The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Wishing to bear in mind the importance for the present time of penetrating into the world in accordance with Spiritual Science, we should not fail to notice that this penetration, as we may have gathered from the various studies made here, will bring with it an essential increase in man's understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And it may be said: whoever in his whole soul, his whole heart and not just by ordinary intelligent reflection, unites himself with the knowledge gained by anthroposophical research, when in any other way he is connected with modern culture, will have repeatedly to ask himself what attitude to the Mystery of Golgotha is taken by anyone to a certain degree changed through knowledge derived from this anthroposophical research? From very various points of view we have surveyed this most important of all events for mankind. Today we will try to look at it in such a way that we shall be striving to follow the stream flowing from this mystery down into the most recent times. The fruitfulness of anthroposophical knowledge can be shown in a certain sense by its success, or at any rate its ability to succeed, in rightly understanding in a similar way what has happened both in the world and in mankind up to the present. Whereas human observation otherwise generally recoils in fear from having recent history permeated by what is spiritual.

In contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha we shall have our attention drawn above all to the impossibility of this Mystery of Golgotha being grasped, being understood, if we wish to start out from a material study of world events. It is only when we try to grasp a spiritual event spiritually that we arrive at area understanding of the eatery of Golgotha. It is true that you may say the Mystery of Golgotha is for all that like other historical events a physical event of the physical world. But only recently I have pointed out to you that knowledge at the present time, when sincere, cannot say this. It cannot recognise the Gospels as historical records in the same sense as other historical records, neither can it accept in the same sense as historical records the few highly contestable historical notes which, in addition to the Gospels, we have about the Mystery of Golgotha. These cannot indeed be taken like the historical accounts about Socrates or Alexander the Great, about Julius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus and people of this kind. And I have often emphasised that just what creates the special relation of Spiritual Science to the Mystery of Golgotha is that Spiritual Science will establish the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality at the very time when every other method of mankind, all other paths of mankind, will be found to lead to nothing when trying to draw near to the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality. For the Mystery of Golgotha must be understood spiritually as a spiritual event. And it is only through spiritual understanding of the Mystery at Golgotha that the external reality of this Mystery of Golgotha can be grasped. (see The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind)

Now what is of most significance in the Mystery of Golgotha? In spite of all the so-called liberal theology of Protestantism the most significant part of the Mystery of Golgotha is the thought of Resurrection. The saying of Paul is still undoubtedly true: “And if Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain”. In other words, it is necessary for Christianity, true, real Christianity, to have the possibility of understanding that Christ Jesus went through death and overcame this death after a certain time by livingly re-uniting Himself with earthly development. It goes without saying that in relation to its inner law this belongs only to the spiritual worlds.

Now I have also pointed out to you something that, when looked at purely from the point of view of reason, might break our hearts because it represents one of these contradictions there must always be in life, which logic would always like to clear away—the Christ was put to death. The most guiltless One who ever trod the earth was put to death through the guilt of man. We can gaze upon this human guilt and regard it in the way human guilt, such great human guilt, is regarded. This is the one side of the matter. But next we have to look at the other side and say to ourselves: And had Christ not been crucified, had He not passed through death, it would not have been possible for Christianity to arise. This means, the greatest human guilt was necessary for the greatest blessing to enter the evolution of the earth, for the evolution of the earth to acquire its meaning. We could speak of this point in paradox—had men not taken upon themselves the burden of that guilt, that greatest of all guilt, the significance of the earth would not have been fulfilled. And in this way we characterise one of those great, fundamental contradictions life provides, which the logic of the world would do away with. For what is logic meant for? Logic is meant to do away with contradictions wherever they are found. Logic today however does not yet know what it is doing by this. With the removal of the contradiction, logic kills the life in human understanding. This is why people do not arrive at any living understanding when they want to give merely abstract, logical form to this understanding. And because of this a man comes to a living understanding only when he is willing to rise above logic to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Looked at superficially, the Mystery of Golgotha gives this picture—that at a certain point of time, in a little mentioned province of the world-wide Roman Empire, the man Jesus was born, lived thirty years in the way we have often described and was then permeated by the spirit of the Christ; as Christ-Jesus he lived on another three years, during the last year going through death and rising again. This event at first remained unnoticed anywhere in the whole Roman Empire. Throughout the centuries this event worked in such a way that the culture of the civilised world not only was absolutely transformed but entirely renewed. This is to begin with the external side. We penetrate to the inner side by trying to become clear how this Mystery of Golgotha arose out of Judaism and within the midst of the heathen world. In its religious conception Judaism has something radically different from any heathen religious conception. It may be said at once that Judaism and paganism exclude each other as the two poles of all religious conception.

Let us therefore first consider paganism. All paganism—whether or no what I want to say is, in paganism, more or less hidden—all paganism starts out with the idea that for human perception the divine-spiritual is in some way to be found in nature. Pagan religion is at the same time essentially the perception of nature. In the heathen the contemplation of nature is always there as a more or less unconscious basis: he feels that even man arises out of the becoming and the weaving of the phenomena of nature, that as man he feels himself related in his whole existence in his whole evolving, with what is there in nature and what is coming into existence through nature. Then, to crown what he is able to gain by his perception of nature, the heathen seeks to grasp as it were with his soul what is living in this nature as divine and spiritual. We see this in those ancient times by the way which man out of his own bodily nature becomes able to grasp the divine spiritual, in visions, in atavistic clairvoyance. In the lofty Culture of Greece we see how man tried in pure thought to grasp the divine spiritual. But everywhere we see man as a heathen tries to prepare a path for himself leading straight from the observation, the contemplation, of nature to the crowning point of her edifice—the perception of the divine spiritual within nature.

Now if one goes deeply into the essential being of all paganism—today I can only give an outline of these things—it will be noticed that a perception such as this cannot bring us to a full understanding of the moral impulses in the human race. For however hard it is sought to recognise from nature the divine spiritual impulse, this divine spiritual impulse remains without morality as a content. In the culturally advanced pagan religion of the Greeks we see that the Gods cannot be said to have had much moral impulse.

Naturally everything is expressed in a more or less masked way, the reality clothing itself in some kind of metamorphosis: but to all intents and purposes it is quite possible to say that in Judaism the matter, the very basis of the matter, shows itself as the polar ic opposite of the pagan religion. If we would put it tritely, Judaism might be called the actual discovery of the moral impulse in the evolution of man. The characteristic feature of all ancient Jewish religion lies in the essential pulsing and weaving of the Jahve Impulse into mankind in such a way that its weaving and coming into being bring the moral too into the development of mankind. But this caused a difficulty to enter into this Jewish religious conception which the pagan religious conception did not have. This difficulty lay in the inability for Judaism to arrive at an intelligent relation to Nature. The God Jahve, Jehovah, waves and weaves through the life of man. But when man then turns his gaze to the Jahve God who brings about human birth, then punishes bad and rewards good actions in the course of life, and when he next turns his gaze away from the Jahve God to the events of nature into which man also is interwoven on earth, then there is no doubt it becomes impossible to bring the events of nature into harmony with the working of the Jahve God. The whole tragedy of this impossibility of reconciling what happens in nature with the impulse of the Jahve God is expressed in the great and powerful tragedy of the Book of Job. In this Book of Job we are particularly shown how, purely in the course of nature, the just can suffer, can be brought to misery, and how in contradiction with what nature brings, the just man has to believe in the justice of his Jahve impulse. The whole underlying tone, however, the deeply tragic underlying tone, which might be said to ring in the human soul of the Book of Job with a feeling of isolation, from nature, from the cosmos, shows us what difficulty exists between the simple conception of what the Jahve-Being actually is, and an unprejudiced contemplation of what presents itself to the human gaze, to everything in human life, as the course of natural events in which won is interwoven. And yet this Jahve-God, this Jahve-impulse, what is it for those who really grasp the Old Testament but the essential innermost being weaving in the human soul itself? Whither is the ancient Hebrew conception driven by being so polarically opposed to the outlook on nature prominent in paganism?

The old Hebrew conception is with necessity driven by all this to the idea of a being in addition to the Jahve impulse, a being having a part in human nature as this human nature is in the present time of world existence, namely, the serpent of Paradise, Lucifer. Satan, a being who, opposed to the God, the Jahve God, is obliged to play a part in what man has become in earthly existence. A believer in the Old Testament must look upon the Jahve-God as the innermost impulse to which he directs his veneration and devotion. But it is not possible for him to ascribe to this Jahve impulse the only share in bringing about man; he has to ascribe a substantial share in man to the devil, as he was called in the Middle Ages. But it is mere dilettantism to believe that it is very scholarly to establish the contrast between the Jahve-God and the devil, the old serpent, as though it were the same as, for instance, the contrast between Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Persian religion. The basis of the Persian religion is indeed of pagan nature and Ormuzd and Ahriman confront each other in such a guise that we can rise by way of the perception of nature to their essential being in the world-outlook. And the whole process of the world struggle, represented by the Persian religion in the battle between Ormuzd and Ahriman, is a process such as has been taken up by the other pagan religions into their religious conceptions. What in the Old Testament is thought of as the contrast between the Jahve-Impulse and and the satanic impulse, on it meets us in the Book of Job, is a moral contrast; and in this book of Job the whole picture of this contrast is permeated through and through by a moral tone. There a spiritual kingdom is in fact indicated, in which are the good and the evil and this is rather different from the Kingdom of Nature. It may be said that at the time the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching human evolution, mankind had not come to the point of having done with these two main streams—the pagan way to the divine and the Jewish way to the divine. Both of these, however, had reached their highest point of development. For it must not be forgotten, again and again we must remind ourselves, that such a refinement of spirituality, such a height in the conceptual life of man, as had developed in the paganism of the Greeks is unique in human evolution. Neither has it since been reached again nor was it there before. On the contrary, a firm, clear hold on the moral Jahve-impulse through natural events, such as is found in the Book of Job, is also unique and not to be discovered anywhere else. In this particular direction the Book of Job is indeed one of the miracles of human evolution.

When the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was coming near, mankind had arrived as it were at a dead end. They could go no further. They had conceived, or had tried to conceive, Nature in the old sense, on the one hand, on the other hand the moral world in the old sense. It was impossible for them to advance. In their outer form both had in man's view reached the highest point and there was no higher point to be gained. And now world-evolution actually resulted in contrasts. It does not move forward so simply, so easily, in such a straight-forward ascending development as the modern theory of evolution would have it. This modern theory of evolution imagines, first, what is simple then rising in a straight line—and so on and so forth. But this evolution is not like that; another evolution lies at the basis of this one, in that certain evolutionary impulses reach their highest point, but at the same time as these impulses are approaching the highest point, others are descending to the lowest depths. There are always these two streams flowing—the one to the highest outer development and at the very time one is coming to this highest outer development the other is coming to its greatest inner development. And at the same time men have arrived on the one hand at a certain height, where the pagan conception is concerned, and on the other hand at a certain height in regard to the Jewish conception, what developed inwardly in mankind on earth was only to be reached through such an event that indeed happened historically, although outwardly it took the form, as it were, of a world symbol.

Thus, it could only be the death of the spirit that was to give the earth its meaning. Highest life, as this life developed in the course of ages, highest life brought to its zenith, at the same time inwardly, spiritually, implied the necessity of death. Only out of death could new life then proceed. This death on Golgotha is therefore the necessary contrast, and the greatest contrast to the abundant life acquired at this time in the world-outlooks of the areas and the Jews.

It is true that the matter can be represented from the most varied standpoints. We have already done this. But the following, for example, can also be said: the old world-outlooks all more or less based on atavistic clairvoyance, outlooks which were first advanced to pure thought by the Greeks—all these ancient world-outlooks were finally aimed at discovering man here on the earth. And particularly in Greece, and in another way in Judaism, this is exactly what happened at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Going farther back in former times it is found that to a certain extent man in that he was thinking about himself was nearer the divine not having yet come to a conception of himself. At the time the Mystery of Golgotha took place man had arrived at his own conception of himself. For when such a thing comes about there arises one of those events when in a certain measure through its on force the event changes into its opposite.

Now if you watch a pendulum swinging from left to right you will find the following. I have often used this illustration. Whereas the pendulum swings here it falls back again here through gravity; and having sunk to here through gravity, at this point because the pendulum cord is in exact opposition to the direction of gravity the latter cannot work; but the pendulum does not remain still. And why? It is because by falling down, as the physicist expresses it (and we can apply the same expression though it is not correct spiritually) the pendulum has gathered so much inertia that through its own inertia it swings to the other side.

This inertia is exhausted, reduced to nil, the moment the pendulum has swung out as far to the left as it did to the right. The agent towards the left comes about through the pendulum's own inertia but is then exhausted. This is a universal law in any process in the world at all, namely that something happens and in happening nullifies the impulse to happen. And so the moment pagan and Jewish culture had reached their zenith the force that had brought them there was exhausted and brought to naught. And the entrance of a new impulse into the world was needed to lead evolution onward.

This impulse was the Christ, for Whom in the way we know, the vessel of Jesus was prepared. So we can put it thus, that had a man been able, at the point in our reckoning of time which might be called zero, to see right into what was actually taking place inwardly in mankind, he would have had to says mankind at this moment meet the tragic destiny that the forces given them at the outset of earthly evolution had been brought by the time at which we have arrived to their highest development where the inner constitution of soul was concerned, but that at the same time these forces had been exhausted. Men were faced with the death of the culture that at the beginning of earth evolution took the course of the impulse which the men of old had received as mankind's heritage. Then anyone thus experiencing mankind's fate could look to the hill of Golgotha and see the external historical symbol, the dying body of Jesus, the dying representative at mankind, and from the Resurrection could take hope that a new impulse would not abandon mankind on the earth but would lead them onward. This impulse, however, could not arise out of what it was possible up to then for earth to give mankind. In other words looking to Golgotha and on Golgotha experiencing the possibility of mankind's further development, men had to aspire to something the world was not able to give. To look up to something coming as a new impact into the evolution of the earth—this is what had to be done, or would have had to be done at that point of time by anyone with an intimate vision into the affairs of mankind's evolution. This is what happened and this was the significance of it. It is a matter of external history whether certain events have been more or less grasped. The essential for Christianity is that this happened, and took place as an objective fact. Christianity is not a doctrine. Christianity is the perception of this objective event being played out in earthly evolution.

And now let us look at the remarkable way in which this perception of Christianity was spread abroad. Recently I have expatiated on this fact from another point of view. Today we will observe only how the conception of the Christ impulse, that has come into earthly evolution, spread out over the lands of Judaism, of Greek paganism, of Roman paganism, If without prejudice we observe the historical development we cannot help saying—Christianity most certainly did not take such thoroughly deep root in Judaism, but in spite of the Gospels having been written out of the Greek spirit, neither did Christianity take deep root in Greece, and when we come to the Roman Empire it quite decidedly did not do so there. You need only take what is left of the Christianity out of the Roman Empire, namely Catholicism, and out of this Roman Catholicism merely take the Mass, in its way great and powerful, it is true, and you will see what a peculiar significance underlies this very spreading of the Christian conception throughout the old Roman Empire.

For what strictly speaking is the Mass? The Mass, as well as other ceremonies of the Catholic Church, are indeed in their magnificence, in their incomparable greatness, taken from the pagan mysteries. You have only to look at the Catholic ritual and to understand it correctly, and you have in this ritual a reproduction of the way of initiation in the old pagen mysteries. The chief parts of the Mass—Gospel, Offertory, Transubstantiation, Communion—represent the path of those seeking initiation in the Ancient pagan mysteries. The Christ impulse had to be clothed in the form of the old pagan mysteries to be spread abroad throughout the regions of the Roman Empire. You can reed in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact how what has been experienced in the conception of Christ-Jesus was represented to those entrusted with the results of Initiation in the old pagan mysteries. There we are shown how on Golgotha, on the scene of world-history, there took place what otherwise was always presented as individual human experience on another plane, in the secret depths of Mystery Initiation, Thus we see that the secret of Christianity in its diffusion over the civilised countries of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, known to us as the Greco-Latin epoch, is steeped in pagan ritual. What was received in the Christ-impulse as idea, lived on in the sacrifice of the Mass. To all intents and purposes it still lives on today in the Catholic sacrifice of the Mass. For he is an orthodox Catholic who experiences Christ-Jesus in all His mystery when at the altar they elevate the Host, the Bread transformed into the body of Christ. In this ritualistic action the true Catholic who experiences the pagan form of Christianity feels what he is intended to feel. This is not an immediate relation to Christ-Jesus; here we have a relation in which through the form of the pagan ritual it is sought to come on, to press on to man.

It is only when having passed through the civilised lands of the south which imbued it with paganism or Judaism it arrives among the barbarians of the north, that Christianity first arises in a quite different form, a form that is intimate and human. For this reason the prevalent attitude of these northern barbarians to Christianity was such that they accepted it in a much more primitive form. And for a long time these barbarian Arians (cf. R. XLVII.) of the north, kept aloof from the complicated conceptions simply embodied in the pagan ritual, and represented Christ-Jesus to themselves more or less as an idealised man, as an idealised man raised to the level of the divine, as the foremost brother of mankind, though still a brother. The relation of the Christ to some kind of unknown God did not much interest them; on the contrary, what interested them extraordinarily was how human nature stood in relation to the Christ nature, what immediate connection the human heart, the human mind, is able to have with the ideal man Christ-Jesus, And this was bound up with the outlook concerning the external social structure for mankind. Christ became a special King, a special Leader of the people. How in their imagination they would follow a leader in whom they had trust so they wished to follow Christ-Jesus as the outstandingly illustrious Leader. Something here arose that might be described as seeking a personal relation to Christ Jesus in contrast to the complicated relation of the south, which could only be expressed by the imaginative picture realised in the ritual.

Now what brought this about? Indeed, my dear friends, these barbarian peoples to whom Christianity penetrated in the north are the germ of what later was to arise in human evolution as the fifth post-Atlantean period. They were not completely men by the time the people of the fourth post-Atlantean period had already come to a comparatively high point. They absorbed into their still primitive human nature what can only enter a highly developed mankind in the form of the realised imaginations of the ritual. The barbarians' hearts and minds absorbed intimately, personally, what in a changed human nature was received in lofty spirituality, nevertheless in the south received only in a pagan form.

Thus we see the germ of Christianity falling into southern hearts and into hearts of the barbarians of the north quite differently. These northern barbarian hearts are far less mature than the hearts of the southern peoples, and the Christ impulse sinks into this immaturity. And we are faced by the remarkable fact that in the whole south, throughout Christianised Judaism, throughout the Christianised paganism of the Greeks, the Christianised paganism of Rome, Christianity so permeated the spirit that before the coming of the Christ impulse that was approaching man, the Christ conception was determined and was given form in the way it was possible to form it according to the old experiences of the soul. For these ancient people had a significant life of soul, a life of soul, in a certain sense, of grandiose development. The northern barbarians had a primitive, simple soul-life, accustomed only to what was nearest the soul, to the closest relations of a personal kind between man and man. And into these close relations there streamed the Christ impulse. These men had no conception at all of scientific knowledge as it was developed among the Greeks, nor had they any political views concerning the structure of the State, as formed by the Romans. There was nothing of this kind among the northern barbarians. Their conceptual life of soul could be said to have been so far disengaged. They could not think much. They could hunt, they could fight, they could do a little tilling of the ground, they could do something else too—well, you have only to read about the old barbarians of the north; but they could not develop any kind of organised science. They had no conceptual life before the coming of the Christ impulse, conceptions could only come to the people with the Christ impulse. Therefore it may be said that to men in the south Christ came in such a way that He to come to had to standstill in face of the Conceptual life which they brought to meet Him. These men of the south erected a gateway. “You must first pass through this”, they said to the Christ. This gateway was still what had been built out of the old traditional conceptions. The barbarians of the north had no such gateway, there was no barrier to admission, the Christ impulse could enter freely. Between the people or peoples who lived their lives there in the north as barbarians, these peoples to whom the Christ came, and Jesus himself as the individual man to whom Christ came, there is only a difference of degree. In Palestine Christ came to the individual man Jesus. Then the impulse spread itself out over the southern lands; everywhere in these southern countries was the gateway of the conceptual life, where the impulse could not enter as it entered into the man Jesus. In the way the Christ impulse came to the northern barbarians it could not, it is true, enter every individual man—they were no Jesuses—but it was able to enter the folk souls; these in a certain relation accepted it as the Christ. And between the folk souls and the Christ a process took place similar to the one between Jesus and the Christ. (cf. R XLVII.)

This is the inner secret of the journey of Christianity up through the southern lands to the barbarians of the north. But they had not progressed very far, these northern barbarians. And even when the Christ had been able to make a direct entry there was nothing very grand in the dwellings He could set foot in. Primitive, the most primitive conceptions, were there. I might say: what in the south was already highly developed had been unfolded as if beneath the aegis of world evolution, but the evolution of a previous stage—what was highly developed in the

south during the fourth post-Atlantean, the Greco-Latin culture stage, in the north was still quite embryonic, waiting on till later. Thus it may be said: we have the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage, the fifth post-Atlantean culture stage; (cf. R XLVII.) we know that the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage runs from 747 years before the event of Golgotha to the year 1413 of our era after which it still goes on; we live now in the fifth post-Atlantean culture epoch. Take any point of the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage, let us say a point during the fifth century before the event of Golgotha, when evolution was already advanced in the Greco-Latin countries; it was, however, very backward among the northern barbarians. It was awaiting the later development; the same point only arrived for them much later. In other words, in the north, even though they finally came to a higher stage, men were much later in arriving at the same point as was reached earlier by men in the south. It is important to bear this in mind. For only by remembering this do we see how the inner evolution, the inner development, of human life takes form throughout the earth.

Only consider to what a height this Graeco-Latin culture has come by the time the great—one cannot call him merely a philosopher but the great man Plato arose in this Greco-Latin culture, Plato with his raising of the human myth into the kingdom of ideas. When he spoke of ideas, it was not to the abstract ideas spun by modern men Plato looked up. Plato's ideas are the very being of the spirit itself. Whoever really knows in Plato on whet heights this old Greco-Latin culture of the fourth post-Atlantean culture period stood. During the time the great Plato was towering above all that was Greece, the northern barbaric culture still had much to pass through until, for its part, it had brought forth out of its own flesh and blood, if only for the fifth post-Atlantean period, the same as had been produced out of Greece in the lifetime of Plato.

We may ask when it was that the barbarian natures of the north, out of their own flesh and blood, first worked themselves up to the heights on which Plato had already stood at an earlier epoch? An the answer to the question is, at the time of Goethe! What in the Greek civilisation was Platonism, is Goetheanism for the fifth post-Atlantean period. For how many years go by, my dear friends, in one culture period? You know that if you take 1413 years after the Mystery of Golgotha and 747 years before, that gives us one culture period, 2160 years, a little over 2000 years. This is about the time that passed between Plato and Goethe, a rather long culture period lies between these two.

And while we consider Plato, one thing stands out concerning him that lights forth from the rest of ancient culture in a grandiose way. There meets us what lies in Plato's words when his philosophy ascends to religious inspiration and he says: “God is the Good”, where he has the feeling that the perception of nature in accordance with ideas must be bound up with the moral ordering of the world—the divine is the good. With these words the promise of Christianity enters Greek civilisation.

But with these words there would also be an indication of a promise with Goethe in the north—an expectation of a renewal of Christianity. Who could look inwardly upon Goethe either in any way but as having within him the promise of a renewed understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha? The boy Goethe, the seven-year-old boy, still stood like a pagan before nature, and lived again all that once lay in Greece. He takes a reading desk, places on it all kinds of stones and bits of rock representing nature's processes, lights a pastille from the direct light of the sun through a burning-glass and thus offers his sacrifice to the great God of nature. Purely pagan worship of nature, nothing lives in this of Christ-Jesus, in this lives the God who can be contemplated in nature. And Goethe is sincere to the innermost fibre of his being. Outwardly he does not acknowledge any God, any divine Being, with whom he cannot inwardly unite himself in all sincerity. To agree with the conception of God given him by a priest is for him an impossibility; to learn outwardly what does not surge up from his inmost soul is an impossibility. Thus, still in the year 1780, there springs forth from his inner being his Hymn to Nature. that wonderful Hymn in prose to nature which begins:

“Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, unable
to step out of her, unable to get into her more deeply.
She takes us up unasked and unwarned into the circle of
her dance and carries us among till we are wearied and
fall from her arms . . . (see George Adams translation: A. Q.)

Everything is nature. We belong to her, she drives us along with her. Even what is unnatural is nature, The greatest philistinism has something of her genius. It is she who places me here and she will not hate her work. The profit is hers, the debt is hers.

This outlook itself springs forth from his intimate inmost being because Goethe is so honestly seeking it in the way it has to be sought by him as representative of his stage of humanity in which there is nothing Christian. You find a wonderful leaning towards God in the whole prose-hymn to Nature, almost as though he were still the seven-year-old boy erecting his pagan altar with its products of nature; but you do not find anything Christian. For Goethe stands as the honest representative of mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean period which for him stood as the period of waiting. But Goethe clearly expresses that it is not possible to remain at the stage of paganism, when on the one hand, in his morphology and his colour theory he comes to his grandiose outlook on nature, an outlook that is at the same time scientific. But this is also expressed from another aspect when he has to go beyond this perception of nature, beyond this paganism. From this point of view take the inner impulse of Faust, take from this point of view particularly all that Goethe has secretly introduced into his fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, take everything about the re-birth of man expressed in this fairy tale—and then try not just to remain on the surface but to press on to what was living in Goethe's mind, then, my dear friends, the idea will come to you: here in the soul of a man is living a new Christ impulse, a new impulse for transforming mankind, brought about by the Mystery of Golgotha, a striving after a new understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha. For the whole fairy tale of the Green Snake end the Beautiful Lily breathes forth this mood of expectation.

Where Plato stands in the culture of the Greeks, Goethe stands in the fifth post-Atlantean period. The question “Where does Goethe stand” leads us on to say: As Plato with the definition of the Divine as the Good pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha as a key to understanding the fourth post-Atlantean period, in all that rings forth from his fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe was pointing to the fresh understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha that had perforce to come. This is the answer to the question of where Goethe stands. What is there that up to most recent times one can picture as spiritualising all that happens to mankind? The outer historical understanding that just counts up men and events one after the other, says actually nothing at all that can touch upon the real inner being of man. But if we look at the inner side of what happens, if we see that at the same point as Plato stood for the fourth post-Atlantean period, Goethe now stands for the fifth period, then there is revealed to us the spiritual wave that up to the present day has been creatively surging into the world. During very recent times history for modern man has in general became thoroughly unspiritual in the way it is grasped. Goetheaism is at the same time a mood of expectancy in which one is waiting for a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We come to an understanding of what happened as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, only by trying to penetrate to the depths of the events affecting mankind. (cf. Karma of Vocation.) My dear friends, as ennobling conceptions can be called up in the human heart if anyone tries today to renew certain experiences that were aroused in paganism—for example if we look up to the conception of the great Isis of the Egyptians. Certainly even up to the time of Plato the conceptions about the Egyptian Isis as the impulse holding sway throughout nature still resounded towards men. If today we hear about Isis, if we hear about Isis without powerfully experiencing anew what people felt in those times, we are left with the mere words. If we are honest it is all mere words. If we are not intoxicated by the sound of words simply words are there—the matter does not grip the heart. what can modern man do if he wishes to awaking the same conceptions within him that in ancient days were aroused in human hearts when Isis was spoken of?

Modern men can let work upon him Goethe's Hymn in prose to Nature. There man is spoken to in the same way as when Isis was spoken of to those men of old. And what sounded to those men of old when Isis was spoken of rings still directly from the hidden depths of the cosmos.

Let us for once think what wrong we do, wrong to world evolution as well as to our own hearts, when we do not wish to hear in this way, when we prefer to take up a purely external attitude, because the way in which the men of old spoke about Isis has round it a glory of the past. When Isis was spoken of by those ancient people there sounded forth from the words a primeval holy secret. And language in our time ought to speak of this secret, truly, actually speak of this secret deeply in the same way as it came from the lips of the Egyptian Priests when they sang about Isis. We should not fail to recognise when deep things hold sway in the new life of spirit. In this way, too, we shall once again feel ourselves true men when we are not prosaic in our feeling, when what is holy sounds towards us in the way it will sound forth out of the newer impulse of historical evolution. Then when we prepare ourselves by paganism, as one might say, through something of the nature of the hymn in prose, with all the widening of soul we can get from this, with all the deepening of soul that makes itself felt within us, with all the ennobling of soul we can experience, we shall sink deeply into what there is in many of the scenes in Faust or in the fairy tale of The Green snake and the Beautiful Lily, where we shall find expressed the mood of waiting for a new understanding among the most modern people of the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is an indication of something about the finding of Goethe and Goetheanism that I wanted to give you, not in the form this discovery often takes but a discovery that really finds the Goethe spirit in the whole course of human evolution, for the understanding of the immediate present, for the strengthening of the impulse we need if we would take our right place today and in the near future, in which we must take our place not sleeping—as I have so often emphasised—but awake, if we do not want to sin against the progress of man's evolution.

More of this tomorrow.

Last night dear Frau Dr. Leyh died. I believe from the very fact of her expending so much energy in playing her part in this organisation during the last weeks of her life on earth, in spite of severe illness that made it hard for her to come up and down here—I believe that from the keenness with which she shared in our work you will have been able simply through these facts, particularly when you have so constantly seen her here, to feel what a delightful and precious personality has left us if one is to speak in the terms of outer space.

Those of our friends who tended her devotedly during the last days of her earthly life, who stood by her in friendship and devotion, have shown in every case of this standing-by, in all the help given her, how fond they had become of this personality. I need not dwell at length on what we all feel in our hearts. Those who have now had the opportunity of knowing this personality so well in her intimate circle, not only during her suffering of the last weeks but all through her spiritual striving, her wonderful spiritual struggles, which came to such a grand conclusion that even on her last day she was deep in many great ideas about our world-outlook—those with her in her intimate circle, and also those less intimately connected with her (as I said, I need not labour this) will send their thoughts towards the spiritual region
where henceforth our good friend will be. They will be following her and will use every moment possible to be together in spirit with one whom physically they have been permitted to be so closely connected with in the spirit of our world conception, in times when the friend who has gone could joyfully follow but also in times when she had to follow only with sorrow, what our Anthroposophical development wills.

In token of this, my dear friends, we will rise from our seats.

Yesterday I wanted to make it clear that, looked at from one side, the actual content, the deeper content, of the Christ impulse that has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has not been entirely imparted to mankind either all at once nor during the relatively long time that there has been a Christianity up to now. During the whole of the future, ever more and more of the content of the Christ impulse will be imparted to mankind; in fact there is deep truth in the saying of Christ Jesus; “For, lo, I am with you away even unto the end of the world.” And Christ did not mean that He would be inactive among men but that He would be revealing Himself actively, entering into their souls, giving souls encouragement, giving them strength; so that when these souls know what is happening within them they find the way, they are able to find the connection with the Christ and feel themselves strong for their earthly striving.

But just in this age of ours, this age of consciousness, it is necessary for all this to be clear, as far as may be today, and as I have said the content will flow forth in an ever clearer and richer stream for men. For this very reason it is already necessary today to make clear to ourselves what actually belongs to the revelation of the Christ impulse. To come to a right understanding on this point we must first be permeated by the knowledge that the human race has really developed, really changed, in the course of the earth period. One can best describe the change by saying that when we look back into very ancient times on earth, times long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find on close scrutiny that the bodily nature of man was more spiritual than it is today. And it was this bodily nature of man that allowed the visions to arise which in a certain way revealed to atavistic clairvoyance the supersensible world. But this faculty, this force, for making oneself acquainted with the spiritual world by atavistic clairvoyance, became gradually lost to mankind. And just at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching there was indeed a crisis. This crisis showed that the force in connection with the revelation of the spiritual had sunk to its lowest degree in man's bodily nature.

Now from that point of time, from that critical point, there had to arise a strengthening of the soul and spirit, a strengthening of the power of soul and spirit, corresponding to the weakening of bodily power. Here in the earthly body we have to count on our body as an instrument. Man would simply not have been capable of acquiring in his soul and spirit the new strength necessary to meet the lowering of his bodily forces, had he net received help from a region that was not of the earth, a region outside the earth, had not something entered the earth from outside—namely, the Christ impulse. Man would have been too weak to make any progress by himself.

