The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the reflections that were made here before my departure, and even from the, I would like to say, basic text of the public lectures, it can be seen that the science of initiation is, so to speak, “read” from the meaning of human developmental history, how one must intervene, absolutely must intervene in outer life, in all that is to be known and undertaken in outer life. If we are not able to fully absorb ourselves in this truth today, then we are asleep to the real demands of the time. This sleep with regard to the real demands of the time is indeed the case with most people of the present. We must be clear about the fact that the present poses questions to humanity that cannot be answered otherwise than from the science of initiation. It is not merely a matter of the fact that a Science of Initiation has always existed in the evolution of humanity, that at all times there have been initiates, as it were, into the events and the forces of existence. the point is that there are also such initiates today into the reasons for events and into the forces of existence; but only very few people have a proper idea of how this matter stands in more detail. And actually, people of the present would not want that at all. They actually shrink back from what can be called the necessity of the intervention of initiated science into the consciousness of the time. One can only get an idea of the seriousness of the situation by observing the differentiation of this matter throughout the civilized world. Because things are quite different in the East, they are quite different in the West. And anyone today who believes that they can get by with absolute judgments that are supposed to apply to everything is not living in reality, but is actually living in an abstract world. But it is necessary that things be looked at again and again from different points of view, so that at least some people may be impelled to realize the seriousness of the times.

If we first look at the West, preferably at the world of the English-speaking population, then today public opinion and what flows from public opinion for external events, for events within this English-speaking population is not merely dependent on what - I want to express myself quite decidedly today - the uninitiated dream and hold up as ideals in life. Particularly in the English-speaking population, there is a huge contrast between what appears in public consciousness as ideas and what those who are truly initiated into the events of world history mean behind the scenes of world history.

For if we take the general consciousness as it expresses itself in these parts of the civilized world, in the best endeavors, in the best public publications, we can say that there is a kind of ideal of a certain humanity, of humanity working towards a certain humanity, towards uniting human endeavors under the aspect of humanity, of the establishment of institutions that place themselves in the service of humanity. We want to disregard all the murky, lying waters that abound; we want to see what is best in public life that comes from the uninitiated. This is a certain striving to bring people together from the point of view of humanity. Behind this external striving stands the knowledge of the initiates, the knowledge of the leading initiates. And without the public knowing this, without the public having the opportunity to gain sufficient knowledge of the facts, the judgments and the guiding forces of certain initiated circles flow into public opinion and into the course of events that depends on it, into external action.

Here and there some society or other may arise with fine programs and beautiful ideals. People may be dripping with idealism. But they live with it without knowing it, not only in what they talk about, but there are ways and means of allowing all these things to be penetrated by what one wants to penetrate from a certain side, from the side of the initiates. And so it came about that in the last third of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century – we will stop at these things for the time being and not go back further – well-meaning people who were uninitiated but dreamed of all kinds of beautiful ideals joined together to in societies, but that behind this hustle and bustle are initiates, those initiates who in the eighties - as I said, we don't want to go back further - of the 19th century spoke of the fact that a world war had to come, which above all had to give the southern and eastern European states a completely different face.

If you are able to follow what has been taught and spoken within the circles of initiates in this field, then you know that the things that have poured over the civilized world in the last five years as terrible, dreadful things have been predicted with great certainty. All these things were no secret to the initiates of the English-speaking population, and the following discrepancy runs through all the discussions: on the one hand, beautiful exoteric ideals, the ideal of humanity with the real belief in this ideal of humanity in the most diverse forms on the part of the uninitiated uninitiated; on the other hand, the doctrine, the conscious, strictly held doctrine that everything that is Romanesque, everything that is Central European culture, must disappear from modern civilization, and that what the culture of the English-speaking population is must predominate and achieve world domination.

When these things are said now, they carry much more weight than if they had been said twenty years ago, for the simple reason that twenty years ago one could say to the people who said it: Well, you hear the grass growing. Today one can point out that a large part of what has been said within the circles of the initiated has actually been realized.

I speak as cautiously as possible so as not to deviate in any way from the presentation of the purely factual. But this presentation of the purely factual is something that is extremely uncomfortable for the majority of people in the present day. They would like to cast it off, they do not want to let it approach them. In the present time, there is something so very soul-satisfying about cultivating nationalism in this or that way, about speaking of the League of Nations, about the re-establishment of ancient sacred national institutions, and so on. The fact that we are currently in the midst of a terrible human crisis is something that people today absolutely do not want to know.

Now, with a few words, we have pointed out the discrepancy between what the uninitiated in the West know and what, unbeknownst to them, is throbbing in their decisions. One can only really know how one is integrated as a human being into what is happening if one makes an effort to get to know what is there in the world, if one does not let oneself be driven and pushed, but if one tries to find ways and means that really make freedom of will possible.

And if we look towards the East: throughout the whole of the East there is also this dichotomy between the initiated and the uninitiated. What do the uninitiated say? — These uninitiated people in the East speak in a way similar to Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore is a wonderful idealist of the East, a person who has extraordinarily far-reaching ideals. Everything he expresses outwardly is beautiful. But everything that comes from Tagore is the speech of an uninitiated person. Those who are initiated in the Orient speak differently, or rather, according to the old custom of the Orient: they do not speak at all. They have other ways of bringing what they actually want into effect, into social effect. They want to ensure that world domination is not sought from any particular side, because they are clear about it – they believe they are clear about it – that if there is still any kind of domination on earth, it can only be that of English-American humanity. But they do not want that. Therefore, they actually want to make civilization disappear from the earth. They are, after all, very familiar with the spiritual world and are convinced that humanity will be better off if it withdraws from subsequent earthly incarnations. They therefore want to work to ensure that people avoid the following incarnations. For these initiates of the Orient, the results of Leninism will have nothing frightening about them, because these initiates of the Orient say to themselves: If these institutions of Leninism spread more and more over the earth, it is the surest way to destroy earthly civilization. But this will be to the advantage of precisely those people who, through their previous incarnation, have provided themselves with the opportunity to continue living without the earth.

When such things are spoken of to Europeans, they consider them to be paradoxical. Within the circles of Oriental initiates, these things are spoken of in the same way that a European speaks without understanding of the fact that pea soup tastes different from rice soup; for them, these are realities that need not lie outside the realm of everyday discussion. If we consider the state of the present-day civilized world and really want to understand it, we must not forget that these things, from East and West, have an effect on our present civilization. And in the present time, one can only work for human progress with a complete sense of these influences on the course of human evolution. The outer life as it presents itself, is it an imprint of what people believe exoterically, what people think, who allow themselves to be controlled only by the science of the uninitiated?

For anyone who seriously wants to study this question, I recommend simply choosing a period of eight days in May or June of the year 1914 and reading newspaper articles and books from May or June 1914, and ask himself how much spirit of reality he finds in them, that is, how much knowledge he finds that what sprouted within civilized humanity in August then broke out in this civilized humanity. The uninitiated had never dreamed of such things! Nor do the uninitiated today dream of what is actually going on. But the events of external life are not a reflection of the knowledge of the uninitiated. There is a great discrepancy between what people think and what really happens in life. This discrepancy should be brought home to oneself and the question should be answered appropriately: How much do the uninitiated really know today about life, about what dominates life?

People talk about life. They create theories and ideals and programs, but without knowing life. And when something arises that is shaped out of life, people do not recognize it, they consider it to be a theory or an absurdity or something of the sort. The influences of the West and the East have a completely different meaning for life. This different meaning plays a blatant role in our lives for those who can observe such things. If what is considered theory, program, or social belief in the West were to rule life, nothing would come of it, absolutely nothing. That there is a Western civilization, that Western life can develop institutions at all, does not stem from the fact that Western life has such ideas as Spencer or Darwin or others, more socially minded people have; because in reality nothing can be done with all these exoteric theories and views. That life goes on, that life does not stand still, is due solely to the fact that old traditional instincts live in the English-speaking population and that life is guided by these instincts, not by theories. The theories are only a decoration, through which one speaks fine words about life. What governs life are the instincts that are driven from the unconscious of the soul to the surface. This is something that must be observed and recognized in all seriousness.

And if we go to the East, let us start this East at the Rhine, because very soon life from the Rhine eastwards will become more and more similar to the East. Let us take a look at what is present in the East. First consider it historically: through Germany, through Russia, even through the Near East. If you look at it historically in Germany, you will find something extraordinarily strange. You will find that these Germans had minds like Goethe, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, like Herder, but that in reality they know nothing about it, that they have had such minds. Within Germany, civilization was the property of a small intellectual aristocracy. This civilization never took root in the broader circles. Goethe remained an unknown figure to broader German circles, even after 1862. I say 1862 because before that, it was very difficult to find Goethe's works in Germany. They were not yet free, and the Cottas made sure that they could not be easily found. Since then they have been free to print. They are read, but they have never penetrated into the real spiritual life of something like a German nation. Therefore, it already begins with the Germans having an instinctive insecurity to the highest degree. Those intensely intervening spiritual powers, which radiate from a Herder, a Goethe, a Fichte, these certain life instincts are confronted by an insecurity of instinct that can be called in the highest degree such, an insecurity of instinct for the reason that in these areas the instincts have not remained conservative. In the West they have remained more conservative. Here they have not remained conservative, but they have not been renewed either, they have not been imbued with what the spiritual substance could have given them.

This is even more noticeable in the actual European East. Just think of the role played by the so-called Orthodox religion in this European East, how it has influenced public institutions, how it has lived an external life and how it has meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to souls. The preservation of this Eastern Orthodoxy, which has long since exhausted its content, means that human souls have been pushed into the uncertainty of life. Anyone who has met Russians in Western Europe was, of course, deeply touched by the peculiar relationship that these people had, on the one hand, to the general human condition and, on the other, to this Orthodox religion. Like souls who fled from the Orthodox religion many centuries ago, who still wore the trappings and memories of this Orthodox religion and who believed that this Orthodox religion could still be something for them, so these people, who could not even imagine how much they had fled from this Orthodox religion, appear to one. This is what characterizes the Russian soul. And so the uncertainty of instinct, of not being inwardly held by instincts, has been poured out on the European East. The peculiarly soft nature that has been poured out on the Russian people is ultimately connected to this uncertainty of instinct.

The whole of Asian humanity can become prey to the European conquerors today, or in the next few decades, because those who are initiated there do not care at all that the general humanity will become prey to the conquerors. For the members of this general humanity will all the more likely acquire a taste for withdrawing from earthly life and leaving the earth for the next incarnation.

We are caught up in these forces. And today it only makes sense to talk about life if one's words are imbued with the awareness that it is precisely the case in life today that one must assume that those forces must be released from human souls that do not go in one direction or the other, but that go towards a real renewal of science and initiation. Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again how the modern human being must steer a course between extreme intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other.

Our life passes in this conflict between an ever more and more intensifying and overwhelming intellectualism and an emotionalism that seeks the impulses of existence by plunging into the wildest, most animalistic drives of human life. Intellectualism is that aspect of spiritual life that has developed out of what has grown since the 15th century. But this intellectual life is shadowy, this intellectual life is thin, this intellectual life is full of empty phrases. Because this intellectual life is thin and shadowy, the forces that work in this intellectual life are determined not by the truly spiritual, but by the instincts, the drives, the animal in humanity. Today, humanity does not have the strength to use its shadowy intellectual ideas to impel the instincts and thereby spiritualize them. And so, in every moment of his life, the modern man is fundamentally divided with regard to his soul.

Just suppose you are judgmental of your fellow human beings. In that case, you are being intellectualistic. Whenever a person today criticizes his fellow human beings in the present, he becomes intellectualistic. If he is to work together with them in a social community, he becomes emotional; then he becomes so that he lets himself be controlled by animal instincts. Everything that we seek in our life's work, we gradually immerse in the animalistic-instinctive; everything that we seek in our life's judgments, even if it extends to our fellow human beings, we immerse in the intellectualistic. People of the present are not at all aware of this dichotomy in their souls. They do not even notice how they are quite different when they judge their fellow human beings, and then when they are supposed to act together with their fellow human beings.

But the intellectual life is going overboard. The intellectual life strives beyond all realities. The intellectual life is one that, as such, does not really attach any particular importance to earthly conditions. With the intellectual life, it is the case that one works out beautiful moral principles in the midst of a social order in which people are servants, in which they are enslaved. I have mentioned this here several times in the past. Today, I would also like to remind you once again of the inquiry that was launched in England in the mid-19th century into the conditions of coal mine workers, which revealed, among many other problems, that children as young as nine, 11, and 13 were sent down the coal shafts before sunrise were sent down into the coal shafts before sunrise every week, and then were brought up after sunset, so that the poor children never saw sunlight except on Sundays, and so had to develop underground, under conditions that I will spare you the description of; because there too, strange things would be told. But with the coals that were brought to light in this way, people then entertained themselves in mirrored rooms about charity, about universal love of one's fellow man without distinction of race, nation, class, and so on.

This is the extreme of intellectual life. Nowhere do the doors to reality open. One floats with one's intellect beyond humanity. A spirit of reality is only that which, in everything one thinks, knows how what one thinks is connected with what is happening in the world outside. It is the task of spiritual science to awaken this sense of reality in humanity again. It is from such a background that what I recently said in Basel must be publicly repeated more often today: over the centuries, the religious denominations have established a monopoly on everything that can be said about soul and spirit (spirit was abolished in the year 869, after all). People who researched nature externally were not allowed to seek the spirit in nature. And it must be said that, from this point of view, the extremely clever Jesuits, for example, have created the most perfect picture of a world view; when natural scientists become naturalists, there is nothing of spirit in their natural science! If someone takes what a Jesuit writes about nature seriously, then of course he becomes a materialist under the present-day spirit of the age. Today one must distinguish between what is theoretically correct and what is really essential. Theoretically correct is that the Jesuits advocate a spiritual world view. What is really essential is that the Jesuits spread materialism! — It was theoretically correct that Newton, in addition to his mechanistic world view, always doffed his hat when he uttered the word “God”. What is really essential is that the mechanistic materialism of a later time emerged from Newton's mechanistic world view. For it is not what one means theoretically that is decisive, but what lies in the laws of reality. And the intellectualistic world view never provides laws of the world. This intellectualistic world view ultimately leads to complete Luciferianism. It actually Luciferianizes the world.

Alongside this intellectualism, we have emotionalism in the present day, life from the instincts, from the animalistic, in the way I have described it. This instinctual life, this animalistic life, actually dominates public life at the moment when man is inclined to live, when he no longer needs only to judge. One can judge that it is shameful, for example, to treat the people in the mines in such and such a way. One can judge that. But one has mining shares! By cutting the coupons, it is oneself who tortures people in this way, one just does not notice it. This is more than a symbol of life, because that is how our life goes. People think on the one hand and act on the other. But they do not realize the huge discrepancy between the one and the other.

This situation is largely due to people's complacency towards all opportunities that provide us with insights into life. Today, people want to be a “good person” in life without striving to really get to know this life. But you can't really live today without getting to know life.

This world war arose from the fact that the people who were, and in some cases still are, the so-called “rulers” were very far removed from life. Some are still in their places, namely.

But what could more clearly show the complete lack of understanding of people for life, on which so much depends, has arrived in the last decades than those of our culture, of our civilization so clearly speaking “memoirs”, which are now piling up. Every week one, initially from the defeated powers, the others will follow, publishes his memoirs. This shows quite clearly how right was the judgment of the one who said: One would not believe with how little understanding the world is ruled. But the consequences of such assumptions are not readily drawn by the people of the present. For these people of the present, for example, do not want to see that there can be no social feeling and social knowledge without a real knowledge of the world. It is still possible to establish zoology without knowledge of the world, because animals are organized by their physical organization for a specific activity, for a specific functioning. What is characteristic of man is precisely that his organization is open to what he is to take up from knowledge of the world. And so there can be no social knowledge without it being based on knowledge of the world. You can never build a real social science without knowing that everything that man has to strive for through his inner being is a result of the whole evolution, which you can find in my “Occult Science in Outline , up to the present development of the earth, and that everything that the man of the present day absorbs through the social community is a germ for that which is to happen further with the development of the earth.

One cannot understand social life without understanding the world in general. It is impossible for people today to intervene in public life with programs or ideas or ideals without laying a spiritual foundation for this intervention; for what is lacking everywhere is a soul that is moved by what really matters.

We are experiencing strange things. The outstanding German socialist theorist Karl Kautsky has now also written a book: “How the World War Came About”. He begins by discussing the question of guilt. On the first pages, Kautsky makes a remarkable confession. I would like to preface the following. I would like to say that Kautsky is one of those who, in the last few decades, have used every means at their disposal to hammer party doctrine and party discipline into the proletariat, to hammer the doctrine into people's heads that it is not individuals who are responsible for world events, but, for example, capitalism. And so you will not find the word 'capitalists' everywhere, but the word 'capitalism'. With such party doctrines one can agitate, one can found parties, one can find effective hammers for the minds of men, so that such doctrines become creeds. As soon as one is compelled to intervene, I will not say in the work at all, but only to judge reality, the whole doctrine goes out of the window! Now, when Kautsky writes about the guilty parties, what does he do? He would have to leave his whole book unwritten if he wanted to continue his old litanies of capitalism. So what does he do? On the first page, he makes a confession, a strange confession, which I will only quote to you with a few words from his book: “You cannot present capitalism as the only culprit. For capitalism is nothing but an abstraction, which is derived from the observation of numerous individual phenomena and which is an indispensable tool in the quest to explore these in their lawful contexts. But you can't fight an abstraction, except theoretically; but not practically. In practice, we can only fight individual phenomena... certain institutions and persons as the bearers of certain social functions.

Now the socialist theorist is only faced with the fact that he is not even supposed to intervene constructively in social life, but only to judge social life in one respect, and now capitalism is suddenly an abstraction. He only just comes up with it! At the moment when the same Karl Kautsky would take it as an occasion to discuss the realistic idea of threefolding, capitalism would again march up in military organization, not as an abstraction but as something highly real! One does not even notice the difference between what is derived from a real observation of life as a social concept and what is derived from general abstract thinking or even abstract feeling.

Insight is what the modern man must seek as a means of protection against the illusionism into which he must fall through the extreme intellectualism. So today I approached you from a certain side to draw your attention to important things of the present. I will continue to develop and expand these things tomorrow and the day after.

In order to make the transition from yesterday's cultural-historical consideration to the perspectives I will be moving on to tomorrow, today I will insert a kind of episode that may seem a little far-fetched to you, but which must be included, even if it is a rather difficult consideration.

Two forces intervene in human life that appear mysterious within that life and demand to be understood, for they actually fall outside the usual course of life. One is the fact that man is capable of illusion, that man can indulge in illusions. The other is that man can fall prey to evil. The effect of illusion and the effect of evil in life are certainly among the greatest riddles of this life.

Now, on various occasions, I have already taken the opportunity to point out the mystery that exists in relation to these two facts of life. The mystery that exists here is only such that one's thinking falls out of the usual channels. And all that one has to think about in relation to illusion and in relation to evil in life is related to the problem, to the riddle of illness and death, which, after all, are actually only not felt by man - like all these riddles - in their full depth because man has become accustomed to having illusions, evil, illness and death in life. But these things should be found incomprehensible by anyone who assumes a materialistic view of life. In particular, the materialistically minded person should ask himself again and again: How is it possible to reconcile that deviation from the usual course of natural laws in life, that deviation that appears in illness and death? For the laws of nature, which are supposed to work through the organisms, undoubtedly express themselves in the normal, healthy course of life. But illness and death intervene abnormally in the course of life.

In order to develop health in the whole world-view of civilized humanity, which has become sick, one will gradually have to realize that illness and death, evil and illusion, can only be understood from the point of view of a spiritual world-view. Man, as he stands as an expression of the facts of the world as he knows them, must be clear about the fact that his development is not possible if only those natural facts that he can immediately grasp play a role in this development, if he has no part in anything other than what today's science is talking about. For just consider the following from the point of view of common sense. Imagine: the vital, the life forces in you become more alive than they are in the so-called normal state, more alive, for example, in fever, more alive than you are able to control them. In all these cases, in which you do not come up, do not gain the upper hand over the natural forces at work in you, consciousness ceases, or at least consciousness enters into an abnormal state.

Anyone who looks at life impartially must say to themselves: having life and having consciousness are two entirely different things. Having consciousness depends on one's having sovereignty over life. When life becomes overgrown, when life becomes feverish and one loses control over this life, then it is impossible to continue to have consciousness in the right way. But it follows directly from this that what arouses life in the organism and what are the life forces in the organism cannot be the forces of consciousness at the same time. If we survey the development of humanity as it has taken place in the cosmos, you know that this earth consciousness, which we usually have in mind when we speak of human consciousness, and which we also want to consider first today, only arose in the course of time; that this earth consciousness was preceded by other, less bright states of consciousness. I have often pointed out to you how this, our earthly planet, was preceded by a planetary embodiment, which we call the lunar embodiment of the earth. In those days, when the human being was connected with this planetary moon condition, man had only a kind of dream consciousness. But he was also - you only need to read about it in my “Occult Science in Outline” - much, much more than today permeated by vital forces.

And if we go further back to even earlier planetary embodiments of our Earth, we find more and more life processes in the human being. The human being lives the life of the whole cosmos. But we find no consciousness behind the consciousness of the moon other than that of our dreamless sleep, that is, from an earthly point of view, no consciousness at all.

Through these states, in which man was, as it were, more alive, but in which he could not have earthly consciousness because of this liveliness, he developed through to this earthly consciousness. And we have already spoken about what this earthly consciousness depends on. It depends on the fact that, as today's physiology does not yet sufficiently take into account, in our head, in our mind, processes take place that, if they extended over the whole body, would have to bring us death continuously, every moment. Our nerve-sense processes are processes that are entirely equivalent to what happens in our organism when it is a corpse. Only as long as we are alive is this continuous dying of our nervous-sensory organism paralyzed, compensated for by the other life processes in our organism. We have to be awakened to life from our trunk and limb organism at every moment, so to speak. For if our organization were to follow only the forces of our head, we would continually die or be suited to dying.

You see, it is necessary that the process of dying, the process of destruction, plays a part in human life. Without this process of destruction playing a part in the human organization, the human being would not be able to develop towards brightness of consciousness. These things must be recognized as necessities of cosmic evolution. And basically it is foolish for people to think: God is almighty, He could have arranged things differently. — That would be more or less the same as saying: God is almighty, He can also make a triangle with four corners. What is at issue here is a law of absolute necessity. The development of consciousness is not possible without the integration of the principle of death into the human organization. But now, insofar as we live in the earthly organization, insofar as we are earthly beings, we are completely integrated into this earthly organization, into this earthly existence. In a sense, the laws of earthly existence permeate our organism. Here it is necessary to distinguish between those cosmic laws that are the actual laws of the earth and those cosmic laws that cannot be regarded as earthly laws in the true sense. It is a rather difficult subject that is touched upon here. Let us imagine, schematically, that we are dealing with the earth, the sun, and many other things in the so-called universe; everything that lives and works in it is connected with everything else. But something has to be left out if it is to be possible to say that everything that lives and works in it is connected with everything else. We have to leave out everything for which our moon is the center.

We actually live cosmically in two spheres of the world, which do indeed interact with each other, but which are essentially different from each other. What belongs to the sun and the earth in terms of the active forces is connected, and everything that belongs to the active forces of the moon has, so to speak, been inserted into that. I should actually have to draw it like this: Earth (E), Sun (S), and many other things.

I draw the apparent movement of the earth and the sun (1). I would then have to draw the moon. If this is the sphere of the moon (2) and this is the sphere of the sun (1), I would now have to push the two into each other (3), so that they coincide spatially but are two entities in terms of their inner forces, not directly united with each other.

And we humans live in this duality. Everything that belongs to the moon is a remnant, a relic - you can read more about this in my “Geheimwissenschaft” - of the old lunar state, does not belong to what the earth has become in its normal progress. This piece, which belongs to the moon, has remained behind like a foreign body, has embedded itself, and we partake of both.

For anyone who truly wants to understand the nature of the world, it is essential to be aware of the independence of the earth-sun and moon. Because something extraordinarily important is connected with this, something so important that not only does present-day science have no idea about it, but it most likely considers it the greatest folly when it hears about it.

Every human being, as he undergoes embryonic development, does not undergo this development merely by following the forces that are unleashed in the mother's body through fertilization. If you want to be made to believe something like that, it's the same as saying: Here I have a magnetic needle that points in a certain direction, so it has the forces within itself. — That wouldn't occur to any physicist. Every physicist says: the earth is also a large magnet, and it attracts one end of the compass needle, and the other end attracts the other point. It is quite possible to talk about the fact that what is closed in itself is dependent in its activity, in its effectiveness, in its position on the larger whole. Only when the human being develops in the mother's womb, one would like to throw everything into this mother's womb that is organizing, while the cosmic forces are at work, from the cosmos, the forces shape the human being. And so it is that the human head organization, everything that is connected with his nerve-sense apparatus, is connected with the lunar forces, and the rest of the organization with the solar forces. And so we human beings become a contradictory being in life. We become a lunar being as a head human being, and a solar being as the rest of the human being. But here the matter becomes quite complicated. If you do not look closely here, you will immediately introduce a tangle of misunderstandings into the matter.

In so far as man is a being with a head, he is a being with a moon, that is to say, the forces of the moon are organized into his head. In so far as he is the rest of the organization, he is a being with a sun, that is to say, the forces of the sun are organized into the rest of his being.

But this means that the head, when the human being is awake and facing the world, is particularly receptive to everything that comes from the sun. The human being absorbs sunlight through the eye when it falls on objects. The head, the nerve-sense apparatus, is a moon creation; but what it receives is precisely the solar element. And in the rest of his organization, the human being is a solar being, that is, he is organized as a solar being. But what, in so far as he develops on earth, has an effect on him, is all lunar.

So you can say: Man, as a being with a head, is a moon vessel that absorbs the currents of the sun. Man, as the rest of the organization, is a sun being that absorbs the currents of the moon forces.

