The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In recent years, anthroposophical spiritual science has found an external center for its work in Dornach, near Basel. The creation of this center, called the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, was the result of the expansion of anthroposophical spiritual science. After many years of me and others spreading this spiritual science in the most diverse states and places, initially in an ideal form through lectures or similar, around 1909 or 1910 the inner necessity arose to bring to the souls of our fellow human beings what is meant by this spiritual science by means of other means of revelation and communication than those of mere thoughts and words. And so it came about that a series of mystery dramas were performed, initially in Munich. These were written by me and were intended to present in pictorial, scenic form the subject matter that anthroposophical spiritual science must speak of in its entirety.

We have been accustomed throughout the entire course of education in the civilized world over the last three to four centuries to seek knowledge primarily through external sensory observation and by applying the human intellect to this external sensory observation. And basically, all our newer sciences, insofar as they are still viable today, have come about through the effects of the results of sensory observation with intellectual work. After all, the historical sciences do not come about in any other way today either. Intellectualism is the one thing the modern world has confidence in when it comes to knowledge. Intellectualism is the one thing that people have become more and more accustomed to.

And so, of course, people have increasingly come to believe that all the results of knowledge that come before the world can be completely revealed through intellectual communication. Indeed, there are epistemological and other scientific disputes in which it is apparently proven that something can only be valid before the cognitive conscience of contemporary people if it can be justified intellectually. That which cannot be clothed in logical-ideational intellectual forms is not accepted as knowledge. Spiritual science, which really did not want to stop at what is rightly asserted in science as the limits of scientific knowledge, and which wants to penetrate beyond these limits of knowledge, had to become more and more aware that the intellectual way of communicating could not be the only way. For one can prove for a long time with all possible sham reasons that one must imprint all knowledge in intellectual form if it is to satisfy people; one can prove this for a long time

prove it and back it up with spurious reasons – if the world is such that it cannot be expressed in mere concepts or ideas, that it must be expressed through images, for example, if you want to know the laws of human development, then you have to get at something other than the presentation through the word in the theoretical lecture; you have to move on to other forms of presentation than the presentation in intellectual forms.

And so I felt the necessity to express that which is fully alive, namely in the development of humanity, not only in theory through the word, but also through the scenic image. And so my four mystery dramas came into being, which were initially performed in ordinary theaters. This was, so to speak, the first step towards a broader presentation of that which actually wants to reveal itself through this anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, through the cause of spiritual science itself.

Not in my own case – I may say that without hesitation – but in the case of friends of our cause, the idea arose in the course of this development, which made an external, theatrical presentation necessary, to prepare a place of our own for the work of this spiritual science. And after many attempts to found such a place here and there, we finally ended up on the Dornach hill near Basel, where we received a piece of land for this purpose from our friend Dr. Emil Grosheintz, and we were able to build this ach Hill, we were able to establish this School of Spiritual Science, which is also intended to be a house for presenting the other types of revelation of what is to come to light through this spiritual science; this School of Spiritual Science, which we call the “Goetheanum” today.

Now, if some association or other had set about creating such a framework, such a house, such an architecture, prompted by the circumstances, what would have happened? They would have turned to this or that architect, who might then, without feeling or sensing anything very intensely and without recognizing the content of our spiritual science, have erected a building in the antique or Gothic or Renaissance style or in some other style, and they would have handed down in such a building, which would have been built out of quite different cultural presuppositions, the content of spiritual science in the most diverse fields. This could well have happened with many other endeavors of the present time and would undoubtedly have happened. However, this could not happen with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

When we opened our first series of courses on a wide range of subjects at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach last year, I was able to speak of how, through this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only what is science in the narrower sense is to come before humanity, how this spiritual not only draws from the achievements of human sensory observation and the human intellect, but draws from the whole, from the fullness of humanity, and draws from the sources from which religion on the one hand and art on the other also emerge.

This spiritual science does not want to create an abstract, symbolic or a straw-like allegorical art, which merely forces the didactic into external forms. No, that is absolutely not the case. Rather, what is expressed through this spiritual science can work through the word, can shape itself through the word. Spiritual processes and spiritual beings in the supersensible world can be spoken of by resorting to ideas and the means of expressing ideas, to words. But that which stands behind it, which wants to reveal itself in this way, is much richer than what can enter into the word, into the idea, pushes into the form, into the image, becomes art by itself, real art, not an allegorical or symbolic expression. This is not what is meant when we speak of Dornach art.

When Dornach art is mentioned, it is first of all a reference to the original source from which human existence and world existence bubble forth. What one experiences in this original source, when one gains access to it in the way often described here, can be clothed in words, shaped into ideas, but it can also be allowed to flow directly into artistic expression, without expressing these ideas allegorically or symbolically. That which can live in art or, as I could expand on but need not today, in religion, is an entirely identical expression of that which can be given in an idealized representation. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is thus predisposed from the outset to flow as a stream from a source from which art and religion can also flow in their original form. What we mean in Dornach when we speak of religious feeling is not just a science made into a religion, but the source of elementary religious power, and what we mean by art is, in turn, also an elementary artistic creation.

Therefore, when some visitors to the Goetheanum or especially those who only hear about it defame our Dornach building and say that one finds this or that allegorical, symbolic representation there, it is simply defamation. There is not a single symbol in the entire Dornach building. Everything that is depicted has been incorporated into the artistic form, is directly sensed. And basically, I always feel somewhat as if I am merely presenting a surrogate when I am expected to explain the Dornach building in words. Of course, if one speaks outside of Dornach, one can make statements about it as one might speak about chapters of art history, for example. But when one sees the building in Dornach itself, I always feel that it is something surrogate-like, if one is also supposed to explain it. This explanation is actually only necessary to convey to people the special kind of language of world view, but the Dornach building has flowed out of it just as, let us say, the Sistine Madonna has flowed out of the Christian world view, without anything being symbolized, but only in such a way that the artist has truly lived in accordance with his feelings, his ideas.

Hamerling, the Austrian poet, was also reproached for using symbolism after he wrote his “Ahasver”. He then rightly replied to his critics: What else can one do when one portrays Nero quite vividly, as a fully-fledged human being, rather than as the symbol of cruelty! For history itself has portrayed Nero as a symbol of cruelty, and there is no mistake in giving the impression of the true, real symbol of cruelty when Nero is portrayed as a living being. At most, there could be an artistic defect in presenting some straw allegory instead of a living entity. Even if the world depicted in Dornach is the supersensible world, it is the supersensible reality that is portrayed. It is not something that seeks to symbolically or allegorically implement concepts. This is the underlying reality, and at the same time it indicates why a house could not be placed here in any old way for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Any architectural style would have been something external to it, because it is not mere theory, it is life in all fields and was able to create its own architectural style.

Of course, one can perhaps draw a historical line retrospectively by characterizing the essence of ancient architecture in terms of its load-bearing and supporting function, then moving on to the Gothic period and showing how architecture there moves beyond mere load-bearing and supporting, and how the buttress is freed from mere load-bearing and supporting by the pointed arch and the cross-ribbed vault, how a kind of transition to the living is found. In Dornach, however, an attempt has been made to develop this life to such an extent that the pure dynamic, metric and symmetrical of earlier forms of building have been truly transferred into the organic.

I am well aware of how much can be written from the point of view of ancient architecture against this allowing of the geometric, metric, symmetrical forms to be transformed into organic forms, into forms that are otherwise found in organic beings. But nothing is naturalistically modeled on any organisms; rather, it is only an attempt to immerse oneself in the organically creative principle of nature. Just as one can become familiarized with the bearing and supporting when the columns are covered by the crossbeams, and with the entire configuration of the Gothic style in the buttresses, in the ribbed vaulting and so on, so one can also familiarize oneself with the inner forms, the forming of nature that is present in the creation of the organic. If one can find one's way into this, then one does not arrive at a naturalistic reproduction of this or that surface form found in the organic, but one arrives at finding surfaces from what one has directly represented architecturally, which are integrated into the whole structure in the same way that, say, the individual surface on a finger is integrated into the whole human organism.

This is therefore the basic feeling that can be gained from the Dornach building, to the extent that this has been achieved in the first attempt at this new architectural style. What has been striven for is perhaps best expressed as follows: In relation to the smallest detail, the greatest formal context is conceived in such a way that each thing is, at the place where it is situated, as it must be. You need only think, for example, of the earlobe on your own body. This earlobe is a very small organ. If you understand the whole organism, you will say to yourself: the earlobe could not be any different than it is; the earlobe cannot be a little toe, it cannot be a right thumb, but in the organism, everything is in its place, and everything in its place is as it emerges from this organism.

This has been attempted in Dornach. The entire structure, the entire architecture, is conceived as part of a whole, and each individual part is formed in its own place in such a way that it is exactly what is needed at that place. Although there are many objections that could be raised, the attempt has been made, as I said, to make the transition from mere geometric-mechanical construction to building in organic forms. As I said, this architectural style could be incorporated into other architectural styles, but that doesn't really get you anywhere. In particular, the creator doesn't get anywhere with it. Something like this simply has to arise from the naive, from the elementary. Therefore, when I am asked how the individual form is conceived from the whole, I can only give the following answer. I can only say: look at a nut, for example. The nut has a shell. This nut shell is formed according to the same laws around the nut, around the nut kernel, according to which the nut itself, the nut kernel has come into being, and you cannot imagine the shell differently than it is, once the nut kernel is as it is.

Now one knows spiritual science. One presents spiritual science out of its inner impulse. One forms it into ideas, one brings them together in ideas. So you live in the whole inner being of this spiritual science. Forgive me, it is a trivial comparison, but it is a comparison that illustrates how you have to create out of naivety if you want to create something like the building in Dornach: you stand inside it as if in the nut kernel and have within you the laws by which you have to execute the shell, the building.

I often used to make another comparison. You see, in Austria we have a special kind of cake called 'Gugelhupf'. I don't know if that expression is also used here. And I said that one should imagine that anthroposophical spiritual science is the Gugelhupf and the Dornach building is the Gugelhupf pan in which it is baked. The cake and the pan must harmonize with each other. It is right when both harmonize, that is, when they are according to the same laws as nut and nut shell.

Because Anthroposophical spiritual science creates out of the whole, out of the fullness of humanity, it could not have the discrepancy within itself of taking an arbitrary architectural style for its construction and speaking into it. It is more than mere theory; it is life. Therefore, it had to provide not only the core but also the shell in the individual forms. It had to be built according to the same innermost laws by which one speaks, by which mysteries are presented, by which eurythmy is now presented. Everything that is presented in words, that is seen performed in eurythmy, that is seen performed in mystery plays, that is otherwise presented, must resound and be seen throughout the hall in such a way that the walls with their forms, that the paintings that are there, say yes to it as a matter of course; that the eyes, so to speak, absorb them like something in which they directly participate. Each column should speak in the same way as the mouth speaks, proclaiming anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Precisely because it is science, art and religion at the same time, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to establish its own architectural style, disregarding all conventional architectural styles. Of course, one can criticize this to no end; but everything that appears for the first time is imperfect at first, and I can perhaps assure you that I know all the mistakes best and that I am the one who says: if I were to rebuild the building a second time, it would be based on the same spirit, on the same laws, but it would be completely different in most details and perhaps even as a whole. But if anything is to be tackled, it must be tackled once, as well as one can at that particular moment. It is only by carrying out such a work that one really learns to know the actual laws of one's being. These are the laws of destiny of spiritual life and spiritual progress, and these have not been violated in the erection of the building at Dornach.

Now the building rises up on the Dornach hill (Fig. 1). Its basic forms had to be sensed first, emerging from the Dornach hill. That is why the lower part is a concrete structure (Fig. 4). I tried to create artistic forms out of this brittle material, and yet some have felt how these forms connect to the rock formations, how nature merges with the building forms with a certain matter-of-factness. Then, on the horizontal terrace, up to which the concrete structure extends, the wooden structure rises. This wooden structure consists of two interlocking cylinders, which are closed off by two incomplete hemispheres that are, as it were, interlocked in a circle, so that two hemispheres, two consecutive hemispheres, enclose the two cylindrical spaces as if they were placed one inside the other. A larger room, the auditorium, a smaller room, the one from which eurythmy is performed, mysteries are played and so on. Between the two rooms is the speaker's podium. This is initially the main building.

Of course, I must not fail to mention that in recent years numerous friends, particularly from this or that scientific field, have now found each other from almost all scientific fields, who have seen through and recognized how natural science, mathematics, history, medicine, jurisprudence, sociology, and the most diverse fields can be fertilized by anthroposophical spiritual science. So that a real Universitas must attach itself to Dornach, and for this the building, for which we have been able to provide for the time being, is nothing more than a large lecture hall, with the possibility of working in this lecture hall, which is intended for about a thousand people, in other ways than through the mere word.

That the building has this dualistic form, I would say, consisting of two cylinders crowned by hemispheres, can be sensed from the whole task that spiritual science, as we understand it in Dornach, must set itself. After all, this is based on what is called inner human development. One does not arrive at this anthroposophical spiritual science by merely using one's ordinary everyday power of judgment - although, of course, full reliance is placed on this - or by using the ordinary rules of research; but rather by

you must bring to the surface the powers slumbering in the soul, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and really ascend to that region where the supersensible powers and entities of existence reveal themselves to you. This revealing of the supersensible world to the sensory world, which expresses itself in the fact that the thousand listeners or spectators sit there and on the other side exactly that which gives knowledge of supersensible worlds is communicated, this whole thing, transformed into feeling, expresses itself in the double-dome building in Dornach. It is not meant to be symbolic in any way. That is why I can also say: Of course one could also express this thought differently, but that is how the artistic expression of this basic thought presented itself to me at the time when it was needed.

In a sense, by approaching it from the environment, in the external form of the wooden structure growing out of the concrete, which is a double dome, one sees in the configuration, in the design of the surfaces, what is actually meant by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The fact that they really tried not to calculate with abstract concepts, but with artistic perception, may become clear to you from the fact that - in the time when it was still possible before the war - Norwegian slate was obtained with all possible efforts to cover the two domes. Once, when I was on a lecture tour in 1913 between Christiania and Bergen, I saw the wonderful Voss slate. And this Voss slate now shines in the sunshine from the double domes, so that one actually has the feeling: this greenish-greyish shine of the sun, which reflects itself there, actually belongs in this whole landscape. It seemed to me that the care that had been taken to bring out the shine of the sun in the right way in such a landscape was something that showed that account had been taken to present something worthy in this place, which, as a place, as a locality, has something extraordinary about it.

I will now take the liberty of showing you a series of slides of what has been created as this Goetheanum in Dornach. They are intended to show in detail how what I have just explained, how the Dornach building idea has actually been realized. The Dornach building idea should present the same thing to the beholder in the outer spatial form in the picture, as it unfolds to the listener through the word, so that what one hears in Dornach is the same as what one sees in Dornach. But because it should really present a renewal out of spiritual life, a renewal of everything scientific, it also needed, in a sense, a new art.

Now the first picture (Fig. 4): You see here the building, the dome is somewhat covered here, here the concrete substructure. When one approaches via a path that leads from the northwest towards the west gate, one has this view. This is therefore the concrete substructure with the entrance; here one goes in first. Further back in this concrete building are the storage rooms. After you have taken your things off, you go up the stairs that lead through this room, to the left and right, and first come to a vestibule – which you can also enter from the terrace through the main gate – and from there to the auditorium. Here you see, starting from this terrace and going up, the wooden structure covered with Nordic slate (Fig. 10). You can see from the shape above the main entrance in the west that an attempt has been made to incorporate something here that really does look like an organic form growing out of the whole of the building. It is not some random thing found in the organic world, copied from nature, but an attempt to explore organic creation itself. The aim is to devote oneself to organic creation in nature in order to have the possibility of forming such organic forms oneself and to shape the whole into an organic form without violating the dynamic laws. I would like to emphasize: without violating the dynamic or mechanical laws.

Anyone who studies interior architecture with us in Dornach will see everywhere that, despite the fact that columns, pillars and so on are organically designed, it is precisely in this organic design that what is properly supported and properly weighted is expressed, without it being expressed in the thickness of the columns or in the heaviness of any load. The correct distribution of load and support is achieved without the aid of organic forms, so that one has the feeling, as it were, that The building feels both the load and the support at the same time. It is this transition to the appearance of consciousness, as it is in the organic, that had to be striven for in this building, out of the anthroposophical-spiritual-scientific will. So without in any way violating the mechanical, geometric, symmetrical laws of architecture, the form should be transformed into the organic.

The next picture (Fig. 5): Here you see the concrete structure from a slightly further point and more from the west front; here the terrace, then the main entrance. The same motif appears here. The second dome, the smaller one, which is for the stage, is covered here; on the other hand, you can see, as it were, what is adjacent to it. Where the two domed structures connect, there are transverse structures on the left and right with dressing rooms for the actors in mystery plays or eurythmy performances, or offices and the like. These are therefore ancillary buildings here. We will see in a moment in the floor plan how these ancillary buildings fit into the overall building concept.

The next picture (Fig. 7): Here you see the building from the southwest side: again the West Gate, the great dome, another tiny bit of the small dome, to the south the southern porch; here the whole front between west and south.

The next picture (Fig. 3): Here you see the two domed rooms, the auditorium, from the other side, from the northeast, one of the transverse buildings from the front, here the small domed room and here the storage rooms that adjoin the small domed room to the east; furthermore, the terrace, and below the concrete building. This is the porch that leads to the west gate, which you have just seen.

The next picture (Fig. 2): This is the strange building that is particularly heavily contested. This is what you see when you look at the building from the northeast side: you then see this heating and lighting house. It is also the case that one was obliged to form something out of the brittle concrete material, and that one said to oneself, out of artistic laws, out of artistic feelings: There I am given everything that is necessary as a lighting machinery, as a heating machinery: that is the nut kernel to me, around which I have to form the nutshell, to form the necessary for the smoke outlet. It is, if I may express myself in such a trivial way, this principle of the formation of the nutshell is fully implemented. And anyone who complains about something like that should consider what would be there if this experiment had not been carried out, which may still have been imperfectly successful today. There would be a red chimney here! A utilitarian building should be created in such a way that one first acquires the necessary sense of material and then finds the framing from the determination.

The next picture (Fig. 20): Here I take the liberty of showing the layout of the whole. The main entrance from the west: you enter the auditorium through a few vestibules. This auditorium holds chairs for nine hundred to a thousand listeners or spectators. Here you can see a gallery that is closed inwards by seven columns on each side. Only one thing is symmetrical here: namely, in relation to the west-east axis. This is the only axis of symmetry. The building's motifs are only designed symmetrically in relation to this axis of symmetry, the east-west axis; otherwise there is no repetition. Therefore, the columns are decorated with capital and base motifs that are not the same, but are in progressive development. I will show this in detail later. So if you have a first column on the left and right, a second column on the left and right, the capital and base are always the same as those of the right column when viewed from the left, but the following columns always have different capitals, different bases and different architrave motifs above them (Figs. 33-54).

This is absolutely the case, and it has emerged as a necessity from organic building. And this is based on an artistic interpretation of Goethe's principle of metamorphosis. Goethe has indeed developed this metamorphosis theory - which, in my firm conviction, will still play a major role in the science of the living - in an ingenious way. Anyone who still reads his simply written booklet “Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of the Plant” from 1790 has before them a grandiose scientific treatise that, according to today's prejudices, simply cannot be sufficiently appreciated. If one wants to express it simply, one must say: Goethe sees the plant as a complicated leaf. He now begins with the lowest leaf, which is closest to the ground, follows the leaves upwards to the heart leaves, which are shaped quite differently than the foliage leaves, then the petals, which are even colored quite differently, then the stamens and pistils, which are shaped quite differently. Goethe says: “Everything that appears in such seemingly different metamorphoses in the leaves of the plant is such that it can be traced back to an ideal similarity and only appears in different metamorphoses for the external sense impression. Basically, the plant leaf always repeats the same basic form; only in the external sensual perception is the ideal similarity differently formed, metamorphosed.

Now, of course, people come and see seven columns – deep mysticism! Yes, there are definitely members of the Anthroposophical Society who, in all sorts of dark, mysterious allusions, talk about the deep mysticism of these seven columns and so on. But there is nothing in it but artistic feeling. When you arrive at the seventh column, this motif of the seventh column is exactly the same as that of the first column – if you really create as nature has created – as the seventh is to the first. And just as the first motif is repeated in the octave, the seventh, you would have to repeat the first motif if you were to move on to the eighth.

Here you can see the boundary between the large and small domes; there is the lectern, which can be retracted because it has to be removed when the theater is in use. Here again there are twelve columns in the perimeter, here the boundary of the small domed room, here the two transverse buildings for dressing rooms and so on.

The next picture (Fig. 21): Here I have made a section through the middle. One enters from the west through the vestibules. Here is the stage area, and rising up from here is the auditorium, the rows of seats, again the seven columns, and here the great dome is connected to the small one by a particularly complicated mechanical structure. Here are the storerooms, the concrete substructure, the dressing rooms for taking off clothes. Here you go in, and then there are the stairs; here you come up and there is the main gate through which you enter.

The next picture (Fig. 22): Here I have taken the liberty of presenting my original model in cross-section. The whole building was originally modeled by me in 1913. Here you see the auditorium with its seven columns, the vestibules, here only hinted at the interior of the great dome, which was then painted; here in the small dome room, the capitals everywhere – I will show them in detail in a moment – here the architrave motifs above them; here the plinth motifs, always emerging metamorphically from one another. So, as I said, it is 'only' a line of symmetry, the central axis of the building. Otherwise, no repetitions can be found, except for what is located on the left and right.

The next picture (Fig. 10): seen from the terrace, the view of the West Gate, the main entrance gate, with two wings, which are necessary [gap in shorthand].

The next picture (Fig. 12): there is such a wing structure, the northern one [seen from the northeast]. Dr. Großheintz's house is also located here, an entire concrete building with about 15 rooms, a family house where I tried to create a residential house out of the concrete material by integrating it into this concrete material. It is near the Goetheanum and was built for the person who donated the land. You can see here how I tried to metamorphose the motif. Everything about this building emerges from the other, like a plant leaf, so to speak, in its form from the other form: it is entirely in the artistic sense the work of metamorphosis.

Next image (Fig. 14): This is one of the side wings, the south wing. Here you can see how the motif above the west entrance appears in a completely different form. It is the same idea, but completely different in form. It is just as, say, the dyed flower petal is the same idea as the lowest green leaf of the plant, and yet in external metamorphosis it is something completely different. In this way, one can indeed sense this organic building-thought by living and finding one's way into the metamorphic by giving oneself up to it, but understanding it in a feeling-based way, not in an abstract, intellectual way. This should not actually be explained, but everything should be given by the sight itself.

Once the building is finished, those who are familiar with the anthroposophical attitude and feeling will not perceive the building as symbolic at all, but as something that flows from this overall attitude. Of course one would say that it should flow out of the “generally human”; but this generally human is only a foggy and fanciful construct, a fantasy. The human is always the concrete. Someone who has never heard of Christianity naturally does not understand the Sistine Madonna either. And someone who has no sense of Christianity would never understand the Last Supper in Milan in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. It is certainly possible to use language to imagine what was given, but apart from that, there is nothing symbolic about the entire structure; all the forms are metamorphosed variations of one another.

Next picture (Fig. 11): Here you see such a lateral transverse structure, viewed from the front, that is, here from the south side. Up here in a substantially modified metamorphosis is the motif that is also above the west entrance. All these motifs are in various metamorphoses, so that the whole architectural idea is carried out organically. Likewise, if you were to study the columns, you would find a basic form, and this is always metamorphosed, just as, in the end, the skull bones of humans are a metamorphosed transformation of the bones of the spinal cord, as everything in the organism is a metamorphosed transformation right down to the last detail.

The upper part (Fig. 14) of the southern transverse structure seen on its own; this motif, which was just a little smaller there, is now a little larger.

Next picture (Fig. 23): Here you can see part of the staircase. You would enter through the main entrance below, into the concrete building, and go up these stairs. Here you can see the banister and here a pillar. On this pillar you can see how the attempt is made to shape the supporting pillar in an organic form, how the attempt is made to give the pillar the form that it must have after the opposite exit, because there is little to carry; the form that it must have where it is braced, where the entire weight of the staircase lies. Of course, something like this can only be formed geometrically. But here, for once, an attempt should be made to shape the whole thing as if it were alive, so that, as it were, the glow of consciousness of bearing and burdening lies within; with every curve, everything is precisely and intuitively measured for the place in the building where it is located.

Especially if you look at this motif here (Fig. 24): there are three half-circular channels on top of each other. Believe it or not, but it is true: when someone goes up there and enters the auditorium, they must have a certain feeling. I said to myself, the one who goes up there must have the feeling: in there, I will be sheltered with my soul, there is peace of mind to absorb the highest truths that man can aspire to next. That is why, based on my intuitive perception, I designed these three semicircular channels in the three perpendicular spatial directions. If you now go up these stairs, you can experience this feeling of calm. It is not modeled on it – it is not that at all – but only later did I remember that the three semicircular channels in the ear also stand in these three directions perpendicular to each other. If they are violated, a person will faint: they are therefore connected with the laws of equilibrium. It was not created out of a naturalistic desire for imitation, but out of the same desire, which is modeled on the way the channels are arranged in the ear.

You enter from the west side, go up the stairs, here are the three perpendicular semicircular canals, and here again these pillars. Of course, it often happens in life – I have experienced it many times – that when people in a city have seen an actor or actress in certain roles, and later another actor or actress has come along who could be good, better, more interesting or different, they judge them based on the earlier ones. If they did everything exactly like the earlier ones, they were good; if they did it differently, they were bad, no matter how good they might be in themselves. And so, of course, people judge such a thing according to what they are accustomed to, and do not know that when something like this is erected, every effort is made to make it look as if it were supported in different ways on different sides, and that this is derived from the overall organic structure of the building. Some found it thin and called it rachitic, others thought it resembled an elephant foot, but could not call it an elephant foot either, and so someone came up with the name “rachitic elephant foot” based on their own intuitive feeling. This is what happens so often today when some attempt is made to bring something new out of the elementary.

Next image (Fig. 27): If you go up the stairs, you will come to the vestibule before entering the large domed room. Here you can already see the beginning of the timber construction. At this height, there would be a concrete terrace, with the concrete structure below. You can see from this column how the capital, with all its curves, is precisely adapted to the location, not just schematically in space, but dynamically. The curves at the exit have to express a different form of support than those on the opposite side of the building, where the columns have to brace against them. That is why all these wooden forms, column capitals, architraves and so on had to be made by our friends from the Anthroposophical Society over many years of work. All this is handcrafted, including, for example, the ceiling, which does not have just any schematic form, but is individually designed on all sides in its curves and surfaces, hollowed out differently in one spatial direction than in the other spatial direction. And all this according to the law, just as the ear is hollowed out differently at the front than at the back, and so on.

Next picture (Fig. 30): Now we have entered and are standing in the room that is the auditorium. If we turn around and look backwards, we see the organ room here, which you can see in more detail in other pictures. But here you only have the model, not as it can be seen now in the building, where a lot has been added. I have tried to integrate this organ in such a way that one does not have the feeling that something has been built into the rest of the space, but rather that at this point what is presented here as the organ case and the organ itself has literally grown out of the whole. That is why the architecture and sculpture are adapted to the lines created by the rest, i.e. the organ pipes and so on.

Next image (Fig. 28): You are now, so to speak, in the auditorium, looking from the auditorium at the columns. Here is the organ motif, here are the first two columns with their capitals. We then come to the altered, metamorphosed capitals of the second, third, fourth columns and so on – I will show this in detail in a moment – above them always the architrave motif and below the base motif. Next image (Fig. 29): The pictures were taken at different times. The construction has been going on since 1913, when the foundation stone was laid, and the pictures show it in various stages. Here again, if you turn around in the auditorium and look to the west, the upper part, the organ motif; the first and second columns with capitals on the left and right, the capitals and the architraves above them are quite simply designed. In the following, I will show one column and the one that follows, and then each column with the column capital on its own, so that you can see how the following column capital always emerges metamorphosically from the preceding one. This particularly emphasizes the fact that, basically, the individual column cannot be judged on its own, but only the entire sequence of columns in their successive form can be judged.

Next image (Fig. 34): Here you see the first column by itself, simply from bottom to top in the forms, simply from top to bottom. You see a very simple motif.

Next image (Fig. 35): Here you see the first motif, the first capital with the architrave above it; here the second, emerging organically from the first. The motif, which goes from top to bottom, grows; in growing, it metamorphoses, and so does the motif from bottom to top. To a certain extent, one has to feel one's way into the forces that are at work when an upper plant leaf is created in its form, metamorphosed compared to the lower one; in the same way, this first simple plant motif develops into a more complicated one. What matters is that you take the whole sequence of motifs, because each one always belongs with the other; in fact, all seven belong together and form a whole.

Next image (Fig. 36): Here you see the second column by itself. The next motif always emerges metamorphically from the previous one. I will now show the second and third columns.

Next picture (Fig. 37): the second and third columns, again the third capital motif with the architrave motif above it is more complicated, so that you really get this complicated form in your feeling if you do not want to explain it symbolically or approach it with some intellectual things, but with feeling. Then you will see the emergence of one from the other.

Next image (Fig. 38): The third column by itself.

Next image (Fig. 39): The third and fourth columns, that is, the capitals of these with the architrave motif. Here one could believe that the search was for this architrave motif to form a kind of caduceus. But it was not sought, it is simply sensed, as these meeting forms, when they continue to grow, continue to complicate, as they become there, and then the sensation of this motif, which resembles the caduceus, arises by itself. Likewise, as if this continues to grow: from bottom to top, things simplify, from top to bottom they complicate; then this form arises, which I will now show again in isolation.

Next image (Fig. 40): The fourth column.

Next image (Fig. 41): The fourth and fifth column. As can be seen from this, if you imagine it growing downwards, this form emerges, and it becomes simpler from the bottom up, and I would say that it grows in a more complex form upwards. That is the strange thing! When you think of development, you believe, from a certain false idea of development that has gradually formed, that development proceeds in such a way that you first have a simple thing, then a more complicated one, and then an increasingly complicated one, and that the most perfect thing is the most complicated. If you now put yourself in the right place in the developmental impulses with artistic perception, you see that this is not the case at all; that you must indeed advance from the simple to the more complicated; but then you arrive at the most complicated in the middle of the development, and then it becomes simpler as it approaches the more perfect.

That was, my dear attendees, while I was working on the models for these things, an extraordinary surprise for me. I had to go from the simple to the complicated - you see, we are here at the fourth and fifth pillars, so roughly in the middle of the seven pillar forms - and I had to have the most complicated thing in the middle and then go back to the simpler. And if I go back, as nature itself creates, I also find the human eye, but the human eye, although it is the most perfect, is not the most complicated. In the eye of certain lower animal forms, for example, we have the fan, the xiphoid process. The eye of certain lower animal forms is more complicated in some respects than the perfect human eye. In nature, too, it does not happen that one goes from the simpler to the more complicated and then further to the most complicated, but by observing things further, one comes back to the simpler. The more perfect is simpler again. And that turns out to be an artistic necessity in such a creative process.

Next image (Fig. 42): The fifth column in itself.

Next image (Fig. 43): Now the fifth and sixth columns. You can see that here the capital of the fifth column is still relatively complicated; if it continues to grow, it becomes simpler again: so that this sixth column, although more perfect in its design, is nobler, is simpler again. The same applies to the architrave motif.

Next image (Fig. 44): This sixth column stands alone.

Next image (Fig. 45): Sixth and seventh column, considerably simplified again. Next image (Fig. 46): The seventh column on its own, again simplified.

Next image (Fig. 47): This is the seventh column, the architrave motif; here is the gap between the large and small domed rooms; here is the curtain. Then the first column of the small domed room, and here we enter the small domed room.

Now that we have gone through the orders of the columns in the large domed room, I will show you the figures on the pedestals, which have also grown out of each other in a metamorphosing organic way. I will show them in quick succession.

Next image (Fig. 48): Here I show the figures on the pedestals in succession. First pedestal.

Next image (Fig. 49): Each one always emerges metamorphically from the other: Second plinth.

Next image (Fig. 50): If you now imagine the changes, this is what happens: Third base.

Next image (Fig. 51): Fourth pedestal, again more complicated. And now the simplifications begin with the pedestal figures, in order to arrive at perfection.

Next image (Fig. 52): Fifth pedestal. Next image (Fig. 53): Sixth pedestal. Next image (Fig. 54): This seventh pedestal figure is relatively simple again.

Next image (Fig. 55): Now, here you can see into the small dome room from the auditorium. You can still see the last column of the auditorium, then the columns and architraves of the small dome room. That is the end of the large dome room, here the center of the small dome room. Here, a kind of architrave is formed between the two central columns of the small dome, but [above it] is not some kind of symbolic figure. If you want to see a pentagram in it, you can see it in every five-petalled flower. We have [below] synthetically summarized all the lines and curves that are distributed on the individual columns. Above, the small dome is then painted. I will have more to say about this coloring.

The next picture (Fig. 56): individual columns of the small domed room. Here the gap [for the curtain]. It is seen here on the left when entering from west to east. Here is the architrave of the small domed room. Here, as you can see, the capitals of the large domed room are not repeated, they correspond to the overall architectural concept. Since the small dome room is smaller and every organ that is smaller in the organic context also has different forms, this is also clearly evident here in the formation of the whole.

The next picture (Fig. 64): Here again is the view into the small domed room, the last two columns of the large domed room; the same motif that you have just seen in a different aspect, and here the small dome. Of course, nothing of the paintings can be seen here, only the situation could be hinted at. The bases of the small columns have been converted into seats.

The next picture (Fig. 67): Here the orders of columns continue to the left and right; this is in the middle in the east, directly under the small domed room, where all the lines and curves found elsewhere are synthetically summarized in the most diverse forms. This is a kind of architrave, a central architrave; below it is the group I will talk about, a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group, the central figure of which represents a kind of human being. Above it is the small domed room.

The next picture (Fig. 69): We now come to the painting of the small domed room. Now, by speaking to you about the painting of the small domed room, I can only show you the pictures of this small domed room. In the painting of the large domed room, I have not yet fully succeeded in doing this, but in the painting of the small domed room, I have tried to realize to a certain extent what I had a character in my mystery dramas express about the new painting: that the forms of color should be the work, that is, that one should really pull oneself together to fully perceive the world of color as such.

Dear attendees! If you look at the world of colors, it is indeed a kind of totality, a world of its own. And if you feel very vividly into the colorful, then I would say red and blue and yellow speak to each other. You get a completely lively feeling within the world of colors and you get to know, so to speak, a world of colors as an essential one at the same time. Then drawing stops, because in the end you perceive drawing as something insincere. What then is the horizon line? If I draw it with a pencil, I am actually drawing an untruth. Below is the green surface of the sea, above is the blue surface of the vault of heaven, and when I put these down as color, the form arises, the line arises as the boundary of the color.

And so you can create everything out of the colored that you essentially want to bring onto the wall as painting – be it the wall of the spheres as here or the other wall. Do not be deceived because there are motifs, because there are all kinds of figures on it, even figures of cultural history. When I painted this small dome, it was not important to me to draw these or those motifs, to put them on the wall; what was important to me was that, for example, there is an orange spot here in different shades of orange: the figure of the child emerged from these color nuances. And here it was important to me that the blue was adjacent: the figure emerged, which you will see in a moment. It is definitely the figure, the essence, drawn entirely from the color. So here we have a flying child in orange tones, here would be the gap between the large and small domed rooms, and the child is, so to speak, the first thing painted on the surface of the small dome. But by seeing these motifs, you will best understand the matter if you say to yourself: I can't actually see anything in it, I have to see it in color. Because it is felt and thought and painted entirely out of color.

The next picture (Fig. 70): Here you see the only word that appears in the whole structure. There is no other inscription to be found anywhere; everything is meant to be developed into art, into form. But here you will find the “I”. Out of the blue, a kind of fist figure has emerged, that is, the 16th-century human being. The whole cognitive problem of modern man has really emerged from the perception of color before the soul. This cognitive problem of modern man can only be perceived in the abstract, if one perceives as it is often portrayed today; it is different from what we can grasp of natural laws today.

It [the problem of knowledge] intrudes into our soul when we do not merely view things scholastically as abstractions, but when we strive with our whole being to immerse ourselves in the riddles and secrets of the world, as we must in order to be fully human, in order to become aware of our human dignity. Then it places itself beside the striving human being, the one striving for knowledge, who in Faust really, I would say, strives out of the mysterious, mystical blue, strives for the fully conscious I that speaks. The older languages have the I in the verb; for this epoch one is justified in letting a word appear; otherwise there is no word, no inscription or the like in the whole structure, everything is expressed in artistic forms. But the child and birth, and the other end of life, death, are placed alongside the person striving for knowledge. Above it would be the Faust figure you have just seen, below it Death, and further over towards us this flying child. This skeleton here (Fig. 71) in brownish black, in the Faust book in blue, the child (Fig. 72) in various shades of orange and yellow.

The next picture (Fig. 73): Here you see a compilation: below the skeleton, here Faust, here this child, whom you saw individually, above it a kind of inspirer, an angel-like figure, which I will show as an individual, then other figures join here. As I said, the necessity arose for me to depict the striving of the people of the last centuries from the color surfaces that I wanted to place in just that position. Here then is the striving of the Greeks. You will see it in detail.

The next picture (Fig. 74): the genius in blue-yellow, who is above the fist-shape, as if inspiring the fist-shape from above. We would then come across the striving child. The next picture (Fig. 75): then a kind of Athena figure, taken out of a brownish-orange with light yellow. It is the way in which Greek thinking has become part of the whole world of knowledge and feeling. This figure that we have here is inspired by a kind of Apollo figure, just as Faust was previously inspired by his angel (Fig. 76); this brings us back to Greek thinking.

The next picture (Fig. 76): The inspiring Apollon. Particular care has been taken here with the bright yellow, through which this Apollo figure has been created out of color. I tried to give this bright yellow a certain radiance through the type of technical treatment.