And this can be seen particularly clearly if we look at the nature of the old Mysteries. What purpose did these old Mysteries serve? On the whole it may be said: the great masses of our forefathers (which means of ourselves, for in our former life we were indeed the very men we now call forefathers) these men in very ancient days were furnished with a much duller consciousness than that of today. They were more instinctive beings. And the men of this instinctive nature would never have been able to find their way into a knowledge that is nevertheless necessary for man's good, for his support, for his growing powers of consciousness. And certain personalities initiated into the Mysteries, whose Karma called them to do so could then proclaim to the others who led a more instinctive life the truths that may be called the truths of salvation. This instruction, however, could only be given in those olden days out of a certain constitution of the human organism, the human being, a constitution no longer existing. The Mystery Ceremonies, the organisation of the Mysteries in their various stages, depended upon a man becoming a different person through the Mysteries. Today, this can no longer really be pictured because through external arrangements (recently I have given an account of these in the Egyptian Mysteries) (cf. R LII.) it is not possible at the stage we are in today. By bringing about certain functions, certain inner experiences of soul, the man's nature really became so transformed that the spiritual was liberated in full consciousness. But the pupil in the Mysteries was prepared to begin with in such a way that this spiritual did not become free in the chaotic condition that it does today in sleep; a man could really perceive in the spiritual. The great experience undergone by Mystery pupils was that after initiation they knew about the spiritual world as a man through his eyes and ears knows about the physical world of the senses. After that they were able to proclaim what they knew of the spiritual world.

But the time came when a man's nature could no longer be straightway transformed in this manner by such doings as those in the ancient Mysteries. Man did indeed change in the course of history. Something different had to come and the different thing that came was actually what at a certain stage man had experienced in the Mysteries, the inner resurrection, enacted as historical fact on Golgotha. Now this had happened historically. A man, Jesus—for outwardly as a man going about He was the man Jesus—had gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. Those who were His intimates knew, however, that after a certain time He appeared among them as a living being (how this was we will not go into today) and that therefore the resurrection is a truth.

Thus we may say: In the course of human evolution the fact once came about that at a certain place on earth the news was proclaimed that through a force coming from beyond the the earth, the Christ impulse, a man had triumphed over death: and thus the overcoming of death could actually be one of the experiences, one of the practical experiences, of earthly existence. And what was the consequence? The consequence was that in the historical evolution of man there had taken place something intellectually incomprehensible, something which should now develop in a special way, something belonging to the progress of man. For it is incomprehensible to the human intellect that a man should die, be buried and rise again. To save the evolution of the earth something therefore was necessary, something had to happen, in the physical course of earthly evolution that is incomprehensible to the understanding which can be employed quite well where nature is in question, but incomprehensible to the intellect that is applied to nature. And it is only honourable to admit that the farther men progress in the development of this intellect—and development in the consciousness age is pre-eminently development of the intellect—the more incomprehensible must the event of Golgotha become for this intellect that is above all directed to external nature. We can put it like this—anyone only conscious of the way the ordinary intellect is applied when directed to Nature, must in honesty gradually come to own that he does not understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But he must give himself a shake for nevertheless he must understand. This is what is essential—to give oneself a shake, and simply think oneself out above the sound human understanding. This is essential, it is something that necessarily must happen—to give oneself this shake so as in spite of all to learn to understand something apparently incomprehensible precisely for the highest human force.

There must be ever more and more a going back—the greater the development of the intellect upon which the flourishing of science depends, the more the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha will have to retreat before the intellectual development. It was for this reason also that in a certain sense historically chosen for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha—in the way I have explained the Mystery of Golgotha to you—it was not the cultured Hebrews, nor the cultured Greeks, nor the cultured Romans, who as I said yesterday converted it into different conceptions, but above all it was the northern barbarians, with their primitive culture, who in their primitive souls received the Christ Who came to them just as He came to Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed in the sense of what I was discussing with you yesterday it may be said: The Christ came first to the man Jesus of Nazareth in the event of Golgotha. There mankind was shown—the mankind of the Hebrews, the mankind of the Greeks, mankind of the Romans—the most important of all happenings in earthly existence. But after that Christ came once again, united Himself with the men who peopled the East and the North of Europe, who by no manner of means possessed the culture of the Hebrews nor of the Greeks, nor of the Romans. There He did not unite Himself with individual man, there He united Himself with the folk souls of these tribes. Yesterday, however, we had to emphasise that these tribes gradually evolved. They had to a certain degree to overtake at a fifth stage what at a fourth stage had been accomplished by the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin peoples. And yesterday we dwelt on the fact that it was only at Goethe's epoch that the epoch of Plato was reached for this later time. In Goethe himself, for the fifth post-Atlantean period, the Platonism of the Greeks of the fourth post-Atlantean period was repeated. Yet in Goetheanism man still had not come to the point at which he already faced the entirely new form of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha, but, as I said yesterday, he was in a state of expectation.

This attitude towards the Mystery of Golgotha on the part of more recent mankind can be particularly well studied if one comes to a real understanding of the personality, but for the moment the personality of soul and spirit of Goethe. It is absolutely in accordance with Spiritual Science for us to ask the following question: Where do Goethe and those who belong to him, the various minds who were in connection with him, stand as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth; where does Goetheanism stand with regard to mankind's evolution, with regard to understanding the Christ impulse? We might first consider how Goethe actually stood within European evolution.

Now it will be well here to recall something I have often said to you during these years of catastrophe, it will be just as well to go back to the answer to the question—where are the European periphery tending with their American off shoots? We should not forget that whoever turns his gaze without prejudice to these civilisations on the periphery of Europe, knows that in what English culture consists, in the cultures too of France, Italy, the Balkans, as as there has been progression here, but even behind the culture of Eastern Europe, all this has been rayed out from the centre of Europe; all these cultures have been radiated out. Naturally it would be dreadfully prejudiced to believe that what today is Italian culture, Italian civilisation, is anything but what has been radiated throughout Italy from mid-Europe, but absorbed into the Latin nature, still there in the language and outer form. It would be shocking prejudice to think that English civilisation is intrinsically different from what has streamed out from mid-Europe, and actually merely appropriated again in its language and so on in another way, in reality far less than the Italian or French way. But all that France, England, Italy and, even in mare respects, what Eastern Europe is, has been rayed out from central Europe. And in this centre there has now remained what indeed we have just found left after the streaming out of these cultures, what has remained as the womb out of which Goetheanism has evolved. We are faced today by this fact, a fact to be calmly accepted, that what has rayed forth into the periphery is working with all its power to bring to naught, to
nullify, even where soul and spirit are in question, everything existing in mid-Europe from which it has streamed. There will come a time when the world will look in a quite different way from how it does today upon this monstrous phenomenon in human events, where the world is reedy to set up as idols fourteen corpses of western thought. At some future date mankind will realise that there came about what may be called the absolute desire to exterminate what thus radiated out in all directions. It goes without saying that the tragedy of this fact will bear its fruit.

For connected with this fact, we see appearing in a further step forward of Europe's evolution, with the exception of the period during recent decades when other forces may be said to have held sway, all that prepared a way for itself and developed throughout the centuries by reason of the personal characteristics of those who in the most various directions developed these civilisations—we see all this streaming forth from the whole of Central Europe. How little inclination mankind has today for forming unprejudiced judgment on this point: I think I may say that, at the time the last traces were to be found of what assured the matter a fully scientific basis, I myself actually stood in intimate connection with it; my old friend, Karl Julius Schröer, was studying the various dialects, the various languages and the various natures of those sections of the people looked upon as German nationals of North Hungary, of Siebenburg and formerly of the various districts in Austria. Whoever observes here all that refers to the unpretentious dictionary and grammar of the Zips-German of Siebenburg Saxony in Schröer's studies which, in personal collaboration with him in the studies he was then making concerning the spread of mid-European culture, I was permitted to comment upon, whoever does this may say that he was still connected with a knowledge unhappily no longer even noticed today amid the confusion and turmoil of events. But let us look at this Hungary where, you must know, purely Magyar culture has been-supposedly established in the course of recent decades, since the year 1867; let us look there, not with political unreality, political delusion, political hatred, let us look in conformity with the truth. It will then be discovered that in the regions that afterwards, later, were supposed to be magyarised as countries of the Magyars, men from the Rhine were moved in—like the Siebenburg Saxons, men from further west, like the Germans of Zips, men out of modern Swabia, like the Germans of Bana. All this is the leaven forming the basis of the Magyar culture over which is now simply poured what then in reality was only developed very late as Magyar culture. At the basis of this Magyar culture, however, though perhaps not in anything expressible in language, but rather in the feelings, in the experiences, in the whole national character, there has always flowed in what has for centuries come from Central Europe.

Astonishing as it is, were you just to take the whole of European history, you could make a study of this in all the periphery regions of Europe. In the east the Slav wave came up against what radiated from the centre, and what radiated from the centre was pushed aside by the Slav wave—in the west by the Latin wave. And through a tragic chain of events, having, however, an inner historical necessity, the periphery then turned against what still remained in the womb of the centre, turned in such a way that from this turning a fact becomes clear—it may be believed or not, it may easily be mocked or scoffed at or not—what remained in mid-Europe grew out of Goetheanism, grasped by soul ant spirit in its reality and its truth, all this no longer meets with any understanding in the best intelligence of the periphery. Of this it might be said: The actual substance of what is the essence of mid-Europe is spoken of everywhere, even in the American countries, as though people had no notion of it. People may have no notion of it, but world history will bring it to the surface. This is what can give one strength in a certain sense to be able to hold fast to it.

It is true, my dear friends, on Silvester eve I gave you here a picture worked out by a man who is well able to make a calculation about the future relations of central Europe. (see Z 269.) If everything is fulfilled, even if only part is fulfilled, of what the periphery countries are wanting, these relations cannot be otherwise. But out of all this, the extermination of which for external existence has been decided upon, indeed the extermination of which will be fulfilled above everything else during the next years, the next decades—for so it has been determined in the councils of the periphery powers—within all this there has been the last shaping of what we described yesterday; there was within it the last shaping of what is nevertheless important as a leaven for the evolution of men. It must flow in, this evolution simply must go on of which I gave you a picture in what has to do with the Magyars. This radiating will indeed continue.

But particularly in central Europe all that during the last decades has certainly been very little understood there, will have to be grasped. Something of the nature of what lies in the aims of the threefold ordering of social existence, as I have presented it, will have to be understood. It will be central Europe itself that will be called upon to understand this threefold ordering. And perhaps if this centre of Europe has no external state, if this centre of Europe is obliged to live tragically in chaos, there will then be the first beginnings of understanding that we have to overcome those old outlooks for which the periphery of Europe is at present struggling, for these old outlooks will be unable to be maintained even by the European periphery. The old concept of the state will vanish, it will give place to the separation into three parts. And what constitutes Goetheanism will indeed have to enter this external life. Whether or not it is given this name is immaterial. The essential thing is that Goethe's world-outlook foresees what simply must be made clear also where the forming of human society is concerned. But all this can be discovered only if we take the trouble to understand this representative, this most representative being of all Germans—Goethe. For he is such a perfect representative of the German nature just because he is so entirely without national Chauvinism or anything at all reminiscent of Chauvinism or nationalism, as understood today. There must be an attempt to understand this man who represents all that is new, this most modern man, at the same time this most fruitful of men in his being for all that is spiritual culture. It cannot be said that mankind have yet reached a high point in their comprehension of Goethe. In his environment Goethe felt very mush alone. And even were Goethe one of those personalities who accustom themselves to social intercourse, who even develop a certain adroitness and grace in society so that a possible relation is set up to their environment, even were this so, the real Goethe living in the inner circle of Weimar and later in outward appearance the stout Privy Councillor with the double chin—the man who inwardly lived in this stout Privy Councillor felt lonely. And in a certain way he may be said still to be alone today. He is alone for a quite definite reason and must feel himself alone. This feeling of cultural isolation, this feeling of his that he was not understood, perhaps underlay his remarkable saying of later years: “Perhaps a hundred years hence Germans will be different from what they are now, perhaps from scholars they will have grown into human beings.”

My dear friends, this saying must touch us in the very depths of our soul. For, you see, we may look at the last years of the eighties, for example. When after the death of the last of Goethe's grandchildren in Weimar the Archives of Goethe and Schiller and the Goethe Society were founded, these were founded by a gathering of men—truly I want to say it in the best sense of the word—by a gathering of scholars. In fact the Goethe cult was organised by men, by personalities, who really had not grown out of scholars into men. One may even go farther. You know how much I revere Herman Grimm, the art historian, the subtle essayist (cf. The Story of My Life, also E.N.43.) and I have never made any secret of my admiration nor spoken to you in any different way about my admiration for Herman Grimm. I have also unconditionally admitted to you that I consider what has come from Herman Grimm's pen about Goethe as the best book as biography, as monography, that has been written about him. But now take this book of Herman Grimm's; it is written out of a certain human affection and width of outlook, but take it as giving a picture of Goethe himself which arises when you have let the book have its affect upon you. What is this figure Goethe? It is just a ghost, a ghost rather than the living Goethe. If these things are taken earnestly and in a spirit worthy of them one cannot help feeling that should Herman Grimm meet Goethe today, or had he met Goethe during his life time, because he harboured fervent admiration for him in the tradition built up about Goethe, he would have been ready at any moment to say: Goethe is predestined to be the spiritual king not only of mid-Europe but of all mankind. Indeed Herman Grimm, had it come his way, would have even gone to great lengths to serve as herald, had it been a question of making Goethe king of all earthly culture. But neither can one get free of the other feelings Had Herman Grimm got into conversation with Goethe, or Goethe with Herman Grimm, Herman Grimm would hardly have found it possible to understand what was in the depths of Goethe's being. For what he portrays in his book, although undoubtedly the best he knew of Goethe, is nothing but the shadow thrown by Goethe on his surroundings, the impression he made upon his age. There is nothing here, not even the slightest suggestion, of what lived in Goethe's soul—but merely a ghost out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not what was living deep down in Goethe.

This is a remarkable phenomenon which must be pondered in the soul in all seriousness and with due consideration. And if we look away from all this well, not Goetheanism but Goethe-worship that even a hundred years after Goethe is in reality far more scholarly than human, if we look back at Goethe himself, beneath much of what is great, much of what is grandiose confronting us in Goethe, we see one thing above all. Much, curiously much in Goethe—just take The Mysteries Frau Dr. Steiner recited here a short time ago, take the Pandora, take the Prometheus Fragment, (cf. E.N. 36) or some other work, take the fact that The Natural Daughter is only the first part of an incomplete trilogy, or the fact that in this fragment there was expressed something of the very greatest that lived in Goethe, and you have the strange, the quite strange, fact that when Goethe set himself to express what was greatest he never brought it to a conclusion. This was because he was sufficiently honest, not outwardly to round off the matter, to bring it to perfection, as a poet, an artist, will even do, but simply to leave off when the inner source of strength became dry. This is the reason wily so much remained unfinished: But the matter goes further, my dear friends. The matter goes far enough for us to be able to say: In an external way Faust is certainly brought to a conclusion, but how much in Faust is inwardly unsound, how much in it is like the figure of Mephistopheles itself. Read what I have said about Faust and about the figure of Mephistopheles in the recently published booklet on Goethe, where I spoke of how Goethe in his Mephistopheles set up a figure that in reality does not exist, for In this figure the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman merge into one another and interweave in a chaotic way. And in the course of the week you will see presented here the last scenes before the appearance of Helen, before the third Act of the second part of Faust, something completed in Goethe's advanced age, something, however, on the one hand impressive, deep, powerful, on the other hand though finished to outward appearance, inwardly quite unfinished. It contains everywhere hints of what Goethe was hankering after, which however would not come into his soul. If we regard Faust from the point of view of its human greatness we have before us a work of gigantic proportions; if we look from the point of view of the greatness that would have lived in it had Goethe in his time been able to bring forth all that lay in his soul, then we have a frail, brittle work everywhere incomplete in itself. (see R LV.)

What Goethe left to those coming after him is perhaps the most powerful testament. That they should not only acknowledge him, that they do not acknowledge him today as a great scholar, or even as a man of certain culture, is easy to understand but Goethe did not make our attitude to him as easy as that. Goethe has to live among us as if he were still alive; he must be further felt, further thought. What is most significant in Goetheanism does not remain where Goethe was, for in his time he was not able to bring it into his soul out of the spiritual, and only the tendency is everywhere present. Goethe demands of us that we should work with him, think with him, feel with him, that we should carry on his task just as though he were standing behind each one of us, tapping us on the shoulder, giving us advice. In this sense it may be said that the whole of the nineteenth century and up to our own time, Goethe has been given the cold shoulder. And the task of our time is to find the way back to Goethe. Strictly speaking nothing is more foreign to real Goetheanism than the whole earthly culture, external earthly culture, with the exception of the modicum of spiritual culture that we have—nothing is more foreign than the earthly culture of the end of the nineteenth century or even of the twentieth century. The way back to Goethe must be found through the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

This can be understood only by one who can go straight for the question: where did Goethe stand actually and in reality? You have from Goethe the most honest human avowal (I spoke of this yesterday) that he started out from paganism as it also corresponded to Platonism. The boy erected for himself a pagan altar to Nature, then the man Goethe was most strongly influenced not by all that was derived from the traditional Christianity of the Church, this fundamentally always remained foreign to him because his world-outlook is a world-outlook of expectancy, of awaiting the new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Those who in the old, traditional sense embraced the faith of the Christian Church in comfort, or even wished within this Christian Church to carry through all manner of purely outward reforms, were not in reality, closely related to him inwardly, where soul and spirit are concerned. Actually he always felt as he did when, travelling with the two apparently good Christians Lavater and Baswdow; two men who represented a progressive but at the same time old ecclesiastical Christianity, he said: “Prophets to right, prophets to left and the worldling in the middle.” It was his actual feeling between two of his contemporaries that he thus gave voice to; as opposed to the Christians around him he was always the definite non-Christian for the very reason that he was to prepare mankind for the Christ mood of waiting.

And so we see three men in a remarkable war having the very greatest influence upon his spiritual culture. These three men are actually thorough worldlings in a certain sense; ordinary Christian ministers were not popular with Goethe. The three personalities having such a great influence upon him are, first Shakespeare. Why had Shakespeare such a decisive influence upon Goethe? This was simply because Goethe aimed at building a bridge from the human to the superhuman, not in accordance with any abstract rule, not out of an intellectuality open to influence, but out of what is human itself. Goethe needed to hold fast to the human so that within it he might find the passage over from the human to the superhuman. Thus we see Goethe making every effort to model, to form the human, to work out of the human as Shakespeare did to a certain degree. Look how Goethe took hold of The History of Godfried Von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Berlichingen's autobiography; how altering it as little as possible he dramatised this history and moulded the first figure of his Götz von Berlichingen; how then he formed a second figure out of him, this time more transformed, having more shape—then a third. In a way Goethe seeks his own straight forward path which holding to Shakespeare's humanity, but out of the human he is wanting to form the superhuman.

This he first succeeded in doing when, on his Italian travels (read his letters), he believes he can recognise from what is near to him, from the Greek works of art, how the Greeks pursued the same intentions, the divine intentions, according to which nature herself proceeds. He goes on his own path, his own individual, personal,true, path of experience. He could not accept what those around him said—he had to find his own way.

The second mind that had an enormous influence upon him, was that of a decided non-Christian, namely, Spinoza. In Spinoza he had the possibility of finding the divine in the way this divine is found a man wishing to make a road for himself leading from the human to the superhuman. Fundamentally Spinoza's thoughts bear the last impression of the intellectual age of the old Hebrew approach to God. As such, Spinoza's thoughts are very far from the Christ-impulse. Spinoza's thoughts, however, are such that the human soul as it were finds in them the thread to which to hold when seeking that way. There within men is my being, from this human being I seek to press on to what is superhuman. This way that he could follow, that he did not have to have dictated to him, that be could fellow while following Spinoza, this path Goethe in a certain sense, at a certain stage in his life, looked upon as his.

And the third of the spirits having the greatest influence upon him was the botanist Linnaeus. Why Linnaeus? Linnaeus for the reason that Goethe would have no other kind botanical science, no other science of the living being, but one which simply placed the living beings in juxtaposition, in a row as Linnaeus has done. Goethe would have nothing to do with the abstract thinking that thinks out all kinds of thoughts about plant classes, species and so on. What he considered important was to let Linnaeus work upon him as a man who placed things beside one another. For from a higher standpoint than that of the people who follow up the plants in an abstract way, what Linnaeus conscientiously placed next to each other as plant forms Goethe wanted to pursue after his own fashion, just as the spirit makes itself felt in this side by side arrangement.

It is just these three spirits who really could give Goethe what was lacking in the intimate circle of his life at the time, but was something he had to find outside; it is just these spirits who had the strongest influence upon him. Goethe himself had nothing of Shakespeare in him, for when he came to the climax of his art he created his Natural Daughter, which certainly contained nothing of Shakespeare's art but strove after something entirely different. He could, however, develop his inmost being only by educating himself in Shakespeare. Goethe's world-outlook had nothing in it of the abstract Spinoza; what was deep within Goethe, however, as his way to God could only be reached through Spinoza. Goethe's morphology had nothing of the placing side by side of the organic being, as in the case of Linnaeus, but, Goethe needed the possibility of taking from Linnaeus what he himself did not have. And what he had to give was something new.

Thus then did Goethe develop and came to his fortieth year, brought up on Shakespeare, Linnaeus and Spinoza; and having gone through what in the way of art Italy could show him he said when there about these works of art: “Here is necessity, here is God”. And as he lived in the spirit of his epoch there took place in him in a strong but unconscious way, also, however, to a certain extent consciously, what may be called his meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold.

And now, bearing in mind his passing the Guardian of the Threshold in the early nineties of the eighteenth century, compare words sounding like prayers to Isis in ancient Egypt, reminiscent of the old Egyptian Isis, such as those in the Prose-Hymn to Nature just recited to you by Frau Dr. Steiner—compare these words in which Goethe had still a quite pagan feeling, with those that as powerful imagination meet you in The Fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, there you have Goethe's path from paganism to Christianity. But there in pictures stands what Goethe became after going through the region of the Threshold, after he passed the Guardian of the Threshold. It stands there in pictures which he himself was unable to analyse for people in intellectual thoughts, which all the same are mighty pictures. Whither are we obliged to go if we wish to understand the Goethe who wrote the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily? Consider what is written about the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in the little book on Goethe already mentioned. (see Goethe's Standard of the Soul) When we really look at this we are confronted by the fact that Goethe created this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily as a mighty Imagination, after passing the Guardian of the Threshold.

This fairy tale of The Green snake and the Beautiful Lily that has sprung from a soul transformed, sprang forth after the soul found the bridge from pagan experience as it still finds utterance in the Hymn in Prose. “Nature! we are surrounded and enveloped by her, unable to step out of her, unable to get into her more deeply. She takes us up unasked and unwarned into the circle of her dance, and carries us along till we are wearied and fall from her arms” . . . “Even the unnatural is Nature . . . Everything is her life; and death is merely her ingenious way of having more life . . .” and so on and so forth.

This pagan Isis mood is changed into the deep truths, not to be grasped at once by the intellect, lying in the mighty Imaginations of The Green Snake end the Beautiful Lily where Goethe set down uncompromisingly how all that man is able to find through the external science of Europe can only lead to the fantastic capers of a will-of-the wisp. He shows also, however, that what man develops within must lead him to develop the powers of his soul in such a way that the self-sacrificing serpent who sacrifices his own being to the progress of human evolution can became the model which enables the bridge to be built from the kingdom of the physical world of the senses to the kingdom of the superphysical; and between these there rises the Temple, the new temple, by means of which the supersensible kingdom may be experienced.

Certainly, in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily there is no talk of Christ. But just as little as Christ asked of a good follower that he should always just be saying Lord, Lord! is he a good Christian who always says Christ, Christ! The manner in which the pictures are conceived, the way the human soul is thought out in its metamorphosis in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, the sequence of the thoughts, the force of the thoughts—this is Christian, this is the new path to Christ. For, why is this? In Goethe's day there were a number of interpretations of this fairy tale and since then in addition to those there have been many more. We have thought to throw light on to the fairy tale from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. My dear friends, I may, (here in this circle I may venture to speak out about this) I have the right to speak about this fairy tale. It was at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century when the knot of this fairy tale untied itself for me. And I have never since forsaken the path that should lead farther and farther into the understanding of Goethe, with the help of the mighty Imaginations embodied In the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It may be said that the intellect that leads us quite well in our search for scientific truths, this intellect that can quite well guide us in acquiring an external outlook on nature and its conditions, at this precise moment so favourable to such an outlook, when anyone wishes to understand the fairy tale, this intellect is found absolutely wanting. It is necessary here to let the intellect be fructified by the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Here you have, transformed for our age and its conditions, what is necessary to all mankind for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha.

For understanding the Mystery of Golgotha the intellect must first be re-forced; it must move itself, jerk itself. No jerk is needed for understanding external nature. It has become ever more impossible for Latin culture as well as for the German—for the Latin because it is too greatly decedent, for the German culture because up to now it has not sufficiently evolved—it has become ever more impossible out of mere intellectuality to school the soul so far that it can find the new way to the Mystery of Golgotha. When, however, you develop the possibility in you, can you re-shape the forces of the soul so that they begin in a natural inner speech to find the passage over to the pictorial for which Goethe strove, then you school the forces of your soul so that they find the way to the new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what is important.

Goethe's significance does not lie only in that he accomplished; it lies above all In what he does to our soul when we fully surrender ourselves to the profoundest depths of his being. Then gradually mankind will be able even consciously to find the path an which to pass the Guardian of the Threshold, the path Goethe fortunately, took while still, unconscious, and on that account was unable to finish just those works in which he wished to express all that was deepest in him. In this soul of Goethe's there lived a shimmering and glimmering of what was conscious and what was unconscious, what was attainable and what was out of reach. When we let such a poem as The Mysteries work upon us, or when we let Pandora work upon us, or any of the things Goethe left unfinished, we have the feeling that in this very incompletion there lies something that must free itself in the souls of those following after Goethe, something that will have to be completed as a great spiritual picture.

Goethe was lonely. Where it was a question of Goethe's real being he was lonely, lonely in his evolution. Goetheanism contains much that is hidden. But, my dear friends, even though the nineteenth century has not yet produced human beings out of scholars, whereas Goethe struggled through out of a scholarly to a human world-outlook, evolution must indeed go forward with the help of Goethe's impulse. I said yesterday and repeat today that the force bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha once united itself in a little known province of the Roman Empire with the man Jesus of Nazareth, and then with the Folk souls at central Europe after that, however, this force became inward. And out of what was weaving there inwardly in central Europe came such results as we find in Goethe and the whole of Goetheanism. But it is just the nineteenth century that has had a great share in letting Goetheanism lie in its grave. In every sphere the nineteenth Century has done everything possible to leave Goetheanism in its grave.

The scholars Who in Weimar founded the Goethe Society at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century would much rather have belonged to those who buried Goetheanism than to those who could raise any thing of this Goetheanism from the deed. Quite certainly the time has not come for Goetheanism to be able to live yet for the external life. The time depends on what we have often spoken of, namely, on the renewal of the human soul through Spiritual Science. Whatever may come to this Europe that now in a certain sense would bring about its own death, the grave which above all, first of all, the lack of thought in modern culture is digging, this grave will nevertheless also be a grave from which something will rise again. I have already pointed to the fact that the Christ spirit united itself with the folk souls of middle Europe; Goetheanism arose in the bosom of these folk souls. A resurrection will come, a resurrection not to be conceived as political, a resurrection that will have a very different appearance—but resurrection it will be. Goetheanism, my dear friends is not alive, Goetheanism for outer culture is still resting in the move: Goetheanism must however rise again from the dead.

Let the building that we have sought to set up on this hill bear testimony to the sincerity of our purpose, with the necessary courage for the present time to undertake the bringing to life of G0etheanism. For this, it is true we should need the courage to understand and penetrate in its ungoethean way what has up till now called itself Goetheanism. We should have to learn to acclaim Goethe's spirit to the same degree as the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have disowned it, denied it in every possible sphere. Then the path of knowledge acquired through Spiritual Science, a path that is to be found unconditionally, will be connected with the historical path of the resurrection of Goetheanism. But it will also be connected with what can come from this resurrection of Goetheanism, that is, the impulse towards a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that right understanding of the Christ which is necessary for our particular age. Perhaps the pathfinder of the Christianity necessary for mankind in the future will be recognised as the decidedly non-Christian Goethe who, like Christ Himself, did not ask for the constant repetition of “Lord, Lord . . .” but that man should carry his spirit in his heart, in his mind; and that in Goetheanism it should not always be a matter of “Christ, Christ . . .” but all the more that what has flowed into men as reality from the Mystery of Golgotha should be preserved in the heart, so that this heart should gradually change abstract and intellectual knowledge, the present knowledge about nature, into something by means of which the supersensible world is seen, so that men may be given the force for a deeper knowledge of the world and for a shaping of the social structure that is worthy of the human being.

In some of the lectures I have recently held here I have dealt from several aspects with the now urgent, burning social question. Everyone who does not sleep through the events that weave themselves into his life, can be aware that this so-called social question has long been, and continues to be, an urgent and burning one for all mankind. From lectures I have held here and also from extracts of some given publicly by me in different parts of Switzerland, it can be seen how far in man's modern necessities of life, and in his most recent development, this social question has taken a definite form, a most incisive form, for life. In our Anthroposophical Movement, therefore, it behooves us to arrive, from our point of view, at a judgment about human destiny especially in regard to the social question, a judgment which in a way possible to us could be put into actual effect.

For a considerable time certain of our members have endeavoured to make their powers of use in our difficult times. Many things have been considered and put under review. Naturally for each of us it is possible to intervene in affairs only in the way his fate, his karma, and his position in life allow. As a result of the various aspirations among us, the following has now evolved. Three well-known members, who set themselves the special task of working in Stuttgart to meet the demands of modern life, Herr Mott, Dr. Bock, and Herr Kühn, came to me early in February and decided to put into practice, as far and as suitably as possible, what we have been able to learn from our world-outlook and conception of life. When we are dealing with a matter not of mere consideration but of practical application, the question can only be what at a definite point of time is suitable, what answers the purpose, what in a certain relation is the fitting thing with which to begin. If one does not make a suitable beginning one will rush in where angels fear to tread and, as a rule, accomplish nothing. For us at the present moment it is a matter of doing something in accordance with what has gone before, something the hard-pressed German people will find justified. In the events of the present day, above all appears one thing that is most significant—the existence of a deep gulf between the classes of men. On one side of this gulf stand the circles that have hitherto more or less led men's destiny; on the other side, the proletariat pressing forward with the reality of their social claims. The proletariat, it is true, appears to the observant in two forms, the workers themselves, and their leaders. I have often shown here how all the thoughts, aspirations and impulses in the heads of the leaders, by the help of which they gain their influence over the workers, are fundamentally a legacy from the middle-class thinking of the previous century. We have spoken of this here from various points of view, and sought to confirm it.

Now one of the most significant phenomena is this deep gulf between the two human groups. In recent days this has been clearly visible to those who follow the history of the times; on the one side Paris, where the standpoint of the formerly leading circles of mankind prevails, where man's destiny and that of the present time are dealt with; on the other side, Berne with its Conference in which lives everything that is divided from the other by the deep gulf. Whoever has carefully followed what has issued from Paris and what on the other hand has been attempted in Berne, at the socialist Congress, could not but confess that the essential thing, the significant and lasting thing, that will make itself felt in human evolution, is not the result of what is thought and hoped for in Paris or Berne, but the fact that in these two places two such very different social languages have been spoken. To be really honest one has to confess that here we have two totally different languages, languages up to now mutually incomprehensible.

On due consideration this significant phenomenon may strike everyone as justifying what I have so often said here, namely, that if we are to understand these things and share in the working out of possible solutions, many root causes must be looked for that are deeper than those sought today by either side. Time and again we have the opportunity of seeing what I referred to two days ago in a public lecture at Basle—that the social question, the social movement, is already an actual question, a question of present events for a great part of civilised mankind, in as deeply decisive a way as anything in the history of mankind. It presents itself in this way to all those of insight. And how often have I pointed out here that the deeper causes are to be found only through those considerations of reality that result from the Movement here for Spiritual Science, Anthroposophy—the deeper causes also for the social study of life and of things.

