The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today, I would like to develop a number of themes, repeatedly presented as far as some of you are concerned. At the same time, this can serve as a preparation for what will have to be put forth tomorrow³² concerning the formation of a social opinion. First of all, I would like to call your attention to the manner in which we proceed within the sphere of present-day academic habits when debating and forming opinions concerning ideological questions. Our main concern is to decide logically: What is true and what is false? This specific mode of inquiry is something that must change today. Johann Gottlieb Fichte³³ put it beautifully, “One's philosophy depends on what sort of person one is.” Depending on a person's disposition, he forms a more materialistic or a more spiritualistic world conception, a realistic, idealistic, liberal or conservative, socialistic political world outlook; he develops a philistine or a progressive opinion concerning the emancipation of women. I could add indefinitely to the list. Opinions are formed and defended, because a person is convinced he possesses the only right view and that someone with an opposing idea is wrong. Right and wrong is something that is of special interest to us today in forming a judgment.

Already, it can be observed—as we shall make clear presently—that we have the beginning of a transition from these “true and false” judgments to something entirely different. First, however, we shall try to clarify that the concepts of “true” and “false” did not always mean what they do today. Even as late as in the early days of Christianity, but particularly in ancient Egyptian and Chaldean times, not to mention the periods that preceded these cultural epochs, something quite different was applicable when one wished to form a judgment. Logic was not the determining factor. Instead, one had the feeling that if a person judged something in a certain way, it was healthy, if he formed an opinion in another way it was unhealthy. Just as we judge a person to be healthy because he is chubby-faced, rosy and lively, and we judge someone to be sickly because he is emaciated, pale and has circles under the eyes, it was said that an individual was healthy or sick depending on the way he made judgments. In the manner in which he formed opinions one saw an expression of the whole human organization just as we do in the chubby-faced or drawn, pale appearance. A person was judged more on what he himself actually was, less in regard to what he represented concerning his surroundings about which he developed for himself conceptions of right or wrong.

I have already emphasized for a number of you who were present earlier that in a certain sense we must return again to this way of looking at things. The course of human evolution is such that certain instinctive atavistic truths, originating from the ancient Mysteries, gradually became intellectualized and abstract. To this day we live in this intellectualism and abstraction. The new initiation science, on the other hand, which must become established, has to revert in a certain sense to the former feelings in full consciousness. Hence, in the future—although in a more or less distant future in regard to general humanity—there will be no dispute concerning whether an opinion is right or wrong, if one is seriously endeavoring to work for the progress of human civilization. An individual who searches for atoms and molecules in the external world, for example, instead of envisioning spiritual beings behind the sensory veil, will be considered to have pathological opinions. People will think that he is suffering from a certain sickness of soul that can be designated as a mental deficiency. The view that the external world is not a “phenomenon” in Goethe's sense, but that behind it something like real atoms and molecules are concealed, will be considered feebleminded. Such a view will be called mentally defective, not wrong, because people will find that it proceeds from an inadequate organization of the whole human being. It would also not be called wrong but childish to describe what arises out of the body's organization as a result of the metabolic processes—the combustion processes arising from the liver, the stomach, the blood circulation, and so on as an exalted mystic does. It can be described accurately, but it is a matter of what standpoint one takes. However, if you consider it as something other than the flame that flares up out of the organization, it would be childish. I told you earlier that the word "childishness" has a different connotation on the other side of the threshold than on this side.^T1 Seen from this side, you realize that the human being must mature in the course of his life between birth and death. He must become composed and sober and, unlike a child, cannot remain playful in his opinions. If, on the other hand, you Look from yonder side of the threshold, from the super-sensible world, into the sense world and observe the growing child, you see how the human being descended from the spiritual world and took hold of the physical body. You also see how the entity that descended works in a sculpturing manner on the corporeality in the physical world. In an entirely different way you then see that the soul-spiritual element is much more perfect than what we can develop in the life between birth and death as our reasoning power, our intellectuality.

I indicated earlier³⁴ that between birth and death the human being is capable of inwardly attaining to the wisdom which, out of the spiritual world, is actively involved in shaping the human brain and the remaining human organization. Philosophers such as Max Dessoir,³⁵ for example, took exception to these views, because when they mention the soul they have no idea what soul and spirit really are. Speaking from the other side of the threshold, “childishness” signifies that the soul-spiritual element of the child's head works on the physical head. What we designate as genius from this side of the threshold is nothing but the preservation of a portion of this “childishness,” “child-headedness,” throughout life. It is only when you retain too much of this childlike quality and you cannot realize how it surges forth out of the seething organism as the inner spark, the inner divine element, that genius turns into excessive “childheadedness,” namely, “childishness.” This is something that must be comprehended quite objectively. We must only be aware that on the other side these matters must be defined differently than on this side and that words receive another meaning. When we use the word “Kindskoepfigkeit” (childishness) on this side of the threshold, we really mean something negative. When we speak from the other side, we refer to the quality that remains in the human being in the right sense as genius and in the pathological sense as false mysticism.

Returning once again from the merely abstract and logical to reality, when We speak of right and wrong, we refer to something that exists in the human being only as thought, a mere discrepancy between the inner and the outer realm, but when we speak of an unhealthy opinion, we indicate that something is amiss in the human being. This is the case, for example, when a person takes the world of phenomena to be a real, material world, or mysticism to be a direct divine manifestation within, instead of the flickering of organic processes. Knowledge, then, must become real, factual. This is the essential point towards which we will have to aim through spiritual science, namely, to refer to the factual, the real, once more, not simply the logical, when we speak of what comes from the human being.

As I said, even in the early ages of ancient Greece such talk of right and wrong in the modern logical sense would not have been understood. The old Greeks still spoke of healthy and unhealthy opinions. The followers of Platonism then gradually worked to achieve logic, which reached its culmination during Roman civilization and continued on into later periods.

Under certain suppositions, the judgments of right and wrong received a special expression in Scholasticism, judgments that were like an echo of the Roman manner of judging, only in a different area. People are still far from regaining a spiritual comprehension of healthy and unhealthy opinions in our time; instead, they aim in a different direction. They have worked their way to something entirely apart from man insofar as making judgments is concerned. When I say that a person makes healthy or unhealthy judgments, I refer to his organization. When I say: This person makes right or wrong judgments, I only make a statement about his condition of soul and frame of mind I mean thereby that he is either a simpleton or an intelligent person, referring to characteristics of his. Lately, however, people have departed from that. Already, a particular world conception has taken hold of a number of individuals. Among those who will not find their way to spiritual-scientific views, this world conception will become popular, will become ever more and more widespread. It is something that proceeds from America but already makes itself felt in Europe, although, to begin with, only among the philosophers who always seem to have the edge on such matters. I am referring to so-called pragmatism. It is no longer concerned with right and wrong in the sense of the logic of antiquity; it maintains that right is what enables a person to adjust well to life. A person who maintains something that is not advantageous to him in life says that it is damaging. On the other hand, if he holds a view whereby he cleverly masters life, then he calls it something useful. Among pragmatists the views of right and wrong are considered so much nonsense, an illusion that people succumb to. An entire school of philosophy has sprung up around pragmatism which, as I said, is more widely known in America than here, but is also beginning to show up in Europe in a variety of forms. This school of thought regards right and wrong as illusory, and believes that what is termed right or true is called that by man only because he finds it useful in life. Man judges something to be false or wrong because it is detrimental in life. In Germany where people are always the most thorough in such matters, this view has attained quite a special development in the so-called “philosophy of the as-if.”³⁶ It originated from a man by the name of Vaihinger and has already found some popularity—I believe there is even an “as-if science,” or something like that. The latter says that we cannot assert that atoms and molecules exist. We can, however, say that we view the world with an eye to what is useful. It serves our purpose to view the world “as if” there were molecules and atoms; it is useful to us to view the world's course “as if” ethical ideals were made manifest. We behold the world “as if” it were ruled by a God. This “as-if” philosophy is quite characteristic of our times. It is the German version of American pragmatism, which has found disciples here. One of them, for example, is Wilhelm Jerusalem,³⁷ who has gone so far as to say that the qualifications true and false originally signified nothing else but something useful or disadvantageous in a dialectical sense. When we have to conclude that a person has a wrong idea about something, but this simultaneously helps him to become rich and well adjusted to life, these logicians come and say, “His idea is true!” To us, this is an illusion. In reality, it is not true, but something that is beneficial to him, which is then reinterpreted and called “true,” and whatever is disadvantageous is then considered incorrect, untrue.

In another passage by Jerusalem we find, "The evaluation, which is subject to an interpretation carried out on the basis of usefulness or disadvantage, and the measure taken on the same basis, is nothing else but the origin of the concepts true and false." Sorry, I cannot read it to you differently; this is philosophical style!

It really is almost legal jargon. You can see that here the concepts true and false are traced back to the concepts of usefulness and disadvantage. This is absolutely the lowest level. We proceed from the concepts of healthy and pathological and then find the concepts of right and wrong. These concepts still adhere to man. One who has a right opinion is called intelligent, one who judges wrongly is called stupid. But it is at least something that still points to human qualities. Now we go so far that we find truth only in what is useful, wrong only in what is detrimental. This is the truth of the present! Philosophers put it into words; others actually judge accordingly, but they are just not aware of it. Particularly social opinions, when voiced, are expressed from none other than this standpoint.

Evolution must again continue in an upward direction. In the presence of truth, we must be capable, first of all, of having a feeling, an inner experience that in itself gives us a feeling of salubriousness. We must feel happy, so to say, in the face of truth and unhappy in the presence of the false. Our age demands this; we must strive for this in a healthy manner. We have to return again to the concepts of true and false, but with feeling.

This is what must take hold of humanity as inner cultural education, namely, that the concepts of true and false are not treated in the complacent manner customary today, but that man can have an inward Part in truth and error. When one has insight into the necessities of the present age, it is a very painful experience to see that people have gradually become so indifferent to one or the other assertion. Even just a century ago it was otherwise. You should have seen what would have happened if a gathering of people a hundred years ago had been told that, looked at from the other side, childishness signifies the same thing which, when seen from this side, is designated under certain circumstances as genius! A Wilhelm von Humboldt or a Fichte would have jumped up from their seats, if something like this had been stated in those days when man was still involved with all his being in such matters. Nowadays, people do not get stirred up when one or another contention is made. The souls are asleep today. To have to encounter these sleeping souls at every step is something that fills one who comprehends the demands of our age with pain. As the most extreme result of this drowsiness in our age, we now have the theosophical movement whose followers wish to feel an inner sensual pleasure. They like matters expressed in such a way that everybody is gently calmed down more and more. A harmonious mood is supposed to pour over the listeners, gradually lulling everybody to sleep. It is just then, when everything can slowly, gently drift into sleep, that the eternal mystical element is felt!

This is what must change again. What we require is that our hearts leap in one or the other direction depending on the kind of assertion that is made. Then, one will no longer analyze with mere logical neutrality whether something is right or wrong; one will feel well or sick depending on whether something is experienced as right or wrong. From that point, still further progress will be made. Spiritual science, however, has to cultivate this already now as an impulse that must penetrate us. We will have to return in full consciousness to where we judge something to be healthy or pathological. This, in turn, must affect the will. What we formerly experienced merely as true or false must now fill us inwardly with will, as it were. The will must be aroused. We must will the right; we must not will but rather destroy what is wrong, namely, what is sick. We must aspire to this change of attitude in man. It is not a matter merely of striving for another more or less correct view that can subsequently be discussed. Instead, we must aim for something that makes human beings sound inside. Our understanding must not merely aim for something concerning which we can then say that it is logically correct. It must lead to action, to reality, by means of which something happens.

It is life that is of importance to true, genuine spiritual science, not something that inhabits the head of a professor who today sits in his chair and with complete indifference holds forth on truth and error, till his listeners, vexed by his neutrality, could climb the walls. Certainly, many people would now interject that it is precisely inner calmness and tranquility that should be developed. Such matters must not be misunderstood. Inner calm and equanimity signify balance. This implies that We are capable of taking the side of the sound opinion, but that we are also able to develop the counter-forces so as to remain in balance in spite of taking sides, meaning that we always have ourselves under control. Conscious balance differs from drowsy inner balance. Thus, you see that what we call an evolution in the spiritual scientific sense must reach deeply into the innermost definitions of truth.

We cannot speak about man's faculties between death and a new birth if we do not become accustomed to using words in a way differing entirely from how it is done in today's spoken language. This is why people who wish to hear only what they already know will always find the language of spiritual science unintelligible. For not only would they have to accustom themselves to the fact that the words are connected in a different manner, but that a content other than the one heretofore understood is poured into the words. It is only when we thus look into human evolution that we acquire the ability to judge how different the human being was in prehistoric times; how he will change again in the far-off future, and how we must evaluate what presently confronts us in the intermediary stage of civilization. Our age is beset by such catastrophic dangers that it is imperative to come round to a real knowledge of man. At the moment, we in Europe find ourselves at a most important, decisive point. Most people have no inkling of what goes on in the complicated organism of public life. The present days are almost more significant for the continuing progress of European civilization than the days of the recent past. People will have to get used to the fact that the wish to cling to the old is destructive, and that only a firm reliance on the sources of spiritual science will lead us forward.

It is strange how a certain insight gained beyond the threshold in the spiritual worlds casts its shadows into this arch-materialistic age. Two or three years ago one became the subject of ridicule if one spoke about the impulses proceeding from certain secret Western societies that determine public affairs. I gave a whole series of lectures³⁸ here concerning these matters, and a number of you will have become familiar with their content in one way or another. One was laughed at, more or less, if one mentioned that public affairs are penetrated by forces whose origin is discovered when light is thrown upon certain secret societies that follow the traditions of ancient initiation wisdom but apply the latter in the wrong direction. Today, in a relatively short time, things have changed. For a week, the sober English press, which is indeed not inclined to lend itself to special capers, has brought out articles about the existence of secret societies. Even though these articles deal with starting points that are nothing but what is put out by the Jesuits, one nonetheless must admit that even though the wind blows from quite the wrong corner it still catches people's attention. What is discussed for as long as a week with, let me say, philosophical exactitude indicates how thoroughly the world has changed in this regard in the last few years. People easily overlook it, however, when the sober English newspapers³⁹ print compilations today such as the one showing that in 1897 the world was confronted with something like a description of future events. Something like this appears in the columns on the left-hand side while on the right side appear the programs of the Bolshevists and current events. What was known already in 1897 is happening today; one can prove philologically that today's events correspond to the earlier forecast. Naturally, people point to these matters journalistically without having any knowledge about the deeper relationships; hardly anybody today senses what he is dealing with. What this is all about is that there are individuals, standing far in the background of what happens on the surface, who with a firm hand manipulate the strings leading to current events. Yet they wish to remain unknown and therefore transfer to others what would otherwise be traced back to them. What is printed is a fabrication, but a carefully calculated one, especially when its origins are considered, because it is designed to lay the blame on others so that mankind will not suspect those who are actually pulling the strings. As I said, today one must feel the responsibility to face what is actually taking place.

I said to many a person in 1914: It is not permissible to write the history of that catastrophic war, which began in 1914, in the manner in which such events were reported in former days simply by drawing on the archives. If one really wishes to comprehend what had its start in 1914, one must resort to the occult means of thinking. One has to clearly understand that some of the most eminent individuals, who participated throughout the civilized world in bringing about the catastrophe, suffered from a benumbed, dimmed consciousness. Such moments, however, when people become benumbed in their consciousness, are the gateways through which the Ahrimanic powers enter the world, governing and taking charge. If a person occupies an important position but in a decisive moment suffers a dimming down of consciousness, he no longer rules; Ahriman rules through him. Spiritual forces extend their rule into this world, such as those I now refer to, in this case of Ahrimanic nature. The events of the last few years can only be understood if one is willing to trace these relationships in a spiritual-scientific manner. It will become increasingly impossible to comprehend what is happening throughout the civilized world unless one is ready to understand it on the basis of spiritual science. One can have endless discussions about what this or that person said three or four years ago or today. It is much more important to acquire a knowledge of man, so that it is possible to ascertain how sound or unsound a person was or is in a given position, for it depends on that whether benign or evil powers affect the course of events. It is true that the path to forming judgments in this manner is not strewn with roses. For when people are asked to form judgments in this manner concerning the interplay in the sense world of supersensory or subsensory powers, they are easily tempted to lose their heads in mystical arrogance.

He who would seriously nurture spiritual science requires not only the normal degree of sobriety but a higher form of it; no rapture, no losing of oneself, but a firm stand on a solid basis of reality. This is what is necessary. We must train ourselves toward reality if we wish to form judgments the way they really ought to be formed today.

It is a great danger when anyone says that his pronouncements are the result of higher powers, not of what he does or does not wish. Nothing but pure egotism is usually concealed behind that. Mystics who present themselves to the world as bearers of this or that spiritual entity are most frequently the biggest of egotists. This is why the first requirement on the path to a certain higher knowledge is the development of sobriety, the ability to disregard everything connected with egotism. As a rule, fanatical ecstasy is nothing but an alternate form of egotism. It is also particularly important that mankind cultivate a certain sense of humor on its path to spirituality. The world is far removed from such humor today. It is extraordinarily difficult to cope with the world's opinion in regard to these matters, because everything possible that organically exists and works in the depths of human nature adds its voice to it.

Perhaps a first indication has now been given of what has to be pointed out in order to stress the significance, on the one hand, of the path leading to the attainment of a spiritual opinion, on the other, the difficulty and danger of this path. We must be aware of these two aspects. We must not allow ourselves to be held back because of the dangers involved; we also may not become remiss in face of the efforts required truly to form an opinion in accordance with the spirit. These points must always be kept in mind when trying to understand the human being of the present time, and without understanding him in this way, we cannot arrive at a social opinion. Man must be comprehended in such a manner that he is fully appraised as a body, soul, and spirit; that not only his life between birth and death but also his life between death and a new birth is taken into consideration. Basically, judgments such as “useful” or “detrimental” have no validity for the life between death and a new birth; the opinions “healthy” or “unhealthy” make much sense for that period. There, human souls are either “healthy” or “unhealthy” due to the after-effects of earthly life. To consider the concepts "useful" or “damaging” as “right” or “wrong” in the sense that we explained it here implies limiting all world observation merely to a physical world. The existence in the present of pragmatism and a philosophy of the “as-if” is the surest sign that people have no feeling at all for what lies across the threshold from the physical world in the spiritual realm.

A sound social view, however, will only come about on the Basis of this initiation science. Let us take one area of the threefold social organism, held by some to be the most material and prosaic, namely, the economic life. We know that the economy will only develop in a healthy direction when it evolves under the principle of associations. What does that imply? It means that in the future people will in no way acquire an economic opinion for themselves through the single individuality. Of course, epistemologically it will stem from the individuality, but it will not be developed by it. To a properly evolved mankind of the future, the forming of an economic opinion merely out of the individuality will seem like the famous sleeper, depicted by Jean Paul, who wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark room, sees nothing, hears nothing and ponders what time it is, trying to figure this out by thinking about it. One must be in harmony with one's surroundings if one wishes to form an idea of what time it is in the middle of the night. And in the future, if one is to arrive at an economic opinion—concerning, for example, prices or the number of workers that can be employed in a certain branch of the economy—one will have to be in close contact with associations, those active in production in this particular branch and those representing its consumers. As a result of such cooperation between associations it will be possible to form a valid judgment. The way one tries to do it today, proceeding from the individuality, is the same thing as what the above mentioned fellow does who has been asleep and attempts to calculate all by himself what time it is. Recent events have demonstrated how far one gets with an opinion that is not based on associative experience.

I have cited another example as well to a number of you already. In the nineteenth century learned discussions were held concerning the usefulness of the gold standard. From the middle well into the last third of the nineteenth century, representatives from all the parliaments of Europe, as well as from any number of practical spheres, always found the most beautiful and ingenious reasons why a gold standard should replace bimetalism.⁴⁰ What did they expect from it? They claimed that the gold standard would bring about free trade. What happened in reality? Protective tariffs everywhere—the opposite of what all those smart economists and parliamentarians had predicted! I am not trying to be funny when I say “those smart people.” They were all in error, yet I am not calling them stupid or foolish; they really were smart. They did not have economic experience, however; for this sort of experience cannot be fabricated out of thin air or developed through pondering. It can only be attained when, in associative connections, one draws lines from one area to another. Just as we read time from the clocks, so, from the associations, we shall read the basics for an economic judgment that can lead to actions.

What does all this signify? You will recall my frequent references to the existence of a kind of group opinion, a group soul, at a certain starting point of our human evolution. Whole groups of people instinctively judged and felt alike. Indeed, languages would never have developed if people had not formed opinions as groups. There even existed a group memory, as I have outlined in some of my lecture cycles.⁴¹ Thus, humanity's evolution proceeded from groups, from instinctive group opinions. It then descended to its lowest point, and will ascend again through associations, but consciously this time by uniting people once again in groups, in associations, that support and base themselves on their economic judgment. People once again ascend to an associative opinion. However, this will be accomplished by the conscious forming of such groups; what happened formerly out of atavistic instinct will now happen in full consciousness. Here, you again have one of the reasons that can be given on the basis of spiritual science for the necessity of a social development such as set forth in my book, Towards Social Renewal. These matters are of such a nature that they can be established with absolute mathematical certainty if one turns to the sources of true perception. These matters are not made public recklessly and lightly; they are brought up from the very foundations of human life. What is necessary for our time is to build a world in a social manner that is based on insight into human nature. We cannot advance without that. All talk about leftist or rightist politics, all dogmatic dictates that men have for believing in a God, everything from a philistine to a liberal conception of women's rights, from the most reactionary to the Bolshevistic side, remains empty talk without such insight, talk not founded on reality, which will lead only into destruction. Reality will only be grasped by means of spiritual experience. Then, however, one must be capable of entering into a true knowledge of the human being. One must be able to see how this associative element, required in the economic life with full consciousness, will result in an ascending development in respect to what had been lost of the atavistic, instinctive judgment during the descent. We deal here with true, genuine, totally discernible science; a science that is as lucid as the Pythagorean theorem, even though today's scientists pay little heed to its lucidity. Yet we must have a sufficient number of human beings who can comprehend the crystal clarity of those judgments which alone are the only ones able to lead from our decline to an ascent by drawing on the sources of spiritual science.

I intended all this as a sort of introduction also for tomorrow, when we are going to speak in lectures and free discussions about the forming of social judgments and the necessities of doing that in the present-day social conditions.

• 32. See lecture by Rudolf Steiner, “Urteilsbildung in den drei Gliedern des sozialen Organismus” in Gegenwart, 1950/51, #7 and 8/9. Not translated.
• 33. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: 1762–1814. The quotation literally says: “The kind of philosophy one chooses depends ... on what kind of human being one is ... A philosophical system is not just a pile of inanimate household goods that one can either dispose of or accept any way one likes; it is ensouled by the soul of him who has it.” In “Erste und zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre und Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre,” 1779.
• T1. Note by translator: In German, the word for “childishness” is “Kindskoepfigkeit,” literally meaning “child-headedness.” Hence the references below to the head, etc.
• 34. Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity, GA 15 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1970).
• 35. Max Dessoir: 1867–1947. Compare this with Rudolf Steiner: Von Seelenraetseln, GA 20 (Dornach, 1960). Not translated.
• 36. Hans Vaihinger: 1852–1933, Die Philosophie des Als-Ob. System der theoretischen, praktischen und religioesen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus. Berlin, 1911.
• 37. Wilhelm Jerusalem: 1842–1910, who in 1908 published a translation of Pragmatism by William James.
• 38. Rudolf Steiner: Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Part I, GA 173 (Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1966). Not translated.
• 39. Appeared in “The Morning Post,” London, July 12–30, 1920. Also published in pamphlet form, The Causes of World Unrest, London, 1920.
• 40. Bimetalism: The policy of using two metals (mostly gold and silver) jointly as a monetary standard. In most cases, replaced by the gold standard since the second half of the nineteenth century.
• 41. Rudolf Steiner: Egyptian Myths and Mysteries, GA 106 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1971).

Once again, I would like to sum up some of what has been presented here recently. We spoke about the external sense world in its relation to the inner world of the human being and I pointed out two things in particular. I stressed that the external sense world certainly must be understood as a world of phenomena and that it is a sign of the prejudices of our age not to interpret correctly this view of the world of phenomena. Certainly, here and there, a certain perception surfaces concerning the fact that the outer sense world is a world of phenomena, of appearances, not one even of merely material realities. Then, however, behind this world of external phenomena, one seeks for material realities, for example, for atoms and molecules, and the like. This search for atoms and molecules, in short, for any world of physical reality standing behind the world of phenomena, is just as if one were to seek for some kind of molecular materiality behind the rainbow that is obviously only an appearance, a phenomenon. This search for material reality in regard to the external world is something quite unfounded, as spiritual science points out from the most diverse directions. We have to understand clearly that surrounding us in what we perceive as the sense world is a world of phenomena, and we may not interpret the sense of touch differently from the other senses in regard to the sense world. Just as we see the rainbow with our eyes without searching for a material reality behind it, accepting it as appearance, so we must accept the entire external world as it is, namely, in the sense I depicted it decades ago in my introduction to the volume an color theory⁴² in Goethe's natural scientific writings. The question then is posed to us: What is it that really stands behind this world of phenomena? The material atoms are not behind it; there are spiritual beings behind it—there is spirituality. This recognition signifies a lot, for it means that we admit that we do not live in a material world but in one of spiritual realities.

When we as human beings turn to the external world this drawing representing, as it were, the boundary of our body—we have here the sense world and behind it the world of spiritual realities, spiritual beings (right side).

Now, when we turn to the human interior, when we move from our senses inward, we have first of all the content of our world of conceptions, our soul world. If we call the sense world the world of sense phenomena, of sensory appearances, we have the world of spiritual phenomena when we turn from our senses inward (left). Naturally, in the manner in which they are present within us, our thoughts, our conceptions, are not realities, they are spiritual phenomena. Now, if we descend from this soul world still deeper into our inner being, it is all-important for us not to believe that we thereby arrive at a special, higher world, something that mystic dreamers presuppose. There, we actually come into the world of our organism, the world of material realities.

This is why it is important not to assume that by inward brooding one could discover something spiritual; there, we should seek for the constitution of the material human organism. One should not seek for all manner of mystical realities within oneself, as I have pointed out from a number of viewpoints. Instead, behind what pushes up into the soul and thus turns into a spiritual phenomenon, especially when one penetrates more and more deeply into oneself, we should seek the interaction of liver, heart, lungs, and other organs that mystics in particular do not like to hear mentioned. There we become acquainted with the essentially material element of our earthly existence. As I have often emphasized, many a person who believes he has encountered mystical realities by descending deeply into his inner being only finds what is given off by his liver, gall bladder and other related organs. Just as tallow turns into flame, so everything that liver, lungs, heart and stomach give off turns into mystical phenomena when it lights up into consciousness.

The important point is that true spiritual science guides the human being beyond any sort of illusion. Materialists cling to the illusion that they can find physical, material realities, not spiritual realities, behind the sense world. It is the illusion of mystics that when they descend into their own being, they can find, not the world of the material organization, but different kinds of special divine sparks, and such like.

In genuine spiritual science, it is important that we do not search for material substance in the outer world and do not seek the Spirit in the inner world, which initially appears as such through inward brooding.

What I have now said is of significant consequence for our entire world view. Bear in mind that from the time man falls asleep until he wakes up he is outside his physical and etheric bodies with his astral body and I. Where is he then? This is the question we must ask ourselves. If we assume that out there is the world described by the physicists, it makes no sense whatever to speak about an existence of the astral body or the ego outside the physical body. If we know, however, that beyond the sense world lies the world of spiritual realities, out of which the sense world blossoms forth, then we are able to imagine that the astral body and ego move into the spiritual world which lies behind the sense world. Indeed, astral body and ego find themselves in that part of the spiritual world that underlies the sense world. Thus, we can say that in sleep man penetrates into the spiritual world which is the basis of the physical world. Of course, upon awakening, his ego and astral body first penetrate his etheric being and then what constitutes the realm of the material organization.