The next picture (Fig. 77): Here you see two figures, which now inspire the Egyptian initiate, who recognizes the tables and feels the world. The man on the right is depicted in a somewhat darker color, I would say a reddish brown, and the Egyptian initiate, who is below him, is also depicted in this way.

The next picture (Fig. 78): The Egyptian knower, that is, the counter-image for those ancient times, which in our case is Faust, who strives for knowledge.

The next picture (Fig. 79): Here you see two figures that I am obliged to always assign certain names to in spiritual science because they keep recurring. One should not think of nebulous mysticism here, but only of the necessity of having a terminology; just as one speaks of north and south magnetism, so I speak of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. When we stand face to face with a human being, we cannot grasp his whole being at once, nor with all the powers of knowledge. He has within him two opposing polarities: that which in him constantly strives towards the rapturously false mysticism, false theosophy, that which always seeks to rise above itself towards the unreal , the unfounded, the nebulous - the Luciferic - and that which makes him a Philistine, that which predisposes him to the spirit of heaviness - the Ahrimanic, which is painted here with its shadow. The Luciferic is painted in the yellow-reddish color, the Ahrimanic in the yellow-brownish. It is the dualism of human nature. We can have it physically, physiologically: Then the Ahrimanic in man is everything that ages him, that brings him to sclerosis, to calcification, that makes him ossify; the Luciferic is everything that, when it develops pathologically, brings one to fever, to pleurisy, that thus develops one towards warmth. Man is always the balance between these two. We do not understand the human being if we do not see in him the balance between these two, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic.

In particular, however, the Germanic-Central European culture that came over Persia is confronted with this duality in its knowledge. Hence the recognizing Central European, who has the child here (Fig. 82) – we will see him in more detail – is inspired by this duality of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic, with which he must come to terms through his inner tragic destiny of knowledge. Here this kind of dualism is seen again in the smaller figure, shaped like a centaur. I painted this during the war, and one sometimes has one's private ideas; the ill-fated fabric of Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points grew out of the abstract transformation of dualism. Here in Switzerland, too, I have repeatedly spoken of the world-destroying nature of these fourteen points: Therefore, I took the private pleasure of immortalizing Mr. and Mrs. Wilson in these figures. But, as I said, this is of little importance.

The next picture (Fig. 81): Here you see the Ahrimanic figure brought out and the shadow above it. In spiritual terms, this is everything that drives man to materialism, to philistinism, to pedantry, what he becomes when – be it expressed in the extreme – he has only intellect and no heart, when all his powers, his soul powers, are directed by the intellect. And if man did not have the good fortune that his outer body is more in balance, his outer body would actually be determined by the soul, he would be an exact expression of the soul: All those people who feel materialistically, feel pedantically, who are almost completely absorbed in the intellect, would look like that on the outside. Of course, they are protected from this by the fact that their body does not always follow the soul, but the soul then looks like this when you see it, when you feel it physically.

Next image (Fig. 80): The Luciferic, worked out of the yellow, worked out of the yellow into the bright. This is what a person develops when he shapes himself one-sidedly according to the visionary, one-sidedly according to the theosophical, when he grows beyond his head; one often finds it developed in some members of other movements who always grow half a meter with their astral head above their physical head so that they can look down on all people. This is the other extreme, the other pole of man.

Here at the bottom, so to speak, is the Germanic initiate (Fig. 82), the Germanic knower in his tragedy, which lies in the fact that duality has a particularly strong effect on him: the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic; as an addition, again, the naivety of the child. This is what emerged for the artistic sensibility. It was worked out of the brown-yellow; the child is kept in the light yellow.

Next picture (Fig. 83): Here we are already approaching the center of the domed room. This man would stand here with the child, and further towards the center are these two figures, which are one. Of course, this does not refer to the current Russian culture or lack of culture, which is corrupting people and the world, but rather the Russian culture actually contains the seed for something future. At present it is overshadowed by what has been imported from the West, by what should indeed disappear from the earth as soon as possible if it does not want to drag the whole of Europe with it into the abyss. But at the bottom of Russian nationality lies something that is guaranteed a future. It should be expressed through this figure, which has its double only here. That which lives in Russian nationality always has something of a double about it. Every Russian carries his shadow around with him. When you see a Russian, you are actually seeing two people: the Russian, who dreams and who is always flying a meter above the ground, and his shadow. All of this holds future possibilities. Hence this characteristic angel figure, painted out of the blue, out of the various shades of blue. Above it, a kind of centaur, a kind of aerial centaur. Here this figure, everything in the indefinite, even the starry sky above this Russian man, who carries his doppelganger with him.

Next image (Fig. 85): We have now passed the center here. This is the same centaur figure – when facing east, located on the left – as the earlier one on the right of the center. This angel figure is the symmetrical one to the one you have just seen. This one, however, is painted in a yellowish orange, and below it would now be the Russian with his doppelganger, but symmetrical to what was shown before.

Next image (Fig. 86): Now we are standing in the middle of the small domed room. Once again, on the other side, the Russian motif. Here, you can see the figure of Ahriman lying in a cave; and here, at the top, the representative of humanity. One can imagine him as the Christ. I have formed him out of my own vision as a Christ-figure. Lightning flashes come out of his right hand and surround Ahriman like the coils of a snake. His arm and hand go up to Lucifer, who is painted emerging from the reddish-yellow.

Next image (Fig. 87): Here you can see the figure of Lucifer a little more clearly. Below would be the figure of Christ, reaching up with his arm; this is the face, painted in yellow-red. So it is the Luciferic in man that strives beyond his head, the enthusiastic, that which alienates us from our actual humanity by making us alien to the world, bottomless.

Next image (Fig. 88): Ahriman in the cave. His head is surrounded by lightning serpents that emanate from the hand of Christ, who is standing above them. Here the wing, the brownish yellow, is painted more in the brownish direction, in places descending into the blackish blue.

Next picture (Fig. 89): Here I am now showing you my first sketch for the plastic figure of Christ. You see, I tried to make Christ beardless, but Christ pictures have only had a beard since the end of the fifth or sixth century. Of course, no one has to believe me. It is the Christ as he presented himself to me in spiritual vision, and there he must be depicted beardless.

Next image (Fig. 90): The painted head of Christ between Ahriman and Lucifer, the images that I have just shown. Painted in the dome room above is Christ between Ahriman and Lucifer, and below it will later be – it is still far from finished – the nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group (Fig. 93), in the middle of which is the representative of humanity, the Christ, with his right arm lowered and his left arm raised, in such a way that this position, like embodied love, is placed between Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces.

Next picture (Fig. 92): This is the first model, made in plasticine, for the Christ, en face, that is, for the representative of humanity, who is to stand in the middle of the wooden group (Fig. 93). But I would like to explicitly note that it will not be somehow obvious that this is the Christ; rather, one will have to feel it from the forms, from the artistic aspect. Nothing, absolutely no inscription, except for the “I” that I mentioned earlier, can be found in the entire structure.

Next image (Fig. 98): This is from the left side of this group of woodcuts [taken from the execution model]: Here is Lucifer striving upwards, and above him a rock creature emerging from the rock, so to speak, the rock transformed into an organ. Here is Lucifer; here Christ would stand; here is the other Lucifer, and that is such a rock creature. It is a risk to make it completely asymmetrical, as asymmetries in general play a certain role in these figures, because here the composition is not conceived in such a way that one takes figures, puts them together and makes a whole – no, the whole is conceived first and the individual is extracted. Therefore, a face at the top left must have a different asymmetry than one at the top right. It is a daring thing to work with such asymmetries, but I hope that it will be felt to be artistically justified if one ever fully comprehends the overall architectural idea.

Next image (Fig. 99): Here you can see the model of the Ahriman head. It is the original wax model that I made in 1915. It is an attempt to shape the human face as if the only things present in the human being were the aging, sclerotizing, calcifying forces, or, in the soul, that which makes the human being a philistine, pedant, materialist, which lies in him by being an intellectualizing being. If he had no heart at all for his soul life, but only reason, then he would present this physiognomy. We do not get to know the nature of a human being by merely describing it in the way that ordinary physiology and anatomy do. This one-sided approach provides only a limited insight into the human being. We must move on to an artistic appreciation of form, and only then do we get to know what lives and breathes in a person, what is truly there. You can never get to know the human being, as is attempted in the academies, anatomically or physiologically; you have to ascend to the artistic – that is part of artistic recognition – and must recognize, as Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him who is open to them, he feels the deepest yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Not only the abstract word, not only the abstract idea and the abstract thought, but also the image gives something of what the forces of nature are, what is really contained in the secrets of nature. One must ascend to the artistic, otherwise one cannot recognize nature. The building may rightly call itself the “Goetheanum” for the reason that precisely such a Goethean understanding of nature also strives for an understanding of the world. Goethe says: Art is a special way of revealing the secrets of nature, which could never be revealed without art.

Next image (Fig. 101): The figure of Lucifer above, here the chest, wing-like. It is the case that one really has to immerse oneself in all of nature's creativity if one wants to give plastic form to something like this figure of Lucifer. Nothing can be symbolized, nothing can be allegorized, nothing can be thought and the thought put into earlier forms, but one must really delve into how nature creates, one must know the nature of the human rib cage, the lungs, one must know the organ of hearing, then the atrophied flight tools that the human being has in his two shoulder blades. All of this must be brought into context, because a person would look quite different if they were not intellectually developed, if the heart did not hypertrophy and overgrow everything: The heart, the hearing organs, wing-like organs, everything would be one. Those who do not merely accept the naturalistic, but also what is ideal, spiritual in the beings, will see in such art only that which reveals the secrets of the world and of existence in the Goethean sense. Up there you can see the hands of this asymmetrical rock creature.

Next image (Fig. 103): Here you can see a building in the vicinity of the Goetheanum. It was originally built to carry out a kind of glass etching. Now it serves as a kind of office space, and eurythmy rehearsals and eurythmy lessons are also given there. In the wooden wall of the large domed room, there are glass windows between every two columns, and these glass windows are not made in the old glass window art, but in a special art, which I would call glass etching. Panes of glass of the same color are engraved with a diamond-tipped stylus that is clamped into an electric machine, and the artist actually works here as an etcher on glass, as he otherwise works as an etcher on a plate, only on a larger scale. So that you scratch out in the monochrome glass plate, thus working the motif in question into the light. This is how we got these glass windows, which have different glass colors, so that there is a harmonious effect. When you enter the building, you first come to one glass color, then to the other, to certain color harmonies. These glass windows had to be ground here; accordingly, this house was built, which, except for the gate and the staircase, is individually designed in every detail. Here we do not have the earlier castles that are otherwise present, but a special form of castle has been used (Fig. 105). So it is individually designed down to the last detail. Next picture (Fig. 104): The gate to this house just shown; below the concrete staircase.

Next image (Fig. 110): Here you see one of these glass windows, which is executed in green. The motifs here are created out of green panes of the same color. The etching is actually only, I would say, a kind of score. This is then a work of art when it is in its place and the sun shines through. So the artist does not finish the work of art, but only a kind of score: when the sun shines through, this etching achieves what, together with the sunbeam shining through, actually creates the work of art. This again marks something that emerges from the whole building idea of Dornach and is physically expressed here.

The Dornach building is built on a fundamentally different architectural idea from other buildings. The walls of the previous buildings are closing walls, artistically also conceived as closing walls. No wall in Dornach is conceived in this way; the walls in Dornach are designed in such a way that they are artistically transparent, so that one does not feel closed in when one is inside the building. All the walls, so to speak, open up through the artistic motifs to the whole great world, and one enters this building with the awareness that one is not in a building but in the world: the walls are transparent. And this is carried out in these glass windows right down to the physical: they are only a work of art when the sun shines through them. Only together with the sunbeam does what the artist has created become artistic.

Next picture (Fig. 113): Another window sample, taken from the same-colored glass pane. The fact that these windows are there means that the room is again illuminated with the harmoniously interwoven rays, and one can, especially when one enters the room in the morning hours, when it is full of sunshine, really feel something through the light effects in the interior, which cannot be called nebulous, but in the best sense inwardness, an impression, an image of the inwardness of the existence of the world and of human beings. For just as, for example, in Greek temple architecture there stands a house that can only be conceived as the house that no human being actually enters, at most the forecourt as a hall of sacrifice, but which is the dwelling place of the god, just as the Gothic building, regardless of whether it is a secular or a church building, is conceived as that which is not complete in itself, but which is complete when it has become a hall for assembly and the community is within it, the whole building idea of Dornach, as I have developed it here in its details, should work so that when a person enters this space, they are just as tempted to be in the space with other people who will look at what is presented and listen to what is sung, played or recited.

Man will be tempted, on the one hand, to feel sympathy with those who are gathered, but the question or the challenge that is as old as Western culture will also arise: know thyself! And he will sense something like an answer to this in the building around him: know thyself. The attempt has been made to express in the building forms, in an artistic and non-symbolic way, that which the human being can inwardly experience.

We have already experienced it: when, for example, an attempt was made to recite - to eurythmy or to recite to oneself - the space that I showed you as the organ room, when an attempt was made to recite into it, or when an attempt was made to speak of the intermediate space between the two dome spaces, the whole room took these things in as a matter of course. Every form is adapted to the word, which wants to unfold recitatively or in discussion and explanation. And music in particular spreads out in these plastic-musical formal elements, which the building idea of Dornach is meant to represent.

In conclusion, I would just like to say, my dear attendees: With these details, which I have tried to make clear to some extent through the pictures, I wanted to present to your souls what the building idea of Dornach should be: a thought that dissolves the mechanical, the geometric, into the organic, into that which itself presents the appearance of consciousness, so that this consciously appearing element willingly accepts that which arises from the depths of human consciousness.

However, this means that something has been created that differs from previous building practices and customs, but in the same way that spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy also wants to place itself in the civilization of the present day: as something that feels related to the emerging forces of the rising sun, and at the same time wants to strongly oppose the terribly devastating forces of decline of our time. Thus, that which wants to live in the teaching of anthroposophy, the whole world view of anthroposophy, also wants to express itself through the building forms. What is to be heard in Dornach through the spoken word should also be seen in the forms. Therefore, no arbitrary architectural style was to be used, no arbitrary building constructed: it had to grow out of the same spiritual and intellectual background from which the words spoken in Dornach arise. The whole idea behind the building, the whole of the Dornach building, is not to be a temple building, but a building in which people come together to receive supersensible knowledge.

People say that just because one is too poor to find words for the new, one often says: that is a temple building. But the whole character contradicts the old temple character. It is entirely that which is adapted in every detail to what, as spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense, wants to step out into the world. And basically, every explanation is a kind of introduction to the language, to the world view, from which the artistic concept has emerged. I believe that artistically, the building expresses its own essence and content, even if it is still often perceived today as something that is not justified in terms of what is considered acceptable in terms of architectural style, forms and artistic language. Only someone who has already absorbed the impulse, the entire civilizing character of spiritual science, will understand that a new architectural idea had to emerge from this new world view. And as badly as contemporaries sometimes take it, something like this had to be presented, just as anthroposophical spiritual science had to be talked about.

And so, in the manner of a confession, today's discussion, which sought to point to the building of Dornach and to these thoughts, may simply conclude with the words: something was ventured that had not been done before as a building idea, but it had to be ventured. If something like this had not been ventured, had not been ventured at various points in time, there would be no progress in the development of humanity. For the sake of human progress, something must be ventured first. Even if the first attempt is perhaps beset with numerous errors – that is the very first thing that the person speaking here will admit – it must nevertheless be said: something like this must always be ventured again in the service of humanity. Therefore, my dear attendees, it has been ventured out there in Dornach, near Basel.

For his present life on Earth man is beholden partly to the external world, including in the wider sense not only the several kingdoms of Nature immediately around him but also the influences coming from the stars and the cosmic expanse. But this is only one part of the world to which he is beholden for his present earthly life. He is beholden above all to his previous lives on Earth, the results and effects of which he brings with him inwardly. As you know from anthroposophical literature, man is a fourfold being. Every time he goes to sleep his astral body and ‘I’ separate from his physical and etheric bodies. Of these members only the physical and etheric bodies owe their character and composition to the external world lying visibly—or also, as etheric world, invisibly—around man. On the other hand, everything that he bears within him in his astral body and Ego in his present earthly existence, he owes entirely to what he experienced in the past, in earlier lives on Earth.

In the outer physical world there are two portals, two gates, through which the life of man, taken in its entirety, reaches out beyond this world. We will begin to-day by considering this cosmic aspect and conclude with a study very directly concerned with human life. For inhabitants of the Earth, these two gates are the Moon and the Sun.

The fact is that modern science knows very little indeed about the heavenly bodies—actually only what can be determined by calculation or observed by means of instruments. Just think what an inhabitant of Mars would know about the Earth if, from Mars or from some other star, he were to acquire his knowledge by employing the same methods as those employed by the inhabitants of the Earth! He would know no more than that the Earth is a luminous body radiating into cosmic space the light it reflects from the Sun. He might form all kinds of hypotheses, just as men do about Mars—as to whether beings do or do not exist on the Earth. But an inhabitant of the Earth knows that beings of his own rank and beings of other kingdoms share his dwelling-place; and those whose knowledge is derived from the inner, spiritual destinies of earthly humanity, will be able to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of the other heavenly bodies, for example, of the Sun and the Moon.

Let us think about what may be said of this physical, psychic and spiritual aspect of Moon existence. I must here remind you of many things to be found in the book Occult Science—an Outline, and in several of the printed lecture-courses. From this literature you know that the Moon was once united with the Earth. It is accepted by orthodox modern science, at any rate by its most important representatives, that the physical Moon once separated from the Earth and, if I may put it so, chose its own position in cosmic space.

But Spiritual Science discloses that not only did the physical Moon separate from the Earth but that certain Beings went with it, Beings who had once inhabited the Earth together with men. They were of a much higher spiritual rank than man in his physical embodiment; but they were in close intercourse with men, although this intercourse was altogether different from the relationships between human beings to-day.

Anyone who devotes even cursory study to the early history of the Earth and its spiritual achievements will feel deep reverence for the different civilisations. Certainly, our forefathers—that is to say, we ourselves in earlier incarnations—were not as ‘clever’ in the modern sense as we imagine ourselves to be to-day, but in point of fact they knew a great deal more. Knowledge, after all, is not acquired through cleverness only. Cleverness comes from intellect, and intellect is only one of the human faculties, although nowadays it is prized, especially by science, more highly than all the others. Yet when we see how the world has developed in a moral and social respect in this enlightened twentieth century, there is really no cause to be so very proud of our intellectual culture—which has come into being only in the course of time. Even if with no other aid than external history we go back and consider, for example, what originates from the ancient East, we cannot but feel great reverence. The same may apply even to certain achievements of so-called ‘uncivilised’ peoples, but we will think now only of ancient India and Persia, of the wonderful wisdom contained in the Vedas, in Vedanta or Yoga philosophy. If we let these things work upon us, not superficially but with all their deep intensity we shall feel an ever-increasing reverence for what past ages created—not through cleverness as we know it, but in a quite different way.

Spiritual Science makes it clear that what has been preserved in documentary records is only the residue of a wonderful, primeval wisdom of mankind. It was expressed in a much more poetic, artistic language than is used for our modern knowledge, but it was nevertheless wonderful wisdom, imparted to men by Beings at a stage of evolution far higher than that of humanity on Earth. Intellectual thinking takes place, after all, through the instrumentality of the physical body, and these Beings had no physical body. This accounts for the fact that they conveyed their primordial wisdom to mankind in an essentially poetic, artistic form.

These Beings did not remain with the Earth; the majority of them to-day actually inhabit the Moon in the heavens. What modern science can discover has to do only with the external properties of the Moon. The Moon is in truth the home of lofty spiritual Beings whose task once was to inspire earthly humanity with the primeval wisdom. They then withdrew to establish this Moon colony in the Cosmos. It is clear from what I have said about these Beings who now inhabit the Moon that our own human past is connected with them. In earlier lives we were their terrestrial companions. And our connection with them is immediately evident if we look beyond what external knowledge and external life can give to man. When we contemplate all the factors by which our existence is determined, which are not, however, dependent upon our intellect but transcend the intellect and are related to our deeper nature, we realise that these Moon Beings, although they no longer have their habitation on the Earth, are still deeply and inwardly connected with our very existence. For before descending to the Earth and receiving a physical body from our forefathers, we were in the spiritual world, in pre-earthly life; and there, even to-day, we are in close contact with these Beings who were our companions in Earth existence long ages ago. When we come down from the spiritual worlds into earthly existence, we pass through the Moon sphere, through the Moon existence. Once upon a time, when these Moon Beings were on the Earth, they had a profound effect upon mankind, and it is still so to-day, inasmuch as they impress into the descending Ego and astral body what is then carried over into the physical body on Earth.

Nobody can himself decide to be a man of talent, or a genius, or even a good man. Yet there are men of talent and genius and some who are innately good. These are qualities which the intellect cannot produce; they are connected with man's inmost nature, a great part of which comes with him when he passes from pre-earthly existence through birth into earthly life. To impress into his Ego and astral body what then makes its way into his nerves and blood as genius or talent or the will to do good or evil—this is the task of the Moon Beings during the time when in a man's pre-earthly existence he is passing through the Moon sphere. It is not only when, in poetic mood, lovers go walking in the moonlight that the Moon has an effect upon what is living and weaving in the deeper part of man's nature below the level of consciousness; this Moon influence is active in everything that rises from a level below that of the conscious intellect and makes man what he really is in earthly life. And so to-day these Moon Beings are still connected with our past, inasmuch as it is they who after our earlier incarnations give us in pre-earthly existence the stamp of individuality.

If we look back over our life to the point where it runs out beyond the earthly realm into the spiritual, whence our particular faculties, our temperament, our inmost, essential character, are derived, we find in the Moon the one gate which leads from the physical into the spiritual world. It is the gate through which the past makes its way into our life and gives us individuality.

The other gate is the Sun. We do not owe our individuality to the Sun. The Sun shines alike on the good and on the evil, on men of genius and on fools. As far as earthly life is concerned the Sun has no direct connection with our individuality. In one instance only has the Sun established connection with earthly individuality and this was possible because at a certain point of time in the Earth's evolution, a sublime Sun Being, the Christ, did not remain on the Sun but came down from the Sun to the Earth and became a Being of the Earth in the body of a man, thus uniting His own cosmic destiny with the destiny of earthly humanity. The other Sun Beings who remained in the Sun sphere have no access to the single human individuality but only to what is common to all mankind. Something of this remained in the Christ and is an infinite blessing for earthly humanity: what had remained in Him was and is that His power knows no differentiation among men. Christ is not the Christ of this or that nation, of this or that rank or class. He is the Christ for all men, without distinction of class, race or nation. Nor is He the Christ of particular individualities, inasmuch as His help is available alike to the genius and the fool. The Christ Impulse has access to the individuality of man, but to become effective it must take effect in the inmost depths of human nature. It is not the forces of the intellect but the deepest forces of the heart and soul which can receive the Christ Impulse; but once received this Impulse works not for the benefit of the individual-human but of the universal-human. This is because Christ is a Sun Being.

Looking back into the past we feel ourselves connected with the Moon existence and realise that we bear within us something not derived from the present but from the cosmic past—not merely from the earthly past. In our present Earth existence we unite this fragment of the past with the present. We do not, in the ordinary way, pay much attention to what is contained in this fragment of the past; but in point of fact we should not be of much account as human beings if it were not there within us. What we acquire at the time of descending from pre-earthly into earthly existence has something automatic about it—the automatic element in our physical and etheric bodies. What makes us into particular human individuals is inwardly connected with our past and thus with the Moon existence. But just as we are connected with the past through our Moon existence, so are we connected with our future through the Sun existence. We were ready for the Moon forces, especially in relation to the Beings who have withdrawn to the Moon, even in earlier times; for the Sun which works to-day as an impulse in the sphere of the universal-human only, we shall not be ready until a very distant future, when evolution has reached a much more advanced stage. The Sun to-day can reach only to our external being; not until distant future ages will it be able to reach our individuality, the inmost core of our being. When the Earth is no longer Earth, when it has passed into quite another metamorphosis, then and then only shall we be ready for the Sun existence. Man is so proud of his intellect—but the intellect in present humanity is purely a product of the Earth, since it is tied to the brain, and the brain—despite current belief—is the most physical structure in the human organism.

The Sun is perpetually wresting us away from this bondage to the earthly, for the Sun does not in reality work upon our brain ... if it did, we should produce much cleverer thoughts! From the physical aspect the Sun's influence is exerted on the heart, and what streams out from the heart is Sun-activity. Through the brain men are essentially egotistic, through the heart they become free from egoism and rise to the level of the universal-human. Thus through the Sun we are more than we should be if we were left to our own resources in our present Earth existence. Let me put it like this: if we can really find our way to the Christ, He enables us, because He is a Sun Being, to be more than we could otherwise be.

The Sun stands in the heavens personifying the future, whereas the Moon personifies the past. The Sun is the other gate into the spiritual world, the gate leading to the future. Just as we are impelled into earthly existence by the Moon Beings and Moon forces, so, through death, we are impelled out of it by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are connected with that part of our nature of which we are not yet master, which the gods have given us so that we may not wilt in earthly life but reach out beyond our own limitations. And so Moon and Sun are in truth the two gates in the universe into the spiritual life. The Moon is inhabited by Beings with whom we were once connected in the way I have indicated. The Sun is inhabited by Beings with whom—with the exception of the Christ—we shall be united only in our future cosmic existence. The Christ will lead us to those who were once His companions on the Sun. But this, as far as man is concerned, belongs to the future.

We have said that the influences of the Moon work upon us from the spiritual world; the same is true of the influences working from the Sun upon our physical and etheric bodies. Think, for example, of the temperaments. There are forces in the temperaments which play into the physical body, but more particularly into the etheric body. This is regulated by the interplay of Sun and Moon. A man with a strong vein of melancholy in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Moon. Similarly, a man with a markedly sanguine vein in his temperament is strongly influenced by the Sun. A man in whom the quality of Sun and Moon are in balance and neutralised, will be a phlegmatic type. When the physical element as such plays into a man and comes to expression in the life of soul, as in the temperaments, the Sun and Moon forces are in play in the whole of his being. But to begin with, man is aware of these forces only when they confront him in their external, physical manifestation, when the Moon—and similarly the Sun—announces its presence through the orb that is outwardly visible. Yet forces far transcending the physical are taking effect; we must always speak of the Sun and Moon as spiritual realities. And that is easy enough to realise.

Think of a human body. This body to-day no longer has within it the same substances as it had ten years ago. You are perpetually casting off these physical substances and replacing them by new. What endures is the spiritual form of man, the configuration of inner forces. Suppose you had been sitting in this room ten years ago; you do not bring with you now the flesh and blood that were within you then as material substance. The physical is involved in a perpetual stream from within outwards; it is being cast off all the time. Although this is a known fact it is not always remembered. It is a fact in the Cosmos too. People think that the Moon which shines down upon the Earth to-day is the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or Buddha. Spiritually, yes, it is the same Moon, but not in respect of physical substance. As for the Sun, the physicists and astrophysicists calculate how long it will be before it disintegrates in cosmic space. They know that it will disintegrate but they reckon in terms of millions of years. The same kind of results would be obtained if such calculations were applied to the human being. The calculations are absolutely correct and cannot be faulted—only they are not true! They are dead correct, but just think of this—if you examined a human heart today, then five days later and then again after a further five days, you could calculate from the minute changes what it was like three hundred years ago and what it will be like three hundred years hence. In the same way geology can calculate what the Earth looked like twenty million years ago and what it will look like twenty million years hence. The calculations may be perfectly correct, but the Earth was not in existence twenty million years ago and will not be in existence twenty million years from now. The calculations themselves are correct but they are not true! Not even for the shortest periods does the Cosmos differ from man in this respect. Although mineral substances last essentially longer in that form than the configuration of substance in living bodies, yet even the purely physical part of mineral substances is transient. As I have said, the Moon in the sky to-day is in its physical composition no longer the same Moon which shone upon Caesar or Alcibiades or the Emperor Augustus, for its substance has changed, just as the substance of a man's physical body has changed. What endures out there in the Cosmos is the spiritual element, just as in the case of a human being what endures from birth to death is the spiritual entity, not the physical substance.

We shall therefore only be viewing the world rightly when we say of man that what endures between birth and death is his soul; what endures out yonder in the celestial bodies is a multiplicity of Beings. And when speaking of Moon and Sun we ought to be conscious that if we are to speak truly we must speak of Beings of the Moon and Beings of the Sun. The Beings of the Moon are connected with our past; the Beings of the Sun will be connected with our future, but even now they work into our present existence.

A sound basis for the study of human karma and destiny can be established only when man is given his real place within the Cosmos.

Try as we will, we can never alter the past. For this reason, in the Moon forces as they work into and lay hold of our human nature there is an element of immutable necessity. Everything that comes to us from the Moon has this character. In whatever comes from the Sun and points to the future, there is something in which our will, our freedom, can be a factor. So that we can say: when man again apprehends the Divine in the Cosmos, and instead of vague, sentimental generalisations is able to speak with precision and definition about the Divine as revealed in the several heavenly bodies, a special kind of language will take shape within him when he contemplates the heavenly bodies with heart-knowledge and true human understanding.

Now suppose a human being were standing in front of us and looking at his hands or his arms, his head, his chest, his legs, his feet, we were to ask in each case, ‘what is that?,’ and were told in reply, ‘that is something human.’ When no distinctions are made but everything is labelled with the generalisation ‘human,’ we are without bearings or direction. The same is true if we gaze out into the Cosmos, contemplate the Sun and Moon and the stars and speak of the Divine as a generalisation. We must acquire a definite, concretely real view of the Divine. And this we do when we recognise, for example, the deep connection of the Moon with our own past, indeed with the past of the whole Earth. Then, when we look at the Moon in the heavens, we can say: “Thou cosmic offspring of Necessity, when I contemplate that within me over which my will has no sway, I feel inwardly united with thee.” Our knowledge of the Moon then becomes feeling, for we realise that every experience arising perceptibly out of inner necessity is connected with the Moon.

If in the same way we contemplate the inmost nature of the Sun, not merely making calculations or observing it through instruments, we shall feel its kinship with everything that lives in us as freedom, with everything that we ourselves can achieve for the benefit of the future.

Such experiences would enable us to find a link with the instinctive wisdom of primeval humanity. For we cannot rightly understand what radiates with such poetic beauty from ancient civilisations unless we can still feel, when we gaze at the Moon, that there we are glimpsing the past with its element of necessity and when we gaze at the Sun that there we are glimpsing the freedom belonging to the future.

Necessity and freedom interweave in our destiny. In terms of the terrestrial and human we speak of Necessity and Freedom; in terms of the heavenly and cosmic we speak of Moon existence and Sun existence.

Now let us try to discover how the forces of the Sun and Moon work in the web of our destiny. We meet some human being. As a rule the fact that we have met him is enough in itself; we accept life as it comes without being very observant or giving it much thought. But deeper scrutiny of individual human life reveals that when two persons meet, their paths have been guided in a remarkable way. Think of two individuals, one aged twenty-five and the other aged twenty, who meet; they can look back over the course of their lives hitherto and it will be evident to each of them that every single happening in the life of the one, say the twenty-year-old, had impelled him from quite a different part of the world to this meeting, at this particular place, with the other. The same will be true of the twenty-five-year-old. In the forming of destiny very much depends upon the fact that human beings, starting from different parts of the world, meet as though guided by an iron necessity directly to the meeting-point. No thought is given to the wonders that can be revealed by studies of this kind but human life is infinitely enriched by insight into such situations and impoverished without it. If we begin to think about our relationship to some human being whom we seem to have met quite by accident, we shall have to say to ourselves that we had been looking for him, seeking for him, ever since we were born into this earthly existence ... and as a matter of fact, even before then. But I do not want to go into that at the moment. We need only remind ourselves that we should not have come across this individual if at some earlier point in earthly life we had taken only a slightly different direction to the left or to the right and had not gone the way we did. As I said, people do not give any thought to these matters. But it is sheer arrogance to believe that something to which one pays no attention is non-existent. It is a fact and will eventually reveal itself to observation. There is, however, a significant difference between what takes place before the actual meeting of two individuals and what takes place from that moment onwards. Before they met in earthly life, they had influenced each other without having any knowledge of the other's existence. After the meeting the mutual influence continues, but now they know each other. And this again is the beginning of something extremely significant.

Naturally, we also meet many individuals in life for whom we have not been seeking. I will not say that we meet a great many people of whom we might think that it would have been better not to have done so! I am not suggesting any such thing ... but at all events we do meet many individuals of whom we cannot say that we have deliberately set out to find them.

If what I have now been saying is viewed in the light of Spiritual Science, it becomes clear that what has been in operation between two human beings before they actually meet in earthly life is determined by the Moon, whereas everything that takes place between them after their meeting is determined by the Sun. Hence what occurs between two human beings before they become acquainted can only be regarded as the outcome of iron necessity and what happens afterwards as the expression of freedom, of mutually free relationship and behaviour. It is indeed true that when we get to know a human being our soul subconsciously looks back and forward: back to the spiritual Moon, forward to the spiritual Sun. And with this is connected the weaving of our karma, our destiny.

Very few people today have faculties for perceiving these things. But it is precisely because these faculties are beginning to develop that so much in our age is in a state of ferment. The faculties are already present in numbers of human beings, only they are unaware of it and ascribe the effects to all kinds of other causes. In reality these faculties of perception are striving to function so that when human beings become acquainted with one another they may realise how much is due to iron necessity, to the forces of the Moon, and how their relationship will go forward in the light of the Sun, in the light of freedom. To experience destiny in this way is itself part of the cosmic destiny of humanity today and on into the future. When we meet a human being in the world we can distinguish quite clearly between two kinds of relationship. In the case of one individual the relationship proceeds from the will, in the case of another, it proceeds more or less from the intellect, or even from the aesthetic sense.

Think of the subtle differences in the relationships between human beings even in childhood or youth. We may love an individual or perhaps we hate him. If our feelings do not reach this intensity, we shall feel sympathy or antipathy; our feelings in this case do not go very deep—we just pass him by or let him pass us by. It cannot be denied that this was how we felt about most of our teachers at school; and we should count ourselves fortunate if it was not so.

But a quite different kind of relationship is possible, even in childhood. It is when we are so inwardly affected by what we see a person do, that we say: we must do it too! The relationship between us makes us choose him as a hero, as one we must follow on the path to Olympus. In short, some human beings have an effect upon our intellect, or at best upon our aesthetic sympathy or antipathy; and others have a direct effect upon our will.

Or think of the other side of life. External circumstances may bring us into very close contact with certain individuals—yet we simply cannot dream about them. We may meet others only once, yet we never seem to be free of them, we are always dreaming about them. If a more intimate association is not vouchsafed to us in this present earthly life, this will have to be reserved for other incarnations. However that may be, our relationship to a human being is deeper if, as soon as we meet him, we begin to dream about him.

There is also a sort of waking dreaming, which in the case of most people to-day lacks clear definition. But as you know, there are also initiated human beings who experience life very differently. If we meet an individual who makes an impression upon our will, he will also have an effect upon our ‘inner speech:’ he will not only speak when he is face to face with us; he will also speak out of us. If we are initiated into the secret of cosmic existence we shall know that there is a double relationship between individuals when they meet: we may meet one person to whom we shall listen, and then go on our way; we need never listen to him any more. Others we may meet to whom we shall listen, but when we go away from them they still seem to be speaking—but out of our own inner being: they are there and they really do seem to speak in this way.

What happens in the case of an Initiate is as I have just described: he actually carries within him, in the very quality of his voice, those who have made this impression on him. In those who are not initiated this also takes place, but only in the realm of feeling; it is there all the same, but subconsciously. Let us suppose that we meet an individual and then come across other people who know him as well and will remark what a splendid fellow he is. This means that they have thought about the man and have formed a judgement based on the intellect. But we do not call everyone we meet a splendid fellow or a cad, as the case may be; there are individuals who have an effect upon our will—which as I have said, leads a kind of sleeping existence within us during our waking life. The effect is that we feel we simply must follow or oppose them. In one who is not initiated, these individuals, even if they do not speak within him, live in his will. What then exactly is the difference between these two kinds of relationship?

When we meet other human beings who have no effect upon our will, but of whom we do no more than form a judgement, then there is no strong karmic connection between us; we have had little to do with them in earlier earthly lives. Individuals who affect our very will, so that they seem to be always with us, whose form is so strongly impressed upon us that they are always in our thoughts, so that we dream of them even in our waking life—these are the individuals with whom we have had a great deal to do in our past earthly lives, with whom we are as it were cosmically connected through the gate of the Moon; whereas in our present life we are connected through the Sun with everything that lives in us without any element of the necessity belonging to Moon existence.

Thus is destiny woven. On the one side man has his isolated ‘head-existence’ which has considerable independence. Even physically this head-existence raises itself all the time above the general conditions of man's cosmic existence, and in the following way—the brain weighs on average 1,500 grammes, and with this weight it would crush all the underlying blood vessels. Just think of it—a weight of 1,500 grammes pressing on those delicate blood vessels! But this does not happen. Why not? Simply because the brain is embedded in the cerebral fluid. If you have learnt any physics, you will know that a body in water loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of water it displaces—this is the so-called principle of Archimedes. The actual weight of the brain is therefore about 20 grammes, because the brain floats in the cerebral fluid. Hence the brain in the body presses with a weight of only 20 grammes—certainly not with its actual weight of 1,500 grammes. The brain is isolated and has its own existence.

