear that man did indeed start from the most material experience, but that he felt this most material experience as spiritual-divine, that he also set up everything economic on earth as a mirror image, as a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In the course of his development on earth, man started out from spiritual experience, albeit with matter. He only progressed to something else when he ceased to perceive the inner soul-spiritual metamorphoses in harmony with the aging body at an advanced age, in his forties, even in his early fifties. The human being was limited to completing his sense of unity for the spiritual and soul and the physical at a younger age. In the previous cultural age, the human being still felt the harmony of the physical with the spiritual and soul until well into his thirties, but no longer higher. In the middle of life, the human being still felt what it meant to enter one's thirties in a bodily and spiritual sense. Then it ceased, just as the ordinary experience ceases for us even earlier, as we grow old earlier, without really experiencing growing old inwardly with the body.

The second period of human development - it begins around the 8th century BC - still includes that wonderful folklore that has gained such a great, such a huge influence on the whole civilizing life of modern times; the development of Greek folklore falls within it. Those who today cannot feel how fundamentally different this Greek culture is from our own do not properly feel the history of the development of humanity.

Oh, this Greek culture! One truly enriches one's human life when one can put oneself in the way the Greeks felt. They no longer remained young like primeval man into old age, but they felt like a unified human being until the middle of life, and they still felt a spiritual connection with the physical in their thirties, as we experience it until the time of sexual maturity. What lived and breathed as a unity in Greek nature formed the basis for the harmonious art and intellectual creativity of Greek culture. Experiencing this as a unity, as an inner harmony, even in middle age, in the middle of existence, made it possible for what we know as Greek culture to develop out of the old forms of artistic creation, of drama and of musical feeling. We only get to know this Greek culture in a truly human way if we are able to direct our gaze to the individual Greek. Oh, this Greek, he is to be our representative of this second epoch in the developmental history of humanity. He also saw the nature around him differently than we do. Because the growth forces of his soul-spiritual were still in use into his thirties, these growth forces flowed into his sensory perception. And anyone who can feel what it means for physical forces to work in the human being in such a way that they express themselves spiritually and soulfully well into the thirties will have to say to themselves: Another force is pushing into the senses themselves, and this results in a different perception of sensory reality. In this way, one learns to empathize with the entire development of humanity, to feel one's way into the individual human being of the past. One learns to feel how he looked at his surroundings in such a way that nature, with all its blossoms, with all its other expressions, yes, with stars, sun and moon, with clouds and so on, in all the nuances of impressions, had a different effect on him than it has on us. If we follow with feeling what was different in the Greek, we can say to ourselves in recognition: The Greek vividly felt precisely the light in its natural environment, everything that stood out, that shone and glistened, while he had little sense for what did not shine and glisten. Anyone who believes that the Greeks saw their surroundings in the same way that we see them has no sense of the developmental history of humanity. They are looking at it much like a forty-year-old would, who believes that a child sees the world around them in the same way that he or she does. But the Greeks, who lived in the second epoch of human development, saw the nature around them in great vividness. He saw what shone and glistened, what spoke directly to the human being; he also saw in other people that which is more active from person to person, that which is more luminous from person to person. The Greek saw his fellow human being differently from us, right down to the other person's complexion. This must be said by spiritual science out of its cognitive compassion for the developmental history of humanity.

This is not refuted by external observation, but fully confirmed, however one may dispute about these things. Anyone who looks at Greek literature with an open mind must notice that the Greeks do not actually have a real word to express blue. They have a word, yAauxög (glaukos), which they use to describe the dark hair and also the dark-colored eyebrows of certain people, and they also use the same word to describe the blue stone lapis lazuli. With the same word they designate everything blue and everything black or dark in general. And it is also quite interesting that the Greeks have a word for green, xAwoög (chloros), but with these words they simultaneously designate the yellow resin, the honey and the hair – just as blue-blind people of the present do not distinguish between green and yellow, so that we can say: External history also confirms that the ancient Greeks saw the light colors as the ones that mattered to them; and that they had no strong sense of blue, of dark colors, at all, that they expressed this sense particularly. Here we must look to a quite different bodily and mental constitution of the Greek. And this is given to us by a consideration of history, which inwardly reveals the course of progress over the earth. This leads us into the inner life of man.

And if we continue along this path and have followed such points of view, then we shall also look at other matters in the same way. Then one will understand why the Roman writers tell us that the Greek painters only painted with four colors, black, white, red, and yellow, and say nothing about their also painting in blue. Perhaps they also had what we see as blue and covered the surface with it, but they did not call it that. They only felt everything insofar as it was bright and shining and luminous. That is, they lived with the forces of nature and did not yet know the reflective element. For one learns to recognize that this reflective element in the developmental history of mankind can only arise when the effects of the thirties on man, in the sense that he still perceives the spiritual and soul in harmony with the physical body, when, so to speak, this sense of unity, where one as a human being feels the metamorphoses of the physical body and the spiritual soul at the same time, already ceases in the twenties. That which the body is primarily organized for develops in the old age body, and that which was present in full clarity in earlier ages only scurries up in traces, in shadows. If one follows these things impartially, then one comes to say that in the present age, this dependence of the spiritual-soul on the physical-corporeal normally ceases for the normal human being around the 26th or 27th year human being, if he does not do something about it by taking his inner development into his own hands, and that then only that which is laid in the human inner being through education during childhood comes to the fore. Something most significant occurs when we consider the developmental history of humanity in this way. We look back to earlier times in human development. We can understand that people were more satisfied with an education in which a person grew up with their environment through the natural process of imitation. We see the full, profound human importance of education and teaching only emerge in this third, “reflective” epoch. We learn to recognize our place as human beings in the developmental history of all humanity; we no longer feel our relationship to all humanity as abstract. We feel our mission in this particular age; by belonging to it, we know that, for example, educational tasks in particular are approaching the present age of humanity – the educational tasks of which the social question is one of the most important.

In the first epoch of humanity and in the aftermath of the second epoch, man in his youth could say to himself – he could learn this from the moods and messages of the ancients: as you grow up and grow older, you will experience this and that, which you will simply experience through your physical transformation in old age. In our time, the way in which a person fills their old age must be germinally assessed in their youth through education and teaching. And more and more, the time is approaching – it is already here to a great extent – when we must feel a strong obligation to educate young people in such a way that throughout their later old age, people can remember what they learned during their years of education. Because life no longer gives us the same things in elementary events that it gave to people in earlier epochs of humanity, what is experienced during the years of education must, I would say, be able to have an elastic effect over time, so that it can permeate and illuminate the whole of life

until we turn gray. In this way, history can gain insights, and in this way, history can give us knowledge that also strengthens the will and provides orientation in life.

This is what spiritual science must repeatedly draw attention to, that by trying to penetrate more deeply into life and existence to the point where this life and existence reveal themselves as spiritual, it can also directly serve practical life.

History that merely adheres to the external will not be able to give man such expanses [in the contemplation] of historical development that simultaneously become life forces in him. Nor does it give him ideas that can enlighten him about what has happened in human development.

It is remarkable to hear, for example, that one of the greatest historians of the recent epoch, Ranke, was always in doubt as to how he should place the figure of Christ Jesus in human history. He was convinced that the figure of Christ Jesus could actually only be considered from a religious point of view, that is, it had to be considered on a different level than is usual in the study of history. He was not able to place the life of Christ among the forces that construct history. Herman Grimm attempted to correct this deficiency in some of his allusions, but he did not succeed because in the present-day conditions of the age, one can only succeed by adopting the spiritual-scientific approach.

What has man basically become by becoming a “reflective” human being, by developing since the middle of the 15th century into the reflective, intellectualistic period? What has he become as a result of developing into everything that comes out of intellectualism in the field of technology, in the field of external life and external knowledge, albeit as something great?

In the first epoch, and to a large extent in the second, of which the Greek can be said to be a representative, man felt himself to be a member of the whole world simply because his body is a member of the whole world. He saw lightning; he had an instinctive realization that the power in lightning is akin to the power that lives in his own feeling. He felt part of the whole existence of the world. He was rich in his inner life because, at bottom, he felt himself to be a part of the whole world, because what lived and breathed in him as a human being was the same as what lived and breathed in the whole world. He saw his own destiny in the course of the stars. He could trace not only what was in him by natural law to the farthest heights of heaven, but also what was in him morally, he could trace it to cosmic widths.

We today have different experiences. Since the dawn of modern intellectual life in the third developmental epoch of humanity, in which we have become contemplative people, we have experienced that we can well calculate, with Galilean grandeur, with Bruno-like insight, looking up into the starry worlds. But we carry nothing down from them but mathematical-mechanistic formulas about planets and the course of the sun, and today at most what spectral analysis tells us about them. And here on this earth we have become lonely. We know we are standing on this earth, but we feel nothing more of a kinship with the starry expanse. We can no longer feel that we are a living link in the world if we live honestly within the modern mechanistic world view. We stand alone with our earth in space; and we only calculate about that which is not our earth. Can we, if we are honest, still develop the biblical belief that the Christ descended from the heights of heaven into the world that we have so rationalized, in order to accomplish the most important event, the meaning of all earthly development, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth?

What humanity has acquired through calculation and mechanistic knowledge is what has led it away from the spiritual understanding of the developmental history of humanity itself. Only spiritual science will be able to reconnect meaning to the fact that what lived in Jesus descended from spiritual heights, that the great marriage of the spiritual world with earthly humanity has been concluded for the benefit of human further development. That the Mystery of Golgotha is a spiritual one, that is the truth that can only be presented to the soul in full clarity through spiritual science.

And then, when one experiences the Mystery of Golgotha from a spiritually renewed perspective, one would like to say that spiritual science also brings to light a further, seemingly only incidental fact of human developmental history, but one that has a deeply moving effect on those who can perceive it in all its depth. By applying this reverse biogenetic law, we discover the fact that what human beings experience today in the age epoch of their individual development is a shadowy hint of what was clearly experienced by our human ancestors in body and soul and is today experienced only in the outer human metamorphoses of earlier developmental epochs. Just as the physical nature of the human being at the embryonic stage naturally repeats itself in the intimations of what was experienced by our ancestors over millions of years, so too what occurs in the human being in the adult stage is a shadowy repetition of what was clearly and distinctly present inwardly in prehumanity. We thus connect our present life with the past.

And if you follow these facts with spiritual scientific methods, which have often been characterized here and which you can read about in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science”, “The Riddle of Man”, “The Riddle of Souls”, you will be able to say to yourself that it is quite possible through inner vision to understand how, in pre-Christian times, people remained capable of development in this way, that is, they experienced inwardly, including spiritually and soulfully, the bodily-physical up to and including the thirties, up to the last thirties. Then it went down and down until our time, the third epoch in the developmental history of humanity, where the human being experiences the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily together only until the twenties. In between lies something that is an important transition in human life.

By shaping himself in terms of developmental history across the earth, the human being has, so to speak, descended from the youthful-childlike experience of aging into those times when he experiences only his unified human being into his thirties. Then the figure emerged from the depths of the world, who lived out before him, into his thirties, that which he is to live out, so that he can absorb the forces in his youth to carry into old age what he absorbs in his youth. In the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, man can no longer carry the forces he needs in old age into old age through natural development. Therefore, the life of Christ Jesus, which only extended to the middle of earthly life, was presented to him on earth, and which gave man a divine-human example until the age of 33. If he seizes the strong forces of this model so that he can grasp within: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” we organize all education and teaching in such a way that it is permeated by the Christ, that we allow the child in the youth to take up the forces that can then, as I have indicated, stretch like a rubber band into old age. We thus Christianize the whole person - then we work on the progress of humanity in this area, based on the knowledge of human developmental history.

And just as I was able to show in individual areas that the truly inwardly living understanding of human developmental history, in turn, provides insights from spiritual science that show us what we have to do in our present age, we can also show it in certain other areas. We can point out how man, through his physical development, was so constituted that he recognized the divine in material things. What we have received as the inheritance of man's relationship to the divine continues to work in us; we only have to cultivate it independently, for today it wants to be independent. It wants to be cultivated as an independent element of our social life.

In the second epoch of human development, where the human being finds harmony only between the physical and the soul-spiritual until about the thirties, which lie in the middle of the earthly life, in this second epoch, the instinctive forces of the human soul life, in particular, come fully to life, those instinctive forces of the human soul life that find expression, for example, in the right-shaping and state-shaping factors of public life. Thus, in the second epoch of human development, we see the germinal seeds of what we can well think of as right, but not reflectively, but instinctively. That is why there is always something controversial in all legal concepts, because they were still instinctively created in the second epoch.

The third epoch, which began in the middle of the 15th century - this can be clearly traced historically - this third epoch, in which we are still living, is primarily a reflective one. Man withdraws from the cosmos. Man withdraws from what he thought of as being organically connected with the human being of the first epoch. Man becomes lonely on earth, and this loneliness of spirit on earth reverses everything. In the first human epoch, it was felt that the spiritual-soul permeated the world as a matter of course, and that the economic was only a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In our epoch, where the human being stands with the spiritual-soul separate from the external in the later developmental epochs of individual life, where he only feels in tune with physical development as a whole human being until his twenties, it is economic life that becomes decisive. Economic life extends into the configuration of the state; the economic sphere becomes state economy, becomes empire. What we now see emerging, what then becomes a one-sided method in Marxism, what becomes theory and appears as if economic life were everything and the spiritual life, which once was everything, were only a reflection of economic life, thus the spiritual life were only ideology. Because we have separated ourselves from the external, bodily realm through our natural development, through the developmental history of humanity, because that is the normal development of human nature, man must now seek harmony through his culture, through his civilization, between what has become separated: the spiritual , which he must cultivate in its independence because it no longer shows itself connected with the material, and the economic, which he must cultivate so that he can fight with it in the right way, so that he can bring the spirit into it again, which used to be taken for granted. And in the middle he must cultivate the state-legal as an independent link.

A correct understanding of history, when viewed from within, also gives us a true social insight into the present. It lives in what we want to put into the social organism today. People have gone through [through these epochs] by developing the three limbs of the social organism more or less one-sidedly. Now the time has come when we must develop these three limbs independently, out of human consciousness, so that we become strong, these three limbs, an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or state life, an independent economic life, through our inner humanity.

The ancient Greeks, who in the Middle Ages still had harmony between the spiritual and soul and the physical, these ancient Greeks were still condemned to split people into classes, into teaching, military and nutritional classes. We are striving for a social structure in which people are not divided into such groups, but where life is structured in threefoldness and each individual person lives in each of these threefold aspects, with the three aspects working together in each individual person.

But, my esteemed audience, what really gives cause to consider the trinity in the strongest sense is the historical consideration of humanity, which allows new perspectives to be gained. I would like to say that in the intellectual circles of scholars, Herman Grimm has found that the facts of history, which are so numerous today, are carried along like a ballast, and that the great perspectives are missing. Yes, as the history of recent years teaches, we need such broad perspectives, but what has emerged [so far] from human thinking and feeling could only be experienced by individuals. The numerous people who come from the great masses to participate in public affairs will not be edified by this kind of history, as Herman Grimm presents it.

If we establish a human history from a spiritual scientific point of view, through which one sees how man has felt through the millennia, going once like this, once like that, if one learns in historical development from what every human being experiences in himself, must experience in himself, in order to feel the same as all other human beings, then we will have a history that our age needs, as the coming age will need: a historical perspective that is not merely absorbed in the intellect, a historical perspective that draws on clear and objective concepts, but one that penetrates into human life, so that the insights warm the mind and the mind, warmed by the insights, is will-forming. And when one feels that, after all, everything that is necessary for further social development does not depend on institutions - for these themselves depend on people - but must depend on people, then one longs for the strong will in people to become the disposition for strong action, so that the recognized and necessary institutions can also be taken. But the man we need, the creative, the insightful, the man who orients himself correctly in the public world, will only be the man who can make his will, his deeds glow and shine – not with dead, not with intellectualistic, but with living, spirit-filled knowledge. But this will come to him when he can recognize himself, feeling, as a link in the whole developmental history of humanity, when he can point to the past of humanity and from this a light will arise for him, which will shine for him to work by, to act, to have an effect on the future.

Dear attendees! Today it is impossible to form an opinion about the great affairs of the time without looking at what is working as the deeper forces of labor and longing in all humanity, what has been working for decades, but what is reaching a very special culmination today. In the present situation, it is not possible to form an opinion about the significance of what is actually happening to humanity without at least glancing at the deeper foundations of all human endeavor and how these deeper foundations are expressed in the present. Therefore, in this first of my two lectures, to be followed by a continuation the day after tomorrow, allow me to at least point out some sketchy observations on such deeper-lying forces of longing in present-day humanity.

It was in July 1909 that Charles Eliot, who had been President of Harvard University from 1868 and at the time of his speech, delivered a significant speech in America. As one could see from his speech, Charles Eliot spoke from the consciousness of looking at the spiritual and intellectual matters of all civilized humanity from his point of view. He called his lecture “The Religion of the Future,” and he wanted to express what this religion of the future should not be and what it should be. But when I look back on this lecture, it seems to me that what Eliot said at the time is much less significant than the overall tenor of his words. Above all, it seems to me that the most significant thing is that at that time a representative of today's civilization was so searching for a way to healthy thinking in the great questions of world view and life view of mankind.

Now, my dear audience, when pointing out something like this, one must never forget that between what was said at that time, even by the most outstanding people of the present, and today, lies that terrible world war catastrophe, which indeed teaches more than all such words could teach – which illuminates everything that such people have designated as great world and life questions in a flash in a completely different way than they could have imagined at the time. Eliot wants to lead humanity to a healthy way of thinking about the world and life. He looks back on the state of religions in those times when science had not yet shed light on the souls of the broad masses of humanity. What disturbed him about the old religions was that they pointed to a God who, in a certain sense, lives outside of that which modern science at least purports to provide such great and powerful insights into. The man felt completely at one with his time. To him, the old ideas about the spiritual world seemed to be just those that a childish humanity had formed. And it was particularly important to him that this scientific age could no longer see demonic, spiritual entities in mountains and rivers, in trees and clouds, that even a scientific age could no longer retain the pictorial old ideas of God. He also wanted to show that the world's view of life and social conditions had suffered in many ways because the religions, which had been the guides to thinking for the vast majority of people, had driven away those who were depressed, those who were miserable, those who could could not cope with life, were expelled by the physical-sensual existence into a supernatural afterlife, so that in place of the processing of life, in place of courageous intervention in life, for many people there had to be a look beyond the immediate physical social existence.

All that the various religions have to say about the reasons why one person is affected by this or that fate, and all that the old religions have to say about divine justice prevailing in the world, also appears Charles Eliot, the modern man, the man who stands in the time that begins for him with Darwin, which has reached a particular size for him through those advances in medicine that are called to physically alleviate the pain of sick humanity, as no longer up to date. And in a way, he wants the old priest, who always referred humanity to an indefinite supernatural realm, to be replaced by the physical physician, who is able to alleviate even the pain that the mother has to endure when the child enters this physical world, he would like to replace the old priest with someone who is able to lend a hand in the work that is done in the physical world, because for him it is about shaping the physical conditions of this earth in such a way that as many people as possible derive joy and satisfaction from life. Charles Eliot believes that all this must be taken up, as it were, by healthy thinking, and he hopes that from the views which science has recently provided to mankind, it may become clear what humanity is capable of achieving in order to reach this goal it so longs for. I mention this particularly for the reason that in this short speech about the religion of the future, everything that the so-called educated, especially the learned educated, have imagined as the path to modern healthy thinking, is in a sense concentrated in a representative human being.

Now this speech about the religion of the future, which has as its content what I have just characterized, has something highly peculiar. And since I have already said something similar about this speech before the war, as I am saying now, no one will be able to accuse me of what many people are accused of today: that they now, after the war has raged for so long, have been strangely enlightened by what happened before the war. Charles Eliot speaks as a man who has certain ideas, as a man can speak who is fully immersed in modern scientific knowledge and who, from the bottom of his heart, wants to give humanity a conception of life that leads to its happiness and satisfaction from these scientific ideas. But how does he speak? If one is able to read between the lines, what must one say about how he speaks? One looks at the thoughts: they are born out of the spirit of the age, but they can only be spoken if one is surrounded by a world in which, first of all, in the social, in the immediate living conditions, these thoughts do not become reality. They can only be spoken when one is surrounded by a world whose views of life are rooted in a much older time, when one is surrounded by a world where certain ideas live in the souls of people that did not originate from what such a scientifically educated religious seeks, but which have a profound influence on the shaping of social life. In other words, it can be said of such a man: he can speak, but one senses his thought at the moment when what he says is to be realized in full consequence, in unadorned form - then, when the old traditions no longer have an effect in the environment - that then these thoughts will prove powerless after all. And anyone who can understand anything at all about the terrible events of recent years will say: These events since 1914 have significantly stepped in between what could be said then and what is before us today as the great, overwhelming questions of our time. To a certain extent, Charles Eliot also points out at the end of his speech that he cannot know how what he regards as sound thinking will be realized in the immediate practice of life; only experience will show.

Now, my dear audience, however strange, however paradoxical it may sound to you, today part of the world is in the process of providing this experience. What an educated, learned man could dare to say in the past, in the midst of an environment that had no need to draw the final consequences of these thoughts, is being tried to be realized today in a different frame of mind, in a different state of mind, in Eastern Europe and in a large part of Asia – as paradoxical as it may sound. And whereas one could express Eliot's thoughts, that is to say the final social consequences of a scientific world view, in complete safety and still be considered a good and honest citizen in the midst of an environment that did not even consider drawing the final conclusions from reality, human existence , you destroy life at the very moment when a clean sweep is made of the old conditions, when the old traditions in the environment no longer build the state, when you do not allow that which comes from the old traditions, albeit through special tyranny, to live on in the environment. If you draw the ultimate consequences of these thoughts for external reality, then you become a Leninist, then you become a Trotskyist, then you begin to realize what should arise purely from what Eliot sought as healthy thinking, from what wants to be born out of the purely scientific world view. But if one tries to realize that, then one does not build anything, but only continues that process of destruction that began in 1914 and that humanity will still have bitter, bitter experiences with. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a review of the relatively recent past teaches us, which was put forward in 1909 by a man who was imbued with honest conviction and with all the education of the present day.

If we now ask ourselves what connection exists between what a person, I would say, as a certain materialistic Sunday sermon in an otherwise very different world, could say and what is being realized in the east of Europe and over a large part of Asia, then, in order to understand the social connections of the present and the whole situation of the present man, one must delve a little into the deeper foundations. And it is instructive to take a look at the question: How did this materialistic world view, which was supposed to bring happiness and contentment to humanity, actually come about in modern times?

If I were to characterize what precisely characterizes the most modern thinking, the thinking that is now preparing to become social reality, I would have to say that this thinking is characterized by the fact that it is unable to build a bridge between what is knowledge of the natural side of the world and what is the moral world, what are ethical ideas, what are moral forces. On the one hand, there is what constitutes the natural side of the world, firmly established in ideas that are extremely plausible for every person who is imbued with the spirit of the present, as it has developed in recent centuries and particularly in the 19th century. On the other hand, what emerges from the human heart are the moral demands and what should elevate man to contemplation is that these moral demands are rooted in a spiritual world order - a world order where the moral and the immoral can have an effect on the shaping of the world, where the moral and the immoral can intervene in world events, just as a flash of lightning intervenes in world events.

These two worlds have been pushing each other aside for decades. And there lives the newer way of thinking, which does strive for healthy thinking and wants to use it to found a natural religion. It is able to consider the one thing, which is knowledge of natural facts, and it is also able, if man is conscientious, to consider the other: that out of the depths of the human breast speaks the voice of morality, which should then point the way to religious consciousness.

But today there is no bridge between these two worlds. There is the one world of the knowledge of natural facts. It believes that it has found a fundamental law that should stand unshakable as the result of the 19th century, the law of the conservation of matter and force - the law that should tell us that everything that happens in the universe happens out of a sum of forces that may well transform, but can never be increased or diminished, that are uncaused and immortal. The interaction of these forces gives rise to the formation of the world, to the world event that presents itself externally to our senses and from which we ourselves have grown as physical human beings. If the forces in question are uncreated and everlasting, if one can speak in the absolute sense of the conservation of matter and of force, then all the views that must arise in the wake of this view cannot be dismissed either. Then we come to assume - out of the same habits of thought that have pushed humanity towards this law of the conservation and transformation of matter and force - that all the earthly-cosmic within which we stand has come into being from the famous Kant-Laplacean nebula, from which the whole solar system is said to have formed through condensation, and that in the course of this natural process, man has also developed, having passed through the various animal forms. And we come to assume that in the human soul, like inner life illusions, those things flash up that occur to this human soul as the forces that alone can guarantee man his dignity: moral ideas and that which leads to religious consciousness.

But anyone who, with all the consequences, clings to this world, which has thus emerged from the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula, must also think in these terms about the end of the world. He must think that this world will transform into one in which everything that humanity offers, everything that has ever lived in human souls and human minds, will disappear; he must think that within a great cosmic process all human thinking of a morality, of a divinity, is merely something that is born out of the laws of nature - just as lightning and thunder, the change of day and night and so on are born out of the laws of nature. And so we look towards an unspiritual, unspiritual world coming into being, we look towards an unspiritual, unspiritual world ending. For him, [who clings to this world with all the consequences,] the best that humanity thinks, dreams, is woven into the processes that lie between these two ends - the creation and the end of the world; the best that this humanity imagines is only an episode for him, vanishing in the purely natural All.

Dearly beloved, with the best will in the world, there is no getting away from all the quackery that people are still willing to put forward for the validity of a moral and religious world, if they admit, with all the consequences, that which underlies this scientific attitude. I know how much is preached today in the direction that, despite this scientific attitude, an ideal world view is indeed possible. It is only possible for those who do not really want to go to the consequences of thinking. And today one is well prompted to ask: Why do people realize so little of what has just been indicated in the present? Why, actually? Perhaps we can gain some insight into this by remembering the, I would say, springtime of what is now also general opinion, but which people do not admit as a general opinion among the so-called enlightened, when we refer back to that springtime of theoretical materialism that befell the civilized world around the middle of the 19th century. It has indeed become fashionable today to depict those who boldly drew the last consequences of the scientific attitude, such as Moleschott, Büchner and so on, as flat – they undoubtedly are that. But then more is needed than what is put forward by scholars or unlearned people to characterize the whole relationship we have to them.

We need only recall a few facts to appreciate the full seriousness and significance of this matter for the social situation of contemporary man. I would like to mention the fact that, for example, a cultural historian much discussed in the 1870s said: One of the most important results of modern times is that scientific knowledge has destroyed everything that was born out of ancient religions as an ethical ideal. Yes, this cultural historian dryly writes that what has been characterized as truth or untruth from this point of view is only a scientific result, like the falling of rain, and is to be considered from this point of view. But a letter from a bold, inwardly bold personality to a contemporary natural scientist is particularly interesting. The letter contains the following: “The newer world view teaches us that everything that people experience is subject to the natural law of cause and effect in the same way as what we see with our senses in the external world. All the good deeds and thoughts that people produce from within themselves, all the religious ideas they produce, are nothing more than the result of purely natural processes that take place within man, just as cloud formations take place outside in nature. So, as far as I am concerned, everything that people have conceived as moral commandments is an illusion, said the personality. And I am of the opinion that someone who is born with the tendencies to be a thief, a robber, or a murderer is just as entitled to live out his murderous and thieving tendencies to the full as someone who is born to the opposite. I am convinced, writes this personality, that it would even be detrimental to the moral development of a personality predisposed to murder, that is, it would be immoral if it did not live out its inclinations. Of course people today will say: That is a paradoxical truth. But why do they say so? They say it because, on the one hand, they have tremendous respect and complete faith in authority for everything that is said to them from the kitchen of science, but because, on the other hand, they do not have the same courage as the personality who wrote this letter to draw the consequences. They stop halfway because they do not want to admit to themselves that if you draw these conclusions, the rest follows.

Now, I would like to say: Just as Charles Eliot was able to speak as he did in 1909 in an environment that did not think about translating his thoughts into social reality, so that personality was able to enthuse about the full expression of criminal instincts, since the full expression of his abilities was part of the moral worth of the personality. The time had not yet come when social institutions were to arise from what people think in this direction, although they could not arise. But then the other question arises: how are these institutions to arise, which must now take shape as a development of our declining way of life?

Dear attendees, when you consider the situation of people today and look at what is actually living within them – and after all, it is from within that that takes place in all outward, business, industrial, and practical life - when one considers all this, one comes, admittedly, to a bitter judgment about the situation of the present-day human being. For, what would it be like if a sufficiently large number of people had the courage to awaken the soul, to wake up the sleeping soul and to say to themselves: If we accept in its entirety what has flowed into thinking from scientific knowledge over the last three to four centuries , then we must shape everything that is to flow into social life according to laws that are empty and devoid of everything that arises within the human being as an impulse of morality, as an impulse of the religious world order, because such laws can then only come from the natural scientific attitude.

And the real beginning of a social order of life, which structures society only as natural phenomena are structured outside - we see it made in the east of Europe and spreading across Asia; we see it taught theoretically in Marxism for decades. It could also talk, this Marxism, as long as it did not occur to its surroundings to respond to it with reference to the shaping of reality. Now the face of the world has become more serious. Now it is a matter of raising the question in a comprehensive sense: Is what has been presented as the path to healthy thinking also a path to a possible life for humanity on earth? Because the matter is so serious, the whole way in which people are, and in particular the way those are who today believe that they can build social life on the achievements that are only good for a certain branch of knowledge of nature, must be addressed. What have these achievements brought us?

I have often and for many years pointed out here in Stuttgart the magnitude and significance of the scientific world view, and those who have heard me often will certainly not see in me a despiser of this scientific world view – within the limits in which it is justified. But what is at issue here is something else. The question is: Is a scientific world view possible if it is a matter of applying the laws of human knowledge to what is to shape social life?

To answer this question, one must look at the supposed path to healthy thinking that this scientific world view has taken. There we see that this natural scientific world view has fathomed everything in the facts of nature that can be applied in the fields of technology and industrial life. There we see that what could be realized in technology and in industrial life and in transport through the knowledge of the laws of nature has been developed on a large scale. All this had reached a high point when the catastrophe of 1914 occurred, which showed how little social observation had followed the observation that built machines, covered the world with means of transport, and so on, based on the knowledge of natural science. Yes, what we see in our technology, regardless of whether it leads to construction or destruction, is related to a certain direction of scientific thinking. This direction of scientific thinking wanted to become universal, wanted to become generally valid, wanted to mean something for all of human life.

And there we see, how isolated spirits live, I might say, who stand there like oddballs in the general development, but who had started out with the attitude of “how we have come so gloriously far”; we see how they look at what is emerging and look into the future with tremendous apprehension. One need only refer to Solowjow, the Russian philosopher who, unfortunately, is only known in Central Europe since the war years, but who died at the beginning of the century. He took a deep look at human life, but he was also enlightened enough to look at practical life and to observe this practical life with his tremendously benevolent, mild soul. This philosopher Solowjow was overcome with the most bitter concern when he said to himself: “All that the modern world view gains from the scientific basis is also spreading over my Russia through an internally rotten rule. And so Russia is covered with all the glories – he does not say this ironically – with all the glories of modern technology and modern transportation, and what should provide the basis for a healthy Russian way of thinking disappears as if stolen from the world. With every railroad that is built and every industrial plant that is established, what should be the basis for healthy Russian thought is disappearing: the land. And one hears Solowjow say that he understands that healthy human thinking is connected with the land in a different way from that kind of thinking which breaks away from this land, which exists, as it were, at an abstract level, even if in a physical reality, and appears on a natural scientific basis as modern culture. Of course, one might call this one-sided; and in a sense it was one-sided. But how can one expect the man who lives in a world that strives with all its might to bring into the world everything that can arise from a scientific attitude, how can one expect him to gain a sound and calm judgment when he wants to stand up against the materialistic dream of all mankind; how can one be reproached for one-sidedness when he expresses his concern, which in a certain way had to appear insane at a time when this modern culture had not yet embarked on its decline as much as it has now, since Solowjow has been dead for twenty years. Now, that Charles Eliot, of whom I have spoken, also indicates approximately what he imagines a kind of future religion to be, when people will no longer believe in an external God or when they will no longer believe in demonology in broad circles. He says: The view of a unified God will prevail, who is intrinsic to things, who is also intrinsic to the human soul and who is at work in all that is natural law. But it is clear from this speech, and it is indeed clearly stated in it, that even for a well-meaning person like Charles Eliot, this God is linked to what he knows about the material that is spreading throughout the world, about the eternally transforming but indestructible force. In essence, the unity of God is nothing other than the unity of matter and of power. And from such theoretical convictions he then preaches to the world that which should serve as the practical basis for human life. He says: “Ever shining will be the sentence ‘Serve your fellow man’.” Serve your fellow man — that is repeated again and again in that speech. But in the case of such a sentence, such a demand, it is truly not only a matter of saying the words, but it is a matter of whether what is demanded of people can also be fulfilled by them – fulfilled by releasing forces from the depths of their souls, which ultimately find their expression in social service to humanity, in social work according to the sentence: “Serve your fellow man”. In other words, we must ask whether a Weltanschhauung is capable of forming a basis for true human love. Is a Weltanschhauung capable of being the root of a plant which, when it grows out of the soil, blossoms and bears fruit as human love? This question cannot be answered in a one-sided, logical and theoretical way. This question can only be answered on the basis of what happens historically. And if Eliot had only waited for the experiences that are now arising and will arise through the shaping of Eastern Europe and Asia, then he would have had his doubts. For the historical result is that the socialist doctrine, which wants to build only on the same scientific premises on which Eliot wants to see the world of the future, life in general, built, that this socialist direction is not able to found social life on free love, welling up from within the human heart and bearing fruit in the world. For what would awaken human love does not sound to us from this social teaching and social tyranny. What does sound to us is the fulfillment of the saying, “Serve your fellow man because you love them.” Instead, we hear the dry, empty, and desolate words of duty to work, of how people are driven to work as if with military drill.

And I would like to say: If on the one hand you listen to Charles Eliot in 1909, when the experience of the present was not yet available, giving his paradigmatic speech from the Harvard University chair, then an echo from a later time, the speech that was recently given by the Russian Socialist Minister of War, who said: Those people who are sincere about the social order will not fail to recognize what we owe to this war. He sent our sons back to us as soldiers. They have become capable soldiers. They have learned to obey and to submit to authority. We do not want to ignore what we owe to this war in that it has trained us officers who can command, who know how to move people to the appropriate place through coercion. And we do not want to forget the leading men of the war, who are able to organize so that everyone submits to the authority of this organization. This talk of translating militarism into the social structure of life sounds like an echo of what we hear from Eliot's speech, which is only a world view because no one around him thought of realizing it. People just don't know that they have sought healthy thinking in ways that, in their ultimate consequence, result in what can now be seen so clearly today. And people do not want to admit the connection between what people have believed they had to think about the world and life for centuries, but especially for decades, and what is now presenting itself as the will to shape the world socially - but which is completely powerless to shape this world in such a way that a dignified existence is actually possible in it. It is from this unwillingness to understand that everything that is sought as a path to healthy thinking within - the life situation of the contemporary human being - emerges.

From my book “The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future” everything emerges that the efforts of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism have brought into being. The aim is to seek a path to healthy social thinking without entertaining illusions, by at least keeping one thing in mind when dealing with these questions: What are the underlying thoughts of what today wants to realize itself in life-destroying structures? What were the underlying thoughts that led to the absurdity of the events that began in 1914? But anyone who does not want to form a clear and healthy judgment on these questions, no matter where they stand, cannot participate in what every person today is called upon to do, according to their abilities and position in life. What is needed today is clear and consistent thinking. But this clear and consistent thinking also leads us to raise the question: Where does that which has developed as so-called healthy thinking on a scientific basis actually come from?

Those who know the historical context know that, in terms of the development of our ideas and the creation of our concepts in public life, we have not progressed further than the Middle Ages. Much is said about the darkness of the Middle Ages, but we still think in the forms of thought of the Middle Ages. What we have brought further are the achievements of knowledge of nature, which have their counter-image in technology, the achievements of knowledge of inanimate nature, actually only of a part of inanimate nature, because only that has its counter-image in technology. What we have achieved, what can be mastered with the means of calculation, with the means of geometry, has become our world view. This has gradually conquered such a position in human thought that it appears in this thought as the self-evident basis of all views of life.

Has humanity also endeavored to further develop the inner strength of thinking, the inner strength of the soul in general? No, that cannot be said. The thought form, the way of thinking, the whole configuration of thinking, with which natural science, even the seemingly most exact and strictest natural science, works today, is the same as that used by the scholastics of the Middle Ages. In the scholastics of the Middle Ages these thoughts were great, these thoughts were ingenious. Why was that so? Because these thoughts set themselves the task of looking into a spiritual world. One may think as one likes about the content of what I have just indicated; but what emerged from the training and development of scholastic thought, when viewed calmly and objectively in the context of the development of modern culture, cannot be interpreted other than as I shall now attempt.

Who knows with what acumen, with what mastery of the technique of thinking, such ideas as those of the Trinity, the sacraments, and the incarnation of Christ were pursued - but which were then ideas in the social life of all humanity - who knows with what acumen these ideas were pursued, which have no counter have any counterpart in the world of ideas, where thought must rely entirely on itself, one will say: however one may think about the Trinity, however one may think about the Incarnation of Christ, the development of thought technique, logical consistency and inner responsibility to the forms of thought in those days was magnificent. It lives on as inheritance. Today we think with no other thinking than the scholastic Catholic scholars have thought; we have only transferred these thoughts to scientific fields. We think with the thought forms of the Middle Ages in the materially developed areas of modern times. We just do not think with the same sharpness because we do not train this sharpness of thinking. If we are enlightened people, we refrain from training this thinking with concepts such as the incarnation of Christ, the Trinity, and so on; we do not train this thinking with the vision of a supersensible world. If we ask for the reason: Why is this scholastic thinking so trained, why is it so internally sharply contoured? we must say: because — whatever the positive religions may say, which often want to cover up the fundamentals of the true facts — because this thinking has developed out of the vision of the soul, which in ancient times was still valid up to Plato, yes, even up to the Neoplatonists, because this thinking has developed out of the vision, the spiritual-soul vision of a spiritual, a supersensible world. He who wanted to arrive at thinking had to look to a supersensible world; he had to train his thoughts in such a way that they could not only master that which lies before our eyes in the gross material world, but also that which must be grasped with the same subtlety and sharpness as the things of the supersensible world. In an instinctive way, not in the conscious way that the world-picture which I have been presenting here for years represents, in an instinctive way, but still in a spiritual way, the thinking of those ancient times was grounded in the ranks of St. Augustine, the High , on a thinking that was schooled by beholding the supersensible world, because this thinking was a sprout of beholding into the supersensible world, even if this is denied by the positive theologians. This thinking had already weakened in the Middle Ages. In ancient times, people used this thinking to penetrate into a spiritual world through the inner strength of the human being. In the Middle Ages, this spiritual world was regarded as something that could not be explored, but only interpreted by the soul itself. Now, in terms of the training of thinking, we are heirs to scholastic thinking. We are still part of the same school of thought, but we can no longer perfect it. We can no longer develop the correct contours of thoughts with logical clarity because we do not train them on [spiritual] problems where thinking is left to its own devices; we can only follow what is being looked at in the experimental room.