Clear concepts of an anthroposophical world-view can only be attained if one is able to form intelligible ideas concerning such matters. For, above all, one will not succumb to the illusion of seeking the divine, or the spiritual underlying our human condition, behind the sensory surroundings. There, only that spiritual element is found which, out of itself, brings forth the sense world. As human beings we have our roots in the spiritual world, but in which spiritual world? We have our roots in the very spiritual world that we leave when incarnating into our physical body. We come from the spiritual world that we live in between death and a new birth; through birth or conception we enter this physical existence. The world we inhabit between death and a new birth, which we then leave, is a different spiritual world than this one [behind the sense world], although, because it is a spiritual world, it is related to the latter from which springs forth our sense world. We will not grasp the spiritual world of which we are speaking—I have described it in the lecture cycle, Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Birth,⁴³ namely, the spiritual world we experience between death and rebirth which creates and brings us forth—if we seek it behind the sense world. We will not take hold of it if we seek it within ourselves. There, we only discover the material element of our own organization. We can only grasp it when we leave space altogether. This spiritual world is not within space. As I have often emphasized, we can only speak about it when we base it solely on time, thinking of it as a world of time. Consequently, it goes without saying that all the descriptions we have about this world between death and rebirth can only be images, merely pictures. We must not confuse these pictures, in which we must of necessity express ourselves, with the realities in which we dwell between death and a new birth. It is vital that on the basis of the anthroposophical world-view we do not merely talk about all manner of fantastic things, depicting them in the ancient terminology which actually does not designate anything new. What matters is that we enrich our world of concepts and ideas when we try to send our thoughts into the world in which we live between death and rebirth. Thus we can acquire a most important concept that can also give rise to profound, albeit uncomfortable, reflection. It is this: When we have absolved the life between death and birth, we incarnate here in space. We penetrate into space out of a condition that is not spatial. Space has significance only for our experiences between birth and death. Again, it is important to know that when we pass through the portal of death, not only do we leave the body with our soul, we also leave space behind.

This concept was quite familiar to people until the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries A.D. Even a person like Scotus Erigena,⁴⁴ who lived in the ninth century, was fully conversant with it. Yet the modern age has completely lost the concept of the spirituality underlying human existence, within which the human being lives after death—as was thought then, only after death; today we must say: between death and rebirth we are outside space. The modern age is proud and arrogant regarding its thinking, yet it can actually think only of what is spatial, holding any and every thought in a spatial context. In order to conceive of spiritual matters, on the one hand, we must make the effort to overcome space within our thinking. Otherwise we will never reach the truly spiritual; above all, we will never attain to an even approximately correct natural science, much less a spiritual science. Particularly in our time it is infinitely important to become acquainted with these finer distinctions of spiritual-scientific knowledge. For, what we acquire through such concepts is not just any kind of world concept, any sort of thought content. The acquisition of a thought content is, after all, the very least we can achieve through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For it is one and the same whether someone believes the world consists of molecules and atoms, or if he believes man consists of a physical body, a somewhat less dense etheric body, then something more nebulous and tenuous, the astral body, followed by whatever is next, say, a still finer mental body, or something even more and more rarefied; for one doesn't come anywhere near the etheric body by just thinking of something more rarefied. It is really the same thing whether one is a materialist picturing the world as atoms, or whether one harbors this coarsely materialistic conception that is the common factor of the so-called theosophical society teachings, or whatever they are called now. Something quite different is what really matters, namely, that we become capable of changing our entire soul constitution. We have to make every effort to think about the spiritual in a manner different from the one in which we are accustomed to think about the external sense world. We do not comprehend spiritual science if we conceive of something other than the sense world as being spiritual; we enter into spiritual science if we think about the spiritual in a different way than we think about the sense realm. We think of the latter in terms of space. We can think about the spiritual world in terms of time within certain limits, because we have to think of ourselves within this spiritual world. And we are in a certain sense spiritually conditioned by time, in that at a certain moment in time we are transposed from the life between death and rebirth into the life between birth and death.

As I have often indicated, it is this transformation of the state of mind that is so absolutely essential for mankind of today. For how did we become caught up in the calamities of the present? It is because, along with so-called modern progress, humanity has altogether forgotten to admit the spiritual into its conceptions. The theosophical teachings of the so-called Theosophical Society are actually the attempt to characterize spiritual facts in materialistic forms of thought, hence, to drive materialism all the way into the spirit. We do not attain to a spiritual concept merely by calling something spiritual, only by transforming our thinking to what is suited to the sensory realm.

Human beings do not live with each other only in purely spatial relationships that can be constructed by means of what has become the general thinking of natural science. We can no longer develop social concepts based on the present-day world view. The kind of thinking that humanity has become accustomed to owing to natural science cannot lead to a characterization of social life. In this way arise the aberrations we experience today as a variety of social ideologies that only come about because it is impossible to think realistically about the social problems based on the conceptions from which we proceed to regard something as right or wrong. Not until people are willing to penetrate spiritual science will it become possible again to think of the social life in the manner it has to be conceived if further decline is to be halted and, instead, progress is to ensue. The discipline brought about in us by spiritual science is more important than its content. Otherwise we shall finally reach the stage of demanding that spiritual matters be popularized, that is to say, that they be presented in coarsely sensory, realistic terms. Things that must be expressed in a certain manner if one doesn't want to fantasize but to speak of realities, as I have done in our anthroposophical presentations as well as in my book, Towards Social Renewal,⁴⁵ are found to be not graphic enough. Well, “graphic” is a word that has a peculiar connotation for people today. There are people today who have much to say about this longing of mankind to have everything presented in a crudely senseperceptible manner. This is true all over the world, not just in certain countries.

I found an interesting passage, for example, in a recently published book, Les forces morales aux Etats-Unis,⁴⁶ written by a French lady. It has the following subdivisions: l'eglise, l'ecole, la femme. The book contains an interesting little episode which demonstrates how, in certain quarters, one triel “graphically” to describe matters pertaining to man's relationship with the spiritual world. The author relates:

One evening a friend and I strolled down Broadway. I came to a church. A quick glance showed us the place was filled with men only. Offended by seeing this, we avoided moving further inside. A priest clad in a soutane saw us, approached and invited us to come in. Since we hesitated, he asked about our confession. “We are not Catholics,” I said. He urged us to enter the church and, index finger pointing upward, he said with conviction “Come here and listen to me. If, for instance, you wish to travel to Chicago, how would you go about it? You might go on foot, take a car, a boat, or travel by train. It stands to reason that you would choose the fastest and most comfortable means. In this case that's the train. Obviously, if you wish to get to the Garden of God you will choose the religion that will get you there in the fastest and safest way. That's the Catholic religion, which is the express train to Paradise.”

The Lady telling the story only concluded that she was so perplexed she did not think of telling him that he had forgotten the airplane in his graphic comparison, which he could have mentioned as a still quicker means of getting to Paradise.

You see, here was someone eager to counter people's prejudices, and he chose graphic conceptions. The description of the Catholic Church as the “express train to heaven” is a graphic image. It is indeed the tendency of our time to search for graphic images, meaning concepts that do not make any demands on people's thinking. It is precisely here that we must already discern the gravity of modern life which demands that we do away with such graphicness which turns into banality and triviality, thus pulling man down into materialism in regard to those matters that must be comprehended spiritually. Even in symptoms such as these we have to search for what is needed most in our age. It must be said again and again: Such symptoms cannot be ignored; we cannot afford to go blindfolded through the world, which is an organism asking to be understood by means of its symptoms. For these symptoms contain what we must comprehend if we wish to arrive at an ascent again from our general decline.

At this point, however, it is necessary to see a number of things in the right light. What has actually been produced from spiritual-scientific foundations in Towards Social Renewal truly has not been created out of some theory but out of the whole breadth of life, with the difference that this life is viewed spiritually. Mankind today cannot progress if people do not adjust to such a view of life.

I would like to put in here two points taken from life that once again showed me recently how necessary it is to lead humanity today to a life-filled comprehension of reality, but at the same time a spiritual comprehension of reality. Yesterday I read an article by a journalist whose name, so I am told, is Rene Marchand,⁴⁷ who, for a long time, was a correspondent for Figaro, Petit Parisien, and so on. He participated in the war on the Russian front, being a radical opponent of the Bolsheviks. He then had dealings with the general of the counter-revolution, becoming a follower of it. Overnight, he became converted to the idea of workers' councils, to Bolshevism. From an opponent of Bolshevism, so it says here, he turned into a protagonist, an unreserved supporter of the leadership and the ideology of workers' councils. Here is a man who belongs to the intellectual class, for he is a journalist, who, after all, lives with a deeper understanding of life, a deeper sensitivity for life, who dwells in the old traditions as do most of today's sleeping souls. It is interesting how such a person suddenly realizes: All this will assuredly lead to destruction!—and now the only goal worth aiming at for him appears to be Bolshevism! In other words, the man now perceives that everything that is not Bolshevism leads to ruin. I explained to you how Spengler described this.⁴⁸ Marchand sees only Bolshevism; initially, he believes that Bolshevism is merely a Russian affair. Then he discovers something quite different. He feels that Bolshevism is an international matter that must spread over the whole world. He says:

It now became clear to me that peace can only be restored when the people in all the countries freely take their destiny into their own hands. The principles, hitherto proclaimed by the bourgeois governments merely to deceive the masses, can only become reality when this new imperialism (that of the Entente powers) has in turn broken down.

He then relates how he has now arrived at the conviction that justice, unity, peace, and law will only rule when the world has become bolshevistic through and through; not till then will reconstruction be possible. This man now sees that all else leads to destruction. And basically he is quite correct in pointing out: If anything outside Bolshevism is to be cultivated further, it must turn into the dictatorship of the old capitalism, the Bourgeoisie and its trappings. It must become the dictatorship of people like Lloyd George,⁴⁹ Clemenceau,⁵⁰ Scheidemann,⁵¹ and so on. If one does not wish for this, if one does not want ruin, there is no other choice but the dictatorship of Bolshevism. He sees the only salvation in the letter.

In a certain sense this man is honest, more honest than all the others who see the approach of Bolshevism and believe they can oppose it with the old regime. At least Marchand sees that all the old ideas are ready to perish. A question arises, however, especially if one stands on spiritual scientific ground and experiences this; for a man like Rene Marchand is an exception. The question forces itself upon one's mind: Where has the man gained knowledge of all this? He has acquired such knowledge where most of our contemporaries have gathered it, namely, from newspapers and books. He does not know life. To a large extent, people living today know -life only from newspapers and books. Particularly the people in leading circles know life just from newspapers. Think of all that we have experienced in this regard through newspapers, by means of books! We have witnessed that a few decades ago people still formed their world conceptions by reading French comedies, that they knew the events occurring in a comedy better than what takes place in life. They ignored the realities of life and informed themselves by what they had seen on the stage. Later, we saw that people formed their view of life based on Ibsen, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy. They did not know life; neither could they judge the books on the basis of life. Actually, people only assimilated the secondhand life printed on paper. From that they developed their slogans, founded societies for all manner of reforms without any real knowledge of life. It was a life which they knew only from Ibsen or Dostoevsky, or a life they knew in a manner that frequently could not help becoming quite obnoxious to a person when, in all the big cities of Europe, Hauptmann's “Weber” (weavers),⁵² for example, was being performed. The lifestyle of weavers appeared on stage. People with no idea of what transpires in life, having seen only its caricature on the stage, observing the misery of weavers on stage, and because it was a time of social involvement—began talking about all sorts of social questions, having become acquainted with these matters only in this way. Basically, they are all people who do not know life except vicariously from newspapers or books such as exist today. I have nothing against the books; one must be familiar with them, but one must read them in such a manner that through them one is able to perceive life. The problem is that we live in an age of abstraction today, abstract demands by political parties, societies, and so on.

This is why it is interesting for me to encounter, on one side, such a realistic man like Rene Marchand who, being a journalist, is simultaneously an oracle for many people. It does not even occur to him to ask if this Bolshevism really leads to a viable life style. For he really does not know life; he only exchanges what he has become acquainted with and finds headed for destruction, with a new abstract formula, with new theories. On the other side, I must now compare a letter I received this morning with these utterances of an intellectual. Somebody who is fully grounded in life, who has experienced precisely what can be experienced today in order to form an opinion of the social condition, wrote to me. He wrote that my book, Towards Social Renewal, had become a sort of salvation for him. This man, who has worked in a weaving mill, was thoroughly familiar with the practical aspects. One will only grasp what is meant with the book, Towards Social Renewal, when one judges it from the standpoint of practical life. It is a book depicting reality, but derived completely from the spiritual world, as must be the case with anything that is to serve life today. One will only know what is meant if one understands that every line, every word of this book is in no way theoretical, but taken straight from practical life; when one realizes that it is a book for those who wish to intervene actively in life, not for those who want to engage in socialistic chatter and babble about life.

It is this that causes one such pain, namely, that a book steeped in reality is called utopian by those who have no idea of reality. Those who have no inkling of the reality of life, being themselves addicted to literature, view even such a book that is truly taken from life as a piece of literature. Today, the “how” matters more than the “what.” Everything depends an our acquiring thought forms that are suitable tools for the comprehension of the spiritual life, for in reality spiritual life is everywhere. We have spiritual realities here in our surroundings as well as from beyond the sense world. It is out of these spiritual realities that social reconstruction must come about, not out of the empty talk appearing in Leninism and Trotskyism, which is nothing but the squeezed-out lemon of old commonplace Western views that have no power to produce any viable kind of social idea. One may well ask: Where are the human beings today who are prepared to comprehend life with the necessary intensity? We will never penetrate life if we are unwilling to view it from the spiritual standpoint. The life between birth and death will not be understood as long as one is not willing to comprehend the life between death and rebirth. If people are unwilling to resort to the spiritual life, they will either become complete materialists or intellectuals living in theories that only enable them to comprehend life after having had it dramatically presented by an Ibsen, a Dostoevsky, or another writer. What matters is that we interpret library presentations as a kind of window through which we look out upon life. This will be possible for us only if we perceive the spiritual world, the world of spiritual entities, behind the sense world; if we finally dismiss all the fantasies concerning atoms and molecules from which present-day physics wishes to construct a world for us. It would follow from these fantasies that the whole present world in fact really consists basically only of atoms and molecules, effectively eliminating all spiritual, and with it, moral and religious ideas. I will say more about this tomorrow.

• 42. See Note #4
• 43. Rudolf Steiner: Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Birth, GA 153 (London, Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1959).
• 44. Scotus Erigena: 810–877 A.D. Translator of the writings by Dionysius Areopagita; author of “De divina praedestinatione,” “ De divisione naturae.” In 1225, the Vatican ordered all his writings burned.
• 45. See Note #13
• 46. Sophie Cheftele, “Les forces morales aux Etats-Unis (l'eglise, l'ecole, la femme),” Paris, 1920.
• 47. The source of this quote could not be found.
• 48. Rudolf Steiner: Oswald Spengler, Prophet of World Chaos, in GA 198 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1949).
• 49. David Lloyd George: 1863–1945, British statesman, prime minister from 1916 until 1922.
• 50. Eugene Clemenceau: 1841–1929, French statesman.
• 51. Philipp Scheidemann: 1865–1939, German secretary of state, later minister president.
• 52. Gerhart Hauptmann: 1862–1946, playwright; “Die Weber,” Berlin, 1892.

Genuine knowledge of the impulses holding sway in humanity, knowledge that must be acquired if we wish to take a Position in life in any direction, is possible only if we attempt to go deeply into the differences of soul conditions existing between the members of the human race. In respect to the right progress for all mankind, it is certainly necessary that human beings understand one another, that an element common to all men is present. This common element, however, can only develop when we focus on the varieties of soul dispositions and developments that exist among the different members of humanity. In an age of abstract thinking and mere intellectualism such as the one in which we find ourselves, people are only too prone to look only for the abstract common denominators. Because of this they fail to arrive at the actual concrete unity, for it is precisely by grasping the differences that one comprehends the former. From any number of viewpoints, I have referred in particular to the mutual relationships resulting out of these differences between the world's population of the West and East. Today, I should like to point to such differentiations from yet another standpoint.

When we look at the obvious features of present general culture, what do we actually find? The form taken by the thoughts of most people in the civilized world really shows an essentially Western coloring, something originating in the characteristic tendencies of the West. Look at newspapers today that are published in America or England, in France, Germany, Austria or Russia. Although you will definitely sense certain differences in the mode of thinking, and so on, you will also notice one thing they have in common. If this is the Western region here (see sketch), this the middle one and that the Eastern, this common element, which comes to light everywhere, say, in newspapers as well as in ordinary popular literary and scientific publications, does not derive its impulse from the depths of the national characteristics. In a St. Petersburg paper, for instance, you do not find what arises from the heritage of the Russian people. You do not discover the heritage of Central European peoples by reading a Viennese paper or one from Berlin. The element determining the basic configuration and character (of all publications) has basically arisen in the West, and then poured itself into the individual regions. The fundamental coloring of what has come to the fore from among the peoples of the West has, therefore, essentially spread out over the civilized world.

When things are viewed superficially, one might doubt this; but if you go more deeply into the matters under discussion here, you can no longer doubt them. Consider the attitude, the basic sentiment, the conceptual form, expressed in a newspaper from Vienna or Berlin, or a literary or scientific work from either city. Compare this with a publication from London—quite aside from the language—and you will discover that there is a greater similarity between the publication from London and the book from Vienna, Paris, or even New York or Chicago than there is between the present thoughts and ideas in literary and scientific works from Vienna and Berlin, and the special nuance which Fichte⁵³ for example, poured into his thoughts as an enlivening element. I shall demonstrate this to you by citing just one example.

There is a saying by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great philosopher who was born at the turn of the nineteenth century, that is so characteristic of him that no one today understands it. It goes, “The external world is the substance of duty become visible.” The sentence means nothing less than this. When we look out into the world of mountains, clouds, woods and rivers, of animals, plants and minerals, all this is in itself something devoid of meaning, without reality, it is merely a phenomenon. It is only there to enable the human being in his evolution to fulfill his duty. For I could not carry out my obligations in a world in which I would not be surrounded by things that I could touch. There must be wood, there must be a hammer. In itself, it has no significance and no materiality. It is only the substance of my duty which has become sense-perceptible. Everything outside exists primarily for the purpose of bringing duty to light.

This saying was coined by a man a century ago out of the innermost sentiments of his soul and character as well as his folk spirit. It did not become generally known. When people talk about Johann Gottlieb Fichte today, when they write books about him and mention him in newspaper articles, they only perceive the external form of his words. No one really understands anything about Fichte. You may take everything you find on him today, either literary or scientific, but it has nothing whatever to do with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It does, however, have a great deal to do with what arose out of the Western folk spirit, and has spread over the rest of the civilized world.

These more delicate relationships are not discerned. That is the reason why nobody even thinks of characterizing in a deep and exhaustive manner the essential feature of what arises from the spirit of the various nationalities. For it is all inundated today by what arises from the West. In Central Europe, in the East, people imagine that they are thinking along their own ethnic lines. This is not the case, they think in accordance with what they have adopted from the West.

In what I am now saying lies the key to much of what is really the riddle of the present age. This riddle can be solved only when we become aware of the specific qualities arising from the various regions of the world. There is, first of all, the East that today certainly offers us no true picture of itself. If untruthfulness were not the underlying characteristic of all public life in our time, the world would not be so ignorant of the fact that what we call Bolshevism is spreading rapidly throughout the East and into Asia; that it has gone far already. People have a great desire to sleep through the actual events, and are glad to be kept in ignorance. It is therefore easy to withhold from them what is really taking place. Thus, people will live to see the East and the whole of Asia inundated by the most extreme, radical product of Western thought, namely Bolshevism, an element utterly foreign to these people.

If we wish to look into what it is that the world of the East brings forth out of the depths of its folk character, it becomes obvious that it is possible to discover the fundamental nuance of feeling in the East only by going back into earlier times and learning through them. For, in regard to its original character, the East has become completely decadent. Forgetting its very nature, the East has allowed itself to be inundated by what I have described as the most extreme, radical offshoots of Western thought. Certainly, it is true that what was once there is still living within Eastern humanity, but today it is all covered up. What once lived in the East, what once vibrated through Eastern souls, survives in its final results where it is no longer understood, where it has turned into a superstitious ritual, where it has become the hypocritical murmurings of the popes of the Orthodox Russian ritual, incomprehensible even to those who believe they understand it. A direct line runs from ancient India to these formulas of the Russian church ritual, which are now only rattled off to the multitudes in the form of lip service. For this whole inclination which thus expressed itself, which bestowed on the Eastern soul its imprint and also does so today in a suppressed form, is the potential for developing a spiritual state of mind that guides the human being towards the prenatal, to what exists in our life before birth, before conception. In the very beginning, the nature of what permeated the East as a world conception and religious attitude was connected with the fact that this East possessed a concept which has been completely lost to the West. As I have said here before, the West has the concept of immortality, not that of “not having been born,” of “unbornness.” We have the word immortality, we do not have the term “unbornness.” This implies that in our thinking we continue life after death, but not into the time before birth. On the other hand, the East possessed that special soul inclination it had that still included Imagination and Inspiration in its thoughts and concepts. By means of this particular manner of expressing the conceptual content of its soul world, the East was far less predisposed to pay heed to the life after death than to that before birth. In regard to the human being it viewed life here in the sense world as something that comes to man after he has received his tasks prior to birth, as something that he has to absolve here in the sense of the task given him. He was disposed to regard this life as a duty set human beings by the gods before they descended into this earthly body of flesh. It goes without saying that such a world conception encompasses both repeated earth lives and the lives between death and birth; for one can quite well speak of a single life after death, but not of only one before birth. That would be an impossible teaching. After all, one who refers at all to pre-existence would then not speak of one earth life only, which is something that should be obvious to you upon reflection. It was the way they had of looking up into the supersensory world, which was brought about by the whole predisposition of these Eastern souls, but it was one that focused their attention on the life we lead between death and a new birth prior to being drawn down to earthly life. Everything else, everything in the way of political, social, historical and economical ideas was only the consequence of what dwelt in the soul due to the orientation towards the life between birth and conception.

This life, this mood of soul, is particularly fitted to turn the human soul's gaze to the spiritual, to fill man with the super-sensible world. For even here on earth, man considers himself entirely a creation of the spiritual world, indeed, as a being who, in the world of the senses, is merely pursuing his super-sensible life. Everything that became decadent in later ages, the establishment of kingdoms, the social structure of the ancient Orient and its very constitution, developed from this special underlying mood of soul. This soul condition might be said today to be overpowered, because it became weak and crippled, because it was only promulgated as if out of what I would like to call “rachitic” soul members, as for example, in the works of Rabindranath Tagore,⁵⁴ which are like something that is poured into vague, nebulous formulas. In actual practice, we are today inundated by what expresses itself in Bolshevism as the most extreme, radical wing of Western thinking. The West will have to experience that something it did not wish to have for itself is moving over into the East, that in a not very distant future, what the West pushed off on the East will surge back upon it from there. This will result in a strange kind of self-knowledge.

What has this remarkable development in the East led to? It has led the people of the East to employ the holy inner zeal they once utilized to foster the impulse for the supersensory world and to apprehend the spiritual in all its purity, to accept the most materialistic view of outer life with religious fervor. Even though Bolshevism is the most extreme consequence of the most materialistic view of the world and social life, it will, as it moves further into Asia, increasingly transform itself into something that is received there with the same religious zeal as was the spiritual world in former times. In the East, people will speak of the economic life in the same terminology once used to speak of the sacred Brahma. The fundamental disposition of the soul does not change; it endures, for it is not the content (of the soul) that matters here. The most materialistic views can be approached with the same fervor formerly used to grasp the most spiritual.

Let us now turn and look at the West. The West has given rise to the human soul's most recent development. It must be of special interest to us because it has brought forth the view which, rising like a mist, has since spread over the whole civilized world. It is the manner of conception that already found, its most significant expression in Francis Bacon and Hobbes; in minds of more recent times, in the economist Adam Smith, for example; among philosophers, in John Stuart Mill, and among historians, in Buckle, and so on.⁵⁵ It is a form of thinking that no longer contains any Imagination and Inspiration in its conceptions and ideas, where the human being is dependent on directing his conceptual life entirely outwards to the sense world, absorbing the impressions of the latter according to the associations of thoughts resulting from that same world. This came to its most brilliant philosophical expression in David Hume, also in other such as Locke.⁵⁶

There is something very strange here that must, however, be mentioned. When we focus on the West, we must pay heed to how minds like John Stuart Mill, for example, speak of human thought associations. The term “association of ideas” is in fact a completely Western thought form, but in Central Europe, for instance, it has been in such common use for more than half a century that people speak of it as if it had originated there. When psychology is taught in John Stuart Mill's sense, one says, for instance, that in the human soul, thoughts first connect themselves by means of one thought embracing another, or by one thought attaching itself to another, or by one permeating another. This implies that people look upon the thought world and view the individual thoughts as they would little spheres that relate themselves to each other (see drawing). To be consistent one would have to eliminate everything to do with the ego and astral body, inwardly referring only to a mere thought mechanism, something that a great number of people do, in fact, speak of. The soul of man is disemboweled, as it were. When you read a book by John Stuart Mill with its deductive and inductive logic, you feel as if you were mentally placed in a dissecting room where a number of animals hang that are having their innards taken out. Likewise, in the way Mill proceeds, one feels as if man's soul-spiritual being were disemboweled. He first empties the human being of everything within, leaving only the outer sheath. Then, thoughts do, indeed, appear only like so many associated atomistic formations that coalesce when we form an opinion. The tree is green. Here “green” is the one thought, “tree” is the other, and the two flow together. The inner being is no longer alive; it has been disemboweled and only the thought mechanism remains.

This manner of conceiving of things is not derived from the sense world; it is imposed upon it. In my book, The Riddles of Philosophy,⁵⁷ I have drawn attention to how a mind such as John Stuart Mill's is in no way related to the inner world; it is simply given to behaving like a mere onlooker in whom the external world is reflected. Our concern here is that this method of thinking brings about what I have often described as the tragedy of materialism, which is that it no longer comprehends matter. For how can materialism fathom the nature of matter—and we have seen that, by going deeply into the human being, one penetrates into the true material element of the earth—if it first eliminates in thought what actually represents matter? In this regard, an extreme consequence already has been reached.

This extreme consequence could easily be traced today if it were not for the fact that people never look at the whole context of things, only at the details. Imagine where it must lead if all the actual inner flexible aspects of the ego are eliminated, if the human being is emptied of the very element that can enlighten him in the sense world concerning the spirit. Just think, where must this finally lead? It must result in the human being feeling that he no longer has anything of the actual content of the world. He looks outside at the sense world without realizing the truth of what we said yesterday, namely, that behind the external world of the senses there are spiritual beings. When he gives himself up to illusions, he assumes that atoms and molecules exist outside. He dreams of atoms and molecules. If man has no illusion concerning the external world, he can say nothing but that the whole outer world contains no truth, that it really is nothing. Inwardly, on the other hand, he has found nothing; he is empty. He must talk himself into believing that there is something inside him. He has no grasp of the spirit; therefore, he suggests spirit to himself, developing the suggestion of spirit. He is not capable of maintaining this suggestion without rigorously denying the reality of matter. This implies that he accommodates himself to a world view which does not perceive the spirit but only suggests it, merely persuading itself into the belief of spirit, while denying matter. You find the most extreme Western exponent of this in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science⁵⁸ as the counterpart of what I described just now for the East. This was bound to arise as the final outcome of such conceptions as those of Locke, David Hume or John Stuart Mill. Christian Science as a concept is, however, also the final consequence of what has been brought about in recent times by the unfortunate division of man's soul life into knowledge and faith.

Once people start restricting themselves to knowledge on one side and faith on the other, a faith that no longer even tries to be knowledge, this leads in the end to their not having the spirit at all. Faith finally ceases to have a content. Then, people must suggest a content to themselves. They make no attempt to reach the genuine spirit through a spiritual science. In their search for the spirit, they arrive at Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science, this spirit which has come to expression there as the final consequence. The politics of the West have for some time been breathing this spirit. It does not sustain itself on realities; it lives on self-made suggestions. Naturally, when it is not a matter of an in-depth cure, one can even effect cures with Christian Science, as has been reported, and accounts are given of its marvelous cures. Likewise, all kinds of edifying results can be achieved with the West's politics of suggestion.

Yet, this Western concept possesses certain qualities, qualities of significance. We can best understand them when we contrast them with those of the East. On looking back to the ages when the Eastern qualities came especially to the fore, we find that they were those which, first of all, were capable of focusing the soul's eye on the prenatal life. They were therefore preeminently fitted to constitute what can represent the spiritual part, the spiritual world, in a social organism. Fundamentally speaking, all that we have created in Central Europe and the West is in a certain sense the legacy of the East. I have already mentioned this on another occasion. The East was particularly predisposed to cultivate the spiritual life. The West, on the other hand, is especially talented at developing thought forms. I have just described them in a somewhat unfavorable light. They can, however, be depicted in a favorable light as well, namely, if we consider all that has originated with Bacon of Verulam, Buckle, Mill, Thomas Reid, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Spencer, and others of like mind, for example, Bentham.⁵⁹ On the one hand, we admit that these thought forms are certainly not suited to penetrate into a spiritual world by means of Imagination and Inspiration, to comprehend the life before birth. Yet, on the other hand, we are obliged to say, particularly when one studies how this manner of thinking has pervaded and lives in our Western science, that all this is especially appropriate for economic thinking; and one day, when the economic life of the social organism will have to be developed, we shall have to become students of Western thought, of Thomas Reid, John Stuart Mill, Buckle, Adam Smith, and the rest. They have only made the mistake of applying their form of thinking to science, to epistemology, and the spiritual life. This thinking is in order when we train ourselves by means of it and reflect on how to form associations, how best to manage the economy. Mill should not have written a book on logic; the spiritual capacity he applied to doing this should have been used for describing in detail the configuration of a given industrial association. We must realize that when anyone today wishes to produce a book such as my Towards Social Renewal, it is necessary for him to have learned to understand in what manner one attains to the spiritual sphere in the Oriental sense, and in what manner—although following a much more erratic path—one arrives at economic thinking in the West. For both directions belong together and are necessary to one another.

