The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy is currently regarded by many people who initially deal with it from the outside as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge that serious science should not concern itself with.

Now, anthroposophy does indeed want to penetrate into those regions that are usually, more or less justifiably, referred to as supersensible regions, and in which the human being is rooted with his or her own deeper, eternal being. There are, of course, already scientific researchers today who are to be taken very seriously and who turn to all kinds of abnormal human abilities that point to the fact that the human being is subject to other laws and is connected to the world in other ways than can be determined by the usual scientific studies.

However, precisely those who turn to such abnormal human abilities, which they then, quite justifiably, only register scientifically and research according to their laws, often see the path that anthroposophy takes as a fantastical, nebulous, mystical one, one that must even lead to all kinds of superstitious beliefs and enthusiasm. Now, my dear ladies and gentlemen, one cannot say that in the long run, enthusiastic mystical natures can be satisfied by what anthroposophy actually is in its essence. Such natures, who, indeed, there are many such today, run everywhere where there is talk of anything occult, as they call it, such natures very soon find that Anthroposophy wants to be based on strict thinking, on that which can be described as a conscientious scientific method. And that is not really suitable for enthusiastic, nebulous and mystical natures. Of course, on the other hand, this does not prevent those who want to reject what is unfamiliar to them with a slight wave of the hand from finding that neurasthenic or hysterical natures and the like come to anthroposophy.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, in the face of this caricature, which is still very often presented of anthroposophy, it is not easy to characterize the essence of this research and this world view in a short lecture. I will try to do so this evening by first characterizing the paths by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate into those areas that are not accessible to ordinary science. And then I will try to say something, at least in outline, about the results that are obtained in such ways.

One should not think that anthroposophy, as it is meant here, wants to oppose in any way what the unique scientific methods have achieved for human progress in the course of the last few centuries and especially in the nineteenth century. It must be accepted as a prerequisite that anthroposophy claims to be in full agreement with the scientific results of modern times, and that anthroposophy wants nothing to do with any abnormal human abilities, but only with an appropriate continuation of the completely normal human capacity for knowledge and soul. It is often believed that nothing of significance can be achieved through such a normal continuation and further development. Anthroposophy first has to fight against this prejudice. But here it encounters two formidable obstacles. And by becoming clear about these two obstacles to knowledge in a completely unbiased way, it wants to find a way to avoid them.

On the one hand, as I have already mentioned, we have the tremendous scientific research results of recent times with their great practical effects on life. Anthroposophy looks squarely at the views of those 'cautious' natural thinkers who are at the forefront of their science and who speak of the necessary limits of this knowledge of nature.

Initially, human knowledge is presented with that which comes from sense impressions, which is accessible to observation and experimentation, and which the human intellect can find in terms of laws within this sensory realm. Now, there is often an effort to go beyond this sensory realm through mere, self-directed thinking to realms that lie beyond the sensory world. These are the attempts that, through philosophical thinking, as it were, philosophical speculation, seek to go beyond the sensory realm. But anyone who approaches these subjects not as a layman or dilettante, but as a connoisseur of scientific methods, can also know, through the special way of handling thinking in natural science, how the thinking that our scientific conscientiousness has produced, how it does not only arbitrarily binds itself to the external facts of the sense world, but how, in more recent times, it has developed to its greatness precisely by adapting to the laws of the external sense world, by conscientiously following the facts that can be observed in the external sense world. And once one has gone through this process of seeing how scientific thinking follows the facts, then one also knows the uncertainties and subjective arbitrariness one encounters when one leaves the safe territory of sensory facts, the territory of observation and experiment, and surrenders to self-abandoned thinking.

This is why those who are approached by a world view that has come about through such thinking feel unsatisfied. They have to say to themselves: Yes, what one or another thinker, going beyond the sensory world, combines in his thoughts could have turned out differently if he had been differently predisposed. And it does turn out differently. The philosophical systems argue with each other, and the dispute between the philosophical systems justifies the very dissatisfaction that must immediately arise for the unbiased human mind when natural science crosses its borders in the manner just indicated. Now, anthroposophy is not at all inclined to think about nature in a different way than the strict natural scientist himself. And what it attempts to fathom about the supersensible worlds is only meant to be a genuine continuation of the unified scientific world view, not the discovery, in a dualistic sense, of some second world to the one in which we live as human beings. But today there are many natures that are much more deeply laid who feel themselves unsatisfied by what science can give about external nature, in which man with his physical corporeality is also integrated. Such deeper natures then turn away from all research, from all conscientious knowledge in the sense of science, and they turn to a certain mystical direction. This is very common today: people say to themselves that external observation and external experiment provide great things for practical life, but they cannot give the human soul, with its hopes for eternity and its longing to fathom its own deeper being. Such natures then seek ways to delve down into the deeper shafts of the soul, and then believe that they will find in these deeper soul shafts, through mystical contemplation, that which cannot be found through external observation.

And this brings me to the second obstacle that anthroposophy must avoid. It cannot remain with a limited knowledge of nature, just as it cannot remain with some kind of nebulous mysticism. For precisely the person who, through unbiased observation of the soul – and one must indeed penetrate ever more deeply to such observation through anthroposophy – the person who, through unbiased observation of the soul, penetrates into the inner self, knows how impressions that we may have absorbed into our souls decades ago, perhaps half unconsciously at the time, resurface after a long time , they do not just emerge as they were received at the time, but in the depths of the human mind they combine with all kinds of feelings and sensations, they are often interspersed with volitional impulses in such a way that the person is not even aware of this subconscious soul activity. And then, after years, they emerge from the soul of the mystic who is absorbed in contemplation. They do not know that these are only transformed external impressions; they consider them to be divine inspirations and believe that, in what they are bringing up in the way of transformed external perceptions, they are approaching the very sources of the existence of the world, in which the human soul is immersed with its eternal essence.

Anthroposophy does not turn to this side of the supposed knowledge of the eternal either, but says to itself: In the external knowledge of nature, the external facts and their laws arise; in inner contemplation, only that which is a direct or transformed memory of the impressions of the external sense world arises. And precisely because anthroposophy deals with these things in such detail, it comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to transcend the limits of natural phenomena on the one hand and to penetrate more deeply into the nature of the human soul itself on the other with the cognitive abilities that a person initially has for normal life and also for ordinary science. It is precisely for this reason, because Anthroposophy looks at both directions impartially, it seeks the path of further developing human soul abilities.

Now, my dear listeners, if you want to embark on this path, you need something that is admittedly difficult for human beings to achieve, and which I would call intellectual humility. You have to be able to say the following to yourself at a certain moment in your life: As a very small child, I was not at all equipped with the abilities that I have today. I was disoriented in the world, and from the depths of my humanity the abilities have developed that make knowledge possible for me today, that make practical orientation in life possible for me today. In ordinary life and also in ordinary science, one now draws a line with what has been acquired through education and what has been appropriated through life. But anyone who wants to do research in the anthroposophical sense must not stop there, but must realize that, in addition to these abilities of ordinary life and ordinary science, there are abilities slumbering in the soul that can be awakened through certain soul exercises, intimate soul exercises, and that through their development one comes to the contemplation of a completely different world than the one that otherwise surrounds one. The development of these abilities does not take place through external measures, but through intimate soul exercises. And it should be noted that these soul exercises are carried out in such a way that they are thoroughly and scientifically conscientious, which can be acquired in the currently legitimate field of science. Initially, however, what can be achieved through anthroposophy is directed towards the soul, but it is done so rigorously that it can be accounted for by the methods of conscientious science.

Now, the aim of these intimate soul exercises is to strengthen the entire human soul, on the one hand by strengthening the life of the imagination.

My dear audience, just as you strengthen a muscle when you need its power for work, so you can also strengthen the power of the imagination in man by simply translating it, by implementing it in a soul work that does not otherwise occur in life. I will describe the principle of this soul work, but the details — for it takes many years of practice to strengthen the life of the imagination — can be found in my books, for example in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in the second part of my 'Occult Science', or more briefly presented in the last chapter of my 'Riddles of Philosophy'. But, as I said, I would like to present the principles, the essentials of the matter this evening.

First of all, in order to strengthen the human faculty of imagination, easily comprehensible ideas or complexes of ideas are brought into the center of consciousness and then, turning away from everything else, the soul life is completely devoted to such a complex of ideas. It is good, indeed almost necessary, to either find such a complex of ideas by seeking it out – let us say – in a book that is completely unknown to you at first, or by simply turning to a page, taking some saying or sentence that you are quite certain that it has not yet passed through one's consciousness, through one's soul life, or one can also get some such content from someone who is experienced in these matters, on which one then concentrates one's soul life, to which one, as I have described in the books mentioned, devotes oneself in meditation. It is necessary to devote oneself to soul-content that was previously unknown in this way, because when one brings up any soul-content from the treasures of one's memories, it is bound up with all kinds of other areas of the soul life. One cannot know what one brings up from the subconscious depths of the soul and what then arises as reminiscences. You can only protect yourself from this if you have a readily comprehensible set of ideas that has been unknown to you until now. Then it is a matter of concentrating the soul on this set of ideas, while disregarding everything else, turning away from all the rest of life and the world, and concentrating it in such a way that the fully conscious will, the genuine reflection, never ceases, but rather the person surrenders to such concentration or meditation with complete inner arbitrariness, with the same inner arbitrariness with which one is also surrendered to an external, sensual perceptual content.

Because that, dear attendees, is the ideal of the anthroposophical method: not to plunge into all kinds of physical or other hidden human conditions, but to strive for the state of mind that one has when one is devoted to external sensory impressions. Anthroposophy is completely misunderstood when it is believed to strive for those areas that involve the visionary, hallucination, suggestion or the like. In all these things, the human being turns to a kind of soul activity that delves into depths that are only weakly active in relation to an external sense perception, an external sense impression. The anthroposophical method does not descend into this foggy darkness; it is the opposite of the visionary, the hallucinatory, the suggestive. This is the opposite of what the anthroposophical method strives for. It further develops the state of mind one has in relation to external sensory impressions, but it develops it in relation to a conceptual content that can be characterized in such a way as I have just described.