As we go about the world, the brain is like a man sitting in his motor-car. The man himself does not move; the car moves and he sits still. And our brain as the bearer of intellect has an isolated existence. That is why the intellect is so independent of our individuality. If each of us had our own separate and distinct intellect this would augur badly for any mutual understanding! We are able to understand one another only because we all possess the same principle of intellect, although naturally there are differences of degree. But intellect is a universal principle. Human beings can understand one another through the intellect which is independent of their individual qualities. Whatever appears in human destiny as something belonging to the immediate Present—such as the meeting of two people—works upon the intellect and impulses of feeling associated with the intellect. In these cases we speak of someone as a ‘splendid fellow’ in whom we have no further interest than that he has had an effect upon our intellect. Everything that is not part of our karma has an effect upon the intellect; everything that is part of our karma and links us with other human beings as a result of experiences once shared with the individuals we now meet—all this works through those depths of human nature which lie in the will. And so it is true that the will is working even before we actually meet a human being with whom we are karmically connected. The will is not always illumined by the intellect. Just think how much in the working of the will is shrouded in darkness! The karma which leads two human beings together is shrouded in the deepest obscurity of all; they become dimly aware that karma is working from the way in which their wills are involved. The moment they come face to face the intellect begins to work; and what is then woven by the intellect can become the basis for future karma. But in essentials—not wholly, but in essentials—it would be true to say that for two human beings who are karmically connected, their karma has worked itself out when the meeting has taken place. Only what they may do after that as a continuation of what lives in the unconscious—that and that alone becomes part of the stream of future karma. But a great deal is then woven into their destiny which has an effect only on the intellect and its sympathies and antipathies. Past and Future, Moon existence and Sun existence are here intermingled. The thread of karma that reaches into the past is interwoven with the thread that reaches into the future.

We can actually gaze into cosmic existence. For if we watch the Sun rising in the morning and look at the Moon at night, we can glimpse in their mutual relationships a picture of how Necessity and Freedom are interwoven in our own destiny. And if, with a concrete idea of the mingling of Necessity and Freedom in human destiny, we again contemplate the Sun and the Moon, they will begin to unveil their spirituality to us. Then we shall not speak like the unwitting physicists who when they look at the Moon merely say that it reflects the light of the Sun ... but when we see this light of the Moon which is the same as the light of the Sun, we shall rather speak of the weaving of cosmic destiny.

Thus contemplation of our own human destiny leads to a conception of cosmic destiny. Then and only then are we able in the real sense to knit our human existence with cosmic existence. Man must learn to feel himself a living member of the Cosmos. Just as a finger is a finger only while it is actually part of a human body—if it is amputated it is no longer really a finger—so man himself has real being only inasmuch as he is part of the Cosmos. But man is arrogant, and the finger would probably be humbler if it had the same kind of consciousness. ... Yet perhaps it would no longer be humble if it could at any moment tear itself free and move around the body... although it would have to remain in the sphere of a human being in order to remain a finger at all! And man, as earthly man, must remain in the Earth-sphere if he is to be man. He is a quite different being, he is a being of eternity when he is outside the Earth-sphere, either in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence. But again, we can gain knowledge of these spheres of existence only when we recognise that we ourselves are members of the Universe. This recognition will never be achieved by fanciful speculation about our connection with the Universe, but only when, as we have tried to do to-day, we learn gradually to feel its concrete reality. Then we feel that our destiny is in very truth an image of the world of stars, of the Sun-nature and the Moon-nature. We learn to look out into the Universe and read the scroll of our human life from the life of the great Universe. Again, we learn to look into our own soul and to understand the world through it. For nobody understands the Moon who does not understand the element of Necessity in human destiny; nobody understands the Sun who does not understand the element of Freedom in human nature. Such are the interconnections of Necessity and Freedom.

At the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum we tried to give the impulses which would help us to make these facts of true esoteric perception still more effective in the years to come. And I hope that our Members will become more and more conscious of what took place at Christmas. I would like particularly to draw your attention to the fact that every Member can now receive the News Sheet. Through this News Sheet and many other developments in the Anthroposophical Society, the whole Society should in future be able to share in that quickening life which can flow from Anthroposophy. The isolation which has hitherto existed between the Groups must as far as possible come to an end. The Anthroposophical Society can become a real whole only when those who are members of a Group in New Zealand know what is going on in a Group in Berne, and members of a Berne Group know what is going on in New Zealand or New York or Vienna. This should now be possible. And one of the many things we are doing, or at least that we want to do in connection with the Christmas Meeting is to make this News Sheet a medium for all anthroposophical work in the world. It will be necessary to pay some attention to the News Sheet, and then everyone will realise what he can do to promote its aims.

While I am speaking here the third number of the News Sheet is being issued in Dornach; in it I have shown how every Member can co-operate in making it a genuine reflection of anthroposophical achievements. Only because I believe that to this end it is necessary for Anthroposophy to be cultivated more intensively within the Society—I do not mean in the sense of more content, but with greater intensity, greater enthusiasm, greater love—only for these reasons, although in the ordinary way I should have every right at my age, to retire, I have decided, after having given up the personal leadership of the Society in 1912, to begin again and to imagine that I have regained my youth and am capable of the work. I want this to be understood as a desire to stimulate interest for a more active life in the Anthroposophical Society. My hope—and anyone who was not at Dornach can read about it in the Goetheanum Weekly and the News Sheet—is that whatever of spiritual value was achieved at the Christmas Meeting shall in some way reach every individual Member. Thereby the aim of bringing true esoteric life into the Society will be achieved. The High School for Spiritual Science was founded at Christmas with the aim that esoteric life shall again flow into the Anthroposophical Society.

I hope that the words I have spoken to you to-day will have expressed the desire that this esoteric life may again unfold among us in the way that will be made clearer and clearer to you. This aim can become reality through what can go out in future from Dornach as the centre where the General Anthroposophical Society was founded at Christmas. May the Members of this Berne Group be able to contribute effectively to what we should like to achieve in Dornach for the whole Movement, to the extent that our forces permit.

Anthroposophical friends in Berne have already heard that the aim of the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was to bring a new trend into the Anthroposophical Movement. The importance of becoming conscious of this new trend cannot be stressed too often, for the gist of the matter is this: before the Christmas Foundation Meeting—in practice at any rate, even if not invariably—the Anthroposophical Society was regarded as a sort of administrative centre for the content and the impulse of Anthroposophy. This, essentially, has been the position since the Anthroposophical Society made itself independent of the Theosophical Society.

You know that I myself had no place on the Society's Executive, but have so to say held a completely free position within the Society. And in this situation the Society's development has not proceeded as it certainly could have done. The fact is that Members have been too little alive to what might have developed on this basis. What happened was that from about the year 1919 onwards—after the War, during which the problem of leadership of the Society was a very difficult one—all kinds of efforts were made and undertakings set on foot within the Society. These undertakings were the outcome of ambitions among the Membership and proved to be detrimental to the real anthroposophical work—detrimental in the sense that they aroused very strong hostility from the outside world. Naturally, when such undertakings are set on foot in a Society resting upon occult foundations, one must, for esoteric reasons, let them be. For think of it—if from the beginning I had stood in the way of all these undertakings, most of those engaged in them would have been saying to-day that if only this or that had happened it would have led to favourable results. But there is no doubt at all that these things made the position of the Anthroposophical Movement in the world increasingly difficult.

I do not want to go into details but to take a more positive line: let me say only that the time had come to counteract by something positive the negative trend that had gradually appeared in the Society. Before the Christmas Foundation Meeting I often found it necessary to emphasise that a real foundation like the Anthroposophical Movement—which is in truth a spiritual stream guided and led from the super-sensible worlds by spiritual Powers and spiritual Forces which are reflected here in the physical worlds—should not be identified with the Anthroposophical Society, which is simply an administrative body for the cultivation—as far as it is capable of this—of the anthroposophical impulse.

But since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum this has completely changed. And it was only because of this change that there was reason and purpose in my taking over the Presidency myself, in cooperation with an Executive which as a unified organism can work with great intensity for the Anthroposophical Movement. This means that the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society are now one. Therefore what was not the position before the Christmas Foundation Meeting has changed fundamentally since that Meeting. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Society is to be identical with the Anthroposophical Movement as presented in the world. But it has thus become essential that the esoteric impulse flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement shall also find expression in the whole constitution of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore since this Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach it must be recognised, unconditionally, that the establishment of the Dornach Executive is itself an esoteric matter, that a stream of true esotericism must flow through the Society, and that the institution of the Executive is to be regarded as an esoteric deed. This was the premise on which the Executive was formed.

Further, it must always be remembered that from now onwards the Anthroposophical Society will no longer exist merely as a body for the administration of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy itself must be practised in everything that happens in the Anthroposophical Society. What is done must itself be anthroposophical. That, apparently, is what it is so difficult to realise. Nevertheless friends must gradually get it into their consciousness that this fundamental change has taken place.

As a first step, in the News Sheet appended to the Goetheanum Weekly, an effort has been made to introduce into the Society something that can provide unified substance for the membership, can further a unified flow of spiritual reality through the Movement. A unified trend of thought is made possible, particularly through the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’ which should be a kind of basic seed for work in the Groups. It is really remarkable that so much misunderstanding still exists as to what the Anthroposophical Movement really is.

A short while ago I received a letter from a fairly recent Member of the Anthroposophical Society. This letter expatiated on the alleged incorporation of the Christian Community into the Anthroposophical Society. (The matter is of no importance here in Switzerland, but I mention it as an example.) At a certain point I had made it quite clear from the Goetheanum in Dornach how the relationship between this Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society is to be thought of. I emphasised that I cannot in any way be regarded as the Founder of the Christian Community on the basis of the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Christian Community formed itself, through me, by the side of the Anthroposophical Society. At the time I used the expression “through me as a private individual.” The letter referred to seizes hold of this expression, “private individual,” after saying that a renewal of religion cannot come about through a human being but only from the higher spheres, for a renewal of religion can be achieved only by divine-spiritual Powers. That is quite right, but something has been overlooked ... and it is essential for this ‘something’ to be fully grasped in the Anthroposophical Society. What must be grasped is that the Anthroposophical Movement as such—in which moreover there also lies the source for a renewal of religion—certainly does not owe its origin to a human impulse alone but has been sent into the world under the influence of divine-spiritual Powers and by their impulse. Only when Anthroposophy itself is seen to be a spiritual reality which flows as an esoteric impulse through civilisation will it be possible to have the right point of view when some other body comes into being with its source in Anthroposophy ... and an objection like that contained in the letter cannot arise. The consciousness must be there that henceforward the Anthroposophical Society will be led from the Goetheanum on an esoteric basis.

Connected with this is the fact that a completely new trend will pervade the Anthroposophical Movement as it must now be conceived. Therefore you too, my dear friends, will notice how differently it has been possible to speak since that time. In the future it will amount to this: in all measures taken by the Anthroposophical Movement, which is now identical with the Anthroposophical Society, the responsibility is to the spiritual Powers themselves. But this must be correctly understood. It must be realised that the title “General Anthroposophical Society” may not be used in connection with any event or fixture organised without understanding having first been reached with the Dornach Executive; that anything inaugurated by Dornach may not be made further use of without corresponding agreement with the Executive. I am obliged to speak of this because it is constantly happening that lectures, for instance, are given under the alleged auspices of the General Anthroposophical Society without any application for permission having been made to Dornach. Matters which have an esoteric foundation, formulae and the like, are sometimes adopted without obtaining the agreement of the Dornach Executive ... and this is absolutely essential, for we have to do with realities, not with administrative measures or formalities. So for all these and similar matters, agreement must be sought from or a request made to the Dornach Executive. If agreement is not forthcoming, the arrangements in question will not be regarded as issuing from the Anthroposophical Movement. This would have in some way to be made plain.

Everything that savours of bureaucracy, all administrative formalities must in the future be eliminated from the Anthroposophical Society. Relationship within the Anthroposophical Society is a purely human relationship; everything is based upon the human reality. Perhaps I may mention here too that this is already indicated by the fact that every one of the 12,000 Membership Cards now being issued are personally signed by me. I was advised to have a rubber stamp made for the signature, but I shall not do so. It is only a minor point but there is, after all, a difference when I have let my eyes rest on the name of a Member; thereby the personal relationship—abstract though it be—has been made. Even if it is an external detail it should nevertheless be an indication that in future we shall endeavour to make relationships personal and human. Thus, for example, when it was recently asked in Prague whether the Bohemian Landesgesellschaft can become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the decision had to be that this is not possible; individual human beings alone can become members of the Anthroposophical Society; they can then join together to form Groups. But they become Members as individuals and have the Membership Card as such. Legal entities—in other words, non-human entities—will have no such Card. Similarly the Statutes are not official regulations but a simple statement of what the esoteric Executive in Dornach wishes, out of its own initiative, to do for the Anthroposophical Movement. In future, all these things must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Only so will it be possible to bring into being in the Anthroposophical Society the attitude which, if it were absent, would make it impossible for me to take over the Presidency of the Society.

Through the Christmas Foundation, a new character and impulse is to enter into all our work. In the future, whatever is said will have a spiritual source—so that many things that have happened recently, can happen no longer. A great deal of the hostility, for instance, has arisen as a result of provocative actions in the Society. Naturally, all kinds of questionable elements play a part, but in the future we can no longer adopt towards the hostility the attitude we have adopted in the past. For the Lecture-Courses are available for everyone and can be obtained from the Anthroposophisch-Philosophischer Verlag. We shall not let them be advertised in the Book Trade; their release is not to be taken to mean that they will be handed over to the Book Trade, but they will be accessible to everyone. This fact in itself refutes the statement that the Anthroposophical Society is a secret society with secret literature. In the future, however, a very great deal will flow through the Anthroposophical Movement in respect of which no kind of relation with a hostile outside world will be possible. Much of what will be introduced into the teachings of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be of such a nature that it will inevitably evoke hostility in the outside world; but we shall not worry about it because it is a matter of course.

And so I want to speak to you to-day in this spirit, to speak particularly of how different a light is shed upon the historical evolution of mankind when the study of karmic relationships in world-existence is pursued in real earnest.

At the very first gathering held in Berlin for the purpose of founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I chose for a lecture I proposed to give, the title: Practical Questions of Karma. I wanted to introduce then what I intend to achieve now, namely, the serious and earnest study of Karma.

In the German Section of the Theosophical Society at the time there were several old Members of the Society. They literally quaked at my intention to begin in such an esoteric way. And in actual fact the attitude and mood for it were not there. It was quite obvious how little the people were prepared in their souls for such things. It was impossible at that time to proceed with the theme ‘Practical Questions of Karma’ in the form that had been intended. Conditions made it necessary to speak in a much more exoteric way. But now, with more than two decades of preparatory work behind us, a beginning must be made with real esotericism. The Christmas Foundation Meeting, when the esoteric impulse came into the Society, has actually taken place, and so now a link can be made with that time when the intention was to introduce this esoteric trend into the Society.

What is the historical evolution of humanity, when we consider what is revealed by the fact of repeated earthly lives? When some personality appears as a leading figure in the evolution of humanity, we must say: This personality is the bearer of an Individuality of soul-and-spirit who was already present many times in earthly existence and who carries over into this earthly life the impulses from earlier incarnations. Only in the light of his earlier earthly lives can we really understand such a personality. From this we see at once how what was working in earlier epochs of world-history is carried over from those earlier epochs by human beings themselves. The civilisation of to-day has developed out of the human beings who belong to the present in the wider sense. But they, after all, are the same souls who were there in earlier epochs and assimilated what those earlier civilisations brought into being; they themselves have carried it over into the present. The same applies to epochs other than the present. Only when we can discover what has been carried over by human souls from one epoch into the other can we understand this onflowing stream of the impulses working in civilisation. But then we have history in the concrete, not in the abstract. People usually speak only about ideas working in world-history, about moral will or moral impulses in general which carry over the fruits of civilisation from one epoch into the others. But the bearers of these fruits of earlier civilisations are the human souls themselves, for they incarnate again and again. Moreover it is only in this way that an individual realises what he has himself become, how he has carried over that which forms the basis of his bodily destiny, his destiny in good and evil alike. When, as a first step, we ponder how history has been carried from one epoch into another by the human beings themselves in their repeated earthly lives, then, and only then are the secrets, the great enigmas of historical evolution, unveiled.

To-day I want to show by three examples how karma works through actual personalities. One of these examples leads us into the wide arena of history; the other two deal more with the reincarnations of particular individuals.

Our modern civilisation contains a great many elements that are really not altogether in keeping with Christianity, with true Christian evolution. Natural science is brought even into the elementary schools, with the result that it has an effect upon the thinking even of people who have no scientific knowledge. These impulses are really not Christian. Whence do they originate?

You all know that about six hundred years after the founding of Christianity, Arabism, inspired by Mohammed, began to spread abroad. In Arabism, Mohammed founded a body of doctrine which in a certain sense was at variance with Christianity. To what extent at variance? The concept of the three forms of the Godhead—Father, Son, Spirit—is of the very essence of Christianity. The origin of this lies away back in the ancient Mysteries in which a man was led through four preparatory stages and then through three higher stages. When he had reached the fifth stage, he came forth as a representative of the Christ; at the seventh and highest stage as a representative of the Father. I want only to make brief mention of this.

It is the Trinity that makes it possible for the impulse of freedom to have its place in the evolution of Christianity. We look upwards to the Father God, seeing in the Father God the spirituality implicit in all those forces of the Universe which go out from the Moon to Earth existence. All those forces which in Earth existence have to do with the impulses of physical germination—in man, therefore, with propagation—proceed from the Moon. It must, of course, always be remembered that the human process of reproduction has its spiritual side. From the pre-earthly existence of spirit-and-soul we come down to earthly existence, uniting with a physical body. But everything that is responsible for placing the human being, from birth onwards, into earthly life, is a creative act of the Father God, a creative act for the Earth through the Moon forces. Therefore inasmuch as throughout an earthly life man is subject to the working of the Moon forces, he is already predestined when he enters earthly existence to be exposed to impulses of a very definite kind. Hence, too, it is the essential characteristic of a Moon religion, a religion like that of the ancient Hebrews, in which the Father Principle is predominant, always to attach value in the human being only to what has been bestowed upon him through the forces of the Father God, through the Moon forces. When Christianity was founded, ancient Mystery-truths were still current in Christ's environment—truths deriving, for example, from specific phenomena of life in the earliest period of post-Atlantean evolution. Grotesque as they seem to-day, these phenomena were grounded in the very nature of man.

During the first epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation, the ancient Indian epoch, when a man had reached the age of thirty a radical change, a complete metamorphosis, took place in his earthly life. So radical was the change that, expressed in modern words, it would have been perfectly possible for a man who had passed his thirtieth year to meet a younger man whom he had known quite well, perhaps as a friend, but when this younger man greeted him the other would simply not understand what he was trying to do. ... When the older man had passed the age of thirty he had forgotten everything he had hitherto experienced on the Earth! And whatever impulse worked in him in the later years of his life was imparted to him by the Mysteries. This is how things were in the earliest period after the Atlantean catastrophe. If he wanted to know what his life had been before his thirtieth year, a man was obliged to enquire about it from the little community around him. At the age of thirty the soul was so completely transformed that the man was veritably a new being; he began a new existence, just as he had done at birth. In those days it was known that until the thirtieth year of life the forces of youth were at work: thereafter, it was the task of the Mysteries, with the very real impulses they contained, to see to it that a genuinely human existence should continue in the man's soul. And this the Mysteries were able to do because they were in possession of the secret of the Son.

Christ lived in an age when the secrets of the Son—I can do no more than touch upon them here—had been lost, were known only to small circles of men. But because of the experience undergone in His thirtieth year, Christ was able to reveal that He, as the last to do so, had received the Son-impulse directly from the Cosmos—in the way it must be received if after his thirtieth year a man is to be dependent upon the Sun forces just as hitherto he was dependent upon the Moon forces. Christ has enabled men to understand that the Son-principle within him is the Sun Being once awaited in the Mysteries but then as a Being not yet on the Earth. And so, just as in the ancient Mysteries men had gazed into the secrets of the Sun, it was made clear to them that their gaze must now turn to the Christ, realising that now the Sun Mystery had entered into man. In the first centuries of Christianity this wisdom was completely exterminated. Star-wisdom, cosmic wisdom, was exterminated and a materialistic conception of the Mystery of Golgotha gradually took shape; Christ was thought of as nothing more than a being who had dwelt in Jesus but men were unwilling to realise what had actually come to pass.

Those who were true knowers in the first Christian centuries were able to say: As well as the Father God there is God the Son, the Christ God. The Father God rules over whatever is predetermined in man because it is born with him and works in him as the forces of Nature. It is upon this principle that the Hebrew religion is based. But by the side of it, Christianity places the power of the Son which during the course of man's life draws into his soul as a creative force, making him free and enabling him to be reborn, realising that in his earthly life he can become something that was not predetermined by the Moon forces at birth.—Such was the essential impulse of Christianity in the first centuries of its existence.

Mohammedanism set its face against this impulse in its far-reaching decree: There is no God save the God proclaimed by Mohammed. It is a retrogression to the pre-Christian principle, but clothed in a new form—as was inevitable six hundred years after the founding of Christianity. The God of Nature, the Father God—not a God of freedom by whom men are led on to freedom—was proclaimed as the one and only God. Within Arabism, where Mohammedanism was making headway, this was favourable for a revival and renewal of the fruits of ancient cultures, and such a revival, with the exclusion of Christianity, did indeed take place in the Orient, on a magnificent scale. Together with the warlike campaigns of Arabism there spread from East towards the West—in Africa as it were enveloping Christianity—an impulse to revive ancient culture.

Over in Asia, Arabism was cultivated with great brilliance at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—at the time when Charles the Great was reigning in Europe. But whereas Charles the Great hardly progressed beyond the stage of being able to read and write, of developing the most primitive rudiments of culture, great and illustrious learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. It cannot, perhaps, be said that Haroun al Raschid in himself was an entirely good man, but he possessed a comprehensive, penetrating and ingenious mind—a universal mind in the best sense. He gathered at his Court all the sages who were the bearers of whatever knowledge was available at that time: poets, philosophers, doctors, theologians, architects—all these branches of learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Rashid, brought thither by his genius.

At this Court there lived a most distinguished and significant personality, one who—in an incarnation earlier than the one at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—had been an Initiate in the true sense. You will ask: Does an Initiate, then, not remain an Initiate as he passes through his incarnations? It is possible for a man to have been a deep Initiate in an earlier epoch and then, in a new epoch, he must use the body and receive the education which this later epoch has to offer. In such a case the forces deriving from the earlier incarnation will have to be held in the subconsciousness and whatever is in keeping with the current civilisation will have to be developed. There are men who seem, outwardly, to be products of the particular civilisation in which they are living; but their manner of life enables one to perceive in them the existence of deeper impulses; in earlier times they were Initiates. Nor do they lose the fruits of Initiation; out of their subconsciousness they act in accordance with its principles. But they cannot do otherwise than adapt themselves to the conditions of the existing civilisation.

The personality of whom tradition says that he made magnificent provision for all the sciences at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was only one of the most eminent sages of his time, with a genius for organisation so outstanding that he was virtually the source of much that was achieved at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

The spread of Arabism continued for many centuries, as we know from the wars waged by Europe in an attempt to keep it within bounds. But that was not the end of it: the souls who were once active in Arabism passed through the gate of death, developed onwards in the spiritual world and remained connected, in a sense, with their work. This was what happened in the case of the Individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of the wise Counsellor who lived at his Court.

To begin with, let us follow Haroun al Raschid. He passes through the gate of death and develops onwards in the spiritual world. In its external form, Arabism is repulsed; Christianity implants itself into Middle and Western Europe in the exoteric form it has gradually acquired. But although it is impossible to continue to be active in the old form of Mohammedanism, of Arabism, in Europe, it is very possible for the souls who once shared in this brilliant culture at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and there received the impulse for further achievements, to work on. And that is what they do.

We find that Haroun al Raschid himself reincarnates in the renowned personality of Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon—the distinguished Englishman whose influence has affected the whole of modern scientific thinking, and therewith much that is to be found in the minds of human beings to-day. Haroun al Raschid could not disseminate from London, from England, a form of culture strictly aligned with Arabism ... this soul was obliged to make use of the form of Arabism that was possible in the West. But the fundamental trend and tendency of what Bacon poured into European thinking is the old Arabism in the new form. And so Arabism lives in the scientific thinking of to-day, because Francis Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid.

The sage who had lived at his Court also passed through the gate of death, but he took a different path. He could not come down into a stream of culture as materialistic as that into which Francis Bacon could enter; he had inevitably to remain within a more spiritual stream. And so it came about that in the epoch when the influence of Francis Bacon was also taking effect, another individuality was working—in this case in Middle Europe—one who in his life of soul encountered what had issued from the soul of the reborn Haroun al Raschid. We see the Bacon stream pouring out from England to Middle Europe, from West to East, bringing Arabism in the form it had acquired in its sweep across Spain and France. It is comprehensible, therefore, that the tenor and content of this soul should differ from the tenor and content of that other soul—who passed through the gate of death, during the period of existence in the spiritual world directed its gaze toward Eastern and Middle Europe, and was reborn in Middle Europe as Amos Comenius. He resuscitated what he had learned from oriental wisdom at the Court of Haroun al Raschid inasmuch as in the seventeenth century he was the one who with much forcefulness promulgated the thought that the evolution of mankind is pervaded by organised spirituality. It is often said, superficially, that Comenius believed in the Kingdom of a Thousand Years. That is a trivial way of putting it. The truth is that Comenius believed in definite epochs in the evolution of humanity; he believed that historical evolution is organised from the spiritual world. His aim was to show that spirituality surges and weaves through the whole of Nature; he wrote a “Pan-Sophia.” There is a deeply spiritual trend in what he achieved. He became an educational reformer. As is known, his aim in education was to achieve concrete perceptibility (Anschaulichkeit) but a thoroughly spiritual perceptibility, not as in materialism. I cannot deal with this in detail but can only indicate how Arabism in its Western form and in its Oriental form issued from what arose in Middle Europe from the meeting of the two spiritual impulses connected with Bacon and Comenius.

Many aspects of the civilisation of Middle Europe can become intelligible to us only when we see how Arabism—in the form in which it could now be re-cast—was actually brought over from Asia by individuals who had once lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. This shows us how human Individuality is an active factor in the evolution of history. And then, by studying examples as striking as these, we can learn from them how karma works through the incarnations. As I have said on various occasions, what we learn from this study can be applied to our own incarnation. But to begin with we must have concrete examples.

Let us now take an example in which this country will be particularly interested. Let us take the example of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet. The very personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, apart from his poetry, may well arouse interest. He is certainly a remarkable personality. When he was composing his poems which flow along in wonderful rhythms, one can perceive how at every moment the soul was prone to slip out of the body. In the wonderful forms of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's poems and of his prose-poems too, there is a quality belonging intrinsically to the soul. Many times in his earthly life he was destined to suffer from a clouding of consciousness when this separation of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body became too pronounced. There was only a loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the physical body—this is quite apparent when we study the poems or the personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. We say to ourselves at once that this Individuality which in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation was only loosely connected with the physical body, must surely have passed through very remarkable experiences in earlier earthly lives.

Now investigation of earlier earthly lives is by no means always easy. Disillusionments and set-backs of every description have to be encountered in the course of such investigation. For this reason, what I say about reincarnations is most emphatically not for the purpose of satisfying cravings for sensation but always in order to shed deeper illumination upon the course of history.

As we follow the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, particularly in the light of this loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the body, we are led back to a very early incarnation in the sixth century A.D. We are led to an Individuality who, to begin with, eludes the spiritual intuition with which these things are investigated. Spiritually we are thrust back from this Individuality who in his life in Italy was finding his way into Christianity in the form in which it was spreading at that time ... we can never get really near him. And then we seem to be thrown back again to the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, so that when in this investigation of an earlier incarnation we really seem to have got hold of the incarnation in the sixth century, we have to come back again to the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, without having properly understood the connection between these two incarnations. .. until at last the solution of the riddle dawns. We notice that in the mind of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer there is a thought that puzzles and misleads us—a thought which was also expressed in his story The Saint, dealing with Thomas Becket, the Chancellor-Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century at the Court of Henry (II) of England.

It is not until we follow the connections of the thoughts and feelings working in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer while he was writing this narrative that we gain any real insight into how his mind was working. We are led as it were from a clouding of consciousness into clarity, then again a clouding, and so on. And finally we come to the conclusion that there must be some special significance in the thought that runs through Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's story; it must have deep roots. And then we hit upon the clue: this thought comes from an impulse in an earlier earthly life, the life when the Individuality of the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived at a minor Court in Italy and played an important part in the development of Christianity. In that life he had an unusual experience. Gradually we discover that this Individuality was sent with a Christian Mission from Italy to England and this Mission founded the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The Individuality who later became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was, on the one side, deeply affected by that form of art which has since died out but was prevalent in Italy in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and subsequently elaborated in the Italian mosaics. The Individuality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived and worked in this environment and then, filled with the impulse of contemporary Christianity, accompanied the Mission to England. After having participated in the founding of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, this individual was murdered, in strange circumstances, by an Anglo-Saxon chieftain.

This happening lived on as an impulse in the soul. And when this soul was born as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the destiny of that earlier time was still alive in the subconscious ... the murder in England ... it has something to do with the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Just as a remembrance is often evoked by the sound of a word, so it was in this case ... “I once had something to do with Canterbury.” And the impulse becomes an urge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul to describe, not his own destiny, for that remains in the subconscious, but the similar destiny of Thomas Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England and at the same time Archbishop of Canterbury.

The strange infirmity of soul suffered by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer also causes experience of his own destiny to slip over into that of the other personality known to him from history.

During the period of the Thirty Years' War, when such chaotic conditions prevailed in Middle Europe, this Individuality had been incarnated as a woman. And all the chaos of those times profoundly affected the Individuality now incarnate in a female body. This woman married a rather uncouth, unpolished personality who fled from the conditions then prevailing in Germany to the region of Graubünden in Switzerland. And there this couple lived ... the woman deeply sensitive to the chaos of the impressions around her, the man more plebeian.

From the far-reaching events of that time the soul had absorbed all that struggles to come forth again in Jürg Jenatsch. The thoughts and emotions rise up again in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from what he had experienced in those earlier circumstances. The difficulty is that the impressions welled up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul but that he felt compelled to transform them, because his life in the world was such that impulses were constantly rising up into his soul-and-spirit which then, in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, were responsible for the very loose connection between his soul-and-spirit and his physical body.

This will indicate to you how impulses from olden times work over in a remarkable way into a man's thinking, feeling, perception and artistic achievements. The truth of such things will quite certainly never be discovered by speculation or intellectual thinking but only in genuine spiritual vision.

Personalities who attract one's attention in some earthly life are especially interesting from the point of view of their reincarnations. There is a personality who is greatly loved and held in high esteem, above all in this country, through whom we can discern how souls pass through their earthly lives. When we have real knowledge of these matters they turn out to be different from what one would naturally assume.

There is a soul ... I was able to find this soul for the first time occupying a kind of priestly office in ancient Mysteries. I say, a kind of priestly office, for although he was not a priest of the highest rank his position in the Mysteries enabled him to do a great deal for the education of souls. In that incarnation he was a noble character, full of goodness of heart which his connection with the Mysteries had developed in him. About a hundred years before the birth of Christ it was the destiny of this personality, in line with the customs of the times, to serve under a cruel slave-owner as the foreman or manager of a host of slaves whose work was hard and heavy and who could only be handled in the way that was the accepted practice in those days. This personality must not be misjudged or misunderstood. The conditions prevailing in ancient civilisations must be seen in a different light from those of to-day; we must understand above all what it meant for this fundamentally noble personality to have been incarnated a hundred years before the founding of Christianity as a kind of foreman-manager of a host of slaves. It was impossible for him always to act in accordance with his own impulses—that was his hard destiny. But at the same time he had established a definite relationship with the souls living in the hard-worked slaves. He obeyed the crueller personality of whom I have spoken (his ‘chief’ we should say to-day) but in such circumstances antipathies and sympathies are formed. ... And when the one who often with a bleeding heart had carried out the orders he received, passed through the gate of death, his soul encountered the souls who had felt, for him too, a certain hatred. This lived itself out in the life between death and rebirth and established connections of soul-and-spirit which then worked as impulses, preparing for the next earthly life.

In the nature of things, karmic connections are formed between all human beings who have to do with one another. It was also destiny that the Individuality of whom I am speaking, who was a kind of slave-overseer and connected karmically with the chief whose orders he was bound to obey, should have made himself guilty in a certain way—it was really innocence and guilt at the same time—of all the misery caused by the cruelty of his chief. He acquiesced in it, not out of any impulse of his own but impelled by the force majeure of customs and circumstances. Thus a karmic tie was established between the two. In the life between death and rebirth this took shape in such a way that the former slave-overseer was born again in the ninth century A.D. as a woman: she became the wife of the one who had been the cruel chief—and in this relationship lived through much that constituted the karmic adjustment of what I have described as a kind of ‘innocent guilt’ in connection with the cruelties that had been committed. But these experiences deepened the soul: much of what had been present in the ancient, priestly incarnation emerged once again, but overshadowed by great tragedy. Circumstances in the ninth century brought this wedded couple into connection with many human beings in whom there were living the souls, now reincarnated, of those who had been together with them as slaves. As a general rule, human souls are reborn during the same time-period. And again in this case there was a connection in the life on the Earth.

The souls who had once worked under the slave-overseer now lived together in spatial proximity as a fairly extensive community. The official servant of the community—but a servant of fairly high rank—was the individual who had once been the cruel slave-owner. He had dealings with all the inhabitants of the community and experienced from them nothing but trouble; he was not their governor but it was his duty to look after many of their affairs. The wife lived through all this at his side. We find, therefore, that a number of human beings are associated with these two personalities. But the karma that had bound the two together—the erstwhile slave-owner and his overseer—this karmic tie was thereby done with. The ancient priest-individuality was no longer bound to the other; but the tie with the other souls remained, precisely because in the incarnation about 100 B.C. he had been at least the instrument for much that had been their lot. As a woman, this Individuality brought only blessing to the community, for her deeds were performed with the greatest goodness and kindness, despite the infinitely tragic experiences she was obliged to undergo.

All these shared experiences, all that wove the threads of karma—it all went on working, and during the next period of life between death and rebirth (after the ninth century and on into the modern age) impulses took shape once again whereby these human beings were held together. And now, the souls who had once been the slaves and later on came together in a village community—these souls were born again, not in any kind of external community but at least during the same period of time. So that there was again the possibility of relationship with the Individuality—now reborn—who had been the slave-overseer a hundred years before the Christian era, and the woman in the ninth century A.D. For this Individuality was reborn as Pestalozzi. The souls who were also reborn more or less as contemporaries in order that karma might be fulfilled—these souls whose relationship to him was as I have described, became the pupils for whom Pestalozzi now performed deeds of untold blessing!

When one studies life and behind life as it presents itself perceives the working of souls from incarnation to incarnation ... certainly it is disturbing and astounding, for things are always different from what the intellect might conjecture. Yet life's content is immeasurably deepened when it is studied in this kind of context. I think, moreover, that a man himself has really gained something when he has studied such connections. If they are drawn forth—often with very great difficulty—from their spiritual backgrounds, and if one points, as I have only been able to do in sketchy outline to-day, to what is present in visible existence, one perceives how karma works through the course of human life. Verily, life acquires serious backgrounds when we pay attention to studies of this kind; and they can be understood if with unprejudiced minds we observe what then presents itself in the external world.

Anthroposophy does not exist in order to expound theories about repeated earthly lives or to give tabulated details of every kind, but to reveal, in all their concrete reality, the spiritual foundations of life. Men will look into the world with quite different eyes once the veils are lifted from these things. One day, if destiny permits, we shall have to speak of how they can play a part, too, in the actual deeds of men. Such knowledge will certainly show that concrete studies of karma are needed by our civilisation as an impetus and a deepening. I wanted to-day merely to lay before you these actual examples of karma. The personalities in question are well-known figures in history. Study them closely and you will find confirmation of much that I have said.

New Education and the Whole Human Being

Here in Bern, I have spoken to you often about anthroposophy in general. And it is a special pleasure to be able now to speak to you in the spirit of anthroposophy about education—the sphere of life that must lie closest to the human heart. We must develop an art of education that can lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen during the last few years and decades. Our chances of overcoming this chaos are very slight. In fact, one is tempted to say that there is no escaping this chaos unless we find a way to bring spirituality into human souls through education, so that human beings may find a way to progress and to further the evolution of civilization out of the spirit itself.

We feel confident that this is the right way to proceed, because in our hearts we know that the world is created in spirit and arises from spirit. Therefore, human creation will be fruitful only when it springs from the fountainhead of spirit itself. To achieve such fruitful creation from spirit, however, people must also be educated and taught in the spirit. I believe that anthroposophy in fact has much to say about the nature of education and teaching, therefore, it gives me great satisfaction that I can present these lectures here.

There are many all over the world who feel that a new impetus of some kind is needed in education and teaching. It is true that the nineteenth century was full of progressive ideas and much was done to further schooling and education. However, a recent tendency of our civilization has been that individuals are seldom brought into touch with their own humanity. For many centuries we have been able to record the most wonderful progress in the realm of natural science and in its resulting technology.

We have also seen that a certain worldview has gradually crystallized out of that scientific progress. The world as a whole—which includes the human being—seems to be viewed exclusively in terms of what the senses tell us about natural phenomena, and what the intellect, which is related to the brain, tells us about the realm of the senses. Nevertheless, all of our recently acquired knowledge about the natural world does not, in fact, lead us to the human being; this is not clearly recognized today. Although many people feel this to be the situation, they are unprepared to acknowledge that—regardless of all that the modern age has provided us in terms of information about the natural world—we are still no closer to understanding the human being.

This impossibility is most likely to be felt when we attempt to understand the growing human being, the child. We sense a barrier between the teacher and the child. Anthroposophy, which is based on a real and comprehensive understanding of the human being, would hear this heartfelt appeal coming from all sides—not by establishing theories on education, but by showing men and women as teachers how to enter the school’s practical life. Anthroposophic education is really the practical life of the school, and our lectures should provide practical details about how to deal with the various details of teaching.

Something else must come first, however; for if we were to begin by speaking of practical details in this way, then the spirit that gives birth to all this could not reveal itself. Therefore, you must kindly permit me to speak today of this spirit of anthroposophic education as a kind of introduction. What we have to say about it will be based on a comprehensive, truly penetrating knowledge of the human being—the active force of anthroposophy in education.

A penetrating knowledge of the human being—what does this mean to us? If a growing human being, a child, stands before us, it is not enough, as I have said, to make certain rules for teaching and educating this child, merely conforming to rules as one would when dealing with a technical problem. This will not lead to good teaching. We must bring an inner fire and enthusiasm to our work; we must have impulses that are not transmitted intellectually from teacher to child according to certain rules, but ones that pass intimately from teacher to child. An educator’s whole being must be at work, not just the thinking person; the person who feels and the person who wills must also play their roles.