As far as a view of life is concerned, this Western thinking then does lead to pseudo-sciences like the one by Mrs. Eddy, her Christian Science. We must not, however, look at matters according to what they cannot be, but consider what they can be. For unity must come about through the cooperation of all human beings on earth, not by some abstract, theoretical structure of ideas that is simply laid down, and then viewed as a unity.

At this point, one may ask from where in the human organization this particular thinking of Mill, Buckle, and Adam Smith originates. We find that Oriental thinking has basically arisen from a contact with the world, especially when looking back to the more ancient forms of Oriental philosophy. It is a thinking, a feeling, which gives the impression that, out of the earth itself, the roots of a tree grow and produce leaves. In just this way, the ancient Indian, for example, seems to us to be united with the whole earth; his thoughts appear to us to have grown out of earthly existence in a spiritual manner, just as a tree's leaves and blossoms appear to have grown out of it by means of all the forces of the earth.

It is precisely this attachment to the external world in the Oriental person, the absorption of the spirituality, that I have referred to as lying beyond the sense world. In the West, everything is brought out of the instincts, the depth of the personality—I might say, from man's metabolic system, not the external world. For the Oriental, the world works upon both his senses and Spirit, kindling within him what he calls his holy Brahma. In the West, we have what arises from the body's metabolism and leads to associations of ideas; it is something that is particularly suited to characterize the economic life, something that does not apply until the next earth incarnation. For, with the exception of the head, what we bear as our physical organism is something that does not find its true expression, as we have outlined, until the following life on earth. We have been given our head from our previous earth life; our limbs and our metabolic system are Borne by us into the next earthly incarnation. This is a metamorphosis from one life on earth to the next. Hence, in the West, people think with something that only becomes mature in the following earth life. For this reason, Western thinking is particularly predisposed to focus on the life after death, to speak of immortality, not of eternity, not to know the term, “unbornness,” but only the word, “immortality.” It is the West which represents life after death as something that the human being should above all else be concerned about. Yet, even now, something I might call radical, but in a radical sense something noble, is preparing itself in the West out of the totally materialistic culture. One with the faculty to look a little more deeply into what is thus trying to evolve makes a strange discovery. Although people strive in the most intimate way for life after death, for some kind of immortality, hence, for an egotistic life after death, they strive in such a manner that, out of this effort, something special will develop. While a large part of humanity still harbors an illusion in this regard, something quite remarkable is, oddly enough, developing in the West. Since individual elements of the ideas concerning life after death being developed by the West are reflected to a certain extent in a great majority of Europeans, they, too, have especially perfected this preoccupation with the postmortem life. The European, however, would prefer to say, “Well, my religion promises me a life after death, but in this transitory, unsatisfactory, merely material earth life I need make no effort to secure the immortality of my soul. Christ died to make me immortal; I need not strive for immortality. It is mine once and for all; Christ makes me immortal.”—or something to that effect.

In the West, particularly in America, something different is preparing itself. Out of the most diverse, occasionally the most bizarre and trivial religious world conceptions, we see something trying to arise which, although it has quite materialistic forms, is nevertheless connected with. something that will be a part of life in the future, particularly in regard to this world-view of immortality. Among certain sects in America, the belief is prevalent that one cannot survive at all after death if one has made no effort in this earthly life, if one has not accomplished something whereby one acquires this life after death. A judgment concerning good and evil is envisioned after death that does not merely follow the pattern of earthly truth. He who makes no effort here on earth to bear through the portals of death what he has developed in his soul will be diffused and scattered in the cosmic all. What a person wishes to carry with him through death must be developed here. A man dies the second death of the soul—to use the saying of Paul—who does not provide here for his soul to become immortal. This is something that is definitely developing in the West as a world concept in place of the leisurely, passive, awaiting what will happen after death. It is something that is emerging in certain American sects. Perhaps today it is still little noticed, but there is a great deal of feeling in favor of viewing life here in a moral sense, and to arrange the conduct of life in such a manner that by means of what one does here, something is carried through the gate of death.

As I said, in the East, the particular attention to the life before birth developed long ago. This made it possible for life on earth to be viewed as a continuation of this prenatal, supersensory life in the spirit. Earthly life thus received its content, not out of itself, but out of the spiritual life. In the West, an attitude is developing today for the future that will have nothing to do with a passive, indifferent life of waiting here for death because the life beyond is guaranteed; instead, the knowledge is growing that man carries nothing through the portal of death unless care is taken on earth to make something out of what one already has here.

Thus, Western thinking is adapted, on the one hand, to organizing economic matters within the social organism; on the other hand, it is suited to develop further the one-sided doctrine of life after death. This is why spiritualism has had a special opportunity for developing in the West, and from there, could invade the rest of the world. After all, spiritualism was only devised to give a sort of guarantee of immortality to those who could no longer attain to any conviction concerning immortality by means of any kind of inner development. For, in most instances, a person actually becomes a spiritualist in order to receive by some means or the other the certain guarantee that he is immortal ,after death.

Between these two worlds lies something that is implied in Fichte's words, “The external world is the substance of my duty become visible.” As I said before, people really have no understanding for this mode of thinking, and what is written today about Fichte could well be compared to what a blind man might say about color. Particularly in the last few years, a tremendous amount of talking and lecturing has been done about this saying by Fichte, but it was all accomplished in such a way that one is disposed to say that Fichte, that out-and-out Central European mind, has really been americanized by the German newspapers and writers of literature. One is confronted with americanized versions of Fichte. There, we find the nuance of human soul life which, in a special way, is supposed to develop the middle member of the social organism, the one that arises from the relationship of man to man. It would be of benefit if some of you would for once make an in-depth study—it isn't easy—of one of Fichte's writings where he speaks as though nature did not exist at all. Duty, for example, and everything else is deduced by first proving that external human beings actually exist in whom the materialized substance of duty can become reality. Here, all the raw material is contained, so to speak, from which the rights and state organism of the threefold social order have to be put together.

What, then, is the actual cause of the catastrophic events in the past few years? The basic reason is that there was no living perception, no feeling, for such matters. Berlin's policies are American. This is fine for America, but it is not suitable for Berlin. This is why Berlin's politics amount to nothing. For, just imagine, since American policies were constantly carried out in Berlin or Vienna, we could just as well have called Berlin, New York, apart from the difference in language, and Vienna, Chicago for all the difference there would have been otherwise. When, in Central Europe, something is done that is completely foreign to it, something originating in the West where it has its rightful place, then the primal essence of the folk spirit is aroused and gives it the lie without the people being aware of it. This was basically the case in recent decades. This was the underlying phenomenon of what happened, the phenomenon that consists, for instance, in the fact that people have trampled Goethe's thinking underfoot, and as another example, have read Ralph Waldo Trine⁶⁰ out of a sort of instinct. Actually, all our aristocratic dandies in politics have shown an interest in Trine, and received their special inner stimulus or whatever from that direction. When affairs came to the boiling point, they even turned to Woodrow Wilson;⁶¹ and he⁶² who would now again like to be President of the German Republic still has that frame of mind that allows his brain automatically to roll out Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Thus, in recent times, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, we experienced how a formerly truly representative German personality spouted forth americanisms. This is the best and most immediate example of how matters really stand at present. Indeed, we must be able to see through these archetypal phenomena if we wish to understand what is actually happening today. If we merely pick up a newspaper and read Prince Max von Baden's speeches, simply studying them out of context, then this is something absolutely worthless today. It is a mere kaleidoscope of words. Only when we are able to place such things into the whole context of the world can we hope to understand anything about the world. No progress can be made until people realize how necessary it is today that world understanding be acquired if one wishes to have a say. The most characteristic sign of the time is the belief that when a group of individuals have set up some trashy proposition as a general program—such as the unity of all men regardless of race, nation or color, and so forth—something has been accomplished. Nothing has been accomplished except to throw sand into people's eyes. Something real is attained only when we note the differences and realize what world conditions are. Formerly, human beings could live in accordance with their instincts. This is no longer possible; they must learn to live consciously. This can be done only by looking deeply into what is actually happening.

The East was supreme in regard to life before birth and repeated earthly lives that are connected with it. The greatness of the West consisted in its disposition in regard to life after death. Here, in the middle (see drawing an next page), the actual science of history has originated, although today it is as yet misunderstood. Take Hegel⁶³ as an example. In Hegel's works, we have neither preexistence nor postexistence; there is neither life before birth nor after death, but there is a spirited grasp of history. Hegel begins with logic, goes from there to a philosophy of nature, develops his doctrine of the soul, then that of the state, and ends with the triad of art, religion and science. They are his world content. There is no mention of preexistence or an immortal soul, only of the spirit that lives here in this world.

Preexistence, postexistence—this is really life in the present state of mankind, the permeation of history. Read what has been drawn up particularly by Hegel as a philosophy of history. In libraries, one generally finds the pages of his books still uncut! Not many editions have appeared of Hegel's works. In the eighties of the last century, Eduard von Hartmann⁶⁴ wrote that in all of Germany, where twenty universities exist that have faculties of philosophy, no more than two of the instructors had read Hegel! What he said could not be refuted; it was true. Nonetheless, it hardly needs to be said that all the students were ready to swear to what they had been told about Hegel by professors who had never read him. Do familiarize yourselves with his work and you will find that here, in fact, historical conception has come about, the experience of what goes on between human beings. There you also find the material from which the state, the rights sphere of the threefold social organism, has to be created. We can learn about the constitution of the spiritual organism from the Orient; the constitution of the economic sphere is to be learned from the West.

In this way, we have to look into the differentiations of humanity all over the whole earth, and can gain an understanding of the matter from one side or the other. If the goal is approached directly, namely, if the social life is studied, one arrives at the threefold order as developed in my book, Towards Social Renewal. By thus studying the life of mankind throughout the earth, we come to the realization that there is one part with a special disposition for the economy; there is another with a special aptitude for organizing the state; and yet another with a specific inclination towards the spiritual life. A threefold structure can then be created by taking the actual economy from the West, the state from the Middle, and from the East—naturally in a renewed form, as I have often said—the spiritual life. Here you have the state, here the economic life and here the spiritual life (see above sketch); the two others have to be taken across from here. In this way, all humanity has to work together, for the origins of these three members of the social organism are found in different regions of the earth, and therefore must be kept properly apart everywhere. If, in the old manner, human beings wish to mix up in a unified state what is striving to be threefold, nothing will result from it except that in the West the state will be a unity where the economic life overwhelms the whole, and everything else is only submerged into it. If the theorists then take hold of and study the matter, meaning, if Karl Marx moves from Germany to London, he then concludes that everything depends on the economic life. If Marx's insanity triumphs, the three spheres are reduced to one, the one being of a purely economic character. If one limits oneself to what wishes to be merely the state or rights configuration, one apes the economic life of the West, which for decades has been fashioning an illusory structure, which then naturally collapses when a catastrophe occurs—something that has indeed happened!

The Orient, which possesses the spiritual life in a weakened state in the first place, simply has adopted the economic life from the West and has inoculated itself with something that is completely alien to it. When these matters are studied, we shall see particularly that blessings can only fall upon the earth when, everywhere, one gathers together into the threefold social organism through human activity what by its very nature develops in the various regions.

• 53. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Appellation an das Publikum ueber die ihm beigemessenen atheistischen Aeusserungen, 1799.
• 54. Rabindranath Tagore: 1861–1941, Indian poet and religious philosopher.
• 55. Francis Bacon: 1561–1626, English philosopher and statesman, founder of empiricism; Thomas Hobbes: 1588–1679, English philosopher; Adam Smith: 1723–1790, English philosopher and sociologist; John Stuart Mill: 1806–1873, English philosopher and political economist, one of the founders of positivism; Henry Thomas Buckle: 1821–1862, English writer on social history.
• 56. David Hume: 1711–1776, English philosopher and statesman; John Locke: 1632–1704, English philosopher.
• 57. Rudolf Steiner: The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 58. Mary Baker Eddy: 1821–1910, founder of Christian Science.
• 59. Herbert Spencer: 1820–1903, English philosopher; Jeremy Bentham: 1748–1832, English Jurist, founder of philosophy of utilitarianism.
• 60. Ralph Waldo Trine: 1866–1958, American author.
• 61. Woodrow Wilson: 1856–1924, president of the USA from 1913 until 1921. In an address to Congress on January 8, 1918, he outlined a “Program of World Peace,” condensed in fourteen points.
• 62. Prinz Max von Baden: 1866–1929, became German chancellor in the fall of 1918; on October 5, 1918, he directed a peace offer to President Wilson based on the latter's “Fourteen Points.”
• 63. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: 1770–1831; complete edition of Hegel's works, Berlin, 1832–1844.
• 64. Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906.

I would like to sum up once more what I said yesterday concerning the differences of the soul constitutions among the various nations and of human beings generally all over the world. I have indicated that various predispositions and soul qualities exist among people in different parts of the earth. Thus, the population of each region on earth can contribute to what all humanity accomplishes in regard to the whole of civilization. Yesterday we had to point out that the Oriental nations and all the people of Asia are especially predisposed by their nature to develop that element which makes its contribution to the spiritual life of the social organism. Oriental people are especially gifted for everything pertaining primarily to the spiritual development in mankind, hence to knowledge and formulation of the super-sensible realm. This is connected with the fact that Oriental people are particularly inclined to develop concepts and ideas on how the human being has descended into this earthly existence from spiritual worlds, in which he has lived since his last death until this birth. The realization or the doctrine of preexistence, which is based on the fact that the human being has undergone a spirit existence before entering into a physical body here, is a principal aspect of these Oriental predispositions. There is therefore also the capability of comprehending repeated earth lives. It is possible for a person to adhere to the view that life goes on after death, continuing on forever without his returning to the earth. It is not logically possible, however, to hold the view that life on earth is a continuation of a spiritual existence without also being obliged to take for granted the thought that this life must repeat itself. Thus, the Oriental was particularly predisposed to understand that he dwelt in spiritual worlds prior to this earth life, that in a sense he received the impulses for this life on earth from the divine spiritual world.

This is connected with the whole way in which the Oriental arrived at his knowledge, his whole soul constitution. I have already indicated this to some of you. Now there are a number of other friends present here, and I would like to characterize something once more that I have already outlined for some of you.

We know that man is a threefold being, that he is divided into the nerves-and-senses man, the rhythmic man—who includes the activities expressed in breathing, blood circulation, and so on—and the third, the metabolic man, everything that has to do with man's metabolism. Now these three members of the human organization do not come to expression in the same manner everywhere on earth; they are expressed in different ways in different parts of the world.

Speaking of the East, all this is in decadence in a sense; it is suppressed and slumbers today in the Oriental human being. We are not concerned now with his present soul condition. Instead, we must become principally acquainted with a soul state that he possessed in a distant past. For the very reason that this soul condition has diminished, Asia humanity is about to adopt Bolshevism with the same religious fervor and devotion with which it formerly received the teaching of the holy Brahman—something that Europeans and Americans will become aware of before very long to their horror. Which of the three members of human nature came to special expression in the Oriental? It was the metabolic man. It was particularly the ancient Oriental who dwelt completely in the metabolism. This will not appear a repulsive view to anyone who does not conceive of substance in terms of lumps of matter, but who knows that spirit lives in all matter. The lofty, admirable spirituality of Orientals was brought about by what rose out of their metabolic process, and radiated into consciousness. What occurs in the human metabolism is, of course, intimately related with what the external sense world is. From the latter, we receive what then turns into matter within us. We know that behind this outer sense world there is spirit. In reality, we consume spirit and the consumed spirit becomes matter first within us. Yet, what we consume in this manner produced spirit in the Oriental even after it had been consumed. Thus, a person who understands these things views the remarkable poetic achievements of the Vedas, the greatness of the Bhagavad Gita, the profound philosophy of the Vedas and Vedanta and the Indian philosophy of Yoga without admiring them any less—because he knows that they have emerged from the inner process as a product of metabolism, just like the blossoms of a tree are the result of its metabolism. Just as we look at the tree and see in its blossoms what the earth pushes toward air and light, so we view what human beings in ancient India produced in the Vedas, in the Vedanta and Yoga philosophies, as a blossom of earthly existence itself. What we see as a product of the earth in tree blossoms is, in a way, offered up to air and light. Nevertheless, it is a product of the earth in the same sense as are wheat and grain growing in the fields, and fruits an trees, which are then cooked, enjoyed and digested by the human being. Within the special nature of the ancient Indian, this—instead of turning into plant blossoms and fruits—became the marvelous formulations of the Vedas, the Vedanta and Yoga philosophies. One who must view the ancient Indian as one would a tree. Both are examples of what the earth is capable of producing in its metabolism—in a tree, through its roots and sap, in man through his nourishment. Thus, one learns to recognize the divine in something that the spiritualist scorns, because he finds matter to be of such a low order.

Moreover, the ancient Indian had an ideal. It was his ideal to go beyond this metabolic experience to the higher member of human nature, namely, the rhythmic system. This is why he did his Yoga exercises, his special breathing exercises, practicing them consciously. What the metabolism brought forth from him as a spiritual blossom of earth evolution came about unconsciously. What he did consciously was to bring his rhythmic system, the system of breathing and blood, into a regulated, systematic movement. What did he do by thus advancing himself, for this was his specific form of advancement. What did he accomplish? What happened in this rhythmic system? We inhale the air from outside; we give to this air something that comes from the human metabolism, namely, carbon. Within us, a metabolic process takes place between something that is a result of our metabolism and something contained in the air that we breathe in. Today's materialistic, physical world-view finds nitrogen and oxygen—ignorant of the true nature of both—mixed together in the air and considers it something purely material. The ancient Indian perceived the air as the process which occurs when the element derived from the metabolism unites in the human being with what is inhaled and is then absorbed. When he fulfilled his ideal inherent in Yoga philosophy, the ancient Indian perceived in the blood circulation the mysteries of the air, that is, what exists spiritually in the air. Through Yoga philosophy he became acquainted with what is spiritual in the air. What does one learn to know there? One comes to recognize what has come into us, insofar as we have become beings that breathe. We learn to perceive what entered into us when we descended from spiritual worlds into this physical body. Knowledge of preexistence, of life before birth, is then cultivated. Therefore, it was in a sense the secret of those who practiced Yoga to penetrate the mystery of life before birth.

We see that the ancient Indian dwelt within his metabolism, notwithstanding the fact that he produced much that was beautiful, grandiose, and powerful, and he artificially raised himself to the rhythmic system. All this has, however, fallen into decadence. Today, all this sleeps in Asia. It only makes itself felt nebulously in abstract forms in asiatic souls when enlightened spirits, such as Rabindranath Tagore, speak of and revel in the ideal of the Asians.

Going from Asia to Central Europe, we find that the European, provided that he really is one, can be characterized as in Fichte's statement which I pointed out to you yesterday: “The external material world is the substance of my duty become visible; on its own, it has no existence. It is there only so that I might have something with which to fulfill my duty.” The human being who lived and lives in the central regions of the earth on this basis, dwells in the rhythmic system, just as the ancient Indian lived in the metabolic system. One remains unconscious of the element in which one lives. The Indian still strove upward to the rhythmic system as to an ideal, and he became aware of it. The Central European lives in the rhythmic system and is not conscious of it. Dwelling in this way in the rhythmic system, he brings about all that belongs to the legal, democratic governmental element in the social organization. He forms it in a one-sided way, but he forms it in the sense I indicated yesterday, because he is especially talented in shaping matters dealing with relationships between people, and between a person and his environment. Yet he, in turn, also has an ideal. He has the ideal to rise to the next level, to the man of nerves and senses. Just as the Indian considered Yoga philosophy to be his ideal, the artistic breathing that leads to insight in a special manner, so the Central European considers it his ideal to lift himself up to conceptions that come from the being of nerves and senses, to conceptions that are pure ideas, attained through an inner elevation, just as the Indian by advancing himself attained to the Yoga philosophy.

Therefore, it is necessary to realize that if one really wishes to understand individuals who have worked from such a basis as did Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Goethe, one must understand them in the same way an Indian understood his Yoga initiates. This special soul disposition, however, tones down the real spirituality. One still gets a clear awareness of it, for instance, in the way Hegel takes ideas as realities. Hegel, Fichte and Goethe possessed this clear awareness that ideas are truths, realities. One even comes to something like Fichte says: “The external sense world has no existence of its own; it is only the visible substance of my duty.” But one does not reach the fulfillment of ideas which the Oriental had. One can reach the point of saying, as did Hegel: “History begins, history lives. That is the living movement of ideas.” Yet one limits oneself only to this external reality. One views this external reality as spirit, as idea. Yet, particularly if one is in Hegel's place, one can speak neither of immortality nor of unbornness. Hegelean philosophy begins with logic; this means that it starts with what the human being thinks of as finite; then it extends over a certain philosophy of nature. It has a psychology, however, that deals only with the earthly soul. It also has a theory of government. Finally, it rises to its highest point when it reaches the threefold aspect of art, science and religion. Yet it goes no further; it does not enter into the spiritual worlds. In the most spiritual way, men like Hegel and Fichte have described what exists in the external world; but anything that would look beyond the outer world is suppressed. Thus we see that the very element that has no counterpart in the spiritual world, namely, the life of rights, of the state, something that is entirely of this world, makes up the greatness of the thought structures that appear here. One looks at the external world as spirit but is unable to go beyond it. Yet, in the process one trains the mind, teaching it a certain discipline. Then, if one values a certain inner development, this can be accomplished, because, by schooling oneself through what can be achieved in this area by occupying the mind with the realm of ideas, one is in a sense inwardly propelled into the spiritual world. This is indeed remarkable.

I must admit to you that whenever I read writings by the Scholastics, they evoke a feeling in me that induces me to say that they can think; they know how to live in thoughts. In a certain other way, directed more to the earthly sphere, I have to say the same of Hegel, Fichte or Schelling. They know how to live in thoughts. Even in the decadent way in which Scholasticism appears in Neo-Scholasticism, I find a much more developed life of thought than is found, for example, in modern science, popular books, or journalism. There, all thinking has already evaporated and disappeared. It is simply true that the better Scholastic minds, in the present time, for example, think in more precise concepts than do our university professors of philosophy. It is somewhat surprising that when one allows these thoughts to work upon oneself, for example, when reading a Scholastic book, even a truly Scholastic-Catholic text, and allows it to affect one, using it in a sense as a kind of self-education, one's soul is driven beyond itself. Such a book works like a meditation. Through its effect, one arrives at something different that brings about enlightenment. Here, we confront a very strange fact.

Consider that if such modern Dominicans, Jesuits and priests of other orders, who immerse themselves in what remains of Scholasticism, would permit the educational effect of Scholastic thought forms to work upon them all the way, they would all come through this discipline in a relatively easy manner to a comprehension of spiritual science. If one would allow those who study Neo-Scholasticism to follow their own soul development, it would not be long before those priests of Catholic orders in particular would become adherents of spiritual science. What had to be done so that this would not happen? They were given a dogma that curtails such study, and does not allow what would develop out of the soul to come about. Even today, someone wishing to develop towards spiritual science could be given as a meditation text the Scholastic book written by a contemporary Jesuit that I once showed here.⁶⁵ Yet, as I told you, it bears the imprimatur of a certain archbishop. The enlightenment that would occur in a person, if he were completely free to devote himself to it, has been cut off.

We must be able to see through these things. For then we will realize how important it is for certain circles to prevent by all means the consequences of what would develop if free reign were given the effects of these matters in the souls. The Central European striving is, after all, aimed at lifting oneself out of the rhythmic man, where one dwells as a matter of fact, to the nerves-and-senses man, who possesses what he attains for himself in the ideal sphere. For these people, there is a special predisposition to understand earthly life as something spiritual. Hegel did this in the most all-encompassing sense.

Let us now go to Western man. Yesterday, I said that Western man, particularly as exemplified by the most brilliant minds as early as Bacon and others, followed by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Buckle, Thomas Reid, and the economist Adam Smith, has a special predisposition to develop the kind of thinking which can then be utilized in the economic part of the social organism.

If we consider Spencer's philosophy, for instance, we realize that this is a kind of thinking which stems completely from the nerves-and-senses man, that in all respects it is a product of the senses and nerves. It would be most appropriate for creating industrial organizations and associations. It is only out of place.when employed by Spencer for philosophy. If he had used this same thinking to set up factories and social organizations, it would have been applied in its rightful place. It was out of place when he used it for philosophy.

This comes from the fact that Western man no longer lives in the rhythmic system, but has taken a step upward, living as a matter of course in the human nerves-and-senses system. It is the nature of the Oriental to live in his metabolic system. It is the Central European's nature to live in the rhythmic system. It is Western man's nature to live in the nerves-and-senses system (see drawing). The Oriental lives in the metabolism; he strives upward, trying to attain to the rhythmic system. The Central European lives in the rhythmic system. He strives towards the nerves-and-senses system. Western man already lives in the latter. Where does he wish to ascend? He is not yet there, but he has the impulse to strive upwards beyond himself. It appears at first in a caricatured form, which I characterized for you yesterday as the denial of matter and the autosuggestion of the human being in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science. Despite the fact that this is as yet a caricature, it is nevertheless a forerunner of what Western man must aim for. The aim must be something superhuman, by which I do not mean to imply that anyone who, instead of striving beyond the nerve-sense system, strives down into unconsciousness, and such as that, would thereby become superhuman.

Yesterday, I concluded by saying that it is in this way that the human faculties are distributed over the world's various regions, and it is necessary for real cooperation to come about. We are in a position today where, in regard to civilization, we are completely dependent on the nerves-and senses being of the West. I made use of a paradox, but this paradox quite clearly expresses the reality of the situation. The thoughts in Vienna and in Berlin are not the thoughts that arose from the folk spirit and then culminated in Fichte or Hegel. The spirits of Fichte and Hegel have been buried. What is written today in books and newspapers in Central Europe, in Vienna or Berlin, are not Fichte's thought forms; it is a lie when people quote Fichte today. Rather, the truth is that what reaches the public in Berlin or Vienna today is more closely related to what is being thought in Chicago or New York than to what was thought by Fichte or Hegel.

What had to happen, however, was that these three members, of which this one (in the East) was, to begin with, especially predisposed to the spiritual life, brought across the spiritual life as a tradition of its original, elementary form once existing in the Orient. There in the East the human being lived as fully within the life of the spirit itself as today he is firmly anchored here in Europe in physical life. Only the shadowy reflection of this spiritual life is found in Central Europe, and only its tradition in Western Europe. Western Europe is characterized by its own predisposition to the postmortem life, the life which is envisioned after death. I told you yesterday that in America an awareness is already in the process of developing, if only in a few sects, that man must not merely be passive about his soul life here on earth if he is to carry something through death and live on in spiritual worlds. He must acquire here through his work and actions what he wishes to carry through the gate of death. The awareness exists that the human being disintegrates if he does not provide for his immortality here, if, on earth, he does not develop a sense for ideals. This is already emerging in some Western sects, even though this ideal still appears in a distorted form.

That which is the life of the state on the other hand was striven for by what existed in the rhythmic system and could be borne upward into thoughts. This has come into evidence especially in the man of the middle (the Central European). From there, it affected the West. We are dealing with an odd phenomenon here that is only understood when one looks at its inner aspect. Strange as it may seem, something was astir in Central Europe. It goes without saying that in the rhythmic system the inclination remained for a communal human life, for a social life together in freedom. This impulse remained, to start with, deep in the unconscious realm (see drawing below). It is true, however, that impulses are present among human beings even if people are not conscious of them. Let us say, therefore, that something definite lived, to begin with unconsciously, in Central Europe in the eighteenth century; it could not rise into consciousness, but its effects were transmitted to the West. Having been received there, but not having developed inwardly as a matter of course, it turned into passion and feeling, thus into the French Revolution.

Schiller had thoughts on this. Here (referring to the drawing on page 12), we have the French Revolution. There is even a symbolic event attesting to the fact that Schiller pondered on what actually happened there. You know that he had the honor of being made a French citizen. He therefore pondered on it all, but to begin with, it all lived in his rhythmic system. Then, through his own insight, he lifted it up into consciousness and wrote his letters concerning the aesthetic education of man.

You find in these letters what one could say at that time about people living together in a truly free state. Hume then merely took this concept of the state, which Schiller had lifted up into consciousness in his Aesthetic Letters, and somewhat pedantically fashioned it into a system. There is something extraordinarily important in what Schiller brought out from the depths of the folk spirit in these letters on aesthetic education. Because it was something so profound, it was subsequently not comprehended when the element of the nerves-and-senses man became dominant everywhere.