And then one must strive more and more to become as alive in one's consciousness when surrendering to such a content of thought as one is otherwise only when facing an external sense impression. You know, my dear audience, how much more alive a person is when they are devoted to an external sense impression than when pursuing ordinary thought life. It is indeed true that one speaks of pale thoughts in contrast to the intense, fully-lived outer sensory impressions. But the anthroposophical method must strive to achieve this liveliness and intensity in relation to the characterized thoughts, which otherwise can only be achieved in relation to outer sensory impressions. As I said, this requires a great deal of stamina and energy.

And the spiritual research we are talking about here is no easier than research in an observatory or in a physics or chemistry laboratory or in a clinic. A great deal of practice is needed in this direction. But when it does take place, then after some time the person does indeed feel an inner mobility of the imagination that he did not know before, and he finds himself in an experience that tells him through the experience: You become more and more free from physicality in your soul experience.

My dear audience, everything we have in our ordinary lives for knowledge, everything we have for the other expressions of the soul, is bound to the physical. The unbiased person knows how our memories are bound to bodily functions. He does not easily give in to the idea that one can be free of the body, that one — I want to use the quite unappealing word — that one can really live spiritually outside of one's body. But that is what one can achieve through a perpetual increase in such practice. One comes to be outside of one's body with one's soul life. But at the same time, one knows that in this kind of knowledge, which I have described as the first stage of higher knowledge in the books mentioned, the stage of imagination, one also knows that with this soul life, which lives in a living, intensified, strengthened thinking, only subjective, pictorial experiences can be had at first. This, in turn, distinguishes the anthroposophical researcher from the false mystic or even from the pathological nature. The one who, out of pathological states, devotes himself to a soul ability, never knows how to preserve what he has in his soul state in ordinary life. I would like to say: He slides with his whole consciousness into the visionary, into the hallucinatory. The person who, as an anthroposophical researcher, develops the soul abilities of which I have spoken, remains, even when developing these abilities, the level-headed person that he is in life, the person with strict self-criticism and world-criticism, who can control at every moment what is going on in the second personality to which he has risen as the imaginative-cognitive one. While for this reason the pathological person takes his hallucinations, his visions, as they are, for realities, the anthroposophical researcher knows that in the imaginations he has something pictorial, something subjective, but that the self-life is increased, that he has this self-life before him in a different way, spiritually, than is otherwise the case in the human soul.

One difference between this imaginative cognition and ordinary imagination is that it is not abstract, as are the concepts and ideas of ordinary cognition, but that it lives in fully saturated images. That is why I call it imaginative cognition. In this imaginative cognition, in which one's subjective awareness of one's own being has been heightened, in this imaginative cognition, the first result of anthroposophical research occurs at a certain stage in the development of these soul abilities. One comes to have before one, as in a large tableau, the inner soul forces that have been at work in one's own human being since birth. What else do we know about this inner human being? It is contained in the stream of memories, from which we can either arbitrarily select individual areas in images of what we have experienced, or images can arise freely. So it is not what you see now, but what you see first, is the sum of those forces that you now know have shaped your abilities, have given direction to your moral impulses. One sees how, in a unified tableau, one has become, and how one has shaped oneself from within through the years. That which otherwise has passed in time confronts one in a unified image, but one that has inner mobility.

This is the first new thing that one sees through such soul development. I have seen what one sees in this way and what one now knows directly: there is a second body, a spiritual body in man, which I have called the formative force body. Older, instinctive knowledge, which already knew something of these things, spoke of the etheric or life body. It is not something that can be drawn – at best in the way one paints a flash of lightning – one must know that one is dealing with something that is intrinsically mobile, that changes in every moment, that one can only capture just as it is in a moment. One is dealing with a – I would say – time body of the human being.

Now, my dear audience, through imaginative knowledge, one can first discover this inner, this inwardly mobile, this formative body of the human being, if I may express it in this way. But the soul developments that I have characterized so far must be continued. When one has first practiced concentrating on certain ideas, one is, in a certain way, nevertheless, one surrenders to these ideas with full inner willfulness, as only a mathematician surrenders to his combinations of thoughts. But in a certain way one is held fast by these ideas. But that should not really be the case. Therefore, from the very beginning – you will find a description in the books mentioned of the appropriate exercises that need to be done to achieve this – not only must this concentration on images be practiced from the very beginning, but a second thing must be practiced. Through the same free arbitrariness, the ideas to which one has just turned with the greatest strength, with increased soul strength, must be able to be suppressed again, completely suppressed, so that one learns to establish what one could call: empty consciousness, a consciousness that is empty, as otherwise only the consciousness is empty in sleep. But just as the soul's inner disposition sinks and is completely paralyzed in sleep, so it remains alert when meditation, as characterized by me, precedes it. One is then fully awake in the empty consciousness. And I will have to characterize to you how the possibility of living in such an empty consciousness is precisely what allows one to enter a spiritual world.

First of all, I would like to point out that anyone who has gained the ability not only to experience individual images that arise in the imagination devotedly, but also to remove them from consciousness so that they can live awake in an empty consciousness, gradually acquires the ability to suppress everything that I have now characterized as the formative forces body, as the great tableau of life that makes us inwardly comprehensible in the life of forces that has been shaping us since our birth. One arrives at this, this whole inner life, after first having fully looked at it, again from the consciousness. But when one arrives at creating an empty consciousness in relation to one's own inner life, then the second stage of human knowledge also arises with all clarity, which I have mentioned. I ask my dear audience not to be offended by expressions . They are only a way of expressing myself. I do not mean anything superstitious or traditional, but only what I myself characterize. I have mentioned the second stage in human knowledge: inspired knowledge. The first stage is imaginative knowledge, the second stage inspired knowledge.

By attaining this inspired knowledge through the empty consciousness, one is then able to expand consciousness beyond birth by suppressing the inner soul tableau of the body of formative forces. One now experiences the soul, the soul-spiritual of one's own being in the state in which it was before it united through birth - or let us say through conception - with the forces of inheritance, which are the forces of the body that man received from his ancestors, from his parents. One comes to understand the destinies that the soul and spirit, the eternal core of the human being, has gone through before uniting with a physical human body. You may ask, my dear audience, how does one know that what one sees really belongs to a soul experience before birth or before conception? Dear attendees, I would like to clarify what appears before the anthroposophical researcher by means of a comparison. When I have a memory of an experience from ten years ago, I know from the content of the memory itself that it is not something that arose in the consciousness at the time, but the content of the memory itself points me to the time ten years ago. Thus the content of what one experiences as spiritual-mental is that it indicates its own time in the relationship, that one knows these are experiences of the soul before it came into an earthly body.

However strange this may still seem to today's humanity, people will be convinced that soul abilities are developed with complete, convinced conscientiousness, not to speculate or to immerse themselves in mystic nebulae, but to come to a real insight into what the eternal-spiritual-soul core of the human being is. In this respect, Anthroposophy has a contribution to make to the further cultural development of humanity: it will show that experience itself must be further developed, that experiencing itself must be increased, so that in increased knowledge, man comes to the contemplation of that which is his eternal core of being. For this reason, Anthroposophy can proceed in the field of natural science in exactly the same way as the strictest natural scientist. It will not misuse the usual method of knowledge, it can, within the justified limits, be Haeckelian for the external physical field, profess Haeckel, because on the other hand it knows how to develop cognitive abilities that come close to an immediate insight into the eternal, spiritual-soul core of being in man. Then, my dear audience, when one has developed this spiritual-soul core, when one has attained inspired knowledge, one not only gets to know what the human soul itself is, but just as one gets to know the sensory environment through the human body, which the senses, one gets to know the sensual environment, in the same way one gets to know the spiritual environment through this knowledge of one's own soul-being when it was in a body-free state before it moved into the physical-earthly body through birth or conception.

But it is not enough to stop at this inspired knowledge. Only one aspect of the soul's abilities has been developed, namely the ability to imagine. The other aspect, the will, must also be developed in the human soul. Then, one might say, the life of feeling and emotion, which lies right in the middle between the life of imagination and the life of will, follows of its own accord. This life of feeling is the very own, most intimate element of the human soul life. It follows the inspired, imaginative knowledge and the one that I will now further characterize by showing how one can also lead the human will into the spiritual world, freeing it from the body.

From the wide range of exercises that I have outlined and explained in the books mentioned, I would like to highlight a few principles that show how this development of the will takes place.

First of all, I would like to point out a very simple exercise, but one that must be undertaken with perseverance and energy in order to achieve real positive results. It consists in starting from the realization that our ordinary thinking is already permeated by the will at all times. It is indeed the case that in abstract thinking we can distinguish the soul abilities according to imagining or thinking, according to feeling, according to willing. In reality, everything that is imagining, feeling and willing flows together in the soul. And even in the purest thinking, the will element is always present. Therefore, for the higher schooling of the spirit, the will element should first be developed in thinking. But ordinary thinking, and also the thinking that a person initially uses in his or her usual science, is in harmony with the external sequences of facts. The earlier is presented earlier, the later later. And even if we free thinking for ordinary life and ordinary science from external temporality and spatiality, we still need it in ordinary logic in such a way that we want to come to the conclusion that things are arranged in space and time. If we also detach thinking from reality, it is only a detour to get to the true reality through thinking. But what will training should be must tear this thinking away from the usual sequence of facts, and this can be done by presenting, if I may call it that, in reverse. Suppose we present a melody or a drama in reverse, a drama from the last events of the fifth act back to the first of the first act. When one presents in reverse in as small portions as possible, then one is forced to apply a stronger will to thinking than is otherwise the case. One can train one's thinking, or rather, the will that lives in thinking, in this direction particularly well by retracing one's own day experiences backwards every evening in as small portions as possible, starting from what one has experienced that evening, going to the afternoon, to the morning, and then really then into the most minute details — I would say —, into the atomization of the day's life, so that one imagines going up a staircase in such a way that, when one has reached the top, one then goes back in thought, going backwards from the last to the penultimate step and so on. You will see how this becomes more and more difficult the smaller the sections you take. But it is precisely through this that the will, which lives in thinking, is torn away from the external sequence of facts and you will gradually notice how you not only tear it away from the external sequence of facts, but how you tear it away from your own corporeality. You can support yourself with other exercises, for example, by developing a habit of observing yourself as a second personality alongside yourself in your own actions and in the expressions of your own life. If you practise such clear self-examination, if you, so to speak, observe every step, including every step of your soul life, as if from the outside, you will strengthen the will element.

