The Rudolf Steiner Archive

at the end of a meeting of members of the Anthroposophical Society at the first Anthroposophical College

Rudolf Steiner: I just want to say a few words at this moment, my dear friends. Speaking too much at general meetings or general assemblies is not something I am particularly known for. There have been quite a number of general assemblies over the years, until the war made that impossible, and I have said many a thing at these general assemblies –– it has basically never been taken into account. And then a number of proposals were made as to how things should actually be done and the like. So basically there is not much reason for me to speak at general meetings, only to say things that are not actually heard. But here I would just like to say a few words about something positive. Because, you see, it won't do much good to have big plans; it's all well and good to have big plans, but you should consider the immediate first. We are here together now, and it seems to me that this is the best opportunity to do something so that we don't go our separate ways again without having done necessary, positive things, things that can be done here and now. Let us talk about something positive for a change.

Above all, I would like to draw your attention to the fact, my dear friends, that when the threefold social order movement emerged quite organically from the anthroposophical movement, it was expected that those who were to work in this or that field would really do so, because a practical impulse had been given with the threefold social order question. Now, from a certain quarter,

A lot of work has been put into creating these Anthroposophical College courses here in Dornach, and the success of these college courses will essentially depend on us as Anthroposophists leaning a little on what these college courses have brought and carrying it out into the world in the future – that will take some work. But perhaps – we still have eight days left for these college courses – perhaps something can be done here to remedy the situation, which has brought us, especially in a certain direction, at least for those who really want to work, a nasty disappointment. That is the following.

You see, my dear friends, it was really meant very seriously that the time should finally come to an end when what was supposed to work together with practice was constantly rejected by so-called practice, so that we could finally make progress; it was calculated that we - in contrast to the routiniers - would find real practitioners precisely in the anthroposophical movement. We have been together for a fortnight now, and it might have been possible for something to have happened, especially in relation to economic thinking, to correct economic thinking on the part of the practitioners among us. We have, however, had various seminar papers. The fact that there have of course been some minor lapses is of no interest to us, because it is simply absolutely necessary. But, my dear friends, what has happened through a co-worker and practitioner, in order to achieve something favorable for the world in the sense of the work of our college courses, has unfortunately so far only resulted in the fact that this morning another envelope arrived with this pack of questions, all of which relate solely to the threefold order. I do not know whether these questions can be formed into at least one lecture by this evening, given the day's other commitments, which will then deal with real economic thinking. I have been told that a few

A Mr. Male at 7 o'clock in the morning, or at some other hour that was perhaps even more impossible - I don't know - meetings were held under the motto that only the practitioners, to the exclusion of the theorists, would come together for once, so that something more sensible would be said - I am only referring to it as a rumor, but it has been said to me. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it would be important that when the student body comes here, they do not leave with the impression that they are all beating each other up because they all have different opinions and cannot express what an association is and the like. It would be much more important to ensure that practitioners really work together in an anthroposophical sense, so that we can present ourselves to the outside world as a real force. You see, this is a positive task that can perhaps be solved in the next eight days: that the practitioners do not isolate themselves because each person says something that the other does not understand. We must therefore try to present ourselves to the world as a society and to build up such a force that the practitioners will actually come together to present something of practical economic thinking. Only in this way can the people who have come here today to learn something really learn something. What will become of our economic endeavors if the students leave with the feeling that they themselves don't know anything? So we need a thorough change in this direction in the next eight days to fulfill our task.

I just wanted to try to bring something positive into the debate for a change.

Dear assembled guests! A wish has been expressed that I should say something here about more economic questions, that is, about the economic realm of the threefold social organism. Actually, my intention during this School of Spiritual Science course has been to devote my energies to showing how spiritual science can have a fertilizing effect on the most diverse scientific fields and on life in general. The field of economic life is precisely that which most urgently requires the insightful collaboration of those active within the anthroposophical movement. And above all, it is necessary that what these practitioners can gain from their practical experience be brought to the spiritual scientific field, just as the scientific knowledge from many different fields has been so beautifully brought to it from so many different sides. We shall be speaking about these matters in greater detail in a moment. Since the wish has been expressed that I should also say something about the third link of the social organism, I thought it best to put down on paper the wishes that have been expressed by the honored audiences themselves, so that I could, as it were, work them into today's lecture. Today, however, was so busy that this could not be done in the way I would have liked, because the most diverse wishes were formulated in 39 questions, which really could not be studied in the short time available to me today. But in addition, I have seen from the way in which these questions were asked how much still needs to be done in this area in particular, and so it will be necessary for me to discuss some of this today, which to a certain extent emerges from the general impression created by these questions. And I will then take the opportunity to continue today's reflections in more detail next Tuesday at 8 a.m., so that perhaps those asking the questions and others who would like to learn more about these questions will get their money's worth. Today, I would like to speak only preliminarily, so to speak, so that on Tuesday we can go into the details in a very practical way. But such preliminary speaking is necessary for a healthier mutual understanding. Then, perhaps, on Tuesday evening, a kind of general discussion, a kind of discussion, can be added to what I will have to say, and in this way we will perhaps be able to cope with the matter.

Dear attendees, although I have already done so here in the late evening hours, I would like to emphasize once again that my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” and, in connection with it, the other book , which has now been published by the Stuttgart publishing house “Der Kommende Tag”, “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (The Threefold Order of the Social Organism), that these two books are intended to be read in a practical way and that those who take them theoretically misunderstand them. They are intended for those people who, as it were, have a vivid and lively sense of social life and are able to grasp it. It will hardly be possible to substantially advance what is today called the social question through other people as such. Above all, I have already emphasized that nothing utopian should be sought in these two books. But I have noticed that many people who approach these two books, basically translate the matter into utopianism out of a certain tendency of our time, that they form ideas according to their own taste, which then appear utopian. I would like to draw your attention to a remark that you will find on some page of my “Key Points”. There I say explicitly: In a matter that is conceived in practical terms, conceived as a challenge for our time, one can think differently about the details of the implementation. And that is why in the book “The Core Points of the Social Question” I only give examples of the details. What is said about one or the other detailed question concerns things that can be carried out in the most diverse ways in practical life. The fact that I also speak about these things in the sense that I present a [possible] realization [happens, therefore,] so that one can see vividly how the whole impulse of the threefold social organism is put into practice. Above all, it was my opinion that after this book was published, people who are practical in their lives would set about letting the results of their practical life enter into the stream of the social question, inspired by this book.

From the questions that have been put to me again today, I can see how much thoroughly impractical thinking lives in our time and how difficult it is for people in the present day to think practically. This is precisely the tragedy of our time, this is the great difficulty that does not really allow us to approach life, that on the one hand we are completely immersed in materialistic views and ideas that we have absorbed through the one-sided pursuit of natural science, that we have become accustomed to looking at all things as we necessarily have to look at external natural things - including things that have to be looked at differently from these external natural things, things that above all necessitate that one penetrates more deeply than one has to in relation to external natural things - that we have actually lost all feeling for the appropriate treatment of these things. And so, on the one hand, one thinks in a completely materialistic way and, on the other hand, in a completely abstract way, especially when it comes to social issues. Thoughts are expressed that have no prospect whatsoever of having any real impact on real life. Or one also finds that people who believe they are putting forward something quite real simply indulge in generalities. We are accustomed to hearing practitioners expound in generalities when discussing something as specific as the social question. It is simply the case that through centuries of education within Western civilization, we have not been brought closer to life, but have actually been alienated from life. And I would like to say: this realization leaps out of everything, how much one has actually been alienated from life, but how one misjudges the nature and character of this alienation. This is misjudged within the most diverse parties, and each party always blames the other. This was particularly evident to me from the questions that were asked.

There were questions that reminded me of some of the bitterness I have felt in dedicating myself to the study of modern, contemporary social conditions over the decades. For example, the question arises in several forms, which suggests the almost impossibility of an understanding that should play a role between the proletariat on the one hand and the other classes of humanity on the other. On the proletarian side, there is a question that is actually couched in the form of an accusation, a bitter accusation. I may, so that nothing remains in the background, but so that we face each other in full sincerity, honesty and truth, I may read this question, which actually involves an accusation, here:

The workers gathered here have found that it is not possible to work together with anthroposophists, with bourgeois circles; in particular, the student body seems to lack the impulse to be able to think its way into the cooperation of all people, otherwise it would be impossible to continue here as fellow students.

That, on the one hand, my dear attendees: no knowledge at all of how much there is a struggle within the student body to come to terms with the social demands of our time! A terrible mistrust has taken hold, especially in the circles of the proletariat. And anyone who is able to look at the social question with open eyes cannot ignore this mistrust, because it is one of the most real factors. But it actually concerns less the student body, which, it seems to me, is wrongly accused by the proletariat, at least it does not concern part of the student body. But, ladies and gentlemen, in general it must be said that in our time, especially in the circles of the bourgeoisie and those just above and below the bourgeoisie, there is little inclination to really look at the social question from its proletarian aspect, to really gain an understanding of how the proletarian question is intimately connected with the entire social question and thus with the fate of our modern civilization in general. As I said, I am only speaking preliminarily today, so that we can then understand each other better, because one can only present these things sympathetically if one knows the background to them.

You see, my dear audience, when we began last year to work from April onwards from Württemberg in the sense of the “Appeal” I had written and my “Key Points of the Social Question” for a recovery of our social life, there was the time, which in a was still, in a certain sense – let us say, overshadowed by the one or illuminated by the other – overshadowed or illuminated by what was like a kind of revolutionary wave sweeping over Europe; and at that time one met above all the big bourgeois and their followers, the entrepreneurial class, in the stage of fear. They were terribly afraid of what could arise from the depths of proletarian social existence, and in April and May one came into a social wave where socialism, or at least socialization, was dreamed of, or rather, dreamed up in wide circles. But then came different times. It turned out how little the proletariat is actually trained in the first place to arrive at any clear formulation of its demands in such a way that something socially positive could arise from it. Certainly, the broadest circles of the proletariat would be sympathetic to the impulse towards threefolding in particular if it were possible to overcome that which is the leadership of this proletariat. And we must not deceive ourselves about this, as can be clearly seen from the experience we have just had with our efforts: the proletariat will only come to a clear understanding when all the leaders are gone and when it can rely on its own instincts and reason. One will be able to speak to them. One can speak to the instincts of the proletarians, one can speak to the reason of the proletarians, but one cannot speak to the leaders, who combine two characteristics: firstly, a terrible parroting of what the bourgeois have thought out for them, and secondly, in all their behavior, an exaggeration of the most vulgar philistinism. But that, as I said, is directed only against the leadership.

But it must be recognized, as it is necessary in our time in general, to take it very seriously and radically into account that everything that stands out from the old times and would like to bring up what was before 1914, that it is not suitable for further development – that must be recognized. And as long as people in all parts of the civilized world think of nothing but how to get so-and-so back into this or that office because he was in such an office before, before 1914 or during the war, as long as people think like that, as long as they do, practically nothing can be worked out that can lead to progress. We absolutely need new people who emerge from a new way of thinking. We have no use for those who want to fall back on the old ways because they are too lazy to develop ideas that will lead to the appreciation of new people. I said that different times were coming. The proletariat proved that it could not come to any clarity on its own. The panic gradually turned into a kind of certainty, certainty to the extent that people said to themselves: Now we can try to continue along the old lines. I would like to say that at the time, from week to week, one could see how everything that was previously entrepreneurial fell back into the old ways of thinking; and now it is basically back on track, but just doesn't realize that it is dancing on a volcano. That was the first experience, that the complete uselessness of the leaders of the proletariat had emerged, so to speak, and that on the other hand the complete impotence of those who had previously held leading positions in the economic field had emerged. Yes, in these circles and in the entourage of these circles there is really no inclination to get to know what is actually pulsating in the present, what often wants to work its way to the surface from the proletariat in an unclear way. They simply do not want to get involved in what is important.

That is why so little of the first third of my “Key Points of the Social Question” has been understood, that first third, which is mainly concerned with presenting that “double bookkeeping”. I am not talking about the one Mr. Leinhas spoke about here in a historical context, but I am talking about another one that he even hinted at. It is that double bookkeeping that has gradually been consists in regarding the world, so to speak, only in terms of its material, mechanical context, in thinking only within this material, mechanical context, in, as I once put it, turning the practice of life into a routine, and then, on the other hand, wanting to develop all kinds of beautiful, all kinds of spiritual, all kinds of moral things.

We know how much the aim of practical people is to have their practice inside the factory, but then, when they have closed the door of the office in the evening, their aim is to be able to indulge themselves somewhere where thoughts can live freely, where the soul can develop, where one can become inwardly warm in thoughts that finally free one from what is behind the office door and so on; there should be a spiritual life outside of the factory – that will be such a motto [for these people], and my book actually wanted to reverse this motto. In this book I wanted to draw attention to the fact that it is not a matter of closing the factory behind you to find spiritual life outside, but that it is a matter of carrying your mind into the factory in the morning when you go into the factory so that reason, spirit and so on might permeate the material, mechanical life, so that the spirit does not develop alongside real life as a luxury, which it has gradually become through this double accounting. On the one hand, there is the business practice, which I don't need to describe to you further, as it is often found today; on the other hand, there is the church, there are the folded hands, there is the asking for a happy, eternal life, the interweaving of the two.

What is needed, this thinking together, is highly inconvenient for many people. On the one hand, they want a spiritless routine that they can adopt without really being present to it, and on the other hand, they want a mystical haziness through which they can satisfy the lust of their souls. How often have we experienced, especially at the time when the transition should be made from anthroposophical spiritual striving to practical striving, that people of practical life approached us who wanted to become successful in practical life from the practices that have arisen in recent decades. How do these people want to become successful? Discussions that have been held, when it came to recruiting people, say for the future or for the coming day - people who were supposed to work with the real spiritual, but who conquer the material - these discussions have shown: Such people are extremely difficult to find today for the simple reason that out of economic life, the practice has developed that the young person actually allows himself to be trained from the outside. He lets himself be brought into a business somewhere, and while his thoughts are actually somewhere else, on a spiritual level, sometimes on a very good one, he does not carry the spirit into his business. He is not there with his soul, he lets himself be trained from the outside, he lets himself be made business-savvy; then he lets himself be sent somewhere, to America or London, and there he is trained further. Afterwards he knows how to do it, and then he goes back, and then he does this or that.

Yes, my dear attendees, this leads to the social question, because we cannot make progress with such people; if we do not decide to shine a light into these things and work on them, nothing can be done. We need people who are educated, even through school, to intervene with their initiative when it comes to preparing themselves in the right way for practical life, so that, as it were, the initiative wants to come from within. To do this, however, it is necessary that the school does not stifle this initiative. I would like to say that, especially when viewed from the human side, this is the case.

A completely different spirit must enter into our economic life. Above all, this spirit will invigorate the connection that must exist between the human being and what he or she produces directly or indirectly in the world. For many branches of our lives, this connection no longer really exists. Many people are utterly indifferent to what they work on and how what they work on fits into the social context. They are only interested in how much they will acquire through their labor, that is, they reduce all interest they have in the outer material world to the interest they may have in the amount of money that can come to them from this outer world through their particular constellation in relation to this outer world. This reduction to the interest in acquiring, not in the thing that is being made, is what basically poisons our entire economic life. But here also lie the serious obstacles to understanding the impulse of the threefold social order.

As I said, I am speaking preliminarily, but I would like to refer to a few aphorisms today. It has been mentioned again and again – and rightly so – that we must work towards an economic life that is governed by the impulse of association. Associations – I have had a strange experience. I once spoke about associations in a circle of proletarians in Stuttgart. They said to me: We have heard of all kinds of things, of cooperatives, of trusts, of cartels, of syndicates, but we have not heard anything about associations. - One must be able to grasp the novelty of this concept quite practically, especially from the point of view of economic life, quite practically, I would say quite vividly, if one wants to find one's way around in these matters. Associations are not cooperatives, associations are not cartels, associations are not syndicates; above all, associations are unions, or rather, federations that work towards a specific goal. What can this goal be?

We will gradually approach a practical understanding of economic life: what can this goal be? My dear audience, this goal can be none other than working towards a very specific pricing of individual goods. It will not be possible to think correctly in terms of political economy until one is able to place the price problem at the center of this economic thinking, as the third third of my book “The Core of the Social Question” does, perhaps not always pedantically with theories, but certainly in the spirit of the whole.

What is important about the price problem? It is important to realize that each good can only have one specific price, at most there should be small fluctuations up and down. Each good corresponds to a specific price, because, dear attendees, the price of a good is – now let go of the money, I will also talk about that the day after tomorrow – the price of a good is nothing other than what represents its value in comparison to the value of the other goods that a person needs. The price expresses a ratio, for example the ratio between the value of a skirt and a loaf of bread or a boot and a hat. This proportionality is what ultimately leads to the price problem. But this proportionality cannot be solved by any ordinary arithmetic, nor can it be determined by law, by any body at all, but can only be achieved through associative work.

What is it in today's economic life that works against the healthy formation of prices, and what is it that has led us into such economic misery? It is that the price of commodities is not formed out of economic life, but that something intervenes between the commodities – the goods that correspond to needs – that cannot be a commodity, that can only serve as a means of equalization for the mutual value relationships of the commodity: money. As I said, we will discuss all of this in more detail, but I would like to touch on a few general points now. Money has been endowed with a commodity character, namely through the emergence of the real ambiguity between paper money and gold money, which is now at its culmination. Thus it has become possible not only to exchange commodities, with money serving merely as a means of facilitating exchange in a large area with a rich division of labor and employment, but also for money itself to become a commodity. And this is simply demonstrated by the fact that one can trade in money, that one can buy and sell money, that the value of money changes through speculation, changes through what one accomplishes on the money market. But now something is coming into play here that very clearly shows how the unitary state still holds together today what wants to become tripartite. Money as we have it today: its value is, so to speak, determined by the state in accordance with the law. It is the state that sets the impulse that essentially determines the value of this 'commodity'. And through this interaction of two things, the exchange of goods and the determination of the monetary value on the part of the state, our entire economic life is made confusing, so that it is no longer comprehensible to the person who is in it today.

If only the people who are involved in economic life would honestly admit to themselves that, on the one hand, any amount of money that is circulating is a complete economic abstraction – circulating like the most abstract concept in our thinking, and that on the other hand there is the production, exchange and consumption of goods, which is so closely connected with human weal and woe, and that, to a certain extent, the present monetary value, like a great forgery, drowns out everything that is supposed to be alive. These things, however, must not be viewed in an inflammatory way, but must be considered soberly and soberly, quite objectively, otherwise one cannot get to the bottom of them. It is ideal, in the first place, that every kind of commodity within economic life should be based, in a very real sense, on having a very definite value. Some kind of commodity X must have a definite relationship to the other kinds of commodities in terms of its value.

But for this value to emerge, various things are necessary. First, it is necessary that the knowledge be available, the real technical-universal knowledge, to be able to produce the relevant goods in the best possible condition and in a rational way, that is, with the least labor and without harming the human being, for any particular age. And secondly, it is necessary that no more people are employed in the [whole production process] than are necessary to ensure that this one commodity, in particular, receives the one specific price, the clearly defined price, based on its production costs and so on. If too many workers are employed in the direction leading to a particular type of goods, the goods will receive a price that is too low; if too few workers are employed, the goods will receive a price that is too high; and it is therefore necessary to understand how many people must be employed in a particular area of goods production in order to be successful in economic life.

This knowledge of the number of people employed in the production of a particular type of goods intended for consumption is necessary in order to arrive at the culmination of economic life, the price problem. This is done by working positively, by negotiating with people in economic life how they are to be placed in their jobs. Of course, this must not be understood in a pedantic or bureaucratic sense. You will notice that complete freedom, including economic freedom, is secured for the human being precisely through the means that The Core Problems of the Social Question propose. It is not a matter of a bureaucratic or mechanistic Leninization or Trotskyization, but of an association through which, on the one hand, industrial life in particular is considered in the right way and through which, on the other hand, the freedom of the individual is fully preserved. So you see what ultimately matters. But how money comes into it: we will see that the day after tomorrow.

What matters first, despite the intervention of money, is the mutual value of the goods, that is, the mutual value of the products of human labor. That is what matters, and the associations must work to extract this value through their actions in economic life, through their negotiations, through their mutual contracts, and so on. Yes, but how do such negotiations come about that deal with the mutual value of goods? Never through an organization of equals, through a corporation of equals, but only through associations. How are you supposed to figure out what the ratio of the price of a boot to the price of a hat should be if you don't let the hatmakers and cobblers work together associatively, if there is no association, if no associations are formed? Associations within a branch do not exist, because these are not associations, but associations go from branch to branch, and above all go from the producers to the consumers. Associations are the exact opposite of what leads to trusts, syndicates and the like. We shall then also see how certain connections between the entrepreneurs of a product category are necessary; but these then have a completely different function. But the process by which the right price comes into being – I do not say is fixed, but comes into being – can only develop through associative life, passing from branch to branch; only when the associations work together with their experiences can the right price be fixed on the basis of experience. It will not be more complicated than, for example, life in our police states or in our democracies; on the contrary, although it goes from industry to industry, it will be much simpler.

Now, it must be clear to everyone that life thinks quite differently, if I may put it this way, than the abstract thinkers, even if they are practitioners. These abstract thinkers will think above all: So, it depends either on the associations of the producers [with each other] or on the associations of the producers with the consumers. Yes, but, ladies and gentlemen, that is only a matter of time. Just imagine (it is drawn on the board) that you associate the producers of industry A with some number of consumers of B, these with the producers of industry C and these in turn somehow with some number of consumers of D – well, then an association arises.

But it arises in such a way that initially one only looked at the producer or only looked at the consumer; but the consumer is, after all, a producer of another article, unless he is a rentier or a loafer. It is not at all important that you proceed according to [abstract] categories; if you think about the matter in a more universal way and make associations out of all the connections, then you also have the consumers in the connections. But the way things are today, you can't even start with the producers among themselves, because only trusts or cartels would arise that only want to have business interests, I don't even want to say, but can only have.

Today, the main task is to form these associations according to the model that I once mentioned as a very primitive model. We wanted to establish a consumer association for bread in the Anthroposophical Society and associate a bread manufacturer with it, so that a relationship would arise between all those who could pay a certain price the Anthroposophists, by producing something else at the same time; and for the value of what they produced, they received what the baker in question produced. So, it actually came down to influencing the price in mutual business transactions. That will be the essence of these associations, that they gradually, by actually functioning properly, strive towards the correct, economically justified price.

If you consider this carefully, you will see that it does not contradict practical experience, insofar as it can still be gained at all in today's perverse economic life. Because take the simplest economy: in the simplest economy, the person who knows how to manage ultimately also has to find the right prices, and he develops the right prices based on his conditions. He determines the right prices from two specific components: firstly, from what he would like to get for his products, and secondly, from what he gets; that is, even if it is still so vague, he enters into an association with the consumer. It is always there, even if it is not externally closed. It is just that our lives have become so complicated that we have to bring these things to full consciousness and external form. If you don't think your way into these things, then something utopian always comes out. But above all, it would be necessary to bring together the experiences that are related to production and consumption. And in those circles that work with us, we would need, above all, practitioners who could, so to speak, synthesize the experiences of life into a science of experience about economic life, so that - and this could well be - it would start from experience.

But today, my dear attendees, you can read about economists in the following style: For any given territory, let's say Germany, they calculate how much of the total wealth, or let's say of the total annual income generated in that territory, is made up of entrepreneurial profits, and how much is made up of the sums that have to be used for intermediate trade in the broadest sense. And those who talk about these things as economists usually reduce everything to the abstract monetary relationship. But that does not give any insight into the real course of economic conditions. One would only get an insight if one heard from those who are involved in economic life how they work in intermediate trade. One would have to be told, for example, how lives are ruined in intermediate trade. And one would also learn, for example, the interesting fact that in a closed economic area, approximately as much entrepreneurial profit is reaped as unnecessary stocks of goods are brought onto the market. Quite curiously, the number given for any territory as the sum of entrepreneurial profits roughly corresponds to the market price of those goods that are unnecessarily in stock on the market and are not sold. You see a connection there that you can see, look at together, but which would only be interestingly illuminated if the practitioners, who basically don't understand the real practice, if these practitioners would come and show you how things really work for them, so that it comes out exactly how the connections are between what is worked and not sold on the market and the entrepreneurial profit that now comes from surplus labor, I mean the pure capital profit. It is quite natural that people who have no idea of how such connections are in economic life are also not in a position today to talk about the actual composition of associations. For what is the task of these associations? Their task is to use the very knowledge that is still lacking in order to arrive at the economically justified price. When association and association exchange their experiences, when these experiences are exchanged in a lively way, instead of being calculated, the price problem can be solved simply and practically in the end. There is no theory to solve the price problem. It cannot be formulated, but only by starting with any given product and really experiencing in life which other products are exchanged with it. Only then can you practically determine how much this product should cost, but practically and with almost complete accuracy. This cannot be done with numbers, but by having a group of people who have experience in one industry, another group who have experience in a different industry, a third in a third industry, and so on, so that these groups can pool their experiences. The matter is not as complicated as one might imagine today; and you can be quite certain that the number of people needed to get the associations up and running in this way and solve the price problem is not as high as the number of people that certain states have used for their militarism and policing. And that is the most important thing in economic life. Then, in a sense, everyone has a standard; they can see from the price how much they need to work. There is no need to think about how to get people to work, because they can see from the price-determining factor how much they have to work; they will be able to act accordingly, and they will be able to negotiate on a completely different basis with other people, on a reciprocal basis, about the amount of work they do, the time they work, and so on.

I would just like to say this today: What is the most important thing in economic life? The price of goods. If you look beyond economic life, in the sense of the “key points of the social question”, you will also find what is most important in state life – but we must think of a living state life. In the life of the state, the most important thing is the rights and duties that can be established through democratic coexistence, which people set for each other. We must bear in mind how, in economic life, experiences are gathered through the activity of associations, in order to arrive at the price of goods that ultimately dominates economic life; we must bear in mind how everything that does not tend towards this price fixing must be removed from economic life. In the life of the state, democracy, or, when it comes to the life of the mind, the free integration of the spiritual element into the social organism; in the life of the mind it is trust that founds the constitution, in the life of the state it is the intuitive sense of rights and duties. The associative principle works towards the right price. Economic life needs trust as a force of spiritual life, needs a sense of right and duty. With this rhythm of right and duty, we have a duality, just as we have exhalation and inhalation in human life. This is what should pulsate in state life, and trust is what should pulsate in spiritual life.

Regarding the questions – as I said, today I have only taken the general impression from the various questions – there is, for example, something that comes into question in relation to such a general impression: it is the question of how this spiritual life should actually work on the other two limbs of the social organism, how it should be constituted in itself. But we will talk about that the day after tomorrow. But just let your soul be filled — intuitively and without prejudice, not influenced by what is already there and has been constantly brought into the spiritual life from the state side — let your soul be filled with what the self-contained spiritual life is. Now, my dear audience, I think you will all be able to understand me quite well in this: When spiritual life is free, then the first thing to take effect in it will be the steadfastness that is born of trust; this steadfastness will take effect to the same extent that this spiritual life is emancipated from the state. And with all those “pigtails” who wanted nothing to do with our cultural advice, it was quite clear – I have already hinted at this from a different angle – that if it came down to the efficiency borne by trust, not the efficiency stamped by the state, then they would very soon no longer be sitting on their curule chairs. That is why the people fled so quickly from our call for a cultural council on all sides that, figuratively speaking, the tails of the tails and coats flew far, far in the wind from the speed with which they fled when we called on them to join us in a free intellectual life.

Now, I wanted to speak today, my dear attendees, about some preliminary matters that may lead us to address individual issues in response to the questions raised. Above all, because I see that there is an urgent need for it, I would like to address the specific question regarding the organization of the individual members of the social organism and their interaction. But I want to be understood, and to do so I want to study and process the questions thoroughly for next Tuesday. But you will see from studying the “Key Points of the Social Question” as well as from everything else I have said in this regard, based on our spiritual scientific work, that it is truly not utopian. But perhaps this also gives me a certain right to say that what is meant by the “key points of the social question” should not be translated into utopianism. I hear this utopianism in many of the ways people talk to me, for example, when someone comes and asks: “If we have the threefold social organism, what will happen to this or that?” — That is precisely how the utopian thinks. The practical person, however, thinks above all about whether something positive will be established. It really does not matter what should happen to the banker A, the milliner F, the sewing machine owner C - all these questions are raised - but something else is essential. What is important is that steps be taken that are in line with one or other of the three impulses for the threefold social order.