Recently, the thinking and worldview of natural science have taken hold of people more deeply and closer to the marrow than they like to think. Even those not specifically trained as scientists think, feel, and act scientifically. This is not acceptable for teachers, since scientific thinking provides an understanding of only one member of the whole human being—the physical body, or body of the senses. But this is only one member of the entire human being, and anthroposophy shows us that when we have genuine knowledge of the human being, we see that the human being possesses three clearly distinguished members—physical body, soul, and spirit.

We see the whole human being only when we have enough wisdom and knowledge to recognize the soul’s true nature as clearly as we recognize the physical body. We must also be able to recognize the human spirit as an individual being. Nevertheless, the connections among the body, soul, and spirit in the child are not the same as in the adult; and it is precisely a loosening of the connection with the physical body that allows us to observe the soul and spirit of the child as the greatest wonder of knowledge and practical life in human existence.

The First Stage of Childhood

Let’s look for a moment at the tiny child and see how that child is born into the world. Here we see a genuinely magical process at work. We see how spirit, springing from the innermost being of the little child, flows into undefined features, chaotic movements, and every action, which seem still disjointed and disconnected. Order and form come into the child’s eyes, facial expressions and physical movements, and the child’s features become increasingly expressive. In the eyes and other features, the spirit manifests, working from within to the surface, and the soul—which permeates the entire body—manifests.

When we look at these things with a serious, unbiased attitude, we see how they come about by observing the growing child; in this way we may gaze reverently into the wonders and enigmas of cosmic and human existence. As we watch in this way while the child develops, we learn to distinguish three clearly differentiated stages. The only reason such stages are not generally distinguished is because such discernment depends on deep, intimate knowledge; and people today, with their crude scientific concepts, are not going to trouble themselves by acquiring this kind of intimate knowledge.

Soul and Spirit Build the “Second” Human Being

The first significant change in a child’s life occurs around the seventh year when the second teeth appear. The outer physical process of the change of teeth is itself very interesting. First we have the baby teeth, then the others force their way through as the first are pushed out. A superficial look at this process will see no farther than the actual change of teeth. But when we look into it more deeply (through means I will describe later in these lectures) we discover that this transformation can be observed throughout the child’s body, though more delicately than the actual change of teeth. The change of teeth is the most physical and basic expression of a subtle process that in fact occurs throughout the body.

What really happens? Anyone can see how the human organism develops. We cut our nails, our hair, and we find that our skin flakes off. This demonstrates how physical substance is cast off from the surface as it is constantly pushed out from within. This pushing from within—which we observe in the change of teeth—is present throughout the whole human body. More exacting knowledge shows us that indeed the child gradually forced out the body received through inheritance; it was cast out. The first teeth are forced out, and likewise the child’s whole initial body is forced out.

At the change of teeth, a child stands before us with a body that—in contrast to the body at birth—is entirely formed anew. The body from birth has been cast out as are the first teeth, and a new body is formed. What is the nature of this more intimate process? The child’s first body was inherited. It is the result of a collaboration between the father and mother, so to speak, and it is formed from the earthly physical conditions. But, just what is this physical body? It is the model that the Earth provides to the person as a model for true development as a human being. The soul and spirit aspect of a human being descends from a realm of soul and spirit where it lived prior to conception and birth. Before we became earthly beings in a physical body, we were all beings of soul and spirit in a soul and spirit realm. What we are given by our parents through inherited physical substance unites in embryonic life with what descends from a higher realm as pure spirit and soul. Spirit and soul take hold of the physical body, whose origin is in the stream of inheritance. This physical body becomes its model, and on this model an entirely new human organism is formed, while the inherited organism is forced out.

Thus, when we consider a child between birth and the change of teeth we can say that the physical body’s existence is due to physical inheritance alone. But, two other forces then combine to work on this physical body. First is the force of those elements the human being brought with it to Earth; the second is assimilated from the matter and substance of the Earth itself. By the time the teeth change, the human being has fashioned a second body modeled after the inherited body, and that second body is the product of the human soul and spirit.

Having arrived at such conclusions by observing the human being more intimately, one will naturally be aware of objections that may be raised; such objections are obvious. One is bound to ask: Can’t you see that a likeness to the parents often appears after the change of teeth—that, therefore, a person is still subject to the laws of inheritance, even after the change of teeth? One could raise a number of similar objections.

Let’s consider just this one: We have a model that comes from the stream of inheritance. On this model the spirit and soul develop the second human being. But when something is built from a model we don’t expect to find a complete dissimilarity to the model; thus, it should be clear that the human spirit and soul use the model’s existence to build up the second human organism in its likeness.

Nevertheless, when you can perceive and recognize what really occurs, you discover something. Certain children come into their second organism between nine and eleven, and this second body is almost identical to the initial, inherited organism. With other children, one may notice a dissimilarity between the second organism and the first, and it is clear that something very different is working its way from the center of their being. In truth, we see every variation between these two extremes. While the human spirit and soul aspect is developing the second organism, it tries most of all to conform to the being it brings with it from the realm of spirit and soul.

A conflict thus arises between what is intended to built as the second organism and what the first organism received through inheritance. Depending on whether thy have had a stronger or weaker spiritual and soul existence (in the following lectures we shall see why this is), human beings can either give their second organism an individual form that is strongly impregnated with soul forces, or, if they descend from the spiritual world with weaker forces, stay as closely as possible to the model.

Consider what we must deal with to educate children during the first period of life between birth and the change of teeth. We are inspired with great reverence when we see how divine spiritual forces work down from supersensible realms! We witness them working daily and weekly, from month to month and year to year, during the first phases of children’s lives, and we see how such work carries them through to forming a second individual body. In education we participate in this work of spirit and soul; for human physical existence, we continue what divine spiritual forces began. We participate in divine labor.

The Child as a Sense Organ

These matters require more than strictly intellectual understanding; one’s whole being must comprehend them. Indeed, when we are brought face to face with the creative forces of the world, we may sense the magnitude of our task in education, especially during the early years. But I would like to point out to you that the way spirit and soul enter the work of creating a second human organism shows us that, in the child, the formation of the body, the activity of the soul, and the creation of the spirit are a unity. Whatever happens while forming a new organism and pushing out the old involves a unity of spirit, soul, and body.

Consequently, children reveal themselves very differently than do adults. We may observe this clearly in individual instances. As adults, when we eat something sweet, it is the tongue and palate that perceive its sweetness; a little later, the experience of sweetness ceases when the sweet substance has gone into another part of the body. As adults, we do not follow it farther with our taste. This is very different for a child, in whom taste permeates the whole organism; children do not taste only with the tongue and palate but with the whole organism. The sweetness is drawn throughout the organism. In fact, the whole child is a sensory organ.

In essence, what is a sensory organ? Let’s consider the human eye. Colors make an impression on the eye. If we properly consider what is involved in human seeing, one has to say that will and perception are one in the human eye. The surface is involved—the periphery of the human being. During the first years of life, however, between birth and the change of teeth, such activity permeates the whole organism, though in a delicate way. The child’s whole organism views itself as one all-inclusive sense organ. This is why all impressions from the environment affect children very differently than they would an adult. An expression of the soul element in the human being—the element of human morality—is occurring in the environment, and this can be seen with the eye.

The Effects of the Teacher’s Temperament on Children

Subconsciously—even unconsciously—children have a delicate and intimate capacity for perceiving what is expressed in every movement and act of those around them. If a choleric person expresses fury in the presence of a child and allows the child to see this in the unconscious way I described, then, believe me, we are very mistaken to believe that the child sees only the outer activity. Children have a clear impression of what is contained within these moral acts, even when it is an unconscious impression. Sense impressions of the eye are also unconscious. Impressions that are not strictly sensory impressions, but expressions of the moral and soul life, flow into a child exactly the way colors flow into the eye, because the child’s organism is a sense organ.

This organism, however, has such a delicate structure that every impression permeates all of it. The first impression a child receives from any moral manifestation is a soul impression. For a child, however, the soul always works down into the bodily nature. Whether it be fear or joy and delight that a child experiences in the environment, all this passes—not crudely but in a subtle and delicate way—into the processes of growth, circulation, and digestion. Children who live in constant terror of what may come their way as expressions of fury and anger from a choleric person, experience something in the soul that immediately penetrates the breathing, the circulation of the blood, and even the digestive activities. This is tremendously significant. In childhood we cannot speak only of physical education, because soul education also means educating the body; everything in the soul element is metamorphosed into the body—it becomes body.

We will realize the significance of this only when, through genuine knowledge of the human being, we do more than merely look at children and imprint certain educational maxims on them, and instead consider all of human earthly life. This is more difficult than merely observing children. We may record observations regarding memory, thinking powers, sensory functions of the eye, ear, and so on, but such records are made for the moment or, at most, for a short while. But this has not helped us in any way toward true knowledge of the human being as such.

When we look at a plant, something is already contained there in the seed that takes root and, after a long time, will appear as blossom and fruit. Similarly, in children before the change of teeth, when the bodily nature is susceptible to the soul’s influences, there are seeds of happiness and unhappiness, health and sickness, which will affect all of life until death. As teachers and educators, whatever we allow to flow into children during their first phase of life will work down into the blood, breathing, and digestion; it is like a seed that may come to fruition only in the form of health or sickness when they are forty or fifty years old. It is in fact true that the way educators act toward the little child creates the predispositions for happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health.

This is particularly noticeable when we observe in detail the effects of teachers on the children, based on actual life events. These phenomena may be observed just as well as the phenomena of botany or physics in laboratories, but we seldom see this. Let us consider individual examples. Let us consider, for instance, the teacher’s relationship to a child in school. Consider the teacher’s temperament. We may know that, due to temperament, a choleric teacher may be energetic, but also quick-tempered and easily angered. A melancholic teacher may be the kind of person who withdraws into the self—an introvert who is self-occupied and avoids the world. A sanguine teacher may be quick to receive outer impressions, flitting from one impression to the next. Or, we may find a phlegmatic person who allows things to slide, someone indifferent to everything, who remains unaffected by outer impressions, generally gliding over things.

Let’s imagine for the moment that a teachers’ training college did nothing to moderate these temperaments and prepare teachers to function well in the school life—that these temperaments were allowed full and total expression with no restraint. The choleric temperament—let us imagine that, before the change of teeth, a child is exposed to a choleric temperament. If a teacher or educator lets loose with a temperament of this kind, it permanently affects the child’s soul, leaving its mark on the circulatory system and all that constitutes the inner rhythmic life. Such effects do not initially penetrate very deeply; really, they are only there in seed, but this seed grows and grows, as all seeds do. It sometimes happens that, at forty or fifty years of age, circulatory disorders of the rhythmic system appear as a direct result of a teacher’s unrestrained choleric temperament. Indeed, we do not educate children only for childhood, but for their whole earthly existence and even, as we shall see later, for the time beyond.

Or, let’s imagine a melancholic giving rein to that particular temperament—someone who was not motivated during teacher training to harmonize it and find an appropriate way to channel it into working with children. Such teachers succumb to their own melancholy in their interactions with children. But by living, feeling, and thinking such inner melancholy, such a person continually withholds from children exactly what should flow from teacher to child—that is, warmth. This warmth, which is so often missing in education, acts first as a warmth of soul, and then passes into the body, primarily into the digestive system. This quickens the seed of certain tendencies that appear later in life as all kinds of disorders and blood diseases.

Or consider the phlegmatic, a person who is indifferent to interactions with the child. A very peculiar relationship arises between them—not exactly a coldness, but an extremely watery element is active in the soul realm between the child and such a teacher. The foundation is not strong enough for the proper interplay of soul between teacher and child. The child is insufficiently aroused to inner activity. If you observe someone who developed under the influence of a phlegmatic person, and if you follow the course of that person’s life into later years, you will often notice a tendency to brain weakness, poor circulation in the brain, or a dulling of brain activity.

And now let us look at the effects of sanguine people on the child—those who allow their sanguine nature to get out of hand. Such an individual responds strongly to every impression, but impressions pass quickly. There is a kind of inner life, but the person’s own nature is taken right out into the surroundings. Children cannot keep up with such a teacher, who rushes from one impression to the next, and fails to stimulate the child properly. In order to arouse sufficient inner activity in a child, the teacher must lovingly hold that child to one impression for a certain period of time. If we observe a child who has grown up under the influence of an uncontrolled sanguine nature, we see in later life that there is a certain lack of vital force—an adult life that lacks strength and content.

Thus, if we have the ability to see it (and education depends on a capacity for subtle perception), we recognize various types of people in their fortieth or fiftieth year of life, and we are able to say whether a person has been influenced by the temperament of an educator who was melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, or sanguine.

The Lasting Effects of a Teacher’s Actions

I mention these things in introducing my lectures, not to give instructions on how to work out these things for training teachers, but to show you how actions meant to affect the child’s soul life do not just remain in the soul, but go all the way into the physical nature. To educate the soul life of children means to educate them for their whole earthly life, even in their bodily nature.

Anthroposophy is often criticized for wanting to speak of spirit as well as soul. There are many today who become very critical and antagonistic whenever they even hear the word spirit, and anthroposophy is easily assumed to be a kind of fantasy. Anthroposophists are accused of reducing the reality of the sense world to a kind of vague abstraction, and those who speak rationally of spiritual things should naturally be unconcerned with such abstraction.

In fact, what anthroposophy attempts in education is to apply the correct principles for bodily education, since we understand that precisely during the first stage of life, the entire physical nature of a child is influenced by soul impulses. Anyone who consciously tries to discover how all physical activity is based fundamentally on soul and spirit can still choose to be a materialist when working on child development between birth and the change of teeth. The way matter works in a child is contained in a unity of soul and spirit. No one can understand matter in a child unless soul and spirit are considered valid. Indeed, soul and spirit are revealed in the outer appearance of matter.

The ability to educate necessitates a sense of responsibility. The considerations I have presented to you strongly arouse one’s sense of responsibility as a matter of heartfelt concern. If you take up educational work knowing what affects the young child and that it will continue through all of life as happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health, such knowledge may initially seem like a burden on the soul; but it will also spur you on to develop forces and capacities and above all, as a teacher, a mental attitude that is strong enough to sow “seeds” of soul in the young child that will blossom only later in life, even in old age.

This knowledge of the human being is what anthroposophy presents as the basis for an art of education. It is not merely knowledge of what we find in a human being in a single stage of life—for example, in childhood; it springs from contemplating all of human earthly life. What, in fact, is a human life on Earth? When we view a person before us at any given moment, we may speak of seeing an organism, since each detail is in harmony with the formation of the whole.

To gain insight into the inner connections of size or form in the individual members of the human organism—how they fit together, how they harmonize to form both a unity and a multiplicity—let us look, for example, at the little finger. Although I am only looking at the little finger, I also get some idea of the shape of the earlobe, since the earlobe’s form has a certain connection with the form of the little finger, and so on. Both the smallest and the largest members of the human organism receive their shape from the whole, and they are also related in form to every other member. Consequently, we cannot understand, for example, an organ in the head unless we see it in relation and in harmony with an organ in the leg or foot. This also applies to the spatial organism—the organism spread out in space.

Besides having a spatial organism, however, the human being has also a time organism. We have seen that within the space organism, the earlobe receives its form from the body as a whole, as well as from the form of, say, the little finger or knee; but the time organism must also be considered. The configuration of a person’s soul in the fiftieth year—the person’s physical health or sickness, cheerfulness or depression, clarity or dullness of mind—is most intimately connected with what was present there in the tenth, seventh, or fourth year of life. Just as the members of a spatial organism have a certain relationship to one another, so do the members of a time organism separated from one another by time.

From one perspective, it may be asserted that when we are five years old, everything within us is already in harmony with what we will be at forty. Of course, a trivial objection may be raised that one might die young, but it doesn’t apply, since other considerations enter in. Additionally, as a spatial organism, a human being is also organized in time. And if you ever find a finger lying around somewhere, it would have to have been very recently dislodged to look like a finger at all—very soon, it would no longer be a finger. A limb separated from the organism soon shrivels and ceases to be a human limb. A finger separated from the human organism is not a finger at all—it could never live apart from the body, but becomes nothing, and since it cannot exist on its own, it is not real. A finger is real only while united with the whole physical body between birth and death.

Such considerations make it clear that in all our teaching, we must consider the time organism. Imagine what would happen to the space organism if it were treated the way people often treat their time-organism. Let say, for example, that we put some substance into a man’s stomach, and it destroys his head. Imagine, however, that we examined only the stomach and never looked at what happened to this substance once it dispersed into the organism, where it eventually reached the head. To understand the human organism, we must be able to examine the process that the substance goes through in the human stomach and also see what it means for the head. In passing from the stomach to the head the substance must continually alter and change; it must be flexible.

In the time organism, we continually sin against children. We teach them to have clear, sharp ideas and become dissatisfied if their ideas are flexible and not sharply defined. Our goal is to teach children in such a way that they retain in their mind what we teach them, so they can tell us just what we told them. We are often especially gratified when a child can reproduce exactly what we taught several years later. But that’s like having a pair of shoes made for a child of three and expecting them to fit when the child is ten years old. In reality, our task is to give children living, flexible ideas that can grow in the soul just as the outer physical limbs grow with the body. It is much less trouble to give a child definitions of various things to memorize and retain, but that is like expecting the shoes of a three-year- old to fit a child of ten.

We ourselves must take part in the inner activities of children’s souls, and we must consider it a joy to give them something inwardly flexible and elastic. Just as their physical limbs grow, so can their ideas, feelings, impulses, and soon they themselves are able to make something new out of what we gave them. This cannot happen unless we cultivate inner joy in ourselves toward growth and change. We have no use for pedantry or sharply defined ideas of life. We can use only active, life forming forces—forces of growth and increase. Teachers who have a feeling for this growing, creative life have already found their relationship to the children because they contain life within themselves, and such life can then pass on to the children who demand it of them. This is what we need most of all. Much that is dead in our pedagogy and educational systems must be transformed into life. What we need, therefore, is a knowledge of the human being that doesn’t say only that a human being is like this or like that. We need knowledge of the human being that affects the whole human being, just as physical nourishment affects the blood. Blood circulates in human beings, and we need human knowledge that gives blood to our souls also; it would not only make us sensible, clever, and intelligent, but also enthusiastic and inwardly flexible, able to enkindle love in us. This would be an art of education that springs from true knowledge of the human being, borne by love.

These have been the introductory remarks I wanted to present about the essential ideas that an art of education must get from anthroposophy. In future lectures we will see how the spirit of anthroposophic education can be realized in the practical details of school.

The Goal of Waldorf Education

You have seen that education must be based on a more intimate knowledge of the human being than is found in natural science, although it is generally assumed that all knowledge must be grounded in natural science. As we have seen, however, natural science cannot come even close to the reality of the human being, and it doesn’t help to base our knowledge on it.

The world is permeated by spirit, and true knowledge of the world must be permeated by spirit as well. Anthroposophy can give us spiritual knowledge of the world, and, with it, spiritual knowledge of the human being, and this alone leads to a true art of education. But don’t make the mistake (which is easy to do) that those who consider themselves anthroposophists want to establish “anthroposophic” schools that teach anthroposophy as a worldview in the place of other contemporary worldviews, regardless of whether such views are inspired more by intellect or feeling. It is important to understand and reiterate that this is not at all our intention. What we are examining is mainly concerned with matters of method and the practice of teaching. Men and women who adhere to anthroposophy feel—and rightly so—that the knowledge of the human being it provides can establish some truly practical principles for the way we treat children.

At the Waldorf school in Stuttgart we have been able to pursue an art of education based on anthroposophy for many years; and we have always made it clear to the rest of the world that anthroposophy as such was never taught there. Roman Catholic children receive religious instruction from a priest and Protestant children from a Protestant pastor. Only those children whose parents specifically request it receive religion lessons involving a freer religious instruction based on anthroposophy. Thus, our own anthroposophic worldview as such really has no place in the school work itself.

Moreover, I would like to point out that the true aim and object of anthroposophic education is not to establish as many anthroposophic schools as possible. Naturally, some model schools are needed, where the methods are practiced in detail. There is a need crying out in our time for such schools. Our goal, however, is to enable every teacher to bring the fruits of anthroposophy to their work, no matter where they may be teaching or the nature of the subject matter. There is no intention of using anthroposophic pedagogy to start revolutions, even silent ones, in established institutions. Our task, instead, is to point to a way of teaching that springs from our anthroposophic knowledge of humankind.

Understanding the Human Being

As you know, we need to gain a more intimate observation of human beings than is customary today. In fact, there are some areas where people are learning a very exact kind of observation, especially in regard to visual observation—for example, using a telescope to observe the stars, for surveying, and in many other realms of knowledge. It arises from a sense for exact, mathematical observation. Because of the scientific mindset that has ruled for the past three centuries, nowhere in contemporary civilization do we find the kind of intimate observation that sees the fine and delicate changes in the human soul or body organization. Consequently, people have little to say about the important changes that have occurred in the child’s whole physical organization, such as those that happen at the change of the teeth, at puberty, and again after the twentieth year. And so, transitions that have great significance in terms of education—such as the period between the change of teeth and puberty—are simply ignored.

These changes are mentioned, it is true, but only as they affect the actual physical body of the child or are expressed in the soul’s more superficial dependence on the physical body. This would require much more delicate observations. Anthroposophy begins by viewing the world as an expression of spiritual forces, which is seldom acknowledged today; it provides exercises that train a person’s soul to acquire direct insight into the spirit world. There are some whose destiny has not yet brought them to the point of seeing the spiritual facts for themselves, but anthroposophy has such power that merely beginning such exercises in itself helps people to learn a much more delicate and intimate observation of the human being. After all, you must remember that our soul and spirit is the part of us that, as we have seen, descends from a pre-earthly existence and unites with the inherited physical body. And spiritual research depends on this higher, supersensible part of us; we have supersensible eyes and ears—soul organs such as the eyes and ears of our physical body—so that we can arrive at certain perceptions independently of the body.

Cosmic and Human Cycles

Each night while asleep, a person is unconsciously in a condition that is similar to what is needed for spiritual investigation. When falling asleep, the human soul and spirit leave the physical body, and re-enter it when the person awakes. While awake, people use their eyes and ears and move their limbs, and the forces for this come from the spirit and soul aspects of the human being. Genuine knowledge of nature—which doesn’t exist yet—would also show that while awake, people’s physical actions are controlled by soul and spirit, and that sleep is only an interruption of this activity. Here again, the difference is too subtle to be perceived by modern scientific methods—upon which today’s education is based, even when directed toward the earliest years of childhood. A sleeping person is completely surrendered to the activities of the organism to which plant and mineral are also subject.

Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, on the other hand, strive for precision and accuracy, and it would not be true, of course, to say that while asleep a person is a plant. In a human being, mineral and plant substances have been raised to the level of animal and human. The human organization is not like that of a plant, since a plant has no muscles and nerves, and the human of course has both muscles and nerves, even while asleep. The important thing, however, is very simple; the vegetative function of the plant has nothing to do with nerves and muscles, but it is different for a human being. Activity in a person is related to muscles and nerves, and thus transcends the physical; even human sleep activity is not merely vegetative. (In a certain sense this applies also to animals, but we cannot address this matter now.) Although we find the same impulses in the plant as in the sleeping human being, nevertheless something different happens in a sleeping person.

It may help us to form an idea of this process if we think of it this way: when we are awake, the soul and spirit are integrated with the human organism. The soul and spirit, in turn, have a certain similarity to the cosmos, the whole universe—but keep in mind that it is only a similarity. And careful observation of plant development will show us that in spring, when the snow has melted, we see plants spring out of the earth and unfold their being. Until now, plant growth was controlled by the Sun forces within the Earth, or the stored sunshine of the previous year.

In spring the plants are released, so to speak, by these earthly Sun forces and, as they shoot out of the soil, they are received by the outer sunlight and guided through the summer until the seeds become ripe. Plant growth is again given over to the Earth. Throughout the summer, the Sun’s forces gradually descend into the Earth to be stored there; thus, the Earth is always permeated by these accumulated sun forces. We need only remember that millions of years ago Sun forces shone on the plants, which then became coal within the Earth; thus, sunlight is in reality now being burned in our stoves. Likewise—though for a much shorter time—the Sun’s forces are preserved in the Earth from summer to summer. Throughout the winter, plants absorb the Sun’s forces found in the earth, and during summer, the Sun pours its rays upon them right from the cosmos. So there really is a rhythm in the life of plants—earthly sun-forces, cosmic sun-forces, earthly sun-forces, cosmic sun forces, and so on. Plant life swings from one to the other as a pendulum on a clock.

Now let us turn to the human being. When I fall asleep I leave behind in my body everything of a mineral and plant nature, though, as we have seen, the plant nature in the human being—in contrast to an actual plant—is organized so that spirit and soul can dwell within it. What is left behind in sleep is thus wholly surrendered to its own plant-like activity. It begins to blossom and sprout, and when we go to sleep it is really springtime within us. When we awaken, the plant forces are driven back, and it becomes autumn within us. As soul and spirit arise on awakening, autumn enters us.

Viewing things externally, it is often said that waking is like spring and sleeping like autumn. This is not true, however. Genuine spiritual insight into human nature shows us that during the first moments of sleep, spring life sprouts and blossoms in us, and when we awaken autumn sinks into us like the setting Sun. While awake, when we are using all our faculties of soul, it is winter within us. Again we see a rhythm, as in plantlife. In plant growth we distinguish between earthly activity and the Sun’s activity. In the human being, we find essentially the same activity imitating the plant; falling asleep—summer activity, awakening—winter activity, and around again to summer activity, winter activity; but here it takes place in only twenty-four hours. Human beings have condensed a yearly rhythm into a day and a night.

These rhythms are similar but not identical, because for a human being the life of the soul and spirit does not have the same duration as the life of spirit in the realm of nature. A year is only a day in the life of the spirits who pervade the cosmos and permeate the whole course of the year, just as the soul and spirit of human beings direct the course of their day.

As we consider this, we arrive at this hypothesis. (I must warn you, by the way, that what I am about to say may seem very strange to you, but I present it as a hypothesis to demonstrate more clearly what I mean. Let us suppose that a woman falls asleep, and within her is what I have described as summer activity. Let us suppose that she continues to sleep without waking up. What will happen then? The plant element within her—the element not of soul and spirit—would eventually become the rhythm of the plant realm. It would go from a daily rhythm to an annual rhythm. Of course, such a rhythm does not exist in the human being. Thus, if the physical body were to go on sleeping as described, the person would be unable to tolerate the resulting yearly rhythm and would die; if the human body were all plant activity, it would be organized differently. The physical body would separate from the soul and spirit, assume a yearly cycle, and take on purely vegetative qualities. When we view physical death, which leads to the body’s destruction, we see that by being born out of the cosmos, the human being passed from a grand cycle to a small cycle. If a human body is on its own and cannot animate the spirit and soul in itself, it is destroyed, since it cannot immediately find its place in the cosmic rhythm.

Therefore, we see that if we can develop a more delicate faculty for observation, we can gain true insight into the essence of human existence. This is why I said that those who have entered the path of spiritual knowledge, though they may not yet have attained spiritual vision for themselves, will nevertheless feel forces stirring within that lead to spiritual insight. And these are the very forces that act as messengers and mediators of all the spirits at work in the cosmos. Spirit is active in the cosmos where we find the beings who guide the life cycle of the year. This is a new realm to us, but when we observe a human being we can see the presence of soul and spirit in all human life, and here we are on familiar ground. For this reason, it is always easier to exercise a fine faculty of perception in regard to the human soul and spiritual qualities than it is to perceive spirit activity itself in the world.

When we think in ordinary life it is as if thinking, or forming mental images, continually escaped us. When we bump into something or feel something with our fingers—a piece of silk or velvet, for example—we immediately perceive that we have encountered that object, and we can feel its shape by touching its surface. Then we know that as human beings, we have connected with our environment. When we think, however, we do not seem to touch objects around us in this way. Once we have thought about something and made it our own, we can say that we have “apprehended,” or “grasped” it (begreifen). What do we mean by this? If external objects are alien to us—which is generally true for our thinking—then we do not say we have grasped them. If, for example, a piece of chalk is lying there, and I am standing here moving my hand as one does when speaking, one does not say, “I have grasped the chalk.” But if I actually take hold of the chalk with my hand, then I can say, “I have grasped it.”

In earlier times, people had a better understanding of what thinking really was, and out of such knowledge, words and expressions flowed into the language that expressed the real thing much better than our modern abstractionists realize. If we have had a mental picture of something, we say we have grasped it. This means we have come into contact with the object—we have “seized” it. Today we no longer realize that we can have intimate contact with objects in our environment through the very expressions in our thinking life. For example, there is a word in our language today that conceals its own meaning in a very hypocritical way. We say “concept” [Begriff in German, from begreifen]. I have a concept. The word conceive (to hold or gather) is contained within it [greifen, to grasp, or seize]. I have something that I have grasped, or gathered into myself. We have only the word now; the life has gone out of its meaning.

Examples such as these from everyday life demonstrate the aim and purpose of the exercises described as anthroposophic methods of research in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, and in the latter half of An Outline of Esoteric Science, and in other works. Consider the exercises in mental imagery. Certain thoughts are held in the mind so that concentration on these thoughts may strengthen the soul life. These exercises are based neither on superstition nor merely on fantasy, but on clear thinking and deliberation as exact as that used for mathematics. They lead human beings to develop a capacity for thought in a much more vital and active way than that found in the abstract thinking of people today.

Thinking and the Etheric Body

People today are truly dominated by abstraction. When they work all day with their arms and legs, they feel the need to sleep off their fatigue, because they recognize that their real being has been actively moving arms and legs. What they fail to understand, however, is that when we think, our being is just as active. People cannot see that when they think their being actively flows out and takes hold of the objects of their thinking; this is because they do not perceive the lowest supersensible member of the human being, the etheric body, living within the physical body, just as the physical body lives within the external world.

The etheric body can in fact be perceived at the moment when—by practicing the exercises I referred to—a person develops the eye of the soul and the ear of the spirit. One can then see how thinking, which is primarily an activity of the etheric body, is really a spiritual “grasping,” or spiritual touching, of the objects around us. Once we have condensed and concentrated our thoughts by means of the exercises mentioned, we experience spirit in such a way that we no longer have the abstract feeling, which is so prevalent today, that objects are far from us. We get a true sense of them that arises from practiced, concentrated thinking. Thinking too will then bring fatigue, and especially after using our powers of thought we will want to have our sleep.

The presence of materialistic ideas is not the worst product of this age of materialism in which we live; educators must also consider another aspect. As educators, we may feel somewhat indifferent to the amount of fatigue caused by people’s activities; eventually, people return to their senses, and things even out. But the worst thing for an educator is to watch a child go through years of schooling and receive for the soul only nourishment that bears the stamp of natural science—that is, of material things. Of course, this does not apply only to school science classes; all education today, even in the lowest grades, is based on scientific thinking. This is absorbed by children, it grows up with them, and it penetrates the whole physical organization so that in later years it appears as insomnia.

What is the cause of the sleeplessness of our materialistic time? It is due to the fact that if we think only in a materialistic way, the activity of thought—this “grasping” or “handling” of our environment through thought—does not allow the corresponding organs of the etheric body to become tired since it has become too abstract. Here, only the physical body becomes tired; we fall asleep—the physical body falls asleep—but the etheric becomes nervous and restless and cannot sleep. It draws the soul and spirit back into it, and this condition will necessarily develop gradually into an epidemic of insomnia. This is already happening today. Only by considering such matters can we understand what this materialistic time signifies. It is bad enough that people think materialistic, theoretical thoughts; but in itself this is not really that serious. It is even worse that we experience the effects of materialism in our moral life and in our economic life. And the worst thing is that through materialism, all of childhood is ruined to the point that people can no longer come to terms with moral or spiritual impulses at all.

These things must be known by everyone who recognizes the need to transform our teaching and education. The transitions we have mentioned, such as those that occur at the change of teeth and at puberty, can be understood only through intimate observation of the human being. We must learn to see how a person is inwardly active, so that people experience their etheric just as they feel their physical body; they must recognize that when they think about any object, they are really doing in the etheric what is otherwise done in the physical human body. If I want to know what an object is like, I feel it, I contact it, and thus gain a knowledge of its surface. This also applies to my etheric body. I “feel” etherically and supersensibly the object I want to “grasp,” what I wish to conceptualize. The etheric body is just as active as the physical body, and correct knowledge of human development can come only from this knowledge and consciousness of the etheric body’s activity.

The Child’s Imitative Nature

If we can activate our thinking in this way and, with this inwardly active thinking, watch a very young child, we see how every action performed in that child’s environment and every look that expresses some moral impulse (for the moral quality of a look contains something that passes into the child as an imponderable force) flows right into the child and continues to work in the breathing and the circulation of the blood. The clearest and most concrete statement we can come to regarding a child is this: “A child is an imitative being through and through.” The way a child breathes or digests in the more delicate and intimate processes of breathing or digesting reflects the actions of those around the child.

Children are completely surrendered to their environment. In adults the only parallel to such devotion is found in religion as expressed through the human soul and spirit. Religion is expressed in spiritual surrender to the universe. The religious life unfolds properly when, with our own spirit, we go beyond ourselves and surrender to a spiritual worldview—we should flow out into a divine worldview. Adult religious life depends on emancipating soul and spirit from the physical body, when a person’s soul and spirit are given up to the divine spirit of the world. Children give up their whole being to the environment. In adults, the activities of breathing, digestion, and circulation are within them, cut off from the external world. In children, however, all such activities are still surrendered to their environment, and they are therefore religious by nature. This is the essential feature of a child’s life between birth and the change of teeth; the whole being is permeated with a natural religious element, so to speak, and even the physical body maintains a religious mood.

But children are not surrounded only by beneficial forces that inspire religious devotion in later life. There are also spiritual forces that are harmful, which come from people around children and from other spiritual forces in the world. In this way, this natural religious element in a child’s physical body may also be exposed to evil in the environment—children can encounter evil forces. And when I say that even a small child’s physical body has a religious quality, I do not mean that children cannot be little demons! Many children are little demons, because they have been open to evil spiritual forces around them.

Our task is to overcome and drive out such forces by applying methods appropriate to our time. As long as a child is an imitative religious being, admonitions do no good. Words can be listened to only when the soul is emancipated to some extent, when its attention can be self-directed. Disapproving words cannot help us deal with a small child. But what we ourselves do in the presence of the child does help, because when a child sees this it flows right in and becomes sense perception. Our actions, however, must contain a moral quality.

If, for example, a man who is color-blind looks at a colored surface, he may see only gray. An adult looks at another person’s actions also in this way, seeing only the speed and flow of the gestures. We see the physical qualities but no longer see the moral qualities of the person’s actions. A child, on the other hand, sees the moral element, even if only unconsciously, and we must make sure that while in the presence of children, we not only never act in a way that should not be imitated, but never think thoughts that should not enter their souls. Such education of the thoughts is most important for the first seven years of life, and we must not allow ourselves to think any impure, ugly, or angry thoughts when in the company of little children. You may say, “But I can think what I like without altering my outer actions in the least; so the child sees nothing and cannot be influenced by what cannot be seen.” Here it is interesting to consider those very peculiar and rather stupid shows given at one time, with so-called thinking horses—horses that could count, and other animals performing tricks demonstrating “intelligence.” These things were interesting, though not in the way that most people believed.

I once saw the Elberfeld horses. (I want to speak only of my own observation). I saw the horse belonging to Mr. von Osten, and I could see how he gave answers to his master. Von Osten gave him arithmatic problems to do—not very complicated, it is true, but difficult enough for a horse. The horse had to add and subtract and would give the correct answers by stamping his hoof. Now you can look at this either from the perspective of a modern scientist—for example, the professor who wrote a whole fat book on the horse—or you can view it from an anthroposophic standpoint. The professor began by repudiating all non-professional opinions on the matter. (Please do not think that I intend to say anything against natural science, because I am well aware of its value.) In the end, the professor concluded that the horse was able to perceive very delicate movements made by the man—a slight twitch of an eyelid, the most delicate vibrations of certain muscles, and so on. From this, the horse eventually learned what answers corresponded to certain vibrations, and could give the required number of stamps with his hoof. This hypothesis is very clever and intelligent. He then arrives at the inevitable question of whether these things have actually been observed. He asks this question himself, since people are indeed learning to be very conscientious in their research. He answers it, however, by saying that the human senses are not organized in such a way that they perceive such fine delicate movements and vibrations, but a horse can see them. In fact, all he proves is that a horse can see more in a person than a professor can.

But for me, there was something else important—the horse could give the correct answers only when Mr. von Osten stood beside him and spoke. While he talked he kept taking lumps of sugar and placing them in the horse’s mouth. The horse was permeated by a taste of sweetness all the time. This is the important thing; the horse felt suffused with sweetness. In such a condition, even a horse can experience things that would otherwise not be possible. In fact, I would put it this way: Mr. von Osten himself constantly lived in the “sweetened horse,” the etheric horse that had permeated the physical horse. His thoughts were alive and diffused there, just as they were in his own body; his thoughts lived on in the horse. It was not because a horse has a finer perception than a professor, but because it is not yet as highly organized and thus more susceptible to external influences while its physical body continually absorbs the sweetness.

Indeed, there are such influences that pass from person to person, aroused by things almost—if not wholly—imperceptible to contemporary human beings. Such things occur in the interactions between humankind and animals, and they also occur very much when the soul and spirit are not yet free of the body—that is, during early childhood. Small children can actually perceive the morality behind every look and gesture of those around them, even though this may be no longer possible for those who are older. It is therefore of the greatest importance that we never allow ourselves to think ugly thoughts around children; not only does this live on in their souls, but works right down into the physical body.

There is no question that much is being accomplished these days in many medical or other dissertations, and they reflect the current state of scientific knowledge. But a time will come when there will be something very new in this area. Let me give you a specific example to demonstrate what I mean. A time will come when a person may write a doctoral thesis showing that a disease, perhaps during the forty-eighth year of a person’s life, can be traced back to certain evil thoughts in the environment of that person as a child of four or five. This way of thinking can bring us to a genuine understanding of human beings and the capacity for seeing the totality of human life.