You see from this: if you do not look closely, if you do not grasp things exactly, but seek convenient concepts, then you will not get by. For someone may come and say: Man is a lunar being as a head being, as a being of the head. — The other says: That is not true, he is a solar being, because the solar processes take place in him. Both are correct. One must only become acquainted with the way in which these things interact. I have often said that reality is not so easy for us to grasp that a few pinned-down concepts would suffice to grasp this reality; rather, it is the case that one must make a little effort to form only those concepts that approximately correspond to this reality. In man himself, the lunar and solar natures interact in two ways. And all that takes place as life processes cannot be understood if man is not understood in this ambivalent connection with the cosmos.

One of the most important matters of the present should be for today - if she feels right - tormented humanity the realization: How did we lose the old, known in the atavistic clairvoyance of humanity concepts, and how are we only at the beginning of Copernicanism, of Galileism! - The ancient Egyptians, so man should say, he knew the man as a member of the whole cosmos. But for this Egyptian, this cosmos was much more highly organized than man himself. Today, man looks out into the cosmos and sees a great machine that he calculates with his mathematical formulas. For him, the planets move around the fixed stars just as if one wanted to calculate that the arms and legs of a human being move according to mathematical laws! In all that is in the cosmos and in which man is included, in all that lives organization - soul and spirit. And without considering the soul and spirituality of the cosmos, one cannot understand anything about human life, which is included in this soul and this spirituality of the cosmos.

So, I would say, we live in the lunar sphere. But with us in this lunar sphere lives everything that is Luciferic. And in a roundabout way, through our head organization, it is precisely the Luciferic that enables us to make this head organization suitable for the solar aspect of our earthly existence. And the Luciferic permeates our head organization. But it is as foreign to the earthly as the moon itself with its sphere. Just as little as our nervous-sensory apparatus is organized out of the same forces as our heart, lungs and stomach are organized out of, just as little is it organized out of our earthly-spiritual-soul what our Luciferic forces are. These are poured into us with the moonlight.

Few people know much about the influence of the moon on earthly life, except what poets sing of moonlit nights of magic and love. We know of the affinity of those flights of fancy with the moonlight that plays into the love life, when it is the higher love life, the romantic love life. But this is only the most shadowy part of what comes from the moon. Not only the imaginative element that plays out between lovers on moonlit, magical nights plays into our ordinary existence from this lunar sphere, but deeper forces play in from this sphere, forces that detach themselves from everyday life, from that which binds people to the earth, just as lovemaking in the moonlit nights of enchantment usually detaches itself from philistine everyday life. And the extreme, the way it plays out, as if coming from this completely alien sphere to the earthly, is the power of illusion that man can develop. If this sphere of the moon's power would not come into us, we would not be capable of illusion as human beings.

But then we would also not be able to detach ourselves from the vital, from the organizational life of our organism, and we would not be able to ascend to that brightness of consciousness that is necessary for us as human beings. In order to ascend to this brightness of consciousness, it is necessary that we are able to live in images that are completely detached from the everyday organism. But then we ourselves must hold them together with the everyday organism. Then it is within our power to hold together what plays through our head with this everyday organism, not to let the illusions tear themselves away from reality, but to relate them to reality in the right way. In order for us to be able to develop concepts that are free of sensuality in the world at all, we must also be capable of illusion. It is simply a necessity that the human being be capable of illusion. And this ability to illusion is also connected with the possibility for man not to be in a feverish or unconscious state all the time, that is, to ascend to clear consciousness. If he lets go the reins, if he does not remain master of the illusion but the illusion becomes master over him, then this is only a necessary accompaniment to the fact that we must be able to illusion.

Thus I have first shown you the capacity for illusion in man from the cosmic-humanistic point of view, according to its origin, and have pointed you to a point in the world view where that which we call natural necessity and that which we call inner human activity converge, while both fall apart for the mechanistic view commonly held today.

But now the other sphere. You may have noticed that I have made a small retouch, and since you are probably extremely attentive, you will have mentally reproached me for making a kind of retouch. I said first: the earth-sun sphere and the moon sphere are interwoven. — Afterwards I spoke of the sun sphere. I was also right in a certain sense. For that which has an effect on the nerve-sense organization, also from the earth, is always a solar effect. Even the illuminated surfaces of objects are only sunlight reflected back. And so everything that plays into our lives, even if it comes from the earth, insofar as it plays into our conscious lives, is a solar effect. But not everything. I could only omit it so far. It is correct that everything you process in your consciousness at first is connected with the sun. But the fact that you have a weight when you stand on the scales is an effect of the earth. But in truth, the solar sphere, that is, what I have so far been allowed to describe as a unified sphere, is in turn differentiated within itself. The earth is a certain inclusion in this earth-sun sphere. And this earth, by being a kind of inclusion in the earth-sun sphere, has an effect on what comes to us from the sun. It does not allow us to be pure sun beings. Again, as far as this point is concerned, one must not see the cosmos merely as a mechanism, but must consider it in its soulfulness and spiritualization.

Man, being part of the terrestrial solar sphere, follows in his subconscious forces more the actual forces of the earth. In his conscious activities, he follows what the sun sends to the earth. But when we examine what is heavy, that which is connected with everything that gives us a certain heaviness when we stand on the scales, it is not just the gravitation that Newton described, but at the same time it is everything that we experience as playing into our moral life. With the sun, it is really as the poet says: It shines on the good and the bad alike. It is indifferent to it. But if we examine the earth from a spiritual scientific point of view, we find that it is not indifferent. The earth is the expression of certain forces that want to stand out from our entire planetary system. Like the moon, which has crept in, the earth wants to 'slip away'. It wants out; it wants to become independent. We human beings would lack something very definite if we did not live under the influence of these earth forces that want to become independent: we would not have the sense of independence. If you were able to rush with the elements without being pulled down by the heaviness of the earth, you would never come to independence. Only by being constantly drawn to the earth – if I may use this expression, but as the expression of a fact, not a theory – does independence develop. And that is what this enclosure in the earth-sun sphere is for, to give us independence.

You may now object again, as you probably already have in your mind: Isn't it the same with animals? No, it is not the same. For the animal's head is attached to a horizontal backbone; the human head, with its full weight, is attached to the rest of the organism. That makes the difference. That is why man has this sense of independence, why man is harnessed in a completely different way into the forces of the earth and the sun than the animal.

We can only approach questions such as the ones we are dealing with here by asking, in effect, the alternative: What would become of us humans if we were left only to the influence of the earth, to the influence of the moon? What would become of us humans if we were left only to the influence of the sun? If we were left only to the influence of the sun, we would be a kind of angel, but stupid. Not that I want to say that angels are stupid. Angels are clever enough; but we would be a kind of angel, but not clever like angels, but stupid. Because we lack a sense of independence. We would only be links in the organization of the cosmos. That we are independent, we owe to our earthly existence. But if we were only under the influence of the earth, if the sun did not affect us, what would we be? Beasts, predators, beings that develop the wildest instincts.

Here you have one of the points where you can really look deeply into the constitution of the universe, because you have to say to yourself: that which is at work in the universe cannot be effective from just one side. For if it were effective from just one side, it would have to be at one radical extreme. If we were only under the influence of the earth, this earthly influence would develop the wildest instincts in us. The flames of our wild instincts would flare up. But if the influence of the earth did not work, we would never become independent beings. It must be there, otherwise we would never become independent beings. We must have the possibility of being wild animals in order to become independent beings. But so that we do not become wild animals, the influence of the earth must be counteracted by the influence of the sun, must paralyze it. That is what happens. And as this is happening, you can see the origin of evil. It simply arises from the fact that we are harnessed into earthly existence. So that on the one hand we are indeed exposed to a radical extreme, the earthly extreme, which, if it were the only influence acting on us, would make us evil beings, would fill us only with illusions.

The solar principle works from the cosmos into both. The solar principle makes it possible for us to develop in such a way that we do not fall prey to illusion. And the solar principle makes it possible for us to develop in such a way that we do not fall prey to evil. Under the illusion lies the possibility of becoming intelligent human beings. If it were not for that which makes us capable of illusion, we would never become intelligent human beings. Expressed cosmically: If we were not creatures of the moon, we would not be capable of illusion on the one hand, nor of intelligence on the other. If we were not subject to the earth and its forces, we would not be exposed to the possibility of evil on the one hand; but at the same time we would be condemned not to develop independence in life.

You see how man must have the possibility, in order to be intelligent, to have illusions. He had illusions for a long time. Then his will came, which was only born into his soul's constitution over time, and he could make the illusion the expression of his own being, he could become a liar. For the lie, objectively speaking, apart from man, is the same as the illusion. Only that which does not correspond to reality is arbitrarily set in opposition to reality by man in the case of the lie.

Thus, that which works into man from the lunar sphere is at the same time the creator, the creator being of his intelligence, and at the same time the creator being of his mendacity. In ancient times, people understood this and formed proverbs out of truths. We Germans, when we see the moon like this, say that it can be added to to make a - the moon waxes. If we see the moon like this, we say that it can be added to a – the moon is waxing. – If we go back to French, which is the legacy of the Romance languages, we have to say of the waning moon: La lune décroît, from décroître. Here the moon does not say what it is doing; it says the opposite. This moon has only just begun to tell the truth for the Germans. Hence the Latin saying: The moon is a liar. But this saying also has its esoteric side; for the forces that come from the moon are at the same time the forces of the human lying nature, and the saying: The moon is a liar has a very, very deep background, as you have now seen. It was only when civilization arose in the 15th century that the moon began to tell the truth in terms of its appearance for certain languages, just as materialism generally tells the truth in terms of its appearance. But in terms of its inner being, the moon is now truly a liar.

I am telling you this merely for mnemonic purposes, so that you remember this profound, cosmic-human truth. And you see, the best thing we humans have, our independence, is inwardly connected with evil. The best thing we humans have, our intelligence, is inwardly connected with the ability to create illusions, with the possibility of error. And we humans must also be capable of development. We must have the opportunity not to stand still. We could not be capable of development if we were not called upon to create something new on the basis of what has been destroyed. This means that we must carry within us illness and the possibility of death so that we can develop within us the forces for further development.

These extraordinarily important truths have been completely covered up, completely buried, by the worldviews of recent centuries. For today, when science extends to anything other than mathematics and mechanics, it is only called that which takes place on earth. From outside the earth, only mathematically and mechanically tangible laws have an effect. Humanity will first have to understand again that completely different forces are at work in this universe, in which the moon goes its way, in which the stars go their way, than mere mechanically and mathematically calculable impulses. And when you consider that the most mundane thing in us is an effect of the cosmos, that the most mundane thing cannot be understood without man considering himself as an effect of the cosmos, how then do you want to pour fruitful thoughts into that which is to permeate human life as a world view? Today man is isolated from the world. He has no inkling of his connection with the world. And he would like to found a social existence and does not even know with whom, because he has no idea what he is.

Yes, until the questions enter into the human soul: How little we know about the world under the influence of the last few centuries, how much we need to know! — no salvation will come into all social endeavors. Wherever it is possible to say mechanical-mathematical somewhere, people of the present still dare to construct connections. They know that all kinds of things are associated with the periods of sunspots, such as plagues and the like on Earth. There are some places where people want to link earthly existence to cosmic events. That everything that takes place in earthly existence is a result of the cosmos, people today would like to deny that, they would not want to think about that. The things that take place on earth among people can never be understood if they are not understood cosmically. And man can never find effective ideas for his work on earth if he does not imbue these effective ideas with the consciousness of his belonging to the cosmos.

Today, one has a bitter feeling when one only looks at what is actually happening historically. If you have a wall here and see all kinds of shadowy figures scurrying across it, you will investigate where these shadowy figures come from. If you see the events of the last five to six years passing over the earth's surface, you do not investigate, even though these are also only the projections, the shadows, of what is happening in the cosmos as a whole. And the big questions that are playing out today between the different areas of the earth can only be understood if the understanding is imbued with cosmic ideality.

Today I read an article in which it is hoped that the British government will find the right impetus to create order between what is happening in Russia and what is happening in the Western countries. They want to develop something in the middle, in the devastated Germany. These hopes will not be fulfilled, for everything that speaks out of such a spirit, that waits for the insights of those who create out of the old, leads to nothing.

The only thing that is fruitful for the future today is that which creates out of something completely new. Only when humanity wakes up to see this will it be the beginning of the salvation of much damage in the development of humanity.

What I presented here yesterday seems to be something very remote. Nevertheless, anyone who really wants to form ideas about what is spiritually and socially necessary in our time must also familiarize themselves with such ideas. Our thinking and feeling, our whole human nature must be imbued with feelings that arise from such ideas. I will briefly summarize what, so to speak, formed the main focus of yesterday's discussions. It is that which we already knew from other, more abstract points of view, namely that the human being has essentially a twofold organization; we could also say a threefold one, but today we want to consider the third, the middle link, less.

First there is the organization of the head, the nerve-sense organization, and then there is the organization of the rest of the human being. For the convenience-seeking thoughts of the present day, such a thing is difficult to grasp because people today want to know everything neatly, almost spatially, divided up. When one speaks of the head organization and the organization of the rest of the human being, people prefer to imagine: the head up to the neck and then the rest of the human being. Of course, this is not how things are meant. What is meant is that in a certain respect the whole person is the head, only that being the head, being the head, is most clearly expressed in the head. And the whole person is also a trunk and limbs person, only that being a trunk and limbs is most clearly expressed in the trunk and the limbs. The senses are, as it were, distributed throughout the whole human being; but inasmuch as they are distributed throughout the whole human being, we count them as belonging to the organization of the head, because those senses that are localized in the head are the most highly developed senses. |

From these indications you will understand how I actually mean the cited structure of the human being. But now we have seen that not only is there a necessity for this structure that comes from inner forces and processes in the human being, but that in fact the human being is integrated into the cosmos in a different way as a head-human being and in a different way as a trunk-and-limb-human being. Our head is, so to speak, the most advanced; but it actually belongs – and this is shown not only by occult knowledge but also by embryology when it is really considered rationally – our head organization does not belong to the earthly and solar sphere, but to the lunar sphere. The forces that are inwardly active in our head organization are lunar forces. And in the rest of our organization, the forces of the earth and sun are active.

The whole evolution of humanity on earth is connected with this essence of man. And now the time has come to see how to take a step forward, which depends on how we can set our human organization in motion. In human evolution on earth, what has taken place in the life of the human spirit and soul, let us say up to the Mystery of Golgotha, is of primary importance. That is the great turning-point in the whole of human evolution on earth. And if we exclude from all that has developed up to the Mystery of Golgotha the ancient Hebrew, the ancient Jewish evolution, we can say that what has developed up to that point bears a thoroughly unified character.

The ancient pagan culture, which, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”, starts from the mysteries of antiquity in the most diverse ways, has a unifying character in a certain respect. What is this unifying character? This unifying character consists in the fact that there is an original wisdom of humanity, that an original revelation has actually taken place all over the earth. Why could this primal revelation take place? It could take place because in the early days of the development of the earth, the human head, if I may put it that way, had not yet progressed as far as it has in our time or as it had already done by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the sense I explained to you yesterday, it was still alive. He was still imbued with the possibility of having dreams that were not connected with what is given only by earthly experience. He was able to evoke in himself what man had in ancient dream experiences, when consciousness was still more dimmed than it is in our time.

All this was used by the revealers of ancient times to guide humanity, so to speak, to the point of development at which it was to be at the dawn of the Mystery of Golgotha. What was revealed there and could be received by humanity through the organization just characterized to you, was such that, compared to what today's humanity knows, there was a comprehensive body of wisdom in primeval times that decreased more and more. We would not be satisfied with this body of wisdom today, because in many cases it was only the content of old atavistic clairvoyant dream images. Today we want to have correct, clear ideas, but we have not yet come very far in these clear, bright ideas.

An ancient wisdom had been poured out over mankind. From this wisdom much was said about the beings that rule nature, about the forces that rule nature, but very little about man himself. Man had not yet come to his earthly consciousness. He was still, as it were, entirely led by the hand of higher powers. He could become wise, but self-awareness had not yet dawned. The Apollonian saying: “Know thyself” is like a yearning placed in humanity, like something that was called out into the future by the leading minds of Greece. A wisdom was there that dealt with nature, but also with the nature of the cosmos. The ancient Hebrew revelation was placed into this life of humanity. If you consider the ancient Hebrew revelation, it has a certain peculiarity. It differs completely from the pagan wisdom revelations that spread around it. It disdained, so to speak, to contain the wisdom of nature and the universe. Basically, it contained only one thing about nature and the universe: God created it with man, and man has to serve God in the world. The whole ancient Hebrew revelation is geared towards the goal of showing man how he can serve his God Yahweh. What is appealed to in this ancient Hebrew revelation? — That which is not appealed to is found in the ancient pagan revelation: the organization of the head, which could still evoke memories of the ancient moon time. This could not be appealed to in the Hebrew revelation. It had to be appealed to in the rest of the human organization. But remember what I said yesterday: This remaining organization of the human being can understand and absorb precisely because it is solar, that which comes from the moon. What comes from the moon is that which, in the extreme, leads to illusions, to that which can reveal itself within the human being. But that is the content of the ancient Hebrew revelation. At first it is only about the human being. In this ancient Hebrew revelation, the human being is at the center.

But in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, man had not yet been led to self-awareness, to self-knowledge. A path had to be sought that was actually a detour. And that was through Jewish nationality. Therefore, the Jewish religion is not primarily a religion of humanity. It does not address the individual human being, but the entire Hebrew nation. It is a national religion. It speaks of the human being, but only indirectly, through the people.

Two things were in existence when the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in the evolution of the Earth: the dying embers of ancient pagan wisdom and humanity's consciousness in the form of the consciousness of a people. Into this was placed the Mystery of Golgotha. It could only be grasped with what was already there. One must distinguish between the fact of the Mystery and the means of comprehending and feeling it. The heathen could only grasp it with the remnants of their world-wisdom. The Jews could only grasp it with what had been revealed. And so it was grasped at first. The remnant of the old wisdom showed itself in the Gnostic view of the event of Golgotha. That which was due to Jewish revelation became more and more the content of the Catholic understanding, the Roman Catholic understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And now, in order to grasp anything at all of the Mystery of Golgotha, the detour had to be made through these two world currents.

The following became evident, however. The old pagan wisdom, because it was a dying ember, because its origin lay far back, increasingly lost the ability to be grasped by people. People became far too lazy to pass on the gnosticized wisdom about the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the thinnest remnants of the old pagan world view remained. This is one current.

The Jewish proclamation was fresher and more intense. But it had no worldly wisdom. It spoke only of man and of commandments for man. It placed man at the center of the world view. It was passed on in the churches of the Occident. The last remnants of pagan wisdom, the origin of which was no longer recognized, remained as concepts for what is now scientific experience. With the last remnants of ancient pagan wisdom, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus grasped the new world experiences that were available. It is no wonder that this gradually became very unsatisfactory. All that had been achieved was the application of the last abstract remnants of ancient pagan wisdom to the knowledge gained through the new means of natural science. And there was no bridge from what was known about man from Jewish revelation to this wisdom. And so it went on, and so it continued to be lived in until our days. On the one hand, we have a science that works only with the very last remnants of the ancient pagan wisdom and that cannot of itself find a way to understand the human being. This lack of understanding culminated in the 19th century in the decision to dispense with any attempt to understand the human being as such and to comprehend only that which appears when one regards the human being as the final consequence of the animal series. The ideal of this science, working with the last remnants of paganism, was not to understand man, but to understand the highest animal and call that man.

That which followed from Jewish revelation gradually lost the possibility of saying anything about nature from what it had to say about man. Try to take on the theology as it has developed, and see if you can find anything in it that could give a satisfactory explanation for today's consciousness of even the simplest natural processes. Of course, moral considerations can be linked from this tradition to natural processes. But today's sense of time is not satisfied with the moral consideration that God allowed an earthquake to occur in Messina to punish people, and theology has gradually become incapable of bridging the gap between what the gods work and what occurs and breaks out in nature. In many respects it is therefore a mere phrase, while our natural science has material upon material before it in a grandiose way, which contains infinite secrets but does not know what to do with them because it lacks the concepts to connect the things with each other. It was out of this conflict that the whole of modern consciousness developed, that something like agnosticism developed, for example, for which it became the hallmark of an enlightened mind when he could say to himself: Man is incapable of knowing anything about the essence of things. He is simply not organized to know anything about the essence of things.

What is deeply present in people as a longing must fight against such a view. It fights in what man wants to know about the world, it fights in the external social order. And one must realize how to make progress because in certain things our ideas are still in the distant past. What did Jewish revelation bring forth? The most characteristic of what it has produced is national Jewish politics. This national Jewish politics, after it had exerted its influence on Romanism, has taken its path into the most recent times. And the most influential nations of the present day, what do they strive for in the political field? — To pursue national politics! But that is ancient Hebrew politics. In our public life we have not yet advanced as far as Christianity. We are still in the Old Testament. And it is the task of the present time to advance as far as Christianity in the sphere of public life. It will not advance unless it is supported on the other side by scientific progress in the field of Christianity. But for this it is necessary to really get to know man.

Take, for example, my “Occult Science”. There is much talk about cosmic evolution, about the evolution of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, that people who are very clever today are either frightened or made to smile or annoyed. If you take a closer look at my “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science), you will find that what is given there as knowledge of the world is at the same time knowledge of man. For man is actually everywhere in all knowledge of the world. What was developed by man in Saturn time and then further developed, how the other beings have joined, that is considered. You cannot separate knowledge of the world and knowledge of man.

But in the present day, this is a Christian demand from the point of view of the field of knowledge. It is also a Christian demand from the social point of view that we learn to disregard all other human contexts and to aim solely at the human being itself. From the point of view of the phrase, these things have been fantasized about for a long time, but from the point of view of reality, little has been done so far. From the standpoint of reality, the national connections in which the human being is largely and completely submerged today still exist as overwhelming forces in the political life of the world. What must take the place of these national connections is a relationship built on the perception of what the human being is, from person to person across the whole civilized earth. But to establish such a relationship requires a certain inner strength of spirit, a certain inner strength of the human soul. And if we ask ourselves: Has the human being actually become stronger in soul in the so-called blessed 19th century? — then, wherever we look, if we are sincere and honest, we find everywhere: in terms of the intensity of our concepts and ideals, the human being has not become stronger, but weaker. Those who know me will know how such a statement is meant.

I may insert a personal remark here. It is now decades since I was in Vienna in a conversation with a man who has since made a great name for himself as a historian. We were talking about the development of Germany. The man was of the abstract view, which he expressed at the time as follows: Well, this German development, it is there and it will continue in the way it is there. — I said: That is an abstraction, it is not something that is taken from reality. It seems to me something like someone saying: Here is a plant, it has already borne fruit, now new flowers will come, then again fruits, then again flowers, and it will continue to grow like this. When the plant has reached the stage of blossoming and fruit formation, one cannot say: it will continue as it is. Something new, a new plant, can indeed arise from the seed that came from the blossom; but one must not imagine that the old plant emerges again from the blossom in a new form and that it continues as it was. I said: That which is the substance, the essence of the German being, has reached its bloom and fruit in the time of Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Hegel. That is a high point. It cannot simply be continued. Since then we have been in decadence, since then we have been in a descending movement. I expressed these ideas at the time. As you can imagine, I received little understanding; for people had already entered the period when such ideas were too intense to be grasped by the human soul, and I had to think how it was quite different until the middle of the 19th century. For example, in the development of the Germans there was a man, Gervinus, who wrote a history of literature. One can have much against him; in the whole writing of this history of literature there is an enormous radicalism. It ends with the death of Goethe, and it denies the following generations the ability to continue to write in the old style, as if new blossoms were growing out of the leaves of the plant. At that time, people were still radical enough to say: with Goethe it is over; if you want to develop further, you have to look for new approaches! Gervinus could not give them, but he concluded the old, he made a line under it.

Of course, many beautiful things have been written in German since then, but they are epigonistic. They do not contain the essence that flows in Herder, Goethe, Schiller, not the philosophical essence, the Hegel-Schelling essence, the Fichte essence. The only thing is that Hamerling, in terms of his maturity, has introduced a new tone into his “Homunculus”, but it has become a satire.

Even then, the demands were already there to grasp something new, to develop a real sense for a new approach to the whole new civilization. This call for a new approach should resound throughout the world today. For it is only from this that any hope of salvation for the future development of humanity can be hoped for. Everything that does not connect with the feelings of the individual human being must be eradicated. You can see an outward sign of this in the way old ideas are being dragged out again today. In order to say something in the present, old ideas are being drawn upon. In one of the present leading spirits of Central Europe, one finds an outlook that is truly spoken out of this decadent sense of time, and which shows what humanity cannot hold on to today. This man asks: How do we come to a moral life again? He sees

In the last five years, the decrepitude of the old morality has become apparent, and lies have triumphed among all nations. The old Hebrew policy of Yahweh has gripped all nations to such an extent that one might think that there was a Judaism in Palestine at that time, and now all nations would like to pursue a policy for themselves that is similar to the one the Jews pursued in Palestine. They would all like to become like that, they would all like to pursue world politics to the exclusion of the achievements of Christianity. The content is missing. Therefore, one resorts to things that actually have no content. Instead of looking for new sources of morality from spiritual, new, fruitful views, one asks: Where are the sources of a new morality? - and gives the following answer: Power is an indispensable means to create good. Therefore, if you do not already possess it, you should strive for the power that is necessary to achieve the good in each case. - You want to have a good thing in the world and are given the good advice: seek the power to achieve the good. - The second reason for the new ethic is: with the power you have, you can create the good. Therefore, one should use power everywhere to achieve the good.

But first you have to have the good, you have to recognize the good first! To speak in this way is the opposite of what must spread through the spiritual science meant here in modern human civilization. Because it is not about basing something on power. You can only found something on power if you combine groups of people. If one person is to face another, you cannot found anything on power, but only on that which develops in the person so that he has value. Man must work to develop a value by which he accomplishes things for man, and at the same time he must develop a receptivity to recognize such human value.