It is important that some kind of start be made with associations. It must be shown how neither the productive cooperatives nor the consumer cooperatives can work well for the future. We must turn away from the productive cooperatives because they have shown in practice that people with real personal initiative do not devote themselves to them, nor could they. But we must also turn away from the consumer cooperatives, although they are still the best, especially when they start producing for themselves; but they cannot achieve the necessary goal for the future for the simple reason that they do not arise from the association of what is there, ation of what is already there, but because they are still rooted in the most ordinary capitalism – at least in one corner of it, in that they initially organize consumption only on one side and actually incorporate production only into the organization of consumption, if they incorporate it at all. Even less indicative of real progress are cooperatives such as the raw materials cooperative and so on; such cooperatives have no sense of associative life at all, but instead they actually only amount to doing something in a partial area of economic life, in any old corner, while the raw materials question is closely related to the consumption question. One might say, but this is a somewhat figurative way of putting it: within the whole of economic life, it is actually the smokers who should have the greatest interest in the work of processing tobacco raw materials in tobacco-producing areas. Now I would like to know how, in our decadent, perverse economy, the interest that the smoker has in the raw materials question, in the raw materials economy, is connected to the product that he finally vaporizes into the air; after all, he only considers the very outermost periphery. I have chosen only one example, which seems a bit strange because it is so far away; in other examples, the connection is much more noticeable. The necessary associative connection between the procurement of raw materials and consumption is not noticed at all today.

It is simply the case that this abstract thinking always translates what is actually meant in a practical way in the “key points” into a theoretical one. And I found the most theory, the most bare business mysticism, if I dare use the term, when today's practitioners translate the practical ideas of the “key points” into their language, because they usually think only from a very tiny corner; and everything that is outside of this corner, which they, as routiniers, dominate, becomes blurred for them in a nebulous business mysticism. But that is precisely against the associative principle. The associative principle must work towards the value of the goods being determined by their mutual relationship. However, this can only happen if the most diverse sectors associate, because the more sectors that are directly or indirectly associated, the more sectors tend to work out the economically appropriate price of the goods through their activity. You can't calculate the price, but you can combine economic sectors associatively, and if they combine in such a way that the result of this combination is the number of people who have to be employed in each individual sector in the economy as a whole, according to production and consumption, then it comes out all by itself: you give me your boots for so many hats, which I give you. - Money is then only the mediator. But behind what is mediated by money, however much money is inserted as an intermediate product, there is still the value of the boot that determines the value of the hat, the value of bread that determines the value of butter, and so on. But this only comes about as a result of branch rubbing against branch in associative life. To believe that associations can only be established between producers in one branch is to fail to recognize reality. We shall see what that means next time, the day after tomorrow. Association is the union, the uniting, so that this uniting can produce that common exponent which then lives in the price. That is the living development of economic life, and only in this way does this economic life come close to a proper satisfaction of human needs. This can only happen when people place themselves with full interest in economic life, not just asking: What are the interests of my industry? What do I acquire in my industry? How do I employ the people in my industry? - This can only happen when people care about: How my industry must relate to the other industries, so that the mutual values of goods are determined in the right way?

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, it is not just a cliché when I say that it is a matter of changing the way we think. Anyone who believes that they can get ahead by continuing to bubble along in the old way of thinking is only leading people further into decadence. We must believe today that we really do need to relearn most of all in economic life.

So I'll talk about that the day after tomorrow.

Roman Boos: It should be noted that today's lecture will be followed by a discussion, and that it will also be necessary to have a further discussion on specific economic questions after this lecture in a smaller group.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! It has already been said that these two lectures or discussions, Sunday and today, are essentially taking place at the request of individual circles and that the main purpose is to say a few words in response to certain questions and requests that have been expressed. Today, after I mentioned a few preliminary remarks on Sunday, I will therefore address the specific questions and requests that have been put forward. First of all, the problem of associations in economic life seems to be causing a few headaches for many people. I would like to say something about this in general terms.

You see, my dear attendees, when you think practically, it is always a matter of considering the very nearest circumstances and taking the point of application for your actions from these very nearest circumstances. Just consider how little fruitfulness there is in imagining all kinds of beautiful, theoretical images of the situations we are facing today, of this or that association and of everything that should or should not be done in such associations. Once you have discussed such matters at length and have formulated all kinds of fine utopian ideas, you can confidently go home and believe that you have done a great deal to solve the social question; but you have not actually done much. What is needed is to intervene in what is immediately at hand. We are, after all, dealing with specific economic conditions, and we have to ask ourselves: what are the most urgent things to be done? And then we have to try to bring about the possibility of intervening in these most important things. Then it will be much better to move forward – which, given the circumstances, really must be very rapid if it is not to be too late – than to come up with all kinds of utopian schemes or to raise questions that are no less utopian. However, we also have to recognize to a certain extent the underlying causes of the great damage of the present. And then, with a certain overview of how these problems have arisen, we may be more likely to muster enthusiasm for the next necessary step than we are for all kinds of utopian phrases. And here I am now in a position to tie in with one of the questions that, incidentally, recurs among the 39 questions – it is the question:

How can we not only carry the impulse of threefolding into the rural population, but how can we specifically think about agriculture as such in terms of the threefolding of the social organism?

Now, no one will come to terms with this thinking who does not see the radical difference in the whole way of production, in all economic contexts, between agriculture and industry. It is necessary to see this because, before the world war catastrophe struck, we were stuck in a completely materialistic, completely capitalist way of thinking - it was, so to speak, international capitalist thinking and and because, precisely, a departure in the direction conditioned by capitalism and which capitalism will continue to pursue, because precisely in that an ever-widening divergence of the agricultural and industrial enterprises must emerge. Agriculture, by the very nature of its being, is incapable of fully participating in the capitalist economic order. Don't misunderstand me; I am not saying that if capitalist thinking became general, agriculture would not also participate in capitalist thinking; we have seen to what a high degree agriculture has participated in capitalist thinking and action. But it would be destroyed in its essence, and it would no longer be able to intervene in the appropriate way in the whole economic process. That which is most eminently suited in economic life, not only to develop in a capitalist way, but which tends to lead to outright over-capitalism – please allow me to use this word, people today will understand it – that is, to assume a complete indifference to the way it works, even to the product of labor, and to be concerned only with acquiring something: that is industry; industry carries quite different forces within it than agriculture. This can only be understood by someone who has really taken a long, hard look at how it is quite impossible to transition to large-scale capitalist agriculture as it is the case in industry. If agriculture is really to be properly integrated into the economy as a whole, then – simply because of what has to happen in agriculture – a certain connection between the human being and the whole of production, the nature of production, and thus all that is to be produced in agriculture, is necessary. And a large part of what is needed for production, if it is to be produced in a truly rational way, requires the most intense interest of those who work in agriculture. It is quite impossible for something like that absurdity to arise within agriculture – it is an absurdity that I will describe in a moment – that absurdity, for example, that has always been held up when you have had to discuss with the proletariat in recent decades. You see, the absurdity I mean is the following.

As I have often related, I was a teacher at a workers' training school for many years. This brought me into contact with the people of the proletariat, and I had the opportunity to discuss a lot with them, and also to get to know everything that was there in terms of psychological forces. But certain things, brought forth by the whole development of modern times, simply lived as an absurdity precisely within the proletarian endeavors. Suppose that, as a rule, the proletarians' deputies rejected the military budget. But in the moment when, in the discussion, the proletarians were reproached: Yes, you are against the military budget, but you still let yourselves be employed or hired by the cannon manufacturers as workers; you still fabricate with the same state of mind as anywhere else – they did not understand that, because that was none of their business. The quality of what they produced was none of their business; they were only interested in the amount of their wages. And so the absurdity arose that on the one hand they manufactured cannons, that they never went on strike anywhere because of the quality of what they produced, but at most because of wages or something else, but on the other hand, out of an abstract party line, they fought the military budget. Combating the military budget should have led to the production of no cannons, according to the laws of the triangle. And if they had done that, for example, at the beginning of the century, much of what happened from 1914 onwards could have been avoided. Then you have, regardless of whether they are capitalists or proletarians who participate in any kind of production, absolute indifference to the quality of what they are working on; but the whole organization of industry depends on that. This is not possible in agriculture; it would simply not work in agriculture if there were such indifference towards what is being worked on. And where this indifference has occurred, where agriculture has been infected, I would say, by the industrial way of thinking, it withers away. It withers away in such a way that it gradually takes on the wrong position in the whole of economic life.

What is actually happening there? The following is actually happening to what I have called the original cell of economic life: with agriculture on the one hand and industry on the other, and with agriculture by its very nature constantly resisting capitalization, while industry, on the other hand, strives towards over-capitalization, a complete falsification is taking place, a real falsification of the original economic cell. But because the products have to be exchanged – because, of course, the industrial workers have to eat and the agricultural workers have to clothe themselves or have to be consumers of industry in some other way – because the products have to be exchanged, a counterfeit arises quite radically in the exchange of agricultural products and industrial products. This economic unit cell, which in a healthy economy simply consists of everyone having to receive as much for a product they have produced – if you include everything else they have to receive, which is, so to speak, the expenses and so on – as they need to satisfy their needs to produce an equivalent product. I have often hinted at this by saying, in a trivial way, that a pair of boots must be worth as much as all the other products - be they physical or intellectual - that the shoemaker needs, that he needs in order to make another pair of boots. An economic life that does not determine the price of boots by some kind of calculation, but that tends to the fact that this price emerges by itself, such an economic life is healthy. And then, when economic life is really healthy through its associations, through its mergers, as I characterized them the day before yesterday, then money can also be inserted in between, then no other means of exchange is needed, then money can be inserted as a matter of course, because money then quite naturally becomes the right representative between the individual products. But in recent times, on the one hand, agriculture, by its very nature, increasingly resisted capitalization – it was, of course, capitalized, but it resisted it, and that was precisely the corrupting factor – and, on the other hand, other hand, industry was striving towards over-capitalism, it was never possible for any agricultural product to be priced in such a way that it would have corresponded to an industrial product in the way I have just characterized the economic primordium. On the contrary, it became more and more apparent that the price level for the industrial product was different from what it should have been. As a result of this price level of the industrial product, money, which had now become independent, became too cheap, thereby disrupting the whole relationship between what should have come from agriculture to the industrial worker and from the industrial worker to agriculture.

Therefore, the first thing that is opposed is associations that are formed precisely between agriculture and various branches of industry. Certainly, this is the first, I would say most abstract principle, that the associations consist of different sectors. These associations will work best when they are formed between agriculture and industry, and in such a way that the creation of such associations actually leads to efforts being made towards a corresponding price structure. But now you cannot do much in associations that would first have to be created, of course – this would soon become apparent. If associations could be created in such a way that industrial enterprises were linked together with agricultural enterprises, and if the matter were handled so cleverly that they could supply each other, then some things would immediately become apparent – I will mention the conditions under which this can happen in a moment; some things can of course be done immediately.

But what is necessary first? Yes, my dear attendees, it is first necessary to be able to establish something like this in a truly rational and meaningful way. Let me give you a concrete example. In Stuttgart, the “Der Kommende Tag” has been founded. The “Der Kommende Tag” naturally proceeds from its idea, which is to be given by the principles, by the impulses of the threefold social order. It would therefore have the primary task of introducing the associative principle between agriculture and industry, to the extent that the association of mutual purchasers would actually [influence prices] by turning those who are consumers in some areas into producers in others. In this way, a great deal could be achieved in a relatively short time in establishing a truly correct price. But take the coming day in Stuttgart: it is quite impossible to appear reasonable now, for the simple reason that you cannot purchase all goods independently because they would come up against today's corrupted state legislation everywhere. Nowhere is it possible to produce what is economically necessary because the state is opposed to it everywhere. Therefore, the first thing to do is to realize that strong associations must first be created that are as popular as possible and that can thoroughly prevent state intervention in all areas of economic life in the broadest circles. Above all, every economic action must be able to be based on purely economic considerations.

Now, state thinking is so strongly ingrained in our present humanity that people do not even notice how they basically long for the state everywhere. For decades I have repeatedly characterized this by saying: The greatest longing of modern man is actually to go through the world with a police officer on the right and a doctor on the left. That is actually the ideal of the modern human being, that the state provides both for him. To stand on one's own two feet is not the ideal of the modern human being. But above all, we must be able to do without the police and the doctor provided by the state. And until we take this attitude on board, we will not make any progress.

Now, however, all those institutions are in place that do not allow us to get close to the people who come into consideration for such an education of associations. Take one of the last great products of capitalism, take the one out of which the strongest obstacles for our threefolding movement have arisen, apart from the lethargy and corruption of the big bourgeoisie: that is the trade union movement of the proletarians. This trade union movement of the proletarians, ladies and gentlemen, is the last decisive product of capitalism, because here people join together purely out of the principles, purely out of the impulses of capitalism, even if it is supposedly to fight capitalism. People join together without regard to any concrete organization of economic life; they join together in industries, metalworkers' associations, book printers' associations, and so on, merely to bring about collective bargaining and wage struggles. What do such associations do? They play at being the state in the economic sphere. They completely introduce the state principle into the economic sphere. Just as the production cooperatives – the associations formed by the producers among themselves – are opposed to the principle of association, so too are the trade unions. And anyone who really wants to study the development of the present-day revolutions, which are so sterile, so barren, so corrupt, without prejudice, should take a closer look at trade union life and its connection with capitalism. By this I do not just mean the capitalist affectations that have already been drawn into trade union life, but I mean the whole intergrowth of the union principle with capitalism.

This brings me to what is now certainly necessary in a certain sense. The day before yesterday I characterized the associations: they go from sector to sector, they go from consumer to producer. This is how the connections between the individual sectors arise, because it is always the case that whoever is the consumer of something is also a producer at the same time; it all goes hand in hand. It is only a matter of beginning to associate. As I mentioned the day before yesterday, it is best to start by bringing together consumers and producers in the most diverse fields and then, as we have seen today, begin to form associations primarily with what is close to agriculture and what is pure industry. I do not mean an industry that still extracts its own raw materials; that is closer to agriculture than an industry that is already a complete parasite and only works with industrial products and semi-finished products and so on. One can get quite practical there. If one is willing and has sufficient initiative, one can start forming these associations. But above all, we need to recognize that the associative principle is the real economic principle, because the associative principle works towards prices and is independent of the outside world in determining them. If the associations extend over a sufficiently large territory and over related economic areas, over areas related to some economic branch, then a great deal can be achieved. You see, the only thing that hinders progress is that when you start forming an associative life today, you immediately encounter people's displeasure at associative formations in the outside world; you can notice this in the most diverse fields. People just don't realize what things are actually based on. Therefore, allow me to come back to an example that we have already practiced ourselves. It is, of course, an example where one has to work economically with intellectual products, so to speak, but in other areas we were not allowed to work.

Now, you see, that is the peculiarity of our Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, as I have already mentioned. At least at first it works in complete harmony with the associative principle, because of course it has to connect with printers and so on in many ways, and so it enters into other economic areas. This makes it difficult to achieve anything drastic, but it can serve as a prime example. All that is needed is for what is being carried out in it to be extended to other sectors, and for the associative principle to be further expanded. And the first step is to gather together those who are interested. For example, if someone were to set about gathering a thousand people who would agree to buy their bread from a particular baker, I would specify a certain number. So it was that in the Anthroposophical Society — which of course was not founded merely for this purpose, but everything also has its economic side — so it was that in the Anthroposophical Society the people came together who were the consumers of these books, and so we never had to produce with competition in mind, but we only produced those books that we knew for sure would be sold. So we did not needlessly employ printers and paper makers and so on, but we only employed as many workers as were necessary to produce the quantity of books that we knew would be consumed. Thus, goods were not unnecessarily thrown onto the market. This really does establish an economic rationality within the limits of book production and book sales, because unnecessary work is avoided. I have already pointed out that otherwise you print editions, throw them onto the market, and then they come back again - so much unnecessary paper production work is done, so many unnecessary typesetters are employed and so on. The fact that so much unnecessary work is done is what destroys our economic life, because there is no sense of working together rationally through associations, so that production actually knows where it is selling its products.

Now, do you know what will disappear? You have to think this through: what will disappear is competition. If you can determine the price in this way, if you can really determine the price by combining the industries, then competition ceases. It is only necessary to support this cessation of competition in a certain way. And it can be supported by [the various industries forming associations]. Of course, there has always been a need for people in the same industries to join forces; but this joining together of people in the same industry actually loses its economic value because, by not having to compete in the free market, it no longer has the necessity to undercut prices and the like. Then, however, the associations, which are essentially based from industry to industry, will be permeated by those associations, which we could then call cooperatives again. These associations, however, need no longer have any real economic significance; they will increasingly drop out of actual economic life. If those who manufacture the same product join forces, that will be all well and good, but it will be a good opportunity for more intellectual interests to develop, for people who work from common lines of thought to get to know each other, for them to have a certain moral connection. Those who think realistically can see how quickly this could be done: the associations of the same industry would be relieved of the burden of setting prices, which would be determined solely by the associations of the unequal industries. I would like to say that the moral aspect would be incorporated into the associations of the same goods, and this would be the best way to create a bridge to the spiritual organization of the three-pronged social organism. But such associations, which have arisen purely out of the capitalist economic system, such as the trade unions, must above all disappear as quickly as possible.

I was recently asked by someone who is involved in economic life what should actually be done now, because it is really very difficult to think of anything to somehow have a favorable effect on the rapidly declining economic life. I said: Yes, if they continue in this way at the relevant government agencies, which are of course still decisive for economic life – and today are more decisive than ever – if they continue in this way, then it will certainly continue into ruin. – Because what would be necessary today? What would be necessary is that those who should gradually work their way out of citizenship to become members of economic associations would be less concerned with the direction that could be seen in Württemberg, for example, where there was a socialist ministry. Yes, especially at the time when we were particularly active, these people sometimes promised that they would come. They did not come. Why? Yes, they were always excused because they had cabinet meetings. You could only ever say to these people: If you sit down together, you can plot whatever you want, but you will not help social life. Ministers and all those who now held lower positions, from ministers downwards, would not have belonged in the cabinets at that time, but everywhere in the people's assemblies, in order to find the masses in this way and work among them; those who had something to teach and do would have belonged among the workers every evening. In this way, we could win the people over, and the trade unions would gradually disappear in a reasonable way. And they must disappear, because only when the trade unions, which are purely workers' associations, disappear will association be able to take place, and it does not matter whether someone today tends towards the direction of the trade union or the employees' association or even the capitalist association of a particular branch - they all belong together, they belong in associations. That is what matters: that we work above all to eliminate the things that tear people apart.

You see, that is the greatest harm we have today. It is quite impossible today to somehow introduce into the rest of the world what is reasonable, especially in economic life. I told you that the Coming Day simply comes up against the laws of the state at every turn; they do not let it do what it is supposed to do. And you see, the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, how could it work in a sensible way? It was able to work in a charitable way by not employing unnecessary workers, unnecessary typesetters, and so on. It was able to work by turning its nose up at the whole organization of the rest of the book trade, trivially — turned up his nose at all these people who act like a state, turned up his nose, didn't care about that, but only cared about the association between book production and book consumption. Of course, all those who constantly and forcefully demanded that the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press should be different did not consider this. Certainly, today we are faced with something quite different from when the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press could work in this way. It needs to have a broader impact. But it is not possible to shape the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House with its production and its prosperity directly in such a way as to shape something that leads into the ordinary, senseless market economy of book production and distribution; if you found an ordinary publishing house, it cannot be any different. Because the point is that things must first be done differently, what is reasonably pursued cannot be incorporated into today's ordinary economic practice.

What does all this teach us? That it is necessary, above all, to form associations in such a way that they aim to make the world as aware as possible of the need to combat unnecessary work and to establish a rational relationship between consumers and producers. At the moment when it is necessary to step out of a closed circle into the public sphere, that is when the great difficulty arises. For example: it was a matter of course that we had to found our newspaper “Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (Threefold Order of the Social Organism). Yes, but what could this newspaper be if it could stand on the ground that it works economically and is distributed in the same way as the books of the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, that is, that nothing unnecessary would have to be produced! Of course, the corresponding number of subscribers is needed, just the small matter of the corresponding number of subscribers. But as things stand now, all of us who work for the threefold social order newspaper have done unnecessary work, for example in our spiritual production. The distribution of the newspaper today is not enough to prevent this work from being considered wasted in some way. And so I could present it to you in the most diverse fields.

What, then, do we need first of all? And here I come to another class of questions, which also keep coming up: What, then, do we need first of all? Above all, we need the movement for the threefold social order to become strong and effective itself and, above all, to be understood. You see, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed due to the circumstances of the time and the inner essence of the matter, and it is not a coincidence, not some quirk of mine or a few others, that this threefolding movement has grown out of the Anthroposophical Society. If it had grown out of it in the right way, if I could say that the Anthroposophical Society was the right one out of which the threefold social order movement grew, then it would already have developed into something different today. Well, what did not happen can be made up for later. But it must be emphasized that one must first recognize that it would have been possible to work in the right way on the basis of anthroposophy in the field of threefolding. Above all, it would have been necessary to realize how necessary human commitment is for such far-reaching principles - which are practical in the most eminent sense, as described in my “Key Points” - and how human commitment is necessary, a right human commitment. Something like this could have been learned on the soil of the anthroposophical movement. Of course, people resented it when, for example, certain cycles were given only to a prepared number of people, but there were good reasons for this. And if people did not constantly say out of silly vanity that this person may receive a cycle and that person may not, and so on, if all these things were not confused in silly vanity but were understood inwardly, then one would arrive at the right thing. But then one would also have seen at the right time, where it is necessary, how much and how little printing ink can do. It would be good if the threefolding newspaper had 40,000 subscribers today for my sake. But how could it get them? It could only get them if it were helped not by what is the printing ink, but if it were helped by personal intervention, by real personal intervention in the matter, according to the demands of the situation. But that is what has been understood least of all.

You see, I have to touch on this point, but today these points have to be touched on because they are vital questions of threefolding; for example, I gave the lecture to the workers of the Daimler-Werke in Stuttgart. Now, my dear audience, the point was to speak to a very specific group of people who, in their thinking about social conditions, had very specific thoughts and spoke in a very specific language. This lecture was given to these workers and similar workers. It would have been necessary to see this, to understand it and to do it in such a way that one would have spoken to the people from their circumstances. Instead, people today strive to have something that only needs to be said in a certain way to certain people - not, of course, to say one thing to one person and another to another, but to be understood by people - printed as quickly as possible, entrusted to the printing press. And then this printed matter is handed over to quite different people, who now become angry because they do not understand it. This is something that could not be learned from the anthroposophical movement; instead, the opposite was done. One should have learned to recognize the situation and to work from a human point of view. Therefore, it would have been important - and it will continue to be important if things are to move forward and not backward - that as many people as possible would have realized that the time is past when one generally expresses one's opinion as one according to one's own class, social, university-teacher or high-school teacher consciousness, or whatever, that one holds this view, regardless of the audience one speaks to. No, one holds this view regardless of whether one is invited to address an assembly of proletarians and one's lecture, prepared page by page, is placed on the highest possible lectern and one reads or recites it page by page, depending on whether one has memorized it or whether one is invited to address a meeting of Protestant pastors and one speaks the same lecture. This is how we destroy our social life. This is not how we move forward. We do not want to learn the language of the people we are speaking to. But it is precisely important that we learn the language of the people we are speaking to. And that could have been learned in the Anthroposophical Society, where it has always been cultivated, where it was really about achieving just what could be achieved at that moment.

Sometimes it was so grotesque that one could not go further in what had been achieved. For example, let me give you an illustration of what I mean. I was once invited to give an anthroposophical lecture at a spiritualist society in Berlin. Well, of course I did not talk to the people about spiritualism, but about anthroposophy. They listened to it. They listened to it in their own way, of course. I did not speak to the people as I would have spoken to natural scientists, because they would have understood little of me, the spiritists, who had large beer glasses in front of us. What happened then? The audience liked the lecture so much – I am telling you a fact – that they elected me president afterwards. Some Theosophists went with me at the time, they were there and they were terribly afraid, because I could not become president of the Spiritualists' Association. What should happen now? they asked me. I will not go there anymore, I replied. That way the presidency was automatically annulled. But you could talk to these people and they did get something out of it, even if it was only a little at first.

So it is a matter of bringing the real out of the situations if we want to win people over to economic things, economic cooperation today. And we will not get anywhere if such things cannot be realized. We must look at such questions as were raised in a smaller meeting yesterday, where a gentleman who is very much involved in economic life said: Yes, threefolding really is the only way out of the calamities, but it must be understood. Above all, we need the technique of personal agitation to make it understood. We can and must, of course, also have newspapers such as the “Threefolding of the Social Organism”, which must be transformed into a daily newspaper as soon as possible. We must have it, but it means nothing more than yet another amount of wasted labor, if it is not backed by energetic personal action. Such conscious personal action, however, really dares to say that in the future people want something other than police officers and state-stamped doctors, so that they are neither robbed nor sick. There are other ways to ensure that you are neither robbed nor sick than this. So it is mainly a matter of bringing together the leaders of companies and the manual workers, especially in the event of a dissolution of the trade unions, because, after all, the manual workers are in their trade unions on the one hand and the managers are in their associations on the other, and they speak different languages and do not understand each other. You wouldn't believe how different the language is. I can assure you that anyone who does not study the language of the proletarian with an honest intention will only create prejudices against himself if he speaks as a bourgeois to proletarians today, no matter how radical his language may be. On the contrary, he makes things worse if he has no honest desire to really go into the state of mind, into what is in the soul of today's proletarian population. It is not the radical phrases that make the difference, but being inside the matter.

And that brings me to another type of question. For example, I am asked:

Who should be considered when the threefold social order is to be propagated? The wealthy cannot be considered because they have no other aspirations than to preserve their wealth undisturbed.

They do not think of adopting different ideas from those by which they have gained their wealth. Furthermore, they all sleep through the important events of the present; they know nothing about them. At most, they know that the Poles have the upper hand again; they made their plans earlier when the Russians had the upper hand and so on. The fact that what is emerging in the East is not defeated with some Polish victory, the dear bourgeois of Western and Central Europe do not notice that either. And if that which lives in the East cannot be fought from those impulses that lie in the direction of threefolding, it goes into another head; if it is defeated and killed in one form, it will arise again in a different, new form. So the question is, in a sense, rightly posed; it is true that the propertied classes are hardly being considered, and the proletariat, the proletarians, as it has been shown, do not want to know anything about it at first. But, ladies and gentlemen, we do not need to raise this question at all; instead, we need only try to do the right thing in the direction I have just indicated and really get to know what is there, not sleepwalk past the present. What do the bourgeois as a rule know about what goes on in the trade unions? They know nothing about it. Yes, the most ordinary phenomenon of today is this: as a bourgeois you pass a worker on the street, and actually you pass him in such a way that you have no idea of the context in which you stand with him. The point is that we have done our duty in the direction of progress, as I have now indicated, then the essentials will be found. And the point is, of course, that today, when we are already able to develop concrete efforts, we call the associative principle into life wherever we can, and that we do everything we can to dissolve trade union life and create associative federations between company managers and workers, the employees. If we can work towards the dissolution of trade union life, we can do many other things. Above all, we can strengthen the Federation for the Tripartite Order of the Social Organism on our own initiative. Of course, by “us” I mean all those sitting here, not just the members of the Anthroposophical Society — among whom there are those who still say today: “The real anthroposophist must be aloof from political life; he can only deal with political life if his profession makes it necessary. This does happen, there are such egotists, and they still call themselves Anthroposophists, believing that they are developing an especially esoteric life by meeting with a small number of people in a sect-like manner and satisfying their soul lust by indulging in all kinds of mysticism.

(Applause)

Dear attendees, this is nothing more than unkindness organized in a sect-like way; it is merely talk of human love, while the former has emerged precisely from human love, that is, from the innermost principle of anthroposophical work. What is to be expressed in the threefold social order is what matters, and to understand these things today is infinitely more important than poring over every detail. Because, my dear attendees, these questions, which will be very specific questions, will arise the day after tomorrow in a completely different way than we could ever have imagined, once we have helped some institution or other to get off the ground that really contributes something real to the emancipation of economic life from state life. Only then will the tasks arise.

We do not need to ask questions based on today's views, for example, how the people from the spiritual organization will arrange the transfer of capital. Just let something happen to bring about the threefold order, just let something energetic come into being, then you will see what significance something like this will have, as compared to what can be asked as a question today. Today, of course, when you look at the spiritual organism, that is, the sum of the lower and higher schools, and ask questions about individual issues, you are asking the questions in relation to a state-corrupted institution. You must first wait to see what questions can be asked when the emancipation of spiritual life has taken place. Then things will turn out quite differently than they do today. And so it is also in economic life. The questions that need to be asked are only just emerging. Therefore, it is not very fruitful to talk in general terms about associations and so on today, and it does not lead to much if you want to get an idea of how one association should really be linked to another. Just let those economic associations arise within which one must then work without state aid, I also mean in the spiritual without state aid, because then the right questions will arise, because then one must work on one's own, then one must think economically so that things can work at all. And that will be of the utmost importance for economic progress.