We thus have to learn gradually that it is not so much a question of inventing from our own abstract thoughts all kinds of things for little children to do, such as using rods and so on. Children do not spontaneously do things like that. Their own soul forces must be aroused, and then they will imitate what the adults do. A little girl plays with a doll because she sees her mother nursing the baby. Whatever we see in adults is present in children as their tendency to imitate. This tendency must be considered in educating children up to the seventh year.

We must bear in mind, however, that what we educate is subject to change in the child’s organism; in children everything is done in a more living and animated way than in adults, because children are still a unity of body, soul, and spirit. In adults, the body has been freed from the soul and spirit, and the soul and spirit from the body. Body, soul, and spirit exist side by side as individual entities; in the child they are still firmly united. This unity even penetrates the thinking.

We can see these things very clearly through an example. A small child is often given a so-called “beautiful” doll—a painted creature with glass eyes, made to look exactly like a human being. These little horrors are made to open and shut their eyes and do all sorts of other things. These are then presented to children as “beautiful” dolls. Even from an artistic perspective they are hideous; but I will not enlarge on that now. But consider what really happens to a child who is presented with a doll of this kind, a doll that can open its eyes and so on. At first the child will love it because it is a novelty, but that does not last.

Now, compare that with what happens to a child if I just take a piece of rag and make a doll out of that. Tie it together for a head, make two dots for eyes, and perhaps a big nose, and there you have it. Give that to a child and the rest of that doll will be filled out by the child through imagination in soul and spirit, which are so closely connected with the body. Then, every time that child plays with the doll, there is an inner awakening that remains inwardly active and alive. By making such experiments yourself, you will see what a difference there is between giving a child playthings that leave as much as possible to the power of imagination and giving finished toys that leave nothing for the child’s own inner activity. Handwork for small children should only indicate, leaving much for the child’s own imagination to do. Working in set forms that can easily be left as they are does not awaken any inner activity in the child, because the imagination cannot get past what is open to the senses.

Physical and Psychical Effects

This shows us what kind of teachers and educators we should be if we really want to approach children in the right way. We need an art of teaching based on a knowledge of human beings—knowledge of the child. This art of education will arise when we find a doctor’s thesis that works with a case of diabetes at the age of forty by tracing it back to the harmful effects of the wrong kind of play in the third or fourth year. People will see then what we mean by saying that the human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, and that in the child, body, soul, and spirit are still a unity. The spirit and soul later become freed of the body, and a trinity is formed. In the adult, body, soul, and spirit are pushed apart, as it were, and only the body retains what was absorbed by the individual during early development as the seed of later life.

Now this is the strange thing: when an experience affects the soul, its consequences are soon visible, even when the experience was unconscious; physical consequences, however, take seven or eight times longer to manifest. If you educate a child of three or four so that you present what will influence the soul’s life, then the effect of this will appear in the eighth year; and people are usually careful to avoid doing anything with a child of four or five that may affect the soul life in an unhealthy way during the eighth or ninth year. Effects on the physical body take much longer to manifest, because the physical body must free itself of the soul and spirit. Therefore, something that influences the soul life at four or five may come to fruition in the physical body when that person is seven or eight times as old—for example, in the thirty-fifth year. Thus, a person may develop an illness during the late thirties or early forties caused by ill influences that affected that soul while at play as a child of three or four.

If you wish to understand the whole human being, you must also realize that the freeing of the body from soul and spirit in the adult, as opposed to a child’s unity of body, soul, and spirit, is not merely abstract theory, but a matter of very specific knowledge, for we are speaking of very different calendars. The time that the body requires to work something out is increasingly lengthened compared to the time needed by the soul. The physical body works more slowly, and harmful influences manifest much later there than in the soul.

Thus, we often see that when we transgress against a little child in the very early years, many things turn out wrong in the teenager’s soul-life. This can be corrected, however. It is not very difficult to find ways of helping even seemingly unmanageable children during their teens. They may even become very good and respectable, if somewhat boring, citizens later on. This is not very serious. But the body develops more and more slowly as life goes on, and in the end, long after all the soul difficulties of early youth have been overcome, the physical effects will gradually emerge, and in later life the person will have to contend with arthritis or some other illness.

Real, experiential knowledge of the human being is of the greatest importance. Truly concrete knowledge of the human being, with the power of seeing right into the person, is the only possible basis for a true art of education—an art of education whereby persons may find their place in life and, subject to the laws of their own destinies, fully develop all their powers. Education should never work against a person’s destiny, but should help people achieve the fullest possible development of their own predispositions. Often today, people’s education lags far behind the talents and tendencies that destiny implanted in them. We must keep pace with these forces to the extent that the human beings in our care can attain all that their destinies will allow—the fullest clarity of thought, the most loving deepening of feeling, and the greatest possible energy and capacity of will.

This can be done only through an art of education and teaching based on a real knowledge of the human being. We will speak more of this in the next lectures.

In the preceding lectures I have repeatedly spoken of how important it is that teachers turn their attention in particular toward the drastic changes, or metamorphoses, that occur during a child’s life—for example, the change of teeth and puberty. We have not fully developed our observation of such changes, because we are used to noticing only the more obvious outer expressions of human nature according to so-called natural laws. What concerns the teacher, however, arises in reality from the innermost center of a child’s being, and what a teacher can do for the child affects a child’s very inner nature. Consequently, we must pay particular attention to the fact that, for example, at this significant change of teeth, the soul itself goes through a transformation.

Memory Prior to the Change of Teeth

Let us examine a single aspect of this soul-life—the memory, or capacity for remembering. A child’s memory is very different before and after the change of teeth. The transitions and developments in human life occur slowly and gradually, so to speak of the change of teeth as a single fixed event in time is only approximate. Nevertheless, this point in time manifests in the middle of the child’s development, and we must consider very intensively what takes place at that time.

When we observe a very young child, we find that the capacity to remember has the quality of a soul habit. When a child recalls something during that first period of life until the change of teeth, such remembering is a kind of habit or skill. We might say that when, as a child, I acquire a certain accomplishment—let us say, writing—it arises largely from a certain suppleness of my physical constitution, a suppleness that I have gradually acquired. When you watch a small child taking hold something, you have found a good illustration of the concept of habit. A child gradually discovers how to move the limbs this way or that way, and this becomes habit and skill. Out of a child’s imitative actions, the soul develops skillfulness, which permeates the child’s finer and more delicate organizations. A child will imitate something one day, then do the same thing again the next day and the next; this activity is performed outwardly, but also—and importantly—within the innermost parts of the physical body. This forms the basis for memory in the early years.

After the change of teeth, the memory is very different, because by then, as I have said, spirit and soul are freed from the body, and picture content can arise that relates to what was experienced in the soul—a formation of images unrelated to bodily nature. Every time we meet the same thing or process, whether due to something outer or inner, the same picture is recalled. The small child does not yet produce these inward pictures. No image emerges for that child when remembering something. When an older child has a thought or idea about some past experience, it arises again as a remembered thought, a thought “made inward.” Prior to the age of seven, children live in their habits, which are not inwardly visualized in this way. This is significant for all of human life after the change of teeth.

When we observe human development through the kind of inner vision I have mentioned—with the soul’s eyes and ears—we will see that human beings do not consist of only a physical body that can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands. There are also supersensible members of this being. I have already pointed out the first so-called supersensible human being living within the physical body—the etheric human being. There is also a third member of human nature. Do not be put off by names; after all, we do need to have some terminology. This third member is the astral body, which develops the capacity of feeling.

Plants have an etheric body; animals have an astral body in common with humans, and they have feeling and sensation. The human being, who exists uniquely as the crown of earthly creation, has yet a fourth member—the I-being. These four members are entirely different from one another, but since they interact with one another they are not generally distinguished by ordinary observation; the ordinary observer never goes far enough to recognize the manifestations of human nature in the etheric body, the astral body, or I-being. We cannot really aspire to teach and educate, however, without knowing these things. One hesitates to say this, because it may be regarded as fantastic and absurd within the broader arena of modern society. It is nevertheless the truth, and an unbiased knowledge of the human being will not disagree.

The way that the human being works through the etheric body, astral body, and I-being is unique and is significant for educators. As you know, we are used to learning about the physical body by observing it—living or dead—and by using the intellect connected with the brain to elucidate what we have thus perceived with the senses. This type of observation alone, however, will never reveal anything of the higher members of human nature. They are inaccessible to methods of observation based only on sense-perception and intellectual activity. If we think only in terms of natural laws, we will never understand the etheric body, for example. Therefore, new methods should be introduced into colleges and universities. Observation through the senses and working in the intellect of the brain enable us to observe only the physical body. A very different training is needed to enable a person to perceive, for example, how the etheric body manifests in the human being. This is really necessary, not just for teachers of every subject, but even more so for doctors.

The Etheric Body and the Art of Sculpting

First, we should learn to sculpt and work with clay, as a sculptor works, modeling forms from within outward, creating forms out of their own inner principles, and guided by the unfolding of our own human nature. The form of a muscle or bone can never be comprehended by the methods of contemporary anatomy and physiology. Only a genuine sense of form reveals the true forms of the human body. But when we say such things we will immediately be considered somewhat crazy. But Copernicus was considered a bit mad in his time; even as late as 1828 some leaders of the Church considered Copernican theories insane and denied the faithful any belief in them!

Now let’s look at the physical body; it is heavy with mass and subject to the laws of gravity. The etheric body is not subject to gravity—on the contrary, it is always trying to get away. Its tendency is to disperse and scatter into far cosmic spaces. This is in fact what happens right after death. Our first experience after death is the dispersal of the etheric body. The dead physical body follows the laws of Earth when lowered into the grave; or when cremated, it burns according to physical laws just like any other physical body. This is not true of the etheric body, which works away from Earth, just as the physical body strives toward Earth. The etheric body, however, does not necessarily extend equally in all directions, nor does it strive away from Earth in a uniform way. Now we arrive at something that might seem very strange to you; but it can in fact be perceived by the kind of observation I have mentioned.

When you look up into the heavens, you see that the stars are clustered into definite groups, and that these groups are all different from one another. Those groups of stars attract the etheric human body, drawing it out into the far spaces. Let’s imagine someone here in the center.

The different groups of stars are drawing out the etheric body in varying degrees; there is a much stronger attraction from one group of stars than from another, thus the etheric body is not drawn out equally on all sides but to varying degrees in the different directions of space. Consequently, the etheric body is not spherical, but, through this dispersion of the etheric, certain definite forms may arise in the human being through the cosmic forces that work down from the stars. These forms remain in us as long as we live on Earth and have an etheric body within us.

If, for example, we take the upper part of the thigh, we see that both the form of the muscle and the form of the bone are shaped by influences from the stars. We need to discover how these very different forms can arise from different directions of cosmic space. We must try to model these varying forms in clay, and we will find that, in one particular form, cosmic forces act to produce length; in another the form is rounded off more quickly. Examples of the latter are the round bones, and the former are the more tubular bones.

Like sculptors, therefore, we must develop a feeling for the world—the kind of feeling that, in ancient humankind, was present as a kind of instinctive consciousness. It was clearly expressed in the Eastern cultures of prehistory, thousands of years before our era; but we still find it in Greek culture. Just consider how contemporary, materialistic artists are often baffled by the forms of the Greek sculptors. They are baffled, because they believe the Greeks worked from models, which they examined from all sides. But the Greeks still had a feeling that the human being is born from the cosmos, and that the cosmos itself forms the human being. When the Greeks created their Venus de Milo (which causes contemporary sculptors to despair), they took what flowed from the cosmos; and although this could reveal itself only imperfectly in any earthly work, they tried to express it in the human form they were creating as much as possible. The point is that, if you really attempt to mold the human form according to nature, you cannot possibly do it by slavishly following a model, which is the contemporary studio method. One must be able to turn to the great “cosmic sculptor,” who forms the human being from a feeling for space, which a person can also acquire.

This then is the first thing we must develop. People think they can gauge the human form by drawing a line going through vertically, another through the outstretched arms and another front to back; there you have the three dimensions. But in doing this, they are slaves to the three dimensions of space, and this is pure abstraction. If you draw even a single line through a person in the right way, you can see that it is subject to manifold forces of attraction—this way or that, in every direction of space. This “space” of geometry, about which Kant produced such unhappy definitions and spun out such abstract theories—this space itself is in fact an organism, producing varied forces in all directions.

Human beings are likely to develop only the grosser physical senses, and do not inwardly unfold this fine delicate feeling for space experienced in all directions. If we could only allow this feeling for space to take over, the true image of the human being would arise. Out of an active inner feeling, you will see the plastic form of the human being emerge. If we develop a feeling for handling soft clay, we have the proper conditions for understanding the etheric body, just as the activity of human intellect connected with the brain provides the appropriate conditions for understanding the physical body.

We must first create a new method of acquiring knowledge—a kind of plastic perception together with an inner plastic activity. Without this, knowledge stops short at the physical body, since we can know the etheric body only through images, not through ideas. We can really understand these etheric images only when we are able to reshape them ourselves in some way, in imitation of the cosmic shaping.

The Astral Body in Relation to Music

Now we can move on to the next member of the human being. Where do things stand today in regard to this? On the one hand, in modern life the advocates of natural science have become the authorities on the human being; on the other hand we find isolated, eccentric anthroposophists, who insist that there are also etheric and astral bodies, and when they describe the etheric and astral bodies, people try to understand those descriptions with the kind of thinking applied to understanding the physical body, which doesn’t work. True, the astral body expresses itself in the physical body, and its physical expression can be comprehended according to the laws of natural science.

However, the astral body itself, in its true inner being and function, cannot be understood by those laws. It can be understood only by understanding music—not just externally, but inwardly. Such understanding existed in the ancient East and still existed in a modified form in Greek culture. In modern times it has disappeared altogether. Just as the etheric body acts through cosmic shaping, the astral body acts through cosmic music, or cosmic melodies. The only earthly thing about the astral body is the beat, or musical measure. Rhythm and melody come directly from the cosmos, and the astral body consists of rhythm and melody.

It does no good to approach the astral body with what we understand as the laws of natural science. We must approach it with what we have acquired as an inner understanding of music. For example, you will find that when the interval of a third is played, it can be felt and experienced within our inner nature. You may have a major and minor third, and this division of the scale can arouse considerable variations in the feeling life of a person; this interval is still something inward in us. When we come to the fifth interval, we experience it at the surface, on our boundary; in hearing the fifth, it is as though we were only just inside ourselves. We feel the sixth and seventh intervals to be finding their way outside us. With the fifth we are passing beyond ourselves; and as we enter the sixth and the seventh, we experience them as external, whereas the third is completely internal. This is the work of the astral body—the musician in every human being—which echoes the music of the cosmos. All this is at work in the human being and finds expression in the physical human form. If we can really get close to such a thought in trying to comprehend the world, it can be an astonishing experience for us.

You see, we are speaking now of something that can be studied very objectively—something that flows from the astral body into the human form. In this case, it is not something that arises from cosmic shaping, but from the musical impulse streaming into the human being through the astral body. Again, we must begin with an understanding of music, just as a sculptural understanding is necessary in understanding the etheric body’s activities. If you take the part of the human being that goes from the shoulder blades to the arms, that is the work of the tonic, the keynote, living in the human being. In the upper arm, we find the interval of the second. (You can experience all this in eurythmy.) And in the lower arm the third—major and minor. When you come to the third, you find two bones in the lower arm, and so on, right down into the fingers.

This may sound like mere words and phrases, but through genuine observation of the human being, based on spiritual science, we can see these things with the same precision that a mathematician uses in approaching mathematical problems. We cannot arrive at this through any kind of mystical nonsense: it must be investigated with precision. In order that students of medicine and education really comprehend these things, their college training must be based on an inner understanding of music. Such understanding, permeated with clear, conscious thinking, leads back to the musical understanding of the ancient East, even before Greek culture began. Eastern architecture can be understood only when we understand it as religious perception descended into form.

Just as music is expressed only though the phenomenon of time, architecture is expressed in space. The human astral and etheric bodies must be understood in the same contrasting way. We can never explain the life of feeling and passion with natural laws and so-called psychological methods. We can understand it only when we consider the human being as a whole in terms of music. A time will come when psychologists will not describe a diseased condition of the soul life as they do today, but will speak of it in terms of music, as one would speak, for example, of a piano that is out of tune.

Please do not think that anthroposophy is unaware of how difficult it is to present such a view in our time. I understand very well that many people will consider what I have presented as pure fantasy, if not somewhat crazy. But, unfortunately, a socalled “reasonable” way of thinking can never portray the human being in actuality. We must develop a new and expanded rationality for these matters. In this connection, it is extraordinary how people view anthroposophy today. They cannot imagine that anything exists that transcends their powers of comprehension, but that those same powers can in fact eventually reach.

Recently, I read a very interesting book by Maeterlinck translated into German. There was a chapter about me, and it ended in an extraordinary and very amusing way. He says: “If you read Steiner’s books you will find that the early chapters are logically correct, intelligently thought-out and presented in a perfectly scientific form. But as you read on, you get the impression that the author has gone mad.” Maeterlinck, of course, has a perfect right to his opinions. Why should he not have the impression that the writer was a clever man when he wrote the first part of the book, but went mad when he wrote the later part? But simply consider the actual situation. Maeterlinck believes that in the first chapters of these books the author was clever, but in the last chapters he had gone mad. So we get the extraordinary fact that this man writes several books, one after the other. Consequently, in each of these books the first few chapters make him seem very smart, but in later chapters he seems mad, then clever again, then mad, and so on. You see how ridiculous it is when one has such a false picture. When writers—otherwise deservedly famous—write in such a way, people fail to notice what nonsense it is. This shows how hard it is, even for such an enlightened person as Maeterlinck, to reach reality. On the firm basis of anthroposophy we have to speak of a reality that is considered unreal today.

I-being and the Genius of Language

Now we come to the I-being. Just as the astral body can be investigated through music, the true nature of the I-being can be studied through the word. It may be assumed that everyone, even doctors and teachers, accepts today’s form of language as a finished product. If this is their standpoint, they can never understand the inner structure of language. This can be understood only when you consider language, not as the product of our modern mechanism, but as the result of the genius of language, working vitally and spiritually. You can do this when you attempt to understand the way a word is formed.

There is untold wisdom in words, way beyond human understanding. All human characteristics are expressed in the way various cultures form their words, and the peculiarities of any nation may be recognized in their language. For example, consider the German word Kopf (“head”). This was originally connected with the rounded form of the head, which you also find in the word Kohl (“cabbage”), and in the expression Kohlkopf (“head of cabbage”). This particular word arises from a feeling for the form of the head. You see, here the I has a very different concept of the head from what we find in testa, for example, the word for “head” in the Romance languages, which comes from testifying, or “to bear witness.” Consequently, in these two instances, the feelings from which the words are formed come from very different sources.

If you understand language in this inward way, then you will see how the I-organization works. There are some districts where lightning is not called Blitz but Himmlitzer. This is because the people there do not think of the single flashes of lightning so much as the snakelike form. People who say Blitz picture the single flash and those who say Himmlitzer picture the zig-zag form. This then is how humans really live in language as far as their I is concerned, although in the current civilization, they have lost connection with their language, which has consequently become something abstract. I do not mean to say that if you have this understanding of language you will already have attained inward clairvoyant consciousness, whereby you will be able to behold beings like the human I. But you will be on the way to such a perception if you accompany your speaking with inner understanding.

Thus, education in medical and teacher training colleges should be advanced as indicated, so that the students’ training may arouse in them an inner feeling for space, an inner relationship to music, and an inner understanding of language. Now you may argue that the lecture halls are already becoming empty and, ultimately, teacher training colleges will be just as empty if we establish what we’ve been speaking of. Where would all this lead to? Medical training keeps getting longer and longer. If we continue with our current methods, people will be sixty by the time they are qualified!

The situation we are speaking of is not due in any way to inner necessity but is related to the fact that inner conditions are not being fulfilled. If we fail to go from abstractions to plastic and musical concepts and to an understanding of the cosmic word—if we stop short at abstract ideas—our horizon will be endless; we will continue on and on and never come to a boundary, to a point where we can survey the whole. The understanding that will come from understanding sculpting and music will make human beings more rational—and, believe me, their training will actually be accelerated rather than delayed. Consequently, this inner course of development will be the correct method of training educators, and not only teachers, but those others who have so much to contribute to educational work—the doctors.

The Therapeutic Nature of Teaching

Given what I spoke of in the introductory lectures concerning the relationship between educational methods and the physical health of children, it should be clear to you that real education cannot be developed without considering medicine. Teachers should be able to assess various conditions of health or disease among their children. Otherwise, a situation will arise that is already being felt—that is, a need for doctors in the schools. The doctor is brought in from outside, which is the worst possible method we could adopt. How do such doctors stand in relation to the children? They do not know the children, nor do they know, for example, what mistakes the teachers have made with them, and so on. The only way is to cultivate an art of education that contains so much therapy that the teacher can continually see whether the methods are having a good or bad influence on the children’s health. Reform is not accomplished by bringing doctors into the schools from outside, no matter how necessary this may seem to be. In any case, the kind of training doctors get these days does not prepare them for what they must do when they are sent into the schools.

In aiming at an art of education we must provide a training based on knowledge of the human being. I hesitate to say these things because they are so difficult to comprehend. But it is an error to believe that the ideas of natural science can give us full understanding of the human being, and an awareness of that error is vital to the progress of the art of education. Only when we view children from this perspective do we see, for example, the radical and far-reaching changes that occur with the coming of the second teeth, when the memory becomes a pictorial memory, no longer related to the physical body but to the etheric body. In actuality, what is it that causes the second teeth? It is the fact that, until this time, the etheric is almost completely connected with the physical body; and when the first teeth are forced out, something separates from the physical body. If this were not the case, we would get new teeth every seven years. (Since people’s teeth decay so quickly nowadays, this might seem to be a good thing, and dentists would have to find another job!) When the etheric body is separated, what formerly worked in the physical body now works in the soul realm.

If you can perceive these things and can examine the children’s mouths without their knowledge, you will see for yourself that this is true. It is always better when children do not know they are being observed. Experimental psychology so often fails because children are aware of what is being done.

You can examine a child’s second teeth and find that they have been formed by the etheric body into a modeled image of the memory; and the shape of the teeth created by the etheric will indicate how the memory of the child will develop. Except for slight alterations in position here or there, you cannot physically change the second teeth once they are through—unless you are able to go so far as, for example, the dentist Professor Romer. He has written a book on dentistry—a new art of medicine based on anthroposophic principles—where he speaks of certain changes that can be effected even after the second teeth are established. But this need not concern us further.

When the etheric body is loosened and exists on its own after the change of teeth, the building of memory leaves the physical realm and remains almost entirely in the element of soul; indeed, this fact can put teachers on the right track. Before this change, the soul and spirit formed a unity with the physical and etheric. After this, the physical—previously acting in conjunction with the soul—is expressed as the second teeth, and what collaborated with the physical in this process separates and manifests as an increased power to form ideas and as the formation and reliability of memory.

Once you have acquired such insight into human nature, you will discover much that will help in your teaching. You must permeate yourselves with this spiritual knowledge of the human being and enliven it in yourselves; your observations of children will then inspire you with ideas and methods for teaching, and this inner inspiration and enthusiasm will penetrate your practical work. The rules established in introductory texts on education produce only abstract activity in the soul. But what arises from anthroposophic knowledge penetrates the will and the efforts of teachers; it becomes the impulse for everything done in the classroom.

A living knowledge of the human being brings life and order to the soul of a teacher. But if teachers study only teaching methods that arise from natural science, they may get some clever ideas of what to do with the children, but they will be unable to carry them out. A teacher’s skill and practical handling of children must arise from the living spirit within, and this is where purely scientific ideas have no place. If teachers can acquire a true knowledge of the human being, they will become aware of how, when the etheric body is freed at the change of teeth, the child has an inner urge to receive everything in the form of images. The child’s own inner being wants to become “image.” During the first stage of life, impressions lack this picture-forming tendency; they are transformed instead into habits and skills in the child; memory itself is habit and skill.

Children want to imitate, through the movement of the limbs, everything they see happening around them; they have no desire to form any inner images. But after the change of teeth, you will notice how children come to know things very differently. Now they want to experience pictures arising in the soul; consequently, teachers must bring everything into a pictorial element in their lessons. Creating images is the most important thing for teachers to understand.

Teaching Writing and Reading

When we begin to view the facts, however, we are immediately faced with certain contradictions. Children must learn to read and write, and when they come to school we assume they will first learn to read, and after that they will learn to write in connection with their reading. Let’s consider, however, the reality of letters—what it means when we take a pen to paper and try to express through writing what is in the mind. What is the relationship between the printed letters of today and the original picture-language of ancient times? How were we taught these things? We show children a capital A and a lowercase a, but what in the world do these letters have to do with the sound “ah”? There is no relationship at all between the form of the letter A and the sound “ah.”

When the art of writing arose, things were different. In certain areas, pictorial signs were used, and a kind of pictorial painting was employed. Later, this was standardized; but originally those drawings copied the process and feeling of the sounds; thus, what appeared on paper was, to some extent, a reproduction of what lived in the soul. Modern characters, however, are alien to a small child’s nature, and it is little wonder that when certain early peoples first saw printed letters, it had a peculiar effect on them. When the people of Europe came among the Native Americans and showed them how they expressed their thoughts on paper, the Native Americans were alarmed and considered it the work of the devil; they were afraid of the little demons lurking behind those written letters. They immediately concluded that the Europeans engaged in black magic, since people have a habit of attributing to black magic whatever they cannot understand.

But what is the truth of the matter? We know that when we utter the sound “ah,” we express wonder and admiration. Now, it is very natural to try to reproduce this sound with the whole body and express it in a gesture of the arms. If you copy this gesture (stretching the arms obliquely above the head) you get the capital A. When you teach writing, you can, for example, begin with a feeling of wonder, and proceed with the children to some kind of painting and drawing, and in this way you can bring their inner and outer experiences into that painting and drawing.

Consider another example. I tell a girl to think of a fish and ask her to paint it (awkward though this may be). It must be done in a particular way, not simply as she might prefer, but with the head of the fish in front, like this, and the rest of the fish here. The child paints the fish, and thus, through a kind of painting and drawing, she produces a written character. You then tell her to pronounce the word fish—“fish.” Now take away the ish, and from fish you have arrived at her first written letter, f.

In this way a child will come to understand how pictorial writing arose, and how it developed into contemporary writing. The forms were copied, but the pictures were abandoned. This is how drawing the various sounds arose. You do not need to make a special study of how such things evolved. This is not really necessary for teachers, since they can develop them out of their own intuition and power to think. Have a boy, for example, paint the upper lip of a mouth, and then pronounce the word mouth. Leave out the outh, and you get the m. In this way you can relate all the written characters to some reality, and the child will constantly develop a living, inner activity.

Thus, you should teach the children writing first, and let today’s abstract letters arise from tangible reality; when a child learns to write in this way, the whole being is engaged in the process. Whereas, if you begin with reading, then only the head organization participates in an abstract way. In writing, the hand must participate as well, and in this way the whole human being is aroused to activity. When you begin with writing—writing developed through the formation of images and drawing forms—your teaching will approach the child’s whole being. Then you can move on to teaching reading; and what was developed out of the child’s whole being through drawing can be understood by the head. This method of teaching writing and reading will naturally take longer, but it will have a far healthier effect on the whole earthly life from birth to death. These things can be done when the practical work of the school flows out of a real spiritual knowledge of the human being. Such knowledge can, through its own inner force, become the teaching method in our schools. The desires of those who earnestly seek a new art of education live in this; but its essence can be truly found only when we are unafraid to look for a full knowledge of the human being in body, soul, and spirit.

Moral Development after the Change of Teeth

We have been speaking of ways to teach reading and writing according to the needs of the soul and spirit of children. If you can inwardly understand the relationship of soul and spirit to the physical body at the change of teeth, you not only see the truth of what has been said, but you will be also able to work it out in practical details. Until the change of teeth, a human being lives entirely in the senses. A child surrenders entirely to the environment and is thus by nature a religious being.

At the change of teeth, however, the senses, which the permeate a small child’s whole being, now come to the surface; they disengage from the rest of the organism and go their separate ways, so to speak. This means that the soul and spirit are freed from the physical body and the child can inwardly develop as an individual. Soul and spirit become independent, but you must bear in mind that the soul and spirit do not really become intellectual until puberty, because the intellect does not assume its natural place in a child’s development before then.

Before that time, a child lacks the forces to meet an appeal to the intellect. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the forces of comprehension and the whole activity of soul have a pictorial quality. It is a kind of aesthetic comprehension that may be characterized in this way: until the change of teeth children want to imitate what happens around them, what is done in front of them. Their motor systems are exerted in such a way—both in general and individually—that they enter an inner, loving relationship with all that surrounds them.

This alters at the change of teeth, when the child no longer goes by what is seen, but by what is revealed in the feelings and soul mood of the educator or teacher. The young child’s soul before the change of teeth is not yet guided by the authority of a teacher. Naturally, such transitions are gradual rather than sudden; but, typically, a small child pays little attention to the subject or meaning of what is said; a child lives much more in the sound of words—in the whole way the speech is formulated. Closer observation shows that when you simply lay down the law and say to a child, “You must not do this,” it makes very little impression. But when, with its own conviction, as it were, your mouth says, “Do this,” or another time, “Don’t do that,” there should be a noticeable difference in how these words are spoken. The child will notice the difference between saying “You should not do that” with a certain intonation, and “That’s right, you may do that.” The intonation reveals the activity of speech, which acts as a guide for the very young child.

Children are unconcerned with the meaning of words and, indeed, with any manifestation of the world around them, until after the change of teeth. Even then, it is not yet the intellectual aspect that concerns them, but an element of feeling. They take it in as one takes anything from acknowledged authority. Before puberty, a child cannot intellectually determine right and wrong. People may speculate about these things as much as they like, but direct observation shows what I have said to be true. This is why all moral concepts brought before a child must be pictorial in nature.

The subject being taught and moral training can thus be interwoven. If, for example, you are presenting examples of history—not in a stilted, pedantic way, with all kinds of moral maxims, but with simple feelings of like and dislike—you can show that what is moral is pleasing to you, and what is not moral is displeasing. Thus, during the time between the change of teeth and puberty, a child can acquire sympathy for what is good and antipathy toward what is bad. We do not begin by giving children commands, because commands will not have the desired effect. It may be possible to enslave children with commands, but we can never foster the moral life in this way, which instead must spring from the depths of the soul. We can do this only when, quite apart from commanding or forbidding, we are able to arouse a fine feeling for good and bad in the child—a feeling for beautiful and ugly and for true and false.

The teacher respected by the child as an authority should personify what is good, true, and beautiful. A child brought up on precepts can never become fully human, formed and developed from the whole of the child’s inner nature. Precepts consider only the development of the head. We can foster the development of the heart—indeed, the whole person—if we can arouse the feeling at that age that something is true, beautiful, or good, because the revered teacher thinks it to be true, beautiful, or good. In a person, in an actual human being, a child will look for manifestations of truth, beauty, and goodness. When the picture of truth, beauty, and goodness comes from the individuality of the educator, it affects the child with the most amazing intensity. The whole being of the child is exerted to find an inner echo of what the teacher says or otherwise makes perceptible. This is most important, therefore, in the educational methods we use for children between seven and fourteen.

Of course, there are obvious objections to such a statement; the idea of “object-lessons,” or teaching based on sense-perception, is so misunderstood these days that people believe they should give children only what they can understand, and since we live in an era of the intellect, such understanding is intellectual. It is not yet understood that it is possible to understand things with soul forces other than those of the intellect—and recommendations for so-called “object-lessons” can drive one nearly to despair.

It is a terrible mindset that wants to pin the teacher down to the children’s level of understanding all the time. If you really set up the principle of giving children only “what they can understand,” one cannot gain a concept of what it means for a child of six or seven to have accepted something based on the unquestioned authority of a teacher. Because the teacher thought something was true or beautiful, the child accepted it, and it will accompany that child throughout life. It grows with the child as the child grows. And at thirty or forty years of age—after more mature experiences—that individual may again find what was accepted at eight or nine based on the authority of a beloved teacher. It springs back into the adult’s life again, and now it can be understood because of adult experiences.

There is a most wonderful life-giving power, when things already contained within a person’s soul emerge and unite with the essence of what was acquired in the meantime. Such lifegiving forces can be born in the person only when what was accepted by the child on the authority of the teacher arises in the soul, through the maturity of subsequent experience. If memories are connected only with the intellect, then a child is robbed of life-giving forces. In these matters we must come to perceive the human being in a much more intimate way than is usual today.

Beginning with the Whole in Mathematics

It is essential that we make sure the child is not driven to a one-sided intellectuality. This will nevertheless be the situation if our teaching is permeated with intellectual thought. What I am saying here applies to everything children should be taught between the change of teeth and puberty. It is most important that mathematics, for example, should not be intellectualized; even in mathematics, we should begin with what is real.

Now imagine that I have ten beans here in front of me. This pile of \(10\) beans is the reality—it is a whole—but I can divide it into smaller groups. If I began by saying, “\(3+3+4\) beans \(= 10\) beans,” then I am starting with a thought instead of an actuality. Let’s do it the other way around and say, “Here are \(10\) beans. I move them around, and now they are divided into groups—\(3\) here, \(3\) again here, and another group of \(4\) that, together, make up the whole.”

When I begin this way with the total actually in front of me, and then go on to the numbers to be added together, I am sticking with reality; I proceed from the whole, which is constant, to its parts. The parts can be grouped in various ways—for example, \(10 = 2+2+3+3\)—but the whole is constant and invariable, and this is the greater reality. Thus, I must teach children to add by proceeding from the whole to the parts. Genuine knowledge of the human being shows us that, at this age, a child will have nothing to do with abstractions, such as addenda, but wants everything concrete; and this requires a reversal of the usual method of teaching mathematics. In teaching addition, we have to proceed from the whole to the parts, showing that it can be divided in various ways. This is the best method to help us awaken forces of observation in children, and it is truly in keeping with their nature. This applies also to the other rules of mathematics. If you say, “What must we take away from \(5\) in order to leave \(2\)?” you will arouse much more interest in children than if you say, “Take \(3\) from \(5\).” And the first question is also much closer to real life. These things happen in real life, and in your teaching methods you can awaken a sense of reality in children at this age.

A sense for reality is sorely lacking in our time, and this is because (though not always acknowledged) something is considered true when it can be observed and is logical. But logic alone cannot establish truth, because truth can arise only when something is not only logical but accords with reality. We hear some very strange ideas about this nowadays. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity—which is brilliant and, from certain points of view, significant—presents ideas that, if one has a sense for reality at all, leave one feeling torn and disintegrated. You may recall his watch that travels out into space with the speed of light supposedly unchanged. But you only need to imagine what it would be like when it returned—completely pulverized, to say the least!

Something is placed before you that can be well-reasoned and very logical; the theory of relativity is as logical as can be, but in many of its applications, it does not accord with reality. Such things make a deep impression on people today, because we no longer have a fine feeling for reality. When we consider the needs of children during this second period of life it is most important to give them realities rather than abstractions. This is the only way we can prepare them properly for later life—not just in thinking, but in the forces of feeling and will. We must first recognize the true nature of the child before we can correctly tackle education, whether at school or at home.

The Natural Religious Feeling in Children

Before we become earthly beings, as I have told you before, we are beings of soul and spirit living in a world of soul and spirit. We come to earth and as beings of soul and spirit and unite with the physical and etheric seed; this physical, etheric seed arises partly through the activity of the soul and spirit itself, and partly through the stream of inheritance that passes through the generations, and finally, through the father and mother, approaches the human being who wishes to incarnate in a physical body. If we consider this soul and spirit descending to Earth, we cannot help but view it with reverence and awe. The unfolding of the child’s being must fill us as teachers with feelings of reverence—indeed, we could speak of priestly feelings; because, the way soul and spirit are unveiled in the child really does constitute a revelation of that soul and spirit within the physical and etheric realm.

This mood of soul allows us to see the child as a being sent down to Earth by the Gods to incarnate in a physical body. It arouses within us the proper attitude of mind for our work in the school. But we learn to perceive only through true observation of what gradually manifests prior to the change of teeth—by observing the building of a child’s body, the ordering of chaotic movements, the “ensouling” of gestures, and so on. We can see in all this, springing from the center of a child’s being, the effects of the human being’s experiences in the divine spiritual realm before coming to Earth.

Only on the basis of this knowledge can we correctly understand what expresses itself in the life and activities of children under seven. They simply continue in their earthly life a tendency of soul that was the most essential aspect of life before birth. In the spiritual realm, a human being surrenders completely to the spirit all around, lives outside itself, though more individually than on Earth. The human being wants to continue this tendency toward devotion in earthly life—wants to continue in the body the activity of pre-earthly life in the spiritual worlds. This is why the whole life of a small child is naturally religious.

Imagery after the Age of Seven

It is very different when we come to the change of teeth. Now, with their individuality, but on the model delivered by its inheritance, children make their own bodies. At this age, a child acquires for the first time a body formed from the individuality. Human beings come to Earth with a remembered tendency; this then develops into a more pictorial and plastic memory. Therefore, what is produced from the impulses of former earthly lives causes life between the change of teeth and puberty to seem familiar. It is very important for us to realize that a child’s experience at this age is like recognizing an acquaintance on the street.

This experience—lowered one level into the subconscious—is what happens in the physical and moral nature of a child at this age. The child experiences what is being learned as old and familiar. The more we can appeal to that feeling, recognizing that we are giving the child old and familiar knowledge, the more pictorial and imaginative we can make our teaching, and the better we will teach, because that individual saw these things as images in the spiritual life and knows that his or her own being rests within those images; they can be understood because they are already well known. The child has not yet developed any clearly defined or individual sympathies and antipathies, but has a general feeling of sympathy or antipathy toward what is found on the Earth, just as I might feel sympathy if I meet a friend or antipathy if I meet someone who once struck me on the head. If we keep in mind that these general feelings are there, and if we work on this hypothesis, our teaching will be on the right track.