At the beginning of the year [ Note 1 ] I pointed out something I believe to be significant, namely, that today it is possible for mankind to be thoroughly pessimistic not just from emotional reasons but on actual social grounds. At the time, I read to you an excellent article by a man [ Note 2 ] who in this way is really able to estimate social matters. I have told you that it is profitable to think pessimistically only when one is not conscious of the other side of the fact—that help can be found by turning to the spirit. For that, a consciousness must be cultivated more and more that there is only ground for belief in destructive forces, which can produce terrible results in the coming decades, if men refuse to turn to the consideration of the realities arising from Spiritual Science. Naturally we do not mean by this the dogma of some spiritual movement or other, what we mean is an appeal to any forces of the spirit that alone can heal and help at this critical juncture in human evolution.

Thus, in a particular way, because it is not called forth arbitrarily but by observation of the forces of the times, the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy becomes in the anthroposophical members the needed healing power in the highest sense. It is not indeed the programme of one individual or of several individuals, but the result of observing what the spiritual leadership of the world dictates as necessary for mankind's present progress. It is on that account only that we can speak of Spiritual Science, of Anthroposophy, otherwise it would obviously be presumptuous. But what springs from true modesty need not be deterred when making itself felt, by the reproach of the presumptuous.

What has come from Paris can be said to be in keeping with an attitude towards life that in the last four-and-a-half years has led ad absurdum. From Berne has streamed what seems salvation to many, but has originated in an insufficiently deep source. From Paris there flows what occasions fear in almost all mankind; from Berne was meant to stream what in a great number of men can arouse hope and belief. And these two things speak quite different languages; there is no possibility of mutual understanding across the abyss. That will come only from the soul's inner appeal to Spiritual Science.

From such impulses arose the thought first at least to speak to the understanding of part of mankind. For it is a question of understanding. I have continually emphasised that in our social chaos we shall make no headway until we succeed in our appeal to the understanding of a sufficiently large number of men before instincts become too uncontrolled. This is what inspired my lectures in Zurich, Berne and Basle. Recently, various people with whom I have talked have given frequent opportunity for discussing how to approach the understanding and whether it be possible to discover the way before there is complete disaster? Now the latter question is one that cannot be raised by anyone who thinks in realities. For anyone thinking in realities does not speak with hypotheses about what is possible or not possible, but seizes on what he considers necessary to be done. When one one sets out on some road, a first step has to be taken; and we should not think, when the first step seems incompatible with the desired goal, that this step is useless. On a long road the first step can only take us a very short way. When going towards a specified goal it is first simply a question of not going in the wrong direction, either to right or left of the goal. Secondly, having once started on, the path, it is a question of having the will to keep to it and not to stumble against anything either left or right. If we would take our stand on realistic ground, we must also be in touch with what is happening at the time, what is already there, and not build castles in the air. Our though must be linked with something showing that from a certain direction a real stream is flowing. The first step may often seem most unfortunate, and only after a time perhaps turn out to be otherwise.

Now the three men previously named—Herr Mott, Dr. Boos, Herr Kühn, have discussed this matter with me. Since a spiritual appeal is to be made to the understanding of mankind, it must first be asked where anything of the sort has been seen to have an effect on men's thinking. You may remember an appeal made to the so-called world of culture, issued by ninety-nine German personalities, for the most part professors, or so I believe. Judged from the point of view of reality and not of emotion, this appeal can only be considered very clumsy. Yet for the most part they were professors: The appeal made an impression, however, and influenced thought in an unfortunate way. And it still haunts us. Being in a certain sense a reality it was a reality that had a worse effect than many others for it set waves in motion.

This makes one wonder how it might be in the present urgency to send out an appeal in contrast to this untimely set of antiquated notions, an appeal to man's understanding, arising out of the real conditions of modern human life. First, arising out of the facts themselves, an appeal to the German people, who have experienced the fate of seeing swept away the whole framework of a State in which they had hoped to realise their appointed task. They should be appealed to in a way to make them see that facts are speaking to them and not just a collection of words or some particular opinion or idea. Whereas perhaps the greater part of mankind would be loath to listen as long as old forms still remain, it can be assumed that the Germans would be more likely to listen, because no longer able to remain on the old ground they must perforce seek out a new basis for their life's task. For men are like that; so long as anything of the old remains—when it is not just a matter of clothes—they will unquestioningly hold firmly to it, unconscious of any sign that this is no longer possible. No one believes what a part love of comfort plays in the inner life of man.

Out of these thoughts I have composed a sort of Manifesto, and imagine it may be listened to by those souls who, where our own particular cultural questions are concerned, can be brought to an understanding based on reality. Above all I hope it may be understood by those Germans who are intelligent; to these it is addressed. But I mean it to be read by the enemies of Germany also, as something that has been considered and found fit by the people of Germany to be translated into reality. I thought of the ninety-nine signatures; if another ninety-nine of the Germans of the old Germany and of the old Austria can be found, and if the ninety-nine could perhaps be increased by a few personalities having an understanding of the present necessities of life—people in neutral countries, in Switzerland for example,—then something positive might be done in contrast to the former negative undertaking of the ninety-nine.

I beg you to understand me aright. This is first and foremost an appeal to the German people. But it is thought that what will be discussed in this form among the Germans themselves should be heard by the whole cultural world. I shall read this appeal here. The ideas will be known and familiar to you, since we have often discussed them. It is not meant to give advice, but it should show people that there is a way and how this way may be found. Certainly the presentation can be criticised as too short. But it is not a question of a textbook, it is an indication that there is something within mankind that can be of help.

The Appeal is addressed: “TO THE GERMAN PEOPLE AND TO THE CULTURAL WORLD”

The German people believed the structure of their empire, set up half a century before, to be secure for an unlimited time. At the outbreak of this catastrophic war, in August 1914, they saw this structure firmly established and imagined it would prove invincible. Today they see only its ruins. After such an experience must come reflection, heart-searching. For this experience has shown that the thoughts prevailing for half a century and more, especially those holding good over the war years, to have been tragically misleading. The question necessarily, arising in the souls of the German people is: where lie the reasons for this tragic error? This question must promote inner reflection in souls, and on their power for such reflection depends the very survival of the German people. Their future depends upon how far they are able to consider the question in all seriousness: How did I fall into this error? If today they face this question, the knowledge will dawn on than that, half a century earlier they founded a realm but omitted to set it the tasks arising from the essential nature of the German people. The realm was set up. In its early years all efforts went to the adjustment, as far as life allowed, of demands remaining over from the old tradition and yearly arising from new needs. Later men went on to confirm and increase their outer predominance in material strength. With this they combined measures concerned with the social claims born of the times, measures that certainly took into account the needs of the day but lacked the larger aims which should come from knowledge of the evolutionary forces to which modern man must turn. Thus the realm was established in a world-connection that lacked a real goal to justify its survival. The course the catastrophe of the war took has revealed this in a tragic way. Until the very outbreak of hostilities the world outside Germany could not see in the conduct of the realm anything to suggest that its rulers were fulfilling a world mission of historic import, not to be lightly swept aside. The failure of the rulers to find such a mission has necessarily given rise in the non-German world to the opinions that to those of insight have been the deeper grounds for the German downfall.

For the German people infinitely much now depends upon their impartial judgment of this state of affairs. In misfortune there must arise the insight which, in the last fifty years, has not been willing to show itself. Instead of the feeble thinking about day-to-day demands, a greater impulse must arise towards an outlook on life that with vigorous thought strives to understand the forces at work in evolution, and devotes itself to these with courageous will. There must be an end to the petty desire to sweep aside as unpractical idealists all those who pay heed to evolutionary forces. So too must cease the pride and presumption of those who imagine themselves to be practical people, who through their narrow vision in the guise of the practical have brought about disaster. Heed must be paid to what the truly practical men—decried as idealists—have to say about the present requirements of evolution.

The ‘practical’ men in all directions have for a long time seen that quite new human demands are being made, but they have tried to fit them within the frame of ordinary traditional thinking end organisation. The economic life of the day has produced demands that private initiative seems incapable of satisfying. One class of men consider it necessary that private enterprise should in individual spheres be transferred to companies; and this would be carried out wherever it appeared profitable according to the outlook on life of this particular class. The drastic transference of all individual work to associations became the aim of another class who, through the development of modern economic life, have no interest in retaining the handed-down aims of private persons.

In all the endeavours in connection with the modern demands of mankind up till now, there is something in common. They press for the socialisation of private undertakings, and count on the latter being taken over by the community (State, Commune) that has sprung from conditions having nothing to do with modern demands. Or men think in terms of newer associations, such as companies, that are nevertheless not formed in complete accordance with these new demands but copy old forms,out of traditional habits of thought.

The truth is that no associations formed in the sense of these old habits of thought can take up what one would like to see accepted. Prevalent forces press towards recognition of a social structure of mankind having something quite different in view from what is customary. Until now the social communities have for the most part been formed out of man's social instincts; the task of our time is to penetrate the forces of these instincts with full consciousness.

The social organism is membered in the same way as the natural organism. And as the natural organism must manage its thinking through the head and not through the lungs, so in the social organism the membering into systems must be such that no system can take over the task of another; all must work together but maintain its own independence.

The economic life can thrive only in developing as an independent member of the social organism in accordance with its own laws and its own forces, and avoids creating confusion in its structure by allowing itself to be absorbed by another member, the political member, of the social organism. The member that works politically must have a completely independent existence alongside the economic life, just as in the human organism the breathing system exists alongside that of the head. Their mutual work cannot be carried on beneficially if the two systems are under a single set of laws and administration; each must have its own, working, however, in a living way with the other. For the political system must destroy the economic life if it wants to take it over, and the economic system loses its forces of life when it becomes political.

To these two members of the social organism must be added a third, completely independent and formed out of the possibilities of its own life. This member is all that is produced spiritually, in which the spiritual part of the two other spheres also have a share. The spiritual part must be given over to them by the third member that is provided with its own laws and administration, but this spiritual part cannot be governed nor influenced by the other spheres more than member organs of a whole organism are influenced by one another.

Already today what has been said here to be necessary for the social organism can be quite scientifically substantiated and developed. Here there can only be given the guiding principles for all those who would follow up what is necessary.

The establishment of the German Empire happened at a time when these necessities were first appearing to modern humanity. Its Government did not understand how to give the Empire a task through insight into these necessities. This insight would alone have given it the right inner structure, it would also have given its foreign policy a competent direction, and enabled the Germans to live in common understanding with other peoples.

Insight must now ripen out of misfortune. We must develop the will for a social organism that is possible. It is not a Germany that no longer exists that should have to face the world outside, but a spiritual, political and economic system in its representatives must have the will to negotiate as independent delegations with those who have cast down that Germany which has been made into an impossible social form through the confusion of the three systems.

One fancies one can hear the ‘practical men’ becoming eloquent over the complexity of what has been said and finding it troublesome even to think about the working together of three corporate members. This is because they have no wish to know of the real demands of life, preferring to fashion everything according to the easier demands of their own thinking. They must come to see that they must accommodate themselves in their thought to the claims of reality or they will have learnt nothing from misfortune and in what arises further, will go on repeating the past ad infinitum.

While I was lecturing in Zurich, Basle and Berne, Herr Mott, Dr. Boos and. Herr Kühn were busy in Germany obtaining signatures for the Appeal. And in Austria others were similarly employed.

So far, although it is only a short time since we began, we can be well satisfied with our progress. For we have an Appeal as well supported as the former unfortunate one. And in the lectures recently given in Zurich—held there because Switzerland is the pivot for the connections of the civilised world—my object was to show that here and there people were to be found whose understanding was ripening. Thus, naturally it was important to learn the results before the last Zurich lecture. By 11th February I could make the happy announcement that about a hundred names had been collected, exclusive of those in Switzerland and Vienna. The news came from Germany where our fiends had been working everywhere, in a suitable way, to make this thing a reality. At the same time I received the following telegram from Vienna: “By midday 11th, 73 signatures, more certain tomorrow”. And on the following day: “Total 93 signatures”. That could be announced from Vienna, and more signatures were reported later. Results so far have been satisfactory. What we need next will be to find among them a number of signatures of well-known personalities capable of making the Appeal public, so that it is seen by those it concerns. For in a case of this kind much depends upon this. It actually concerns everyone today. And it may indeed be said that in the subconscious of man's soul something is calling upon him to understand such an affair as this. As I have told you in the course of these lectures, the idea appearing in this form is no new one to me. At the time when this catastrophic war was taking a decisive turn, I tried to help, on this necessary impulse towards reality wherever it came to my notice. I have described to you how this took place. I told those who had to do with the matter that this is not just a programme, not just an ideal, but that it should be considered as something having evolutionary force for modern mankind, something that certainly will be made a reality in the next ten, twenty or thirty years. It is not a question whether it is realised but solely how it is realised. I said to many of these people: You now have the choice either of having recourse to reason and of bringing about something through that, or of undergoing cataclysms and revolutions. It did not take long for people to be convinced that this was no false prophecy. It is hard, however, for the easy-going man of today to find the way from a certain understanding to that courage in life which, in accordance with his situation, is necessary for him to carry on the matter into the realm of reality.

Here in Switzerland, too, several signatures have already been obtained. We have always to consider here that in the first part of this Appeal something is said of the necessity for the German people to reflect about themselves and the errors in which they have been implicated. Thus, it has been said that it is impossible for the Swiss to give instructions across the frontier to the Germans. I do not believe that today we should still think like that. Before 1914 such things might have had a certain significance as old mummified thought, but now they have lost that significance. In these times the narrow-mindedness that comes from judging on national grounds must cease. The misfortunes of the last four-and-a-half years should have taught men this. Today even in Switzerland one should be able to think differently from the way one did four-and-a-half years ago. For here, too, something should have been learnt if thinking is to correspond to the picture we get by following the last four-and-a-half years with a little insight. They really appear like centuries which have been poured over mankind. And it seems most remarkable that people today have been willing to set up a new world-order, a new map of Europe, out of old national prejudices of a former age, or out of mummified thought, which really by 1914 should have come to an end. This map-building in Europe will be very quickly upset by other forces, the only ones with power at the present time and the only determining forces for what is called politics, that is, the social factors. For today all the rest is a mask. That, however, is the reality. The Europeans will very greatly deceive themselves if they form their judgments and criticisms out of ancient mummified, thinking.

Of course the objection can be made—I myself could easily give you a whole catalogue of objections—that with this impulses are given to all the States; that this can only come to pass when all States make a beginning. No! One single so-called State can make a beginning; it is indeed so, one single State can begin. And the beginning once made, the State will have done something for all mankind. It is indeed a misfortune for the German people that its Empire should have been set up at the start of more modern history, when at the time of its foundation the necessity already existed for the Empire to be given this as its task. And because the Empire did not accept this task it has never been understood why it should have any place in the world. Had it undertaken the task everything would have happened differently, for then men would have had before their very eyes the conditions of their existence and seen this existence justified.

Today people make their decisions out of mummified thoughts. There are many in Europe who cannot free themselves from mummified thinking and today regard the world-famous personality, Wilson, as a savior—perhaps out of some fear, it is difficult to express it. Nevertheless, if people should think without condemning Wilson, and put their question on a basis of fact, they must ask themselves why he has become such an influential man in his own country. This is because he is against all other Parties, and out of sound American instinct has carried out a policy utterly opposed to that of a great part of Europe. A great part of Europe wants to steer towards a community, the politics of a social community, in which the individual forces of liberty will go under. Wilson owes his election and his influence entirely to the circumstance that as an American democrat he has contributed to the release of the individual forces in economic life.

Let us suppose that Europe realised the ideal of Bolshevism, the ideal of the Berne social democracy, which means the social democracy of the Socialist Congress. What would be the consequence should these people achieve what they are dreaming of? Europe would take on a form so that despite every national prejudice all free forces would of necessity flood over into free America, where Wilson has become great by means of his opposite policy. Between Europe and America terrible competition would have to arise, making it impossible for anything to happen but pauperism in Europe and wealth in America—not from any injustice but out of the foolishness of European social politics. That would be the shape of things if Europeans do not, in accordance with their task, interpret and bring to realisation the social forces so that they meet the demands of a healthy social organism.

In this Appeal we have not to do with something merely thought out, but we are indicating forces everywhere present in what is reality, forces that must be brought to realisation, without which the fate not only of Germany and Austria but of all Europe can be simply a fall into poverty, suffering and alienation. from the spirit. We are living in serious times from which we cannot escape by trivial thinking. In men there lives something that attracts them to what is said in this Appeal, something that can already be observed. Because this is so, because one can hope to find the way to the hearts and souls of men, we are seeking now to reorganise what, as I said, was a necessary form to be sought during the catastrophe of the war, into the form necessary for present-day conditions.

I only hope no one thinks that this kind of Appeal has a significance that is absolute. I spoke of this to someone—concerned with it later—in January, 1918, as it was then drafted, and ended by saying: This can of course take on many different forms according to the different conditions prevailing at the time. It has nothing to do with a theory, nor a programme, nor an ideal, but with what has been thought out of reality. I said further that because the thought comes out of reality, for me it is nothing Utopian. Utopians who set up their programmes imagine everything to be bad that is not carried out according to their plan. It does not strike me at all in this way. It may happen, for example, that such a matter touches men's souls, and because they consider it practical they begin to put it into practice. And today it can be said quite clearly that a beginning has been made to put it into a practical form, suitable for life everywhere. I can quite well imagine that nothing may remain of all I have said here and in the lectures in Zurich, Berne and Basle, but that everything will take on a different form. For anyone who thinks in realities it is not a matter of his forms and phrases being put into practice, but that they should somewhere be laid hold of by reality. Then it will soon be seen what becomes of it. Perhaps it will go another way, there is always that possibility, but it is certain that the result must be in conformity with the conditions. For it is not any abstract ideal, any programme striven for, but simply a seizing hold of the forces of reality. What we are concerned with here should be as far removed as possible from all fantasy, from all dogmatising. Therefore I was much astonished when a well-known personality, whose signature one of the three friends mentioned above had undertaken to procure, let it be known that he would have thought, in making the appeal, I should have addressed it more to men's spirit, and went on to say that mankind's salvation could only come by their finding the way back to the Spirit.

Thus people want one always to be repeating spirit, spirit, spirit! But that is not what is of importance; what matters is that the Spirit should be shown and proved able really to give form to the facts. They are fundamentally dangerous who keep on speaking of the spirit without giving any indication of its reality; for they refer to it simply in the sense of an ideology. We have reason to be thankful that in the midst of our society personalities have been found with understanding, active understanding, at what is aimed at here, so that they will also actually do something. One hears constant echoes of this.

Our friend, Dr. Boos, after in my last lecture in Zurich I had referred to the results of our Appeal, issued an appeal on his own account that, from among the audience, people willing to take a practical part in this matter should come forward and give their addresses. The result of that evening, too, was extraordinarily satisfying. There were of course objections but I could well understand them. They were, however, of a nature to make one see that men today do not take their stand upon reality, they are carried away by enthusiasm. And this applies precisely to those considered the most practical. Hence, at Zurich, in a lecture when speaking of enthusiasts, I gave General Ludendorf as a good modern example. That is the type, the representative, of an enthusiast, a man who may be good or bad, but to my thinking bad at understanding strategy, and in regard to everything else remote from life and all reality, having no idea of the conditions of the reality in which he should have been active. He was an abstract idealist in a way that only a socialistic utopian can be. One should pay good heed to this insane concept of the ‘practical man’ which has done such harm to mankind. This being practical, up to now in such favour, is nothing but enthusiasm carried into actual fact through brutality, an unrealistic way of thinking, and it is above all this that must vanish. What has to come must be created spiritually, and the bearer of this will be the Anthroposophical Movement.

This is what I wanted to tell you on this eventful evening of our Lecture Cycle, as something that has proceeded out of the inner being of our movement.

Notes:

1. Lecture of December 31, 1981 not translated

2. Walther Rathenau

In connection with what I said yesterday about our Appeal, I should like to emphasise again that in man's present conditions of life everything depends upon arousing, in as many people as possible, a right social understanding. You must not forget that the way the relations in life have recently developed has brought a great part of the civilised world into a state of chaos such as is only occasioned by what arises out of human souls. As the situation is at present, external means cannot greatly help mankind, whether this is in the form of laws or in the form of outward administration of the economic life. In individual States it is possible, of course, that for a time things may go on, but it would be a mistake to think conditions in these individual States can permanently remain as they are in the midst of the developing social upheavals encompassing all mankind. Help can come only when an understanding of the social relations is cultivated in men's souls.

What I have put in rather a complicated form can also be said more simply. We may say that what is now a striving for disorder will first take an orderly direction when men show themselves capable of producing order. They will be so only when they arrive at a real social understanding from which man today—of whatever party—stands very far removed. It is the most imperative task to spread this understanding. It is a fact of the utmost importance that what is agitating the souls of many millions of the proletariat is something very different from what lives in the souls of their leaders. The leaders have for the greater part inherited the bourgeois attitude to life, which they try to apply to the conditions of proletarian life adorned with a few flourishes of the agitator. This is an essential fact with which we act in accordance only when deciding to work above all for social understanding. Even when external conditions of life have to be recognised as being in still greater confusion and error than formerly, nevertheless the assumption that something can be attained by muddling through would be false. What modern man lacks is social understanding. And this lack is due to the whole of human thinking, feeling and willing having developed in recent times without being applied to this understanding. It is remarkably limited even in the many people today whose social impulses are strong.

Do not think that this social understanding needs some specially comprehensive and far-reaching knowledge for its development. That is not of any consequence; the point is that in contemporary mankind there is lacking even the elementary basis for such an understanding. People's thoughts are very different from those needed for grasping the most primitive social questions.—It is quite right today that attention should be given above all to finding a way to avoid the abstract sentimental concepts at present pacifying so many. It is widely believed that it is possible today to deal with the social problem from some kind of ethical or religious standpoint. This possibility does not exist. Today one cannot just preach religion or ethics, however excellent. This may just warm the feelings and, in an egoistic sense, have some effect. Concepts, however, must be made capable of gripping hold of the everyday affairs of human beings.

Infinitely much depends today on acquiring this understanding. I have said that men today in whom social impulses are flashing up have very often only primitive concepts. Many in leading circles as well as among the proletariat imagine that a simple reassortment of social levels can bring about real change;—for example, if those who were at the top, ministers and secretaries of State were to fall and those who were formerly proletarians were to rise, in effect, if there were a re-levelling. It would be quite a mistake to fancy that things could be changed thus. Many have this idea however much they may protest. Befogged by the outlook of some party or another they are unconscious of holding these views. It is a question, however, of coming quite simply to a clear understanding of the threefold social organism, often dealt with here and also in many public lectures. It is a question of every detail in social measures being so developed that they comply with the necessity inherent in the threefold order. Whether measures have to be taken to build a railway, either under a private company or the State, or a decision is to be made about the ways and means for paying an undertaking on some occasion (I am not speaking of labour-power but of undertakings) it is always a matter of carrying out the measures in the threefold direction, in accordance with the independence of the spiritual life, of the political life of rights and of the economic life. You can of course ask how this or the other should happen. But at the stage where the matter now stands those are for the most part the wrong kind of questions. The spirit living in the threefold order can perhaps be described like this, to take an example: What is the best system of taxation? Now today the important thing is not to think out a system of taxation but to work towards the threefold order. When this threefold membering of the social organism becomes more and more an actuality the best system of taxation will arise through this threefold activity. It is a matter of establishing the conditions under which the best social organisation can originate. Someone or other ruminating over what would be best is not of importance and is not in accordance with reality. But imagine that one of you were a genius, such a genius as has never before been seen in human evolution, and were therefore in a position to think out the best possible system of taxation. But what if you were to stand alone with your magnificently thought-out system and the others refused it, wanting perhaps something less good but anyhow not yours? You see it is not a matter of thinking out the best, but of finding what men as a whole would accept as a basis on which to do their best.

It is true that you may say here: One must begin somewhere. The threefold State must be set up even though men appear unwilling to accept it. That is something different, for there it is not a matter of what men can wish for or not, such as a system of taxation, but of what fundamentally all men would want were they to understand it. If you find the right way you can make it intelligible to them, for subconsciously men want it to be realised during the coming decades throughout the civilised world. That is not merely thought-out, but seen to be what men are wanting. And it is not because they lack the desire that countless men reject it, but because being still full of prejudices, they work in opposition to this matter, which in future will be fully realised. The essential thing is to pay heed to what is primary. The primary is that for which, in a longer or shorter period, understanding can be awakened when once the hindrances to this understanding have been removed. Naturally there are always leading personalities who stand in the way. These personalities are not to be convinced; they must first break their heads against the obstacles they meet. And there will be many such obstacles. On this account if at first the affair does not go as one had imagined, it need not be labeled a failure. Things of this sort must be prepared for. Something must be there when what is now brought about in a mistaken way will have led to an absurd situation, when much that now appears in the world is no longer there—just as the German princes are no longer there, who in 1913 never dreamed they would have disappeared by 1919—when what so many people now applaud is gone, then something on which they can fall back must at least be there in people is heads and hearts. Preparation must be made, the ground must be ready. When once you have penetrated long and deeply enough into this threefold membering of the spiritual life, the economic life and the political life, then the need will arise in you to have a more fundamental understanding of all this. This understanding is absolutely essential, otherwise even when spoken with all possible goodwill what is said will have no connection with reality. The social organism is subject to definite laws in the same way as the natural human organism. You gain nothing by acting against these laws even on grounds of principle. You can at best lead men into a blind alley.

Now do not say: Where is human freedom when man finds himself in a social organism with fixed laws? You might as well ask whether a man can be free when daily he has to eat. It does not make him free to refrain from eating. Things subject to certain laws—even men themselves—have nothing at all to do with the problem of freedom, just as little as our not being able to grasp the moon has to do with our freedom.

To gain a social understanding it is advisable for us to be in the position to go back to fundamentals, to primaries, rather than let our understanding remain bogged in secondaries or tertiaries, which are subsequent phenomena. We may give this example from a certain condition of life—a man needs a definite minimum, let us say in money—since we have converted our values into money—in order to support life. This subsistence minimum can be spoken of as referring to some special condition of life. But we can so speak of it that we say something apparently extremely obvious on the one hand, on the other, what is complete nonsense. I will try to make this clear to you by an example. Taking given conditions of life in any part of the world you may perhaps say with feeling that a manual worker needs so and so much as a subsistence minimum, otherwise he would be unable to live in the particular community. This can seem quite an obvious idea. But how is it then, in accordance with what has been assumed here, when this is not realisable within a certain social organism? The question that must first of all be answered is: What then if the realisation of this is impossible?

To reflect upon the matter thus is not the primary thinking I have represented. Thought out in the abstract, the subsistence minimum demanded does not lead us to fundamentals but ties us down to what is secondary, what appears as a mere consequence. To attain social understanding we have to be in a position to enter into fundamental things. It is fundamental to cultivate a practical view as to how there can be a subsistence minimum in accordance with conditions of life in the social organism. In this case I mean by ‘practical’ such a view that would result in humanly possible social conditions and social community life. This is the primary.

And now one comes to certain conceptions very unpopular with a great part of present-day mankind, because the basic teaching that should work towards such things, and really guide them in this direction, has been neglected. Men need to realise that even to be half-educated one should not merely know that three times nine is twenty-seven; one should also know, for example, what it is that we call ground-rent. I ask you, how many people today have any clear idea of what ground-rent is? But without considering the social organism in connection with such things, no human progress can be made.

The wrong-headed conceptions men hold today are due to confusion in this sphere. Ground-rent, which can be reckoned according to the productivity of a piece of land in a certain district, yields a certain sum for a State-bounded area. The land tapes its value according to its productivity, that is, in accordance with the way or the degree in which it is put to rational use in relation to the whole economy. It is very difficult today for anyone to gain a clear concept of this simple land value, since in the modern capitalistic economic life interest on capital, or capital in any form, has confused the whole picture of ground-rent, and the true concept of its economic value for the people has been blurred by phantoms in the form of mortgage law and the system of stocks and shares. Strictly speaking, everything has been forced into conceptions that are impossible and false. Naturally a true conception of ground-rent cannot be acquired in the twinkling of an eye. But think of it simply as the economic value of the land in some territory, with regard to its productivity. Now there exists a necessary relation between this ground-rent and subsistence what I have referred to as a subsistence minimum. There are many social reformers and social revolutionaries today who dream of the wholesale abolition of ground-rent, who believe, for example, that ground-rent will be done away with by all land being nationalised or communalised. Essentials, however, are never changed by a mere change of form. Whether a whole community owns the land or it is owned by a number of individuals makes no difference to the existence of ground-rent. It is simply obscured and takes on other forms. Ground-rent as I have defined it is always there. Take the ground-rent of a certain district and divide it up among the individual inhabitants, then you will get as quotient the only possible subsistence minimum. This is a law as definite and unalterable as a law of Physics. It is a primary fact, something fundamental, that in a social organism in reality no one deserves more than is yielded by the ground-rent being divided among the total population. What can be earned further arises through coalitions and associations in which conditions are established where one individual can acquire more value than another. But not a whit more can pass into the movable property of an individual man than what I have here indicated. From this minimum, which really exists everywhere even though the real conditions are obscured, arises all economic life in so for as it applies to an individual's movable property. It must have arisen from this basic fact. Hence it is that one starts not from something secondary but from this primary fact. This primary fact may be compared to any other, for example to a primary fact also valid for the economic life, that on a certain territory there is only a certain amount of raw product. Naturally you may think it desirable to have more of this raw product and to be able just to reckon how much more might be had from this land. But the raw product does not allow of any arbitrary increase; that is a primary fact. And it is a primary fact in the same way that, in a social organism, in reality nothing more can be earned through work—however hard this work may be—than can be yielded by the quotient I mentioned. As I said, all surplus is acquired through human coalition.

The social and political administration can be in contradiction to these facts. Therefore it is necessary to bring all organising thought into the direction that facts take. Man can find satisfaction only when these things are thoroughly understood. Then the organising factor, the thinking that has taken on reality, is brought into line with what the nature of the social organism demands, and other thinking adjusts itself to it, so that it cannot happen that one thinking considers itself prejudiced by the other. That is what lies as a law at the basis of the true life of the social organism. Right thinking, realistic concepts on such matters can be gained—as I showed by the example of the relation of a subsistence minimum to ground-rent—only when you make your start on the basic principles of the threefold order. For only under its influence is it possible for men to create measures by which human life in common on any given territory can be developed really productively. Life will develop most productively when it goes in a direction that accords with law and not in the opposite direction. Thus it is a matter of living in time with the social organism.

It is necessary to be quite clear about this—that you will never gain insight into the fundamentals of the Threefold Order by observing life externally, any more than observation of any number of right-angled triangles will give you the Pythagorean theorem. But once known it can be applied to any real right-angled triangle. It is the same with these fundamental laws. Once grasped correctly in accordance with reality, they can be of universal application. And in addition you have from the basis of Spiritual Science the opportunity to grasp the necessity of the Threefold Order. Consider what can be given through it—the life of earthly spirituality, if I may so call it, art, science, religion and also, as already mentioned, civil and criminal law; that is one sphere. The second is the political association of men and is concerned with man's relation to his fellows. And the third is the economic life, concerned with man's relation to the lower man, what man needs in order to raise himself to his true manhood. The Threefold Order has to do with these three spheres. Man should be established in the social organism in accordance with these three members; he must be so established. For the three members have each a quite distinct origin in regard to the human being as such. All life of the spirit on earth—and what I now say counts for our own age—is a kind of echo of what man lived through in the life before his descent through birth into physical existence. In that life the human being lived as a spiritual individual in a spiritual relation to the higher hierarchies, with those disembodied souls who were in the spiritual world and not at the time incarnated on earth. What man develops here as spiritual life, be it in devotion to religious practice or life in a religious community, be it in activity in the arts, or as a judge passing sentence on those of his fellowmen found guilty, everything lived out in this spiritual life has its origin in the forces acquired by man when, before he entered physical existence through birth, he lived with the higher hierarchies in the spiritual worlds. Here you must distinguish between life lived in common with other men in accordance with individual destiny, and that lived with others in accordance with what I have just described. In earthly existence we come into individual relations with one or other of our fellow-men. These relations depend upon our individual karma, and either trace back to earlier lives on earth or point to those coming later. But among these individual relations between human beings you must distinguish those, for example, that arise from belonging to a certain religious community. For in a religious community you think or feel as a number of other men do. Or suppose a book is published. Men read the book, take up thoughts from the book, and thus enter into a community. Spiritual life on earth, whether having to do with the bringing-up of children, education, or anything else of the kind, consists in our coming into relation with people and developing a life in common with them, in order thereby oneself to make spiritual progress. All that, however, is experiencing relationships in which, before descending into spiritual life on earth, we were in a quite different form. It has nothing to do with individual karma but with what was prepared during life in the spiritual world in the time lived through between death and a new birth. Thus, one has to seek the source of what I have called the spiritual sphere, in the life passed through by man before he prepared to descend. through birth into earthly existence.