I have often referred to a lonely man, living in Vienna, by the name of Heinrich Deinhardt.⁶⁶ Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt: 1821–1879, “Beitraege zur Wuerdigung Schillers. Briefe ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen.” Published by G. Wachsmuth, Stuttgart, 1922. He wrote letters upon letters about this aesthetic education of the human being, most ingenious letters. This man had the misfortune of breaking a leg as the result of a fall in the street. The leg was set, but, being undernourished, Deinhardt could not recover and died from breaking a bone. That is to say, he who already in the second half of the nineteenth century had so conscientiously interpreted Schiller's Aesthetic Letters died of malnutrition. And Deinhardt's letters on Schiller's aesthetic education of man are completely forgotten!

Again, these Aesthetic Letters by Schiller would be a good preparation for purifying and uplifting the soul so as to gain a spiritual view of the world. Schiller himself was not yet able to do this. It is always effective, however, if another person engaged in soul development takes up something originating from the one who as yet does not reach up into the spiritual world. It then has the effect of letting him see into the spiritual world. To be sure, people in Europe have revered as special remedies for the soul Ralph Waldo Trine, Marden⁶⁷ and similar superficial minds instead of Schiller, forgetting the other views that would actually lead upward into the spiritual world.

It is indeed necessary that these matters be grasped and comprehended in the whole context of life and world conditions. People have to realize how differentiated human capabilities are all over the earth. And the following must be pointed out. Up to now, no effort has been spared to publicize Schiller's riotous early works, The Robbers, Fiesco, or Intrigue and Love. People become most enthusiastic about the sentimentalities of Mary Stuart, the very profitable dramatic scenes of Maid of Orleans or the Bride of Messina. Today, Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, in which he surpasses himself in significance for all humanity—his Robbers, the whole of Mary Stuart and Wallenstein notwithstanding should not only be taken up and studied, one should allow them to affect one. For today, it is up to us not just to indulge in the empty talk of philistine academics existing in regard to our classical writers such as Goethe and Schiller, but above all else to take our own stand and on our own to discover what was great about them. We go on repeating what philistine academia has said for over a century about Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, and so forth. Our task today is to grasp such greatness ourselves in a fundamental way, for only then can humanity progress. So, here too, we discover the necessity for a transformation, a renewal. Even what people in our schools read and hear about Mary Stuart, Wallenstein, The Robbers, and so forth, must be revised. In this critical age we need a complete renewal, for the times are critical indeed.

If we look over to the West, we see that with all that it can produce as the expression of mankind through the nerves-and-senses system, this West is asking for the ascent into what lies beyond human knowledge in the spiritual world. I told you yesterday that in order for the cultural life, the life of the state and the economic life to be able to assert themselves in the threefold social organism, they must work together. These three elements must work together. Let us not merely say, “Ex Oriente lux!” We can turn to the Orient, study the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga philosophy and the Vedas; we can grind away at these subjects just as we have become accustomed to grind away at others in Europe. We can start grinding away at Oriental philosophy after the other subjects have become boring to us. But we shall make no progress this way, for what was once right for the earth will not again be appropriate for the present and Future; it will remain something of the past. We can admire it as something that was once right for the earth; we cannot, however, simply adopt it again in a passive manner as does the Theosophical Society, for instance. Likewise, we cannot just carry over what has been handed down to us of the European past in the old tradition. We cannot say that what is contained in the national characteristics of the Orient, of Middle Europe, can simply be renewed by us. Rather, we must ask, if we wish to achieve a realistic union of these three elements that are inherent dispositions of human nature, how can we do that? We can only do it when we realize in what way the nerves-and-senses life, which has, after all, taken hold of all of us, must pass beyond itself. It means that we must rise to something different that can come neither from the East, the Middle nor the West. It can only come through the new initiation, through the new spiritual science. It is brought about by our ascending from the most current form of thinking, trained by natural science and the nerves-and-senses being, to the science of the new initiation; acquiring from this new initiation the ways and means for bringing about cooperation between what was once the nature of the ancient Orient, later that of the Middle and now that of the West. We need a new science of initiation that can bring about a unity of these three, a living unity. In this modern age, we will not arrive at a cultural life if we do not strive for this new initiation science. We will have no proper politics, no life of the state, if we just continue in the same old way, if we do not turn to those scientific branches born of the new initiation and inquire how the politics of the future must be shaped. Neither will we achieve a new economic life, if we do not understand that form of thinking which should be applied neither to philosophy as did Spencer, nor to the life of the state as did Adam Smith, but only to the organization of the economic life. Then, however, we must also know how to integrate the latter into the two other systems. For that we need the science of initiation. We cannot progress if we cannot say to ourselves: From a comprehension of what was once the Oriental disposition, we come to the essence of the cultural, the spiritual life. By truly comprehending the disposition of the human being of the Middle, we reach the point of really understanding the nature of the life of rights, of the state. By understanding the Western nature, we gain a comprehension of what the economic life is. The three fall apart, however, if we cannot unite them in a higher unity. And we can only accomplish that when we view the three from the perspective resulting for us from the new Mysteries, which are here called the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

These matters must be understood, for whoever has insight into them knows that all the aspirations coming to expression today are leading towards ruin. People simply do not reckon with the most important factors. Take the most radical socialists. Subjectively they may have honorable intentions for humanity, but they only count an forces of decline. They strike a wrong balance of life. We only take stock the right way when, out of spiritual science, we do not just grasp at anything arbitrarily put there, saying that this is the way it must be if humanity is to be happy, but when we ask ourselves: What will come into being when the cultural life, the life of rights and the economic life are brought into the right relationship with each other; what kind of social organism results from that? Then, such a social body will also contain its permeation with spirit. This implies the presence of a realistic economic life, not one that people dream and fantasize about, but one that can originate as the best possible one. Again, its political system will be the best possible; a cultural life will be present that will unite the prenatal life with that after death. Such a cultural life will see in the human being, dwelling here in this physical world, a being orienting himself according to his rights; a being into whom, in the cultural sphere, shines his prenatal life; a being who in the economic life cannot attain to an ideal, only to the best possible one, yet is able through initiation science in his will to transform the faculties active in the economic sphere so that they allow the life after death to shine forth. Because this is the case, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just one theory among many, not something that takes its place as a party or sectarian program alongside others. Anthroposophy is something that is brought forth out of the knowledge that can be acquired when garth's and mankind's evolution are comprehended in their working together and in their totality.

In the present time, we have to admit that any other relationship to the world or to temporal reforms will lead to nothing, for what can bring progress to mankind must emerge out of the new initiation science.

Today, this must be expressed again and again in many different ways. It has been incorporated into this building; it is expressed in all the details of this structure. Looking even at its smallest segment, it can tell you about what is intended here, what is expressed in words in a variety of ways. This is what gives the whole matter here a certain uniform character. At the same time, a will comes to expression here that is intimately connected with the forces of ascent, not the declining forces of evolving humanity, something one could wish people would understand. This is what we should like to work for more and more. This is what we now wish to aim for by means of the courses⁶⁸ that will be given here this fall, in which we intend to show that the knowledge derived from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can work in a truly fructifying manner into the individual branches of science. Then, the day will perhaps come when people will understand what is really intended here, when sufficient comprehension will exist in the world so that we can reach the point at some future date when this building, still enshrouded in mist, can be opened up. For, as long as this building cannot be opened up, there still exists something that shows a lack of understanding for what is intended here.
I shall continue with this next Friday at eight o'clock.

At eight tomorrow, our friend, Count Polzer,⁶⁹ will lecture on European politics of the last century in connection with the testament of Peter the Great. This is an interesting subject about which, hopefully, a discussion will ensue. On Friday, I shall continue with the questions, already presented, and their application to the individual human being. On Saturday, at eight o'clock, I will continue with those particular questions that relate to religious problems. Sunday at six-thirty will be the next eurythmy performance, followed by a lecture.

• 65. Reference to Alfons Lehmen, SJ: 1847–1910, and his book Lehrbuch der Philosophie auf aristotelisch-scholastischer Grundlage, Vol. I, Freiburg i. Br., 1917. Compare with this the lecture of July 10, 1920, reprinted in “Blaetter fuer Anthroposophie,” September, 1953. Not translated.
• 66. Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt: 1821–1879, “Beitraege zur Wuerdigung Schillers. Briefe ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen.” Published by G. Wachsmuth, Stuttgart, 1922.
• 67. Orison Swett Marden: 1850–1924, American author.
• 68. Reference to the first Course of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum from September 26 until October 16, 1920.
• 69. Ludwig Graf von Polzer-Hoditz: 1869–1945; his lecture was later published under the title, “Der Kampf gegen den Geist und das Testament Peters des Grossen,” Stuttgart, 1922.

A hundred-fifty years ago today Hegel was born in Stuttgart, and when we recall this fact today, we should be spontaneously filled with a feeling for the tremendous change and transformation the times have undergone since the birth of this individual whose spirit was so extraordinarily characteristic of the whole of modern civilization. In a sense, Hegel does embody the essence of the Central European cultural life, which, subsequent to his influence, has changed so considerably. Having played a certain role in Central Europe, this cultural life is just about beginning to disappear from this region.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart, in Swabia; he spent his maturing years of development of his particular spiritual character in middle Germany. In the last period of his life, he was a personality of great consequence in northern Germany, where he was particularly influential in public education, but also in a number of other cultural concerns of that region. Born on August 27, 1770, having developed slowly because of a certain sluggish mentality, Hegel attended the University of Tuebingen where he studied theology. Above all else, he made the acquaintance of the much more mentally mobile and quick, young Schelling.⁷⁰ He also became acquainted with Hoelderlin,⁷¹ who, one might say, transposed the melancholic sentiments of ancient Greece into modern times. In close relationship with these two, Hegel spent his years of study in Tuebingen. Then, like Schelling, he turned to middle Germany, to the University of Jena in Thuringia, where, again like Schelling, attracted to the personality of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, he made his first attempts at working out his own ideas of a world view. He taught at the University until 1806. In that year, while Napoleon's cannons thundered around Jena, he concluded his first sizable independent work, his Phenomenology of the Spirit. This work contains the attempt to re-experience in thoughts all that human consciousness can experience—from the dimmest impressions of the world to that mental clarity in which the human being experiences the world of ideas with such intensity that this ideal world itself appears to him as the very substance of spirit. One could say that this Phenomenology of the Spirit is something like a world tour of the spirit.

The difficult conditions in Germany at that time brought an end to Hegel's position at the University of Jena. Yet he continued to remain in middle Germany, and for the next year or so edited a political newspaper in Bamberg. Then he was principal of a secondary school in Nuremberg, until he took a position as professor at the University of Heidelberg for a few years. During his years in Nuremberg, Hegel completed his most important work, Science of Logic. In Heidelberg, he wrote his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Then he was called to the University of Berlin, which had been founded on the spirit of Fichte and Humboldt. There, his activity expanded in influence and authority to cover the entire educational system then being administered from Berlin, as well as other matters of cultural importance.

Hegel was a strange personality even in outward appearance when he lectured. Before him were the written pages of his manuscript, which, so it seems, were always in disarray so that he was constantly turning and searching among his pages. He was somewhat awkward in his presentation and laborious in his delivery. While he was lecturing, the thought within him worked out of deep substrata of the soul, forming itself only with great difficulty into a word, which then issued forth as if in a stuttering, disjointed manner. Yet, his lecture, which reached its audience in this way as if constantly interrupting itself, is supposed to have made an extraordinarily grand impression on those who were capable of appreciating such a personality. In other ways, too, Hegel had remarkable personal qualities. He truly entered into and familiarized himself with the whole structure of the environment in which he happened to find himself. Thus, one can observe how he actually outgrew the Swabian milieu. One can see that he retained within himself the Swabian spirit with all its special characteristic features until he went to Switzerland and Frankfurt/Main—he spent some time as a private tutor in both Switzerland and Frankfurt after graduating from the university—where he again merged relatively quickly with the life of his new surroundings.

Then he moved to Jena, where Fichte's fiery spirit operated, where, above all else, there existed something like a concentrated summation of the entire cultural essence of Central Europe—a time of which people today can scarcely form a picture. It was indeed so that when Fichte presented his expositions in the university auditorium, which, in his characteristic manner, were on a high spiritual, yet nevertheless abstract level, these discourses were continued and carried on in debates right out into the streets and squares of Jena. In very truth, a lecture by Fichte was not merely a discussion pertaining to questions of one or another kind, but an event. It was an event also in this respect, that at that time, from all around Jena, individuals in need of a world outlook came to hear Fichte speak. One who reads the correspondence, of which there is a great deal, in which people tell of hearing Fichte in Jena, will again and again come across passages testifying to Fichte's tremendous spiritual influence. Indeed, long after Fichte had died, decades later, people who had heard him in Jena still spoke of the great influence he had upon their soul life. The philosophical fire-spirit, Schelling, was stimulated by what flowed as the power of spirit into the world; the more ponderous Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was motivated as well, and joined forces with Schelling to develop Fichte's philosophy further. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schelling and Hegel published the Critical Journal of Philosophy in Jena. Its articles certainly stood on the highest levels of abstract philosophical thinking, but in such a manner that one sees how these utterances, couched in thin abstractions, concern themselves—as though welling up straight from the human heart—with those affairs of human life and the world that have always been the high points of all striving for a world concept. Following this, Hegel worked his way to a certain independence, and in 1806 wrote his Phenomenology of the Spirit, which, however, is actually a phenomenology of consciousness.

As I said, Hegel always stood completely within his milieu. The riddles of his surroundings worked deep within him. Just as the Swabian spirit with its depth, as found in a few select Swabians, was so strongly revealed in Hegel's youth, so was this whole spirit of philosophy, comprising in concentrated form the whole new cultural striving, that took hold of him in Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was out of this philosophical spirit that he wrote and taught, a spirit which was always nourished, and increasingly maintained, however, by an overview of the general world condition.

Out of this spirit, too, arose Hegel's Logic—no ordinary logic, but something entirely different. It was written in the second decade of the nineteenth century. One is moved to say that the most singular of all kinds of human striving on the highest level manifests itself in this Hegelian logic.

To Hegel, logic was something akin to a summation of what Hellenism, in a manner somewhat different from Hegel's, understood as logos or universal reason. During the profound inner experience that Hegel underwent while working out his Phenomenology of the Spirit, he began to feel strongly that if man works himself up to the intensive experience of the “idea,” hence the ideas of the world, then this experiencing of the “idea” is no longer a mere thought experience but one of the divine cosmic element in all its truth, purity, and light-filled clarity. Something that had pulsed for centuries in the minds and souls of Central Europe came into inner soul existence at that time in Hegel. One need only recall the deep mysticism of Meister Eckhart, of Johannes Tauler. Recently, we have become acquainted with this mysticism from another side; yet it nevertheless remains profound—for the experience remains the same, after all, even if one is familiar with the deeper occult foundations of which I spoke here a few days ago.⁷² One need only think of this mystical experience that became an inner revelation, as in Valentin Weigel, even in Paracelsus or in Jacob Boehme. One need only transform for oneself into the bright, light-filled clarity of universal ideas what minds such as Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler experienced more out of intense feeling than something abstract, what Jacob Boehme set out in images through inner experience, hence replacing the mysticism of feeling and imagery with the mysticism of ideas; then one has the experience that was Hegel's when he wrote his Logic. It was the soul's surrender to pure ideas, but in the conviction that these ideas are the very substance of the universe. It was a dwelling in something that Nietzsche later called the cold, icy realm of ideas. To Hegel, on the other hand, this was accompanied by the awareness that such an experience of the ideas was a dialogue with the cosmic spirit itself.

What Hegel experienced, not in a vaguely defined unity of the world, not in such vague concepts as those produced by the Pantheists, but in concrete ideas that were followed through from simple “existence” all the way to the fully saturated “idea of the organism” and the “spirit,” what can be experienced to the full extent of the developed world of ideas, this Hegel summed up in his Logic. Thus, it is the intent in his Logic to present a structure of those ideas attainable for the human being, ideas which, as man experiences them, simultaneously demonstrate the certainty that they are of the same element by which the universal spirit allows reality to come into being. This is why Hegel called the contents of his Logic the divinity prior to the creation of the world. Yet, icy is the region in which a person finds himself who studies Hegel's Logic; this is because Hegel moves entirely in what the ordinary person calls the uttermost abstraction. He begins by presenting “being” as the simplest idea; then he passes over to “nothingness”; proceeds dialectically from “being” through “nothingness” to “becoming,” to “existence,” and on to “causality.” One does not gain from this what the ordinary person wants when he wishes to be filled inwardly in his soul with divine cosmic warmth. Instead, one receives what in ordinary life would be called a sum of abstract ideas.

What is this Logic? When it is really contemplated, this Logic becomes an experience; it even turns into an experience that can give a person much information about many a secret of humanity and the world in general. One is induced to say that what is experienced through Hegel's Logic can really only be characterized by means of spiritual science. It is only through spiritual science that one finds words to characterize this experience. This is a remarkable discovery. Hegel's pupil, Rosenkranz,⁷³ who was devoted to his master, has presented us with a biography of Hegel, written not only in a kindly but also a spirited manner. In it, he uses words that are, I might say, in a certain respect significant for the events of that time. It was around the mid-forties of the nineteenth century that he said, “We are actually the grave diggers of the great philosophers.” Rosenkranz then lists the great philosophers who rose from European civilization during the period near the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and how they actually died within that same period. One experiences a melancholy feeling when reading this passage in Rosenkranz's biography of Hegel, for something very true has been expressed. As this nineteenth century advanced step by step, it became the grave digger not only of the philosophers but of philosophy itself, indeed, of the profound questions dealing with world concepts. The decay of European civilization, now approaching us with giant strides, first announced itself in the lofty regions of philosophy. The presumptuous philosophical systems of the second half of the nineteenth century are at bottom expressions of decline.

On the basis of spiritual science, on the other hand, one cannot speak as did Rosenkranz; based on spiritual science, I would say that even what is outwardly, physically dead must also come to life. For what is eternal in the human being works on eternally, on one side in super-sensible worlds, but on the other side also in the earthly realm itself; and if it falls to the impulses of decline to have grave diggers, it is up to spiritual science to seek out what is eternally alive soul essence in what is dead and to place it before the world in its ever continuing life. Therefore, I would like to speak today not of the dead but of the living Hegel.

To be sure, however, living personalities of Hegel's kind also become, in a certain sense, sharp critics of what—partly from indolence of soul, partly from sheer bad will—presently forms an alliance with the powers of decadence. Therefore, from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, I must say: Yes, it is true that Hegel's logical dialectic runs its course in the cold, icy realm of what at first seem to be abstract concepts. To experience Hegel's Logic actually means finding oneself dwelling in a multitude of concepts, which a thoughtless person does not care for, about which the thoughtless man would say, “That does not interest me.” But this conceptual world of Hegel's, this sum of apparent abstractions, these icy, cold concepts, what exactly are they? One can investigate what these concepts are, particularly through what spiritual science offers us. There is no doubt that they cannot be eternal universal reason itself, for universal reason could never have created from this sum of pure abstractions the entire multiform and, above all, warmth-pervaded world of ours. These logical concepts, these logical ideas, seem like transparent conceptual veils; indeed, Hegel himself calls his logical ideas shadow images.

Therefore, what Hegel initially experienced in this logic is, of course, something that it cannot be. It is a sum of ideas that begin with “being,” pass from “nothingness” to “becoming,” and so on through many such concepts, ending with the “idea bearing its own purpose within itself ”—therefore, concluding with what ordinary consciousness would also still call an abstraction. It is certain then that the world could not have been created out of such ideas; nor is this logic to be viewed as the living spirit, that is, what must be grasped in supersensory perception as living spirit. Indeed, I would say, it is out of an admittedly subjective feeling that Hegel declares that the contents of this logic are the thoughts of God prior to the world's creation. Out of these thoughts, one could never in any way comprehend the rich abundance of the created world. And yet, if one allows oneself to go into these thoughts, the experience is a strong and powerful one. What exactly is it then that is contained in this logic?

Look at our building here.⁷⁴ It is intended to have as the central group in the middle of the eastern end a kind of Christ figure, with Lucifer rising above it, and below Ahriman, as though being thrust into the earth by the Representative of Humanity, who inwardly preserves complete balance of soul. The intention is to represent the full human condition in this group. In reality, man is, after all, that being who must seek the balance between what tries to rise above the human being and what draws him down into the ground—the balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic nature. Physiologically, physically speaking, the Luciferic force is that element in us which brings about fever, pleurisy, which brings man into conditions of warmth that tend to dissolve him, cause him to be dissipated in the world; the Ahrimanic force brings about ossification, calcification. Speaking of the soul level, man is the entity who must seek the equilibrium, on the one hand, between rapturous mysticism—between theory, between all that strives to the insubstantial but nevertheless light-irradiated realm—and what pulls him down, on the other hand, to the pedantic, philistine, materialistic and intellectualistic sphere. Spiritually speaking, man must hold the balance between the Luciferic force always wishing to lull him to sleep, always tempting him to yield himself up to the universal all, and the Ahrimanic force that shocks him awake again and again, striking through him with a violence that does not let him sleep. One does not comprehend the nature of the human being if one cannot place it in the middle between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic force.

Yet, the experience of the human soul at this middle point is a complicated one; the soul can only fully experience this complexity in its development in the course of time, and one must understand each of the successive stages of this development. One can say that whoever understands Hegel and the way he elaborated his Logic can see how, at that time, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, mankind began to calcify, to become materialistic, to densify inwardly, to become entangled in matter. In the realm of knowledge and perception, this age gives the impression of sinking down into matter. As in a picture, humanity appears to be sinking into the material element, with Hegel standing in the center, working himself out of it with all his might and snatching away from Ahriman what he has that is good, namely, the abstract logic that we need for our inner liberation, without which we will not achieve pure thinking. Hegel wrests this logic from the powers of gravity, from the terrestrial powers, presenting it in all its cold abstractness, so that it may not live in the Ahrimanic element dwelling in man, but can rise into human thinking. Yes, this Hegelian logic is wrested from the Ahrimanic powers, torn free from them and bestowed on humanity. This is what mankind needs and without which it cannot progress—which, however, had first to be rescued from Ahriman.

Thus, Hegelian logic actually remains something eternal; thus it must continue to be effective. It must ever and again be sought for. We cannot do without it. If we try to manage without it, we either fall back into the nebulous softness of “Schleiermacherei,”^T1 or we founder in what people immediately became enmeshed in when they have approached Hegel without being able to grasp him. For there appears on the one side the image of Hegel, who Lifts himself out of Ahriman's realm, who rescues from Ahriman what, as pure logic, has to be saved for mankind, actually has to be saved for human thinking. On the other side, there arises the image of Karl Marx, who also orients himself on Hegel, taking up Hegel's thinking, but is gripped by Ahriman's claws and dragged into the lowest depths of the material bog—who by Hegel's method arrives at historical materialism. Here, we cannot help but see, side by side, the upward striving spirit, snatching the logic away from Ahriman, because, with this logic, one must truly keep oneself upright by means of all one's inner human soul forces, and the one who, with this logic, sinks into the Ahrimanic morass.

Hegel actually appears as a spirit that can be understood only if one tries to comprehend him with the concepts which only spiritual science can supply. This is what Hegel became through the influence brought to bear on him by Fichte's fiery words in Jena, the essence of which he then formulated in his way, during his subsequent sojourns in Bamberg, Nuremberg and Heidelberg.

Subsequently, he was transferred to northern Germany. He always experienced fully what his surroundings contained. In a humanly personal manner, his inner life awakened to what was around him. Thus he became the influential genius of the University of Berlin. Now the world experienced through him that work which he had to create out of the very middle of the modern civilized world if he was truly a spirit fully belonging to this middle. In the last few weeks, we have, after all, been characterizing the East, the Middle, and the West. We have found that it is the economic thinking that flourishes particularly in the West; in the East, spiritual thinking flourished; in the Middle, the legal, political element has chiefly raised itself to a special flowering. Fichte has written a work dealing with natural law. The most enlightened minds occupied themselves with ideas concerning human rights. It was just at the time of his move to northern Germany that Hegel gave the world his Basic Principles of the Philosophy of Rights or Natural Rights and Science of the State in Outline. Everything that could be termed a defamation of Hegel was due chiefly to this book, which contains the remarkable sentence: “Everything reasonable is real, and everything real is reasonable.”⁷⁵

Whoever can appreciate that it was Hegel who wrested human reason from the clutches of the Ahrimanic powers will also recognize his right to search it out, and to make it effectual throughout the world. Thus, because his field of action was the Ahrimanic which cannot lead a person upward to what lies before birth or into what is active after death, Hegel became an interpreter of spirituality, but only of the physical, earthly one; he turned into a philosopher of natural science and history. Yet he depicted what dwells in the external world in the relation of man to man and which then develops systematically as organized human life. This he summed up in his concept of “objective spirit.” In the expression of rights, in morality, in the implementation of treaties and so forth, he beheld the spirit active in the social organization itself. Regarding these matters, he stood completely within not only the spatial, but also the temporal milieu. It was not yet the trend of that time, particularly in the area where Hegel lived, to worship the state as much as was the case later on. Therefore, it is incorrect to view the concept of the state appearing in Hegel's writing in the same light as must be done in regard to later times. Within his structure of the state, for example, Hegel still acknowledged free corporations, a corporate life. All the antihuman elements that made their appearance later in the Prussian realm were not yet in evidence when Hegel, one might say, deified the idea of the state in Prussia of all places; but this grew out of his attempt to see at work in the world that reason which he had wrested from Ahriman through his logic.

Thus, we cannot help but say that this is basically the tragedy that has since been enacted historically in such a shocking way. The element living in Middle Europe is indeed something we must not regard in the same way as do Western eyes, particularly since the mendacities of recent years. It is something best characterized by the fact that, even now, it gives the impression to a mind such as Oswald Spengler's that the only social salvation for the impending age of decline must come through Central Europe, not in order to counteract the decline—Spengler does not believe in such counteraction—but merely to make the decline that will take place tolerable, until, in the beginning of the next millennium, total barbarism supposedly will come into being.

One can say that in the twenties of the nineteenth century Hegel appears as the ruling spirit governing the whole realm of Prussian education; he stands there with the kind of reasonableness I have just characterized for you. It is a reasonableness that is born, as it were, out of the ice of Ahriman, but it also possesses in its spirit structure something of an inner firmness, having nothing mathematical about it, yet containing a tremendous force, an element of fine spirituality.

Now, one has to understand that what was present as the special element of Central Europe has to be characterized also from this aspect: that right into the ninth century its lack of culture still included the practice of blood sacrifice. This showed characteristics that have a certain value when taken up by such a spirit as Hegel's. Such a spirituality, however, is rare, it does not repeat itself. Hegel's students were basically all small minds, and the one who, in a certain respect, was a great mind, Karl Marx, quickly succumbed to the Ahrimanic powers. The element which then gained ground was the very one that precipitated the plunge into the Ahrimanic abyss.

Hegel salvaged something from what plunged into this abyss—something that must be eternal, something he could only salvage because it was saved from just this element. It was necessary that this be done by a person whose soul essence was of the very being of Middle Europe. This was the case with Hegel. He was Swabian by birth and by virtue of the region of his youth: middle German, Franconian and Thuringian in respect to his maturation; and he was so pronouncedly Prussian in the final period of his life that he experienced Prussia as the center of the world, with Berlin as the very center of this world center.

There is a certain inherent force in Hegelianism, truly not a physical force but a different one, namely a spiritual force; Hegelianism contains something that must be taken up by every spiritual world view. For any spiritual science would have to become rachitic if it could not be permeated by the skeletal system of ideas which Hegel wrested from the ossifying grip of Ahriman. We need this system to become inwardly strong in a certain manner. We have need of this sober thoughtfulness if, in our spiritual endeavors, we wish to avoid the degeneracy of nebulous, cozy mysticism. We also need the force that lived in Hegel; we require the force of his creed of reason, if we do not wish to sink into what Karl Marx directly succumbed to when he tried independently to work himself into Hegel's mentality.

It would really be necessary at this point in time—which is perhaps one of the most important moments, more important even than 1914—that as many people as possible recall this significant element in Hegel. For a true recognition, especially of Hegel, could bring about a certain awakening of soul. And an awakening is needed! No one believes, no one wishes to believe, what dangers are actually at work in European civilization and its American appendage; one does not wish to believe what forces of decline prevail. In public life today, only the forces of decline are taken into account. No one wishes to perceive, to feel the uplifting forces. Let us focus on single characteristic things that just recently may have caught our attention. What thoughts are harbored, for instance, in the attitude becoming prevalent now in the civilized world in regard to the traditional spiritual life? I am not referring to our spiritual life, for we intend to bring a new spirit into humanity's civilization. What are the thoughts in the attitude of mind now growing and spreading in relation to the life of the spirit? You can find such thoughts in a recent article⁷⁶ written by the rector of the University of Halle for the Hallischen Nachrichten under the title, “Gradual Abolition of the Universities.” He states:

At least this much appears certain, namely, that a government agency has actually put forward the suggestion to close down a part of the German universities. Other educational tasks are held to be more important, and it is believed that greater financial resources have to be freed for them. Since these resources are unavailable, it is thought that a number of universities should be abolished in order to found a type of civil service school where persons who have not attended a university would be educated so that they could administer the official posts allotted to them.