And what is the last offshoot of Catholic, scholastic thought in the Middle Ages? Where is the last offshoot of what emerged as a social view from the theocracy of Augustine and his successors, from this tight organization, this militaristic arrangement of human coexistence? Where is the last offshoot, the last offshoot of medieval Catholic theology with regard to its thought forms? That is Marxism. That is the doctrine which is being prepared today as a socialist teaching for the masses. All the thought forms of modern socialism are nothing more than the last decrepit offshoot of the thinking that still rose to half its height in high scholasticism. It was born out of supersensible observation, but is no longer suitable for an age of natural science. We have come to describe the wide world of natural existence, to have geometrized and mechanized it - and people like Charles Eliot speak entirely out of this sense of having arrived - but we have not come to find our way into this world from thought. Therefore we had to speak, as Du Bois-Reymond spoke about the limits of knowledge of nature and the seven world riddles. What question was answered by Du Bois-Reymond in his sensational speeches “On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature” and “The Seven World Riddles”? — The question that the legacy of scholastic thinking cannot penetrate into natural science. That is no wonder. Thomas Aquinas had the doctrine of revelation before him; he had the doctrine of the supersensible worlds before him, as it was then common practice. The newer natural science was not yet there at that time; he could not deal with the newer natural science. If one were to continue to work in his spirit - not in the sense of the Catholic revival of scholasticism, of Neuthomism - then one would have to say: This is something that has become outdated, which in the theoretical socialism of Lenin and Trotsky seeks to realize itself out of scholastic, superscholastic thought forms in the east of Europe and in Asia. All this thinking, which has become decrepit, must in turn be transformed into thinking rooted in the vision of the supersensible worlds. Just as scholastic thinking, which has now become decrepit and too weak to cope with real social conditions and cannot be the root from which love blossoms and bears fruit, was present at the beginning of that thinking, which has now become decrepit, this thinking must be replaced by a thinking rooted in a knowledge of the supersensible world.

When Charles Eliot complained that what he imagines to be healthy thinking is not really appreciated in the broadest circles of people, but that most people only want to deal with it superficially through hypocrisy, he said: On the one hand, those people who are serious about science cultivate such a natural religion and seek to establish it for the future and develop it later, but we see how some of those people, who are also among the educated, seek a substitute for the old traditions in all kinds of secret societies, in the Masonic lodges, in the Odd Fellows lodges. We see, as Charles Eliot says, how a large part of humanity, honestly seeking the supersensible, seeks a way to the spirit in spiritualism and Christian Science. We see how the broad masses, out of old habit, cling to the traditional denominations. — Charles Eliot complains about this. He sees this as the thing that stands in the way of pursuing this path to healthy thinking. But he does not realize how what he is developing actually stands outside the reality of natural science. He does not even come to realize that what has emerged must be grasped with a different kind of thinking than the thinking that is only the legacy of the scholastic Middle Ages: with a thinking that has been reborn from the spiritual world. Truly, what has emerged today as socialism is nothing other than what lived through the centuries of the Middle Ages and has not been overcome in the minds of the masses to this day, despite the influence of modern culture. And even when these people appear as opponents of the creeds, their thought forms are still entirely in the spirit of these creeds. With the same thought forms with which the medieval man wanted to penetrate the supernatural God, with the same thought forms the modern naturalist, the layman popularizing the modern world view, the theoretical socialist turns to the unity of matter and force.

What must be gained by a new way of seeing is what has been advocated from this platform for many years and in Stuttgart in general. It is a matter of realizing how what is now being cultivated as a social vision through the threefold social organism is a necessary result of this new way of seeing – the necessity of a renewal of thinking, a rebirth of thinking out of the spiritual world. Only this rebirth of thinking can lead us to build the bridge that could not be built in the last centuries up to our time: to build that bridge between the world that stands as the world of natural facts and that can be overlooked with pure natural causality, and the world that arises in the human interior, the world of morality, of religious upliftment, of religious world plan. And only by having the courage to think in terms of this world view will we come to understand what is necessary in terms of both a view of life and a social direction for the present.

My dear audience, this spiritually-oriented world view, which is based on knowledge and is so thoroughly imbued with the existence of a spiritual-divine world, is what is meant here. It is clear about the fact that in everything that lives in the knowledge of man, that which man experiences inwardly as his thoughts about the world, and also in what arises from man as human will in individual or social relationship, that in all this the divine lives just as it lives in the outer existence of nature. This is what I wanted to express in my Philosophy of Freedom at the beginning of the nineties, and what has now been expressed again by the publication of the new edition of this book. That is what anyone who wants to build a real bridge between the contemplation of nature and the contemplation of those impulses of humanity that must arise out of human freedom and that can only give a justifiable structure to social life if they arise out of freedom. But one thing is absolutely necessary: we need to summon up a little more inner courage to think than the dormant souls of the present generally have. Here it is necessary to seriously consider the question: Wherein are rooted the things we expect as the future of humanity?

The external view of nature says: That which we expect as the future of the earth, as the future of the entire solar system, must arise through the transformation of matter and of force out of what we see around us, what is already there today. We calculate, we apply mechanics, we apply the mechanics of atoms, which so many have spoken of, earlier in the absolute sense, now in the hypothetical sense or in the sense of fictions. Then you realize that what we have to regard as the end of the earth happens through the transformation of matter and energy and without what is going on in man, because that is only an episode in these facts of the world. This is a necessary consequence of a purely naturalistic view of the world. This naturalistic view of the world appears to the view of the world that I have been advocating for decades as if someone were to look at the plant root and say: everything that arises there must arise from the plant root. That is, he would assume: there is the root, it produces stem, leaf, stem, leaf, and so on. He would only see what can develop out of this root, and he would not see that this root, which he now has before him, is rotting and dissolving, but that a new germ will arise from the plant that has grown from the root, in which the new plant is already predisposed. Read what is available in the literature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and you will see: This is how this spiritual science, which is based on supersensible vision, judges the great cosmic context, as described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. It says: at the basis of what we now have before us as the physical-sensory world, rooted in it, arises what develops in the depths of our soul as moral impulses, as ideal contemplation, as ideal thought forms, as religious truth courage - one must only see that in the right light. There it develops, as the germ develops in miniature in the plant. When once this whole world, which surrounds us as the world of matter and of force, will have decayed, will be a corpse, will have been scattered into space, what will be the end? The end, when all around us is scattered into the world, will be that which now arises as a spiritual germ in the human soul. This atomization, this annihilation of matter, this annihilation of strength, that is what we are looking forward to. But just as the human soul rises out of the human corpse at death, so that which lives as a germ in the human soul, that which is the moral impulse, that which is the ethical idea, that which is the elevation to the Divine, rises out of out of this pulverization] that which lives as a germ in the human soul, that which is moral impulse, that which is ethical idea, that which is elevation to the divine; this is what shapes the future, this is the new world. The future of the world does not come into being through the transformation of the seemingly transforming substance and the seemingly transforming force, but through that which now lives in our soul as soul-knowledge, as spirit-knowledge. There, in the human breast, the future lives, even if only as a germ. And because we are looking at a cosmic future that has its germ in this inner being of ours, we must have the courage to fight against this law of the conservation of matter and energy. We must have the courage to lead back to its true basis that which, in the 19th century, developed out of a scientific attitude into a world and life view. We must build the bridge between what is external and sensual and what is inwardly spiritual and real. We cannot build it as long as we are hindered by the illusion of the conservation of matter and energy. We can only build it through the newly perceived spiritual world, which opens up a thinking to us that has grown with social life.

This social life, if man is able to look into his inner being, so that he says to himself with all inner conscientiousness, with all inner strength and emotion: And if everything that my eyes see, what my ears hear, what I feel in the outer world – that is, everything that science alone speaks of – then what I now awaken in my inner being will live on as a metamorphosis, then what lives is moral value, what gives man his dignity from within. Spiritual science establishes the reality of the ethical, the reality of the moral, the reality of the religious, because it does not succumb to the illusion of the eternity of force and matter. Look at the metamorphosis of power and matter as described by Charles Eliot in 1909, and you will see that a spiritual-scientific worldview, as advocated here, has within it the power to say yes to spiritual life as the seed of the future. And let us imagine a human community that lives with such souls. Let us imagine that people enter social life with this sense of responsibility - not with illusions of the causality of social life - then we may hope that from such inner conscientiousness, from such a cosmic sense of responsibility, something will arise that can bring the social organism to recovery. That which emerges from a new spiritual science is the way to healthy thinking.

It is also that which, when present in a sufficiently large number of people, can be brought into the right relationship to the situation of the present human being. But that which cannot build this bridge, to which the moral order of the world must appear as no more than an episode, that will - if it alone is to be valid, if it seeks to push aside everything else, if it is opposed to a true spiritual-scientific world view, will always be reduced to absurdity, as everything that we have gloriously advanced in has been reduced to absurdity by the terrible catastrophes of recent years. Those who cannot learn from the lessons of these last years cannot see what social forces lie in the idea that seeks a new way of thinking based on observation – a way of thinking that can only be mastered by a sufficiently large number of people, and that only when it is equipped with the great ideological issues that confront us today.

Dear attendees! I have thus basically expressed, albeit only in sketchy terms, what I want to say today as an introduction to what I will say in more detail and in more specific terms the day after tomorrow. And now that my task has been fulfilled, I would like to briefly return to some of the things I said here last time, because otherwise the wrong conclusions are always drawn when certain things are not mentioned at all.

Dear attendees,

When I was able to visit our Waldorf School again, at least for a few hours, the day before yesterday after a long absence from here, I was able to attend a lesson in the eighth grade, in which world history was being taught. And I can say it openly: I have the impression that if we really succeed in continuing in this way with regard to education and teaching, at least the main part of it, then we can hope to educate people in our school who will be able to cope with the increasingly difficult life issues of the near future and who will stand their ground in life. There was undoubtedly something in this that was aimed at, and it seems to me that, to a certain extent, what I would like to call the following was achieved through what was accomplished: history as an expression of human development. For the children here, who are 13, 14, or 15 years old, history has become so vivid that what they will take from it in terms of thoughts that are full of strength will be something that can provide strength for their whole subsequent life, not just for an understanding of history, but for an understanding of life situations and living conditions in general.

And when I ask myself: How could – after I had been dealing with it for almost a year now, pedagogically and didactically, in order to pave the way for the Waldorf school of our friend Molt, who has just spoken here , how could the interest that I now had to take in the way the impulses given at the time would turn out in reality, how could this interest be satisfied in such a way as I have just indicated? And then I could see: the liveliness that had entered into the story was due to the fact that the teacher, Dr. Stein, had found the inner courage to incorporate into his historical perspective the power of the spiritual science that I have taken the liberty of presenting here in Stuttgart for many years now. This spiritual science is not meant to be a mere inner comfort for souls turned away from the world, but something that can actually permeate and fertilize all human knowledge and all human activity, including all human creativity. It should be something that not only makes people cognizant, but also provides ideas that, I would say, pour into the human limbs like a spiritual heart blood, into the spiritual and physical limbs, to make people more skillful, more capable, more adept at life in every respect.

However, in order to overcome the prejudices of the broad masses of people that still stand in the way of such a permeation of the branches of education, teaching and life with the impulses of spiritual science, one must have the inner courage - the courage that can only flow from being inwardly united in one's soul with the convincing power that springs from the knowledge of reality that comes from the contemplation of spiritual life, as I have often hinted at here. From what I have taken the liberty of speaking so directly about, thoughts are then easily directed to an appearance that is all too well-founded in today's general world situation and all too understandable in view of it.

We live – and I already hinted at this from a different point of view in my lecture the day before yesterday – we live today in a time in which the social question can no longer be a question of institutions and facilities, but in which it is a great question of human value, human dignity, a question of humanity in general. The question today is not how to devise the best institutions based on these or those ideas about social life, but rather: how can we win over the broad masses of the people who have appeared on the scene of life to work together with those who, in a certain way, through their intelligence, their intellectual direction, and what they have absorbed, must nevertheless be leading in all that is incorporated into the social life of the present as forces. It is indeed extremely difficult to express certain truths that may no longer sound quite so paradoxical today, but still sound somewhat cruel. But again and again, reference must be made to a truth that is all too clearly taught by what has happened in recent years. It must be pointed out that in the last few centuries, but especially in the last few decades, the bearers of present-day education, the bearers of what is actually civilizational life – apart from the survival of traditions – have lapsed into a certain materialistic view of life and that they have not found their way out of it to what has since emerged among the broad masses as theories, as views of life.

What had developed among the ruling classes as religion, as science, as art, did not have the inner strength to take hold of the broad masses of humanity. In particular, it lacked the power to educate the broad masses of humanity, who, as a result of the upsurge of our industrial life, had to be put to work at the machines, in the factories, and so on, to what was now the content of the education, religion, science, and art of the leading classes. The broad masses of the proletariat were left to their own devices, as it were. The members of the proletariat were left to what they could see of what was merely a mechanical institution, what was merely a lifeless, heartless, soulless machine and machinery. And from the sight of such a life connected with the mechanical, with the machine, an outlook could develop within the broad masses, which today expresses itself as more or less radical Marxism and now unfortunately wants to appear as a reality-shaping force, as I also hinted at the day before yesterday. But today there is no bridge between what the educated classes recognize as their civilization, based on old traditions, and what has entered the sphere of newer human life in the broad masses. And uncertain, very uncertain, we now face the great problems of life: how to build a bridge between those who, from their knowledge of human nature, can form ideas about how our social life should proceed, and those who, understandably, can only make demands on life from a sphere of life that actually only has to do with the inanimate, and who therefore believe that all life, all religion, all science, all art could develop, as it were, like a superstructure from these production conditions, which themselves are far removed from all spiritual life?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the terrible riddle of the present day: how can we manage to bring these two sections of humanity together – which, despite everything that has been said, must come together – how can we manage to fulfill this requirement? This weighs more or less unconsciously, of course, on many people. And out of this burden, many well-intentioned endeavors have emerged in the present. And here it becomes difficult again to express something that I must now express in the face of these, as I am quite willing to acknowledge, well-intentioned endeavors. But, ladies and gentlemen, today it is of no use just not to offend people, just not to offend people, to hold back what must be said out of a deeper insight into the laws of human development so that we can move forward to a new structure of our social life. Many people feel that we have neglected to establish something of spiritual content for humanity and to allow this to flow into science, religion and art as spiritual content, something that could have the power to convince the masses - for those masses who so far only want to accept what speaks to them from their own sphere of life, from their coexistence with the machine and with the mechanistic, and so on. And so many have already come to the conclusion that it is necessary to bring a certain education to the masses, because after all, our social question is basically an educational question. Education that is able to spread ideas about the possibilities of human coexistence, about the possibilities of social reciprocity – that is the well-intentioned endeavor of many. And so, in many circles, one thinks first of all, and with the very best of intentions, of adult education centers and all kinds of other similarly oriented educational institutions.

You see, that is precisely the difficulty, that one must speak of well-intentioned things in the way that I must now. The point is that those who today speak out of honest desire to spread education and science take it for granted that science as it exists today, as it has been learned and is taught in our schools and colleges, will simply be carried into the adult education centers and similar institutions in an appropriately prepared way. This is taken for granted by many today. Why? Because many people are not yet willing to ask the questions about the present situation of humanity with sufficient consistency. Today we see how much destructive power there is in our public life. We see the dimensions that the effects of decline have taken on, but we have become accustomed to them over the last three to four centuries, to what has emerged as popular science and popular art, to an unconditional, absolute sense of authority. And so people say to themselves: Yes, if we can now bring that which is absolutely right and absolutely appropriate to the truth to the masses, then it must be a blessing. What would be more natural than for such an opinion to arise where the vital questions of the present are not yet being raised consistently enough? But might not the other question also be raised, my dear audience, namely the question: Yes, were it not the hitherto leading classes of humanity, were it not the owners of this science and spirit that one now wants to throw into the universities and similar institutions - were it not those who had the leadership of humanity in their hands, who rode this humanity into today's conditions? Did this science, which one wants to give to the broad masses of the people today, perhaps prevent the leading classes from leading humanity into the absurdity of life? No, it has not! Can we now hope that something other than phenomena of decline will emerge when the leading classes, despite being saturated with this science, with this art and so on, rush into the present absurdity of life and are not protected by this science from this rush? Do we want to popularize something that is obviously part of the phenomena of decline? Is it to be spread to the broad masses, so that these broad masses are now led in an even more forceful way to the same absurdities to which the leading circles have been drawn by this science?

This question is a cruel one in the present day. But it is a question that must be raised, even if one suffers from raising it, because one knows from the outset how little one can be understood for raising such a question. The reason why one is so little understood is that most people today still believe: Well, something solid like the science of the last centuries does exist, we can build on it, it has just not yet sufficiently entered the masses; if it enters the masses, then it will be a solid ground for these masses. It is understandable that people want something they can call solid ground under their feet. But today the seriousness of our present world situation is so great that it is impossible to continue to keep silent about certain things that one believes one recognizes from the course of human development simply because they radically contradict, in a certain sense, what the prejudices of the broadest circles are. But what is basically an answer to the fateful question just posed was always in the forefront of the spiritual science that I have been speaking about for years in Stuttgart, and this spiritual science always wanted something quite different from what was wanted in the broadest circles [ was wanted] by prejudice; it always wanted not only that which it believed could broaden ordinary scientific education, but it always wanted a thorough fertilization of the whole of civilization with a new spiritual knowledge. And it was only from a new spiritual perspective that it could promise anything for this fertilization of the whole of civilized life. And so we are not thinking of directing our efforts towards placing popular science on as broad a basis as possible, but rather we are thinking of a renewal of the whole scientific and ideological spirit of the present into the near future.

You see, it is out of such a basic attitude that what flows through the Waldorf School here as pedagogy and didactics, as the basis of education and teaching, has arisen. And it is out of such a basic attitude that what has been said in the time between my previous and my present stay in Stuttgart, over in Switzerland, in Dornach, to a number of doctors and medical students, has also arisen. The aim was to go through the current form of medicine, particularly in a therapeutic context, and to show how everything that can be the basis of this medicine and what can then be further developed can actually be examined from a spiritual scientific point of view. The starting point was not to look at what is available as science in order to pass it on to adult education centres, but to gain a new basis of knowledge in order to enrich science and only then to pass it on to these institutions, because one should not take from the old science what is to become folk knowledge. A science of man, of the healthy and sick human being, has been attempted [through spiritual science]. It is still in its early days. Naturally, when one is immersed in the subject, one is very modest in one's thinking about everything related to these great problems of the present. But this knowledge of the healthy and sick human being has been attempted because there is a belief that only a spiritual-scientific science will be able to work in the broadest circles of humanity, to work with such a vitality that it can arise out of what the masses have gained from the view of the merely mechanical. This can never be achieved by the science that has so misled the ruling classes; only a world view that actually penetrates to completely different sources of knowledge than the sources that the intellectual and artistic conscience of humanity was inclined to penetrate to in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades.

I must take the liberty, esteemed attendees, despite the presence of such a large gathering here today, to speak first in a seemingly unpopular way and to point out some things in particular that most people today still say: Oh, we don't need that at all when we speak of the reorganization of the life situation of present-day humanity. That is much too high for certain spiritual heights, the broad masses cannot yet understand that. Yes, my dear audience, I am nevertheless speaking from such points of view, as I have just indicated. When I am often told today that what comes from here is not understood at all by the majority of people, I am reminded again and again of what I have often heard from theater directors, whose only concern has always been to present as many trashy plays as possible to the audience; they have always excused themselves by saying that the audience wants this because it does not understand better things. It was always clear to me that the theater directors concerned, who judge in this way, simply do not understand the value of better plays. And so I do not pay any attention when one or the other complains about incomprehensibility today, but I believe that we, perhaps influenced by the hardship of the times, are very much ready to take in many things that the last decades, swimming in philistinism, have called incomprehensible out of convenience. Many things have happened to me that I can cite as proof of this incomprehensibility. For example, about twenty years ago I was invited to give a series of lectures on Goethe's “Faust” to a circle of educated people in a German city. There were, however, a number of people who did not even think to say that what I was saying was incomprehensible. But there were also enthusiastic representatives of Oskar Blumenthal's muse, and they said: Yes, “Faust” is not a play, it is a science. - It has gradually emerged from certain backgrounds, which I do not want to characterize here, an educational ideal that was always at hand: you have to speak more popularly and more generally. But it is precisely this complacency that has led us to the situation we now find ourselves in. And we will not get out of it any sooner, ladies and gentlemen, until a sufficiently large number of people decide to have the conscience to understand that which simply cannot be conveyed in the most general terms, which are as clear as day, and which one can also sleep with.

When we speak today about the significance of education and teaching in the face of the current world situation, it is above all about the fact that it must be recognized: The teacher, the educator of today, can only fulfill his role in a fruitful way if he has a real understanding of the developing human being, if he has the real gift of looking into the human being and seeing the riddle that is revealed from the first day the child is born to the days when he is an adult. But we have no general world view that could lead us to truly look into a person, especially into the person becoming, in an intimate way. Our world view of recent years, of recent decades and centuries, has not actually led us to the human being, but has led us away from the human being. It has shown us a very astute way to recognize how man stands at the top of the animal series, how he has developed from lower animal forms, and today we believe we recognize what man's relationship to the non-human actually is. By raising the big questions of humanity in the popular sense, we do not actually ask: What is man? What is man's inner being? — Instead, we ask: What is the inner nature of the animal, of animality? — We study the development of animality, and when we have studied how animality develops up to its highest stage, we stop there, so that we then come to an understanding of man only from the development of animality.

It was certainly a long and meaningful path that was taken from a certain point of view, but it is characteristic of the foundations of the development of world views in recent times. For man does not stand before himself as man in terms of his actual essence, but he only stands before himself in so far as he is the pinnacle of animality, in so far as he is something other than the actual human essence. To what extent is man an animal? — We ask this today in all forms. And as a result, we have lost sight of the question: To what extent is man human in the true sense of the word? And so it becomes almost a fact that people, I would say, bite their logical teeth out on the question: What is the relationship between what we call the soul, what we call the spirit of man, and what we call the body, what we call the body of man? - In all forms, this is raised within today's philosophy, but people only bite their logical teeth out in the process. And it is strange how sometimes, when a lone raven is placed among the number of those observers who, out of the world view of the present day, are really dealing with such questions, how then, out of a certain common sense, they speak. Here is an example. Such an example illustrates many things.

For a long time, the brilliant philologist Rudolf Hildebrand worked at the University of Leipzig. He was a student of Jacob Grimm's linguistic research and also edited the famous dictionary for the most part in the parts that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had left to edit. Rudolf Hildebrand also wrote a number of diary pages that were published by Diederichs in 1910. In them, he expresses himself as a person who is immersed in the life, teaching and education of the present day with an attitude that, I would say, suddenly stops and wants to assert common sense in all that he has around him, especially in the people around him who talk about world view issues in today's school and teaching manner. An interesting sentence sequence can be found in Rudolf Hildebrand's diary pages “Thoughts about God, the World and the Self,” which were published after his death, in the chapter where he talks about education and teaching. There he says: “When I visualize how my colleagues at the university talk about the actual questions of world view, then I often want the lecturer to talk upstairs and the audience to sit downstairs in the sense of duty or perhaps also in something else and listen to him, I want a man from the people to come and tug the lecturer's ear a little, but not not too weakly, but so strongly that it hurts, and said to him: You, look me in the face, and look your students in the face, from person to person, and try to accept this empirical fact, and then ask yourself whether you do not speak all that you say only because you are self-absorbed and are not at all aware that you are facing another human being in the social life. Rudolf Hildebrand thinks it would be particularly interesting if the lecturer's wife went along with him and drew his attention to it by also pulling his ear lobe, not too weakly but so hard that it hurt and said: “You, would you really dare to say what you say under the influence of your authority at home in private, and do you think that I would attach any value to it?”

Now, esteemed attendees, I have expressed this not only to convey to you my own judgment, but also the judgment of a person who has worked for decades at a representative university, who has observed and to whom the question at hand has become a real matter of conscience. But what is at stake today, in the present world situation, if we want to educate and have an effect through teaching, is a true knowledge of the human being – a knowledge of the human being that we must demand should inspire us in our treatment of people, and a treatment of people that is thoroughly imbued with love for humanity. For only such knowledge of human nature, permeated by skill in human treatment and permeated by love of humanity, can lead teaching and education in such a way that the coming generations are introduced to the social context of life in the right way.

But, esteemed attendees, that is precisely the difficulty: our present science oscillates at abstract heights, believing that it can grasp reality with its atoms and atomic groupings, while it only rambles about in abstract heights of thought, in abstract concepts. If, therefore, one first forms a concept of soul and then forms a concept of body, without carefully considering the real configuration of the human body and the real essence of the human soul through direct spiritual observation, then one can come to nothing but a logical struggle with this great riddle of life, which must underlie all human knowledge. This is where the subject of spiritual science comes in, not in the sense of the abstract philosophical formulas that are almost the only ones being sought after today, but by to really look at the soul activity of the human being as self-education and self-discipline in the sense of spiritual research, which I have often described here, and likewise the attempt is made to look at the physical, the bodily, in the sense of this spiritual research.

And then, of course, we arrive at concepts, a few of which I would like to characterize today. But from these few I will be able to show how a living knowledge of the human being wells up from such a renewal, from such a refreshing of the human being's life of world-view. We see the human being growing up from birth, when he enters the physical world from the spiritual world. We see something emerging that works its way out of the deepest core of the human being, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, becoming more and more enigmatic and yet more and more magnificent and meaningful in the outer structure, in the outward physical body of the human being. And we see how significant life events impact this human existence as the person grows up. These life events are usually not sufficiently taken into account by what is now commonly accepted science. I will mention two of these life events first; from a different point of view, I have already characterized them from this point several times.

I would like to mention that around the age of seven, the child's original milk teeth are replaced by permanent teeth. I have already pointed out here that the entire mental constitution of the human being changes at this age. At the same time, it is the age at which we get the child out of the parental home and into primary school. It is the age we have to look at if we want to gain the methodological, didactic and pedagogical starting point for primary school teaching and education. I have pointed out how, in the years up to the change of teeth, the human being is primarily an imitator, how his soul is shaped in such a way that he experiences, out of his instinct, what is going on in his immediate surroundings, how he does not, so to speak, detach himself from his surroundings. The hand movements that the father and mother make, the sounds that the father and mother utter, are imitated by the child because, in a sense, albeit not so visibly, the child is connected to the father and mother and the whole environment in the same way that the mother's arm and father's arm are connected to the body of the mother and father, only to a higher degree. But I do not wish to draw attention to what I have already pointed out here today, but to something else, which in turn is intimately connected with it. What appears to be a change of teeth is, in a sense, the conclusion of a whole organic process; what culminates, so to speak, in the eruption of the second teeth, these are the results of forces that flood the entire human organism in the preceding age. At first we do not need to distinguish between what is spiritual-soul and what is bodily-physical. We see, when we observe the child's facial expressions, when we see the changes in his face from year to year, how the soul works on the body. And we see, so to speak, only deeper into this soul-spiritual work when we see how this soul-spiritual work in the child works organically, how it penetrates the outside world, finally finding a conclusion in the appearance of the second teeth. What exactly is it that is at work here? I can only sketch the matter out, but what I sketch out can be established with all scientific exactitude, down to the smallest details. What exactly is going on in the human being? Observe what happens to the human being in soul and spirit when he undergoes the change of teeth. At the same time, those human perceptions that fluctuate so much that they are no longer remembered in later life become [sharply defined concepts]. Think about how far back you have to go if you want to remember the first clearly defined concepts that you formed in your childhood; at this age, up to the change of teeth, the concepts are still unclear , fluctuating, not sharply defined, not yet so firmly established that they can be woven into the soul-spiritual life in such a way that they can then be retained, that all these memories shape the whole life. This interconnection of the soul-spiritual with sharply defined concepts and ideas, which can be incorporated into memory, begins at the same age at which the teeth change. And if we now investigate what is actually present, it turns out that the same forces that then come to light in our memory, in what we carry within us as the power of thought, the power of our remembering thought, that these forces, which around the seventh year have, as it were, emancipated themselves from the corporeal-physical, have worked in the corporeal-physical until the change of teeth: they were the same forces that drove out the teeth. Thus, until the change of teeth, we are intimately connected with the physicality of the human being with the same forces that then become powers of thought; they work on the formation of the bones that finds its conclusion in the change of teeth.

Dear attendees, we are looking at a very real relationship between soul and body. For in later life we have our sharply contoured concepts of memory, we know what our thinking power is, we look inside ourselves and observe this thinking power, and we say to ourselves: this thinking power has only been working as a free thinking power in us since the seventh year. Before that, it was submerged in our organism and directed the forces that pushed out the second teeth. We have an intimate relationship between the soul and the body; we look concretely at this relationship. We do not speculate about it: what is the relationship between body and soul? We look at the soul and see where we can observe, so to speak, the emergence of free memory images. And we see how these forces have worked in the organism before they were released into memory, how they were organically formative.

You see, this is the progression of the spiritual scientific worldview from the abstract to the concrete, from the merely conceptual, which imagines that it is penetrating into reality, to the truly realistic. This is the advance to the true essence of the human being, for now we know how to answer the question: What takes place in the body of a human being before the age of seven? One cannot describe this in the abstract; one must point to something factual, one must show something that is working in the human being. The same thing is at work that is our remembering thinking power. This is the one example that is intended to characterize the radical change that must come into our scientific way of thinking, into our world view. You can imagine, my dear audience, Because something like this is completely outside the consciousness of so-called educated humanity today, because no one – least of all science – wants to know anything about the concrete state of the soul and spirit and body of the human being, that is why the human being is a stranger to himself, that is why one cannot see into the human being. But how can one found a teaching method, an art of teaching, if one cannot see into the human being?

A second life event to which I would like to draw attention is sexual maturation. And just as much happens from birth to the change of teeth as from the change of teeth to sexual maturation. And if we now look again from the same spiritual-scientific point of view at what works towards sexual maturity and reaches its culmination in sexual maturity, we have to ask ourselves: what exactly is it? Just as the power of thought works in the body and the teeth, if I may express myself trivially, push out, so - as spiritual science shows, I can only sketch it out here - so the will works in man up to the age of fifteen. The will has an organic formative effect. It works in such a way that it governs the conditions of growth, the inner organic conditions. Then this inner organic working of the will comes to a certain conclusion, just as the working of the thoughts does when the teeth change. And that which comes to a conclusion here appears in the outer formation of the human being at sexual maturity. The forces of the will are rooted not in the human being's head but in his entire being. These forces of the will regulate the human being's growth forces up to sexual maturity. Then they accumulate. They have a tendency, as it were, to permeate the formation of the head. These forces of the will also shot in before sexual maturity; they were inwardly and organically active in the whole human being; with sexual maturity they accumulate. They accumulate and find their conclusion in the human vocal organ, which is the most intimate expression of the human will, just as the other forces accumulate in the formation of the teeth. They accumulate below the head – the head, the organ of the actual intellectual human being, is excepted. The forces of will accumulate, and in the male nature this accumulation is even expressed in the transformation of the voice through the larynx, in the female nature somewhat differently. In this lies a release of those forces of will, which are now to engage with the outside world in experience and in life – those forces of will that until then have worked inwardly in the human body as soul and spirit. It is exactly the same as with the powers of thought, which finally brought about the change of teeth and then appeared in their actual form as emancipated powers of thought.

Thus, as spiritual scientists, we look on the one hand at the thinking human being, at the human being with the power of thought, and on the other hand at the human being with the power of will. We are not talking in the abstract about some kind of soul, but we are talking about the soul that we observe. We follow its activity as a thinking soul until the second dentition changes, and then we follow its liberation, its becoming independent of certain internal aspects of the organic process. And we follow the will in the same way. That is to say, we no longer construct theories about the relationship of soul and spirit to the body, but we observe, we approach reality. You see, here a path is taken which, I believe, is suitable for flowing into general human education in a completely different way than the path that once occurred to an honest mind, namely to pluck the lecturer by the ear lobe, but not too weakly.

But now we are dealing with something quite different. It is a matter of not only attaching importance to the results, to the knowledge that is gained in this way, but also to how one should attach importance to how, through spiritual scientific methods, as I have described them in my “Occult Science”, in “How to Know Higher Worlds » or in «A Way to Know Thyself», how by such paths of thinking one comes to know something and truly much more about the healthy and the sick human being, which is simply closed in its depths to science, which today can be called an authoritative one. In a sense, one must train the mind, one must orient the mind in a certain way. The mind must take a different direction than one is accustomed to today. And much more depends on this. After all, the results are just results; they can be more or less important or unimportant, interesting or uninteresting. But what we do by taking the path to such knowledge, what we make of ourselves by educating ourselves in our essence, what we make of ourselves as human beings by preparing the way for such knowledge - that is the essential thing, that is what matters. It always depends on what we make of ourselves as human beings by developing a very specific way of looking at the world from within, in a very specific state of mind. This also enables us to look at life free of all illusions and yet in all its wonderful grandeur.

For example, we see that children are obliged to play in their early years and even in later years. The direction and guidance of play is essentially one of the tasks of a sensible, humane art of education and teaching. The child plays. The person who has now sharpened his view of the world and of human life in such a way as I have just characterized it, notices a great difference between the way one child plays and the way another child plays. To the superficial observer, almost all children play the same. For those who have sharpened their gaze, all children play differently from each other. Each has its own unique way of playing. It is now very strange when one focuses on what play means for a child's age: an activity for the human being in the soul-spiritual, as it is present when the actual thinking is still working within the organic until the teeth change. It is very strange how the child's soul-spiritual, which has not yet taken in the conceptual, moves in free play - in that play whose design is separate from the use and purpose of life, that play where the child follows only what flows from his own soul. On the surface, this appears to be a departure from the principle of imitation, for the way the child engages with the game is something that comes from the freedom of the child's soul – but only on the surface. For the one who watches more closely will see how the child incorporates into the game what he experiences through his environment, through everything that is going on around him. But if you have sharpened your gaze, then you look at this game not just as something interesting that happens in the individual life of a child at a certain time, but you place this game with all its character in the whole human life.

And by observing this, one learns to compare what happens at different ages of human life. Just as one can compare zinc and copper in the inanimate, as one can compare a cockchafer with a sun chafer in the animate, and so on, one can also compare the different ages of human life with each other. And here something most remarkable presents itself. When, with the sharpened eye that characterizes us today, we have gained a real conception of child play, then we must seek, in the various human ages, for something into which the special character of this child play flows. And there, through a very experiential search, we find that, when a person reaches the approximate age of 20 to 28 or 29, he really has to find his place in the world, really has to deal with what the world should give him as experience and guidance for an independent life, and when you look at how the human being engages with life and allows himself to be touched by life, you really do find a metamorphosis at a certain stage, a transformation of the particular character of child's play. Before the change of teeth, the child used to create freely from its soul activity with what did not belong to life, with the doll, with other play materials; it was active in a certain configuration, in a certain structure. If we learn to recognize and understand this and then observe people in their twenties as they engage with the serious side of life, with what is useful and purposeful in life, with what they have to find their way into through experience, you find that now the human being places himself in the usefulness, in the purpose of the world, in what is required by life, with such a character as he first freely showed in the childlike years of life in childlike play. Consider what this means. You want to influence education, and you know: what you observe as a special character trait in a child's play, what you then understand and how you guide the child's play, you do so that it will bear fruit when the person has dealt with the world that should be useful and appropriate for them in their twenties. Imagine the feelings that arise in the soul of the educator when he knows that what he is doing with the child, he is doing for the adult in his twenties. What matters is not what we know as educational principles in abstract forms, what we can muster from intellectual backgrounds in didactic-methodical rules, but what matters is that through such insights, when we see through life in this way, we develop a deep sense of responsibility in our hearts. A true insight into human nature does not only speak to our intellect; it speaks to our feelings, it speaks to our perceptions, it speaks to our whole conception of life. It permeates and interweaves us with a sense of responsibility at the post where we stand. We are not looking for an educational theory that merely says, out of a crazy or a justified cleverness, that one should educate in this or that way, but we are looking for such an educational theory in view of the present situation of man, which - out of knowledge of the human being - puts a sense of responsibility into the educator, a sense of social responsibility towards all of humanity. The art of education arises out of a sense of responsibility, which can only arise in us out of a right foundation of world view.

I am not speaking to you here about a renewal of science for the reason that it particularly interests me or tempts me to tell you that there will be different scientific results and that these different results would form a different world-view basis than the one commonly held today. No, I am speaking to you in this way because I believe that the whole trend, the whole character of world-view and scientific life will change. I say this because I believe that there will be a science, a life of world view, which will penetrate the whole human being, which will permeate the human being through body, soul and spirit, and which is particularly important for all the art of educating, for all the art of teaching, in view of the human being's present situation.

But something else is connected with what stands on the basis of such a new view of the human being. What do we strive for today when we speak of science, of a scientifically based foundation of a world view? We speak of what presents itself to us, for the most part in abstract concepts, and we are satisfied when we can say to ourselves: we must demand what only sharply defined concepts can give us; we must demand such concepts out of our prejudice. — Yes, but what if nature, the world is not such that it can be fitted into the concepts we demand, what if the world forms itself according to completely different forms, what if nature, for example, does not form itself according to what our natural laws are, what if these natural laws of nature only comprise a small part of reality and that the essential aspects of nature are not formed according to abstract laws of nature and ideas, but according to images - then we can discuss the logical justification of sharply defined laws of nature for as long as we like, we will not penetrate into nature, because nature does not lend itself to such laws, because it demands to be grasped in images. In particular, human nature demands that it be grasped in images. And one is led to all that I have outlined today only through a pictorial, through an imaginative way of thinking.

I would like to say: When you look at the human being in such a way that you see how the power of thought rules in his organism until the teeth come out, how willpower rules, how it draws into the larynx and transforms the voice. When one looks at all this, one cannot stop at formulating those abstract laws of nature that are so popular today, but one comes to make the soul active, plastic, by wanting to understand the human being. One comes to not stop at abstract concepts, at abstract ideas, but one comes to images. In other words, one arrives at a point where one can derive the abstract-logical scientific concepts from an artistic understanding of the world, from an aesthetic understanding of the world. One arrives at an understanding of what Goethe spoke so deeply from the foundations of his world view: Art is based on a perception of deeper natural laws that would never be revealed to man without art. Goethe believes that they would never reveal themselves through the abstract laws of nature, but only through the contemplation of nature in pictorial forms. In this way, one moves from a logical-abstract contemplation, from a mechanistic contemplation of external nature to an artistic comprehension, and such artistic comprehension gives our whole personality a different spiritual suppleness than abstract concepts.