When one then proceeds to go more into the depths of the soul, to say: You now have the intention of doing a very specific, concretely outlined action in some future time, you take self-observation so far that it becomes an activity, that you take your own inner life into your own hands, become master of your development, while otherwise you have left yourself to the stream of life. When one takes into one's own hands what the stream of life accomplishes for the soul's own development, one then also succeeds in tearing the will away from the ordinary physical body. Then one also comes with the will outside of one's body, and this willpower, which can be experienced outside of the body, unites with the power of imagination, which I have characterized.

But in this way one arrives at developing something in the human being that is rightly not regarded as an ability to perceive in ordinary life – and I know, esteemed attendees, how fully justified the reasons are for not regarding the soul abilities are not regarded as cognitive abilities — but when the soul nature of man is so elevated as I have characterized it, then the ability to love, devotion to something external, can indeed become an ability to cognize. And just as the body-free imagination, which is similar to memory but again quite different from it, presents us with pictures of a life that we cannot otherwise recognize, so too does this will, which has become body-free and now represents an increased ability to love, represent an increased living out into reality and, since it is body-free, into spiritual reality. We acquire the faculty which I have mentioned in the books referred to as intuitive knowledge; we acquire the faculty not only of allowing the revelations of a spiritual world to flow in, as in inspired knowledge, but we acquire the faculty of living over into the outer spiritual world with our own life. When I speak of intuitive knowledge, I naturally mean an intensification of that which is also called intuition in ordinary life, a knowledge that is not only based on abstract-logical thinking. What I mean, however, is an exact increase of what is otherwise called intuition, and represents a real cognitive survival of the human being into objective spirituality. And when a person has attained this intuition, then he also gets to know the other side of his being. Through what has been described so far, he reaches the moment of his birth, to that spiritual-soul that preceded the birth or conception. Now, by developing the will to intuitive knowledge, so that he can step out of himself with the will, now he also reaches the knowledge of that which steps out of the human body in reality when the human being passes through the gate of death. Only at that moment does man recognize the soul-spiritual that passes through the gate of death as something eternal, when, through a development of will, he has grasped this soul-spiritual in such a way that it can truly step out of itself, out of the ordinary human being, out of the bodily being, in intuitive knowledge. And now the human being beholds the nature of immortality on both sides, on the side of the unborn and on the side of what is usually called immortality. In this way, as I said before, the human being also gets to know the spiritual environment in which he lives before birth or conception and after death.

But once these two worlds have been grasped, once the sense world is really recognized in accordance with natural law, once the spiritual world is recognized through the cognitive faculties I have described, then there is still something within the human being that cannot be explained from either of these worlds. After becoming acquainted with the two worlds — I call them 'two worlds', although they only constitute a unified whole — we now stand before the mystery of the human soul. But we also acquire the ability to see through that in man which, through his development, unites both worlds in himself. And that is that in man which goes through repeated earth-lives, which thus goes through repeated earth-lives in such a way that it lives through the existence here in the physical body between birth and death, or let us say between conception and death, but then another existence between death and a new birth. And since one learns to recognize what the soul acquires through one life and the other, when one looks into what the results of development from both give, one arrives at the view of what underlies repeated earthly lives. And these repeated earthly lives themselves also become a view.

You see, my dear audience, that in speaking here in all seriousness about Anthroposophy, I cannot present these things of repeated earthly lives to you as fantastic creations. I must present to you everything that the human soul must do in order to cognitively arrive at these things. Today, I must of course briefly present this in an introductory lecture, and it could very easily be thought that only someone who has gone through everything I have described in principle in more detail in the books mentioned can see into these areas. Now these books are precisely there so that everyone can do the suggested exercises up to a certain level, and so that what the anthroposophical researcher says can be verified by actual observation. But the anthroposophical researcher uses ordinary common sense, ordinary thinking. And anyone who, uninfluenced by certain prejudices that are unfortunately so widespread today, simply asks themselves: “Is what is being presented reasonable or unreasonable?” does not need to become a researcher themselves, but can use their common sense to form an opinion about the value or lack of value of the anthroposophical results. Just as one does not need to be a painter to get a proper impression of a picture, one does not need to be an anthroposophical researcher to judge whether something that comes to light in anthroposophy is reasonable or unreasonable. Intuitive knowledge completes the stages of higher knowledge in a certain way.

Now, my dear audience, even in ordinary life, intuition points to a certain area. In my book, which was published a long time ago, I wrote it at the beginning of the nineties of the last century, in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, I pointed out how man's truly free actions are based on impulses of sensuality-free thinking, on moral ideals, which are created by the human being from a spiritual world quite free of the body, so that in this “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the nineties of the last century I spoke of the deepest impulses of the moral life of the human being as moral intuitions. And I tried to grasp the concept of freedom in a way that would guide today's natural science by showing that the question is completely wrong as to whether man is free or unfree, that the question must be formulated in such a way that one realizes that man is unfree for a large number of his actions, that they arise from his instincts, his drives, which are tied to the body. But the human being develops to the point of experiencing intuitive moral impulses, which are purely spiritual in nature and yet are impulsive for moral action. At this stage of development, in the way he grasps moral intuition, he is free. What I am characterizing today as the intuition of knowledge is only an expansion and deepening of what can actually be experienced by everyone who seeks out this moral world in its impulses through real self-knowledge.

What gives a person their true value and dignity here in this world, their moral nature, is what, when properly grasped, points to the end of all knowledge. And anthroposophy must then lead to the insertion of imagination and inspiration between intuition, which it expands into the cosmic and the human, and between this and ordinary knowledge, as I have characterized it today.

So, my dear audience, this is how one attains knowledge of one's own eternity in the human being. But if one develops the abilities of which I have spoken, then the world around us will also approach the human being in a different way. Man, so to speak, as a whole human being, becomes a sense organ for the outer world. And whereas before we only encountered the world, I would say, as a sensory tapestry, which the intellect then discerns its laws, the spiritual world enters human consciousness, imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness, in a new, metamorphosed form, but in such a way that the earlier, sensory one is fully preserved. And it enters in such a way that the contemplation of nature, which is otherwise present in the person who becomes an anthroposophist, is preserved. While the hallucinator, the visionary, turns away from nature and usually has no love for nature either, everything that is given by external natural science and ordinary love of nature remains fully intact for the one who becomes an anthroposophical researcher. It is only that the material world, which is the object of outer natural science, is permeated with the spiritual world, which is always around us, just as the physical is. Now the outer, physical world, if I may express myself comparatively, appears in a certain respect in sharp contours, in finished forms.

The spiritual view, which is gained in the way described, develops everything according to certain processes, according to an event, according to a becoming. This gives a completely new slant to natural and cosmic events. And I do not want to shrink from describing specific details as an example, despite the fact that such things are still not very well received today. We see the sun, for example, as a limited structure in the sky. We explore it with our science, with astronomy, astrophysics and so on. But what we encounter as the sun appears in a new form in the described supersensible knowledge. It now emerges not only tied to the place where it otherwise appears, but emerges as something solar, permeating and flowing through and permeating the whole cosmos. One learns to recognize the solar as permeating all spaces. And by relating it to the human, one learns to recognize the solar in its deeper meaning. I would like to express myself in the following way to make myself clear.

By having the outer world around us, which provides us with our experiences, we compare these experiences with what we form inside in our soul out of them in terms of ideas and feelings. And afterwards we still have the experiences in our memory, we can relive them. We can relive something that has long since passed and connect with the long-gone past. So there is a relationship between this — I would say — abstract soul-life and the outer concrete sense world. But there is also a relationship between the deeper part of one's own human existence and what is recognized through supersensible perception. We carry within us the effect of what is solar that the spiritual vision finds in us. This solar element enters into our human being, just as an external sensory experience enters into our memories, only it forms something deeper in the human being. This deeper aspect must first be recognized only through such a view as I have described. Then one learns to recognize that everything that is in us by virtue of growth, that is by virtue of youthfulness, that is even the force that converts our nutrients in our own human process, that this is the sunlike in us. We get to know the rising, sprouting, sprouting forces of the universe and the sprouting, sprouting forces, the rejuvenating forces in ourselves, in their interrelationships. We thus get to know a more intimate connection between the human inner being and the cosmos. Just as we learn to recognize the solar in this way, we learn to recognize the lunar.