The Individual after Puberty

Then a child reaches puberty, and an important change occurs. The more general feelings of sympathy and antipathy give way to individualized feelings. Each thing has or lacks value in the child’s eyes, but differently now. This is because at puberty, a human being’s true destiny begins to be felt. Before this time, children had more general feelings about life, viewing it as an old acquaintance. Now, having attained sexual maturity, a child feels that the individual experiences that arise are related to destiny. Only when a person views life in terms of destiny does it become one’s own individual life in the proper way. Therefore, what we experienced before must be recalled a second time in order to connect it with one’s destiny.

Before fourteen, everything must be based on the teacher’s authority, but if it is to become a part of a child’s destiny it must be presented again after fourteen, to be experienced in an individual way. This must in no way be ignored. With regard to moral concepts, we must bring the child before puberty to have a liking for the good and such a dislike for evil. Then, during the next period of life, things that were developed in sympathy and antipathy appear again in the soul, and the growing individual will make what was loved into precepts for the self, and what was repugnant, the person must now avoid. This is freedom, but as human beings we can find it only if, before we come to “Do this” and “Don’t do that,” we feel attracted to the good and repelled by the bad. A child must learn morality through feeling.

With regard to religion, we must be clear that young children are naturally religious. At the change of teeth, when the soul and spirit become more free of the body, this close relationship with nature falls away, and thus what was formerly natural religion must be lifted to a religion of the soul. Only after puberty does religious understanding arise, and then, once the spirit has become free, what was formerly expressed in imitation of the father or mother must be surrendered to the invisible, supersensible forces. Thus, what has always been present in the child as a seed gradually develops in a concrete way. Nothing is grafted onto the child; it arises from the child’s own being.

True Reform in Education

Here is an extraordinary fact you can verify for yourselves; with all relatively rational people—and nearly everyone is rational these days (and I mean that seriously)—you find that people have been educated only to be rational, only to work with their heads, and no more. To educate the whole person is not as easy. You only have to read what very sensible people have written about education, and you repeatedly encounter this sort of statement: “Nothing should be presented to a child from outside; but what is already there should be developed.” You can read that everywhere, but how is it done? That is the question. It is not a matter of establishing principles. Programmatic principles are easy to come by, but what matters is to live in reality. This is what we must aim for, but we will find ourselves nearly overwhelmed by the difficulties and dangers in our path.

Thirty, forty, or a hundred people can sit down together today and draft treatises on the best methods for teaching and education and other recommendations, and I am convinced that in most cases they do it very cleverly. I am not being ironic—our materialistic culture has reached its zenith. Everywhere societies are being established and principles elaborated. In themselves, these are splendid, but they accomplish nothing. That is why the Waldorf school came into being in such a way that there were no set principles or systems—only children and teachers. We have to consider not only the individuality of every single child, but the individuality of every single teacher as well. We must know our teachers. It is easy to draft rules and principles that tell teachers what to do and not do. But what matters is the capacities of individual teachers, and the development of their capacities; they do not need educational precepts, but a knowledge of the human being that takes them into life itself and considers whole persons in a living way. You see, our job must always be development, but we must know where to look for what we wish to develop. We must link religious feeling—and later, religious thinking—with imitation during the first stage of childhood, and moral judgment during the second.

It is most important to bear in mind the pictorial element in the period between the change of teeth and puberty. Artistic presentation is essential in teaching and education. Painting, music, and perhaps modeling as well, must all find their proper place in education in order to satisfy the inherent longings of children.

Children’s Relationship to the Earth

In other subjects we must also work according to these needs, not according to the demands of our materialistic age. Our materialistic age has fine things to tell us—for example, about how to distinguish one plant from another—but during this second stage, the teacher must know, above all, that the scientific method of classification and descriptions of individual plants does not belong in the education of children of this age. You must ask yourself whether a plant is, in effect, a reality. Can you understand a plant in isolation? This is impossible. Suppose you found a hair; you would not try to determine how this hair could have formed all by itself. It must have been pulled out or fallen out of someone’s head. You can think of it as a reality only in relation to the whole organism. The hair is nothing on its own and cannot be understood that way. It is a sin against one’s sense of reality to describe a hair in isolation, and it is just as much a sin against our sense of reality to describe a plant as an isolated unit.

It may seem fantastic, but plants are in fact the “hair” of the living Earth. Just as you can understand what a hair is really like only when you consider how it grows out of the head—actually out of the whole organism—so in teaching about nature you must show the children how the Earth exists in a most intimate relationship to the world of plants. You must begin with the soil and, in this way, evoke an image of Earth as a living being. Just as people have hair on their head, the Earth as a living being has the plants on it. You should never consider the plants apart from the soil. You must never show the children a plucked flower as something real, since it has no reality of its own. A plant can no more exist without the soil than a hair can exist without the human organism. The essential thing in your teaching is to arouse the feeling in the child that this is so.

When children have the feeling that the Earth has some formation or another, and from this arises one or another blossom in the plant—when in fact they really experience the Earth as a living organism—they will gain the proper and true relationship to the human being and to the whole great Earth spread out before them. One would never arrive at this view by considering the plants in isolation from the Earth.

Children will be capable of acquiring the right view (which I have characterized in a somewhat abstract way) at about ten years of age. This may be seen through intimately observing what develops in a child. But up to this age, our teaching about plants—springing as they do from the living body of the Earth—must be in the form of an image. We should clothe it in fairy tales, in pictures, and in legends. Only after the tenth year, when the child begins to feel like an independent personality, can we speak of plants individually. Before then, a child does not discriminate between the self and the environment. The I is not completely separated from the surrounding world. So we must speak of plants as though they were little human beings or little angels, we must make them feel and act like human beings, and we must do the same thing with the animals. Only later in school life do we speak of them objectively as separate units.

You must not pass too abruptly from one thing to another, however; for the true reality of the living Earth from which the plants spring has another side to show us—the animal realm. Animals are typically studied by placing one beside the other, dividing them into classes and species according to their similarities. At best, one speaks of the more perfect as having developed from the less perfected, and so on. In this way, however, we fail to bring the human being into any relationship with the environment. When you study animal forms without preconceptions, it soon becomes clear that there are essential differences in the nature of, for example, a lion and a cow.

When you observe a cow you find in her a one-sided development of what in human beings is the digestive system. The cow is completely a system of digestion, and all the other organs act as appendages more or less. This is why it is so interesting to watch a cow chewing the cud; she lies on the meadow and digests her food with great enthusiasm, such bodily enthusiasm. She is all digestion. Just watch her and you will see how the substances pass over from her stomach to the other parts of her body. You can see from her sense of ease and comfort, from the whole soul quality of the cow, how all this comes about.

Now look at the lion. Do you not feel that, if your own heart were not prevented by your intellect from pressing too heavily into the limbs, your own heart would be as warm as that of the lion? The lion is a one-sided development of the human breast quality; the lion’s other organs are merely appendages. Or consider birds. We can see that a bird is really entirely head. Everything else about a bird is stunted; it is all head. I have chosen these particularly striking examples, but you can discover that every animal embodies some aspect of humankind in a onesided way.

In the human being everything is brought into harmony; each organ is developed so that it is modulated and harmonized by the other organs. For animals, however, each species embodies one of these human qualities in a specialized way. What would the human nose be like if it were not held in check by the rest of the organization? You can find certain animals with highly developed noses. What would the human mouth become if it were free and were not subdued by the other organs? So you find in all animal forms a one-sided development of some part of the human being.

In ancient times, humankind had an instinctive knowledge of these things, but that has been forgotten in our materialistic era. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, echoes of such knowledge could still be found, but now we must come to it anew. Schelling, for example, based himself on an old tradition in his sense that an animal form lives in every human organ, and he made a rather extraordinary statement: What, he asked, is the human tongue? The human tongue is a “cuttlefish.” The cuttlefish found in the sea is a tongue developed in a one-sided way. In this statement there is something that can really bring us knowledge of our relationship to the animal world spread out before us.

It is really true that—once you have detached this from the abstract form in which I have presented it to you, when you have grasped it inwardly and transformed it into a picture—it will link in a wonderful way to fables and stories about animals. If you have previously told children stories in which animals act like humans, now you can divide the human being into the entire animal kingdom. In this way you can move beautifully from one to the other.

Thus, we get two kinds of feeling in children. One is aroused by the plant world and wanders over the fields and meadows gazing at the plants. The child muses: “Below me is the living Earth, living its life in the plant realm, which gives me such delight. I am looking at something beyond myself that belongs to the Earth.” Just as a child gets a deep, inner feeling that the plant world belongs to the Earth—as indeed it does—so also the child deeply feels the true relationship between the human and the animal world—the human being built up by a harmonization of the whole animal kingdom spread out over the Earth.

Thus, in natural history children see their own relationship to the world, and the connection between the living Earth and what springs forth from it. Poetic feelings are awakened, imaginative feelings that were slumbering in the child. In this way, a child is truly led through the feelings to find a place in the universe, and the subject of natural history at this age can be something that leads the child to moral experiences.

It is really true that education cannot consist of external rules and techniques, but must arise from a true knowledge of the human being; this will lead to experiencing oneself as a part of the world. And this experience of belonging to the world is what must be brought to children by educators.

Three Divisions in the Middle Period of Childhood

When we consider the time from the change of teeth to puberty (this important period really sets the standard for our education as a whole), we see that it is divided again into smaller stages. During the first of these, up to the ninth year, children are not in a position to distinguish clearly between self and the outside world; even in the feeling life, the experience of the world as distinguished from I-being is unclear. People today do not generally regard these things correctly. They may observe that a child bumps into the corner of a table and then immediately strikes the table. People then say, “This child thinks the table is alive, and because of this, the child hits it in return.” People speak in terms of “animism” as they do in relation to cultural history, but in reality this is not the situation.

If you look into the child’s soul you can see that the table is not seen as alive; not even living things are considered to be alive as they will be later on. But, just as children see their arms and hands as members of their own being, they view what occurs beyond the self as a continuation of their own being. Children do not yet distinguish between self and world. Consequently, during this stage—the first third of the time between change of teeth and puberty—we must bring everything to the child through fairy tales and legends so that, in everything children see, they will find something that is not separate, but a continuation of their own being.

From a developmental standpoint, the transition from the ninth to the tenth year is vitally important for children, though the precise moment varies from child to child, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. You will notice that around this time, children grow somewhat restless; they come to the teacher with questioning eyes, and these things require that you have a fine feeling. Children will ask things that startle you, very different from anything they had asked before. Children find themselves in a strange situation inwardly. Now it is not a question of giving them all sorts of admonitions in a pedantic and stilted way; it is our task, above all, to feel our way into their own being.

At this stage, something appears in the subconscious being of a child. It is not, of course, anything that the child could express consciously, but we may characterize it in this way: until this time, children unquestioningly accepted as truth, goodness, and beauty whatever the authority, or revered teacher, presented as true, good, and beautiful. They were completely devoted to the one who was their authority. But at this point between the ninth and tenth year something comes over children—in the feelings, not in thinking, since they do not yet intellectualize things. Something comes over them, and it awakens in the soul as a kind of faint, dreamlike question: How does the teacher know this? Where does it come from? Is my teacher really the world? Until now, my teacher was the world, but now there is a question: Does not the world go beyond the teacher?

Up to this point, the teacher’s soul was transparent, and the child saw through it into the world; but now this adult has become increasingly opaque, and the child asks, out of the feelings, what justifies one thing or another. The teacher’s whole bearing must then very tactfully find what is right for the child. It is not a matter of figuring out ahead of time what to say, but of knowing how to adapt to the situation with inner tact. If right at this moment one can find the appropriate thing for the child through an inner, imperceptible sympathy, it will have an immense significance for that child’s whole life right up to the time of death. If a child at this stage of inner life can say of the teacher, “This person’s words arise from the secrets and mysteries of the world,” this will be of great value to the child. This is an essential aspect of our teaching method.

Cause and Effect and Education as a Healing Art

At this point in life, children experience the difference between the world and the I-being. Now you can progress from teaching about plants, as I described yesterday, to teaching about animals. If you do this as I described it, you will make the correct approach to a child’s feeling for the world. Only in the third period—beginning between the middle of the eleventh year and toward the twelfth—will a child acquire any understanding for what we might call a “feeling of causality.” Prior to the twelfth year, you can speak to children as cleverly as you like about cause and effect, but you will find them blind to causality at that age. Just as the term color-blind is coined from color, we may coin the term cause-blind. Connections between cause and effect are not formed in the human being before the twelfth year. Therefore, it is only at this age that we can begin to teach children what they need to know about the physical, mineral realm, which of course involves physics and chemistry, thus going beyond a purely pictorial presentation. Before that age, not only would it be useless but would in fact be harmful.

This also shows us how to approach history lessons. Initially, history should be presented in terms of individual figures through a kind of “painting” of the soul, if I may call it that. Until a child’s twelfth year, you should give the children only living pictures. Anything else would harden their being—it would bring about a kind of sclerosis of the soul. If before the eleventh year you speak to children of the way one epoch prepared another through certain impulses and so on, you create in them a sclerosis of the soul. People who have an eye for such things often see old men and women who learned about cause and effect in history much too early. This can even go into the physical body at this age through the same principles I have described. Physical sclerosis in old people can be traced back to, among other causes, the fact that they were taught too much about causality as children.

We must notice such connections and understand them. They constitute a demand of our civilization and lead us back to what could at one time be found through an instinctive knowledge of human nature—a knowledge that we can no longer use in these times of conscious thought. If we go back to earlier eras, however, even only as far as the early Greek times, we find that the words educator and healer were very closely related to each other, because people knew that when human beings enter this earthly life they have not yet reached their full height; they are beings who have yet to be brought to their highest potential.

This is why the idea of the Fall has such validity—that souls really enter earthly existence as subhuman beings. If they were not subhuman, we not need to educate them any more than we must educate a spider so that later on it can make a web. Human beings must be educated because they must be brought into their full humanity. And if you have the proper idea of how we must lead a person in body, soul, and spirit to become truly human, you will see that this must be done according to the same principles that bring an abnormal human being back to the right path. In the same way, ordinary education has the task of healing a person whose humanity has been injured. Only when we recognize again the natural and spiritual relationship between these two activities will we be able to fructify our education properly through an ethical physiology.

It is extraordinary to think how recently—and how thoroughly—these ideas have been lost. For example, Herder’s Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1791) describes with real inner devotion how illness can teach one to observe the inner human being. When people become ill, it is an attack on their normal course of being, and the way an illness manifests and how it leaves a person demonstrate the laws of human nature. Herder is delighted to discover that through instances of mental as well as of physical illness, he can learn about the inner structure of the human being. He is still clearly aware of the relationship between medicine and pedagogy. It is not so long ago, then, when the old principle still applied—the principle that when a human being enters the world, it is really due to illness caused by sin, and we must heal, or educate, that individual. Admittedly, this is expressed somewhat in the extreme, but there is real truth at its basis. This must be recognized as a demand of contemporary civilization, so that the widespread practice of creating abstractions, which has even penetrated education, will end, and so that we can truly move away from the things I have seen practiced.

Recently, I had to show a man round the Waldorf school, a man who had an important position in the world of education. We discussed the specifics of several pupils, and then this man summarized what he had observed in a somewhat strange way. He said, “If this is what we need to do, then teachers should study medicine.” I replied that such an absolute judgment was unjustified. If it becomes necessary to bring a certain amount of medical knowledge to education, then we must do it. But it is impossible to rely on old traditions and decide that one thing or another must apply. It will happen; it will become a requirement of society that “cultural medicine” and “cultural pedagogy” be brought closer together so they become mutually more beneficial. In many ways, everything that is currently needed is troublesome and awkward, but even life itself has become increasingly troublesome, and the cure will also be a troublesome matter.

In any case, teaching about minerals should, in practice, begin only between the eleventh and twelfth year, and history should also be treated only pictorially before then. During the eleventh or twelfth year, you can begin to consider cause and effect by connecting the various historical eras, and thus present children with a comprehensive survey. You will be able to observe the correctness of this method in this way: If you present causality in describing historical processes too soon, you will find that children do not listen; but if you do it at the proper time, they meet you with inner joy and eager participation.

Indeed, it is impossible to teach anything at all without a child’s inner cooperation. In all education, we must bear in mind how a child will enter life at puberty. Of course, there are also those young ladies and gentlemen who continue their education, and in the Waldorf school we have a university standard, with twelve classes that take them on to their eighteenth or nineteenth year or even farther. But even with these children, we must recognize that after puberty they really do go out into life, and our relationship to those students must be very different from what it was before. We must make every effort to educate in such a way that the intellect, which awakens at puberty, can then find nourishment in the child’s own nature.

If during the early school years children have stored up an inner treasury of riches through imitation, through a feeling for authority, and from the pictorial nature of the teaching, then at puberty those inner riches can be transformed into intellectual activity. From that point on, the individual will be faced with the task of thinking what was willed and felt previously. And we must take the very greatest care that this intellectual thinking does not manifest too early; for a human being can experience freedom only when, rather than being poured in by teachers, the intellect can awaken from within on its own. It must not awaken in an impoverished soul, however. If there is nothing present in a person’s inner being that was acquired through imitation and imagery—something that can rise into thinking from deep in the soul—then, as thinking develops at puberty, that individual will be unable to find the inner resources to progress; thinking would reach only into an emptiness. Such a person will find no anchorage in life; and at the very time when a person should really have found a certain inner sense of security, there will be a tendency to chase trivialities. During these awkward years, adolescents will imitate many things that seem pleasant (usually they are not exactly what would please their elders, who have a more utilitarian perspective); they imitate these things now, because they were not allowed to imitate in an appropriate and living way as younger children. Consequently, we see many young people after puberty wandering around looking for security in one thing or another, thus numbing their experience of inner freedom.

Educating for All of Life and Beyond

In every stage of life we must make sure that we do not educate only for that stage, but educate for all of a person’s earthly life—and, in fact, beyond. People can arrive most beautifully at an understanding of their own immortal human being; after puberty, they can experience for themselves how what poured into their soul as images through imitation is now freed from the soul and rises into spirit. People can feel how it continues to work, from time into eternity, passing through birth and death. It is exactly this welling up of what was instilled in the human soul through the proper education that provides an inner experience of immortality; primarily, it is life experience itself that shows us we had existence before coming down into the physical world. And what the child takes in as picture and imitates through religious feeling, unites with what that child was before descending into the physical realm; thus an inner experience of the kernel of immortality arises.

I use the word immortality, which is in current use; but even though people still believe in it, it is really only half of the question. When we speak of immortality today, we do so out of a certain self-centeredness; it is true, of course, because it represents the fact that we do not perish at death, but that our life continues. But we fail to mention the other side—the “unborn.” In ancient times, those who possessed an instinctive spiritual knowledge still recognized the two sides of eternity—the undying and the unborn. We will understand eternity only when we are able to understand both of these concepts. Eternity will be experienced when children are properly educated. Here again we are confronted by something where materialism should not be considered theoretically.

As I have already shown you, it is bad enough that all kinds of monists go around spreading various materialistic theories. But that is not in any sense the worst. The least harmful is what people only think; the worst is what flows into life to become life itself. And since the art of education has also fallen into the clutches of materialistic thinking, children are unable to experience the things I have mentioned—the experience of time passing into eternity. In this way, they lose their relationship to the eternal aspect of their own being. You can preach as much materialism as you like to those who have been correctly educated, and it will not affect them greatly. They will reply, “I have the sense that I am immortal, and unfortunately this is something that you and your proofs have overlooked.”

It is always a matter of comprehending life itself, and not merely the thoughts. Furthermore, this may seem contradictory, but an indication and a symptom of the materialism of our present age is the very fact that people today are so eager for theories and world philosophies based on ideas and concepts. If we really perceive spirit, we never leave matter. If you pursue your study of anthroposophy, you will see how it makes its way into psychology and physiology, how it speaks of material things and processes in every detail. Anthroposophic physiology addresses the activity of the liver, the spleen, or the lung very differently from today’s abstract physiology.

Abstract physiology thinks it sees the facts, but it really views facts in the same way a man might who, for example, finds a magnet. He does not know what it is, nor what forces are concealed within it, but he finds the magnet while with a woman who knows what a magnet is. He says to himself, “I’ll take this home; it will make a good horseshoe.” The woman says, “You can’t use that as a horseshoe; that is a magnet.” But the man only laughs.

Similarly, a natural scientist laughs when one speaks of the spiritual basis of the liver, spleen, or heart—if one says that spirit in fact lives within those organs. But people who laugh at such things can never deeply enter the reality of material substance. The most harmful aspect of materialism is not that it fails to understand spirit. That will be corrected eventually. The worst thing about materialism is that it is completely ignorant of matter and its activity, because it fails to find spirit in matter.

There was never a time when people knew less about matter than they do now; for you cannot find material substance in the human being without a knowledge of spirit. Consequently, I would say that the error of materialism in education is demonstrated in life when people have no feeling or inner experience of their own eternal nature. If a person has been educated in the right way—that is, if the principles of the education have been read from human nature itself—death will be experienced as an event in life and not merely its end. In this way, one learns that in the relationship between teacher and child (and later between the teacher and the young man or woman) there are not only external things at work; even in the very small child, as I have already told you, intangible forces are at work—things we can neither see nor weigh and measure.

Punishment in the Classroom

We must bear this in mind when we consider punishment as a means of education. (A question was raised in regard to this.) We cannot simply ask ourselves whether or not we should punish. How can we possibly deal with all the mischievous things children do if we completely eliminate punishment? The question of whether to punish or not is really an individual matter. Various methods can be used with some children, whereas others may respond only to punishment. The manner of punishment, however, really depends on the teacher’s temperament.

We must remember that we are not dealing with carved wooden figures but with human beings. Teachers must consider their own nature, as well as the nature of the children. The important thing is not so much what we do, but how—that the only effective punishment is inflicted by a teacher with complete inner calm and deliberation. If a punishment arises from anger, it will be completely ineffective. Here, of course, a teacher can accomplish a great deal through self-development. Otherwise, something like this may happen: A girl makes a mess, and the boy next to her gets upset with her. The teacher then begins to scold the boy, saying, “You should not get angry like that! The child replies, “But grown-up people get angry when unpleasant things happen to them.” Then the teacher says, “If you get angry I’ll throw something at you!”

If you punish in anger this way, you may get a scene like this: a teacher comes into a classroom of fairly young children who are playing. She says, “What an awful commotion you are all making! What are you doing? Why are you shouting and making so much noise?” Finally one child gets up enough courage to say, “You are the only one shouting.” Now, in terms of punishment or admonition, everything depends on the soul mood of the one punishing or admonishing. Whenever a child has done something very naughty, you can even take the precaution of ignoring it for the time being; you could sleep on it and take it up again the next day. At least in this way you may find the necessary inner calm, and however you decide to deal with that child, your admonition or your punishment will be far more effective than anything you do while angry. This method may have its drawbacks as well, but you must always weigh one thing against another and not become too one-sided.

“Reading” the Child

You can see that in this method of teaching and education, based as it is on anthroposophic principles, each particular age of the child must be read, as it were. We must see more in a human being than present scientific thinking wants to see. Of course, such scientific thinking has contributed to wonderful progress, but in terms of human beings, it is as though they had something written in front of them and began to describe the letters of that writing. It is certainly useful and beautiful to have the letters described, but that is not the point; we must read. We do not need to describe the organs and how the soul works in them, which is the modern method, but we must have the capacity to read the human being. Such “reading” for a teacher may be understood by imagining that you have a book in your hand, and, no matter how interesting it may be, if you cannot read it but only look at the printed letters, it will not arouse you very strongly to any inner activity. If, for example, someone has a very interesting novel, but can only describe the letters, then nothing will happen within that person. So it is with the art of education—nothing happens in a person who merely describes the individual organs or the various aspects of the human soul. Educators who can read will find in every child a “book of the soul.”

Children can become reading material of the soul for their teachers, even in very large classes. If this happens, a teacher will sense when, before the ninth or tenth year, children do not differentiate between the world and their own I-being; they will sense how, before this time, children are unable, out of themselves, to write anything in the way of a composition. At most, they will be able to retell something they have heard in fairy tales or legends. Only when children are nine or ten can you gradually begin to present images and thoughts that they can in turn write about from their own free feelings and ideas. The inner thought structure needed by a child before being able to write an essay is not yet present before the twelfth year; they should not be encouraged to write essays before then. (I am speaking of this, because someone asked about it.) If they do this too soon, they will begin to suffer not from “sclerosis” of the soul in this case, but from “rickets” of the soul. Later in life, such a child will become inwardly weak and ineffective.

Only when our study of the human being can lead us to an a unique knowledge of each child will we be able to educate them in the appropriate way; the correct education must enable children to take their place socially in the everyday world. Indeed, children belong to this world, and must enter more and more deeply into it as long as they live on Earth; and after death they will be able to live on properly in the spiritual realm. This experience is indeed a real condition for life in the world beyond the gate of death.

The Capacity to Meet Other Human Beings

Human beings become hardened when they cannot discover how to meet other people in a truly human way; they harden themselves for the life that will face them after death. People have lost the capacity for meeting one another in a human way, and this is yet another dark side to the picture of our time. Nowhere do we find people who can enter with loving feeling into another human being. This is clearly evident due to the amount of talk about social demands these days. Why is this?

The obvious basis of social life—the power to truly feel and experience with another person—has been sadly lost. Whenever demands are urgently presented in any given age, those very demands show us what is missing in that time, because whatever people lack, they demand. Real social life is missing, and this is why the social ideal is so vehemently discussed in our current era. But education for social life is hardly touched, although many enlightened people speak of it. It has retreated increasingly into the background, and in many respects, human beings meet and pass each other without any understanding of one another.

It is indeed a grievous feature of present-day life that when one human being meets another, there is no mutual understanding. You can find clubs and societies with one or another common aim, where people have worked together for years, but they really do not know each other at all. People know nothing about the inner life of those they work with, because they lack a living interest, a living devotion, a living sympathy in relation to the other. But such living interest, devotion, and sympathy will be present if, at the right age, we permeate every area of teaching and education with the principle of imitation and, in its proper place, the principle of authority. This social feeling and understanding for others depends, in a most intimate way, on whether or not we have any sense of what in our world participates in the spiritual realm.

There was a time when human beings knew very little about the Earth; the tools they used were simple and primitive, and the way they represented natural objects in art was sometimes very talented but remarkably undeveloped. We now live in an age when we use complicated tools to master nature, and the most minute details are painstakingly copied, for example, in our works of art. But what we lack today is the power to enter the spirit of nature, the spirit of the cosmos, and the universe as a grand whole. That power must be reclaimed.

Above all, in the astronomical realm we have lost sight of our relationship to the universe. If you look at a plant, you can see how it takes root in the ground—how it arises from a seed, unfolds its first leaves and stem, more leaves and a blossom, and how it then gathers itself together again in the fruit. Goethe described it this way: In the plant you see how it draws out into space, rotates, and then contracts. Goethe was unable to go far enough. He described this expansion and contraction of the plant, but could not come to the point of knowing why this happens. It happens because the plant is exposed to the forces of the Moon and Sun. Whenever the Sun’s forces are active, the plant expands and opens its leaves; when Moon forces act on it, plant life contracts—it develops the stem and then the seed, where the whole plant life is drawn together in a single point. Thus, when we consider this expansion and contraction as Goethe has shown it to us, we see in it the alternation of Sun and Moon forces, and we are led out into the distant spaces of the cosmos. When we can see how the stars are at work in the plant, we do not remain bound and limited.

These Sun and Moon forces that influence plants act in a more complicated way on the human being, and this leads us to think that the human being is not just a citizen of Earth, but of the cosmos as well. We know that when we eat—for example, cabbage or venison—or drink something, whatever relates to life pursues its own course within us. We nevertheless know about such things, because can perceive them. But we have no knowledge of how we are connected with the starry worlds in our soul and spirit—how the forces of contraction live in the sphere of the Moon, the forces of expansion in that of the Sun; we do not know that these forces maintain the balance more or less perfectly in a human being—that melancholic tendencies have their roots in the Moon realm, sanguine tendencies of soul in the Sun, and balance and harmony are brought about by cosmic activity.

A detailed discussion of this in no way diminishes our concept of freedom, nor does it lead to preposterous ideas of any kind. This can all be examined with the same precision used in mathematics. But mathematics, though true, remains abstract. The knowledge of Sun and Moon that I mentioned leads us to see how we receive spiritual nourishment from what flows from the whole galaxy of stars; it becomes a strength within us, a driving force. If we can unite in this way with the spirit of the universe, we will become whole human beings, and the urge will no longer arise to bypass others without understanding, but as true human beings we will find the true human being in others. The more we describe only matter and apply those descriptions to human beings, the more we freeze the life of the soul; but if we can ally ourselves with the spirit, we can serve our fellow human beings with true warmth of heart. Thus, an education that seeks and finds the spirit in the person will lay the foundations for human love, human sympathy, and human service in the proper sense of the word.

In an organism, everything is at the same time a beginning and an end; this is also true of the whole life of the spirit. You can never know the world without practicing a knowledge of the human being—without looking into the self. For the human being is a mirror of the world; all the secrets of the universe are contained in the human being. The fixed stars work in the human being, the moving planets work in the human being, and all the elements of nature work there as well. To understand the human being—to see true being there—is also to find a place in the world in the right way.

Consequently, education must be permeated by a kind of golden rule that quickens all the teacher’s work with the children, something that gives life to that work, just as, in a physical sense, the blood gives life to the physical organism. So out of a worldview permeated with spirit, the lifeblood of the soul must enter the soul of the teacher. Then the soul’s lifeblood will set its imprint on all the methods and practice of the teaching effort and save them from becoming abstract principles. Something will thus live in the educator, which I would like to characterize through these concluding words, as a kind of education for life itself:

To spend oneself in matter
is to grind down souls.
To find oneself in the spirit
is to unite human beings.
To see oneself in all humanity
is to construct worlds.

Over the past four years, we have often heard that events as terrible for mankind as those that have just taken place have not occurred in the entire period covered by human historical thought. It is less common to hear this sentiment countered by the idea that the terrible events that have befallen mankind should at least be countered by attempts to reorganize social coexistence, which differ in their conceptual foundations just as thoroughly from what we are accustomed to think as the terrible events of recent years differ from what we have experienced in the course of human development. Indeed, when such an attempt arises to develop thoughts that run counter to ingrained habits of thought, then today one usually hears such an attempt met with reproach: Well, another utopia! - However, in the course of more recent times, we have already had some experience with the attitude on which such an accusation is based. It was precisely those people who think like those who speak of “utopia” in the case alluded to, who would have considered a description of the catastrophic events that affected us as late as the spring of 1914 to be a dream, a fantasy. They call themselves practitioners, these people. How did they talk back then, before the world-shattering catastrophe struck? Let's take a look at some of them. We need only look at some of the leading statesmen of Europe at that time, in the spring of 1914. They were almost verbatim when they said: “Such practitioners, such despisers of what they call utopias, spoke at that time something like this: the relations between the great European powers, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, give a certain guarantee that world peace cannot be shaken for the foreseeable future. - Such talk is not an invention, it can be read in the parliamentary reports; it is contained there in the most diverse variations.

However, anyone who could not follow the thinking of such people in the inner state of his soul at that time, but who tried to maintain an unbiased view of events, perhaps spoke in the same way as the person who had to speak to a meeting in Vienna in April 1914, who is also speaking to you today. At that time, my intellectual conscience and my powers of observation forced me to say: with regard to the development of our social and international relations, we are in the midst of something that can only be described as a carcinoma, a cancerous disease in the life of nations, which must break out in a terrible way in a very short time. - Perhaps the force of events will force people to regard as utopians less those who speak out of this state of mind than those who, in what they say, are so well in tune with events as I have just indicated. Today, on the other hand, you can hear the practitioners, who are poring over some of what they call utopias, saying: “We cannot climb the highest mountain peaks of a new order in human society right now, we have to move forward step by step. Certainly some thoughts - say such people - are nice, and perhaps we will come to such things centuries from now; but today it is up to us to take the next steps.

Now it is quite certainly simply a matter of course that one must first take the very next steps, but he will climb a mountain badly who has no idea at all, when he takes the next step, which direction he should take; who has no idea at all in which direction the summit actually lies. And those who do not think in the sense of these utopia-despisers, but perhaps think in a realistic sense, will perhaps have to start today from a different comparison with what lies hidden in the germ and could also erupt in a terrible way. He will perhaps not have to start from the carcinoma that has broken out in the war catastrophe of recent years. But he will have to point out that many people are now thinking like those who live in a house that has cracks and fissures, who are threatening the house with collapse, but who cannot decide to do anything to rebuild the house, but who enter into all kinds of discussions about how to connect the individual rooms that they live in with each other through doors, so that they can help each other more easily through these doors. - The help that can be afforded through these doors will be of little help when the leaps have grown to a corresponding strength!

Thinking such things, it seems, is probably due to the development of the facts, which today speak a louder and clearer language than people are often inclined to hear today.

Now, out of the horrors that had to be lived through, this world war catastrophe has released a sentiment that has gradually crystallized in such views as are now again the basis of the significant meeting that is being held here in Bern as a League of Nations Conference. The call for a League of Nations has developed out of the terrible events of recent years. It must be said, however, that it might be justified to approach the call for a League of Nations with different feelings than some people do today. For perhaps it is more important to ask not only: What could be done for this League of Nations? What measures could be taken to bring it about in the best way imaginable? Rather, the question could perhaps be raised: What foundations exist in the life of the peoples for the establishment of such a League of Nations? For only if one looks at the forces that exist in the life of nations can one perhaps recognize from these forces to what extent one is in a position to achieve something fruitful with such a League of Nations. And does it not seem necessary, I would say, to shift the question somewhat in this direction, since the important conception of this League of Nations, which is particularly plausible to the world, arose together with an idea whose realization can no longer be spoken of today? In 1917, in a speech by Wilson to the American Senate, a thought emerged which, in connection with another thought, went something like this: What one could strive for with this League of Nations had a certain precondition, namely the precondition that in the events of the war neither one side nor the other would achieve what one would have to call victory or defeat in the decisive sense. - Wilson was looking towards an outcome that was not that of victory or defeat for one party. And from the direction of thought towards such an outcome he derived the feelings that urged him towards this League of Nations.

To be sure, the thought had a reality in itself; but the reality that was thought of then can no longer be spoken of today; for today the decisive victory on the one side is the decisive defeat on the other. Indeed, perhaps it is precisely for this reason that the question of the League of Nations, for example, must be posed in a completely different way.

I think it is particularly natural for me to ask the question about the League of Nations myself and to dare to discuss it in front of people today, to ask this question in a very special way. As a member of the people on whose side the decisive defeat is, it is not possible today to pose the question as if its answer could only emerge from a free agreement of those peoples who might wish to unite in such a League of Nations, and to whom, according to their innermost feelings, the Central European peoples most certainly also belong. The events in Paris basically rule out such a question for the Germans today, and one should have no illusions about this. But that is not how I want to pose this question either. My aim is to find a question and formulate a corresponding answer in which even those who may be excluded from participation in this League of Nations for the foreseeable future can have their say. In other words, the question will have to be posed in this way: Whatever agreements are reached at the moment, what can each individual nation contribute from its own resources, regardless of whether it has suffered victory or defeat, to a real League of Nations that can bring humanity what it longs for?

But since a League of Nations will undoubtedly have to deal with international affairs, it will have to turn its attention above all to the most important international affairs, which will concern all peoples in the near future under all circumstances.

When dealing with such matters today, we first look in two directions, as is customary in this day and age. On the one hand, we look at the state, and on the other hand, we look at economic life. Those people who today want something with regard to the coexistence of people look first of all to the state with regard to the guidelines of this will, asking: What should the state do in this or that matter for which a change has become ripe? - Or else, in order to arrive at an explanation, people look today, as if, I might say, with hypnotized eyes, to economic life; for economic conditions seem to be the only ones that cause today's conflicts, the greatest conflicts at least of the present day.

In these considerations, which are based on these two points of view, one thing is usually ignored. Even if one assures oneself that one wants to take account of the circumstances of the present day and, above all, focus on the human being, this is rarely done in reality. Here I would like to try not to shy away from looking at what we find when we look at the state on the one hand and at economic life on the other. But above all, I do not want to neglect to ask a question in a very energetic way, starting from the point of view of man as such: What do the states have to do in order to unite in a league of nations? That is what is asked first and foremost. And many things - do not think that I wish to criticize or condemn - many quite good things will come about in the near future if this question is posed in this way, by attempting to find from the construction of the states, from the individual customs of the states, something that transcends the states, as it were, such as a world federation or a world parliament. -- But today I would like to contrast the question: What should the states do? - the other question: What should states refrain from doing for the good of mankind? - In many respects we have learned through the terrible events of recent years what the states have accomplished with their actions; they have led mankind into this terrible catastrophe. We cannot deny it, it is the states that have led humanity into this terrible catastrophe!

Shouldn't it make sense to consider whether a person, when he has seen that he is causing all kinds of harm with his actions, should always ask himself: How do I do things differently? - Might it not be more useful to say: perhaps I should leave what I have done badly to someone else to do? - Then, you see, the question might be led down a completely different track.

It may be necessary to turn to the most important international questions if we want to obtain fruitful documentation on what can be said to be the cracks and fissures in the house that present-day humanity inhabits, consisting of various states. One must perhaps ask: Where do these cracks and fissures come from? Where does it come from that the states have driven people into this terrible catastrophe of war?

Two things have certainly become international in the course of modern times; apart from many others, they are capitalism and human labor. Undoubtedly, we had a “League of Nations” or something similar to it: the League based on international capital. And another “League of Nations” was also in the making, and it is very much in evidence today: it is the one based on the international of human labor. And we will have to fall back on these two things if we want to arrive at the fruitful germs of such a League of Nations, which can now really be built on the affairs of man as such.