And now let us imagine the person who has risen from scientific knowledge of man to an artistic understanding of the world and man; let us imagine this person flooded, permeated with this artistic-pictorial view of man and then practicing the art of education and teaching. In this way, life passes directly from the teacher to the life of the developing human being; it is not a philistine-abstract educational science that is at work here, but a living art of education, that which can take place in the most beautiful way as a social element between human being and human being. Finally, from a deeper basis of knowledge, what Schiller tried to express in his letters 'On the Aesthetic Education of Man' is fulfilled, based on more humanistic feelings. There it is actually made clear that man, in true knowledge, also maintains a state of equilibrium between the merely abstract necessity of reason and the merely sensual natural instinct; it is made clear that man stands between these instincts and that he works out of an attitude that asserts itself in the same way as the attitude in artistic creation or in artistic contemplation. It asserts itself in such a way that it presents that which we pursue as spirit, at the same time as something sensual; it brings about that which presents itself as something sensual, at the same time as something spiritual.

It is with this in mind that we begin to educate and teach at the Waldorf school. We no longer give the developing human being something that is prescribed to us; as educators and teachers, we devote ourselves entirely to the developing human being, and we educate people who can then engage fully in life. I have only mentioned a few examples. Just as we can give the child the best possible start in finding his way into life in his twenties by directing the game, we can observe other things in the developing human being on which we can base our education in order to give him the best for his later life. We can establish a form of teaching and education that takes into account the whole human being and the whole of human life. It may be said that the gravity of the present world situation demands that we take a look into the depths of that from which things can improve, from which the suffering and hardship of the present can be overcome. But this cannot be done with superficial means, it can only be done with deeper means. Only in this way will we educate people who will have what they need in the most eminent sense, because that is precisely what people lack in the current world situation.

If we look at people as they are today, if we look at what is coming to the surface of life, what even wants to direct life, at what is being lived out in public life, as it has have taken shape again — we see everywhere that two things are lacking in people today, which one would only wish for them in the most intense degree: what is lacking to a great extent in people today is what might be called self-confidence, but also what might be called trust in humanity. Consider, honored attendees, why people today so rarely turn inward to energetically place themselves in that social life of the present that so urgently needs energy. We find: People lack self-confidence. But self-confidence is only justified and can only exist when it is supported by trust in others. Just as the north and south poles belong together and cannot exist without each other, so self-confidence cannot exist without trust in other people. No educational science, no teaching science, will ever bring into people what self-confidence, what trust in humanity is, if it is not born out of such love for humanity, which comes from the knowledge of humanity, as I have characterized it today. For that is what one experiences, ladies and gentlemen.

When one gets to know the human being, as I have characterized it, when one learns to recognize how the soul and spiritual aspects work in the human organism, how the different ages of the human being interact - as I have illustrated with the example of the effect of a child's play on the age of twenty - when one gets to know the spiritual, soul and physical being of the human being so intimately Then one cannot but educate one's self in true human love at the same time, for one power of the soul is connected with another power of the soul, just as in the blossom of a plant the stamens are connected with the pistil; if the stamens are perfect, they require a perfect pistil. Thus true knowledge, arising out of love for one's fellow-men, does not develop into that abstractness which is so often and justly despised today, but into that which, on the other hand, also draws forth true love for one's fellow-men.

And what prevails in education, in teaching, out of such knowledge of the human being, out of such love for the human being, what pedagogy and didactics can create as a curriculum and timetable out of such knowledge of the human being, we have tried to do here in the Waldorf School, as far as this is already possible today. The effect of this, ladies and gentlemen, is that love for other people dawns in the child. The trust in humanity that is kindled in the child through the power that is born in us from real knowledge of the human being, which comes from the artistic understanding of the natural human being, that is what forms in us the power to ignite in the child lasting, inexhaustible self-confidence. And two other qualities that humanity so sorely lacks today and that can only be handed down to the human spirit through such an art of education are, on the one hand, composure and, on the other, a willingness and eagerness to act. These things are not clearly thought about today, quite, quite unclear, because one does not think from reality, namely from social reality.

I have already mentioned the amiable scholar Rudolf Hildebrand in very laudatory terms. So you will not believe that I want to misjudge this man. But he too was a person who – although he was sometimes driven by his instincts to make the kind of observations I have mentioned – was a person who was steeped in all the prejudices that have brought us the present misfortune. And so he also wrote a remarkable sentence in his diary pages, the sentence: “Compare a gawker who stands in front of a target to be shot at with a marksman who aims at the target. The gawker can hit the target with his gaze; he hits it every time. The marksman must first learn to hit the target; only then does he actually hit it.” Thus, according to Hildebrand, there is a difference between someone who is a mere onlooker of life, that is, someone who looks at life philosophically or scientifically or mystically or theosophically or in some other way, and someone who actively participates in life.

There is much that is correct in such a sentence, but nevertheless, there is also much that is one-sided. For let us not think of the example of Hildebrand, but of a “life gawker”, of someone who has only looked at life, for example, of Leibniz, who discovered differential and integral calculus. Let us imagine how this “gazer at life”, who discovered differential and integral calculus, has now become the cause of everything that is done in technology today through differential and integral calculus, of everything that is done in life today by the “shooter”, by the person who shoots. If you look at the person in such an unsocial isolation, you can aptly see the parallel between the onlooker and the marksman, each aiming at the target. But if one regards life in its social breadth, then one must say to oneself: If the one who is the life-gazer, out of his life-gazing, has a fruitful thought that leads to countless deeds, then, with regard to the interaction of people, with regard to social life, perhaps the life-gazer is the more active than the one compared to the archer.

The point is that we have gradually come to observe life one isolated act at a time, and now lack the ability to see the big social picture. To point this out, we need to be level-headed and reflect. Today, it is often the case that people avoid this reflection, this introspection, this “gazing” at life because they are too lazy to turn their thoughts and ideas into action, because they do not want to engage with the real conditions of life, because even when adversity comes knocking at the door, when it extends to the mouth, when the adversity is infinitely great, they are fatalists and say: tomorrow it will get better from some corner or another. We need prudence, life in action-thoughts. And on the other hand, we need a new willingness to act; this will follow from such thoughts in people, in whom we can ignite the human element from the love that we gain from true knowledge of spirit, soul and body - as the basis of a future world view, as we have described it today. And what is best, what education and training can give us in the face of the current world situation, is that we gain an open and free sense of life when the human is unlocked by such knowledge of the human being as is meant here. We are experiencing in our time that people misunderstand life in a strange way. They imagine themselves to be spirits of reality, but when it comes to reality, they are truly quite, quite far from this reality. Here is an example.

You see, a certain judgment was once passed in the course of the 19th century. Please read the parliamentary reports, read the best speeches of the best minds, read from newspaper reports what the most esteemed practitioners have said. You can always find in the parliamentary reports, in the speeches of the best economists, of the best practitioners, how they have passed a certain judgment that has become of the utmost importance for the development of modern times in political, governmental and economic terms. For example, there was a time when certain states introduced the gold standard. Read what was said about it. The best practitioners, the most experienced economists, predicted that the gold standard would lead to the abolition of customs barriers; that the gold standard would bring about free world trade. And if we look at what these practitioners of life, these businessmen, these industrialists, these parliamentarians said, who had emerged from an understanding that was typical of the 19th century, we find – I do not want to mock, I just want to speak the truth – we find that they said something very clever; but reality turned out quite differently. They said: tariff borders, protective tariffs, all of this will be done away with when the gold standard is introduced. The opposite has happened. After the introduction of the gold standard, tariff borders and protective tariffs have been erected everywhere. So, the opposite of what the cleverest people said has happened. I say explicitly the cleverest people; I am far from saying that the people who so radically failed to grasp reality were fools; they were the opposite of fools. They said the smartest things based on their education, but no one can arrive at the truth when the truth is not predetermined by anything, when the circumstances around us are such that one cannot see through reality even with the sharpest mind. That is why the smartest people talk nonsense in such a field. This is because the economic conditions, in their interconnection with the state and political conditions, were so tangled up that no matter how clever one was, one could not see through them; one said nonsense as a matter of course because one could not learn anything from reality. One could not shape reality in advance so that one could learn from it.

What we call the idea of the threefold social order is that economic life, spiritual life and political life should each stand on their own ground, and that these three spheres of life should stand as three interlocking and interacting parts of the whole social organism. It is demanded that the individual economic spheres, whether they be spheres of production or consumption or professions or the like, develop in the way that they must, uninfluenced by state or other organizations, from the foundations of the economy itself. It is required that they develop so independently from the expertise and knowledge of those working in them that one organization, which under such conditions can only have a certain size, then joins another, a third, a fourth, in a certain way; depending on how such associations develop, they will associate with each other again. In this way a network of economic associations will arise. Those who are part of one association will know: in the other association, with which I am involved in trade, in the exchange of goods, the other person whom I know is part of it; one can see the relationships of the two associations. The mutual relationship is regulated by contract. In this way one can concretely see into what the economic realm is. Through the associative principle, overall relationships are created; life is shaped in such a way that we can learn from it. The present situation demands that the unmanageable nature of economic life be replaced by the associative principle, by something transparent, the essence of which you can read about in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' and especially in our newspaper 'Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus', which has now appeared in fifty numbers.

You cannot learn from that which is opaque. Life should be shaped in such a way that, when we are placed in life in the right way, we can learn from that life. People who have been educated in such a way that this education is based on genuine, true knowledge of the human being, from which, as if according to natural law, love for humanity will follow — such people will feel how economic life, in its independence, wants to shape itself associatively. For such people will have learned in their childhood in such a way that this learning was such a school for them that they can now learn from life all the time. But that is the greatest experiential science of the school, that we emerge from it in such a way that life always remains a great continuing school for us. In this way, we are guaranteed throughout our lives: we continue to develop, we do not stand still, we carry the world forward. Until the end of our lives, until we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, we can live here in such a way that we expand our soul-spiritual, that we make our physical life more skillful, that we can regard all of life as a school. The present situation in life demands this. And what it demands here can best be expressed by saying: Everything that must come out of such a renewal of the foundations of world view, as it is meant here from spiritual-scientific foundations, must lead to the emergence of an art of education, a teaching art which, out of true, genuine knowledge of the human being, gives birth to that love of humanity which educates such human beings that are released from the school of childhood into the school of life in the right way, for it is only through this learning in the school of life that the right work on the social plane will be possible.

I will then talk about this in the next week's lecture on “Questions of the Soul and Questions of Life”, a lecture for our time. Today I just wanted to show that, when it comes to education and teaching in the present day, we are indeed obliged to say, in view of all the pressing issues of the day, that we must adhere to the principle: base education and teaching on that which, based on a deeper world view, is the foundation of education and teaching. For in this way you create the true, the genuine, the firm foundation for a solution to those social and human questions that have now become so pressing in all of human life.

Dear attendees! When you look at all the circumstances of the present, at the hardship, misery, and hopelessness, and when you look at the causes from which all this has emerged, then, in my opinion, an unbiased view of life suggests itself that the first riddle of our present time is, so to speak, the most urgent riddle: How can humanity unite the paths of the soul with the paths of life so as to work together constructively on building our social and other relationships in the future?

Since I intend to provide an addition to some of the things that I have said from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here in Stuttgart for years, you will forgive me if I take up one or the other in a historical way today and thus perhaps give the impression that these links are sometimes more personal than what I have presented here over the course of many years. But that will only appear to be the case.

The starting point of my talk today is that I would like to point out how this very question: How can present-day humanity harmonize the paths of the soul with the paths of life? – how this question was in my mind when, at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s, I was working on my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1894, as the basis of the world view that emerged for me over many years. For basically, the way it was presented by me at the time, this “Philosophy of Freedom” should already answer the fateful question of humanity posed at the beginning of our deliberations today. I do not intend to talk about the content of this “Philosophy of Freedom” today, but I would like to touch on the intentions underlying this writing with a few introductory words.

The underlying intention was to answer the question: How can a person, placed in the present, come to terms with the most important feeling, the most important longing of modern times, with the feeling of freedom, the longing for freedom, in the face of the great social demands of the present? And it is indeed essential, especially in this consideration of the nature of freedom, that we break with the whole way in which we have always asked about the justification of the idea of freedom, of the impulse for freedom. We have asked: Is man a free being by nature, or is he not? — This way of asking the question seems to me to have been superseded by the whole development of modern humanity for our time. Today, after what humanity has been through in the last three to four centuries, we can really only ask: Is man capable of founding a social order such that, as he develops from childhood to adulthood, he can find in it that which he is justified to call the freedom of his being? The question in the Philosophy of Freedom is not whether man is born free, but rather, in this writing, the question is whether it is possible for man to find something in the depths of his being that he can bring up from subconscious or unconscious depths into full, clear, bright consciousness, and whether he can cultivate a free being within himself through this bringing up. And this consideration led me to the conclusion that this most essential element in the development of humanity in modern times could only be based on two things: firstly, on what I then called intuitive thinking, and secondly, on what I then called social trust. And since I did not use these two words to describe something abstract or theoretical, but rather things of reality, things of life, what was meant in my writing was understood very, very slowly, because we live in a time of abstractions, as I have often stated here. We live in the age of theorizing. And when someone asserts something that comes only from a sense of reality and this assertion is then formulated as an idea, people confuse what has been taken from reality and clearly appears in the form of an idea with what lives in them as abstract ideas that have nothing to do with reality. And then they look at what can actually work in people as a real impulse, as something utopian or the like - especially those people who themselves only have utopian ideas in their heads, they see something like this as utopian.

What was the idea behind this striving for a universal education of humanity in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom”? It was this: that man can never become free if he only takes into his consciousness those ideas that have come to him for three to four centuries from the scientific world view, if he only fills himself with what can be learned from nature. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have often said here that the objection is raised: But how many people today absorb into their consciousness those ideas that are borrowed from the observation of nature? People think that only a few individuals study natural science and that perhaps those who learn something from natural science recruit others who establish a monistic – or as it is otherwise called – world view, but that this still has no decisive influence on the broad masses of humanity today.

It is not so, my dear attendees, it is different. It is the case that, gradually, over the course of the last three to four centuries, we have entered into a spiritual life, into a life in general, which is essentially fed — even now, even in the outermost regions of the country, not only among city dwellers or among the so-called educated — by what flows through our journalistic, newspaper, and book literature: Without being aware of it, people absorb into their imagination what follows from fiction, popular science, and journal and newspaper literature. They fill their souls with it. They may go to church on Sundays and think they are good Catholics or good Protestants, they may indulge in the idea that they honestly believe everything that is proclaimed to them. But in what they are, so to speak, in their everyday lives, the form of their thoughts, the whole configuration of their imaginative life is shaped by what unconsciously flows in from all the sources I have just mentioned. We can determine this by a kind of crucible test:

I believe that a large number of you are of the opinion that a certain community wants to instill ancient religious ideas with very intense forces into the life of the present - ancient religious ideas. Who doubts, for example, that the members of Jesuitism are striving to instill ancient religious ideas into the life of the present? That is certainly the case when the Jesuits write about what they believe should be said on the basis of the confession, when they speak about what people should believe, when they speak about what expresses the relationship of people to the church, and so on. But when today the Jesuits write about natural objects, about objects of human nature as well, and believe they should take science into account, then what are these Jesuits? They are the most pronounced materialists. Anyone who follows what a Jesuit presents to the world as secular literature in addition to his theological and religious writing will find that the sole aim of this secular literature is to establish materialism in the broadest sense. One can even form very clear ideas about the why. From this side, efforts are made to remove everything that concerns the soul, everything that concerns spiritual life, from human research and direct human thought. People should not research these questions of the soul and these questions of life, but should devote themselves to what is traditionally available. Everything that concerns the questions of the soul and the questions of spiritual life is thereby set apart from what research is to cover. One must not look at nature, at the real, true environment of life, from the standpoint of the spirit, from the standpoint of the soul, because such research is unchristian from its point of view, is irreligious. But if one is not allowed to research life from a spiritual point of view, then research becomes materialism, because if one is not allowed to bring the spirit into research about matter, then the spirit remains outside of research about matter, and one has only the most blatant materialism at hand. Therefore, in addition to the assertion of all traditional ideas on religious or theological ground, you see the most blatant materialism when [besides theological literature] secular literature comes out of precisely this circle. Today it is of no use to indulge in delusions about these things, only an unbiased examination of them can help.

And so it can be said that even those who, so to speak, officially represent piety – how could one not believe that Jesuitism officially represents piety, of course – even those are, as a result of what has taken place in modern times, crass materialists. And so we can naturally always see that people go to church on Sundays and cling to what they do not understand, and during the week only understand that which comes from the basis of the materialistic world view. It is this state of affairs, as I have often emphasized here, that has led us into the distress of the most recent times. For it is easy to see that from such circumstances man cannot find those paths of the soul that lead him to the paths of life. From that which, on the one hand, is an uncomprehended spirit, handed down only traditionally and, to make matters worse, traditionally incorrectly, and from that which is mere materialism, the soul cannot build for itself those paths that lead it into a strong, secure movement along the ways of life.

That is why I tried in my “Philosophy of Freedom” to point out, on the one hand, how man must come to not only fill his consciousness with what he overhears from nature, what the newer natural science hands down to him in ideas and images, but it was pointed out that a source of inner life can develop in man himself. And when he grasps this source of the inner soul life, when he grasps that in the soul which does not come from outside through the observation of the senses, but what comes from the soul itself, then he educates himself through this grasping of the intuitive soul content to make free decisions, to will freely, to do freely. And in my Philosophy of Freedom I have endeavored to show that if we follow only what are called the natural impulses, we are always dependent; I have endeavored to show that we can become free only when we are able to follow what develops in the human soul itself as intuitive thinking, as intuitive, pure thinking. This reference to that which man must first conquer in his soul through self-education in order to truly partake of freedom, this reference then led me to the necessity of giving a continuation of what was indicated in The Philosophy of Freedom. I have tried to do this over the past decades through what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For if one has pointed out that man must draw the impulse of this freedom, intuitive thinking, out of the depths of his soul, then it must also be pointed out what comes out when man turns to this inner source of his soul life. And basically, the explanations in the anthroposophically written works of the following years are only a summary of everything that was pointed out in my Philosophy of Freedom. I have pointed out that there are paths to be followed in the soul to a thinking that does not merely intellectually combine the environment, but that rises from inner vision to the experience of the spirit. And I was compelled to show what one sees when one looks into the spiritual world.

However, this must be emphasized today: the nebulous mysticism that many people mean when they speak of this inner source of the soul, that unclear hovering and rambling that surrenders to inner dreams, was not meant. Therefore, however, two things emerged. One is that those people who did not want to turn to the subject of pursuing clear thinking, which is perceived as uncomfortable today, felt little attracted by precisely what lay in the direction of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” That is one thing that has emerged. The other thing that has happened is that, admittedly, a sufficiently large number of wishy-washers and windbags, who want to find everything through unclear, nebulous paths, have latched onto what should be striven for with clarity through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It has turned out that this attaching of themselves has brought about malicious spirits enough who today fight against that which people say with whom I have nothing to do and who, by fighting, attach to me everything that the Schwafler and Schwätzer, the nebulous mystics, pull out as their own making from what was meant as most intensely necessary for the culture of the present.

For that is what we particularly need on the one hand: clarity of inner striving – that clarity of inner striving that distinguishes the true natural scientist today in his outer striving, but a clarity of inner striving. That is what we demand on the one hand. Not darkness and twilight, not dim mysticism, but bright, clear clarity in all that thinking has to do with. That is one thing. The other thing that should be based on and what I wanted to express through my “Philosophy of Freedom” is social trust. We live in an age in which every individual must strive within his or her own consciousness for the direction of his or her own thinking, feeling and will. We no longer live in a time when people will endure being led only by authority; nor do we live in a time when people truly endure having their whole life organized. Organizing has only emerged as a kind of counterpoint.

In 1908, I tried to point out the underlying facts in the following way. I said: On the one hand, there has been a general human force for three to four centuries that people want to be more and more focused on their own individuality, that they want to find within themselves the impulses for all that they actually strive for in life.

But while this is deeply rooted in the unconsciousness of many people, something that they do not want to realize because, at heart, they are still afraid of their own innermost being, something has emerged – I would say like a shadow in a strong light – that is opposed to this striving for freedom, this striving for for the individual to live their life as they see fit, something emerged that actually worked against everything that had developed in human nature over long periods of time; something emerged in the last three to four centuries that worked against all urges of human nature, and it grew ever stronger towards the present. I said: While it is actually natural for people today to strive for individual fulfillment, one can see how, because they do not understand themselves in this most modern of pursuits, they actually set the polar opposite goal externally. I characterized it somewhat grotesquely in 1908, but I am sure that even today people will understand me as many did at the time. I said: It seems as if people were not striving for the development of individuality at all, but for such a state, social, social organization that makes nothing else possible for people than that they move in all ways and means of life in such a way that the doctor is on their left and the police - the doctor, so that he is constantly taking care of health, without the person having the slightest need to trust his own judgment about his health; the police officer, so that he ensures that the person finds the direction of life, without the person giving himself this direction of life.

Just follow what, despite all enlightenment, despite all the alleged sense of freedom, has been done in this direction in recent times, more or less unconsciously. It had to be said: If we continue in this direction, we will descend into a terrible decline. We can only ascend if we strive to cultivate in humanity that which gradually makes possible a social life together that is filled with complete mutual trust. We must regain faith in people; we must regain faith in the fact that, through appropriate education in the truly human sense, through the development of our humanity, it can become possible for us to get along with each other in the affairs of life that demand something more than just being able to pass each other on the street, and to do so in the same way that we get along with each other when we meet on the street. For when people meet on the street, one goes left and the other goes right; they pass each other without jostling. That is a matter of course. If the source in humanity that I speak of as the true intuition in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is opened, then one can found a social community in the higher matters of life on trust, just as one must ultimately found everyday life must be based on trust, because it is not acceptable for a policeman to approach two people who meet on the street and say, “You have to walk this way so that you don't bump into others.” This matter of course of everyday life can also be brought into the higher life, where the seriousness of life is present and cultivated.

Admittedly, two demands were made in that “Philosophy of Freedom” regarding the paths of the soul. One was that we should not be satisfied with the thinking that is popular today, that is popular in everyday life, that is popular in science, but that we should rise to the level of educating that in man which the new time wants: to a thinking that flows from its own source in the soul of man, to a thinking that is full of light and clarity in itself. And here I must again draw attention to the fact that traditional education leads to the opposite of what I have described as a necessary future requirement in my last lecture here.

If a person today is educated only by what comes to him from the traditions of the confessions and from the more recent world of ideas in the natural sciences, if he bases his thought forms of everyday life on nothing but on what he has absorbed from the popularized versions of the natural-scientific world view, from popular literature, from literature in general, from journalism and newspapers, then, ladies and gentlemen, then the human being becomes a materialist. Why does he become a materialist? He becomes a materialist because he does not free his thinking from the body, because he does not strive to find that source in his soul that frees the soul from the body; but by doing so, man falls into the dependency of the body in life.

Why are we materialists today? Not because we interpret life wrongly, but because we live wrongly. We live and educate our children in such a way that they do not think with their soul, but only with their brain, because the brain can become an imprint of thinking. We switch off the soul and think with the brain. No wonder that we then also speak about this thinking as if it were dependent on the brain; for the greater part of people today it is dependent on the brain. People are materialistic because they have become material with their whole life, because they do not strive to gain freedom through a thinking that breaks away from the body, that becomes free of the body - if I may use this expression today, which I have often justified. The one who wants to develop himself in the sense of today's demands must free his thinking from corporeality. He must transform his thinking into a free mobility of the soul that exists in itself. He must know what it means to think in the mere thought within, not to think in such a way that what is thought is only the result of the brain.

The question today is absurd: is thinking only a result of the brain or not? It is a result of the brain if we do not first detach it from that brain. Here I would draw attention to a whole tangle of errors in which present-day humanity is entangled, for we are now in a position, through what humanity has achieved in the course of historical development, to detach our thinking from the body with full, clear clarity. How do you detach it? Not by becoming a spiritual researcher oneself, although everyone can become one to a certain extent if they pay attention to what is written in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and other similar books. But it is not even necessary to do this. One need only accept from the spiritual researcher what he has to say to the world, just as one accepts from the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist what the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist has to say. One need only approach what is to be received with one's common sense. But then one will make a certain discovery. One will make the discovery: No matter how long you follow what the spiritual scientist says with your thinking, which has been trained only on natural science, on today's life, with your material thinking, then it seems to you to be fantasy, enthusiasm, something you have to reject. You only understand what the spiritual researcher says when you realize that thinking can be detached from the body, that you can immerse yourself in the thinking that is drawn in from spiritual worlds at birth or conception, that will be drawn into spiritual worlds when you pass through the gate of death. Detachment of thinking from the body is the first great goal on those paths that must be followed by the soul in today's life.

And another great goal is still necessary: when we train the will as spiritual science methodically describes it - it is presented in the books just mentioned - then this will take the opposite path to thinking. Thinking frees itself from the body, it breaks away from the body. But the will, precisely through the training described in these books, will take hold of the body all the more. For this is the peculiar characteristic of modern man, that he indulges in abstractions through the will, devotes himself to abstract ideals through the will, hears abstract commandments from the pulpits, but that these abstract commandments do not enter into his arm, not into his body, not into his actions. The second link in the chain of the education and development of humanity that is meant here leads to the human becoming one in what he experiences as the impulses of the will in his body itself. The spiritualization of the body with the will, the introduction of the will into everything sensual, everything physical and everything social, is what this spiritual science imparts as a second step.

And what becomes of ideals when they are, as it were, inoculated into the body in this way, according to the method of spiritual scientific thinking? They are seized by that which would otherwise be directed out of this body only towards the ordinary world of the senses. What gradually awakens in our body during childhood, sensual love, becomes, when a person is seized by spiritual science, so that all ideals too do not remain mere abstraction, that they do not remain mere thoughts, but that they are loved, loved with the whole human being. It becomes so that one loves the spiritual that underlies our morality, our ethics, our morals, our religious impulses, as one loves a loved one, so that what would otherwise remain abstract becomes completely concrete like a being of flesh and blood.

Therefore, Kant's categorical imperative, which already disturbed Schiller, had to be overcome by the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Because this categorical imperative intrudes into human life like something to which one submits. And what Kant says, proceeding from a consciousness that must be overcome today if we want to make progress: “Duty! thou exalted, great name, thou that dost not connote anything complaisant, anything that implies ingratiation , but demands submission,” you who ‘lay down a law... before which all inclinations are silent, even if they secretly work against it’ - that must be replaced by the other: Freedom, you wonderful spiritual construct that encompasses everything, to which my humanity would like to surrender in love! Schiller was disturbed by the inhuman categorical imperative of Kant, and he said: “I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it with inclination. And so it often bothers me that I am not virtuous.” — “There is no other advice, you must try to despise it, and then, with disgust, do as duty bids you.” Schiller sensitively saw all that was philistine and inhuman in this categorical imperative. He did not yet live in the time when it had to be pointed out — as it has in the present — that what is to be sought in spiritual science combined with the human being, and what makes what is to live spiritually in us an impulse of love, must be sought beyond all natural foundations in spiritual foundations. When such an impulse of love becomes the social driving force among people, then the social community is based on trust. Then the relationship between people is such that what happens between them happens through the experience of each individual person, not because people live like a herd of animals and everything that should be the direction, the path of their lives, is ordered and arranged for them from above by some kind of organization.

And so we can say: In the early nineties, I strongly wanted to raise the call for something with my “Philosophy of Freedom” that today is being counteracted by the terrible, murderous opposite in Eastern Europe, and from there contagiously in many other places, and across a large part of Asia.

We have just entered into social conditions in modern times that — out of perverse human instincts — sought the complete opposite of what should have been striven for out of the knowledge of the true, deeper goal of modern humanity — that is the terrible 'tragedy of the latest times. But it is also the absolute necessity of the latest times for a striving towards the future that we recognize: the social order must be built in such a way that it can only be built on free thinking, on trust, on what Goethe meant when he wanted to define duty and said: “Duty is when I love what I command myself.

Dear attendees, when an education works for the paths of life and the paths of people's souls in such a way that these people, out of a keen interest in their environment, know how they should relate to other people, in that their whole existence is imbued with human dignity, only then can the ideal of modern times be fulfilled. Not through any organization, because it takes away so much of what people today must strive for if they follow their nature, and that must lead not to freedom but to bondage and decline.

And I have never made a secret of the fact that, in advocating the 'Philosophy of Freedom' and then the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science built on it, I never made a secret of the fact that I did not care about this or that content, about this or that detail. I have always spoken with a certain irony of those for whom the main thing is to hear: How many parts does human nature consist of? What can be found in this or that region of the spiritual world? — I have always spoken with a certain irony about such endeavors. On the other hand, it was always important to me to answer the question: What happens to the whole human being, to the human attitude, soul, body and spirit, when this person strives not to think as mere science gives it today, not to will as the organizations inoculate it, but to think and will as it is in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom” and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? I always pointed out that thinking, simply by absorbing this spiritual science, becomes agile, that it opens up interest widely to the affairs of the present, that it provides a free and unbiased view of what is necessary and of what is holding back our progress in human development.

That there is much that holds back our necessary progress in human development - I may say that it came to me early on, a good forty years ago, when I got to know, through a student of Gervinus, such people who, within German intellectual life, and who, under the impressions made on him by the revolutionary years around 1848, wrote his History of German Literature and his History of the German People in the 19th Century. When delving into Gervinus' history of German literature, one still says today: He actually set the guidelines that all later literary historians followed. He set the broad lines according to which German antiquity, the German Middle Ages, Minnesang and Meistersang, the early days of the German classical period are to be judged. But he also set the guidelines for a healthy assessment of the Goethe-Schiller period. Some of his views may be considered pedantic today – but those who followed him are even more pedantic. And some people today who believe themselves to be at the height of a particularly modern, expressionist era really show through their snobbery a pedanticity that is much greater than that of the old traditions, but I do not want to defend their pedanticity. But there was something strange about Gervinus, this Gervinus, who became quite bitter in the 1770s, so that – despite the fact that he was owed so much – he caused much offence to those who under the auspices of these Siebziger Jahre believed they were sailing into the golden age of Germanness and who, in any case, had no inkling of what was to come from the seeds that were already present in that age.

What did Gervinus proclaim as his own well-intentioned conclusion in his history of German literature? He proclaimed the remarkable fact that German poetry ended with Goethe's death. — Just think, my dear audience, the one who first described this German literature with such deep love, he stated at the end of his description that the German people should no longer listen to what comes from all sorts of lyricists and the like, but that they should become aware of what has emerged from the deepest essence of Germanness to the surface until 1832. Beyond that, Gervinus believes, the German people must no longer devote themselves to lyric poetry and drama, to fiction, but to politics, to practical action. The time for practical action has come. In a strange way, the first seed of this came to me; I felt it more than forty years ago, when I received the whole of Gervinus's teachings in this way from Karl Julius Schröer, my dear old friend Schröer, at the Technical University. At that time, I felt something that was a seed of another, which, I would say, is now fully developed.

There were a good number of people like Gervinus who, based on a largely justified insight, said that the time of inward contemplation, the time when one withdrew from practical life and strove for spiritual heights, was over. It was now a matter of devoting oneself to practical life. But by observing this germ one could already feel something: that all these people who spoke in this way pointed to practical life in a very abstract, unrealistic way, that they regarded the old ideals as fulfilled, so to speak, and pointed to a new, practical life, but for this practical life they had no impulsive ideas, no impulsive forces. For if one asked Gervinus, for example: What is the spiritual content of what you described so beautifully until 1832? One was given a vast, grand tableau in the presentation. If one asked: What should live in the hearts, in the souls of those people who are now to move out into practical life, who are to lead this practical life, who are to find the ways of life from the ways of the soul? There was nothing, no new ideals were there! And the thought had to arise in the soul: First of all, the world, the spiritual world, must be found, from which the new ideals for a new practice of life can be found; this spiritual world must first be scientifically fathomed, just as the natural world has been scientifically fathomed for three to four centuries.

And basically, the time has shown that the world has remained without drawing from these spiritual sources, that it wanted to establish practice, but practice without spirituality - and this desire to establish practice without spirituality has led us into today's time of decline, into a time of need, misery and hopelessness. And many a thing has been said that repeatedly points to where we are actually heading. Yes, many things have permeated the lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Stuttgart for two decades, many things that seemed necessary to me to bring to people's consciousness from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, if there is to be an upward development – an upward development not through cannons and guns, but through a practice of life that is supported by spirituality, but by a spirituality that must first be created anew. And here today I may point out something that I have said from the most diverse points of view as belonging to our spiritual science.

I have said: if someone applies the same approach, which has come to us from natural science and which fills our thought forms with natural scientific formations, if someone applies this to history, then they see only that which leads to decline in history. For in history there are always forces that bring about decline. And if you follow history only with the methods that are common in science, as for example the English cultural historian Buckle did and those who followed him, then you see in history only that which leads to the downfall, then you see only the evening glow of history. In order to see what has brought about the ascents in history, it is necessary to look into the spiritual world. That which brings about the ascents in history are impulses that arise from the spiritual world. I have already pointed out here that, for example, through Gibbon we have an excellent history of the decadence of Romanism written in the age of natural science. But what we still lack today is a historical account of what was the impulse of Christianity in the declining Roman world. One can describe what perished in Romanism with a scientific way of thinking; but one cannot describe what arose in Christianity with a scientific way of thinking. I have pointed this out. And what follows from what I have pointed out? It may seem to follow only in ideas, only in thoughts, but in reality in terms of the ways of life? What follows from this?

This follows: If someone were to appear in our age, in which natural science has taken hold of all circles and minds, right down to the circles of the Jesuits, as I have indicated, if someone were to appear and give a life-historical account from this natural scientific spirit, what would he have to say? He can only see phenomena of decline, because he regards our Western culture from the perspective of natural science. What would such a person write if he were to write about the present from a scientific point of view? He writes: “The Decline of the West”. And have we not - in contrast to all healthy thinking in spiritual science - now also received this terrible literary product: “The Decline of the West” - a morphological historical view by Oswald Spengler. My dear audience, the only way to understand how this could be possible is to realize that those who are saturated with a purely scientific way of thinking can only see the signs of decline, so that they must prophetically predict: the whole culture must perish.

But must it not go under if all people think as this Spengler thinks? Just as one must become a materialist if one does not detach thinking from corporeality, so one must think about Western culture as Oswald Spengler thinks if one looks at this culture of the West only from a natural scientific point of view. But if everyone looks at it that way, if everyone believes that we must perish, then we will perish. That is why I call this book a terrible book. For those who are infected by these ideas, by these impulses, and who take them up in an honest way, must become bearers of decline from the deepest depths of their soul; they must enter soul paths that lead to the life paths into the abyss. From time to time we must look at such phenomena, because only they show us the depths of human life in which the phenomena of decline are present today, and the depths to which the paths of the soul are prepared that rush down into the abysses of the paths of life.

Now, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science faces such things. It keeps its gaze fixed on that which is rooted in the spiritual world by the human being. Of course, this is most attacked in itself, that it asserts that the human being can, if he only develops the powers of the soul present in him, come to the contemplation of a spiritual world. Today this is brusquely rejected from almost all sides as enthusiasm, although one could easily follow that those paths to the spiritual world - which I tried to open in my book “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” and in my attempt at meditations on self-knowledge and so on - that these paths are just as safe as those that lead into the fields of mathematics with absolutely clear, sharply defined thinking. Only in this spiritual research one does not only think, but also other, more real powers of the soul than in mathematics come into consideration in this research.

There this spiritual research must indeed speak about the spiritual world; it cannot place itself on the foundation on which many traditional creeds are based today. What do these traditional creeds proclaim? One thing they proclaim, for example, is something that has been fully established by spiritual science: the indestructibility of the human soul when the body is returned to the earth, the transition of the human being into the spiritual world when the human being passes through the gate of death. But it is not enough just to come to such conclusions; it is also important how these conclusions are cultivated in the human being. And how is the idea of immortality cultivated today? By appealing to the selfish instincts of the human soul's journey. Read the countless sermons, read the countless reflections on this subject – you will find everywhere speculation that man has an egoistic interest of the most intense kind, that he does not perish with death. Basically, all talk about immortality is a concession to this egoism of the soul. The way in which the idea is presented is characterized by this. And what is sharply denied in the face of this half-immortality is the other half, the part that Origen still had expressed, although he was considered a heretic by the church: the pre-existence of the soul, to which the unbiased spiritual researcher returns. What do today's confessions have to give? The conviction that two people come together in the world, produce a child and that the soul is then newly created from the spiritual world, that every time a sensual process takes place here, a spiritual process is added from the spiritual worlds.

Dear attendees, this idea is not a Christian one. This idea is an Aristotelian one. It was Aristotle who, out of the decadence of Greek thought and out of an uncomprehended Platonism, taught this coming into being of the soul with the body and thus the one-sided immortality only after death. And so the Christian denominations, by denying pre-existence, do not represent something Christian, but rather something Aristotelian, something that in its depths has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. And when spiritual science, as it is meant here, comes along and reveals the whole state of affairs, then the “Trauben” like the pastor, the professor Traub, come along and declare that spiritual science is merely copying. No, it is not like that. In truth, with regard to certain elementary things, one agrees with old truths just as one agrees today with the old Euclid in geometry. But people like Traub are only too willing to throw mud at anything that existed in older times, because if one studies impartially, one would recognize where their own wisdom comes from. Their wisdom is borrowed from all the things they want to bury so that no one will find out about it. That is why they make people think that anthroposophy draws from gnosticism and the like, so that people think of gnosticism as something dangerous and do not look for themselves how this gnosticism has flowed not into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but into the modern content of creeds, by bringing into decadence what lived in gnosticism.

This spiritual science must point out precisely how man descends from the spiritual world, how it is not a whim of the physical world that causes the divine-spiritual world to create a soul for what human beings procreate on earth, but how the soul descends from the spiritual world with experiences that it has had there; it must point out precisely how physical life is a continuation of spiritual life. Spiritual science adds full, complete immortality to half immortality. If one walks this path, one recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds into the individual human being. One also recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds – but through the human being – into cultural advances, and how these cultural advances have very specific, distinct epochs and periods. Today we are in the period that, in terms of our conception of culture and civilization, must lead to something entirely new. That is how it is.

When you read a book like Oswald Spengler's, which is quite a thick volume, you can see how he looks at individual cultures from his scientific point of view. He says: Cultures are always developing; they have had a childhood, an adolescence, a maturity, a death. This was the case with oriental cultures. They emerged, grew, matured, and died. It was the same with Greek culture. And it is the same with our culture; and our culture is now in the process of dying. Because, he says, we are compelled to look at cultures in the same way that we look at an oak or a pine tree. An oak tree emerges, grows, matures, and dies. We look at cultures in the same way. Yes, we look at them in the same way when we are completely imbued with a purely scientific way of thinking. If we get to know the spiritual world and learn to cultivate it in the right way, then we also know how to look at cultures differently.