In our sensory perception, we experience the moon as a closed, limited, contoured entity. For the spiritual perception that I have described, this moon-like quality becomes the dying forces in the cosmos that permeate all spaces and fill all of time. Everything that breaks down, everything that appears in the cosmos in a paralyzing way, everything that leads to death is moon power. And one would like to say: the solar and the lunar, as I am now describing them, are merely concentrated or consolidated in the bodies that we have given ourselves through external sensory perception. We get to know the world as processes, as becoming, and these processes, this becoming, continue within our own human inner being. We also get to know the outer natural kingdoms, how they are permeated by such cosmic forces. Just as we get to know the solar and lunar, we get to know other planetary or other forces of the universe without superstitious mysticism, through very exact observation that has been developed exactly. One gets to know the interplay of a cosmos that cannot be grasped merely mathematically or astrophysically, but spiritually and soulfully. One gets to know this interplay in human nature, and one recognizes the interplay of such cosmic forces in plant and animal nature. One learns to recognize the solar element that urges the plant towards flowering, and the lunar element that is revealed in the dying away of the plant world. One learns to recognize the forces right down to the mineral kingdom.

When one advances to this knowledge, the side of anthroposophical research also presents itself through which this anthroposophy has a fertilizing effect on all other areas of life. And that is the hope that the anthroposophical researcher devotes himself to, and which - at least in part - is already realized in its beginnings, that anthroposophy can become fruitful for the other sciences, for the practical areas of life.

We already have a medical-therapeutic institute in Dornach and Stuttgart that is based on anthroposophy. This medical-therapeutic institute is based on research that can be carried out on an anthroposophical basis into the relationship between humans and the surrounding universe. By appropriating the cosmic effects in this way — as I have only been able to hint at with the recognition of the solar and lunar — one does not merely gain the knowledge of human nature that ordinary physiology or biology gives us. You also get to know the whole human being, but in such a way that the sharply contoured merges — it remains, but at the same time merges, it shows itself from a different side as a process. While in ordinary biology, as one is accustomed to, one speaks of the lungs, heart, brain and so on, from the point of view of anthroposophy one must speak of the brain process, which is vividly there, not merely , or not merely shown in its parts by external physical experiments, but be observed; of the heart process, of the lung process, of all that makes up the human being, of processes, of a becoming. All this is, after all, only the inner continuation of the ascending solar becoming and the descending lunar becoming.

And if we pursue these things further, we not only get to know the healthy human being with his organs, but we also get to know the pathological [degenerative and] anabolic processes, the growths, the paralyses, the killing off of organs. One learns to recognize how processes can be held back in individual organs. One learns to recognize how processes can proliferate when one understands the connection between such internal anabolic and catabolic processes. With the anabolic and catabolic in the universe, with the solar and lunar, one can see how these forces are then present in the plant, mineral and animal kingdoms. And then the remedies for certain illnesses present themselves, in that we know: a catabolic process is taking place in this organ, so you have to counteract it with the catabolic process that is present outside in this plant or in that mineral. We learn to recognize the inner relationship between the human organism and the kingdoms of nature. One learns to recognize how medicine can advance from mere trial and error to a rational understanding of both the healthy and the diseased human condition, how pathology can become rational, how therapy can become rational, that the process of recovery and disease can be understood. This is what emerges as a development on an anthroposophical basis that is fruitful for medicine.

I am well aware, dear ladies and gentlemen, that to raise such matters is to stir up a hornet's nest. But the world has had to face many things that were unaccustomed in older times, and what was at first met with hostility has sometimes later become accepted practice. The anthroposophical researcher must console himself with such things. I will simply cite this example of the fertilization of medicine for the fertilization of the individual sciences. We also have a physiological, a physical, and a biological research institute in Stuttgart and are trying to introduce the anthroposophical method into the individual sciences in an anthroposophical way.

But anthroposophy can also have a fertilizing effect on other areas of life. We were – for anthroposophy has existed as a spiritual movement for quite some time now – we were faced with the task of building a home for the anthroposophical movement. Friends of the anthroposophical movement came together to create a home for this movement. This building, known as the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, was erected in Dornach near Basel. What would have happened, dear ladies and gentlemen, if some other spiritual or cultural movement had had to erect such a building? They would have turned to an architect who would have given it a framework in the Renaissance, Rococo or antique style, and then they would have done in it what stands as a present.

Anthroposophy could not proceed in this way. It does not want to be something that expresses itself one-sidedly through ideas, that is spread only in theory, as it were, but something that takes hold of the whole human being directly, and therefore reaches into all areas of life. If I may use a trivial comparison, it would be this: When you look at a nut, you say to yourself: the nut is formed by certain forces that work within it, but the shell is formed in the direction of the same forces. Basically, you cannot separate the lawfulness of the nutshell from the lawfulness of the nut kernel itself. Both are one! This is how anthroposophy wants to be. Therefore, it must build its shell, its framework, its house out of the same impulse with a new architectural style, with the architectural style that corresponds to its innermost impulses, just as the nut shell is formed out of the same natural forces and their directions, like the nut kernel itself.

And when, from the pulpit in Dornach, the language of ideas is used to speak of what can be seen in the spirit about man and the universe, then this expression of ideas through the language of thoughts should contain exactly the same life that the columns, the paintings and the sculptures of this Dornach Goetheanum contain. Art forms, without being allegory, without being straw-like allegory or abstract symbolism — neither that nor the other is found — but everything has flowed into real art forms. Everything should speak out of the same life, out of which the content of spiritual vision can be spoken in thought. On anthroposophical ground, one believes that one is approaching an artistic view that is truly in line with Goethe's thinking. Perhaps one can see most deeply into what Goethe strove for in the artistic field if one recalls such sayings of Goethe as these: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never become apparent without it. And Goethe also says: When nature begins to reveal its secret to someone, that person feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.

Yes, my dear audience, one can express one's ideas about the secrets of nature in art forms without becoming inartistic, without becoming allegorical or symbolic, and by proceeding in this way, an architectural style that is still unfamiliar today is created. Anthroposophy could not turn to something else, which would have been a foreign framework. Anthroposophy does not want to be theory, anthroposophy wants to be life. Therefore, it also had to flow into the forms of the architectural style itself, which constitutes the building, which has shaped the building, in which anthroposophy is to live first.

With that, I have indicated a second area that can be fertilized by anthroposophy: the field of art. Anthroposophy also wants to have a fertilizing effect in other fields of art. A eurythmy performance is to be given here in a few days. On this occasion, it will be possible to hint at how Anthroposophy can be fruitful in the sense of such an art of movement.

In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School, which I run. This Waldorf School seeks to make fruitful use of what comes from anthroposophical sources in the field of pedagogy and didactics. How does real human knowledge arise from these sources? We come to know the human being in terms of his or her full nature, body, soul and spirit, not just through some abstractions, but through concrete observation. We learn to follow the child as it gradually shapes the outer physical body out of the spiritual and soul. We learn to revere the divine spiritual being in the child, and we learn a complete unity, a mutual formation of the physical and the spiritual. Anthroposophy does not want to found schools in the usual sense in the pedagogical and didactic fields. We go so far as to leave what religious worldviews are, for example, to the representatives of the individual religious fields for the time being. Catholic priests teach Catholic children in the Waldorf School, Protestant priests teach Protestant children. However, since a large number of dissident children were enrolled at the Waldorf School after it opened, it was necessary for us to set up a free religious education for them; however, this is run in the same way as the others, as a worldview lesson. The school itself does not want to graft any anthroposophical theories into the children, but it wants to allow what can flow from anthroposophical knowledge to flow into the pedagogical-didactic skill, into the practice of education. Anthroposophy does not want to oppose the achievements that have been made through the great pedagogy of the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy is aware of the significant maxims that exist in this regard, but it also knows that the means must first be acquired in order to fulfill the justified pedagogical demand. These means can only lie in a penetrating knowledge of the human being, and Anthroposophy would like to provide these means through the knowledge of the human being that can be attained through spiritualized vision, as I have described it today. In this way, anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the field of education.

My dear attendees, just how little knowledge of human nature there actually is in the present day, knowledge of human nature suitable for education, was demonstrated in a lecture given at the Anthroposophical Congress held in Stuttgart last summer. The individual topics discussed at this anthroposophical congress would have flooded out into the world and been widely discussed if they had not originated on anthroposophical soil, which is still so unpopular today. From the rich field of what was discussed, I want to emphasize the lecture by Dr. von Heydebrand, a teacher at the Waldorf School. In an extremely vivid way, it shows how experimental pedagogy, which is repeatedly being worked towards today, must be complemented by a direct insight into the soul and spirit of the child, as it can flow from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not oppose the legitimacy of experimental pedagogy and psychology, but this legitimacy attains its practical value precisely by being permeated by the spirit. Anthroposophy is never opposed to the legitimate findings of natural science. It seeks to bring out what can be found in these natural-scientific findings, everywhere, wherever it is possible to do so, and to do so in complete harmony with the legitimate demands of modern times with regard to natural science.

Dear attendees,

In today's world, it is particularly necessary to arrive at a deeper understanding in a field that is infinitely close to people, and whose proximity must be particularly evident to them in the present, which has emerged from the great, terrible global catastrophe. It was believed that the social life of man could also be mastered by the laws of nature, which are one-sidedly scientific. The social laws were imitated, and gradually, quite automatically, from the unconscious, the social forces were imitated from the natural laws, from what was naturally effective. Today, anyone who looks at life impartially can see the results. Many other things could be pointed out, besides Marxism, that can be gained from purely natural forces in terms of social insights; one need only point to the way in which this view is already devastating and destructive in Eastern Europe, because it is being put into practice. What began in the East hangs threateningly over Europe. And Europe – indeed, modern civilization – will only escape this impending doom if we once again immerse ourselves in the spiritual and psychological. If we can develop a conception of the whole, of the complete human being in body, soul and spirit, then we will also gain insights and perspectives for our social life, insights into how the moral impulses from the free, from the complete human being, can flow into social life. The one-sided economic view, although it can remain an economic view, will lead to an insight into a social structure that takes into account the whole, the fully human being. There was also a beginning to this in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the Stuttgart congress mentioned above, which has already been printed. In this lecture, Emil Leinhas showed in an excellent way how present-day national economy has reached a kind of bankruptcy, and how no social impulses can be found from it that are fruitful for life. Anthroposophy has set itself the task of transferring what is cognitively experienced in man into life, into the social and moral life.