Just think what would have happened if these things had been understood at an important moment in modern economic life; at the point where transport grew as a result of the railways growing more and more, modern people declared themselves economically impotent and handed over the railways to the state. If the railways had been administered by the economic body, something different would have come of it than what has come of it under the interests of the state, with the greater part of it coming under its fiscal interests. The most important things for economic life have been neglected; they must not be neglected any longer; the concrete questions will arise by themselves. People have forgotten how to think economically because they believed that if something is missing in economic life, then they should elect the appropriate representatives, who will then bring it up in parliament and the ministers will make a law. But people are involved. They will complain, however, if the state does not take care of it – apparently, of course, only then.

From such backward-looking views of progress, I would say, everything that lives in the following question also emerges:

If intellectual life becomes free, will not the Catholic Church occupy a particularly favorable position? Is it not better to tame it with the state?

So far, the greatest damage has been done from the other side, from the favoring of the Catholic Church by the state. In short, these things look quite different when one is really inside what is being brought about by the three-part social organism, which we must first work towards, so that we do not take the third step before the first.

Now, questions arise that are very interesting, of course, because they are obvious, but, my dear attendees, they take on a different aspect than one might think when faced with the impulse of threefolding. For example, someone asked how, in the threefolded social organism, anthroposophy would acquire the money for the Goetheanum, because they believe that capital would not be available. Well, my dear audience, I am quite reassured about this, because the moment we have a free spiritual life, the situation with Anthroposophy will be quite different altogether, simply because of the nature of this free spiritual life, and we can do without the beggar principle on which we unfortunately depend today and to which we have to appeal in the strongest terms. But within a truly free, that is, healthy spiritual life, I would not be at all worried about building a Goetheanum.

Nor has it ever caused me any headaches when the question arises again and again, and that is this:

If the threefold social organism were already in existence, there would also be people in the spiritual organization who would decide in the right way: is this a brilliant artist, whose pictures must be distributed and sold?

If the threefold social organism were already in existence, I can only say that something would have to be created first to get it off the ground. But people think: if it were only there – there are so many artists who, in their opinion, are so terribly talented, so terribly gifted, so terribly ingenious – will there not be a great danger that the number of unrecognized geniuses will increase more and more? As I said, this matter has never really troubled me, because a free spiritual life will be the very best basis for bringing these talents to bear. And above all, you only have to bear in mind that no unnecessary work is done in the threefold social organism. You see, people do not even consider what we will gain in free time when unnecessary work is no longer done; in comparison, the ample unoccupied time of our rentiers and our idlers is a trifle; only with them it extends to the whole of life. But for that which basically cannot flourish if it is paid for, there would be plenty of time in the tripartite social organism to develop it. You can take what I am about to say as an abstraction, but I can only say that you should first try to help the tripartite social organism to get on its feet and you will then see that art will also be able to develop within it in a way that is entirely appropriate to people's abilities.

Dear attendees, I had to divide the questions more by category, because after all, it is not possible to answer all 39 questions in detail. Some questions are only of interest to people because they basically cannot imagine that certain things look quite different, for example, in a free spiritual life. So the question is raised whether the immoral outbursts of the cinema should be allowed to flourish in the threefold social organism, or whether the State should not intervene to prevent people from seeing such immoral films. Those who ask such questions do not know a certain deeply social law. Every time you believe that you can fight something, let's say the immorality of the movies, through state power, you fail to take into account that by such an abolition of immoral cinema plays – if people's instincts to watch such plays exist at all – you divert these instincts to another area, perhaps a more harmful one. And the call for legislation against immoral art – even if it is only in the cinema – expresses nothing other than the powerlessness of the intellectual life to take control of these things. In a free intellectual life, the intellectual life will have such power that people will not go to the cinema out of conviction. Then it will also be unnecessary to prohibit immoral films by the state, because they will be too stupid for people. But with what we bring into the world today as science, we naturally do not cultivate those instincts that flee from immoral films.

You would find many questions answered if you were to look more closely at the literature on the threefold social order. I have tried to pick out at least the most important questions. I will mention just one more, the twenty-eighth:

Would it not be possible to contribute to the popularization of both anthroposophy and the threefold social order by not using terms that are not understood by the broadest sections of society.

I can only say: do it as much as you can, and you will see that you can do it to a high degree. But I think you have to take more what the whole tendency of such a discussion is today, rather than the details; and this tendency is to point out that this impulse for threefolding is a thoroughly practical one. And so we should not just chat and discuss what the details will look like in this or that aspect of the threefolded social organism, but above all we should understand this threefold social organism and really spread this understanding, carry it into everything, because we need people who have an understanding for it. And then, when we have these people, we only need to call on them for the details. But we must have them first. We must first gain a healthy following – but as quickly as possible, otherwise it will be too late.

Well, this is what I have wanted to say for a long time, because more than a year ago I tried to write an appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World”. It was certainly understood, as shown by the large number of signatures. But those who work for its realization remain a small number. The Appeal should have become better known, and the core points should have become known quite differently, namely through the work of individuals. You don't make a movement, as we would need to today, by just sending out writings, by just sending out brochures, by just sending out principles; you make it in a completely different way. The Federation for the Threefold Order of the Social Organism must have life in it; above all, it must be a union of people. It does not matter whether we send this or that, if it is just sending. Above all, care must be taken to ensure that within the Federation for the Threefold Order, no bureaucratic principle or the like is allowed to arise. It is necessary to distribute our literature and our newspapers, but at the same time, work must be done humanely. It must be understood that we are working towards transforming the newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” into a daily newspaper as soon as possible. But above all, it is necessary to realize that our institutions must flourish.

Dear attendees, if things continue as they are, with us constantly stuck in the difficulties we are in today, where we don't really know how to continue the Waldorf school, how we should found more schools like this and how we should actually complete this Goetheanum, if we do not take hold of what people can really muster in terms of understanding for such things on all sides — then of course it will not continue. We need understanding, but not an understanding that only sees idealism, that only admires the ideas and puts its hands firmly on its pockets because the ideas are too great, too spiritual, for it to want to let dirty money near them. Money is kept in one's pocket and ideas are admired, but ideas are too pure to be defiled by spending dirty money on them. I meant what I said figuratively, but here it is a matter of learning to think practically and then also to bring it to practical deeds.

I said when the Waldorf School was founded: It's nice, the Waldorf School is nice; but just because we founded the Waldorf School, we have not done enough in this area. At most, we have made a very first start, just the beginning of a beginning. We have only really founded the Waldorf School when we have laid the foundations for ten new such Waldorf Schools in the next quarter. Only then does the Waldorf School make sense. — In the face of the current social situation in Europe, it simply makes no sense to found a single Waldorf School with four or five hundred or, for that matter, a thousand children. Only if the founding of Waldorf Schools is followed by more, if it is followed everywhere, does it make sense – only what arises out of the right practical attitude makes sense. If those who are enthusiastic about the ideas of Waldorf education cannot even develop enough understanding to realize that it is necessary to fight for independence from the state, to do everything in their power to ensure that the state releases the school, you do not also have the courage to strive for the school's independence from the state, then the whole Waldorf school movement is a waste of time, because it only makes sense if it grows into a free spiritual life.

In addition to this, we need what I would call an international effort for all school systems, but an international effort that does not just go around the world spreading principles about how schools should be run – that is already happening as funding is being provided for such schools. What we need is a world school association in all civilized countries, so that the largest possible sum of funds can be raised as quickly as possible. Then it will be possible to create, on the basis of these funds, the beginnings of a free spiritual life. Therefore, wherever you go in the world, try to work to ensure that the work is not done merely through all kinds of idealistic efforts, but that it is done through such an understanding of the freedom of the spiritual life that money is really raised on the broadest scale for the establishment of free schools and colleges in the world. What will be the flowering of the spirit in the future must grow out of the fertilizer of the old culture. Just as the fields yield the food that men must consume, so must that which is ripe for transformation into fertilizer be gathered from the old culture, so that one day the fruits of the future's spiritual, political and economic life may flourish from this fertilizer.

Roman Boos: The aim of this evening is to strengthen the awareness of those present and to clarify the idea of what concrete effects of what is intended at the Goetheanum can be expected in the near or distant future. The task should be such that the course should give the participants something to take away, so that everyone has the opportunity to say or know where they can help, where they can actively participate in the work.

The first thing to be discussed is the idea that in the very near future, the spiritual life must be detached with the greatest intensity from the entanglement in the powers of the state. The political states, in the West as well as in the East, are no longer even able to economically maintain the usurped school supervision rights. Schools are to be established over those areas that were not involved in the economic collapse and want to emerge from the spiritual collapse. The idea of a world school association on an international basis was indeed expressed and carried out in a large number of meetings in Holland a few weeks ago. And so today, Dutch friends have promised to share more information about this World School Association. And I would also like to point out in this regard that those gathered here can be trusted to help the World School Association become a reality.

The enterprises founded under Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG were also set up to grow into what are currently unlimited expanses. What grew up as a Stinnes group, for example, has joined forces with the worst of existences; if such a monster were to receive international credit, it would be to the detriment of healthy development. It is therefore necessary to gain a foothold in economic life, to bring into being economic associations that do justice to the international dimension; it is necessary to seek the way forward in international discussions. In order to say something internationally significant, it will be necessary to speak across the divides created by the currency situation, of the future and of the day to come.

We are being accosted from all sides. And so it is an absolute necessity for the continuation of our work in Switzerland and beyond that we are given the opportunity to regularly publish a journal here at the Goetheanum, at least a weekly publication, in which we do not have to continually polemicize and discussions — although this will sometimes be necessary — but in which brief sketches and suggestions could be used to outline what is actually at stake here, and in which the international idea of a world school association or a world economic association, in particular, would have to be expressed again and again. In a sense, here in Switzerland we still have a foundation that we can speak of more clearly and impressively than anywhere else. Otherwise the Goetheanum would have to remain silent if it cannot make itself known in this way. Actually, very few people have come to this course. The Goetheanum itself, as a work of art, as a building, as a physical reality, has not yet been permeated with sufficient intensity. It is becoming necessary to carry out what is to be achieved for the whole world from the Goetheanum.

All those who have the opportunity to help us find the economic basis for such a newspaper are warmly invited to do so. We have to calculate 50,000 francs for one year; we cannot start before then. The reason we cannot start before then is that otherwise we might have to stop the project again after a while. If any of you could help to ensure that the newspaper can be published, you would be doing a great service that could hardly be achieved in any other way under the present circumstances.

Elisabeth Vreede: I would like to say a few words about the 'World School Association'. It is actually more of an appeal than a concrete foundation. The first steps towards the founding of a World School Association have been taken in the Netherlands, in order to get a world-wide response to what would now have to be done, and that is to liberate spiritual life, especially education, and make it independent. The hope has been expressed that this can be done in Holland. On February 27, Dr. Steiner gave a captivating lecture in The Hague on “Educational, Teaching and Practical Life Issues from the Perspective of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science” and drew attention to the necessity of a free spiritual life and of the school's detachment from state authority, which was met with strong applause from the audience. Afterwards, our member, Mr. de Haan, addressed an appeal to those present. As a result, a number of things have happened; people with good reputations have become interested in working for independent schools. Representatives from Switzerland, Germany and England expressed their conviction of the necessity of a world school association and promised to work for the cause in their own countries. A similar thing happened the next day in Amsterdam. But the World School Association was not yet founded, because such a foundation is only of value if it arises from within, so to speak. But we must not draw the conclusion that nothing should be done; rather, the most intensive work is needed to bring about a concrete foundation.

The first thing to be done now is to approach all educated people with a kind of prospectus - they are, after all, fundamentally interested in a free spiritual life; Dr. Steiner has given the guidelines for this. An appeal is to be made to all educated people to join us in providing our movement with the breeding ground and the air it needs to thrive. Since the whole thing started in Holland, I would like to draw attention to the address of Mr. de Haan, Utrecht; he is willing to provide information. From the events of the past few years, enough has emerged to show how important and significant it is, but also how much work will be needed if something like this is to be undertaken. So let us make an appeal that will find an echo throughout the educated world, so to speak.

(Applause)

Josef van Leer: Dear attendees, a few weeks ago the World School Association was discussed for the first time in The Hague and in Amsterdam. However, nothing will come of it if we do not take action immediately. We did have about 150 names that evening in The Hague, but you can't do anything with just names. Our friends in the Netherlands have the good will, but they are too weak.

A little less than ten years ago, similar discussions were held in Berlin, when Baron von Walleen spoke about his experiences on lecture tours in Scandinavia and England and said that it was so difficult to present Dr. Steiner's ideas there; what is today the Anthroposophical Society emerged from these discussions.

If you talk about an independent spiritual life in England today, everyone will say: We don't need one, we have one. That is an abstraction, of course, but that is how it is; as far as the people in England belong to the bourgeoisie, they can educate their children as they wish, they do not need certified teachers. If you have to propagate the World School Association in England, you are dealing with something quite different than in Germany or in Holland or in Switzerland. I believe that Scandinavia, Holland, England — even if it is not neutral, but it does not matter — all the countries that do not belong to the medium-sized states, should join together. In Holland, one has gained plenty of confidence, but the 25 sounding names do not help much. Dr. Steiner gave about ten lectures in Holland, but of the thousands who were there, not three voted in favor of it. It will be difficult to get only these three.

The question was raised: How do we propagate? — It is necessary to work differently for each country. Our friends in Stuttgart know best what to do because they are in the work. I would therefore like to suggest that we people from different countries — America, England, France, Switzerland, Italy — that we sit down together and say this evening: we will do it this way! I would like to propose this right now. Who from all the countries represented here is willing to participate? Let's start with America: Mr. Monges? Mr. Wheeler from England? Miss Wilson from England? Norway, Sweden: Mrs. Ljungquist? Denmark: Mr. Hohlenberg? Finland: Mr. Donner? Russia? From the Netherlands: Mr. Ledebour, Mr. Zagwijn, Mr. Deventer? From France: Mademoiselle Rihouet? Italy: Miss Schwarz? Czechoslovakia and Poland? I would therefore like to suggest that the various people sit down together and consider what is right for their countries, how it should be done, which people should be approached, which people can be given which material. It is possible that the representatives of a particular country are not in a position to make the right decision, but then perhaps together we will be able to find something better.

I would like to put up for discussion whether what I have suggested would be the right starting point.

Roman Boos: It could be very valuable to speak in smaller groups for each area this evening. But I would just like to ask very sincerely that when personalities are chosen, the matter should not be considered in the same way as parliaments or other associations: as a mandate to work like a commission. We should not put off until the evening what should be done during the day: to promote the idea of the World School Association in each individual group. We just have to try to see how what we have to say can be expressed in the other countries.

Johannes Hohlenberg: I would like to report on the work in Denmark regarding the World School Association. Unfortunately, in terms of results, it is not very much, but it may serve as an example for others. In the last fall course, particular emphasis was placed on the fact that everyone who goes back to their country should talk to as many people as possible and spread the idea of the World School Association. All those who were here have probably done what they could.

Now, to my personal experiences: I gave various lectures in Copenhagen, but unfortunately the timing was bad, because a few years ago the state took over almost all schools from the communities. This is a new fact, two or three years old, not yet fully implemented everywhere. Teachers are generally satisfied because their economic and financial situation has improved a lot and, as civil servants, they have the prospect of a pension. The teaching staff is therefore very reluctant to make any changes to these conditions. But on the other hand, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among parents with the school system that exists in Denmark today; parents would be willing to try something new. The main difficulty, however, is financial. It should not be forgotten that state schools are completely free of charge; school lessons, materials and books are free.

The only possible way to establish independent schools would be as in Stuttgart, namely a large factory that takes it all in hand. In Denmark, it is just mainly a financial issue, quite simply! If a way could be found to establish such schools that would not cost more than the state schools, then the children would come and the parents would be very satisfied. I have collected a list of names – there are perhaps no more than 200 of them, so it is still nothing – and I am convinced that if you really do the propaganda, you can find real understanding.

Elisabeth Vreede: You have to do the right thing. As Dr. Steiner explained in Holland, it is not primarily a matter of founding individual schools that can only exist on the side and that can only gain their right to exist by stealth; it is about something much bigger: to really implement a free spiritual life! Today, we have a spiritual life that needs fresh air above all and that will wither without it. In this mood, the demand must arise in public: spiritual life must be liberated!

This does not mean that individual schools, such as the Waldorf School, cannot be founded. But it is not enough to found a school or institute here and there. Legally, they all have a meager existence. They always have a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, whether they are legal or not. Schools that depend on the mercy of the state should not be established.

Our Goetheanum is also a school, a free university. First and foremost, a world school association should be created that would feel the need to support or maintain such institutions as the Waldorf School and the Goetheanum. It is necessary that something concrete is already there. There are also teachers' associations, artists' associations; for them it would be a positive goal to work towards the need for a free spiritual life. The goal must be set higher than just setting up individual schools; everything must be seen on a larger scale so that the larger context is also recognized.

We have heard that in Denmark the teachers are very satisfied because they have become “state teachers” and are better paid. We cannot turn to the teaching profession in general; those who are involved in the matter are often the most dried up and do not have the broad view. This public opinion and mood must arise from a broader base than the teaching profession is or can be. Then the national differences will not carry as much weight as they would otherwise, because that would act as a unifying force. The points of view must be taken from the big picture, so that one encompasses everything that one can experience as a human being in our intellectual life, and elevates it to a different level; otherwise we get stuck in the details too much.

Roman Boos: It would be good if, in the discussion, a position could be taken on the recently asserted claim that Switzerland is a country in which a free

spiritual life can develop fully. Mademoiselle Rihouet has the floor first.

Simone Rihouet: I would just like to express a wish for France, that here at the Goetheanum this international purpose may be fully expressed and that the national may not again triumph over the international. It is striking to see that in France we have exactly the same situation as in Germany regarding the schools. But Swiss teachers, for example, who feel so little compulsion from the state, are not in the same situation as teachers in France and Germany, where the state's influence is so strong that there is already a great need among teachers for liberation and independence in their profession. In France, it will be particularly the student body that will show an understanding for the free spiritual impulses that have been given here. And so, as far as France is concerned – I cannot speak for Germany – I would like to express the wish that a student body should emerge from France that could create an alliance with its colleagues from other countries, an alliance of brotherhood.

Roman Boos: These words from France are all the more warmly welcomed to us because a certain kind of intense fraternization has already arisen on the opposing side. At about the same time that in Germany there was talk of “treason of the fatherland” by Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophists, a similar claim was circulating in the French newspapers, namely that Dr. Steiner's circles were working towards a war of revenge that would last for three years. And in the face of this “League of Nations” of the opposing clans, it will be necessary for an association of people from different nations to form here and work from the Goetheanum.

A German student talks about the attitudes of young people at the universities and the possibility of winning them over to the anthroposophical cause.

Fritz Wullschleger: I would like to speak briefly as a Swiss citizen. It is indeed the case in our country that teachers themselves can exercise a great deal of freedom, for example, in relation to the cantonal government; but they can also exert a great deal of influence on the authorities. If you want to introduce changes in your school, you can request them and they will usually be granted.

Now, I believe that these college courses have a tremendous impact on us. And under this tremendous impact, we can now try to approach our colleagues in conferences and so on and try to create an understanding for the fertilization of the school, at least to make a start in shaping the spiritual life freely. I heard Dr. Steiner's lectures in Basel this spring and – I speak as a teacher – I have so far had the impression that our task is to reshape our teaching as much as possible in the way that anthroposophy demands. Does that mean that we should transfer all our manpower into our schools? No, we should also direct our time and energy and work outwards. We must try to inform the Swiss, perhaps with lectures; we must try to win over the Swiss teacher magazine and, above all, the cantonal teacher magazine. This could perhaps be a start in making a difference in this direction.

Roman Boos: We thank Mr. Wullsch and I would like to take the liberty of adding just a few words to what has been said. In recent years, teacher newspapers in Switzerland have reprinted various articles and reports from our circles, including the excellent essays in the education booklet. But since then, there has not been much interest in the work; there are not many Swiss teachers present at these courses. Imagine if it said in the invitation: “Cantonal Department of Education” – don't you think the hall would be full? These are the small criteria by which one can see whether intellectual life among teachers in Switzerland is truly freely developed.

About a year and a half ago, the teachers of Basel-Stadt were invited by the cantonal education department, and the lectures on educational issues were received with great enthusiasm; a number of school people spoke very enthusiastically about them. Subsequently, a course was set up by the Goetheanum – not by the education department – but there were considerably fewer people there than at the course organized by the education department. And what has grown out of these courses today is, so to speak, nothing. Individual teachers may have taken very great and valuable things from the course, but in social terms, virtually nothing has happened. Why? Because nothing can happen! Because people everywhere are bound by the state. As the student says: we can win every ground, but not the state ground. This can be seen more or less clearly in Switzerland too; because if it were not the case here, we would be making more intensive progress. A long time ago there was a lecture in St. Gallen; and a Swiss teacher came who said: It is quite different for us in Switzerland; we do not have this subservience towards the authorities. We have not been accustomed to censorship and official decrees and so on. And when it was pointed out to him that this was not entirely true, the man replied: Yes, there is a big difference, because we did it voluntarily!

Friedrich Husemann talks about medical education in Germany.

Roman Boos: In order to provide the necessary economic basis for the entire spiritual movement, the two joint-stock companies Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG have been founded in Dornach and Stuttgart. It was intended to say more about these two companies this evening and to give the opportunity to ask questions. But I think it will now be too late to go into it.

Futurum brochures are available in German, French and English, so that everyone has the opportunity to support the cause by subscribing to shares in the manner indicated. You can also contact Mr. Ith at Futurum A. G., who can personally provide you with all the necessary information. It is absolutely necessary in this day and age that we support these economic enterprises with all the strength at our disposal to help them move forward.

Time is getting very late, so that not much more can be debated on the other questions that may still be outstanding. Perhaps someone has something significant to contribute? I would now like to give Dr. Steiner the floor for the final remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: I do not wish to keep you much longer, but I would like to make a few comments, first in connection with what our friend van Leer has proposed here, which is certainly quite commendable and will be, if it leads to the promised goal. I would just like to note that it would be a questionable basis if the matter were to be built on the same foundation as the “covenant” to which [Mr. van Leer] has referred. At that time, work was indeed carried out with a certain zeal in the way Mr. van Leer has roughly outlined today: people sat together in small committees, discussed all sorts of things, what should be done and so on – but then Mr. van Leer made a statement, which is of course a small mistake at first, but which, if it were to continue to have an effect, could lead to a big mistake. It was said, in fact, that the Anthroposophical Society emerged from the work that was so tirelessly carried out that night. No, that is not the case at all: nothing emerged from that night and from that founding of the society! I would like to protect the “restless work of this night” that is intended today from this fate. There was a lot of talk back then about what needed to be done, but nothing came of it. And the mistake that could arise is based on the fact that one might think that something must now be done in the direction indicated by that “covenant”. What was done at that time was that those who were already involved in our anthroposophical work, who were already with us, founded the Anthroposophical Society, quite separately from this covenant. This then developed further, while the “covenant” gradually passed from a gentle sleep into social death, let us say. So, it would be a small mistake! And this must be emphasized, so that the mistakes of that night committee are not repeated in its second edition. That is one thing.

The other point I would like to make, and which Miss Vreede has already mentioned, is that what should be aimed at with the world school association should now really be put on a broad footing and tackled from the outset with a certain courage and a comprehensive view. Our friend Mr. van Leer quite rightly emphasized that the approach to be taken to the free life of the spirit in connection with the threefold social order must be different for the most diverse fields. But this must really be done in such a way that the approach is appropriate for the territories concerned. I myself will always point out that, for example, in England it will be necessary to present things in a way that is appropriate to the English civilization. But one must not overlook the fact that one must thoroughly understand what is imagination in relation to the great human questions of the present and what is reality. One must not, therefore, put the case in such a way as to create the belief that English intellectual life is freer than other countries. And you will see, if you really go through the “key points”, that there is less emphasis on the negative aspect – the liberation of intellectual life from the state – and much less emphasis on it than on the establishment of a free intellectual life in general. And here it will always remain a good word: that it depends on the human being, that it really depends on the spiritual foundations from which the human being emerges, which spiritual foundations are created for his education. It is not so much a matter of emphasizing the negative, but rather of emphasizing the positive. And I need only say this: if intellectual life were formally freed from state control, but everything else remained the same, then this liberation from the state would not be of much use.

The point is that positive spirit, as it has been advocated here this week, as it has been tried to advocate it, that this free spirit be introduced into intellectual life internationally. And then things will happen as they are meant to happen. For example, it is not just the case that a Waldorf school is a truly independent school, that it does not even have a head teacher, but that the teaching body is truly a representative community. The point is not that all measures are taken in such a way that “nothing else” speaks except what comes from the teaching staff itself, that one really has “an independent spiritual community” here, but the point is also that in all countries the spiritual life that has been talked about here all week is missing. And when one hears it emphasized somewhere that “the spiritual life is free in this country” – I am not talking about Switzerland now, I am talking about England – that is another matter. And it is this positive aspect, above all, that is important. It must then be emphasized that this will only exist, of course, if one tries to actually respond to the specific circumstances in the individual countries and territories.

But one must have a heart and mind for what unfree intellectual life has ultimately done in our time. Not in order to respond to what was said here yesterday, but to show the blossoms of human thinking in our present intellectual, moral, and cozy life, I would like to read you a sentence. I do not wish to detain you for long, and I do not wish to speak from the standpoint from which there was such virulent opposition to anthroposophy and the threefold social order here yesterday; but I would like to read a sentence from the brochure that had to be discussed here yesterday. General von Gleich writes about me: “Around the turn of the century, which also marks a turning point in the supersensible world of Anthroposophy, Mr. Steiner, then almost forty years old, was gradually led to Theosophy through Winter's lectures on mysticism.” Now you may ask who this “Herr Winter” is, whom Herr von Gleich cites here as the person through whose lectures I was “converted” to Anthroposophy in Berlin. One can only put forward the following hypothesis: in the preface to those lectures that I gave in Berlin in the winter of 1900/1901, there is a sentence in which I say: “What I present in this writing previously formed the content of lectures that I gave last winter at the Theosophical Library in Berlin.” That 'Mr. Winter' who converted me to Theosophy in 1901/1902 became the 'winter' during which I gave my lectures. You see, I do not want to use the expression that applies to the intellectual disposition of a person who is now called upon to lead the opponents of the anthroposophical movement with it; I do not want to use the expression; but you will certainly be able to use it sufficiently. Today, spiritual life leads to such blossoms of human intellectual activity, through which one could pass in the present day up to the point where one could become a major general.

So one must look at the matter from a somewhat greater depth. Only then will one develop a heart and a mind for what is necessary. And just because the spiritual life must be tackled first of all from the school system, it would be so desirable to found this World School Association, which would not be so difficult to found if the will for it exists. But it must not be a smaller or larger committee, but it must be founded in such a way that its membership is unmanageable. Only then will it have value. It must not – I do not want to give any advice on this, because I have said enough on the subject – it must not, of course, impose any special sacrifices on any individual. It must be there to create the mood for what urgently needs a mood today! – That is something of what I still had to tie in with what has come to light today.

Finally, I must say something that I would rather not say, but which I must say, since otherwise it would not have been touched upon this evening and it might be too late for the next few days, when the pain of departure will probably already be setting in. I must point this out myself. The point is that it is a matter of course that everything that has been said today should be put into practice. But this work only makes sense if we can maintain the Goetheanum as it stands and, above all, can complete it.

Even if things go well with 'Futurum AG' and even if things go well with 'Kommenden Tag' – they will certainly not be any economic support for this Goetheanum for a long time to come, they certainly will not. And the greatest concern — despite all the other concerns that weigh on me today, allow me to speak personally for once — the greatest concern is this: that in the not too distant future it could be the case that we have no economic inflows for this Goetheanum. And that is why it is above all necessary to emphasize that everyone should work towards this, that everyone who can contribute something should do so, so that this building can be completed! That is what is needed above all: that we may be put in a position, through the friends of our cause, to be able to maintain this Goetheanum, to be able above all to finish building this Goetheanum. And that, as I said, is my great concern. I must say so here, because after all, what would it help if we could do as much propaganda as we like and we might have to close this Goetheanum in three months from now? This, too, is one of the social concerns that, in my opinion, are connected with the general social life of the present day. And I had to emphasize this concern because the facts on which it is based should not be forgotten; only this makes it possible to strengthen the movement that emanates from this Goetheanum.