Then there comes what is experienced simply by living on earth between birth and death. We grow into this life by degrees. When as an infant we enter into this existence through birth, we still bear—if I may make a foolish comparison—much of the egg-shell of the spiritual world around us, though it is not hard. The child is very spiritual in spite of its main task being the development of its physical body. In its aura there is much of the spiritual; what it brings with it is very nearly akin to the spiritual life on earth. Gradually, however, it enters more and more deeply into the life that belongs entirely to the time between birth and death.

Now the sources of the life of the political state are found in this life not chiefly concerned with the spiritual. The political state has to do only with what man experiences between birth and death. Therefore nothing should be involved in it save what concerns us as beings between birth and death in our mutual relations as man to man. If the state involved itself in anything other than what concerns the public life of rights between birth and death, if it spread its wings over Church and School, for example, well—in the places where there were people with a faculty for judging such things it used to be said: “There the Prince of this world holds his unjust sway!” Nothing belongs to all that is the object of state-organisation except what has to do with the life between birth and death.

The third member is the economic. This economic life, which we are obliged to lead because we eat and drink, clothe ourselves and so on, forces us as human beings to descend into the subhuman. It chains us to something beneath the level of our full humanity. By having to concern ourselves with life economically, by having to dive down into economic life, we experience something which, when observed socially, has more in it than is usually thought. In so far as we stand in the economic life we cannot live in the spiritual nor in the life of rights, but must plunge below the human level. But just by this plunging into the subhuman we take into ourselves something that thus has an opportunity to develop. Whereas in the economic life we are active and higher thoughts must be silent and even the human mutual relations play in only from another sphere, there is worked in our subconscious then what we then carry with us into the spiritual world through the gate of death. Whereas in the spiritual life on earth we experience the echo of what we lived through before our descent to earth, and in the life of rights of the political state experience only what lies between birth and death, in the economic life, into which we cannot enter with our higher self, something is being prepared that is also spiritual and carried by us through the gate of death. People would like the economic life to exist only for the earth. But this is not so. Just through our plunging down into the economic life something is prepared for us as human beings that is again connected with the supersensible world. Therefore no one should think of holding the economic life too lightly. However strange and paradoxical it may seem, this external materialistic life has a certain connection with the life after death. So that in actual fact, for anyone who knows man, the three spheres fall asunder—the purely spiritual sphere points to life before birth; the political sphere of the State points to life between birth and death; the economic life points to life after death. It is not in vain that we cultivate fraternity in the economic life. In all that we develop as brotherliness in the economic sphere lie the foundations and preliminary conditions of life after death. I am giving you only a first brief indication of how the threefold membering of the nature of the human being gives the spiritual scientist in these three distinct spheres the differentiation necessary for social life.

It is a particular characteristic of Spiritual Science that, when we come to deal with it, we find it directly practical. It sheds light on the life around us, and at the present time men have no other possibility of getting light on the real relationships of life than by in some way accepting spiritual knowledge. Thus it is desirable that those who are interested in the Anthroposophical Movement should let the light of their understanding ray out to others; for the Anthroposophist it is relatively easier to penetrate these things with insight. He knows something of life both before and after birth, for example, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, and this shows him the necessity for the threefoldness in life from this point of view. This necessity can indeed be seen today. But we shall gain a deeper, more comprehensive insight if we have the anthroposophical basis of which I have been speaking here.

In the course of the last centuries how much has been spoken in a sentimental way, when men have held forth, for instance, about universal moral teaching and the like, and religion has been kept as far as possible apart from external daily life. We are now at a point of time when we have to develop concepts that can penetrate right into daily life and do not just extend to the promise of salvation or to the demand “Children love one another”. They do not do it in any case when they do not have to or when other business is on hand. The concepts we develop must have sufficient driving force to enable us really to understand our present-day complicated economic life. Thus, simply through knowledge of the nature of man we are shown the necessity for the sound social organism to be threefold.

It must become clear to as many people as possible today that this is the very foundation-stone of a new structure. just to prate about the spirit is, as I was saying yesterday, perhaps more harmful just now than the materialism which, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, has up to now continued to spread. For mere talk of the spirit, mere sighing after the spirit, mere worship of the spirit, no longer meet the needs of our epoch. In our epoch it is fitting that we realise the spirit, that we give the spirit the possibility of living in our midst. Today it does not suffice just to believe in the Christ; it is essential that men should now manifest the Christ in their deeds, in their work. This is the important thing. If man develops sound thinking and perceiving in this sphere, these sound thoughts and perceptions will flow into another sphere as well. Consider how a great many of the present official representatives of one or other of the Christian faiths speak today of Christ. But if asked: Why is He whom you call Christ, the Christ? they can give only a fictitious answer, what is indeed an inner lie. Many modern theologians talk of Christ, but were you to ask them: How does your concept of the Christ-being differ from your concept of the Jahve-God, the one God, weaving and creating throughout the universe? they would have no answer to give.

The great theologian Harnack, in Berlin, has written a book on The Being of Christianity. What he describes as the Being of Christianity is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, with all Jehovah's characteristics. It is inwardly a lie to describe Jehovah as Christ, And it is thus with hundreds, nay thousands, of those preaching Christianity today; they are simply preaching God in general, the God of Whom we can say ex Deo nascimur. Christ is discovered only when one has experienced a kind of new birth. We need only be healthy human beings to have to recognise the God of Whom we say ex Deo nascimur; for to be an atheist is in reality to be ill. But one can speak of the Christ only when in the life of soul one has experienced a kind of re-birth, in the way this happens in the present cycle of human evolution. For this, it is not enough that man is simply born as a human being.

Man as he is born today is necessarily full of prejudices; that is the nature of present-day man. And if we remain as we are born we carry these prejudices with us through life; we live in one-sidedness. We can save ourselves only by having inner tolerance, by being able to enter into the opinions of others even when we think them wrong. If we can bring a deep understanding for the opinions of other souls even when considering them mistaken, if we can take what the other thinks and feels in the same way as we take what we think and feel ourself, if we adopt this faculty of inner tolerance, we may overcome these prejudices due to the human cycle in which we were born. We then learn to say: What you have understood in this the least of my brethren, you have understood of me. For Christ did not speak to men in this way only at the time when Christianity began, but has made good His word “Lo, I am with you always even unto the end of earthly time”. He still continues to reveal Himself. Once Be said: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto Me”. Today He tells men: What you understand with inward tolerance in the least of your brothers, even when he is mistaken, you have understood of Me, and I will let you overcome your prejudices when you convert those prejudices into tolerant reception of what others think and feel.—That is one thing; that, in regard to thinking, is the way to come to Christ. Then Christ can so permeate us that we not only have thoughts about Him but Christ can live in our thoughts. This, however, is only achieved in the way I have just described.

And secondly, in regard to the will. In youth the human being is sometimes idealistic. This is an inherent idealism and we have it simply by being born as human beings. Today, in this era, this idealism belonging to mankind is not enough. We now need a quite different kind—an idealism to which we educate ourselves; we do not have it simply by becoming human beings but by making an effort. It is this kind of idealism we need. We need the idealism we have ourselves acquired. It then becomes the idealism that will not vanish with youth, it will keep us young and idealistic throughout our life. If through training we make an idealism our own, then, on the basis not of logical law but of the law of reality, we bring to bear the driving force to place ourselves actively into the social organism in accordance with the very purport of this organism, instead of acting egoistically as an individual man. No one today who does not train himself to this self-acquired idealism will gain a true social understanding. The ex Deo nascimur is innate. The way to Christ is found on the one hand through supersensible thought, on the other hand through the will. It comes through the thought by our being convinced beforehand that nowadays we are born as men full of prejudice and must overcame our prejudice by tolerantly listening to the opinions of others, thus gaining right judgment. Where the way of the will is concerned, this will only be fired socially in the right way today when we have this self-acquired idealism, the idealism we drive into ourselves through our own activity. That is re-birth. And what we have found when we as men have gained it for ourselves leads us to the Christ. Not the God of Whom we say Ex Deo nascimur may we describe as Christ, for that is inwardly untrue. That God was known in the Old Testament. When we as men shall have transformed ourselves in life in the two directions mentioned, we shall clearly see the distinction between the God Who is pure Father and the God Who will then speak to us. For this God is the Christ.

Modern Theology actually speaks very little about this Christ. This Christ must eater men as a social impulse. What many people say today of Christ is intrinsically untrue. Now such things are not to be looked into as people today subtly present them, taking them logically, point by point. As I once told you recently, there is an understanding in accordance with reality different from one that is merely external and logical. But when man has developed in himself what I have called a re-birth, then human thinking will be brought near Christ, and we shall learn to think and feel as we must think and feel if, for the benefit and salvation of man, we are to place ourselves into human society. We shall also learn to think and feel rightly in other matters by thinking and feeling rightly on these fundamental things. From this, however, the spiritual life of modern mankind has travelled terribly far. And the reason is that this spiritual life has been absorbed by the political State. Man's spiritual life must be freed from the political State to become fruitful and full of impulse for human evolution. Otherwise all thinking will be dislocated and from this dislocation false realities will be created.

I have already referred to Wilson's definition of freedom. For anyone who has some understanding of philosophy it is not very important how a statesman of the day defines freedom. It is important, however, as symptom of what lives in a men when he has thoughts about freedom. Now Wilson says: We call free what adapts itself to certain conditions so that it can still move freely. Thus we say when in a machine the piston can move freely, when it does not knock against anything but can move without impediment—we say the piston runs free. Or a ship moves forward freely which is so built that it runs before the wind. If it run against the wind it is hampered and not free. So man is free when he fits in with the conditions of the social mechanism. There, then one can only speak of the social mechanism.

It is not very important that thoughts such as these live in a head and are realised; the importance lies in what is realised being experienced in such thoughts. Then one knows whether this is sound or the opposite of sound. The thinking is quite dislocated; and why? Now you need only reflect on the following with the experience you have gained from Spiritual Science: when you fit into the external conditions of your life, when your life is running according to this adapting oneself to conditions without impediment, then you are free, free as a ship is free when running with the wind. But man does not stand thus in the whole world: For if indeed the ship running before the wind does run freely, it must, however, sometimes also be able to stop. And that is just what is very important for man—that he can sometimes turn round and take his stand against the wind, so that he not only fits in with circumstances but can also adapt himself to what is within him. One cannot think of anything more foolish, more absurd, than Wilson's definition of freedom, for it is opposed to human nature and the very reverse of what lies at the basis of true freedom. If we compare a man with a ship running freely before the wind, we must also compare him with a ship that having run in a certain direction and not needing to go further, can turn to face the wind. For if a man has to proceed only in accordance with external conditions, he is naturally free in them but not in himself. We have completely lost sight of the human being today in our observation of the world and of life. He has dropped out of our considerations concerning life and the world. But he must once more be given a place in the world. [ Note 01 ]

This has its exceedingly serious side; here it is seen only as a symptom but it has a most serious side. For today the human being is placed into the social organism in such a way that really he is only running with the wind, and the capitalist ordering of economy has particularly destined the proletariat only to run with the wind, never to be able, as a rest, to stop and face the wind. In a public lecture in Basle I said that within the capitalist. economic system the capitalist uses only the labour of the workers; in a healthy social organism the capitalist must use the workers' leisure also. Abstract capitalistic capital needs only labour-power. Capital that, under the threefold order, will give back to men their purely human driving force will also use the leisure of the workers, the leisure indeed of all mankind. For that, capital must be placed into the social organism, it will know how it is to be sustained by the social organism and how it must in return sustain the organism.

It is a question of the proletariat being able to save their labour-power so as to be capable of taking part in the spiritual life; and it is a question of the will being there to allow the worker sufficient leisure, to leave him sufficient labour-power, that of himself he can join in this spiritual life. The bourgeois economic order has allowed a deep cleft gradually to arise. What it produces spiritually is valid only for this bourgeois order and is out of touch with proletarian life.

Capitalism has brought things to the point where only labour-power is considered and not the leisure of the proletariat. Today these matters still seem abstract. It should be so no longer, for upon understanding these things rightly depends the sound human evolution both of the present and the future.

Now I have once again given a few indications as to the relation to social life of some of the fundamental tenets of Anthroposophy. It would be very desirable if such a spiritual movement as ours should, as a little social organism in itself, cease this unhealthy separation—developed to man's hurt by appalling bourgeois concepts—of the economic life from the spiritual, and should seek health by permeating the concepts of practical life with the concepts of Spiritual Science. The social organism must so organise its different members that there will no longer be men who cut off coupons and in this coupon-cutting become nothing less than slave-drivers, since for the coupons they cut off, a number of people, with whom they have no connection, have to perform hard work. Afterwards the coupon-cutters go to Church and pray God to be saved, or they go to a meeting and talk theoretically about all sorts of beautiful things; but they have no conception of the foolishness of living such an abstract spiritual life that they can seek, on the one hand, a connection with a God, and on the other hand share in slave ownership and the exploitation of labour by this coupon-cutting. They separate these things in a way that is not salutary by not attempting to discover the salutary. This is what is in question, what has been neglected and what must be changed: this separation between the religion and ethics that float in a cloud-cuckoo-land, and the external life thoughtlessly pursued in the form given it today by an unsound social organism. Above all it must be recognised that the misfortunes of the present-day have come about through this separation by the bourgeoisie of the abstract from the concrete. If efforts are made to drive out all that shows itself in an unsound and sectarian form, it is in just such a movement as ours that there can be a first setting-up of a kind of small social organism that is sound. In our Anthroposophical Movement there is nothing from which we have had to suffer more than the repeated appearance of a tendency towards sectarianism. Without noticing it people strive towards some kind of separation. But Anthroposophy must be the reverse of sectarian. It will then meet the subconscious and unconscious contemporary demands which truly do not run to creating sects, but cultivate something that develops out of the whole man for all men and out of all men for the whole man.

Just consider how you, in your own souls, can get away from sectarianism. In countless souls today sectarianism lives like something atavistic, an unhealthy inheritance, because the will does not exist to carry the true life of the spirit into the conditions of external life. Only through such sectarian sentimentality could it happen that the Appeal of which I spoke yesterday should meet with the reproach that it was just from this direction that mention of the spiritual had been expected! But I have never been able to refer to the spiritual in the sense of these enthusiasts. When, in the beginning of the nineties, there spread in America the Adler-Unold Ethical Movement, I opposed it with all my might, because a movement for ethical culture was to be founded based on nothing, and connected with nothing in life, but a desire to give out ethical maxims. The understanding of life, life in its fundamentals, is what contemporary men need, not the fashioning of phrases as to how things should be done. In regard to the social organism, the threefold order is above all something to be studied fundamentally, investigated and given consideration, something to be taken deeply to heart, so that it may be mastered in the same way as the multiplication table is mastered.

Notes:

1. See lecture 13.1.23 (Anthr.Qtly VI.1.)

It will be apparent to you that what I have put forward here and elsewhere about the present social problems has its source in the foundations of Spiritual Science. And further, that there has been an endeavour to let flow into the Appeal I recently read out to you, the practical ideas which must arise from a deeper insight into the existing world situation. We should never tire of bringing before our souls ever and again the most important thing, and that is how ways and means may be found to call up the clearest possible understanding for what must enter into mankind, to promote deeds and actions, when there is right thinking about the essential nature of the social organism. You will have realised how radically different man's whole thinking, feeling and willing have become since the middle of the fifteenth century, and how the whole of our history, if it is to be made fruitful for mankind, must be revised from the standpoint of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch with its fundamental change in man's attitude of soul, The characteristics of the evolution during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch have had the result that in people endowed with a certain will – be it regarded as right or wrong, good or bad – that the thinking underlying these people's will, takes on a definite form. And from this thinking that has a definite form, in essentials the whole of our social movement is built. The social movement has its foundation in those thoughts that people are able to formulate in accordance with the fundamental character of our time.

In the threefold division of which we have often spoken, and which is the subject of the Appeal, the actual political State is really but one department, one member, of the threefold organism, though most people believe it to embrace the whole social organism, confusing it indeed with the social organism. When on the one hand you understand what the threefold social organism amounts to, and on the other hand you try to grasp how in modern life there has been a one-sided tendency to centralise the social organism, to let the State swallow up everything, then putting together these two things you have something important for understanding the matter. And to understand the present social movement from a serious standpoint is today the most vital necessity for man. For a long time people will still be groping in uncertainty as to what is to happen. It cannot be otherwise. The way it must be regarded, however, the way it must be worked for, is by widening the understanding of the social organism, creating the possibility for it really to be understood. From this standpoint it is extraordinarily interesting to observe the kind of thinking of the men who, in some particular direction, are active in social matters. Things must depend more and more upon our observing the way, the form, the structure of men's thinking, and upon our paying less heed to the content. On the most various occasions we have had to emphasise that what people really think matters very much less than how they think, and how their thinking is directed. Finally, it is not of such great importance for what is penetrating and decisive in the present world movement whether anyone is a reactionary in the original sense or liberal, democratic, socialist or bolshevik. What people say is not very important, but what is important is how they think, in what way their thoughts are formed. We can see today how personalities arise whose thought content and programmes are thoroughly socialistic, but who in the form of their thought are not very different from those who, over a large area of the earth, have just been overthrown.

We must therefore look deeper into what lies behind all this. For, as I recently said in Basle, as time goes on very little will depend upon the programmes that go around as if they had been mummified. Much will, depend upon people learning to think differently, to form their thoughts differently. Up to now there is only anthroposophical thinking that can guide men's thinking today in another direction, and for this reason it is regarded by many as something fantastic. It is, however, the people who call it so who themselves are fantastic, even if materialistically fantastic, for all the same they are theorists who cannot face reality. But what is developing will come from the way in which men think. It is just this that I want to dwell upon today.

Whoever pays heed to the ways in which the views of the proletarian movement have gradually been formed and developed up to now, must see how very various these views are. One fact should be of special interest to us today – that by far the greater number among the proletariat wholeheartedly profess Marxism in either its original or its more mature form. It is very characteristic how Karl Marx, having become acquainted with French social Positivism and then, from London, having studied the world of socialism and its development, built up on these foundations his extraordinarily arresting socialist theories which have gradually caught hold of the whole proletarian world. It is actually the Marxist thought that has spread abroad and has flamed up into the conflagration of this last catastrophe, as we have it today, and as it will continue to spread. Many even among the socialists refer to Karl Marx as if they themselves were Marxists. The one maintains that his standpoint is orthodox Marxism, another says that he represents advanced Marxism, and so on but everything goes back to Marx.

Now a statement by Karl Marx himself throws great light on certain aspects of this matter. Speaking of Marxism he once emphasised that he himself was no Marxist. Particularly in these times one should not forget this statement. For it is only by paying dire heed to such things that one notices how everything depends not on what is said but on the way in which thoughts are formed. Especially in our hard times the easy way of just building programmes will never meet human needs. And there is a way, even if a long one, that leads from Marx to Lenin who now regards himself as a true Marxist. To speak of Lenin is not to speak of a single personality but of a movement, which, if you like, is fundamentally open to criticism but from which the impulse is spreading widely. This movement, however, is also extended through certain methods considered by its adherents as actually being true Marxism.

Now the problem we have here is most easily approached when in the centre of our considerations we place the now prevalent one-sidedness that consists in handing over everything to the State, when in reality we have to do with a threefold organism of which the State is only one member. It is indeed interesting to follow up how Karl Marx formed his thoughts, and, quite apart from what he says with regard to their content, to look more at the thought structure. Whoever, for example, goes to his writings and reads them in the hope of finding some conception of how the social organism will be moulded, will be greatly disappointed. Statements such as those imparted by Spiritual Science about the social organism, in Karl Marx will be sought in vain. In the way he develops his thoughts there is nowhere a trace of anything of the kind. If in his writings you follow his national-economic views on the formation of the social order, you come to the conclusion that Karl Marx has thought out nothing new about the social organism. He has done no original thinking whatever about what the future of the world should be. He seeks to discover how those men thought who brought about the age of capitalism, and how the questions of wage, capital, ground-rent, and so on, were matured under the rule of capitalism. He pulls to pieces the national-economy of the capitalist rule. The most important ideas given by Karl Marx to the proletariat can already be found in Ricardo and elsewhere. Karl Marx says: In the capitalistic economic order, gradually built up in recent times, men have held the opinions from which have arisen the modern wage conditions, the modern capital conditions, the modern ground-rent conditions. And now he tries to think further. Not that he tells us what shall be put in place of this social membering that has arisen under capitalism; he only shows that under this capitalist system the proletariat necessarily developed as a special class
of human beings. That is so; that is a reality. He then goes on to show whither the capitalist rule is leading. He proves that it is leading to an absurdity, that having reached its peak it is obliged to change into its opposite. Capital is increasingly gathered into the hands of the individual until it reaches what is most individual, which at the same time is the community. However Marx and Marxists strive against the recognition of the word, according to Marx capital passes over to the control of the State, so that the State becomes the one great capitalist. But this then includes in the representation of the people created by the State, all the human beings taking part in that State.

It is on this statement that the most varied socialistic ideas of recent times have been formed. Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels worked for a long time limiting, modifying, elaborating, the original expression of these thoughts, as must happen with men who do not remain stationary but, in observing the world, develop themselves. And because Karl Marx' thoughts appealed deeply to the souls of the proletariat there now arose on the basis of Marxism a great movement which has taken the most varied forms in the different countries. The socialism that has developed on the foundation of Marxism is of one shade in England, another in France; it finds its most definite expression in Germany, and this has passed on to Russia. But the essential question of principle, the relation of the proletariat to the State, has become more or less nebulous. Thus the people have formed a number of parties within the framework of socialism, and these parties fight each other to the knife because they regard in such different ways this recent historic development, namely, the relation of the proletariat to the State. The most varied streams play their part here, upon which today we do not wish to touch. We will merely indicate the way that leads from Karl Marx to Lenin. For Lenin claims to be the most orthodox Marxist who best understands Marx, whereas numerous other socialists calling themselves Marxists are stigmatised by Lenin as deserters and traitors, and given many other names besides. Many, because of their attitude during the so-called world war, are given the name Social-Chauvinists, and so on.

As I have just said, an essential feature of Karl Marx' thought-structure is the lack of positive ideas on how the matter should develop, the lack in his thought of any solution. Marx only says: you capitalist thinkers have spoken and acted in such a way that it must bring about your undoing. Then the proletariat will be supreme. I do not know what they will do then, nor does anyone, but we shall soon see. What is certain is that you capitalist thinkers, by your own measures and by what you have made of the world, have prepared your own downfall. What will then happen if the proletariat are there, what they will do, neither I nor any of the rest of you know, but it will soon be seen.

If you take all this as I have just been picturing it, you will see the form of the thought. What is showing itself everywhere in the external world is simply being absorbed and thought-out. But when we have come to the end of the thought it nullifies itself, comes to nothing, fades away. This must come as a shock to anyone with feeling for such things. Studying Marxism one always finds that it is all the result of certain thoughts, not however Marx' thoughts but the thoughts of modern times. Then one is driven into an eddying confusion of thoughts leaning to what is destructive, leading to no firm ground. It is most interesting how this thought-structure, really striking even in Marx, in Lenin comes to its highest potency, one might almost say to the point of genius. Lenin points to Marx as if to an absolute opponent of the State, as if Marx had really started out with the idea that when once the suppression of the proletariat ceased, the State, as it has developed historically, would have to came to an end. This is interesting, because it is just those who regard Lenin as opponent who would like to throw everything on to this State in its historically developed form. So that in present-day socialist circles we have this contrast—on the one hand the strict fanatic of the State, wanting everything state-controlled, on the other hand Lenin, the absolute opponent of the State, who sees salvation for mankind not in the abolition—he would consider that a Utopia—but in the gradual dying away of the State. And just by observing how Lenin thought about this, we arrive at the form of the thought living in him. Lenin thinks thus: The proletariat is the only class that can come to the top when the others have arrived at what is absurd and are ripe for their downfall. This proletarian class will bring to its highest perfection what has developed as a bourgeois State.—Please give due heed to the form of the thoughts. For example, Lenin does not say as the anarchists do: Away with the State! That would not occur to him. He is opposed to Anarchism and would consider it pure madness to abolish the State. Rather would he say: Should evolution advance on the lines laid down by the bourgeoisie, then the bourgeoisie will soon come to an end. The proletariat will take over the machinery of the State, and will bring to perfection this State founded by the bourgeoisie as an instrument to suppress the proletariat; they will make of it the most perfect State. But, Lenin now asks, what are the characteristics are of the most perfect State? And he thinks himself a true Marxist in saying: What will be characteristic of the perfect State when it comes into being—and it will be brought into being by the proletariat, as the logical conclusion of what has been set up by the bourgeoisie—is that it will lead to its own decay. The present State can only exist as a State created by the bourgeois class, because it is imperfect; when the proletariat have brought to completion what the bourgeoisie began, then the State will have received an impulse in the right direction, that consists in its bringing about its own end.

That is the particular form of Lenin's thinking. Here you see in greater potency what is to be found already in Marx. The thought when developed comes to nothing. Lenin is, however, a very realistic thinker who, by reason of the historic course of events, has arrived at the conclusion that the State must be brought to fulfillment; so far it has not died because, not having come to full development, it has preserved its life-forces. When the proletariat have perfected it, the ground will have been prepared for its gradual disappearance.

Thus you see a conception that has been formed out of reality, and this conception has the tendency to extend its reality over a great part of eastern Europe. It is no mere conception, it passes over into reality. The proletarian says: You bourgeois have made this State arise; you have used it as an instrument for suppressing the proletariat; it is the State of a privileged class. It serves you for the suppression of the proletarian classes and owes to this its ability to live. Now the proletariat will arise, will do away with class rule and bring the State to full maturity; then the State will no longer be able to live, then it will die.—And something will arise that should arise, but as Lenin says, no one can tell what. Social ignorabimus—this is what comes of this socialism. It is very interesting; for the way of thinking that has grasped the social conception today has developed out of science, and as science from its one-sided standpoint, has justly arrived at its ignorabimus, (we can know nothing) socialistic thinking, too, has come to the socialistic ignorabimus. This connection should be duly recognised. Without all that is being taught at the good bourgeois Universities about the scientific outlook on the world, there would be no socialism. Socialism is a child of the bourgeoisie; so too is bolshevism. There lies the deeper connection that must above all be understood. Now that these forms of thought have been made clear, we are able to refer to important points in the kind of outlook of such a man as Lenin. He lays special weight, for example, on the fact that within the bourgeois State bureaucracy has developed—the military machine, as he calls it. This bureaucratic military machine has arisen because it is needed by the leading classes to suppress the proletarian classes. Bolshevism, the most advanced wing of socialism, is quite clear that it can only realise its aims through an armed proletariat. Without arms there would be no hope of this, as can be seen in the historic example of the French Commune, which could act only so long as those who were in power had arms. The moment they were disarmed they were powerless. That is one thing to be remembered—the organisation of the proletariat as an armed force. And then what should be done with than? To some extent it is happening even, now. It is supposed to teach us that many who have long been sleeping deeply should awake where social matters are concerned. And what should happen? Before all else, the State as a class government is to cease. What the bourgeoisie have founded as a class State is to be taken over by an armed labour force. Again it is interesting that in clear and plain terms those who have developed the form of modern socialistic thought, to a point amounting almost to genius, make evident what, through historical evolution, has been placed in the souls of the proletariat.

Lenin shows, for example, that instead of officials and a military hierarchy there would have to be a kind of managing body composed only of elected members. He further shows that in the present condition of things all the education needed for this State management would be what is given in ordinary schools. Lenin himself uses a remarkable expression which says much. He says that what today is called the State should be transformed into a great factory with public book-keeping. To bring that about, to control it and so on, all that is needed would be the four rules of arithmetic, learnt at any ordinary school.

One should not just make fun of these things but see clearly how such an outlook is nothing but the final consequence of bourgeois evolution. Just as the modern social structure is given up entirely to economics, we have to own that capitalists, those who direct capital, mostly have no more in their heads than what Lenin asks of the modern overseer of labour.

Had there been men to whom the proletarian, as he has recently evolved, could have looked, in whose special capabilities he could have believed, and to whom he could have looked up as to certain justified authority, everything would have taken a different form. But there is no one of the kind to whom he can turn. He can look only to those who, when all is said and done, are no different in spiritual qualities from himself, but have only been before him in acquiring capital. He finds no difference between himself and those who are directing. That becomes evident in Lenin's words in a very theoretical form.

In Lenin's radical formulas it can be seen how things have gone. And this exclamation will undoubtedly be on the tip of your tongues: Yes, but such dreadful things come to light in all this, it is all horrible!—Nevertheless it is our duty to look squarely at the matter and to make a real effort to enter into men's thoughts. When what is happening here or there in the ranks of the more advanced socialists is reported, one may often meet with bourgeois indignation, which in many cases becomes bourgeois cowardice. For the urge to understand is not yet very great.

Now in any case the following must be understood, namely, what is in part already happening and what is still to happen. Lenin, who regards himself as a true Marxist, indicates how already through Marx a definite outlook on the recent and future evolution of the social ordering has been brought about. These people think that actually the new social formation must be accomplished in two phases. The first phase is when the proletariat take over the bourgeois State, which Lenin considers must, when matured, die a natural death. The proletariat will step in and bring to its end what, out of their own outlooks and impulses, they will have been able to make of the bourgeois State. According to Marx himself, it cannot at present lead to any desirable conditions. And in the sense of both Leninism and Marxism where will this first social stage lead? If we express it in a simple fashion, but as the people themselves would express it, it leads to this—that no man can eat who does not work, that everyone has special work to do and by virtue of this work has a claim to the articles essential to support life. The people are, however, quite clear that no possible equality between men would be promoted in this way, but that inequality would continue. Neither would a man receives thus the proceeds of his labour. Both Marx and Lenin have emphasised this. All that is necessary for schooling, for public services, and so on, must be withheld by the community, that is, by the State—or whatever we shall call what remains of the middle-class ordering of the world. According to this kind of socialism, Lasalle's old ideas of right to the full proceeds from labour will naturally have to go by the board. No equality results from this either, for conditions bring it about that even those who do the same work have different claims to make on life. This socialism naturally accepts that, but again inequality is immediately created. In short, these socialists take the view that in the first phase the socialist order simply continues the bourgeois order, only this bourgeois order is run by the proletariat. How outspokenly Lenin expresses himself about it is of great interest. For example, in a passage of his work State and Revolution he says: Something like a bourgeois order, a bourgeois State will arise, but without the bourgeoisie.

From these words of Lenin's, that a bourgeois State will be there without the bourgeoisie, you can see what I am always emphasising and what I regard as particularly important, that is, that those who today are thinking on socialistic lines are only taking over the heritage of the bourgeoisie. Their thoughts are bourgeois thoughts. A man who has such a genius for putting his thoughts into form as Lenin, says that the next phase will be a bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie, who will be either exterminated or made into a caste of servers. This will never bring equality, for it only means the proletariat coming to the fore and being elected instead of being nominated and decorated by something in the nature of a monarchy. The proletariat will govern and at the same time pass laws. It is still, however, the bourgeois State, but with no bourgeoisie.

This by no means produces an ideal condition. If anyone asks what these people will have made of the ordering of human society Lenin will simply answer: we have promised you nothing more than a first phase, in which we shall carry to its final conclusion what you founded as a bourgeois State; but it is we who now run it, we as proletarians. Formerly you did it, now it is for us to do. We, however, shall run this bourgeois State that you have made without the bourgeoisie. Everyone will earn according to his labour, but inequality will still remain.

Lenin says that the bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie will lead to the dying-out of the State. It will be completely extinct when the community has once realised the ordering considered as the ideal, and when an end will have been made of the narrow concept of justice held by the middle-class where, with the hard-heartedness of a Shylock, account is taken as to whether one man has worked a half-hour less or been paid more than another. This narrow outlook will be overcome only at the end of the first phase. Until then the Shylock attitude of the bourgeoisie State will persist and naturally become intensified. Thus it will prevail during the first phase of socialists.

Here you have all that these people promise to begin with: What you made for your caste we will use for the proletariat. It is nonsense to speak of democracy, for democracy would lead merely to the suppression of the minority. The proletariat will do the same as you have done. But by doing so it will bring to an end everything to which you gave a semblance of life. Then only can the second phase come.