Then what I gave here during my last stay in Stuttgart as an outline of the historical life of mankind will come into our souls, in which I pointed out that once upon a time, in primeval times, people had an instinctive knowledge, an instinctive spiritual life, but something higher than we can achieve today with our intellectuality. Compared with what was there at the beginning from the human instincts of wisdom, we are today, however, in an epoch of decline. But if we understand, as spiritual science means, to open the source in our souls for free, enlightened thinking, for freedom, which is love at the same time, for social trust, for spiritual insight at all, then what lives in us, what penetrates through our soul, into this earthly culture, into this earthly civilization, brings about an ascent. But if we were to be satisfied with what contemplation of nature and the scientific world view can give us, if we could only believe in what is there today through this view, then there would be an inevitable decline. There will be no decline if we become aware that within us is the source of a thinking that can detach itself from the body, that within us is the source of a willing that can love the ascent into the spiritual world as much as only sexual love can love something. If we raise in freedom the wisdom that ancient humanity received in instincts and that can only be raised today because physicality no longer gives us anything, if we raise in freedom that, then we insert the impulses of ascent into what wants to descend. So the question that is put to humanity today is: Is the world not in decline? Yes, it is in decline if man wants to follow only what is given to him from outside, if he will only be harnessed in a natural or social organization given from the outside.

Decline will not occur if people build and found a new world from within themselves. The Lenins and Trotskys, who want to build a new world in every respect and only on the basis of natural science, lead most quickly and most intensely to decline. Those who want to build a new world out of the spirit lead to social advancement – but only they. For all those who still believe that the world can be cured by external institutions, by all kinds of external means, by Marxism or the like, Oswald Spengler has spoken the truth. If only these people work on the world with their powers, if only they direct world development, then Spengler's prophecy must be fulfilled. For he only drew the consequences from that, from which they must draw one, who today is only filled with a scientific world view. Today the ways of life are serious, and it is necessary that the greatest seriousness should take hold of the ways of the soul. But one must also take such great matters seriously. And one must be able to judge from symptoms.

I told you that more than forty years ago, when I, as a young man, got to know Gervinus' way of thinking through Schröer and then approached Gervinus myself, it had a profound effect on me how Gervinus demands practice but has no ideas for practice, how he wants the world in which there were still those ideas, of which he alone knows how to speak, to have ended in 1832, to have ended with the death of Goethe. It made a deep impression on me how he called on people to stop writing poetry and drama, to stop writing fiction, but to devote themselves to the practical tasks of life, how he pointed people in the direction of practicality, but had no ideas for these practical tasks of life. And so people behaved accordingly. The lyricists were only there for the school, at most for the concert hall; there they were declaimed. But what flowed from the spiritual life could not intervene in the ways of life. There was a discordance between the ways of the soul and the ways of life. And so we developed. Now people like Oswald Spengler are saying: All that Western culture and civilization have brought is finished, it is doomed! So what do we do? This is now particularly interesting, and let us consider with Spengler's own words why he actually wrote his book, for which minds he actually intended it. He says himself: “If, under the influence of this book, people of the newer generation turn to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of epistemology, then they are doing what I want, and one cannot wish them anything better.

Now, my dear audience, I think that in the age in which one believes that one has made such splendid progress in practice, people have turned to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of the critique of knowledge, before Spengler wrote his book – all that was truly already there; there have truly never been too few politicians. Now to prophesy the decline of Western civilization, now to have to admit that one wants to call on people to turn away from spirituality, to turn to a practice for which one does not have any ideas, indeed, does not want to have any ideas, in principle, to now prophesy the downfall of the ideas of the West because one believes them to be dying - that is speaking from the heart of the time of decline. And perhaps I may, without being immodest – for I only want to characterize a desire, an attempt, a beginning – perhaps I may point out that what has been presented here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what now, out of this spirituality, wants to take on a practical form here in Stuttgart, the center of the movement, stands on the opposite point of view. We do not say to people: Turn away from all spirituality, because that is in decline, and turn to the coming day. We say to people: New spirituality must be created; we need to delve into new sources of spiritual life. We need to enter into the soul paths of a spiritual vision so that we can find precisely that practical life that is supported by realistic ideas. Without ideas we have ridden ourselves into decline; but with ideas, which cannot now be the traditional, old ones, but must be newly created, with these new ideas alone will we be able to enter the dawn. Admittedly, it seems as if it could not happen so quickly, because what can be seen on a large scale is also evident on a small scale. But I only want to speak of this symptomatically.

The way in which such a desire, as it emanates from here, is judged – it had to be characterized in issue no. 50 of our newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” by Eugen Kolisko under the title “Theologians' Criticism and Conscience”. It had to be characterized once again on the basis of the book by a university professor, Dr. Philipp Bachmann, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen. This book, “Life or Death?” was published here in Stuttgart. Read the article written by Dr. Kolisko and you will see that he rightly summarizes his review at the end with the following sentences, which are a perfect description of a science that today is effective only through diplomas and external positions, but which is inwardly hollow and which always develops precisely those forces that, from the alleged spirit, must only lead into decline. Today we must have the courage to characterize the phenomena of decline not only in general and abstract terms, but to shine a bright light on how we have an alleged intellectual life today, which even in the simplest things works with an unscrupulousness that only parallels its thoughtlessness, its ignorance. This, ladies and gentlemen, must not be ignored if one wants to speak today of the harmonies between the ways of the soul and the ways of life.

Thus Dr. Kolisko had to characterize what is identified with such an insignificant little book:

It would not be necessary to concern oneself so thoroughly with this book if it had not been written by a university professor. Such a person must know what the task of an objective critic is. But the present critique is careless.

In particular, the way the train of thought of my “Secret Science” is reproduced in this book is careless.

One can only proceed in this way without prejudice in the field of theosophy. For here one is not checked when one asserts the most absurd. Anthroposophy, theosophy, spiritualism are all considered equal by many, and according to the saying that at night all cows are gray, one can with impunity combine everything and write derogatory reviews. If a critique were to be written in such a careless manner in any other scientific field, without sufficient knowledge of the criticized field, if only in one case, instead of in many places, the thoughts of a writer, ignoring the relevant literature and mixing up the opinions of different writers, would be held accountable in scientific circles and would lose his reputation and perhaps even his position. Anyone who presents to their readers the content of what is said in the book “The Occult Science” about the human constitutional elements with the words: “The physical body dies, the etheric body sleeps, the astral body forgets, the I (the sentient soul) is the memory.” He is either incapable of reproducing someone else's train of thought, or he does it to maliciously distort it. Either way, he is condemned as a critic. It is an indictment of today's education system that a university professor can produce such a work unhindered. What is to be thought of the Christianity of a theology professor who writes such criticisms is left to those who can still muster some outrage at such a frivolous and unscrupulous procedure.

That is what that Bachmann, in his “Bachmann-like manner,” discovered as the content of what is in my book “Die Geheimwissenschaft.” This is how university professors read today.

Now, my dear attendees, this is what is opposed from all corners to the will for ascent; these are the ones who do not want to let anything approach that could somehow lead to ascent. These people are present in large numbers, they educate our youth. And there are the “Spenglers” and write that we must necessarily fall into decline. Why do the “Spenglers” write like that? Because they are incapable of focusing on anything but the “Bachmanns” with their ignorance and carelessness. These things must be faced in all seriousness today. And I may, after having three lectures preceding, say at the end today: After I in my first two lectures last week tried to show something of the paths that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take in an epistemological way, in a social way — wants to go scientifically, not as the “Bachmen” and “Trauben” [a play by Max Frisch about the perversion of art for the sake of money] — after I have also spoken of what is to be artistically developed in Dornach, I may say today that those who strive for science and art in such a way can truly be reminded of a beautiful saying that extends from Goethe and will remain eternally true: ‘He who possesses science and art also has religion’. Spiritual science and its art have religion, but a religion that is not built on blind faith, but on a clear, bright, truly spirit-knowing science, on an artistic will striving for spiritual deepening. And after Goethe said, “He who possesses science and art has religion,” he continues, “He who does not possess those two, let him have religion!”

In our time, however, it may perhaps be said of spiritual science, of the representative of the idea of threefold social order, as a special, deepest matter of the heart: Yes, whoever possesses science and art also has religion. But today, religion can only lead to ascent if it draws from a living science in a living way, not from a science of the dead. It can only lead to ascent if it arises out of an artistic volition that is connected with a knowledge of the spirit such that one can say: Whoever today possesses a science rooted in spiritual insight, whoever today attempts, even if only in the weakest beginning, an art that is completely connected with this spiritual insight in its most intense will, should not be reproached for opposing the religious element in the way of life in the present. For he who seeks the spirit, who seeks to embody the spirit artistically, certainly also has the will to introduce into social life that which, connected with human worth and human dignity, truly exercises in the social community the look up to the divine guidance of the world, to the divine primal forces of life - a true look up that does not merely speculate on human egoism, but on the connection of human beings with the great eternal laws of existence. Only a religion that does not want to speculate on egoism, but points to the deepest harmony of the individual human being with the whole world, can lead to ascent.

And to the same extent that such a religion permeates the human soul through the impulse of such science and art, we will advance socially. To the same extent, despite adversity and misery — but perhaps, if the opposing forces are all too strong, through much adversity and much misery — we will not face the decline of Western culture, but the ascent of true human life: a life in which ways of the soul and the ways of life can and will be worked on religiously, scientifically, and artistically, in which the spirit, the spirit-filled art, and the spirit-filled religion will be worked out for the human present and into the human future.

Dear attendees,In one of my last lectures here, I already referred to a significant contemporary literary publication, a literary publication that even someone who otherwise doesn't like to have much to do with what is commonly referred to as “literature” can point out, as is the case with the person speaking here. He wants to be concerned with the roots of practical life, with the forces that shape this practical life; he wants to be concerned with everything that shapes this practical life out of the spiritual, with everything that approaches man's mind and heart and soul directly, elementarily, and strengthens man for life. He wants as little as possible to do with what is regarded as “literature” today. But about the book – you can guess from the formulation of the title of today's Contemporary Speech – about the book by Oswald Spengler “The Decline of the West”, even those who do not particularly love literature as such may speak. For one can say: Precisely about that which today every person who is not actually asleep in his soul must feel, about the forces of decline, the forces of decline that are working powerfully, the forces of decline that are working terribly in our cultural and civilizational life must feel, precisely about this decline, about these phenomena of decline, Oswald Spengler in his book has used a language that, firstly, sounds so characteristically of the whole spirit of our time, but, secondly, and in particular, sounds of the Central European, of the German spirit. In this book by Oswald Spengler, nothing less is attempted than to prove the necessity of this decline of Western civilization, to prove it by all means, one might almost say with all the sophistication of today's science—yes, a science that is distilled from today's by a man of genius like a new science so that Oswald Spengler's book is, I would say, not a theoretical book, not a literary book, but a book that speaks of facts, of facts emerging directly from the human spiritual life of the present, but also speaks in such a way that the very thoughts of this book influence the actions of the people who take them up. And the fact that many people are taking up these ideas from Oswald Spengler's book is clear from the simple fact that, despite its 615 pages, well over 20,000 copies of the book have already been sold. What the sale of 20,000 copies of a book means for the number of readers concerned is known to anyone who has ever dealt with such questions. It can be said that among the things in the spiritual realm that one must deal with today if one wants to delve a little into the undercurrents of contemporary cultural and civilizational life, two books are among the most important for us Central Europeans books are among the most important: firstly, this book by Oswald Spengler, 'The Decline of the West'; and secondly, a work that has perhaps not yet received much attention in the literary world, the book 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship'. This book has just been published by the Viennese cooperative publishing house “Neue Erde” and was written by the man who, as the highest economic commissar, that is, as the minister for economic affairs, summarized his principles and experiences in this book after the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, following his escape and internment in Austria. One would like to say: These two books cast a terrible light on what is present in the undercurrents of intellectual and even working life in the present.

Oswald Spengler is a man who in his “Decline of the West” tried to - the seeds for his book, he states, lie in 1911, so already before the beginning of the world war catastrophe - tried to show how our Western culture contains within itself forces of decline, how it necessarily shows itself to be a culture of decline through its characteristic manifestations. For Oswald Spengler, this culture is so obviously a culture of decline that he predicts that with the beginning of the third millennium, it will have reached its end as the ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, ancient Greek, and ancient Roman cultures once reached their end. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not proved by a man who is acting on a superstitious prophecy, it is not said by a man who indulges in some random fantasy, it is said by a man who has mastered the scientific spirit of the present in an outstanding way. Precisely because of the genius of the author's personality, because of his universal mastery, one might say of twelve to fifteen sciences of the present day, because of his courageous penetration of all the consequences of these sciences for practical and historical life, this book must be seen as a wealth of deeds, not just as a single deed. All that I have just said must be said about this book on the one hand. But on the other hand, it is a terrible book. Is it not a terrible book that, with the full weight of the scientific armamentarium that can only be mustered today, ingeniously proves that the symptoms of decline in this Western culture must lead to the downfall of this Western culture, right from the beginning of the third millennium thousand years – these symptoms of decline, within which we live, which were played out with a blaze in the world catastrophe of war and which now continue, even if they are not noticed by sleepy souls?

One must concern oneself a little, and we want to do that in the introduction, with the whole way in which Oswald Spengler comes to his conviction of the necessity of the decline of the West, if one wants to answer the question that should actually be the topic of my reflection today: Who may now speak against the decline of the West? – for one should not speak lightly against Spengler's book. To speak against it carelessly would mean to carelessly ignore the serious scientific armament of the author, and would mean that one does not want to consider at all what he conscientiously brings out of the phenomena of contemporary life. And I believe that many people have already spoken out against Oswald Spengler's book who should not really have done so. Oswald Spengler appears in his book first of all as a historian. He says himself that he noticed the symptoms of decline before the world war catastrophe, as I said. He wanted to understand the actual causes, the essence of these symptoms of decline. He was one of those personalities on whose soul the symptoms of decline weighed heavily, while the great mass of the population, especially the so-called intelligent population, still talked about how we had come so far and how we we have achieved and how we want to carry it everywhere, into all corners of the world - it has become clear to us what power we actually had to carry out what we believed we had to carry out into all corners of the world. Oswald Spengler describes for us how he came to the conclusion, from observing the phenomena of decline in the present day, that one cannot really speak properly about these phenomena of decline without speaking about the whole history of the West, namely about what thoughts live in Western culture and how we are able today, precisely from a historical perspective, to bring these thoughts to life in us and to make them active. And so Oswald Spengler's reflection expanded into a comprehensive historical book that aims to explore the entire foundations of Western thought and feeling. Oswald Spengler comes to the conclusion that the scientific view that has become common in recent centuries has indeed been gradually applied to history, that this scientific view – we have often emphasized this here from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – that this scientific view has been incorporated into all the thinking, feeling and willing of those parts of humanity that are relevant to progress in general. But it is precisely in history, in what the [scientific view of] history does not provide, in the way it does not elucidate the actual causes of historical events, that Oswald Spengler realizes how misguided the entire historical approach has become in the last few centuries up to the present. This, ladies and gentlemen, is truly not without significance for the present day in a practical sense, for we will see later how, in the broadest circles, it is precisely historical prejudices that are to be made reality. We shall show, by means of a typical example, the Hungarian Council of Economic Commissioners, Eugen Varga, how the ideas which Oswald Spengler describes as historical thinking are actually being put into practice. If Oswald Spengler's thesis is only applicable to forces of decline, then the way of thinking and looking at things, which only uses thoughts and ideas that come from this view of decline, must also create only phenomena of decline in the field of social organism.

In a person like Professor Eugen Varga, the way of thinking that Oswald Spengler finds only touches on, and which, with the beginning of the third millennium, must lead to the decline of the entire Western world, has been incarnated, has become flesh.

Now Oswald Spengler became acquainted with what I have often called Goetheanism here; he became acquainted with the Goethean method of observing nature, in contrast to the natural science that is practiced everywhere as the official one at the universities and radiates from there to the lower teaching institutions and which [through application to historiography] has turned history into a caricature. And what does he find himself compelled to do when he becomes acquainted with Goethe's method of observing nature? He finds himself compelled to apply this Goethean method to history, to apply it, to be sure, in the way he believes it must be applied to historical phenomena. Goethe's method is far different from what is today officially the scientific approach. Goethe does not look at nature in a philistine, mechanical, pedantic way, as a mere cause and effect relationship; he looks at how the living being lives out its emergence, its birth, its growing young, its maturing, its growing old, its dying, by ascending into the realm of living beings. And one need only read his essay from 1790, his attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants, to see how Goethe observes the development of the plant from the root, from leaf to leaf, in its ascent to blossom and fruit , to see how he contemplates nature in its living becoming, how each leaf is the symbol of what is formed differently, how the primordial organ is only metamorphosed in the petal, in the stamen, and even in the germ. Inspired by this Goethean morphology, by this theory of the development of living beings, Oswald Spengler sets out to consider the historical development of mankind itself according to the pattern of Goethe's ideas of organic nature. He then comes to look at [the cultures] in the same way that one looks at the development and growth of an organic living being, a plant, an animal or even a physical human being, at the birth, growth, maturation, aging and death of cultures; and he looks at the birth , the growth, the maturing, the aging, the dying of Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman culture. He observes this by looking at the individual phenomena of these cultures in the same way that Goethe looked at the individual organs of a living being. And now he focuses on what Western culture has produced so far; he compares - just as someone who studies living beings compares one living being with another - he compares what Western culture has produced so far with what Greek, Roman, and so on, culture has produced in ancient times up to a certain point in its development. And then he can calculate where the present culture of the Occident stands, because one can compare this point of view with the corresponding point of view of Persia, Egypt, Greece, and so on; one can calculate when the present culture of the Occident will perish, because one knows how long the ancient cultures took to perish.

All this becomes fruitful because Oswald Spengler breaks with the philistine method of looking at history, and he has the courage to break with it, he has the courage to say what history has become in its connection to mere scientific ideas; he has the courage to say, for example: The previous form of historical approach has kept the formal consideration of history at a level that one would have been ashamed of in other sciences. Why does he think this? Because he thinks it is necessary not to apply the dead method to history, which is suitable for the mineral kingdom and other inanimate things, but to apply a living method to history, by comparing one cultural form with another. Of course, to do that you have to be as knowledgeable as Oswald Spengler; you have to be able to compare the achievements of the most diverse fields of science and art and technology in the most diverse times and cultures; you have to be able, for example, to compare the style in the architecture of any cultural period with the methods of optics, chemistry, and so on – that is, one must have a comprehensive view of what has really happened, and Oswald Spengler has that view, and he has it in the way that someone has it who has completely mastered the scientific spirit of the present. He can compare as the eye compares one plant with another, one animal with another; he can compare what the mathematician accomplishes in a cultural period with what the musician accomplishes; he can compare what the physicist accomplishes at the experimental table with what the socialist agitator designates as a cultural form in the same time; he can compare what the chemist says with what the painter conjures up on the canvas. That is to say, he can really apply a morphological approach: He can compare, he can shape the comparison, the analogy, as he believes, into a scientific method, and from this application of comparison, of analogy – which the others only apply as if on a string of fantasy – he finds strict methods to deduce the underlying causes from the superficial events of history, which are usually considered alone. He does this in his own way, and it is interesting to see what conclusions Oswald Spengler, with his genius, knowledge and courage, comes to. He truly manages to penetrate to what history has actually become today in the hands of those who treat it mostly from the point of view of some party or other and do not even realize it. How today's historians themselves mock the fact that in the time of Herder and Goethe, people described a Brutus, a Caesar, an Antony, an Alexander, a Pericles in the way they needed them for their ideals, in the way they needed any ideal personality, in order to present them either in their excellent, angelic or even nefarious nature. Today's historians believe that they have gone beyond the personal and human aspects that were introduced into the historical approach at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Oswald Spengler rightly reproaches them: “They sneer at the historians of Goethe's time when they express their political ideals by writing a history of antiquity and using the names Lykurg, Brutus , Cato, Cicero, Augustus, and by whose rescue or condemnation they cover their own program or a personal infatuation; but they themselves cannot write a chapter without betraying which party their morning newspaper belongs to.” One must often characterize that which lives in the consciousness of people of the present day, especially of intellectuals, even of those who appear to be at the pinnacle of science, one must often characterize it as Oswald Spengler has characterized it here.

And Spengler also notes many other things. For example, he notes how little some of what has been perceived in recent times as, I might say, absolute truth about some phenomenon has been drawn from the depths of events. Oswald Spengler, for example, draws attention to the whole fuss that was kicked up about Ibsen's “Nora” at the time. Those good bourgeois people who belonged to this milieu and knew only this milieu, from which something like Ibsen's “Nora” emerged, believed that they could draw the whole problem of femininity into their sphere. Oswald Spengler says: How comical Ibsen's women's problems appear when, instead of the famous Nora, you put, for example, Caesar's wife. Don't they know that they are basically only considering something modest: the lady who does not go beyond the bourgeois boundaries between 1850 and 1950 – because then they will have disappeared? It is quite a feat when a contemporary person who has to be taken seriously, like Oswald Spengler, hurls these things at people who, I would like to say, so gladly and often - unspoken or spoken in a strange with self-praise and self-satisfaction, they demonstrate, tacitly or explicitly, their self-praise and self-satisfaction at knowing so much about the deepest secrets of the world, and they have no idea that these secrets are nothing more than European superficialities between 1850 and 1950.

It would be terrible if the present could not muster anything to effectively counter the serious armament of Oswald Spengler. And there, my dear attendees, much must be pointed out that has been put forward for a number of years - actually, I may say, for decades - here in Stuttgart from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. You see, reference has often been made here to a significant fact, to the fact that the way in which science has affected the Western cultural process over the last three to four hundred years is actually quite wrongly regarded. It is believed that natural science has come about through Kepler, Copernicus, Galilei and so on – all this is a prevailing belief in the broadest circles, especially in scholarly circles – that one must learn from it how to penetrate reality. It is believed that one has to train one's thinking in science, because in science one can see how to think correctly, how to think exactly, and therefore one must look at everything else that occurs in life according to the pattern of this way of looking at things.

Spiritual scientific considerations lead to a different realization. These spiritual scientific considerations, they do what, I would like to say, Oswald Spengler falls back on in a scanty way from his also only superficial considerations of Goetheanism, they do it in a deeper way. Long before the name of Oswald Spengler could be mentioned in any way, something else was pointed out here in the most essential foundations of the whole development of Western culture. It was pointed out that what has happened in the development of this Western culture in the last three to four centuries can only be understood if one gains a real overview of the course of the whole history of mankind from the foundations of spiritual science. Here too, in public lectures, it has been repeatedly pointed out how quite different an ancient Indian culture was, and one must go back to the 7th or 8th millennium to find it. This is what I have called in my book Occult Science. I have pointed out how different the nature of such an ancient Indian culture was, and how different the nature of an ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, and Greek-Latin culture, and how, after these cultures had been born , matured and died, and how our present-day culture emerged from it, the fifth cultural epoch after the great Atlantic catastrophe – our present-day culture, which people talk about in the most diverse ways. And again it was shown how within our present culture, since the middle of the 15th century, the intellectual element has been emerging and how, in the development of humanity, the emergence of this intellect – for before that time the intellect did not mean the most excellent cognitive power of man – how the emergence of this intellect has meant something special for the whole education of humanity, especially in the West.

My dear audience, if we take a spiritual scientific look at the entire configuration – precisely what Oswald Spengler strives for but does not achieve – the morphology of earlier cultural epochs, we know that these ancient cultures produced something great, powerful and awe-inspiring as they were born, grew young, matured, aged and died. But that to which our culture is called, what it has to bring from the deepest depths of the human soul to the surface of the outer cultural life, is the maturing of the true power of freedom in the human being. That is why I tried to present that which must well up from the depths of the human soul in the early 1890s in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. After this experience of freedom, after the experience of freedom in the pure intellect, for freedom can be experienced in nothing else – although other things in the human being are also valuable – freedom can only be experienced in pure thinking and can then radiate out to the whole of the human being's remaining nature. Mankind had to discard everything that it had previously brought to the surface out of instinct, like knowledge, in the form of mysticism, occultism, and theosophy. Today it is impossible to awaken again what humanity has acquired in the way of ancient astrology, mysticism, theosophy, gnosticism, and what was quite useful for an old knowledge, or to want to warm it up again. What is incumbent on us today, is to bring out from the present point of development of humanity just that which leads to the consciousness of freedom: the grasping of the human being in pure thinking. But when we grasp this human essence in pure thinking, then a completely new spiritual world must be born out of this thinking. Never in ancient cultures was that which we have handed down in terms of spiritual treasures and insights born out of pure thinking. Only in our time can a true realization of the spirit be born out of pure thinking, because this realization of the spirit must be born out of pure thinking, because only in this way can man, at the same time in the whole process of human development, mature to freedom, to the real consciousness of freedom, which from now on is his due in his development on earth. And everything we are experiencing today in the way of terrible present-day events and symptoms of decline comes from this: because humanity is to grasp from the very depths of its soul life the crystal-clear clarity of thought to conquer freedom, and because humanity is to mature to the strength necessary for this, the old realities are no longer relevant to it; they are no longer relevant to it at first, they are in decline, and the way must be sought to rise from the crumbling ruins of the old cultural life, permeated with pure thinking and thus growing into freedom.

In order to conquer freedom, to find ourselves completely within, we must give birth to human greatness from within, out of the chaos, out of the ruins of external life. Therefore, at first, humanity lost sight of what could really essentially control the external life, and just at the time when the urge was to awaken the consciousness of freedom, only a dead natural science came about. And what natural science did achieve was not something from which one could learn the actually progressive thinking, but it was something that afflicted humanity as a weakness. The fact that it must achieve freedom appears as a weakness in natural science. Natural science has become weak because the power must be turned to another side. Science itself has taken shape out of the educational forces within the human being. How science has become what it is is connected with the forces in the development of humanity. It is not the case that these forces have to learn from what science has become.

Now Oswald Spengler comes to this: one cannot penetrate into historical becoming with the ideas that science has produced. It really does matter that one needs comparison in order to get from the exterior of historical events to the deeper, interior happening. But — and we must be clear about this: Oswald Spengler does indeed recognize what is missing from today's historical perspective, from the perspective of humanity as a whole. He recognizes this clearly and sharply, and he even sees that only the perspective that has emerged in Goetheanism could help us to escape from the limitations of the scientific perspective. But Oswald Spengler is a mind that, although he has a universal command of the present-day sciences, is deeply stuck, not in the way of thinking that is produced by science, but in the way of thinking that has produced science since the middle of the 15th century; and he cannot develop himself out of it to what, from the depths of the human soul, could now overcome this scientific way of looking at things. Thus Oswald Spengler came to the negative realization in a brilliant way: Yes, we only bring about decline when we let natural science become our way of life. He comes to claim: What does today's natural science give us? It gives us the proof that the Occident, at the beginning of the third millennium, must end with its present culture. But now he cannot overcome in himself what has led to natural science. One has to give him the right: with those ideas that live in scientific knowledge, one can only come to the unproductive in the social ideas of the present. One must ascend to comparison, to the image, to the allegory, in order to recognize from it the deeper historical forces. But if the comparison, the allegory, is not to be merely a fantasy image and the image not merely a product of the imagination, if image and comparison, allegory and symbol in Spengler's sense are not to be merely something created by the imagination, then a real power must arise from the soul, which does not arise in Oswald Spengler. The real forces—the methods of attaining knowledge of the higher worlds have been described here—these forces must be developed if one seriously wants to use image, allegory, symbol, symptom, as Oswald Spengler uses them, for the consideration of world events. In other words, Oswald Spengler is a person who strives to go beyond this way of looking at things because he feels that the present way of looking at things is insufficient for the development of humanity; he knows that other forms of ideas must be applied, especially to history, but he does not want to apply these forms of ideas by inwardly invoking the power that alone can apply these forms of ideas. For it must be said: If someone applies images, allegories, imaginations, symbols to the historical approach, then he remains, if he remains at the point of view with which we are born, if he does not develop within himself the spiritual powers of knowledge that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks of, then he remains a player with mere allegories, remains a fantasist in the historical field. That means: What Oswald Spengler demands as his method must not be applied from his spiritual point of view, but it may only be applied when one ascends to that which has already been described here as imaginative, inspirative and intuitive knowledge.

Oswald Spengler wants to apply methods to the historical perspective that are still permeated by the old scientific thinking, even if not by the scientific spirit. And Oswald Spengler is one of those who blush when one speaks of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must speak of as the only way out of the decline of the West. To Oswald Spengler, the social orientation that is created from this anthroposophically oriented underground seems like salon communism and the like. That is to say, Oswald Spengler displays genius in terms of his personal intellectual power, displays universal thinking and insight in the most diverse fields of science, but at the same time he also displays the utmost narrow-mindedness when it comes to developing such intellectual powers that can apply his method in a fruitful way.

My dear audience, only when you understand this, only then can you speak out against Oswald Spengler's arguments about the decline of the Occident. Only then can one say: Yes, you are right, it is the cultures that have emerged in the course of historical development that are to be regarded in such a way that one looks at their birth, their youth, their maturity, their aging, their dying. Yes, if we look at them in this way, our culture also shows that we must ascribe to it the downfall meant by Oswald Spengler. But then we see only one culture next to the other, like one plant next to the other, like one animal organism next to the other. We then have none of what we get when we look at them in a spiritual scientific way.

If we look at cultures from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see the first culture, the ancient Indian culture – I have dealt with it in my lecture on the historical development of humanity – and we find that what man brings forth from his own consciousness at that time is primitive, very elementary, simple. But at the same time we find that what man can bring forth out of his own powers of consciousness is imbued with an awe-inspiring primeval world wisdom. We go back and find the first cultures at an elementary stage of development; but when we understand what primeval world wisdom lives in these cultures, we literally kneel down in awe before that which has permeated these primeval cultures. And if we go further, we find that these first cultures have been replaced by other cultures. We find less and less primeval world wisdom, more and more that which man consciously brings forth, and so more and more until we find a complete drying up of primeval world wisdom in our culture, especially since the middle of the 15th century. This is even expressed externally. It is nonsense for people to believe that they can understand scientific thought from the 10th or 11th century. No, they cannot understand it, because a completely different language was spoken then than is spoken today. One must first become familiar with the way of thinking of that time, which has changed fundamentally. Therefore, what these earlier cultures instinctively mastered of primeval world wisdom has died out, so that one culture could emerge from another, that the primeval Indian culture could send the germ of primeval world wisdom to the primeval Persian culture, which in turn could send it to the primeval Egyptian culture, which in turn could send it to the Greek-Latin culture, and so on. We have advanced — because of our sense of freedom — to a development of pure intellect, of pure thinking, but we have lost the ancient instinctive primeval wisdom.

If we, like Oswald Spengler, look at nature only from the outside, then we must speak as Oswald Spengler spoke about the decline of the West. And we may only speak out against this decline of the West if we have the courage to say to ourselves: the old, instinctive spiritual wisdom has dried up, but a new spark is already glowing in our hearts; we will give birth to a new spiritual life from what we have acquired as intellect, which can permeate our inner being with new cultural achievements. We not only believe, but we know: In our inner being is the germ of futures, not just of one future, and there we learn to understand how very differently we must view what has taken place in history than Oswald Spengler saw it. We see, for example, how the old Greco-Latin culture, which came up from the south, is drawing to its close; it brought Christianity over from the East, initially preserving the secret of Golgotha, and then — what happened to this secret of Golgotha? In those days it was still understood because a remnant of primeval world wisdom still existed; it understood the origin of Christianity. Then the Germanic peoples came from the north and took up what the aged peoples had developed, who had come to maturity and to die; they took it into their young blood and transformed it. These Germanic peoples were the last who could still absorb primeval world wisdom. Then, in their bosom, humanity developed, in which this primeval world wisdom dried up and which will bring forth a new spiritual life from the power that must be generated within itself. If this new spiritual life is not brought forth, then Western culture will descend into barbarism.

Today it is not a matter of looking at the outside world and saying: I believe there will still be enough forces to rekindle the declining life. —- It is not a matter of standing there with a sleeping soul and waiting for this or that to appear here and there that lives in the outside world; it leads to decline. And Oswald Spengler is right about the proof, no matter how many mistakes the historians he laughs at prove in his favor; but he ceases to be right in the eyes of those who are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West from a new spiritual life. He ceases to be right in the eyes of those who say: Yes, everything in the external world may and will collapse. But we can find something that was not there before: we can build a new world out of our will, if we illuminate it with pure thoughts, a world that is not seen today, but that must be willed. And one has strength for such volition only when one wants to permeate and interpenetrate this volition with what can be won through spiritual knowledge, as a permeation and impelling of this volition — in ways that have often been described here. And so today one does not appeal to the vague belief that there were always forces at work that brought forth new cultures. No, today one has to agree with Oswald Spengler: Yes, the facts prove the decline, and Oswald Spengler only summarizes the facts as proof. One has to agree with him if one does not have the certainty that The will that is kindled by the spirit, of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks, will not refute theories, not views, not concepts and ideas that are false, but will fight the facts of decline through its own sense of fact. Today we do not have to refute theories, we do not have to refute false views, today we have to overcome the facts based on the truth. That is the only thing that justifies speaking about the decline of the West. And at the same time it shows us how one has to understand an idea like Oswald Spengler's: that the Western, the Central European peoples, with everything they have produced, are already at the end, and that the Russian population – I have long before Oswald Spengler, I have said time and again that the Russian population contains the core, the true germ of the future Europe; that is true. But how does Oswald Spengler imagine the process of the future? He thinks that Western culture will disappear and that what is emerging in Russia will then take the place of what is in Central Europe. No, once one has grasped the core of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, one says something else, one says: Just as the Germanic peoples received the essence of Christianity in their own way, and could not have developed anything out of their young blood if the mystery of Golgotha had not appeared from the south, so too must the culture that comes from the east shine out of this Central Europe, which we ourselves develop from a new spiritual life. It is not a matter of a Russism alien to Oswald Spengler's sense flooding Western and Central Europe with something that is young in comparison to what has died. No, it is a matter of this Russism having to find something that we ourselves create as a new spiritual life, something that this Russism has to receive in the same way that the Germanic peoples received the Mystery of Golgotha with their young blood. The future of those who are rumored to have a future also depends on us not dying from the decline of the West, but on us developing the immortal part in us through a new spiritual life; only those who speak of such a thing may speak against the decline of the West.

Therefore, wherever the old ideas live on today, especially when they become socialist theories, it shows that people not only observe the decline and allow it to happen, but that they actually foster it. And in this respect it is extremely interesting to see how the Minister for Economic Affairs in Räterepublik Hungary, Professor Eugen Varga, has gained his experiences, which he describes in his book “The Economic and Political Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship”, which has just been published by the Wiener Genossenschaftsverlag der “Neuen Erde”. He describes how, in terms of his principles, he is a Marxist similar to Lenin and Trotsky in an even more radical form, and he wants to establish an order, an economic order in Hungary with these forces that are shaping themselves to the point of bullishness. I will only emphasize in a few brief strokes how, on the one hand, he is a true Marxist. He believes that if you make the world Marxist, it will become real, so he is making Hungary Marxist, and real, in the first instance. He knows that it was the urban industrial proletariat that carried the Marxist ideas, and he knows that what he wants to establish can only be born out of the ideas that the urban industrial proletariat swears by. But he has to state one thing right away: yes, the entire belief of this urban proletariat is that the future depends on the practical realization of Marxist ideas. But when such institutions are set up, the urban population and thus the urban industrial proletariat will be left without bread and become unhappy. The only ones who will benefit are the peasants outside; if things are set up as we want them to be, they can do a little better; the proletarians in the cities are initially faced with nothing but impoverishment, enormous price increases, and ultimately only ruin. —So how does Professor Eugen Varga, as a true Marxist, console himself? He says to himself: The greatness of an ideal is shown by the fact that you can starve for it. — But if the ideal has promised the people that, if it is fulfilled, they will not have to starve, then it is questionable whether they will really be so willing to starve if it is not fulfilled. And Varga should have waited to see if his Hungary of councils did not collapse for internal reasons. He has the excuse, however, that it did not come to that because he can point to the Romanian incursions and other external reasons; and so he finds all sorts of other things that he cites as his experiences.

And it is particularly interesting to point out these phenomena because one is dealing with someone who was allowed to become a practitioner, who was able to show how the stubborn theories that one thinks are just practical turn out to be reprehensible and corrupting when one wants to transfer them into reality. And so Professor Eugen Varga also has many a nice story to tell about his Marxism. But he also describes how he appoints his works councils, how everything is chosen from the workforce, how the positions in the factories that are foremen are filled, and so on. He says: You have to avoid the old bureaucracy. But what he describes is bureaucracy. But he says: What is currently rife will all be beautifully resolved in the future. He says: Yes, in the present, one does indeed have bad experiences; because those who have been elected to supervise the companies are just hanging around, arguing, and the others, who are still supposed to work, think that they should all be elected to the supervisory bodies themselves, because this loitering and arguing seems to them to be a very special ideal. This is the picture painted by Professor Eugen Varga, the creator of the Soviet dictatorship in Hungary. He does not realize that in a single sentence, on page 47 of his book, he expresses a significant truth. I will be quite frank with you: his book is an extremely interesting contemporary phenomenon for me, because in Professor Eugen Varga, what Oswald Spengler regards as the symptoms of decline are transformed into socialist ideas. There is a power of decline in his ideas, so that through people like Professor Eugen Varga, the power of decline is instilled in people. If you leave culture to its own devices, if you try to use such ideas to meddle in such areas, as Lenin and Trotsky and others do in the East and in Asia, then you are pushing for destruction in a concentrated way, so that history then rushes headlong into complete destruction. So, in terms of cultural history, a book by a man like Eugen Varga, who wants to be a practitioner and in doing so brings the theory of the decline of the West into his practice, is interesting to me, because this book is not just literature, it is something that expresses real life.

But what is actually interesting about it? I have to say that as interesting as the book is, what actually interests me the most is just a single sentence, which can be found on page 47 of Professor Eugen Varga's book. The sentence even surprised me. He describes how he formed his works councils, how the production commissar is at the top and how the individual commissars are, as the true Marxist envisions them. These production commissars mediate between the works councils and the supreme economic office. Now, on page 47 of his book, there is a strange confession about these commissars. You see, he says: This system – he means his system of councils – meets all four of the above-mentioned requirements, if the person of the production commissioner is the right one. Well, my dear audience, if you put the right people in all the positions, then you don't need to implement socialist ideas in reality, because then all the requirements will be met by these personalities. Thus, from the considerations of this practical abstract theorist, what he consciously certainly did not want to admit jumps out. His four demands are: 1. the councils must be elected from the working class, 2. the establishment of economic commissariats, 3. that the whole thing is not bureaucratic, and 4. that all individuals, including teachers, must be politically reliable. These demands are being met – when? When the commissioner is a suitable person. – The economic system of Professor Eugen Varga will, of course, only find the commissioner reliable who is just as much a Marxist and Leninist as Varga himself. This shows how these people deal with reality. They do not merely describe – as historians describe the old heroes, an Alexander, a Pericles – according to the political concepts contained in their morning newspaper – no, they want to shape people according to what their morning newspaper contains. Here we have what Oswald Spengler finds to be the main cause of decline, transferred into the most direct practice, and the most important thing in practice is simply not seen. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what leads to an answer to the question: Who is allowed to speak out against the decline of the West?