With regard to capital, we see that a large number of people regard the way in which it has been administered over the course of time and what has led to so-called capitalism as that which is most contrary to the interests of a large part of humanity, and which, moreover, through much that lies within it, has led us to such terrible events. And the call is being raised from many sides - which is expressed in opposition to this capitalism - the radical call that the entire social order based on capitalism must be changed, that the private management of capitalism must give way to what we are now used to calling socialization. This, combined with a feeling about human labor power, gives international life its coloring today. It must be repeated again and again: however little it is clearly expressed in the consciously expressed thoughts of the proletarian world population, it lives unconsciously in the subsoil of a mass of people numbering in the millions that in the course of capitalist development it is precisely human labor power that has taken on a character that it should not continue to have.

Let us first look in these two directions. Capital, the capitalist administration of economic life, must, if we wish to see through it clearly, be quite distinctly separated from what it is connected with today. Two things are connected today with what is called capitalism: the one points to something that cannot be separated from capitalism; the other is something that must be distanced from it. Today, economic enterprises based on capital and private ownership of capital are combined into one. But the question must be asked: Can these two things be separated? For the private management of economic enterprises, which is built on the greater or lesser intensity of individual human abilities, this private management, which requires an auxiliary means, capital, for its operation, cannot be abolished. Anyone who somehow makes an impartial effort to ask under what conditions the social organism is viable will always have to say to himself: This social organism is not viable if it is deprived of its most important source, namely that which flows into it through the individual abilities that one person or another can acquire on different scales. What works in the direction of capital must also work in the direction of individual human abilities. This indicates that in no way can the necessary addition to social life, which comes from individual human abilities, be separated from its means, capital, in the future state.

However, the private possession of capital, the ownership of private capital, is something else. This ownership of private capital has a different social function from the management of the enterprises for which capital is necessary, by individual human capacities. The fact that someone acquires or has acquired private capital, by whatever means, gives him a certain power over other people. This power, which will mostly be an economic power, cannot be regulated in any other way than by bringing it into connection with the legal relations of the social organism. That which supplies the social organism with really fruitful forces is the work which the individual faculties perform through capital. But that which harms the social organism is when people who cannot perform such work themselves through their individual abilities are nevertheless in permanent possession of capital through some kind of relationship. For such people have economic power. What does it mean then? To have capital? - Having capital means having a number of people work according to your intentions, having power over the work of a number of people.

Health can only be brought about by ensuring that everything that has to be achieved in the social organism by means of capital is not separated from the human personality with its individual abilities behind it. But it is precisely through the possession of capital on the part of those persons who do not put their individual abilities into the use of capital that the fruitfulness of the effect of capital is again and again detached in the social organism from that which capital is in general, and which can also have very, very harmful consequences for the social coexistence of people. That is to say, at the present historical moment of mankind we are faced with the necessity of separating the possession of capital from the administration of capital. That is one question. Let us leave it at that for the moment. We shall see shortly afterwards what possible solution can be found to this question.

The second is the question of the social significance of human labor. This social significance of human labor can be seen if we can follow what has passed through the minds of the proletarian population over the last few decades, if we have seen the impact on these minds of what Karl Marx and those who worked in his direction have said about this human labor. What Karl Marx said in his theory of surplus value struck a chord in the souls of the proletariat! Why? Because there were feelings in them that brought this question about human labor power together with the deepest questions about human dignity and about an existence worthy of human beings in general. Marx had to put into such words what he had to say about the social significance of human labor power, which said that human labor power had not yet been freed by the modern capitalist economic order from the character of being a commodity. In the economic process commodities circulate; but in the modern economic process not only commodities circulate; not only commodities follow the dictates of supply and demand, but human labor is also offered on the commodity market, which in this case must be called the labor market, and it is paid for, just as commodities are otherwise paid for. The person who has to carry his human labor power to the market feels, despite the existence of the modern labor contract, the degradation of his human value when he sees his labor power turned into a commodity. For this modern labor contract, it is concluded on the condition that the labor manager - in this case the entrepreneur - takes the worker's labor power from him in return for a compensation that proves necessary on the economic market. In short: labor power is turned into a commodity.

But this question can only be solved by not stopping at what Karl Marx said. Today it will be a vital question for what is to be achieved - whether on the part of the proletarian population or on the part of the leading bourgeois circles - to bring about liberation on this very point by learning in the right way to go beyond what Karl Marx was able to teach the proletarian population in this field. Wherever there are people today who believe that their social will is entirely in the direction of the proletariat, they are always and forever based on the feeling that those who are otherwise propertyless, who have only their labor power, must go out for wages; that is, they must turn their labor power into a commodity. How can labor-power best be made into a commodity? this is how the question is formulated, how can it be made most profitable? - This question will never be solved in such a way that it cannot give rise to new social upheavals unless the opposite demand is made: How can human labor power be stripped of the character of a commodity? How is a social organization possible in which human labour power is no longer a commodity? - After all, the fact of labor in the actual sense results in the following. Through the joint - let us now call it work -, through the joint work of the manual worker and the intellectual leader, a product is created. The question is this: How can this joint production of a product for the commodity market be brought into a satisfactory relationship with what is today called the employee and with what is today called the employer?

These are the two most important questions that can and must be raised today across the entire international community: What is there in the use of capital in human social life? What, on the other hand, is there in the flow of human labor power into this social human life?

The worker today - let us consider his situation - even if he does not express this, even if Marx did not learn to think in this direction to the end, the worker can feel: I manufacture my product together with the entrepreneur. That which is produced at the workplace comes from both of us. It can only be a question of: what division occurs between what is today called the entrepreneur and what is today called the manual worker? And such a division must occur, which can be satisfactory to both sides in the immediate concrete case.

What is the actual relationship today between the employer and the employee? I do not want to fall into agitational phrases. But let us look at this whole relationship soberly, soberly, as it is formulated by today's proletarians - though not even in clear terms - but as it is deeply and intensely rooted in the subconscious feelings of these proletarians. Since the economic power of the entrepreneur does not enable the worker to conclude a contract about what they jointly produce as a commodity, or what the joint yield of this commodity is, about how much accrues to one and how much to the other, since he is only in a position to conclude a labor contract, the worker gets into a state of mind which gives him the feeling that basically no labor power can ever be compared with any commodity. And yet today we speak of exchanging commodity for commodity or its representative, money, in the economic process. And we also speak of exchanging goods or their representative, money, for human labor power. So the worker today gets the impression that although he works together with the entrepreneur on the production of goods, he is actually being cheated because he does not get the part he is entitled to.

This already points to the fact that the individual human abilities that have to make use of capital are actually running on a slippery slope. For what these individual human faculties accomplish by managing capital out of human mental or physical strength is perceived by a large part of humanity as overreaching, as a kind of fraud. Whether this is justified or not is not something we want to investigate at the moment, but it is perceived as such. And in the perception it forms the basis for the vocal facts of the present.

This, however, points to the fact that the individual abilities of human beings must be rooted in something that is, or at least can be, placed in the social organism today in a skewed way. This utilization of man's individual abilities is connected today in the modern capitalist economy with the appropriation of the ownership of the means of production; it is thus connected with the appropriation of a certain economic power, an economic superiority. But that which can express itself in a power, which can express itself in this superiority of one person over another, is nothing other than what constitutes a legal relationship in human life.

Whoever now takes a look at how a legal relationship is strangely intertwined with the application of individual human abilities will perhaps, as happened to the person speaking to you here, have to direct his gaze to something that is more deeply rooted in the entire nature of the social organism than the things that are very often sought today. It is obvious to ask from such premises: How is right and how is the use of individual human abilities, which must always be productive anew, which must always emerge anew from their original source in man, how is the utilization of individual abilities in the social organism justified?

Whoever has retained an unbiased view of human life will gradually come to the realization that three quite different, original sources of human life can be distinguished in a social organism. These three original sources of human life flow together quite naturally in the social organism, they work together. But the way in which they work together can only be fathomed if we are able to look at the reality of the human being as such, who must be a unity, a unified being within the social trinity.

In the social organism these individual human faculties are first of all present. And we can trace their domain from the highest spiritual achievements of man in art, in science, in religious life, down to that form of the application of individual human faculties as they are more or less grounded in the spiritual or in the physical, down to that application of individual human faculties which must be used in the most ordinary, in the materialistic process, which is based on capitalism, right into the economic process, which is usually called with a derogatory word the material sphere. Up to this point a uniform current can be traced down from the other intellectual achievements. Within this area everything is based on the corresponding, on the fruitful application of that which must always be lifted anew from the primal sources of human nature if it is to flow in the right way into the healthy social organism.

In the healthy social organism everything that is based on law lives quite differently. For this right is something that takes place between man and man simply because man is generally man. We must have the opportunity to develop our individual abilities in social life. The better we develop them, the better for the generality of the social organism. The more freedom we have in bringing out and utilizing our individual abilities, the better for the social organism. For anyone who does not start out from theories and dogmas, who is able to observe real life, everything that must play out as law between people stands in stark contrast to this in real life. There is nothing else to be considered but that in which all men are equal to each other.

A third thing that plays a role in human social coexistence, which in turn is totally different from the other two - the individual human faculties that come from the inequalities of human nature, the right that comes from the consciousness of right - is the human need that comes from the natural foundations of physical and spiritual life, and which must find its satisfaction in the cycle of economic life through production, circulation and consumption.

This threefold structure of the social organism has not been brought about by some abstract thinking, this threefold structure is there. And the question can only be: How can this threefold structure be regulated in such a way that the result is not a sick but a healthy social organism? An unbiased view of the social organism - and of course I can only cite results in these allusions - leads one to say: It is precisely the misjudgment of this radical difference between the three sources of social life in the course of recent historical development that has led to the discussion in which we are already involved today, and in which we will find ourselves more and more. In the course of modern times, these three currents of human interaction have been mixed up in an unlawful way.

What started it? When, in more recent times, economic life, I would like to say, took up the view as if hypnotized, it was found justified in the progress of mankind to merge with the purely political state - which has to do with that in which all men are equal, with the actual right - at first certain branches of the economy, especially telegraphy, railroads and so on, i.e. those branches of the economy which appeared to be the most suitable for merging with the state, on which, as on economic life, the human gaze was hypnotized. And what does the socialist thinker of today actually do? He is merely inheriting the legacy of bourgeois thinking in this respect. He does not merely want certain individual branches of the economy that seem suitable to be nationalized or socialized. He wants to socialize either the entire property or the entire business. He just wants to draw the final consequences of what has been done.

Now one could cite many things. One need only mention in the external political sphere the role played by what I need only call the “Baghdad Railway” among the disastrous causes of war that have been preparing for years. Hundreds and hundreds of such things could be mentioned. What do such things mean? Such things mean a merging of economic interests with the pure interests of the state. So that in the end the result is that the administrators of state life must give themselves up to rendering the services that are possible to them by virtue of their power, following economic interests. And in this way the political interests of the states are drawn into the conflicts of economic interests. The whole configuration of states in recent times has shown this intermingling of economic life with political life.

Anyone who has been able to observe Central European life from this point of view - as the person who is speaking to you today has been able to observe it in Austria - knows that much of what has wiped the Austrian state out of the circle of the existing state has contributed to what people think of least. When, in the sixties, people in Austria thought of establishing a constitutional life, this constitutional life was based on the fact that the mere economic life was actually used for the configuration of the state. For the Austrian Imperial Council, voting was organized in such a way that four electoral curiae voted: that of the large landowners, that of the chambers of commerce, that of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and that of the rural communities, all economic communities. What was elected out of these economic communities became law in Austria. What emerged as law from purely economic interests could not, of course, come to terms with something that came from the spiritual and individual foundations of humanity: the interests of the people of the so-called Austrian state. And so things became entangled in such a way that what the people elected by the four economic curiae wanted to make law in a sham state out of their economic interests was made law. This, in turn, confounded itself with what one particularly likes to confound out of the sentiments of modern times, that confounded itself with the spiritual interests and aspirations of mankind, with all that which one can call the whole scope of spiritual life.

If, on the one hand, economic life has been incorporated into modern state life, then, on the other hand, the entire spiritual life has been incorporated into this state life. We have also seen in this that which is precisely in the spirit of modern human progress. The ideal was to gradually make all spiritual life a part of the political life of the state. How much has remained free today? Individual branches of the arts and individual branches of science, which are carried on by those who may not be employed by a state, and the like. Today there is still no sense of the fact that spiritual life can only integrate its reality into the social organism in the right way if this spiritual life is completely emancipated from all other life, if it can give itself its own administration, its own structure. While in recent times more and more efforts have been made to nationalize the entire school system, it is within the developmental powers of modern man to bring about a complete reversal in this area. Just imagine: If the lowest teacher is not the servant of the state, but if the lowest teacher knows how to place himself in a freely organized spiritual life, knows how to place himself in a spiritual organism, how differently he can then integrate what he is able to achieve into the unity of the human social organism, how differently than if the state demands of him what he must or must not do, what he must teach the developing human being!

Those who judge these things perhaps believe, from many a bad experience that has been made, that the people who have to deal with science, for example, on which so much depends, are employed according to certain considerations. But science itself and its teaching are free. Such laws can be found in the most diverse states. And many people claim that this is the case. Anyone who really knows things knows that these transgressions occur not only with regard to employment, not only with regard to the administration of intellectual offices, but also in the work itself. Free spiritual life, which can powerfully place itself with its own reality in the healthy social organism, must also be able to develop freely and separately from state and economic life, as being on its own.

I know the cheap objections that can be raised: “When schools are freed from state compulsion, when everyone can send their children to school out of the zeal they have for intellectual education, then we will return to illiteracy.” People who speak like this are reckoning with old sentiments in modern circumstances. We shall see in a moment how these modern conditions have quite a different effect from what these people with the old sentiments suppose. But the result - it must be said in advance - is that the real truth can only live in the social organism if the necessary division is also present and comprises the following: the spiritual organism, which is built on the individual physical and mental faculties of human beings - what we could also call spiritual life in its full extent; the legal organism, which comprises the area of the actual political state; and the cycle of economic processes, in which only the production, circulation and consumption of goods are concerned.

It is not believed that the unity of life is thereby destroyed. On the contrary, each of these members of the healthy social organism will become healthy again precisely because it receives its strength from itself and each member can give the other the appropriate contribution. And so those who aim at the recovery of our social conditions must demand the independence of these three links, which have been fused together by confused thinking and confused action in the last century, i.e. the independence of these three links: spiritual life, legal life and the life that comprises the cycle of the economic process.

The state cannot be an economist. Economic life must necessarily be placed on its own basis according to its own conditions. In economic life this has also developed to a certain extent in cooperative and trade union life. But this cooperative and trade union life has repeatedly become inappropriately intertwined with legal relationships. That which is necessary in economic life is the system of association, that is, the association of certain circles of people according to the needs of consumption and the production necessary for this, the association of people according to professional interests and the administration of that which circulates within these circles according to corresponding human needs, as can only result from an expert judgment of economic life itself.

The effects of human labor now play into this life, the effects of capital play into it. I can only indicate in a few lines how these effects are formed. The use of human labor power in the social organism consists in the relationship of the person who works manually to some spiritual leader who must make use of capital by managing some economic enterprise or anything at all that is useful to the social organism. This relationship can only be a legal relationship. The relationship that the worker has with the entrepreneur must be based on a right. It must be founded on a different ground than the ground of economic life itself. This will bring about a radically different situation from the one we have today. But today we must also come to radical judgments in the face of radical facts. Economic life today is, on the one hand, dependent on the natural basis. Man must face this with expert judgment. He can, to a certain extent, make one piece of land or another fertile through his diligence and technology, but only within certain limits. He is to a large extent dependent on his natural basis. Just as economic life is dependent on the natural basis on the one hand, it must also become dependent on what must be established on the basis of the rule of law, in the cooperation of all people, no matter what kind of work they do. Whether they are intellectual or manual laborers, they enter into a relationship on the basis of the rule of law in which the equality of men among themselves comes into consideration. And it is established, now not in an associative way, as it must be in economic life, but in a purely democratic way, in a way that makes the effects in the political field of the state equal for all people before the law. There is determined what relates to the utilization of human labor power, what relates to the relationship of the worker to the leader. Only a maximum or minimum working day and the type of work a person can perform can be determined. What is fixed - this must be taken into account - will have an effect on the prosperity of the people. If any branch of production should not prosper because too much legally impossible work is demanded of it, it should not be done; then a remedy should be found in other ways. Economic life should reach its limits on both sides: on the one hand, the limits of its scientific basis, and on the other, the limits of law. In short, we move from one part of the social organism to the other, the political state, in which everything legal and everything related to law is regulated to the greatest extent possible.

And then we come to the third member, which again must regulate itself out of its own conditions and needs and give laws: this is the organization of the spiritual. The spiritual must be based on the free initiative of man on the one hand, so that man is able to offer his powers individually to humanity in a free spiritual life. On the other side must be the free understanding and the free acceptance of these spiritual powers. How can this be? It can only be by the fact that the spiritual life, which is free in school life, in all spiritual branches, is administered solely by the spiritual organization right up to the use of the spiritual life, which expresses itself in the utilization of capital. How is this possible? It is only possible if that socialization really takes place which cannot come about by making human society into a uniform cooperative society in which perhaps only economic interests assert themselves and everything is to be organized on the basis of economic interests. If the spiritual organism is structured in a healthy way, free from the two other branches, the state and the economic organism, which have been mentioned, and if one is in a position to provide from that spiritual organism also that administration which relates to the use of capital and the whole economic life, that is: if all the places which are necessary in economic life are filled by the administration of the spiritual organization, if man with his individual abilities is placed in economic life from the spiritual organization, then alone one arrives at a healthy, fruitful socialization. For only in this way is it possible to separate what is the possession of private capital from the administration of this capital in favour of the healthy social organism.

What will happen? Well, many things will happen. I will only cite a few examples. It is quite natural that in the economic process man acquires private capital, property. But as little as it will be possible to separate the utilization of this private capital from the utilization of individual abilities as long as these individual abilities can be active, it will be necessary to separate private property from the individual when their activity ceases. For all private property is after all acquired through that which plays in the social forces, and it must in turn flow back into the social organism from which it is taken. That is to say, there will have to be a law from within the legal organism - for property is a right, the right to use some object or something exclusively - there will have to be a law that what one has acquired as private property from economic life must - through the free disposal of the one who has acquired it - after a certain time fall back to the spiritual organism, which in turn has to look for another individuality that can utilize it in a corresponding way.

Something similar will occur for all possessions that exist today, as for the possession of certain spiritual things that one produces, which belong to general humanity thirty years after death. One cannot say that one has more right to any other possession than to this spiritual possession. However long it may take to be allowed to keep what one has acquired, the time will have to come, be it for inherited property or otherwise acquired property, when, through the free disposal of the private owner, that which has passed into his possession through individual labor will return to the spiritual organism. In addition, the other will develop, that those who acquire private property from the economic process will be able to choose freely, out of free understanding, those whom they consider individually capable of operating something. But this will be made impossible by the power of the rule of law, of the actual political state, that a considerable part of private property will revert to pure interest, by means of which someone will be able to use private labor and other people's labor for himself without using individual abilities that enter into the economic process of life as a whole. It is possible, and it is made possible by these three links, that human productivity always remains connected with the individual abilities of man, with which it must be properly connected.

This tripartite structure of the social organism still appears to be a radical idea today. And yet, whoever will not be comfortable with this idea, whoever will not want to take the first step in this direction towards the summit that we must climb in the social order, whoever does not realize that the most immediate, most everyday, most immediate actions must be developed with the knowledge of this direction, will not be acting in the spirit of human development, but will be acting against this spirit of human development. Today we are faced with facts that have demanded the primal feelings of human beings. We must counter these with the original ideas of human social order. And one such original idea is this threefold structure.

This idea will now initially be regarded as something quite practical even by those who do not consider it to be a pure utopia, but who can perhaps bring themselves to regard it as something quite practical, it will only be regarded as something that relates to the interior of states.

And now you will ask: What does this have to do with the League of Nations? - That is what can at the same time be the most realistic foreign policy! For if we work towards answering the question: What should the state refrain from doing? - the answer that emerges from this consideration is that it should refrain from interfering in the functions of spiritual and economic life. It should confine itself to the purely political, the purely legal sphere. This, however, will also have the necessary consequence in non-political life that the economic interests of one area will come directly into negotiation, into exchange, into intercourse with the economic interests of the other area, and likewise the legal relationships and the spiritual relationships. If the spiritual conditions in one area are liberated, then no cause can ever arise from this spiritual area which could result in any warlike event. This can be observed on the smallest scale. Spiritual interests can only come into a relationship with warlike conflicts through the interposition of state life.

Even here one can really only judge from experience; but even small experiences can be eloquent. One could observe, if one has an eye for such things, how in Hungary, for example, in the times when state life in Hungary had not yet interfered with everything in the German-speaking parts, the people who had German children in the numerous German areas sent them to German-speaking schools, the Magyars living in German areas sent them to Magyar schools, and vice versa: the Germans who lived in areas with Magyar schools sent their children to such areas where there were German schools. This exchange of children was maintained in a free manner.

It was a free exchange of the spiritual goods of languages, just as one can cultivate other spiritual goods in free exchange, from country to country, from town to town. This free exchange of the spiritual goods of languages meant deep peace for the country of Hungary in all areas in which it was cultivated. The inner instinct of the people was imprinted in this free exchange. When the state became involved, things changed. That which happened in the inner political life, happened in the course of modern times in the outer political life. Anyone with an eye for such things could see how deeply peaceful the German intellectuals actually were. The mood of these German intellectuals would never have given rise to the mood of war! But the relationship they had with the state was what gave rise to this impression of the state. This is not meant to be an objection or anything else, but merely an understanding of the facts.

The economic life of a tripartite social organism will be able to live itself out within international economic life precisely because the economic relations are not made by state relations, but by people who grow out of territories in which there is not one parliament, but three parliaments, a spiritual, an economic and a state parliament, in which there is not one administration, but three administrations that work together. Only from such territories will people be able to grow up and play the right role in an intergovernmental organization. And it is not the state and the economy that matter, but the human being, the whole, full human being.

The role of the spiritual leaders will be different if it develops out of the emancipated spiritual organization, different from the theatrical play that takes place, for example, between the Middle States and America in the exchange of professors, which could only develop out of that which was spiritually improperly connected with the state. All these relationships will also be placed on a sound basis in the international sphere when the sound basis has been established in the individual social territory. From these individual social territories will then emerge the man who can also contribute in the right way to international life.

That seems to me to be the answer which can be given in such a way that it takes into consideration not only the coordination of the various peoples, but that the contribution of each people can be considered for the real future ideals of the human League of Nations. A German can also speak in this way; for even if the Central European countries or Germany are excluded from the next League of Nations, they can work in such a way that, through the recovery of their own territory, they work ahead for the healthy League of Nations of the future; they can contribute their share to it.

This is an answer that everyone can give for themselves. It is an answer that each state can also develop as its own policy towards the outside world. For just as the states that enter into peace negotiations with the German Empire, for example, elect their own peace delegates, it will not be possible to prevent the chaotic former German Empire from electing special delegates from the three members - from the economic, the state and the spiritual organism - who can then represent the healthy social organism to the outside world in a corresponding manner. That is real, possible, that is true real politics.

In the last few years I have often presented these ideas to people; I have also, as perhaps some of you have seen, summarized them in an appeal which is now appearing in the newspapers, signed by a very satisfactory number of people, among whom are those who cannot doubt that they have a right to judge these things, and I have often had to hear: such a division would bring back the old, which is precisely contrary to the feelings of a large part of modern mankind, that mankind would be divided again into the old three classes: Nourishing, military and teaching. The opposite is the case! Nothing is so different from these old estates of nourishment, defense and apprenticeship as what is wanted here; for it is not people who are divided into classes, into estates, as earlier times were divided, but that which is separated from man, in which man lives: the social organism is divided. And the human being is precisely that which, as a whole, complete, self-contained being, will only be able to develop as a human being within this structure that is self-contained. This liberated human being, he alone will be able to form the basis of the thoughts, the feelings, the acts of will that must play out in the modern League of Nations.

In thinking about these things, one does not want to become one-sided. And it is easy to become one-sided if you only take your own feelings as a basis. That is why I would like to refer to someone else now, at the end, after I have so radically presented what I have said as necessary for the recovery of the social organism and want to distinguish it from what has developed so far and what has led to this terrible catastrophe. I would like to refer to another, to a man to whom I often refer when I look for a highly respected spiritual observer of those things that have occurred within the development of humanity up to the present day: Herman Grimm. He once said in a passage that emerged from his thoughts on the modern social development of mankind: If one looks at Europe today, one sees on the one hand how people have come into connections with one another of which former times could not have dreamed; but one sees at the same time projecting into this, what is called modern civilization, that which expresses itself in our warlike armament - so he says as a German - in our own militarism and in the armament of the other states, which after all can only amount to invading one another one fine day. And when you see what could come of it - the words sound truly prophetic, they were written in the nineties, Herman Grimm died in 1901 - when you look at it, Herman Grimm says, it is as if a future consisting of nothing but human conflicts could develop, so that you would like to set aside a day for the general suicide of humanity so that it does not have to experience the terrible things that follow from these conditions.

Since then, people have seen many things that result from these conditions. What they have seen could well lead to thoughts that are then no longer regarded as utopian, especially when one has seen how many things that have really come into being should look like utopia to the eyes of practitioners compared to what they believed to be impossible just a short time ago.

This is what should make people today not only change their actions, but also change their thoughts and rethink. In the future, we will not only need different institutions, we will ultimately need new ideas, new people, which can only grow out of a new organization of the social organism. International alliances, we have basically experienced them after all! Whether what we are striving for is on firmer ground, offers a firmer foothold than the old conditions, can only be decided if we really go back to the basic conditions of human social coexistence. Have we not also seen something like an international life develop in the way people used to marry among the members of various royal houses? There would be nothing wrong with that if the princely houses had developed in a promising way! Something could then have arisen in terms of this “international alliance” that would have been very useful even under the monarchical principle! - We have seen other international alliances, for example the very real international alliance of capital. We have experienced international social democracy. We have experienced various international alliances. That which was based on the international of family instincts has disintegrated. That which is based on the economic power of unspiritual capitalism, it is clear to the unbiased eye: it will disintegrate. But what international socialism is aiming at is basically the longing for power. In the future, this power will have to give way to the right, because what man can seize through his striving for power in social life can only lead to the salvation of mankind if it is integrated into legal life, illuminated by legal life.

And so perhaps the feeling may arise in contemporary man in the face of many an internationalism that a truly fruitful alliance of nations of mankind must be founded on something other than these old relationships. It must be founded on entirely new human ideas, entirely new human impulses, and not on princely blood, not on the power of capital or labor. It must be founded on the right, on the truly liberated whole man. For only this truly liberated, whole human being, awake to international feeling, will also have the right understanding for what can then shine for him as the light of international law.

Discussion

1st speaker: Explained that the solution proposed by Dr. Steiner was not clear to him. Nor was it possible to dismiss socialism as a great spiritual concept in the way that Dr. Steiner had done, because, after all, a new right does not come into being by wiping away the healthy core of socialism. The idea of the threefold structure may seem to be a solution, but it is an arbitrary solution. According to this speaker, land reform is something that is in the nature of the times. Finally, reference was made to the progressive spread of socialism as a testimony to the fact that it is not an imaginary system but corresponds to a reality.

Rudolf Steiner: It is, of course, difficult to discuss whether or not what was indicated in a lecture that was, after all, not very short, must be clear to each individual in an absolute sense; after all, that is an individual matter, and each listener will, of course, have his or her own opinion about it. I will therefore not touch on this question in particular. I would just like to make a few very brief comments on the other thoughts expressed by the previous speaker, above all on matters of principle. Anyone who has followed my perhaps radical and therefore seemingly unprovable train of thought today has perhaps been able to see, from the way the matter was formulated, that what I said did not come from a mere flash of inspiration one fine morning, or from other ideas, but that they are built on what I believe has been proven by others. It is not necessary to prove to you again everything that socialism, for example, has proved! I have expressed one thought, the thought that the theory of surplus value and its relation to human labor power is particularly plausible to the proletarian soul. I then expressed the thought that this view must be taken one step further. In doing so, however, I believe I have also shown that I do not want to wipe away what the honorable previous speaker has just pointed out: modern socialism. Anyone who has listened to me more closely will perhaps also be able to tell that I have made sufficient allusions to the significance of modern socialism in my speech.

I could not understand what I said in any other way than in the sense of the example I mentioned. I meant that if one did not get involved in modern socialism, then one would live like the inhabitants of a house that was threatening to collapse and who did not decide to build a new one, but instead discussed how to connect all the rooms so that they could help each other through these doors.

Thus, with some good will, you could see the weight I actually attach to modern socialism. And it was basically not so difficult to derive from this the idea, which could of course be developed further in forty or fifty lectures, that you can't get by with what is already in modern socialism. I would like to point out one more thing. Of course, I will again only be able to be brief enough for those who wish to do so to be able to say that I am not giving the audience anything to take home with them. I would just like to say that I have the greatest respect for what Marxism and everything that has been built on Marxism has produced, especially in modern proletarian thought. I myself was a teacher for many years at a workers' education school founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, and I was involved, so to speak, in helping to establish socialist ideas within the working class. And I may perhaps point out that it would not exactly be incorrect if I said: I believe that a number of corresponding older editors of German socialist newspapers, even orators, who at least have a not insignificant say in Germany today, are perhaps my pupils. So I not only know modern socialism as such - one could have seen that from the way I put forward my points of view - but I also know the weight that this socialism has in the life of the modern proletariat. If you have been involved in it for years, I might say decades, then you don't really need to wait for a nice, special idea to develop a system, because you want to have one, but then you continue to build on what is there. And those who respond to things see from what they continue to build that they are respecting what is already there.

But there is one thing we must not lose sight of. Certainly, thoughts as such, if they are kept within the theoretical, are basically nothing more than symptoms of what is moving in real life. Therefore do not think that I want to suggest to you how the modern labor movement or anything else is actually carried only by the driving force of thought, but on the contrary I want to express that the thoughts that come to light - and I am not only thinking of economic forces - express deeper inner forces symptomatically. In general, I believe that in the future we will move towards a symptomatological view of history, not the causal one that is popular today.

But now we must see how certain thoughts, which are all to be regarded as symptoms of certain underlying facts, how these thought-symptoms present themselves. Today you are familiar with very radical forms of socialism. Do not believe how this could arise in the subconscious of some people who misinterpret this - which perhaps the previous speaker did not mean in this way - do not believe that I feel as frightened as some people in leading circles about what is emerging in the present - although I must regard it with the same weight as I did in my lecture. I can already look with a certain objectivity at the consequences of the social way of thinking and social development that are emerging today, for example. I would like to point out something that might seem significant to you. You see, Lenin and Trotsky are also socialists. And anyone who is not, I would say, intimidated by what is now being said about Eastern Europe and ascribes it all to the “wicked Bolsheviks”, but who knows that everything that is now tended to be attributed to the Russian socialists is still largely due to Tsarism and what preceded it, will perhaps take a somewhat more objective view of what is happening! And those who look objectively will then have to say to themselves above all: In a certain direction, Lenin in particular is a kind of final consequence of Marx, including the way he sees himself. And Lenin draws attention to two things in Marx. First, he draws attention to the fact that the modern social movement must strive to proletarianize the state itself through the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the state is only - I must briefly indicate this - taken up by the dictatorship of the proletariat because it thereby draws its ultimate consequences. The ultimate consequences of what is germinating in the state are drawn by social-democratism: namely, the state kills itself, it dissolves itself.

Now, the various dark sides of this socialist state must come to light. Lenin, for example, is under no illusions about this. That is also better than indulging in illusions, as so many people do. But he is working towards creating a state that carries within it the seeds of death, that will dissolve. Then comes the really new stage, where work is not paid equally, but where the motto is: each according to his abilities, each according to his needs. - And at that moment, when this appears: each according to his abilities, each according to his needs - which must not only be a socialist ideal, but a very general one - at that moment Lenin, like Marx, makes a strange remark that allows us to look much deeper than we usually do. He makes the remark: this social order, which can only come about in such a way that everyone is placed in the social order according to his needs and his abilities, cannot, of course, be achieved with today's people; it requires a completely new breed of people, which must first come into being.

Yes, you see, those who do not want to wait and cannot wait for a “new breed of man”, because otherwise the time might come when it would be better to establish the general suicide of which I have spoken, will turn their thoughts to the present life, and will try to gain from this present life an idea of what the mistakes were. And in this respect I do believe that it might already be evident from my, albeit brief and sketchy, train of thought, in which I have referred to the question: What should the state do, and what should it not do? How the entanglement of economic life with the state, the entanglement of intellectual life with the state, has caused damage to the social order - I have tried to indicate this; the examples I have given could be multiplied a hundredfold.

Does it not stand to reason that we should think about how these damages can be remedied? It can be remedied by not merging further, but by reversing what has just occurred.

You could call it naïve, of course, but I believe that my lecture today showed how deeply what I have said actually penetrates the very foundations of modern life. How far this is the case, however, must be left to the judgment of each individual. The ideas that are currently realized and recognized are indeed not new ideas; and nothing new can be built with these ideas.

I have presented the idea of the threefold structure to many a person who would have been in a position to realize it, especially during the difficult time of war. I have also found understanding in some circles. But today there is still no bridge between understanding and the courageous will to do something. This bridge has not been built.

I have had a strange experience in the last few days, which could perhaps point out to you how what I have said is deeply rooted in real life and is not a wiping away, but rather a taking up or rather a continuation of socialist thinking: I spoke - which is not exactly easy today - to a workers' meeting that was simply invited from the street. As I experienced many times during my work in Berlin, it was precisely the socialist leaders who opposed my remarks in many ways. And after many objections had been raised, a Russian woman appeared who - I'm just telling you! - said, among many other things, that we may have heard many things today against which we could object to this or that, but it would be impossible today to remain merely with the old ideas or even with the old socialist ideas, but it was necessary to move forward to new ideas.

We will not come to a real, thorough rebuilding of the house, but only to new doors and so on, which cannot help if the whole thing collapses, if we do not really engage in new thoughts. And that is why I have said to many people in these difficult times that many of the misfortunes that have happened in recent years could have been avoided if many people had thought like the Russian woman I spoke of. I am convinced that it would have been understood if the Central European negotiators at the time had made the ideas I have expressed here - which were very well known to a few of them - the content of foreign policy, the content of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. If these ideas had been presented to the outside world, they would have been understood.

Of course, one cannot explain such things in detail in a lecture; but one has the feeling that real life must live in the human soul in the present, as it is simply rooted in reality. I do not consider myself so clever that I know better than others what has to happen in detail!

Because I am not a program person, because I do not give programs and utopias, but because I am someone who wants reality to be grasped as reality, I am not at all interested in having all my suggestions carried out in detail. If at any point one begins to work in the spirit of what I have said today, then let not one stone of the content I have conveyed be left upon another; something quite different may result, but it will be something that is justified in the face of real life.

With programmes, whether socialist or other programmes, the aim is always to ensure that the individual ideas that have been devised are realized in accordance with the programme; here it is a matter of tackling reality at one point. Then the result may be something quite different! And so what I have said is only apparently so incomprehensible because the matter is not to be understood in the same way as other programs. You could say that today it is easy not only to introduce a program with a few thoughts, but even to prove it. But it is difficult to appeal to human souls, and to appeal in the way I wanted to do, namely to point these souls back to themselves, to give them suggestions. Then perhaps they will think something completely different. But it is basically the most necessary thing today for people to know: you have to start from one reality, then the other will follow.

There is therefore no need to despise what the land reformers are striving for. In a conversation I once had with Damaschke in Berlin many years ago, I pointed out to him that his ideas certainly have a great deal of power, but that they cannot fully intervene in real life and understand it thoroughly because the soil is not elastic. It is not; and therefore, I told him, it is not possible to translate them directly into reality.

Well, there is no other way of coming to terms with it than by looking at the tendency of the times, which results from the fact that people have come to a dead end through the confusion of legal life, economic life and spiritual life. Then something arises which is not at all difficult to prove, namely that one should not continue to confound them, but should start on the way back!

What I have said is intended to continue thoughts about how socialization should actually be carried out, how we can get into a situation where human labour may not legitimately be used in the sense of someone else's power. And as I said, as incomplete as this must remain, because it cannot be dealt with exhaustively in one lecture, I believe that today it is necessary to approach things with a little good will, because the facts speak too loudly! And even in the face of what might well appear to be different in the socialist field than four years ago, the facts speak too loudly today. I will soon explain all this comprehensively and in detail in a brochure, because I consider this to be extremely necessary for the present, which will then prove in detail what has now only appeared in a truly suggestive way.

I believe there is one thing we must not lose sight of today. I had a special experience yesterday. When I was a little boy, I used to learn the following in my religion books: I learned that you have to realize that Christ must either be a fool or a hypocrite, or that he must be what he pretended to be. And that's what it says in these religious books: And since he can be considered neither a fool nor a hypocrite, he must be the Son of the living God. - I also heard that answered yesterday as the solution to the social questions here in Bern! I read it in my school books more than fifty years ago, and I hear it repeated again today - as the right solution to the social question. Between the time when I read it in my religion books at school and this almost word-for-word repetition, which one could hear again and again during the difficult times, I would like to say: word-for-word exactly, but between the two points in time lies the experience that mankind should have had through the great catastrophe that we have lived through. We should learn something from this great catastrophe! Above all, I believe, we should have become more willing to accept thoughts that may seem somewhat sketchy today, but which, by the way in which they refer to things, perhaps show that they are at least making an attempt to delve into the depths of things.

2nd speaker (Baron von Wrangell): Sees in the threefold structure of the social organism proposed by Dr. Steiner the right solution. How the idea can be realized seems to him to be a different question. The fundamental error of socialism lies in the fact that it leads to an overvaluation of the state.

3rd and 4th speakers: Objected essentially that a realization of the idea of tripartism would unnecessarily complicate the situation, which speaks against this solution. The threefold structure would lead to fragmentation, whereas human life should form a unity.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, I think I should perhaps say something very briefly. I can understand quite well what the honorable previous speaker wants; but I have the feeling that he does not understand himself very well! I think he should assess the whole situation we are in from a somewhat broader perspective. We humans really don't just have the task of making our lives comfortable. There are many other things in life than making ourselves comfortable! And I believe that a large part of the damage we suffer today comes precisely from the fact that a large part of humanity only strives to make life comfortable, in its own way. But it seems to me that what matters is something else.