We can see the intellectual foundations on which those who are now taking up their posts against us are fighting. That will be a beginning. We must be vigilant, very vigilant, because these people are clever. They know how to organize themselves. What happened in Stuttgart is a beginning, it is intended as a beginning. And only then will we be able to stand up to them if we spark such idealism – I would like to say it again this time – that does not say: Oh, ideals are so terribly high, they are so lofty, and my pocket is something so small that I do not reach into it when it comes to lofty ideals. – It must be said: Only idealism is true that also digs into its pockets for the ideals!

Dear fellow students, dear attendees! First of all, I would like to address the esteemed speakers who were kind enough to greet me in such a friendly manner. I assume that this greeting also applies to the spiritual matter that is to be represented here in the course of this college event.

In response to these greetings, I would like to say that I am deeply gratified by them for two fundamental reasons that inspire me in all that I represent of what I call anthroposophical spiritual science. Of course, this anthroposophical spiritual science is still much attacked today, but it will be able to go the way it is meant to go through its inner strength if, among other things, two contemporary forces in particular stand by its side. And it is precisely from these two contemporary forces that your friendly greetings come. Firstly, from those who want to devote themselves to the cultivation of scientific life, and secondly, from the youth. Now, I am deeply convinced that, among the many different conditions that must be met if anthroposophical spiritual science is to go its way, two things are needed above all. The first is that people learn to recognize that this spiritual science, for its part, wants to work out of the strictest scientific spirit. And because it wants to do that, this welcome is particularly valuable to me. And secondly, I am deeply convinced that — however some people who are in the present life may still think about this anthroposophical spiritual science today — what is even more important is how young people think about it. For it is on what young people bring into human development in the coming decades that it will depend on whether we find our way out of the numerous forces of decline and into the forces of awakening. Working towards this goal should also be the aim of anthroposophical spiritual science. It must therefore be particularly satisfying for it to be welcomed by young people. And believe me – believe it, my honored greeters, and believe it, all of you sitting here: the anthroposophical spiritual science will never shy away from justified criticism, from what is above all a completely critical confrontation with itself. On the contrary, it will derive the greatest satisfaction from it when this criticism arises out of a real urge for knowledge and out of the urge to work practically on the goals of human development. Anthroposophical spiritual science is at the beginning of its development; it needs true and honest criticism. It does not need blind trust and cannot really use blind trust. It needs thinking evaluators. May these thinking judges grow up from the youth.

Therefore, because this is my dearest wish, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the kind words that have just been dedicated to me as the representative of this anthroposophical spiritual science. Thank you very much for that and let me express the wish that what will be presented here in a rather makeshift way in the course of this week, i.e. in a relatively short time, may at least to some extent correspond to your prerequisites in an inspiring way. These prerequisites are certainly such that they are in line with what has just been said, otherwise the event could not have taken place.

And in particular, I must express my heartfelt thanks for the kind invitation extended to me by the student body as a whole. I take this as an expression of the fact that more and more people are realizing that anthroposophical spiritual science, as I represent it, is the opposite of any sectarian endeavor, that it is also the opposite of anything that appeals to any narrow-minded belief or something similar. Therefore, I consider it a source of deep satisfaction to me that the general student body here in Darmstadt has accepted the invitation issued by the special anthroposophical groups. And for this invitation, let me express my heartfelt thanks to all those who have taken part.

Now, dear fellow students, dear attendees, what is called anthroposophical spiritual science today is often judged by wider circles from points of view that could actually be done away with by considering the starting point from which this anthroposophical spiritual science originated. This starting point was certainly not a sectarian one, not a religious confession in the narrower sense of the time, or the like - although the religious denominations, for their part, will have every reason to engage with this anthroposophical spiritual science. The starting point was an examination of the scientific thinking of our more immediate present, the present that roughly encompasses the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.

The scientific way of thinking has not only taken hold within science itself, but has also conquered a wider sphere of human thought, actually only in recent times. It has been rightly emphasized by insightful minds that the luminaries of modern scientific thinking – let us say Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, even Kepler himself – started out with the followers of an old belief in revelation, as they found it within their own time. The great confrontation between the scientific way of thinking and the great questions of world view only really occurred in the course of the 19th century. And this scientific way of thinking has also taken hold of what is now called “spiritual science”, not on the basis of anthroposophy but in today's official science. It has taken hold of history, for example.

If we look at the development of science on the one hand and the development of historical views on the other, then it must be said that anyone who, with all seriousness and from the inner experiences of the whole human being, the full human being, experienced the last stage of development of our spiritual life at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the twentieth century encountered, as it were, two cornerstones; two cornerstones, one of which once caused a great stir but is now almost forgotten, that is, forgotten from the point of view that it is no longer consciously remembered. But it lives on in the way in which questions of world view are treated today. This cornerstone is the once famous “Ignorabimus” – “We will never know” – of Du Bois-Reymond from the 1870s. Du Bois-Reymond, who was a representative natural scientist of his time, wanted to strictly define the boundaries of scientific thought, and he concluded the debates in which the natural scientist's ignorabimus was contained with the words: Natural science will never be able to fathom the essence of the material itself, that is, the essence of that which underlies the external world, the world that can be observed by our senses and dissected by our minds. In the face of this world, one must utter the ignorabimus — Du Bois-Reymond believed — because anything that would go beyond the indicated limits would lead to supernaturalism. This would lead to a kind of supersensible research — Du Bois-Reymond believes, by presenting the sentence in a monumental way, that where supernaturalism begins, science ends.

So the great question that stood at the starting point of anthroposophical thinking and observation was: Is it really the end of all science where supersensible research should begin, or, as Du Bois-Reymond believes, supernaturalism?

But that is only one of the cornerstones. The other cornerstone was provided not by a natural scientist but by a historian, the famous Leopold von Ranke. And again it was an Ignorabimus, a “We cannot and will not know!” Ranke, the great historian, tried with all objectivity to find his way into the course of human development that can be traced through historical documents. And he stated that what we see as the most far-reaching event in the course of the development of the earth, the event of the founding of Christianity, the appearance of Christ Jesus in the course of human development, reaches into this historical becoming. Ranke does not deny that this event was world-shaking in historical evolution; but he asserts that the historical approach must stop at the cause of the origin of Christianity, just as Du Bois-Reymond asserted that science must stop at the supersensible. That which flowed into historical development through the founder of Christianity – says Ranke, for example – belongs to the primal elements of historical becoming – so he expresses it – which methodical historical research cannot approach. Of course, many such primal elements could be pointed out. I have only emphasized the most important one for the Western world in the sense of Leopold von Ranke. That is the other cornerstone. It was erected for the reason that in the course of the 19th century, the education that scientific humanity has received over the last four to five centuries has also developed its powers in other scientific considerations. And even if Leopold von Ranke was far from combining his own historical perspective with natural science, it must be said that natural science, with its great and mighty triumphs and its rightful place in the modern intellectual development of humanity, has also asserted its authority in other fields. These had to, if I may say so, “resemble” it. And so, in essence, Leopold von Ranke's ignorabimus is nothing other than the historical answer to Du Bois-Reymond's scientific ignorabimus.

A confrontation with what was alive in modern spiritual life and – because spiritual life is, after all, at the basis of all human cultural and civilizational development – with all of modern human life: such a confrontation with these two cornerstones stands at the starting point of what anthroposophical spiritual science wanted to become: a confrontation with the scientific way of thinking. And I say explicitly: with the scientific way of thinking. For when this starting point is mentioned, it is not a matter of going into individual scientific results – which have already been so gratefully addressed in the lectures that have been given so far – but rather of looking at the way way in which the scientific researcher wants to relate to reality, and to look in particular at what one has as a human being in terms of one's own human development in the present in the practice of scientific research or even just in the appropriation of scientific results.

You will understand when I say that natural science, especially in the course of the 19th century – although it was prepared for earlier – has gradually developed research methods in which, in particular, those who is engaged in research in any branch of this natural science, acquires an inner scientific conscientiousness and an inner scientific discipline that cannot be acquired in any other way than in this natural scientific research work. And this inner mental discipline, this inner mental conscientiousness, which one can acquire in this way, we need in all of modern civilization and cultural life. The only question that arises is whether science can take what is being cultivated within humanity in terms of conscientiousness and inner discipline, and take it to its ultimate conclusion. No matter whether the results of scientific research are justified or not, and whether they need to be modified in the future or not – the relative lack of justification has indeed been put into perspective by some speakers at these events – the important thing is that even at the most radical extreme, to which science has turned more in the direction of theory than of practice or experiment, this conscientiousness and this inner discipline still underlie it.

We have seen how scientific research has gradually been pushed to work itself out of the qualitative, more and more towards the quantitative. This is, as I said, debatable in terms of results – I am not talking about that now. But I am talking about the education that the researcher has been able to receive precisely from the extreme of this tendency, which has gone so far as to only accept in the field of scientific observation that which can be measured, counted or weighed, that which can be expressed in numbers, in measure or in weight. In certain circles, people profess the view that one can only achieve a certain objectivity if one only accepts as objective that which is subject to number, measure and weight. As I said, in terms of the results, this will be very disputable.

I would now like to consider the other side, the side that may culminate in the question: What does a thinker, a researcher, himself gain by working towards achieving the objective through weight, measure and number? One gains by the fact that one is increasingly compelled to exclude from scientific investigation, from scientific experiment or scientific observation, everything that could flow from the subject, from the human personality itself, into the formulation of these scientific findings. Everything that comes from the human subject itself must go. The aim is to develop a completely objective picture of the world. But if we take this tendency to its logical conclusion, then, my dear audience, the very thing with which the researcher, as it were, moves away from his research, from his observation, from his experiment, with which he rises to the of the laws of nature, then that which he carries away, which he then keeps within himself, must not have any part, not the slightest part, in what he regards as the true external world, as the truly objective. And if we follow this train of thought to its conclusion, we are forced to say: If, in the strictest scientific sense, everything subjective is to be excluded, then what we ultimately carry in our minds, which has emerged from combinations of natural phenomena, must not be in any way part of this external world. But what then of this external world may be in us, that we carry within us when we research, when we are no longer in living interaction with this objectivity through our mental power, but when we only look back on what has worked subjectively in us while we were devoted to research? The subjective must not be stuck inside, it must be recognized as lying entirely within the human being himself. But in so far as the human being must also belong to objectivity, it must not be stuck in the objectivity of the human being himself either. We must therefore carry something of our research results, insofar as they are our soul-good, in us, which has nothing to do with our own objectivity, although it strives to represent a true image of the outside world. By thinking about nature, no kind of being, as we ascribe it to our own objectivity, may be present in this thinking about nature. Therefore, at the starting point of an epistemological consideration, the sentence must be: “I think, therefore I am not.” Only when we dare to contrast this sentence with the great Cartesian fallacy “I think, therefore I am,” only then do we really place ourselves on the ground of scientific thinking.

Today it is necessary to make this turn, to move from the revered, one might say, starting point of modern thinking, from the “cogito, ergo sum” to the “cogito, ergo non sum”, “I think, therefore I am not”! For it is only by realizing the non-being of what we gain from objectivity that we become aware of how we must now address our subjective experience: we must address it as an image. If we understand our soul nature correctly, we live in the image. This is now, in a certain way, the cornerstone – in so far as it is a matter of thinking – of what stands at the starting point of anthroposophical spiritual science.

But what has humanity as such achieved, in particular with regard to – if I may use Lessing's expression – the “education of humanity” through scientific thinking, through the characterized methodology and inner discipline? I would like to particularly point out what has actually been achieved in the course of more recent times. And if we want to appreciate and honor this in the right way, then we have to look back to older times in the development of humanity, to those times when there was not yet a scientific thinking in our present sense, when people did not draw such a strict, conceptual line between what man subjectively brought to the outer world and what is really objectively present in the outer world. Today, one need only take any literary work that wanted to have a scientific character and that still belongs to that older time, which did not have the scientific impact, and one will see how man was not yet able to really separate the subjective from the objective; but how he was also not able to develop something that is precisely one of the most important developmental forces of the latest phase of human history: full self-awareness, full human composure, that places itself in the universe and becomes more and more aware of itself as an individuality, as a personality in this universe. The growth of personality consciousness, the growth of the sense of self, the growth of composure, is what increases to the same extent that modern scientific consciousness arises. Man consolidates himself inwardly, one might say, in relation to all the forces with which he holds his personality together, precisely under the influence of this veneration of the principle of objectivity. Man becomes stronger inwardly as a personality, and his longing for free individuality grows to the same extent that scientific consciousness has developed in recent times. From this consideration alone, something can be inferred, which you will find confirmed when you penetrate into the now already somewhat widespread literature of our anthroposophical spiritual science. And what can follow from this consideration is this: the more man engages in the observation of the sense world and in the gradual processing of this sense world in a scientific way, the more he arrives at an inner consciousness of himself as I. With these two latter elements, that grows in man which securely places him as an I in his whole environment. This should be felt particularly by technicians, because one can develop a feeling there for how the human inner consciousness is changed by looking not only at the establishment of natural laws through observation, through experimentation, but at the weaving of natural laws into what one has to accomplish for the world in terms of instruments, tools, and entire undertakings. In this integration of natural laws into enterprise, in this integration of natural laws into reality, one can feel how human inner composure grows under the influence of a scientific way of thinking.

If we understand this in the right way, my dear audience, then we may ask the question on the other hand: Under what circumstances does this composure decrease? Under what circumstances does one lose this sense of self?

It is remarkable: with the expansion of material knowledge, the sense of self becomes stronger. If, so to speak, you are absorbed in material knowledge, you initially achieve the maximum of the ordinary sense of self. — When does it weaken? Well, you only need to recall the most ordinary, everyday phenomenon that shows when the sense of self weakens. I remind you of the dream, of dreaming. It is not necessary that something has an external reality meaning when you look at this something in order to recognize from it how to enter into true reality. Dreaming can ultimately be made the subject of extraordinarily interesting research, and Johannes Volkelt, a very important philosopher of modern times, published his book on dream fantasy as one of his first literary works. It is a pity that Volkelt then left the paths he had taken with it and through which he could have come very close to real spiritual scientific knowledge, under the power of the latest philosophy. If one really studies the life of dreams, one notices in the course of the dreams many things, but one of the most essential characteristics of interesting dreams is their symbolism. Let us say, for example, that there is some kind of fire alarm outside on the street, but we are still asleep and do not recognize the fire alarm as such. The dream sometimes symbolizes some event to us, which we then recognize when we awaken, as it is symbolic of what appears as an external fire alarm. This is an example of the symbolization of external events. But it is the same with internal states. We dream of a boiling oven and when we awaken we recognize that the boiling oven is the dream symbol that is placed before us for the pounding heart with which we awaken. The dream symbolizes the inner and the outer for us in the strangest way. But we will not be able to deny it: the dream realm represents that in which our ego, so to speak, loses itself again. It goes so far that we experience in our dreams what can only come from our own ego as if it were coming from an alien ego. The dream dissolves our ego, so to speak, as the chaotic manifestation of our soul life, our soul life that is not initially connected to the outside world. It brings us out of the composure into which we grow more and more, especially when we devote ourselves to material knowledge.

And if we follow what initially still appears in dreams in a healthy state, if we follow this through all the phenomena that follow the dream life, through the faint-like states, through the notorious internal states, through many things that otherwise lead the human being from the imaginative to the fantastic and the rhapsodic, if we follow this path to its end, where — in a sense in other metamorphoses — what appears is what characterizes the dream in that the dream is no longer able to grasp reality adequately, but grasps it in the symbol, which is still striving to grasp reality but can no longer grasp it, — if we look at all these phenomena, these feverish phenomena, and also on everything that emerges as pathological states of the soul, one sees the other pole, the pole which, when the I develops according to it, has such an effect on this I that it dissolves, that it comes out of its composure, that it passes over into the unconscious.

Now there is a remarkable connection between these inner experiences of the human being, which at first approach him in a healthy way in his dreams, and then, in the other cases I have listed, approach the pathological more and more. There is a remarkable connection between all these experiences, I would say, between the human being who is becoming egoless and what we can call: a soul life that is free from the body. This is shown simply by the ordinary observation that the actual soul life becomes freer from the body. So on the one hand we have this soul life that is becoming freer from the body. And if we then, as one could say, look for its scientific correlate, we come to something highly peculiar. There is now something that I want to mention here, which is well known in today's external science, but which is actually not always appreciated in its full value and significance.

You all know, my dear attendees, what a great influence the Darwinian direction, the Darwinian type of modern developmental theory, has exerted on all recent intellectual and cultural life. Now there is a point within Darwinian developmental theory that touches in a very strange way on what I have just characterized as inner experience. What I mean is this: the true Darwinist, who has of course been superseded by true science in a sense, but whose way of thinking is still in today's thinking trends, says: the different forms of living beings have developed from each other, in that small, very slight changes , which something that can only be called chance has brought about, have added up more and more, so that finally a living being with certain, let us say morphological peculiarities has developed by transformation into another living being with quite different morphological peculiarities. As a specific example, let us take the development as conceived in Darwinism, that gill-breathing lower creatures would have developed into lung-breathing ones. It has been assumed that the organ that gradually transformed into the lungs was the swim bladder. It was assumed that the swim bladder had undergone a small change by some kind of accident, and that then, again, as a result of such changes accumulating, one organ with a very specific function for the outside world had gradually developed into another organ, so that the gill activity could gradually recede and the lung activity could occur through the swim bladder that had been transformed into the lung.

But certain objections are repeatedly raised against this principle of small changes, and not by the least ingenious naturalists, in that it is emphasized that such changes are actually only pathological in nature due to the rigidity of a living being's organs. If, therefore, the deformation of the swim bladder is ever so slight, it is something pathological, it cannot prove expedient, it must be cast off again; and it is precisely because such slight deformations are to be understood as pathological that no transformations of animal or vegetable organisms can come about in this way.

The important thing for this consideration is that in order to explain progress, one was obliged, in the external study of nature, to look at the pathological, at that which deviates from the strictly organized, from that which is strictly ordered by laws in objectivity.

One can say – and especially when thinking technically, one will be able to develop a feeling for it – that which one can technically achieve, so that one can rely on it in terms of its usefulness, must be so thoroughly organized through the entire arrangement of the mechanical that it does not deviate anywhere from that which one has arranged according to law – precisely so that one can rely on it. Darwinism actually bases its principle of progress entirely on such deviations from the strict organization of nature itself, on deviations from what one might consider – for example in morphology – to be just as strictly organized or mechanized as the mechanism of a machine. It was therefore forced to base progress in the development of living things on deviations, on what many rightly regard as pathological. Is it any wonder that our ego — which draws itself to become a level-headed being precisely from that which is most highly ordered in the external world: from external phenomena — that our ego, when these external phenomena enter even a trace into the pathological, has as a mental antithesis the experience of the descent of consciousness, the loss of consciousness? We can see a remarkable parallelism, a connection between what wants to break out of the lawfulness, what wants to overcome what we have to recognize in external nature or in technology, and what tears the I away from the composure that it achieves precisely through the material observation of the cosmos.

We see here a reference to the other pole. And it is this other pole that spiritual science now refers to with all its energy. For spiritual science opens up methods that can prevent the unconsciousness of the ego when this ego tears itself away from the ordinary organization prescribed for it by the body. All methods of spiritual scientific research work towards tearing the I away from the activity of the body, and yet not allowing it to drift into the unconscious, but consciously guiding it into a world into which it would unconsciously and pathologically enter if the organization were to deviate, without its intervention, from what must be recognized as its own laws.

What has emerged in modern human consciousness is deeply significant: this clinging to the pathological as a principle of progress in development, and then looking at what occurs when there is a deviation from the fixed organization, at the fluttering of the I. The aim of the spiritual-scientific method is to prevent the ego from fluttering, to enable the development of soul and spiritual activity in a healthy and not in an unhealthy way. And this spiritual-scientific method is now being developed in the same strict way as the external scientific method is being developed. It is highly desirable, however, that those who want to do significant research in the spiritual realm have acquired the inner discipline and conscientiousness that I characterized at the beginning of my discussion as the inner discipline and conscientiousness acquired through scientific research. Those who have not undergone the training provided by modern science can basically only produce nebulous ideas in the field of spiritual science. What the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here aims to achieve should not be confused with the vague and hazy products of mystics or the like, who proceed without this inner discipline, sometimes with downright indiscipline, without this inner conscientiousness, indeed with a lack of conscience, when they present their so-called spiritual experiences to the world, which unfortunately are only too easily believed by the undiscerning. A truly scientific method must be acquired in the same strict sense and on the same presupposition as that on which the training of the natural scientist is based, as is the natural scientific method itself.

There are two things that must be considered first when developing the method of spiritual science. The first is what arises as a necessary force in our everyday soul life and also in our ordinary scientific research, namely the ability to remember or memory. Anyone who has studied the pathological conditions that overtake people when their memory is not intact, when, let us say, certain periods of time since their birth have been erased from their memory — you can find sufficient studies on this in psychiatric literature — anyone who has studied what people experience when their memory is interrupted, will see how this memory forms a basis for ordinary, healthy life. But what does this ability to remember mean? This is precisely what spiritual scientific research shows. We must have this ability to remember in our ordinary human life and also in ordinary science. But if we conduct psychological research, now with unbiased psychology, into what is actually contained in this ability to remember, if we research the development of this ability to remember from the first years of childhood, then we find that the 'ideas that emerge as memories emerge from the depths of our soul are what we have acquired through our experiences in the outside world, even if they appear in many metamorphoses, sometimes also transformed by justified or unjustified imagination. But if you study human development as a whole, you come to see in this memory something like a reflection of our experiential life in our own organism. Just as we see in the mirror what is in front of it — I am using a comparison here for what you will find amply substantiated in the anthroposophical literature —, just as we see in a mirror what is is in front of the mirror and you cannot see behind the mirror, then with ordinary consciousness you can, so to speak, see only as far as a mirror surface, a soul mirror surface, which reflects back the memory images. How the will plays into this cannot be touched upon today; perhaps in one of the next lectures. It is our own organism that reflects what we experience. And just as we cannot look behind the mirror when we stand in front of it, we cannot look inside our own organism and get to know it as a living organism. We have to get to know it from the corpse or from what it shows us in pathological and other deviations. We get to know it from the outside. We do not get to know this organism from the inside for the same reason that we cannot see behind the mirror. However, it is possible if one has first developed this ability to remember to such an extent that one can rely on it, through the special method of meditation as described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of “Occult Science.” In other words, if one is not a nebulous mystic, but a reasonable human being, who is equal to every degree of inner research, so that he cannot be “twisted” when he goes further, — it is possible to “interrupt” the memory through meditation, just as one can break a mirror and then see what is behind it. If this is done through full willpower, in a level-headed manner and while maintaining self-awareness, it leads the person to see beyond memory. It does not lead to pathological states. When a person, through spiritual scientific methods – which I can only describe here in principle – develops lasting ideas that should not be reminiscences, when he devotes himself to meditatively easily comprehensible ideas, when he lets his soul rest on them, concentrating on it, but in such a way that everything is excluded that does not arise from the human application of will, and if he excludes all nebulous mysticism, then the human being does indeed manage to look beyond memory; he manages to come to real self-knowledge. This self-knowledge, which anthroposophical spiritual science must strive for with its empirical methods, is very different from the poetic, in a sense admirable mysticism of a John of the Cross or St. Therese. Those who devote themselves to the writings of these spirits feel the high poetry, feel what reigns in these wonderful images. Those who have become spiritual researchers in the anthroposophical sense know another, know that it is precisely with such spirits from the depths of human nature, into which ordinary consciousness does not look down, that special facts flare up into consciousness, one might say. In the case of a Saint Therese or a Saint John of the Cross, in the human organs, especially in the so-called physical human organs, in the liver, lungs and digestive organs — however prosaic or profane one may consider this, it is not profane for him who sees through the matter. In these physical organs, abnormal things are happening, which “bubble up” into consciousness and become images there, as they then play out in such personalities who are suited to them. But the true spiritual researcher breaks through the mirror of memory. He does not arrive at such nebulous self-knowledge, which is called mysticism and idolized, but he arrives at concrete self-knowledge. He arrives at a living conception of what the human organs are. There the way opens to a real knowledge of the human organization, the way by which spiritual science also leads over into the medical field. But that is only the beginning. For when one looks in this way, through spiritual and supersensible powers, into the actual material substance of the human organism, then one also overcomes the mere material observation of this human organism. For ultimately one sees how that which presents itself as material in man is not merely born out of the hereditary current with which it has only connected itself, but how it is born out of a world that man has passed through before his birth or conception. One looks into the pre-existent human life by means of a detour through material inner knowledge. The pre-existent life becomes a reality through supersensible knowledge. Ordinary mysticism, as it is idolized by uncritical minds, is more of an obstacle to real spiritual knowledge. — That on the one hand.

Another human power that is necessary for life in the most eminent sense, and which must not be broken for this ordinary life, just as little as the power of memory or recollection, is the power of love. Now, you all know how this power of love is bound to the human organism in ordinary life. It only comes into being at a particular age in the way that it has its special significance for social life, namely when a person reaches sexual maturity; before that it is only a kind of preparation — but this love is only a special case of what we call 'love' in general. Just as sexual love is bound to the human organism, so too is love in the ordinary sense bound to the organism. But just as knowledge can be released when memory breaks down, so love can be freed from the human organism when it is developed spiritually and soulfully through a special methodology. We must not, however, call in a trivial sense every manifestation of “platonic love”, which is nothing more than some vapour from the organism, but this love must be developed in the higher sense through human self-discipline, again through exercises as they are given in the writings mentioned. This love, which in ordinary life is not a power of knowledge, can be developed so that it transforms itself into the power of knowledge of true intuition. When we take into our own hands that to which we otherwise only surrender in life, that which actually educates us in life, in self-discipline, when we become, so to speak, more and more our own companion in our self-education in a strictly methodical way, then we arrive at making love a free force in the human being, in the human organization, and then it becomes a power of knowledge. And just as we arrive at self-knowledge by overcoming memory, so we arrive at supersensible knowledge by making love a cognitive activity in relation to the external world. There must be limits to our knowledge of the external world, otherwise we would not be able to develop love in us. If we were not separate from the external world, we could not be so separate from person to person as to develop love in social life. But when we have developed this love to higher knowledge, when we have it in a sufficiently healthy degree, and then develop it to the power of recognition, then we attain knowledge of the world just as we attain self-knowledge in the other way. And this knowledge of the world leads us to the knowledge of that world in which we only live between falling asleep and waking up, when we have no consciousness, when consciousness again fades away. We experience a state that is in some ways similar to the one between falling asleep and waking up, but we experience this state in full consciousness. There we experience a new external world. We do not experience an atomistic world, which underlies the external sense world, but we experience a spiritual world. To educate ourselves in love means to take the step into the true reality of the external world, into spiritual reality; into the reality that our soul absorbs every evening when we fall asleep, when our ordinary consciousness, which is still bound to the body, becomes unconscious because of the longing to return to the body that lies in the bed. When we ascend to a higher consciousness, we become acquainted with the world that consciously receives us when we pass through the gate of death. Thus, the two ends of our human life initially confront us scientifically. Much more will be further characterized in a subsequent lecture. Today, I have only set myself the task of showing how what can be inwardly cultivated in the soul through natural science must be expanded if true spiritual knowledge is to be attained through true spiritual science. Therefore, because the soul wants to educate itself, not in some amateurish, dilettantish way, but in strict methodology, if it wants to ascend from nature-knowledge to spirit-knowledge, therefore one may also believe: Whoever is able to judge from the full humanity what material natural knowledge gives us, and who is able to recognize that we strengthened through material knowledge, will also be able to find his way into the contemplation that seeks this strengthening of the ego on the other, the spiritual side, into which we fall asleep, dream, or which we encounter in pathological states, but which we can develop in a completely healthy way, in order to then advance to a spiritual knowledge of the world. Therefore, I believe that anyone who can fulfill the recognition of nature in the right way will also ascend to a spiritual recognition that is accessible to every human being, but especially to those educated in natural science. Therefore, I believe that the recognition of spiritual science will come precisely through the strengthening of the scientific spirit and the recognition of nature.

Dear fellow students, esteemed audience! I would very much like to stick to the topic, and since we will be talking about threefolding afterwards, I would ask that any questions relating to threefolding be deferred to later. But I do believe that it is justified to say a few words about the threefold order here, because Dr. Unger himself, in his discussions, took the threefold order as the basis for his views on the creation of technology as a free art.

In a certain sense, it cannot be maintained – I also expressed this in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, and Dr. Unger probably meant it that way – that the idea of threefolding as such, that is, the threefolding of the social organism as an idea, as a concept, is a kind of new discovery in the strict sense of the word. Rather, there may be a kind of new discovery in the social laws to which I referred in the essays of 1905. The threefold social order is actually an old idea and has been mentioned many times before in this form. The essential thing about the way in which the threefold social order is presented here and how it appears in the present is not its actual character as an idea but the position it seeks to occupy in relation to the whole social organism. The idea of structuring the life of humanity as a whole into a spiritual part, a state-legal part and an economic part has had to come up again and again. And if, here and there, someone were to claim that this is something completely new as an idea, I believe that, as I am well aware, there are bound to be claims of primacy. That is why I pointed out in the “key points” that the way the idea of threefolding appears here is something quite different.