We live in a time in which only those who feel in their souls that there is a spiritually oriented science that can ignite the will so that forces arise that were not there before are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West. Those who consider only the forces that existed before, like Oswald Spengler, or those who work outside, like Professor Eugen Varga, can either see only the decline or must bring it about themselves. Who may speak against the decline of the West? The one who demands the human deed that comes from the newborn spiritual life may speak out against the downfall of the West. — This is how the question must be answered clearly and unambiguously today, and this is how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been trying to do so for years.

When I observed the results of the teaching in the individual classes towards the end of the school year at the Waldorf School, I could see – I have already mentioned some of it – how, for example, Dr. Stein introduced the 7th and 8th grades to history from the perspective of the rising spiritual life, a will that is contrasted with the dwindling forces. I have mentioned other things that shine into the Waldorf School as good fruits of our spiritual science. Today I would just like to mention that people outside scoff, especially when the soul and spirit of the human being, alongside the body, are spoken about — as they have to be from a spiritual science. But one should just have seen, for example, how in Class 5, under the direction of Miss von Heydebrand, what anthroposophy makes of anthropology is brought to the children - albeit in a form appropriate to the children - and what awakens in the children an idea of the real concrete form of the soul and spirit of the human being. There is a pulsating life in man, there is nothing of the dullness of today's anthropological concepts that are otherwise brought to children; because the insights are drawn from real life, real life is also stimulated in the young. It is only a matter of the teacher being able to transform what emerges from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for the corresponding age.

And so it may also be said: At the time when it struck the development of the earth, one had the Mystery of Golgotha; one understood it with the remnants of the old instinctive spiritual science - I have presented this several times in my lectures -; one must understand it today with the rising, new spiritual science. Then Christianity itself will experience a new birth, then Christianity will be understood again for the first time, because under the hand of theologians, Christianity has degenerated into materialism. But instead of seriously addressing the issue of how Christianity itself must be rediscovered from a renewed spiritual life, today theologians are emerging - forgive me for also bringing this up - theologians who [turn against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science]. If one wanted to read all the literature against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science today, one would come to nothing else, but it is sometimes interesting to keep an eye on the titles of the writings that appear there. For example, there is a publication called “The New Church”, edited by Pastor Franz Tügel and Dr. Peter Petersen on behalf of the Hamburg Volkskirche. In the 15th issue of 1920, there is an article titled “Theological Direction, Dr. Steiner and the Devil”. And on page 232 we find the following sentence: “At best, it can still be imagined that a Catholic becomes a disciple of Steiner...” — something like this is born out of today's culture; people should just consider what the Catholic clergy hurls at anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but here a Protestant is speaking, and so the author thinks that this spiritual science could, well, be acceptable to Catholicism – “[...] there are relationships that one can understand; but how a Protestant, at least a conscious one, one who has been influenced by the spirit of the Reformation, can follow it, is completely beyond comprehension. In Steiner's school, all belief is an assumption of truth! And Schaeder rightly points out that all the exercises recommended by Steiner result in legalism and moralism. For me, there is no doubt: Luther would have handed over the Steiner doctrine to the devil in his language, and he would also have emphasized the thoroughly un-German aspect of it. He would have warned his Protestant Church against the false prophet.” Now I would like to ask: Do the exercises I recommend lead to lawlessness and immorality? Because that is emphasized here as something particularly bad, that the exercises I recommend lead to legalism and moralism. Well, a lot is written in this tone today.

However, there is also another tone in which, one cannot say, is written. For example, the anatomy professor Fuchs in Göttingen, who has already been mentioned here, managed to use a sophisticated distortion in newspaper articles to claim that anthroposophy is not scientific. He proved nothing other than that as a scientist of today he can only regard that as science which just happens to fit into his head, and what does not, he does not regard as science. That means, he does it the way those did it who, when Copernicus appeared, considered Copernicus to be unscientific because he did not teach what they taught the faithful in the church. In medieval times, the grand inquisitors came from the ranks of the church; today they can come from the ranks of university professors and be called Fuchs; and their followers are prepared to pull out all possible means of fighting from their pockets, such as children's trumpets and ratchets, house keys that are whistled with when a Dr. Stein and a Dr. Kolisko talk about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It cannot be said that these people had not heard the speeches that had been delivered, because otherwise they would have had to conjure up the children's trumpets and ratchets and whatever else they had, after hearing the “bad” reasons of Dr. Kolisko and Dr. Stein. But it was not in their power to hear the reasons of Dr. Stein and Dr. Kolisko; it was in their power to shout something down, as in medieval times, with other means, they would have crushed what these people today venerate as progress. One must have the courage to look at such an attitude without reservation. And yet one needs to look no further than the numerous sleeping souls of people who do not want to look at the phenomena of spiritual life, who would like to sleep in the face of these phenomena. Then one must say - also about the supernatural - what a Viennese writes about his Vienna, what he writes about what he loves there - even if it is not particularly well written, it is still something like self-knowledge. After this young Viennese draws attention to his own youth and brings it together with what he says has developed into a healthier spirituality, he writes in the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung no. 29 of July 19, 1920:

The intellectual situation of the German Danube countries seems to me to be even less encouraging than the economic and political situation. We have more or less the cheapest and shallowest kind of socialism, the oldest and long-since-overcome variety of philosophy in free-spirited debauchery and banal historical concepts; alongside it, the most unedifying method of playing off knowledge and belief against each other; alongside it, religiously embellished blanket intolerance; alongside it, the most uncritical desire to pounce on all noisily embellished artifice , an admirable loquacity and sentimental preference for the self-evident; alongside it, traits of genius, muffled by tacitly agreed lack of talent among intellectuals, which regards half as whole and the whole as half, and finally, on top of that, a considerable variety of vanity that, puffing itself up, says: “Don't tell me! I am bad and educated myself!” It is hardly surprising that, embedded in such a kind of spirituality, even the softest and most unprofiled brand of occultism is the most popular here. A broad, murky stream of nonsense flows through this city and all kinds of truisms flourish on its banks.

Now, my dear attendees, it is fair to say that a kind of spirituality prevails here that allows the most stupid brand of occultism, the most stupid spiritualistic stream of nonsense, to flow around freely – that, my dear attendees, is a matter of course! I do not want to point out now – because it is already too late – that there might be other places besides Vienna where this stream of frivolous shallowness has its audience and where people are asleep to what is most necessary: the reawakening of those forces that must awaken in the human breast if we want the dawning of the dawn to take the place of decline. But if we can recognize error, just as, on the one hand, people of genius like Oswald Spengler can prove the downfall of what exists, and, on the other hand, people like Professor Eugen Varga can show the currents of decline through their deeds, then we – if we have the ability to awaken in the soul, then we will be able to look at the spiritual current that, as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, wants to put into the will of people that which can be born out of the light of supersensible knowledge. And then, then we will gain a new version of the Christ's words: Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will not pass away. - We will then say: Yes, everything that is accessible to the eyes of Oswald Spengler and everything in which social reforms such as those of Professor Eugen Varga would like to move, that will pass away. But that which is born of a truly new spirit will dominate the future, because it not only believes in some indeterminate forces somewhere that will help to bring about a new culture, as has been helped in the past, but it wants to ignite the own will, the deepest inner will of man himself, which one has in freedom in one's hands, to new powers. We speak out against the downfall of the West not only because we have faith in the future, but because we want to bring about a future that we can already see. Just as we see the future plant in the germ of the old one, so we want a future that we already see as a germ in us. The future will be, if only we want it, against all forces of doom. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is directed at the will, not at the idle point of view, and from this it wants to take the right to speak out against the downfall of the West.

Distinguished attendees! To the untrained eye, the circumstances of public life in the civilized world over the past 50 years have become unmistakable; their interrelationships have become difficult to grasp and confusing. The present misery has emerged from what might be called the great economic boom before 1914; the most complicated circumstances, caused by the most diverse facts, loom into our decline – facts that are in turn difficult to grasp. It is no wonder that the human being who must live in this decline, must work, must strive, feels from the depths of his soul the yearning for an ascent. But as understandable as this is, anyone who takes a deeper look at today's conditions must recognize that, in the present and in the near future, there is no way out of the decline to a recovery other than an understanding of the great tasks of the time, the great tasks of the time from certain sources, which cannot really be found within small areas. As well as I can in one evening, I will endeavor to try to offer some modest observations on some of these great tasks of our time – I would say that one can only do so in the face of these tasks.

It seems that if anything quite obviously indicates how we have to approach the great tasks, it is the great mistakes that have been made in this time. Two stages today characterize our entire public life in its immediate present development, and it seems to me that these stages point not only to external, economic conditions, but also to legal, moral and especially spiritual conditions within contemporary civilization. But when one names these two stages, Versailles, Spa and all that follows in their train, when one remembers all that they have brought us, then it becomes somewhat difficult to characterize them, because today one is suspected of striving for a certain objectivity. People's opinions are sharply opposed to each other: anyone who wants to judge the West as a member of Central European civilization can be quite sure that his objectivity will be very, very strongly doubted by Westerners. Therefore, I would prefer not to give my own opinion on what happened in Versailles, which is still a painful part of our present, but rather to follow the opinion of the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who wrote the significant book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, which I have already referred to in my Stuttgart lectures from a different point of view than today.

Keynes was a person who, until a certain point in time, was present in an outstanding position at the negotiations in Versailles, and he judged [in his book] what happened and also what, in his opinion, should have happened. One might say that in three sentences he roughly summarizes the striking facts of Versailles that are so symptomatic of our present time. He, the Englishman, whom Lenin only recently called the “English philistine”, says quite simply: nothing, absolutely nothing of any magnitude has been achieved at Versailles by those who could claim to be the victors. What did Clemenceau do? He ruined Europe's economic resources and did nothing to rebuild the economy in France itself. What did Lloyd George do? He made a few deals that allowed him to shine in London for a short time. What did Wilson do? Wilson had good intentions regarding what was right and just – according to Keynes – but no way presented itself to him to somehow implement what he may have had in mind in a well-meaning way. The three most important men made the big mistakes of the time.

And now let us take a look at what has actually emerged for Germany from the terrible events that have taken place since 1914. I do not need to describe it to you. To the southeast of Germany, Czechoslovakia has become a relatively large empire. Born out of national aspirations, everything that rules there proves to be economically powerless in the face of the tasks that the economy in particular faces for these areas. To the north of it, Poland. Well, you only need to recall the last few weeks to see, on the one hand, how what has been formed there has only contributed to the unrest in Europe; and on the other hand, you only need to recall the perplexity of the leading European personalities in the face of what is seething and boiling there. One need only think of the “tragicomedy in the transformation of the view of the Polish ‘defeats’ to the Polish ‘victories’, how one was confronted without opinion, without great guidelines, today with this, tomorrow with the opposite. And if you go further east, it may seem today that Leninism and Trotskyism, especially when you add to that the devastating conditions in Italy, have no other guidelines than to develop, out of a phenomenal megalomania, all those forces that can serve to destroy what has been achieved by more recent civilization. The Germans of Austria are crushed, not to mention Hungary, where the sad spectacle is taking place that when members of the party that was at the helm until recently are led through the streets, bound and captured, they are then stabbed in the eyes with umbrellas by ladies in elegant, magnificent attire. This description could be continued for a long time, and one could see what has emerged for humanity from the circumstances since 1914.

And if we look at the ideas of those who are somehow active within this terrible decline – at the ideas of personalities who are often even capable of entertaining tragicomic illusions about an ascent that could be brought about by their intentions – we might be tempted to say: In the short-sighted, in the uncomprehending, that speech that Lenin delivered at the Second Congress of the Third International was monumental, where he once again, entirely in the old Marxist style, proved Western capitalism with all the banalities that have been heard so often. If one approaches what was said in this grandiose speech from a certain world-historical point of view, namely that capitalism, having developed into imperialism, tyrannizes over five-sevenths of humanity, then today, on the other hand, the question must be raised: What would have become of all of modern civilization if it had not been for the accumulation of capital? And should we not ask: Is it not self-evident, after all the forces that our modern times have brought forth, that such capital accumulation has also taken place for the sake of human progress? Can we still get by in today's collapsing world with such abstraction, which only proclaims the struggle in a very abstract form, or should we not ask: Is there not also something moral underlying our decline, especially when this note is struck? Do not perhaps precisely such fighters as Lenin confuse the harmfulness of capitalism in general with the kind of morality or, rather, immorality with which capitalism has operated? Can we not also trace this spiritual note in the effects of capitalism? And might we not arrive at deeper impulses than those which are constantly being declaimed today, and whose declamation has brought so little practical success for the better?

Now, one could say that the opposite view, which also comes from the Englishman Keynes, the harsh critic of the Western powers, is more indicative of today's intellectual, legal and economic situation. But that sounds somewhat different than Lenin's words. Keynes says, for example: Yes, terrible things happened in Versailles. Instead of doing something to build Europe, everything has been done to turn Europe into a heap of ruins of civilization; something terrible has happened, something worse will happen in the coming years. — I am quoting the sense, not the wording. And in an even stranger way, Keynes addresses some of the underlying mental states that have brought us into this present situation. It is interesting to see how this man, who sat through the negotiations led by Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George for weeks on end, realizes what actually caused Wilson, who beguiled so many people with his abstract Fourteen Points, to fail so utterly. This becomes a significant problem for the Englishman Keynes, and something very strange comes to light.

Keynes constructs – as I said, from the way Wilson was sitting – how the others did everything to deceive him, to keep him from finding out what they actually want. It is a remarkable psychological event that Keynes describes and dissects, which, I would like to say, shines a deep and significant light on the whole cultural state of the present. Keynes obviously means: If one had told Wilson that France wanted the Germans of Austria to be prevented from uniting with the Germans of Germany, if one had said this clearly and distinctly, so that Wilson would have heard these words, his sense of justice would have risen up against it. Now, if you are going to visualize the struggle of such a dull mentality - if I may use this Entente word - you have to realize how Wilson feels - as Keynes does - if you now bring the following to mind as a spectator. Keynes says: Yes, the people around Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not say: “The Germans of Austria will not be allowed to unite with the Germans of Germany,” because Wilson would have rebelled against that; that is why they said: “The independence of German-Austria is to be guaranteed by a treaty with the Entente powers until the League of Nations pronounces otherwise.” Wilson understood that the independence and freedom of the Germans of Austria had to be guaranteed. If he had been told that they were forbidden to unite with the Germans of Germany, Wilson would have understood the same thing that he had otherwise understood as freedom and independence as the highest compulsion. If one had told him – as Keynes continues –: “Danzig shall become a Polish city”, he would have revolted against it; that quite obviously contradicts the Fourteen Points. So one told him: “Danzig shall become a free city, but all customs matters shall be handled from Poland, as shall the supervision of all transport matters, and the Poles shall become the protectors of the nationals living abroad. Oh, that sounded different from saying that Danzig should become a Polish city. And one can almost say: Yes, when it is said like that: 'Danzig should become a free city', then Wilson's dull mentality is inspired. But if he had been told that Danzig should become a Polish city, that would have contradicted Wilson's view that every nation should be led to freedom. And if one had told Wilson that the Entente was to supervise the German rivers, he would not have been able to agree to that; but instead one said: 'Navigation, where it passes through several states, is an international matter.' Wilson was satisfied with that again.

If you want to see what the great forces are that are moving the world today, you have to look at what is developing between the – I will speak in German now and translate the Entente word – “state of mind” of the leading personalities who have grown out of the previous circumstances. Is there still any honesty and sincerity there? Is there still any healthy sense and openness? The opposite is true, and what is more, it lives in such a way that one is still convinced of being an honest, open person, because what actually works has become an unconscious habit. How could Wilson actually be so deceived as he has been in this way, as I have just described it after Keynes? People who still cannot bring themselves to believe that an abstract, theorizing mind like Wilson's is a disaster for Europe sometimes say benevolent words like, “He, this Wilson, knew European conditions far too little.” Hypothetically admitted, although I do not admit it, Wilson knew European conditions far too little. But Wilson wrote a work on the state comprising almost 500 pages, in which he describes the conditions of the European states in great detail, the state and legal conditions and so on. So we are faced with the fact that either it is not true that Wilson did not know the European situation, or an influential contemporary figure writes a work on European conditions that is influential in America precisely because he is ignorant of those European conditions. The latter would cast a bright light on the superficiality of our time, on everything that draws only from the superficial spirit and does not delve into what lives in the deeper foundations of things as the real cause of the present events, the present developments and the whole evolution of humanity. But there is something much more significant behind what I have presented.

Many years ago, during a lecture series in Helsingfors – at a time when Wilson was revered everywhere because two significant literary works had been published by him – I drew attention to something that characterizes the whole nature of Wilson's state of mind. Wilson says, for example, that if you look at the time in which, for example, Newton, the great physicist, lived, you find that, as in the theory of constitutional law or in the thinking of those who reflect on economic and financial conditions, the same forms of thought and the same mental images are found for the economic and political conditions that Newton, the physicist, created for physicists. And now Wilson says: We must free ourselves from such a dependence of thought in relation to public, political or economic conditions; we must think today in terms of the organic about politics, about the world economy and so on. And now he develops a kind of political idea, of which one must say: Just as those whom he criticizes for being dependent on Newton in their time, so he is entirely a copycat of Darwinism and thinks Darwinian as a politician, as an economist, and as a legal expert, just as those whom he criticizes thought in a Newtonian way. Darwin is fashionable – so Wilson, the world reformer, thinks Darwinian. But I said at the time: We are now in such a time that we must no longer allow ourselves to be blinded to the real conditions of public life by what comes to us from the natural sciences. What comes to us from the natural sciences – I have often said it here – is quite excellently suited to precisely explore the surface of things; but what ideas want to form about human action, about human coexistence, must go into deeper world reasons than natural science even needs. And that is why – I said – the dangerous thing in our time is precisely a way of thinking like that of Woodrow Wilson.

That was long before the war, at a time when Wilson was still being glorified as a world hero for a long time to come. What matters today, namely, is to avert one's gaze from everything that only holds people to the superficial. It is necessary to be able to sharpen one's gaze into the deeper reasons for becoming and happening. But, esteemed attendees, that is what the school of thought that, like science, approaches the spiritual and soul life in man from a scientific spirit is trying to do. It is the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that I have been representing here in my lectures in Stuttgart for almost two decades now, and more and more every year.

What must be striven for in our spiritual life in terms of the spiritual science that is meant here? I will only briefly indicate that this spiritual science does not arrive at its results in an external way, but rather through the fact that the human being first performs certain exercises, which are intellectual in nature. Time and again, the human being must say to himself what I characterized as a comparison in one of my last lectures here. I said: If a five-year-old child picks up a volume of Goethe's poetry, he will not be able to do anything with it, he will in any case do something completely different with it than what the volume of poetry by Goethe is intended for. But if he is ten years older, he will have gone through a development and reached a level of maturity by which time he will know what to do with this volume of poetry. The spiritual researcher referred to here says: With the form of consciousness that we use in ordinary life and that we also apply in conventional science, we face the higher world forces as a five-year-old child faces a volume of Goethe's poetry. Thus, forces slumber in every human being that he can develop within himself and that then show him a different, a spiritual, understanding of the world. Above all, they show him that although scientific thinking is a magnificent way to explore the surface of things, and that in this respect science has justly achieved the greatest triumphs, They show him that we cannot, however, understand natural things that play a role in human activity with the scientific way of thinking, if we do not resort to methods and ways of thinking that are permeated by the spirit and with which we can also grasp the human being and the forces within him in a thoroughly scientific way. But then we come from such a grasp of the human being to a completely different grasp of the world than through the conventional spiritual life in which we are immersed today. In the face of this conventional spiritual life, one would like to recall a word spoken by Hölderlin that cuts deep into the heart, when his mind was still bright, not yet clouded, but was finely sensitive to what was present in his cultural environment. Hölderlin, who had immersed himself in the harmonious humanity of ancient Greece and had grown fond of it, looked at the people around him, exaggerating to some extent, as a mind of his calibre would do in his time, and characterized them as follows, comparing them to the Greeks. He said: “Do people live among us ordinary Germans? I see no human beings around me, as the Greeks were; I see officials, teachers, professors, but no human beings; I see lawyers, artists and scholars, but no human beings; I see young and mature people around me, but no human beings; what I miss in my environment is the whole, full, developed humanity that can also gain a harmonious relationship with the universe. Such humanity also lived consciously and unconsciously, sensually and supernaturally in Goethe, and what Goethe himself valued even higher than his poetry — although it was then so little understood after Goethe: his scientific creations. In these lines of scientific thought, Goethe's physicist does not live one-sidedly when he presents a theory of colors, nor does his botanist live one-sidedly when he describes plants, nor does his anatomist live one-sidedly when he characterizes human bones. but in this way of thinking the whole human being lives always and in everything; and the whole human being grasps in the individual parts of nature that which can only be revealed when one experiences it in its effect on all of humanity within oneself.

Over time, this thinking was increasingly confronted with something that has been praised so much, but also occasionally criticized: specialization in all areas of life, the kind of specialization that has found its way into our higher knowledge in particular and has had an impact on it, for example, all the way down to primary school education. This specialization made man a physicist, a botanist, a lawyer, a professor, a teacher, and so on, but it drove out the human being. And we must ask ourselves: Is it really a furthering of knowledge itself, when this knowledge has developed in such a way in modern times that the knowledge that led to a world view has split into those small portions, from which one has lost the human element and can no longer keep an eye on the world? Again and again, a few influential personalities were portrayed as if they were knowledge itself. But anyone who can see into the development of modern times will find that this is not the case. He sees that knowledge and the striving for the abstract unified state, as it has developed over the last three to four centuries throughout the civilized world. He sees that the unitary state, which absorbed everything that we today want to re-organize through the impulse of the threefold social organism, that this unitary state, with its mixing of spiritual, legal and economic life into one fabric, made physicists and chemists, professors and teachers, in short, specialized people, and it was with these that it had to fill its positions if it followed its principles. It was this unified state that sucked the fullness of humanity out of people. This fullness of humanity lived so powerfully in Goethe and was so longed for by Hölderlin for his Germans. It is spiritual science that wants to give this fullness of humanity back to today's humanity, because only from this fullness of humanity can come what is at the same time knowledge, what is feeling with all humanity, what is real right and at the same time reasonable economic life.

If one proceeds according to the methods of spiritual research, one does not get a superficial view of something concocted from the individual disciplines, but one gets fully living spiritual knowledge. But this is like a light that can be cast on the individual areas. And with it one gets the possibility again to place the human being above the specialists; one gets the possibility to put the human being first and the social structure afterwards - and not the other way around, to put the social structure first and only then the human being, and thereby let him wither away into a system template. Because spiritual science is something that really comes from the fullness of the human being, but that must first be gained through spiritual research, that is why it can also have a fertilizing effect on what is fragmented in the world. Fragmented in the world, for example, is our present-day jurisprudence, the individual branches of our present-day economic life - everything is fragmented.

Those who have heard me speak at length and are able to grasp the actual meaning of what I have said know that I do not say such things out of immodesty or silliness. But I may well point out that in February, in Dornach, before an audience of more than thirty medical specialists, I attempted to present the therapeutic element of medicine from a spiritual-scientific understanding of the nature of the human being in such a way that one could really arrive at a genuine therapy that goes straight to the human core. In this single case I have tried to show how a central view of the nature of the natural, soul and spiritual can have a fruitful effect on a single science. And anyone who now considers the social effect of the striving of personalities imbued with our knowledge will reflect on the significance of what I have said.

ar A It is one thing for a physician to be educated in a closed circle and unable to see beyond the boundaries of his science, and quite another for him to grasp his science in such a way that it becomes a light for everything physical, mental and spiritual in the human being and that he thereby also acquires a true sense for all social interaction and coexistence of people and thus, from his art of healing, gains a living, fruitful judgment on the treatment of major social issues.

This fall, beginning on September 26, more than twenty individuals who have immersed themselves in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here will give a course of nine lectures at the School for Spiritual Science in Dornach. We have, of course, established our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, which we cannot open because it is not yet ready, but we will hold these School of Spiritual Science courses at the unopened Dornach School from September 26 to October 16. Personalities from the fields of physics, chemistry, political science, economics and history, practitioners who are involved in life, in the factory or otherwise in life, artistic personalities from all fields, they will first show in this trial course how what specializes [in individual fields] is illuminated by the living spiritual , such a light is shed on these sciences that they are no longer something theoretical - not something one acquires and then has to peel off again for the most part in order to stand in one corner of life and see nothing but one's own specialization. No, it is shown how, through this enlivening of knowledge, which can arise from spiritual science, specialization is overcome, and how, through the new spirit, through a spirit that is just as strictly scientific as the one cultivated at universities today, yes, 'strictly strict science', how this spirit brings together specialists so that they will not go their lonely but humanity-damaging ways in mutual misunderstanding, but will work together socially and be able to help our ailing time to rise again.

These School of Spiritual Science lectures are held at our Goetheanum in Dornach, where every detail seeks to express the style, the architectural, sculptural and pictorial style, that arises out of the artistic aspect of our spiritual science, out of the whole of our intuitive perception. Everything, down to this framing, should act as a symbol, as it were, for what is to happen, what must happen, from the spiritual side. For it must be the spirit that, following its true threads, comes back to the truth, to a truth from which goodness, morality and healthy, strong will follow. This does not arise from superficial knowledge; it arises from deep spiritual knowledge. And I hope that our Dornach lectures will show much more than mere characterizations can express, how the forces to build up our languishing civilization should be sought from the spirit. We do not want to refute such arguments [about the decline of the West] logically, as I characterized them here last time, but through action we want to create that which can be set against the forces of decline. And I am convinced that we would truly not be able to accommodate all the listeners who would come to Dornach and its wider surroundings today - who will hopefully come in large numbers despite the drowsiness of souls today - if the communication difficulties arising from our decline were not so insurmountable.

If I may refer to something closer to home, I would like to return to what our Waldorf School is meant to achieve here. This Waldorf School, which we opened today for the second school year, we described here some time ago with reference to its successes in the first school year. It is exactly what it has become – it could not have become more in its first year – having become what it is because our teachers were inspired and imbued with those feelings towards the developing human being, the child – emotions that come from the research of spiritual science, that spiritual science that must indeed, with regard to certain spiritual things, behave in a completely different way than many people assume with regard to these same things.

We have, of course, confessions in our time that speak about the eternal in man. What have all these confessions come to? If one can really look at the world impartially and listen to everything that is said in sermons or theologies today about the eternal in the human soul, then it is not an appeal to the urge for knowledge, but basically it is an appeal to the finer instincts of the soul. Those who have often heard my lectures will know the foundations on which the spiritual science referred to here speaks of the immortality of man, how it makes certain statements about what man becomes when he has passed through the gate of death and shed his physical body. But the basis of this discussion is different from what has been customary in Western civilization for centuries. What is it that this Western civilization appeals to again and again? The finer instincts of the soul; people do not want their entire being to cease to be when their body decays into dust. This is the human desire for eternity. And I ask you to go through everything that is offered in this direction in traditional confessions, sermons and theologies: it is the appeal to this human egoism, not wanting to die. And because it is only this appeal to egoism, it is even conveniently separated for life: knowledge for the world of sense, and faith for the supersensible world. Naturally one can only speak of the instincts under discussion here if, with regard to the eternal in man, one arrives only at a belief and not at knowledge. But when we investigate the human being by means of spiritual science methods, which are not easier than chemical or astronomical methods, but essentially more difficult (for more details see my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” or “Occult Science: An Outline” and others), then we come not only to speak of immortality, that is, of the forms that the human soul and spirit takes after death, but one then comes to look at what the human being was before birth or conception, before he descended as a spiritual being from the spiritual world into the physical world through birth and assumed a physical body through descent from father and mother. This can become knowledge, but it is knowledge of such inner power that it flashes through our entire being.

If we approach the child as educators with such knowledge, we look at the child quite differently. Then we know something of how the soul and spirit form the human body from the deepest human depths, how the physiognomy and skills that arise from year to year are formed in the body out of the soul and spirit. As a teacher and educator, you develop a feeling without which there can be no fruitful education: the feeling that everything you come into contact with through the human body comes from spiritual worlds. It has been entrusted to you; the gods have sent it down to you. You stand before it with holy reverence.

Dear attendees, just as there are forces that can only be explored through their effects in the external, physical world, for example electricity or magnetism, so does what one acquires as a teacher or educator, as reverence, act as an imponderable force, as something that one only

a en learn to believe when one beholds its effects, when one sees how that which radiates from such sacred reverence for the teacher is something that surrounds the child's spiritual and soul growth just as sunlight surrounds the plant to make it flourish and thrive. A pedagogy that is based on the full human being, that is carried by feelings and perceptions, but by a perception that sees through world and human conditions, a pedagogy that naturally becomes art, that does not talk abstractly about education, it is a pedagogy of this kind that may aspire to make of the generation that will be decisive for the coming decades that which can lead out of our decline towards an ascent. And we can say: What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been able to achieve through our teachers has, after all, borne fruit in the first school year.

Only one thing stands ghostly before the mind's eye of the one whose whole heart and mind is with this Waldorf school, especially today, when we have opened the second school year. Out of the spirit we could bring Waldorf education to life through Waldorf education; in this way, one of the great tasks of our time would be solved step by step in practice, not in theory. But we need understanding, understanding in the broadest sense. We may hope that the spirit will continue to support us in our endeavors, because in a certain way it depends on us. But we need understanding, because the buildings in which the school is held are to be built; the teachers are to live in homes, and they are also to eat. All this is necessary. And already the spectre of destitution for such things and for what is behind it, of the lack of understanding of the broadest circles for what belongs to the great tasks of our time, stands before our soul and impairs what we would like to do for the second school year, especially in these days. So what is needed today for the great tasks of the time is understanding in the broadest sense. Many people have idealism, which says: ideals are lofty, it is not dignified to associate them with the material circumstances of the day, because the material world is something base; ideals are lofty, they must find their own way. Therefore, we keep our hands on our wallets and no longer spend anything on our ideals, because why should we give up dirty money, which is not worthy of serving ideals, for our ideals? That may sound trivial, but if you want to do something necessary for the Waldorf school in our days, then it may be said in this case. Today, idealism often expresses itself more through enthusiasm to hold together the material world and to cultivate the ideal in it.

I could now describe something to you that is related to something very new in our spiritual life. For a long time now, we have lost precisely that direction and current of our spiritual life that looks at what I want to characterize, at the prenatal human being. Even the language testifies to it: when we speak of the eternal in man, what do we say? Immortality. - We thus point only to the one end of life, which human egoism also looks at. We have no word for the other: one would have to say “unbornness,” for just as little as we lose our eternal being when we discard the body, we did not receive it with birth either. And when we speak of the eternal in man, we must speak of unbornness as well as of immortality. We do not even suspect what we lack in this direction. What we hope for after death inspires us little for action. But when we know what lives in us, what lives in us as having descended from the spiritual worlds, even if only in a reflection of the spiritual world, then we can say that we feel ourselves to be - I would like to use the word - missionaries of the spiritual world. Our feelings are stirred and our actions inspired by our earthly work, and this is what our task as human beings in earthly existence is. We have to draw strength from the spirit in order to truly penetrate into something like this, which is our task as human beings in earthly existence; for this it is not enough to stick only to the nearest districts of what surrounds us in life. We must look at what surrounds us in the spiritual life, what lives in us inwardly as the spiritual and permeates all life down to the economic. In this respect, people indulge in the strangest illusions.

Anyone with a sense of reality who follows the historical course of humanity will see that they must look for the actual sources of the somewhat more distant spiritual impulses in human life over in the Orient - although not in today's Orient, because today's Orient is in a state of decadence in this regard. What the source of this very special spiritual life is, as I described in that lecture, which I gave on the historical development of mankind, lived in the Orient thousands of years ago. There lived a race of men who understood nothing of what we call 'deductive' or 'logical thinking' — a race of men who, from the same sources that the spiritual science meant here, but in a different way, in a Western way, once knew that something could live in the soul of man that reveals to him the spirit that permeates the world. But it is not in the East that we find a knowledge of the spirit that is not based on proof or reasoning. Today, if we do not want to become antiquated, we can no longer penetrate this oriental spiritual life, but something of it still lives in our ordinary intellectual education. There is a direct line from the spirit that shone in the Vedas, in the Vedanta philosophy, in the ancient Indian yoga system, which itself lived in the Chaldean teachings and in ancient China. It is a direct line that moved in many currents through many channels to the Occident. And in our everyday thinking, we still have traces of that oriental spiritual life before us. Even when the Mystery of Golgotha entered into the development of mankind, when it became necessary to understand Christ Jesus, it was Oriental wisdom that sought to comprehend this event, which could only be grasped through supersensible knowledge. It was Oriental wisdom that was then transformed into the teaching of Christianity and spread with Christianity throughout the Occident. In this Oriental wisdom lives something that today's man can no longer feel and sense in the right way, for which he needs a support. What was present in the original soul life of the Oriental had to be anchored in the West - for centuries already - in dogmatically cohesive religious communities; because the inner source of spiritual life no longer flows in the same way, that is why man needed such religious communities. This is what initially extends into our public life like a first branch - a branch that still has the Orient as its “lifeblood”. And if one were to look at our spiritual life with an open mind, one would still discover effects of what originated in the Orient in what modern man thinks, feels and senses and what lives even in the sciences, right down to physics, but above all in religious beliefs.

In addition to this peculiar oriental spirit, which is little understood today in its entirety and which permeates the West in its own unique way, there was another school of thought that came more from the south and poured into Central Europe, but also fertilized the west. It came from what I would like to call, in a comprehensive sense, legal, state and political thinking. In the wonderful Greek civilization we see a remarkable mixture of what came from the East and still lived in the Greek people, as it had come from the Egyptians, and the now already legal thinking that was not yet fully revealed in Greece, which brought the peculiar evidential way into the imagination of man. In Greece, we see life only sparsely permeated by logical, legal, and state thinking, which was not present at all in the Orient. If, for example, there were commandments in the Orient, they were something quite different there from the commandments in the Occident. We then see the legal spirit essentially absorbed in ancient Rome. We see how there the process of proving, of reasoning, of combining and separating concepts is developed into a special art. We see how a second element is mixed into what flows from the Orient, how the legal and political current pours into the spiritual current, the “state machine”. And we see even the spiritual-religious, the spiritual-scholastic, permeated by this legal element. It would have been quite impossible for the Oriental to think of something like “guilt and atonement” or “redemption” in the original thought of his world view instead of the concept of “karma”. What lived in the Orient in “karma”, in the fate of the world, was something quite different. But then the legal element began to make itself felt in the world view, and it even found its way into the religious conception of the world. At the turn of the ages, man was thought of differently from the way he was in the Orient. Now he was thought of in such a way that he was “judged” by the world judges because he had incurred “guilt”. In the Orient, people spoke only of “guilt” and “judgment”. In the Occident, even the religious element has been infiltrated by the legal-evidential, the divisive-judgmental. And when we go, for example, to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and see the painting by Michelangelo, 'Christ as Judge of the World', where he judges the good and the bad, we see even there the legal, world-political spirit carried into the religious world view. This is the second branch of our civilization, which still has an effect in Fichte and Hegel and which imbues everything that is still emerging in German intellectual life at the turn of the 18th to 19th century. It is not without reason that Fichte and Hegel started their thinking precisely from the roots of right, from the political and state conditions, and the way in which these minds conceive the development of humanity is to be understood in an “emphatic of the state” sense, in contrast to earlier times.

Only in more recent times did a third current join this second one, which developed in the West out of the Western peoples' dispositions and instincts. In the East, in the times when the East was great, nature provided what man needed in such a way that he undertook the distribution of natural products as well as the distribution of what man produced out of his spiritual life. There was no economic thinking, there was not even any legal thinking. If we go back to the 18th century, we find little economic thinking in Central Europe. But we find everything dominated by an increasingly intense legal thinking, by a state-oriented, political thinking. In the West, economic thinking had developed long ago, and it developed more and more out of people's natural instincts and abilities. Circumstances developed in such a way that where people think in a truly “western” way, economic thinking is now also applied to what was previously grasped from the point of view of logic - to science, to truth. It came from America. There they have the doctrine of pragmatism, which roughly says: “True” and “false” is something that is only an illusion; we have taken that from the legal world view. Our view is this: if something proves useful in practical life, then it is right, it is true, and everything that does not prove useful is harmful, is false. According to this view of life, everything is judged only by whether it is “useful” or “harmful”. These ideas have become part of human thought and are also alive in philosophers. Yes, if, for example, one wants to understand Herbert Spencer and other philosophers correctly, one understands them only if one says to oneself: This Herbert Spencer devises philosophical systems, but he has ideas that, as such, are only in the wrong place; instead of devising philosophical systems, he should build factories with his way of thinking, set up trade unions and help the economy on its feet; his ideas are useful for this, but not in the philosophical field.

If we follow the path our humanity has taken in its historical development, we see that first a spiritual life develops, which points back to a heritage from earlier millennia in later times. Then, little by little, a state and political life, a legal way of thinking, develops. Later, the economic life develops alongside this, and this life develops in a differentiated way across the earth. But as we approach the modern age, we see how the spiritual life that came from the East has died out. The dry, pedantic and philistine nature of today's education and upbringing stems in particular from the withering away of that ancient spiritual heritage. But this also points with all vividness to the fact that we should not migrate back to the Orient, but must develop a free and original spiritual life through ourselves again, by opening the sources of this spiritual life for ourselves. The old inheritance is at an end. Our time demands a new spiritual life, and spiritual science now wants to proclaim this from Dornach. With this new spiritual life, it will permeate education, and through something like the Waldorf School, it wants to make it fruitful for modern life.

But there is also little left today for the old legal spirit. I advise you to read characteristic, symptomatic phenomena of the present day, such as the little booklet on jurisprudence by the Mannheim teacher Rumpf, and you will see that Just as religious worldviews today have to rely on outward appearances because the inner life no longer bubbles up, so jurisprudence and political science borrow from economic conditions because they no longer have anything that bubbles up from the inner life. Thus we see that today a mixture of economic thinking and legal thinking is coming about, which spreads chaos over our lives. And anyone who sees through things knows how much of this chaotic confusion has penetrated into the sphere of our public life, and how this is then expressed in deeds, causing social upheaval, social confusion and turmoil. We can only move forward if we seek a new spiritual life in the way I have described. The old spiritual life has passed away as an inheritance. But we will only find the new spiritual life if we do not hand over the school to the state, if we set up the whole spiritual life on its own, because then alone we can lift the spiritual life out of what it is now. When a human being steps down from spiritual heights into the physical world, he brings with him a new, real spiritual element for each generation from his human individuality and personality. We do not want to dictate to people that they must develop according to these or those rules, but we want to let this real spiritual element develop powerfully through love from the teacher to the child. This spiritual life can only be administered by those who are active in it. A new spiritual life will reintroduce the living spirit, which our social life so urgently needs, into the present; it will make fruitful for human coexistence the deep source that man brings with him when he enters physical existence through birth. This is one of the great tasks of our time.

A second task is how we can once again develop a living sense of duty in the social community, through the living interaction between individuals in the democratic structure of the state – not by regurgitating old Roman or old concepts in general, but by original thought. No law dictated from above will ever develop a sense of duty. Only that right which arises between equals, between one mature human and another mature human in lively intercourse, only this right will also make people keen to work, and this right will have to incorporate the [regulation of] labor.