That is the only possible basis for any morality of the future: developing human value and the ability to recognize human value. To put it in other words, this means: All morality must be built on real trust! — Because one did not want to penetrate to such views, one could not understand the moral demands contained in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. There is a reasoned justification for a so-called individualistic morality, and it is built on the idea that if what can be developed is developed in each individual human being, there is no need for legislation, but rather one can wait and see what people will do in their mutual dealings. And I had to say to many people at the time: Just look, when we walk down the street, one person going this way and the other that, do we need legislation to make us step aside for each other? That one goes to the left and the other to the right is done out of the demands of existence, which one reasonably recognizes. — Thus one acts morally when all the things that lie within the human being are truly developed. Without this there is no morality of the future.

But this is the only morality that will really be built upon a newly grasped Christianity. It must be built upon this: Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me. The Christ has come into the human race so that every single human being may recognize the value of his fellow man. And when people treat each other in the world in this way, the foundation for a new morality is laid. But only from our present point of view is the Mystery of Golgotha newly understood. This Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. It must be understood by each world-age in a new form. Not the teachings that are there are the decisive ones; they must change from age to age. The decisive thing is that the Mystery of Golgotha has happened once. For the creeds of the present day, it is becoming more and more apparent that they are becoming increasingly indifferent to the Mystery of Golgotha. They do not attach any importance to it being understood in terms of contemporary consciousness; they only attach importance to their teachings being propagated. But these teachings will be incapable of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha. And so today we already have a branch of theology that no longer speaks of the Christ at all, but only of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the “simple man” who walked in Palestine, a kind of Socrates. And then one cannot understand why those who speak of this Christ speak of him as the center of human development. Such are the serious issues facing the present age. And it is precisely this seriousness that must be recognized. But it will be necessary to work in harmony on the one hand with the scientific field and on the other with the social field. After all, things do converge. I believe that today the orthodox university graduate will be surprised if, for example, he is asked to accept that botany must become “Christian”. But it must become Christian, that is to say, the spirit that has seized humanity through the mind must also work its way into botany. And a few socialist-minded people, but only a few, only individual parts of this socialist-minded mass, talk about the fact that Christian sentiment - one then speaks of original Christian sentiment - must take hold in the mutual behavior of people. Nevertheless, no special value is placed on permeating social ideas with the Christian principle.

There is, of course, also a third variant; but the point is that we learn, on the one hand, to find the Christ in the world and, on the other hand, to ignite within us the ability to understand this Christ. What must work together in the great as well as in the particular in social life is the development of a certain human value and the development of the ability to recognize this human value trustingly and to act accordingly in the relationship between people!

In the 19th century, when people had the least understanding of how a new spirit was needed to grasp anew the mystery of Golgotha, they spoke of practical Christianity because they had become as impractical as possible with regard to Christianity. Now that the events of the past few years in the development of humanity have passed by, it would certainly be necessary for as many people as possible to realize how a new spiritual revelation actually wants to enter into human development and how it must be grasped by people. As long as we continue to pledge our entire spiritual life to external powers, to state powers or whatever else the world has, there will be no possibility for this spiritual life to really take in the spiritual revelation that wants to enter humanity. For this it is necessary that spiritual life really be put on its own feet, as is demanded in our threefold social order, that it develop out of its own impulses. Out of these own impulses, science will be imbued with spiritual methods, and the spiritual methods developed for science will ignite the power to morally permeate social life with what is spiritual. We must learn to actualize and actualize spiritual things in our social work and in the social life of people. But to do that, we must go beyond what we have to call empty words today. We live a spiritual life in empty words, in phrases. Today you can experience someone saying beautiful things that you may like in terms of content; if you get closer to them, you will find their soul empty of spiritual content. Why? Because nowadays you can pick up empty phrases anywhere. You don't need to be connected to the buzz of empty words in human life. There is no other way to find the connection with the spirit again than to first seek the guide, so that the human soul can truly reach the spirit on its own, but this guide cannot be found in any other way than by seeking him with the conviction that man can become what can become in the world today only by not remaining with what is present in him in the way of inheritance, of blood forces, but by developing something in himself that goes beyond what is merely inherited, beyond what is merely taken from the outer world. Today we are born into a world with certain predispositions; these predispositions are developed in school, but in such a way that only the traditions that have been handed down are used as a stimulus for this development. We must come to know that there is a hidden germ in every human being that is not there through mere inheritance, nor through what is included in education today as a stimulus. We must have the faith that there is something in every human being today that can only be awakened through spiritual forces and through the conviction of the existence of spiritual forces within him. From what is being educated and lived by today, only the consciousness of Yahweh can be experienced. Christ consciousness can only be awakened when one has faith not only in the development of the human being, but in the transformation of the human being, when one has faith that something will come of the human being that is not inherent in him simply because he has inherited a body from his ancestors, but that is seated within him because he has gone through earlier earthly lives in earlier human world cycles. At that time, however, the principle of inheritance predominated and shone forth in the human being, which came over from repeated previous earthly lives. Now the inherited qualities have become weak, and those characteristics in man become ever stronger, which come over from the earlier incarnations not with the blood, but with the soul.

This can be taken over into consciousness. And when it lives in the consciousness of one person, that person encounters another with quite different feelings than people usually have today.

Thus, although it is a very extensive subject and I may have stumbled over my words, I have tried to explain something of what must enter into our human development as an elementary necessity. When this demand arises in life, it still encounters the most serious prejudices in life today. It is fought against. And I have had to tell you about some of the fighting against what is being striven for with the anthroposophically oriented world view that is meant here, in recent times. I would like to mention just two more things in this direction today. Recently I read to you the letter of our friend Dr. Stein, which refreshingly showed how we had to confront a churchman whose helper, when he was shown Bible passages that sounded somewhat anthroposophical, even ventured the confession: “Then Christ is wrong - in his opinion!” So it is not he, the churchman, who is wrong, but Christ! When I came to Stuttgart, I was informed that all kinds of judgments had been registered from our circles about how it was so harsh to confront an old gentleman, who had even read my writings, in such a way. One must show consideration for, first of all, secondly, thirdly... Unfortunately, this is still widespread in our ranks, that precisely when it comes to taking a serious stand on any point, those people who would most like to keep our movement in a sectarian light will stab us in the back. That is one thing I must mention.

The other thing is that I have to familiarize you with the accusation that has now been made in the German press, the murky sources of which – and I am explicitly mentioning this here – I know very well, and where it is fairly unimportant what because the people who spread such things are not concerned with awakening belief in the things they spread, but only with fabricating something that can disparage an inconvenient personality or current trend. So, despite the not very enlightened hall, I will read these “unenlightened” remarks, which are now circulating in part of the press:

"The theosophist Steiner as a stooge of the Entente. - The “Mannheimer Generalanzeiger” reports from Berlin: Theosoph Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences a following of several million men and women” - - I expressly note: this sentence, which will be extraordinarily evidential for anyone who somehow looks into the affairs of the present, and in the time to come, when such attacks will intensify considerably, one will see why such attacks said, among other false things, “founded the League for the Threefold Social Organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a strange and repulsive political agitation. The learns the following from Dresden: “From reliable information, it is unequivocally clear,” - I ask you to take note of the tone — “that the League for Tripartite Division is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for the purpose of extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the veracity of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proven by the passage of a letter in which it says: “Accusations of theft are to be refrained from, since untruthfulness is easier to prove here. Likewise, one should not make accusations that are too incredible, such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, the fact that every sentence, every word – forgive me for using the expression in this context – is a “first-told” lie, that is quite obvious. But these things are fabricated in the present. They prove that what comes from the school of thought represented here is taken seriously enough to consider these malicious means necessary at all. You can be sure: small sectarian movements, that is, those that are supposed to be small in number, are not bombarded with such things. One would only wish – and I also expressed this in the article sent the day before yesterday for our next but one “Dreigliederungs” issue – that the number of naive people would become smaller and smaller, who still believe that by refuting such things, they are helping the people who are working today out of the murky sources that are at issue here. They are not interested in refutations; for they are not concerned with even touching the truth, but they fight with every means against all that is to move in as a new spirit in humanity. They follow the forces by which they are possessed.

I had to give you this example for the reason that a sense of the seriousness that should actually prevail among all those who find themselves somehow seriously inclined towards what is stated here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should be evoked little by little. One would really like to find words that our current worn-out language hardly has to awaken this seriousness in souls. But the souls are often paralyzed. Nothing that is necessary will penetrate them, if time is not to lead into complete decadence. You cannot continue to manage in the old way. Nor should we call 'ideals' what we take from the old currents. We should become more and more aware that a complete new beginning in human development is necessary.

Today I shall discuss once more the law of human development in the post-Atlantean age, for the reason that I shall have to link various comments to this law in the next few days. An understanding of the significant demands of the present and the near future cannot take hold in the consciousness of people, which is so necessary in our time, if there is no keen understanding of the way in which people have arrived at the current point of view of the development of civilization. Since the time of the great Atlantean catastrophe, humanity has undergone a soul development that can only be understood from a spiritual-scientific point of view. When we consider this age of the great Atlantic catastrophe, we do not come back as far as the present scientific interpretation of human development would like to go back with humanity, but we come back to the times that are geologically referred to as the Ice Age, in which great upheavals are also assumed by external science for the areas that we today call the areas of civilized Europe. We are going back to about the 8th or 9th millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and indeed always referred to the ancient Indian cultural epoch as the first great cultural epoch that emerged in the post-Atlantic civilization after the Atlantic catastrophe. We need to focus our attention on the fact that the nature of the soul of people in those ancient times was essentially different from that of later times, especially from our own time. From the spiritual-scientific point of view, it is significant to look at the development of the soul of human beings. The development of the outer body and the development of material cultural contexts can only be understood if one really penetrates the development of the soul.

If we now consider the two millennia that, beginning in the 8th and 9th millennia, make up the ancient Indian age, we encounter a humanity that developed under completely different conditions from what is generally known as the development of humanity today. In particular, as I have often said, it must be borne in mind that today's human being undergoes a development in such a way that his physical-bodily development goes hand in hand with his soul-spiritual development, but that today the human being actually only undergoes this development in the first decades of life. In the first decade of life, there is the important physical transition that we describe as the change of teeth around the seventh year, which we can parallel with important mental and spiritual processes. Then, again, there is a profound intervention in the physical development of the present human being, which in turn affects the mental and spiritual development, with sexual maturity in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then, as is still clearly evident for today's human being, there is a certain connection between the spiritual-soul and the physical development well into the twenties. It is less abrupt, less distinct than in the periods around the seventh, around the fourteenth year, but still clearly perceptible to a precise observer.

In such parallelism between physical development and spiritual development, humanity was in the primeval Indian period up to the age of fifty-five, well into the sixth decade of life. One was so dependent on what was happening in the body, in terms of mind and soul, at the same time. Even in old age, people experienced the same kinds of changes as they do today when their teeth change, when they reach sexual maturity, and so on. So, a person's physical life extended into their sixties, the fifties. And I have pointed out what this actually means for a person's life. One became a person, let us say, at the age of thirty; as a person of thirty, one said to oneself: I will also reach the age of forty, fifty years; then, purely through my physical development, I will be mature in front of the world in a completely different way than I am now. One lived towards old age even in the higher decades of life, as one actually only lives towards old age as a child today. One grew and matured well into the highest decades of life. And one had the awareness that the older one became, the more things of the world became clear to one, the more one's soul life was filled, one might say, from the unknown depths of world existence. One still had such epochs in development even in old age, just as one now has the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

This changed, of course, in that this parallelism between physical and spiritual development increasingly receded. In the next cultural period, in ancient Persian, as I have called it in my “Occult Science in Outline”, this was only the case until the beginning of the 1950s or even until the end of the 1940s. And in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, this was only the case until the beginning of the forties; and in the period in which the Greek-Latin culture, which is still important for us today, spread, people were capable of development until the beginning of the thirties. Man felt young in Greece until the beginning of the thirties. And he said to himself that something would grow with him when he reached his thirties. Today, with the onset of our thirties, we are already dried-up mummies if we only look at our physical development. Today we stop making sense at a much earlier stage of physical development.

But all this is connected with other aspects of human development. The first period after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the primeval Indian period, had people who, to a high degree, participated in the entire life of the universe, who, in particular, participated in the life of the universe through their head experiences. We only know about the universe what is explored in observatories through telescopes and what is calculated by astronomers. In primeval India, man felt the course of the stars in his head. He not only experienced earthly nature in spring, summer, autumn and winter, but he also experienced cosmic events, he experienced the age of, say, a certain Sirius constellation, and so on. What was later calculated in an elaborate astrological way was experienced in the human being, just as today we experience satiety after a meal or hunger when we are expecting a meal. The course of the sun and the stars in one's own head was thus experienced.

The consequence of this was that man at that time did not feel at all as mere citizens of the earth, but as belonging to a supermundane world, which is merely transferred to earth. He felt as a wanderer during a short pilgrimage over the earth. He felt a certain kinship with what is extraterrestrial.

This already changed in the second post-Atlantean period. It became the case that people felt less the life of the universe, but more everything that, I would like to say, relates to the nature of illumination, to the light of the universe. The people of the ancient Persian period experienced day and night differently. They really felt themselves to be still present in the universe in the time between falling asleep and waking up. This time had a real content for them, whereas today it only means something like a hole in the conscious life of a person. After all, a kind of co-experience of the universe still existed. So that we can say: to the same extent that the physical-bodily ability to develop is shifted from the higher decades of life into the lower ones, to the same extent does the coexistence of the human being with the universe cease.

We can therefore say (see the overview): in the first post-Atlantean, primeval Indian period, we experience the physical and bodily up to the years from forty-eight or forty-nine to fifty-six, and even beyond. In the second, the primeval Persian period, from the forty-second to the forty-ninth year of life, we still have developmental moments in the physical development of the human being that can be compared to our second dentition or sexual maturity and the like. In the third period, which we are accustomed to call the Egyptian-Chaldean period, we have such bodily developmental moments from the age of thirty-five to forty-two. And in what we are accustomed to consider the Greek period, in the fourth post-Atlantean, Greek-Latin period, this development goes from the age of twenty-eight to the age of thirty-five.

If you take note of this, you will say to yourself: The developmental capacity of man is declining more and more. And with this decline of the developmental capacity of man, the gates to the co-experience of universal events are, as it were, closing for him. If you want to remember it, do not write it down, but remember it, we can say: the first period ranges from 8167 to 5567 BC; the second from 5567 to 2907 BC; the third from 2907 to 747 BC; the fourth the Greek period from 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha to 1413 AD after the Mystery of Golgotha; and then our fifth period begins, the time when we remain approximately capable of development only from the age of twenty-one to twenty-eight. That begins in 1413 and that is the period in which we live. And if we want to be precise, we have to say: the present human being remains capable of development until the twenty-seventh year. It is then that he begins, so to speak, to emancipate himself in his soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily. Emancipation from the physical-bodily is therefore something that occurs more and more. You can see from this that the time will come when human beings will only be capable of development up to the age of fourteen, when the age of sexual maturity will cease to have any significance in human development.

This is a period of time that will most certainly occur. No matter how long geologists calculate for the development of humanity on earth, for the development of the physical humanity of the earth, this physical humanity on earth will not develop longer than until the moment when this upper age limit is pushed down to the fourteenth, thirteenth year of age. Because from that point on, the physical humanity on earth will no longer be able to develop. Women will no longer bear children. Then the physical humanity on earth will have come to an end. I once said: The calculations that geologists commonly make are all based on a certain error. Today, one can calculate geological periods of time according to the way in which river mud is deposited or how much mud the Niagara River carries and similar things, and then “determine” what kind of flora and fauna existed on Earth so many years ago. These calculations are all made in much the same way as if one were to calculate today what changes, say, have taken place in the stomach over the last ten years and then calculate what the stomach looked like 150 years ago. And just as geologists today can calculate what the earth will look like millions of years from now, so we can calculate what the stomach looked like three hundred years ago. Only, the earth will no longer be there in millions of years, just as the physical man was no longer there three hundred years ago when his stomach supposedly looked a certain way. According to the physical laws on which these scientific works are based, it is of course possible to calculate quite correctly, but what one calculates is no more “correct” than one can calculate what a human stomach looked like three hundred years ago. These things that I am mentioning are rejected by exact science today. But that which really is, that which is factual, cannot be found by this exact science. Because you can calculate for a long time what the earth will look like after a hundred thousand years, what people will be like and the like: people will no longer exist on earth!

These are things that should already force us to build a bridge to spiritual scientific considerations. For only in this way can insights arise into the real development of man and insights into certain necessities that are to be included in this human consciousness. Now it may not be difficult for you to see that in older times man, so to speak, simply by being a physical human being, experienced certain revelations, revelations that one can only experience if one remains physically capable of development until a certain age. In ancient Persia and ancient India, the brain was soft and flexible and plastic well into one's fifties. It was so plastic that today it is only so in early youth. Simply through this plastic brain one received revelations that one cannot receive when one is still a child, but only when the body remains plastic well into old age. Our mummified brain, which has already dried up by the age of thirty, cannot achieve these revelations through the old natural path. This results in the necessity for the emancipated spiritual soul to acquire content in a different, purely spiritual way.

This means that it is eminently necessary for you to turn to spiritual life in our time. Because at the age of thirty-five, we have reached the half-way point of life, and from there it goes downhill. Anything that can only be achieved in the descending half will not be achieved by today's man by himself. If he does nothing to achieve it in any other way than through his physical development, it does not come to him at all. From such insights, one should understand how necessary it is for today's human being to turn to spiritual science.

Whatever external social structures people have created so far have arisen entirely under the influence of the old plastic body. But now the age has dawned in which these old structures are becoming decrepit and in which something new can only be created if it is created out of the spirit. This is already evident today, even if one only follows external events. But one only understands external events if one follows them in connection with the spirit. I would like to draw your attention to a topic that seems quite distant from the one we have just discussed. As I have often mentioned, disreputable generals and statesmen are now writing their memoirs. Among those who have written their memoirs, there is relatively one of the best, most interesting of frivolous and cynical people, who has guided Austrian history for a certain period of time, Czernin. He has also written his memoirs. I am not exaggerating when I say that he is one of the best memoirists, for I must also call him a frivolous and cynical superficialist. But his memoirs are still among the most interesting.

There is an interesting passage in which Czernin discusses what could have prevented or brought about this world war catastrophe. He discusses it as an Austrian and says: This Austria, it was destroyed by the world war. But it would have been destroyed even without the world war, because it was ripe to be destroyed. It could no longer exist. It was rotten inside. — He even expresses himself somewhat dramatically by saying: We had to go under anyway, we could only choose our method of death. We could not choose anything other than the method of death. We chose the worst one. Well, something better has not been understood. Perhaps another would have been slower, less painful. — That is how he expresses himself.

This is basically a very true apercu, because this Austria was a state structure, put together according to the intentions of the imagination, which still came from an old time. Even if they did not, I would like to say, grow any more in the brains, they were still there, luciferically. Today people see how these old structures are beginning to become decrepit and die off. People would only see clearly if they saw the inner reasons, the reasons of the times, for the dying off of these structures. But no one sees anything until the structure in question has catastrophically perished. What it would be about for a person who is truly at the cutting edge of his time would be not just coming up with all kinds of social ideas and taking the old state structures, as if these old state structures, these old state frameworks could be taken at all. They cannot. One must realize that the old concept of the state has ceased to have any meaning, that something else must take its place: the threefold social organism. This threefold social organism will create its own state boundaries; the old ones have lost their inner coherence.

But people today are simply asleep. They go along with what is happening catastrophically. But people do not want to look at the inner motivating forces of existence. They will only decide if they learn to really understand things from a spiritual-scientific point of view. Then, through a truly spiritual understanding of existence, a bridge will also be built between the understanding of the purely natural and the social. For in the last analysis both fields have laws that are connected with each other. Only if we look at the present time from this point of view will we gain the necessary insight into what is really going on today. We must decide to say: Today, if a person wants to do something for the ascending development of humanity, he must not be satisfied with what comes to him from outside, because only up to the age of twenty-seven does something come to him. After that, he mummifies; after that, the soul and spirit must draw its strength from the spiritual world.

A person who only develops out of what the outside world brings to him is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven. You can take the following idea as eminently correct: if today most people who advance to so-called higher positions still undergo all kinds of grammar school or similar education, then this twenty-seven-year limit is somewhat shifted because something comes into people from old traditions, which they absorb from them. But if someone grows out of our present life, truly as a self-made man, and then reaches the age of twenty-seven without having imbued this self-made man nature with a grammar school education in the usual sense and the then at twenty-seven he can be so far advanced that he is steeped in everything that applies only to the present of the earth today, that gives no possibility of development into the future, and that must find its conclusion in the present. For if anyone is to have something in his soul that gives a power of development towards the future, then he must have it from the spirit. So today, when someone turns twenty-seven, he is, so to speak, educated only through humanity, through what naturally comes to him through physical development. He will understand the present, and the present will understand him. But for what he understands, for what is understood of him, evolution could actually proceed in such a way that it perishes tomorrow through a gigantic cataclysm on earth, for his soul would contain no further ferment for further development. Just such a man, who would be a self-made man, who would have been exposed to what is received from the outside today, who would then have finished at the age of twenty-seven and become a member of parliament for my sake, then soon a minister and so on, would be the most characteristic expression of the present.

The man who is the most characteristic example of the present is Lloyd George. He is the most absolute expression of the present. If you study his biography, you will find that he is the person who embodies everything that a person can achieve through his physical and spiritual development up to the age of twenty-seven. But since he rejects everything that does not come of itself, that is won from the spiritual world, he can never become older than twenty-seven years. He is certainly much older today in terms of his counted years, but in reality he is twenty-seven years old. And so today there are many of us who stop at these twenty-seven years because they do not absorb anything from the spiritual world. The fact that one gets gray hair, that one shows other signs of age, does not matter. Today you can be twenty-seven years old even if you are a seventy-year-old man according to the years counted, and you can be the French Prime Minister and be called Clemenceau. That is the secret of the development of humanity: growing old is not connected with the number of years, but today, if someone really wants to grow old, they have to do so by developing spiritually. It is therefore no coincidence that it was Lloyd George who set the tone for the world, especially in the decisive events. For the keynote for the present age, which is so fundamentally maternal, had to be given by someone who reached the age of twenty-seven in the most characteristic, the most typical way and did not go beyond these twenty-seven years. He became a member of parliament at precisely this age and developed all these things with great genius. Today, one does not get to know the world by merely looking at it as the ideas that float on the surface of so-called civilization today suggest. One only gets to know the world by really looking at it from the inside out in the way just indicated.

We human beings are given two things for our development: I would like to say the shell and the content. The old people of the first, second, and third periods were given not only the physical development but also the spiritual. The members of the higher hierarchies still lived in the physical shells. We develop our bodies only in such a way that we have the forces of the spirits of form in our human forms, the spirit of the time in our etheric body, archangelic beings in our astral body, and angelic beings in our I. But it does not go any further, for we must consciously and voluntarily ascend to that which the human being of ancient times simply approached with the development of his body. And one does not get to know the moral development of humanity without really taking such things into consideration. People today write history exactly as the blind would write of color. They write only external phrases that have no content. From these empty, superficial phrases party programs and social programs are then constructed, and so-called ideals arise, ideals which are used as a basis for social action. Today one cannot achieve anything socially without taking into account the driving forces of human evolution. A sense of the times is necessary today. But it can only be gained from spiritual foundations.

How strangely such an understanding of the times is often perceived can be seen from outward things. When people want to rise above the everyday, they often do all kinds of things. For example, some time ago, when people no longer knew what kind of trivialities of civilization to start, all kinds of “Olympic Games” were to be held before the war catastrophe. Yes, the Olympic Games were for the Greeks. Our age has gone beyond the Greeks by so many centuries. We no longer have the state of soul and body that the Greeks had. We must find something that is appropriate for our state of soul and body. We only show the impotence of our spirit, the complete emptiness of soul content, when we want to regurgitate the old over and over again. The Olympic Games were only possible for those human beings who had retained their capacity for development until the age of thirty-three. To simply renew things that were once there for the benefit of humanity is no different than for someone who has turned thirty-five to suddenly decide that they want to behave like a fifteen-year-old boy. That is roughly how it was when the ideal of the Olympic Games emerged.

This inner search for understanding based on the spiritual foundations of development is what must be striven for unconditionally from our present time onwards. For the old connections from which people have worked until now have become rotten and brittle. A snail's shell will indeed hold together for a while even after the snail is dead. In the same way the old states, which had arisen out of quite different shells, out of quite different conceptions, have held their own. But it is imperative that today new social formations should really develop out of the renewed life of human thinking. The great dying out of the old social structures, which began in the East and has taken hold of Central Europe, will continue! But it would be good if it were understood and if people would think less about raising the old empires and more about facing the real conditions of the present and creating new social structures out of these real conditions of the present.

On the whole, it must be said that spiritual science requires people to develop a little less complacency with regard to the soul than people are inclined to have today. People today are already so unaware of the driving forces of evolution that they are immersed in. It was interesting for me to see how a member of our Society wrote about the style of The Core of the Social Question in the last issue of the Dreigliederungs-Zeitung. Many people have talked all sorts of nonsense about this style of the “Key Points of the Social Question”: difficult to understand, convoluted sentences, and the like. It is quite good that someone has finally said that this book is intended to be a call for the renewal of humanity, that it should not be a sleeping pill for those who want to have a pleasant read.