Karl Marx already alluded to this second phase; Lenin has done so also but in a remarkable way. I consider it most important to bear this in mind. Marx in the person of Lenin says: We will drive the bourgeois order to its logical conclusion, then what is now the State will die out and the people will have became used to no longer needing a constitutional State, or any form of State; it will just cease. Everything the State has to do will have ceased to be necessary. The age will then be past in which wages are paid in accordance with the principle that whoever does not work may not eat. That is just the first phase of socialism. The time will then come when everyone will be able to live according to his capacities and his needs, and not according to the work he does. That will be the higher stage to which everything now striven for is merely a preparation. When it is no longer asked exactly how long a man has worked, the time will have come when the value of spiritual work and the work of the artist will be rightly assessed; each man will find his right place in the social order, that is in accordance with Nature, each out of his own capacities will not only be able but also willing to work. For through the civilising influence of the first phase men will have become accustomed to regard work not as a mere necessity but as something they feel the urge to do. Thus everyone will receive his livelihood according to his needs. The middle-class ordering of rights in the spirit of Shylock will no longer be needed, nor the question whether a half hour more or less has been worked; it will be seen that whoever has a certain piece of work to do may perhaps need to work two whole hours less. In short, everyone will work according to his capacities and be maintained according to his needs. That is the higher order. The intermediate stages needed at present—because the bourgeois State in order to perish must go on developing—lead to conditions in which people on the one hand say: Ignorabimus, we do not know, and on the other hand affirm that these conditions would bring about a second higher stage of socialism.

What Lenin says about this higher phase of socialism is most interesting. He calls it ignorance to maintain the possibility of people, as they are today, being able to realise a social order in which everyone could live according to his capacities and needs. For it does not occur to anyone who is a socialist to promise that the more highly developed phase of communism is bound to come about. Those times foreseen by the great socialists presuppose a productivity and a race of men far removed from those of today, far removed from present-day man who is calmly capable of stealing underclothing and who cries for the moon. This is extraordinarily significant. We have a first phase—socialism with present-day man, and the logical end of the bourgeois world-order, of the State that dies by reason of its inherent qualities. We have a higher phase with people who will have become quite different from what they are today, in effect a new race.

You see here the ideal in abstraction. First the bourgeois order will come to an end by developing into what is absurd. The State will thus be brought to an end, and through this process a new human race will be bred, the members of which will be accustomed to work according to their capacities and live according to their needs. Then it will be impossible for anyone to steal because, just as today the respectable rebel when some lady is insulted, then, the respectable will rebel of themselves. No military or bureaucratic caste will he needed to interfere, and so on and so forth. And upon what is this belief based? On the superstitious belief in the economic order! Capitalism, for its part, has produced an economic order with only an ideology and no spiritual life as counterbalance. This state of things the socialists want to carry to extremes. Away with everything except the economic life! Then they think this will produce a different race of men.

It is most important to be alive to this superstition where the economic life is concerned. For today, in accordance with all this, a tremendous number of people imagine that when the economic life, in their sense, will have been set up, not only a desirable social order will arise but even a new human race will be bred—a race fitted for this desirable social order.

All this is the modern form of superstition, which is unable to accept the standpoint that behind all external economic and materialistic actuality there lies the spiritual with its impulses. And men must receive this as something spiritual. What I have been referring to is a misunderstanding of the spiritual. If mankind is to be healed, this is possible only by spiritual means, by men receiving into themselves spiritual impulses as spiritual knowledge, as social thinking and social feeling established on the foundations of Spiritual Science. The new man will never be brought forth through economic evolution, but entirely from within outwards. For that, the spiritual life must be free and independent. A spiritual life as developed during recent centuries, formerly chained to the financial State as now to the economic, will never be able really to create the new man.

For this reason, on the one hand freedom in the life of spirit must be striven for by giving this spiritual life its own department. On the other hand there must be an effort to guide the economic life purely as such, so that the State, which has to do only with the relation of man to man, should not be concerned with economy. For the economic life will use up anything that presses into its sphere. In so far as man stands within the economic life he too will be used, and he must continually be rescuing himself from this fate. He will be able to do so when he sets up en appropriate relation between man and man, and that is brought about in a rightly organised State. Unbiased observation of things as they are today, enables us to say that what is fundamental in the impulses developed by the modern social movement is that these impulses are full of a thinking that leads to nothing. Just picture this to yourselves! Anyone properly applying this kind of thought would argue in the following way: I want to think out the most perfect form of modern educational method. I come to see that human beings must be so instructed that they absorb as much as possible of the principle of death, so that when they come to maturity they may begin at once to die. That thought if really grasped would nullify itself. But take Lenin's thoughts about the State—as soon as it is matured it prepares to die. Thus you see that modern thinking can arrive at nothing productive, nothing fruitful, nothing for the spiritual life. For the spiritual life has become a mere ideology, only surrounded by thoughts, or natural laws which are themselves just thoughts, and because of this, because the spiritual life is at the mercy of the economic life or of the political life, it has become unfruitful. This has been made particularly evident by the war catastrophe. Just consider how much depended upon this spiritual life. And everywhere on earth, in the most dreadful way, its fetters have been shown.

And now consider the sphere of the life of the State. The socialists, thinking to their logical conclusion the half-thoughts of the middle-class, think out a State with the peculiar characteristic of bringing about its own death. And in the sphere of economic life everyone indulges in the worn-out superstition that this economic life—that in reality consumes life, for which reason the other two departments are necessary to help the economy too to keep its place—that this economic life will bring forth a new human race.

In no sphere has modern thinking succeeded in arriving at anything capable of producing conditions for a prosperous life. But what is sought on the grounds of Spiritual Science in this domain is to shape conditions worthy of life out of those deserving death. Then, however, it will not be enough—as many hope and as here and there it has already been done—that those who were formerly the underlings should now he supreme, and those formerly supreme the underlings. Those now underlings, when at the top thought in reactionary terms, bourgeois terms; those now supreme think socialistically. But the form of the thoughts is fragmentally the same. For it is not a question of what one thinks but of how one thinks. Once this is understood it gives the initial impulse towards understanding the threef0ld nature of the social organism, which enters right into reality and has to do with all that must develop as a healthy social organism. The most important thing for these times must be produced out of anthroposophical knowledge, and we must guard ourselves from misunderstanding this most deeply serious and significant side of our Anthroposophical Movement. But we do misunderstand it when we allow ourselves, especially in this sphere of Anthroposophy, to be carried away by any kind of sectarianism. Everyone should take counsel with himself concerning the question: How much sectarianism is there still in me? For the modern human Movement must aim at driving out everything sectarian, at not being sectarian, at not being abstract but interested in humanity, at not having a narrow but a broad outlook. In so far as, from a certain side, our Movement has grown out of the Theosophical Movement, it retains the seeds of sectarianism. These seeds must be crushed. What is sectarian must be cast out. Above everything there is need for wide horizons and an unprejudiced contemplation of reality.

I said recently that those who cut off coupons must clearly realise that in the cut-off coupons there lies the labour power of men, and that in so far as human labour power is enslaved by the capitalist economic order, the cutter of coupons is taking part in this enslavement. The answer to this should not be “How shocking”, or anything of that kind, for “how shocking” is dreadfully theoretic and something that can easily land one in modern sectarian tendencies. I have often put this in another way—people hear of Lucifer and Ahriman and say to themselves: keep well out of the way; have nothing to do with Lucifer and Ahriman; I'll stand fast by God:—To deal with the matter in this abstract manner is to be only the more deeply drawn into the toils of Lucifer and Ahriman. We must have the sincerity and honesty to acknowledge that we are part of the present social process, from which we do not escape by deceiving ourselves. We should instead do our utmost to make it more healthy. At the present stage of mankind's development, the individual cannot help all this; but he can play his part in cooperating with his unfortunate fellowmen. Today it is not a matter of saying: be a good fellow, nor of sitting down to send out thoughts of universal love, and so on. The important thing is that being within this social process, we should come to an understanding with ourselves, and develop the capacity of even being bad with the bad—not that it is a good thing to be bad, but because a social order that is due to be overthrown forces the individual to live thus. We should not wish to live in the illusion that we are good and splendid, priding ourselves that we are better than others, but we should recognise that we are part of the social order and not be deceived about it. The less we give way to illusion, the greater will be the impulse to work for what will lead to the salvation of the social organism, to strive to acquire capacities, and to awake from the deep sleep of present-day humanity. Nothing can help here save the possible recourse to the energetic and penetrating thinking given by Spiritual Science, which may be contrasted with the feeble, lazy and half-hearted thinking of present-day official science.

This makes me think of how, eighteen or nineteen years ago, speaking at the Working Men's Club at Berlin, I said that science today is a bourgeois science and that it must evolve by freeing thinking, freeing knowledge, from the bourgeois element. The leaders of the proletariat today do not understand this, being convinced the bourgeois science they have adopted is something absolute—that what is true is true. Socialists do not consider how it all is connected with bourgeois development. They talk of the impulses, the emotions, of the proletariat, but their thinking is entirely bourgeois. Certainly many of you will say at this point: All the same, what is true is true! Indeed a certain amount of the truths, let us say, of chemistry, physics, mathematics, is of course true and these truths cannot be true either in a bourgeois sense or a proletarian sense. The theorem of Pythagoras is most certainly not true in a bourgeois sense or in a proletarian sense, but simply true. This however is not the point, the point is that the truths enclose a certain field; if one remains in this field what is contained within it can certainly be truths, but they are truths that are useful, convenient and suitable just for middle-class circles, whereas outside are many other truths which can also be known but remain unnoticed by the bourgeoisie. Thus, the point is not that the truths of chemistry and mathematics are true but that there exist besides other truths able to throw on the former the right light, and then a quite different shade of meaning is revealed. Then knowledge is given a wider scientific horizon than is possible for the bourgeoisie to give. It is not whether these matters are true or not but how much truth man wants. And the whole affair is coloured by the quality of the truth. Certainly the Professors of Chemistry at the Universities will not be able to make any remarkable sudden transitions, for in the laboratory it is he who has the knowledge about things and he knows that he is the last to do the thinking, that is done by the method. But as soon as this same thinking passes over into history, or into the history of literature, into all that men rescue from the economic life and bring into a sphere worthy of human beings, it immediately becomes free. History as we now have it is nothing but a middle-class fiction, as are philosophy and the other sciences. People, however, have no idea of this and accept it all as objective knowledge.

A healthy life can only take root when scientific research is given back its autonomy, in short, when the threefold order of which I have so often spoken is established.

I have here to add a small correction. Recently, in drawing your attention to the German Committee formed for our Appeal, I mentioned that Dr. Boos, Herr Molt and Herr Kühn had formed it. I have been notified that in Stuttgart our friend Dr. Unger is working with it in an essential way. This ought not to be forgotten.

Today I have been trying to throw light for you on things of contemporary history. I have it very much at heart that our friends should try to go more deeply into the social problem, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. You have the basis for an understanding of this social problem, and this understanding is what is of most importance. Whoever looks into present-day history will not imagine that we can hope for success in the Appeal and all connected with it, in the course of a few days. The lectures given in Zurich, extended and supplemented by certain definite questions, will shortly appear in book-form, so that the details of what is in the Appeal can be had in a few concise sentences. [ Note 01 ]

The next thing will be for the movements today devouring the social organism to be brought to the point of absurdity. These must first develop, however, into complete helplessness and calamity. But, at the right time, something must be ready which can be grasped when what is old has reached this point. Therefore it is so infinitely important that when once these impulses are taken to your hearts they should not be allowed to cool, but that each of you should help, as far as he is able, to bring about what must of necessity happen.

In what we have here been considering I have shown how in the course of man's evolution something very different may be going on in the unconscious depths of his soul from what appears more on the surface. A man may think he is striving for this or that, whereas in reality in his innermost soul there hold sway impulses directed to quite different aims. This truth is particularly significant in our time. We see today a whole class of men setting their wills in a certain direction. But just here we may have the experience how in this age of the development of consciousness something different is coming to expression on the surface of the soul from what is living in its depths, where impulses not present in consciousness today are striving for expression, for realisation.

The consciousness of the proletariat is today filled with three things. First, the materialistic interpretation of history; secondly, the view that up to now, in reality, class struggles have been at the basis of what has gone on in the world, what is now happening being thought to be a reflection of these class struggles. The third thing is the theory of surplus value, that is, the theory that surplus value arises through the unpaid labour of the worker, which makes a profit that is than taken by the employer from the worker without the latter receiving compensation.

What makes the impulses arise in the consciousness of the proletariat, from which are drawn the forces active in the modern social movement, is derived from the combination of these three factors. This, however, refers only to what lies in the consciousness of the proletariat. In the depths of the souls of all present-day mankind, in the deeper layers of the souls of the proletariat too, three other things are living, of which the world as yet knows very little. The world does not make such effort towards self-knowledge, and therefore knows nothing of what, in the depths of the soul, is actually striving for historical realisation.

These three other things are, first, a penetration of the spiritual life, a penetration fitted for the present age, what may be called Spiritual Science. The second is freedom in the life
of thought, freedom of thought. The third is socialism in its right and true sense. Without knowing it the proletariat are striving for these three things. Their instincts follow the other three things that I referred to as being active on the surface of their soul-life, in their actual consciousness.

In this very difference between the proletariat's conscious efforts and their unconscious impulses we see particularly clearly what a complete contrast they make. Take the materialistic interpretation of history. This is due to the modern materialism which has arisen during the last four centuries. This materialism first made itself felt among the leading classes of men in the field of natural science, and later took its hold on all science. It then turned to the material interpretation of history among the members of the modern proletariat, who in reality have simply taken over as heritage the kind of conceptions concerning science holding good for the bourgeoisie. This material conception of history is due to all spiritual life being, as it were, merely the smoke arising from the proceedings in the economic life, from all that is working in the sphere of man's economic life. In the historical course of man's life there is actually only what is going on in the different spheres concerned with the creation of goods—production, trade, consumption; and according to how men have carried on their economy at different times, has depended on their religious belief, what kind of art they have cultivated, what attitude they have taken to rights and morality. The spiritual life is, finally, an ideology, that is, it has no independent reality, being a reflection of the eternal economic struggle. Certainly all the ideas required by men, what they feel aesthetically, on what they bring to expression through their moral will can work back again on the economic struggle. But ultimately all spiritual life is a mirrored image of the external economic life. This is what is called the materialistic interpretation of history. If human life be a mere reflection of purely external, material, economic forces, if it be true that the world is only a world of the senses and that men's thoughts reflect only what is of the senses, if men live entirely in such ideas, wanting to see as reality only what the sense world reveals, then this is a turning away from all true life of the spirit, and signifies man's refusal to recognise an independent spirit resting on itself.

Thus in modern times efforts are directed towards marshalling more and more proofs to justify the assertion that no such thing exists as an independent spirit living in the supersensible, that there is no such thing as spirit at all. This plays upon the surface of men's life of soul, and has constituted. the essential content of modern consciousness since mankind entered the age of the consciousness soul. But in the very depths of their life of soul men today are striving for the spirit; they have, one might say, a most deep and inward need of the spirit. This may be confirmed if we look at the evolution of human history.

We have often looked back on the special kind of spirituality in the first post-Atlantian period of culture, the Indian, and described its character from the most varied standpoints. What we have learnt about it enables those who can look on the things without prejudice to say that the life of spirit, as it existed in the old Indian culture-epoch—to be discovered only by means of Spiritual Science—rests upon unconscious intuition. Mark well, unconscious, for it was then a matter of an atavistic life of spirit.

If we then pass on to the ancient Persian life of spirit and seek its sources, we find them flowing from an unconscious inspiration. The Egypto-Chaldean life of spirit is still prevalent in so-called historic Egyptian times, and if we study history without prejudice we shall be able to see that in the old Egyptian and Chaldaea knowledge we have to do with what is in the soul as unconscious though living imagination.

There then followed the Graeco-Latin life of spirit. In this the ancient imaginations remained, permeated, however, with concepts, ideas. The essential thing expressed by Greek life was that, in human evolution, the Greeks were the first to possess this element that, as an impulse of the soul, was previously non-existent. The Greeks already had ideas, concepts, as I have shown more fully in my Riddles of Philosophy. But through all their ideas and concepts there were weaving the figurative, the imaginative. This is unnoticed today, particularly when it is a question of that unaccountable Greece of which our schools and universities speak. When the Greeks uttered the word ‘idea’ for example, they had in mind nothing so abstract as the concept called up by our word. With than the word conjured up a kind of vision, which was nevertheless to be grasped clearly in the form of concept. It was something perceptible; idea was at the same time vision. In Greek one would never have been able to speak of ideology, though the word comes from the Greek. In any case a Greek would not have spoken so that the same feelings would have been aroused that are aroused today by the word ‘ideology’. For to the Greek ideas were full of being, something permeated by pictures.

Now it is characteristic of our fifth post-Atlantian epoch that imaginations have vanished from the consciousness soul, and it is the concept above all that remains.

Our modern life of spirit, with so little power of picturing things that only abstractions remain, is particularly prized by the cultured for its very dryness and dullness. These times live, so to speak, on abstractions and would reduce everything to some kind of abstract concept. It is just in what is called middle class practical life that, in the most extensive sense, this abstract concept holds sway. It is, however, already making itself felt that in the depths of men's souls slumbering, unconscious impulses are striving after renewed imagination. (This is true of the present and will continue to be so in the near future.) Thus, of the fifth epoch we may say: Concepts striving for imaginations.

1. Old Indian Culture-epoch: Unconscious intuitions as the source of the life of spirit.

2. Old Persian Culture-epoch: Unconscious inspirations as the source of the life of spirit.

3. Egypto-Chaldean Culture-epoch: Unconscious imaginations as the source of the life of spirit.

4. Graeco-Latin Culture-epoch: Unconscious imaginations with concepts.

5. Modern Culture-epoch: Concepts striving for imaginations.

Our Spiritual Science goes to meet this striving for imaginations. The overwhelmingly greater part of mankind knows as yet nothing of what goes on in the soul, and thus see all life of the spirit in mere ideas and concepts before which men feel themselves helpless. For concepts as such have in themselves no content. Till now it has been the destiny among leading circles to develop a certain predilection for purely abstract thinking. This love of abstract thinking, however, has produced something else. This thinking in pure concepts is helpless! It produces an endeavour to rely upon the reality that cannot be relied on because it is only suited to the senses, namely, external physical reality. This belief in external physical reality has, in truth, arisen from the ineffectiveness of the concepts of modern mankind.

The ineffectiveness, the helplessness, of the conceptual life is expressed in every sphere of the spiritual life. In science the great desire is to experiment, so as to discover something not otherwise given to the world of the senses. Pondering on the world of the senses with ideas alone we do not got beyond it, for concepts themselves contain no reality. In art we are getting ever more accustomed to the copying of a model and keeping to the external object alone. Up to now, in art, it has been the destiny of the leading circles of mankind to be absorbed more and more in the mere study of external sense reality. The capacity to create out of the spirit and to represent the spiritual by artistic means is being increasingly lost naturalism alone is striven for, imitation of what nature, as such, represents in the external world, because from the abstract life of the spirit nothing wells up which in itself van be given independent form.

If you consider the development of art in recent times, you will find this everywhere confirmed—this continual striving after more naturalism, after a representation of what externally is seen and perceived. This has finally reached its peak in what is called Impressionism. Before Impressionism artistic endeavour was directed to the reproduction of some external object. Then came those who carried this to its logical conclusion end said: When I have before me a human being or a wood, and I paint this men or this wood, I am not giving my impression, for while I am standing before the wood the sun illumines it in a particular way, but after a few moments the light effect may be suite different. In my desire to be naturalistic what am I to perpetuate? I cannot hold to what the external world shows me for that changes each moment. I try to paint a man who is smiling, but the next instant his expression may be grim! Am I to turn the grim face into the smiling one? What am I to paint? If I wish to paint the external object in its temporary state I shall have to use force on the object. Objects of nature do not allow of this, but with the human object as model force has to be used for the pose and expression to be held as long as possible. But then, when one tries to imitate nature, the model takes on an expression as if he had catalepsy. So that is no good.—For this reason they became Impressionists; they waited to catch and hold the fleeting impression. Then, however, it is no longer possible to be altogether naturalistic, but all means must be used, not to irritate nature, but to reproduce how it appears and reveals itself to anyone in a certain moment. The trouble is that in an effort to be naturalistic one becomes impressionist, and then, alas, as impressionist it is impossible to remain naturalistic: So the whole thing is changed round. Some no longer aimed at giving the impression, at fixing the outward impression, and tried to express what, however primitive, arose within themselves—they tried to hold fast what happens within. These became Expressionists.

In the moral sphere, even in the life of rights, the same course can be shown; everywhere there arises this striving after the abstract life of spirit preferred by men. We have only to look at modern human evolution correctly, and we shall find everywhere this urge towards abstraction. And what effect has this had on the modern proletariat? Since they have been tied to machines, caught up in the present soulless capitalism, their whole destiny has become bound up in the economic life. The same trend of ideas that brought members of the middle-class circles to naturalism in art has now brought the proletariat to the theories expressed in the materialistic interpretation of history. The proletariat everywhere has drawn upon the logical consequences of bourgeois culture—consequences before which the bourgeoisie now stand aghast.

Now, within these bourgeois circles what has been the attitude towards religion? In earlier times there was at least a dim atavistic conception of the Christ-Mystery; there was a feeling that abstract spiritual life offered no possibility of conceiving how the Christ had lived in Jesus. Thus men's ideas became limited to what, in the early days of Christianity, had happened in the world of the senses; they became limited to what merely concerned Jesus. The Christ was looked upon more and more as mere man, whereas the Christ belonging to the supersensible world vanished ever further from the field of human vision. The abstract life of the soul, finding no way to the Christ, contented itself with Jesus. What did the proletariat make of this? They asked themselves: Why do we need any specially religious outlook regarding Jesus? The bourgeoisie have already made of Him the simple man of Nazareth. If Jesus is this simple man of Nazareth, He will naturally be just like us. We are dependent on the economic life and why should Jesus not have been so too? Have we still any justification in ascribing to Him a special mission, or in calling Him the founder of a new human age if He is just the simple man of Nazareth who, for His part, drew His teachings from the economic processes into which He Himself was placed? We must study the economic processes at the time of the founding of Christianity, and the way in which a simple worker deserted his work to spread ideas around concerning the contemporary economic ordering in Palestine. From that we shall see why Jesus made the statements like he did. This Jesus-theory is the final result of modern protestant theology, which no longer has any power over modern men, the modern proletariat.—

But now, in the subconscious depths of their souls, modern men are once more striving for freedom of thought, for inward initiative in thought. On the conscious surface of their soul-life it appears that the opposite is to be the aim, and this opposite is the object of their striving. Hence the deep protesting opposition in the subconscious which comes to expression in the present terrible struggle. The leading bourgeois circles want to be free of any authority; but they are up to the neck in every kind of belief in authority. They have a blind belief in authority above all where the sphere of the State is concerned—now regarded by them as the highest authority. For whose judgment stands higher for the modern middle-class than that of the ‘expert’? The expert is consulted in everything, even in matters of external life. Whoever enters life having left the University with a degree, must know everything. Be he a theologian, he is consulted about God's intentions towards man; if a lawyer he is asked what rights a man has in life; if a doctor of medicine, he is asked for a universal cure, and if any kind of philosopher at all, he is questioned about every possible thing in the world. Modern philosophers always smile when their glance falls on the book of a venerable philosopher of pre-Kantian days—Christian Wolf. This book is called Rational Thoughts on God, the World, the Soul of Man, and all other things; people smile at such a book. But modern leading classes most firmly believe in the spiritual laboratories the State has set up for its citizens, where the whole content of human intelligence is brewed. The concern of these circles is not to give everyone a consciousness of his own, but to create a uniform consciousness, and to manage that in the widest sense it should be a State-consciousness. Modern consciousness is much more a consciousness of the State than is commonly believed. People think of the State as their God who Gives them all they need. They no longer have to bother themselves about things, for the State sees to it that there should be provision for all reasonable departments of life. The proletariat have been excluded from the life of the State except in a few spheres allowed them by its democratic form. With their labour-power that engages the whole man, the proletariat were yoked to the economic life. For this reason it now drew upon itself, for its own life alone, the final consequence. The modern middle-class citizen has a State-consciousness, and though he may not always admit it he is quite willing to boast about this State-consciousness. It is really not necessary to have “Reserve-Lieutenant” and “Professor” printed on your card, just to make a parade of your State-consciousness. It can be done in a quite different way. But the proletariat had no interest in the State. They were harnessed to the economic life, and their feelings were again, though in accordance with their own lives, the final consequence of middle-class feelings. The proletarian consciousness became class-consciousness, and thus we see that since they had nothing to do with the State their class-consciousness was built on internationalism. The middle-class were able to have leanings towards the State only because this modern State looked after them, and the middle-class wish to be looked after. The State, however, did not look after the proletarian, and he felt himself as part of the world only in so far as he belonged to his class. The arising of the proletarian class has been brought about in the same way throughout all States. Hence came the formation of an international proletariat, feeling consciously opposed to the bourgeoisie and all that tended, with the same force of consciousness, towards the State and the agents of the State. Thus, within recent times there has arisen an extraordinarily powerful form of class-consciousness among the proletariat. I do not know how many of you have been to proletarian meetings. But how do they always close They close by copying as a proletarian consequence what has come from so many bourgeois organisations and interests! For example, with what did bourgeois meetings in middle Europe begin and and? With “Hail to the Emperor:” And every proletarian meeting has ended with “Long live the international revolutionary social democracy!” We have only to reflect on what enormous suggestive power lies in these words heard by the proletariat week after week, and how these words induce a uniform consciousness throughout the masses so that all freedom of thought has naturally been driven out. All this has taken firm hold of the soul. Formerly there were meetings, that have now become less frequent, called by the bourgeoisie, to which social democrats also were invited. The Chairman on closing would say: “I shall first beg the social democrats to leave, and then ask the audience to rise and give a salute to the Emperor.” There were also proletarian meetings at the discussions of which the bourgeoisie were allowed to contribute. And at the end the Chairman would ask middle-class members to retire, so that the “Long live the international revolutionary social democracy” could be proposed. Thus was welded what passed through the soul as a uniform class-consciousness—the opposite of what was in the depths of their souls, the opposite of the longing for individual freedom of thought, for an individual form of consciousness!—That is the second thing.

And the third thing pressing for realisation in the depths of the modern soul is Socialism, which can be briefly described as the effort of the modern soul, in the time of the consciousness soul, to be able to feel itself an individual within the social organism. This is how man wants the social organism to be founded; he wants to feel himself member of this social organism. This means that he wishes a consciousness to permeate him that gives him the feeling: What I do is done so that I know in what way the social organism has a part in me and how I have a share in the social organism. Man lives within the social organism. But nowadays, as I have said, the feeling for the social organism is present only in the subconscious.

Today when a painter points a picture he is right in saying: This picture must be paid for; I have put my art into it.—What is his art? It is something only made possible for him by the community, by the social organism. His artistic ability, it is true, depends upon his karma, his earlier earth lives; but people today do not believe that, and by not believing it deceive themselves. If however we ignore the share of ability brought down by our individuality from higher regions through birth, then we are entirely dependent upon the social organism. But modern man pays no conscious heed to this, so instead of a social feeling in his consciousness there has arisen during the last four centuries, above all, on increasingly egoistic, anti-social trend of thought. This anti-social thought expresses itself particularly by everyone thinking first of himself and trying to get as much as possible out of the social organism. The feeling that one should return to the social organism what one has received, is harboured indeed by very few. In leading bourgeois circles there has gradually arisen in regard to the spiritual life the greatest imaginable egoism, egoism that looks upon sheer spiritual enjoyment, sheer intellectual enjoyment, as something man is specially justified in procuring for himself. We have, however, no claim to spiritual enjoyment prepared for us by the social organism if we are not in the position to return to the social organism an appropriate equivalent.

Now the proletariat, not being able to share in the spiritual part of the social organism, and being yoked to the economic life and to soulless capitalism, are again driven to the final consequence of middle-class egoism shown in the theory of surplus value. The worker recognises that it is he who actually produces what comes from machines at the factories, and wants to have the proceeds. He does not wish a part to be withdrawn and to go elsewhere. Seeing nothing but the capitalist who places him at the machine, he naturally thinks that all the surplus value goes to the capitalists and that he must above all turn against them. Considered objectively, there is of course something else, quite different hidden in this so-called surplus value. For what is surplus value? It is everything produced by manual labour for which this labour receives no compensation. Suppose there were no surplus value, that everything went to the worker for his immediate needs. Then it would go without saying that there would be no spiritual culture, no further culture at all! There would be only the economic life, only what can be brought into existence through manual labour. It cannot be a question therefore of the surplus value going to the manual worker, but only of its application in a way that can bring surplus value and manual work into agreement. This will happen only when conditions are created in which the manual worker can have some understanding of where the surplus value goes.

Here one touches on the point where most of the offences of the modern middle-class order have been committed. Machines and factories have been set up, trade has been carried on, capital put into circulation, the worker placed at the machine and thus harnessed to the capitalistic economic order. There he is meant to work. But no one has had the idea that the worker has need of anything beyond his labour power. It is not his labour power alone but also his leisure, the force he has left when his work is done, that must be used in a healthy social order. Only those capitalists are justified who have as great an interest in the Proletariat's labour power that is left over, as they have in the economic application of their forces. Those capitalists alone have justification who take care that the worker, at the end of a definite period of work, can have access to what is good from a universal human point of view spiritually and otherwise educationally.

For this, he must first have the fruits of education. In Middle-class society these fruits of education have been developed, therefore it has been possible for all kinds of popular cultural institutions to be set up. What people's kitchens of the spiritual life! What has not been founded in this sphere! But what feelings must have been awakened by all this in the proletariat? The feeling indeed that the middle-class is giving him something they are cooking there among themselves. Naturally he distrusts it and thinks: Aha, they would make me middle-class too by feeding me with the milk of the pious way of thinking in these people's kitchens!—These welfare movements of the bourgeoisie are largely responsible for the facts arising today in such a shocking way on the horizon of social life. What is appearing flows from much deeper sources than is generally thought. I want the surplus value. That is the egoistic principle that appears as the final consequence of the egoism of the middle-class who also wanted the surplus value. Once again the proletariat takes on the final consequence. And instead of the real, true socialism, slumbering in the depths of the soul, there appears on the surface of the life of the soul, in the consciousness, the theory of surplus value which is eminently anti-social. For everyone who takes surplus value to his heart is doing so for the satisfaction of his own egoism.

Thus today we have an anti-social socialism, just as we have a striving for a content of consciousness that is nothing of the sort. It is simply the result of the economic connection of one class of human beings expressing itself in the class-consciousness of the proletariat. Thus today we have a spiritual endeavour that denies the spirit and has found its logical conclusion in the materialistic interpretation of history.

We must look deeply into these things otherwise we shall not understood the present times. H0w little, in this direction, have the middle-class circles been inclined to cultivate insight into these connections, how little are they still prone to become conscious of them though the facts have spoken so clearly and with such urgency. In no other way will it be possible to bring about a striving among the proletariat that is truly social, in place of the present anti-social striving, than by trying to establish the economic life on a healthy, independent basis as a member of the social organism, which without State interference will have its own laws and its own governing body. In other words, we must make every effort to prevent the State being its own economist in any sphere. Then could be developed real socialism in the economic life, for which there is a deep yearning in the human soul. And there must also be an endeavour to separate from the economic life that of the actual political State, which for its part has no claim either to the economic life nor to the spiritual, cultural, educational life, and so on. If the life of the State makes no demands in either direction, but simply embodies the life of rights, than it bring to expression what here in the physical world is the basis of the relation between man and man—the relation that makes all men equal in the sight of the law. It is only when the life of the State is thus that true freedom of thought can be developed.

As third member of the sound social organism the life of spirit must be formed on its own basis, which can be drawn from the reality of the spirit and must press onward to true Spiritual Science. What in the depths of their souls men are striving for today is indeed the healthy social order, which must, however, be threefold.

Thus can things be regarded, as they have been considered by us today, and Spiritual Science should be taken also in this sense both deeply and earnestly, not as something that is listened to like a Sunday sermon, for that is middle-class.