And to mention one last thing – which is only mentioned as a last thing, but is by no means of least importance – I would like to draw attention to the fact that, while anthroposophy can invigorate the impulses of the social, it can also deepen religious experience, even when it is not working externally in human society, but rather in the deepest inner being of the human being. Anthroposophy – oh, it is misunderstood when characterized in this way – Anthroposophy does not want to be a sect of any kind, it certainly does not want to found a new religion, it wants to deepen what people can experience in their religious minds by illuminating it with the clarity of an understanding of spiritual life. Those who believe that religion or even Christianity is endangered by anthroposophy are labouring under a serious misunderstanding; firstly, the misunderstanding that what they present as an ideal in a blind faith can hold its own in the face of the growing knowledge of nature; and then they succumb to the blind judgment that clarity, clear insight into the spiritual world, could somehow be disturbing to the most profound piety. And this most profound piety can be strengthened if it can be attained on the basis of a true knowledge of the spirit. Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion or a new sect, but wants to serve life as a spiritual science, and also wants to serve the innermost, most intimate, religious life of human beings.

And so, in conclusion, I would like to summarize what the essence of anthroposophy is. From my discussions this evening, it should have become clear how anthroposophy is by no means in opposition to modern, progressive worldviews, but how it is entirely in line with them. But just as the human being presents us with the physical, the bodily, and we experience from this physical, this bodily, its mobility, its physiognomic, and other revelations of the spiritual-soul, so too, when we survey the natural realm in strict natural science, we should also recognize that within the realm of nature with which the human being is connected to his eternal core, where he originates with that which is immortal in him, is one with the divine-spiritual essence of the world. And just as we can only fully recognize a person when we see their soul and spirit in their physical body, so we will only fully recognize the world, the cosmos, when we want to juxtapose the external knowledge of natural science with the spiritual knowledge of anthroposophy. But anthroposophy strives to do just that. It seeks to be in touch with nature and the world by taking the human being as its model, in whose corporeality the soul and spiritual reveal themselves.

So, dear attendees, while Anthroposophy would like to look at the knowledge of external nature with full recognition, it would also like to add something that can be there, the inspiration, the spiritualization of this external natural science.

Dear attendees! The remarks that I will be presenting here today require a certain premise if they are to appear justified in the present – I would like to say – in our scientific age. This premise is the examination of what must currently be recognized as scientifically possible. I took the liberty of discussing in my last lecture, which I had the honor of giving here a few months ago, what needs to be said in this regard, what Anthroposophy asserts about its relationship to the scientific world view of the present day, how it is not in opposition to it at all, but fully recognizes its significance, and how it, in turn, goes further than this science. And since I may well assume that a large part of today's honored audience was also present at the time, it seems to me neither possible nor necessary to repeat what was said then. I will simply take it for granted and build on it what Anthroposophy now has to say through its research, through its knowledge of the relationship between man and the spiritual world.

When we speak as human beings of the difficulties we face when enigmatic questions arise about the spiritual world, when we speak of such difficulties, these difficulties cannot relate to the existence of a spiritual world as such, to which the human being feels connected in his earthly existence. For man needs only to reflect on himself, and he lives in a spiritual world. Through his spirit, he is cognitively related to the things around him, to the actions he performs himself. And even the most ardent materialist does not deny this relationship of man to the spiritual world, insofar as man is always aware of his spirit in the waking state. The difficulty only begins when man looks at the nature of this spirit, in that he can actually see his human dignity, his true human value, only through it. Man must indeed say to himself: I have the spirit. As I said, even the worst materialist does not deny that. At most, he believes that what man experiences as spirit within himself is a product, a creature of material existence. And precisely because man feels himself to be a spirit, because he senses his value and dignity in this spiritual realm, he must ask: What is this essence of the spirit, how is it grounded perhaps in an all-encompassing spiritual world that does not belong to the transitory, but which is permanent in the face of the transitory? With this, I would like to point out to you, dear listeners, the inner soul difficulties that man feels himself confronted with every day and every hour when he looks at the essence of his own spirituality. These difficulties, people do not always bring them to their full awareness in the full sense of the word. But they live in the depths of the soul, whether one explores them or not, they live in these depths of the soul, flow up into the conscious soul existence, make up the happiness and suffering of the innermost human being, make up the innermost destiny of the human being, form the soul mood and soul condition. In this way, the human being finds his way into the world and becomes useful to his fellow human beings and the world to the extent that he can educate himself, even if unconsciously and naively, about the nature of the spirit. And from many subsoils, the riddle questions in this regard arise, and I could cite many things that live in the soul consciously or more or less unconsciously.

I would like to highlight two examples from all that is present in the soul, two examples that perhaps do not even belong to the most common ones, but which can show precisely what corners of his soul life a person encounters when he wants to educate himself about the spirit. Every day, when we pass from the waking state to the sleeping state, we see how our inner spiritual activity, our inner spiritual activity, how that paralyzes itself, dawns down into an indefinite darkness, how the time of sleep occurs, in relation to which we cannot say what it actually is with our inner spiritual-soul activity and activity. Then we feel – one may well say – the powerlessness of that which is our spirituality. We live in this spirituality from waking up to falling asleep; we actually feel truly human when we live in this spirituality, but we see it fade away, dim, and are powerless in the face of this everyday disappears from us, from that which is truly human in us, and without us always feeling it – as I said – from the unconscious experience of this powerlessness comes that which gives us insecurity about the nature and destiny of our mind. And that is one side.

The other is, I would say, the polar opposite. We experience it again more or less unconsciously — unconsciously in most people — when we pass from the sleeping state to the waking state, at most with the transition through more or less chaotic dreams, but we know from healthy reason that they have only an illusory value compared to what we call in ordinary life the reality of existence. With this transition through the dream life, we take possession of our physical body with our spiritual self. When we wake up, we grasp our senses, how the outside world is reflected in our senses in its colors, sounds, and so on, and we experience this inwardly. We inwardly experience how we grasp our willpower and thereby become active human beings. However, as I already hinted at in the last lecture from a different point of view, what darkness are we actually looking down into when we have only a simple willpower, when we decide to raise our arm and move our hand? We have this thought, and then we see how this thought is carried out in the movement of the hand, in the raised arm. But how the thought flows down into the organism, what complicated processes are involved before the hand is moved, all this disappears from our consciousness. When we wake up, we take hold of our body with our spirit, but what this spirit experiences down there is shrouded in complete darkness even during the waking state, so that in this waking state, too, we have only an indeterminate relationship to our spirituality and its relation to the outer world – to the outer world that we ourselves are through our body – which presents us with a mystery. On the one hand, we feel the powerlessness of the spirit; on the other hand, we feel it sinking into our own inner darkness when we wake up. From such experiences, man forms the riddle questions about the nature of spirituality, and then two opponents of the soul life stand before this spiritual world, to which man strives with his knowledge, with his will, two enemies, one of whom clouds this spiritual world for him, the other threatens to take it from him. One enemy strikes precisely those who, even in our present existence, still live more or less naively in the face of our scientific worldviews, accepting many traditional ideas into their worldview without examination, often as the worst illusions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, because they feel that they cannot truly live in mental health without such ideas about the spiritual. Then they give themselves over to that which comes from the one enemy of the soul life: superstition. All kinds of soul-forms stream out of the human life of will and place themselves before the human spirit, wanting to tell it what underlies the external world as spiritual reality. Those who have not become acquainted with the scientific conscientiousness and methodology of the present time very easily succumb to such ideas, but they also experience a sad consequence of superstition in the human soul. If we understand the world in such a way that we accept what flows into our consciousness through our will as decisive for the supersensible, then we go to recognize the outer world. We find obstacles at every turn when trying to orient ourselves in the external world. We believe that this or that must apply in the sense world because we accept it through our superstition. External nature does not confirm what we assume in our superstitious experience at every turn. This leads us to a certain reorientation towards this external world. The world appears to us differently than we imagine it. We become unsure of ourselves, and because we become unsure of ourselves, we lose the ability to develop strong impulses for our actions. We become unfit for our own actions, we become unfit for interaction with other people.

That, dear attendees, is the one enemy that arises in the human soul when faced with the riddles of the spiritual world. The other enemy appears primarily to those souls who enter into the modern way of scientific life. They learn to recognize how to develop their thinking in a conscientious, methodical, one might say exact, way in order to follow sense phenomena to their external laws and to permeate them with ideas through which they become understandable. But it is very often the case, especially when one is conscientiously immersed in the external world in this way, that one notices how our thinking becomes, I might say, thin through this scientific path, how it only gradually becomes appropriate to what the sensory world is, and how, in its thinness, it cannot find its way up from the sensory to the supersensible realm, precisely because of its conscientiousness. And then precisely those who enter deeply into the scientific sphere are assailed by doubt, the other enemy of the human soul life. Doubt is certainly something that is connected with the development and education of the intellect. But when doubt presents itself to the human intellect, then it sinks down into the soul, it sinks down into the mind. Those who, on the basis of the deeper insights that anthroposophy can provide, now recognize the connection between the life of the soul and the physical experience of the human being, know how what takes place in the soul pours into the body and how that which — one must put it this way — rushes from doubt into the , how it first causes a certain wasting disease of the soul life in the person, how this wasting disease can weaken us — I would say — to the marrow, to the limbs, to the muscles, that we can become unfit for our soul, for our spiritual and for our physical activity precisely because of doubt. Precisely because this is experienced by modern man from one side or the other, perhaps the worst doubters feel particularly compelled to seek information about the spiritual, about the supersensible, to which they do not want to turn out of traditional belief, like the first type of person, who surrender to superstition. Since they want to turn to the supersensible realm through knowledge, scientific minds are led to study the abnormal spiritual life, the spiritual life of attuned people, mediums, people who have all kinds of hallucinations. It is seen that something else is going on in the abnormal life than in the normal human life of knowledge and will, and it is believed that something can be drawn from this abnormal life, which comes from mediumship or from visions, about human abilities and their connection with another world into the realm of ordinary consciousness.