Today, people, by wanting to be consistent, unite the most disparate. You can go among the so-called people today, that will demand a popular presentation. Perhaps the most popular presentation will be demanded by those who feel most free-spirited. They will find a closed style boring, these people. Where does this striving for so-called popular presentation come from? If only people would consider it just once, they would more easily move away from such judgments as are often heard. For what many people hostile to the church today demand as popularity in style is nothing other than a result of the presentation that certain representatives of the faiths sought in order to keep people as stupid as possible. In their Sunday afternoon sermons they gave them, as far as possible, only what was as clear as daylight, and this was also clear as daylight for those who wanted to stay awake during the sermons. The furthest limit of hearing sermons is, of course, the old lady who always slept during the sermon and who was taken to task for it. She said: Well, what does a person have in this world if they no longer have that little bit of church sleep! The difference in level from this state of drowsiness to popular presentation is not very great. It has essentially arisen from the fact that people have not been allowed to develop a certain free and lively way of thinking. What people have become accustomed to when listening to sermons is what the anti-church Social Democrats demand today as a popular presentation. Such are the circumstances. People today find the style of the “Core Points” difficult, which would have them reject any sense of confession; but the fact that they find the style difficult stems from the fact that these people have been educated by the “watery clarity” of Sunday afternoon sermons. This is also something that people must learn through spiritual science: to look at events impartially. People would prefer to be mistaken about the laws of development.

Above all, energy in the life of the soul is what is needed most urgently for the future development of humanity. And in this respect, we are living in an extraordinarily difficult time today. Last Sunday, here, while “Egyptian darkness” prevailed in the hall, I pointed out the many efforts that are being made against our spiritual science in particular. But it is not at all uncommon for a decisive, firm thinking about it to be resented, one might say, in our ranks. This must be clearly stated for the reason that the kind of defamatory campaigns against author-oriented spiritual science and what it socially entails are only just beginning. Again and again, we are confronted with the pernicious demand that when someone is slandered, the old man or whoever it is, sometimes a young man, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young one, should be treated as gently as possible. They say: above all, anyone who slanders should be treated as gently as possible in our ranks; you should first befriend people who spread slander! – That is not what matters today! Anyone who understands the times should realize that. Today it is not a matter of dealing with people who spread slander throughout the world, but rather of characterizing these people to others, of having nothing to do with them, of treating them as people whom one does not want to let approach oneself, and of educating others in an appropriate way about what kind of individuals they are in the world. That is what matters today! — For today we are facing serious moments of development, and today looking through one's fingers is the very worst thing that can happen in the service of humanity. It is more convenient to look through one's fingers than to grasp sharply what is at stake here.

Above all, we must be clear about the fact that a real understanding of the social task of the present is only possible from the spirit. But in addition, of course, much else must first be brought about, I would say. On the one hand, there is our science, which needs a complete renewal. We can no longer do anything with the old science. We must have the opportunity to truly penetrate the spirit of nature. We must have the opportunity to really grasp science, medicine, biology in general in a spiritual way, then we can really develop fruitful thoughts for social thinking with the education that is undergone in this way. Otherwise we will continue to want to create something new with the old buzzwords. But that is precisely what is leading us so powerfully down into the abyss. Humanity must ascend, but it must do so out of a spiritual renewal. And anyone who will not resolve to look at the old in such a way that it is really seen by him as old will simply not be able to work with humanity for its progress.

I have, of course, developed this before you in the most diverse variations. Today I wanted to point out how humanity is actually becoming younger and younger in relation to its age, which I have discussed several times before. The ancient Indians lived well into their fifties, then the Persians lived into their forties, the Egyptians and Chaldeans lived into their thirties, and the Greeks lived into their thirties. We do not grow old in this way. We still drag ourselves along if we do not inwardly enliven ourselves spiritually, but we do not grow old. For in the old ages, to grow old meant at the same time to become wiser through that which the human being developed bodily-physically. Today's people, by growing old, merely become old, they do not become wiser; they become mummies. They only become wise when they fill the mummies inwardly with something. The Egyptians mummified their dead. Contemporary people have no need to become mummies at all, for they already walk around as mummies and are only not mummies when the spiritual is grasped in the living, immediate present; then the mummy is enlivened. But it is necessary for present-day humanity that the mummies be brought to life. Otherwise we will continue to have those world associations in which all kinds of sounds come from mummified human beings. These associations are called 'parties'. But what came from the mummified human beings gradually became purely Ahrimanic voices, and these brought about the catastrophe of the last few years. That is the other side of the coin, that is the very serious side of the matter. If, from the present time onwards, man does not begin to fill his mummy with spiritual content, it will be filled by the whisperings of Ahriman. Then the human mummies will walk around, but the Ahrimanic demons will speak out of them. They can only be prevented from populating the earth if people decide to seek their living connection with the spiritual world. Yes, the matter is very, very serious. To pursue spiritual science today is at the same time to expel the Ahrimanic spirit from humanity, to prevent humanity from being possessed by Ahrimanic spiritual forces.

Yesterday I tried to characterize the nature of the moment in human evolution at which we find ourselves. I tried to show you how, in the course of human evolution, humanity has now arrived at a point where it is absolutely dependent on what we call the science of initiation. This means that it is necessary, firstly, for the branches of knowledge of human cultural life to be permeated by this science of initiation, but secondly also for social thinking and social feeling to be permeated by those feelings and perceptions that result for the human soul from consciousness: there is a spiritual revelation, a supersensible revelation – one need only turn to it.

One can be convinced that many people come and say: Yes, but history has been conscientiously studied, and what is supposed to result from spiritual science about the character of the present period, and how it has developed from the preceding ones, is not spoken of in history.

Yes, it does not speak of it because, uninfluenced by real spiritual knowledge, it does not ask about its real impulses and forces. In order to know what speaks through history, one must first understand how to ask history in the right way.

Now, the three successive post-Atlantean periods, the primeval Indian, the primeval Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, are such that, in the sense sense, humanity has become younger and younger, that is to say, in the second period it did not remain capable of development into those years in which it was still capable of development in the first period, and so on. In the Graeco-Latin period, that is to say, in the period that began in the 8th century BC and ended in the 15th century, it was the case that human beings remained capable of development until the beginning of their thirties. When this period closed in the 15th century, human beings were clearly capable of development until well beyond the twenty-eighth year. Today, as we have emphasized, the ability to develop only extends to the twenty-seventh year and will descend more and more.

Now, simply due to their physical and bodily constitution, human beings can only come into contact with the spiritual world from their thirties onwards. Do not misunderstand me! Of course, if he turns to spiritual science, he can come into contact with the spiritual world earlier, even today; but if man, through his own development, which is bound to the physical body, is to receive spiritual forces from the universe, this can only happen if he remains capable of development well into his thirties. He does not. Therefore, from our point of view, there can be no question of human development progressing by natural means. It can only progress if humanity is fertilized by the science of initiation.

Now, as I have already indicated in one of the previous lectures, there are initiates in areas of Western civilization, especially in Anglo-American areas. But the peculiar thing about these initiates is that, from their point of view, they only intend to promote as a science of initiation that which British-American world domination can gradually bring about on earth. However strange it may sound, it is so. And it may be said that every single assertion that comes from this side bears a stamp that the knowledgeable person can recognize as being true. Above all, the various ways in which the science of initiation is handled in Western countries point to all these things.

You have seen that, within certain limits, certain truths of initiation are not withheld here. And if you look through what has been presented to you over the years, you will find in it, if you really follow things unsleeping, a whole series of important initiatory truths that are suitable for bringing not just a part of humanity, but all of humanity across the earth, beyond the current crisis and towards a real further development. But you will always find people, especially among Western initiates, who disapprove of and condemn the fact that so much of what has been communicated here is being made public today. This is due to a distorted conception of the science of initiation. In order to make you understand this distorted conception, I must first say the following.

The science of initiation always addresses the individual human being. Even if it speaks to a group of people, it is in reality addressing the individual human being. One cannot present the true science of initiation in the way it used to be presented to people in the past. The Catholic Church, for example, transplanted this kind of thing into the present day, and not only the Catholic Church, but certain political parties also still use the same method today. The way they worked was to use, if I may put it this way, the mass psyche, to appeal to what is instilled in a community of people in a certain, I would say hypnotic, way. You know that, as a rule, if you only use the appropriate means, you can teach a crowd things more easily than you can teach each individual to whom you wanted to speak. There is some truth to such mass hypnosis.

These methods, which are quite effective, cannot be used by a true wisdom of initiation. It must speak as though addressing each individual person and appeal to the powers of persuasion of each individual person. The way of speaking which the science of initiation, which today stands at the height of human development, must make use of, has not yet existed. Therefore, the way in which, for example, I speak here and in my books is still an abomination to some people today, because the way of speaking strictly adheres to the rule of appealing only to the power of persuasion of the individual individuality.

This also gives us an important social principle, which I have already mentioned in another context in recent days and which you will find systematically and in principle implemented in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. If you only want to appeal to the individual with ethical, moral impulses, then you cannot want to organize from general abstractions, then you cannot group people together like herd animals in order to give them some kind of common directive, but then one can only appeal to the individual and then wait for the right thing to happen in the whole, because each individual, in his standing in the whole, wants the right thing.

The social morality of the future cannot be based on any other principle than this principle of general human behavior. When I published my “Philosophy of Freedom”, for example, a review appeared in the “Athenaeum” in which it was said that such a view leads to a theoretical anarchism. But it only leads to anarchism if we do not succeed in making people into real people, that is, if people absolutely want to be subhuman, if they absolutely want to be kept together under such aspects as the members of a group of animals are kept together. Lions are held together as lions by their very shape, hyenas too, dogs too; but the development of humanity is such that in the future groups of people should not be organized either by blood ties or by ideological ties like flocks of sheep, but that what arises from the interaction of people should actually happen out of the power of individualities.

A few days ago I used a comparison here that may sound a little grotesque, but which I believe can shed light on the whole matter. I do not know whether there are not also people who would find it particularly liberating if they saw inscriptions everywhere: Decree of such and such an authority: The one who walks in this direction must give way to the other who walks in the other direction. Even in populous cities, people generally still get along with each other on the street, they pass each other; out of their reason, out of what they have as an impulse within them, they do not constantly push each other away. Humanity is moving towards this ideal. That it does not recognize this is its misfortune. It is important to have the directives of one's actions within oneself, even in important matters, so that the other can rely on them, without a common law that trains them to behave in such a way that the other can exist alongside them.

This work towards individuality is what is connected with the most important impulses of human development. Human individuality can never be brought to bear on something like this if it can only be conveyed through the current knowledge of nature or the current social science or the current social motives. Man only comes to such an individuality as I have just spoken of when a mass of thoughts is awakened in him that comes from the science of initiation. Only through his relation to the supersensible is man imbued with such thoughts as will make him a free individuality, but which can also function in the social order with the greatest possible freedom. Everything depends on humanity opening its heart and mind to what comes from the science of initiation.

Great trust must become the most important social motive of the future. People must be able to rely on each other. Otherwise things will not move forward. What I have told you now seems obvious to anyone who is serious about the whole of humanity, if they are sufficiently initiated into supersensible things, to the extent that they must say: either this happens or humanity goes into the abyss. There is no third way.

You can say that you cannot imagine that a social order is based on general trust. To that one can only answer: Fine, if you cannot imagine it, then you just have to imagine: Humanity must go into the swamp. – These things are serious, and they must be taken seriously as such.

To a certain degree of abstraction, the initiates of Western countries also know this. But they say the following: We have the science of initiation to a certain degree, we could publish it. They would, however, only publish a science of initiation that leads to the goals I have indicated; we are also now moving in an area that is just as applicable to the true science of initiation as it is to the one-sided one. The initiates of Western countries can therefore say: We have the science of initiation; we can publish it, but the fact is that it is only addressed to the individual. Now the great fear begins for these people, the terrible fear. They say, 'Yes, if we only speak to individuals in the future, then we will unleash a fight of everyone against everyone, because then people are not organized, then we rely on general trust, then people will enter into the fight of everyone against everyone. This fear stands before people. Therefore, they want to keep the most important truths of initiation, I would say, in the darkroom and let humanity walk towards the future in an apparent light, but asleep.

These things are indeed very topical, since the mid-19th century, when the peak of materialism in modern civilization was reached and since then people have had to ask themselves: How far do we go with the science of initiation? — They have not dared to communicate a real science of initiation to humanity beyond certain smaller circles until now.

Now, a certain education that humanity has undergone must not be allowed to break down, but it is already breaking down today thanks to a completely misguided theology. You can follow this education if you do not study that fable convenue which is usually called “history”, but if you study real history. Today, people do not really know how what is designated by certain words has changed over time. People talk about Catholicism, about emperorship, about aristocracy, about bourgeoisie, and believe that if they find the same words in the fourteenth century, they mean approximately the same thing, perhaps only a little nuance is different. As long as we do not realize that what Catholicism, emperorship, bourgeoisie and aristocracy meant in the 14th century has nothing at all in common with what we mean by these words today, we do not understand history. We must be quite clear about how the state of mind of human beings has really changed a great deal over the course of a few centuries.

What was it, then, that, until the 15th century, and in its after-effects even further, was the basis of what worked from general human education into the consciousness of the souls of the civilized world? All this was based on the fact that, during these centuries, human beings were able to assimilate supersensuous knowledge into their imaginative life, not in the way it is to be assimilated now through spiritual science, but in the way they were able to assimilate it at that time, according to their still atavistic states of consciousness. A fundamental fact filled human souls. It was the fundamental fact that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. In the way people thought at that time, they knew that the Christ-Being had descended from supermundane heights, had been embodied in the man Jesus of Nazareth, and that something had happened in the Mystery of Golgotha that could not have happened according to ordinary laws discoverable by the knowledge of nature. The concepts and ideas that people had of the Mystery of Golgotha had such ideas and such conceptions that went beyond the earthly sphere.

Such conceptions create very different thought forms than the ideas that the average person has today. The thoughts that people have today do not extend into the supersensible life at all. Thoughts that people formed with such a connection to the mystery of Golgotha, as I have just characterized it, were suitable for evoking thought forms that had a reality in the supersensible. Therefore, one can also characterize the present moment in time by saying that humanity has gradually lost the ability to form such thought forms that have a meaning in the supersensible. Thus, one cannot create social orders on Earth that will advance it. Therefore, everything that has been introduced into humanity in the way of social ideas since about the sixteenth century bears the character that can be described as follows: We encounter social institutions according to the thought forms that are the thought forms of modern times. All such social institutions are destined to break down. They have no inner power of further development. That is even the secret of the newer development. No matter how willingly people may create social institutions on the basis of the external world-building that has taken place since the 16th century, all these social institutions carry the seed of death within them as they arise, because they are not connected to thought-forms that have a reality in the supersensible. As long as there are no people in the present who understand this, there is no point in talking about social progress at all. It is not a matter of deriving social ideas in an abstract way, perhaps out of some spiritual web of thought. That is not important at all. In my “Key Points of the Social Question”, for example, there is no long chapter about spiritual science from which social laws are then deduced, but reality itself draws attention to what has to happen. What matters is not that one deduces the social life from some spiritual web or other, but that one is oneself imbued with such thoughts, which are rooted in the supersensible. For it is this state of being imbued that makes it possible for everything one thinks to have a reality in the supersensible.

It is a paradox, but the following is quite true: Imagine a person, I will say a “statesman” - a word that is currently said in quotation marks - who says all sorts of clever things, that is, things that people today call clever, but has never established a connection with the supersensible world. What he says, if realized in reality, would bear the germ of death. Another speaks. If one does not know that he is engaged in spiritual science, one does not even need to notice it from his speech; he just talks about things in a slightly different way. From what he says about social issues, for example, one does not even need to notice that he is engaged in spiritual science, but the fact that he is engaged in spiritual science gives his ideas the real impulse.

So the point is that today it is not enough to have an abstract logic, but that one must speak reality. Because today we are already at a stage in the development of humanity that, let's say, a journalist can write the most beautiful things that people admire because they say: Yes, when I read this, it is pure spiritual science! That is not the point! Today it is no longer about the wording, but about the basis of the soul, from which something like this comes. It is about what the human being carries within himself as substance!

If I am to draw a comparison from a completely different field, then let it be the one I have often used before: there are poets today who write poetry with extraordinary ease, who make beautiful verses that one can admire. Nevertheless, the same also applies: today, ninety-nine percent of poetry is overdone. But there are others whose verses are like a stammer; but these verses, which sound like a stammer, can come from a genuine human, that is, spiritual, source, while those that one admires because the languages are so simple that any fool can create something admirable out of language can be worthless sound.

Today it is absolutely necessary to go beyond the mere wording to the motive, that is, not to remain in the abstract, not to read according to the wording, but to place oneself in full life and judge the phenomena from the standpoint of life. And so it is a matter of spiritual science, as it is meant here, above all, having to have a fertilizing effect on the various branches of life, otherwise what must happen will not happen.

When two people talk to each other, they communicate through language. But in relatively recent times, language was quite different from what it is today. Today, when we communicate through language, we actually become more or less a slave to language. In the past, people learned a great deal through the genius of language, and they did not actually think very much themselves; they let language do the thinking for them. This only worked until the period I described to you yesterday. Today, people only get ahead if they can emancipate themselves from language with their thinking and feeling. Language today runs, as it were, like a mechanism in which we stand, and instead of us, Ahriman actually lives more and more in the development of language. Ahriman actually speaks today when people speak. And little by little people have to get used to understanding each other from something quite different than from the mere wording of languages. One must go much deeper into life in order to understand another person today than in the age when the wings of language still contained what people had exchanged with each other. Today this is no longer contained in the wings of language. Today one can basically be a person completely empty of real knowledge. But the fact that language – every civilized language today – has gradually developed sentence forms, sentences, and even entire theories that already lie in the language, you just need to change what is in the language a little, then you have something seemingly created by itself, in reality you have basically just mixed up a little what was already there.

It would be very easy today, as grotesque as it may sound to you, to do the following experiment. Take the pronouncements of good bourgeois professors, philosophy professors, natural science professors and the like, who are only slightly inclined towards materialism, towards one side or the other, take what these people have said over the past few decades, in the second half of the 19th century, and with a little rethinking, the following can be easily achieved. Take, I mean, any concoction of a fairly brave philosopher, a brave dozen philosophers from the second half of the 19th century, who has expressed himself on this or that social thing, you can now take away certain adjectives and replace them with others that are in another sentence. You can turn things around a bit – and out of it comes the life philosophy of Mr. Trotsky! In order to be a Trotskyist with a Weltanschauung today, one does not need to be able to think for oneself at all, but only to let language think within oneself in the way I have just described. But because language has emancipated itself from them in a certain way, it is not people who are at work here, but Ahrimanic powers in human culture.

What I have told you now can be experienced. One only has to have the inner soul eyes open to such things. For those who work not with words but with thoughts, language today is a truly dreadful instrument. It is indeed not easy for those who work with thoughts to write today. Because if you want to write a sentence, it will not do so because so and so many people have written similar sentences. The sentence always wants to form itself out of the collective psyche, but you must first become its enemy in order to truly shape what is in your soul into a sentence. Anyone who works for the public today and cannot feel this hostility of language always runs the risk of abandoning themselves to the thinking of language and devising beautiful programs out of language.

The necessity of enforcing one's thoughts must begin today with the struggle against language. Nothing is more dangerous than for a person to allow themselves to be carried by language, in the sense of: This is how you express it, that is how you express it. — Because by having a stereotyped way of expressing things, by being able to say: you can only say it that way – you actually go with the usual flow of speech and do not work from the original thought.

Our schools are terrible in this respect. The schoolmasters, who actually correct every seemingly clumsy but at least original thought in terms of convention, commit great crimes in school. One should search for every awkward but substantially individual sentence that any boy or girl writes at school. One should use it to start discussions at school and not use the cursed red ink to replace what comes out of youthful individuality with convention. For today it is most important to look at what comes out of youthful individualities. Perhaps it will reveal itself in a way that we do not always find comfortable, that we easily see as flawed. If one wanted to correct Goethe's youthful letters with the eye of a high school teacher, then many things would have to be corrected! The Austrian poet Robert Hamerling received the worst grade in the “German essay” in his teaching examination! And there is still some truth to what Hebbel wrote in his diary, as I have often mentioned: he wanted to write a drama with the motif that a high school teacher of the higher grades in particular has a student who is the reincarnation of Plato, with whom he reads Plato in class; then the teacher finds that this “reincarnation of Plato” does not understand the slightest thing about Plato! The poet Friedrich Hebbel noted down this motif for a drama that was then not carried out. But there is some truth to it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that at all times, seduced by the remaining Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, people have resisted the normal progress of humanity. Today we are faced with the necessity of having to seek something completely new from spiritual life in order to save humanity. It is no wonder that people are violently opposed to all kinds of logical absurdities and immorality. And so, for a long time now, I have always had to talk about my own situation as a kind of prologue to our reflections.

About a week ago I told you about the defamatory and mean way in which a large number of German newspapers are currently reporting things that are known to be their source, but which could turn against everything that comes from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the related social issues. It is a very direct example, I might say, of what is happening “at the house” itself, how strongly the opposing forces are stirring. But there is a certain reason why I would like to characterize this matter for you in somewhat more detail today. To this end, I would like to draw attention once more to what has happened. It has come about that a defamatory report suddenly appeared in a number of German newspapers, which can be summarized in the following sentences. I have already read these sentences. However, we should bear them in mind once more, for they are actually worthy of being remembered as a characteristic example of certain cultural phenomena of the present day:

"Rudolf Steiner as political informer. The well-known Theosophical charlatan Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences millions of men and women, founded a league for the threefold social organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a very strange and repulsive political agitation. We learn the following about this from Dresden: “It is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – please note this sentence, “it is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – “that the League for Threefold Order is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the accuracy of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proved by the passage of a letter which says: “Accusations of theft are to be avoided because it is easier to prove that they are untrue. Similarly, one should not make incredible accusations such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, of course, this most slanderous and most mendacious story, sentence by sentence, is going through a series of German newspapers! One can be amazed at the most diverse things in it, but let us single out one fact. There is talk of letters that are said to have been written and that are referred to as authentic documents. In the issue of “Dreigliederung” that has not yet appeared, I expressly pointed out that I am well aware of the dubious sources from which such things originate. Now, however, I will read you a charming document from which you will see what the authentic foundations are for those people who spread such things into the world.

After this flood of meanness had subsided, and after I had received confirmation from various other sides of what I had known anyway about the murky sources, I received the following letter from a friend. This letter only reached me now, but it was written – I ask you to bear this in mind – before these newspaper articles appeared. So what this letter contains has been established before the newspaper articles appeared. I ask you to bear this fact in mind. This letter states:

So you see, there are factories for forging letters! These letters really do circulate. It continues:

"The second letter makes the following suggestion: Since there are still many officers in the army who are monarchists, it would be absolutely necessary to neutralize them by the following shameless means. The members of the troop to which the officer in question belonged during the campaign should be searched for people who, under oath, are to testify to as many of the person's crimes as possible. It is also stated in more detail that these would only have to be credible offenses, not rape, infanticide, and similar things. This record of sins should then be transmitted by a Mr. Grelling” - that is the only name mentioned in the letter - ‘to the Entente, and they would then demand the immediate extradition of the persons concerned.’

Both letters were read by the person concerned with his own eyes.

So this is the letter referred to in the newspaper article, the letter that is probably circulating in countless copies and that is addressed to this and that office in Berlin! So first the letters are forged, fabricated, then the newspaper articles are made up. This is the method of fighting!

I would like to know if other things are needed to make it clear that it is necessary to wake up today! — From what has happened in recent years, a moral ground for humanity has emerged, which was rooted in the impossibilities that had already preceded it, and which is producing such flowers.

It is no longer acceptable to continue sleeping when we know the depths of the swamp we are in. It could easily be, if these things were not talked about openly, that there would still be people in our ranks who would say, for example: Shouldn't we rather write to all the fine gentlemen who forge letters and then use the forged letters to fabricate newspaper articles in order to change their minds? Today it is really a matter of opening our eyes and seeing what kind of people are walking around among us, people whom we would soil ourselves if we got seriously involved with them. These things must not be overlooked; this must be said again and again. The connections must be pointed out. Do you think that it can be with impunity that, for example, in those Jesuit publications, in which the false statements that I have already mentioned to you are printed, the story has been circulated for years that I am a runaway priest, and then simply to take back such a thing with the words: This is something that one heard, “but which could not be substantiated”? Do you think that one has the right to say to such a Jesuit priest: You have taken back what you spread? No, one has to say to him: You have violated your duty in the most irresponsible way by spreading a thing unchecked, and your retraction means nothing at all. Today, morality must be taken seriously by those people who still understand something about morality. During the past five years, we have heard almost nothing but lies from all over the civilized world, and we are still living under the effects of the lie. It is necessary to face these things seriously.

Here you can clearly see an example of how things are. When things are not brought home to us through karma, so that the individual is at the same time completely decisive for the general, then there will always be people who want to vote for compromises, who, for example, treat a Ferriere still as a human being, with whom one engages on equal terms, while he belongs to the scum of the human race, by writing something unscrupulously, which he accepts without verification. These things are no longer acceptable today for a person who wants to stand on sound ground.

If I did not have this example of the origin of a matter at hand, it would not be so easy to believe me that there are now factories for forging letters, on the basis of which “they” then treat people in public as they did in this newspaper article.

But that happens today over and over again, and a large part of what you read consists of nothing other than the blossoms of this moral swamp. Today it is simply part of a healthy, serious and honest world view to know these things and to treat them accordingly. Today people are not allowed to make compromises with people who work with defamation in this way. For it cannot be justified by saying: One must be benevolent towards all people — love towards all people! — Love towards such people means extreme unkindness towards those who are slandered, who are distorted. It is a matter of knowing where to direct one's love. For loving the crime can never lead to the recovery of humanity. That such things would come could be foreseen. But it could be foreseen not only from the way certain quarters have been working. You only have to open the Jesuit literature that has been unleashed since the Church's condemnation of the anthroposophical writings in July 1919. You only have to look at the people who write and examine their approach to the truth, and you will naturally see everything that ultimately leads into such swamps. I do not want to talk today about the very murky sources, which I know very well and through whose acquaintance I also know how all these things are connected and how they are just the beginning.