It is middle-class that in its economic life only a small circle should, at a pinch, be cared for—at least, think they are caring for themselves. It is middle-class in the life of the State to let the State do the caring, and when, to pay a little attention to the life of the spirit, people visit a person, or take up theosophy or anything of the kind. It is really respectably bourgeois: And the Theosophical Movement today has indeed established a life of the spirit very characteristic of middle-class life. One can think of nothing more bourgeois in character than this modern Theosophical Movement. It has grown up as a sectarian spiritual movement right out of the needs of this class. Hence came the struggle when we tried to work out from the Theosophical Movement something that should be permeated by modern human consciousness, and established as a movement for mankind. But from this sectarian bourgeois element, that found an anchorage in the superficiality of human souls, there was always opposition. We must get beyond this; anthroposophical striving must be understood as something demanded by the times, giving us wide instead of narrow interests, and not merely leading us into little groups for the reading of lecture cycles. It is good to reed lecture cycles; I beg you not to jump to the conclusion that no one in future should read them. We should, however, not stop there. What is read must be put into practice by seeking above all to find the relation with modern consciousness. Let us therefore thoroughly read the cycles, and we shall soon see that what is in them actually passes over into our life forces! Then it is the best social nourishment today for striving souls. For everything is thought out there, as indeed it is ultimately in our building, especially in what is there striven for artistically. It is thought out in the sense of modern times, and in these times it can be thought out in no other way. I do not know if you have considered how this building tries to be, even in social respects, a most modern product, and how in this modern sense it aids man in his striving. Just imagine a building the inside of which, or the greater part of which, had no purpose—if it just stood there! It ought to stand in a connection with the whole of the rest of the world order, to have any sense at all. Overhead in the cupola even by day it would be pitch dark, dark as night, were electric light not to come in from outside! This building points to all that is going on outside, so thoroughly is it born of all that is most modern. It must therefore develop in connection not with what is on the surface of the soul but with the inner spiritual aspirations of the time.

Thus, you might reflect upon much that is connected with this building. It is indeed a representative of the most modern spiritual life, and is only to be rightly understood if we grasp the idea of it being a kind of comet, a comet with a tail. The tail consists in there living in the human soul what is really raying forth in feeling from Anthroposophy. But it might easily happen that many people would take up the attitude towards this building that some Catholics, and indeed leading Catholics, have taken towards modern astronomy. In modern astronomy comets are looked upon as ordinary bodies in the firmament, whereas in olden days they were thought to be rods of correction wielded by some materially conceived spirit from a heavenly window. When the time came that leaders of Catholicism could no longer deny that comets should be ranked with other heavenly bodies, they invented en expedient. Some of them who were clever said: The comet consists of a core and a tail; we cannot deny that the core is a heavenly body like the rest, but the tail is not so; the tail has the origin formerly ascribed to it!—So it may also happen that people come to think: We approve of the building, but we will have nothing to do with all the odd experiences issuing from it like a comet's tail!—

But the building, like the comet, belongs to its tail, and it will be necessary that everything in relation to it should be felt in its true connection.

Yesterday from a certain standpoint we endeavoured to go deeply into the present social movement. The fact brought to light by the subject of our observations was that, to have any understanding of a movement promoted by mankind, careful distinction must be made between what goes on superficially in ordinary consciousness in the soul, and what on the other hand is working in the depths of the soul in the subconscious regions. We became aware of the three impulses behind the modern proletariat movement—first, the so-called materialistic interpretation of history; then what the proletariat have learnt from their leaders, what they understand as the class struggle that is at the basis of all that happens historically; and then we gave our attention to the theory of surplus value which has worked so incisively on the proletarian soul. These are the things at work today on the surface of their soul life. In its depths something very different is stirring and coming to life. Whereas the modern proletarian surrenders himself to illusion when he says that all that develops historically amply reflects purely economic processes, arising like smoke from the spiritual life, he in really yearning, with all present-day humanity, for definite spiritual knowledge of the world. But so far he is ignorant of this subconscious yearning of his soul for spiritual knowledge. What is going on in the subconscious depths of his life of soul and appears in a different guise on the surface, often just expresses itself in the most uncontrolled instincts.

Similarly, when the modern proletarian utters the word class-struggle, he does not realise that this is only an attempt to disguise what is filling the soul of modern mankind as a deep yearning, namely, the impulse towards freedom of thought. On its way from the subconscious to the conscious, the striving for freedom of thought changes into its opposite. This striving for freedom of thought is the real basis of the very intensive life in the element of authority, in sheer class-consciousness. And true socialism, which is the fundamental aim of our times, is expressed also in its opposite—in the striving to put all surplus value to egoistic uses.

Whoever does not understand this secret of the existing proletarian movement cannot today discover the underlying social impulses. Having had all this before our souls yesterday, we will now consider a few of its relevant truths.

A very different attitude to a world historic movement arises in those who look more deeply into what is happening, from the attitude of those who observe merely what is on the surface. The present social movement is now finding its most radical expression in Bolshevism, which is more a social method, having for its content all that has been absorbed into the will of the most advanced so-called socialism. The student of history as reality rather then theory, endeavours above all to understand how certain streams in the cosmic development of man reveal themselves in their most extreme form. For in an extreme form it is often easier to recognise what, though no less active, is frequently hidden in the less extreme. If we are rightly to understand the historic consequences of Bolshevism, the horrifying deeds of which are already historic fact, we shall, in some measure, have to observe the more recent life of history.

In answer to the question: Who are the Bolshevists?—various names would have to be given today. The names most often repeated are those of Lenin and Trotsky. I will, however, give you a third name which may Perhaps astonish you. But from a certain point of view I can do no less than call Johann Gottlieb Fichte a genuine Bolshevist. I have often spoken to you of him [ Note 01 ] and tried to present his life history from a rather more profound standpoint, and we have also called up before our souls some of his leading thoughts. It cannot be denied that Fichte was one of the most forceful thinkers of recent times and, in the truest sense of the word, an idealist. He stated his views on socialism in a little book entitled Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (The Enclosed Commercial State). If what he there presents as a kind of ideal picture of social conditions is studied in its reality, it can only be said that, if realised, this social ideal set forth in Fichte's book could lead to nothing but Bolshevism. Trotsky is writings sentence for sentence, almost word for word, as far a this can be the case in such widely different things, are reminiscent of Fichte's Der geschlossene Handelsstaat.

Now Fichte is, it is true, a Bolshevist long since dead. This is a reason however to go further into the matter. In Fichte we have, above all, a solitary thinker who reached great heights in in his philosophic ideas. He reflected upon the crying injustices of the social order of his time, and how they could be swept away to give place to juster social conditions. And out of his own innermost soul arose a picture of a communal order that aimed at organising human beings in much the same forceful way as Russian Bolshevism organises them, and as its followers will continue to do. I can imagine that many people today, concerned about the injustices arising within the social order, feel themselves captivated by the very simple conceptions developed by Fichte in his book. I need not dwell upon this; it is enough to think that you have here, described in the cultured language of a philosopher, what Bolshevism is doing. You will then have an idea of Der geschlossene Handelsstaat by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It is just these facts that can prove a justification of the threefold nature of the healthy social organism.

Now what is the aim of this threefold order? In public lectures I have often pointed out how this particular way of thinking socially differs from other ways. I have said that seeing what has partly come into being already, in one or another of the forms of States, seeing what those who are socialistically minded aim at realising, we have the feeling that what people think of already as medieval superstition is nevertheless deeply rooted in their souls. It is as if in the human soul there were a certain hankering after superstition, and when superstition is driven out on the one side, it turns to the other side. Thus, many things existing in social life, as well as the aims of socialistic thinkers, recall the scene in the second part of Goethe is Faust where Wagner is producing Homunculus. Homunculus is supposed to be put together mechanically, out of certain ingredients in accordance with dry intellectual principles. The Alchemists, looked upon as superstitious, considered that this could not be done thus simply, and set this artificial creation of a manikin, of Homunculus, in contrast to the forming of a true human organism. A true human organism cannot be put together out of just so many ingredients; the necessary conditions must be forthcoming in which he can to a certain extent produce himself. It is thought that in scientific spheres alchemistic superstitions have been overcome. But in the social sphere superstition continues to flourish. And it endeavours to sot up an artificial social order consisting in all manner of ingredients out of the human will.

This way of thinking is diametrically opposed to the fundamentals of Spiritual Science represented here. The way of thinking we represent, aims at getting rid of all social superstition, so that in a practical way we can answer the following question: What conditions must be set up, not to enable some cleverly designed, socialistic ideal to be put into practice, but so that human beings in mutual cooperation should bring about the necessary shaping of the social life

One finds, however, that in actual fact this social organism like the natural organism must consist of three relatively independent members. Just as the human head, the chief bearer of the sense-organs, by reason of these organs stands in a special relation to the external world and is centred in itself; just as, too, the rhythmic system, the lungs and the breathing, end then again the digestive system are centred in themselves, as these three work together in relative independence; so it is fundamentally necessary for the social organism to be threefold, its three members being relatively independent. There must work side-by-side the independent spiritual organism, the independent organism of the political state in its narrow sense, and the independent economic life. Each of these bodies should have its own legislation and government, arising out of its own conditions and its own forces. This seems to be abstract, but this threefold order is just the element in which man can be so fused that from the working together of all the members a healthy social organism can result. It cannot be just a question of thinking out what for the social organism is to take. Our thinking, indeed, is not so advanced in the social sphere that a structure can be given straightway to the social organism. One individual by himself could as little bring about such a structure as a man growing up alone on a desert island without any human society could, out of himself, learn to speak. Everything social arises through cooperation, but a cooperation harmoniously regulated on this threefold basis. It is only by keeping in mind the direction leading to a really practical structure, a really practical life, that we understand how a men like Johann Gottlieb Fichte came to think out a social system which, put into practice, would actually be Bolshevism.

For what kind of personality is Fichte? Fichte is a characteristic modern thinker. He cultivated in the most energetic way and in its purest form the thinking that was evolving, as we know, though not always on the same level. (Read up this in my Rätseln der Philosophie; Riddles of Philosophy). It is just in a personality like Fichte that one can see in what direction thinking goes when a man wishes to draw it entirely out of himself, out of his ego. And if one applies this thinking to the social structure there arises the picture given in Fichte's Der geschlossene Handelsstaat. Only with deep insight can it be understood how thinking like Fichte's is not suitable for finding the right social structure. Thinking drawn entirely from the impulse of the ego is not able to find the social structure of the ego, any more than the single man can invent speech. The social structure is far more readily found when men are brought together into such a relation that this structure can be created through their mutual intercourse and cooperation. We must make a halt, so to speak, before certain things relating to the social structure; we must dare to follow the way only so far as we are shown: This is the relation in which men must stand if the social organism is to be realised through their combined efforts—That is thinking in terms of reality and experience! Fichte's thinking is born out of the pure ego and is ultimately, though in a different form, Bolshevistic thinking. It is an anti-social thinking because it is born out of the ego alone; its form does not originate in human association. The community life of the proletariat has accepted this anti-social form on the authority of an individual leader who has become its guiding principle.

The question now arises: How is it that this life in common gives more just in the social sphere than does the inner life of the individual man? Here we must be clear whither the purest form of thinking, as arising in Fichte, actually leads. The ordinary man with no grounding in philosophy, accustomed to reading the newspaper or light literature, and having perhaps some knowledge of science as taught today in the universities—this man coming to Fichte's works cannot cope with them. He feels himself overcome by the thoughts which are so forceful and so abstract in their development. To most people they seem just a web of thoughts. The reason is that it is pure thinking, woven out of the content of the soul alone, apart from all concrete experience. Studying Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre (Theory of Knowledge) you follow it sentence by sentence in the heights of abstraction, often with no idea why, as these thoughts mean nothing to you, you should be concerned with them at all. You can read pages of this and simply experience the following: The ego is asserting itself. To begin with many pages are taken up with en analysis of this. Next we come to—the ego fixes the non-ego, which again takes up a number of pages. Thirdly, the ego establishes itself, its limits being the non-ego, and the non-ego being bounded by the ego.—So it goes on through the Wissenschaftlehre in which only these propositions with far-reaching deductions are set forth. You will say: I am not interested in all this, for ultimately it is just empty abstraction.—Nevertheless when you consider Fichte's life and endeavours, as I described them to you here a little time ago, you come to respect both him and his striving after pure thinking. Whence comes then this remarkable contradiction It arises from the necessity for man to arrive at a certain period of his evolution at this pure thinking, this thinking filled with pure thought. For in more ancient days human thinking was filled only with pictures. Men like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have thought in thoughts alone, pictureless thoughts. The Greeks could never have thought in this way, nor the Romans, nor could men have thought thus in the middle ages, for in spite of all their abstractions, the thinking of the Scholastics was still quite different. Why then has abstract thinking arisen in modern historical evolution? It is because men have to make great inner effort! And it partakes of this effort when, in Fichte's sense, for example, an endeavour is made to rise to the abstract, and there is a real struggle to attain to such abstraction. This is said by the ordinary, practical men to be of no use because all experience has been eliminated. And that is indeed so. Such abstractions are, however, necessary as a stage in progress. And as soon as there is sufficiently strong impulse within the human life of soul to develop to a stage beyond these abstractions, then the soul rises into the spiritual life. In modern mysticism there is no sound path that does not lead through vigorous thinking. That must first be achieved. After vigorous thinking, the next step is to actual experience of the spiritual. In historical evolution this naturally takes a long time, but it is the path on which mankind has to travel. And this longing holding sway in present-day mankind, to get beyond the abstract to the spiritual life, lies secretly at the basis of the force in the modern proletarian movement. The proletarian fights against the activity of spiritual forces in history, where he considers economic forces alone should prevail. He clings to the most blatant external perception, and regards what he thus perceives as the only historic development. The life of the spirit is for him a mere superstructure, an ideology, a reflection of external economic processes. He pictures it thus because when modern man directs his gaze within, he can no longer discover the old atavistic visions; he sees merely abstractions, abstract thoughts, in which he can find no reality. For that, he would have to take the next step which I have already described. Thus each seeks in the external world that reality for which he inwardly yearns. Being tied, since capitalism arose, to the economic life alone, the proletarian seeks there his reality.

And what will be the next obvious step? The next step will be to see that ultimately no real driving forces lie in the economic order. In exact contrast to this historical materialism, it is out of the inner life that, as historical impulse, the force will develop for pressing forward to the spiritual. What comes to appearance in historical materialism is only the caricature of the yearning in the deep recesses of man is soul.

In the same way the force of each man's individuality is contained in class-consciousness, and this individuality looks within itself for a content it has so far been unable to find. Still finding emptiness there it leans on the class as a whole in order, as man, to feel the strength of a common bond.

Thus, all the impulses holding good. on the surface of the social movement, secretly issue from the sources I have described. Therefore at the time Fichte was working, a time not then ripe for developing Spiritual Science, nothing more could appear than a thinking that awaited the approach of the spiritual world and had no power to serve external reality. For when thinking that really should be concerned with the spiritual world, is applied instead, powerfully, logically and fundamentally, to the external reality of the senses, it does not work upon this reality constructively but destructively. Now I have often spoken to you of the function of evil. I have told you what forces are really active in what we call the evil in man. I have said that, from a plane higher than that of the senses, from the spiritual plane that is nearest to ours, we can with the perception we then have see what is at work in evil. For the forces living in thieves, robbers, murderers, would not then be experienced in their unlawful aspect as here in the sense-world, but on the higher plane they would be metamorohosed, transformed, and thus fully within their rights. That is where evil belongs. Evil is misplaced good. Only because the ahrimanic powers force upon our world something belonging to a quite different world, does what we see as evil arise. And thus arises also destructive thinking, when social ideals are spun out of what is within man, and the pure thinking does not wait to be filled by the spiritual world.

This gives us a glimpse into the difference between all the prevalent ruling abstractions and what is striving for a really practical grasp of the social organism. For in what arises and is cultivated in man's community life, when rightly brought about , there does not live abstract thought. Abstract thought is not experienced when human beings are together. For then hidden, secret Imaginations are experienced. And only when these are actually realised do they give the appropriate form to the social organism. The progress to be made in modern Spiritual Science will be closely connected with the only impulses essential for a sound socialistic ordering of the world. And the deficiencies and defects, all that is unhealthy in the present social organism, consist in what can be the result of experience alone being, in the manner of Fichte, woven out of demands arising merely within man.

When we observe the direction of modern endeavour, to make the State more and more into a uniform State in which everything would be centralised, it becomes clear that this can lead to nothing but a shattering, a disturbance, of the social organism. And the reason for this lies far deeper than is thought by those who consider the modern proletarian movement to exist merely to be concerned with bread or wages. For even if a movement concerned with bread and wages should be necessary or were in actual practice today, what is important is not the endeavour to change the bread situation or its organisation, but the way in which this is striven for. And you arrive at that way through considerations such as today I have once again put forward. Think of the question of surplus value to which we came at the end of yesterday's lecture. Whoever has had experience of the proletarian movement knows what a deep effect this question has made, as it has been planted in the souls of proletarians by certain of the leaders.

Now upon what does this theory of surplus value rest? It rests actually upon what I was describing in yesterday's public lecture in Basle, namely, that there is something false in the relations between employer and employee, of which neither employer nor employee is conscious. The facts of the matter are masked. But although unconsciously, it is working on the soul out of the subconscious depths as fact, it is working as feeling.

Let us observe the main point more closely. The employee stands today in a quite definite relation to the employer, a relation that, as a human being, he finds unworthy, though in a although in a conscious description he might sometimes put it quite differently. In his soul he experiences it as unworthy because it leads to the sale to the employer of his labour power as a commodity. In the secret depths of his soul he feels that nothing human should be for sale. When a man sells his labour power the whole man is sold.

The question could be put differently, and in the usual socialistic way of thinking it is put thus: How is man to be refunded in the right way for his labour power? The socialistic ideals run mostly on the lines of making adequate refund for power expended on manual labour. But the facts are quite otherwise. A human study of folk-economy makes it clear that no form of human labour power can be exchanged for anything else—neither goods nor anything representing goods, such as money, are interchangeable with labour power. Even when transformed into reality it is no real process but only a thing of the imagination that the manual worker should give his work, and then, in exchange, receive money for what he expends in labour power. That is absolutely false and the true process is masked; something quite different happens. In the present social organism the worker brings his labour power to market and the employer, the contractor, buys it with wages. But it is not really thus. In the economic life there can only be exchange of one commodity with another, commodities, that is, in the widest sense; and in reality the whole of economic life consists in the exchange of commodities. What is a commodity, if we think of its reality? A piece of ground is not a commodity; coal, when under the earth is not a commodity. A commodity is the result of human activity alone, something transformed by human activity or something men has moved from one place to another. Under those two headings you find everything that can be brought into the concept ‘commodity’. The nature of a commodity has been the subject of much argument. A close study of economic connections generally shows that in reality only this definition will hold water.

Now in the modern social organism there has been an element of confusion in the circulation and interchange of commodities, which has driven the social organism to its present revolutionary convulsions. It is fantastic today to believe it possible not only to exchange commodities for commodities but also commodities for labour power, as in the matter of wages. It is fantastic too when we believe it possible to exchange commodities, or the money representing them, for what cannot be a commodity—ground, land, for example, that has not been changed by man. For land, as such, is not an object belonging to the economic process. Upon the land things of the economic process are attained by human activity, but land, as such, cannot be counted as belonging to this process. With regard to the significance of the land in the social organism, we see that one man or another has exclusive right to use and work this land. It is this right to land that has a real significance for the social organism. Land itself is not a commodity but commodities come from the land. And here enters the right the possessor has to the land. If you acquire a piece of land by sale, that is, by exchange, what you really acquire is a right, you exchange something for a right, such as is the case for example in buying a patent. There one gets a good idea of the process of fusion that has had such unfortunate results. The fusion of the purely political rights-State with the economic life. For this there can be no cure other than separation. The economic life must be left to the independent management of its own production, circulation, consumption of commodities, in a life of association in which production, consumption, and individual professional interests link men together and place them in proper relation. But in these associations and groups there would be only mutual economic activity, just as the human metabolic system is concerned only with the digestion. Digestion is then taken up from another aide by the independent system of lung and heart, which for its part is connected with the external world. So, too, must be established from a special source what is implanted in the economic life as rights. This means that everything relating to political conditions should have a relatively independent existence alongside the economic life. Those who are observant see what unreality lies in the relation between employer and employee, where their relation is represented as though labour power could really be refunded. Labour power is not immediately but only immediately funded, what appears being a certain apparent right which has become economically powerful, by which, not manifestly but fundamentally, the employer is able to drive the worker to the machine or into the factory. What is here exchanged is in reality not labour power for commodities or for the money representing them, but for something performed. Commodities produced by the worker are bartered for other commodities or money. For the commodities given him by the employer the worker barters the goods he produces. Here, clearly revealed, we have the unreality of goods apparently being bartered for labour power. This is what the modern proletarian secretly feels to be beneath his dignity as a man, and makes him say: You produce an amount of goods of which the employer gives you back only a certain proportion.

The correct relation between contractor or employer and the worker cannot be brought about in the sphere of economic processes, but only in the sphere of the political State as a relation of rights. That is what it really comes to. If on the one side man stands on the ground of economic life, on the other side on the ground of an independent life of rights, then the economic life will be determined by the two sides; on the one hand by the life of rights, on the other hand it will depend on the natural independent factors of human activity.

At Basle, in public lectures, I have pointed out that on a certain piece of ground in order to produce wheat, for example, more labour has to be expended than in other places where the rate of productivity is higher. That is the working of natural causes on which, on the one side, border on the economic life. On the other side, what should be the relation between employee and employee must flow from the life of rights into the economic life.

How people who take a superficial view of things will say; yes, but today that is already the case, for a contract is drawn up.—How does it help if a Trade Union decides about something that is recognisably a false relation? For the decision is made about the relative position between worker and employer in respect to labour power and its earnings. The right relation will come about only when the decision is not concerned about payment but about the way in which employer and employed share in the results produced. Then the worker will see—and more depends on this than is thought at present—that without the production of surplus value no subsistence will be forthcoming. But he must perceive how surplus value arises. He must not be implicated in a false relationship. Then the worker will see that without the creation of surplus value there can be no spiritual culture at all, and no rights State, for all this comes out of surplus value. When the social organism is healthy, however, all this comes into being as a result of its threefold ordering.

One can naturally speak not for merely hours but for weeks on end about all this, and this is what we have already nearly done. And of course we continually come upon fresh details that help to make the matter clearer; for every individual concrete question that will arise makes itself felt, the solution of which will be sought in practical life through the threefold social organism.

The following above all must be kept in mind. In the economic life commodities are exchanged; with this life is closely allied that of the political State that controls the labour power in man's common life, in his life of rights. So that whereas this economic life is, on the one hand, dependent upon natural elements, on the other hand it depends on what is settled by the State, for instance, the hours of work, work in relation to the individual man—to his strength, weakness, age, and so on. There can be no set maximum for working hours, or anything of that kind; in reality there can be merely a higher or lower limit. These are conditions flowing into the economic life from the side of the rights State, just as the natural elements come to meet it from the other side. Once the social organism is put on this healthy basis, the evil will disappear that arises from the connection of wages with the economic life. The fact that wages rise in good times and fall in a crisis will be changed into its opposite. The good and bad times will be influenced by what is paid for labour.

This can be seen especially clearly where ground-rent is concerned, which today largely depends upon the price of the goods produced on the land, upon market prices. The opposite would be healthier, namely, for the rights expressed in ground-rent on their part to influence market prices. Under the threefold order much will be the exact opposite of the existing conditions that have caused the present revolutionary upheavals. The whole of life will run a different course.

Now what is it that above all calls for our attention in the mutual relation of the economic life and the political State, in their narrower sense? Let us take as an example what is sometimes felt to be extremely unpleasant—the payment of taxes. In this connection we have simply to make ourselves clear that taxes must come out of surplus value; while in the common democratic political life we must always bear in mind the living conditions of the political organism, lust as we do those of the economic life when, in buying and selling, we perceive clearly through human needs the realities of the economic conditions. Here, too, the opposite will result to what exists today. I do not say that the legislation with regard to taxes should be altered; there is much today that does not allow of change, for then what is at fault might just be shifted to another quarter. So many things in social life will be regarded differently under the influence of the sound threefold organism. It will be seen that for the social life as such, for the life of men in the social organism, getting money has no significance. Man separates himself from the social organism in money-getting which is a matter of indifference to it. In the functioning of the social organism, what money man gathers in has no significance; he becomes a social being only when he gives out.

It is in his giving-out that a men begins to act in a social way. The point is—and here I am not thinking of indirect taxes but of direct taxes which are a quite different matter that it is in connection with paying-out that the rate of taxation should be settled. Although it could be worked out, naturally I cannot give details here, because for a lecture it would mean going too deeply into the science of economics. Nevertheless some indication of it can be given.

In a healthy economic life of the social organism, separate from the other members, it is clear that for geographical reasons, because of natural conditions, wheat in a certain territory, for instance, must be dearer to produce than elsewhere. And it can be shown that no adjustment will be created through mere Associations. But the matter can be properly adjusted by the Rights-State in such a case and this would arise out of its very nature by those who buy wheat more cheaply, namely, those who pay out less being more highly taxed than those who give out more when buying the wheat.

If the rights in the economic life are well regulated by the Rights-State, if the rights are not merely economic interests brought to realisation, if members of the agricultural Unions have no seat in Parliament but only those are there who consider rights as between man and man, then there will come about a satisfactory ordering of the economic life.

I have shown this in an abstract generalisation but it could be gone into in detail. The tax position is a question to be regulated between the economic life and that of rights. The regulation, however, between these two spheres, on the one hand, and on the other the cultural, spiritual life, is such that it can be established only on mutual trust and understanding. As the payment of taxes must be compulsory even in a healthy social organism, what on the other hand is given to the spiritual life can be a matter of free will alone; for the spiritual life must be built wholly upon the spirit of man and be completely emancipated from anything else. Then it will react on everything else in the deepest, most intensive way.

Such is the outline I can give you of the way in which the healthy social organism must function. This Threefold Order is not an invention, it is simply what can be observed if one recognises the underlying forces active today in human evolution. These forces can be brought into action in the next ten, twenty, thirty years if only various people exert their will in various directions. It is a question of the way. The forces have been observed and have been given a perceptible form. It is in this way we must live in regard to historical life. Freedom, in its quite different relations, will be as little disturbed by this as by the fact that one cannot grasp the moon, for example, however much we wish to do so. Freedom is realised according to the necessities lying in the natural as well as in the historic processes of evolution.

Notes:

1. See The Spirit of Fichte present in our Midst

In a lecture Kurt Eisner recently gave to students in Basle we find a remarkable sentence. Eisner starts with a really curious question about the present external world, namely, whether what can be expressed as the present situation of mankind is a reality or a mere dream; whether what mankind is now experiencing is not actually a sort of dreamed reality? What he said about it ran something like this: “Do we not hear, do we not see clearly that pressing for realisation there lives a longing in our life to know that this life, as we have to live it today, is only the outwardly expressed invention of some evil spirit? Picture to yourselves, gentlemen, some great thinker living about 2000 years ago and knowing nothing of our times, who dreamed what the world would look like in 2000 years. With the most vivid imagination he could never have a thought-out a world like the one in which we are destined to live. Nevertheless what persists is the one Utopia in the world, and what we want, what lives in us as this longing, is the final and deepest reality, and everything else is horrible. Only we are confusing dreaming and waking. Our task is to shake off the old dream of our present useless existence . Look at the war—can it reasonably be thought possible that such a thing could be thought-out? If the war were not what is called reality it was perhaps a dream out of which we are now waking. We are in a society in which, in spite of railway, steam and electricity, we men see nevertheless only a small part of the star on which we were born.” And so on and so forth …

This is what Kurt Eisner felt, and what he said about it shortly before his death in Basle. The reality makes us ask ourselves today whether we are awake or dreaming. Is this reality a reality at all? It would be a good thing today were the mass of humanity to set themselves such questions. Above all it is of importance that we should be in a position to discern the actual truth about what surrounds us in the external world. It is particularly important that what the world needs and above all what is needed for our social life should no longer be judged according to the old customary way of thinking during recent centuries. For it is this customary thinking that has led to the present catastrophe, which becomes plain when one really studies all the conditions. With this way of thinking many of those who think themselves really practical have started out with mere abstractions which they have tried to carry out in real life. And it is because such men have applied their customary way of thinking to social conditions in the common life of men that reality has gradually become unreality, a mere image incapable of dealing with life. And there man stands regarding it as reality, and he lacks the forces to bring about conditions possible for life.

These are things that cannot be too strongly emphasised today; they must be given clear and unmistakable expression by everyone who without prejudice looks facts in the face. These facts, working in the external everyday world, speak to us clearly and show us that the cure for existing conditions can come only from impulses out of the spiritual world. For what has become estranged from the spiritual world, what has held sway economically without regard to the spiritual world, has today lost its way in a blind alley. Believing as men do today that they can continue their economic life in the way that has brought the world to this catastrophe is simply refusing to think.

We have been living through a time in which existence was believed to have come to the highest point of material civilisation, Looking back before August, 1914, how comfortable life was, how easily, if we had the means, we could travel from country to country. Consider how simple it was to communicate by telegraph or telephone between the most distant places and across national frontiers. Think of all men called modern civilisation. And then think of what since August, 1914, has become of this modern European civilisation, consider the conditions in which we now live. Truly it does not need much thought to see that the one does not exist without the other, that in the life we led until August, 1914, so comfortable, so civilised, was contained the present situation, so much so indeed that in lectures given in Vienna before the war I referred to it as a carcinoma, a cancerous growth, in human society. [ Note 01 ] We should give due weight to the fact that at the time everything was so ‘comfortable’ and the world so ‘civilised’ and all going according to the wishes of those whose social position allowed of their fulfillment, at that time Spiritual Science forced those who saw into the real state of affairs to say: this is not a healthy society we are living in, but an unhealthy one. It has long been offered the anthroposophical way of thinking for its healing. For this healing nothing will serve but the realisation that all other ways of thinking, not directed to what is really spiritual, are more or less quackery. Reality must come into the dreams men dream today. Whence is this reality to come? It does not exist in the region whence practical men derive their thoughts. Reality exists only where the spirit can be seen. From there the principles and impulses flowing into social life must be found. That is why the connection between such things must continually be stressed.

Now in connection with these lectures I have often mentioned the name Fritz Mauthner. When in a series of catchwords he classified alphabetically the thinking of the present-day, he made of this two volumes and called them a Philosophical Dictionary. In this philosophical dictionary, in Mauthner's own style, with his criticisms that were often caustic and biting, a description of present-day thinking was contained. There, among other things, he deals with the State, the res publica. From his outlook Mauthner even arrives at some sort of answer to the question: What exactly is the State? And his particular definition is that the State is a necessary evil, the necessity of which there is no denying. But it has dawned on some people that the social structure we today call the State has led to what we are living in the midst of now. That is why people call it a necessary evil, for its evil character in its present form is before their very eyes. The question, however, is how a positive conception is to be arrived at in contrast to all that is negative.

If something be rejected, what would be acceptable in its place must be indicated. If someone says that the State is a necessary evil it is important to define the good, in contrast to this evil of the State. What is this something of which this State should be the opposite: In the spiritual-scientific connection something very remarkable appears. To understand the State one must have insight into the form of the rights that prevail in the State, which is regulated according to possession, work and so on. One has also to ask to what this form of rights can be compared.

Now the conditions existing in the spiritual world in the time lived through by man between death and a new birth have often been described to you. How do these conditions existing between man and man between death and a new birth stand in relation to the conditions of rights established within the State community on the physical plane? As soon as this question is put intelligibly, we get the answer: All that the State consists in is the exact opposite of this. The human relations that are State-controlled are the exact opposite of those in the spiritual world. This gives you a true idea of the State. Men who know nothing of the spiritual world can get no idea of the State, because they have a purely negative attitude towards the relation between man and man. What is positive is the relation arising between one soul and another in the spiritual world. With this in view, read the chapter on the soul-world in my book Theosophy; you will there find a certain regulation existing in the relation of soul to soul, which may be described as the mutual working of soul to soul, continuing into what is called spirit-land, and governed by forces going from sympathy end antipathy. Read in this same chapter how sympathy and antipathy bring about a certain connection between the souls in the spiritual world. You will see that there in the spiritual world everything depends on the inner life, namely on what through the forces of sympathy and antipathy is working from soul to soul. In man on the physical plane the forces of antipathy between soul and soul are concealed by the physical body, and because this is so its place in the State has to be taken by all that is most external—what has to do with rights, Whereas we must describe the unfolding of the innermost forces of the soul as belonging to the actual spiritual world, what can live in the State is all that is most external in the relation between men. And the State is not in a healthy condition when seeking to establish anything beyond the external relation of rights. Therefore everything should be eliminated by the State that does not concern this most external relation. As opposed to the State itself on the one side must be the spiritual sphere, the administration of the affairs of spiritual culture, and on the other side the third member, the purely economic life of the social organism. Whereas the actual State represents the exact opposite of the spiritual world, the spiritual life signifies a continuation of what we experienced before we descended through birth into earthly existence. What we experience here in religion, schooling, education, art, science, and so forth, in company with others, what develops from our mutual relation as between man and man, all this, though a mere reflection, is the earthly continuation of the real spiritual life before birth.