The spiritual life, as I understand it, is described in my “Key Points of the Social Question” in such a way that it must become the regulator of capital. Then the accumulation of capital or means of production, which is necessary for more recent development, will, through the spirit – which will illuminate it when the spirit is formed anew in its freedom, in its fertility, in its progress from generation to generation – then capital will also carry within itself, through the spirit, what, for example, Keynes and others miss: morality. And then, economic life will not be characterized by a capitalism based on egoism and mere self-acquisition; instead, it will be imbued with spirituality, arising from an understanding of the necessities of the world and of humanity and of existence, and it will work in the spirit of the people educated in the new spiritual life. Then labor will no longer be a commodity, but will be incorporated into the independent, self-developing constitutional state; then, in the social fabric in which the mature human being works with every other mature human being on the basis of equal rights, labor will come into its own. And only from the feeling for our duty to work in freedom can arise the upswing in our lives, not from the demand for barracking and duty, which must stifle every sense of justice in man. From an independent spiritual life, from an independent legal life, one must grasp the great tasks of our time.

If we look at economic life, we see that if we separate out everything that is in it today and needs to be separated out – the right to land, because that belongs in the constitutional state, labor, which is paid for like a commodity today, because it belongs in the legal state, and means of production, insofar as they can be capitalized, because they belong in the spiritual link of the social organism. If we take all this out of economic life, what remains is the production and consumption of goods. A product of human labor, a commodity is not only concerned with one person; a commodity passes from one person to another. Not only does the person who produces the commodity and has experience in its production have something to say about it, but so does the person who creates the conditions of exchange for the thing or who has to decide on the needs. Thus, many different kinds of people are involved in economic life, and everything in economic life is a commodity. If we have, on the one hand, the administration of capital in the spiritual element and the administration of labor in the legal element, then what remains for the administration of economic life is the only thing that is justified: the price level, the mutual price value of the goods. But if it is to be carried up from chance to reason, it can only be determined through associations. The various groups of people who, from the point of view that I have characterized, have to do with a product, must be summarized in associations; because people have to do with the product from different starting points in order to determine the price of one product in relation to the other, so that money can only be the external indicator of the value of the product. It is only through associations of economic life that it is possible to arrive at the true price of a product for economic life - that is what matters. And this cannot be determined by dictates and so on, but only by the experiences that are made from association to association.

If, for example, a person is employed in a particular branch of industry and works in it, the price of his product of labor must be set so that it is not too expensive and not too cheap. So if I make a pair of boots, when I have finished them I must get so much in the way of sundry goods for what I get for them that I can satisfy my needs and those of my family with them until I have finished another pair of boots. This cannot be calculated, it can only be experienced in the living interaction of associations. In order to understand that the price problem is at the center of the whole economic life, a more precise study of the “key points” and those writings that point to them will be necessary, especially for example my essays in the Dreigliederungs-Zeitung, which will soon be published in a collection by the publishing house of Kommenden Tages. There you can see what we need to get the spirit back that we need for our ascent.

To solve this one great task of the present, we must have a new spiritual life to cultivate individuality; we must bring out human self-importance and human abilities, which can only be properly placed in a human context through a proper understanding of human personality and human individuality. In order to bring intellectual life into effect in the right way, we need the self-contained – not the intellectual life encompassing, but letting it out of itself – state or legal life or political life in its parliamentary structure; this can never be in intellectual life or in economic life. Morality and mutual assistance can then be produced from this again, in other words, everything that must take place between all people in order for a dignified existence to be possible. And in economic life, we need to solve the price problems as a major task of the present. We can only solve them if we first base economic life on itself, on the basis of association.

And we can only move forward if we allow these three independent links to interact in a certain free way and do not fear any possible “division” or “cutting up” of these three links. One need only reflect a little on the human organism to lose this fear. In my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Soul Mysteries) I indicated how the human organism also consists of three independent members: the nervous-sensory activity, the rhythmic activity and the metabolic activity. The entire function of human life is structured from these three activities as activities. Just as one cannot breathe with one's eyes or see with one's lungs, so the state should not determine spiritual life, nor should spiritual life interfere with legal life. And just as one cannot think with one's stomach, so one should not dictate politics or determine rights from the economic point of view. And just as the lungs breathe, the head sees and thinks, and the stomach digests, so the three independent limbs of the human organism work together in unity; this unity does not exist in the abstract, but arises as a living unity from the three independent limbs.

In the same way the true unity of the social organism will come into being when we grasp the three great tasks of the present time in the life of the spirit, in the life of the right and in the life of the economy. These three great tasks are certainly utopian for many people. But even for the people of the 1830s, what developed in Central Europe from 1870 to 1913 would have been utopian in purely economic terms. If we just think that in 1870, 30 million tons of coal were mined and processed in Germany, whereas in 1913, 190 million tons were mined and processed — truly, for a person in the 1930s, that would have been a utopia if one had spoken of such a surge in coal mining and processing at the time. We should not be afraid of being accused of utopianism or fantasy. Even if what is presented as a threefold order cannot be realized immediately, we should remember a saying of Fichte's, spoken to his audience when he was talking about the nature and destiny of the scholar. He said something like this: We know that ideals cannot be immediately realized in practical life, but we also know that great impulses and great powers lie in such ideals, which can advance humanity. If the so-called practitioners do not recognize this, then they are merely testifying that they were not reckoned with in the evolution of the world. And so may a benevolent Deity grant them light and sunshine, good digestion and, if it can be, a little sense as well! Those who are true practitioners count on the real practical forces of life and do not let themselves be annoyed by those objections that are so characteristic of the way Fichte characterizes them, and which say: What is downcast Germany, what is humanity, reduced to misery in Central Europe, to do alone if all the others do not want to go along with the threefold social order?

Dear attendees, if we work with all our strength – even today, when it is almost too late – on this threefold social order, so that it enters as many minds as possible, and really present it to the world in a living way, then the others, even if they are the victors, will accept it as something fruitful and beneficial for the world and for humanity. When the “key points” were translated into English, one could see how almost every discussion of this book began with the words: “One can hardly read this book with any other frame of mind,” but even then one approached the content with a certain objectivity. We lack only people to help us make these ideas fruitful for life. We need people who have a spirit of progress, but not a spirit of empty phrases. And the more we can win such people, the less we need to fear the accusation that we in Central Europe can achieve nothing against the others.

Another objection that is often made is: What can the individual do, even if he sees something like the fertility of the impulse for threefolding? Oh, let no one grieve because the “others” do not see through it, let him alone see it himself as an individual, then he sets an example for others and enters the path where individuals become many. And let us not be annoyed by the other reproach either, when people say again and again: If you seek ascent by such a path, it will take a long time. We do not want to waste time wondering how long it will take, but we do want to be clear about one thing: the more we want it, the sooner it will come! We do not want to engage in idle speculation, but we want to think and act in such a way that our actions, our will and our thoughts make it happen as quickly as possible.

When a person brings to life in his soul the right ways for the right social coexistence, when he ignites his soul and lives through it with these impulses, which show us how spiritual, legal, state or political life and from economic life, then he can work from a single earthly territory, even against the prejudices of the whole world, in such a way that many individual territories arise that take up the impulses and carry them forward for the progress and welfare of humanity. In this way, a long period of pain can become a short one; in this way, one can overcome space and time and manifold [obstacles] if one really wants to find the true good of humanity for a new ascent, based on independent legal consciousness and on the correct economic consciousness of the present.

Not only everyone notices that civilized humanity is going through severe crises in the present, but everyone actually experiences them. I would like to say that two of these crises have recently emerged quite clearly, so to speak explosively.

The first, more insidious crisis, is already being noticed and mentioned by a great many people in the present, but its nature is understood by very few. For this crisis, which has brought such severe misery and hardship to humanity in the first instance and which we can describe as the state crisis of the present, we can probably set 1914 as the year of explosion. We know, of course, how the most terrible struggles took place in the European state system at that time, and how humanity is still suffering from the terrible after-effects of those struggles today. It may be said that it became apparent during the course of these struggles, but especially after these struggles came to an apparent end in 1918, that it became apparent how little is understood as to where the source, the actual cause of this state-legal crisis of humanity is to be found.

From two sides, one could hear something like a motto that would indicate the direction in which the terrible crisis would develop. Some thought – I do not want to go into the characteristics of the individual parties now, that does not belong here, but I just want to mention it – they thought that a different structure of the state system of civilized humanity must emerge from the chaos of war; at least, many thought, the existing states would have to change their borders, set up safeguards here or there. The others, no less numerous, wanted to make the motto from the most diverse points of view: Neither winners nor losers! - That would mean that the system of states of civilized humanity must emerge from the chaos of war in the same form as it was before.

It must be said that both those who thought of conquests, of changing state borders, and those who spoke the slogan “neither victor nor vanquished” actually realized that this terrible confusion in the second decade of the 20th 0th century had arisen from the fact that the states, in their mutual relationship, with their borders as they were, simply could not remain, but that they also did not have the strength within themselves to reorganize themselves in such a way that a tolerable relationship could emerge between them. That it could not come to the conclusion 'neither victor nor vanquished' is shown by the outcome of the war. But that the conclusion 'victory' is not enough either is shown by what has developed since then, because if you look at what has arisen from the way of thinking, from the outlook of those who are among the victors , then one must say: in Versailles, in Saint-Germain, in Spa and so on, everywhere those who thought with the same thoughts were together, with which one set up the states that had come into confusion and chaos. They wanted to continue with the same way of thinking, the same way of looking at things. They wanted to set up some new state territories, which we also saw emerging – at first only on the surface – but what was hoped for did not come of it. Anyone who takes an unbiased look at the conditions of civilized humanity today will have to admit that what has been established, especially in Europe, already clearly shows that it cannot have an inner foundation. From the disorder in which everything that emerged from the peace agreements finds itself, the unbiased must recognize that one simply cannot continue the old way of thinking, the state way of thinking, which has emerged through modern history. It has asserted itself in the peace agreements; it has proved its impossibility through the facts.

The second crisis – or perhaps it would be better to say the explosion of the second crisis, since it had been in preparation for a long time – occurred around 1918 and in the following years. It can be called the economic crisis. Out of the chaos of war arose in the yearning of humanity what could be called the aspiration to arrive at economic conditions such as are present in the instincts and needs of numerous members of today's civilized humanity. What have we seen emerging from this economic crisis so far? If we look to the West, we see absolute helplessness; we also see the continuation of economic activity as it has emerged in modern history; we see continuous experimentation without guiding ideas; we see those who are concerned about this economic activity, so far in great apprehension about the outcome of this experimentation. And if we look to the East, we see how purely economic thinking, insofar as it has asserted itself in the minds of the proletariat, has taken on a strange form. We see in the European East – and we see the same thing continuing deep into Asia – the endeavour to create, one might say, a militarized economic state structure. We see the purely militaristic principle applied in the East, which has suffered such shipwreck from the old constitutional states. I would like to say: we see the purely militaristic principle applied to an economic organism that is to be created. And today the facts speak clearly enough for these efforts. Who would claim today that anything else could be achieved by this militarization of economic life in the east of Europe than merely the plundering of the old economy and the destruction of the old economic structure? One has illusions about anything that is to be created for humanity, but which crumbles more with each day, with each week. On the other hand, we see how the ideas and views of people, how they have developed, particularly in the second half of the 19th century, as so-called thought-based economic reforms, social reforms, how these ideas, where they are to be applied radically, cannot in the least produce anything fruitful.

And so it may be said that two crises, the state crisis and the economic crisis, now face civilized humanity with no prospect of a way out. One does not need to develop extensive spiritual abilities to recognize this, as I mentioned in the introduction; one need only devote oneself impartially to observing what is happening. From these observations, which could already be made over decades, if one directed the attention of the soul to the way in which these two crises were clearly preparing, arose that which has been undertaken in recent times in Dornach as anthroposophical college courses. Of course, the anthroposophical college courses held in September and October of this year in Dornach by three lecturers from the most diverse branches of science need not be overestimated in their present significance; they are a very first and perhaps very weak beginning, but the beginning of a very definite, purposeful will. The thirty lecturers in Dornach were intended to show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that I have been presenting for almost two decades now, also in Stuttgart, has the inner strength and the inner scientific methodology to fertilize the most diverse human scientific branches, so that they can take on a form corresponding to the demands of contemporary and future life.

But what is necessary in order for something like this to be undertaken in a purposeful way? It is necessary to understand what the most important, the third crisis is, of which the other two crises mentioned are basically only the outward expression. But this third crisis is not yet being properly understood by almost all of humanity today: it is the crisis of our entire spiritual life. I know, my dear audience, that what I am saying is something that is met with the gravest doubt in the broadest circles today. I also know that what I am saying is something that people actually find uncomfortable to hear. This is shown, for example, by the fact that many people admit the state crisis and many people admit the economic crisis, that they demand fundamental changes in the conception and organization of state and economic life as a result of this admission, but that very few people are convinced that intellectual life, including the individual sciences, must also undergo a transformation. In many circles today, it is thought that intellectual life must provide the sources for further fruitful progress for humanity, for emerging from hardship and misery and social confusion. But people think of the contribution of intellectual life in such a way that they simply take only those 'intellectual goods' that have been produced so far as so-called 'safe science' and want to introduce them into the widest circles through the most diverse channels, through adult education centres, popular education associations and so on. But - as I have mentioned here before - people are not unbiased enough to thoroughly consider the following fact: When one recognizes that it was precisely those circles that have so far participated in the intellectual life as it has developed in modern human development, and that it was precisely these educated circles that have essentially become the bearers of the confusion, when one recognizes this, one must admit that the same confusion cannot be removed by popularizing the thoughts that have led to disaster and that have been brought about by this intellectual movement, because then the same confusion would arise from the widest circles that has already emerged from the narrow circle of the representatives of this intellectual life.

Therefore, the aim that has emerged from Dornach, where these Anthroposophical college courses have taken place, is not to simply popularize in a conservative way what we already have in terms of so-called certain science or other spiritual goods within which the confusions have asserted themselves, but to fertilize this spiritual material anew, to give it an impetus through which it can become the bearer of a different social and economic life. The aim of the spiritual movement inspired by anthroposophy is to renew spiritual life, not to broaden the old spiritual life. It should be recognized within the spiritual movement inspired by anthroposophy that the impulses, thoughts and views that have led to the confusion of states and the confusion of the economy were already present in the old school of thought. But few people today still take the trouble to really look at the origins of our distress and our lives, at the crisis in our intellectual life. That is just inconvenient. After all, something should be “certain”, one should be able to stand on some firm ground. One believes that everything would be shaken if one were to have a reforming effect on this intellectual life itself. That is why it is so difficult for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to speak to people of the present day, because basically the interest that it must assert out of its inner sense of duty in world history is not active at all among the people in the broadest circles. One would like to look everywhere, in the economic and the state, for the sources of the crises, but one shrinks from looking for them in the spiritual life.

But until we look for it in the intellectual life, nothing, absolutely nothing, will improve – not in economic life, nor in the life of the state. For what is external reality in the life of the state and in economic life is, even if people do not want to see it today, only the expression of what people think, what they have learned to think through the spiritual life that has emerged in the last three to four centuries, particularly in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century in the developmental history of humanity. The state and economic crises are too noticeable to be denied, and it has become necessary to recognize that new impulses must be supplied to both state and economic development. Many people admit that something must happen in the spiritual life as well. But that something must happen that is oriented towards anthroposophical spiritual science is something that people of the present day, who also admit the former, very often resist. We can already give enough examples of this today - examples that can be taken from the present, both from the world regions suffering from terrible cultural pressure that belong to the defeated, and from those cultural regions that belong to the victors.

We see, now that the war turmoil has come to a temporary, but only apparent, end, that after the revolutionary spirit had emerged, the call to separate the ecclesiastical and religious element from the state element has been asserted within Germany. Taken in the abstract, I would say that this is the first call for a part of what the threefold social organism wants: it wants to separate the entire spiritual life from the state and economic life and place it in its own self-government, built only on its own principles. Today, only this innermost part of spiritual life is understood, so that one has demanded, but only in an abstract sense, its separation from state life.

Now, however, other phenomena have emerged in this very area within Germany: from a certain quarter, a decidedly anti-religious, anti-Christian sentiment has asserted itself, and that which has asserted itself there has combined with the war cry: separation of the Church from the State. In particular, it became difficult for Protestantism to come to terms with what emerged as a result of the war, the revolution. On the one hand, one had to realize that the Catholic Church, with its ancient constitution, would not lose much by separating from the state, because it has so many political and administrative and also popular impulses within itself that it could indeed only gain from this separation from the state, especially if it still circumvents the separation from the state in a scheming way. On the other hand, the connection of the Protestant churches with the state authorities was so close – the Protestant churches were designed to see the ecclesiastical authority exercised by state powers – that they had to feel, as it were, abandoned by the separation from the state. This was felt to a certain extent, leading to a kind of rallying call for a gathering of all that could still, from a religious point of view, direct the gaze towards the spiritual. The various denominations were to be organized so that they could achieve together what they could not achieve separately, through a kind of self-government.

Yes, something else emerged that is highly characteristic: those who were the bearers of this “consolidation” idea of the various church denominations openly stated that it was good that the separation of church and state affairs was still taking place as trustingly as possible with regard to the state authorities, that the separation - as it was put - was happening in a “benevolent” manner, so to speak. They openly stated that at least religious education would still be provided by the state and so on, that the church would not simply be released from state authority, but would be compensated in a certain way - well, and what more such things are -: “benevolent detachment from the state”. From this it can be seen that religious denominations are accustomed to being run by the state; they cannot imagine a certain state independence. This is not only due to economic circumstances, but also to the way people think. And so we see that the churches that are to gain their independence still look, so to speak, if only halfheartedly, to the state leadership they have become accustomed to over the centuries. This is more or less the case in Central Europe.

Let us now look at the rest of the world. It is extremely interesting that in Switzerland, for example, speakers from America are now being heard who are church representatives of religious denominations. What do they say in their speeches? They say something like the following in their speeches – I can only summarize what is explained in detail in a few sentences – they say something like the following, from the American point of view, of course: Humanity is striving, they say, for the League of Nations. The League of Nations is supposed to lead humanity out of the old, militaristic conditions; it is supposed to bring the longed-for peace and a new human culture and human civilization. But, they say, the achievements of the statesmen to date, what they have accomplished so far, cannot bring about a viable League of Nations. In saying this, they are attacking Woodrow Wilson, whom they describe as a well-meaning but somewhat foolish idealist. For such a League of Nations would be forged together by external, state conditions that have actually outlived themselves, that no longer have the strength to support human civilization. The true League of Nations, so say these American pastors, must be rooted in the hearts of men. But it can take root in the hearts of men only when Christian feeling and religious confession are found throughout the earth. And so these American speakers would actually like to come to the constitution of the League of Nations with the Europeans from the religious point of view; they would like to win the hearts of humanity religiously.

What I am relating to you, ladies and gentlemen, is something that comes from the spiritual life. But anyone who hears the speeches of such American pastors, and who is able to see without prejudice what is now raging economically in Europe, will say: however beautiful the words may be – they are sometimes very beautiful, these words that are spoken there - however beautiful the words may be, they do not find the way to the hearts of men; they are powerless to found an inner league of nations. For those people, whose instincts and desires give rise to the social battle cries of today, no longer have an ear for these beautifully spoken words; they demand something else; hearts do not open to these words. Here it is shown, as well as on the ground, where the call sounds to break away benevolently from the state, to gather together what is scattered, everywhere it is shown that one already notices the creeping mental crisis of the present. But one must really be quite biased if one can believe that, on the one hand, the beautiful words of American pastors can found the world federation in the hearts of men or that, on the other hand, by collecting the various denominations that exist in Central Europe can be brought about by the collection of what exists in terms of denominations in Central Europe – a spiritual renewal that is truly powerful enough to bring about strength for social human progress, to bring about strength that can reform in the state and economic spheres. Only if one is biased can one believe such things.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science studies what is actually taking place from its insights and its perspective, and it notes: Yes, the will is there to make a spiritual life powerful among people again, so that the state and economic life can emerge from thoughts rooted in a fruitful spiritual life. Otherwise, economic and political life cannot be reformed. The will is there, but something is missing: the creative power. Today it is not enough for American pastors to repeat old-fashioned words, however beautifully they are forged, but which have lost their value for human hearts. Today it is not a matter of collecting the confessions of the past; today it is a matter of bringing a new spiritual life to people through a new creation. Only those who do not merely want to repeat the old, do not merely want to collect the old, but who develop the will to create spiritually anew understand the spiritual crisis.

We must ask ourselves: Why do the most beautiful words prove powerless? Why does the collection [of religious creeds] lead to nothing? We see that in the course of the last three to four centuries, what is called state life and what is called economic life has become powerful throughout civilized humanity. These two have taken the spiritual life so completely in tow that those in Central Europe who, in terms of their religious confession, are to be separated from the state, nevertheless crave the state and its leadership. So completely has the spiritual life been dragged in tow that today the most beautiful words that can be spoken from this old spiritual life no longer find their way to the hearts in which the instincts for today's reforms arise. This proves, from the external historical facts, that we do not merely need a new fertilization of the old, a stimulus for the old, but that we need a complete new creation. From this point of view, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science stands. It wants to fertilize the individual sciences, which are supposed to provide the thoughts for the state and economic life of humanity. But spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented should also inspire state life itself and economic life in such a way that both are supplied with new impulses that are created in spiritual life itself. We have succeeded in doing this for a large part of the sciences, at least for a start – we can emphasize this after our successes, after our results during the Dornach college courses. Historical, physical, chemical, biological, legal, yes, even mathematical, philosophical, psychological research – all these fields have already taken shape through our college courses, showing what these branches of science will become if they are methodically and rigorously permeated by what spiritual scientific research intends, as it has been presented here in Stuttgart for more than a decade and a half. It is precisely this crisis of the spirit, which makes necessary new spiritual creations, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to point out. Why, I said, have the most beautiful words proved powerless? Why do we long for guidance from the state again? Because, basically, we have gradually attained a spiritual life that was entirely an appendage of state or economic life, that was entirely established in relation to educational and teaching institutions out of state will, that was entirely maintained by the aging economic forms. What state and economic life have hammered together with spiritual life over the past few centuries, what they have made out of the old creeds, has now become something that proves powerless when it wants to assert itself, as is the case with the American pastors for the founding of a League of Nations. Yes, my dear ladies and gentlemen, spiritual life has been reduced to this impotence by the state's supreme supervision and economic supremacy. The spiritual life towards which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims must, as I have often discussed here, arise from the innermost soul life of the human being himself. This soul life, however, cannot be subject to any kind of supervision or control, but can only arise in full freedom, through the completely free development of human individuality, in the free self-administration of this spiritual life itself. If this spiritual life is in free self-management, if it can produce precisely the kind of science that has emerged in Dornach and that the Waldorf School demonstrates for the art of education every day, if this spiritual life in free self-management can truly bring forth the human individual abilities that are sent into the physical world with every human being through birth or conception from spiritual worlds, then the fruits that flourish from such a free spiritual life can be fed to state life and economic life. The crises in the life of the state and in economic life are due to the fact that they lack the fertilizing ideas which should be supplied to them from a free spiritual life. When the state and economic life took it upon themselves to direct the spiritual life, it resulted in the suppression of the fertilizing influence which can only come to them if the spiritual life is left free, so that from this freedom the spiritual life can have an effect on the state and economic life. What I am hinting at here can also be fully substantiated by an unbiased observation of the course of civilization history. I will just point out some of this evidence. We see how, since the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, especially since the 18th century, economic life has become more and more complicated. We see how the necessity has developed to lead this economic life, which used to be guided more instinctively, even into city culture, even into the guild system, out of unconscious thinking. But one need only look at the people who are to be named among the spiritual founders of the newer economic sciences, at minds like those of the Frenchman Frangois Quesnay and the Englishman Adam Smith, and one will find that, in the period of world history in which it has become necessary to grasp the economy from the spirit, scientific thinking itself has become powerless to cast any kind of light on economic life. Both Quesnay, the Frenchman who wanted to establish a political economy more from a natural science background, and Smith, the Englishman who founded a similar political economy, basically wanted to construct the whole political economy from a few axiomatic-looking principles such as “the validity of private property” and “the economic freedom of the human individual”.

If we look in particular at the founder of modern political economy, Adam Smith – and his thinking is, of course, only an expression of the thinking of his entire age, the 17th and 18th centuries – we find that this economic thinking of Adam Smith is basically a true reflection of the thinking that was established as scientific thinking in the West of civilization in particular at that time. It is very interesting to follow how, for example, what entered into physical-astronomical thinking as a method, as a way of looking at things, through Newton, and then entered into science as a way of dealing with problems, is encountered again in Smith in the treatment of economic tasks. Just as mathematical physics seeks to derive everything from a few principles that can be grasped by the intellect in the abstract, so a man like Adam Smith seeks to derive the whole of political economy from a few principles that can be grasped by the intellect in the abstract. It is interesting to observe how unprejudiced minds, even Bulwer in a novel, set about mocking what has now become established as thinking in political economy. We find the mocking thought in Bulwer: “In the past it was believed that anyone who wanted to get involved in political economy had to have extensive knowledge of what people do when they do business with each other. Today, all you need are a few abstract principles, and you can derive the entire national economy from them. - And even earlier, an unbiased thinker, Young, said: Until now, he had thought that someone who wanted to talk about the national economy had to know the virtues and vices of people, the way people communicate in economic life, what they do there - in short: that such a person had to have extensive knowledge. But Adam Smith showed him, said Young, that you only need a few ideas and that with a few strokes of the pen you can compress all the extensive, empirical economic knowledge into a few abstract ideas.

As economic life has become more complicated, what has happened to economic thinking? Well, my dear audience, something has come over this economic thinking, which first asserted itself in the West, which originates from the newer economic life, which is modeled on the newer economic life and which, in its final consequences, whether one admits it or not, now appears in the East of Europe in the few abstract thoughts of Lenin and Trotsky as the final consequence. That is what we have to face. But you only understand what is at stake here if you not only acquire a few abstract thoughts - which today's humanity loves very much - but if you get a thorough overview of the course of human development for many centuries, as I have often hinted at and as I will now hint at from a different point of view.

My dear attendees, just as a view such as that begun by Newton, which then came into the human psychology through other thinkers and mechanized the human psychology , just as Newton mechanized astronomy, just as this mechanical-mathematical scientific approach came into political economy through Adam Smith, so, basically, it has taken hold of even the popular views of the modern civilized world. And today, in the age of newspapers and the popularization of science, there are basically few people alive who have not been touched in some way, even if they are unaware of it, by the spirit of this scientific discipline. This type of science lives on the one hand in mathematics; in mathematics it has the only thing that springs from within the human being, for all of mathematics is not something that is gained through observation, but it is something that springs from within the human being. This branch of science, which has mathematical thinking, which can be clearly seen, for example, in Smith, and also in Ricardo, the later editor of the national economy, - this mathematical thinking is one side of modern science. The other side is the sensory observation of the external world and the formation of all kinds of abstract theories, of atomistic or other materialistic theories about this sensory external world. These two currents actually stand there: sensory observation of the external world, mathematizing thinking. We must be fair to what appears on the one hand as mathematizing thinking, right into economics, and on the other hand as conscientious observation and conscientious experimentation in the external world. We must be fair to this, for it has brought about the great triumphs of modern Western science. And I have emphasized it many times: these triumphs of modern science are by no means opposed by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but fully recognized. But it must be realized that there was a time in the development of humanity when this kind of scientific attitude was not present at all. Today, of what was present in humanity in this field, only the last decadent remnants are left.

Again I point to the Orient. But if one wants to see the essential things in their true form, one must not look to the present-day Orient, where everything is already in decline and destruction, which was once an ancient wisdom of humanity, which was even greater than it later became — you can read about it in my book “Occult Science”. It was even greater in the time before the Vedas, before the Vedanta philosophy came into being; what still shines out artistically from the Vedas, and only in the last echoes from the Vedanta philosophy, can still be seen by the unbiased knower in the whole of oriental development. There is much that is magnificent and powerful in the wisdom. There is nothing in it of the special way in which Western science of more recent times works. The way of thinking, the way of looking at the world, was quite different. The scientific methods that we so admire today, and rightly so, that we must emulate, were not found in ancient oriental thought. Instead, ancient Oriental wisdom had what I would call a world view, in contrast to science: a world view without science. That was basically the characteristic essence of the ancient East in its wisdom.

This world view is significant in that it encompasses the whole person; it is significant in that through this world view, the human being grasps himself as spirit, soul and body. Admittedly, this world view in the ancient Orient occurred in such a way that little attention was paid to the body and to that which belonged to the external, physical world. This life was more of an understanding between soul and spirit, in which man knew himself rooted, but it was a world view. That is to say, through what man thought and felt, he firmly established his position, his relationship to the world of the senses and to the world of the spirit. He did this not in a scientific way, but through soul perception. What was gained through spiritual contemplation certainly lived in its original form in the ancient times of the Orient. But the legacy of it lived on, and basically, the legacy of this oriental world view can be felt right up to the present day. This life of world-conception gave that through which, for example, the first Christianity - in which this ancient oriental wisdom and world-conception was still alive - grasped the mystery of Golgotha that gives meaning to the earth. But in the place of the view that the ancient Orient had, the intellectual element became more and more established as this view remained. Before the appearance in more recent times of the Western world's science, which is also without a worldview and which has also given shape to the teaching of the soul and to economics, as I have mentioned, what I would like to call an inner struggle arose in the middle, beginning with ancient Greece, clearly developing in ancient Rome, and then establishing itself throughout Central Europe. He grasped an event that can only be grasped by the spirit, the Christ event, still through the inherited echoes of ancient, oriental wisdom. Alongside this, through the special talents of Western humanity, there shimmered more and more, even into this Central Europe, that which is mere human intellectuality, which basically wants to understand the entire cosmos, above all our earthly surroundings and human beings themselves, only through mathematics and through observation of the external world.

And so, in Central Europe, on the one hand, there was precisely that which one might call a leaning towards the ancient oriental heritage. Everything that lived and still lives today through the Middle Ages and more recent times in the content of Christian teaching, everything that lives in it as a world view - even if it has almost gone out, even if pure rationalism has taken hold of modern theology - is for the most part old oriental heritage, because only a few attempts at a new creation exist. And connected with this is what man now finds out of himself through mathematics and observation of nature, but which does not lead to a world view. And so we see in the Middle Ages, in the time when Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were working, this conflict between what human reason can achieve through observation and mathematics, what should be limited to the sensory world, and that which is supposed to be revelation, world-view revelation – the Mystery of Golgotha, which was not called by that name at the time, but which, in terms of its content, not of fact, was ancient oriental heritage. And basically, this dichotomy lives on to this day in all public life in Central Europe, including in state and economic life, emerging from the Middle Ages - this dichotomy between scientific thinking without a worldview and an old, inherited worldview without science. Man in Central Europe has been called upon to wage this inner battle since the time of the ancient Greeks. And it was precisely this inner struggle that produced the greatest spiritual achievements during the period of German culture at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. For that which lived in Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the philosophers of German idealism, in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, only lived in all these minds because these minds, in their inmost depths, concentrated the struggle that exists between science without world-view and the inherited world-view without science. In Goethe's works, one can follow this conflict in his individual utterances, as he tried to reconcile what science gives on the one hand, and what lived in him as an intuitive feeling, in accordance with the imagination, as an ancient heritage of the Orient. Indeed, with Goethe it goes even further; he experienced this inner conflict until the eighties of the 18th century. Then he was drawn to the south, so that he could at least still feel in the south the echoes that remained in southern Europe of the ancient oriental, unscientific world view, which, however, was very, very much dying out in Greece. From this unscientific world view, nothing but mathematics, dry mathematics, came through the Arabs from the European south to the west. It is basically Europe's last remnant, albeit a lasting remnant, of what arose from the unscientific world view of the Orient as a comprehensively universal concept. For there, all wisdom was so intrinsic to the human being, whereas in our civilization, only mathematics is still intrinsic. Novalis, in particular, felt this about mathematics and stammered out.

And what the Western civilization has gained is what I would call the system of observation and experimentation, from which the actual science of the West has emerged, from which everything that man does not initially gain from his inner being emerges, but which he gains by allowing the world of the senses to have an effect on the senses. And what has become of the scientific spirit in the process, what has been transferred from the scientific spirit to all the things through which our leading people gain their education, their scientific knowledge, that, my dear audience, has revealed its powerlessness in the face of economic and state life, in the face of the spirits I have mentioned, to whom many other names could be added.

And so we see our modern life looming. I would like to express it symbolically, what has actually become established in the last three to four centuries as our looming modern life. Outwardly, it is characterized as follows: On the one hand, we see the essential spirit of science developing and dominating schools and universities. But we see that what is done in schools and universities leads to an unworldly existence. We see how the universities stand as lonely islands of education. But we also see something else happening: that what is done in the way of newer science, of science without world view, stops at nothing. A characteristic example of this is the Darwinian doctrine, which, with such scientific conscientiousness, traces the development of living beings from the simplest creature to the most perfect one. However, it places man at the top of this animal organization, so to speak, and only comes to explain man insofar as he is an animal. From this and many other examples, one could show how the insights of mathematizing and purely externally observing science stop at the human being. Thus we have a scientific system of education, without a world view, that lives in abstractions, that does not give the human being what the world view of the Orient, without science, still gave - a sense of his place in the world - that only satisfies the head, only the intellect, that does not take hold of the whole person. On the one hand.

On the other hand, something arises that I would like to describe symbolically by showing you the factory with the modern practitioner. What is the relationship between the factory and the university? Yes, there is a relationship, but this relationship has become very one-sided. The one thing that shines from the modern universities into the factory is mechanical science. And this shining of mechanical science has brought about the great development of technology for the factory and for everything that goes with it, which has founded modern civilization. This science, which stops at the human being with its knowledge, was able to contribute to the development of technology in the highest sense. But even in the factory, the practitioner stops at the human being. He extends his routine — for it is nothing other than routine — only into the technical and into that which is connected with the technical. He cannot establish any relationship, any human relationship, between himself as an entrepreneur and leader and those who work on modern civilization from out of the broad mass of humanity. In knowledge, science stops short of the human being; in practice, in social activity, it stops short of the human being. This halting of the advance is indicated by a boundary. Everything that could come from modern mathematical science into technology, everything that could fertilize trade and commerce, and so on, has been taken into the area that has this boundary. But from science, which stops at human knowledge, no social life could be gained from this science that could have satisfied the great demands of modern times on this purely human side. And so, beyond the boundary, stood all of humanity, which in the most recent time now demanded its human dignity; so stood that humanity to which one had not found the path in practice, just as one had not found the path to the human being himself and his essence in the modern world-view-less scientific knowledge. This is the tragedy that has led to the modern crises, because what is written about modern practical life in the books, what is written in the ledger and the cash book, has nothing to do with what lives in the souls of those who stand beyond the boundary, beyond which humanity one stopped. But these came forward with their soul demands, and from these soul demands arose the counter-image of the spiritual crisis of the present.

Thus we have seen the rise of those universities, those colleges, those educational institutions that only opened the way to the technical, to the commercial, to the inhuman, I might say, into the factory, into industry, into the modern money economy, but which did not penetrate to the human being itself. And so, on the other hand, we have seen the imperfect sense of observation, which was first found in cognitive science without a world view, develop into the experimental sense of modern practitioners, who want nothing to do with guiding ideas, who limit themselves to experimenting with the mathematical-mechanical-technical, who summon people and make them work without concerning themselves with the social structure of humanity. We have seen the rise of the practitioner, who today has a formal hatred of all guiding ideas, who has a formal hatred of everything scientific, of everything cognitive, but who is right on the one hand in that this modern, world-view-less science has nothing of what can illuminate practice, insofar as the human heart is involved in practice. But this practitioner is wrong in that he attributes to this branch of science what he attributes to every spiritual life. And so he wants to remain a routine practitioner, he wants to continue what I would call a spiritless, mere experimental approach. This makes it so difficult to really build the bridge that could be built from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to the most practical life. The only thing to blame for this is the aversion of practitioners, who want to remain routiniers, to what, for example, the impulse for the threefold social organism comes from spiritual science. More and more we have seen this hatred of practice against everything that is spiritual life. And so today in the West we see a confused hustle and bustle of experimental economic activity, of experimental state activity. And we see in the East this economic activity, this state activity, leading to a militarized economic state that must paralyze everything human.

Thus we see how the crisis of the state and the economic crisis have actually arisen from the crisis of the spirit. Based on this clear insight, what has been represented here for more than a decade and a half as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to develop the forces for human progress. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to develop living knowledge out of the same scientific spirit that developed in the West without a worldview, out of the innermost human soul experience. This knowledge in turn becomes a worldview, not just a repetition of old words that no longer find their way to the hearts of men, but which seeks to shed light on the old creeds and to open up the view to that mighty event in the evolution of the earth, the Mystery of Golgotha. There is resistance to such a renewal of spiritual life, which, from the spirit of modern humanity, seeks to view the fundamental fact of Christianity, which can only be properly grasped and contemplated in spirit. We can no longer return to the ancient Orient. We can no longer aspire to a worldview that is not scientific. We have moved beyond the times when a worldview lacking in science could suffice for humanity. Today we are faced with the great task of developing a worldview from science through the inner development of the human being. We will be able to do this if we truly understand the nature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, as long as there are still people who claim that what is gained through the spiritual-scientific method of knowledge - an inward but strictly scientific method modeled on the strictest mathematical methods - could be just as much a vision as any other vision or hallucination, as long as there are there are people who claim such things, because, for example, they cannot in reality read what is written in my books “Occult Science” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”; as long as there are such people and as long as such people find credence, spiritual science will indeed have a difficult road to travel. I will have more to say about this. For such people do not realize that what is grasped with spiritual insight, what is grasped by man inwardly awakening himself to a spiritual insight, teaches him to distinguish fantasy from reality just as one learns to distinguish fantasy from reality in ordinary consciousness. The logic of facts on which this distinction is based is basically very simple, a logic of facts that only our opponents cannot grasp.

How do I know, for example, that when I lift a kilogram weight, I am not hallucinating, but that it is external reality? How do I recognize that? I recognize this by the fact that I simply have to strengthen my sense of self when I lift the weight. I have to make myself stronger inwardly. If I have a mere vision or hallucination, my sense of self remains with the same intensity. I am absorbed in the vision because I do not have the experience of intensifying my sense of self. I notice the resistance by the fact that I have to apply strength that is within me when lifting the kilogram weight; I am not absorbed in the vision. Likewise, when I have spiritual experiences, I do not lose myself in hallucinations or fantasies in which my sense of self does not increase. They are described everywhere in the spiritual scientific writings that those experiences through which one penetrates into the world in which man is before birth or conception, in which he will be after death, in which his eternal is rooted , that these experiences through which one penetrates into the supersensible world presuppose that one must awaken the soul more than in ordinary life, that is, one must make it experience more intensely, more strongly inwardly. But this expresses precisely what guarantees the scientific nature of what is asserted as spiritual insight. And if one asserts what I have only hinted at here, what I have often discussed in lectures here in Stuttgart over many years, if one asserts this, then, yes, then one acquires accurate views about what has seized modern humanity like a crisis in intellectual life.