The idea of threefolding, as it is advocated by me, for example, is the result of decades of observation of the needs of contemporary humanity. If you look at the situation with open eyes in the present day, you had to recognize as early as the end of the 19th century that things were heading for a catastrophe. And in the spring of 1914, in a series of lectures that I gave in Vienna to a small circle (a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time because of my remarks), I pointed out that in the near future the conditions of the civilized world (I did not just say “European conditions” at the time) were heading towards a decisive catastrophe. You see, that was at a time when disaster was already very close. Nevertheless, in the following weeks, people in positions of responsibility for the course of events spoke in the following way. A statesman with responsibility, to call outstanding - of course only in the sense of what our time so often calls “outstanding” - said, when it came to discussing the general world situation in a parliament: the relations between Central Europe and Russia were in the most favorable way imaginable; one could be convinced that peace would be consolidated more and more. He could see this from the friendly neighborly relations that existed, for example, between St. Petersburg and Berlin. — So it was in May 1914, spoken of by those in positions of responsibility, after it had been necessary, as it was by me, to point out with all energy beforehand that the circumstances were pushing towards a catastrophe, and simply because the three elements of human coexistence, the spiritual, the legal and the economic, had interacted in such a way in all of social life that the catastrophe in its depths can actually only be seen in the confusion of these three areas. One could see, especially if one had an eye for it, how the increasing intellectualism of modern times affected our entire public life, how the complete devotion of people to the intellectual element, as had developed in the usual scientific mind-set, which has permeated everything else as well – one could see how this devotion to the intellectual prepared everything for the catastrophe in a certain sense. That is where the deeper reasons lie, and anyone who does not yet see them there today cannot meaningfully participate in a discussion about constructive forces.

You see, back then you could experience something like this – I'm not saying this out of immodesty, but because it seems symptomatically significant to me as my own experience – in the summer of 1914, I gave a German lecture in Paris about the things I usually talk about and, for example, also talked about yesterday. This lecture was not given for a German colony there, but was translated word for word, so it was explicitly given for the French, not for German colonists living in Paris – they were not there either. So in May 1914, with what had flowed from German spiritual life in the strictest sense — for basically it is the case that everything that is asserted here as anthroposophy has flowed from German spiritual life — one could somehow make a certain impression with it all over the world. We were at that stage in the spiritual realm. But what worked against this was, again, the economic realm. And one only has to look through it carefully to see how this disharmonious working of the spiritual life with the economic life was the primal phenomenon of all the phenomena that were preparing in the 1880s and had reached their peak at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Of course, countless forces and currents converge there, so that it is impossible to summarize everything in a few words.

But if one wants to emphasize an important phenomenon, a fundamental phenomenon, it could be done in the way I once did in a lecture in Nuremberg in 1908. At the time, I pointed out how characteristic it is of modern social life that the personal has actually been increasingly eliminated, especially in what is called capitalism, in capitalism in general – without wanting to belittle capital in the economy , of course, you cannot conduct modern economic life without capital investments, that is, without capitalism. And the way that capitalism is often talked about today is nothing more than the purest layman or dilettante behavior. What it is about is that the capitalist essence, basically since the beginning of the 20th century, let's say – it was already prepared earlier – has become more and more impersonal and impersonal. I like to tell an anecdote here; anecdotes are sometimes indicative of what happened. When international economic life was still more dependent on personality, it once happened that the finance minister of the King of France also had to come to Rothschild in Paris because the king, for reasons you can easily imagine, had to turn to the banker. He came just at the time when Rothschild was dealing with a leather merchant. Now, capitalism leads to a certain instinctive socialism; one must realize that. Rothschild, who was very powerful and who asserted the personal element in everything he administered in a capitalist way, not the impersonal capitalist – Rothschild was therefore dealing with a leather merchant. The servant entered and announced the finance minister of the king. He should wait until I am finished, said Rothschild. The servant could not really understand this and the one who was waiting outside could not understand it at all. He thought there must be a misunderstanding. “Please say,” he sent the servant again, “the minister of the king of France is here.” Rothschild had him say again that yes, he would just have to wait. The minister did not understand this at all, he tore open the door and was inside. He said: I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France. - Fine, said Rothschild, I still have work to do, please take a chair and sit down. - Yes, but I am the Minister of the King of France! - Please take two chairs, - said Rothschild.

I tell this story so that you can see from this anecdote, too, that under capitalism something was indeed at work that lay in personal will and personal emotions. This personal element ceased to exist. What I have said is, of course, not a line of argument, just an illustration. The argument would have to be developed in a whole series of lectures. But just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, this personal element took a turn towards the purely factual. I would like to say: forces came into play through which the capital masses moved as if by themselves. Share capital came to the fore, as opposed to individual capital, and society took the place of the influence of the individual personality. This introduced an impersonal element, so that in modern economic life man was gradually harnessed as if into an impersonal element. And in place of personal initiative came what might be called routine. It was no longer possible to develop anything other than routine in economic life. Those who study economic history will find how these things are rooted in the development of modern economic life, and how they are the things that pushed towards the terrible world catastrophe. That was now there, and so one could believe, especially at that time, that the right time had come when people could understand from their practical lives that the interaction of these three areas must be sought in an appropriate way. And that is the essential thing about the threefold social organism: not the idea as such, but the way in which, in every detail, things are thought out of the concrete, out of direct life practice. There is something thoroughly anti-utopian in this impulse of threefolding, as it appears here, something that rejects every kind of utopia, that only wants to work out of the practical side of life.

This is what is so rarely seen and what is often not given due consideration, even by adherents of the so-called threefolding idea. It happens very often that the threefold order is discussed, even by its adherents, as if it were a utopia, as if it had not emerged from what all people actually want in their fields. One need only summarize the individual wills. Most of the time people are not consciously aware of what they want, but they do want it. The subconscious plays a much greater role in social life than one might think. That is why people have repeatedly said to me: Yes, what is written in the “Key Points”, which after all underlie the impulse for threefolding that is emerging today, that is what this or that society in this or that field also wants. Another came with a different area of specialization. “That is nothing new,” they said. — ‘All the better,’ I said. ”The less something is new, the better. The more it is rooted in what people already want, the better.” What matters is that a certain understanding should arise among the individual specialized fields. And here I do believe that Dr. Unger's lecture today could be of extraordinary importance because it was inspired by the thought that ultimately what the technician wants in his field cannot be solved as a special question without turning one's gaze to the whole of social life. It is therefore of little significance when people say that the specialized ideas have already been expressed or have appeared here or there in echoes, or when they say that everything has already occurred before. Let us assume the most extreme hypothesis. Let us assume that Dr. Unger had not said anything new, but that his ideas had been expressed for decades by the most diverse technical branches and societies for my sake. But I believe that one thing must be agreed, even if this hypothesis were correct: they have not been implemented, these ideas – surely no one will claim that. Some may claim that they have been nurtured, but no one can claim that they have been implemented. Today they are questions as they were decades ago. And that is because they were treated in a specialized way, so that the technician limited himself to his circle and dealt with all special technical questions from this point of view. But things cannot be solved that way today. We not only have a world economy, we also have a world consciousness, something that encompasses the whole world and that can only be dealt with as a world issue in the economic and technical fields. The reason why a solution could not be found is that the technician was, to a certain extent, isolated. The technician was even painfully aware of this isolation because, as a modern technician, he is the most modern aspect of the personality in modern life. It can be said of the most diverse other aspects of modern life: they have their roots here and there. The modern technician is what he has become through modern technology. He represents a class in the entire social order, and his particular profession gives rise to a social context that is itself a social issue. However, this can only be treated in the context of social life as a whole. Therefore, what Dr. Unger formulated with the words “Technology as a free art” will remain a utopia as long as the connection between the special wishes and ideas of technicians and universal social ideas is not found. The technician most of all needs to acquire a universal view of social needs, and this is because he has placed himself in modern life as something new. The farmer also needs this social perspective, inasmuch as agriculture itself is being spun by technology. But as a farmer, he is ancient. But the essence of the social question must emerge most significantly from that which has emerged as something completely new in modern social development. And that is perhaps what needs to be emphasized. I do not want to go into specific questions of threefolding, which arise when one is speaking about specific questions of the technicians. The essential point is that the questions of the technicians are treated as a chapter of the great general social questions. It is not a matter of assuming, for instance, that the anthroposophical side simply wants to draw the question of the technicians into the threefolding movement from the outside. The threefolding movement would be a mere slogan if that were the intention. But slogans are not at issue here. The point is that the movement, which could also call itself something else, aims to bring the three aspects of social life into the right relationship with one another. This is in contrast to intellectualism, which seeks to throw everything into one pot , even if it then takes out of that pot, for example, the Fourteen Points, which, insofar as they were Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, truly leave nothing to be desired in terms of their intellectualism. The idea of threefold social order was first expressed by me, just when, at a terribly serious moment, the solution of the questions was once again sought not from the practice of life, but from minds, from intellectualism, with Wilson's fourteen points. Particularly abroad, one could see how these fourteen points, when they arose, addressed something pathological in humanity, and it was highly regrettable that at the most serious moment in the recent development of German history, in the fall of 1918, 1918, Central Europe even agreed to these Fourteen Points and could not see how, at the present moment, we are compelled to engage directly in practical life without any vague theories and to study things from that basis. The Fourteen Points were a utopia; further development has shown that. Humanity will have to convince itself that nothing can be achieved with such utopias, but that something can only be achieved if one engages realistically with what is there; if one is able to think out of what exists not only logically — that is easy today — but realistically.

Anthroposophy strives for this kind of thinking, which can only be grasped when, when we speak of the spirit, we do not do as that farmer did when he was shown a magnet: “Oh, nonsense, that's a horseshoe, I'll use it to shoe my horse.” That is more or less how someone who denies the spirit of this reality behaves. And there is no way around it: if someone wants to think in a realistic way, they must also address the spiritual. That is why anthroposophy is a spiritual science. And what it has in common with the deepest, most significant demands of our time is that it wants to be realistic, that it wants to be practical when it comes to practical matters, especially in the economic and technical spheres. And although everyone has or believes they have this or that different opinion – for example, that anthroposophy does not deal enough with God, which is a completely unfounded opinion, or that for some people it deals far too much with God, who are opponents from this point of view, and the same applies to the other things mentioned here, they are said from different points of view again — but everyone, even if they have different views on one or the other, if they are serious about realistically shaping our social conditions in some specialized area based on the universal thinking of the whole, will then also find points of contact with what asserts itself as the anthroposophical movement. For it does not want to be fanciful, but human. And it will be happy to join forces with anyone who understands the human element.

Dear attendees, dear fellow students! Anthroposophy can be a matter that the individual deals with in his or her own little room, so to speak, as something that touches the most intimate questions of the heart and soul, something from which one can gain the conviction that it is connected with what binds the individual, in that he experiences himself in his full individuality and personality, to the eternal, to the divine. I spoke more from this point of view yesterday. Today I would like to speak to you about the other point of view, from which anthroposophical spiritual science can be a matter of our present age. This age, which has thrown a huge number of questions to the surface from the depths of human development, and which now not only concern the individual in his quiet chamber, but which are a common, a, if one may say so, thoroughly social affair of the whole of humanity.

If we wish to examine anthroposophical striving from this point of view, then we must first give some points of view about what I would call “the signature of our time”, which particularly characterizes certain forces and currents, certain aspirations in our time. Naturally I shall not have the opportunity to characterize the details of our age, but I would like to present the main lines of those aspirations and currents, which are of course well known in the widest circles, although unfortunately their full weight is all too rarely appreciated. These lines show how the individual moves, so to speak, in our age, without particular consideration being given to the individual.

Perhaps some people found it strange, even paradoxical, when I said something yesterday that actually contradicts a great deal of what has emerged in recent human history where worldviews are intended to be shaped. I have uttered the sentence that man, when he grows up in the scientific consciousness, which has long since become the general consciousness of mankind and which has also been incorporated into certain religious views, acquires a concept of being, a feeling of the existence of himself, which he can no longer hold on to when he looks back on his own thinking in his self-reflection. I have said that man can arrive at the proposition, “I think, therefore I am not”, only through the consciousness of time — and by that I mean the consciousness of the last three to four centuries. Man cannot apply the concept of existence, which he needs to justify his scientific view of the world, to what he opens up in his thinking, especially in his intellectual life. And perhaps in the striving for a world view that began with Descartes and has infected almost all of the world view striving of modern times, one must see in the sentence “I think, therefore I am” more of a kind of rescue attempt, a search for some kind of fixed point within oneself. One must grasp the emergence of this sentence “I think, therefore I am” psychologically, one could say. And psychology could tell us: philosophers and those who follow them occupy themselves with this sentence, believe in this sentence, because it offers them a certain illusory help against sinking into non-being, [which overtakes one] when one looks into one's own inner self and has been educated in the external scientific world view for one's existence. It might even seem paradoxical to anthroposophists when this sentence is spoken by someone who, with his Philosophy of Freedom, published in the early 1890s, sought to counter the dominant philosophy of the time. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I started out from pure thinking. It might therefore appear that what was said in the past about pure thinking, by means of which the general forces of the world are grasped as if by the corner of their cloak, should today be condemned. But that is not the case. And precisely because, starting from pure thinking, one rediscovers the being of the soul, precisely for this reason, in the sense of a matter of the times, it is for anthroposophical spiritual science. But one will only arrive at an understanding of what has just been said if, in the sense I have indicated, one familiarizes oneself a little with the signature of our time, with the most important characteristic properties of this our time.

And such a property, one can say, sheds light on all the others, and follows precisely from the way in which humanity of our age approaches scientific conviction, in which one has become accustomed to in the last few centuries. My dear audience, today man is so proud to say that he has cast off the belief in authority of the past centuries, as prescribed by the religious authorities. Man today is so proud to say that he only believes in what he can grasp in his own personal being. And yet, to the discerning, it seems as if the old authoritarian belief of the confessional religions has merely jumped to another area, and this area is precisely what is called “science” in the abstract, with a great deal of vagueness but with all the more conviction. Science. — As soon as a modern man hears the word “science,” everything within him that once went in quite different directions because of the old belief in authority is stirred. Nowadays, for reasons that people in wider circles do not really understand, anything that is said to be scientifically established is an authority of much greater power than any authority ever was. How often do we hear the answer to something that arises as a question from within the human mind: “Science says this or that.” This general power, science, has taken all authority for itself today. It has taken this authority from those people who consider themselves to be at the height of their time, including with regard to questions of world view.

But what is the relationship of today's humanity to scientific authority? It has become the case that what is scientifically recognized is what everyone is believed to understand, given the way they have developed up to a certain point according to ordinary human education, the usual human education. Science should, in principle, establish nothing but what every human being, given the necessary preconditions, can affirm. Science should be something very general. Science should live in every human being in the same way. For one knows how it is received by those who, above all, cling to the authority of science when a single personality somewhere rebels against this general validity of scientific judgment. So that one could say: The ideal of a scientific world view is that it provides a set of judgments about world and human affairs that apply equally to every human being with complete uniformity. One might say that a gigantic uniformity is the ideal of this scientific conviction.

When one expresses something like this, it might at first seem trivial. In life, however, this triviality means an extraordinary amount. For with the great influence that science, especially in so far as it is based on natural scientific foundations, has gained in our time – and as I explained yesterday, rightly so in certain areas – one must assume that, where science increasingly uniforms people, it increasingly becomes the case that one person becomes just a copy of another. And indeed, if we do not take science in terms of its content, but rather in terms of what it has achieved in the most recent period of human development, we see how this uniformity, based on scientific conviction, seeks to be made a general human affair. One need only look at the terrible, destructive forces that are raging in the east of Europe today – forces whose significance here, unfortunately, is still not sufficiently appreciated in terms of their destructive power – to see how, after all, the people who today devote themselves to such forces of destruction with a certain fanaticism, actually started out from the assumption that certain teachings, which come from scientific foundations, or perhaps it would be better to say a certain state of mind that comes from these scientific foundations, should also be made the basis of social thinking. And what is striven for by this transfer of the scientific state of mind into social thinking, that great prison of humanity, where one man is supposed to be just a copy of another in the social sphere as well, as for example in Leninism or Trotskyism, there it is taken to the point of paradox, but indeed to the point of the most tragic paradox. Everywhere one looks – and I have only pointed to an extreme, a radical case – one sees, one could say, how the scientific state of mind seeks to achieve this levelling of humanity, as if it were flowing out in the developmental tendencies of our time. This is basically one of the main forces that can be found in the signature of current human development: this levelling from the perspective of theory, of thinking, of research. This is not to say anything against the justification of this research, as can be seen from my remarks yesterday. For on the ground of natural science this research is fully justified, and it has led science and technology to the great, fully justified triumphs, which I do not need to describe here.

However, this one pole of modern human development is juxtaposed with another one that is no less characteristic of the present spirituality of humanity. To the same extent that humanity strives towards this levelling out through intellect and intellectual observation of nature, to the same extent does the individual and the personal take revenge on human nature; polarities arise everywhere in the world, and here too there is an inner polarity. And we see how, in contrast to the levelling out just described, the instinctive forces of human nature come to the fore. One is tempted to say that the impulses of the will emerge from the individuality of the human being with instinctive force, right down to the animal level. While people strive towards a certain leveling with their heads, the most personal element in the human being asserts itself everywhere, that which distinguishes the individual human being from every other human being to the greatest extent. So that at the moment when we disregard the thoughts that people might have about the world in the indicated scientific sense, and move on to what people feel, what people recognize as the basis, as the impulse of their will, we can see how people completely miss each other, how the individual no longer has any kind of understanding for the other. Only in the narrowest circles is there still an understanding, often artificially cultivated, from one person to another. People do not understand each other today. We talk so much about social ideals, about artificial institutions that are supposed to bring about a social life, and this is mainly for the reason of deceiving ourselves about the elementary fact that we have actually become terribly anti-social in our instinct, in our development of will and feeling. An anti-social element runs through humanity as soon as one disregards the life of thought and looks at what actually lives in the depths of the emotional life and in the depths of the impulses of the will. This is the great controversy of our time, in which humanity is embroiled: on the one hand, it seeks to level the mind and, on the other, it develops a differentiation from the very depths of the human organization that has an incredibly anti-social effect.

This is basically the situation in which man finds himself. And from this question, which is one of the most important components in the signature of contemporary intellectual life, basically all other questions arise; basically, that is what has developed into such a terrible catastrophe in the second decade of the 20th century.

If you follow the judgments floating on the surface, how nations and people judge each other, how they assign guilt and innocence to each other, how they talk about what they want to recognize as right or wrong, then you have only a surface view of everything that is said on the surface. In the depths below, the antagonism and polarities of which I have just spoken rage.

In a certain sense, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is juxtaposed to this. It wants to become a matter for the whole human being, for the fully human being, and wants to take hold of his feelings and will. On the one hand, as I explained yesterday, it draws from sources of knowledge that learn to look into the human interior. It draws from certain abilities that can be developed beyond the everyday through the method I mentioned yesterday. From these latent powers of knowledge, dormant in ordinary life and in ordinary science, it draws out something that looks down into human nature, into those regions that are covered in ordinary life by the so necessary power of remembrance, by memory, just as the space behind a mirror is covered by the mirror. If we break through what our memory power faces, as I suggested yesterday, and develop powers of supersensible insight, then we will indeed, as I indicated yesterday, first of all gain insight into the human organs themselves in their vitality. We arrive at the point where a living medicine must search, where a living anthropology must search. But we then go beyond what we find in the present human being as the spiritual-material, to the prenatal human being, or rather to the human being as he was in the spiritual world before he entered this earthly life through conception. We arrive at a real expansion of those powers of the human soul life that would otherwise - filling the period of time that lies between a few years after our birth and our present moment - only extend to this life within our earthly existence. By breaking through memory, we attain a higher soul power, a higher power of knowledge; we attain the ability to behold the spiritual-soul essence of the human being as it was before the human being was conceived for this earthly life. And from there the current then flows, which is so difficult for today's man to think about: the current of penetrating from self-knowledge to world knowledge.

I know very well, my esteemed audience, how much paradox is found in what I have described of world knowledge in my “Occult Science”. But anyone who can find their way into this growth of a supersensible power of knowledge, into this — I would rather not use the expression at all because it is so often misused today — into this true, genuine clairvoyance, will find how what is otherwise only given for a small span of time in the ability to remember expands, how it expands into a power of knowledge of the world.

What is presented here – of course, people always say that it should be proven. But those who constantly speak of proving at every opportunity have never familiarized themselves with the nature of proving itself. Only what is at least suspected as a fact can be proven. All other so-called proving is a dialectical playing with concepts, a piling up of concept upon concept. And humanity only succumbs to great illusions when it comes to this kind of proof, which is so often demanded; this is not to object to justified proof, of course. The anthroposophical researcher simply has to point out what arises when the cognitive faculty is expanded in the way indicated. And I would like to suggest what happens in the following way.

If we look at our ordinary, earthly memory, we can say that this memory, together with all the experiences we have gone through from a certain point in our earthly existence, forms us. These experiences are initially mostly in the subconscious of the human organization at the present moment. We either bring them up voluntarily or they drift up into consciousness by their own power. Memories emerge from the stream of experiences we have gone through. And the possibility of remembering must be continuous in order for our soul life, our soul condition, to be a healthy one. We as human beings, by having this possibility of remembering, not only stand within ourselves, but we are also connected with everything with which we are connected through experiences in the outer life. Through our healthy reflection, we can already find out the difference between the image that emerges today as an after-experience in our memory, and that intense, saturated experience that was once there, that lives in our memory, the memory of which has remained with us from what had united us with the world. When we had an experience, we were involved in it as human beings; we were connected to the objects; the objects poured their essence into our personality. Everything that was experienced intensely, that we went through with the outside world, with nature or with other people, was transformed into images, and from these images we conjure up the experience again. Why can we conjure up what we have experienced in the present? Because we were once connected to it as human beings, because we were one with the outside world during the experience.

If you take a look at what anthroposophical spiritual science has achieved in the most diverse fields of knowledge, you will realize how, in everyday life, we only ever see part of what we are. We must indeed expand our powers of knowledge if we want to look down into our own inner being. Take just what I have already said: that when we break through our ordinary powers of remembrance, we first look down into the living context of our organization, and then, through the organization, we look beyond into the forces within which we lived in a purely spiritual and soul existence before our earthly existence. Man's entire being is connected with the entire existence of the world. And just as he, as a human being, who is enclosed between birth and death, is only connected with what he has enjoyed or experienced together with the world in the characterized way, so he is connected with the entire human development of the earth and also with the development of the earth itself, through what one then discovers through further research within oneself. It is nothing less than an overcoming, a breaking through of memory, and a re-emergence of memory power on a higher level. By overcoming the power of memory on a small scale, which preserves our earthly experiences, we arrive at a higher level of a new power of memory, through which we can develop images of the destinies that the earth itself has gone through in other planetary forms, as I have described in my “Occult Science”. And just as we conjure up in pictorial form what we have experienced since our birth through our everyday memory, so, if we get to know the whole human being through spiritual science, we can conjure up what the whole human organization has been through, what it was connected with: the entire development of the world. For the human being is a microcosm. We are not dealing with a different world from the one with which we ourselves were connected. This is what I have shown in my “Occult Science”.

Thus we see, my dear audience, how anthroposophical spiritual science becomes an expansion of human consciousness. We see how, by descending into the depths of the human being, we simultaneously ascend into the objective evolution of the world. To the same extent that we momentarily renounce the ordinary inner life, we enter into this inner life that would otherwise have remained the objective outer life. In the same moment that one submerges into the regions that are otherwise withdrawn from consciousness, one emerges into those regions that have formed us as objective beings, as human beings, out of the entire cosmos. This is the only way that the world knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to provide can come about.

In view of the present situation, as I have characterized it, the objection of the modern human being to such world knowledge is: Yes, but there one enters a region in which subjectivity can assert itself in any arbitrary way. And it is always pointed out with a certain sense of well-being, one might say, by certain people that the most diverse spiritual researchers who were already there have given account in the most diverse ways of what they have seen in the universe. However, this diversity is mainly emphasized by those who have not really dealt with what is said by the most diverse spiritual researchers in an intimate way. Just as it seems understandable that a tree looks different when photographed from different sides – and that an overall picture of the tree is actually only formed in an external way when the tree is photographed from four or six sides, and these photographs are then viewed together – it should also be quite understandable that a person who applies the spiritual-scientific method to his own soul life naturally starts from his subjective point of view, but that as he advances in his research, the point of view from which he stands will surely become apparent. And just as photographing a tree from a certain side is objectively [correct], so too can the description of a spiritual scientist be objectively [correct] - even though it reads differently from that of another who has started from a different point of view. It will be noted, however, that the Anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have to represent, always endeavors to characterize that which is characterized from the most diverse sides, and that in this way it is to be compensated in a certain way for what can become one-sided through the description of only one point of view, which can occur when someone takes my books and compares them with each other in an abstract way and then says: Yes, this is what it says about one thing and that is what it says about another. This can easily be taken out of context and made to look like contradictions. But this arises from nothing other than the effort to describe things from the most diverse points of view, so that precisely through these particular turns of phrase in anthroposophical spiritual science a kind of comprehensiveness can be achieved.

Those who become thoroughly acquainted with what is sought and found on the inner path will be able to realize more and more clearly how an inner capacity develops there that is actually similar to what man has in the mathematical state of mind. It is the same in mathematics, where we have something that gives us a certain soul content that is derived entirely from the inner being. For mathematics is derived entirely from the inner being; we know that a mathematical truth is true when we have grasped it inwardly, even if millions of people say otherwise. What takes place in the soul when we know how to grasp a mathematical truth, which is both inward and outward at the same time, takes place in a similar way when we come to the inwardly objective through the subjective, which can really be present to us in anthroposophical spiritual science. Only the beginning of the research path is subjective, but the true anthroposophist remains silent about this. What then arises after the subjective idiosyncrasies of the researcher have been overcome is thoroughly objective, and one can speak of it as of an external observation made through the senses or also through the scales or with the measuring rod; just as one can speak of mathematical findings, only that these are formal, while the findings made through spiritual science are substantive.

This shows, however, that this anthroposophical spiritual science is above all concerned with speaking directly to the human being. That is also its task. While present-day science strives for standardization, in a sense strives to make one human being an imitation of another, anthroposophical spiritual science cannot but speak to each human being as to an individuality. This, I might say, is the direct social trust that one acquires in working for this anthroposophical spiritual science, that one does not want to put forward something that, because one has researched it, should now apply to all people, but through which one only wants to appeal to people by saying: one has researched the content of anthroposophical spiritual science oneself. But this content is the true content of human nature. When I speak to individuals, I do so in such a way that I do not speak to them in a generalizing way, but address each one as an individuality. I count on the fact that, because man is man, because human beings have the same soul, spirit and body, related strings will resonate, and what is struck by one person will come back from the innermost being in an individual way. One does not speak to people through anthroposophy as one otherwise does in science, as if one were seeking followers for something that has now been established. Rather, one speaks through anthroposophy in such a way that you appeal to the inner being of each individual and say: If you look into your own inner being, you will discover in this way in your own being that which I want to communicate to you because I have researched it. The way of speaking from person to person about spiritual science, all kinds of teaching, takes on a different tone, a different attitude, by wrapping the messages in formulas of anthroposophical spiritual science. This is what is effective in anthroposophical spiritual science against the signature of our time, as I have described it: that which, in turn, appeals from thinking, but from thinking from the fully human being, appeals at the same time to every single human being. The opposite of this is what is striven for in levelling. The individualization of the human being through knowledge and the development of the content of a worldview is striven for. This content of anthroposophical spiritual science is intended to be the most subjective and at the same time the most objective, the most personal and at the same time the most generally valid content of human scientific endeavor. Contemporary humanity needs this contrast to levelling. What I have described to you, which is basically an anti-social element, because it asserts itself as the opposite pole, arises from this leveling: the lack of understanding of one human being towards another. From anthroposophical spiritual science, loving understanding of one person towards another should arise; and above all, not only a general knowledge of human nature, a general anthroposophy, will come, but through what this general anthroposophy and world knowledge will be, a state of mind will be stimulated that in turn also includes loving understanding for every single peculiarity of our fellow human being.

A social life cannot be founded if it is not founded on the deepest, most sacred roots of human existence itself; but for the present phase of human development, these are the individual roots, as I indicated yesterday. Therefore, spiritual science will essentially give this other slant to the spiritual signature of the present time, which we need so urgently.