Those who are familiar with anthroposophy know that all these outlets are from the pathological realm, from a diseased soul life. The soul life of a medium is diseased because their physical life must be attuned down at the moment when they are acting as a medium. This detuning makes it impossible for the person acting as a medium to grasp what his soul is directly experiencing. It is impossible to verify — even for an external observer, who may have a sound mind when observing the medium — it is impossible to realize what kind of relationship the person, the medium, has to another world if one is not immersed in this experience. The medium is, after all, singled out and, with his healthy human understanding, distracted from what he is experiencing in his mediumistic states. Whenever a person has hallucinations, we can always show how these have their roots in a diseased area of the human body and how what arises in the soul as other experiences can only be there because of this diseased part of the human organization. Thus we have no possibility of finding the transition we are seeking from the healthy human soul life to a knowledge of the supersensible, of the spiritual realm. For wherever we turn to the sick soul life, we lack control at every step. And so most of our contemporaries feel compelled to cling to time-honored, traditional ideas when it comes to the supersensible, to the spiritual, to that which has developed from earlier epochs of humanity into our time as the content of creeds and worldviews.

One then tends towards these world-view contents, which go right into our philosophies – people do not even realize how this is the case even in the philosophies that are considered to be unprejudiced by some great thinkers, but they are not – one holds, as they say, with the belief in that which they cannot achieve with knowledge, with insight. And today we have already come so far as to construct all kinds of artificial concepts to justify faith as something that must stand independently in the face of knowledge, in the face of knowledge, which is only supposed to be directed towards our sensual or the like, while faith alone may be directed towards the supersensible. But this supersensible realm is taken from what has been handed down traditionally and has an effect on people with the strength with which it often does so today, through its venerable age. But if we look impartially at what people believe and what they hold in terms of worldviews that have been handed down historically, we can trace this in real history — not just in the history that is recognized today, but in a history that is steeped in psychology and the study of the soul. There one sees that what one wants to believe today, what one accepts as an idea in its effect on the world of feeling, that in older epochs of humanity this was once entirely derived from insights that the individual human being gained out of his need for knowledge, on paths that were to lead him into the supersensible. Everything that is justified as religious belief today can in fact be traced back to ancient knowledge.

At some point, an individual or that person's community found their way, through special inner spiritual paths, into the supersensible world, received ideas from this supersensible world, grasped them with their ordinary consciousness and passed them on to their fellow human beings. Their fellow human beings recognized that through such paths of knowledge one could discover something about the supersensible world. Such earlier paths of knowledge may be primitive compared to what is needed today for us humans in such paths of knowledge. But it is not acceptable for the truly unbiased person to overlook the fact that one cannot help but notice how the beliefs of today go back to such old paths of knowledge, whose source of knowledge has only been forgotten. And if you explore them, sometimes through external history, through some kind of document, then you feel disturbed because you no longer devote yourself to such sources of knowledge; you say: That is good for an earlier civilization and culture. Yes, but – my dear audience – today we believe what comes from these sources of knowledge, we have only somehow changed it in terms, but its true content goes back to such sources.

My dear attendees, anthroposophy, as I understand it, offers people a path of knowledge into the supersensible world, and we will have more to say about this anthroposophical path of knowledge, as it is appropriate for today's people. But we will be able to communicate more easily today if we look at older paths of knowledge, which I mentioned in my last lecture, and the results of which are available to the naive and often also to the learned person today when it comes to the supersensible.

I would like to characterize two of the old paths of knowledge here before you. There is also the possibility of characterizing countless other such paths of knowledge, but I want to pick out two because they are particularly characteristic, and because to a large extent people have forgotten how much of what people today take in as beliefs comes precisely from these sources.

I would like to mention first – as I said, just so that we are all on the same page, not because I would like to recommend such a path of knowledge to anyone, but because it is by understanding the old that we can ascend to the knowledge of the new – I would like to mention first the path that is well known, the path that was taken in ancient India to gain knowledge of a different world from the one that usually surrounds people.

I would first like to characterize what is called the ancient yoga system of knowledge, which was once sacred in the Orient but has now degenerated. The yoga system of knowledge leads, I would say, to its kind of erudition, to its kind of knowledge of another world. What were the essential elements of this yoga system? I would like to mention the characteristic that is questionable today when it is practiced – at the time it was not questionable, but the way it is practiced today is questionable – because it is no longer appropriate for today's human nature, because human nature has changed since the times when the yoga practice was performed. What could be done in ancient times without harming human nature, and was done in ancient times, say, by the Indians, cannot be done today, especially by Westerners, without harming their body and mind. But let us agree on this. The essential and purely essential thing, among other things, in the practice of yoga is a modified breathing in addition to the ordinary everyday breathing of a person.

How does this everyday breathing process take place? More or less unconsciously. Only when we are somehow affected by illness do we become aware of our breathing. Otherwise, inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling take place to a great extent unconsciously. And it is precisely on this unconsciousness of inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling that the unbiased matter-of-factness of our life is based. Those who believed in ancient Orient that they could become yoga scholars trained for certain periods of time to regulate their breathing differently than nature itself regulates human breathing. They created a different rhythm for inhaling, holding and exhaling. What did they achieve by doing this? He achieved the ability to breathe more or less consciously, while otherwise breathing unconsciously, to experience breathing as a fully conscious process. This happens to me when I breathe in, this happens to me throughout my entire organism during the flow of inhalation, this happens to me during the retention of breath, this during exhalation. In particular, the yogi focused his attention on what now resulted from this altered breathing process, raised into consciousness, for his thinking. For his thinking, what resulted then? Well, we can characterize it physiologically in the modern sense, what happened there. That which unconsciously takes place in the breathing process, what is it in relation to the human head organization, to the thought organization? We breathe in, the respiratory impulse goes into our organism, works up through the spinal cord channel to our brain, to the tool of our thinking, which performs a certain activity out of the nerve-sense life, so that something flows through this activity from the respiratory current. In reality, we are not only dealing with the activity of our nervous sensory life in our thought life, but this nervous sensory life is permeated and permeated by the rhythmic life of the respiratory current. But we know nothing of this. The yogi, who aspired to higher knowledge, brought himself to consciousness of this permeation of the physical part of his thought activity with the respiratory current. What did he attain there? We can only grasp what he attained there by comparing what the yogi experienced in his consciousness with regard to thinking, when we compare that with what his whole environment, the rest of humanity, experienced.

Yes, my dear audience, in the course of historical development, humanity has changed more than we realize today in terms of the life of the soul. What today, I might say, makes up our whole consciousness was quite different in ancient times. Today we see the external world by absorbing the colors through the sense of our eyes in a, I might say, pure way; we hear the external world through the sense of the ear, absorbing the sounds in a certain purity, and it is the same with the other sensations. It was not like that in ancient times. We misunderstand the senses of early humanity if we say that they fantasized their way into the world, as animism would have it. It was not like that. Early humans naturally experienced what was in the outer world as a living spiritual soul striving up within them. And by looking at lightning and thunder, at the hurrying clouds, at the streaming wind, springs, plants and animals, they saw everything that surrounded people in the outer world. They saw not only a colorful, warm, cold or otherwise sensually shaped world, as we do today. No, they saw a world in which every spring was permeated by the spiritual soul, in every breath of wind that played around them, in the stars, in the sun and moon they felt how the spiritual soul expressed itself. It was just as natural for people to see this spiritual soul as it is natural for us to see colors and hear sounds. That was the usual experience of the people around the yogi. The yogi, however, wanted to experience a different world than the one they usually experienced. That is why he undertook the exercises I have just described. And by driving the conscious flow of breath through his thinking through these exercises, I would say, he made something completely different out of his thinking.

Indeed, the person who immersed himself in this way, seeing a spiritual soul in every spring, in every breath of wind, in everything that is nature, did not have the strong ego, the strong self-confidence that the present man has. strong sense of self that the present-day man has. He could not feel the strong spiritual element in his own self. In a sense, his being merged with the outer world, which was a spiritual element for him, just as his inner being was a spiritual element for him. When the yogi, breathing in this way, transformed his thinking, then his experience was that he attained an insight similar to our own, but by this path of knowledge; he made his thinking strong, he led it into the abstract. In this way he perceived the spirituality of his own self. And he felt this self rooted in another world, in a world that is eternal.

And all the wonderful things that were said in older times about the spiritual world were said from the experience that man, in the way described, came to the self, to the I, that he felt his I as his eternal spirituality connected to the universal spirituality of the world. And if you read the most beautiful chapters in the wonderful poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, you will read how it is described in such a wonderful way how man comes to his self and to the experience of the spiritual world, and you will feel transported to the special spiritual path of those ancient times. Much of what has been revealed to man in this way about the human self, about human spirituality and its relationship to world spirituality, lives in many of today's traditional creeds, in today's traditional world views, and even in the philosophies that one believes one can approach without prejudice. People do not realize how much of what they have adopted in their belief in authority comes from the experiences of the ancient yogi.

Those who today want to educate themselves about the meaning of today's yoga systems usually come to something wrong and believe that by applying such a method they can still achieve something special today. This is not the case. People will harm themselves, both mentally and physically, if they want to resurrect on their path of knowledge that which was appropriate for an ancient humanity. But even with regard to that which is necessary for today's human being to attain higher knowledge — and which we want to discuss later, also in order to communicate about it — such a characteristic of old, no longer useful paths of knowledge cannot serve us. I would like to say that, on the other hand, the opposite reveals itself to us as an example when we look at an older path of knowledge, the one that was walked in asceticism, a path of knowledge that we can no longer walk today.