You see, I would not bother you with any ideas about a tripartite division if these three parts were not inherent in the reality of the social organism. The fact that this threefold division wants to happen is something that does not depend on us, we cannot change it, it makes itself. I really did have the opportunity, I must come back to this again, during this difficult time, to talk to many a person who I thought should do something from the positions that are so authoritative today - it was two and a half years ago, there would still have been the possibility of doing something - and I said to some people: “You see, what is being said here is not a simple matter. It is the result of decades of observation of what will happen in Europe over the next ten, twenty or thirty years. For anyone who observes the course of events - and there is no other way to understand the social threefold structure than to recognize the possibilities for future development from the whole of the present - will see that, whether we like it or not, this threefold structure is taking place. In earlier times it arose instinctively; more and more in recent times there has been a confusion, a fusion of the three parts. Now these three parts want to separate again in the way that suits them, to become independent. - And I have said this to some people with the drastic words: “You see, those who are now at the helm could still do many things in this direction with reason; people have the choice - Goethe also said with reference to the revolution: either evolution or revolution - they have the choice of either doing this now through reason, or they will experience revolutions and cataclysms. Not only those who have been at the helm up to now will experience cataclysms, but also those who merely want to hold on to the dogmas of socialism will experience cataclysms. It is a matter of this threefold organization of the social organism taking place by itself. And you can also see that: That which is natural always occurs under certain extraordinary conditions in certain one-sidednesses of development; these three members want to become more and more independent. And they become independent in an unnatural way if they are not given their natural independence, if they are confounded, if they are thrown together; they develop in a way that hinders humanity. The spiritual power, the spiritual organization develops, be it as a church state or state church or whatever, becomes independent, and even if it cannot encompass the whole of spiritual life, it nevertheless seeks to catch as much as it can. The other, legal life, is taken up by the state, and in its turn makes serviceable to the state that which will seek to become independent. What wants to realize itself in political life in an unnatural way is everything that is today the much frowned upon militarism. For you see, many a healthy opinion was expressed during the war about this militarism and its one-sided relationship to state life. But if one gets to the bottom of these opinions with common sense, then one also realizes that militarism is nothing other than the one-sided realization of what one does not want to give its natural independence, political life in turn. And Clausewitz said: War is the continuation of politics by other means; Clausewitz puts it in a certain context; one can still go into these things, not as in recent years, when one has heard many such one-sided statements. One can also say that marital strife and divorce are the continuation of marriage by other means! There have been a lot of one-sided statements like that in recent years; people just mix everything up. But what everything is based on, if one wants to develop fruitful views in life, which then also turn into real institutions, is that one sees these relationships as healthy. And so these things really want to take on a life of their own, to develop independently. In recent times, the economic organism has flooded the whole of public life to such an extent that today many people no longer see anything but an economic organism. And then they see in what can otherwise be there only an administration of the economic organism.

That is what you can prove. But above all, if I have achieved nothing more than to stimulate some people, that is quite enough for me. That is all I want! For I do not believe that one can say anything right about what should happen socially. I would like to add the following: You know that there are two Bolsheviks in the present day: one is Lenin, the other Trotsky. I know of a third, who, however, does not live in the present day and whom few people think of when they talk about the Bolsheviks: Johann Gottlieb Fichte! Read his “Closed Commercial State” and you have, theoretically speaking, exactly what you can read in Lenin and Trotsky! Why? Because Fichte spins a state system out of his own soul! From the forces with which you can reach the highest heights in philosophy, he develops a state system, a political, or rather a social system. Why did this happen? Because it is not at all possible to gain a view of what is socially fruitful from the individual! That can only be found from person to person. Just as language cannot be developed if a person lives alone on an island, but just as language can only develop as a social phenomenon, only when people live together properly, so that which is social at all cannot be gained by spinning it out of an individual person! One cannot draw up a program out of oneself. But we can think about the social order in which people must be placed so that they relate to each other so naturally that they find the right social order of their own accord.

The social question will not disappear from the agenda! It is there and must continue to be solved more and more. But the task at hand is to answer the question: How should people relate to each other in the tripartite social organism? Then you will always more or less find the solution. People must relate to each other in the social organism in such a way that the solutions arise from their living together. To do this preliminary work is the task of truly social thinking, the preliminary work that shows how people can solve social issues in real social life.

I have already said that I do not believe I could be so clever as to draw up a social program. But I drew attention to the fact that if people live in this natural threefold division, and if they really allow what corresponds to their impulses as institutions in this natural threefold division to arise in the world, then it is only through people, in this cooperation of people appropriate to the healthy social organism, that the social order arises! One can cooperate in this! You can't do it the way modern Marxists say: first we make a big mess, then comes the dictatorship of the proletariat, then the right thing will happen. - No, at the very least it is necessary to do this preliminary work, to ask oneself: How must people stand in the social organism so that, through their cooperation, what is demanded of us today by the facts that truly speak loudly will happen?

Do not think that I wish to take the floor this evening for the purpose of speaking of an understanding between the various classes of the present population, in the same way that the ruling classes, the hitherto ruling classes in particular, so often speak of reconciliation and understanding. I would like to speak to you this evening about a quite different kind of understanding, about the understanding that is being challenged by the social facts that are speaking loudly today and by the great historical forces that are currently entering the course of human development. I would like to speak of what seems to me to be demanded of the proletarian movement in particular, of these historical forces that are today, one might say, revolutionizing the world.

To speak of a different understanding is forbidden by almost the whole of modern life, the life that certain people call modern civilization. What voices have we heard within this modern civilization over the last few decades! Let us remember how the hitherto ruling classes have perceived this modern civilization, one might say, right up to the terrible catastrophe of war which has come as a horror to mankind in recent years. How often has it been said how far we humans have come in creating, in producing! How we have brought it about that thought can be sent far across the earth in a short time, how connections have been created between the most distant countries, how spiritual life in all its forms has gained a tremendous expansion. Well, I could go on singing the praises of modern civilization for a long time, not the way I want to sing them, but the way they have been sung by this ruling class. But let us now look at things from the other side. How was this modern civilization, to which so many songs of praise have been sung, actually possible? It was only possible because it was, so to speak, undermined by those who, from the innermost essence of their humanity, could not agree with what the bearers of this modern civilization were doing. And so, alongside all this, which one could also call a kind of luxury culture, one could hear the voices coming from the other side, which essentially always ended with the words: It can't go on like this! As wonderful as your civilization may be for you, it is impossible for it to go on any other way than for the vast majority of the earth's population to have no direct share in it. They have to feel excluded from this civilization, they have to watch from the outside, so to speak, but on the other hand they have to work hard for this civilization!

Has anyone on the other side shown any understanding in recent decades for the reasons and background from which such a call has emerged? You can't say that. In general, certain people today speak a very strange language. Over the last few days, I have witnessed some of what has taken place here in Bern at the League of Nations Conference. You could hear all kinds of beautiful speeches, that is, speeches that the gentlemen thought were very beautiful. But anyone who is able to look a little deeper into what is being expressed in the world-changing deeds that are going through Europe today could hear, above all, in what was said there, that the most important question of the present, the question that is of ever-increasing concern to a large part of humanity, was being talked and thought past. The actual nerve of the social question was talked and thought past! This conference showed extraordinarily little understanding for this question, and one was reminded of something else, namely the weeks of the spring and early summer of 1914, when one could hear many a strange speech from the hitherto ruling circles and their leaders. One could cite many similar speeches, such as the one made by a leading statesman in a Central European country to a parliament in 1914, in which he said: “Thanks to the energetic efforts of the European cabinets, we can hope that peace among the great powers of Europe will be secured for the foreseeable future. - This was still being said, with all possible modifications, in May and June 1914.

And then? Then came what killed millions of people, what crippled millions of people. So well foreseen was that which also asserted itself alongside that to which one sang such hymns of praise as modern civilization!

I myself, if I may make this personal remark, had to speak differently from these statesmen at the time. Before a meeting in Vienna in the spring of 1914, I had to say: Anyone who looks at the life of contemporary European humanity sees in it something like a creeping cancer that must break out. - Well, we can leave it to the judgment of mankind today as to who was a better prophet: the one who spoke of a cancerous disease that broke out so terribly in the so-called world war, or those who thought that, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, a longer peace was in prospect. Just as in those days these gentlemen talked past what was gathering as a black cloud in the political sky of Europe, so today certain people talk past what is most important: the social powers and forces entering the life of the nations of the earth. Since things are like this, there is really very little prospect of bringing about an understanding through reason, so to speak. But an understanding on the other side, as I have already said, can be sought. And this understanding seems to me to arise if we take the following starting point.

Until our time, the proletarian population was basically in a completely different situation than it will be from now on. Anyone who has not only thought about the proletarian movement from a certain theoretical point of view, but who has experienced this proletarian movement in such a way that he has lived with it, knows that what the modern proletariat experienced was the great, penetrating criticism of what the institutions and maxims of the hitherto leading circles have done for centuries, for three to four centuries. What the modern proletarian experienced was the living, world-historical critique of everything they believed they had to impose on humanity. And basically, what was going on within the proletariat was a great, powerful critique. While the hitherto leading circles lingered within their bourgeois culture, to which they sang such hymns of praise, while they could hear in their lecture halls that which served their state, while they heard in their theaters the illusory world of their affairs, while they did many other things, what they perceived as such a salutary modern civilization, the proletarian masses came together in the hours they could spare from the heavy, arduous work of the day to reflect on the serious questions of human development, the serious questions of world history. After all, modern technical development and the capitalist development connected with it had taken the modern proletarian away from all other human contexts, which, for example, the old craft had provided, had placed him next to the machine, harnessed into the capitalist world order and thus excluded from the immediate feeling of what the leading, leading circles were doing. Then the proletarian's spiritual gaze turned to the general and, from a certain point of view, the highest interest of humanity. And in the proletarian assemblies that was driven which then always had to sound out again in the cry: It can't go on like this!

But what developed there was also a powerful, magnificent criticism of the previous policy, the previous economic management of the leading circles. This has now entered a new stage. And to really follow this entry into a new stage with attention seems to me to be one of the most necessary social tasks today.

How has the modern proletarian felt about the social order that has developed over the last three to four centuries, since the time when modern capitalism and modern technology entered the development of mankind? How did the modern proletarian feel about all this, which he had to look at as if he were standing on his feet, which he, as far as he could use it, wanted to absorb with his intimate share, so that he would also have something for his soul? The old leading circles spoke to him of various powers and forces at work in the historical development of mankind; they spoke to him of all kinds of moral world orders and the like. But he, the modern proletarian, who looked up to what these ruling classes were doing, felt little of the power, of the inner originality of such moral world orders; He felt that the actions, the thoughts, the feelings of the leading, governing circles are essentially shaped by the way they can live by virtue of their economic forms, their economic order, through which they are able to establish their civilization as a kind of superstructure on the misery, on the oppression of larger masses of humanity who had to work for them.

And so there arose in the modern proletariat what was the truth in relation to the reality of these newer thoughts about the development of mankind. The modern proletarian felt a truth about what the others fantasized about in a certain lying way; they spoke of a moral, of a divine world order, through which people are brought into mutual social relations on earth. The proletarian felt this to be a profound lie. And he felt that the truth in all this is that people live as they can by exploiting economic life for their own convenience, for their own benefit. And so the materialistic conception of history arose - and one must now say, as the proper inheritance of what was bourgeois science - the conception which did not admit that the actually effective forces in the historical development of mankind were anything other than economic forces. And that became the belief that everything that is human religion, human science, human spirituality, rises above the economic forces like a kind of “superstructure”, and that below it the economic forces reign as the only reality on which at most the superstructure acts back. The modern proletariat was right in the face of what the bourgeois world order has made of social life - a mere economy.

The second thing that emanated from Karl Marx's power of thought and spread into the proletarian assemblies, into the proletarian souls, is not the intellectual question, as I have just characterized it in the materialist view of history, but the legal question. This culminates in the one word that you all know, but which had an electrifying effect within the modern proletarian movements, which evoked understanding in the innermost feelings of the modern proletarian souls when it was presented to these proletarian souls by Marx and his successors: it is the word of surplus value. And behind much of what has been said around this word of surplus value, what the modern proletarian actually feels to be his most important human question, lies the question which is more or less consciously or unconsciously, more or less merely felt or posed with the intellect, but which is deeply felt. What sense does my work actually have within the modern social order? And it must be said that Karl Marx's various answers are brilliant. - But today we live in a time in which we must go further than even Marx went, especially if we understand Marx in the right way, not in the direction of the opportunist politicians, but in a completely different direction, as we shall see in a moment.

When the modern proletarian raised the question of the meaning of his labor and this became for him the question of his position within modern society, of his human dignity, he was repeatedly confronted with the problem that his labor was, as it were, absorbed by the capitalist economic process. He experienced that his labor had become something that it could only appear to be, namely: a commodity. The modern proletarian, who can only acquire his labor power anew as his only “possession”, experienced that he must also carry his labor power to the market, must have his labor power treated according to the rules of supply and demand, as otherwise objective commodities separated from man are treated on the commodity market.

Now the peculiarity of human life is that things can occur in this human life which are real, but which are not truths, which are lies of life. And one such lie is that human labor can ever become a commodity. For human labor power can never enter into any comparisons, any price comparisons with commodities. It is something fundamentally different from commodities. It is therefore a lie if that which can never become a commodity is nevertheless made into a commodity. Even if this is not expressed in such a clear manner, it is nevertheless something that is perceived as, I would say, the center of the proletarian question of modern times. Because human labor power has become a commodity, the legal relationship that should exist between the entrepreneur and the worker over work has become a purchasing relationship. And modern bourgeois national economists do indeed talk as if it were possible within economic life to exchange commodity for commodity on the one hand, and commodity for labor on the other.

The fact that a so-called labor contract exists in the modern sense of the word does not change the matter; for a legal contract can only be concluded about the relationship between entrepreneur and worker in the sense that we shall see later. Human labor could only be liberated from its commodity character - and it must be liberated - if the only contract possible between the employee and the employer were not the contract for the work performed, but the contract for the distribution of the jointly produced goods or services in a way that serves the healthy organism in the right sense. This is the demand that lies behind the Marxist theory of surplus value. At the same time, this is the way in which one must go beyond the merely Marxist conception. And the question must be asked: How does the wage relationship end? How does a commodity distribution contract take the place of the labor contract?

But with this we have indicated the second thing that repeatedly ran through the soul of the modern proletarian and which was hurled at the leading circles as a powerful criticism.

And the third, that was the conviction that everything that takes place in modern life and which has led to these conditions into which we have now got, does not consist in a harmony, not in a work of modern men arising from a common purpose, but in a struggle between groups of men in which one of them has the advantage at first; that is the class struggle of the modern proletariat with the leading classes.

Truly, these three points: the materialist conception of history, the theory of surplus-value and labor-power, and the theory of class struggle have been studied with more contemporary force than anything that has been written within bourgeois society in recent times. For it was recognized that what human development has come to in the last centuries is merely a result of economic forms. All other interpretations are basically a great lie of humanity.

And so the whole intellectual life, as it had become a kind of cultural luxury for the ruling class, became an “ideology” for the modern proletariat, a word that was heard again and again. It became a mere fabric of thoughts and feelings and sentiments, which were expressed as smoke emanating from the true reality of economic life.

But one does not understand the matter if one only understands it in this way. One only understands the matter correctly if one knows that in the face of this desolating ideology, this soul-killing ideology, which is essentially a legacy of the thinking of the hitherto ruling class, in the modern proletarian soul, which had time to think about human dignity and about truly becoming a human being on the machine and in the enclosure of the capitalist economic process, a real longing for a true spiritual life, not for a spiritual luxury, not for abundance, awoke. One can still often hear in bourgeois circles today how the modern proletarian question, viewed from this or that side, is actually a bread-and-butter question. Certainly, it is a bread-and-butter question; but there is really no need to talk about the fact that it is a bread-and-butter question in an assembly where proletarian understanding prevails. For it is not a question of thinking in the same way as a bourgeois sociologist and pedagogue, for instance, who now travels about a great deal in many regions, and who, among other things, recently coined the words: You only have to really know modern poverty once, then you will already come to the longing for a humanization of human society. - Behind such words there is usually nothing more than the question: How can one continue in the delusion of the old life of the ruling circles and how can one in the best way let chunks fall off for those who should not participate in this life of the ruling class? How can labor be dealt with while maintaining the existing social order? - It is not a question of bread. If it is a question of bread, then it is above all a question of how bread is fought for, out of which soul motives.

This has to do with much deeper historical forces than those who often talk about history from this perspective even suspect. And today the three questions which I have just characterized have reached a new stage in that there is much in them which one is not yet able to express clearly, but which can be heard by those who have an ear for the workings of historical forces, for the sounds which herald the great world-historical upheavals. Today the proletarian movement is no longer a mere criticism, today it is that which is called upon by the world-historical powers themselves to take action, to raise the great question: What must be done? - And here it seems to me that what I characterized earlier must be transformed somewhat, transformed in such a way that, in contrast to the purely material life as it has developed up to now, another life should develop that allows the oppressed part of humanity to have an existence that is truly humane in soul as well. That is the first question, the question of spiritual life: How can we transform the luxury ideology, the affluent spiritual life, into that which, from the innermost nature of man, man must really experience for an existence worthy of man?

The other thing that has developed, apart from this spiritual life, is precisely that which has turned the proletarian's human labor power into a commodity in the field of legal life. This could only develop because in the social order that emerged under capitalism and modern technology, law became a prerogative in many respects. How can the prerogative be replaced by law, within whose order the human labor power of the proletarian is stripped of the character of a mere commodity?

And the third question is: how can what has developed as class struggle continue to develop in other forms? The proletarian has felt very well that what must happen in life can only develop in this mutual struggle. But he perceives the struggles that have taken place in the course of modern history as those that must be overcome. And so the question of the necessity of class struggles will now, at the present stage of development, be transformed into the question: How do we overcome class struggles? - The question of surplus value, which has moved into the realm of privileges within the social order as it has developed over the last few centuries, this question of surplus value gives rise to the other question: How to find in human society, in the true sense of the word, a state of law satisfactory to all men?

With regard to the first question, the spiritual side of the social question, one only has to see how deep the abyss is between the hitherto ruling classes and those on the other side who are striving for a new world and social order. And here it must be said that what fills the modern proletarian with spiritual life has basically been inherited from the bourgeois class, which has been able to cultivate science, art and so on. - But this spiritual life had a different effect within the proletariat, for the proletarian was in a different position in relation to what he had inherited in the way of science and the like than in relation to what arose as modern spiritual life among those who were bourgeois, the leading circles. One could be a very convinced follower of modern intellectual life, one could consider oneself very enlightened, but one stood as a member of the ruling class within such a social order, which was not at all organized according to this modern intellectual life. One could be a natural scientist like Vogt, a scientific popularizer like Büchner, one could believe oneself to be completely enlightened - that was perhaps good for the head, for the intellectual conviction; but it was not suitable for understanding the position of man in real life. For the way these people stood in life could only be justified by the fact that the social order derived from quite different powers, from religious, from outdated moral world views, or at any rate from other powers than those which had presented themselves as scientifically certified powers to these ruling, leading classes. Therefore, that which is the modern scientific spirit and to which the proletarian simply brought himself from the culture of modern times had a completely different effect on the proletarian soul.

I may recall a small scene that illustrates this particularly well, this different effect of modern spiritual life on the proletarian, who was compelled to grasp this modern spiritual life not just for the head, but for the whole person, for his entire position within humanity.

Many years ago, I once stood on the same podium in Spandau with Rosa Luxemburg, who has now come to such a tragic end. At that time she spoke about science and the workers, and as a teacher at the workers' education school I had a few things to add to her words on the same subject. This topic, “Science and the workers”, gave her the opportunity to express precisely that which is so characteristic of the intellectual life of the modern proletariat. She said: “The sentiments - despite the conviction of the head - the sentiments of the modern leading class of humanity are still rooted in views as if man came from angelic beings who were originally good; and from this origin, in terms of feeling and sentiment, these ruling classes justify the differences in rank and class that have emerged in the course of development. But the modern proletarian is driven in a quite different way to take bourgeois science seriously. He must take seriously when he is taught how man was not originally an angelic being, but climbed about on trees like an animal and behaved most indecently. Looking back to this origin of man in the sense of the modern world view does not justify differences in life, class and status in the same way that others believe it to be justified, it justifies a completely different idea of the equality of all people.

You see, that's the difference! The proletarian was compelled to take what the others took as a head conviction, which did not go very deep, no matter how enlightened they were, he was compelled to take it up with his whole person, to take the matter with the bitterest seriousness of life. As a result, however, it wove itself into his soul in a completely different way. One must simply become attentive to such things, then one will already recognize in what sense the modern social question is above all a question of spiritual life and strives for the development of a spiritual life that satisfies all people.

Then, if you look into the causes of everything that I have only been able to describe today, I would like to say, in a stammering manner, because if you really wanted to describe it in detail, it would require too much elaboration, if you research the causes and then ask yourself: what development must be striven for? - then we can say the following: today it is really not a question of whether materialistic culture is the real foundation of spiritual life, but of how we can arrive at a spiritual life that can truly satisfy the human soul, the soul of all human beings. Today it can no longer be about a critical interpretation of what surplus value is, what human labor power represents itself as within the capitalist world order, but today the question arises: How can human labor power be freed from the character of a commodity and how can we ensure that “surplus value” does not remain a prerogative but becomes a right? And if there must be struggles within the human social order, can they be class struggles, can they be the struggles that have gradually emerged over the course of recent centuries?

Today we are at a stage of development where criticism alone is no longer decisive, but where the question is decisive: What is to be done? - For those who look at the foundations of life, the answer is, I would say, very radical. It may look less radical to some than it is, but it is a radical answer. Because proletarian thinking is in many respects only the legacy of bourgeois thinking, because proletarian habits of thought are the legacy of bourgeois habits of thought, the first questions to be considered are: How can the damage caused by capitalism be eliminated? How can the oppressive nature of the commodification of human labor power be eliminated? How can the class struggle be overcome in a humane way?

These questions must be asked from a much deeper perspective today. And great demands are made today by the historical facts themselves on the habits of thought, on the thoughts of the proletarian. For it is up to him to be equal to the times, to ask himself: How can we get beyond the unhealthy foundations of today's material historical life? How can we get beyond the devastation that the cycle of surplus-value production has wreaked on life, on legal life? How do we get beyond the devastation of modern class struggles? The three most important modern social questions are transformed from the negative into the positive.

If we look at the causes of current living conditions, we find that there is actually a tendency to continue what the bourgeois world order has brought about. Many people are asking themselves today: How can we overcome capitalism? How can we overcome private ownership of the means of production? - And they then come to the ancient order of human social institutions, that of the cooperative and the like, that is, they come to regard a common ownership of the means of production as an ideal.

This is understandable, and truly, it is not out of any bourgeois prejudice that these things should be discussed here, but solely from the point of view of: Is it possible to achieve what the modern proletarian wants in the way that some socialist thinkers believe they can achieve it today? Is it possible, by resorting to the framework of the old state and inserting into this old state what is the economic order, only in a different form, to bring about a redemption from the oppression brought about by the past?

Let us look at the modern state. It came into being because at a time - in the 16th and 17th centuries - when modern technology and modern capitalism were also developing, the leading circles, who then had to call the proletariat more and more to the machine, found that their interests were best satisfied within the framework of the state. And so they began to allow economic life to run into the state in those branches where it was convenient for them. And especially when modern achievements came along, large parts of economic life, such as the postal, telegraph and railroad systems, were taken over into the economy of the state, which had been handed down from time immemorial. At that time, intellectual life was also incorporated into the modern state structure!

And more and more this fusion of economic life, the legal life of the state and intellectual life took place. This fusion not only led to all the unnatural conditions associated with the oppressive conditions of modern times, but this fusion also ultimately led to the devastating effects of the world war catastrophe.

Those who think today from the historical facts will not ask: What should the states do? - on the contrary, they may be forced to ask: What should states refrain from doing? - For what they do and thereby bring about, we have indeed experienced in the killing of ten million people and in what crippled eighteen million people.

And so perhaps the question does come to mind: What should states refrain from doing? - This is what I can only hint at here, but what can truly be asked from the deep foundations of a true social science. If you look at certain political and social conditions as they have, I would say, typically developed, but also as they have typically led to their well-deserved end, then you need only look at Austria, for example, which in the 1960s turned towards a common constitutional system in the Austrian Reichsrat.

What had emerged at that time - I spent three decades of my life in Austria, got to know the conditions thoroughly, got to know what developed as constitutional life in the Austrian state at that time - truly fitted the mishmash of different nations like a glove. And for anyone who can really follow historical facts, it is clear that it was precisely what was founded in Austrian constitutional life at that time, what became Austria's policy in the sixties and seventies, that contributed to the end to which the present years have led.

Why? Well, at that time an Austrian Imperial Council was founded. Initially, the purely economic curia, the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the markets, the cities and industrial towns, the curia of the rural communities were elected to this Austrian Imperial Council. They had to represent their economic interests in the state parliament. And they made rights, they made laws out of their economic life. Only rights that were a transformation of economic interests were created. With regard to the law, however, we are not dealing with the same thing that we are dealing with on the ground of economic life. On the ground of economic life one has to do with human needs, with the production of goods, the circulation of goods, the consumption of goods. In the field of legal life, however, one has to do with that which, apart from all other interests, concerns man, in so far as he is purely only man, in so far as he as man is equal to all other men. Judgment must be based on quite different grounds when the question is asked: What is right? - than: What must be done in order to introduce any product into the cycle of economic life? - The unnatural coupling of the economic curia with legal life is what is eating away at the so-called Austrian state as a cancer.

These things could be illustrated by many examples throughout the modern states. It is not a question of merely studying these things, but of finding the right point of view from which one can gain an insight into true reality, into that which lives and weaves, not into that which people imagine to be the right thing politically or economically.

And again, look at the German Reichstag, of blessed memory, at this democratic parliament with equal voting rights, in which there could be a representation of interests like the Farmers' Union, but in which there could also be a representation of a mere spiritual community, like the Center! There we see something welded, melted into purely political life that belongs only to intellectual life. And to what unnatural conditions has this led! Again, one could cite many examples in addition to this one. If one wants to get to know the life of modern mankind, one must be able to approach it radically from this point of view. One must really have the courage to look such things in the face, then one will come to something that modern people do not yet want to admit, I would even like to say that people of all parties do not want to admit it. But what alone can be the impulse for a recovery of our social organism is the recognition that from now on there can no longer be a welding together, a coupling together of the three areas of life - spiritual life, legal life and economic life - but that each of these areas has its own laws of life, that each of these areas must therefore also give itself its social formation from its own sources.

In economic life only the interests of commodity production, commodity consumption and commodity circulation can prevail. The fundamental laws of this economic life must be decisive for administration and legislation. In the field of legal life that must prevail which springs directly from the human consciousness of law, that in which all men are really equal as men. In the field of spiritual life, that which can flow from the natural human endowment in full free initiative must prevail.

Modern Social Democracy has made inroads - I would like to say, from a completely different point of view, but that cannot affect us here today - in a single area, in that it has the proposition in its views: Religion must be a private matter. - The proposition must be extended to all branches of spiritual life. All spiritual life must be a private matter in relation to the rule of law and to the cycle of economic life. That spiritual life alone which is directed to its own powers, that spiritual life alone which always proves its reality out of its own impulse, that will not be a spiritual luxury, that will not be a spiritual abundance, that will be a spiritual life which must be longed for by all men in the same way. In looking at medieval spiritual life, for example science in relation to religion and theology, the following sentence has often been uttered: Philosophy, the wisdom of the world, is trailing behind theology. - Well, it was also believed that this had changed in more recent times. It has changed, but how has it changed? The secular sciences have become the servants of secular powers, of states, of economic cycles. And they really haven't gotten any better as a result. And why have they not become better? When one sees that there is basically a unified current, a unified force, from the highest branches of spiritual life down to the utilization of man's individual abilities, as they are carried by capital and capitalism, then one sees to the bottom of the question that arises here. Anyone who does not separate the functions and activities of capital in the modern social order from the rest of spiritual life is not looking at the bottom of the matter. Working on the basis of capital is only possible in a society in which there is a healthy, emancipated intellectual life, from which the development of such abilities based on capital can also grow.

What has happened in more recent times need not always be as grotesque as it once was when a modern, very important researcher, a physiologist, wanted to characterize what the Berlin Academy of Sciences, that is, the learned gentlemen of this Berlin Academy of Sciences, actually were: he called them, these learned gentlemen, “the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns”. You see, things had changed. Science was no longer the servant of theology; but whether it had risen to a higher dignity by becoming the servant of the state is another matter.

I would have to speak a great deal if I wanted to offer you the well-founded, well-reasoned truth in all its parts that only the reversal of that movement which has occurred in recent times, namely the liberation of spiritual life in all branches from state life, can lead to the recovery of our social organism. How differently will the lowest teacher feel if, in all that he has to represent, he knows himself to be dependent only on administration and legislation, which is built on the basis of spiritual life itself, than if he has to carry out the maxims, the impulses of political life! The teaching profession was once supposed to develop. It is precisely in this area that the servant class has developed. And this servant state in this field truly corresponds to what has developed in the field of economic life. In antiquity it was called the “nourishing state”. The exploitative and exploited classes have developed in more recent times. However, the two went hand in hand. One is not possible without the other.

All that which relates to the personal relationship between man and man - and this personal relationship from man to man also relates to what employees and employers agree with each other - all this can only be administered by that part of the social organism which is organized independently on the basis of spiritual life. Everything connected with rights, and with rights above all the labor relationship, must remain the domain of the political, the constitutional state. But that which is connected with commodity production, commodity circulation and consumption must become a separate member of the social order, in which only the laws of life of this organism are active.

Thus, by entering into the foundations of these things, one arrives at the radical view, which for some will prove uncomfortable, that for the health of our social relations three independent social organizations must develop side by side, which will work together in the right way precisely because they do not have a uniform centralization, but are centralized in themselves: a parliament which administers spiritual affairs, an administration which serves only these spiritual affairs; a parliament and an administration of the constitutional state, the political state in the narrower sense; a parliament and an independent administration of the economic cycle for itself; like sovereign states side by side, so to speak. Through their coexistence, they will be able to realize what the modern proletarian soul wants, but which cannot be achieved by a mere centralist nationalization of the social order.

Just take economic life for example. Today it is attached on the one hand to the natural foundations. One can also improve these natural bases by improving the soil and the like, then the working conditions can become more favorable by improving the working bases; but there is a limit beyond which one cannot go. Such a limit must also be reached on the other side. Just as economic life is attached to nature, which is outside, so on the other side must stand the rule of law. From this constitutional state, rights and laws are determined in such a way that they are separate from economic life. Just as the judge has to judge separately from his family or human relations when he judges according to the law, just as he allows his human will to function from a different source than in everyday life, so, even if it is the same people - for it will be the same people who rule through all three areas of social organization - when they judge from the modern constitutional state, they will judge according to quite different principles. For example, to cite just one, the measure of work that a person can perform, the time in which a person can work, will result precisely from the human demands of life. All this must be independent of the price formation that prevails in economic life. And just as, on the one hand, nature imposes pricing on economic life, so, on the other hand, free, independent humanity must always first decide on labor out of a sense of justice. And from the political state, which stands outside economic life, labor must be placed within economic life. Then labor is price-forming; then the character of a commodity will not be imposed on labor, then labor participates in the formation of the price, is not dependent on the price formation of the commodity. Just as nature acts on economic life from without, so must law, which is embodied in human labor, act from without.

It may be - for this may be objected - that the prosperity of a social organism becomes in a certain way dependent upon it, when labor first asserts its right; but this dependence is a healthy dependence, and it will lead to a healthy improvement in the same way as, for example, the improvement of the soil by technical means, when it is necessary or expedient or proves possible. But labor will never be able to set prices in the same way that it must set prices in accordance with human dignity if economic life is placed within the framework of the modern state as in a large cooperative. Economic life must be removed and left to its own devices. Legal life, political life, security life must be taken out and placed on its own. People have to speak from the most democratic basis about that which affects all people. Then this will have the right effect on economic life and what must come from it. This will never be able to happen from a cooperative or state institution of any kind. We will see that, if things remain the same as the present oppressors have developed from other, historical foundations, the new oppressors will also develop in the same way if real democratic foundations are not created outside of economic life.

Just as the legal life of the state must stand outside economic life, so must the entire intellectual life from the lowest school up to the university. Then that which develops out of this spiritual life will be able to be a real spiritual administration of the other two branches of life. Then it will be possible for that which is formed as profit in economic life to be genuinely supplied to the community from which it is taken. Then it will be possible for something similar to take place for the material goods, as today only for the beautiful spiritual goods. For the spiritual goods of modern society are actually the most precious of all. It is so: with regard to this spiritual good, it is true that what is produced is given to the general public at least thirty years after death, becomes free property, can be administered by everyone. People today truly do not put up with this with regard to material goods

Possession in social life is not what these or those social economists so often dream of in a strange way; it can only be understood in this way for social life: Possession is the exclusive right of disposal over a thing; possession in the productive sense, in the sense of land, is a right. And this right can only be made into a right, instead of a privilege, which corresponds to the legal consciousness of all men, if the formation of judgement takes place on a ground where only the right is determined, if it becomes possible that that which has resulted as profit can be transferred through the rule of law into the disposal of the spiritual organization, so that the spiritual organization has to find the right individual abilities for that which is no longer used for production, that is, for human service, but becomes mere profit. In this way it will become possible to bring ever new individual abilities to mankind.

But in order that there may really be a power which leads in the right way, not into bureaucratism, but into the free administration of the individual mental faculties of men, that which must be taken as property from one side, it is necessary that the constitutional state should supervise property, that is, the right of property, and that it should not itself become the owner, but that it should be able to hand over free property to that intellectual circle from which it can best be administered. From this you can see that from such backgrounds one arrives today at radical views which will surprise even you; but for my part I am convinced that the facts of world history demand such things of men today. I am convinced that what the modern proletarian wants cannot be achieved in any other way than by extending his hand to the separation of powers. That is the only possible “foreign policy” today. And strangely enough, each individual territory can carry it out for itself. If Germany were to take up this idea for itself today, as I recently expressed in an “Appeal to the Germans and the Cultural World”, which has attracted many signatures, if the Germans were to take up this tripartite division today, then perhaps they could negotiate with the others in a different way than they can today, when they stand there as a unified state that has been completely overcome, completely overcome precisely by its former centralization, and is basically incapable of doing anything.

I do not mean to take sides, but only to say that what I am saying can become the basis not only of all domestic policy, but also of true foreign policy, for the reason that each individual country, each individual people can carry it out for itself alone. Today, if one considers the enormously telling facts, one is led to the conviction that it is no longer merely a matter of changing some of the conditions according to the old ideas, but that it is necessary to base them on new ideas, new facts. In recent years we have heard quite often that there have never been such terrible events as those of the last four and a half years as long as mankind has had a history. You can hear that more often today. But what should be the echo to this assertion is not heard so often today, namely: Never before have people had such a need to rethink, to relearn as they do today, when the social question points to what most needs to be relearned, points to what is most talked and thought past.

Today it is clear that it is the people who have to act. You don't have to come up with ready-made programs! What I have developed here is not a program, is not a social theory. What I have developed here is a realistic theory of humanity. I do not imagine that I can draw up a program for all the conditions that are to arise; the individual cannot do that on his own. For just as individuals cannot form language, which is a social phenomenon, on their own, but just as language is formed in the coexistence of people, all social life must develop in the coexistence of people.

For this, however, people must first be in the right relationship to one another. [The same person can be in the economic parliament, in the democratic parliament, in the spiritual parliament at the same time; he will only have to see how he always has to find the judgment from the objectivity of the circumstances from the different sources.

How people will administer legal, economic and spiritual life when they are properly related to each other, what people will say about the social, that is what one should fathom; not put forward an abstract, theoretical program about what is right in all cases! To bring people into such a relationship that they work together in the right way - one might think - is something the modern proletariat in particular would understand, and this for the simple reason that the modern proletariat has seen how the various interests, the legal, the economic and the spiritual interests work against each other. In this way they are brought into such mutual action that they produce, out of their own forces, a humane existence for each, a viable organism for the whole. Even if it is radical, I believe that nothing else is needed than good will and insight to translate this social program, which is not a program in the common sense - it has to be called that because there are no other words - into life. However, this will make the social question appear to be what it really is. There are certain people who believe that the social question that has arisen will be solved if we do this or that, [...] no, the social question has arisen because people have reached a certain stage of development. And now it is there and will always be there and will always have to be solved anew. And if people are not prepared to accept ever new solutions, the forces will ultimately lead to such disharmonies that they must increasingly lead to revolutionary upheavals of the social order. Revolutions must be defeated step by step on a small scale; then they will not occur on a large scale. But if one does not defeat that which enters into life day by day as legitimate revolutionary forces, then one need not be surprised if that which one does not want to be aware of discharges itself in great upheavals. Rather, in a certain sense, this must be seen as something understandable.

So I believe that it is precisely in the proletariat that an understanding could develop for a truly far-reaching overview of the social question as it arises in this tripartite organization of the social organism. And I am convinced that if some understanding develops, the proletarian will only then realize how he is the true modern man in the true sense of the word. He, who has been torn out of the old legalities, placed next to the barren machine, harnessed into the soulless economic process, has the opportunity to think about what is worthy of man, about what makes human life truly worthy of man, alongside this killing and destroying of man; he has the opportunity to think about it from the fundamental bases and to consider man as a pure human being. That is why one can also believe that if what is hidden in the modern proletarian class consciousness, what lies behind it, develops out of it: the consciousness of human dignity - “an existence worthy of man must be granted to all men” - then with the solution of the proletarian question, with the liberation of the proletariat, the solution of a great world-historical question of humanity will take place. Then the proletarian will not only redeem himself, then the proletarian will become the redeemer of all humanity in humanity. Then, with proletarian liberation, the whole of humanity, that which is worth liberating in this humanity, can be liberated at the same time.