This means, however, that the other pole, which had to be characterized with reference to the signature of the present, will also take on a different character. In practical life, something will happen that is not an anti-social element, but a social element. This anti-social element, where does it actually come from? It comes from the fact that, precisely because head culture has reached a high point, the instincts of human nature prevail and take hold of feeling and will. What anthroposophical knowledge is shines into feeling and into will; it does not blunt the elemental power of feeling and will, as people so easily believe; it does not take away people's original naivety. No, when anything beautiful is illuminated, it does not lose its peculiarity, but it comes out even more. That which lies in the depths of human nature does not become duller when it is illuminated anthroposophically, but it is unfolded in just the right way, without the person having to suffer from today's disease, nervousness. Thought, in turn, shines into feeling; feeling takes hold of it, and by shining into feeling with thought, the “I think, therefore I am not”, the “I am only in the picture by thinking” — thinking is transformed into being. And only by immersing ourselves in the realm of the will, which is otherwise only experienced in sleep — for in ordinary cognition, what does man know of the relationship that exists between a thought that is to lead to the will and the raising of the hand? By means of this thinking, which delves spiritually into this volition, there develops what might be called the path leading from one human being to another in the clear light of spiritual knowledge. Humanity can only become a social whole if feelings and volitional impulses are illuminated, not by abstract, intellectualistic knowledge, but by higher vision. And it is through this infusion of higher vision that a true social science, a social ethics, will arise. It is precisely such a social ethics that my book The Philosophy of Freedom seeks to provide. There I showed that man can only feel free if he develops an impulse for action, for willing, out of purest thinking. Man could never feel free if he had to draw impulses of the will from any other basis. If we stand before a mirror and merely have an image before us – the comparison is more than a mere comparison – then this image cannot force us. If something pushes me, then I am forced by causality. If I look at the image, I cannot be forced; the image has no power in itself to force me. If I grasp my volitional impulses in the pure pictorial thought, then these pictorial thoughts have no causal power, no momentum. By recognizing the pictorial quality of thinking, one recognizes how, in pure thinking, free will is truly absorbed, so that the impulses for free action can only be found in the most individual part of the human being. But it is precisely through the will entering into this pure thinking, which is initially an image for us, and the will entering in, as is the case with loving social action or with higher supersensible knowledge, as you can see in the explanations in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, that otherwise pure thinking is filled with what is man's very own eternal being. And the first clairvoyance, ladies and gentlemen, is already there when a free decision of the will flashes through the mind. And basically all that I then give as a method for ascending to the highest spiritual worlds is nothing other than a metamorphosed formulation of what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as underlying free will. When one recognizes how, in this pure thinking permeated by the will, there is something in which man can grasp world events as if at a corner, then one also gradually learns to see how one can expand this state of mind, which otherwise only exists in the free action of man, in the way described yesterday, and how one can thereby come to supersensible knowledge. If man wants to know himself as a free being, he must begin with this true supersensible vision, otherwise freedom will always be something impossible for him. Freedom is also irreconcilable with natural causality — not even for a Kantian or for someone who at least claims to be one. And there is no other way to harmonize natural causality and human freedom than to see things as I have just described.

But then something else is established. What I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as the basis of social will has been much, much misunderstood. People have objected: How are people supposed to work together in the social organism if everyone only follows the inner impulses of their individual being? — But that is not the point at all. The point is that through a real, genuine, true spiritual development of the human being, what I would call real social trust can be cultivated. A dignified existence in social life is only possible if we are not forced to act from the outside by commandments or other means, but if we are free to act from the innermost urge of our being. But then we must be able to develop this great trust in the other person, the trust that he will gradually come to act from the innermost urge of his human nature as well. And as man progresses to the innermost part of his nature and gradually such an understanding develops from one to the other, a social ethic, a social organism, will be able to arise out of the individual shaping of the individual will through full mutual trust. - So what conscious trust is depends on what, in the sense of man's striving today, can only be seen as social will.

One can best see how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to the current signature of spiritual life by looking at what has gradually become of the religious conception of humanity from the underground movements that I have just characterized. Spiritual science is repeatedly attacked from this very quarter, with the accusation that spiritual science seeks to enter the supersensible worlds through knowledge, but that precisely in this, it is said, the essence of religious life consists: that one does not know that in which one has trust as a divine world order, that one therefore has a merely subjective trust. So, according to this, the essence of religion would consist precisely in developing a mere belief in it, and in excluding the certainty of knowledge. But my dear audience, this certainty of faith, which is identical with what we might call trust, cannot be established in the religious life by anyone who honestly reflects on these matters, except through what follows from a truly supersensible knowledge. A historical consideration could teach humanity this. Where do today's people, who rebel against anthroposophy in the manner indicated, take their religious trust from? Is it something truly elementary? That is a mere illusion. It is the remnants of the historical religions. They are the remnants of what has developed in history as the historical religions. In the sense of anthroposophical spiritual science, these religions have their full justification, and their ultimate height, through which the development of the earth has received its true meaning, has received its highest height in Christianity. Christianity contains what can be regarded as the original religion, the last form of religion to which humanity has been able to ascend, and which must continue to be the one for the rest of humanity's time. Anthroposophical spiritual science not only does not touch Christianity, but it is the first to establish it in a deeper sense. But on the other hand, it must be said: where did religions get their content from? They got it — this can be historically proven — from spiritual visions, albeit from ancient instinctive spiritual visions. Religions have acquired their supersensible content from ancient instinctive visions in no other way than that which spiritual science in anthroposophical orientation now seeks to show scientifically. This content has been handed down and is to be found in scripture and tradition. Religions would have no content if there had not once been instinctive supersensible visions of human beings. From this, and from many other things, it can be seen how wrong it is to say that the anthroposophical side should not point the way to the supersensible worlds, for the supersensible worlds must be preserved for the religions precisely as the distant unknown, to which one cannot come through knowledge, but only through naive trust and belief. The value of religions will reveal itself when it is illuminated by the light of knowledge. Those who believe that the greatness and significance of Christianity could be affected by any kind of spiritual-scientific discovery are fundamentally weak Christians. In my opinion, those who believe that one should not approach Christianity with any kind of science because it could suffer from it are weak Christians. Just as there is nothing about America in the Gospels, but America must be accepted as a reality, so must the repeated lives on earth be accepted, even though the Gospels say nothing about them.

This is what makes anthroposophy a matter of time, out of a certain state of mind. I have presented this in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, where I have shown how the individual philosophical views up to the present day tend to converge into the anthroposophical view. So that in fact from the signature of the spiritual present one can read how one can ascend to the anthroposophical worldview.

I would now like to sketch this signature of the spiritual present for you with a few strokes, from anthroposophy itself, so that you can see that the one who stands on the ground of anthroposophy does not shy away from to communicate the results of his research, which he has explored along the path I have described to you, and which are as certain to him as the results of astronomy, physiology, biology, and botany.

If we look back over a relatively short span of human development with an anthroposophically sharpened eye, we find, for example, that we cannot understand Greek culture. In the previous lecture, Dr. Heyer pointed out how human consciousness has changed in the course of historical development. In order to substantiate this purely empirically, we need only look at the special nature of the Greek consciousness. Herman Grimm, who, although challenged in many respects, had retained the keen eye of a historical observer for such things, pointed out our relationship to the Greeks with the following sharp words. He said: What the Romans have experienced, how a Caesar, a Brutus has lived, that we can understand. Our elements of consciousness have not changed so much since then that we could not understand that. What is told to us by Alcibiades, by Pericles, by Plato, by Sophocles, people only imagine they understand if they remain on the standpoint of today's understanding of humanity. The figures of Pericles and Alcibiades, who only emerge shadow-like before the ordinary ideas of humanity, are actually like fairy-tale heroes. Herman Grimm sees fairy-tale figures throughout Greek history. Spiritual science is called upon to bring about what can expand consciousness, so that one can truly change one's inner soul state, so that one can in turn stand within this particular inner experience of the Greeks. And here we must say: this experience of the Greeks was based on a historical law, the full extent of which is only now being recognized by anthroposophical spiritual science. It is the law that I will now characterize in the following way.

The further we go back in human development, to Greek, Egyptian, Persian and Indian cultures and prehistoric times, the more we find that the entire human constitution is actually different. We see today that in childhood life develops in such a way that the soul life is bound to a high degree to the bodily organization. Take my little book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy or other things I have said about education, and you will see how, with the change of teeth in the seventh or eighth year, the whole soul constitution of the child changes. And from ordinary life we know how the whole soul constitution of a human being changes when he reaches sexual maturity. It is less noticeable that similar changes take place at the beginning and the end of the twenties; these take place more inwardly, but they are quite clearly still present even for the modern human being. When we come to the later years, to the thirties, the soul and spiritual life of the human being becomes highly independent of the physical. We enter a stage of our development in which we change our soul through external experience, through being with the world. We no longer change our soul through what happens in us in such a way as the change of teeth, sexual maturity, or the changes after the age of twenty. But what extends in us more during the youthful years until the end of the twenties, in ancient times extended up to the high age of man. This law is a historical law. This can be observed by those who have acquired the ability to observe the inner soul life, which shows us, in the remnants that still occur today in old people, that such a development was once present. If we know this, then we can look back, for example, to the ancient Indian times, to times that lead into prehistory, where man's soul and spiritual life was dependent on physical development up to the fifties. One became a patriarch at the same time through physical development and in spiritual development, just as today one becomes a sexually mature person both physically and spiritually. This harmony of the physical with the soul-spiritual went up into old age in ancient times. In those ancient times, man also experienced the descending line of physical development, which begins around the age of 35. Until then, our organism grows and sprouts; from then on, it goes downhill, from then on, there is a descending development. Today, we do not go through this descending development in the same way; we are certainly weighed down by old age, but that is different from what it was in ancient times. In ancient times, as the external physical body became stiffer and drier, there was a simultaneous bright illumination of spirituality, so that in the patriarchal age one grew into a certain spirituality through natural development. What was still present in older times for older ages was still present for the Greeks until their mid-thirties. What the Greeks still went through until about the age of 35, we as human beings in our thirties simply no longer go through and therefore no longer radiate it into our social lives. This brought into the whole social life of the Greeks what, for example, Goethe felt when he was driven by longing in Italy to relive Greek culture and where he said: But when I look at these Greek works of art and see how the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that Nature herself follows in creating her works of nature, then I feel necessity, then I feel God. The Greeks were only able to reproduce the laws of nature in their works of art by feeling themselves in the harmonization of the spiritual and mental and the physical and bodily, which occurs when a person reaches the middle of their life in full, physical development. They were only able to do this in their most excellent exemplars [...] because they were able to experience this themselves. From this organization of body and soul there arose the Greek way of artistic creation, the Greek way of religious feeling, and also the Greek way of thinking in medicine. That was the signature of the spiritual life in humanity, which simply arose from the fact that in the thirties what I have described was experienced. One could say: Just as the equilibrium of the balance-beam is experienced in the middle of the beam, so the Greeks experienced the equilibrium of human life in that they still grasped the interplay of soul and spirit into the middle of their thirties. We no longer grasp it. If I am to continue in the same vein, we only achieve physical development that still has an influence on the soul until the end of our twenties in today's age. As a result, in our later years, what arises from the depths of human nature and permeates the world view ceases. But this has also brought about the necessity that what no longer develops naturally in humanity after the age of 28 must be consciously achieved through anthroposophical spiritual education, that what used to arise from human nature itself must now actually be inwardly achieved by the soul. This has become the signature of our time: we only live within the physical realm in our younger years. This is what has now also, and in fact - now I may say it without being misunderstood - legitimately led into materialism. For the child, in looking at itself, must be materialistic, because spirituality first breaks away from matter. We have become materialistic as humanity in the newer centuries to the extent that we are bound to the age that is in the ascending material, organic development, and the less we still receive from nature in the descending development after the age of 35.

This is the signature of our time. It has led us into materialism, as we as humanity have abandoned ourselves to unconscious forces in the last few centuries.

What anthroposophical spiritual science wants is for us to receive from the spirit what nature no longer gives us, just as naively as we used to receive it from nature, to develop the courage to receive from the spiritual realm what we can no longer receive from the natural realm. The spiritual signature of our time points out to us the necessity of developing our full humanity, which we can no longer obtain from nature, out of spiritual, free will activity. This does not establish a decadence. No, decadence is established precisely by the fact that in a time that demands the spirit, one only wants to abandon oneself to nature. Materialism has emerged as a necessary phenomenon. Overcoming materialism must likewise occur as a necessary phenomenon. Anthroposophical spiritual science believes it can read this from the signs of the times, from the signature of the times. From this consciousness of the world and humanity, it wants to have an effect.

People who have delved a little deeper into the signature of our time and who have spoken out in recent times have basically only ever pointed out in a negative way what forces of decline are at work in our time and what must basically be the case if we consider the development of the human race that we have just characterized. There is no need to refer to Spengler, who is much referred to today, but one can refer to one of our best philosophers, Gideon Spicker, who wrote his work out of a broad-minded consciousness and who repeatedly pointed out how man in our time can no longer create the connecting bridge to that which, in full consciousness, gives him his true humanity, that which in turn connects him to the eternal, that which allows him to be permeated by the divine-eternal. And Gideon Spicker spoke words worth heeding in 1909, in which he described the signature of our time in his own way. He said: We have come to have metaphysics without supersensible conviction; a theory of knowledge without objective meaning; a logic without content, a psychology without soul, an ethic without commitment and a religion without reason. —

Now, my dear attendees, dear fellow students. Anthroposophy wants to give people a theory of knowledge again that leads to reality, because reality is both material and spiritual. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to give people a real conviction of the supersensible world by showing the way to see this world. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to establish a logic that in turn delves into the reality of things. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to speak of a soul life as reality, not just of the soul life that we interpret pictorially from the scientific results of anthropology. Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to create a binding social ethic from the foundations of humanity. And anthroposophical spiritual science aims to provide a religious conviction that is based on knowledge, on the vision of that which must exist in religious life as the divine existence.

In this way, anthroposophical spiritual science aims to have an effect on the signature of our time, but not because it arises from some utopian sense or arbitrary decision, but because it appears necessary in the most essential sense for our age to those who are now able to observe the greatest need and deepest longing of our time.

Question: The principle of direct observation [in teaching] has been rediscovered in recent times. Now it turns out that when the child leaves school, they are helpless when it comes to thinking about life. They have been so taken by direct observation that they can only see the picture.

Rudolf Steiner: This is an extraordinarily important pedagogical question of the present day, the question of the concreteness or the exclusive concreteness of teaching. Now perhaps this question is not so specialized, but can only be treated exhaustively by looking at pedagogical thinking as a whole. I would like to mention first of all that teaching in the Waldorf school is based on our knowledge of human development. It is certainly not the case that the Waldorf school is a school of world view, but the educational skill, the educational methodology, the educational handling of things that can be achieved from an anthroposophical state of mind should be put into practice to benefit the Waldorf school. In this practical respect, the insight that children up to about the age of six or seven imitate everything plays a major role. Children continue to imitate up to this age. This means that at this age, at kindergarten age, one should not actually teach in the usual sense, but should rely on the child's ability to imitate. You see, when you have been dealing with such things for decades, as I had to, you gain all kinds of experience. People come to you and ask about all sorts of things. Once a father came to me, very unhappy, and said: What should we do, our boy, who has always been a good boy, has stolen. — I asked the father: How old is the boy? - Four to five years. – Then, I said, we must first examine whether he really stole. – The examination showed that he had not stolen at all, the little boy, even though he had taken money from a drawer. He had only seen every day that his mother gave money to the delivery people from her drawer. He thought: if that's how my mother does it, then it must be right – and he simply took money from the drawer too. He bought sweets, but did not eat them himself, but gave them away. The child was simply an imitator, according to his age. What he did was simply an act of imitation. The point is that you don't actually lead children of this age to believe anything that they are not allowed to imitate. Then begins the age of life that starts with the change of teeth and ends with sexual maturity, which is the actual elementary school age. This elementary school age simply demands – what is demanded today from some party lines must be set aside, the factual must be placed in the foreground – this age demands that the child learns to understand and act on the basis of authority. It is of the greatest importance for the whole of later life, especially for the education of the young for later difficult times and for everything that may happen in life, that the child at this age, from about seven to fourteen years, accepts something on the basis of authority. This relationship of a natural authority of the teacher and educator to the child is something that cannot be replaced by anything else for the human being in his or her whole later life. It would be easy to find proof of what cannot be replaced later in life if one has not had the good fortune to have a natural authority in one's life.

And so it is at this age that the question of object lessons arises. The object lessons that are demanded today have grown out of materialism in their extreme form. Everything is simply placed before the eye. They believe in nothing but what is before their eyes; so everything should be placed before the child. But not only the difficulties you have emphasized arise, but also others that arise on the part of the teachers. Take the auxiliary books written for teachers, in which instructions are given for visual instruction. The banalities and trivialities that are served up there are nothing short of monstrosities. There is an instinctive constant striving to push everything to the lowest possible level. This is the kind of visual instruction in which you teach the child nothing more than what he already knows. This is the worst possible teaching, which provides insight in this way. The best teaching is that which not only caters for childhood, but for the whole of a person's life. If life is not such that one still has something to gain from one's time sitting at school in one's forties or fifties, then the teaching was bad. One must be able to look back on one's school lessons in such a way that there are living forces in this reminiscing. We also grow, of course, as our limbs become larger and many other things within us are also transformed; everything about us grows. When we teach children concepts, ideas and views that do not grow, that remain, and on which we place great emphasis, we are violating the principle of growth. We must present things to the child in such a way that they are placed in the context of living growth. We cannot do this with trite, banal object lessons, but rather when we as educators face the child, imponderables come into play. I very often use an example like this: let us assume that we want to teach the child a concept - one that can be understood purely from the knowledge of the psychology of the child at a certain age -: the concept of immortality. One can make this tangible through natural processes, for example, through the transformation of a butterfly from a chrysalis. One can say: the immortal soul in man is contained in it, like the butterfly in the chrysalis, only that it develops in a spiritual world, just as the butterfly develops from the chrysalis. This is an image. One can teach this image to the child in two different ways. The first is this: one imagines, “I am the teacher, I am tremendously clever; the child is young and terribly stupid.” So I set up this symbol for the child to represent this concept. Of course I have long since outgrown this, but in this way the child is to grasp the immortality of the soul. Now I am explaining this in an intellectualistic way. This is not the way to teach a child; not because what I have said is wrong, but because I am not attuned to the child in the right way. When I immerse myself in anthroposophical spiritual science, it is not an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but a truth. Nature itself has created the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis at a lower level, and the passage through the gate of death at a higher level. If I bring what is so vividly alive in me to the child, then the child will benefit from it. You can't just say that something should be done in a certain way; instead, it depends on imponderables, on a certain state of mind that you yourself have as a teacher – that is what is important. Difficulties arise when one stops at the flat illustrative teaching, which is becoming more and more impersonal; at the age when the teacher should play the important role as a self-evident authority, he withdraws. There are, for example, certain things that should simply be handed down to the child on the authority of an adult. Not everything can be taught to the child on the basis of direct experience — for example, moral concepts: here one cannot start from direct experience, nor from mere commandments; these can only be conveyed to the child through the authority of an adult. And it is one of the most significant experiences one can have in later life, when one has absorbed something in the eighth, ninth, or twelfth year because a revered personality regards it as correct. This relationship to a revered personality is one of the imponderables of . You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life. This is in fact a living growth of what one has taken in during childhood. That is why all this discussion about more or less intuition is not so important. These things must arise out of the object itself. Even the discussion about more or less thinking and so on is not very important. The important thing is that teachers are put in their rightful place, that the human element is brought together in the right way in a school organization. That is the main goal. You can't do anything with curricula or anything that can be formulated in paragraphs in real life – and teaching and educational life is real life. Because if three or six or twelve people sit down together, regardless of their antecedents, from which circle, from which education they come, they will be able to work out an ideally beautiful curriculum. If you somehow put something together in paragraphs out of reflection, it can become ideally beautiful, the most wonderful things can be in it. I am not mocking, it does not have to be bad, it can be extraordinarily beautiful and magnificent, but that is not the point. The point is that in the school, which has a number of teachers, real life takes place; each of these teachers has their own special abilities, that is the real thing, and that is what has to be worked with. What use is it if the teacher can see: this and this is the teaching goal? - That is just an abstraction. What he can be to the children as a personality, by the fact that he stands in a certain way in the world, that is what matters.

The question of schooling in our time is essentially a question of the teacher, and from this point of view all the more detailed questions, such as the question of practical instruction and the like, should be treated. Can children, for example, be taught in a very extreme way through visual instruction? I must say that I feel a slight horror when I see these tortures with the calculating machines in a class, where they even want to transform things that should be cultivated in a completely different way into visual instruction. If you just want to continue with pure visual instruction, you will, of course, end up with clumsy children. This is the result of unbiased observation. It has nothing to do with phenomenology, with phenomenalism: in order to develop proper phenomenalism, you first have to be able to think properly. At school, you are dealing with pedagogical methodology, not with scientific methodology. But one must know how closely proper thinking is connected not only with the brain and the mind of the person, but with the whole person. It depends on the way in which someone has learned to think, on the skill in the fingers. For in reality, man thinks with his whole body. It is only believed today that he thinks with the nervous system; in reality he thinks with the whole organism. And the reverse is also true: if one can teach a child quick thinking in the right way, and even presence of mind to a certain extent in a natural way, one is working for physical dexterity; and if one carries this quickness of thinking to the point of physicality, then the children's dexterity also comes to one's aid. What we have now established in the Waldorf school is much more important: instead of the usual visual instruction in manual skills, the children move on to self-forming, through which they get a sense of the artistic design of the surface. This then leads in turn to the mathematical conception of the surface in later years. This living into the subject matter, not through mere visual instruction for the senses, but through a living together with the whole environment, which is achieved for the whole human being, is what we must work towards.

I just wanted to point out that such questions should be placed in the context of pedagogical thinking as a whole, and that today we spend far too much time discussing specifics.

Rudolf Steiner (in response to other questions): What has been said and often emphasized must be noted: the Waldorf School does not want to be a world view school as such. The fact that it is based on anthroposophical soul-condition is only the case insofar as it is implemented in educational practice. Thus, what is at issue in the Waldorf School is the development of what can be achieved through the anthroposophical movement by purely pedagogical means. The Waldorf School does not want to be, and cannot be, a school of world view in any sense. That is why the Waldorf School has never claimed the right to provide religious instruction for the children in its care. What individual anthroposophists believe about worldviews is not the point. The important thing is that anthroposophy in schools and all that goes with it is intended to have an effect only in the pedagogical practice. For this reason, the religious education of the Catholic children was handed over to the Catholic priest and that of the Protestant children to the Protestant pastor. Now it turned out – this simply came about due to the current circumstances – that there were quite a lot of dissident children who would actually have grown up without religion. For these children, religious education is now provided, but it is not considered part of the school, rather it is presented as free religious education alongside Protestant and Catholic religious education. We have at least had the success that children who would otherwise not have been admitted to any religious education at all now grow up with a religious life as a result. This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view. The aim is not to indoctrinate children with anthroposophy but to apply anthroposophy in practice. So questions on this topic are irrelevant. At the beginning we had to find an appropriate approach to what follows from practice. We have our views about how a seven-, eight- or nine-year-old child should be taught, and these are appropriate. We believed that we had to decide these things on the basis of purely objective principles. Now, of course, the Waldorf school is not an institution for hermits or sects, but an institution that wants to fully engage with life, that wants to make capable people out of children for the sake of contemporary, very practical life. Therefore, it is important to organize the lessons in such a way that, on the one hand, the strict pedagogical requirements are met, and on the other hand, it is important that the Waldorf school is not just any institution for eccentrics. I then worked out the matter in such a way that from the time of entering school until the completion of the third class, you have an absolutely free hand in the individual years, but by the time they have completed the third class, the children are ready to transfer to any school. From the ninth to the twelfth year, you again have a free hand, and then the child must be ready to transfer to any other school, and the same applies when they have completed primary school. We are currently setting up one class each year; what happens next remains to be seen.

As you can see, it is not a matter of working from party-political views, worldviews or anything like that, but purely of putting anthroposophy into pedagogical practice. The ideal would be that the children initially — because Anthroposophy is only developed for adults, we have no children's teaching, and have not yet been in a position to want to have one — would not know that there is an Anthroposophy, but that they would be kept objective and thus placed in life. These things cannot be achieved in the ideal: no matter how hard the teacher tries to remain objective, one child will live in the circle of these parents, the other in the circle of those parents; there are also anthroposophical fanatics, and their children bring anthroposophical mischief into the school, as well as all kinds of other things. It must be made absolutely clear that it can never be a question of the Waldorf School in any way being a school of world view or anything of the sort. It is not that at all, but it wants to make children into capable people in the immediate present, that is, in the life in which we are placed within the state and everything else, so that they are capable within it. It is self-evident that the Waldorf school does not bring the ideas of threefolding into the school. This cannot happen through the efforts of Waldorf education. No party politics are brought into the Waldorf school from the anthroposophical side.

Question: Isn't the methodology that the pastor uses somewhat opposed to the rest of the teaching? Isn't there a conflict here?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't achieve anything completely in life. It would be very nice if we could find not only a Protestant pastor but also a Catholic one who would teach according to our methodology. As I said, our school only wants to put pedagogical practice into practice, not a worldview. The other can go hand in hand with this. Now it is self-evident that in free religious education — because after such, only by anthroposophists to be held, was asked —, also after our methodology is proceeded. It would be very dear to us if the Protestant and Catholic lessons were also given in this way, but we have not yet achieved that.

Question: What is the content of the material taught to anthroposophical children?

Rudolf Steiner: The material is determined in such a way that an attempt is made to take the child's age into account. This is what is always at the psychological basis. That is why it is important in all things that they are most effectively brought to the child when they are introduced at exactly the right age, when the child's inner being resonates most strongly with them. It is a fact that in the seventh or eighth year of life, little is achieved with objective gospel or Bible knowledge, and nothing at all with catechism knowledge. It is not absorbed by the child. This is an anthropological law. On the other hand, everything religious that can be directly formed from a certain shaping of natural processes is very well absorbed by the child at this age; all ethical and genuinely religious concepts that can be formed from natural processes. Above all, one can lead the child to religious feeling indirectly through images of nature. One can only lead the child to the actual Christian feeling from the age of eight, or even from the age of nine. It is only then that they begin to grasp what lies behind the figure of Christ Jesus, for example. These are the concepts that one must teach the child if they are to grasp the content of the Gospels. It is good if it has a foundation and is only introduced to the content of the Gospels around the age of nine, and then gradually led up to the deeper mysteries of Christianity. It must be emphasized that this free religious education is, in the most eminent sense, a thoroughly Christian one, in that the various denominations that take part in it are introduced to a real Christianity. It is the case that if you are a teacher at the Waldorf School, you have come to this [Christian] conviction yourself, from an anthroposophical point of view. You have entered into Christianity from this side. You might phrase it differently, but the children are introduced to a real Christianity. Just as we leave the Protestant and Catholic religious education to their own devices, we also leave the free religious education based on anthroposophy to its own devices. It has never been my intention to ensure that children come to this free religious education. They came in large numbers, but it is really not the aim to damage the external reputation of the school by making it happen in such a way that it could be said to be a school of world view. One does not want to be that at first. That is why we are careful about free religious education and only give it because it is requested.

I do not want to give a lecture in response to the remarks of the esteemed Mr. Strakosch, but please take what I am about to say only as a supplementary comment. Nor should it be taken as something conclusive in any sense.

When I was recently given the task of supervising the construction of the Dornach building, a saying kept ringing in my ears that I had heard when I was studying at the Technical University in Vienna and during that time the builder of the Votive Church in Vienna, the famous architect Ferstel, took up the post of rector at this university. He delivered his inaugural address on the history of architecture. Ferstel said something like this during his speech: architectural styles cannot be invented, they must emerge from the foundations of nationality. On the basis of this view, Ferstel explained the fact that the modern period could be less productive in terms of architectural styles because the folk soul, so to speak, did not bring anything like styles to the surface, and that it could only be more reproductive, which is why people resorted to ancient, to posophie talk, you can make anything out of these mystical foundations. You can do the craziest stuff. But anthroposophy is not allowed to do that. It is not allowed to do the craziest stuff. So that, as I said, you are in a position to have, on the one hand, the craziest stuff of modern mystics, and on the other hand, you have to perform an anthroposophical building that has to be justified before strict science, and you have the most modern material, concrete, with which you can do the craziest stuff, but you can't do that with a sense of style.

Now I want to make it clear: when you are working practically on the realization of a style, history is of no help at all. Historical observation is of no help at all. Everything that has to be done must come from a place of naivety, must truly come from a creative place. Otherwise, it cannot be done, and what must arise in a certain way, must practically arise in opposition to such a view as Ferstel expressed at the time: “Architectural styles cannot be invented, they must arise from the foundations of folklore.” One must simply come to the view with a certain stylistic conscience: the architectural style must be created out of a certain reality, out of a truth. It cannot be invented out of thin air, it must be created out of reality.