So, civil service training begins! In Russia it is going at full speed. And the Western world pays no attention! They will have to pay bitter attention to it, however, if an awakening of souls does not take place, if even the best minds continually turn a deaf ear to all that refers to the spirit; and, for their own amusement, certainly not for the good of this world, they continue to entertain the world with the timeworn slogans of liberalism, conservatism, pacificism, and so on.

And particularly morality among our intellectuals is fast going downhill. Here is a small indication of it. But first, I must mention that when Ernst Haeckel retired from his professorship at Jena, he himself chose as his successor his pupil Plate,⁷⁷ who had recently arrived from Berlin. He installed him, so to speak, for Haeckel's voice really carried weight at the University of Jena at the time of his retirement. He installed Plate in all the responsible posts he had held: His professorship, his administration of the Zoological Institute and the Phyletic Museum, established for Haeckel himself on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday⁷⁸ by the Haeckel Foundation that had come into existence. It was from all this that Haeckel withdrew, installing in his place his pupil Plate. Now I would like to read you a news item⁷⁹ of a few days ago:

One year ago, eight days after Haeckel's death, an obituary notice in the Berliner Tageblatt by Dr. Adolf Heilborn made the first mention of the martyrdom inflicted on Haeckel during the last ten years of his life, as a result of the conduct of Professor Ludwig Plate. On April 1, 1909, Haeckel had relinquished the chair of zoology at Jena, which he had occupied for forty-eight years, and the directorship of the Zoological Institute and Phyletic Museum to his former pupil Ludwig Plate, for which the latter expressed his heartiest thanks to “his highly honored Excellency.” Upon settling down in his new positions, one of Plate's first official acts was to demand that Haeckel clear out his workroom in the Zoological Institute without delay. When Haeckel protested,⁸⁰ Plate's explanation was: “Since April 1, I have been sole director of the Phyletic Museum, and you are to comply without question to all my directions.” This prelude and the further developments of the conflict were related in simple words by Heilborn who was Haeckel's pupil and friend, with the result that Professor Ludwig Plate brought an action of libel against him at the District Court in Jena. Following this, Dr. Heilborn made public all the relevant facts in a small brochure, The Lear-Tragedy of Ernst Haeckel (Hoffman & Campe, Hamburg/Berlin 1920), based on Haeckel's unpublished letters and notes, and on official documents. Heilborn could make use of a turn of phrase that a witty advocate once used before the court: “I move for the condemnation of my respected Opponent on the same grounds which he himself has brought forward.” Nothing weighed more against Plate than his own remarks. From Haeckel, who had made endowments to the University of over a million marks, who had donated his large library and collections representing fifty-five years of work to it, Plate demanded the return of a-number of allegedly missing books, and at another time the return of a considerable number of cardboard boxes. Furthermore, Plate stated the following: “This grave injustice which has been done to me can never be erased; however, in recognition of his great services to science and because he is my former teacher, I shall forgive him.”—and “No one will hold it against me that after all these experiences I have broken off all personal contact with Haeckel.”

So much for Plate versus Haeckel. I am reminded of a lecture once given by Ottokar Lorenz,⁸¹ one of the better historians of earlier times. I did not agree with its content, but one expression appealed to me that he used right at the beginning. At a Schiller jubilee, Ottokar Lorenz had to lecture on “Schiller as a Historian.” As I said, I did not agree with the content, but he said:

Indeed, from the standpoint of present-day science, there is actually nothing more to be said about Schiller as a historian. If I nevertheless do say something more, it will be on behalf of the High Senate and my honored colleagues.

The High Senate and the colleagues were all sitting there. Now follows what we could call a special declaration by the High Senate and the colleagues. For he says:

“ In the academic world of Jena, Plate stood quite alone.”

—I question whether he stood by himself when he came into the lecture hall!?

The anatomist Schwalbe once wrote: “It is unbelievable ... how Plate behaved. I am amazed that the students in Jena did not react. It would be a really good deed if they could make it too hot for him in Jena.”

Thus write the professors, the "honored colleagues," who thoroughly deplore that the students did not manage to torment Plate enough to make him leave Jena. These honored colleagues who write like this—in private letters, of course have, however, carefully avoided being unfriendly to Professor Plate when he enters the lecture hall.

Heinrich Heine once said that Lessing's opponents, due to their association with him, were preserved, like an insect in amber, from vanishing without a trace. Now it would be discourteous to apply this comparison to living persons, however well it would fit in a scientific context. We will therefore content ourselves with Heilborn's remark to the effect that nothing will remain of Plate's name and work except the sinister remembrance of the martyrdom that he inflicted on Haeckel.

One could cite a great many similar examples of academic morality, of the morality of the present-day intelligentsia. What comes to light thereby is that today we have to do not merely with the struggle of this or that world-view versus another; we are dealing today with the struggle of truth against the lie, and in this conflict it is the lie that directs its weapons against the truth. Today, truth's struggle against falsehood, which is extending its grip further and further on mankind, is more important than any dispute over other concepts.

It was perhaps thought to be exaggerated when, in a recent lecture, I said that the people of Europe are asleep. They will have to experience bitterly—I mentioned this in a different context—how the most extreme effect of the Western world concept is spreading in Bolshevism across all of Asia, and will be taken up by the people of Asia with the same fervor with which they received their sacred Brahman at one time. This will indeed happen, and modern civilization will have to face up to it. And one feels the deepest pain on seeing the sleeping souls in Europe, who fall so completely to evoke in their minds that real earnestness which is what matters today.

A few days after I had expressed this here, I came across the following news item:

Some days ago, I had the opportunity to take a look at a 10,000 ruble note in possession of a representative of the Soviet Republic. What astonished me was not so much its high denomination; rather, what struck me was that in the center the bank note bore a finely and clearly drawn swastika.

This symbol, which a Hindu or an ancient Egyptian once looked upon when he spoke of his sacred Brahman, is seen today on a 10,000 ruble note! In the strongholds of politics, people know how to influence human souls. One knows what the victorious advance of the swastika signifies, the sign which a great number of people in Central Europe are already wearing today—again based on other underlying reasons—one knows what it means. Yet one is unwilling to listen to something that seeks to interpret the secrets of today's historical developments out of the most important symptoms.

This interpretation, however, can proceed only out of what can come to light through spiritual science. One must take a good look at what is presently going on. One must focus on the tendency to devastation in regard to the established cultural life, the tendency that is seeking to transform even the vestiges of this old cultural life into schools for civil servants and bureaucratic machinery, and that has morally sunk down to a low point such as I described to you in regard to Herr Plate, who is Haeckel's closest pupil, the favorite pupil of that inwardly decent, good man, Haeckel! Haeckel did not do things like that; the Ahrimanic, materialistic culture does.

In this age—in which one knows how to proceed if one goes about it consciously—one should recall great minds such as Hegel, born 150 years ago in Stuttgart, who in an inner struggle of soul and spirit wrested from the Ahrimanic powers those concepts and ideas which are needed to acquire sufficient inner spiritual steadfastness for ascending the ladder into the spiritual world; but who also offers much else of inner spiritual discipline. Truly, through the way in which his ideas can be alive now, Hegel should be treasured on the part of spiritual science; and because of what can live of him today, let us commemorate him today, on this, his 150th birthday.

He died of cholera on November 14, 1831, in Berlin, on the anniversary of the death of Leibnitz, the great European philosopher. What he has left behind, has, to begin with, either been misunderstood in the outer world, or been misrepresented by his students, or else has been dragged down directly into the Ahrimanic sphere, as in Marxism. With the help of spiritual science, the soil must be found in which the eternally enduring force that was born 150 years ago in Stuttgart in Georg Friedrich Hegel—a force containing the best extract of European spiritual life, which exerted its influence throughout sixty years in Middle Europe—can grow. It must not be buried; it must be awakened to life in spiritual science, a life such as we now truly need in this intellectual, moral and economic decline.

• 70. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling: 1775–1854.
• 71. Friedrich Hoelderlin: 1770–1843.
• 72. See Lecture IV of this volume.
• 73. Karl Rosenkranz: 1805–1879, philosopher and literary historian. Hegel's Leben, Berlin, 1844.
• 74. Rudolf Steiner: Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum, Gesamtausgabe Stuttgart, 1958.
• T1. “Schleiermacherei”—an apt play on words around the name of Hegel's contemporary, F.D.E. Schleiermacher (lit. = veil maker). Steiner described his world view as ardently devotional and sincere, but introspective. See Riddles of Philosophy, pp. 165–168.
• 75. Literally, this sentence says: “What is rational, is real; and what is real is rational.” From preface to Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1821.
• 76. Professor Paul Menzer: “Abbau der Universitaeten?” in “Hallische Nachrichten,” August 18, 1920.
• 77. Ludwig Plate, 1862–1937.
• 78. The Phyletic Museum of the University of Jena was founded in 1907, and according to its foundation-charter was "intended for the development and dissemination of the teaching of evolution as well as morphology and anthropology." Already in 1886, Ernst Haeckel had tried to realize the plan of the museum with the help of the so-called Ritter-Foundation, but had failed because of the Opposition of the donor, Paul von Ritter. It is quite possible that on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Haeckel talked about this planned museum in Dr. Steiner's presence. For Haeckel's birthday, his students and friends collected money for a marble bust. More money was collected than was needed. In 1894, this surplus of 10,000 marks still existed when the museum was established. It was then included in the capital of the foundation. In a footnote to a letter from Haeckel to Carneri on March 23, 1907, the publisher of the letters writes, “The construction of the Phyletic Museum in Jena was of great significance for the popularization of the teaching of evolution. For a long time, Haeckel had been envisioning such a ‘public-spirited center of education,’ namely, a collection ... in which the most pertinent facts of phylogeny would be suitably placed together, ... preparations, pictures and explanations would aid the public's understanding. The necessary fmancial means came together through donations.” Rudolf Steiner was aware of all these matters.
• 79. Refers to the article by E.F.: “Haeckel und—Plate,” in the “Berliner Tageblatt,” evening edition of August 19, 1920.
• 80 . The writer of the article, E.F., bypasses the true facts with his report. Compare with this Heilborn's description on pp. 12 and 13 of his pamphlet, Die Lear-Tragoedie Ernst Haeckels: “One of Plate's first official actions after his move was the demand that Haeckel immediately clear out his study in the zoological institute. The elderly scientist was at that moment suffering from severe rheumatism. In order to be able to comply with Plate's request, Haeckel had to have himself carried into the institute ... This hasty move then took place in the custodian's and Haeckel's daughter's presence; a move that required the transport of letters, documents and books across to the Phyletic Museum. In two days, this was accomplished. Haeckel was just surveying his new workroom when the recently appointed director of the museum, Plate, appeared, announcing that he was requisitioning the„assistant's room for his ... 84 cages of live mice that he had brought with him ... for the purpose of genetic tests. Haeckel ... protested against this because of the unavoidable dirt and smell of such a breeding center and asked whether the mice couldn't be housed somewhere else in Jena besides the brand-new museum. Haeckel suggested ... a room in the zoological institute for this purpose. Plate, however, did not like this, because the foul smell would be too irksome for him in the adjacent laboratory. When Haeckel remarked that surely he had a voice in the matter of the arrangements in the Phyletic Museum, which was to serve purposes other than the raising of mice, especially since the museum had cost him two years of work and a great part of his own fmancial resources, Plate declared as if with the full weight of his office, ‘I am sole director of the Phyletic Museum since April 1 and you have to submit to all my orders without exception.’ A bitter exchange of words ensued and the elderly Haeckel finally said, ‘You treat me like an assistant who is twenty years younger, not like your teacher who is thirty years older!’ Plate left without a word ... This was the first tribute of gratitude on the part of the ‘sincerely devoted old pupil’ and the first expression of his ‘special joy over furnishing the museum together with Haeckel according to the latter's intentions!’”
• 81 . Ottokar Lorenz: 1832–1904, Austrian historian.

I have often had to mention here that the science of initiation is required for the forces that are to bring about a reconstruction of declining civilization; that it is necessary to know what can be gained from beyond the threshold of the super-sensible world. One can say that the spiritual evolution of humanity has proceeded from a knowledge and corresponding attitude, feeling and will that were drawn from beyond this threshold. Everything that is discovered when we go back to mankind's primordial treasures of wisdom becomes intelligible when we can trace this original wisdom to the revelations derived from mystery knowledge; when we can assume that, to begin with, sources of knowledge, of feeling and will, were accessible to humanity in its earth evolution that are not accessible by means of the purely human forces known to people today. As evolution progressed, human beings increasingly had to depend an what can be derived from the human being himself. This then is essentially the content of the forces that have been active during recent centuries in the development of civilization.

These forces that have emerged out of man himself up to now have produced a condition of civilization which, if left to its own devices, would inevitably lead to its own downfall. The majority of people today do not believe this as yet. They continue to talk and act automatically in the same old way, rejecting what is drawn from the same spiritual sources from which the ancient mystery wisdom was drawn, but now in a new way, directly through the forces of man himself. We must go quite concretely into what can be disclosed to present-day humanity as a sort of basis for all that is needed in the immediate future in the way of natural science; a knowledge that comprises human ethics, moral philosophy, but also social will. We must therefore go into certain matters that have been discussed here in the past few weeks from any number of viewpoints; today, I shall refer to them again from yet a different point of view.

When we are awake, we are, in the first place, surrounded by the outer sense world, by what produces the impressions made on our eyes, ears, organs of warmth, and on our senses as a whole. The external sense world is spread out around us, and the inner life of most people mainly consists of a further elaboration of the outer impressions. From the other side of the threshold this outer world presents an appearance that differs from the one it exhibits on this side. You know, of course, what humanity has come to in these last centuries by confming itself basically to viewing the world from this side of the threshold. To put it in a word, I would say that mankind has reached the point of looking at itself, so to speak. What man himself beholds we call the threefold man, the head man, the rhythmic man and the limb and metabolic man. Here, we shall indicate diagrammatically the tapestry that spreads round about us (see sketch on p. 3), which in the main constitutes the content of the sensory world. From this side of the threshold people now speculate on what is behind this sense tapestry. They say that behind it molecules, atoms and substances perform all sorts of dances. They give these dances any number of names, but they are convinced that when the human being looks out through his eyes, listens to the outside through his ears, in short, perceives outwardly through his senses, that some sort of material world lies behind it.

From the other side of the threshold, no such world of substance is disclosed. If a person penetrates only a little way into the region beyond the threshold, it is immediately obvious that a certain region of the spiritual world lies behind the tapestry of the senses; meaning, we are essentially dealing with a world of spirit which is located behind this sensory world.

When we take into consideration that the human being consists of the ego, the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, we have to say that when man is awake, meaning, when he is immersed in his organism with his ego and astral body, he has no share in the spirit region behind the tapestry of the senses. In sleep, on the other hand, having drawn his ego and astral body out of his physical organism, man dwells within this (upper) region of the spirit world with his ego and astral body. From the time he falls asleep until he awakens, man participates in the region lying, as it were, behind nature in a spirit-nature world. One could also say that it is the world to which man belongs for this period; a certain part of the spiritual realm is in fact allotted to him for this state of sleep.

Now man also has insight into himself only to a certain degree. He can brood about himself to some extent and then, referring to his soul nature, he speaks of thoughts, feelings and will impulses, but in most instances in a very vague manner. From this inner nature, which remains quite undefined to him, he draws the thoughts that represent memories, but he does not see behind his inner being. Thus, we can say that just as a sort of barrier stands between ourselves and a certain region of the external world, so, too, a barrier can be drawn through which the gaze, turned inward, does not penetrate. If the human being would, however, penetrate into this region that lies in a sense on yonder side of the mirror which reflects his memories, he would not discover what many mystics, affected by illusions, believe. For they assume that all one has to do is brood over one's inner being and the loftiest spiritual insight can be attained. Instead, man discovers there the mysteries of his organization, the secrets of the wondrous structure expressed in the human organism. Were man really to penetrate the barrier, he would not behold the images of a Mechthild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhdidt or St. Theresa; he would perceive the human organization, something that would appear thoroughly prosaic to certain illusion-prone mystics, but does not seem prosaic to one who possesses the right feeling for the actual mystery of the universe. One is indeed justified in saying that far more wonderful than the images of St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg, or Johannes Tauler; far more remarkable than these reminiscences forged by the reflections that exist as memories are those saturated with impulses of sensations radiating up from liver, stomach, spieen, and so on; far more wonderful than all that—yes, more remarkable, too, than what has been depicted in archetypal pictures of mankind's evolution through myths, legends and such like—is what establishes itself in the prosaic organs of the human interior. Strange as this sounds, the truth must be grasped at this point. What establishes itself there is, first of all, actual earthly substance, the element, in fact, that constitutes earthly matter. We do not find earthly matter in the outer world; it is found within the human skin. Again, this whole inner structure of man's organs is none other than something that is being pressed in a sense out of another spirit region. It is a spirit region that in a manner of speaking sweats out of itself what is present as organs in the human organism. When man looks into his inner being upon penetrating the tapestry of memories customarily radiating towards him, this organic structure is first discovered, although mystically embellished on occasion. Just as he can penetrate from beyond the threshold through the tapestry of the outer senses, when he looks through this memory tapestry, he then beholds behind this organic structure the other region of the spirit to which he belongs from the time he falls asleep until he awakens. It is a spirit region that man pays no attention to, but it is the one that bestows on him the forces expressed in his limbs.

When we contemplate our senses, we find that forces dwell in them that are mainly those lying behind the tapestry of the senses. Yet they penetrate us through the openings of our senses (see sketch) unbeknown to us, when we observe the world purely from this side of the threshold.

In our organs, too, forces are present that come from that spiritual region (Steiner here referred to the previous diagram), and the forces we possess in our arms and legs are really those that come from that other region of the spirit. Thus, the moment man is observed from the other side of the threshold, he is perceived as the confluence of two spirit domains. What confronts us when we contemplate the human being here in the earthly world is basically only an apparent unity. In fact, man is not a unity at all. He is the confluence of the spiritually active forces from the two regions I have indicated to you. The forces that live in our eyes or in our ears, for example, are of quite another origin than those that develop when we put one foot before the other, or move our arms. One cannot harbor such a concept without realizing that man is embedded, as it were, in the whole cosmos, that owing to his senses he belongs to one particular spirit region of the cosmos and through his limbs to another. Only what lives approximately in the middle—the rhythmic man, the system of the lungs and the heart and all that is connected with it—is actually of earthly origin; it is woven, as it were, out of a kind of world in the middle. Thus, man himself is a threefold being. Without understanding this threefoldness, we cannot comprehend man. I said that this is how the human being appears when we view him from beyond the threshold. We learn to see him as a member of the whole cosmos. One becomes aware through spiritual science how man lives in the whole cosmos and is fashioned out of it. One is then no longer ignorant of the truth that must be perceived, namely, that man's task is not merely comprised of what he accomplishes here on earth; he has tasks to fulfill in the whole of cosmic evolution. He represents an essential factor, to be reckoned with in the whole spiritual cosmic evolution.

Thus, one can say that spiritual science opens our eyes to what man represents as a member of the cosmos. Compared to this, just picture how liliputian the ideas appear that people today think up concerning the human being. Nowadays matters have reached the point where a person will only accept as knowledge something derived from this side of the threshold. He only looks at what is revealed to him between awakening and falling asleep, between birth and death. Moreover, he would like to construe all the tasks that the human being can accomplish here on earth from the concepts and ideas derived from this liliputian comprehension of man. We make no progress this way. We move closer and closer towards total decline precisely because our intellectuals will not venture to construe the tasks in this world by utilizing ideas other than those gained from waking life, from what lies between birth and death. What man accomplishes, however, is of an essentially much vaster scope. This can only be understood when the insights gained by ordinary observation of life are illumined and fructified with those that can be known by means of viewing the world from beyond the threshold. There can be absolutely no improvement in the development of civilization in the world if we do not accept what can be attained for human knowledge, feeling and will from beyond the threshold.

One is moved to say that it is especially painful when one finds that programs concerning life are drawn up today out of all the truncated knowledge, curtailed on all sides, which has been amassed by humanity in the last three to four hundred years. One is really in a strange position in regard to these programs. Religious denominations exist today which, at least textually, trace their faith to earlier ages, to times when ancient mystery knowledge was still alive. Their creed is no longer understood in these religious groups. It is only textual tradition, everything else has been squeezed out like a dry lemon. It is in fact no longer there, though in a certain sense one or the other person can penetrate to an understanding of it, particularly if he presses forward to what is usually prohibited by his church. Then a person can acquire a good deal from the traditional knowledge of the confessions. For instance, if, independent of what is prescribed for him, a Catholic reflects upon the Trinity and the Incarnation, he can arrive at significant insights. Indeed, it would be more sensible in many respects to reflect upon the Trinity or the Creed than to patronize all the movements that emerge today and forge a new creed and knowledge out of the modern truncated torso of learning. For what mankind has accumulated in recent centuries and utilizes today in order to launch into movements that introduce apparent improvements in the world is far short of what has remained from antiquity in tradition, even though it has been deformed by the confessions. It is lamentable to see how all sorts of scholastic or women's movements, fabricated out of the truncated knowledge of the last few centuries, believe that they can stir the world, whereas they only talk around the real questions.

It must be said that all this rests on a certain invincible pride of modern humanity, an arrogance that will learn absolutely nothing. If a person has grown up in a movement, in some party, he generally feels that this party has not yet reached just that particular insight which he, based on his viewpoint in life, has attained on his own, and so he sets about reforming it. It is the regrettable fact of the present day that so much immature nonsense appears as reformatory ideas. Truly fruitful things can only be accomplished if these movements that hope to Shake the world will allow the influx of all that can be investigated beyond the threshold of the sense world. For, you see, there is a certain domain of the spirit out there beyond the tapestry of the sensory world. What purpose does it serve? Just think, this spirit region is the very wörld we are in when we are awake, albeit not consciously, but in reality we are in it with our whole organism; for, as we stand, as we walk, we are within this world, we just do not see it. We continually move through this world, we are in it; we accomplish our actions in it. And when men engage in politics in it, for example, in Bolshevism, then what Bolshevists do not perceive strikes back at mankind. The Bolshevists only wish to construct a world out of what they see, but they are not in the world that they see—they are in the world that lies beyond the tapestry of the sense world. When women's movements appear today and make all sorts of demands, they do this based on what they see, but they make these demands for the world that they do not perceive. It therefore always backfires out of the world we are in, which in reality is there, but is not present in the demands that are raised, because people stand firm against receiving anything from the spiritual world.

This world we live in, this region, naturally has its significance in the great universe. To what purpose then is it there? You see, the world we live in between death and a new birth is a different world from the one existing here behind the sense tapestry. The world we enter between death and a new birth is another domain of the spiritual world. It is mainly the spiritual region where those beings dwell whom we refer to when speaking of the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. Yet this world of the nine hierarchies can only subsist when, through the physical human beingand it can only happen through him—it enters into a certain mutual intercourse with the world that I have described here as the spirit region beyond the domain of the senses.

When you live in a house and wish to have contact with the outer world without actually stepping outside, you must look out of the window. When the gods of the nine hierarchies wish to communicate with this world, they must do so through man. They cannot do it directly, they must do it through man. It is a region of the world that can be contemplated by the gods only by means of human beings. Man must enter the physical world from the world he inhabits between death and rebirth in order to bring about a reciprocal intercourse for the gods with the world evolving here (see sketch below). And for what purpose does this world, developing beyond the sense tapestry, exist? If this world were not there, the physical world would disperse in all directions. It is the world that would be reduced to dust, for it is the world in which only forces of antipathy hold sway. The world beyond the sense tapestry (circle) holds this physical world together. In the physical world, the tendency exists to expand and spread out constantly; this world (circle) holds it together.

The gods, too, however, only come into contact with this centripetally working world through the human being. The reason man has entered the cosmos is so that the world of the gods can come into a relationship, into a perceptive relation and intercourse, with this centripetal world.

Viewed from beyond the threshold, this centripetal world is cold and icy. To experience it is to be affected by something rigidifying, calcifying; yet it is filled with wisdom. It is woven, as it were, out of wisdom-filled thoughts, but it is cold, rigid, evoking chills. This cold, rigid world of forces holds the other (physical) world together. The human being is not organized so that he can sense this centripetal world directly. The person who enters the realm beyond the threshold feels this chill, this cold contraction. This coldness is the sign that one is actually entering with one's ego and astral body into the world which man enters each night, but without consciousness, not experiencing it. It is a sign that you enter consciously when you come into a world that makes you freeze, pervades you luminously with infmitely intensive wisdom, yet makes you freeze. Without this experience of freezing and stiffening to begin with, you cannot sense yourself an the other side of the threshold with your ego and astral body.

This is an experience that can be had and it is, in fact, one that can be gained only through actual experience. Indeed, in accordance with the explanations that you find in my books—Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and Occult Science, which are sufficient to have these experiences if they are consistently pursued—the region beyond the threshold has to be entered. For it is a region that is as real as the sense realm.

However, if one is familiar with it, when one comprehends that this region (beyond the sensory realm) existsfor one cannot truly understand the physical world without knowledge of the other one—then one realizes something else, namely, why one does go about in it. True, is it not, one cannot go about perpetually freezing and feeling chilled; this is why a boundary has been set up for his ordinary consciousness. One would really pass bad nights if one were consciously to experience the time between falling asleep and waking up. Then why does one go about in it—for, after all, one also goes about in the same world when one is awake—why does one? Man brings into this world of centripetal forces cosmic forces that dwell within his inner being. When we grasp clearly in our mind's eye what it is that lives as forces in man's inner being—we shall speak of it in more detail in the next lecture—it is an element that we can call love, warmth, warmth of soul; the human being carries this soul warmth into the cold domain. This is preeminently his cosmic task. He is the source of warmth for this sphere. If I may so express myself, inasmuch as the gods have created man—to put the matter trivially—they have created the opening for just this region that must hold together for them the world that would otherwise disperse in dust.

This is only one example. Tomorrow we shall hear of others, and particularly those that have to do with the social field so we may realize what mission men's social life on earth has for the whole cosmos. However, this is just one example of how, from beyond the threshold, man is seen to have a task that is not exhausted by what is normally viewed as his task within this (physical) world, but how he has a cosmic mission, how he exists for something, so to speak, that lies within the scope of the great universal plan of the divine spirits. And just as one must realize that man's existence is in fact there in order for something to take place in the universe, so must one be able to see that in everything, even in regard to the most minute achievements of humanity, man is a member of the cosmos. One must realize that everything he does signifies something that surpasses what he can first perceive with his consciousness, and that all he does signifies something in relation to the whole cosmos. By expanding ordinary, small human perceptions, they can be transformed . into cosmic world perceptions. This is of primary importance in spiritual science, and it is what humanity 'needs today.

In the last three to four centuries, the whole of civilized mankind has fallen in a way out of its celestial sphere. It has occupied itself merely with what happens from birth to death and between waking up and falling asleep. The whole of modern life is composed only of this. This life, however, is doomed to death; this life is a gradually dying life. Place into it as many socialistic theories as you like as well as their metamorphoses into so-called actions; they will only hasten the decline. Bring any number of women's movements into this life and do not allow them to be fructified by a new spiritual science, and it will be less and less possible to attain what is actually instinctively desired by means of such feminist movements and the like.

What has to be fructified today must always be grasped at the right end. Oswald Spengler, who wrote a book about the decline of the West, has calculated correctly from actual scientific hypotheses that the decline of the West must definitely take place—that is, if one can only take into consideration the means at Spengler's disposal. In some measure, Oswald Spengler is right. This decline will certainly be forthcoming if an impulse does not come from spiritual science. Of course, he does not admit to such an impulse and therefore, from his standpoint, he is quite correct to write only of the West's decline. Out of this feeling of decline, Spenglerthis theorist of decline—can, nevertheless, make many significant statements. He makes quite pertinent remarks at one point, for instance, about recent philistine, middle-class philosophies, mysticisms, or whatever one wishes to call them, such as vegetarianism, the manner in which discussions about food are ordinarily carried on, especially in those philistine magazines that are usually displayed in vegetarian restaurants. It is a commonplace philistine philosophy, the most philistine imaginable. But why is that? Is it so in the absolute sense? Yes, what is discussed there is naturally philistine in the absolute sense; for during the last three or four centuries people did not perceive the spirit concealed behind these things. People do not talk of the spirit today. Vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism and other fine subjects are all debated from the standpoint of pure materialism. The spirit concealed behind them is not seen. Thus, the (negative) things have actually triumphed. Philistinism has arisen because the people who would like to begin to be spiritual are often really the worst materialists. They absorb the concepts of other materialists and, in some fashion, frame a spiritual system from them.