I only wish that as few people as possible would be naive enough to believe that refutations could achieve anything. For these people, it is not about asserting this or that, but only about asserting something juicy, whereby they disparage others. These people could not care less about what they assert.

But not only that we have to take into account the fact that today we have numerous such people among us who work in this way, but also that we have to take into account the fact that for decades now, due to drowsiness, we have had a broad tolerance among the general public for this kind of thing, a reluctance to look at how public opinion is actually made today. But that is the most important part of what can lead to improvement. As long as people of the caliber of the Jesuit Zimmermann or the university professor Dessoir are not treated in the appropriate way, there can be no recovery. The people who stand opposite them and do not give them the right treatment are even more guilty than these individuals. For these individuals conduct their business in these matters, albeit in such a dirty way as Professor Dessoir. I characterized this to you some time ago. But it is a matter of finally waking up. Because a Dessoir book or a Zimmermann critique leads straight to these swamps, which I was able to characterize for you. I had to mention this not only with the intention of showing the symptoms of the forces that are effective in our time to suppress every legitimate spiritual aspiration, And so I would also like to mention the fact that I was recently given an article here that was supposedly intended for the Brockhaus Conversations Encyclopedia, for which the infamous Dessoir — infamous only with us! — was supposed to write articles about anthroposophy; at the same time that he had these articles of mine written by an intermediary, he was writing his book, this disgrace. But now consider the case that this article would lie here in our local archives! It would later be found there as an article that is said to come from me. So someone might say: Yes, Steiner copied the article in the archives from Dessoir's article in the encyclopedia and claimed it for himself! - Such blossoms can be driven when one is not awake! First one's things can be stolen by literary thieves, and then they can appear in such a way somewhere that not the one who made them but the one who stole them is considered the author and the one who is the author is considered the thief!

The moral question must be approached today from many sides; but it will not be approached profitably by anyone who does not stand on the ground of a sound spiritual science. That is what I wanted to share with you in the appendix to today's lecture, based on contemporary history.

In our deliberations over the past three hours, we have included as an episode the description of our building here, its facilities and the goal associated with it. Today, we will now have a lot to tie in with these building deliberations, which I would like to see in the broadest sense as a consideration of time. We have indeed had to emphasize that this building, as a representative of our anthroposophical spiritual science, should at the same time be a manifestation of the times, so to speak, in its forms, in its entire design, it should express that which wants to and must be part of our contemporary development from the present into the near future. When we speak today of the great tasks of our time and in particular when we must point out that a certain inclination to receive spiritual things must arise in a larger part of humanity and that this is a special demand of the time, then such an indication is directly derived from all that the Science of Initiation and Initiation Wisdom can currently gain from the spiritual world. But there is no need to approach the spiritual world directly to convince oneself of the necessity of a spiritual impact in our time. In one of the last lectures here, I spoke of the fact that we are indeed facing a major transformation of the world, including its outward appearance. Today it can already be more or less apparent to everyone that, as a result of current events, the outer world domination is falling to the English-speaking population. We do not want to talk about this falling into world domination, but we do want to talk about, and have already talked about, the fact that this is linked to a fundamental sense of responsibility, a sense of responsibility that is quite clear about the fact that wherever there is the possibility of exercising a certain domination over the world, the urge to permeate what one can do with the spiritual impulse that is currently demanded by the development of humanity must take hold. For not to penetrate what one can do, or not to want to penetrate it, means to lead human development towards its decline.

It is really not without significance, especially at this time, to engage in retrospective reflection, and from the abundance of what could be unrolled here before you from such retrospective reflection, I would like to present one thing to you. A remarkable coincidence of events led to a subtle man giving a lecture in a German city in 1870, just as the Battle of Sedan was being fought – but this was not yet known in the city – where this man, whom I call a subtle man, gave his lecture and was already able to point out certain successes that Germany had at the time. But this reference to these successes was at the same time accompanied by the demand that a spiritual deepening must take place among those who have the success. And soon after, after fuller successes had been achieved, the same man wrote an essay on the necessities of the development of the times. In this essay, which now lies almost fifty years behind us, there are remarkable things, things that bear witness to a twofold aspect. Firstly, it explicitly states that it is urgently necessary to avoid two one-sidedness. One of these consists in turning only to the abstract spiritual, the other in turning only to the contemplation and worship of the material. And what the man in question demanded of his contemporaries and their descendants was something he called “ideal realism”.

It can be seen from this that such a demand was made at that time, when there was a certain longing for a renewal of spiritual life. But if one follows everything that was put forward at that time out of this longing for a renewal of spiritual life, then one sees the complete powerlessness to find anything that could represent a connection between spiritual striving and material striving, that could arise as a reality for the concept of ideal realism. So it was an important demand, but one that was voiced out of a mere intuited yearning, out of a profound impotence, out of the impossibility of finding any real content. It was an indefinite feeling, nothing more. But the explanation of this feeling was connected with something else. The man in question, and in agreement with many others who at that time felt something of a longing for a renewal of spiritual life, pointed out that if a new spirit did not come, the broad masses of Europe would storm and destroy everything that had so far been surrendered to humanity in the way of culture. At the time, a man who spoke a lot here in Switzerland, Johannes Scherr – I ask you to bear in mind that what was said was said fifty years ago! He pointed out the great danger that the broad masses of humanity would become self-aware in a certain sense, but this at a time when the bearers of education had turned away from a spiritual world view and turned to materialistic concepts and ideas. In those days, such things were spoken of in sharp and serious words.

What followed? The time came when a materialistic wave swept over the whole of Europe. It was a time when it was easy to delude oneself about the great dangers inherent in not wanting to know anything about a spiritual impact. Only now and then did one or the other arise to point out that, despite the conscious persistence in comfortable everyday life in the subconscious depths of human souls, the yearning for spiritual life is more present than at any time in world-historical development.

But all such voices were taken as the voices of the feuilleton. Such voices were not appreciated in their full seriousness. And basically, we are still living in that time today. Basically, the wave of the most terrible misfortunes of the last five years has passed through most European souls at most in such a way that they reflect on and empathize with the external consequences, but do not want to go into what needs to be addressed if there is to be any further development of humanity in the future in any favorable sense at all.

What we are facing today in Europe has been decades in preparation. But the souls of men have not prepared themselves. The souls of the majority of people today are as unreceptive as possible to the impact of a spiritual wave from the spiritual world, which is beating at the gates of life, which wants to come in and which people do not want to accept in their souls and hearts. What is necessary is that people turn to a spiritual view of the world, above all to a real knowledge of man himself. The human being cannot be recognized without recognizing the spiritual world, because man lives with two-thirds of his being in the spiritual-soul world, only with one-third in the physical-material world. And without seeking to understand spiritual life, man remains without knowledge of his own nature. In a much more comprehensive sense than is even suspected by most people today, we must ask: What is the nature of the realm of human soul life that we encompass with the word thinking? What kind of essence is the realm of human soul that we encompass with the words willing or acting? Between the two lies the soul, the life of feeling. Knowledge of the life of feeling or soul would arise if one were only to turn one's attention to the life of thoughts and actions, to the life of will.

Please follow me for a short time in a contemplation of what our thinking is. Man is, of course, aware that he inwardly accompanies with his thinking the life that makes an impression on him from there or from over there. This thinking — one lives in it. But one should also become aware that the greater part of life is filled with the fact that this thinking is permeated by all kinds of dream-like elements. Most people are not aware of how much of their thinking is an involuntary element. All involuntary thinking is basically of a dream-like nature. Try to realize, in a superficial self-knowledge, how far you direct your thoughts from the center of your will in everyday life. Try to realize how far you have the aspiration to direct thoughts inwardly, to shape thoughts yourself. Try to realize to what extent it is the case that the soul lets thoughts come, lets them break in. They give themselves up to it, the thoughts, one weaving itself together with the other, and man comfortably surrenders himself to this involuntary play of thoughts. There is no great difference between this everyday play of thoughts and between the dreams that dawn from sleep.

Dream-like elements also intrude into human thinking from other sides. Today, one participates in the outer life. How does one participate in this outer life? One informs oneself about what is going on in the world; one informs oneself in such a way that one allows oneself to be carried into one's experience, so to speak, by what comes into life through this or that impulse. One surrenders to some popular agitation. Just examine how much of this devotion to a popular agitation arises from one's own will and how much can simply be attributed to being carried along by the surges of life! And I could tell you many, many things that rush into thinking and dominate it, without the will of the human being itself having a direct effect on this thinking.

The specific historical task in writing my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” was to point out how human freedom is only possible at all if this involuntary, dreamy thinking is not present, but rather impulses from the fully conscious will assert themselves. This thinking - what nature is it then? When is it real thinking? When it really comes from the fully conscious will, when we grasp the thought in such a way that it is we ourselves who grasp the thought. At the moment when the thought grasps us, we are no longer free. Only when we can grasp the thought out of our own power, out of our own being, are we free. But then the thought can be nothing but an image. If the thought were anything other than an image, it would be a reality, and then it could not leave us free. Everything that is a reality weaves us into the stream of the real. Only that which is an image leaves us free. Imagine how everything you see in a room has a real effect on you. You are only completely free in relation to the images that look back at you from the mirror. These cannot harm you on their own, you cannot be offended by these images. If you are to do something in response to these images, then it must be you who takes action. If a fly lands on your nose – it is, after all, an insignificant animal – you are not free, you make a reflexive movement. And so it is with everything that is there. You are only free in relation to what you can perceive as an image that is not reality, that is an image. Why are the contents of our thinking images? Well, we need only recall from my 'Occult Science in Outline' how man was connected with a previous embodiment of our earth planet, with the development of the moon. If you read everything that is said there about the development of the moon, you will say to yourself: During this development of the moon, man was connected with quite different entities and also with quite different natural forces than he is in his earthly existence. He has gone through this moon existence. The after-effect of it is in him. He has developed from this moon existence to the earthly existence. And if you read more carefully what I have discussed there, you will say to yourself: During the time on the moon, man did not yet think in the same way as he does as an earth human being. He lived in unconscious imaginations then, and these unconscious imaginations were not at his disposal, any more than the images in dreams are at his disposal today. Only the thoughts are at our discretion, to which we as human beings are only now gradually developing in the fifth post-Atlantic period. What we have today as thinking is a further development of what we had as pictorial experiences of the soul during our lunar existence.

If you understand this quite clearly, then you will also see that everything that creeps into thinking, as I have just characterized the dream-like aspect of thinking in everyday life, is a remnant of what the human being had as soul life during the moon-end. If today man abandons himself to his surging thoughts, if he shuts out his will from his thoughts, if he lets what is dream-like in nature play into his thinking, then the conditions of the moon-life somehow play into his thinking.

You will see that this influence of the moon's existence on our everyday thinking has a wide, very, very wide scope. Everywhere you can feel how the involuntary element of what arises purely and shoots up mingles with thinking and imagining. This is a remnant of the moon's existence. So you have two opposing forces at work in human nature itself. The one kind of thing draws us towards letting our will dominate our thinking, towards becoming free in our thinking element. The other power constantly wants to mix into this free thinking that which is a remnant of the old moon culture: a Luciferic element. The Luciferic element constantly mixes into our everyday thinking. We cannot reject it. We would have to reject everything that we cannot yet reach with our conscious free thinking, but we must strive for knowledge. We must be clear about this in our consciousness. It is merely a phrase when someone says they want to escape Lucifer. That is nonsense, because the Luciferic constantly plays into everyday existence. But today, if one really wants to engage with the demands of the development of humanity in the present, one must have the good will to know within oneself that these two powers, the actual earthly powers and the luciferic powers, interact in our soul existence. Only in this way can one gain a real knowledge of what is inside the human soul.

In this way, I have, I would say, outlined one pole of the human soul. Take the other pole, which lies more on the side of the will. The will also plays a part in thinking; but we have now considered thinking permeated by the will. Now let us consider the volition that is permeated by thinking. How does volition, which leads to action, play a role in the ordinary everyday life of a human being? We can realize this by considering the connection between our everyday real actions and the whole of cosmic existence. Just think: when you take a single step, when you walk from here to there [forward], you bring about, even if only to a very small extent, a different state of equilibrium in the whole earth. When you step here [backwards], you step to a different place than when you step here [forwards]. You influence the balance of the earth in a different way when you step here [backwards] than when you step here [forwards]. But when you look at it properly, you will see that you yourself are constantly influencing the balance of the earth through your movements, and you will come up with yet another way of influencing it. Just imagine you take something that comes purely from nature. If, for example, there is a tree branch on a tree trunk, this tree branch, the way it is attached to the tree trunk, has a certain relationship to the whole earth. It has a certain equilibrium relationship to the whole earth. The whole earth and the branch together form a whole. The moment you break off the branch and lay it down beside it, you have changed the whole equilibrium of the earth, even if only to a small extent. The tree weighs less, and the broken branch weighs differently in a different place. You change the balance to a different degree if you lay the branch there or if you lay it there.

This is something that you bring into the whole earthly existence of your own accord. But at least initially you are only bringing out the relationship between your human being and the surrounding world. But you can do more. For example, you can shape something out of this tree branch. What I mean is, you can artificially shape it into something that is an object for some use. You have thought up the form, and you have carved away the other parts that do not belong to this form. Now you exert a completely different influence with your object, not only by breaking off, not only by putting aside, but by giving a certain form to what you have taken from nature. Just think how much people in the technical and artistic fields do in this direction, how they shape what they wrest from nature, and how they influence the earthly through this!

And now I ask you: When man does this, when he changes nature, when he takes what he takes from nature and forms it into his machines, into his works of art, does he do this out of his thinking? — Let us consider it in so far as he does it out of his thinking: He does it out of the pictorial nature of thinking. To the earthly, it is absolutely unimportant what happens, just as the images that arise in the mirror make no particular impression on the objects in the room. But the human being gives reality to these things. That is the other side of things when the human being, after having developed out of the lunar existence, surrenders to thinking: When man forms something and places it into the world, just as the dreamlike plays into our thinking and, in the dreamlike, the old lunar state, the Luciferic, plays into all our mechanization, into all our reshaping of the world, that which is not yet connected with earthly existence, what we ourselves place into this earthly existence. What is that actually?

What we place out of our free soul life into earthly existence does not follow from the old moon existence, but is added to the present earthly existence. It will only have full significance when something else has entered into earthly existence. Just as the child that is carried in the womb of the mother, or perhaps is not yet carried but is only waiting in the spiritual world for its embodiment, is still a future event, so everything that a person forms is actually destined for the future and is still in its embryonic state in the present. And we only look at it truthfully when we look at it in its embryonic state, in its significance for the future. When we shape something in life today, we do not take nature as it is, but change it out of our thoughts, thus creating for the future. But if we regard what we create for the future as belonging to the present, if it becomes so ingrained in our lives that we consider it solely in terms of its usefulness for the present, then the future becomes ingrained in our actions, just as the past becomes ingrained in our thinking in dream-like thinking; then the Ahrimanic takes hold of our actions.

In human life, only the child, who, when playing, also shapes objects but shapes them without purpose, not seeking utility, is protected in his unconsciousness from taking what he does in life for the present and not in preparation for the future. We should be aware that we shape the machines and works of art we produce for the next existence, for the existence on Jupiter, that the earthly existence must first be shed and that only a future existence will give meaning to our actions.

This is the great error of modern times: that people place what they produce in the mechanical and artistic spheres directly in their present earthly usefulness and do not want to be aware that we have to work for our future earthly existence. The Ahrimanic can thus creep into our volition by applying a mere utilitarian point of view to what we do mechanically or artistically or otherwise in life.

But we must ask ourselves: Has this utilitarian point of view always been there? — This utilitarian point of view was not present as such in the older times of Greek culture, for example, and even less so in the older cultures. There was, if only as an atavistic presentiment, an awareness that man creates beyond earthly existence. Particularly since the fifteenth century, the striving for mere utility in what man produces has grown strong. And today, world programs are already being made from the mere point of view of utility.

Just as it is impossible to exclude from our thinking the realm of dream-thoughts, so it is impossible to exclude the utilitarian point of view. Therefore no one should speak the thoughtless words that he wants to flee from Ahriman. That is nonsense. He cannot. Ahriman plays a part in all our actions, with the exception of our child's play, in which we strive for no purpose, no use, but which is done for the sake of the action itself. In all our other actions we can only strive for some kind of ideal. But how? We must be clear about how two forces play into our human existence here again. What forces? One is the force that makes us act for reasons of utility, but the other is this: when we do something in life where we do not just let ourselves be carried by life like puppets, when we do something in life without leading such a puppet existence, then something is always going on with ourselves: we become more skillful, we become wiser, we can do things better afterwards. That is the other power. Most people today pay no attention to it, especially after they have passed the age of eighteen, when they are already “quite wise” and “quite clever” for their present-day view of life, that one can become more and more skillful in what one does throughout one's life. One is a sense of usefulness, the other is a constant self-discipline to pay such attention to what one does that one observes how one enhances one's human existence by doing this or that, by experiencing this or that. What plays into our human existence has a completely different meaning than the mere external point of view of usefulness and the moment. Take a more elevated example, I might say, and consider Raphael's pictures. Raphael worked on his pictures throughout his short life. The time will certainly come when none of Raphael's pictures will remain, perhaps after-images, but having nothing directly to do with Raphael. A time will surely come when the earth will no longer have any of these images of Raphael's, when no embodied earthly human being will be able to see Raphael's images. But Raphael will still be there, and that which Raphael has become by creating these images will also be there. By creating these images, Raphael has been furthered in a corresponding incarnation. He carried this through life between death and a new birth, appeared in a new earthly incarnation, did something there that he carried through life, that remains, even when the earth perishes in the cosmos. That which Raphael became through his paintings is what remains. One can even define the utilitarian point of view so subtly that one includes the fact that pictures exist in this utilitarian point of view. If you think about it, you will not find much difference between gross utility and the utility that is created by the fact that Raphael's pictures exist. But something else is that Raphael's individuality and soul have been transformed by the fact that he made his pictures. This is carried over from earthly existence into the existence on Jupiter. This is what develops.

Here, I would like to say, we have a more exalted example of what becomes of human souls, which can be distinguished from external action. This distinction must be borne in mind in a comprehensive sense. One must realize that the earth will one day be shattered in the cosmos, that nothing will remain but human souls. When nothing remains but human souls, the harvest of the development of human souls will be what distinguishes this earthly existence at its end from the earthly existence at its beginning. From this point of view, what one can call an obligation to further oneself in earthly development begins. There begins the obligation to make something of oneself, so that one can be something for the Cosmos. And there begins the thought: The earth will shatter, the earth will split apart, the human souls will be alone!

The strength needed to bear this thought, I would say to grasp it in all its poignancy, this strength will be completely lost to people. And thus the evolution of the earth will cease to make sense if people do not contrive to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha spiritually. For basically, the mystery of Golgotha, properly understood, contains the germ of such thoughts, to be grasped from a correct, spiritual world view that is appropriate for today. Consider just one very specific popular saying that the Gospels ascribe to Christ Jesus: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” That which He gives to the human soul will remain, will be there even when the earth has shattered and shattered in the cosmos.

Now I ask you – and now I come back to my consideration of time – can that which religions and theology have gradually made of the Mystery of Golgotha still give man this perspective? No, that is impossible! Theology and religions have also become materialized. But a materialized mystery of Golgotha does not extend in its meaning beyond earthly existence. Anyone who is serious about Christianity today - I have explained it to you from different points of view, and today you have heard it again from a new point of view - cannot help but seek a spiritual understanding of this mystery of Golgotha.

In other words, however, this means that spiritual science, real knowledge of the spirit, is necessary for humanity today. As I said at the beginning of today's reflection, fifty years ago people were powerless to fill their ideal realism with anything that had reality. Hence the sailing into European misfortune. But today the question arises: Do those who can avert a new disaster, where spiritual science speaks today, want to continue living as those to whom spiritual science has not yet spoken had to live fifty years ago? — Then, indeed, earthly catastrophes will come, against which what is happening now is a trifle. Today it is not possible to say anything other than this. Fifty years ago, when people demanded a new spiritual life, they were unable to create it because the time had not yet come. Today the time has come. Today, not wanting to turn to this spiritual life means not being serious about the development of humanity! This is the responsibility I must speak of, which must be spoken of today, especially to those who can take on this responsibility today for the reasons already stated. Today, man must look at the horizon of world-historical observation. He cannot reduce his existence. Imagine you have a cupboard. The cupboard breaks apart. You have its pieces in front of you, you look at them. The cupboard has broken apart due to some natural event, and you have its pieces in front of you. What do you do? You take the pieces, take nails, and put the pieces together to make the old cupboard again. But it will fall apart again very soon if the pieces are rotten, if the nails can no longer hold, or if the pieces are torn in other places. Europe has fallen apart like an old cupboard: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, German-Austria, the former Germany, the former Russia, Ukraine – these are the pieces, the debris of the cupboard. And the Western powers are trying to hammer these rotten pieces of the cupboard back together with nails that will not hold. People do not realize that they are dealing with rotten pieces. They want to glue the old together, whereas what is needed is to bring a completely new substance into human development. That is the idea at stake. Only spiritual science can draw our attention to this idea in a penetrating way today. And the question is: should the world, after what has seized Europe today, and what will very soon seize Asia and, beyond Europe, America, be glued and nailed together merely from its old rotten pieces for the sake of humanity's comfort, or should the connection be sought to renew the whole human being from the spiritual? — We will talk about this further tomorrow.

I would like to start today by drawing your attention to something that may be connected with the assessment of what is now being associated socially with our anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement. You know the inner connection; I have spoken of it often. I have also drawn your attention to the fact that a spiritual movement would be in very little shape to meet the challenges of our time if it were to withdraw from the great questions that must occupy humanity and had nothing to say about the most significant demands of the present and the near future.

Yesterday I pointed out how dream-like elements creep into human thinking, and I pointed out the various ways, or at least some of the various ways, in which dream-like elements creep into human thinking. We must be particularly attentive to such creeping in when we are confronted with ready-made judgments from the outside world. A large part of what we think is thought by us in such a way that it is not first examined, that it is not first brought to life within us, but that it is repeated, re-evaluated, re-thought. You need only consider the numerous judgments that people of the most diverse nations have made in the last four to five years about the fate of the world, about the value of individual nations, about the causes of the war, and so on, and you cannot help but say to themselves: Of all the judgments that have been passed, even by people of whom one would have liked to assume a completely different one, very few have actually been examined; they have been repeated, re-judged, re-thought.

Perhaps I may also take this opportunity to remind you that when I have spoken here about contemporary phenomena, I have never given ready-made judgments, but have always characterized things that could serve to help people form their own judgments. In general, there should be more and more emphasis on giving the world the foundations for forming judgments, not ready-made judgments. But people today are very much inclined, when they hear something here or there, especially if it is said with great self-confidence, when it is imbued with a perhaps not quite perceptible fanaticism, to then reflect on, think about, repeat such judgments. And especially in view of the fact that some of our English friends are still here, I must touch on the following, which may also be of importance for the other friends sitting here from over there or over there.

For example, it has now been judged from a certain quarter that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which has its representative seat in Dornach, is now dealing with politics, and such a movement should not deal with politics. Among other things, it is said to have been pointed out that the Catholic Church had indeed come into its times of disaster by dealing with matters that are usually considered political.

When such a judgment arises, it echoes many things that one is accustomed to thinking. And when someone hears such a judgment, it seems somewhat plausible. He then says to himself: Yes, there is something to it, it is perhaps nonsense after all, when a spiritual scientific movement starts dealing with such questions, as the threefold social organism is one now.

Now, both the original judgment about this matter in the direction that I have just characterized it, and the repetition of it, belong to the class of superficial methods of thinking that are now emerging in large numbers. Our time very much believes that one has particularly advanced in thinking. Yes, we have the task of raising thinking to a certain level if humanity is not to perish in disaster. But what is demanded of humanity with regard to clear, sharp thinking, above all with regard to inwardly truthful thinking – because thinking that is unclear is always somewhat dishonest – what is demanded of humanity in terms of clear, sharp, inwardly truthful thinking, is confronted today with the urge to think unclearly, to think incompletely, to think half-way, to repeat what one hears here or there, or to think it again. But I also say: originally, the saying that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has strayed into the political sphere, which does not belong to it, on the issue of threefolding, is based on an extraordinary superficiality. For anyone who judges in this way judges in a completely abstract way. He simply takes something that may be right for the Catholic Church and applies it to something that is quite different. This is just as if someone had learned that something is good for a shoe that you put on your foot, and then applied the judgment that he had formed about the shoe to the glove; that is how clever such a judgment is. Why? What is the original aim of the threefold social order? It is to create a clear division in the social order between spiritual life, which should have its own administration; legal or state life, which should stand in the middle between the other two with its full independence; and economic life, which should be clearly separated from the other two as the third link.

Now let us not think superficially, as does the person who says that anthroposophy should not concern itself with politics, but let us think through the matter objectively: What is the aim of such a strict separation? Well, spiritual life should stand on its own, spiritual life should develop on its own ground, spiritual life should only emphasize that which comes from its own impulses. The aim is therefore to achieve a spiritual life that is no longer dependent on the life of the state and the economic life, but can be free and independent, just as the Catholic Church has never been, always confounding itself with the state and the economic life. So it is a matter of creating precisely that through which one is in a position to assert all the impulses of this spiritual life. Therefore, think how frivolous, how superficial it is when someone says that anthroposophy should not venture into the field of politics, while it is precisely demanding that such a social order should be created that will make it possible for spiritual life to no longer deal with politics. What is to be created is a policy through which spiritual life has its own administration, its own internal organization. And it should no longer be necessary to turn to the political authority or to the state curriculum when one wants to found a school or develop a curriculum; because that is precisely how one becomes dependent on politics. From this example you can see what clear, sharp thinking means and how those think who today make judgments about what has been drawn from the impulses of spiritual life simply from things that have come their way. For the idea of threefolding is drawn from the Science of Initiation. And anyone who says that spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy should not deal with the idea of threefold social order does not understand how to think clearly; his thinking is confused. But secondly, he understands nothing whatever of the real impulse of spiritual science, for he does not know that this matter, in connection with the great demands of our time, has been brought out of the impulse of spiritual science.