And in the economic life, in what we call ordinary material life, we find the origin of much that we shall have to experience beyond the gate of death, that is, in the life after death.

But the State has nothing to do with spiritual life. It is its very opposite. To understand the terrible facts of today men must learn to penetrate this fact in all its significance. Present-day man must learn to grasp that, to come to a conception of external reality, it is essential once more to have in mind spiritual reality. In the spiritual world sympathy and antipathy work together. What persists in us from the spiritual world as antipathy, what has to go on working as antipathy, is experienced down here as spiritual culture. Through speech we learn as men to understand each other and to create a spiritual bond between man and man. And by understanding one another in speech we have to overcome certain antipathies still left over from the spiritual world. We learn to speak among ourselves in certain conceptions, developing thoughts in common, in a common art, in a common religious belief, thereby overcoming certain mutual antipathies we had in the spiritual world. We learn here in our economic life to help one another, to work for one another, to be of advantage to each other economically, thus laying foundations for certain sympathies to be woven into the life after death between souls who, through their ordinary karma have found no previous bond.

In this way we have to understand how to unite this earthly world with the spiritual world. Ultimately, the deepest and most active cause of our present time of catastrophe is that man has lost his connection with the spiritual world, which has largely become for him mere empty words. It has become so for the upper classes to an increasing degree during the last four centuries. And there has developed more and more in the dumb instincts of great masses of the proletariat a subconscious, unconscious yearning for something different from what the upper classes can offer as so-called culture, science, art, religion, and so forth.

Where the spiritual life is concerned people become accustomed with such difficulty to the necessity of gradually learning to understand a new language. They would prefer to go on speaking the old one for they think that will serve their purpose.

And we hear unctuous prophets today holding forth on their views—I have often referred to these views. One such prophet, greatly respected today, says for example how this war has shown that men have been living in a kind of external organisation but have not inwardly come nearer each other. And so in the guise of this war there has come a lapse into barbarism.—To rescue us from this barbarism only empty and sentimental words are forthcoming, exhorting men to return to a kind of inward spirituality. But today it is not a question of reprimanding people, telling them they should once more become good Christians, learn to love their fellow men, and to find an inward bond between man and man. It is far more important now to develop a power of the spirit able to give external relations a form in which the social organism can prosper. One cannot with honesty say that the real reason for man's sickness today is first and foremost his not believing in the spirit. There are still plenty of men who believe in the spirit. And every little village still has its church where I fancy there is much talk of the spirit. Even those who struggle against it have a certain respect for the spirit. In ordinary thought, too, there are still certain references to it. Those who would say in the true Anzengruber manner: “As sure as there is a God in Heaven I am an atheist” are no great rarity though they may not put this into words. The point is not whether the spirit is spoken of nor whether people believe in the spirit, but that the spirit should become effective in all material life and that it should be realised how there can never be any matter without spirit.

At present, however, we are farther than ever from such insight. One man may affect superiority, despise external material life, consider it a necessary evil and turn his attention to the inner life, perhaps becoming a theosophist so that he can develop an inner life alongside the external one. He thinks the external life to be without spirit and that it behooves him to give himself up to a life of inner contemplation. Another does not go directly this way—said by the socialist to be very middle-class and decadent—but still believes that on the one side there is material reality in which there lives all that is capital, human labour-power, credit, mortgages and money in any form; in short, spiritless reality. And on the other side he sees spiritual reality which has to be striven for out of the depths of the heart.

We could quote many variations of this particular way of understanding the connection between the material life and that of the spirit, as it holds sway today. For people generally feel that, to reach the spiritual, they have to turn away from external material reality. Ultimately this is all connected with the fact that in these days we see so many broken lives, so many people discontented with external existence. My dear friends, indeed I am not speaking just for the honour of the cause—pro domo—for it is my karma alone that obliges me to do this work. Had my karma led me to something different, I should be able to understand that too. No, I am speaking quite objectively. In spite of this I venture to say that there is nothing in life that is not interesting if only we have a healthy social organism in which man is rightly placed in accordance with his karma. Strictly speaking, no one has cause to consider any world-current of less worth than another. The healing of the social organism must, it is true, be brought about by every single worker having as much connection with the spiritual life as those who can now have the good fortune to occupy themselves with it. For it is one of the greatest defects in present social life that certain interests inaccessible to ethers are cultivated in exclusive circles. Just realise how today this exclusiveness has been increasingly fostered in religion, in art, and in everything else, in bourgeois circles, and how the proletariat stand outside all this. That is why the proletariat have been given ‘People's Institutions’, ‘People's Houses’, ‘People's Art’, and so forth. But all this has arisen out of the experiences of the middle-class. Received by the proletariat it becomes one of the lies of life, for only what has arisen out of general experience can become a common spiritual life. There is no general experience where one member of the community stands at a machine eight hours a day (you see I take the eight-hour day as an actual fact) whereas another is able to build a social life peculiar to his class, and then throws as crumbs to those working at the machines what, in its inner structure, can really be understood only by those who have always belonged to the governing classes.

Within these governing classes it is possible, with its up-bringing and education, to speak of the Sistine Madonna—to take a concrete example. I have taken working men into galleries and have seen how false it is to show them anything arousing the kind of impression the Sistine Madonna creates upon the bourgeoisie. It is an impossibility. By trying to do so one brings about a false situation, since there is no common life between the two classes. And where there is no common life there is no common speech. Those who up to now have formed the upper classes were destined during man's former evolution to receive something, even in art for example, that can take root in the experiences of their life. Through the way mankind has lived. until now, a picture like the Sistine Madonna has become a real gift for the upper classes. For the others it is incomprehensible. There has first to be sought a speech common to both, and that means efforts have to be made to find a cultural life common to all men. At present our schools and universities are very far from such a cultural life. In these there will never be realised what is so often striven for—a universal school for the people. In a school common to all must be taught what is derived from a free life of the spirit which, as an independently working member, has its roots in the social organism. We must teach something very different from what is taught today, for in his innermost being the proletarian does not understand what is now taught in the ordinary schools.

Now you may be right in saying that I am contradicting myself, and you may tell me that in the schools the people all are on a level, so why should the proletarian child understand less than the bourgeois child? But the bourgeois child in reality does not understand anything either, for the teaching in our ordinary schools is so unsound that everything is incomprehensible. And it is only because members of the upper classes, who have the means to go to the better schools, reflect something of what they learn there, like a shadow, on to the people's schools so that something of what was formerly learnt is understood. Those who have no opportunity to receive the reflection of what was learnt earlier cannot profit by the education which is present in our life like the dream of something real.

Due attention should be paid to this; it is deeply connected with the gravity of the present times and the present situation. And can we not actually feel that our only salvation lies in a new life of the spirit. Now try to be honest about what concerns one sphere or another. Consider what has happened in the course of the last centuries in the sphere of art, for example, and the appreciation of art. Try to look intelligently at what has been said about art, what artists themselves have said about the arts of painting and sculpture and so on, how critics have influenced public opinion. Follow this, than try to make it clear to the working-man, who is supposed to listen to it, after eight hours at a machine—for him it is just meaningless rubbish! For him it is a life lived by others from which he is excluded in an anti-social way, and he can form no idea of its necessity for human existence; to his mind it is simply luxury. It is not that I am giving judgment; I am merely stating facts that are comprehensible.

But now let us consider what fruits have been produced by this worthy middle-class society which continued to develop so comfortably up to the year 1914. I was still experiencing it in the eighties when, for instance, the young people of Vienna were imitating everything originating at the time in Paris as the new trend in art. These young people wrote a great deal of verse, and having done everything calculated to make dark rings under their eyes, wandered about in pensive mood declaring their preference for the decadent and their desire to sleep in rooms scented with hothouse flowers, and so forth. Then with this background they propounded how verse should be written. I have no wish to criticise all they did; it is just one side of the human being coming to expression in an extreme way. But eventually it was carried so far that something resulted which to a great many people today may seem merely an impulse towards cultural extravagance, cultural luxury, which in any case could not appear to them as necessary for a dignified human existence. Everything in life finally depends upon what pulsates in the human soul, and upon the way in which human souls can be moved in life. It was indeed a cancer breaking out in a dreadful way in human society. From all these things we must recognise that these facts are now so firmly established that we no longer speak with the some conceptions; we must learn a new language. And it is clearly manifest that we have to strive for something that besides being human is universal.

In our building we have striven for something universally human, but how far this is so will not immediately be understood. Within it there is meant to be nothing of interest only for the middle-class and incomprehensible to the proletariat. Even if the very highest spiritual claims are made, what is striven for is something everyone can understand. Much is certainly imperfect and what is middle-class still meets us in much of it, but on the whole—naturally I am not here referring to the people—the chief thing striven for is quite generally human. It can be understood from the point of view of life. And because men have various standpoints in life today we must speak to each one differently. But it is possible now to bring to the simplest, most primitive hearts and minds what is meant to be expressed in the forms and other features of our building. Thus the attempt has really to be made in every sphere of life to leave behind what is old, to speak a new language , and to see how it was the old ideas that landed us in this catastrophe.

Today it is often said that to oppose the aims of modern Socialists, really frightening to many people, we might hold up the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, where not by class struggles but by love, the weary, heavy-laden should be led to a new world-order. This is not something just thought-out but the way of speaking adopted in the moral sermons of well known tub-thumpers and repeated over and over again in recent weeks. Only a few days ago in Berne you could have heard someone saying that we should go back to the pure spirit of Christianity, to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, which is not to be found in the modern class struggle. Unfortunately the speaker went on—The Christian spirit prevails only in private lives; it ought, however, to do so in the life of the State too; external public, life must be christianised.—Then people get up and say: Ah, that is spoken out of the spirit! And they finally show the path modern man must take to free himself from all this unfortunate materialism and turn back to the spirit of love. The fact remains, however, that for nearly two thousand years people have been talking thus, and it has not helped a whit, so that at last they ought to be able to see how today what we need in a new language.

But today the difference between the two languages often remains unnoticed. It is still unnoticed that something different is represented by this new life of the spirit that directly penetrates material reality. This is because the new spiritual life is convinced that spirit lives in all matter, and that matter must be regarded as matter and not in an unreal way as a thing to be despised. Where there appears to be nothing but matter one is simply not seeing the spirit. Therefore today we must be conscious of the pressing need to develop the spirit that can master reality and penetrate material life. This spirit will not teach us to say: Deepen yourself within and you then discover the God there; you will be able to unfold the source of love within you. You will then find the way out of the present social order to one in which men will stand inwardly united with one another! No, today it is a matter of finding such spirit, such speech, such Christianity, that we shall not merely talk of ethics and religion bit be so strong in spirit hat we are able to comprehend the most everyday things. Out of this spirit it must be asked: What should we do to discover the right way to heal the wastage, the ravages of this capitalism to which man's labour power is exposed?

As things are, people feel what is destructive and unsound in the social organism without knowing the causes. In matters great and small it can be seen how money is the root of much that is harmful. Many who may not themselves have money can see today in small matters around them that something is wrong with it. The time has come to end the old indifference when things were brushed aside with the saying: “One holds the purse, the other the money”. The time has come when this saying no longer holds good. People even when seldom crossing the frontier notice that much harm is created by money. Is it not true that though we now have peace, people cannot cross this frontier even as easily as during the war? Beyond it the mark has a certain value, here it is worth very little. With the money question is united that of standard values. In big things and small, people are realising that with money a situation has arisen that has to do with the most ordinary affairs of men. They wonder what the remedy may be for the harm done today, but they do not see the necessity of shaking off the ordinary superficial thoughts bound up with the situation, and of penetrating the thoughts that are original, primal. For certain primal thoughts are the basis of all human affair. It is, however, inherent in human life that these affairs gradually grow farther and farther away from the thought originally behind them. Then these original thoughts withdraw into the inner regions of man's being, and turn into feelings, instincts, that then express themselves in such a way that their original nature is no longer recognised. The social demands made today are the reaction of the primal thoughts on modern human relations. Men who formulate their thoughts merely in accordance with these relations are the most vexatious of all fanatics; for all the demands made by the proletariat are nothing but veiled feelings having their roots in primal thoughts. To such thoughts belongs the separation of the spiritual, political and economic spheres of life as we have seen it here, for which the instincts strive. And they will not rest until that direction at least is now taken again towards these archetypal thoughts. For it is because we have come so far from them that we are now going through this difficult crisis.

All other remedies are quackery, even where the most external material questions are concerned. For today the question is often put, even from the lecture platform, what actually is money? And there are innumerable discussions as to whether money is a commodity or a mere token of value. One person deems it a commodity among other commodities to be bartered in the economic market and considers that men have simply chosen a convenient commodity to avoid certain other difficultly in modern economic life. Suppose you were carpenter and there were no such thing as money. You would have to eat, to have vegetables, butter, cheese, but being a carpenter you would make only tables and chairs. So you would have to betake yourself with your tables and chairs to the market , and try, for example, to get rid of a chair so that someone will give you a certain amount of food in exchange for it. You have to get a table taken in exchange for something else, perhaps a suit of clothes. Imagine what all that would mean! In reality, however, it is exactly what one does. Only it is disguised by an ordinary marketable commodity, money, being there, for which one can exchange everything else, so that the other goods can then wait until needed.

Now it appears as if money were only there as a medium for the exchange of commodities. Thus many national economists hold the view that money is a commodity. Paper money is looked upon as a substitute for this commodity. For the commodity on which it depends is really gold and States have been obliged to introduce the gold-standard, having had today to follow the leading economic State, England, because it chose gold as its medium of adjustment and its sole standard of value. Thus the medium of exchange is there and the carpenter has no need to take his chairs to market, but sells his wares to those who want them, and gets money with which he can then, on his part, buy his vegetables and cheese.

Others hold a contrary opinion about money. For them it is not a question whether one has a piece of gold or not, but a matter of the existence of a substitute medium bearing a certain stamp. Our modern paper money, for example, bears a stamp stating its value. And there are economists who consider it quite unnecessary that the corresponding value in gold should be lying at the back. There are also, as you may know, individual States having only paper values with no corresponding gold. With it, however, under present conditions they can to a certain extent carry on their economy.

In any case you see—in our sphere we must take our stand on the basis of a purely human point of view—that now-a-days there are clever people who consider money to be a commodity, whereas other clever people regard it merely as something stewed, marked, a mere mark. But which is it in reality? Under present conditions it is actually both! It comes to this, that as things are today we see that on the one hand in international trade money has the character of a mere commodity, while on the other hand it represents outstanding debt. What serves as the real covering is the exchange of gold as a commodity carried on between States. Everything else depends upon there being the assurance that when a certain amount of paper or barter goes from one State to another, whoever has been responsible for this possesses the gold also, that the commodity gold is also there to be dealt with in the some way as any other commodity. A merchant is given credit no matter whether he possesses gold or fish or anything else, if only there is something real behind this as a covering. In this sense therefore money is a commodity in international trade.

But the State has interfered and has gradually made money into something assessed, something stamped. Thus the two things work together. The trouble that arises comes from the control of money not being given over to what we have called the third member of the social organism. Were money entirely controlled by the economic part of the organism, that means freed from the State member of the organism, money would then have to be a commodity and derive its commodity value in the commodity market. The present curious dependence expressing itself in the remarkable relation between value and wages would no longer exist. The curious thing now is that when wages rise, values fall, so that the worker often derives no benefit from higher pay, since he is unable to buy more than he could with his former smaller wage. When both wages and cost of living rise at the same time, which means that a change takes place in values, no other conditions can help. Help can come only by the economic commodity, money, being freed from the political State, and when the money that exists for the purpose of balance can be controlled by the third member, the economic member of the healthy social organism.

Thus on the path of the threefold order special problems too are resolved in the right way. Therefore whoever wants to work out sound ideas for the social organism must go back to the primal thought. Those administering the State today are asking what they should do in face of the chaos that has arisen in values. The answer, and the only answer, is that as long as they have to do with the control of the political State they should not meddle with values at all, but leave the control of money and values to the economic organism. Only there can the sound basis be created for these affairs. We must be able to get back to what today will create a healthy state of things. Before the catastrophe of the war there was the strange fact that because a condition existed between States upon which the internal political taxation had no influence, we had relations between individual States which, for example, in the economic life resulted from the economic life itself. Thus these relations arose internationally between the States. They did not take effect within the individual States because the States extended their control over the economic life, Therefore the conflict broke out from which the world can be freed only by real striving towards the threefold order. Then every time adjustment is needed facts of one member of the organism will be corrected by the facts of another. There are no other means possible than a return to primal ideas, to the practical trinity—spiritual life, political life, economic life. Only those so placed in a community thus organised will be able to solve our present problems from one or another point of view. The health of the social organism can be brought about only when economic matters are regulated by one member, democratic rights discussed in another, and all cultural, spiritual relations arranged by the third. For, as in the human being the three members, head-system, heart- and lung-system and digestive-system, work together naturally, so also do the three members in the healthy social organism. They work over into each other. And as in the head you can trace disorder in the stomach in spite of the separation of the systems because the stomach is not taking care of the head, so too in the healthy social organism one member, say the economic, works over into the rights member and the cultural member. They work together in the right way only when relatively independent. But this correct mutual working, when in order, really takes place only when the three members are independent and each governed by its own laws. How, for example, how does the spiritual life work into that of the economic? You know what is the spiritual element in the economic life? Capital is the spirit in economic life: And a great part of the present evil rests on the control of capital, the fructifying of capital, being withdrawn from the spiritual life. The relation between the physical workers to those organising with the help of capital, must in a healthy social organism be managed on a basis of mutual trust and understanding. Take, as an example of this, the election in our Waldorf School. In a healthy social organism the existing gulf between employer and worker will necessarily cease. Today the worker stands at a machine without knowing what it is producing. For this reason outside the factory he naturally wastes his time in trivialities. The employer, again, has his own life that corresponds to what he has made of it. I have already described the young men who went about with dark circles under their eyes and slept with tuberroses beside their beds! The employer leads this freed spiritual life, freed, that is, not for himself but for others. But when a spiritual, cultural life has been built up, which includes those who work physically and spiritually, capitalism will be out on a social basis, not, it is true, in the way the modern sentimentalist would approve, but so that a possibility is created for every individual worker to have a spiritual life in common with all those who organise his work in the social organism, and distribute the products throughout the world.

It must be regarded as essential that with the same degree of regularity with which work is done at the machine, discussions take place concerning business relations between employer end employed, so that the worker can have a comprehensive grasp of all that is happening. In future the aim must be to oblige the employer to have frank and full explanation of all details to the employed, so that factory and management may be limited in a common spiritual life. This is what is important. Only than will it be possible for the situation to arise when the worker will say: The employer is just as necessary as I am; for what would my work be in the social organism without him. He gives it its right place. But he is also obliged to give the worker his right place end to allow him to come into his own. Then everything will become quite clear.

There you see how the spiritual life must play into the working of capitalism. Everything else today is simply talk, sheer sentimentality. Sound relations between work and capital cannot come about in the social bureaucratic way, but only through a spiritual life common to all men having the individual capacity for it, all men who are in a position to out it into practice and to produce capital for a sound social organism. With this will come the free understanding of those who do the physical work. Understanding will then be able to arise for the initiative of the individual faculties which, in a free life of spirit, are socialised from the start. Today they work in an anti-social way because of unnatural relationships. Socialism must rest upon the free initiative of individual faculties and the free understanding of what these faculties promote. There is no other socialism that is genuine. From symptoms already appearing in the social organism we can realise the truth of this.

There are two things in the world the value of which for everyday life can be, and is, very differently estimated. The one is a piece of bread, the other a world-outlook. About a piece of bread everyone will admit that it is the means for satisfying man is hunger; there is no disputing the fact that he will have bread. But about a piece of world-outlook there is a great deal of despite what one man finds true the other thinks false. And however true a world-outlook is it cannot have universal value. There can be strife about the spirit but not about affairs of, the economic life. This is merely because the spirit is not working as a reality but only as something connected with the economic life and the life of the State. When it is based upon itself it will have to display its reality to the world and to reveal itself, and then reality will flash out from the spiritual. And then it will certainly not be found in the idle talk of the would-be moralist, in what is said by those who, because they regard as spiritual only what is entirely divorced from reality, exhort people to be good Christians, and uphold all manner of virtues having nothing to do with external, material reality. There must be a bridge between this abstract form of the spirit and the spirit working in capital, for capital is also spirit in its organising of labour. This organising, however, must in actual fact be the result of spiritual direction.

Thus on the one side the control of money must be left to the economic life, whereas the organising of labour by capital should be under the control of the life of the spirit. There you see the interworking of things which, to outward appearance, are separate; for naturally in industry capital is represented by money. The relation, however, between employee and employer, this whole relation based on trust and especially the fact that the employer has a certain position as giver of work—all this is organised from the spiritual sphere. The equivalent of a certain commodity in money will be regulated by the economic life, and for the health of the organism things will be woven into each other, just as they are in the three systems of the human organism.

In this way you will be able to penetrate into the things of everyday life, and you will see that what your attention has been called to here comes from the actual and real archetypal thoughts which must be the basis for the cure of the social organism.

Notes:

1. See The Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth, Lecture 6

If you follow present-day developments with full awareness, in all humanity you will find a trend little adapted to direct thinking towards what the purely perceptible facts at work in the world themselves demand. There exists a general aversion to thoughts that do not run in the old grooves. But never before, perhaps, would it have been so apt to ask how it comes about that people are quite unready to entertain thoughts new to them. We experience today a fundamental phenomenon running through the whole evolution of the times. I have often pointed out how this came to expression some years ago. One could quote quite a collection of speeches delivered in the spring and early summer of 1914 by European statesmen, and find much the same in all their utterances—in what, for example, the Secretary of State, Jagow, said when addressing the Reichstag. This was to the effect that by the efforts of the European Cabinets it had been possible to create a satisfactory relation between the great powers, and that peace in Europe had been secured for a long time to come. Again and again you might find this kind of speech, repeated with variations by these self-styled ‘practical’ men. Thus it was at that time. A few weeks later began the world-conflagration now merely entering on a different phase.

What else do we experience today in the aims and actions of men so largely the children of their times? I have recently attended a so-called League of Nations Conference at Berne. There people talked of many things. Fundamentally everything concerning recent previous events was of the same caliber as the speeches of the European statesmen in the spring and summer of 1914. These men talk on the old customary lines of thought as for years they have been accustomed to talk. In truth, during the last four-and-half years they have actually learnt nothing, nothing at all from the lessons speaking to them out of the depths of world-existence. This is a fact to which the Anthroposophist should give his most earnest attention; for this depressing indifference in face of facts is widespread throughout the greater part of the continent of Europe. Despite many variations there repeatedly appears, quite typically, what is produced out of powerful depths, which are, however, ruinous for these times. This appears from the direction of a certain current in world-outlook, which on account of indifference and lack of interest among Europeans has every prospect of making impression upon impression, conquest upon conquest. When I was quite a boy—a long time ago now—in my religious books the following could be read, which was intended to lead boys to knowledge of Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ was either a hypocrite, a lunatic, or what He Himself said—the Son of the living God. Since one dare not accept His being either a hypocrite or a lunatic, there remains only the other possibility, namely, that it is true that He was, as He said, the Son of the living God! What was there in print in my religious books decades ago, I heard again recently in an address given in Berne by a Graz Professor Ude, in connection with the so-called Berne League of Nations Conference. Once again one could hear the words Jesus was either a hypocrite, a lunatic, or as He Himself said the Son of the living God. “And as we dare not call Christ”—this was hurled at the audience—“a lunatic or a hypocrite. He can only have been what He said, the Son of the living God!” With Jesuitical fervour this was cast at the audience, and there were few indeed in the hall who today in face of such things would ask the only really significant question: Has not this been repeated over and over again before the faithful, and in spite of it has not destruction descended upon mankind? Is there no one with heart and sense today in whom the thought can arise of the senselessness in the midst of the great world catastrophe of crying aloud to the multitude things that have shown such strong proof of their fruitlessness: And I heard another talk, by the same professor, on the social question, which from beginning to end gave no hint of what should happen, what must happen. It was solely a kind of condemnation of many immoral practices that, in the present time, are certainly both prevalent and predominant. But here, too, one realised that nothing had been learnt from the sad experiences of these four-and-a-half years.

This is a better example than many because, among the numerous speeches given in Berne these of Professor Ude were by far the best. For behind them was at least a world-outlook, even though one which if preached today must have its dangers. The other speeches had their roots in a lack of power to rise to any kind of world-outlook or understanding of life. We must continually emphasise that men's thoughts today have become dull and summary. They are unable to penetrate into realities. They move among illusions and are entirely superficial. Men cannot see into what it is that these times demand from those who would speak about the necessary organisation of things.

We should remind ourselves again and again, my dear friends, that during the last four centuries we Europeans, with the new blood of America, have produced a thinking only fit to understand what is lifeless. We have brought into being a thinking entirely dominated by mathematical technics. We have become incapable of directing our thought to what is living in nature, and comprehend only what is dead. What official science has to say about the living organism is only valid for the organism when dead, and is actually acquired from the corpse. So accustomed have people become to this thinking that it is also applied to the social organism. This simply means that mankind in general today is incapable of any creative thinking about the living social organism, at least they find it very difficult. But what thoughts do they find easy? They find easy such thoughts as have been drubbed into them for centuries through the method of catechism and as run in the ruts they have made; or those thoughts born of thinking that relates only to what is dead in the living organism. But today it is the living social organism we have to comprehend.

Let us start from a concrete example. Modern socialist thinking is directed against capitalism. Socialism demands the association of all private capital for means of production. There was already much talk about this socialisation in what I believe was called the National Assembly of Weimar. The way in which capitalism is now spoken of absolutely conforms with the dead thinking of recent centuries, which has greatly increased in the world-conception of purely materialistic natural science. What exactly have we in capitalism? We have something that fundamentally has become a terrible oppressor of the great mass of human beings, and we have the fact that there is very little to be said in answer to what is urged, and will continue to be urged from the side of the proletariat against the oppressive nature of capitalism in its relation to the spheres of the spiritual, of the economic, and of rights. But what conclusions are drawn by the socialist thinker from these undeniable facts? The conclusion that capitalism must be done away with! Capitalism is the oppressor, something dreadful, it has proven itself a scourge of modern mankind, so it must be destroyed. What should appear more comprehensible, more fruitful, for the usual agitator than this demand for the abolition of capitalism. But it has resulted in terrible deeds all over Europe. For those who do not confine themselves to these dead thoughts of the last four hundred years, but are able to turn to living thinking needed above all for our Spiritual Science—for those, this talk of the necessity for abolishing capitalism as an oppression and a scourge, is just as logical, based on just such factual as the following: We continually breathe in oxygen end breathe out dead carbonic acid; in us the oxygen is transformed into carbonic acid. Then why should we first inhale it? For it only produces a deadly poison in us, it becomes a deadly poison! There is no doubt that oxygen changes inside us to deadly poison, but for our life's sake we have to breathe it in; the life process in both human and animal bodies is unthinkable without the inhaling, of oxygen. And the social life is just as unthinkable without the continual building up of capital; without the constant building-up of the means of production which, strictly speaking, is nothing more nor less than capital. There is no social organism that would not show the interworking of individual human capacities. Were the demands of the social organism widely understood the worker would say: It is a question of having confidence in the director of the undertaking, for unless he takes the responsibility for it I cannot do my work. When there are directors of undertakings, however, the accumulation of capital necessarily follows. It is impossible to escape the accumulation. If socialistic thinkers, well-meaning up to a point, but mistaken, put the question: How is capitalism to be done away with? this is as significant as to ask: How is the social organism itself to be done away with? How, best is the social organism to be driven to its death?

It is quite clear for anyone who has insight into the matter that capital is accumulated even in the wisest social order, and equally clear that it is idle to ask: How can the amassing of capital be prevented; how can we arrange that no capital is accumulated?—But you see, people today find it too difficult to face up to these things; they prefer to avoid such thoughts. Where thinking is concerned they prefer everything to be easy. But this is not allowed by the times. It is always forgotten that everything living is in a state of becoming, that to comprehend the living time must be taken into account; what is living is one thing at one time and later something different. With a little thought it is not hard to become aware that to understand in its concrete nature anything living, we must take time into account. For the human organism in something alive. Think of your organism about half-past-one; you are all busy people who do not stay long over your meals; coming out after having eaten you have—at least it is to be hoped you have—satisfied your hunger, you are no longer hungry. You can describe your organism, taking it in its concrete condition at half-past-one, as a human organism that is a living being without hunger. But at half-past-twelve on entering the restaurant it was otherwise; then you were all hungry; then you would say: a human organism is something having hunger. The fact is that you are looking at the concrete, the living, at two different points of time, and that, at two different points of time, two entirely contrasting conditions are needed for the well-being of the organism, and something has to be brought about in the the organism that has the effect of causing its opposite to arise. It is the same in what is living in nature as it is in what is socially alive. In a living society capital can never be prevented from arising as a natural symptom of the work of individual human capacities; private property can never be prevented from becoming the means of production. When anyone devotes himself to the direction of some branch of production, and also shares equally in the resulting products with the manual workers working with him, the social organism would never be able to exist unless capital appeared as an attendant phenomenon. For the individual possesses this just as much as he possesses what he needs for his own use, what he produces so that he can exchange it for what he needs.

But we can think just as little whether or not we should eat since we shall certainly become hungry again, as we can think about how the building-up of capital can be permanently prevented. We can think only how this capital is to be transformed at some future date, what must become of it. You cannot wish to prevent the accumulation of capital without undermining the whole social organism in its capacity for life; you can only want what is thus accumulated not to cause harm to the soundness of the social organism.

What is demanded in this way for the soundness of the social organism to be found only in the threefold ordering. For only in the threefold social organism, as in the human natural organism, can the different members work in their various directions. It is in the interest of the individual that a member should be there in the social organism in which individual human capacities come to expression; but it is in the general interest that these individual human capacities should not take on a form that sooner or later would injure the organism. In the course of the economic life capital will always be accumulated. If just left there it will simply pile up to an unlimited extent. Capital piled up through the capacities of human individuals cannot be left in the economic sphere, it must be transferred to the sphere of rights. For the moment man acquires more than he needs of what is produced by him alone or in association with his fellows, the moment capital is accumulated, what he possesses is no more a commodity than is human labour. Possession is a right. Possession is nothing more nor less than an exclusive right, a matter of using or disposing of a thing—be it land, house, or anything of the sort—with utter disregard of others. No other definition of possession is fruitful for understanding the social organism. The moment a man acquires a possession, it must come under the political State and be directed from within the Rights State. But the State may not itself acquire, for then it would itself become economist. It has only to pass over what is acquired to the spiritual organism where the individual capacities of men are dealt with. Now-a-days a process of this kind is carried out only with goods today considered of least value. What I have just been stating holds good for these; it does not hold good for what is of value. When today anything spiritual is produced, a fine poem for instance, an important work by writer or artist, the proceeds from it can be left to his heirs for thirty years after his death, then it passes ever as the free property of all men in common. Thirty years after his death an author's works can be reprinted without any restriction. This originates in the sound idea that man has society to thank for his own individual capacities. Just as a man cannot learn to speak on a desert island but only in the company of others, it is also only from society that he has his individual capacities—on the basis of his karma, certainly, but that has to be developed in society. The fruits of individual activity must return to society. For a time only the individual has command of it because this is better for the social organism. A man himself best knows what he has produced, so to begin with he can be its best administrator. The goods valued least by modern mankind, the spiritual goods, are thus socially estimated in a certain way by taking into account the current concepts.

Some apparently capitalistic members of my recent audience in Berne are supposed to have been very angry—so I was told—when I asked in a lecture why it should not be possible for a capitalist to be obliged by law to assign his capital, a certain number of years after his death, to the free control of a corporation of the spiritual organisation, the spiritual part of the social organism. One can surely think out different ways of establishing a concrete right. But, if it should be expected of people today to return to what was a matter of right in the old Hebraic times, namely, that after a definite time: goods should be apportioned anew, it would be regarded as something unheard of. But what is the consequence of men looking upon it in this way? The consequence is that in the last four-and-a-half years ten million people have been killed, eighteen million crippled, and we have the prospect of more happening in this way. Reflection above all is needed in these matters. It is really not without importance that there should be a desire for the concept of time to be brought to the understanding of the social organism The social organism is thought of as being timeless if it is said that already in a condition of arising something should be done with the incipient capital. But one has to allow capital to come into existence, end even let it for a time be controlled by those who have caused it to arise. We must, however, have the possibility of letting it actually pass over again to men in general through a sound organisation, a sound organism, that is to say, an organism functioning as one that is threefold.