Now, in this regard, even theoretical constructions are extraordinarily interesting. As most of you know, a certain Leadbeater is active in the Theosophical Society. This Leadbeater has written all sorts of books, and a great number of people were particularly charmed when he wrote something like an occult chemistry; I even met scholars who were most delighted by this occult chemistry. What really happened? This Mr. Leadbeater has become acquainted with the materialistic chemistry of the present with its molecules and atoms. This materialistic chemistry of today with its molecules and atoms describes oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, fron oxide, sodium acetate, and so on, building them up from these molecules and atoms. Out of such atoms, Leadbeater builds up the spiritual worlds, the Spirits and the angels. He creates a spiritualism out of materialism I have seen people who went about nearly enchanted when, among many things, the so-called "permanent atom" once swam around like a drop of fat on the soup of the Theosophical Society—such drops of fat sometimes did swim about, didn't they? This permanent atom—a remarkable thing! The human being dies; returns to earth again. What is it that has here endured? Of course, people could not imagine that the human organism is constituted of forces. It would be an actual impossibility for them to picture how the human limb system organizes itself from' one life to the next, how the head is structured out of the previous incarnation. For in regard to the head and the limbs, these people only conceive of something grossly material which is naturally placed into the grave. They cannot imagine that forces are contained within, and that one is actually referring to these forces when speaking in this way. After all, something must pass over from one life into the next! There is one atom among the millions and billions of atoms; this one atom passes through the spiritual world, then the atoms of the subsequent organism group themselves around this one atom, the permanent atom. It was the delight of theosophical folk to see how this drop of fat, the permanent atom, floated on the water soup of the Theosophical Society—the spiritual water soup, that is.

Truly, these matters were only mentioned in order to show how everything at the present, even something wishing to strive for the spirit, is corroded by the materialistic conceptions of the last three to four centuries; to stress how one must leave these ideas behind in order to arrive at any kind of constructive new direction. It is, however, as I pointed out yesterday: At the present time, there exist forces that are absolutely unwilling to allow anything to arise that can aid humanity in an upward reorganization.

You may ask: Then does humanity desire its downfall? One really cannot assume that people wish the downfall of the whole of civilization. Yet, observation shows that they do, for they continue to live automatically in the old established manner. I will explain to you why they wish that. I need only indicate a single phenomenon and this will give you an explanation. Have you never seen insects flying about in a room where a light was burning and saw how they dived into the flame? Consider such a phenomenon, and then you will have a picture of the mood of modern humanity. One must simply take the phenomena of nature for what they are—symptoms of the activities of forces in the universe. We shall speak more about these things tomorrow as we seek to fmd the bridge to a certain form of social thinking.

It was my aim in yesterday's lecture to evoke an idea of man's Position in the universe. If he is considered from the viewpoint attained beyond the threshold that lies between the world of the senses and the super-sensible worlds, then man's being is understood to be an integral member of the cosmos. Yesterday, I first sought to show how man stands externally in the cosmos, as it were, by indicating that there exists a spiritual world behind the tapestry spread out about us containing all the sense impressions. I stressed that this spiritual realm is a chilly, cold world. We are within this domain unconsciously as you know, between falling asleep and waking, but in reality we then dwell in it without experiencing its actual character. We then mediate the spiritual world's intercourse with this domain by carrying warmth-bestowing love into it. This then is one region of the spirit. As I pointed out yesterday, however, the spiritual region that is our actual environment is a different one; it is the one that lies below that mirror that reflects the memories within us. It is this domain of the spirit that gives rise to the forming of our limb organism and all that belongs to it; it is to this spirit region that the ordinary mystic strives. He does not find it because it can only be disclosed if man penetrates the secrets of the physical and etheric organisms and discovers what it is that forms and molds this organism and permeates it with movement. This spiritual region differs essentially from the spirit domain described in connection with the external world. It need not first be warmed by man; it gives the impression of warmth. It is a region endowed with forces opposite of those in the other domain. Concerning the latter, I said that it is equipped with centripetal forces that hold the spiritual cosmos together. This other region, the source of the forces that move our limbs, is permeated with the opposite, namely, centrifugal forces. These are active perpetually, expanding the spiritual universe far and wide as it were. They are the centrifugal forces, but you must not picture them as physical forces. They are spiritual beings. Here, in a sense, we look into the constitution of the universe. We relate what constitutes the universe to what is within ourselves. We trace the forces that live in our eyes, our ears, in short, in our whole sensory apparatus, and we recognize them as the forces that hold the world together. We find in ourselves the forces through which we move our arms and legs, by means of which a number of other things occur in our limb organism. We pronounce them to be forces that if left to themselves would disperse the universe in all directions. We as human beings are set within this nexus of forces. Within it is found a world of the most diverse beings, those beings with whom the nine hierarchies, of whom we have spoken on many occasions, come into relation through the human being, who is the intermediary between worlds of gods. One would like to put it like this: The gods encounter each other through the human being.

Thus, one looks into the universe and beholds the human being in a certain respect as the mediator between divine worlds. One wishes that the awareness of this would penetrate human souls, for only such an awareness could overcome the egoistic elements of traditional religions. Indeed, these old religious elements are to a large extent founded entirely on egoism. In existing denominations, sermons are preached to appeal to people's egoistic instincts of immortality and the like. In the traditional religions, the egoistic instincts are addressed. One need only have a feeling for how people speculate on these instincts. Spiritual science aims at presenting man in such a way that he becomes conscious of the role he plays in the universe. He arrives at the realization that through him a world of centripetal forces and a world of centrifugal forces are connected; in fact, they meet one another only in man himself (see drawing below).

If what I have just said does not remain a colorless theory but passes over into man's whole nature of feeling and perception, then he feels himself standing in the universe and says, “I am here for the sake of cosmic evolution; through me passes the stream of cosmic events.” This feeling of being an integral part of the universe must permeate the consciousness of the present and of the immediate future. Think how this feeling contrasts with another that has been brought to the surface of human development by the civilization of the last three to four hundred years. Have these last centuries arrived on their own at anything like such an awareness of the human being? Indeed not; science has in no way reflected on what the human being is and signifies in the cosmos. Attention was directed to the various types of animals. People learned to recognize how one animal form evolved from others and concluded that man is the highest of the animal forms. Man was added on to the lower animals, so to speak, as the highest animal. People learned to know man in his animality; they did not speak at all about the essential being of man. From now on, a reversal must take place in the souls of mankind. The human being must again become aware that he represents a channel for divine forces, that in a way he is the stage on which hierarchies encounter each other so that they may work together in the universe. Man should also know that when he has a low opinion of himself, acts basely and degrades his awareness of humanity, he will not be a mediator between the higher and the lower worlds. Man must learn to think of himself as a being that belongs to the cosmos. Divine beings who serve the centrifugal motive powers and divine beings serving the centripetal powers meet each other in man.

Where do they find their balance? The centripetal forces work principally through the human head; the centrifugal ones work primarily through the limb system. The middle man, the rhythmic man, is the one who is supposed to bring about the balance, the consonance and harmony between the centripetal and centrifugal cosmic forces. Consider what that means! It implies that when the human being develops a certain mood of soul, an inner attitude, which, as we have seen from a variety of aspects, can only come about in him through spiritual science, he gives a certain nuance to his whole inner experience, and it takes its course in a certain manner. This is expressed even in his very organism, the rhythms of heart and breathing. This means, in other words, that the manner in which man breathes and his heart beats has significance not only within the human being but within the whole cosmos. In the human heartbeat we have the combined activity of different worlds of gods or spirits. The ancient saying that man is a temple of the divine emerges anew from the modern knowledge of initiation science.

Therefore, what arises from these insights of initiation science will have to bear a different character from what the traditional religions can bring to man. They reckon with his egoism. And the world conception that can come about through spiritual science—on what does that count? It reckons with man's responsibility in regard to the world; it appeals primarily to his sense of responsibility. It exalts the human being by showing him his Position as an essential member of the whole universe.

This attainment of a certain consciousness of humanity is what is so urgently required. For what is the reason that mankind has fallen into such chaos today, the chaos into which, all over our civilized world, the social order has partly disintegrated already, and in part threatens to disintegrate? The reason is that the human being has forgotten his Position in the cosmos; he wishes to know nothing of it. A Person who does sense his link with the cosmos will realize that world evolution cannot be depicted as proceeding merely from causes outside man. He will know that it is primarily the forces in man himself that have caused the earth's origin and that will bring about its end, carrying it over into other metamorphoses of universal formation. It is in the human being that we above all must seek for what we should know and feel, and through which we are intended to shape our will.

What is the nature of the forces that work chiefly in the human head and are related to the centripetal, compressing forces of the cosmos? They are the forces that are the oldest in our universe. Recall my description in Occult Science where I depicted the ancient Saturn evolution, and had to indicate that the human sense life emerged out of it. Behind our sense tapestry lies what has remained behind of this Saturn evolution as the cold, frosty world that has developed from the initial condition of warmth, into which we today must carry warmth. What lies behind the tapestry of the senses is, as it were, the oldest of worlds. We enter it unconsciously from the moment we fall asleep until we awaken; though, actually, we move about in it all the time. This world bestows an us everything connected with our senses. Shaping the senses in a way from within outwards, the centripetal forces work into our senses, into our eyes, ears, and from there into our physical brain, into which we think. Inasmuch as we go through the world as thinking beings, we actually pass through it with that human property that is fashioned for us out of this environment; that is to say, with the oldest forces that have already reached disintegration. We must never forget that these are the forces that have already arrived at dissolution.

It is really like this: If one makes a diagram of the universe as it draws apart into distant space, yet is held together centripetally at this boundary, we discover the oldest forces of the universe (see sketch above). In a certain sense, they disintegrate. And our comprehension, our human intellect, arises from these disintegrating forces that are passing over into death and have turned into chaos.

It was modern humanity's destiny that since the last three to four hundred years this intellect had to be especially developed. This intellect, however, arises, so to speak, out of the dying chaos remaining from the ancient Saturn evolution. Right into the present, into the social life, people have been trying to introduce reforms based on these very forces. These forces, however, are those that exert their normal effect just when they are destructive. We could not think if we did not have them. We could not develop our intellect without them. We destroy the social order if we try to permeate it with what results out of this, our intellect.

Any activity of thought must call upon the intellect, the intellect that arises from chaos. We must not, however, apply to social reforms something that emerges out of chaos. In Eastern Europe, we see the extreme offshoots of European intellectualism appearing in social reforms. What has arisen in Eastern Europe will spread across Asia, Europe, and the West unless, while there is still time, not once again an intellectual counteraction, but a different action is brought about that we shall consider right away. We need these forces for our spiritual life, our free cultural life. We need them because what is to be produced by our intellect can only arise from the chaos. But these forces are not usable if they are joined with the forces active in the social life. Here, the same intelligence that is useful and productive in the narrowly defined life of the mind is harmful. The element that brings about inventions and creates gifted poems must arise out of the chaos, the mature material aspect of the human organism, but it must not be believed that it can bestow social impulses to man's external life. It is important for mankind to begin now to have clear insight into these matters. This will not be the case as long as people continue to reject any consideration of spiritual science. Nonetheless, what bestows greatness on the actual life of the spirit has to arise from this chaos. Mental life must emerge out of the chaotic substrata of man's individuality.

This links the question of education with that of general culture. For anything of this nature that is to be given to humanity must arise from the chaos that man brings with him when he descends through birth from higher worlds. He brings the disintegrating organism of the brain. From this chaotic brain organism arises the element that can constitute the life of the spirit. At the opposite end of mankind's organization, the forces must develop that can underlie social ideas.
There, however, I am touching on something still quite incomprehensible to modern humanity's dreadful prejudices. Modern people believe that they think only with the head. This is nonsense; man thinks, feels and wills not only with the head but with his whole being. Arms and legs are just as much organs of the soul as is the head. It is one of the worst prejudices that the soul life was apportioned organically in a one-sided way to the nervous system. Only the intellectual life is apportioned to the nervous system. Hence, it is from the centrifugal forces, the fresh organic forces that do not represent the chaos but dwell particularly in man's limb organization and in all that belongs to it, that we must develop that which can result in social impulses, above all those of outer life and particularly the third member of the social organism, namely, the economic life. Here we are dealing with the youngest developments. In the head organization underlying the mind and spirit we deal with the oldest formations. In everything forming the basis of the economic organization we confront the youngest developments, those that are the bearers of the human will. In man of today, they normally rest entirely in the unconscious; they must, however, be drawn up into consciousness through initiation science, the science of the Mysteries. And how can they be drawn up? I do not need to describe to you how the actual free spiritual life has to come about. It begins with the education of the child; from the child's individuality it draws out what was sent down by the gods from the spiritual worlds when the child entered through birth into physical existence. There, we work out of the chaos, out of the dark, misty depths, in order to lead the human talents and gifts out of the spirit, through the chaos of matter, into physical existence.

It is a different matter when we must call upon the youngest member of man's organization, of which the human being is completely unaware in normal consciousness. There initiation science must draw everything out of unconscious depths. How does this take place? Well, social thinking is different from thinking out of the spirit. In the case of spiritual thinking, everything is based on the development of the individuality. In the case of social thinking, one can, for instance, figure out statistically how many persons among a thousand twenty-year-olds will reach age sixty. The necessary figures are easily obtained by taking a thousand twenty year-olds from a certain region; of these, so many will reach age thirty after ten years; ten years hence, a certain number will reach age forty; and so on for age fifty and sixty. A certain type of calculation, the theory of probabilities, relies on what can thus be deduced from the numerical course of the development of groups of people. And in the matter of social institutions, one can rely upon this calculation. The insurance systems are based on these figures. If I insure my life when I am twenty, I have to pay at the rate arrived at by someone having calculated how many persons among one thousand twenty-year-olds will reach sixty, meaning how much one still has to pay at sixty. By considering this matter from the social standpoint, from that of the group, it works; otherwise all insurance companies would be bankrupted. They rely upon such groupings of facts in humanity's development.

Does this calculation have any value for the individual? Does it tell me at twenty how much longer I will probably live? Nobody will say to himself, "This means that I shall live only so many more years." The probable length of life according to which I insure my life is different from the one I count on as an individuality. We are dealing with two quite different spheres of thinking and forming judgments. One has to consider the human being in quite a different way when trying to insure him, hence wishing to make some social arrangements, than when one thinks as an individual human being about one's own life.

What should be done if we wish to arrive at social arrangements in general, particularly those of an economic nature? We must engage in statistics along the same lines as these insurance statistics; we must compile results. From this, we never arrive at the wisdom that arises from man's inner being, the chaos; instead, we obtain something that can be expressed in numbers. Just look around at what people have come to, especially those devoted to Western science. You find statistics everywhere; based on statistics, decisions are made on how much duty should be paid for this or that article, how much is needed for one thing or another. The calculation is quite similar to that used for insurance. When we focus on the individual element that stands creatively in the spiritual life, we are subject to forming a quite different judgment than if we turn to what becomes established socially in groups of people. What becomes socially established, however, in human groups and can thus be calculated is connected with the centrifugal forces, the youngest forces of man's organization that have not yet reached consciousness. Therefore, their content must be concluded from statistics.

Those who have a particular kind of enthusiasm, a cynical enthusiasm like Nietzsche⁸² had, for all that springs from man's inner chaotic being and works itself out of it, attribute value to to this alone, and despise everything of a group order. Nietzsche had a tremendous scorn for anything of a group nature in the world. This is the reason why, particularly in his early years, he considered the whole development of humanity in such a manner that only the single chosen individuals had value in his view. He regarded world history as being merely the path whereby the others, the insignificant ones, provided a sort of circuitous route for a few outstanding individuals. This was the foundation of Nietzsche's first world conception. He wished to focus solely on the few geniuses evident in human evolution. As for the rest, Nietzsche said that the devil or statistics could have them. They were more or less the same thing to him. What is connected, however, with the economic structure and judgment which deal with the centrifugal, the youngest forces of humanity's organization, is, and has to be, founded on statistics today.

Nevertheless, nothing really sound and wholesome can result from statistics. Trotsky and Lenin⁸³ have acquired their principal tenets from such statistics. In the purely economic thinking of the West, statistics play a major role. Yet, the whole of statistics has no direct value. Try sometime to compile statistics. You will not get much from them, however ingeniously you go about it. Indeed, it must be admitted that what goes on by means of statistics as sociology is a pretty bad thing. Nothing much results or has resulted from it. Basically, some people classify the figures one way, others group them a different way; accordingly, the most diverse counsels are advocated.

What is the reason for this? The reason is that the forces to which all this relates, the centrifugal forces, are indeed the youngest forces in the human being, and have in no way risen into the realms of consciousness. Man is still childishly lost in this region. We therefore have to say that if one wishes to establish social science and impulses upon what exists in the normal, modern consciousness of humanity, nothing constructive would result. There will be no clear insight into what is necessary until men admit that modern science and consciousness are impotent in shaping a social judgment in the form which is necessary today. For what is required? It is necessary to know that an individual can get nowhere with figures; only associations can do something with numbers—groups of people who make use of these experiences, each complementary to the other. Yet, despite this, such associations will still accomplish nothing special unless they have forces of direction, and what kind must they be? They must be those arising from imaginative perception, from initiation science. There will have to be those who are initiated in a certain sense, who will guide the experiences of associations into the right direction, particularly in the economic life.

Where will spiritual scientific directive forces first be required, if the needs of mankind in the present and near future are correctly understood? They will be needed precisely in the domain of the economic life. There, associations must be formed. The results that associations compile with their figures must be given their guidelines from the effects that can be gained solely from inner experience in the higher worlds. The life of the spirit, the life of geniuses, must be drawn from the chaos of the natural human organization by means of education. The basis of the economic life must be given its guidelines from initiation science. Initiation science must regulate whatever is collected by the different associations from various professional, industrial or agricultural circles, and so on. It is precisely the economic realm that makes the influence of the spiritual life mandatory, particularly in economics. There will be no advancement without it. For, in the sphere of economics, everything will remain instinctive if it is not brought to consciousness by being developed in the manner I have stated. Therefore, one should really say, “First of all, get a broom and out with everything that negates the spirit in the economic life!” On that depends the future welfare of mankind. Away with everything that rejects the spirit in the economic life—there above all! There, it is the most compelling; otherwise, economic chaos will result and with it the general chaos of civilization; and this, I might say, is becoming evident clearly and plainly enough.

People's way of thinking during this catastrophic, world-historical moment has been strange. Since 1914, they have seen the advent of a world catastrophe. What have been their thoughts? They felt that if only peace would come within a year, all would be in order again. When peace did not come, they said, “If only it comes next year everything will be all right!”—and so on. Then came a peace that was actually only the starting point for greater conflicts. Now people continue to sleep. They do not see that the forces of decline accumulate and grow stronger from month to month. They do not wish to see it. And why not? Because they do not want to accept the spirit; they do not wish to have what alone can help to restore the world. It is of no use to believe today that compromises can be made with anything carried over from the past. That does not work. The world is asking to be built up anew; from new sources it must have new forces. What must be brought to bear as initiation science—from which forces could originate such as those I have characterized—it is this that is newly trying to come into the world. Initiation science must be accepted because without it the measures intended to lead to an ascent will deteriorate without fail, and there will be no progress.

What is needed is that a strong awareness of these things is established particularly in those people who will shoulder the greatest responsibility in the near future—I have already spoken of these facts here—namely, the Anglo-American world. The nations of Central and Eastern Europe are struck down. Inasmuch as their power and, above all, their influence are increasing, the English and American people have the definite responsibility to turn towards the life of the spirit.

This was the reason it was of such great importance that the representative center of our spiritual movement stood on neutral ground during the catastrophic years. Dornach offered a neutral ground on which those from all nations who wished to come could meet one another, where what was rooted in the soil of spiritual science itself placed no obstacle in the way of anybody. What stands here now was placed here, I might say, out of Central Europe. Truly, those were certainly not the worst forces of Central Europe which, in a material respect as well, established what stands here now. It stands here as if asking, “Does the world confront this with understanding?” Central Europe cannot be asked whether the world has an understanding for it. It is crushed to the ground, nearing its spiritual and economic devaluation, but that it had values may be evident from the fact that it could place this building here. This structure^T1 now stands here as a question to man's comprehension for it. It is indeed an international question, a question directed to the world: Will this building stand here unfinished one day, as conditions now appear to suggest? Will it be unfinished, with only that part constructed that was built by Central Europe and added to by neutral regions? Or will the Anglo-American world bring understanding to this question that is directed to the future of humanity? One should experience this question as a deeply significant one. For either one will say “yes” to the spirit, and then the ways and means will be found to finish what otherwise must remain incomplete; or one will say “no” to the spirit, and then an unfinished building will stand here as a sign that one has no wish to understand the forces of ascent. Then, however, one will have given a negative reply to the question of whether one wishes to take the progress of humanity seriously.

• 82 . Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: 1844–1900.
• 83 . See Note #9
• T1. Note by translator: Reference to the First Goetheanum.

In our spiritual-scientific endeavors, it is important to acquaint ourselves gradually from the most diverse points of view with what we are supposed to understand. One can say that, particularly in regard to spiritual-scientific subjects, the world expects an uncomplicated, facile approach towards conviction; however, this is not easily provided. For as far as spiritual-scientific facts are concerned, it is actually necessary to attain our conviction in a gradually evolving manner. To begin with, this conviction is still weak. One becomes acquainted with the same things from ever changing new viewpoints; thus, conviction increasingly gains in strength. This is the one premise from which I should like to start today. The other will relate to various matters that I have discussed here for weeks; it will relate to what has been said concerning the differentiation of humanity throughout the civilized world.⁸⁴ Let me indicate briefly a few of the most salient facts that are of some importance to our considerations in the next three days.

I have pointed out in what sense the Orient is the source of humanity's essential spiritual life. I then indicated that in the central areas, in Greece, Middle Europe and the Roman Empire—what must be discussed covers vast periods of time—there primarily exists the predisposition for developing the legal, political concepts. The West is notably predisposed to contribute economic concepts to the totality of human civilization. It has already been mentioned that when we look across to the Orient, we find that the life of its civilization is basically decadent today. In order to evaluate properly what the Orient really signifies for the whole of human civilization, we have to turn back to more ancient periods of time. Among the historically accessible documents which are proof of the Orient's essential nature, the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, stand out above all; they and others are in turn evidence, however, of what was present in the Orient in still more ancient epochs. They indicate how a cultural life was born out of a primeval, wholly spiritual disposition of Oriental humanity. Subsequently, for the Orient too, ensued the times of obscuration of this spiritual life. Yet, a person who is able to contemplate in the right way what is happening in the Orient at present—although it is a mere caricature of what was formerly there—even today will still note the aftereffect of the ancient spiritual life in the decadent phenomena.

During a somewhat later period, the essentially legalistic, political thinking developed throughout the central regions of the earth. It evolved in ancient Greece and Rome, later on in the regions spread over Europe from the Middle Ages onward. The Orient originally possessed no actual political thinking, particularly not what we today define as juridical thinking. This is not in contradiction to the existence of codes of law such as Hammurabi's and others. For if you study the contents of these codes, you recognize from the whole tone and attitude that you are dealing with something quite different from the mode of thinking defined in the Occident as juridical. It is only in recent times that an actually economic form of thinking has developed in the West. As I have already explained, even science as it is practiced now is assuming those forms that really belong to the economic life.

As far as the Oriental spiritual life is concerned, it is interesting to observe how everything that the Occident has possessed up to now is basically also a legacy of the Oriental spiritual life, although in metamorphosed forms. Some time ago, I pointed out here how considerably this spiritual life of the Orient has been transformed in Europe. We are confronted by the fact that the capacities that held sway in the Orient have yielded up a perception of the immortal human soul, but in such a manner that this immortality was intrinsically bound up with prenatal existence before birth. The soul perception of the Oriental mind had a view, above all else, of preexistent life, of the soul's life between birth and death preceding this earthly existence. Everything else followed in consequence of this in a manner of speaking. From this view resulted the mighty relationships, only dimly glimpsed by the Westerner to this day, that one might call the karmic relationships, which subsequently left a reflection, albeit only a faint one, in the Greek concept of destiny. What is it, really, that passed over, that flowed across into the Occidental version of those concepts, even those with which an attempt was made to understand the Mystery of Golgotha? It was something that was strongly tinged by legalistic thinking. There is a radical contrast between contemplating the path of the soul in the sense of the Oriental world conception as descending from a spiritual world into the physical realm, noting how the karmic relationships are viewed there from wide perspectives, and considering the juridical idea of holding court over the soul that, in the Occident, has invaded these Oriental concepts. We need only recall Michelangelo's magnificent painting in the Vatican, in the Sistine Chapel, where the World Judge, like a cosmic magistrate, adjudicates upon good and evil men. This is the Oriental world view translated into Occidental legalism; this is in no way the original Eastern world conception. This legalistic thinking lies entirely outside Oriental perception. Indeed, the more advanced the concept of the spirit became in Central Europe, the more it culminated in the Roman legalistic element.

Hence, in the central regions, we are dealing primarily with the element predisposed for the juridical and political thinking. Civilization is, however, not only differentiated over the earth in this manner but in yet another way. If we study the accomplishments of the East, if we consider the special nuance of Oriental soul life, in particular where it is at its greatest, we find that this soul life is most eminently atavistic and instinctive, notwithstanding the fact that its fruits are primarily cultural; and all of mankind has continued to sustain itself on them. This spiritual life emerges out of unconscious imaginations that are, however, already muted by a certain ray of consciousness. Nevertheless, it contains much that is unconscious and instinctive.

The spiritual life produced by humanity up until now is indeed brought forth in a way that points to the highest spheres of which the human soul can partake, but the lofty heights of these spheres were reached in a sort of instinctive flight. It does not suffice to retrace the concepts or images produced by the Orient. Rather, it is necessary to focus on the singular kind of spiritual and soul life, by means of which, especially in its flowering time, the Oriental arrived at these conceptions. To be sure, we only gain an idea of this distinctive soul quality that I have already characterized by relating it with the life of the metabolism, if we want to have a feeling for the whole original soul structure contained in the Vedas and other texts. We simply must not overlook the fact that the Orient has reached its decadence today; for example, we should in no way confuse the mystic, nebulous manner which, despite his greatness, distinguishes Rabindranath Tagore,⁸⁵ from the true essence of Oriental soul life. For, although Rabindranath Tagore possesses what has been handed down to this day of the ancient Eastern soul life, he permeates it with all manner of modern, Western European affectations and is, above all, an affected individual.

Spiritual science must indeed lay hold of these matters, step by step, and in such a way that we do not merely accept some rigidly set up concepts, but really envision the unique soul nuance involved here. Thus, we find in the Orient an instinctive cultural life, permeated through and through with the trend for the legalistic and political soul life developing in the central regions. There, we come to the development of the half instinctive, the half conscious. It is most interesting to examine how a purely juridical thinking is produced from the souls of people, say, like Fichte, Goethe, Schelling or Hegel. It is purely juridical, but it is partly instinctive, partly a fully conscious thinking; something that is, for example, the special charm of Hegel's mode of thinking. A completely conscious element only appears in the Western soul, where consciousness develops out of the instincts themselves. The conscious element is still instinctive in the Western soul, but instinctively the conscious emerges in Western economic thinking. Here, for the first time, mankind is called upon to attain to a conscious penetration of even public, social affairs.

Now we come across something quite strange. One might actually recommend that those to whom it matters for one reason or another should now try to understand the configuration of civilized humanity's thinking by becoming acquainted with the attempts of the English thinkers to arrive at a mode of social thinking, say, the attempts of Spencer, Bentham, particularly Huxley, and so on. These thinkers are indeed all rooted in the same atmosphere of thought in which Darwin was rooted; they all really think as Darwin thought, except that they try, as does Huxley, to develop a social view out of their scientific way of thinking. A strange feeling pervades us when we delve into the attempts by Huxley⁸⁶ to achieve a social thinking, for instance, about the state, about the legal aspects of human relationships. It gives one a strange feeling. Let us suppose the following: Someone wishes to acquire a sense, a feeling for what I have here in mind, and to that end reads Hegel's book on natural rights,⁸⁷ on political sciences, Fichte's philosophy of rights,⁸⁸ or something else by a minor Middle European mind; afterwards, he reads, possibly, Huxley's attempts to advance from scientific to political thinking. He would experience something like the following. He would say to himself, "I read Hegel and Fichte; the concepts here are fully developed, they have strong contours and are precisely drawn. Now I read Huxley or Spencer, and I find the concepts primitive; it as though one had just begun to contemplate these questions. Confronted by such things, it does not do to say, “Well, the one was perfect, the other imperfect.” This does not suffice at all when one confronts realities.