But today, numerous judgments that are made publicly and that are simply repeated, re-judged and re-thought by a large number of people are based on such self-contradictions. Our most important task is to try to arrive at a pure, straightforward, inwardly truthful thinking, independently of all national chauvinisms. We will not achieve this if we do not first admit that the present is far from it. For if we have no sense of how far the judgments that are flying around today are from objectivity, then we will not even experience the drive within us to arrive at clarity, at an inner truthfulness of thought.

I wanted to use an obvious example of the misunderstanding of the position of threefolding in relation to the actual spiritual-scientific problem to make it clear to you what confused judgments are flying around the world today, and I know very well that such judgments have a blinding effect on many people because they do not think about it, because they believe that when the person in question says that anthroposophy should not deal with the threefold social order, there is something to be said for it, because it is subject to the fact that a spiritual movement can only flourish if it is self-contained. But that is precisely what is being sought. So anyone who judges as I have characterized it stops halfway.

On the basis of such premises, I would like to encourage self-examination to see where unfinished judgments are sitting in the mind, judgments for which the documentation is completely missing. It is, in fact, all too easy to criticize superficially what is given by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. If you do not feel the depths from which things are created, then you can judge anthroposophy from the most superficial daily moods. That is why we so often see people who have hardly even sniffed into the field of anthroposophy, but who are clever, immediately saying: “I can agree with that, I cannot agree with that” and so on. The task for those who can really feel is always to penetrate deeper and deeper into the matter, to get a feeling for how initiation truths are actually drawn from the depths of being. For if we now take a somewhat deeper look at what I have touched on in terms of its outward appearance, the following emerges.

In modern history, we have seen more and more aspects of public life merge into a social organism: intellectual life, legal life, economic life. Modern parliaments strive to make their decisions on their own initiative through majority votes by people who may not understand the issues at hand, which can only be decided if you understand something about them. The unified parliaments are supposed to decide on everything: intellectual life, legal life, economic life. But the moment intellectual life — let us take this first — is separated from the other two elements, from the legal-state and economic spheres, intellectual life is brought entirely to the people themselves. Intellectual life becomes a separate organism. Spiritual life must be administered on the basis of the same principles from which it is constantly drawn. Those people who have this or that to teach must also administer the way teachers are employed and schools are run. Spiritual life should be completely free to rely on itself. In this way, individual human abilities are constantly called upon, especially in the field of intellectual life. Thus, what is to be decided in the field of intellectual life is constantly made dependent on the abilities of the people, on the abilities of those people who happen to be around in any given age. But that is how it should be. Those who are individually capable of this or that in any age should not be prevented by any state or parliamentary instruments from bringing their abilities to bear. In this way, spiritual life is made completely dependent on man. But because nothing else works in the development of spiritual life except human beings themselves, what I characterized yesterday, that element of spiritual life that develops itself, is at work. I have quoted Raphael as an example of the outstanding but also characteristic type. When his works have long since been lost, there will be in the world that he has developed through the works. This inward principle of development is applied to that which is active in spiritual life, that is to say, all that is Luciferian is eliminated from spiritual life precisely through its separation from the state. And only by this separation can the Luciferic be eliminated. Every spiritual life that depends on the state is permeated with Luciferic impulses. Then into spiritual life come into play the decisions of the majority or the like, which always cover up what comes from human individuality, but thereby blur the sharp thinking, the sharp volition that comes from human individuality. But it is precisely this blurring of clarity that gives rise to the Luciferic element in human thinking and human volition. So we can say that all spiritual life that is connected with the life of rights bears the Luciferic character. And it is precisely in order to overcome the Luciferic character, which must be overcome in public spiritual life, that it is necessary to separate from the life of rights. The individual human being cannot overcome it, because dream-like elements — I pointed this out yesterday — must always play a part in his spiritual life. But these are repelled by the fact that the human being is part of the social spiritual life, but this spiritual life is separate from the state.

Similarly, Ahrimanic elements play a part in economic life when it is administered by the state. These Ahrimanic elements, which play a part in economic life and in the administration of economic life when the state is involved in that economic life, can only be eliminated if economic life, as I have often emphasized here, is built on the life of brotherhood in corporations, associations and so on.

You see, it is a matter of applying truly great principles to this threefold order. In the middle then remains the actual structure of the state, everything that relates only to public law.

Now you will remember something that I have already explained to you here, but which I will repeat for those who have not heard it. Man, by living here on earth between birth and death, is not just this being that lives here between birth and death, but he carries within himself the echoes of what he has lived through, firstly in previous incarnations, but especially of what he has lived through between the last death and the birth that preceded his present life. In this time between death and a new birth, we have experiences in the spiritual world, and these experiences resonate in the present life. And how do they resonate in public social life? - So that everything that people bring into public life through their talents, through their special gifts, in other words, what public intellectual life actually is, is not at all from the earth, but is all the resonance from the pre-earthly life. What Goethe achieved as Goethe between 1749 and 1832 was all influenced by what he had experienced in the spiritual world before 1749; he had brought it down with him. And all the art, science and religious impulses that are developed by people here on earth, that is, all that is developed as earthly spiritual life, is an echo of the supermundane spiritual life, which people bring here through the portal of birth. If you take literature, if you take art, everything that is in it has been sent down from the spiritual worlds. So in this social life, in terms of forces, we have an element within us that is simply sent down to us from the spiritual worlds. Human beings bring it down by entering through the gate of birth into this world between birth and death. But what is worked in economic life through brotherliness or unbrotherliness, what people do for one another in their economic lives, has, strange as it may sound, not only a significance for this life between birth and death, but a very great significance for life after death. For example, it makes a difference whether I act as a grumbler all my life and behave in such a way that envy is my guiding principle, or whether I act out of love for my fellow human beings. Actions that influence public life, that bring people into contact with each other, are not only important here on earth, but their effects are carried through the gateway of death and are significant throughout the entire life between our death, which occurs after this life on earth, and the next life on earth. So that we can say: What takes place here as economic life is the cause of how people will live between death and a new birth.

If, for example, an economic order is based solely on selfishness, it means that people will become highly reclusive between death and a new birth, that they will have great difficulty in finding other human beings. In short, how a person behaves economically here has a huge significance for their life between death and the next birth.

Therefore, the only thing that remains purely earthly is the life under the rule of law or the life of the state. This has no significance for prenatal life or for the life after death, it only has significance for what happens here on earth. If we strictly separate the life of the rule of law from the other two areas, we separate the earthly from everything supernatural that plays a role here on earth. Thus, in this respect, there are also great principles in the threefold social organism. We divide into three parts because we must separate the most diverse areas that have something to do with the supersensible from that which has only to do with the sensual between birth and death. What the human being can decide on the path that alone makes majority decisions possible can only have significance here for the earth. What a person accomplishes through his talents, through his abilities, which are said to be innate but are actually acquired in the way I have just characterized, he accomplishes as a human individuality. And in that moment, to use an old expression, the “prince of this world” reigns when individuality is somehow compromised by majority decisions. Majority decisions can only and alone relate to that which, let it be said once more, has significance for earthly conditions; for that which has significance after death, again requires human love, humanity, goodwill, which in turn is and can only be entirely individual, to unfold its power.

In this way, I am pointing out to you that which can only be gained from the science of initiation to reinforce the idea of threefold social order. But what is the actual basis for the intrusion of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic into our world? The intrusion of all that is Luciferic and Ahrimanic into our world is due to the fact that something flows into our world from other degrees of consciousness than are the normal degrees of consciousness. When we pass through the gate of birth, we enter this earthly stage of consciousness from a normal stage of consciousness that is quite different from the earthly one here. Just now, for our fifth post-Atlantic period, the dream consciousness is abnormal: the day consciousness, which is permeated by the images of the dream. If we let dreams into our thinking, we mix up what we should have only through our prenatal life with what happens between birth and death. And this mixture is particularly suitable for Lucifer to achieve his goals with us, not the normal divine goals of the earth. All the abnormal dream-like elements that enter into the present world of consciousness can therefore only lead to the Luciferization of humanity. It is normal for our consciousness to be educated in a dreamy way as long as our consciousness is still dreamy, namely during childhood. If we continue this same relationship to the world, which is quite good during childhood, where we are supposed to learn to speak, for example, in a dream-like state, beyond childhood, which a large part of today's humanity does, then we open the doors and windows and everything we can possibly open to Lucifer in our consciousness. Therefore, if we do not accept public judgments more deeply than something is founded when we dream it, then we continually open the gates to Lucifer. If, for example, we are ordered from some quarter to regard such and such a person as a “great statesman” or a “great prince” or as “innocent of war” or as a “great military leader,” without our examining the matter, then the reason why we form such a judgment is no different from the reasons why we dream anything at all.

A large part of the present human race has until recently considered Woodrow Wilson a great man because he sent the nonsense of the “Fourteen Articles” into the world. If you ask with what inner conviction people did that, you will find no difference between the conviction they felt in considering Woodrow Wilson a great man and the conviction you feel when you dream something. The dream comes to you with the same inner arbitrariness or involuntariness as the judgment about Woodrow Wilson and his “Fourteen Nonsenses” came to you. There is no difference between dreaming fully consciously in this way and dreaming while asleep. There is no difference between considering Ludendorff a great general or Clemenceau a great statesman in response to the voices of the outside world and dreaming this or that in the night. But humanity must become aware of these things. For in noticing such things, judgment enters into us at the same time, as we are seized by the Luciferic in the world. For we are seized by the Luciferic in the world in that we dream consciously, especially in dreams. In relation to this public judgment, a large part of humanity today has been and continues to be truly childish.

These are things that must be considered more seriously today than many people think. And on the other hand, it is important that we learn from life. Because in relation to our will, we are constantly asleep, as I have often said. I have explained to you: you have ideas about what you are doing, but not even about what the hand is actually doing when it moves; usually, people have no idea about that. People have as little idea about this strange process, which is connected with human will, as they have about what they do when they are deeply asleep. As a rule, will is an awake sleeping. This volition must be raised more and more to consciousness. This will be a long process, as volition is raised to consciousness in the understanding of the earth time. It is partially raised to consciousness in a small area, in other areas too, but most outstandingly in one area - for example, through our eurythmy. In it, movements are carried out with full consciousness. In it, full consciousness truly permeates the will. That is why I have often emphasized in the introduction to the eurythmic performance that it is important that eurythmists in particular fight against any drowsiness and work towards the opposite of dreaminess. It is a great mistake if eurythmy is not performed in a fully conscious state, but if it is performed in such a way that one believes one can also “mystify” into eurythmy. “Mystifying” comes from mysticism. It is very bad to mystify into ordinary life, and it is even worse when something that is supposed to be intentional, that is supposed to be the counter-image of the dream, is thoroughly mystified. But the will permeated by full consciousness must also be striven for more and more in the rest of life.

Once again we have a case here where a large part of humanity is working towards the opposite, towards the opposite of what should be before our eyes as a basic demand of our time. A basic demand of our time is this: to permeate life with consciousness, not just with intellect. The intellect is something very one-sided. Today people even believe that they can gain supersensible truths in a mystical way by using mediums, that is, they tune their consciousness down as much as possible. There is no more luciferic-Ahrimanic path to the spiritual world than the spiritualistic one. On the one hand, it brings the medium close to Lucifer, and on the other hand, it brings those who allow themselves to be told their “truths” by the medium close to Ahrimanism. And the content of such truths, of these so-called truths, is also accordingly. For what the medium has to say about the extrasensory is not something higher than the sensory. The sensible has a certain meaning throughout the whole of earthly time. What mediums have to say is only meaningful for a very short period of time, if it is based on truth, of course. It is only of significance for certain elementary spiritual effects over a short period of time, so that even if one does nothing but see with one's healthy eyes and hear with one's healthy ears throughout one's entire life, one still experiences something higher than that through mediums.

From these and similar things you can see that on the one hand there are great demands in our time for the renewal of spiritual life, but that there is also what can be called a strong resistance to the real sources of spiritual life that have grown in our time. People today resist the intrusion of the spiritual into the physical-sensual world. This resistance is what can confront you in all possible fields and what you should recognize from the various attacks on spiritual science as it is meant here. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, is clear about the fact that everything that is to enter into public social life in the future must flow entirely from the sources of initiation. What is being asserted there, such as the threefold social order, may not appeal to certain people today. There are people who say: I don't like this or that about it. These people should in turn learn to understand what whole thinking is. In life, it does not depend on what we like or dislike. I once knew a lady - I have told this story before - who had many things told to her about spiritual science. Then she said: Yes, but re-incarnation, the repeated lives on earth, that is something I don't like; I don't want to come back to earth. Little by little she could be made to understand that it did not depend on whether she wanted to or not, especially not whether she wanted to in this life or not, because she did not yet know what she would want between death and a new birth; then she would want to come back. Now she seemed to gradually understand that and also left, saying that she now understood. It was in Berlin. From Stettin she wrote a card saying that she did not believe in it after all; she did not like the idea of coming back to earth after all. — Then the thinking breaks off dynamically; it can also break off mechanically. We have already experienced an example of this on our own soil. The example is very plausible; but that it can be applied to much of what people think is less plausible. Once at a meeting I had to explain how human beings come back in reincarnation, how they reappear with their individual human souls. I had to say that animals have a group soul; and while it is the case with man that he has an individual soul, preserves this individual soul for the time between death and a new birth, reappears with his individual soul and so on, it is the case with animals that has a group soul, it is so that it is taken into the whole group at death, that each individual animal is then separated again at birth and, as it were, drawn back into the group soul after death through a tentacle. Then a lady began to polemicize: Yes, she could see that for all animals, only not for her dog - which she had particularly liked; because she had raised him so much that he had such a strong individual soul that he would reappear as an individuality! — Afterwards I had a conversation with another lady who said: How stupid the lady was to believe that her dog, who only has a group soul, will return as an individuality. I realized right away that that cannot be. But my parrot, he will surely return as an individuality, that is something else!

Of course, these things make you laugh; but it is precisely in these things that you notice when you make the thinking mistakes. From what I have told you regarding the alleged conflation of threefolding with spiritual science, one does not notice one's short thinking! I have seen how, in the last five years, numerous judgments have been made entirely according to the pattern of this parrot judgment, how people in one region of the country have grasped how things are everywhere else, but for them it was always something different, entirely according to the pattern of the parrot's return. The point is that we really take these things seriously in the present and that we can see: initiation science must be able to flow into social life, and that we must not deceive ourselves about the difference between what we would like to think and what is real. That is why many people today may find it unpleasant to propagate threefolding. But there are two things in the world today, and anyone who looks at the world honestly and sincerely, who has no illusions, can see that there are these two things: either Bolshevism over the whole world or threefolding! You may not like threefolding; then you decide in favor of an old world order! But just consider what has been left of a large part of Europe in the last four to five years! Take the individual parts. There you have, for example, German-Austria; apart from the efforts of a few prominent individuals whom I have singled out in my book 'Vom Menschenrätsel' (The Riddle of Man), the substance of the whole derives from the Catholic principles of the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. That still existed there, and could be artificially preserved under the principle of cohesion of the so-called House of Habsburg, which was only natural at the time, and then under the entire unnatural principle of cohesion of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Or take, for example, what the former lands of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen are, Hungary: it is, in its entire constitution, what it became in the year 1000! And so we could indicate from all the individual areas what the essence of this overall substance actually is. It is not even convenient to say these things to people in the present, because people do not want to look at such circumstances impartially. But how can we expect that simply by piecing together these ruins, which have become old and decrepit because their entire substance dates from the 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th centuries and so on, they can be welded together into lasting structures today! No, only a real renewal of the soul life will do. But that must actually be grasped. Therefore, one must always appeal to people's sense of responsibility to take a look at this soul life. If it is looked at, then it will also be attended to.

I will continue speaking about these matters tomorrow, especially about the relationship between what I have said today and the particular view of the Christ principle.

In what I shall say today as a further elaboration of the considerations given last, it will be necessary to bear in mind that something very definite must also apply in spiritual scientific terms to the work of the individual personality in history. It is usually imagined that a personality, whether artistic, statesmanlike, religious or any other personality that is effective in history, works through that which spreads through consciously unfolding impulses, and that such a personality only works in this way. And then questions that are related to it are considered in such a way that one looks at them: What did such a personality do, what did he say, how did that reach people, and the like?

In the most significant cases of historical development, things are not so simple. Rather, what is effective in the development of humanity depends on the driving spiritual forces behind historical development. Personalities are, so to speak, only the means and ways through which certain driving spiritual forces and powers from the spiritual world work into our historical earthly development. This does not contradict the fact that much of the individuality and subjectivity of such leading personalities also has an effect on wider circles. That is self-evident. But one only acquires a correct concept of history when one is clear about the fact that when here or there a so-called great man expresses this or that, it is the leading spiritual powers of human evolution that speak through him, and that he is, so to speak, only the symptom that certain driving forces are present. He is the gateway through which these forces speak into the historical process.

If, for example, a personality from a certain historical period is mentioned and one tries to characterize this person's influence on the entire configuration of the time, this does not mean that one wants to awaken the belief, when speaking spiritually, that this man has only worked through the power of his personality, as is the case. I will give an example. Let us assume that for some period of time — as we will have to do shortly — a philosophical personality has to be cited as particularly characteristic. Then someone could come and say: Yes, this personality has written philosophical works, but they only had an effect on a certain circle; a wider circle of people did not experience any influence from this personality.

It would be quite wrong to raise this objection, because the personality in question, even if it is a philosophical personality, is merely the expression of certain forces that stand behind it, and it is these forces that have influenced and impressed the wider circles. In this personality one sees only what is working in time. For example, the following could be the case. At a particular time, some intellectual trend or school of thought could be operating in the subconscious of wide circles of human souls. This could find expression in a personality in such a way that what wide circles, perhaps entire nations, only sense, this individual personality formulates particularly characteristically clearly, but does not write down at all, perhaps only telling five or six other people or saying nothing at all. So it could happen that after centuries have passed we discover the memoirs of some personality and find things in them that were not spread by literary means, and yet these memoirs might contain the most characteristic ideas and forces of that particular time. In this sense I have always given characteristics when I have attempted to give such characteristics. I never wanted to give the impression that ideas of personalities only work through the usual channels of propaganda, but I always wanted to point out that one finds the effective ideas formulated in the individual personalities. Of course, the effective influence of such personalities can come in between. But the opposite can also be the case. A broad effect can emanate from a personality; but the other must be stated explicitly so that certain things are not taken to mean that one says, for example, that when someone characterizes a personality as significant for some time, he is characterizing something that is happening only in some corner, whereas one is interested in hearing what is going on in the broad masses. From these points of view, I ask you to consider what I will say today.

I have often discussed how there is a certain strong leap in the historical development of humanity in the 15th century. He who studies the soul life of civilized humanity finds that this soul life in the 16th, 17th century is radically different from the soul life in the 10th, 11th, 12th century. I have often pointed out how it is one of the most untrue statements, but it is repeated over and over again: nature or the world, world events do not make leaps. Such leaps are present precisely at the most significant points of development. And one such leap in the development of civilized humanity is precisely the transition from the fourth post-Atlantic period, which comes to an end in the 15th century, to the fifth, in which we now still live, at the beginning of which we are actually only just standing. In a certain sense, the whole mentality, the thought forms of European civilized humanity will be different after the 15th century; but it will be different in a different way for different nations, for different peoples. Certain transitional phenomena occur in a different way in different peoples.

Now, we cannot understand the spiritual life in which we live today if we do not have an idea of what has been gradually emerging in our spiritual life since the 15th century. We must grasp characteristic points of this newly emerging spiritual life. But of course one can only ever characterize individual currents and individual points of view. If we consider the time that precedes this fifth post-Atlantic period, from the Mystery of Golgotha to the 15th century, we must say that a large part of civilized humanity in Europe is trying to gain an understanding, a religious understanding of Christianity. Anyone who makes the attempt to study the individual views that have emerged in relation to Christianity in Europe from the 3rd, 4th century up to the 15th century will find that the people of this civilized Europe have applied all their conceptual capacity , their intuitive perception, everything they could draw from their soul, to understand Christianity in their own way, to gain an understanding of what had become of the world through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now, after the 15th century, very special circumstances arise. It is only now that what is called scientific thinking in the broadest circles today is emerging. Before that, something quite different was actually there. What is regarded today as the true science only begins in this fifth post-Atlantic period. And a very specific configuration is imposed on it, and indeed, one can say, it is imposed in different ways. It is always the same imprint, but it is imprinted differently in the West, in areas of Western civilization, and somewhat differently in areas of Central European civilization. And the time has now come when these things should be considered quite impartially, without nationalist ideas influencing the way they are considered in the unfavorable sense that I characterized yesterday.

And so, if we want to look at a characteristic personality manifestation of how this newer time has acquired its spiritual signature, we come across such a personality as the one who is particularly characteristic of the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, the English philosopher Baco of Verulam. Among those people who consider themselves scientific, Bacon is considered a kind of innovator of human thinking. But this Bacon is an exponent, a symptom of something that has emerged in modern times in the sense in which I have just expressed it. The whole Western world is basically permeated by a certain wave of thinking, and Bacon is only the one who has most clearly formulated this wave of thinking in the Western world. Without people knowing it, this wave of thinking lives in individuals. The way they think, the way they express themselves about the most important matters of life, is in some areas of Western civilization Baconian, even if people fight Bacon when they say something contrary. What matters is not so much the content that one gives to any world-view idea, but the way in which such a world-view idea first presents itself to the heart of man, and then how it presents itself in the impulses of world-historical becoming.

To make what I have just said clearer, I would like to say, through a paradox: in our time, someone could be a blatant materialist and another a blatant spiritualist, and both could express their ideas quite well from our materialistic time - the difference would not be great. It does not depend so much on whether someone today professes spiritualism or materialism in the literal sense of the words, but rather on the spirit in which he does one or the other. For it is not the literal content that actually has an effect, but the spirit from which something is done. That is what has an effect; only if one is an abstraction does one give something solely and exclusively to the literal content.

Now it should be noted that if one really goes into what the spirit of Bacon's way of thinking is, Bacon has attempted to use the intellectual powers that had emerged particularly since the mid-15th century to found knowledge of humanity, to found science. The powers of knowledge that have been available to humanity in modern times should become sciences. It was an important time, the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, when Bacon emerged. It was, so to speak, the time when everything was really called into question; for one could no longer spin any ideas about the riddles of the world in the old way, with the means of old alchemy, old astrology, with all the other old means, nor with the old religious way of thinking. There was an urge for renewal. How did this urge express itself most characteristically? — This urge expressed itself in the fact that just at this time there was a low point for all of humanity's real spiritual powers of comprehension.

Until the 15th century, it would have seemed impossible to want to grasp something like the Mystery of Golgotha with a mere intellect directed towards the sensual. It was rather taken for granted that something like the Mystery of Golgotha must be grasped only as the highest manifestation among others, grasped with higher powers of knowledge than those with which what extends around us as nature is grasped. These powers of knowledge were still at a certain height when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. They declined more and more in the evolution of mankind. And when the newest time began after the 15th century, people no longer had any spiritual powers of comprehension; they only had a mind directed towards the sensual.

With this mind directed towards the sensual, Bacon now sought to establish a scientific attitude. And so he rejected all those methods of research that had previously been recognized as legitimate, and first established the experiment as the only thing on which science should be built in the main. A large part of the world still takes this view today: you have to experiment, you have to create the equipment and experiment, and from the experiments you have to arrive at views about nature. Seen before the forum of the spirit, it means: I have a butterfly here; it is too complicated for me to examine this butterfly, I make a very deceptive reproduction out of papier-mâché and then examine the papier-mâché model. — That is basically the same as observing living nature through the dead experiment, which is nothing more than replacing living nature with the corpse for the purpose of observing nature. Even when we work in a physics laboratory, we should be aware that we are experimenting on the corpses of nature. Of course, experiments have to be carried out, and investigations have to be made on the human corpse. But with the human corpse, there can be no illusion that one is dealing only with a corpse. In the case of experiments, however, one succumbs to the illusion that the truth is handed over to one. But no one who does not already have the spiritual intuition within themselves to infuse the experiment with the living nature of the matter at hand can extract anything from the experiment, the dead experiment, that applies to the living nature.

This suggests, however, that Bacon's way of thinking was based from the outset on the idea of making the dead the explanatory principle of the world's nature. Now the peculiar thing is that in that imitation of the living, which one still achieves in the experiment, one has starting points for explanations of non-human nature, but one should not be under any illusion that one can really gain anything through any experimental method that sheds light on man himself. All experimentation leads away from the human essence.

Therefore, in the centuries that have passed since then, and in which the spirit of thinking, which reached a certain height in Bacon, has spread, understanding of the actual human being and his nature has been lost. Understanding of what is actually contained as a driving, active being at the very core of human nature has been lost.

Now no one can find the great impulses of moral and social will without going into the essence of human nature. Therefore, the understanding for the impulses of moral and social will has also disappeared in these centuries, disappeared precisely because of Bacon's thinking. Therefore, parallel to the killing of the understanding of the world, as it starts from Bacon, goes the mere utilitarian morality. It is almost a Baconian definition: good is that which is useful to man, either to the individual human being or to humanity as a whole.

Thus, proceeding from the Baconian attitude — and it was much more widespread than anyone today can imagine — on the one hand we have a scientific, thinking attitude that can only grasp what is extra-human, and on the other hand we have a morality that only focuses on the Ahrimanic useful. In Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Bacon, this was expressed to an even greater extent than in Bacon himself. But then this wave of utilitarian morality poured out into the mere sense of understanding the extra-human world, poured out into all the philosophers from Locke and Hume and so on up to Spencer and into the natural scientists from Newton to Darwin. Whoever wants to study most characteristically what came out of the leading Western world to constitute the latest wave of European sentiment must begin there, must start from the Baconian way of thinking.