We cannot have the yoga path. We cannot follow the yoga path because the person who lives in his breathing in the way described, and then lives in the thinking that is permeated by breathing, becomes so highly sensitive that he can no longer endure the robust external world to any great extent. Because of this sensitivity, he must withdraw from the outer world, he must surrender to a certain solitude, even hermitage. But it was precisely in the views of the ancients that they sought wisdom about higher worlds precisely from those who did not experience as they did, but who isolated themselves, so to speak, in the corner, in order to strive in this solitude into the higher world, in order to explore that which is supersensible in human nature, in order to be able to proclaim it to others. Today, the healthy person cannot relate to human natures that seek solitude and hermitage in this way. Modern life makes such tough demands that we have to find our way into it in its liveliness, and the modern person can only have trust in the one who does not need to withdraw from life, but who places himself in life as much as anyone else. Therefore, we cannot use the yoga path. It would not inspire trust in those who understand themselves within modern cultural development.

The same applies to the old ascetic path. What does the ascetic do in the old sense of the word? He downgrades his bodily functions, he paralyzes them to a certain extent. His physical organism should be less active in those periods when he should be open to higher knowledge than he would be if he were to devote himself externally to a robust life. Through this attunement of bodily functions, the person striving for a higher life experiences and realizes that, yes, for the life we lead outwardly, this body we carry is suitable and appropriate, and we may not really wish for a different body, and so there is no need for the bodily functions to be slowed down. But if we want to look into the spiritual world, then this body, which is constituted for the sensual world, is an obstacle. If we degrade it, make it less active than it is in ordinary life, then we remove the obstacle and the supersensible world flows into our consciousness. This is simply what the ancients experienced: the body is an obstacle to the knowledge of higher worlds. On the other hand, it was the case that by attuning the physical body to pain and suffering in order to come into contact with the spiritual world, the ascetic entered into an inner experience that took him away from the robust outer world into solitude, into hermitage. From there he was able to explore many things that then sank deep into the human soul when the soul wanted to know: How am I connected to the spiritual worlds, how do I find the happiness of my mind?

But then again, the people who could say such things — and this goes right back to our present-day religious beliefs and world views, without people being aware of it —, then again the people had to tune down the functions of their physicality in relation to the robust outer life, they had to develop a hypersensitivity to this life, to loneliness, to hermitage. The old path of asceticism, which has also been corrupted today, is not suitable for modern man. Through such asceticism, man first of all makes himself alien to reality, in which we must fully place ourselves today, but he also makes himself unfit for his actions, he makes himself unfit for working for the benefit of his fellow human beings. But we can still look at the two paths by which people once struggled to gain an insight into the supersensible worlds.

How a person today can raise themselves in the supersensible world, my dear listeners, is something that I described in my last lecture here, at least in principle. You can find it described in full detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science” and in other books of mine. But there you will see that today's man can no longer follow the path of, say, a reorganization of his breathing, the path of conscious breathing, in order to change his thought life in the sense that ordinary views of man become the wonderful world view of the Bhagavad Gita. I would say that for his path of knowledge, for his path of thought, man started from something that was still entirely appropriate for those ancient times, something that was intimately connected with his bodily functions.

All that I described to you in the previous lecture, and what I describe in my books, are processes that are not carried out in breathing, that are not carried out in this way in the body, but that are carried out in the life of thought itself, in the inner life of the soul, through a special training in meditation, through a special training in the concentration of thought, in contemplation. Today's exercises, which are intended to lead to the higher world, are done through practices that are carried out in the regulation of thinking itself. The ancient Indian yogi regulated his breathing; we regulate our ordinary thinking directly, we bring a different rhythm, a different inner lawfulness into meditation and concentration in thinking. We do not approach a transformation of our thinking indirectly through breathing, we go straight to the thinking. Of course, I cannot repeat all the exercises that you can read about in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”; I can only hint at the principles in this way.

But what do we achieve by doing such exercises, which address human thoughts so intimately? Through them we come to see through what we have today as our ordinary thinking, through birth and upbringing, in its abstractness, in its deadness, if I may express it so. We arrive at essentially enlivening thinking, whereas the ancient Indian yogi — I might say — started from a certain liveliness of thinking, from which he went away to abstract thinking, to the thinking that we have as a matter of course in life. There he experienced the self. Now, we have this self through birth and upbringing; we have to, by grasping thinking, not breathing, enliven this thinking. But in doing so, we come to perceive ordinary thinking precisely as the abstract, as the dead, and to move on to a living thinking through inner exercises.

This is the significant transformation that the modern seeker of knowledge who wants to penetrate into the higher worlds, into the world of the spiritual, must undergo. This is the method that the modern seeker of knowledge must go through, which leads from abstract, from inanimate, from dead thinking to inwardly living thinking.

And now I would like to give you a characterization of modern forms of consciousness, where we arrive when we acquire this living thinking. I will point out something that is close to every person today. If we have any connection at all with today's worldviews, we realize how a so-called higher animal is constituted, how its functions, its bodily processes work. We form an inner image of this higher animal in our thoughts. In doing so, we visualize the nature of this animal. But then we may turn to the human being. We form an inner picture of the human being again, using all the material that science provides us with today. Later it will be even more complete, but in principle no different, as long as thinking is applied only in the abstract, as it is today in the study of natural laws — we form an image of the human being, of the structure of the bones, the structure of the muscles, the structure of the other organs, of the interweaving and interflowing of the inner bodily processes. Then we compare this picture with the picture we have of higher animals and we find a certain relationship. Depending on whether we think more or less materialistically, we imagine that man then emerges physically from the higher animal. If we think more idealistically or spiritually, we imagine this relationship differently. But we look at it by forming the idea of the higher animal on the one hand and the idea of man on the other and comparing them, we form something through this comparison, which is then to become our world view of our environment. But now let us ask ourselves a question that may interest us. What is the difference between thinking, with which one compares the concept of the higher animal with the concept of man, as one can outwardly compare a higher animal with a lower animal, the lower animal with a plant. Let us ask ourselves the question: What is the difference between this dead abstract thinking and that living thinking that one acquires through the modern exercises of knowledge for the supersensible world?

If we form an idea with our ordinary thinking about the higher animal, about its inner structure, about its processes, about the intermingling of its life processes, then, I would say, we have inwardly visualized the being of this higher animal through a thought. But the thought lives, and this thought changes inwardly, if it lives, without us having to look at it. It forms the thought of the human being out of itself, it undergoes this metamorphosis inwardly. With dead thinking, we can only form the thought of the higher animal, then go over with our thinking to the human being, to the human being whom we experience outwardly, find human thought, but with animal thought we never come to human thought. Simply by allowing the thought to come to life in us, through which the human thought then arises from the animal thought, we arrive at a different, a spiritual relationship to the world.

I would like to illustrate it in the following way. Consider a magnetic needle. You can point it in many different directions. Only one direction is the excellent one, the direction that points from the magnetic north pole to the magnetic south pole. This one line is the excellent one. Wherever you point the magnetic needle, you do not have such an excellent direction. By its own natural law, this magnetic needle belongs in the north-south direction. Thus, through the living thought, the whole space is differentiated. In living thinking, we do not have the space of indifferent juxtaposition, the calculative space, but we experience the space in which something else becomes the vertical line that goes from the earth to the stars; the horizontal line that is the tangent of the ground on which we stand. Space is experienced inwardly by the living thought.

Then we turn to the higher animal, we find its backbone line horizontal, and where this line goes into the vertical, are the exceptions that show that what I say is right. We see the vertical direction in the human being, we feel that this line is different from the one the animal maintains with its backbone, and we feel this line, in which the human being now places himself, and many other things that we have to change when we move from animal thought to human thought. We feel that a different being is emerging, and by seizing the animal thought, we have to keep the form flexible and know: if we enter into a different spatial direction, we come to a different being. We allow one thought to arise from the other in our inner experience.

Consider, my dear audience, how alive our soul life becomes, how spiritualized our soul life becomes, while we juxtapose one with the other with the dead abstract thought, how we stand before the world, how we now become similar to the interweaving, the growth and becoming of external things with our inner experience, how we immerse ourselves in the outer world, no longer merely standing beside it.

This is the first step for modern man. To bring abstract, dead thinking to life, and in so doing, to live in the spirituality of the world. But all of you – my dear audience – can raise a significant objection as I describe this living thinking. You can object that there have been all kinds of thinkers, natural philosophers Oken, Schelling, who have had such living thinking in a certain sense; they have known how to grasp the thought of an external object in a certain imaginative way and have understood how to transform it in order to find something that then coincides with another thing of its own accord. And modern humanity has indeed recognized how much fantasy there is in Schelling and Oken precisely because of this thinking. But there is something that anthroposophy must add to what the most recent ancient times did not have. When such thinkers as those mentioned describe what actually takes place in their spiritual life, one does not find what anthroposophical research and experience must point to.

The person who, as I have described it, forms thoughts about the things of the external world, who is himself alive, cannot take a step with this living thought without feeling pain inwardly, in a certain way suffering. And now, when this living thought is felt as suffering, as pain – not initially in the physical sense, for it can only be transmitted in that direction – now something begins that can be felt as reality. Anyone who comes to realize that higher knowledge in the modern sense can only be attained by going through suffering and pain will always tell you something about their ordinary life as well: they will say, “What I have experienced as happiness, as joy, as good fortune, I am grateful to my destiny for. What I have had in the way of suffering, pain, disappointment and privation in my ordinary life, I owe to the little knowledge that I have gained. And the fact that I have gained such knowledge through the ordinary pains and disappointments that life has given me means that I have undergone preliminary training for that which must be experienced when the living thought, as living spirituality, fills the soul, is therefore also alive in the soul, and therefore also drives the soul to suffering and pain.