For example, one sees how mathematics came to the West as an ancient inheritance via a detour through Arabia, but how it was powerless to conquer the complicated economic and political life of the West, as can be seen, for example, in Adam Smith. One observes that this mathematical thinking, this mathematical view, is gained entirely from within the human being, and by inwardly awakening the soul, one develops precisely that which adheres to this mathematical thinking. It is precisely that which lives in mathematical thinking that one develops into a higher perfection through inner, spiritual methods. In this way one acquires a very specific spiritual view. By inwardly enlivening the mathematization, which is limited only to the world between birth and death, through spiritual-scientific methods, one learns to recognize that which comes into the soul through inspiration. It comes in such a way that the intuition opens up for us to what the human being has experienced supersensibly in spiritual worlds before birth or conception. Mathematics is the one field of science that has preserved for us a final starting point for arriving at a view of prenatal human life.

What Western science, without a worldview, acquires in its external observation, if it is developed here [in spiritual science], initially provides something that does not remain an abstract view - for worldview For science without world-view it remains abstract contemplation – but it rises to become moral, as I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, rising to become moral imagination and thus the foundation of the moral life of the human being. Everything we gain in thoughts from the outside world leads to images, to imaginations, which ultimately connect with inspiration. We experience this. And however imperfect what we can observe of the external world between birth and death may be, when we process it inwardly, when we also experience what we have observed outwardly in our soul through the spiritual-scientific method, then from our imaginations we also gain a view of the life into which we enter after our death. When applied to science, spiritual science will in turn lead to a world view that is based on mathematics, observation and experimentation. However, this world view can give modern civilization the strength to advance humanity. For the world view has the property - as it already showed as an oriental, science-less world view - that it affects the mind and will of man, that it works in such a way that man founds a legal life according to these particular views, through which he brings about an understanding from person to person in the human community, in other words, that he builds himself a state life. A worldview stimulates the will through which economic life is determined. Science without a worldview speaks only to the head, to the intellect; it leaves the emotions and the will unaffected.

And so we see that while intellectual science has reached its highest flowering at the beginning of the twentieth century, the feeling that should permeate the state and the will that should shape economic life have remained uninfluenced. We would be heading towards this barbarization if head and intellect increasingly develop the life of instinct and leave mind and will uncared for, as it is already so terribly evident in the East of today's civilization. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, on the other hand, can take hold of feeling and will and thus generate a new force for human progress. This is something that science, without a worldview, cannot do. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in turn penetrates into feeling, that is, into state life; it penetrates into the will, that is, into economic life. It is by this crisis and the healing of it that one must recognize what the other two crises are. Non-ideological science, ladies and gentlemen, only seizes the intellect. It leaves unaffected the emotional life, which should lead to that proper understanding between man and man, which is the decisive thing in the state, and it leaves equally unaffected the will, which should have a formative effect in economic life.

And so we see what has emerged as the threefold crisis in modern times. We see how people long for a renewal of intellectual life, but how they do not want to admit that this renewal of intellectual life can only come from a new creation. And so we see the powerlessness of the old intellectual life in the “collection” idea, in the fine words of the American speakers who address the Swiss and the Europeans in general. But attention must be drawn to the necessity of a new creation of intellectual life. Only from this new creation of spiritual life will something new be able to emerge that was not there, that has not proved its impossibility, like the modern state system, which in 1914 entered into its catastrophe, not merely into its crisis because it had no free spiritual life alongside it, which had not proved its impossibility like the economic life, which entered into its catastrophe in the present because it did not have the fertilization of the free spiritual life.

In modern times, we see the emergence of an intellectualized science that cannot produce the human being who is equal to political and economic life, who can find fruitful ideas for political and economic life. We see the emergence of the type of person who, in the institutions of the state, seeks only the satisfaction of his or her egoism through human sentiment, instead of communication from person to person, and thus gradually undermines the structure of these state institutions. We see through mere intellectual science, which seizes the head alone, the will degenerating into mere instinctive life, and thus also flowing into acts of egoism. We see the rise of a lack of brotherhood, which aims only at enhancing the existence of one's own being, from mere science without a worldview. However, we will find the new forces for human progress precisely through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and thus find a worldview from modern science. It will produce a thinking human being whose thinking is not merely intellectual, whose thinking shines into feeling, whose thinking penetrates into will. We will see the man of action springing from the thinker, the man who, instead of merely satisfying his egoism, seeks human understanding in a state community.

We will see the emergence of the human being who, in the associations that bring together people with the most diverse economic needs and with different economic abilities, we will see the sense of brotherhood emerging from the will, which is fertilized by a real spiritual thinking, which works in associative community in such a way that the human being works together with the other people with understanding for all and thus also for himself. We shall see emerging from a truly spiritual world-knowledge the thinking man of action, the feeling man of right, the fraternally minded economic will-man, and thus we shall gain out of such an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science a new power for human progress out of the spiritual crisis.

Introductory words by Rudolf Steiner

Dear attendees! In light of what the chairman has told you, I imagine that our evening could preferably unfold in such a way that the esteemed attendees ask specific questions. In this way we shall best achieve our purpose, which has just been explained to you. So it will perhaps be best if I say just a few words in advance to give you a little background for the discussion that follows, which, I believe, should be the main thing today.

You will, as the chairman assumed, have taken note of what I, based on a lifetime of experience, had to do for a truly practical way to socialization, which only came to a conclusion under the loudly speaking facts of the present. Just briefly, I would like to characterize some things.

The point is that in the future we must strive radically for what I have called the threefold social order in an Appeal and in my book. This can be achieved much more quickly than many people think. This threefold social order would lead to the existence in the future of an independent spiritual organism that would govern itself and would have the task of caring for the natural foundations of the human being, that is, his or her individual abilities, in the same way that the natural foundations must otherwise be cared for in economic life. The second would be the organization that has to take the place of the present state, the actual legal organization. In the first place, it would have to regulate all the present conditions of ownership and property, which are the main thing in the actual socialization of property. On the one hand, there would be the question of what should take the place of the State. The present conditions of violence, property and ownership would have to be transferred into conditions based on the law in which all men are equal. And on the other hand, everything that comprises the entire field of labor law would be regulated in this intermediate link of the social organism that replaces the state.

I see labor law as being endangered whenever it is to be regulated within the cycle of economic life itself. The damage that occurs in today's economy, in particular, is usually misjudged. I have made a great effort to form a corresponding picture not from what has been written about the things – because in truth very little can be learned from that – but directly from life. I would like to briefly discuss these matters today so that we can move on to specific questions. I have explained it in detail in my book: as long as there is a belief that the question of what constitutes working hours, and the extent and type of work, should be regulated within the economic body itself, the worker cannot obtain his rights. The worker must already have his labor law fully regulated when he comes face to face with the labor manager. Only then will he be in a position to draw up a real contract in place of today's sham contracts, the wage contract, or whatever you want to call it, which is not a free contract because the worker does not have the labor law behind him, which is what enables him to conclude a truly free contract. In this economic system, the worker cannot obtain justice, but only through the separation of the entire legal system from economic life and its transfer to what should take the place of the state.

The third possibility is the independent economic organism. In this case, we shall no longer have to deal with any dependence of labor law on any kind of economic situation, price formation, and so on, but all economic consequences, especially all economic price formations, will arise not as a cause but as an effect of what is already established in labor law, or rather, in labor law itself. Labor law will be to economic life what natural conditions are to the natural world. Through this alone you will create a sound basis for the socialization of the economic cycle.

You see, this view is truly not an ideological one, not a utopian one, but one that has emerged from my involvement – and that is almost as old or quite as old as my life – in the proletarian movement. Of course, one then looks back at how the social movement has developed. The social movement is truly not of today. It is something, even in the form in which it lives today, quite old. One might think that if one wants to understand the social movement today, one only has to go back to the Communist Manifesto. But anyone who wants to get a proper grip on things today, when we are at such a tremendous turning point, when we are not facing a small reckoning but a great reckoning, and not just wants to understand them, must actually trace back economic life and the ideas that people have formed about it to earlier times.

Because, you see, it is truly not a matter of indifference that, for example, in 1826, at a time when most people in Europe had not yet thought of anything like a social question, a person like Thünen already predicted in a certain way what then occurred as a consequence of our world catastrophe. Thünen was a person who worked the land himself, but not in the usual way. He did so with full understanding and with a relationship to economic life that was based on reality. As early as 1826, this Thünen said: If people do not decide to do what is necessary in social terms, then Europe is heading for terrible devastation and barbarism. — So people already knew this, but there were only a few who spoke like this. This was said in 1826.

Now, in the course of the 19th century, honest and sincere people repeatedly struggled with what is called the social question, and I would like to emphasize once again – this was not decisive for me but nevertheless something that throws back a light – that the one who objectively deals with what has emerged on the part of some as the demand of socialism – yesterday was indeed spoken about in more detail – could only say to himself: socialism must come one day. Socialism is a necessity. It must come, it will come. And then he also had to realize that the arguments put forward by people who are sincere about socialism are important. And, if you have gone through all the nonsense of the economists who thought they had to refute Marx, you can say: the most important claims of Karl Marx cannot be refuted, are quite impossible to refute. But if you turn to the other side, not to the mercenaries and servants of the capitalists, of course, but to those who had social understanding, you will also find among them those who, out of the reality of practical life, raised objections to socialism that could make one stop and think. It is not uninteresting that in the same year that the Communist Manifesto went out into the world, a book was published by Bruno Hildebrand, an honest person who has put forward weighty arguments against socialism. And especially if you are an honest socialist, you may have some strange thoughts when you read such things. I do not want to attach any importance to what this or that other person from bourgeois circles has said, that is mostly nonsense, but when you have something like Bruno Hildebrand's account in front of you, you do end up saying to yourself: On the one hand, you can't object to socialism, it's bound to come. However, the concerns that people like Hildebrand have are extremely difficult to refute. For Hildebrand does not raise his objections out of any dislike of socialism, but rather, in view of socialism as he knew it in 1848 – and the same would apply to Hildebrand today, at least until 1914 – he has merely expressed his concerns. He imagined that if socialism were introduced in the old style, it would not be the middle classes who would somehow suffer, but those who wanted socialism would ultimately achieve nothing. In a sense, people like Hildebrand already foresaw what could happen when precisely such people from the circles of the Socialist Party come to the top, because the desires of the broad masses of the proletariat cannot arise from that background.

You see, there are of course many different views on this. And if we are completely honest about it, we have to say: Yes, it is a general defect of our current human thinking that we are not able to find something that is not just made up, because, despite what is said, socialist programs are often just made up. Today we need something that is not made up.

What I have just told you now sheds some light on what has emerged for me from practical life. If I look at the development of socialist thought in the 19th century and also take into account Hildebrand and revisionist thought in the 19th century, then I come to the following conclusion: If socialism is to be implemented in such a way that economic activity continues under the hypnosis of the unified state, that is, if the unified state is merely extended to cover economic matters, then the broad masses will suffer all the harms that Hildebrand foresaw. That means that we need a socialism that is realized in such a way that these things do not occur. Therefore, the social organism, the economic organism, must not contain anything that could lead to such concerns. And then I said to myself: this is precisely where this threefold division applies, because I take out spiritual life on the one hand and legal life on the other, thereby creating an economic organism that can no longer give rise to concerns because generous socialization can be carried out in the threefold organism. You will see this in all the specific questions, especially when we then go into the most concrete questions.

Let us take the question of works councils as an example of a question that is becoming topical today, which I hope we will discuss in more detail later. You see, my proposals are based on reality and are therefore not a finished program, but something that is to be tackled and that is to be developed bit by bit, not slowly, but perhaps also quickly bit by bit, as the circumstances of the time will require. The possibility of really making progress arises from what I have tried to present as a three-pronged impulse for real socialization.

The question of works councils – I hope that it will be discussed in detail later – is a real one today, and practically speaking, we can start from any point in reality today to realize what is set out in my book. Those who think in the old socialist way, for example, imagine these works councils primarily – I have been told this – as being more or less introduced by law, that is, they think of the works councils as a state institution. Now, once again, I am of the opinion that if they are introduced in this way, they will most certainly be a fifth wheel on the wagon. It is only possible to create the works councils out of economic life itself.

I recently said: Let the works councils arise, and do not interfere in their creation by passing laws about them! They should come into being first, they should arise first in the individual companies, but they must create a position for themselves, especially during the transition period, that makes them completely independent of the previous bosses and plant managers. They must, of course, have an independent position.

Then the next step will be to ensure that the companies that are set up today form their own corporate body across the economic territories in question. For anyone today who still understands socialization as merely wanting to socialize individual companies would very soon see the strange position we would be in in five years if we only socialized individual companies. If we were to socialize only individual enterprises, we would end up with the wildest individualism of the individual enterprises, and the most dissatisfied would be the workers. There would be such inequality among workers in terms of income that it would be unbearable. You can only socialize if you socialize the entire economic entity, of a certain size, as such.

So, first of all, it is a matter of establishing works councils for certain similar businesses in a certain area. A very important act of overall socialization emanates from the works councils, so that not only is a bond created between the works councils of similar businesses, but across all businesses. Then a real socialization of economic life can gradually occur. Only then will things be a blessing. If, therefore, we begin to develop an understanding of the extraordinarily important appointment of works councils, we will see that we are on the right track with the idea of tripartism. We shall only achieve something if we do not tolerate the intervention of that which replaces the state in the functions of the works councils in any way other than merely with reference to the fact that the state has to ensure that the works councils can function, just as it naturally has to ensure that I can walk down a street without being attacked. But otherwise than the state otherwise relates to the personal rights of the individual, it should also not relate to the works councils with some kind of limitations of functions and so on. The functions must arise from the self-constitution of the works council within the economic body. That alone leads to success. With this example I wanted to show you how threefolding is actually meant. It is meant to be practical, that is, everything we have to do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow can only lead somewhere if it is handled from the point of view of threefold division. Then things will interact in the right way.

You see, my suggestion assumes that socialism, now that it is here, cannot be taken off the agenda. Anyone who is familiar with the conditions in both economic and political life, and thus in legal and intellectual life, can no longer imagine, because that is an unrealistic notion, that socialism can be introduced today and then it will be here tomorrow. No, once socialism is in place, it will have to be continuously worked on. Socialism will always have to be handled in a new way. It is something very much alive. We must have precisely those organizations that work again and again in the spirit of socialism. People do not yet come up with their thoughts in line with what is actually happening in this area.

A long time ago, a strange sentence emerged from a school of economics. It is considered overcome today, but it still haunts people's minds. It was the Physiocrats who said that there was no need to prescribe laws for economic life, because either it develops by itself in line with these laws, in which case they are not needed, or you prescribe different laws that do not correspond to the development. But then you would harm the economy. It seems that, when stated in this way, it is absolutely right and yet is totally wrong, namely for the reason that economic life is not something that remains stationary, that is, remains as it once was. It is an organism, and just as a natural organism grows older and older and changes, and one must recognize its change as a condition of life, so it must be with economic life. That means that laws must be there, but they must arise from economic life itself. Thus, the impulses must always be there to counteract the damage to economic life that it must inflict on itself. Anyone who believes that he can introduce socialism once and for all is like a person who says: I ate yesterday, and that was enough to fill me up. Now I don't need to eat anymore. You have to eat continuously because the organism is constantly undergoing certain changes and because it is a living thing. And so it is with what socialist measures are. You have to continually socialize because the social organism is a living thing. And that is also what leads to the necessity for us to create something like works councils and much more right from the start.

You see, the greatest mistake that has been made so far is that people have believed that social life is something like a reproduction of an organism made of papier-mâché. So they imagined it was a mechanism; it is not alive. But it is alive, only people have given the social organism such laws that should apply to something that is dead. But the organism went further, and now people are surprised when revolutions come. That which must be continually improved upon accumulates when it is not improved upon and breaks out in revolutions. Revolutions have been made by those who were short-sighted enough not to recognize the liveliness of social life. I do not mean those who are pushed to do one thing or another, but those who are the leaders and do not understand how to exercise leadership. That is why it is so important today that, if sooner or later the call is really made again to take matters into our own hands, we do not approach the matter with empty heads again, but come up with constructive proposals. It is not enough to say that power must be acquired. That is certainly true, but then, what can we do with that power once we have it? I wanted to say that first. Now I hope that the discussion can become a very lively one through your questions.

Discussion

Debater Beierat explains, among other things: When it comes to socialization, the entrepreneurs must also be asked, because the workers cannot solve all the questions on their own. In order to have a handle so that the previous owners help to create the works councils, it is necessary that a legal basis is created that is the same for the whole Reich.¹

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say a few words about this, because perhaps we can best move forward by addressing the individual questions.

You see, what the previous speaker just said is not fundamentally inconsistent with what I have put forward. I just tried to approach the matter not theoretically, but in such a practical way that it really leads somewhere. If you want to achieve something practical, you should not let yourself be discouraged by not wanting to make a definite start somewhere. The beginning of something practical must always be made somewhere, and after all, before we came here, there was a meeting down in a small room where all the works councils that already exist were gathered. So at least a start has been made. The only thing that matters is that something practical comes out of such a beginning. Of course, you can think of this beginning as you like, you can make another one. In this connection I would remind you that I spoke about this yesterday: that for the practical implementation of the threefold order, it is of course necessary first of all to set up a kind of liquidation government. I certainly do not think that we can decide today to implement the threefold order by tomorrow!

Since we are living in a time when people can only think in terms of a unitary state, we must, under all circumstances, not because we love any particular government, but because people have lived together in the state until now, have a government for a wide range of different things. Contrary to what the previous speaker said, I must say: Whether it is one government or the other is not important to me. So it is very important to me that it is a government that makes proposals in the sense of real socialization. So I do not feel that is a correct statement: “It does not matter to me whether it is one government or the other.” Because precisely when there is a government, it will have to be clear that in the future it will have to stand only on the legal ground and liquidate, on the one hand, intellectual life and, on the other, economic life. Then, in the form of such a liquidation government, the right authority will be there to create that transitional period, and to do so with reasonable measures. These would then form the basis on which the works councils can be built up, which, instead of some of the other things that various governments are doing today, could in fact use their power to somehow persuade the recalcitrant employers - forgive the expression - to take up reasonable socialization ideas. That would be the task of a reasonable government during the transition period.

These foundations, which still have to be laid today by the liquidation government, could already be in place. But in doing so, this liquidation government in particular would have to be thoroughly imbued with the realization that government laws must never interfere with the development of a healthy economic life, so that this economic life can truly build itself up from the ground up. Therefore, it is necessary that the liquidation government ensures that works councils can emerge. However, it must not interfere in their entire formation. This must happen from within the works council itself.

The government has no other task than to ensure that the works councils can constitute themselves beyond their economic territories, that is, out of economic necessity. This will be the best foundation if the government ensures that the works councils can work properly. The works councils can constitute themselves if the government creates a basis and does not want to rule over them.

Today, the actual difference between ruling and governing is not known, and one can actually be very surprised that, as a result of the November events, people have learned so little about this distinction. There is – this distinction is not mine, but Karl Marx's – a very considerable difference between governing and ruling. And when a government learns to govern and no longer believes that it is only a government when it can rule, then even what the broad masses can imagine under socialization will be possible. For in the future it is not a government that must rule, but the whole broad mass of the people. The government must govern and learn how to govern when the whole broad mass of the people actually rules. The people have not yet got out of the habit of associating the term 'ruler' with a single personality or body. This is something that must be thoroughly eradicated from the people's way of thinking. When a body is set up with socialization in mind – and it must be set up in the same way as works councils – the difference between governing and ruling must be understood above all. Everything that belongs to the powers of the works councils must be formed from the broad masses of the workers. Governance will only consist of creating a real basis, not a legal basis, so that the works council can form freely, purely out of economic necessity, out of knowledge and insight.

You see, the peculiar thing about my proposals for threefolding is that I do not draw up programs, but rather that I try to give such suggestions based on reality so that something reasonable can arise. I say openly: in this way my impulses for threefolding differ from all the rest. Yesterday it was said here that they contain nothing new. They contain something fundamentally new. People who spoke of socialization and other reforms in the past were clever and knew exactly what should be done. I do not claim to be cleverer than the others, but I firmly believe that conditions can be brought about in which those who know something about the matter can come into their own. I do not want to show the way to what the works councils should do, but how they can educate themselves. Then they will recognize for themselves what they have to do. I want to put the right people in the right place. I do not claim to know anything new, but I want the new to come into being.

Various participants in the discussion take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: With reference to the two esteemed previous speakers, it gives me a certain satisfaction to note that I myself have little left to say, because the discussion between these two speakers has progressed in such a gratifying way that one has completely complemented the other and what actually needs to be said has already been said. I would just like to add the following.

When it is said that there is a difference between focusing all thoughts on the path: How do we gain the power of domination? – and the other way of thinking: What do we do when we have gained power? I must say that I am always reminded of what played such a strong role in the discussions of the 1880s. In those years I had occasion to discuss many questions that were already being dealt with on socialist ground at the time, for example with Adler in Vienna, who recently passed away, and also with Pernerstorfer, who also died last year. And of course, these socialist thinkers of the past were even closer to the great socialist impulses that came from Marx and Engels. It was not yet the time of so-called revisionism, which I believe has done a lot of harm to the development of socialism. I don't want to be misunderstood, but I have always thought that this gentle transition of real socialism into a somewhat unclear, bourgeois way of thinking, which was called revisionism, has actually done a great deal of harm, for the simple reason that some people are so terribly satisfied when they can say: We want what is practical and achievable for tomorrow. These people do not consider that what is achieved for tomorrow can, under certain circumstances, undermine all ground for the day after tomorrow. I often had to object to Adler and Pernerstorfer that I recognize everything that they mention as criticism of the present social order, but one must also have something that one would do when what these socialist leaders themselves assumed finally occurred. These socialist leaders always predicted: This present social order will dismantle itself, it will destroy itself. That was an absolutely correct view. And that is why these socialist leaders always waved away any suggestion that something should be done to forcibly replace the current order with another. They were, in the most eminent sense, developmental socialists, and they said: the dismantling will be taken care of, then it will be the proletariat's turn. — I have always been of the opinion that if you assume what will happen, then you should know.

Are we not actually in a different situation today? We have the November events behind us, and you can be quite sure that those people who were leaders at the time had already imagined something like the November events, but now there was nothing that could be done positively. This shows that it is of some importance not just to keep asking the question, 'How do we gain power?' like a hypnotized chicken, but to ask ourselves, 'What do we do with power?' I keep asking this: How do we act?

The previous speaker said that economic collapse is coming. I don't actually share this view. I believe that it has long since arrived, and that what is being done by the ruling circles is just a continuous covering up and concealment of the economic collapse that has long since occurred. The economic collapse has been there since the time when it was officially declared that it was best for the German Reich to no longer produce for the needs of the people, but for what is blown up into the air. Thus, the economic collapse has actually taken place. And it was always inexplicable to me how little the

people have actually realized that with a measure such as the Auxiliary Service Act, which corresponds well to the subjective needs of the old rulers, a terrible blow has been dealt to economic life that cannot really be cured by anything. They have only ever thought of other things, but had no sense of the economic consequences of such a measure.

So, I believe that economic collapse is here, and we are facing events that will only be delayed as long as it is still possible to disguise or conceal certain things through this or that. But then we will have to know how to set up the new structure. I therefore have nothing against what the previous speaker, Mr. Schreiber, said, but I say to you: It will come about of itself that the leadership must turn from the circles that have been leading up to now to the circles that the previous speaker had in mind. But all the more must these circles feel the sense of responsibility, so that when they come to power they are able to do the right thing. So that is what I want to emphasize again and again and what is of very special importance to me.

It has been said, not as a reproach, but in agreement with me, that I first want the institution of the works councils and then it will become clear what their functions will be. But then we must not have any illusions, because what the new structure will demand will not be very easy, and it will not be possible without real factual knowledge of the economic body. The previous speaker has just given us a number of useful examples. We must not fall back on amateurism; we must be properly prepared when we make the observation, for example, that the work of the works council is not completed when individual businesses are socialized. What the previous speaker said about the right of co-determination, about profit, which must take on a completely different form, and what he said about the right of co-determination in relation to price, shows us that as soon as these concrete things come up, we have a great deal of work to do in the factual field. For it is precisely with these things, which are peculiar to capitalist, private capitalist ownership, that it has not dealt with, but has simply left humanity to a wild competition of interests, of income and so on.

We must not continue in this direction, otherwise we will soon revert to the old conditions. Whether those who then manage the means of production are called capitalists or something else is irrelevant. There is also the possibility that people will come to the top from the ranks – I don't want to say necessarily from the proletariat, but from those who lead the proletariat – who then, under certain circumstances, are in no way inferior to the practices of old capitalists; well, that is something that can only be avoided if we are firmly in the saddle.

You will not hold it against me if I mention something that seems theoretical, but is in fact practical. When it comes to the right of co-determination in pricing, two things come into particular consideration. In a random economic system that is not socialized, the price is regulated from two sides, because it is a kind of law of nature that the price is not based on one force, but on two forces. For example, suppose a certain amount of butter is produced in an economic context. Let us assume that more butter is produced than is necessary for human needs. Then, under certain circumstances, it may well happen that the rest of the butter that people do not need, say, for example, is used to make cart grease. This causes the butter to become much cheaper than it is, for example, when less butter is produced than the total number of people needs. Such things are included in the formation of prices in the most eminent sense. That is one direction from which pricing is determined. The other direction, namely that pricing is based on production costs, is quite separate from the above-mentioned direction in economic life; what is taken into account is what production costs. A completely different price system is formed there, and this price system intersects with the random economic system, that is, with the other. And as a result, we get mutual competition not only of prices but also of price systems, and that is where we are today.

Now just think about this: if the regulation of a worker's income is based on only one price system, then you may find that the worker gets higher and higher wages, but never a better standard of living, because the prices of housing and all the other things rise to the same extent. You can close one hole, but another one opens up by itself. We can only create order here if we are properly equipped.

In the future, one thing must be taken into account, namely how the causes converge from the most diverse sides. This will be necessary if socialization is to really live, not as a mere heartfelt demand, but in a practical way as an impulse. And if the works councils are to have a say in pricing, they will have to be prepared for these things. They will have to work at it, and not say, “Oh, the speeches, the idealistically conceived speeches, they achieve nothing.” No, these are not idealistically conceived speeches, but practical instructions for what has to be done. People cannot simply take on a task without first agreeing on how to do it. Things, including in economic life, must really be learned. And today there is not much knowledge available. We must make a great effort in this regard, must have the good will to come to institutions, and then try to relearn in the most diverse circles. I consider it terribly necessary that the works councils set up cooperatives as quickly as possible, in which people work together with good will, so that we can achieve a real, economically appropriate reconstruction.

We will have to do a great deal of intellectual work if we want to make progress. I ask you to bear this in mind. It was therefore very satisfying that the previous speakers drew attention to this matter. It will be a matter of really putting ourselves in their shoes, of not wanting to be clever and know something alone, so that attention is drawn to the fact that we must bring people to the point where they can share with each other the life experiences that individuals have gained while working. Then, precisely through this collaboration of people in the right positions, socialization will take place.

Further contributions to the discussion follow, and a motion is put forward that Dr. Steiner would like to give further lectures to discuss the important questions further. Dr. Steiner agrees.

Final words from Rudolf Steiner: Yes, my dear attendees, the motion has been accepted that this discussion may continue. So there will be an opportunity to talk about some of the questions that have arisen in the course of the discussion, perhaps later in a more favorable way than today, when time is already too far advanced for me to say anything significant or to expect you to understand. I will therefore only very briefly address a few points that arose during the last part of the discussion.

First there was the question of how I envision further development when workers' councils exist but mean nothing, that is, when the workers' councils are merely a kind of decoration until the political upheaval. - Well, I do believe that in such matters one does harm with all too much pessimism. I believe that in practical life, in such a serious situation as the one we find ourselves in, it is eminently important that we help each other. This does not at all preclude the works councils, when they bring to the surface of the social movement what they have learned and experienced in the factories – and there will be a wealth of social insight in this – essentially also contributing to bringing about the time when the necessary upheavals can bring us. We should not be content with saying: We have to wait until the revolution has occurred. Instead, we have to recognize that if the works councils remain in their posts, we will have a very important means of moving forward.

I believe you should not think too little of what the works councils can be. They will not be a decoration if they stand their ground. Much will arise precisely as a task for the works councils, in which even the most malicious employers will not be able to interfere. They will not be able to somehow eliminate the matter. I believe, therefore, that we should start in practice at some point — and this is an important point. We should not hold back, being overly cautious or even fearing that the works councils might be merely decorative, but we should take action. This is also what the “call” and the impulse of threefolding contain. We should not just carry on talking, but the words should be the seeds of deeds, and that is the essence of the whole series of lectures that I have given, and that will be the essence if I really have the honor of speaking to you in more detail about these things. And another thing: there has been a lot of talk about intellectual workers, especially in the last part of the discussion. Well, I can claim some experience in this field. It is based on what I have lived through over many years. The intellectual workers have ended up in an actually dreadful situation due to the circumstances that I am describing in my lectures. It is almost impossible, even after these terrible experiences of world war catastrophe, to talk to the great mass of those who call themselves intellectual workers about political issues. I am not flattering you when I say – as I have already said in my lecture – that, in terms of political training and education, the manual laboring proletariat is far ahead of the intellectual workers, and that the intellectual workers' political education is almost non-existent. This must be taken into account. In this context, something else must be considered.

I am of the opinion that it will not have a fundamentally favorable effect if a council of intellectual workers develops separately alongside the actual workers' councils. Perhaps this will have to be an important point in the discussion when it comes to the lectures that were requested of me. I believe that nothing can come of the segregation of intellectual workers as special “intellectual workers” from the other workers. The workers who work in a particular area of a company belong, even if they are intellectual workers, to the workers of that branch of the company. There must be a sense of belonging between all the workers in the individual branches of the company. We will not make progress if the intellectual workers of the various branches of the company isolate themselves and act as if they are something special, because the category, the term “intellectual workers” has no justification. One should awaken understanding for the fact that the intellectual workers of the individual branches of industry should join the other workers. Only then will something sensible come of it.

I do not agree with what has been said, namely that intellectual workers and manual workers are on the same ground when they jointly recognize the program of threefolding. This is, after all, a general social policy program, and they are not yet on solid ground! One can jointly recognize many programs, but one only stands on solid ground when this ground is a living ground, when one does not, in turn, form an aristocratic class out of what belongs together. I see an aristocratic class formation in this separation of the spiritual workers, and this should be understood. And if what I actually mean were implemented, then the intellectual worker would gain an enormous amount, above all in political education, which I would generally emphasize in the near future, so that each person learns from the other.

I would therefore not wish to be as pessimistic as the previous speaker, who said: Yes, it is above all important that a certain specialized education and training is the absolute basis for the works councils. – It is indeed the case today that anyone familiar with the situation knows that not much can be gained from the usual specialized training, which today is, after all, a thoroughly bourgeois product. I expect more from practical collaboration, from what arises when everyone contributes what they can from their life experiences. We will train each other, and something completely new will arise. I could imagine that the best results will be achieved when the workers' councils work together in the right way and without maintaining the philistine prejudice that one should first go to school, and when there is a sincere will to learn from each other and to learn from both mistakes. Above all, we will need to socialize in this way, from person to person. Socialization means working together, helping each other, developing brotherhood, and that is precisely what we need in the spiritual realm. In recent years, I have often said to my audiences that the world believes that those who are to learn can only learn from those who have so many diplomas. Those who really want to learn – they may have already learned a great deal – can learn an awful lot from a child of two or three years old, or even younger. This is learning from life, and we will have to cultivate it especially. We must get beyond the Philistinism of the old technical school system, then the works councils will be able to achieve something tremendously important for the new structure. The matter should not be viewed pessimistically, but with trust. From trust will grow efficiency. Then the works councils will not be a decoration, if they do not want to be a decoration themselves.

However, I fully agree that the works councils will be a buffer on two sides. I do not believe that the time we are heading for, if we want to work seriously, will be one in which we let ourselves be carried by the waves of life, possibly even lying down on a soft bed of rest from time to time. We shall have to work very hard and we must not shrink from being storm-troops in all directions. It will not be easy to create something new out of the collapse. We need only remember that the old economic system, especially in Germany, led us into sheer nonsense. We are not only in a state of collapse, but also in a state of nonsense. Just consider what it means if, in the next few years, only the interest is to be paid on everything that has accumulated as a result of the devastation of the war! It is much more than Dernburg calculated. It will be at least 30 billion marks a year; where will it come from? 30 billion marks, which of course will not be available! If we think of continuing anything from the past, then we are not only heading for impossible conditions, but also for sheer nonsense. It will be difficult, very difficult, but I think that anyone who has a slight understanding of the spirit of the times must say to himself: we just have to work, we have to work seriously. Only in this way can we get out of this situation.

Now I would just like to point out that I do not want to go into Mr. Remmele's reply, and that is because it is not yet clear to me what the main point of his objections is. What has been said makes the whole matter seem strange to me, because, you see, you can call anything a false doctrine. I was immediately suspicious when it was said that it was a heresy like the teaching of Dühring, who taught the same thing decades ago. I know Dühring and suspect that the speaker knows him little, because I can safely recommend to you: read him, then you will see that he did not want the same thing, but something completely different from what I consider necessary. I consider Dühring's teachings to be the outburst of a man who was somewhat angry with human society and who did not know much about reality. It is sometimes witty, but it is not something that can be applied in reality. Such objections are then fleeting. I believe it is perhaps not advisable to go into these things at length, because in time it will become apparent from the way in which the words, which can initially be spoken out of reality, can also be transformed into deeds and become part of reality. I am reassured when reality tests what I say. I believe it will know how to take in what I have to say.

Mr. Molt has already spoken to you about what was said against the signatures of the appeal, and I believe that in this respect, through your consent to Mr. Molt, you have truly shown your fundamental understanding of something that is absolutely necessary. You can be quite sure that not many entrepreneurs will act out of the kind of attitude shown by those who signed this “appeal”. But those who do act in this way are fully aware that, on the one hand, this “appeal” and these impulses were certainly not created for the sake of the factory owners, but if the factory owners are to have anything to do with them, then they must commit to them for the freest of human reasons. At the most, the factory owners can profess their support for the “appeal”, but the “appeal” has no consideration for them and will not do so. That is one thing. On the other hand, it must be seen that it will be necessary to work precisely with those people who, out of the most earnest will, profess the cause of socialization, of social progress in the objective sense at all, because otherwise you only have the choice – since, after all, those who have some expertise will still be needed – either to occupy the top positions and leave everything else as it was, as we have seen in some examples, or you run the risk of everything being sabotaged by those on the inside.

It is therefore not only a matter of our being able to appreciate the right attitude in a feeling-based way, but we must also be able to see what is necessary, to see that we are not working towards the sabotage of those who, out of the old way of thinking, do not want to develop the new. We must realize that we are compelled to work together with those who have joined the “call” not out of selfish interest but for the sake of the cause. This has happened with the signatories, otherwise they would not be on it. For I have not yet found that anyone has placed themselves behind me in order to satisfy their selfish interests. That is an experience I have had all my life. They will not make any too bad experiences. Forgive this personal remark, but we will be able to discuss many a factual question in detail, just as the seriousness of the times demands. In this brief closing address, I could only hint at a few things, but I hope that the discussions will be able to continue.

• 1. The wording of the votes of individual participants in the discussion was not always recorded by the stenographer – and then sometimes only in fragments. Sometimes the texts that have been handed down are also summaries of the meaning of the comments.

Introductory words by Rudolf Steiner

Dear attendees,
You have just heard how this evening is to proceed. We will make the best progress in the whole movement, which is to serve the social reconstruction, if we try to communicate on this path of questioning and free discussion about what should happen. Since I will have to inform myself through your later contributions to the discussion about what is to be discussed this evening, I will only take a few words to draw attention to a few things, since it may be good to put them forward in advance of our disputations. Above all, I would like to emphasize once more that this 'Federation for the Threefold Social Organism' differs in some respects from other, party-like movements, without these party-like movements being in any way disturbed or impaired by this 'Federation for Threefold Social Organism'. If the “Federation for the Threefold Order of the Social Organism” believes it must take action today, it is for a very specific reason.

You are all well aware of how long the call for socialization has been going around in a more emotional way. You all also know that this call for socialization has taken on a particularly urgent form today. They know that we cannot escape confusion and chaos if we do not take into account what is contained in the demand for socialization, if we do not seriously strive through action for what can really be called socialization.

On the other hand, we see that precisely since the beginning of the German Revolution, it has become clear in so many ways that although the call for socialization is there, at the same time there is a lack of ideas about what should actually be done, how what is demanded as socialization should actually be implemented. Right now, every day brings new evidence of how little people are clear about what needs to be done to bring about socialization. And so we see that the call for socialization is becoming clearer and clearer, more and more justified, but that the government is not doing anything significant, or even insignificant, to achieve true socialization. Yes, we can even say – perhaps you will want to elaborate on this question or provide more precise information later in the course of the disputation – that it can be clearly seen from what is happening that there is no concept of real socialization.

You may have read the draft law that is supposed to initiate – so they say in bureaucratic language – the institution of the so-called works councils. Of course, the first thing one thinks of is the places where they want to initiate such things today, making laws about what works councils should do, what their rights will be, and so on. But if you take the whole thing, what has now been launched as a draft, you will have to say to yourself: Yes, this does not bear the stamp of true socialization in the slightest. It is even called “socialization of the companies,” as if one could actually socialize the individual companies! What this draft contains for the constitution of the works councils is nothing more than, I would say, the introduction of a certain democratic principle of the parliamentarism with which we are all too familiar into the individual companies. In fact, the matter is already often referred to as the “democratization of the companies”. The parliamentary principle should extend certain offshoots, such gulfs, into the companies, where further parliamentarization should then take place. Yes, just as the previous parliamentarism, in that it was practiced in isolation in all kinds of “houses”, was unable to contribute anything to socialization, so this extension of the parliamentary gulfs will be unable to bring anything of socialization to the factories. You see it best from the fact that in this draft, everywhere the old language of “employer” and “employee” is used. Even if it is not openly stated, it is still the case that the old capitalism continues to lurk behind all of this. Everything is conceived in the old capitalist form. Basically, everything should remain the same, and the employees should be reassured by the fact that works councils can now somehow be elected that have all sorts of theoretical negotiations with the employers. But when it comes to the actual social structure, ultimately everything should remain the same. This can be clearly seen from such a draft by anyone who has a sense of reading something like this at all. Not even the slightest attempt has been made to really dismantle capitalism. And so we see that the very first demand for socialization, the dismantling of capitalism, is not tackled by what is now so often called socialization.