But there is something very definite connected with this Baconian way of thinking and moralizing. With it one can grasp only what is extra-human; one can morally find only what is useful to man and to humanity. That is to say, with the means by which one here strives for science and natural morality, one does not at all enter into the region in which religion is found!

What is the consequence? The consequence is that among those who are the bearers of this attitude, there arises an endeavor to leave religion as it was before, that is, to develop it historically without adding new elements from a new science of the spirit. Bacon, of course, put forward the most characteristic view: science must not be brought together with religion in any way, because that would make science fanciful; and religion must not be brought together with science in any way, because that would make religion heterodox. - So religion is to be kept well away from the kind of striving that asserts itself in man as scientific striving. The new forces that have been active in civilized humanity since the 15th century are attributed to scientific endeavor. No new forces are added to religion. It is to be preserved along with the forces that were previously added to it, because people are afraid of the new forces that could be added to it. They fear that it would become heterodox, that it would lose its true content.

What had to happen under the influence of such a thinker's attitude? What happened? What happened was that out of a certain human truthfulness, science was sought for the extra-human world, out of a certain truthfulness, a utilitarian morality was sought, but that out of what science was sought, religion was not to be sought. It was not to be touched by it at all. It should have nothing to do with actual scientific endeavor, at most only to the extent that it is considered historically. This is how one can distinguish between science and revealed religion. This distinction can also be expressed somewhat more strongly, as follows. It is only more strongly expressed and therefore more unpleasant for people who do not like to hear the truth; it can be characterized as follows: One strives honestly for science, namely for that science that only extends to the extra-human. One also strives honestly, truly, for a utilitarian morality; but one does not apply this honest, truthful striving to religion, it must remain untouched, science must not touch it. Honest extra-human science, honest utilitarian morality – religion as hypocrisy, religion arising from dishonesty: this is only stated somewhat more sharply, and is therefore unpleasant for those people who do not want to hear the truth unvarnished, the difference between science and revealed religion. But it is only by stating such a thing very clearly and sharply that one gets to its essence. And so the most characteristic feature of this line of thinking is that one shrank from applying science to religion, that one did not want the power of knowledge, which one applies in natural science and the like, to play into religion.

This kind of thinking was, so to speak, natural to Western civilization. It is so natural to it that many people in this Western civilization do not understand anything other than that one should not use the same principle with which one wants to understand nature to turn to the religious. This is characteristic of the Western world, and it is quite appropriate for it.

But now let us imagine the same impulse transported to Central Europe. I can show this by a characteristic example. It does not always happen that this way of thinking is opposed as sharply as Goethe opposed Newtonism. Instead, it also happens that Darwinism, which is directed entirely towards the extra- and which at the same time can never found anything other than a utilitarian morality, has now been conceived by a man who was as quintessentially European, even Prussian-Central European, as Ernst Haeckel was. The matter does not remain what it is with Darwin. In Darwin we see the thinking of Bacon continuing to have an effect. He regards the natural world through Darwinism, but he remains a believer, just as Newton remained a believer. He quietly preserves the old way of thinking with regard to mere religion. But what about Haeckel? Haeckel takes Darwinism into his very soul. For him, there is no possibility of dichotomy; for him, there is no possibility of leaving religion untouched. He takes Darwinism, which can really only be used to understand things outside of humanity, but he applies it with a furor religiosus to precisely the human, and he makes a religion out of it. It becomes a unity, it becomes a religion out of it.

And so the impulses that are there work everywhere. The impulses are the same, but they work in a differentiated way, specified according to the different areas. In the West, Darwinism and religion are served together quite well in world development. Ernst Haeckel, the Central European, has to stir them up together and turn them into a unified dish because it is not possible for him to have them side by side. Bacon and his descendants up to Spencer and Darwin are afraid that religion will become heterodox if science is applied to it. Haeckel is not afraid of this. He makes religion as good as possible because he applies the same truthfulness that he asserts in science to his entire view and must also carry it into religion. This is the case in many fields. Goetheanism in Goethe himself already opposed the understanding of the merely extra-human. You only have to take the prose hymn 'Nature', which Goethe at least thought of around the 1880s, even if he did not write it down himself at the time. It has also been presented here in eurythmy. If you look at it, you will see that for Goethe, nature does not exist in the same sense as it does for Newton or Darwin. Rather, it is inwardly ensouled. It even has an active effect on him with humor: ' she has thought and is constantly pondering.” And so, throughout his life, Goethe only expanded on the maxims he set out in his “Fragment” about nature in more and more concrete terms. A strange essay was recently published here in a newspaper, which I believe was even continued in this Sunday paper. It said that when I published the “Fragment” about nature in the nineties in the new edition of the “Tiefurter Journal” in the writings of the Weimar Goethe Society, I had published the “Fragment” about nature with an explanation, I had emphasized too strongly that the properties that Goethe had processed in the prose hymn “Nature” then play a role in his scientific works. It is really funny what objection is made in that essay. It is said that this “Fragment” does not contain any natural philosophical ideas at all, but religious ideas, and one should not find the religious ideas of this prose hymn in Goethe's later scientific ideas in the way I have found them. — So there was a pedant – one doesn't know what else to call him – who took pleasure in splitting the human search for understanding by trying to persuade people to believe that Goethe's scientific ideas are different from his religious ideas. From the outset, the deduction is such that one can see how this gentleman, who wrote this essay, is steeped in Baconism in every limb!

Can we see from something else, I would now like to ask, that there is a differentiation in modern civilization between science and religion? - We can see it from something else. Of course, in England, in the land of Bacon, there was a Wycliffe and the like; but that did not have any influence on the actual configuration of civilization. In Central Europe, on the other hand, something asserted itself to a very special degree that did not have a significant influence to the west, for example, in France. This is because, when the more recent period, the fifth post-Atlantic period, emerged, in Central Europe there was no opposition of the kind that occurred in the western countries, where science was really founded in a very appropriate way, but this science was not allowed to encroach on the religious sphere, which was supposed to continue to , only the religion revealed in the old sense is to remain. But in Central Europe, in the religious sphere, the opposition arises in a sharp way, and from it all the misfortunes in the Central European development, the instigation of the Thirty Years' War by the Jesuits, everything else that happened as a result of this unfortunate war, and again everything that has come later. In this Central Europe, we see directly in the religious sphere that the impulse from the age after the 15th century was effective.

In the smallest and in the greatest historical phenomena, one sees that the same impulse is present, but shifted, welling up from the human soul, from the human heart, in a different way. But gradually the Western world is taking the lead, and gradually something very significant is happening. The further we see the intellectual life of Central Europe developing in the post-Goethean period, the more it moves away from Goethe. Goethe is still studied by literary historians and other people, well, there is even a Goethe research emerging. But Goethe does not live in all this. What Goethe actually wanted to bring as an impulse into Central European civilization, Goethe and his people, that gradually seeped away in the 19th century. And into this Central European world seeps slowly, just as Darwinism has become Haeckelism, that which is the impulses of the Western world. The Western world tolerates these impulses quite well, but the Central European world does not tolerate them. The Central European world is receptive to Western impulses, it absorbs them, but it cannot tolerate them. On the one hand, we see Darwin, who, although he drew a conclusion for humans from the principle that actually only applies to the non-human in his last work, did not by any means push this conclusion to the extent that Haeckel did. In Darwin's work, the scientific principle is, as it were, left behind in the extra-human realm. In Central Europe, however, the situation is the same as that of Haeckelism in relation to Darwinism: there is an attempt to permeate all of life with such an impulse. One does not want to leave aside the unpermeated religious realm, for example; one also wants to permeate that with the impulse. And so it is with the other areas, which follow the same path. Those who are now older have indeed experienced it themselves, how parliamentarism of English coloration has spread throughout Europe, with the exception of Prussian Germany, and how it has been received in Europe like Darwinism through Haeckelism. Parliamentarism, as it exists in England, is quite good for England. For those countries of Central Europe to which it has been transferred, it has been associated with such consistency as Haeckel has associated with Darwinism. Under such influence, the modern times have surrendered.

But one can go deeper and characterize the phenomena much more deeply as they have unfolded. In the Western world, we have, in addition to Bacon, a personality in Shakespeare who has a great influence on modern civilization. For those who are able to study spiritual life, Baconism and Shakespearianism point to the same extraterrestrial source, but one that is represented in the earthly. Both take the same path into the newer development, and it is known that the inspiration for Bacon and Shakespeare comes from the same source. In modern times, when everything is taken roughly, this has even led to the well-known Bacon theory being put forward, which, of course, is complete nonsense as it has been put forward. But the source from which the inspiration of Bacon and Shakespeare originates for Central Europe is the same, and the same initiates personality is the source of the spiritual currents of Jakob Böhme and the South German Jacobus Baldus. And much more than one would think lives in Central European spiritual life that comes from Jakob Böhme – again, a personality who only formulated that which was already working as fact in the widest circles, even if it did not happen in Jakob Böhme's words. One must only be aware that a good deal of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis comes from Jakob Böhme, that a good deal of what is in Goethe's entire organic system came to him via Jakob Böhme, in certain roundabout ways that can easily be proven. And even if Jacobus Baldus lived in lonely Ingolstadt, he is just such a personality who did not influence many contemporaries, but who expressed in a characteristic way what was thought and felt in the broadest circles of this newly emerging modern age.

But let us consider the remarkable depth that lies in these things: Baconism and Shakespeareanism, Böhmetum, Balderum, all come from the same source of inspiration. What comes from Jakob Böhme is still noticeable at the bottom of Central European striving today, but it is seeping away. On the other hand, Baconism, whether in its own form or in the form of the later Darwin, has had a significant influence in Central Europe, and Shakespeare has also had a significant influence. Consider, for example, that the entire second half of the eighteenth century, at least the latter part of it, was strongly influenced by Shakespeare, and that in the nineteenth century, Central European intellectual life was strongly influenced by Shakespeare. Goethe was deeply impressed by Shakespeare in his youth and only from the 1880s onwards did he emancipate himself from Shakespeareanism.

The same path can be seen everywhere, the impulses are the same everywhere. But they work in different ways. In Central Europe, the impulses work in such a way that they seep away; the western impulses pour out over the non-human. They make religious life, in the first instance, a hypocritical thing alongside scientific striving. And since this Western element pours out over the whole of modern civilization, we see how people have not yet come to apply the spiritual forces - spiritual science, which in recent times has to present itself as coming from human nature, just like the scientific forces that go beyond the human - to the religious. Christianity is to be newly comprehended, because one can never continue to work with what has been left untouched. The old spiritual powers have been exhausted, and anyone today who thinks they can somehow grasp Christianity with the old spiritual powers that are recognized in the West for religious matters is living in the most terrible illusions. This must be said today: that a new epoch of humanity must come, through which the mystery of Golgotha itself must be grasped anew with new spiritual powers. For everything that has been said about it has been used up, has reached its own absurdity, can be glued here or there, treated here or there in such a way that it is treated as a scientific “don't touch me”, but humanity cannot go on living with these things. Mankind needs the strength to draw from its own inner being the new spiritual forces that will now grasp the mystery of Golgotha in a new way.

The Western world has realized that it is incumbent upon it to look around for these new spiritual forces. For in this Western world, people have limited themselves to a mere understanding of the extra-human. This extra-human will never be able to reach people. A new spiritual science will have to be understood by people, but only then will new perspectives on the Mystery of Golgotha open up. A mere utilitarian morality can be applied to the mere extra-human world; but such a utilitarian morality will never bring man to his own dignity. Only a morality that man knows is poured into him through supersensible forces that work in his soul can bring him to this dignity. But these can never be grasped with the means that have been left to religious revelation in Western countries. A renewal is necessary.

The questions that I have touched upon here seem to live in areas very, very far removed from everyday life, but they are not. These questions are the basis of the most important, world-shaping questions of today, and no one will be able to answer the big question: What is the relationship between East and West, between Europe, Asia and America? — who does not want to go back to these things. Because what we are experiencing today is ultimately the consequence of what has been going on in human souls over the centuries.

It is only human convenience to not want to go back to these things. Therefore, one can experience what I would call that terrible heartbreak that overcomes one when one hears people today talk about the great misfortunes of the time, about other configurations of the present political or economic or other life, about the affairs of Asia, Europe and America – but hear them speak as the blind speak of color, because they do not want to enter into what actually underlies these great questions as the inner pulsation.

In our recent reflections here, we have been speaking of the necessities of the time. Today, man must be content to absorb the impact that wants to enter the physical world. We have seen how, for about sixty years, there has been a struggle in the most intense way in European life, which began in the last third of the 19th century and contains the causes of all the confusions of these last times. I have pointed out to you the fact that what is happening is still being taken too lightly, in that people do not want to admit that old Europe has led a sham existence in the 20th century, has broken up and cannot be glued back together. This crisis can be compared to a crisis such as occurred in the ancient Roman Empire, when Christianity gradually broke into this Roman Empire and swept away everything that existed. Something completely new has developed. Anyone who has insight into life will realize that everything that has been built up since the first Christian century has been shattered.

Let us now take a look at what has been built up. The Mystery of Golgotha was there. But the Mystery of Golgotha and its understanding are two different things. Let us make this clear by means of a comparison. Suppose you look at a person who has this or that as the content of his soul or as the impulse for his actions. If a child looks at such a person, it forms a judgment; but this is a childlike view. A person who has learned something, who is an adult, will then also be able to form an opinion about this person; this will be a more mature view. But not everyone who has a mature view will be able to have sufficient knowledge or insight into the person in question, if that person is, for example, a genius. For this it would be necessary that in turn a genius would have formed his view about this person.

So we have a fact in this case: a person can be there, and there can be different understandings of this fact. — This is how it is in the course of time with the event that Christianity brought into the world. This event as such was once there, it stands at the starting point of our modern civilization. The understanding that has been shown for Christianity until now is rooted essentially in the views, in the ideas, in the concepts that people could have from those soul foundations that had taken the place of the soul foundations of the old Roman Empire. To substantiate this, you need only look at the lost Austria, which, with the exception of a few outstanding personalities, had a culture – not just a spiritual culture, but a culture in the full breadth of life – that basically went back to the first Christian centuries.

There the seeds of decay begin. People did not want to believe it, but anyone familiar with the circumstances could see it. And so it was in the rest of Europe. Europe was built on very old ideas, and thus in an old spirituality. And out of these ideas the Mystery of Golgotha was also understood. But these ideas are now worn out. They are no longer sufficient to convey an understanding of the event of Golgotha to the present-day human being. Man wants to stick to the old ideas because of his conservative tendencies. But in the depths of the soul there are definitely demands for a re-creation of Europe and the whole civilized world. This is the great struggle that has been evident at the basis of European culture for about sixty years. Something wants to be formed, but the preserved ideas of people are pushing it back. When a river current is dammed up somewhere, a rapid will eventually appear. This rapid has come to European culture. These are the years of terror that have befallen us, that are by no means over yet, and that are actually only just beginning. What is needed today is to establish a new conception of life based on spiritual principles. Those who today oppose such a conception of life are like those who, when Christianity spread from south to north, opposed it. The wave of evolution sweeps over such people.

But such people can cause much harm, and much harm will still be caused by such people. Let us take a concrete example. If you look at how the situation developed that could be seen before 1914 and also, in a sense, during the last few years, when the catastrophe began, you will see that there were certain so-called state borders on the map of Europe. Why these state borders have developed in this way over the centuries can be traced through history. But it is precisely from a true, unprejudiced consideration of history that you will gain the insight that these states, from the great Russia to the smallest entities, came into being under the influence of the understanding of Christ, that is, the understanding of Christ as it took hold in Europe at the time of the so-called migration of peoples, at the time of the decadence of the Roman Empire. In 1914, to give a date, these conditions, which found expression in these 'strokes' that demarcated states on the map of Europe, were all already unnatural. There was nothing true about these borders. There was nothing there that had any inner hold. And anyone today who believes that anything can be held together by what was no longer true in 1914 has clearly gone down the wrong path. Even that which has been or wants to be formed on the basis of these conditions is no longer tenable.

What do the people of Europe with their American appendage now want to do with the civilized world? Let us take an unbiased look at what the people of Europe with their American appendages currently want to do with the civilized world. They want to do what might have emerged in the first centuries A.D., in the migrations of nations, from the ideas that the Goths, the Vandals, the Lombards, Heruls, Cherusci, and so on had, and that the Romans had before they were seized by Christianity. It did not come about, although at that time people did not even resist the course of events as strongly with their consciousness as they do today. But let us hypothetically assume that in those days they would not have allowed Christianity to spread, but would have wanted a Europe glued together from the ideas of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Vandals, the Lombards and so on, with the remnants of ancient Roman civilization – an impossibility, pure and simple! A possible Europe only arose from the fact that a spiritual impact came to this Europe. And this spiritual impact came through Christianity. Without this spiritual impact, which has made everything different, nothing would have come of Europe for the centuries from the 4th, 5th to the 20th century. Imagine Europe without the impact of Christianity in the past centuries: you could not imagine it. Just think of what remains of the Goths, the Heruls, the Langobards and so on in Europe. You have to admit: the impact of Christianity was enormous and everything changed.

If, in those days, the Lombards had rejected every new impulse just as much as, for example, the Czechoslovaks or the Poles or the French reject it today, then what I hypothetically assumed, the impossible, would have happened. And just as the Lombards would have behaved if they had said, “We do not want Christianity, we want to remain Lombard,” so today the Czechoslovaks, the Magyars, the French, the English and so on are behaving. They do not want a new spiritual impact.

But Europe is at rock bottom without a new influence. Nothing comes of it. Just as little comes of Europe as of a Goth, Lombard, or Vandal Europe when Christianity was ripe to make its impact on European civilization. This thought is one that the vast majority of people today fear. You may be surprised if I say that they are afraid, because you believe that it is for these or those reasons of life or logical or other reasons that they resist this thought. That is not the case. The reason why they resist is subconscious fear. When you have subconscious fear, you do not understand things. One invents logical reasons, one invents all kinds of observations that one believes one has made in order to refute this thought, while one is actually afraid of it. But man does not admit to fear! But the time is so great that it is necessary to look into these circumstances without fail. And it is necessary to speak words today that will certainly sound paradoxical to a large proportion of people. When it first spread, Christianity also sounded paradoxical to people. You should just imagine what it sounded like when the spreaders of Christianity came, say, to Alsace or Switzerland, where they still worshipped the images of Odin, the god Saxnot and so on. It was something paradoxical. Today it is paradoxical for people when one speaks to them of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must speak of as a new impact and at the same time as a new understanding of Christianity. Only today everything must become conscious, only today everything must be more willed than people in those days were capable of wanting. Above all, one thing must be grasped by humanity today with all its sharpness. We have a so-called scientific, intellectual life. In my last Sunday lecture I characterized one aspect of this intellectual life; I pointed out to you the character that this intellectual life has acquired through the English-speaking population. Do not believe that this intellectual life leaves anything to chance. What our children learn at school, from the age of six, shapes their souls, shapes the whole person, and people today walk around as they are shaped by our school system, which in its lower levels is strongly influenced, especially today in the age of the proliferation of the newspaper industry, much more than one might think, is influenced to a great extent by what is so-called science in the upper echelons of intellectual life. Science has had its great external successes. It has brought about the telephone and air travel, and it has brought about wireless telegraphy. In all these fields, it has made great achievements. But I have repeatedly drawn your attention to a peculiarity of this science, a peculiarity of our entire knowledge. This peculiarity consists in the fact that we can understand everything. We can understand machines, we can understand minerals, we can understand plants, we can understand animals, but we can least of all understand the human being through what our science presents. That one infers man directly from animality, that one says he is only a higher stage of development of animality, that comes only from the fact that one does not know anything about man. Not because man really comes from the animal, but because one does not know anything about the true man, but can only reveal the idea that one has, one leaves man coming from the animal kingdom. It is only a prejudice of the age that has no science with which to judge man. Therefore, we are also incapable in the present time of acquiring a real knowledge of human nature from our own education. By knowledge of human nature cannot be meant that conglomeration of all sorts of ideas that man today has of himself. A true knowledge of human nature could only arise out of the realization of what the true human being, the genuine human being, is made of.

Even if we study everything we have on earth, study with the means of today's science, we can build machines with it, we can design mechanisms with it, but we can never understand the human being with it. That is precisely what anthroposophical spiritual science is for: to make man comprehensible from extraterrestrial conditions. People feel this, but in their current ideas they do not admit that man today must be understood from extraterrestrial, from supersensible conditions. And so there is no science for this man. For centuries the world has been deluding itself about this fact in a strange way.

I would like to show you, using one example (of which there are many), how this fact has been ignored over the centuries. When the time had come to present to you, as an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, what has been developed here over the past few years, some people who had come close to what I, for example, had given on the basis of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, said: We prefer to delve into the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, into the mysticism of Johannes Tauler. There everything is much simpler; there one can comfortably say: I immerse myself in my inner being, I grasp the higher human being in me, my higher self has grasped the divine human being in me. — But that is nothing more than sophisticated egotism, nothing more than a retreat into the egoistic personality, a running away from all humanity, an inward self-deception. When, in the 14th and 15th centuries, people began to fail to understand their fellow human beings, it was clear that spirits such as Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart would have to arise to point to the human soul in order to seek the human being. But today that time is over. Today this deepening and sinking into the inner being is no longer good. Today it is about really understanding a Christ-word correctly - that is the example I mean - this one Christ-word, which is one of the most important, the most significant, that is: “If two or three are united in my name, then I am in the midst of you.” That means that if someone is alone, the Christ is not there. One cannot find the Christ without feeling connected to all of humanity. Today, one must seek the Christ through the path that all of humanity is walking. That is to say, inner satisfaction leads away from the Christ impulse.

This is the misfortune, especially for 19th-century Protestant theology, that the impulse arose to have a mere individualistic, egoistic inner Christ experience. There is a crowned head in Europe, one of those who are still crowned, who always replied when it came to contemporary spiritual knowledge: “I have my personal Christ experience!” This crowned head was satisfied with that. But many say similar things. That, however, is precisely the misfortune of the present time: people do not want a general interest in the impersonal human. You only get to know yourself when you know the human being as such. But you cannot get to know the human being as such without seeking his origin in extra-terrestrial conditions.

Consider how, in my book Occult Science, I describe the search for the origin of what we call man in extraterrestrial conditions. People dislike this “Occult Science” for no other reason than because all confused knowledge about humanity is rejected and man as such is derived from the whole universe, namely from the extraterrestrial universe. But this is precisely what is needed in today's world. The present time must decide to add the other, the spiritual sources of knowledge to all that is loved as sources of knowledge today.

Here lies, call it guilt, call it ignorance – either word may be used, words are not important – what must be characterized as emanating from our scientific universities, from those people who set the tone when it comes to what man can and cannot know. The so-called human wisdom, but also the social wisdom, the technical wisdom, etc., that emanates from our European and American universities regards the world with the exclusion of all those factors that, after all, include the human being as a matter of course. Anyone who seeks access to any leading position today, even a lowly one, has no opportunity to get to know anything that would enable him to gain knowledge of human nature. And without knowledge of human nature there can be no social life, and without knowledge of human nature there can be no renewal of Christianity. Today one can become a theologian without having the slightest idea what the Mystery of Golgotha means, for most theologians today have no idea who Christ is. Today one can become a lawyer without having the slightest idea what the human being actually is. One can become a physician today without having the slightest idea of how the human being is constructed out of the cosmos, without having the slightest idea of how a healthy and a sick body relate to each other. Today one can become a technician without having the slightest idea what influence the construction of any machine has on the whole course of earthly development, and today one can be a brilliant inventor of a telephone without having the slightest idea what the telephone means for the whole development of the earth. People lack an overview of the course of human development. And so every person has the need to form a small circle and acquire a routine within this small circle, to apply this routine in the sense of their own selfishness, so that they can distinguish themselves without considering how what they are inserting as a part into the whole world will turn out in this whole world. If we were to build houses in the world using the same method by which we establish our existence today, they would collapse immediately. If we were to form bricks and build houses using the same method by which we educate our theologians, our lawyers, physicians, philologists and so on, and in particular our philosophers, these houses would not be able to survive for a week in the whole of the world. In the grand scheme of things, people do not notice the collapse. It has been collapsing continuously since the last third of the 19th century. People know nothing about it; on the contrary, they talk about the great upturn, and some still talk about building a new world with the same bricks that have long since become unusable. A new world cannot be built in any other way than by bringing a new spiritual impact into the whole civilized world from the ground up. You can make a mockery of something, but you cannot build without this spiritual impact.

There are people - well-meaning people - who are terribly afraid of such an intensity of knowledge, of such an intensity of knowledge as is sought through spiritual science. They are afraid for a reason – I am not telling you something I made up, only things that correspond to facts – they say to themselves: How boring it will be when people will know everything that spiritual science claims to know; then one can no longer hope that the future will bring new knowledge, then one cannot even know that knowledge will help. They still think that it would be a terrible prospect for the future if everything were already known!