You cannot just ask why a social organism consisting in only one member should not be capable of doing all this. Today people still believe that it is possible, but when they believe it they must reckon badly with the human soul. Only think what it means—for the human soul must be reckoned with—when a near, or even distant, relation of a judge stands before him. As a relation he has his special feelings, but when he has to pronounce judgment it will not be in accordance with his feelings but obviously in accordance with the law. He will give his decision from this other source. Thought out in an all-embracing psychological way this gives you an idea of the necessity for men to judge from three directions, to control from three sources, whatever streams into the social organism. Our times demand that we should go into these things. For ours is the time of the epoch of consciousness, that wishes man to have concrete ideas as guiding impulses for his actions. Many people claim today that we should not keep to the intellect, and to abstract thinking (which is all the thinking they know) but that we should judge out of feeling and, since thinking is only for scientific matters, should hold above all to belief in principles that concern life between man and man.

This is all very doubtful because in our time men are inclined to the most abstract thinking and hold fast to the most straight-forward concepts. And when they have grasped these they cling to them with tremendous tenacity. This abstract thinking has for its organ chiefly the human head, is bound up at least with the physical organ. Formerly, in the time of atavistic clairvoyance, there entered into this thinking from the rest of the human organism a thinking directed to the spiritual. This time is past. Henceforward man must rise consciously to Imagination and grasp the spiritual life consciously. For without this penetration into spiritual life today man's thoughts remain empty.

Now why is this? You know from our recent discussions that what belongs to every human head today is brought over from the rest of the organism of the previous incarnation, excluding the head. I have often dwelt upon this with you. Naturally this does not mean the physical substance but the formative forces of the head,which even in the roundness of its form, resembles the cosmos, these forces after death merge into the cosmos. What remains over for our life as forces between death and a new birth, what in the next life will become the head, is the rest of the body of the previous incarnation. To this is appended the rest of the organism which, fertilised by the father, then comes from the body of the mother. On passing through death we lose what belongs to the head as forces, and transform the forces of the rest of the body into the head of our next incarnation. The great mass of mankind of the present day was in its former incarnation so placed on earth that in the way they thought, in a truly Christian sense, they despised this earthly vale of tears. This scorn is a feeling that is connected not with the head but with the remaining organism. When these human beings re-incarnate today, what appeared in their former incarnation as an exalted Christian feeling, being now reincarnated and developed into the head organism, is transformed into its opposite and becomes a longing for the material, a yearning after material life. Present-day man has reached a turning point in evolution of which we must say that very little from the previous incarnation has come into the head. And just because of this something fresh must enter man, something that as a revelation from the present is manifested anew from the spiritual world. It is no longer possible today simply to hold to the Gospels; it is necessary to listen to what man is now being told about the spiritual. The Catholic Church is sharing in this dead thinking that cannot grip the living organism. Here in Berne the preachers of the Catholic Church too never tire in their professions of faith in the Christ, the Son of the Living God. But of what use is it to believe in the Christ, the Son of the living God, if one grasps Him only with dead thinking, that is, if He becomes a dead ideal in one's own thoughts? Our need today is not to call on the Christ, the Son of the living God, but to call on Christ, the living Son of God, which means to call on the Christ who is living now in the new revelations He is sending to mankind.

Spiritual Science wishes to make what as new revelation is striving directly towards the earth out of the spiritual worlds, into the impulse behind all thoughts. Through this men would receive thoughts capable of diving deep down into reality. These thoughts, it is true, would in many respects be the opposite of those holding sway in men today. Present-day men would like to hold to the most audacious thoughts, as far as possible from reality. And when they have such thoughts they cling to then tenaciously without noticing what the realities are that alter the circumstances with regard to thoughts. I will quote you a striking example of this.

Just as in the Spring and early Summer of 1914 statesmen talked of world peace, so now in Berne the various so-called ‘internationally’ thinking people talk of the coming League of Nations. You know that this idea came from the head of Woodrow Wilson. In his speech of January, 1917, Wilson made public this idea of a League of Nations. He set it up as a model of what men must strive for if he is not again in the future to suffer the terrible catastrophe into which we have today been driven. He described the striving for such a league as an absolute necessity. At the same time he said—and this is important—that the realisation of this League of Nations would depend upon a certain assumption without which there could be no talk of founding a league of the sort. This necessary assumption would be that the war should end without victory on either side for a League of Nations could never be founded in a world where there was definite conquest on the one side, definite defeat on the other.

This is the assumption Wilson made for the setting up of a League of Nations. What has arisen is the exact reverse of this assumption. Nevertheless men will establish the League of Nations in the way that, in January, 1917, Wilson spoke of it as a hypothesis. This means he was very far from reality in his thinking, that he clung to a thinking that offers no possibility of going with these thoughts deeply into reality, comprehending reality, of coming to terms with reality through thought. But that is just what is most needed. for the present time. People do not in the least realise that they dare not hold to their old way of thinking but that it is absolutely essential with thought to look deep into reality.

Now at Berne, as an example of a well-meaning man, we might point to the pacifist, Schücking. There was a discussion about the League of Nations and its organisation. It was curious to listen to the words that the aim would have to be a super-State and a super-Parliament resembling the parliaments of the individual States. For example, Schücking said: The objection will be made that the various States remain individualities and will not submit to the control of a single centralised super-State. The answer to that is what is being done in the national Assembly in Weimar. In that Assembly small local principalities are also individuals, nevertheless there exists a sense of the collective whole.—Here we have, close at hand, an obvious thought for those who love abstractions; for what could be more illuminating than to see that what can be done in miniature with a number of principalities, by joining them into a National Assembly, is now sought to be realised on a large scale with this super-State? But who ever thinks realistically, concretely, whoever makes straight for reality in his thinking, will ask why it was possible in Weimar? It was possible only because a German revolution took place! Otherwise there would have been no talk of doing away with the small States.

Today it is very difficult to make people see that a completely new thinking is necessary, a thinking in sympathy with reality, and that setting things right in present conditions depends upon how much inclination men have for this kind of thinking. A thinking, however, that wishes to know nothing of the spiritual world cannot dive into reality for in all reality there lives the spiritual world. And when we know nothing of the spiritual world we are unable to grasp reality, either today or in the future. Therefore, for the healing of the world today the chief condition is that man should turn to the knowledge of spiritual science. This must form the foundation, this can form the foundation, this can easily form the foundation. Do not keep repeating the superficial chatter that it is difficult to apply Spiritual Science to reality because people are not ready to receive it. Abolish State control over universities, schools, all schools, and. in ten years, in place of the present science which harms and kills the human soul, Spiritual Science, at least in its rudiments, will have arisen! Then what today can grow out of the emancipated third part of the sound social organism, out of the spiritual organisation, will have a different appearance from what is supervised by the State. For this State wishes to develop only its own spirituality, which means that it tolerates only a State theology, or would train its own jurists so that State jurists alone are recognised. Not to speak of medicine! How stupid, how ridiculous it is that medical practice should vary from one State to another, that the same knowledge should not be supposed to heal human beings on both sides of a frontier!

I have often emphasised that to socialistic thinking all spiritual life is mere ideology. What is the deeper reason of this being so for the masses of the proletariat? The reason is that all knowledge is supposed to be controlled by an external political State, and that it is only the shadow of the political State. It is indeed an ideology! If the spiritual life is not to be mere ideology, it must continually out of its own forces, be proving its reality, that means being established on its own foundation. The spiritual life must continually be showing its reality and may not depend upon outward support. Only this kind of independent spiritual life, which sees itself established solely on human ability and has entire control over itself, only a spiritual life of this kind will let its tributaries flow into capitalism with healing effect. For the control of capitalism too is brought about simply by human ability. Make the sources healthy, and spiritual life where it joins with capitalism in guiding economic life, will also be healthy. Thus things hang together and we must become conscious of the connection. The thinking of the present abstractionists must be avoided, the thinking estranged from reality which meets us at every step. It created the conditions that caused our present conditions; but this is not yet understood.

Today men ask how the super-State must be created, and they think of the former State. What was done by that should be done also by the super-State.—But is it not more to the point to ask what the State should leave undone? When the States have landed us in a European catastrophe is it not more apt to askr what it should not do? It should have done with its meddling in spiritual life and its acting as economist; and it should limit itself to the political sphere! It can no longer be asked how a League of Nations should be established, by taking as model what the States have done or should do; it is better and more suitable to the times to ask what the States should give up doing.

People are still little inclined to look deeply into these things. But upon their doing so the destiny of man today will depend.

Yesterday I set about to show how far from reality present-day thinking is, when in circles working on international questions it is already forgotten that the founding of a League of Nations was, in accordance with Wilson's ideas at the time, deemed possible only if peace were concluded without victory on either side. That you may see how exactly Wilson, on 22nd January, 1917, set out these conditions for the League, I should like today to read you the relevant passage from his speech. He said: “The chief thing in what has been said is that there must be peace without victory. It is not pleasant to have to say this. I may perhaps be allowed to state my own views about it and to emphasise that no other conception has entered my mind. I am trying merely to face the facts and to do this without shielding myself by hiding anything. A victory would mean that peace would be forced upon the vanquished, that the vanquished have to bow to the conditions of their conquerors. Such conditions could be accepted only with profound humility in circumstances of necessity and with insufferable sacrifice, and there would remain a smarting wound, a feeling of resentment, a bitter memory. A peace resting on such foundations could not be lasting, it would be like the house built on sand. The only lasting peace is a peace established between equals, a peace that in its whole essence rests on equality and the common benefit derived from a common act of good-will. The right attitude, the right mood of feeling, is as necessary between the different nations for enduring peace as for the just settlement of obstinate strife over questions of countries, races or peoples.” [ Note 1 ]

At that time this was held to be the condition for the founding of a League of Nations. And if we think clearly, it must be said that the moment this peace without victory is not forthcoming, all talk at present of founding a League ought to be abandoned, for it can no longer offer any prospect of success. But this has not happened. People do not think in accordance with reality, they think abstractly, letting their thoughts run on in the way they have begun, quite indifferent as to whether these thoughts have been based on suppositions likely to come true or not.

This is simply an outstanding example of the thinking that has brought the world so much misery. And unless we see that in place of this thinking estranged from reality there must be one that can penetrate reality, the situation will certainly not change in a way that is healing for mankind. This must be understood both in the great concerns of the world and also in the ordering of everyday life. For the measures affecting the daily life of individuals are closely connected with the most important affairs of mankind. The mention, therefore, must continually come before our souls: What then, today, could produce real change?

We know that what we call men's acceptance of Spiritual Science, is not merely a question of being convinced that there is a supersensible world. That is the what. But the important thing is that whoever in the true sense takes into his thinking what today can be told in the right way about the supersensible world, out of present spiritual revelation, should arrive at a certain how in his thinking. By this his thinking should gradually be transformed, in such a way that he really gets a sense for, an interest in, what truly and actually takes place in the world. It does not merely depend on what we acknowledge through Spiritual Science, but on how through it our thinking is transformed. The question therefore must touch us particularly closely why at present there is so strong an opposition to Spiritual Science.

Now yesterday I asked you to notice how everything that can be said about this opposition has to be related at the sane time to all that can arise under the influence of the threefold social organism. I said that once it has come about that the spiritual sphere has been placed on its own feet, so that it becomes independent of the economic sphere and of the life of the State, then in a comparatively short time Spiritual Science will become widespread. But one might go deeper into the question and ask: Why are people so little inclined to recognise necessity for the proper emancipation, of the life of the spirit and for its being placed on its own foundation? The reason is that this spiritual life has in recent times taken on a certain form that holds men back from directing their gaze to the supersensible world. One might say that the present sad experiences are in a certain way a kind of punishment for the necessary misunderstanding of spiritual life which has recently arisen. It must be realised that unless future human thought is led in a social direction, man will never get anywhere. We are taught this by facts against which it is foolish to contend. On the other hand it must be realised by penetrating deeply into things that any kind of socialism that is not at the same time spiritualised will prove the undoing rather than the salvation of mankind. The best groundwork for this penetration is a thorough understanding of the fact that socialistic thinking has proceeded out of modern thinking as a whole.

I have already given indications of this. Today we will gather up many of the things we have already heard. I have pointed out that there is something lurking in spirits like Fichte, when they direct their thoughts to the social sphere, that leads to an outlook quite similar to what is found today in Bolshevism. I tried to express this by saying that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would have actually been a genuine Bolshevist had he put his social theory into practice. He himself had so much spirituality that he could let his Bolshevist ideas appear in print (Der Geschlossene Handelsstaat) without becoming dangerous for mankind.

So little inclination exists today to penetrate into the real content of things that it is never noticed how in this book Fichte is a true Bolshevist.

Nevertheless it is in Hegel that modern thinking comes to expression with its particular characteristics. And Karl Marx isis again dependent upon Hegel though in a most remarkable way. Even if it leads us into the heights of abstraction I should like just to speak of what is characteristic in Hegel's mode of thinking. In the confusion of the last four-and-a-half years many inapt things have been said about Hegel. Why should we not for once be able to go objectively into the matter of his thinking?

Now let us consider how Hegel thought about the world, how he tried to direct his gaze to the revelations of the mysteries of the world. Hegel put what he had to say about his actual fundamental being of the world quite distinctly in various places—most distinctly of all in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Knowledge. Let us observe in a quite ordinary way what sort of world-outlook we here find expressed. Hegel's world-outlook falls into three parts. The first part he called Logic. Logic for him, however, is not the art of subjective human thinking but the sum of all ideas active in the world itself. Hegel sees indeed in these ideas not only what flits ghostlike through human heads. That for him is only the perception of the idea. Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. The ideas not appearing creatively in nature, the ideas that do not come to reflection in man and are not recognised by man, are ideas in themselves which are working in the world as ideas. I know quite well that perhaps you may not become much wiser from what I am saying; but people have long been maintaining that they do not gain much wisdom from Hegel, for they are unable to imagine the existence of a pure tissue of ideas. In this pure tissue of ideas, however, Hegel sees God before the creation of the world. For Hegel, God is a sum, or better, an organism, of ideas in the form in which these ideas existed before nature arose and before man was evolved on the foundation of nature. Thus Hegel tried to represent ideas in pure logic—that is, God before the creation of the world. God before the creation of the world is therefore pure logic.

Now we might say that it would be very profitable for man's life were someone to set forth all the ideas there were, irrespective of whether they are ideas of a living God or ideas only hovering in the air like a spider's web—but at that time there was no such thing as a web—that this would be of great advantage to the human soul. If, however, you take this pure Hegelian logic, you again find nothing but a web of ideas; and this is the reason it is so seldom done. A beginning is made with the most meagre concept, that of pure being. Then it rises to the non-being, then to existence, and so on. You come therefore to the sum of all ideas man has had about the world, about which he does not usually reflect. He finds it tedious to place before his soul all that follows from pure being up to the appropriate building-up of the organism, apart from any external world. You then get a sum of ideas but only of abstract ideas. And man's living feeling will naturally take up a certain attitude towards this sum or this organism of abstract ideas. How anyone might protest that this is a pantheistic prejudice of Hegel's, this belief that ideas as such are there. I take up the standpoint that before the creation of the world a God would have been there who might have had these ideas and created the world in accordance with them. Try, however, for once to imagine the reason and the soul-life of a God who would have nothing in Him but these Hegelian ideas, and would have reflected only about what lived between being and suitable organisation, who would have had in Himself only ideas of the most external abstractions. What would you say on being expected thus to picture the soul-life of a God? You would never be able to understand how a God could be so poor in His divine reasoning as to think only in such abstractions! Nevertheless for Hegel the sum of these abstract ideas is God Himself, not merely God is understanding but God Himself before the creation of the world. The essential thing is that Hegel in reality never gets beyond abstract ideas, but looks upon these abstractions as divine.

Then he goes on to his second point—nature. Here too, I might give you certain opinions as a kind of definition of the way Hegel progresses from the idea, that is, God before the creation, to nature. Probably, however, you would not gain much here either, were you to keep to your ordinary way of thinking. According to Hegel, logic contains the idea in itself; nature contains the idea in its external form. What therefore you contemplate as nature is also idea, actually nothing but what is contained in logic, in the form, however, of being outside itself or having a different being. Then Hegel examines nature in its pure mechanism to the point where it displays its biological, plant, animal relations. He tries everywhere, as far as nature is an open book to man, to point to ideas in her, in the light, in warmth, and in other forces, that of gravity and so forth. Hegel makes up for the significance lost through his abstractions, by his own powers of perception and imagination. But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. I defend Hegel, you know, because I count it fruitful to defend everything positive rather than always to swear by one's own opinion, roundly criticizing everything else. Anything at all good I always defend. That is the positivism of Spiritual Science. But that time, in the defence of Hegel, I went to work the wrong way. The friend in question said: “O leave me in peace about Hegel. One can't take a man seriously who has nothing to say about the comets except that they are an eruption in the sky!”—Naturally such a statement, that the comets are some sort of rash in the heavens rather like measles, must be taken in its whole context.

Now after Hegel has given a sort of catalogue of all the concepts and ideas incorporated in nature, he goes on to his third point, the spirit. In the spirit he sees the idea in its own being, that is, not only as it was before the creation of the world, not only in itself, but as it is apart from all else. The idea lives in the human soul, then objectively outside, and then for itself apart, for man. Since man is the idea because all is idea, this is the idea for itself alone. Hegel again tries to follow up the idea as it is present first in the souls of single human individuals, then—if I skip over something—in the State. In human souls the idea is inwardly active; in the State it is again objectified, living in laws and administration. In all this the idea lives, having become objective. It then goes on developing objectively in world-history, State, world-history. Thus in world-history everything is registered as ideas which brings about the further evolution of mankind on the physical plane. Nothing living as ideas in souls, in the State, in world-history, goes beyond the physical plane, nor does it make man aware of there being a spiritual world. For the spiritual world is for Hegel only the sum total of the ideas living in everything, first in the being in itself before the creation of the world., then apart in nature, and in the separateness of the human soul, in the State and in world-history.

After this the idea is developed to its greatest height, in the last moment of its development comes, as it were, to itself, in art, religion and philosophy.

I Logic: Idea in itself
II Nature: Idea in its external being
III Spirit: Idea in its separateness

Soul—State—World-history
Art—Religion—Philosophy

When the three, art, religion, and philosophy, arise in the life of man they stand above the State and world-history; nevertheless they are simply the embodiment of pure logic, the embodiment of abstract ideas. Those ideas existing before the creation of the world are represented in art in a physical image; in religion through a conception in accordance with feeling; and in philosophy the idea in its pure form appears finally in the human spirit. Man comes to fulfillment in philosophy, looks back on everything else that mankind and nature have produced in the way of ideas. He now feels himself filled with the God who is indeed the idea that looks back on the whole of its previous becoming. God sees Himself in men. Actually in man the idea is contemplating itself. Abstraction contemplates abstraction.

Nothing more ingenious can be imagined than these thoughts about human abstraction, if one bears in mind that this ingenuity is in the sphere of abstraction. And one can conceive nothing more inwardly daring than what holds good in the following—Ideas are what is highest, there is no God beyond ideas, ideas are God, and you, O soul of man, you are also an idea, only in you the idea is brought to its separateness, it contemplates itself.

Thus you see that we swim in ideas, we are ourselves ideas, everything is idea—the world in its extremest form of abstraction! It is of very great importance that just at the turn of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, there should have arisen a spirit who had the courage to say: It is only one who grasps the abstract idea who grasps reality; there is no higher reality than the abstract idea.

In the whole of Hegel's philosophy, from beginning to and, there is no path that leads into the supersensible world. For Hegel there is no such path; and if amen dies, because he is actually idea, in the sense of Hegelian philosophy he goes into the universal stream of world ideas. It is only about this stream of world ideas that anything can be said. There is no single concept that deals with the supersensible—this is just what is so great-minded about the Hegelian philosophy. Everything that meets us in Hegel's philosophy—in icy abstraction, it is true—is itself supersensible, even though abstractly supersensible. This proves itself entirely unsuited. to take up anything supersensible; it shows itself to be fitted only to enter into what is physical. The physical is spiritualised by the superphysical but only in a truly abstract form. At the same time everything supersensible is rejected because the sum of ideas given from beginning to end is related only to the physical world. Thus, I might say, the supersensible character of Hegel's ideas does not become very apparent, for this superphysical is not related to what is superphysical but only to what is physical.

I should particularly like to draw your attention to how the tendency of modern thinking is expressed. in its fundamental rejection of the supersensible; not, however, in superficial materialism but in the highest force of spiritual thinking. Hegel is therefore no materialist; he is an objective idealist. His objective idealism upholds the view that the objective idea is itself God, the founder of the world, the founder of everything.

Whoever thinks out a spiritual impulse of this kind, experiences in his thinking a certain inner satisfaction, which makes him overlook what is lacking. But what is lacking is felt all the more strongly by anyone who is not the original conceiver of the system but only reflects upon it. I have indicated this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (The Riddle of Man).

Now imagine that a man—not like Hegel—spins thoughts in this way, with an inner supersensible impulse, but that this thinking is taken up by a different head having a sense only for the material—as was the case with Karl Marx. Then this idealistic philosophy of Hegel's becomes the motive for rejecting everything supersensible, and with it everything idealistic. And so it happened with Karl Marx. Karl Marx adopted the form of Hegel of thought. But he did not consider the idea in the reality; he considered the reality as it goes on shinning itself out as mere external material reality. He continued Hegel's impulse and materialised it. Thus the basic nerve of modern socialistic thought has its roots in the very pinnacle of modern idealistic thought. This personal contact that at the same time had to do with the history of the world, this contact of the most abstract thinker with the most material of all thinkers, was an inner necessity but also the tragedy of the nineteenth century; it has been in a certain way the change over of the spiritual life into its opposite.

Hegel continues in abstract concepts. Being is changed into non-being, cannot reconcile itself with non-being and therefore merges into becoming. Thus the concept progresses through thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to a certain inner triad, dealt with by Hegel in a grandiose way in the field of pure idea. Karl Marx carries over this inner triad, sought by Hegel for logic, nature and spirit in the inner flexibility of ideas, into outer material reality. He says, for example: Out of the modern economic and capitalistic form of human community, under private ownership, there has developed, as there developed with Hegel nothingness, non-being out of being, the formation of trusts, the capitalistic socialisation of the economy of private capital. With the increased amassing of industrial plant by the trusts, the private ownership of capital changes into its opposite. There arise associations that are the reverse of individual economy. This is a changing over into the opposite, the antithesis. Then comes synthesis. Once again the whole is changed as nothingness is changed into becoming; and the merging of private economy into the economy of trusts changes into something still greater—the trust economy ands in the communal ownership of the means of production. This purely external economic reality progresses in the triad. Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. So, side-by-side we find the extremes, one might say like being and non-being.

Now you can argue as long as you like about idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, but nothing comes of it, you get nowhere. What sustains man can be found only by thinking in the sense of the modern trinity, with man in the centre, the luciferic extreme on the one side, on the other the ahrimanic extreme. Ahrimanic materialism, luciferic spiritualism, as the two extremes, man keeping the balance. If you wish for the truth you can neither be idealist nor realist; you must be one just as much as the other. You must seek the spirit with such intensity that you find spirit even in the material; you must penetrate what is material so that through the material you find the spirit. That is the task of the modern age; no longer to wrangle about spiritualism and materialism but to find the balance between the two. For the two extremes of the luciferic in Hegel and the ahrimanic in Marx are outlived. They were there, they were manifested. Now there must be found what will bring agreement, and this can be done just by Spiritual Science. Here, it is true, we have to rise as did Hegel to the heights of pure thought, but this pure thought must be used for breaking through to the supersensible. We do not have to find logic, that is, an organism of ideas, which can be related only to the world of the senses; but at the point where logic has been found we must pierce through what belongs to the senses and reach the supersensible. Hegel was unable to succeed in thus breaking through, and because of this men was thrown back.

In a certain way it depends upon the heights and purity reached by modern thinking that socialism should have appeared without any reference to what is to any degree spiritual. And the present—day difficulty in adding spiritual thinking to socialistic thinking is bound up with the very ground of mankind's inner path of development. The whole connection must be seen into, however, for us to gain the strength to find the way out of the situation. The pursuit of science as it is now carried on in our universities has certainly not led to this.

Not physically, but where thinking is concerned, Hegel has squeezed out man as a lemon is squeezed till it is dry; and this squeezed out lemon of a man is then only another idea. You sit there in your chairs; in the sense of Hegel's philosophy you are pure ideas; there are not bodies sitting there, not souls, but ideas, for each of you bears en idea within him. And this was already there an abstract idea before the creation of the world. Then each one of you in yourself is body, nature—the idea outside itself is sitting there on those chairs. Then again within you is the idea in its separateness. You yourself grasp this idea that id you. Think what a shadow you are: Only think how squeezed out you are while you sit there as the idea in itself, outside itself, and apart from itself—but always just idea!

Now in the sense of Karl Marx you are quite different from ideas. Just because he has passed through Hegel's method of idealism you are for him an animal that has become two-legged, as you appear outwardly in the order of nature. The other extreme!

In face of what exists in man's evolution must we not make an attempt to give him back his manhood again even in our outward view of him? This means not taking man's nature to be merely universal idea nor animal-men, but really individual man in his own envelope, man who stands at the highest point in nature, who has within him a soul-being and is the goal of a spiritual world. The conception of man must be brought back to this real man. I have tried to do this in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. That is the actual historical statement of the problem which I had before me when I was constrained to write The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The most highly developed animal enveloping man cannot be free, neither can there be freedom for the shadowy man—the idea in itself, outside itself, the idea in its separate being, for that is built up by the necessity of logic. Neither of these is free. Only the real man is free, the man who is the balance between the idea that breaks through to the actual spirit, and external materiel reality.

Therefore in the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an attempt was even made to base moral life not upon any kind of abstract principle, but upon inner moral experience, which at the time I called moral imagination, that is, upon what, expressed figuratively, individual man draws from the well of intuition. Kant set up the categorical imperative that runs: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be a guiding line for all men: Put on a coat that will fit every man.—The maxim of the philosophy of freedom runs: Let your action be such that it flows to you in a precise concrete moment, in an individual concrete moment, out of your highest human forces, out of the spirit.

Through moral philosophy in this roundabout way we arrive at spirituality. And for modern mankind it might be a way of coming to an understanding of the spiritual world, were men first to see into something that, after all, is not hard to grasp, namely, that what is moral has no support if it is not conceived as part of the supersensible and spiritual. From beginning to end Hegel's logic is a sum of abstract ideas. But ultimately what harm is there in my looking upon the whole of nature, upon every visible thing, as simply a scheme of ideas? It becomes harmful, however, when what spurs us on as an impulse to the moral, does not come from the spiritual world. For if it does not come from the spiritual world it has no true reality and is more noise and smoke issuing from animal-man. When animal-man dies nothing is left. In Hegel's philosophy there is no single concept related to anything that would still be there for man when he has gone through the gate of death, or that could have been there before he came through the gate of birth. Hegel's philosophy is great, but great as a point of transition for the nineteenth century. To recognise Hegel in his greatness leads us to carry him further, to make a passage through what stands in our way when we come to pure thought, to pure logic, to the idea in the abstract—a passage through to the supersensible world. Being still a follower of Hegel, can only be represented as the personal enjoyment of a few twisted minds who, at the beginning of the twentieth century set out to prove their great spirituality by going as far as it was permissible to go in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For we have to learn not only to wish to live abstractly as men, but to live wholly with the times, to live in the evolution of the time. We come to what is really living by refusing, to be absolute, otherwise we cannot cooperate in the sense of human evolution. The important thing is that we should work together for human evolution.

Raphael was great. The Sistine Madonna is a very important artistic creation. Actually it could be estimated justifiably only by someone who, if a painter produced a Sistine Madonna today, would consider it a bad picture. For it is a question of not taking anything as absolute, but of understanding how to place oneself into the great association of all mankind. And the necessity lies before us today of not simply taking up an absolute attitude in the world, as might be done formerly, but of feeling ourselves consciously in the epoch into which we are placed in a certain incarnation. Strange as it may sound, a right estimation of the Sistine Madonna could be made only by someone who was able to condemn the picture out of the modern attitude of mind, had it been painted today. For nothing has an absolute value; things derive their value from the place where they stand in the world. Up to now people have been able to make do without this insight; but from now on it is essential. It is not so particularly profound. In his epoch the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem was a great man. Today should anyone invent or discover this theorem it would be interesting but nothing more. It would also be interesting were anyone to paint the Sistine Madonna today. It is however not the time for this; it in not what must happen at the point of evolution in which we now stand.

You see what a new form thinking must take, what a socialising of thought there must be to experience jointly with other men is the important thing for today. To most people this will seem distinctly strange. Today however we find ourselves compelled to make a fundamental change in our thinking, to come to really new thoughts. We are no longer able to live with the old thoughts. If men go on spinning these old thoughts, the world will simply tumble about their ears. The salvation of mankind depends on men being able to free themselves from the old thinking and really wish for new thinking. Spiritual Science is a new thinking. The very reason it is so shunned is that fundamentally it is at variance with the old habits of thought. It is only those men who perceive the necessity for a new thinking who will be able to have a true feeling for Spiritual Science generally, and also for its revelations concerning individual spheres of the life of soul, for example, concerning the social question.

Something else is making the present age unhealthy, namely that men have come to think differently in their subconscious, but out of historic obstinacy they suppress this different thinking sitting in their subconscious, and for this they will have to suffer the consequences. Present historical evolution is in many respects the punishment for man's obstinacy in suppressing what lies in his subconscious and clinging in an artificial way to what for centuries he has maintained. We should not take those thinkers who are illogical and love the easy way, we should take the logical thinker of the epoch that is past and gone and learn from him where we have gone astray. It is not the thinker who makes concessions who is characteristic of this period that is past, but the thinker who clings fast to the standpoint of what is old. When, many years ago in the Austrian Upper Chamber, all the lovers of abstraction and the advanced Liberals were speaking of progress and liberalism, and of how religion was to be transformed to suit modern demands—when they used the cliches of all those who take up the cudgels, from Gladstone down to the valiant parliamentarians of the continent—the following rejoinder was made by Cardinal Rauscher, a Churchman keeping fast to the old, with nothing modern about him. He said: The Catholic Church knows no progress; what was once true is true for all time; nothing opposing it in the way of innovation that claims validity, has any right to it!—This was no modern spirit but a finished product of bygone times. And the same is true of Pobedonosceff (Russian Jurist and Statesmen) the only man who in an intelligent way partaking of genius has condemned the whole modern culture of the west, because in his opinion it really led to nothing. It was only possible to uphold the old order to which the bourgeoisie of today have become accustomed if people were willing to believe the world to be formed as Cardinal Rauscher, and Pobedonosceff himself, would have it. Had the world not been fed on the twaddle of Nicolas II but with the stark Principles of Pobedonosceff, it goes without saying that the present war would not have taken place. But on the other hand there is this to be said: One could no have built on Pobedonosceff's ideas, because the reality went in another direction. And now it is a question of following the reality, not by making concessions, not by behaving in the way most spirits have behaved during the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth, but by resolving to think something as different from the earlier thought as the devastation of the world war, in its other negative side, is different from what went before. From this terrible calamity, of which it is constantly said that there has never been anything like it in the course of history, we should learn to grasp thoughts of which we can say that there has never been anything like these in the course of history.

Thus you see it is incumbent upon man to make a great resolution. What out of instinct will unconsciously bring this resolution to fruition makes itself felt as socialism. The world will never get out of chaos till a sufficient number of men combine material socialism with the socialism that is ideal and spiritual. This is the existing condition of things. Salvation cannot come to historical social evolution so long as man fails to reach the point of being able to see the immediate reality beneath his nose. This should become the inner practice, as it were, of the soul which can originate from the impulses of Spiritual Science. I should like to try to point you continually to this inner practice of the soul. The more strongly you feel the importance for our time of what I have been trying to put forward in these considerations, the more freely will you move in the spiritual stream which receives its life from the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

Notes:

1. Not Wilson's original English. Translated from the German.