What is left for us to think about in the face of such a government? Truly, today we can no longer arrive at any other conclusion than that the only salvation lies in the fact that the great mass of workers are now truly informed about the damage that the social order has caused so far, and that they are informed about what can really bring about improvement. It is, above all, enlightenment that is needed. In this context, it is important that we should no longer listen to those who keep saying, “But enlightenment takes a long time.” It need not take long if we are willing to make a little effort to see things without masks and illusions, if we try to see things as they are and as they must happen. We no longer have the time to wait years for socialization. Something must happen immediately. But something can only happen if a united mass of people carry what is to be done. People keep asking: Yes, where is the practical instruction for what is written in my book, for example, 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future'? The most practical thing is to have as many people as possible demanding what is in my book, so that it becomes quite impossible to continue to govern against these demands. The future power will consist in the fact that it will enforce what it is all about. Otherwise a power will never know how to use that power, what it should do. It really depends on knowing what to do. Therefore, proper education must take place in the broadest circles, and one must be able to form an idea of how something like the dismantling of private capital and the abolition of the wage system can take place.

Above all, one must be able to form a thorough idea of the following. You see, the actual economic question, where does it arise? You have to be able to see it in the right place. You must not let gray theories obscure the facts. You have to see the economic question where it is, and start from there. Where is it? Where is it as a fact? Well, it is there where I have to take my wallet out of my pocket and have the money in it for which I am to get something in a store to satisfy my needs. And there must be enough in my wallet for me to be able to get the things I need to live. That is the basic fact of all economic life. Today, everything else is basically only there to obscure this fact.

Why does the tripartite social organism demand a separation of economic life from legal and spiritual life? It demands this separation for the reason that economic life can be truly socialized in itself, so that it is finally presented in its true form, the true form that takes place between the goods in the shop and the contents of the wallet. Only when we extract from the whole remaining social process that which must take place between the purse and the shop, do we put ourselves in a position to think in a truly socialist way. But what does that mean? It means a great deal. But if one does not start from the right fact, then one cannot arrive at correct views with regard to all the other things.

I will educate myself from your disputation about what is to be said about the details. But before that, I would like to give some necessary guidelines, starting from the basic economic fact I have just described. You see, when I go into a shop and there is something in it that I need to satisfy my vital needs, and I come with my purse and spend the money for the goods from this purse, then you have to be clear about the fact that there is a process involved in this that somewhat obscures the true facts. I get goods, I spend money. Is money a commodity? Can money ever be a commodity? You really don't need to do any in-depth studies, but the in-depth studies prove exactly what I am going to say now.

You just need to have a real sense of what a piece of paper is, and you will say to yourself: a piece of paper can never be a commodity in the same way as, for example, a loaf of bread that you buy in a shop. I think that is something that the simplest mind can understand, and no science can claim anything else. What you take out of your wallet as money cannot be a commodity, but only an instruction to receive a commodity, nothing else. But that is why it must come from the commodity. A commodity must have been produced at some point, so something must have been provided. In this sense, services are also goods. This piece of paper must have been created by such a process that produces goods, and so the piece of paper only forms the bridge between the goods that you buy in the store and those goods that must be produced once so that you can receive the paper instruction for those goods. That, to put it simply, is the economic process. Any other element in the economic process is unhealthy. If it is to be healthy, nothing can be exchanged in the economic process except commodity for commodity.

Now, however, we ask: Is only commodity exchanged for commodity in the economic process today? No, and as soon as you think about it properly, you come to the point. Today, in the economic process, not only goods are exchanged for goods, but today, in the economic process, goods, even if perhaps represented by money, are exchanged for labor. In the economic process, labor power is paid just like goods. But this is how labor power is introduced into the economic process.

You see, there is a very simple consideration that can show you that labor does not belong in the economic process at all, because it can never be compared to any commodity in its nature. You just have to correct people's very convoluted ideas about such things today. You have to understand how people have learned to think about these things incorrectly.

You see, it is still associated with a certain amount of effort on the part of the human organism. Now, even if a person has no need to chop wood, for example, he may still feel the need to work. Then he does sports, for example. And the amount of labor that one devotes to sports could, under certain circumstances, wear out the body just as much as the work of someone chopping wood wears out the body – if he exerts himself particularly during sports. Labor has nothing to do with the economic process, but labor has something to do with the economic process only in that it is applied to something economically valuable. Sport is economically worthless, it exists only for human egoism. Chopping wood is valuable. Because labor is economically valuable, it becomes part of the economic process. But the essential thing about work is that I must be a free person with regard to the use of my labor, that I cannot be compelled by economic coercion to put my labor at the service of capitalism in any old way. When it comes to the use of labor, freedom and bondage and coercion intervene. Just as labor as such must be a matter of law and not of economics, so too, what must be made clear in the simplest possible way, is that in economics only what is produced, created by labor, has any significance.

In economic life, only that which is produced and created by labor has any significance; it must be paid for. But there must be an entrepreneur who pays a worker for his labor. How the labor manager and the worker relate to each other must be determined on a completely different basis, namely that of law. In the economic sphere, when true right exists, the laborer and the labor manager can only be partners who distribute the proceeds of the labor among themselves in a just manner. In the future, there must be no more payment for labor, that is to say, the wage relationship must be eliminated, and furthermore, the wage relationship must not exist.

A state must be brought about, and that is then a social state in which the labor manager and the worker jointly produce the goods and share with each other in a just way according to the contract of goods, not according to the contract of employment, what they produce together as free associates. Only when such a transformation of the production relations has been brought about can one speak of socialization. But then one also stops using all the old terms that are still based on capitalism in a socialization program. You have to rethink things very thoroughly. You really have to throw out the old ideas, not just because they are ideas, but because they are embedded in life.

But now something else must be considered. If the labor force is to be placed in a relationship of compulsion within the economic process, then something must be there. What is that? You see, I have to go back to the original fact of the economic process, to the purse and the shop. If the note that I have in my purse is really nothing more than an order for a commodity, then basically no compulsion to work can prevail, because then this note must always lead back in some way to something that has been put into the world as a service. And it is only a matter of this service then circulating in the appropriate way, circulating in such a way that consumption regulates production at all times. But that is not the case today. What I carry in my wallet has become something quite different from an instruction for the goods as a result of the economic process of recent times. It has become a commodity in its own right, something that has an independent value in the social order. But it has only become so because a type of commodity – which, basically, could be eliminated altogether if only the leading trading state, England, would also eliminate it, then it could be eliminated entirely from the economic process; it can always be eliminated from an internal economic process, it can always be eliminated; one would then only need to take another consideration into account with respect to foreign countries –– that this token, which I carry in my wallet, has a different meaning than being a mere order for goods. This is due to the fact that a commodity has been created by the state, which is not really a commodity, namely gold or silver. In reality, neither is a commodity, but they are represented by the note. This separates the monetary process from the economic process, withdraws it from the economic process, thereby turning money itself into a commodity, and thereby allowing money, which in reality should not be a commodity, to become completely independent in economic life. But this is the basis of capitalism.

[If you can trade money independently, what happens? Since money can never be created other than by producing goods, but goods can never be produced other than through labor in an economy based on the division of labor, power over labor arises through capital. Capital is nothing more than power over human labor. You get the opportunity to obtain human labor by detaching money as an independent commodity from the economic process, while money should actually be just a worthless bill in the sense of an order for what you exchange as a commodity through money. But through this detachment of money, labor has become the servant of the power of “capital.” As a result, something in the economic process, such as the formation of prices, is constantly distorted. For while I should only pay for the goods, I also have to pay for the labor. But because power dominates labor, labor is paid as cheaply as possible, because, of course, a power that dominates tends to buy as cheaply as possible. If labor power is included in the economic process itself, then capitalism cheapens it.

What is important now is that labor must be removed from the economic process. Only goods may be in the economic process. However, because the economic process is so distorted, other things can also be in it. You see, for many decades the socialists have repeatedly called for the socialization of the means of production. But today it is necessary to know how this socialization of the means of production must be effected. It is not enough to merely call for socialization in the abstract; instead, one must know how it can be carried out. Today we have reached the point where we can already realize such things if we really want to, if we really have the courage to.

Before we inform ourselves in detail about the peculiar position of the means of production in today's economic life – essentially, they are capital – it is good if we first look at something else.

Today, not only goods can be bought, that is, what is produced by human labor in the social organism through the division of labor, but one can also buy something quite different, which no human being produces, but which is there by nature, that is, land. But this buying of land or taking out a mortgage on land is only a process of falsifying the economic order. It is something quite different from what people actually imagine. You cannot really buy land, because land only has value when it is worked on. What you buy, that is, what you acquire through the so-called purchase, is the exclusive right to use the land. That is what it comes down to, this exclusive right to use the land.

So you are not buying a commodity when you buy land, but a right. And that is the cancer of today's social order, that within the economic process you can not only buy goods, but you can also buy labor and rights. By buying labor, you acquire the ability to draw that labor into the economic process, that is, to rape it. And by buying the right to use land, you acquire power.

It must be clear that this calamity cannot be overcome unless we tackle the matter radically. The finished means of production, or rather, the finished means of production that are used to produce further products, have exactly the same value in the economic process as land, or rather, the same importance. In reality, you can't buy these finished means of production either. But if you buy them, you are actually acquiring the right to use them exclusively. So, you buy a right again. And now you can see best of all from these means of production that when they are finished, they simply must not be for sale, that the means of production must cease to have a value on the economic market. When they are finished, they are just like land. Now the question arises that really contains a social demand: How do we manage that the means of production no longer have an economic value when they are finished? We can only manage this – as I said earlier – by allowing everything that does not belong in the economic process to be transformed into independent members of the social organism.

What is necessary for production? Is capital really necessary? No! It is nonsense that capital is necessary. In order for the means of production to be operated, it is necessary that intellectual work is there. Of course, every worker understands that intellectual leadership and intellectual work must be present. And he also understands that he would soon have to stop working if there were no intellectual leadership or intellectual work. But today it is not about spiritual leadership, but about private ownership of the means of production and about profitability, about the ability to reinvest the capital invested in the means of production. Therefore, it is necessary to separate the means of production from the economic process so that they can always reach the person with the appropriate abilities and in whom the workers have confidence, through the social order itself. Therefore, the threefold social organism requires an independent spiritual organism. It is simply nonsense to say that this would create new ownership structures... In this spiritual life, which is of course closely connected with the other branches of life, it is then ensured that the means of production make their way through the world differently than through purchase. And in what I call the constitutional state – it really has nothing to do with the old state – it will be ensured that labor can get its rights. In the economic life itself, only the production, distribution and consumption of goods then remain.

Then, when we have such an economic process before us, we will be able to demand that there must be a liquidation government. This government then says to itself: Well, I have to exist for a while because the old order must continue. But I must at most retain only something like a Ministry of Police, a Ministry of the Interior, and also a Ministry of Justice, which will establish the legal conditions through the corresponding democratic representation.

It is again a calumny when it is said that then only the legal scholars will prevail on the legal basis. No, the people will rule; there will be a real democracy that will expand. The government to the left and to the right must be a liquidation government that, on the one hand, transfers spiritual life to its own administration and, on the other hand, transfers economic life to its own administration. The liquidation government will have to take the initiative in such a way that it creates the free space for economic life, so that in the economic sphere, out of the forces that regulate the respective values of goods, that is, the prices necessary for the healthy maintenance of life, a real socialization can occur.

You see, I know, of course, that when I explain something like this, people always say from the most diverse points of view: Yes, he expresses himself so vaguely. — I would just like to know how someone should express themselves definitively about something that is an infinite area. One can only point out what actually underlies things. But I always have the hope that precisely those who, out of their life's struggles, have acquired a certain inner sense of the truth of this matter, would like to see that what is presented here is based on a really thorough insight into the entire process of production and consumption. And only from such an insight can one proceed to action. That alone is therefore the truly practical thing, while those who always make the laws or design institutions in such a way that one hole is closed and another is opened as a result are not practical people.

You can set up an economic enterprise quite nicely if you leave it capitalist, that is, leave the whole economy capitalist. Then it may be possible in the individual economic enterprises that even what is so beautifully called a full labor yield comes about for the worker, but that no more surplus value is generated. Walther Rathenau will come and say: the surplus value is there for nothing other than for the reserve, that is, for the continuous improvement of the means of production and the expansion of the business. Everything that is generated in surplus value goes back into the business. I would just like to know how those who do not work but receive royalties or the like live when everything goes back into the business. Well, you can let such people talk. But something else is much more important.

Let us assume that the entire surplus value is simply distributed among the workers. Do you think that if the old capitalist order remained and if the surplus value were distributed among the workers in a company, that there would be no need to work for surplus value? You can still make a profit if you do not socialize the economy. In that case, it is not subtracted from the workers' wages, but the consumer has to pay it. It is not important that no surplus value is generated, but that the producer does not pay for it... the consumer has to pay for it. But who is that? The worker again. So if you add the surplus value to your wages, you in turn have to pay for what you have earned as a consumer. You plug one hole, but open another.

You can never escape this unnatural economic cycle unless you eliminate the fifth wheel, which is only there to enable people who have not worked to make a profit. This fifth wheel is called capital. And you cannot get out of this cycle if you do not establish a direct relationship between the means of production and the intellectual worker on the one hand and the physical worker on the other. If you do not want this, if you do not throw out this fifth wheel on the wagon, which only serves those who do not work, then you will not achieve socialization.

As you will find, the main thing described in my book is that it really strives to eliminate what capital is from economic life and what is a forced relationship of work. This cannot be done otherwise than by creating a legal basis on which labor is regulated independently of economic life, and by creating a spiritual basis on which human individual abilities are regulated independently of economic life. Then they will flow into economic life in the right way.

Those who understand this will not be very impressed when people come and say: Yes, you want to destroy the unity of social life by dividing it into three parts. No, I want to establish precisely this unity, and those people who speak of dividing this unity, like the foolish writer of an article in yesterday's Süddeutsche Zeitung, believe that I want to cut up a horse. I don't want to cut up the horse, but they believe that if I don't put it on a single foot, I will cut it up. What matters to people is that the horse is only a unit when it stands on one leg. But the horse must stand on four legs. I do not want to cut up the social organism, but to place it on its three healthy legs. In doing so, I want to shape it straight into a whole. That is what matters.

Now I have again told you something about how things are to be understood, but from a different angle than I have usually said in lectures. I just wanted to introduce this evening, and I hope that now many of you will say something that can help us move forward this evening. We must move forward, especially with regard to a real dismantling of capitalism and a real dismantling of forced labor.

Discussion

Mr. Biel asks two questions: 1. Is democracy a necessity for the implementation of such a new form of economic life, or is it right, under certain circumstances, to use force if such a state of affairs cannot be brought about through democracy? Can violence in this case also be a right? — 2. Is this threefold division or socialization possible without taking into account international conditions, that is, without all culturally developed peoples coming onto the scene at the same time with the same ideas and demands?

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the question of whether democracy is a necessity for the implementation of real socialization, I would like to say the following: In a sense, it is true that so far a majority of people have not been able to warm to new ideas, but, as the previous speaker has already said, only small groups have done so. But on this point in particular, we must realize that today we are not on the threshold of a small reckoning of world history, but of a great one. Many things must change, and they will only change if we are willing to strive for something different, especially with regard to the most important issues, from what has existed so far. Those who today not only look back at the practices of earlier times, but can see today what people want, will take into account the most diverse real factors.

For example, the previous speaker said that a small group of people drove humanity into the world war. Well, I will be publishing a small brochure in the next few days about the outbreak of the First World War, which will show how small the number of those was who, for example, were behind it on the German side. This small group worked in a way that was completely out of touch with the circumstances of the time. They simply carried the old conditions into the present. In terms of attitude, not with the technical means, it would not have been possible to govern in Berlin as it was done if, for example, the art of printing had not existed, through which education and the ability to judge were carried into the broadest masses. But did not this catastrophe of the world wars really bring about the downfall of that which had simply continued to be managed? |

Today we are on a different footing, and today people are not so that they want to let small groups dictate to them what they have to do, and that they just want to exchange one small group for another. Today everyone wants to be involved. Today is the time to learn the difference between ruling and governing. It seems, however, that this difference has not yet been thoroughly enough recognized. The people must rule today; a government may only govern. That is what matters. And that is why democracy is necessary today in a healthy sense. That is why I have no hope that one can achieve anything with the most beautiful ideas if one wants to realize them through small groups and if one is not supported by the knowledge and insight of the real majority of the population. The most important task today is to win over the vast majority of the population for what has been recognized as a possibility for change. Thus, today we are faced with the necessity of having the majority of the population on our side in a democratic way for what will ultimately be truly achieved in terms of socialization.

Of course, there could be transitional periods in which a small group would implement something that is not recognized by the majority. But that would only be short-lived. On this point in particular, it must be made clear that even today the time has come when, through democratization, people are to be regarded as equals, and therefore we must create the conditions in which all people can be equal in their judgment, which we must detach from that in which people cannot be equal in their judgment. Just imagine if some child at school is particularly talented at learning arithmetic and you want to make a musician out of him, then by training the child wrongly you are depriving the social life of a very special strength. The healthy development of individuality must be nurtured precisely in the social organism. You cannot democratize there, you can only apply the insight into the real knowledge of human nature. Something completely new must be introduced into the field of education and teaching.

And in economic life, do you want to make democratic decisions? For example, how to make boots or valves? Here, based on factual knowledge, corporations must be formed in relation to production and consumption; here, objective interests must be decisive. The purely factual interests must be separated to the left and to the right, and then the ground of democracy remains in the middle, on which nothing else comes into consideration than what every mature, fully developed person has to demand from every mature, fully developed person as an equal, and from where law then radiates into the spiritual and economic life. Precisely because the call for democracy is so justified today, we must recognize how democracy can be carried out. That was not necessary in capitalist society. There, too, people called themselves democrats, but it was not yet necessary to approach the concept of democracy as thoroughly as it is today. Today we have reached the point where we have to ask ourselves: Because democracy must come, how can we realize it in practice? The answer must be: only by basing it on its own foundations, and what cannot be administered democratically, what cannot be judged by all people, that is separated factually to the left and right.

It is so easy to understand why this tripartite social organism is necessary that one must actually always be surprised that people have so much against it. If they ask who is open and honest about democracy, for example, it is precisely the tripartite social organism, because it seeks to find out how to realize democracy and does not want to mix and confuse everything, so that there can be no democracy in the unitary state. Of course, those who always shout “For throne and altar!” have not made democracy. But, my dear attendees, they will not make democracy either, who put the office in place of the throne and the cash register in place of the altar. Democracy will only be made by those who are sincere about human society and do not want to carry the democratic to where expertise can be the only thing that matters. Therefore, people will have to come to terms with the fact that, as reasonable socialists have always said, there must be factual administrations in the future and no sham administrations through elections and the like. Of course, there must be elections, but beyond the technique of voting, one will have to learn other things than one already knows today. I just want to point out: Democracy must come, but we must have a social organism of such a kind that it thoroughly makes democracy possible.

As for international relations, I will just say that, while this world war was raging, it was precisely because of the internationality of this threefold order that I established it, because I saw only in the threefold order a remedy for somehow emerging from the terrible devastation and devastation of this world war. For if you have been an attentive observer for decades, you clearly recognized that this modern catastrophe, the greatest in world history, which, by the way, is far from over, was bound to happen as a result of the mixing up of everything possible.

Let us illustrate the story with a single phenomenon, the Baghdad Railway question. You may know that the Baghdad Railway question played a major role in the events that led to the First World War. Anyone who studies the negotiations in connection with the Baghdad Railway question knows how intertwined the economic interests of capitalist imperialism or capitalisms and national, chauvinistic, state, and legal prejudices are. For example, a certain German financial consortium thought it had the matter in the bag because it had attracted certain people in England, also financial consortia, that is to say people steeped in capital-economic interests. Then the state dimension emerged and confused everything so much that the English dropped out again. Then the French dropped out for the same reasons. Then again it was against German national interests, and so it went through the whole negotiations. Those who know real life know that in modern life the three spheres of life, intellectual life, to which national life also belongs, economic life and state or legal life, have become increasingly intertwined.

You see, when I came to Vienna during this world war – people judged this world war and their fate in it from the most diverse points of view – some people told me: This whole war is a pig war. – Not condemning, but characterizing, they wanted to express that one of the most important causes was that Hungary refused to let the Serbian pigs be imported. Thus it was a purely economic matter that became entangled with national, that is, spiritual issues. Thus various cauldrons were formed in which what then became a world war was brewed: all kinds of legal, extra-legal, class-legal and similar issues. Therefore, anyone who looks at the international situation must point out that the only hope for the future is to separate the three areas of life so that a three-part social organism is formed. Then the individual areas will support each other, then one will point to the other.

Sometimes people are so stubborn that it is amazing. You see, I once spoke to a person who is a legal scholar and even a ministerial director, and I pointed out to him that if the social organism is tripartite, conflicts can no longer arise at the borders because one does not interfere with the other. I said that state conflicts do not arise so quickly from economic conflicts if everything is not mixed up. Good economic relations, for example, will help with state conflicts and the like. Yes, he said, but if you implement that, then you are going against something that has always been in history, namely that the most important wars in history are actually wars over raw materials. If you want to introduce that, you are eliminating the raw material conflicts from the world, and it is our experience that these raw material conflicts have always been there. I had to answer: Yes, if you had wanted to give me confirmation that I am right, then it would make sense to me. That you tell me it as a refutation, I cannot understand. That is how people are today. When they think straight and naturally, they cannot bring themselves to accept it, because people's ideas have already been distorted.

So, with regard to the international as such, it was precisely the threefold order that was thought of first. It is the basis for a real socialization of international life as well. But it has another special feature. It does no harm at all if one social organism becomes threefold and the others do not yet want to become threefold. If the others are not yet ready, those who have introduced the threefold structure can enjoy the benefits of the threefold organism. Outwardly, if it should hinder them, they can of course act as one. If there are three parliaments, they can join together in negotiations with foreign countries because the others will not yet allow it otherwise. But they will still be ahead of the others because they are realizing the threefold order in their own area. That is precisely the important thing: not to think that you want to revolutionize the whole world, but to start in a particular area. Then it will be - and I am quite sure of this - very contagious when truly salutary conditions arise in an area. That will have a very contagious effect. And that is precisely what will contribute to internationalization. We just have to think practically. The only thing that could happen now is that the Entente would prevent us from introducing these blessings so that we cannot set an example. But we must show courage and drive in what we are able to create. Perhaps it is precisely through something like this that we will be able to fight against the strong capitalist-imperialist powers.

Discussion participant Mittwich asks: 1. How will it be possible to tax people in the socialist economy in the future? - 2. How will we socialize?

Rudolf Steiner: By pointing out the importance of democratization in the transition period, I do not think that the two previous speakers have really presented anything different from what I have said. Of course, misunderstandings could arise in one circle or another, but nothing really different from what I have said has actually been presented.

You see, you have to see this as a basis for the whole impulse of threefolding, namely that it aims at reality everywhere, that it does not theorize at all. In fact, if I may express myself somewhat paradoxically, what is written in my book about the social question is not so important as what happens when one sets about realizing what is written there. There people will notice that all kinds of things come out that they had no idea of before, precisely the things that are unconsciously demanded today by the truly working and productive people. And in a special case this is the case with democracy. Of course, for the transition period a very important question will be this: If we now really get a sufficient majority, and I consider that the only healthy one, because nothing can be maintained in the long run with small groups, if we get a sufficient majority for something that can really be carried out practically, then of course the question arises from the actual circumstances in question, it can only come from them: How do you then, more or less clearly, compliment — you know what I mean by that — those whom you wish were no longer in power? This is, of course, a significant transitional question, and I believe that if there is a real relative majority – I would even say a sufficient majority, it just depends on there being a number of people who can tip the scales and carry the matter, who are there out of conviction, out of insight and not out of following, not out of authority – then there will also be a way in which the new can be achieved.

But, you see, the question, which Mr. Mittwich has discussed very nicely here, does not seem to me to have been dealt with in a completely practical way, especially when I imagine that things are supposed to happen in space and not in our heads, not in our thoughts. Mr. Mittwich was right to say: when it comes to the fateful questions of Germany, when it comes to the big, serious questions of the present, only those who are productive workers, who are in some way truly productively active, should have a say. I fully agree. But you see, human society would be in a bad way if the majority of people were not productive, if they were inactive. The majority are already productively active. And if we only had all those who were productively active, if they really formed a majority, then we would be fine. Then those who are productively inactive would be in a strong minority: the parasites of society.

Now the thing about the tripartite organism is that only the productive workers, that is, those who really produce something and mean something to society, will certainly appropriate what is in its impulses. When they appropriate it, we can rely on these people, and the minority who do not appropriate it do not come into consideration. By accepting what is really reasonable, we will in practice get a majority that can be relied on. So I think that if it is accepted, the matter itself will ensure that the majority of those who are productively active will assert themselves. But how you want to push something through without being able to rely on the majority of those who are productively active, I don't see that in practice yet. It is not enough to demand that only the productive workers should share in the fate of Germany. The question only becomes practical when one considers how the productive workers alone can form a majority. The parasites will be weeded out if we can adhere to the tripartite social organism. Because that will bring about a real socialization, and those who are unproductive social parasites – you can be quite sure of that – will not be able to find any taste in this socialization. They will have to fall back into inactivity – well, they are already in there – but also into inactivity in terms of their vote and so on.

It is true that, economically, capitalism can be used to exert pressure, as I have sufficiently explained. But this compulsion ceases to exist when we render it harmless by ensuring the dismantling of capitalism. That is why I actually cannot understand how people constantly mix up what is appropriate for the present and what is appropriate for the time to come, which must really be just around the corner, because we do not have much time. For the present, one can indeed speak of the fact that the capitalists can strangle us, but we want to prevent them from doing that. So we cannot imagine conditions that we want to eliminate. Therefore, it is not correct to object that the capitalists will have the power. They will not have it if we move forward as the three-part social organism indicates. It will be taken from them. And finally, for those who take a closer look today, the question arises like this: Is capital, as such, really so extraordinarily powerful today, mainly as economic power over wide areas?

You see, I'll try to make something clear to you with a comparison. I once knew a family that had a really big dog. And suddenly, after the woman of the family had looked at this dog very thoughtfully for a long time, she came up with a strange idea. She said that if this dog were suddenly to become aware of its strength and were to use it, then it could tear us all apart. But it is so tame, and we are only saved because it has become accustomed to tameness. — You see, a great deal of the power of old capitalism has already been undermined. People just don't think about how much has already been undermined, how much is only maintained in appearance today by the fact that the old conditions are being propagated. Yes, you see, if after the German Revolution – don't get me wrong, comparisons are always misleading, the comparison is only meant to express the balance of power – those who came up afterwards had produced within themselves the awareness of the power that lies in the bulldog, if they had not allowed themselves to be hypnotized by muddling through in old ways, then we would have come further today.

Now, it is not always easy to answer specific questions, especially when it comes to practical people. I will tell you why. The specific questions are to be answered differently depending on the circumstances. Things can be handled in very different ways, and it is not always necessary to do them in the same way. The programmatic person, the theorist, is usually so clever that he thinks up a socialist program down to the last detail. There have always been such people. But that is not the point, but rather to show how the ground must be shaped so that people can socialize themselves, so that they come together in socializing.

I must always emphasize: I do not feel smarter than others with regard to the details, but I am trying to give suggestions as to how each person can bring out what can contribute to socialization. Therefore, I want people to place themselves on three levels. After all, people will not be divided into classes, but they will all be within each area. And it is people who will form the unity. Therefore, I would like to join the community of ideas in such a way that socialization can really be brought about by the people. Then, under the new conditions, we will also find a fair system of taxation. We must not forget: we cannot find a just principle for taxation from today's wealth statistics, since we are working to place them on a completely different footing. All these things, such as income tax, consumption tax and so on, will be placed on a completely different footing in the future. Read my writing on the social question. There you will see that many things will indeed be quite different in the future. For example, the family man is in the social organism in a completely different way than the single person, and that is because, if the constitutional state really develops as I assume, then every child has the right to an education. Then the situation is not that the family man has to distribute his meager wages among a large family, while the single person can use it all for himself. The circumstances will be quite different. [Interjection: And the other consumer goods?] The right to consumer goods is a matter of course. This is ensured by the fact that the economic process is a real one. Everyone who produces something will, simply through the economic process, have the opportunity to procure the consumer goods, which is much more certain than an abstract right. The aim of the emancipation of economic life is to have enough. Needs are better met if you have a right to consumer goods and thus enough in your wallet. That is the aspect concerning the right to consumer goods. In reality, it is not really important if one is really thinking about realizing the threefold social organism. Then, in fact, what is produced is what really equates one person with another from a certain age onwards.

Isn't it true that, in a truly socialized community, income as such need not be the determining factor for what one can consume. For it is quite possible that a person, by performing some kind of, well, let's call it quality work, may appear to earn more than another in a socialist community; but that does not mean that he has more for his consumption than another; he must spend it in the appropriate way. It is not a matter of keeping this concept of income and consumption in mind in the future, but rather of ensuring that - because one person will be economically fair in relation to another - it will be possible in the future to even eliminate the state as a tax collector from the economic process.

You see, one concept will have to disappear completely in the future: the concept of legal personality, including economic-legal personality. What is to be paid in taxes will actually be paid by individual people, because in the state, in the democratic state, on the ground on which the law is to live, the individual human being faces the individual human being. Human beings can only be equal when one human being is face to face with another. In the sphere of economic life and in the sphere of intellectual life there must be corporations. In the sphere of the state there can only be law, which is the same for all human beings, and which every adult can understand. The corollary of this, however, is that every private person, every individual, is only the bearer of the tax. This can be proportioned so that injustice never occurs, but this proportionality will not be necessary if there is real equality among people. The tax issue will then be something completely different. Therefore, the things that are at stake and that can be asked about today apply more to the transitional stage. Often, things have to be done that are not permanent. Of course, the aim is to gradually create the conditions for taxing the individual, not for taxing complexes [...] Of course, a consumption tax must also be created, by which I do not mean indirect taxes, which are unfair. So, a consumption tax must be created, that is, those who consume a lot of money must, of course, be taxed more than those who do not consume much, because if someone puts the money in the straw bag, it has no significance for social life. It only acquires significance when it is spent.

These are, of course, very specific questions, which today, because they are very specific practical questions, can basically only be answered insufficiently, because the institutions in the transition stage cannot yet be good either. If we can find a way of thinking that makes it possible to distribute fairly what is due to the state, we will also find a way to tax those who today still have a large income more than those who have less. And what Mr. Mittwich said about the future can only be realized when everything that can be created through the threefold social order is in place.

A very real question is how to think about implementing socialization. Some say it can only be achieved by increasing production. Yes, but there are many other things to be considered. In this regard, there is still a lack of clarity in contemporary humanity. You see, I once said in a lecture – I think to Daimler workers – that the peculiar thing about the more recent development of humanity is that, due to machines, the number of workers on the whole earth does not correspond to the number of people given in the encyclopedia as the population of the earth. It says there are about 1500 million people, but in reality, if we count the working population, there are 2000 million, so 500 million more. That is a curious fact. Of course, I am not saying that ghosts are walking around, who would not work even if they were walking around, but that is so because we have machines and can compare what is produced economically using machines, for example, in contrast to the Orient, where there are not yet so many machines, where man does more by hand. This makes it possible to calculate that the increased output resulting from the use of machines throughout the world is equivalent to 500 million people. Imagine how much labor and productive power could be saved if this were actually utilized in a sensible way. But strangely enough, I was met with the following response: Yes, I had said quite correctly that through the machine there are 500 million imaginary people, so 500 million more than in reality, so that the work is done by 2,000 million people, but on the other hand, people's needs have increased during the machine age and the same is true as before. That is an objection that one hears very often, that simply when the productive power is increased, needs also increase. One hole is closed, another opens. But in reality it is different. It is the case that everything must be taken into account that can lead to rationalization, to the proper design of the production process. Those who only think that the production process must be increased will not get it right – and that is: a proper balance between consumption and production, not the greatest possible increase in production. That does not lead to what must be striven for, that is, to a pricing system that really creates decent living conditions for all people.

What is necessary, in particular, is that in production, the kind of mistakes that have been made, let's say, in Germany, are not made. One of them – and there have been many – is that in the years long before the outbreak of the World War, twice as much coal was used for German industry as would have been necessary. So many resources were wasted, which could have been used for something completely different. What matters most is that we have people in the economic process who are up to the current situation. But we don't have them. People may be able to think very advanced on a large scale, but we don't have any real economic leaders. The economic process is not really organized at all in the way it should be, because people have no idea how important it is not to squander productive forces unnecessarily.

I have often used a grotesque example in these lectures. It is not uncommon today for a young badger to have to write his doctoral thesis after graduating from university. I will give you a concrete example. A young person was given the task by his professor to write his doctoral thesis on the commas in Homer - which, by the way, do not exist. This is, of course, a thesis that does not contribute the slightest thing to the social process. People who are hypnotized by scientific thinking take offense when you say something like that. But this matter must be viewed in an economic light. From an economic point of view, it is taken into account that this young man needs a year and a half for the work. During this time, he must eat, drink and dress. The fact that he can do this means that so-and-so many people have to work to provide him with food and drink, but he squanders his productive power and does nothing for society. Through what people call “free independent science,” he becomes a parasite on social life. This is just one example. But there are many such things in our production process, in our whole social life, where one can be very hardworking but ultimately unproductive. This raises the question: how do we find this out? We cannot find out without placing the spiritual life on its own ground. Is it on its own ground today? Wherever it is attacked, you can feel the unhealthy ground. Where do the numerous people come from who are let loose on the working population and who are supposed to lead or govern those who work?

In my lectures, I have often used the example of a certain government councilor Kolb. This Mr. Kolb did not do as many others do, who retire after a certain time, but went to America and worked there among the workers, first in a bicycle factory, then in a brewery. Then he wrote a book: “As a Worker in America”. In this book you can read the following beautiful sentence: “Earlier, when I saw a person on the street who was not working, I thought: Why isn't this bum working?” Today I see the matter quite differently. Today I know that the uncomfortable things in life look quite comfortable in the study. — Well, you see, this person has made it to the level of a senior government official. He has certainly studied in our present-day intellectual workshops, but he had no idea of life, no idea of work. And today, life is run by people like that! One has no idea how much our living conditions depend on such things! But must not these conditions be unhealthy? Yes, I only ask you to consider that man really depends on his thoughts. What is in the mind is not indifferent, it is contagious, it infects the whole person, especially when it comes to people during the developmental years. And now I want to tell you something: Do today's teaching institutions ensure that people are educated who then understand something about life, on the ground of which the work takes place? No, the circumstances are quite different. And in the minds of those who are released from our teaching institutions today, what kind of thoughts live in them? The thoughts that people absorb through the Greek language, for example, live in them. But a language is the clearest mirror of external life. Grammar, word formation, even intonation and everything else is taken from life. The Greek language, when I immerse myself in it, makes me able to find my way into Greek life. In those days, only those who pursued politics or art or science or perhaps managed agriculture could be free. All the rest were unfree. Everything is geared to this when one takes in Greek. People who come out of the teaching institutions today come out with thoughts that can only be applied to a social order in which only a few people are free and most are unfree. People do not notice what is happening unconsciously, what is flowing into them. That is why intellectual life must be freed, so that we do not have capitalists and their servants as intellectual leaders, but so that intellectual leadership is in line with economic life. Isn't it absurd – we are talking about the 'great reckoning' here – isn't it absurd that our intellectual leaders do not do things the way the Greeks did? The Greeks learned for their lives in their educational institutions. You can criticize that today as you like, but that was life back then. Today, life must not be that! But we do not learn what is necessary for our lives; instead, we let our youth learn what was for ancient Greece.

Yes, you see, people today still do not think about these basics for healthy socialization. But this is necessary, especially when we are talking about the proper organization of production, which is quite complicated today. So today we have to learn to understand, for example, how large a production plant can be. Because, you see, what Mr. Mittwich said applies to a production plant that is too small. Of course it cannot survive because it belongs to an old economic order. But we must not let the production plants become too large for purely economic reasons, and this is why: too small plants - I must express this as an economic law today - too small plants will lead in the future to those who work in them starving to death. Too large plants will cause those who are supposed to buy what is produced in these plants to starve. The production plant must have a very definite size, and this size will only be able to be determined when in the future, through the people who understand something, a right balance between consumption and production is created. The interests of consumption are always such that they want to expand. You will always see that consumption cooperatives have an interest in becoming large. Production cooperatives always want to become smaller. The right balance is created by what production and consumption achieve together. Then such enterprises will come into being that will have a size that is appropriate for the spiritually active person to work for the benefit of the physically working person, and from this will come a natural prosperity that will ensure a dignified existence for the broad masses.

So, as you can see, it is not that simple. It is necessary to realize that it is unhealthy for someone to say that if all production is done by machines – as the gentleman told me at the time – then needs will also increase. It is a question of whether it is a healthy state of affairs if needs are allowed to increase, or whether we should not consider the possibility of relieving people of work so that they can find some rest. This can also contribute to the proper regulation of prices. People often fail to see the simplest things. I would like to give you an example: I once had a friendly argument with someone about scribbling on postcards. I said: I don't like writing postcards, because most of the time they are just a whim and actually unnecessary. And I believe that I can spare all the postmen who have to run up and down stairs from having to run up and down stairs. I want to spare them this work. The other one said: That's not right, because first of all, I'm happy when I can make someone else happy with the card. – Well, that was still tolerable. But then he said: Secondly, the current number of postmen will soon no longer be sufficient, and more will have to be hired. So someone will have bread again because I write a lot of postcards. – To that I said: But think about what you are actually saying now. Do you really believe that you can increase the amount of bread by even a single gram by employing people to carry picture postcards around? Carrying the cards around will not increase the amount of consumer goods needed for the same number of people! You have to distinguish between productive power, which just needs to be transformed into labor, and completely unproductive forces. And this horrible phrase, which is often used, that work must be created so that people can be employed, makes no sense at all when it comes to creating something completely unproductive.

So, it is important that, through sensible socialization, production is not simply increased blindly, but that a proper balance is struck between consumption and production. You see, it is so very necessary that we develop the good will today to educate ourselves about these things. Because if we continue to think in these dreadful terms, with which one thinks out of the capitalist order, then we will not get anywhere. One must always ask oneself: Is something still being thought in a capitalist way, or is it a realistic germinal idea for the future? Therefore, one must say to oneself: Today one must turn around a thought twice to be sure that it is a thought for the new structure and not a thought learned from what is ripe for the dismantling. That is what I wanted to say about the questions.

The following question was asked: Under the present circumstances, we can hardly get a majority for the threefold social order because not even the proletarians are united among themselves. What can be done to bring about this unity?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that is one of those questions that always comes down to the fact that although one understands what is right, one imagines that for some reason it cannot be achieved. This question should not really be raised; it really gets you nowhere. The question must become a will question. I cannot express myself on this. You just have to do something. What we have recognized as being right must be carried from person to person. We must not ask ourselves: Will we win over the majority or not? but we must do everything to win that majority. Then we shall have done our duty, not only to ourselves but to all humanity. It must be a matter of will, not a mere theoretical question, such as: How can we get the majority? I say: We must have it! And therefore we must work to get it. It must be a matter of will. There is no other way.