Now I would like to draw attention to a third point, which Mr. Strakosch also mentioned. He pointed out the Gothic style, which, with full justification, must be built out of concrete due to the circumstances, and the concrete substructure, which goes up to a certain height, had to be crowned by the actual structure, a wooden structure. You will also admit that the forms of the wooden structure are actually dictated by the material itself with a certain strictness. The wooden structure provides precisely what must arise from the interaction of need, purpose and sense of material. So in Dornach, there was a very specific style to be combined with something that Mr. Strakosch has said: you can do anything with it; you can build the craziest things out of concrete.

Now, if one is not predisposed to building the craziest things, then one actually has a different feeling towards concrete than towards wood. And here I must say, based on practical experience, the opposite of what has just been said. If you take all the antecedents of architectural styles, you can't really build anything out of concrete today. Not everything, but absolutely nothing. If you have a sense of style, you can't just take the “you can do anything” approach. You can only get started if you can use concrete as a material out of a certain stylistic conscience. In a certain respect, you are in a parallel situation with what sometimes occurs on anthroposophical ground at the moment. You see, from the misunderstood backgrounds of mystical contemplation and so on, which many people have in mind when they talk about mysticism, theosophy, anthroposophy today, you can make anything out of these mystical backgrounds. You can make the craziest stuff. But anthroposophy is not allowed to do that. It is not allowed to do the craziest stuff. So that, as I said, you are in a position to have, on the one hand, the craziest stuff of modern mystics, and on the other hand, you have to perform an anthroposophical building that has to be justified before strict science, and you have the most modern material, concrete, with which you can do the craziest stuff, but you can't do that with a sense of style.

Now I would like to make it clear: when you are working on the practical realization of a style, history is of no help at all. Historical reflection is of no help at all. Everything that has to be done must come from the realm of the naive, must really come from the realm of creativity. There is no other way to do it, which must in a certain way rebel, practically rebel against such a view as Ferstel expressed at the time: “Architectural styles cannot be invented, they must come from the foundations of folklore.” - One must simply come to the view with a certain stylistic conscience: The architectural style must be created out of a specific reality, out of a reality. It cannot be invented out of the blue, it must be created out of reality.

Now I would like to draw attention to a third point, which Mr. Strakosch also mentioned. He pointed out the Gothic style and showed, with full justification, how the Gothic style actually draws heavily from craftsmanship. And there is indeed a backward devotion to craftsmanship in the Gothic style. In one direction, the question of style was resolved by the combination of cross vaulting, pointed arches and flying buttresses that the Gothic style then developed. But if we consider the other aspect that has been emphasized, the matter takes on a different perspective. It was also said that the mere mechanical fitting together of the components would not result in the Gothic style, that certain forms and certain views live on in the Gothic style, which can be found in the Gothic style, and about which a certain secret has been kept, even in the “building huts”, which has been strictly guarded, and which now goes beyond the craftsmanship. We thus find an element that has been built into it, that can be found in the style, but which – it will be possible to admit this in the broadest sense – has actually been lost for the more recent period in terms of its actual essence, or at least in terms of its application. Today we no longer do what was done in those days out of the secrets of architecture, which arose out of quite different presuppositions, without the necessity of making strict calculations and the like. It is just these conditions that could, I am putting this hypothetically for the moment, be connected with other things. They could be connected with the fact that today the reproductive element rules: not really the productive creation of style rules, but the reproductive shaping of style rules. Perhaps it is precisely from those soul entities that have been very strictly preserved that those forces which underlie productivity and from which the productivity of style comes, flow. And perhaps this perplexity about style in recent times stems from the fact that we have lost a certain element in building. This element must be given special consideration in architecture because it has to conform to the strict laws by which a building must be constructed, must conform to the static and other conditions that Mr. Strakosch has discussed. In architecture, in the broadest sense, we are dealing with what scientifically based technology makes possible, and on the other hand we are obliged to incorporate a certain stylistic element into what we build.

The question now arises: Was not perhaps in older times what technology is much more closely tied to style than it is today? Was it not perhaps the case that the building rules that existed at the time were formulated in such a way that they included the technology, so that one could build safely, as it were, by simply following the results of these guarded rules? Were they not, despite being artistically stylish, perhaps also technically correct through and through?

You get such a feeling when you experience something like what could be experienced in Dornach. It occurred to me — as I said, the main things always arise out of naivety — to enclose the auditorium with a dome and to attach this dome to a smaller dome that was to crown the stage area. The question now was how to find the technique for the connection, and that was an important question in Dornach for quite some time. I felt the necessity to do it this way; on the other hand, it had to be technically feasible. Until we found the solution, I could only say that the right technical solution must be found for what arises out of the necessity of style, and that it must also show a certain perfection in terms of technique. These things must coincide. Of course, if something is conceived in an intellectualistic or inartistic way and one somehow wants to build a building without style, no technical problem will arise for it. But if something is really found in the foundations where the style must lie, then the appropriate technique must also be found for it.

Now, as I said, the historical is of no help if one - if I may put it this way - has to create something like a style from a naive point of view. But afterwards one can still orient oneself towards what the development may lead to. And here I would like to add something to what has just been said, which may initially seem somewhat paradoxical in the present, like so many things that have to be said from anthroposophical spiritual science, but which will probably prove to be thoroughly practical in the course of time, however fantastic it may seem to some people today.

I do not want to go back to Oriental or Egyptian architecture, which has been sufficiently considered just now, but I want to refer first to what is already on the foundations of what has emerged from Oriental-Egyptian architecture, I want to refer to Greek architecture, and there again - first disregarding everything else - to Greek temple construction. But I do not want to touch on the technical side of things now, but rather on the style.

I believe that anyone who studies Greek architecture more closely will find that the forms cannot really be grasped if one concentrates too much on the static element. Greek architecture definitely takes static elements into account – this is clear. They are there, but in an extraordinarily free way. They are everywhere in such a way that one sees: in a certain way, what we today call statics is handled quite freely. The bearing and the load are there. But they have not fallen into the trap of regarding what has been put there as decoration, nor, on the other hand, have they fallen into the trap of one-sidedness, of regarding it as merely static. There is an element hidden there that has perhaps been kept even more jealously than the secrets of the later masons' lodges, that has emerged from the original, instinctive views of humanity and that, in turn, can only be found through anthroposophical, spiritual scientific investigation. In a sense, these Greek temples are also functional buildings. A Greek temple, considered in itself as a mere structure, is never complete. If you take the statue of the god out of the Greek temple and look at it, you get the feeling that the most essential thing is missing. It was understood only as the dwelling of the god, and only if one assumes that the people actually only have something to do with the temple from the outside, that actually only the god should have his residence in it. But now it follows that the temple is the dwelling of the god, not much for those intuitions that flowed into the temple construction. One must go back to something else, especially with regard to the purpose of building a temple; if I may now call it that in a figurative sense: with regard to the question of need. In this regard, one can say that the purely external aspect of the temple's purpose is clear to anyone who wants to describe these things in a feature-like way; the fact that the temple is the dwelling place of the god. But this is not enough for those who want to go beyond the feature-like description and really understand the inner form of the temple. For this, it is necessary to add another element: that the Greek temple is to be seen as a transformation of the original burial vault, the burial building. The Greek temple cannot be understood otherwise than by seeing in it a metamorphosis of a burial building. But this leads back to times when the soul of the deceased was sought in the vicinity of the buried corpse. The building was actually erected in its forms for the soul, which should still be there, even when one passed from ancestor worship to the cult of the gods. The cult of the gods in the older religions was nothing other than a metamorphosed cult of ancestors; the old gods are basically ancestors, are thought of as ancestors, and the way in which the rule of the soul-spiritual was also a transformation of how the workings of the soul after death were viewed in the deceased person – in terms of the forms of perception, there was something that was strictly related to this. Now it was a matter of rebuilding a soul, and for that one had to come up with the right balance of power, the right statics, which was possible as an external statics, but at the same time served this purpose, to be a soul's reconstruction, so that the soul could dwell within; for the soul of the god had to dwell in just such a structure.

Where did the power relations come from? That is the big question. They were not calculated at all in such a way, as we are rightly learning today in our age. This was not understood in those older times. The little literature that still exists clearly shows that such a structure was not built from strict statics and mathematics and mechanics. But those older times had something else, and here I come to what is of course regarded as fantastic today, and can be regarded as such, however practical it actually is: the question is to find out by what means, let us say for example, the position of the center of gravity was found, the center of gravity that simply had to be placed in such a way that by looking at the building, one knew where it was. But not with the intellect, but with the feeling, the sense of style in particular, it was necessary to find out how to distribute the forces, how to distribute the material in order to get the right feeling. There was a soul dwelling within. In those ancient times, one did not have the abstract ideas of the soul that one finds today, for example, among our psychologists, where the soul is something very vague – for some it is a point that is sought at some point in the physical organization, and what more such nonsense is –; these abstract views of the soul did not have the old days. They had very definite views of the soul. It would be interesting to explain these views, but there is no time for that. It would be all the more interesting because the views that these ancients had about the soul, to a certain extent, contained what the descriptions of the old soul conceptions, for example in Wundt's philosophy, do not contain, but did not contain everything that Wundt describes of the old soul conceptions. These things are such that they cannot be grasped by a materialistic way of thinking. But they lived in ancient times and they lived so concretely that one could also connect with them concrete ideas with regard to the forming of the material. But how was that done? You see, everything that was built, everything that was designed in terms of static relationships, arose for older times, however strange it may seem today, from the human organization and its statics. And what was still considered in Greek times for architecture arose from the statics of the human limb organism. I do not mean the human limb organism only as a combination of arms and legs, but also, for example, the lower jaw and much in the middle human, the chest human and so on. But everything that lies within the human being with limbs could be studied. For example, you could try out how a certain connection of forces works when you squat down, say, with bent knees. You could see how the center of gravity relates to a certain system of forces, and you could see how the center of gravity relates to a certain system of forces when you tried out the best way to hold your mouth open to find the ideal center of gravity of the head, which you do at the lower jaw. It is interesting to study the strange shaping that is present in Greek sculptures with this slightly open mouth; it arose from a very specific study of the position of the lower jaw, which one experienced internally in its static and dynamic aspects.

And in the same way, you experienced the static and dynamic relationships that arise when you squat down and rest your arms on your knees, for example. You studied this dynamic in humans, and in older times especially in the human limbs. They observed the dynamics as they express themselves in the human being when walking – because the unfolding of very special inner static-dynamic conditions is needed for this walking – and from this they formed ideas about very specific static conditions; and what could be studied in the human organism itself, we find again in the formation of the temple buildings. It was said that what the human being has as a head is indeed a beautiful external expression of the physical human being, but it is just an expression for the physical human being. After all, the human being is a rational being precisely in order to be efficient in the physical world. Similarly, the trunk and respiratory system of the human being were thought of in a certain way. It was said that this is something that underlies the connection between the human being and the earthly environment. Head and chest were, as it were, left out when, in ancient times, people thought of the human being as a spiritual container. They thought in particular of what could not be directly animated in the human form; they thought of the balance of power that arises in the use of the limb-based human being. This limb-based human being was the vehicle through which the human being carried his soul into the earth here. The systems of forces that the person revealed entered into the soul; they were studied; and people wanted to see the soul surrounded by them even after death. What one could experience by carrying one's soul through life, that one most secreted into what one wanted as the enclosure of the soul, but not in an abstract way, but with all the concreteness and practicality of the old view.

Such things can only be studied externally by observing certain qualities of feeling. It is also possible – spiritual science provides complete certainty in what I have just explained – to gain a certain insight into such things from external symptoms. Consider what the Greek sculptor particularly wanted to show when he depicted the human being as a physical figure: tall legs and an extraordinarily large head by later standards; in Greek sculpture, the length of the head is contained eight times in the total length of the human being. He particularly looked at the head in that the head has a certain length, thus it has a limb organism. The Greek sculptor particularly studied the limb system of the head and in turn studied the limb system of the whole human being. Everything contained in one system of the human being is also contained in the other. The whole human being is in turn contained in the head, the arm and leg construction in the jaws, only one must then look at the head the other way around. So that one can say: In the case of the Greeks, the main focus of attention in man was the organization of the limbs — right up to the head. The limb system is expressed least in the chest and trunk of the human being; it recedes completely in Greek sculpture. It is actually the shortest and weakest part in Greek sculpture. High lower limbs, a large head in relation to the rest – that is precisely the focus of attention on that from which an inner static in man follows. And this inner static was carefully studied and carefully guarded. Therefore, in those days, being an architect was to be in possession of the knowledge that had been studied on the noblest of what could be studied, on man.

Now, the Middle Ages are approaching. Mr. Strakosch has excellently described how something else flows into the vaulting, into the pointed arch, how something lives in it. You can study what lives in it by turning your attention to how man was viewed in the Middle Ages. If you look at the medieval representation of man, you will see that the head is not contained eight times in the whole human figure, but about ten times. The legs are short. People have small heads, which means that the limb organism of the head recedes and that little attention is paid to the other limbs. Hence the huge, long trunk; it is the main thing in medieval sculpture, all attention is paid to it. If you study this statics – I have to express myself paradigmatically because of the limited time – if you study what was contained in the rules of the masons' lodges, you can find the secrets of that part of the human body that we today call the rhythmic part of the human body, that which is expressed in rhythm, in the statics of the rhythms, in that element that was added to the purely craftsmanship of the Gothic period. In a sense – one must not become fanciful when mentioning this matter – this is what trust in God is – Mr. Strakosch has correctly traced it back to its real meaning – it comes from the heart, it comes from the middle human being, not from the head human being. Thus we find that in the same period in which, as a result of the study of external nature and the study of pure mathematics and mechanics, which are to be applied to nature, the attention to man is lost, and those elements that lead to a style are also lost. For one can only achieve a style if one can shape in the external present that which one can study in the microcosm.

And if one is faced with the task of finding a new architectural style, then it is naturally a matter of creating from similar foundations again. It is a matter of returning to what follows from the human essence itself. Now, in our time of scientific development, this cannot be found as I have outlined it for two epochs of humanity, but only by ascending from the limb-man to the head-man through the rhythmic man. But you can't start with that, because he has already developed his abilities to the highest degree. The head human being is, after all, the one in which the individuality of the human being is most expressed in form. You can't use it in the same way as, for example, in Greek statics, where you had in the spatial drawing precisely what you can't see in a person when he is simply standing in front of you. Likewise in later times: one had this in the spatial drawing, which cannot be seen, but which only results from a feeling through those arches that make up the rhythmic human being.

Now, in the present, the only thing that can be done is to find the spiritually seen basis that underlies the actual spirituality of man. Therefore, something had to be done in the Dornach building that is not just a meeting room, but also a room that invites the individual to feel in it in such a way that he comes to self-knowledge at the same time. The Greek building was the frame for the soul. The Gothic building is, through everything I have just mentioned, the place of assembly; it is not complete unless the community, the assembly, is present within it. 'Assembly' is something that corresponds to the 'Duma' and is etymologically related to 'cathedral'. The assembly belongs there. Now we need a building that is so responsive to human beings that they can see the forms not in their external human form but in their imagination. If one wanted to build in the same way as before, one would fall back into intellectualized building, which would be impossible because it would no longer be art. In art, one must remain in intuition, but one must also find the style for what is now brainwork, namely our present-day statics. While the statics of the Greeks was entirely intuition, our statics today is a product of work, a brainwork, and we must find that which was precisely withheld from the Greeks. They built up what they saw as statics. For us, this comes from the intellect. Intuition must add what can only be given in intuition. The Dornach building, which is not at all symbolic, is constructed in this way. It is a slander to say that, because that would mean that the building was constructed in an unartistic way. It is absolutely the case that everything about this building is only artistically conceived, but in such a way that the artistic is shaped directly out of direct perception. It is, again, the arrival at a style, but in such a way that this style has been found in an equally naive way as it was created earlier, out of the necessity of direct perception. Therefore, anyone who comes to Dornach will be able to feel at home in this building, because it is executed in such a way that one finds oneself in it as one has always found oneself in real architectural works. There is truly nothing fantastic in the Dornach building; everything has arisen out of the stylistic conscience just concretely characterized. Therefore what would otherwise have happened could not occur. — Is that not so? Anthroposophy was there, had been there for many years before it needed a building like the Dornach building. Then a number of people who at that time considered themselves convinced of the basic truths of anthroposophy had the idea — it was not my idea — of building a structure of this kind for the special kind of life that arises from anthroposophy in an artistic and practical way. I was only given the task of finding the forms, the style, for this building. I was, so to speak, commissioned by the Anthroposophists. The building did not arise as a fact from my idea.

Now, it is not the case that today such things happen in such a way that one says: There is some kind of association, a society with this or that goal. That is the order of the day: you found societies and associations everywhere, and then you set up the programs that are to be carried out for this or that association. These programs are usually very clever, because when people get together, they can come up with the cleverest things intellectually, but with all that, they would get no further than a theory; with all that, they would get no further than, say, Wilson's Fourteen Points in the direction of world history. That is also a program of that kind, clever, but in relation to the real affairs of the world, something impracticable, something quite abstractly foolish, one might almost say. And then, when such an association is there that needs its own house, then it chooses some style from the available ones, according to which it has its building constructed. Anthroposophy, if it is honest with itself, cannot proceed in this way. That is not possible with anthroposophy. By being thoroughly honest with itself, it knows that it is bringing something into modern civilization, into modern cultural development, that has not been there before. Anyone who has a sense of style and other artistic feelings knows that all forms of art, including architecture, grow out of the way of thinking of a particular time, and that they cannot be understood at all without living with the whole person in the way of thinking of that time. That is why the old architectural styles are only reminiscences for us. We can only understand them to the extent that we can put ourselves in those ancient times. Therefore, for most people who cannot do that, much is incomprehensible.

Anthroposophy is something completely new, not in the sense of a theory but in the sense of life. It is something that can become art at the same time because it does not blunt the feelings as mere intellectualism does. Artists are often afraid of anthroposophy because they think of it as a theory like any other theory. Theory deadens everything artistic, but not anthroposophy. There, the impulses of feeling and will are stimulated. The whole human being is stimulated. Anthroposophy makes people more skillful in their hands — this should be considered today, when most men are so clumsy that they can't even sew on a torn-off trouser button. Therefore, we must really recognize that everything that is anthroposophical is included in skill, in manual dexterity, in human mobility. These are not just thoughts, but at the same time they are world forces in which man lives. Therefore, they can be built, sculpted, and painted in the same way that one builds, sculpts, and paints that which has been brought out of man in the way described.

Because anthroposophy is something new in our culture, a setting had to be found for it that could only exist for anthroposophy. That is to say, a style had to be found that arose out of its spiritual impulses. The building at Dornach stands in such a way that what can be said from the rostrum, the word that is there to proclaim the content of the spiritual world, is one way of speaking; another is the way seen in the setting of the building. Every column and every capital speaks exactly like the words spoken from the rostrum. There is a harmony, just as there was a harmony in the Greek soul between the vision of God and the building of temples. One must create from the impulses of the origin of art. Then something comes out that cannot be discussed: the style – the style that must be grasped from the whole person, from where one experiences the thoughts, which are more than mere thoughts, as forces that sit within one and pulsate through one's blood, so that one can also shape them externally.

I only wanted to make a few remarks, my dear fellow students, honored guests. I just wanted to point out how one can indeed arrive at finding styles again. No matter how imperfectly this may have been achieved in Dornach — I myself am the strictest critic of this building, which is only the first step — an attempt has been made to find the characteristic style of the period, to find again what belongs to the style. And that is why something is being placed in the style here that is real spirituality, one can also conquer the material that proves to be so brittle, as Mr. Strakosch described it, the concrete, so that one then says to oneself: Certainly, one cannot make anything out of concrete if one does not want to make the craziest stuff, but the craziest stuff is precisely the most style-less. You can only do something with concrete if you have the other prerequisites – whether they are practical prerequisites for a functional building or spiritual prerequisites for a building such as the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach – if you have what is alive within, within you; then you can say, even if you have concrete in front of you: It is not the case that concrete allows you to make anything out of it, but rather you can only place one thing in a single place. Where a human being has an earlobe, there could not be a big toe, nature would not allow it; when a certain mass of forces of the organism is present, only one thing can be formed in one place – if one lives in contemplation. That is what is meant when one speaks of a sense of style, of a firmly established sense of style, and of the absolutely plastic concrete material.

So you may be able to experience in Dornach that, despite the truth of what Mr. Strakosch said about the concrete material from certain points of view, the concrete material in Dornach has been treated in such a way — even if not everything has been successful — that what is situated in any given place is sensed as necessary precisely there, and that one says to oneself out of direct perception: just as only an earlobe can be in a certain place on the head, so only a very definite form can be here. But before that, the merely symmetrical, the merely moderate-metrical must be transferred into the organic, the internally experienced moderate, the internally experienced symmetrical, as one experiences it when one passes from the merely mechanical to the organism. In order to arrive at a style again, the step had to be taken from the geometric-symmetrical, metrical style and so on to the organic style. No matter how imperfectly this may have been achieved, it is undoubtedly in this direction that we must seek what the further stylistic development of architecture must be. And I believe that we will only find the [style for a] utility building, as well as [for] a building like the Goetheanum in Dornach, if we follow such paths; otherwise we will only ever get as far as the reproductive. We will only get to the productive by following this path. Then there will be no need for pessimistic observations about the fact that architectural styles are not being invented, but then the urge for new stylization, new stylistics, will arise out of the full, artistic life.

Question: I would like to ask whether Dr. Steiner has found the relationship between today's man and the new stylistic form of the Dornach building on the path of higher knowledge, as was previously suggested for spiritual-scientific things, and if so, whether this path may be applied where intuitive and artistic

creation is involved.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question that cannot be treated in such general terms. I have, I believe, described the process as far as it was possible in the sketchy presentation. The point is that the intuition is there, and this intuition comes with a certain inevitability. So you can't say that preparations could be made for something specific or something like that, so that these things will come. Rather, in the anthroposophical — whether one believes it today or not — there is something that, in contrast to the merely abstract, theoretical, is an element that is connected with organization, with growth and so on. It is the case that one can say: Even what I recognize as an idea, as some kind of essence in the spiritual world, is there, it is seen, but one does not now have the possibility of holding on to it in the same way as one holds on to a sensual experience that clings to the memory; one can only reconstruct the paths by which one has come to such a higher experience, that is, what lies before the experience, and then wait to see if the experience is there again. The experience is the direct perception; and just as I do not have this hall if I only have the memory of it, so I do not have the higher spiritual experience if I only have it in memory. It does not present itself at all in memory. That is the peculiar thing about higher spiritual experiences: they cannot be remembered in the usual way. I explained in my lecture that the higher spiritual experiences are due to a transformation of the power of memory, which is why they are not subject to memory, but must be experienced again and again in a new way. I have written four mystery dramas, and every single word was there, it was there. I cannot say that one can prepare oneself specifically, but through anthroposophy one enters into a living process. I could hint at what underlies it with something that might seem trivial to you. If you have learned something and have a corresponding memory, then you have it, you always have it present; but if you have eaten something, you cannot say: I do not need to eat today because I ate the day before yesterday. — What I learned yesterday is available to me today; that is an abstract process that underlies memory. What is a real process is not subject to memory, it is processed. This is how it is with the experience of what is experienced in supersensible worlds. It is a real experience. Therefore one can say: in general, the realization of what anthroposophy can give is already the path to such things, and will naturally be found in detail when the preconditions for it are there. But it is self-evident that one cannot say that one should now cultivate one thing or another through anthroposophy or that anthroposophy is the means to realize the ideal of Friedrich von Schlegel, the romantic, which consisted in nothing more than: one should resolve to become a genius. Anthroposophy is not the way to do that. But it is something living, that is what it is about. I have said that something like a new style emerges from the naive; historical considerations would be of no use in shaping a new style. It is not aimed at intellectualizing artistic production, but at what simply arises from the development of humanity, as I presented it yesterday, that the forces that used to be physically effective must now be sought spiritually. That is what matters. But I would like to warn against trying to regulate in any way the things that should actually lead to the fullest freedom, and thus also to artistic freedom, in the way indicated. I do not want to pass over these things without reminding you that artistic freedom must prevail in them, and that I very much fear that if you apply a rule to these things from the outset, even the golden section, that in the end it is not the free creation that lies there, but the feeling of being forced into those Spanish boots that a German poet once, let us say, “glorified” in a poem. The application of standards as to what may be achieved in free creation, and the judgment: “That is not beautiful” — if it does not meet a certain standard, that leads to the inartistic. And I fear that the Dornach building would become inartistic if one were to apply only the golden section [gap] —- the golden section is, of course, abstracted from what has been built so far; it is contained in countless works of art and is justified because it is contained in the human form; but if you apply it as a preconceived rule, you do not arrive at what is pleasing clothing, but at what was worn at the Spanish court and later at the Austrian court.

Question: How can it be explained that we can often solve problems in our half-asleep state that we cannot solve in broad daylight? ... [pause]

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the current ideas of physiological science or even psychological science, which is almost the same thing nowadays, we cannot explain this fact, which is undoubtedly a fact. But if one has trained oneself without prejudice to observe human life in reality, then such facts become proof of this basic view. We must be clear about the following, and in the same way that one can be clear in a materialistic-physiological way about other things that can be achieved through such science. We must realize that man is actually only awake to a certain part of his being from waking to sleeping, namely only to his life of thinking. The life of thinking can be seen clearly when it is awake. On the other hand, there is no possibility of being in the same nuance of consciousness in the life of feeling as in the life of thinking. When analyzing the emotional life, it has the same nuance of consciousness as the dream life. Dreams are just images that string together. But the sequences of the dream life, especially in interesting dreams, do not correspond to the logic of the imagination, but actually to the logic of the emotions, the association of feelings. Feelings are basically only the waking parallel to what occurs in dreams in images, in instinctive imagination. Even when we are awake, we are completely asleep in terms of our will. No matter how we will, we only awaken in our imaginative life. How the will functions, what happens when we move just one arm, we do not have that [in consciousness]; we have the intention, we lift our arm in the imagination, but we only have the imaginative image of the act of the will. But now, for example, mathematical ideas do not come from that part of our consciousness that is exhausted in ordinary waking imagination. If we were only waking human beings, that is, only thinking beings — Dilthey describes this interestingly in a Berlin Academy treatise — we would not come to any mathematics, much less to mechanics. Mathematics and mechanics are grounded in the human being, and the human being comes to mathematics only through the movements of his own limbs. There is something similar at the basis of Greek statics, only we have it in reflection. We have mechanics, especially phoronomy, everything that we grasp with measure and number, only reflected in the imagination. Therefore, we are much closer to the mathematical, to what can be calculated, to what must be found by man. And if man would only experience it once – I have to express myself paradoxically – if he only really experienced how clever and ingenious he is in his sleep, he could become megalomaniac. It is actually very good that this fog of sleep spreads over this undeserved cleverness and that it only sometimes comes up in dreams. But it is absolutely right that when we wake up, we can just about catch what we are doing, if we are preparing some problem in our sleep. We solve many problems in our sleep. And if you want to proceed experimentally, you can do the following experiment. He should try to deal with a difficult task in the afternoon until the evening. He will see if he succeeds in formulating the question clearly towards the evening – the question is a difficult problem – and if he then has the composure to tackle it properly the next morning, he will see what he has worked on in the meantime. This can then seem like an inspiration. So you can even approach these things experimentally. Such things virtually confirm what anthroposophical spiritual science — in a methodical and thoroughly trained way, of course — wants to bring to light. I do not believe that we have yet reached the point where the “heaviness of the technician's trials” that Dr. Unger presented so brilliantly yesterday can be resolved by these means; we have not yet developed enough life pedagogy and didactics for that. But the problem can certainly be explained in the ways that I have just suggested.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy, of which I can, of course, only sketch a meager and inadequate picture in the context of a short lecture this evening, does not want to talk about worldviews merely out of theoretical considerations or emotional impulses, but this anthroposophy wants to penetrate the most diverse branches of scientific and other life in a fruitful way. At present, anthroposophy is not only being discussed, but in Dornach, near Basel, we already have a School of Spiritual Science where a series of experts gave lectures and lecture courses on a wide range of scientific topics last fall and this spring. A therapeutic institute is being founded in Stuttgart to gradually introduce into medical practice the medical applications of anthroposophical spiritual science. And I could mention many more examples of this kind, which show that anthroposophy does not arise from some kind of sectarian sentiment or emotional impulse, but that it wants to place itself in life as a fact of life. Since it is based on such premises, it feels thoroughly permeated by the obligation to justify itself before the strictest demands that have gradually arisen in the scientific life of humanity. And it may well be said that anthroposophy seeks to take up precisely those points where the most diverse branches of science are currently showing that they demand a continuation from within their own structure. I would like to go straight to the point.