Let me present to you a parallel taken from an entirely different realm. It can happen that one lectures on some spiritual-scientific subject, say, the former embodiment of the earth, the Moon embodiment. A variety of facts are set forth. Someone reads or listens to this lecture who is clairvoyant in a quite atavistic manner. It could be an individual who is outwardly illogical, who in practical life is unable to put five words together in logical sequence, who is inept in everything and therefore of no use in ordinary life. Such a person listens to what is being related about the configuration of some Moon era. Now, this same person who is quite dull and blundering in outer life and unable to count up to five properly, yet who is atavistically clairvoyant, can take in what he has heard, enlarge upon it, develop it further and discover additional facts not mentioned earlier. The things that such a person then adds can be infused with extraordinarily penetrating logic, a logic that arouses admiration, while, in everyday life, this person is clumsy and illogical. This is entirely possible, for if someone is atavistically clairvoyant, it is not his ego that joins his images together in a logical manner, although he can discover the images by himself. The images are joined by various spiritual beings dwelling within him. We become acquainted with their logic, not his.

This is why we cannot simply say that one view is on a higher, the other on a lower level; in every case we have to go into the specific character of the matter. This is true here too. The views of Fichte, Hegel and other less illustrious minds are half instinctive, only partly fully conscious ones. What arises, on the other hand, in the West as primitive economic thinking is indeed fully conscious. The concepts such as those thought out by Huxley, Spencer and others are impertinently conscious, but conceived in a primitive way. What had appeared in former times in instinctive or half instinctive form emerges here consciously but in quite an elementary way. I shall illustrate this by means of a concrete example.

Huxley tells himself that if we observe nature—he naturally looks at it from the Darwinian standpoint—we find the struggle for survival. Every creature fights ruthlessly for self-preservation, and the whole animal kingdom's struggle is waged so that the naturally strong survive by annihilating the weak. This theory has penetrated into Huxley's flesh and blood. This, however, cannot be continued on into humanity. Freedom such as we must seek in human social life is nonexistent in nature, for there can be no freedom—thinks Huxley—in a realm where every creature must either assert itself ruthlessly or perish. There can be no equality where the fittest must always eliminate the less fit. Now Huxley turns from the natural realm to the social sphere and is compelled to conclude that, indeed, this is true, but in the social realm goodness should prevail, freedom should reign. Something should come to pass that as yet cannot be found in nature.

It is again the great chasm that I have characterized from so many points of view. Once, Huxley very aptly calls man “the splendid rebel,” who, in order to establish a human kingdom, rebels against all that prevails in nature. Something therefore ensues here that is not yet found in nature. Now again, Huxley actually thinks along scientific lines. He is compelled to search for natural forces in man that constitute the social life and rebel against nature herself. He looks in man for something concrete that serves as the basis for the human social community. The other forces of the kingdoms of nature cannot establish this social community; in nature, the struggle for survival holds sway, and there is nothing that could hold humanity together in a social structure. Nonetheless, as far as Huxley is concerned, there is nothing but this natural cohesion. Hence, this “splendid rebel” must in turn have natural forces which, although they are forces of nature, rebel against the natural forces in general. Now, Huxley finds two natural forces that are at the same time the basic forces of the social life. The first one is actually worked out wrongly, for it is not yet capable of establishing a social life, only family egoism. It is what Huxley calls the family attraction, something that is active within blood relationships. The second force he lists that could form a sort of natural foundation for the social life is something that he calls “the human instinct for mimicry,” the human talent for imitation.

Now, there is something that appears in the human being in the sense referred to by Huxley, namely, the faculty of imitation. It means that one person follows what the other does. This is the reason the individual pursues not merely his own directions, but society as a whole, the social life, runs along the same lines, as it were, because one person imitates the other. This is as far as Huxley goes. It is very interesting, because you know that in describing the human being we list the following: The element of imitation from the first to the seventh year; from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the element of authority; the one of independent judgment from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year. All three, of course, participate in the social development. Huxley, however, stops short at the first; he is only laboring to emerge from the primitive level. He has taken hold of nothing but the force that is active in the human being only until his seventh year. We are confronted with nothing less than the fact that if the social community as envisioned by Huxley were actually to exist, it would have to consist entirely of children; human beings would have to remain children perpetually. Thus, in envisioning the social life, Western society has, in fact, only advanced to the stage applicable to children. The social science striven for in full consciousness has progressed no further than this That is most interesting.

Here, you can detect the primitive aspect in connection with a particular element. The West works its way out of the scientific-economic thinking and attains something in a conscious manner that has been reached in the central regions in a half conscious, half instinctive way on a higher level. We can actually follow up these things in detail and they can thus become most interesting. All matters brought to light by spiritual science can invariably be followed up by means of details. It only requires a sufficiently large number of people to develop enough diligence to pursue all details of spiritual-scientific matters.

Is it not actually rubbed into us in this instance that something else must be present that cooperates in the social development of existence? For, certainly, social structures cannot be established in which only forces of imitation hold sway. Otherwise, they could only contain children; human beings would have to remain children forever, if the social life would originate only through mutual imitation. In order to arrive at something that can throw light on the primitive attempts, and can also bring together East, Middle and West, we must proceed from initiation science. This means that we have to link the train of thought that we tried to connect with the above to what initiation science can offer to humanity, so that mankind may be capable of developing a social life truly structured in conformity with the Spirit.

People fail to observe how the environment of the human being is pervaded with quite clearly differentiated forces. Modern science has reached the point where it states that we are surrounded by air, for we inhale and exhale it; but there is something that is even more obvious in our life than “the air around us,” something that people fail to notice. Take the following simple fact that no one today takes into consideration, yet is something that could be understood by anybody. An animal kingdom is spread out around our human kingdom. This animal kingdom includes creatures of every imaginable form. Let us picture to ourselves this whole manifold animal kingdom around us. In the case of a table, everybody knows that there are forces present that gave this table its shape. In regard to the animal kingdom surrounding us, we ought, naturally, to assume the same, namely, that just as air is present, so, in the environment, the forces are contained that bestow form upon the creatures of the animal kingdom. We all dwell within the same realm. The dog, the horse, the oxen and donkey do not move about in a different world from the one which we also inhabit. And the forces that bestow the donkey shape on the donkey affect us human beings too; yet—forgive me for speaking so bluntly—we do not acquire the form of a donkey. There are also elephants in our environment, but we do not assume the shape of elephants. Yet all the forces fashioning these shapes surround us everywhere. Why is it that we do not take on the forms of, say, a donkey or an elephant? We possess other forces that counteract them. We would indeed acquire these shapes if we did not have these other opposing forces. It is a fact that if we as human beings confront a donkey, our etheric body constantly has the tendency to assume the shape of a donkey. We restrain our etheric body from doing so only because we have a physical body possessing a solid form. Again, if we face an elephant, our etheric body endeavors to assume the elephant shape and is prevented from doing so only because of the physical body's solid shape. Whether it be elephant, stag-beetle or dirt-beetle, the etheric body tries to assume the shapes of any and all creatures. Potentially, all the forms are present in our etheric body, and we comprehend these forms only when we retrace them inwardly, as it were. Our physical body merely prevents us from turning into all these shapes. Therefore, we can say that we carry the entire animal kingdom within our etheric body. We are human only in our physical body. In our etheric body, we bear with us the whole animal kingdom.

Again, there flows all around us the same complex of forces that creates the plant forms. Just as our etheric body is predisposed to assume all animal shapes, our astral body is inclined to reproduce all the plant forms. Here it is already more pleasant to make comparisons, for, while the etheric body is imbued with the tendency to become a donkey when it sees one, the astral body wishes merely to become the thistle on which the donkey feeds. But this astral body is definately ensouled with the tendency to accommodate itself to those forces that find their external expression in the plant forms. Thus we may say that the astral body reacts to the complex of forces that shapes the plant kingdom.

The mineral kingdom is again a force complex that develops the various shapes of this specific realm. This acts within our ego. It is quite evident in the case of the ego, for you only think in terms of the mineral realm. After all, it has been reiterated time and again that the intellect can only grasp the inanimate. Hence, what is contained in the human ego understands the lifeless. Consequently, our ego dwells in the complex of forces that creates the mineral kingdom. The physical body, as such, lives in none of these realms; it has, as you know, a realm of its own. In my Occult Science, an Outline, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms are dealt with separately; this signifies that the physical body possesses a domain of its own. The animal kingdom, on the other hand, is actually found in the etheric body; as far as this viewpoint is concerned, the plant kingdom is found in the astral body, and the mineral kingdom in the ego. From my various books, however, you are familiar with something else. You know that during earthly life these various bodies are worked upon. I have described how the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and even the physical body are worked on. I initially outlined it there, I might say, from the human, the humanistic intention. Now let us try to depict it from another point of view.

Take the mineral concepts that the human being acquires. He experiences the external world, after all, by experiencing it in mineral concepts and forms. Only enlightened minds like Goethe work their way up to the pictorial forms, to the morphology of plants, to metamorphosis. Here, the shapes are transformed. The ordinary view, still prevailing today, on the other hand, only dwells in the solid, mineral forms. If, now, the ego works on these forms and develops them, what is the result? Then, the result is the conscious cultural life, one of the domains of the threefold social organism. The ego creates the cultural life while working inwardly upon itself. All cultural life is, in fact, inner formative development of the ego. What the ego acquires from the mineral realm and in turn transforms into art, religion, science, and so forth, that is the cultural sphere, the transformed mineral kingdom, the spiritual realm.

What results from the tendency of the astral body, residing in the subconscious depths of most human beings, to assume every plant form possible? When you transform this tendency indwelling the astral body, when it radiates up into consciousness in half instinctive, half conscious form, what comes about then? The domain of rights, of the state, comes about.

Now, if you comprehend what holds sway in the relationships between human beings, namely, what is now, within external life, transformed from man's experiences of animality in the ether body, then you arrive at the third domain of the threefold social organism. Were we to stop at the etheric body as it comes to us from birth, we would only have the tendency in this etheric body to turn now into a donkey, now into an oxen, now into a cow, now into a Butterfly. We would reproduce the entire animal kingdom. As human beings we do not merely do this, however, we also transform the ether body. We accomplish this within the social life by living together with others. When we face a donkey, our etheric body wishes to become a donkey. When we confront another human being, we certainly cannot say without uttering a real insult that now, too, we wish to turn into a donkey. This is not possible, at least not in ordinary life; here we must change in another way. I should like to say that, here, the transformation becomes visible; here, those forces come into play that are effective in the economic life. These are the forces that assert themselves when a human being confronts his fellowman in brotherliness. In this way, in the brotherly confrontation, those forces are active that represent the work on the etheric body; thus, through the work on this body, the third realm, the economic sphere, comes into being.

Animal Kingdom: Etheric Body Economic Realm
Plant Kingdom: Astral Body Realm of Rights, of State
Mineral Kingdom: Ego
60; Cultural, Spiritual Realm

Thus, just as man is connected on the one side with the animal kingdom through his etheric body, he is related on the other side in the external environment with the economic sphere of the social organism. We could say that if man is viewed inwardly, spiritually, from the physical body towards the etheric, we find the animal kingdom within man. Outwardly, in his surroundings, we find the economic life.

When we penetrate into the human being and search out what he represents by virtue of his astral body, we find the plant kingdom. Outwardly, in the social configuration, the life of rights corresponds to the plant kingdom. Again, penetrating the human being, we discover the mineral kingdom corresponding to the ego. Outside, in the environment, corresponding to the mineral kingdom, we have the cultural life. Thus, through his constitution, man is linked to the three kingdoms of nature. By working on his whole being, he becomes a social being.

You see that we can never arrive at a comprehension of the social life if we are not in a position to ascend to the etheric body, astral body and ego. For we do not understand man's relationship to the social order if we don't ascend like that. If one proceeds merely from natural science, one stops short at the “human instinct for mimicry,” the faculty of imitation; one cannot progress. In thoughts, one makes the whole world puerile, for it is the child that still retains most of the natural forces. If one wishes to advance further, one needs the insight into initiation science. We need the insight into the fact that the human being is bound up with his etheric body through the animal kingdom, with the astral body through the plant world, and with the ego through the mineral realm. We need to know that owing to his observation of the mineral world man attains to his cultural life; that due to the transformation of the deep instincts harbored by him and owing to his kinship with the surrounding plant world he attains to the life of rights, of the state. We realize that these deep instincts correspond to the sphere of rights and the state. This is why, at first, the life of the state contains so much of the instinctive element if it is not infused with the cultural element of jurisprudence. Finally, we have the economic sphere which basically represents the metamorphosis of those inner experiences gained in the etheric body.

Now, these experiences are not brought to the surface from within by the science of initiation, for Huxley is not motivated in any sense by initiation science to explore the connection between man and the economic life. He observes the exterior, the conditions economically present outside. The whole complex of relations between the economic sphere, the etheric body and the animal kingdom is unclear to him. He looks at what is outwardly present. Consequently, he can certainly not advance beyond the most primitive, elementary level, the faculty of imitation.

From this we realize that if people would wish to continue extracting social thinking from modern science, they would remain caught up in absurdities and something quite dreadful would have to ensue. Over the whole earth, a social life would have to arise that would bring about the most primitive conditions; it would lead humanity back to a puerile social life. Gradually, untruth and lying would become a matter of course simply because people could not do otherwise even if they wanted to. They would be thirty, forty, fifty or even older, yet they would have to behave like children, if, with their consciousness, they only wanted to comprehend what is derived from science. People would only be able to develop the instincts of imitation. Even today we frequently have the feeling that only these instincts of imitation are being developed. We watch the appearance, somewhere, of yet another reform movement of a radical nature. It really only contains the instincts of imitation derived from some university philistine. Much of what, today, looks most illustrious when given the polish derived from the customary falsehoods would appear very different in the light of initiation science. Modern comprehension of the world, however, is limited to what can be seen in the light of the concept of imitation unless one is willing to advance from ordinary, official science to the science of initiation, the science that draws its substance from the inner impulses of existence.

Thus I have tried to show you how the aspects that are lacking in the present, the very. aspects through which it becomes evident where the present age must remain stuck because of its inability to penetrate reality, can be fructified and illuminated by the science of initiation.

• 84 . See Lecture VII of this volume.
• 85 . See Note #54
• 86 . Thomas Huxley: 1825–1895.
• 87 . Friedrich Hegel: Grundlinien einer Philosophie des Rechts, 1821.
• 88 . Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Grundlage des Naturrechts, 1796.

Yesterday, I tried from a certain angle to point out the need for a structural organization of the social order. At the same time I drew attention to the fact that what in spiritual science may be termed presentation of proof consists in recognizing that these facts under discussion are supported from the most varied aspects; finally, that the degree of conviction increases in proportion to the amount of such support.

I should like to repeat briefly what has been brought forward. We are familiar with the constitution of the human being; we know that he is composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and what we call the ego. We are also aware, however, that this constitution of man is something that is, so to speak, in a state of flux. You can follow my descriptions in my books, Theosophy and Occult Science, and you will learn from them that physical, etheric, astral body and finally also the ego are not really something static. Instead, you will find that the purpose of human evolution consists in the very fact that man, throughout his repeated lives on earth, works upon these members of his organization. Thus, after a certain time, after a certain number of incarnations, he is born in such a way that it is possible to say that he normally consists, as it were, of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. Then, however, he first begins to work on his ego, continuing this work through a number of incarnations. When the ego has been strengthened, having completed a certain amount of work on itself, this work then passes over to the astral body. Again, when, with the help of the ego and through its own efforts, the astral body has in this manner completed inner work upon itself, then this activity passes over to the etheric body and finally to the physical body. Here, however, we already enter the realm of the distant future. For you know that the human being essentially retains his outer form throughout the incarnations that we trace in the first place. You also know from my Occult Science that this human form has undergone fundamental changes in the course of time and will also continue to do so in the future. These changes, these metamorphoses, are imposed upon it by the activity of the more refined members of the human organism, the astral and etheric bodies, in their work of perfecting the physical body. Ultimately, in distant future times, man's physical body, too, will assume different forms.

Now, this work that the human being performs upon the members of his organism is connected with the human environment, just as man is similarly connected since his primal beginning with his natural environment through his individual members.

We must indeed be clear about one thing. Let us take the physical body of man. It stands as a unique phenomenon within the natural order. In a way, it is lifted out of this natural order. If we are sufficiently observant of the strong differentiation existing between the human being and the various species of the animal kingdom, we cannot help but say that the human being should not simply be placed at the end of the animal kingdom as the evolution theorists would have it. He is not only a composite of all animal forms in the entire animal kingdom; he is also a composite at a higher stage. Therefore, we can class this physical body of man with nothing but itself. In all that surrounds us, in all our natural environment, we are unable to find anything that could be placed in the same category with the physical body of the human being. This human physical body, then, stands by itself (see outline on next page).

Proceeding inward, we now advance to the etheric body. Here we reach man's next and already mobile component. In a way that some of you may feel is peculiar, I have already described to you the extent of the etheric body's mobility. It has the tendency to confront the animal world in a certain way, having a particular affinity with this realm. I have said that when we confront an elephant, a donkey, a calf, or other animal shapes, our etheric body has the inner tendency to imitate the given form, to become similar to it. It is prevented from carrying this out entirely, but it has the inner tendency to assume these animal forms. It has a special kinship with them. Due to the forces concentrated in the physical body, the etheric body is prevented from realizing these tendencies, but it strives to do so. One of the first experiences of initiation is the emergence of this inner tension and urge in regard to the animal world, of wishing to become like the animals. Thus we can say that concerning his physical body the human being is not related to the animal world, but his etheric body displays a quite decided kinship with that world.

We now advance to the astral body. Here we come across a similar inner relationship to the plant world. When the astral body faces the plant kingdom, it has the tendency to become plantlike, that is, to become like the particular plant it confronts. I said to you yesterday, rather as an aid for your memory, that if we stand in front of a donkey that is eating thistles, our etheric body desires to resemble the donkey and the astral body the thistle. This is a fact. In this way, we are related to the kingdoms of nature surrounding us. With our astral body, we are related to the plant world.

Physical Body
Etheric Body: Animal World
Astral Body: Plant World
Ego:  Mineral World

As I have said, in regard to our ego we are related to the mineral world. That seems natural, for it is something inaccessible to immediate consciousness, something that we can also establish most easily in regard to ordinary consciousness. In fact, we owe the entire content of our consciousness to this kinship with the mineral world. We form the content of our consciousness essentially out of the mineral realm. I have told you that it is due to the fact that man's ego in its present condition is organized in the direction of the mineral world that we are unable through our scientific efforts to advance to an apprehension of the plant world, let alone the animal world. We are unable to lay hold of the living and continue to argue back and forth whether the living can be comprehended or not. Only people who, like Goethe, proceed from a different manner of perception can acquire an awareness of the fact that the living can, in a certain way, be entered into. In the same manner as ordinary consciousness merely traces man's kinship to the mineral world, initiation, of course, offers the possibility of tracing inwardly what takes place in the astral body in regard to the plant world, or in the etheric body regarding the animal world.

I also told you that the human being works on his ego. Throughout his repeated earth lives he develops his ego. He thus transforms the content born out of the mineral kingdom. He creates from it his science, his art, and his religion. Everything that in this way appears as the content of culture and civilization is, basically speaking, transformed mineral kingdom.

Imagine, for example, that you are looking at a Greek statue. There is, of course, no life in it. All that is circumscribed by the mineral, however, such as form and structure, has been attained by you because of your transformation and here it is an artistic transformation—of the images and sensations you have been able to receive directly into your consciousness from the mineral kingdom.

So it is with the other contents of culture. In every cultural content, insofar as it consists of art, science and religion, is expressed what the ego has achieved as work upon itself, naturally in cooperation with other humans, and what is, essentially, transformed content derived from the mineral kingdom. Whoever pursues these matters without prejudice will find that in the activity of the ego he is dealing with a transformed content won from the mineral kingdom.

By strictly defining what lives in man's social environment, we discover the following. Everything brought into being because the ego transforms the content gained from the mineral realm and forms it into a cultural life (which then exists in our midst as art, as literature, science, religious denominations or the contents of their creeds, in fact all that is essentially comprehended by means of the ego's self-transformation) defines quite clearly what we call the cultural realm of the threefold social organism. Here you have, then, the possibility of strictly defining the spiritual or cultural domain of the threefold social organism. Such a spiritual domain would not exist at all were the ego not to transform its own being so that it can work artistically, religiously and scientifically on what is derived from the mineral kingdom.

We transform our astral body, too, though not in the same conscious manner in which we transform our ego. If we survey the content of our culture, we find its most conscious component parts to be those from the spiritual domain just characterized. Only half conscious are the concepts that regulate the life between man and man (although here they have come into existence most poignantly) and comprise the life of rights and all that pertains to the sphere of rights—namely, the relationships between man and man. Anyone who cannot comprehend the difference between a concept belonging to the religious, scientific or artistic sphere with one pertaining to the sphere of rights, of the state, is without doubt not a good psychologist or observer of the soul. In a very different way do we regulate the relations, the dim awareness between people: What is my duty to the other person? What are his rights and what are mine? All these questions playing between man and man issue from a much dimmer consciousness than that which deals with science, religion and art. The realm of interplay between man and man, where matters cannot be decided by individuals as in science, art or religion, which can be determined only by human social life, by agreement and reciprocal understanding, is the realm that comprises the life of jurisprudence or the state, the sphere of rights of the threefold social organism.

We experience with an even duller consciousness a third domain that comes into existence because we transform our etheric body. This is a domain of which we acquire an awareness in a most indirect manner through all kinds of vague dietetic rules and so forth. It is a domain which we experience almost in a state of sleep and which sends its effects into full consciousness to such a slight degree that not even the relations between people can throw light on it. The domain of rights can be illuminated by the mutual agreement between people, and it constitutes a certain ideal of our social order that in the sphere of rights we have introduced full democracy where all people of legal age are equal and can secure their rights through mutual understanding. The dullness of consciousness which has as its content the transformation of the astral body suffices for the individual when he is sustained by an understanding with his fellowman. The human being must grasp science on his own; religion he must generate for himself; art he must bring forth from the wellspring of his individual being, the innermost fountain of his personality. These must proceed from the most wide awake, clearest consciousness. Here, he must rely entirely upon himself, upon his individuality. One even considers it somewhat abnormal that associations have recently cropped up from time to time in the arts. As a rule, they usually consisted only of two people, as when playwrights collaborate. Occasionally one reads in theater programs, “Popular Comedy by X. Y. and U. Z.” In most instances, however, as those familiar with this field know, it is not a proper association of two. As a rule, some elderly gentleman who in his youth had written plays, but whole talent, if such it can be called, has since evaporated, enters into an agreement with an as yet unknown young man, lets him write the drama, makes a few corrections, and has now added his name to it. Thus, the young playwright, too, has slid into the limelight. In this manner, “associations” have come about in this area, but anybody senses that this is something abnormal, for what actually belongs to the spiritual sphere must also belong entirely to the personality of an individual. By comparison, with regard to the settlement of rights, the human being is able to manage if, as an individual personality, he has the support of another individual. This, however, does not suffice in reference to a sphere into which consciousness does not really penetrate. In the etheric body where etheric processes run their course, it is not enough if man as an individual confronts another individual. Where man as an individual confronts mankind as a whole, it is necessary to form associations; it is necessary that judgments or decisions be formulated by individuals in association, hence, that individuals Pool their experiences. Deeds and accomplishments then must spring from associations, not from individual personalities Here we are referred to a life where the individual person can do nothing by himself, where he can accomplish something only when he is part of an association, and where the association enters into reciprocal relationships with another association. In short, we are directed to what really takes place within the human social community in this duller consciousness—the economic sphere of the social organism.

Thus we can say that if we look in a backward direction at what the human being represents today, in the direction of nature, we find him grounded with his etheric body in the animal world, with his astral body in the plant world, with his ego in the mineral world. He does, however, transform these existing component members of his. He transforms his etheric body; as a consequence of this, the economic sphere arises around him in the life of the human community, the economic life in which, in turn, he is grounded with his etheric body in the outer world, in the social organism. With his astral body, man is anchored in the rights sphere of the social organism; with his ego he is grounded in its cultural sphere. Thus, as human beings, we stand linked together with the three kingdoms of nature on the one side; on the other side, we are linked with the social life in accordance with the three members of the social order: the spiritual, the rights, and the economic.

Physical Body
Etheric Body: Animal World Economic Sphere
Astral Body: Plant World Rights Sphere
Ego: Mineral World Cultural Sphere

We must now proceed from the basis of a completely clear manner of conception in order to deepen still further this whole insight we have thus gained. Let us keep well in mind that the social order in its structural organization is brought about by the metamorphosis of our etheric body, astral body and ego that we carry out in successive earth lives. Looking at it in this way, we find, as it were, what man contributes on his own to the emergence of the social life by means of the structure of his organism. The social life, in turn, reacts upon the human being. Up to now we have considered the will aspect of the social life. We observed how it comes into existence, how it flows out of the configuration of human nature. Keep in mind that it is present in reality when it has flown out! So, the economic sphere flows out of the etheric body or out of the transformation of the latter; the rights sphere arises from the astral body; the spiritual or cultural sphere from the transformation of the ego. Now, these three spheres, having thus issued forth, are then realities and in turn react upon the human being. First, he produces them out of his own being; then they react upon him.

You see, we must also take into consideration this second form of human interaction. We can say of it that it is more from the aspect of cognition. What we have considered so far, namely, the manner in which the human being brings about the threefold social organism, was more from the will aspect. Now we turn more to the cognitive side, and consider what kind of impressions arise when man's environment reacts in turn on him. Then, observation shows that the spiritual sphere reacts upon the human physical body, although only to a very slight degree in the present incarnation. To be sure, it can to some extent be noted that the human being, as he develops within a certain relationship to his environment, adopts something from his environment insofar as it is the cultural sphere. If a person grows up in an artistic atmosphere, one who is sensitive to this will note it in his physiognomy. A prosaic environment will, likewise, be noticeable. However, this is only a matter of a most delicate nuance of life. For the most part, we can say that in regard to the way it is formed in this earth life, man's physical body-does not exhibit a strong influence from the spiritual environment. All the stronger is this influence in regard to the following earth lives. It is true that in our subsequent incarnations our physiognomy will bear the marked result of our spiritual environment in this life. The way we look today, the kind of physiognomy we now possess, is essentially due to the influence of the spiritual environment in which we spent our previous earth life. If one has a feeling for this—although this is possible, I might say, only in a certain general sense—one can, indeed, see in the face of a person the sort of environment in which he lived in previous earth lives. Certain discrepancies also arise from matters such as these which, at times, confront us quite emphatically in human life.

Imagine, let us say, that in regard to his former incarnation a person descends from a cultured family; he now grows up in an uncultured family. His face then bears that subtle nuance of life that I spoke of before, although, perhaps to a trifling degree. Perhaps, in his face, he strongly reveals what he brought over from his former earth life. Often, it is only in this context that one understands how it is possible that a crude fellow can sometimes have quite delicate features. The things in human life are related, indeed, in decidedly complicated ways.

Now we can say: Yes, but the human being does not take along his physical body into his next earth incarnation; after all, he discards it. This is true of the physical substance, but I should like to repeat what I said some time ago (drawing). What you actually behold as the physical body in its form is not the physical organism of man; it is the form (see drawing). Into this form, matter is merely inserted. It is absorbed by the form. The form is something absolutely spiritual, and I refer to this form when I speak of the effect of the spiritual sphere upon the physical body. What is discarded are only the material particles that are built into the form. The form man possesses is not laid aside; on the contrary, it sends it effects into the next life, especially what is developed through the agility and nimbleness of the limbs, hands and arms, feet and legs. This comes to expression in the shape of the head in the next incarnation.

The physical organism, then, decidedly bears its traces into the next earth life, carrying them into it in accordance with the provision of the cultural sphere that surrounds it in this life.

The rights sphere, on the other hand, reacts upon the etheric body (see drawing below). After death, while the physical body—its material substance, not the form—is delivered over to the earth, the etheric body is surrendered to the cosmos and dissolves into it. What is present and active as forces in it, however, is borne across into the next earth life, or at least affects it. Actually, however, through spiritual science we can know empirically that it does so only to a very slight degree. Whereas the form of the physical body powerfully transmits its effect into the next earth incarnation and, along with it, all that it has gained from the cultural sphere surrounding the physical body, what now comes from the rights sphere in the etheric body works, first of all, upon the cosmos. This is a most important discovery made by the science of initiation.