I am not saying that this is convenient information for those who are too lazy to approach knowledge, but I would like to point out that the moment man is seen as he can be seen through spiritual science, the possibility of thinking about social construction really begins. You cannot establish social construction in any other way than by first bringing human knowledge into the clear, so to speak. To make this clear, one must only say the following: Take everything that leads to our present-day communities. People do not owe it to their enlightenment; they do not owe it to the ideas that they have fully absorbed into their consciousness, they owe it to those spiritual forces that shine through the blood, which have sprung from the old blood connections, blood relationships. Even today we still have something that enters our world as a remnant of that old blood relationship, which is given to us by the national principle and comes to the fore in it. The reason why one person calls himself an Englishman, another a Frenchman, and a third a Pole, stems from all those relationships between people that have always been based on blood ties. This blood relationship had its good justification through the thousands of years of human development, because through this blood relationship that which brought people together, that which founded human communities, rose up into humanity. And as you can see from my “Occult Science”, at the beginning of the development of the earth, people were not at all so uniform. The human souls came to earth from the most diverse places, as you know, and did not truly love each other. They only learned to love each other by being born as souls into blood-related bodies. In earlier lectures I repeatedly showed how the beneficence of this blood relationship, blood community, has been fought by the powers opposed to man, by the luciferic-ahrimanic powers. That was in ancient times. Then people were dependent on having human communities founded on blood ties. Today, to believe that one only needs to translate the old principle of blood relationship into the abstract language and that one can say, by clothing the abstractness in “Fourteen Points”: To every single, even the smallest people, its right to self-determination! One must be Woodrow Wilson in his unworldliness, in his abstraction, if one can do such a thing. Today one must realize: that was once. Blood relationships once established human communities. Today, however, other forces are at work in the ahrimanic and luciferic powers that are opposed to humanity. Today, blood relationship is to be used to seduce people. Just as the Christ did not come into the world to abolish the law, but to take it up into Himself, so blood relationship is not to be done away with. On the contrary, blood relationship must first be guided in the right way. But whereas in ancient times the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in human hearts opposed blood relationship and sought to split human beings into egoistic individuals, today the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers seek to seduce human beings are to be seduced into building only on the blood relationship. Today the time has come to recognize that every human being who really has body, soul and spirit and stands before us comes down from the spiritual world. He comes down from the spiritual world in such a way that he has gone through a pre-earthly life. He seeks out for himself the blood through which he wants to embody himself on earth. And a feeling for this spiritual community must gradually arise. In pre-Christian times, reincarnation existed as a feeling, for it was only a realization before the year 1860 before Christianity; after the year 1860 it was only an instinctive feeling in all of Egypt, in the Near East, in Roman times. But now the time is coming when the view of man as a spiritual being undergoing a development between death and a new birth will become a living feeling, a living sensation, when one must live with the idea of the supermundane significance of human souls. For without this idea, the culture of the earth will be killed. It will not be possible to develop a practical activity in the future without being able to look up to the spiritual significance of the fact that every human being is a spiritual being. And one will have to add, as paradoxical as this may still appear to today's man – less paradoxical in theory, for I do not want to theorize, but to parallelize, in terms of feeling, but it is nevertheless so – that one will have to learn not only to say to oneself: We as parents rejoice that a child is born to us, we rejoice at this addition to our family because this child is born to us – but one will have to say: No, we are merely the instrument through which a spiritual individuality, waiting to continue its existence on earth, finds the opportunity to do so through us! The aristocratic idea of the “Stammhalter” (the son who continues the family line) and the aristocratic idea of the mere continuation of the family bloodline, for example, will have to be among the antiquated things. And the feeling will have to extend to all humanity. Even today, aristocrats still have the attitude that their primary task is to continue their family line so that the physical person has descendants with the same name. The feeling will have to be reversed to the effect that one must have these successors in the service of all humanity, so that certain individualities, who want to descend to the world, can continue their existence here on this earth. The old sentiments in aristocracy, in family aristocracy, extend into our present time. The feeling of that general human knowledge must be opposed to this; then we will also be able to understand the Christ anew. For He did not come to earth for the sake of family egoism, but for the sake of all mankind. Nor did He come for the sake of any nationality, but for the sake of all mankind. He did not come so that those who call themselves the victors could establish nation-states, but so that the universal human element could be cultivated on earth within the framework of nationality.

These things are at the root of what is happening now. And they are so rooted that what is being sought in earthly existence today is opposed by what the majority of people still say and want today. But if people continue to want things, they will only establish things that lead themselves ad absurdum, that lead themselves into impossibility. Either one will realize this, or one will have to wade in the European chaos for a long time to come. It is the best means to continue wading in this European chaos by founding nation states.

For this reason, we had to speak of the great responsibility to those who will soon fall outwardly to world domination. This responsibility is there. The English-speaking population has this terrible responsibility before the world, no longer to reject the spiritual, no longer to be Baconian or Newtonian, but to take up the spirit in its new form. Picture to yourself today Newton, who formulated that astronomical world view of which Herman Grimm rightly says: “As one imagines it in the sense of this astronomical world view, that the earth and the planetary system of the sun emerged from a haze, a thin mist, that transformed and transformed, that then from this vortex also animals, man and plants also arose from this vortex, and that one day the whole will fall back into the sun, is a carrion bone around which a hungry dog circles, a more appetizing piece than this world view; and times to come will have a hard time understanding the cultural and historical madness of the Newtonian, Kant-Laplacean system that is taught in school today. People will ask: How could an entire age once be so insane as to praise this view? Today it is still considered madness to side with Goethe against Newton, to occupy oneself with Goethean conceptions about physical phenomena. But everything that lies within the tasks of our time is connected with these things. A few people are beginning to see these connections today, and it was a pleasant surprise for me when, in the last issue of our journal 'Die Dreigliederung', it was explained how what is in my book 'Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage' about the social understanding of the world means the same as what Goetheanism once meant for natural science. But just as people turned away from Goethe because he had to contradict the science of his time, so people today turn away from the threefold social order. Why? It contradicts what is customary, just as Goetheanism once did, so that it is also contradicted by this threefold social order.

These things can lead you to ask: But what should the individual do then? — First of all, it depends on one's attitude towards the matter, on a clear and objective examination. It is important that one really begins to develop a deep interest in the affairs of all humanity. You can look back on what you have experienced in the last four to five years, and never have you had more opportunities to meet a certain kind of know-it-all in the world over and over again, because basically every person was a know-it-all. Then the Germans came and knew exactly who was to blame for the war and that they were actually highly innocent; then the French came and knew exactly how everything was; then the Italians at least still stood for “sacro egoismo”. — People always knew exactly what it was all about. They all had their views, they had their thoughts, their ideas. It is indeed convenient to gain these ideas without any basis. One is French by blood, one is Polish by blood, one is Czechoslovakian by blood, and one has a certain view of life as it must develop in Europe. One does not need to do anything other than this or that, to feel it within oneself, and one judges, judges as one is confronted with the judgments. That is the great misfortune of our time: that people, without really making an effort, without taking an interest in the affairs of humanity, judge from their subconscious, consider this or that to be right, consider this or that to be indispensable. But the time is no longer there when one can consider this or that to be indispensable from one's subconscious. The time has come when we must judge only on the basis of facts, when we must make an effort to really get an overview of the necessity of the time and of what the time demands of us. Today it constricts one's heart when one meets people who are only interested in themselves. For that is the great misfortune of our time, while the only redemption of time could consist in people saying to themselves now, after the terrible things that have happened in recent years: We must take an interest in the affairs of all humanity, we must not stop at what is happening directly around us in the sphere of our own nation.

These things arise directly from spiritual science as intuitive perceptions, and I am speaking of them today in preparation for certain concluding thoughts. You see here this building, which is the representative of our Anthroposophical spiritual science. One can have feelings for one or other of the elements in this building, and one will be right. But the only person who has the right feeling for this building is the one who sees something in every single line that is demanded by the most urgent needs of our time. The person who sees that the building must stand because our time demands this or that, because this or that must be sensed in these or those columns, in these or those rows of windows; because it is necessary for humanity today to take this building, what it wants to be, out of the whole configuration of time. And anyone who feels this new style at the same time, once they have felt it through, will recognize that this style has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is specified for this or that, but that it has only to do with the most general human aspects. There is nothing about this entire structure that the American, the Englishman, the German, the Russian, the Japanese, or the Chinese cannot say yes to, because it is not shaped from the sensibilities of a single person. I will not be able to be portrayed, at least not by those who know me, as an immodest person when I say: I myself know of nothing that is currently being made of this kind that is as independent of differentiated human will and would merge into the most general knowledge and understanding of human nature as this building.

But this must be taken up if the things that arise from our motives for the future of humanity are to serve that future well.

Today I shall again insert a kind of episode into our reflections, which will serve to further the actual theme tomorrow. I shall be obliged to use a somewhat more aphoristic mode of presentation today in order to discuss certain things with you. We have, of course, taken the most diverse symptoms and phenomena from current events in order to recognize how these events are leading humanity to a grasp of spiritual realities. And it was my endeavor to make clear that this taking hold of spiritual realities cannot be merely a matter of man's continuing to take hold of the spiritual world in the future, so to speak, in order to have something from it, I might say, for his Sunday hours. That was precisely the pernicious thing in the civilization that has developed in recent centuries, that spiritual life has gradually become something so detached and abstract. In answer to the question that I posed in a public lecture in Basel some time ago: What connects the world view, the view of the spiritual or the unspiritual, that someone has as a civil servant, lawyer, factory owner, or merchant, with what one does every day? One could say: The thoughts that he has as a worldview have no influence on his professional and everyday affairs, or rather, on how he conducts them. On the one hand, one is a person of external practical life, and on the other, one has a purely abstract worldview, whether it is more or less religious or more or less scientifically colored. This has become common practice in the course of the last few centuries and has reached a climax in our so ominous time. And what underlies this is expressed in another, even more fatal circumstance, that people who have the good will to acquire a spiritual worldview are virtually absorbed in the content of this spiritual worldview, that this spiritual worldview has nothing to do with their practical life. Because practical life is the real thing, it is what one devotes oneself to externally; one has spirituality for Sundays, it is set apart from life, and life is not worthy of absorbing this spirituality. I have always endeavored to make it clear that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here, while seeking to ascend to the highest heights of spiritual life, should then cultivate in man, through this ascent into the spiritual worlds, a way of thinking, a way of imagining, that makes him suitable, adept, and practical in every aspect of everyday life. One should have something for one's business, for daily practical life, from what one also works for spiritually in the higher worlds.

This work for the spiritual world should not tempt one to say: This spiritual world is the other world, it must not be touched by the coarse everyday life; the coarse everyday life is separate, it is despised, the spiritual world is the high, the exalted. I have often pointed these things out very sharply in earlier years and have said that, over the years, many a person has come to me and said: Oh, I have such a prosaic profession, I want to leave this prosaic profession and devote myself to more ideal things. That is the worst maxim one can have in life. I have often said that anyone who, by fate or karma, is a postal worker, and a decent postal worker at that, certainly serves the world more by properly fulfilling their profession than someone who is a bad poet or even a bad journalist or the like, which one sometimes craves. The point is, when one approaches the spiritual, to take this spirituality into one's mind in such a way that it does not make one unskillful, but skillful for the outer life.

Because this maxim has disappeared from life since the 15th century and, to a certain extent, life has split into these two currents, into the outer practical life despised by idealists and mystics, and into the mystical, religious, idealistic life regarded by practical people as somewhat dreamy and starry-eyed, we now find ourselves in the deadlock of life described to you yesterday. That is the deeper reason why we are stuck in this impasse. As a result, on the one hand, in practical life, each individual stands in a small circle, as I said yesterday, working without an overview and also without a warm interest in the whole, and on the other hand, if one is idealistic enough to devote oneself to a spiritual world-view, one then wants to have this spiritual world-view in such a way that one is not educated in this spiritual world-view, for example, in practical leadership, let us say, of a proper ledger or a proper journal. There are people who consider it an advantage if someone does not understand and cannot grasp how to keep a journal or a cash book. This is the great damage that has gradually become more and more widespread over the past few centuries.

It is not an advantage to have no idea of how to keep ledgers and cash books, and it is not a blessing for humanity when there are as many people as possible who want to be idealists by not understanding anything practical and only wanting to devote themselves to spiritual contemplation. The only healthy thing in life is when these two maxims in life go so far together that one supports the other. But what has gradually emerged more and more as a life-damage in the smallest circles over the past few centuries is also expressed in the great affairs of life, in that no one, really, one can say, no one except a few people who have done it quite impractically, has actually worried about it: How can something really healthy arise from the structures that are outdated – I characterized them for you yesterday in terms of how they look on the map – that were used before the war, until 1914, to describe the states of the world? – Yes, even after the trials of the last four to five years, unfortunately we have not yet come far enough to think about these things in a healthy way. Take just one thing. When we have a cool head to consider the more distant causes of the terrible catastrophe of the last four and a half or five years, we will find that these causes lie in the industrial and commercial conditions between Central Europe and the western regions, including America, in those industrial and commercial conditions that have long since come into conflict with national borders. The state structures, which have developed out of quite different conditions and which are a relic of medieval conditions, have been used artificially as a framework for what are only commercial and industrial interests. They were not suited for that purpose at all, but they could be used for it. And today one notices that so little that a social-democratic movement, which is hopeless for longer periods of time but extremely disruptive for shorter periods, does not do it any differently. We are experiencing today that socialist theories are emerging everywhere, even in the Asian world, and they are becoming particularly radical. These socialist theories want to create something practical. Before the war they wanted to use the framework of the old states, now they want to use the framework of what has emerged from the catastrophe of war, that is to say, we say Russia, as it has emerged from the war, should be used as a framework for Bolshevik theories. If you can think according to reality, you cannot think of anything more nonsensical than this attempt. There is no greater nonsense than this construct, which initially arose out of purely medieval forces, combined then with the unnatural results that arose more and more in the war that had come to Versailles, that is, to an unpeaceful state. That this structure in the east of Europe should now take up the fantasies of Lenin and Trotsky is nonsense in the long term, and in the short term it is a tumult that must enormously delay the healthy development of Europe's humanity. This is the result if one has a sense of reality.

But this sense of reality is lacking today, one might say, in the whole of humanity's public judgment. The whole of humanity's public judgment is not formed out of a sense of reality, but actually out of abstractions, out of abstract theories. And when something arises that is not based on abstract theories, such as threefolding, something that is taken from life and, because one cannot write thirty volumes about it, which people would not read anyway, one has to summarize it briefly, then people do not recognize the spirit of reality in it, but, because they are completely filled with theories today, they consider it to be a theory all the more. One no longer has any sense of what is taken from reality, because one has become completely estranged from reality.

It must happen that people today can become practical in the most eminent sense and yet still look up to the spiritual world. For only in this way will the human mind develop healthily into the future, that these two elements in the human mind can go side by side. When the time comes that he who says: Over in the East live souls who, due to the special historical circumstances of Asia, have developed in such a way that today they have little sense for the outer world and could easily become the prey of the Europeans, who are attached to the mere material world, but that they have been able to preserve their gaze into the spiritual world. Then one will see that in the Orient we have such souls. I have often mentioned Rabindranath Tagore as an especially important representative. But this Rabindranath Tagore, who is not even an initiate but merely an Asian intellectual, has within him, I might say, the whole spirit of Asia, and you can learn much about this striving Asian spirit from his collection of lectures, 'Nationalism'.

But the souls that are over there lack any inner relationship to what has been achieved in Europe and America in relation to the outer life. Let me remind you once again of something that I have already said before you. It is only in the last few centuries that we have developed what can be called a purely mechanistic culture. Even today you will find in geography books that the entire earth is populated by about fifteen hundred million people. But that is not true if you take into account the work that is done on the earth. If, let us say, a Martian were to come down to Earth and assess the Earth's population in the following way, first asking: How much does a person work on Earth, taking into account the amount of labor they can apply? – and then asking: How much work is done altogether? — let us take the figures that existed before the war, the current figures cannot be used for this, they are not yet available either, then if we were to note how much work is done by people on earth, not fifteen hundred million would come out, but two thousand million or even two thousand two hundred million people as the earth's population. Why? Because the work done by machines on earth is actually so great that it is the equivalent of about seven hundred million human workers. If the machines did not work and if what the machines do were to be done by human labor, there would have to be seven hundred million more people on earth. I have calculated this from the amount of coal used on earth, based on an eight-hour working day. What I have said applies approximately to the coal consumption at the beginning of the 20th century and to an eight-hour working day, so that one can say: judging by what is being done on the earth, there are actually two thousand two hundred million people on the earth. But what is achieved by purely mechanical instruments of labor is more or less done entirely in Europe and America; not much of it is done in Asia today. It has begun there, but it is still in its early stages, because the Asian has no sense of this mechanization of the world. He completely lacks the sense for what has been absorbed in the Occident since the last century or even since the middle of the 15th century. But we must not just think about the fact that mechanical work is being done; we must also think about the fact that people's entire way of thinking is turning to this mechanization of the world. Today, someone can say: So-and-so many workers were needed to build the Gotthard tunnel. But today you can't build a Gotthard tunnel without knowing differential and integral calculus, and that comes from Leibniz, the English say from Newton; we won't argue about that. So the Gotthard tunnel or the Hauenstein tunnel near here could not have been built if Leibniz had not discovered differential and integral calculus in his study one day. All of European thought since Copernicus and Galileo is directed towards this mechanization of the world. Read up on Rabindranath Tagore and how much he hates this mechanization of the world.

But what will this have to lead to? In the mirror of the spiritual world view, it can be said: All those souls that are embodied today in the East, in what we call the East, will seek their next embodiment in the West. Western people will seek their next embodiment more in the East. The middle will have to form a mediation. But if you say something like a cultural-historical demand, that the whole education system and the like should be designed so that this intersecting wave of souls passes over the earth, you say something like that to the very clever people of the present, let us take the cleverest, those who are chosen by the nations to come into parliaments, then you will hear that you are a fool, that this is quite mad! But the recognition of these truths must also move people as much as what is now called anthropological truths moved people in earlier times; the mixing of races, the mutual distribution of races and so on. We must begin to look at everything from a spiritual point of view, instead of regarding it merely from an external physiological point of view, as we have done in the past. There are, of course, good Theosophists who, in moments of solemnity in their lives, think that man lives in repeated lives on earth; it is a creed for them. But that is not enough. If one merely believes in reincarnation and karma as an article of faith, it is no more valuable than making a laundry list. These things only take on value when they are integrated into the whole way of thinking about the world and also into the way of acting and behaving in the world. These things only have value when they are considered in terms of cultural history. And if you do not see these things as something you only devote yourself to in the festive moments of life, but as something you permeate with life, and if you really have such thoughts in earnest - theosophically you can of course play with these thoughts a lot with these thoughts, then one will also have a sense for the proper keeping of a cash book or a ledger, for the shaping of a proper workbench; one will also not disdain it if one is put in the position of having to do cobbling work oneself. For only in the case of someone who is able to engage practically in life, who can be dexterous in circumstances where it comes down to taking hold everywhere, in the case of such a person the whole human organism is so imbued with inner skill that this inner skill also finds expression in truly viable thoughts.

This is what should penetrate our minds. It will permeate our culture if we familiarize ourselves with what people today fear most.

One could say that there are two things today that point to two states of fear in contemporary humanity – I do not think that you, if you look at the situation with an inner sense of truthfulness, can refute me. The first is that, throughout the civilized world, there is a terrible fear of getting to the real causes of war. They do not want to look into it, or even stick their nose into it, at most with the opponent, but certainly not at home! With a few exceptions, people avoid dealing with the actual causes of the terrible human catastrophe of recent years, they are terribly afraid of it. During the war, this was even idealized. There were people who took the view: From this war will emerge a new human life, a new fertilization of the ideals of humanity and so on. - One will be able to study the events of recent times a lot to get behind the real cause of this horror catastrophe. But then nothing positive will arise as the content of this war, but it will arise that the old forms of culture and civilization have become rotten, that they have led themselves ad absurdum in this war catastrophe, that this war means nothing more than the leading ad absurdum of civilization as it was until this war. That is one thing that people are terribly afraid of, afraid of an external event. They are so afraid that today they have generally given up even thinking in terms of tomorrow. Because no reasonable person, from either side, could believe that what is called the Treaty of Versailles could ever give birth to reality. And yet, because people think only for today, not for tomorrow, this strange instrument has come into being. That is an external event.

But there is something else, and that is the fear people have of advancing into ever greater and greater awareness of the soul life. If it seems to people somehow justified to flee from consciousness into the unconscious, then they are glad. When a world view such as this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science comes along, which strives for a complete development of consciousness and wants to arrive at its truths from this complete development of consciousness, then people do not want to approach it. It is too difficult for them. It requires activity, it requires that one really engages in flexible spiritual life. That is too difficult.

But people strive for revelation in their lower states of consciousness: first, of what spiritual life is, and second, of what lives within the human being. How many people, much more than you think, do not want to engage with spiritual truths grasped with a healthy soul sense today. But if something from the spiritual worlds is proclaimed to them by a medium, then they fall for it. One does not need to make an effort to understand it. It comes about unconsciously, and one wants to believe the unconscious. The other thing that follows directly from this is the blatant spread of psychoanalysis. It is hard to believe how this psychoanalysis has taken root in people's minds with breakneck speed. What does it consist of? It consists of the fact that all kinds of medical people are opening up today and – it's hard to say in a nutshell, I've often analyzed psychoanalysis here – setting up something that brings what is subconscious in the human psyche up into consciousness. People are made to tell their dreams, and they explore earlier experiences of disappointment, of unfulfilled desires and so on, which have then been forgotten and formed islands in the soul and so on. In this way, they try to get a clear picture of what actually lives in the human being. Particularly clever people have found out that a great deal lives in the human soul, which takes root in the soul during early childhood in the form of unnatural feelings and sensations, which are then pushed down into the subconscious; but they continue to live in the human being, the human being is their slave. These people trace the Oedipus myth back to the unnatural feelings that every child is supposed to have towards its mother and so on. These people are clear in their view that every little girl is actually jealous of her mother because she loves her father, and every little boy is jealous of his father because he loves his mother. From this arises a complex of feelings, which, transformed into myth, appears in the Oedipus myth and the like. People do not want to believe that spiritual things play a role, but spiritual things that must be permeated with the light of consciousness, people are afraid of that. They are afraid of bringing these things into the light of consciousness. They would prefer to keep everything shrouded in a nebulous darkness. I have already pointed out to you a splendid example, which keeps cropping up time and again when psychoanalysis is discussed: a lady is invited to an evening entertainment at a house where the lady of the house is ailing and the farewell party is being celebrated because she has to travel to a spa. The master of the house stays at home, the lady of the house has to go to the spa. The evening entertainment is over. The lady of the house has already been sent to the train station, the evening party is leaving and is on its way home. A cab, not a car, is driving around the corner, and the evening party is moving out of the way to the left and right. But the one lady I am actually eyeing does not move to the left or to the right, but remains in the middle of the street and runs in front of the horses. The coachman naturally makes a terrible din, but the lady runs and runs, and the coachman has the greatest difficulty in holding the horses back, because he could run over the lady. They come to a bridge. The lady, quite an object for the psychoanalysts, throws herself into the stream, and of course the evening party follows suit to save her. What do you do with her? Well, of course, take her back to the host's house, that's the next step.

The psychoanalyst now has this lady in front of him. He lets her tell him everything she went through in her youth, and he now also happily comes to the conclusion that when she was a very little girl, she was crossing the street and a horse came around the corner; she was very frightened. That has sunk down into the subconscious. It is down there. Since then she has been so afraid of horses that she ran away from them on the street, not dodging to the right or to the left. That is the isolated province of the soul that she has, the fear of horses, which dwells in the subconscious.

There is something in this subconscious, but one must penetrate this subconscious with the light of spiritual research. Then one comes to the conclusion that this subconscious is very clever under certain pathological conditions, that under the ordinary individual human consciousness, however, it is not exactly the foundations of the Oedipus myth, not exactly the fear of the horse that once crossed one's path, but rather a certain sophistication. Because the lady who was invited to that evening party naturally wanted nothing more than to spend the night in that house after the lady of the house had been sent off to the bath, and the best way for the subconscious to arrange things was to seize the next best opportunity – had it not been the steed, had it been something else – that the evening party would have to bring her back to the house. That is how she had achieved her goal. Of course, according to her upbringing, according to what she had absorbed, she would never have violated her morality to such an extent as to do something like that. In the superconscious, she is not that clever; but in the subconscious, there are many sophisticated impulses that can be very clever.

This whole spreading psychoanalysis, which takes on such blatant forms today, in which, more than you think, today in particular the more hopeful intellectuals believe - I say this not in a derogatory sense, but even with the tone of truth -, in which even today theologians would like to base religion, this psychoanalysis is the other fear product of the present. People are afraid of consciousness. They do not want things to be seen in the clear light of consciousness, but they want the most important thing to dwell down there in the subconscious, and for man to be dominated in regard to his most important things, especially in regard to his religious feelings. Read about this in William James, the American. Because whether it is called psychoanalysis in some areas of Europe or whether it is called it as William James, the American, expresses these things, it is all the same. There is a fear of the conscious. One does not want the most important thing that lives in man to be in his consciousness. After all, man would have to think more if he were to direct himself with his conscious will. It is important that the human being has justified that he thinks less.

Our eurythmy is worked out entirely from the consciousness. It is the opposite of everything dreamy. People are afraid that it is less artistic because they associate the artistic with the dreamy. But that is nonsense. In the artistic, it does not matter whether it comes from this or that region, but that it is artistic in its forms and in its development. This eurythmy, which is based entirely on the superconscious, on the opposite of the subconscious, was recently appraised by a gentleman, as I was told, who is now also a doctor: He noticed a lot of unconsciousness in it. — Of course, this is proof that the gentleman did not understand eurythmy at all. Precisely that which is the lifeblood of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been noticed very little. And it will only be fully noticed when one can really undergo such an inner education of thinking, feeling and will through this spiritual science that it makes one more skillful for life, not less. I do not want to claim that today all those who have made anthroposophy their creed are skilled in life. A creed does not mean much in this respect. I really dare not claim that all anthroposophists are skilled in life. But you see, what is expressed in the real movement of the Anthroposophical Society is often what is brought into it from outside. And only then will anthroposophically oriented spiritual science be able to be what it should be for the world, not only when mystical tendencies, unworldliness, false idealism, and a kind of spiritualism — I could also say “uncleism”; no, I mean similar things — are brought into it , but when what can be gained in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is carried out: a stimulation of the soul life that passes into the limbs, that takes hold of the whole human being - not just the creed - and thereby enables people to intervene in the affairs of the world. That is what it is mainly about. In this one should seek the whole seriousness of life.