The great triumphs of modern science, which, as I have mentioned time and again, are fully recognized and appreciated by anthroposophy, these great triumphs of modern science are partly due to the fact that we have understood how to transform mere observation of the external sense world into scientific systematic experiment. And it is not only the results of the sciences of modern times that arise from experimentation, from the methodology of the experiment, from the experimental design, but at the same time, from the experimental design, from the way the experiment is conducted, arises what I would like to call the modern scientific attitude, which one must have if one wants to have any say in modern scientific life.

Anthroposophy now seeks to fully meet these requirements in a field other than that of recognized natural science.

What, then, is the actual basis of the certainty that we gain from experimentation in relation to the external world? It is based on the fact that we are able to compose the conditions of the experiment from our considerations, from our insights, in such a way that we are able to have a clear overview of what now emerges as a series of facts from these conditions that we ourselves have composed. What follows from this special characteristic of the experiment has now been worked out in the modern scientific world view, so that a knowledge of certain conditions, especially of the inorganic conditions of the external world, has indeed been achieved to a certain extent. The special esteem in which experiments were held has, however, led to what may be called scientific materialism. But this scientific materialism is justified in a certain sense. For, insofar as one aims to methodically get to know the laws of the course of material phenomena, it is really a matter of getting to know what we encounter in material existence as objectively material, as actual, and in its lawfulness. Great, tremendous progress has been made in this way.

But in more recent scientific life, we are confronted with another fact, a fact that does not stand alone, but which I would like to emphasize as a particularly symptomatic one: it was in the first half of the 19th century, in the age in which just that way of thinking emerged, of which I have just given a very brief description; it was in the age when one said goodbye to talking about a certain force that had always been assumed in the past and without which one did not think one could get along. What earlier natural philosophers or naturalists called the “life force” was abandoned. In the 19th century, this life force was already understood to be something very nebulous. The idea was that compounds of chemical elements and chemical processes in general should take place in the organism under the influence of this life force in a way that was only vaguely understood. And to the same extent that the newer experimental science emerged, to the same extent people no longer found satisfaction in speculating about such a life force. Because gradually all the talk about such a life force had become speculation. So around the middle of the nineteenth century, the scientific consideration of this talk about a special life force disappeared, and rightly so – at least if one is able to grasp things historically and scientifically.

But in more recent times, we are once again confronted with a different fact. The certainty that has been gained in experimental science, and what has been acquired there in terms of knowledge of material connections – it is gradually becoming apparent that this is not enough. The material connections, insofar as they can be traced into the organic, even into the life of the soul, these connections cannot be grasped with what can be gained from the experimental science that has been customary up to now. And there is more: one gradually gets the feeling that it is impossible to approach what is already manifested in the living organism, let alone the ensouled organism, with the concepts and ideas, with the summaries of phenomena that are gained as natural laws. And so there has emerged what is called neo-vitalism, which in turn appeals to something similar to the old life force that has been abandoned.

Anyone who looks impartially at everything that is being attempted in this field of penetration, or, as it is also called, the overcoming of the science that grew up in the second half of the 19th century, will see it as a hybrid, a half-measure, because the same kind of thinking that has been developed for external experimental science is being used to penetrate more or less hypothetically into the living organism. And by observing without prejudice everything that presents itself in this respect as a kind of hybrid, one must actually come to the conclusion that the same thinking that one has developed in the usual experimental science is really not suitable for penetrating into the laws, into the essence of what lives in the organic, in the animated, and in the spiritualized. Can we get by with a renewal of the concept of the life force when we want to grasp the organic, the ensouled and the spiritualized with the same thoughts that we are accustomed to rightly apply to the external sensual nature?

Those who have correctly grasped the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here are fundamentally convinced that we cannot get by with this. They are convinced that it is perfectly justified to assume that the phenomena of life demand, precisely when they are observed with the strictest science of the 19th and 20th centuries, a going beyond this science; but at the same time they require a transformation of knowledge itself, a transformation of the whole soul disposition, a transformation of the whole position of the human observer to that which is to be observed. Therefore, the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here does not start from the same knowledge that must rightly be assumed in external natural science, but seeks to grasp that which obviously lies beyond this natural scientific field through other powers of knowledge. And these other powers of cognition – this is for her a thoroughly empirical, an experiential fact – these other powers of cognition are not present in ordinary life, in ordinary scientific research; they lie, so to speak, dormant in the soul, they must first be brought out of this soul. And until one recognizes that every speculative reconstruction of something like the old life force is of no use, until one recognizes that only the transition to a special kind of knowledge, the development of a special kind of knowledge that lies dormant in the soul in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Otherwise, one will not advance from the comprehension of the inorganic to the comprehension of the organic, of the ensouled, of the spiritualized.

How should one imagine the development of such powers lying dormant in the soul? What I shall now have to characterize in a few words as a matter of principle – the path to supersensible knowledge – can be found described in detail in my book How to Know Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, as well as in other books of mine. I shall only emphasize here what is of fundamental importance in the matter.

Two things should be aimed for first. To a certain extent, human soul life must be developed systematically and consciously in two poles if such higher knowledge is to emerge in man. One side is this, which is best understood by building on the human capacity for memory. We need this memory for ordinary life, and we need it to establish a scientific life. If a person's ability to remember, if their memory, is disturbed, they lose their normal mental health. You only need to familiarize yourself with what a pathologist tells you about people whose recollection of their life events is somehow interrupted, so that they can no longer see their past life. What makes us a whole person inwardly, in our soul, is actually the ability to remember. But this ability to remember is at the same time what must now be overcome in a certain respect for higher knowledge. One must tie in with what comes to light in memory. In memory, so to speak, our ideas become something permanent. Again and again, memories can arise arbitrarily or involuntarily from the stream of our experiences, and this is precisely how our soul life is constituted. What arises there, the making permanent of the ideas, can be recreated in a certain way by means of the method that I called the meditative method of knowledge in the books mentioned. I mean this in the technical sense, not in the nebulous, mystical sense in which it is often meant today. Then, with full and free will, one must imitate what arises in the memory, namely, the fact that certain images enter into consciousness. One must present such easily comprehensible ideas to oneself, which may not be reminiscences, which may not themselves be memory images, which one can therefore either have recommended by another, or which one must put together in such a way that they are thoroughly comprehensible, so that nothing from the subconscious can arise and mix in; and these ideas must then be given duration at will. To a certain extent, one must be able to rest with the whole life of the soul on such images. It does not depend on the actual content of such images, but on this act of the soul. It depends on bringing the whole life of the soul together in looking, inwardly looking at such images. In this way, one acts on this life of the soul in a similar way to how one acts, for example, on a muscle that performs work and thereby experiences a strengthening. What matters is this intensification of the soul life. Therefore, what I have now briefly described is, in practice, a very extensive exercise, something to which one must devote oneself for a long time and in a very orderly fashion. Then forces develop that otherwise would not be drawn out of the soul life. Under the influence of the modern scientific spirit, we are actually striving more and more not to evoke these kinds of images into the field of our consciousness and to rest on them, but rather we have come to life or through observation, so that this soul power, to which I have particularly referred, and which must be strengthened, has actually been little practised in the modern scientific and life attitude. But it is this soul power that is important.

Now, I would like to add something here, so to speak in parentheses: Those who hear that such soul forces are being developed that otherwise lie dormant in the soul will be inclined, out of certain foundations of today's thinking, to say with a light heart: Well, yes, a certain pathology of the soul is being developed; hallucinations or illusions or other unjustified soul content are being created. And those people who have not seriously studied what is actually meant here have presented their misunderstandings to the world in the most inaccurate way [for example, by claiming] that, to a certain extent, such exercises provoke pathological states of consciousness. If you are a true observer of the soul and understand how auto-suggestion, illusions and hallucinations come about – I would have to give many lectures to describe it in detail – if you know these pathological phenomena – for they are all pathological – if you know these pathological phenomena of the soul life and the forces that lead to them, then you also know that what is developed in the soul life through anthroposophy, through anthroposophical methodology, points in precisely the opposite direction. Everything that leads to illusion, to suggestion, points in the direction of illness. What is cultivated in the soul through the anthroposophical method points in the opposite direction. All the powers that heal and restore health in the life of the soul and, through it, in the organic life are called forth by the exercises I am referring to here.

What I have described here leads to a certain emergence of soul forces that grow stronger. This leads to the first stage of supersensible knowledge, which I call the imaginative stage. Not because one is dealing with “imagination” in the sense in which the word is often used, but because through such exercises one gradually comes to images without being forced to do so by external sensory perceptions. These images are purely mental images that cannot be compared to hallucinations, but only to memory images. One comes to such images gradually, but in the experience of the image one knows at the same time that this image, unlike a memory, does not refer to anything we have experienced in the life between birth and death, but that these images come from the depths of the soul when one gradually appropriates these images. These pictures do not arise from morbid sources, for in that case one would be subject to an inner compulsion, but in completely free creation, but they arise in such a way that one knows: they point to a spiritual reality. That is the essential thing, that one rises to the realization: just as our memories point to ordinary experiences that we have gone through in a healthy, level-headed way, so these imaginations, these images, point to a spiritual world. A spiritual world enters our consciousness by bringing this soul power up from its depths.

Now, the important thing is not to stop at such an exercise, but to proceed to call up such images at will, in the same way as one has formed them. I would like to say: just as one develops a kind of higher, a kind of artificial memory within oneself, so one must develop in a higher way the power that would otherwise lie in forgetting. It is even more difficult to bring this power of forgetting under the control of the will, but this must be practiced. In this one has only just begun, and just as one would otherwise relate an impression to an object through an external sense organ, one now learns to relate what one experiences in the imagination to a spiritual object. Only through this does one then attain the next higher level of supersensible knowledge, even if only partially at first. One reaches the level that I — please do not take offense at this term, it is often misused, I use it only in the sense in which I have often characterized it — which I call the inspired stage; inspired for the reason that one now comes to relate that which was previously only subjectively experienced, only subjective imagination, to an objective, spiritual external world.

Now, my dear audience, something arises that is a new inner experience. It arises that a judgment, an approval or a denial of any fact that one experiences in this way in the spiritual, takes on the form of an inner fact. One now knows: One no longer lives in such an abstract inner soul life as one was accustomed to and as it must be for the outer world, which merely has to be depicted, which cannot be experienced, but one now lives in an inner world of facts, which is, however, a purely soul-spiritual world of facts. One experiences agreement with a judgment in such a way that what otherwise appears in one's soul life as what is primitively called the power of sympathy clearly emerges. One experiences rejection as antipathy; only that these experiences are not something that occurs so subjectively in relation to the objects as in ordinary life, but as something that is incorporated into that spiritual world that one is now beginning to experience.

To these exercises, which I have described, must now be added others that can be described in principle – the details can be found in the books mentioned – as belonging to human inner self-discipline. We surrender to the outer life in our ordinary existence. We surrender to our educators as children, we surrender to the living out of inherited traits, and in later life we surrender more or less to this life itself. One should only be honest with oneself and say how much inner self-discipline there actually is for a person in ordinary life. This self-discipline is what the spiritual researcher must tackle in a systematic, methodical way. I can only emphasize a few individual points here; in my books I have presented many such exercises, all of which must be applied to a greater or lesser extent if one is to arrive at a certain degree of the knowledge I am referring to here.

It is a matter of, for example, clearly and calmly investigating what is a particular idiosyncrasy of one's own self, what is a habit that has developed, and so on. Now, out of a purely inner impulse, one sets about completely mastering this habit, that is, not leaving it in such a way that it leads one, so to speak, that one is under its compulsion, but in such a way that one can say: I follow this habit or I don't follow it. There are all kinds of exercises that can be done, which in turn are entirely up to the person recovering – also because they introduce the person to a certain sphere of freedom, to a way of moving freely in life and also in relation to themselves. One can carry out such exercises in such a way that, for example, if one is a slave to one's handwriting, one can decide to change one's handwriting thoroughly. This is also a change of habit. In this way, one really takes one's inner being into one's own hands, so to speak. When such exercises are carried out systematically – but not as in the previously described exercises, where the soul life is more reshaped on the intellectual side, but now more on the will side – then it happens that it becomes much more difficult for us inwardly, let us say, to come to a decision or to let go of something than it is otherwise in life. In everyday life, the impulses of the will lie in the depths of our nature; we follow them directly; we are led by them. The spiritual researcher must, for the times when he wants to devote himself to spiritual research - naturally only for these times - be able to withdraw from the constraints of his soul life.

And if I were to describe the whole path, I would finally come to say: the spiritual researcher comes to distinguish precisely between rest and the transition from rest to activity in relation to his life of will. This is what one now comes to know: this summoning of oneself to action, this fully conscious surrender of the will, which can then no longer be guided by the instincts, which is completely distinct from the organic life, which becomes independent, such an effort of the will, as is otherwise only present in external action, where the muscles must be strained, this strengthening of the inner life of the will by raising it out of the bodily: into the soul. And when we get to know this, then the possibility arises to fully develop the inspired knowledge of which I spoke earlier, that is, to now really gain the ability to relate the imaginations to spiritual facts, to spiritual entities, just as we otherwise relate our outer sense impressions to outer physical objects or physical facts. And then we learn to recognize the nature of the spiritual; we stand face to face with it when we acquire an inner culture in this way, also on the part of the will.

I have so far described to you, my dear audience, what emerges — more on the level of the soul — in human experience as a result of doing such exercises. But one need not stop at that. And however paradoxical it may still appear to some people today, it is simply a fact of the empirically developing soul life, which can be systematically trained to become supersensible research.

What we gain by transforming the intellectual more, as I have described it, is that we not only work our way into an actual experience of the soul, but that we also arrive at the transition - and not through external observation, but through inner experience - to what we have now grasped purely in spirit. For we have gone through imagination, inspiration and intuition and have grasped the spiritual. And we are now able to follow up what we really grasp imaginatively – if we add the other types of knowledge – in relation to the physical processes that take place in the human organism through this soul-spiritual life. In short, through actual research, through observation or, if I am not misunderstood, I can also express myself by saying: through inner experiment, we are now able to see in reality what psychologists and soul scientists are striving for through speculation. The question is always: Yes, how does the external world affect the human organism? Does it work indirectly through observation, through thinking? How, on the other hand, does the human being work through the will into the activity, into the mobility of the organism, and so on? —

These things — call it interaction or parallelism or whatever all the words are called, but they remain words — these things, which one seeks in a speculative way but for which one can never arrive at a result through speculation, one simply penetrates to them through inner vision when one has attained to imagination. Then one recognizes that this imagination is nothing other than a higher stage of development of what I called in my Philosophy of Freedom, which appeared in the early 1990s, “pure thinking,” that pure thinking that I used as the basis for the concept of human freedom. This pure thinking, in which pure will also actually lives, is the thinking from which the impulse of free action must proceed. In ordinary life it often goes unnoticed when it occurs, and it occurs when there is freedom in some part of our otherwise determined action. We cannot ask whether we are free or not; we are always only free in some part, but freedom lives in our actions. Developing this thinking upwards to a real reality, which is now of a spiritual nature, results in the possibility of finding, in inner vision, the relationship of thinking not only to the soul, as I have just described it, but also to the physical organism. As I said, as paradoxical as it may seem to modern man, it is nevertheless the case that the one who experiences thinking in this way knows that there is something in the development of thinking that is in the human organism – it is quite different in animals — in a consolidation of the material, it represents a process that is essentially a nervous process and which, in its connection with thinking, can be seen right into its physical aspect. It is a process that can be compared to a consolidation of matter, to what happens when some substance that is dissolved in another settles. This material consolidation, this becoming denser of the material, this separating out of the material from a medium, that is what is now actually experienced.

The other side, the development of the will, is experienced differently when the experience is extended into the physical-organic. One experiences now: every real act of the will, everything that corresponds to the will, has an effect in the organic that can be compared to a kind of dissolution, a kind of atomization of the material. One could also say that it is something that is realized in a kind of material process that begins with warming and leads into a process that starts with warming and then gradually leads into that which, in ordinary life, our will development also more or less consciously represents. While in ordinary life, full consciousness is linked to the fact that very fine consolidations of matter take place inwardly, dissolutions of the material take place when more or less unconscious acts of will take place in ordinary life; not so in the spiritual life, where they unfold transparently.

In anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, it is not about those nebulous things that are talked about in ordinary mysticism, but here it is about an equally strict development of an inner soul condition, as it occurs, for example, in the development of mathematical methodology. There it is a matter of learning to dispense with beating about the bush, with mystifying, if I may use the expression, for the purpose of supersensible research; there it is a matter of proceeding with inner systematic strictness in relation to the development of the soul, as one has become accustomed to doing out of the scientific conscience and the scientific discipline of modern times. Therefore, in spiritual science, those who have first truly acquired a scientific conscience and scientific discipline in external research will be called upon to say something above all.

Lest I be misunderstood, I must say the following: What I am describing here are the states of the soul that the spiritual researcher attains, but these are not his ordinary states. No, the spiritual researcher must be grounded in ordinary life with all composure, with all reasonableness, with all inclination to ordinary scientific thinking and research. And that which I have described to you as higher cognitive power, so to speak, only occurs at the moment when the spiritual researcher devotes himself to these higher cognitions. It is not something that captivates him or makes him a mystical enthusiast who always lives outside of life, but it is something that he can handle, that he consciously goes to, just as one goes to an external scientific experiment and then goes away again into ordinary life, in which one is a reasonable person with all the sobriety that is necessary in this life. Precisely the one who in ordinary life tends towards some pathological states of mind, who in ordinary life cannot employ his full personality like any other person, cannot be a spiritual researcher in the true sense of the word.

But now, when you consider this strict inner methodology, what do you get from it? Unfortunately, due to the limited time, I can only hint at what the further continuation of this research is.

On the one hand, you get the opportunity, I said, to see the connection between the thought, which is initially grasped as a purely spiritual one, and material existence. One comes to see how the thought unfolds in the material inner life. This is the primitive fact from which one starts, the experiential axiom, which in its further pursuit now gives that which allows one to recognize — as imaginative and inspired recognition develops more and more — what our soul life is like before birth or before conception in a spiritual-soul world. What lives in us in a spiritual-soul world, what connects with what comes to us from our ancestors through the material of heredity, we now learn to recognize in its context as a further continuation of the primitive connection between thinking and the material processes within us. In a sense, one learns to experiment inwardly. One learns to penetrate into the living experimental process, albeit in a higher, metamorphosed art of experimentation. Just as we create the conditions in the experiment under which the results develop, so we get to know their consequences in the material-inner life through arbitrary thought processes. And by learning to develop this, one recognizes how the spiritual and soul life, the supersensible life of the human being, which continues from life to life, lived in a spiritual and soul world before birth, or rather before the conception of the present life. This cannot be achieved through any kind of speculation, nor from dark mysticism, but only through a systematic inner development of initially latent soul forces, as I have described it.

And the other side: one learns how the will works, how the will, as it were, leads to the dissociation of matter, how the will initiates a warming process that then passes into something else. From this one learns to recognize how the spiritual extricates itself from the material, how the spiritual as volitional extricates itself from the material. And that, in turn, can be compared to the process that confronts us when a person dies, when the volitional spiritual breaks free from the physical body. One comes to recognize this complete process of passing through death, of the immortal part of man passing over into a spiritual world.

They see that the point is to pursue a spiritual science in such a way that one does not want to go into the abstract, into the nebulous spiritual, and only talk about it, but that one follows the living activity and creation of this spiritual, the transition of the spiritual into the material life, the wresting of the spiritual from the material. Thus presents itself a spiritual science that does not prattle and ramble on about some abstract spiritual, but which seizes the living spirit, which finds its transition to material activity. That is why true spiritual science is not at all an enemy of materialism, because it recognizes matter as that which fits into the general spirituality. It allows materialism to remain in its own field, as I said before, and it learns to recognize its justification. This will also give you the opportunity to see, if I can only briefly hint at it, how the fact that one learns to see the soul-spiritual functions in their expression in the details of the whole human organism provides an opportunity to follow the effect of the material itself in this human organism. I would like to say: He who knows how thought and will work in the human organism also learns to recognize how a substance or remedy works in the whole human being, which consists of body, soul and spirit. One learns to see through, to see through the human organism inwardly. This, however, is the entrance to an anthroposophically oriented therapy, to a truly rational therapy, which starts from a knowledge of the human being that has been acquired by seeing through the whole human being.

In the same way, it could be shown for the other sciences, as it has indeed been indicated, at least, to those who have taken part in this course, by various experts from our circle for the individual sciences.

This, then, is what I want to give at least a hint about, albeit a meagre and insufficient hint: how anthroposophy can have a fertilizing effect on the individual specialized sciences. But notice what actually arises in the cognition that is formed in such a way. I will present only one property of this cognition.

First of all, when we have struggled up to imagination and see through something imaginatively, when we see through a realm of facts, a realm of entities in the spiritual world, as one sees through a genus, a species of plants, or animals or crystals, then we are confronted with a real perception of external spiritual reality, with which the human being is connected; when we understand something in the external sense world, we also know how the human being as a whole is integrated into this external world. But by living in this external spiritual reality, we come to see through the world's interconnections as such. And here I would just like to hint at something. It should only be highlighted as an example.

The science that I characterized at the beginning leads us to the so-called heat death, into which the events of the earth will one day end. Yes, my dear audience, we can certainly grant a certain justification to everything that external science can tell us about this heat death. But this external science lacks that which man himself introduces into the events that external science describes to us. And by learning to recognize how human will works within the warmth being — I have described how it intervenes in a warming process — we can sense, and this suspicion becomes a certainty through spiritual science, that in this process towards entropy can mix in that which emanates from human morality, from human ideality, from human volitional impulses; we can surmise that this then plays an essential role when considered in connection with its effect on the outer physical nature. And then one comes to say to oneself: Just as the individual human being rises as a soul out of his physical body and enters into a spiritual world, so the totality of human souls and human spirits will live beyond the heat death, indeed beyond the end of the earth, into other cosmic conditions; they will experience what is no longer earthly, but what belongs to a metamorphosis of the earth's development itself. All these things result in a certain change, a metamorphosis of our cognition itself. And there it is a striking fact that I must now touch upon.

When one has already come to see something in the external spiritual world, then one notices what it actually means: one has metamorphosed one's own ability to remember, one has transformed it into something else. For the peculiar thing is that At first, spiritual observations do not enter into the ordinary realm of memory. If one wants to recognize what one has once seen in the spiritual world, one cannot remember it in the ordinary sense. This shows precisely that it is an observation, not an ordinary concept or a fantasy. If one wants to go again to that which one has observed and of which one has only an image, one must also here again take the same spiritual path. One can only remember the way in which one brought about this spiritual observation, but it does not pass over into the immediate spiritual observation. That is surprising for beginners who devote themselves to spiritual science, who come to see and then forget what they have seen because it is an observation and not a mere concept. One must remember all the details through which one has brought about the vision, then, if one has the necessary strength and if the meditative exercise was sufficient, one can bring it about again. Thus, however, the spiritual researcher is obliged to make the ascent into the spiritual world again and again and again. What we see in the spiritual world does not become a memory; if I may express it this way, it can only be the cause to bring about the same processes again and again, through which one has risen to spiritual vision. I would also like to mention: One can even — and that is not the worst thing about this spiritual science, because it protects against illusions —, one can, when one has already achieved a great deal for oneself in this respect, come to skepticism and can be repeatedly compelled to overcome this skepticism. One must always work inwardly, in inner activity. And this inner activity also flows from what is communicated, what is written down by the spiritual researcher, and what the other person can accept based on his common sense. For spiritual science can be received by every layperson with common sense, without needing to be a spiritual researcher, just as astronomical truths can be received by the layperson who can see through them, even without being an astronomer. But through what is developed in spiritual science as a concept, as an idea, as a mental picture, an inner activity is transferred to the human being, which is transferred to the whole person. In other words, what is transferred to the human being is what could be called a spirit-filled contemplation of the world. This presence of mind, this apprehension of the concrete, this leaving behind of the merely abstract, is what one particularly cultivates in spiritual science. But through this one is prepared for life in a living realization.

It must be said again and again: in modern times it is difficult for people to come out of their inner individuality to a social life such as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, which I have already mentioned, because this beginning must be made by looking at spirituality, even if it is in a primitive way, but still by looking at spirituality itself. But when one finds one's way into it by studying spiritual science, by living into spiritual science, then one is led to the concrete. But this concrete must be grasped if one wants to understand this life, which we can call social life in the sense of modern times. We need only look back a few centuries to recognize the transformation that has taken place in the social life of human culture. In earlier times, social associations and social ties emerged from certain instinctive foundations that lived in human beings. And from these social ties, one might say, from what one human being experienced in another, , that particular degree of love also emerged, which is no longer appropriate in today's world, of course, but which in earlier centuries, even in those that we do not want to conjure up, did live from person to person. This degree of love must be understood from the instinctive relationships from person to person.

The more recent period, with its advances in natural science, with the justified applications of natural science in the field of technology, with what in turn technology has demanded in terms of world trade and world economy, in everything we can call the modern technology of life, and in everything that man sees himself in this modern life, - all this has emerged, at the same time as man has found himself in the modern spirit of science. But this modern scientific spirit tends first towards theory. Spiritual science, as it can appear today in anthroposophical orientation, moves away from theory, it moves towards observation, towards the concrete, towards the grasping of the momentarily given. But through this, this spiritual science will not only be able to serve the sciences, of which I was able to give a rough outline, but it will also be able to provide essential services to modern life. This modern life has indeed taken on forms that clearly show how forces of decline and destruction have entered the modern world. One need only study their destructive frenzy in the East. Far too little study is being done in the Center and West regarding the destructive forces that have entered humanity. How did these forces enter humanity? We shall see how not science itself – which has its full justification – but how what has asserted itself as a scientific way of thinking wanted to extend itself to thinking about social life. You see how people like the leaders of the radical socialist parties, the Leninists, the Trotskyists, say that what they now want to develop in social life, they have appropriated from the scientific spirit. — Theories applied to social life — that is what we see approaching today as something much more destructive than what has already been in effect: this will to apply theories to life, to want to theorize about life, to want to spin all kinds of utopias in life. But what is given to us in social human life is everywhere the living human beings. And it is only an illusion, a sociological illusion, not to see how today, out of a certain inclination towards the theoretical, man also tends towards the theoretical shaping of reality. Even if he wants to be a practical man, he shapes according to theoretical prejudices. Today, the worst practitioners do this, that is, those who consider themselves to be practitioners; their practice becomes routine. One can see how humanity is in danger of growing into a social machine, a mechanism. What is well suited to the external art of experimentation cannot be transferred to the way people live together. By asserting himself today, the human being wants to be an individual. This is what causes the bitter struggles of the present, which one only has to understand. One can understand them as a rebellion of the human being against what wants to envelop humanity like something objectively external, like a social madhouse. That is where the human being rebels. It is the human being that matters. But the human being that matters is the human being who acts through his or her impulses of will and who can only be understood if one starts from a love and a feeling that are inspired by spiritual knowledge. For it is the spirit that works through people in social life. What is at work in social life cannot be grasped by anthropology, but only by anthroposophy, because anthropology starts from the general, while anthroposophy starts from in his individual freedom; because anthroposophy knows how to look everywhere, right down to the individual human being, and see how this human being is the one who places himself in social life. In this sense, anthroposophical spiritual science also wants to serve the most practical aspects of life. This tendency has given rise to what was first attempted in my 'Philosophy of Freedom', for example, as a foundation of the subjective in man for a contemporary social life adapted to the present historical period of humanity , which was then in turn presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question” not as utopia but as the fullest expression of life, from empirical observation of life, but one that is borne by the spirit.

What flows into life that fully takes into account the human being, that has understanding for the individual, that shows how the individual human being cannot be pressed into the general human mold, how national stocks are just national stocks, how other small associations are small associations with their peculiarities — all this flows from the spirit. And only an education that springs from the ideas and concepts of true anthroposophy can look into social human life in such a way that a living, vital, enduring, and inwardly fruitful sociology can arise, which can then also shape social associations. In my “Key Points”, I have attempted to develop such a sociology by eliminating all utopia.

And on such foundations, this anthroposophical spiritual science may believe that it can work in the direction indicated in today's lecture; in the direction that it can be fruitful — not by talking about world view out of theoretical or sentimental considerations —, but that it can have a fertilizing effect on the one hand, for science, which after all underlies our life more and more, and that it has a fertilizing effect on the other hand, for life itself, in its social shaping in particular; that anthroposophical spiritual science can not only create knowledge, but an actual spiritual-soul reality that is fruitful for science and for life.