We live in this world. Because of the way and manner in which we have been placed into the social context of the world, we have a certain state of mind. We confront those with whom we come into contact in life with certain rights' concepts or concepts and sensations resembling the feelings of rights. This gives our soul a certain configuration. Simply speaking, let us say that I have a certain relationship to ten people in life. The one I love, the other I hate, I am indifferent to the third, I am dependent on the fourth, the fifth is dependent on me, and so on. In the most diverse ways, then, my rights and duties concerning these ten persons are outlined. All this crystallizes into a certain soul state in me, but not only in a superficial manner, for the emotional fiber of my soul is conditioned by it. This Position within the social order from the viewpoint of the rights sphere brings about a certain configuration of my etheric body, which is transmitted to the cosmos upon my death. After this body separates from me, what vibrates in my etheric body here (on earth) continues to vibrate in the cosmos, causing further reverberations.

Unfortunately, such things pass entirely unnoticed by what today is called science. Consequently, this science has no consciousness of the more intimate relationships between human life and cosmic life. The course taken by wind and weather today, hence the manner in which the rhythm of our external climate develops, is essentially the continuation of rhythms, brought about by the life of rights in the social organism of past ages.

The human being stands indeed in a certain relationship to outer reality, even the reality of nature. It is important to realize that what develops all around us as the sphere of rights is not something merely abstract, man-made, arising and again disappearing; instead, what is at first a thought content, having its being initially in the realm of rights, lives in a subsequent age of earth existence in the atmosphere, in the vibrations, in the entire configuration, and in the movements of the atmosphere.

If man understands this properly, it gives him a sense of his connection with the entire life of the earth. Only this allows him to realize how significant it is whether he develops one or another kind of political life, a good or bad life of rights. All things physical, in fact, derive originally from something given order or disorder by spirit. Spiritual science, therefore, must insist that the human being has a fully alive, conscious evolutionary connection with the cosmos.

What is it like today? In our present era of decadence we have reached the point where we apprehend nature with abstract concepts. We construct a natural science that is actually devoid of all that lives in the human being, a natural science offering a content that fundamentally is not the content of human life; and what the human being experiences within himself stands in no relationship to what is occurring outside him. This is one side of the picture.

On the other side, the human being, though completely separated, as it were, from this knowledge of nature that he develops, is supposed to advance to a sort of awareness of God, or to a consciousness of his relationship to God. Both these views will have nothing to do with each other, really cannot have anything to do with each other because of the manner in which they have evolved to the present day. Spiritual science, on the contrary, shows in concrete detail how the human being is not only connected with the whole world, but how he himself cooperates with it. Out of what arises we can Interpret the way man has lived in previous earth lives. In earlier incarnations, we founded legal systems. Now we live again. We have a certain kind of weather, wind and so forth, seasons with this or that configuration. Now we experience externally, in the atmosphere, what once upon a time we set up as the order of justice. Here, man in his consciousness grows into what surrounds him as his environment. We no longer talk here abstractly and in general of man's having a consciousness of God within him, of forming a unity with the surrounding world; here we learn to recognize in detail how this unity is constituted, how the human being is joined with the entire universe.

Just think, what would we know of the human being if we had no idea that it is the blood of his head that flows through his legs, if, therefore, insofar as it is enclosed within the skin, we did not consider the entire circulation processes in the organism? In the same way that we cannot consider the head by itself, for instance, ignoring the connection to the remaining organism, we must not consider the human being in one earth life by itself; instead, we have to focus on the cycle of metamorphosis. What at one time is a social system of rights conceived by the mind will become an order of nature at another, albeit distant, future time. With the help of spiritual science one can see how the thought-out political order of one age is connected with the atmospheric order of nature of another time.

If these views evolve in such a manner that man's sense of participation in the world, his feeling of oneness with it, is thereby intensified, then indeed will that indispensable reconciliation take place between science and religion that is absolutely necessary to the upbuilding of our social life.

Just as the rights sphere acts upon the etheric body and the cultural sphere upon the physical body, so does the economic sphere act upon the astral body, and we may say that it is just upon this innermost principle of human nature that the economic sphere acts. You must distinguish the following: The economic sphere originates from the etheric body, but when, in turn,. it reacts upon the human being, it reacts upon the astral body. The reaction is unlike that which proceeds from the human being. It is impossible merely to construe these matters schematically, for they must be derived empirically from observation. Because the economic sphere acts upon the astral body, brotherliness that should exist in the economic sphere is borne through the portal of death, for the human being takes along his astral body for a certain time. What is thus established by virtue of brotherliness in the human soul is carried through death into the spiritual world, and there continues to be effective as such. Thus, what has already been discussed by me from other points of view appears again from this particular aspect.

The economic sphere (that is to say, the manner and method by which, in associations, we form the basis for our economic decisions and actions together with our fellow men) reacts on man's astral body and shapes it. It is, in fact, this formation of the astral body, attained because of brotherliness in the economic sphere, which the human being carries through death. As an idealist or perhaps even a mystic, one ought not to hold the economic sphere in particularly low esteem, for it is just in this sphere that we can develop brotherhood, as has often been pointed out. The spiritual element that is brought into the apparently material life is the very aspect acquired by the human being for his higher realm. What we establish in the cultural or spiritual sphere we draw from the mineral kingdom; it is something that we basically carry within our predispositions that we bring with us through birth. What we implant in the economic sphere, on the other hand, is something so strongly united with the soul that we bear it with us through the portal of death.

The facts are such that we must say, yes, people believe themselves to be idealists, or mystics, and feel obliged to disdain materialism, but no one becomes an idealist by disdain of materialism. Rather, he is an idealist if he knows how to spiritualize matter. What counts is not that we confront the economic life in false abnegation, that we scorn and slight it, but that we shape the economic life so that it bears the impression of the spirit everywhere, that this economic member of the social organism becomes a sphere molded and impregnated with the spirit by man. This is what is essentially decisive for the future.

And on a small scale, as I have already mentioned, this does make itself felt through the fact that people believe they are idealistic and spiritual if they deny the spirit any material tribute and think: It is not necessary really to offer this or that sacrifice to the spirit. The spiritual is, after all, spiritual—so they say—one must esteem it highly, not drag it into the dust by giving money, of all things, as an offering for it! By that token a proper idealist would be one who says to himself, “Oh, I revere the spirit, but I keep my wallet closed and do nothing for the care of the spiritual life!” One despises matter, despises above all the worst, the most Ahrimanic form of matter, closing one's purse tightly so as to make sure that nothing can escape to sustain the life of the spirit. These are facts that in some degree are connected with the state of mind so easily arising in idealists and mystics. Matter is scorned rather than spiritualized. Where does this contempt for matter come from? It arises because today's idealists and mystics are frequently the greatest materialists, because they are so controlled by matter that they can resist it in no other way than by dreaming themselves into a contempt of it. Their contempt, however, is only imagined. They despise matter, because they themselves cannot cope with it. They are too deeply immersed in it.

We must be clearly aware that certain feelings and attitudes exist in our time that are really only masks. Many a person parading around as a mystic today is just a materialist, as I have had occasion to explain from other aspects in the last few weeks. From what I have tried to bring close to you today, it becomes apparent, above all else, how, through spiritual science, the feeling of solidarity between the human being and the world can awaken and become more and more intense. In our present time this is necessary!

Actually, man has been able to arrive at a certain point in his evolution because he did not have to contribute anything to it. In the course of earth's evolution, we have proceeded from the beginning of earthly existence itself. In the beginning of earth evolution divine spiritual beings provided for us; they incorporated into the earth's organization the soil, the climate, finally even the cultural life. You know that there were great teachers in the mystery centers whose teachers were in turn the gods themselves. Thus, nothing human had been stored up; instead, the divine had been taken over. The gods had provided for mankind everything that was at hand in good order. This has essentially vanished in our time; I have shown you this in the most varied connections. The catastrophic character of our age is connected with this dissipation of the primeval, divine content and the creation of a new content by human beings on their own. They then create this new content not merely for human life in the cultural, political and economic sphere, but also for what issues forth from these domains into the life of nature; and the future of the earth must be man's own creation, his own concern.

In regard to humanity's present mentality, therefore, the views of a person like Spengler are quite correct, unless men awaken that inner fountain which can give rise not only to creative impulses for the activities of the cultural, political and economic spheres, but which must act creatively out of these spheres for all of earth life, including the life of nature itself. For civilization will not only pass over into barbarism, as Spengler has already proven scientifically, but the whole earth will approach its doom, will never reach its goal. If only people would imbue themselves with this awareness that the future events of earth evolution depend on humanity itself! For then, out of this feeling, the powerful impulse could emerge that we need today in order to lead the obviously declining order of the world again into an ascending direction, in order to challenge the drowsy souls who refuse to see what is actually happening, in order to transform these sleepy souls into awakened ones. We need an alert humanity today. Only a watchful mankind can survey what occurs around it and know the tasks placed upon it by the course of human evolution, in regard to which present mankind is being confronted with severe tests.

In order to comprehend a number of things that have to be mentioned in connection with previously presented matters, it is necessary to recall several facts. We have seen how we are connected with our environment, with the other realms of existence. We have seen how our etheric body is directed toward the animal kingdom, the astral body toward the plant kingdom and the ego toward the mineral kingdom. We have seen how, as a result of the work which the ego performs upon itself together with others within the social order, there arises what we know as the cultural development of mankind in art, religion and science. I said yesterday that these soul contents—art, religion and science—are basically nothing else than what comes about through the work of the human ego upon itself. Thus we have here one of the examples showing the connection of the human being with social life. Art, religion and science are really, in the widest extent, the contents of the actual spirit realm of the social organism.

Then we have what comes into existence through the transformation of the astral body. As a matter of course, this transformation must be essentially more subconscious at the present stage of human evolution than what is accomplished in the spiritual realm of art, religion and science; and what grows out of the metamorphosis of the astral body is essentially what we have to designate as the rights sphere within the social organism. Then, even more subconsciously, we have what results from the transformation of the etheric body because of our living in union with our fellowmen. All that springs from this, all that men do through the transmutation of their ether body, belongs to the economic sphere of the social organism. Here then we have the connections, the relationships of the human being to what is outside him. Yesterday, too, we saw the significance of such relationships that the human being has to the life of the social order outside him. For, as we have seen, he thus actually prepares the basic natural foundation for his next life on earth. He works in a certain measure at the creation of earthly existence itself. It would indeed be desirable for as many people as possible to grasp the extraordinary importance and relevance of the present moment of human evolution.

It can be said that until this world-historical hour the evolution of humanity has, in general, rested on the providential care of the forces standing above man in the higher hierarchies. As we know, mankind achieved a certain development of the ether body during the old Indian cultural period, a certain development of the astral body during the Egypto-Chaldean time, and a development of the intellectual soul in the Greco-Latin time. Now humanity is on the point of lifting the consciousness soul from the depths of soul existence. But since the germ of what is to come must always be present in the preceding evolutionary stages, what is to be the content of the next cultural epoch—the unfoldment of the spirit-self—is already proclaiming itself; however, this development of the spirit-self must of necessity proceed from man himself.

We have passed through various earth lives. When we speak of the men of the primeval Indian time, of the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean and the Greco-Latin times, we are, in fact, speaking of ourselves; for we lived under quite different conditions in those ancient times. We lived in surroundings of animal, plant or mineral nature prepared for us at the instigation of our divine progenitors, who were the humanity on the Moon, the Sun and Saturn and who, in the pre-stages of the earth, experienced what we are experiencing today. What constitutes content upon an earlier planetary evolution remains as form for the succeeding one. We lived on what was bequeathed to us by the gods, the beings of the higher hierarchies. Now we have reached the point where the earth would dry up and wither, if man, in a sense, did not spin out a new thread of life from himself.

Just think how all this was really prepared for us. Naturally, we have a spiritual life within our social life. The people of the Occident are proud of this social life; they are proud of their art, religion and science. Human beings must distinguish, however, between the Mystery of Golgotha as a fact, and the manner in which it has been heretofore understood through concepts obtained from religion, art and science. We have comprehended the Christ according to the standard of what we possessed as spiritual content in our souls. Here in the Occident we have established something like a continuation of the old spirituality. When anyone is able objectively to enter upon the nature of the actual spiritual life of Europe and its American extension, he finds that in the end it is all an Oriental heritage. It is nothing else. Certainly, we have changed any number of things. As I have already pointed out in these lectures, the quite different world view of the Orient which, once upon a time, could magnificently grasp the causative connections between the successive earth lives of the human being, but which later in the Greek concept of the cosmos had become a shadow of itself in the fatum, in destiny—all that turned finally through the Latin Roman element into something juristic. I have indicated how this is felt when we look at Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel where Christ appears in the role of World Judge, a cosmic jurist, deciding between good and evil human beings. The world concept had become juristic. This was not so in the Oriental world view.

Then there was added what results from economic thinking. Bacon was one who actually proceeded entirely from economic thought, and all of Europe allowed itself to be taught by him. What we possess in our sciences, and what today constitutes the popular view of the world permeating all European circles, is the result of this Western economic thinking which, as I have indicated, simply did not stop with the economic sphere, but has entered the higher domains, the rights domain and even the cultural domain. If individuals like Huxley and Spencer had employed their thinking to bring order into economic relationships, they would then be in the right place. They are out of place when employing their particular kind of thinking for the purpose of creating science. Yet the whole world has imitated them.

We can therefore say that what we possess of actual spirituality is fundamentally only an obsolete legacy of the ancient Orient. Later, legalistic, political thinking began in Greece and Rome. It would simply be nonsense to believe that this could have existed in the ancient structure of the Oriental state. The dignified patriarchal structures, of which the early Chinese constitution was a reflection, were not state formations in the sense that the European understands them. What we now possess as the rights structure did not yet exist in Orientalism. It entered into Occidental culture, faintly at first, by way of Greek thinking, and then quite strongly by way of Latin thinking. Thus we must say that our entire spiritual life basically still has a character which was inherited from what the Oriental possessed. Bear in mind, however, how I had to present this emergence of the Oriental spiritual life. It arose out of man's metabolism—out of the inner impulses of metabolism—in the Vedas, in the magnificent poetry of the Orient. It must be sought as a new outgrowth of the metabolism, just as blossom and fruit issue from the tree. Anyone who can look upon the inner relationships as they are in reality knows how to look upon the blossoms and fruit of the tree; he will observe how the sap rises up from the earth, ascends in the trunk, shoots out into the branches, turns green within the leaves, becomes varicolored in the blossoms and achieves ripeness in the fruit. This is what presents itself to our eyes. If we then note the result in our metabolic processes of what is drawn up with the substance coming from the earth and taken up into ourselves, how it is digested and burned up, how it passes over into the blood, is refined and etherized within the body, we see that it sprouts, flourishes and ripens just like the vegetative process that turns to blossoms, fruits and trees. It only changes into something else by sprouting, flourishing and ripening through the human organs; it turns into the poetic fruit of the Vedas, it becomes the philosophic fruit of the Vedanta philosophy. In the Orient, the spiritual life was considered a fruit of the earth, of the metabolism that courses through the human being, just as one looked upon the process coursing through the verdant, fruit-bearing tree. What appears in the Vedas and in Oriental poetry is intimately bound up with the essence of the earth. It is the flower of the earth. It is nonsense when men of today make our earth into a lifeless product, as geology does, for instance. For not only what arises from the earth in flower and fruit belongs to her, but also what has arisen like a philosophical fruit in the primordial epochs of mankind in the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy. Whoever wishes to see nothing but stones come into existence in or upon the earth, whoever sees her only as tillable soil, whoever views the earth as nothing but mineral substance, does not know the earth. For to her belongs also what she has borne in times past as blossom and fruit through the body of man.

Then the other age arrived, the age in which man had already emancipated himself from the earth. He was no longer connected with the earth, but only with the climate and atmosphere, in which he brought to expression his rhythmic system rather than his metabolic system. It was the age in which the mighty spiritual intuitions of antiquity were no longer manifest, but in which man's concepts of rights developed.

In the more recent age, particularly since Bacon, the human being has begun to withdraw completely into himself, to divorce himself from the earth, and to manifest what lives only within himself as mere intellect within the economic thinking of the Western world. Thus, what evolves through the human being is differentiated over the earth.

All these are matters to which we must pay attention at present. If we would pay attention to these things, we must certainly bring our soul to an inward awakening. We must seek to comprehend what spiritual science can give us. We must confess to ourselves that the time is past when, after having worked hard all week, we can simply sit down and listen to an abstract sermon about the connection of the human being with a divine world order. Those times are over; that is antiquated.

It is the duty of modern humanity to comprehend quite concretely how man's essential being is itself linked with the cosmos, how its existence is bound up with the cosmos. Only as a consequence of this comprehension will the human being understand the necessity of dividing the social life into the spiritual sphere—which is basically only a heritage from the Orient grown more and more lifeless, for our spiritual life today is dead—and the other two spheres. The old Oriental of primeval times could never have grasped what is meant when we say that we do not understand life. Today we say that we do not understand life, for we live only in the dead mineral realm, even though we do so with our ego, which the Oriental did not yet do. Precisely here, life must enter. After all, what do we mean when we strive as human beings to accord a special place and emphasis to the spiritual sphere within the social organism? What is it, after all, that we desire here?

As long as the spiritual or cultural sphere is bound up with the wholly differently constituted rights or state structure—or worse, with the economic life—so long will the single human individuality be unable to contribute to the spiritual life what this spiritual life should contain. Let us understand one another on this particular point! With the thinking habits of the present it is not an easy task to understand just what matters here. In what follows I shall attempt to make comprehensible just what needs to be grasped in this respect.

Consider, for instance, the case where the state enacts its school laws. These school laws are put through either from a despotic, tyrannical point of view or from a democratic one. How are they made? Let us put the matter quite simply. Picture to yourself three people sitting together. When three people sit down together they are “terribly clever” in an abstract sense. Three people who get together really know everything about all things; it is not much better when people come together as a party—they usually know everything about all things. One knows exactly how to set up paragraph one: how religion should be taught; paragraph two: how German or any other language should be taught; paragraph three: how arithmetic should be taught; paragraph four: how geography should be taught. Wonderful paragraphs can be worked out that should represent an ideal condition for the educational system. Then all this can be made into rules and regulations, and then put into effect. It is quite immaterial whether it is done by three or three hundred people, it will always be very clever, for people are very clever when they construct something in abstractions. Then it becomes law. It is something else, however, when, for instance, someone confronts a class of fifty real children. They have quite definite characters; they are not the wax we pretend they are, when, with great cleverness, we formulate paragraphs one, two and so forth. Children can be molded only as far as their special peculiarities and abilities allow. In addition, something else enters the picture. The teacher himself confronts the class with his particular capabilities. They, too, are limited. And one with experience knows that rules can be this good in an abstract sense (referring to larger form in drawing); the clever teacher, however, can only apply them this well (referring to the smaller form). In abstractions, everything can be figured out. In reality, however, it is a question of dealing with reality. In the educational system that is part of the spiritual sphere, the state as such can accomplish nothing but abstractions. These can be quite wonderful and outstandingly good, but leave the state out of it! Take it out of the educational system, which is a part of the spiritual sphere! Make the educational system dependent on the teachers themselves who are available at a particular time. Then it will be a reality; then it will not become a lie but something that is in accordance with the particular age. That is what is meant by working toward realities. Something else, however, takes its place: Paragraphs one, two, three, ten, fifty are all dead, and the way in which they are observed is actually something absolutely irrational. What lives through the Body of teachers and comes into existence in the living collaboration among real teachers is alive. Here you have the point where life enters into what is derived from the dead mineral. A higher sphere is reached. We bring life, illuminated life, into the spiritual sphere by resting it upon human individualities, not upon paragraphs one, two, and so on. We infuse life into the spiritual sphere; out of an ether body we permeate the spiritual sphere around us with what is derived from the living human being. In your own attitude of mind, what is otherwise dead, inanimate, a machinelike thought, turns into a living being. The spiritual sphere spreads out as something inwardly alive over the entire earth. That is what must be understood inwardly. One must feel how life streams out of an undreamed-of soul depth into the independent life of the spirit, and how we actually vivify this self-reliant spiritual life by founding it upon the human individuality.

You see from this that what we draw forth from spiritual science for everyday life has to do most intensely with realities. One could really despair when one sees how little actual energy and enthusiasm is generated in humanity for this vivification of the spiritual sphere. One feels as though humanity were imbued by the same attitude of mind as is a person who desires to see only stillborn children brought into the world, and who does not wish the spark of life to enter the body that otherwise would come into the world dead. This is how one feels about modern mankind. Humanity sits upon a dead culture, as if stuck with pitch to comfortable seats, not willing to rise to the enthusiasm of vivifying the spiritual life. Enthusiasm is what we need above all else, for this spiritual life will not be revitalized out of its dead traditions.

Next is the rights sphere. I said that it is born out of instincts, out of half conscious instincts. This rights sphere was still something semiconscious, glimmering up into consciousness, when born out of Greek life, more particularly, out of the Latin-Roman life, and was then elaborated upon further. Now it is to be placed independently on its own democratic basis. What has developed under the impulse of the rights sphere up to now? The legal paragraphs came into being in which the individual has such a small share that I must say there has been hardly anything that has left such a bitter taste in my mouth as when I had dealings with a lawyer. This has happened repeatedly in my life. One goes to somebody who is a representative of the law, a man learned in the law. One is concerned with a specific case. One watches this lawyer go to some filing cabinet. He takes out a bundle of briefs. With much effort, he fits together what he is reading at the moment; he himself is quite detached from the matter at hand. One wishes to know how this case fits into the framework of the law. He goes to his library, takes out a certain law book, leafs through it at length, but nothing results because in reality he is entirely unacquainted with the subject. Nothing at all of a living, human connection is present in such a proceeding.

A matter of litigation once caused considerable correspondence between a lawyer and myself; I do not wish to relate the whole affair. In the end, it turned out that it was necessary to refer also to a book on international law. The case had been going on for nearly two and a half years when the good man told me that he did not have a book on international law, and I would have to procure it myself. He said, “You will have to supply me with the necessary data anyway, if I am to give you further advice!” Now, those who know me are aware that I am certainly not boastful in such matters. I am certainly not conceited, either. I obtained the book on international law, and within two hours it was clear to me just how the case stood. One need only look into matters with a healthy mind and one finds that what otherwise might be protracted over two years can be accomplished in two hours. This is how far removed the human element has come from what really exists as the system of rights, which has become entangled in what is derived from the three members in the social organism. We must return to a life that experiences what holds sway in rights in the same way we experience the external sense objects. We must be connected in a living manner with what exists as the rights body.

The true meaning of democracy is for the dead paragraphs to be humanized, and for our feelings to participate in what otherwise lies buried in the dead paragraphs. Just as life enters the spiritual sphere through what can be born out of spiritual science, so also will feeling enter into the rights sphere through what is being willed by spiritual science. What lives from man to man will then be felt.

We proceed to the third sphere—the economic sphere. We know that this takes place very much in the subconscious; that based on what he has to deal with an individual today is simply not in a position to penetrate with full consciousness into what is at hand in the economic sphere. Associations must be formed in which the experience of the one supplements the experience of another. Out of associations, out of group formations, the decisions must subsequently be made. Whereas each one of us must individually create out of ourselves what is commensurate with our talents in the spiritual sphere, what is active in the economic sphere must result from a group decision. From such group judgment, governing reason will then emerge and hold sway in the economic life.

1. spiritual life: life etheri c body
2. rights sphere: feeling astral body
3. economic-sphere reason ego

Reason will reign in the economic sphere. This means that we contribute what we have evolved in ourselves as a gift from the gods. We contribute what we have evolved as our etheric element, what we have developed in regard to feeling as astral body, and what we have evolved as reason for our ego. All this we bring to the outer world. In the economic sphere we need not yet make the contribution as individuals; therefore we do so through associations and groups. But what we have developed individually in the ego—reason—becomes something that permeates the whole economic sphere if we aim at associations in the proper manner. Hence, we carry the impulses existing in our ether body out into the social order, into the spiritual life, by enlivening the spiritual life. We carry into the rights sphere what pulsates in our astral body as feeling, and we bear into the economic sphere what lives in our ego as reason. As human beings, we have attained three things in the cosmic order: etheric body, astral body, and ego. We leave the world again with the etheric body, astral body, and ego. We yield it up to the world. We fashion the world order out of ourselves. Why should it be otherwise? Among the lower animals much is exemplified for us by the spider that spins out of herself what must come to pass. Man must indeed become a world creator, and must form out of himself what will constitute his environment in the future. We bear the future in us. I have discussed this from the most varied points of view.

Of what use is all the philosophical talk about the reality of the world? We should inform ourselves about the reality of the world by looking at the realities of the future. What is to be real in the future is borne today within us as ideality. Let us fashion the world so that it will be real. This must not live in us merely as theory; it must be a feeling in us, an innermost life impulse. Then we shall simultaneously have a cognitive relationship and a religious relationship to our environment. Out of this innermost impulse, an, too, will become something quite different in the future. It will turn into something that unites with immediate life. Our very existence will have to shape itself artistically. Without that, we will inevitably drift into the philistinism of a Lenin, a Trotsky, or a Lunatsharsky.⁸⁹ It is only the Spirit created by man out of himself that can save us from this morass; and if the life of rights is not to succumb to utter desolation, we must permeate it with feeling, and we must permeate the economic life with reason.

There was a man who looked back at the way and means the world developed and he said, “All that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real.” He, however, looked back to what the world had become through the old gods; he did not look to the future. It was Hegel, of whom I spoke here on August 27th, his 150th birthday. Today, we are at a point where the world is irrational, and where man must make it rational once more. We must realize this, and this knowledge must pass into thinking, feeling and will. There is only one social reform: People must realize what part mankind must play in the shaping of the world order.

This is what we ought to repeat to ourselves each morning and night so that we will understand anew what nonsense it is to speak of the eternity and preservation of matter. Everything surrounding us as substance will pass away. What dwells in us as ideals will replace the vacuums brought about by the destruction of matter. The ideals that live within us for the time being will occupy the empty spaces as future reality.

In this way the human being must feel a bond with the world order. In a new way he must experience Christ's words, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”⁹⁰ One who understands this utterance knows that it is a genuinely Christian saying. For Christianity starts from the destructibility of matter and external energy, whereas the recent natural scientific world outlook mocks Christianity by promulgating the conservation of matter and energy. Indeed, heaven and earth—meaning all matter—will pass away and all energy cease to be, but what forms within the soul of man and dwells in the word will be the world of the future. That is Christianity.

This newly understood Christianity must eradicate the anti-Christian attitude of the modern materialistic world outlook, which fantasizes about the conservation of things transitory—matter and energy. Things have gone so far that the tenets of Christianity, namely, eternity of the spirit and the avowal of the transitory nature of matter, are considered sheer insanity as compared to the firmly established phantasm of the conservation of matter and energy. It has gone so far that we lie when we still allege to be Christians, while we lend a hand to the dissemination of an anti-Christian world outlook. One who holds fast to modern natural science's basic views on matter would only be honest if he could recant Christianity. Above all, in reality, representatives of Christian confessions, ministers and pastors, who make their compromises with modern natural science, are inwardly quite certainly the worst enemies of Christianity. There is no other way but to begin to see these matters clearly and honestly. We must definitely speak about these things more and more in full earnestness. Without this, there will be no progress. All talk of reforms of which any number of organizations and reform movements chatter today is mere fantasy; it is only grist to the mill of those who bring about the decline. The only hope for renewal can come from grasping the living spirit, the living spirit that has to find its source in the creative human being and which, in turn, becomes the foundation for the reality of the future, not just of some ideal future, but that of the cosmic future.

In all truth, not until modern humanity accepts this metamorphosis of modern thinking with the same ardor with which world outlooks were once accepted in former times, not until then will decline transform itself into ascending progress. One wishes that what is thus being stated would not only be comprehended conveniently by concepts; one wishes that it would be grasped by the feelings and that it would pulse through the will. For, unless it is sensed and felt, unless it pulses through the will, all talk of emerging from this catastrophic age remains so much talk into the wind. Most people are unaware of the terrible way in which we are sailing into the decline that now is taking hold already of the physical environment. The physical, however, is always the consequence of the spiritual. The physical of the future will be the consequence of the spiritual we harbor in our souls today. The physical of the present is caused by the spiritual of the past, and the most recent physical conditions are brought about by the most recent past spiritual activities of mankind.

When we hear today that out of about 600 school children in Berlin an average of much more than one hundred do not have shoes and socks at present and no hope of getting them; when we are told that many more than a hundred and fifty of these 600 children have parents who cannot even purchase rations for them and who no longer receive a warm breakfast before going to school; that in the course of the last school year over a hundred of these children died of tuberculosis—just add this up for yourselves!—then, my dear friends, you have material occurrences. These physical occurrences are the external expression of the spirituality that has been nurtured in mankind during the past few centuries. One must ask today: Do people wish to go on cultivating social movements, women's movements and any number of other reforms while continuing the thoughts that have borne such fruit? Or are they willing to create and draw from a new source? This question should place itself in shining letters before our souls as we experience and feel the point in time at which we now stand.

• 89 . A.W. Lunatsharsky: 1875–1933, Russian author and politician.
• 90 . n Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 16:17.