What is achieved by this? Through this our whole human nature becomes an organ of perception – the expression sounds paradoxical – but now not an organ of perception that, like the eye and ear, perceives the outer world, but it becomes an organ of perception that spiritually perceives itself within and also looks into the spiritual world, into the world to which the living thought gives its thought-content, and now truly experiences this living world. One can understand why we have to go through pain and suffering. It is now the case – esteemed attendees – that even in such a perfect structure as the eye, some processes, changes take place due to the light acting on it. These changes that take place, if we had a fine sense for it, we would have a sensation of pain, and this sensation of pain would only change into the sensation of color. And in the earliest times of human development, this was what man had. Sensory perception arose out of pain, man became robust against it, became neutral, today he experiences the sensory perception directly; that which underlies the pain withdraws from perception. But if we are to live our way up into the spiritual world, we must force our way through suffering and pain, and only when we have overcome these, when we have turned suffering, pain to our advantage, can we glimpse into the spiritual world, which is opened up to us on the one hand through the living thought. And then, after we have transformed our whole organism into a sense organ by bringing thought to life and overcoming the suffering, we see ourselves, as a modern human being, facing the spiritual world with understanding, with science.

We can now seek spiritual knowledge for ourselves, and we do not need to withdraw from life into a hermitage. We can immerse ourselves in life, our outer physicality does not lead us to asceticism, our outer physicality remains as it is, and can therefore robustly face the external world and fulfill all the demands that today's life places on modern people. In this way we can create an understanding of the spiritual world by remaining in this world, in which modern man must one day remain. But when we create such insights, then man certainly approaches us in a different way than he approaches us when we merely look at him with our sensory eyes. Usually we perceive only the external physicality of this human form. But the person who has struggled to the mobile, living thoughts does not just see this outer, sensual human form; he sees something spiritual and soul-like in this human form, an auric, a spiritual and soul-like aura. The word “aura” is to be understood only in this sense, not in any superstitious sense. One beholds the auric in which the human form is embedded, but one does not only recognize in this aura that which stands externally in front of one, but one looks at that which the person already was in his spiritual-soul before he descended from a spiritual-soul world. One gets to know the person through their auric being, which reveals itself through the kind of contemplation that I have characterized as a spiritual-soul being, and one learns to look back into the spiritual-soul world, into one's preexistence, into the life that one had before one entered one's earthly life. And one does not just learn in such abstractness that the person truly lived in a spiritual-soul world before his birth, one also gets to know the concrete of this spiritual-soul human being, that is, our self, as we get to know the outer world through sensory perception.

I can characterize this in the following way. While we are here between birth and death, we look out into the outer world, we look up into the cosmos, admire the stars, admire the glory of the sun and moon; we look at the kingdoms of nature, we see more and more of the wonderful laws that live in all of this through our science. But by looking out there and looking back at ourselves in an unbiased way, at what is within us, we have to say to ourselves: Dark is what the human being sees between birth and death in the ordinary consciousness when he looks into his inner being. We have to say: what lives in there as our organism – certainly, some of it, but only in its deadness, shows anatomy, physiology – but anthroposophy shows that the human being has a world in there in a completely different sense than ordinary science shows us. When we really get to know what is inside us, we will say to ourselves: Yes, the air we breathe and its inner laws are wonderful, but what goes on in our own lungs as laws is more wonderful than this air circle with all its secrets. The sun is wonderful out there with all the effects that emanate from it, which express themselves in light and warmth, but more wonderful than the light, than the currents of warmth, more wonderful than all that is what lives inside the human organism, in the structure of our heart. And so, when we look at the human interior in terms of the bodily organization, we can say to ourselves: great and powerful is the world of external knowledge; greater and more powerful is that which lives in us as a microcosm.

That, my dear audience, is something that one learns to recognize more and more. You can see this from my “Secret Science” and from other of my books. But what is shrouded for the ordinary consciousness between birth and death today ceases to be shrouded when we look at the spiritual and soul nature of the human being before he descended into the physical world. What was man's world while he was a spiritual being in a spiritual world? Not the external world of space, which we otherwise survey, but precisely this human inner world. What is human inner being for the earth is the outer world for our spiritual being.

Just as we have the sun, moon and stars, the three kingdoms of nature around us here, so we have the secrets of the lungs and heart in front of us in the spiritual world, from which we descended. We have the human interior as an external world before us, and there we acquire the ability that is exercised by us human beings to integrate with this physical body. We see the inner laws as an outer world before we descend from the pre-existent life into earthly life; this is the outer world of the spiritual and soul that we experience before conception. And only when we enter the physical body does the outer world appear around us, and the world of the human inner self disappears. What is revealed to us by the one aura is out there.

The other aura that we acquire reveals to us what lives in human actions. Here in the physical world, we look at these actions with our ordinary human consciousness, we see how this or that action is done from childhood on, we see an encounter between people, we see how this encounter shapes the destiny for the whole of the following life, how these people now form a community; as one often says, this appears out of the ordinary consciousness, as a coincidence.

If we acquire the consciousness that leads to the auric, which I have characterized, then it is like the world is for the blind person who has undergone an operation. He used to be unable to perceive colors or lights, but now he can perceive them. Previously, what a person undertook as steps in their life was seen as a matter of chance. But now, after the spiritual eye has been opened, we look at the first steps that a child takes, at the endless sympathies and antipathies, and see how the child develops its life steps more and more. Sympathies and antipathies that arise in him guide the child in the following steps, which become decisive in human life, and we realize how the goal was already present in the sympathies and antipathies that were present in the first childlike steps. In other words, we look at the shaping of human destiny, and in a completely natural, elementary way we become aware when our spiritual eye is opened – just as we realize when we look at an adult that they were a child – we can know that this destiny, which course of life, that people's lives on earth are lived through in repetitions, that the whole of life is cause and effect of other lives between death and a new birth, and that what is fateful carries over from one life to the next.

One might think that this sense of destiny takes away our freedom as human beings. But we do not impair our freedom any more than we impair our freedom by building a house this year and wanting to move into it the next. We only become free by creating such foundations for our lives. Nor do we take away our freedom by building a house for ourselves in this life for the next.

So, my dear attendees, the spiritual world, the relationship of the human being to this spiritual world, is revealed by anthroposophy reopening the paths by which individual people can ascend into the spiritual world and proclaim the results to their fellow human beings. We need a method that can be trusted in the same way as the natural sciences are trusted. In the books mentioned above, I have described how everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, and how people can develop such views of the supersensible and spiritual that give them their true value and true human dignity. But people do not necessarily have to become spiritual researchers. Just as one does not need to become an astronomer in order to include astronomical findings in one's knowledge, or a botanist in order to include the necessary botanical findings in one's education, one also does not need to become a spiritual scientist in order to include the findings of spiritual science.

I would like to use another comparison that I have used often, I believe here as well. A person who wants to judge a painted picture in terms of beauty and artistic value does not need to be a painter himself. Man's organization is directed towards truth and beauty. Even someone who is not a spiritual researcher and whose mind is not oriented towards illusions and error can test what the spiritual researcher says with his common sense. And even the spiritual researcher must first test what is revealed to him through his own common sense, just as the other person must do, because the higher vision provides him with a higher world, but not its reality. Just as we first test the dream through common sense, so we must first test the reality of what we see in higher worlds through our common sense. The one who acquires exact clairvoyance — not the old mystical clairvoyance — the one who acquires this modern clairvoyance, finds his way into the spiritual world by means of paths that are entirely appropriate for today's human being, and what he explores there can be thoroughly examined with common sense in the manner indicated.

But what does our civilization gain from this, ladies and gentlemen? Well, what is gained is not unimportant. What is gained can certainly be used. Do we have spirituality today? We have thoughts about the spirit and we live in these thoughts and ideas. But if we look back to older times, it was different. Yes, my dear audience, it was different. We do not want to conjure up old times again, nor do we want to overestimate them. We know that humanity must always move forward; we do not want to bring up in a reactionary way what belongs to a bygone era. But when we look at the ancient epochs from which many unconscious beliefs have come down to us, we see that in those ancient times there were insights through which the spirit was grasped not only in thoughts, but through which the spirit entered the whole human being in a living way. One can say of a person of those times, not only: He has thoughts about the spirit, he has ideas about the spirit, but through his thoughts and ideas the living spirit moves into the human being. Such epochs have existed, and such epochs have actually given the right power and the right impulses for the development of humanity, where it was known that the spirit lives among us, the divinity lives among us. Only then did spiritual knowledge deepen into true religious devotion. If such times can arise again, not in the old form but in the modern form, then the human being acquires a true religious inwardness, an appropriate piety, through deepening their knowledge of anthroposophy. But through this, the modern being gains the knowledge that a time will come when not only, as is the case today, thoughts and ideas live in dryness, but also in the spirituality. Spirituality will move through the living thought. And through the suffering-overcoming conception of reality, the living thought, the living reality, the spirit itself in its liveliness will move into the human being. We must long for such a time because we need it, in which we say to ourselves again: Not only do we exist in the world, we as human beings with our outwardly random actions, but because we human beings ourselves are spiritual , we recognize our relationship to the eternal spirit, we recognize how other spiritual beings are at work beside us, a spiritual world, just like the sensual one, how the spirits not only live in our thoughts, but how they are our fellow travelers in earthly life.

That – dear attendees – when we perceive the spiritual world as the world of our fellow creatures, not as mere abstract theoretical thoughts, then we enter the world that today's humanity, and even more so the humanity of the near future, needs , in order to become more life-affirming, to achieve inner devotion, to achieve fruitful insights, to achieve actions, to achieve impulses for activity, which today's humanity longs for – longs for more than it usually believes.

Today we look into our social life, we see how people long for new impulses to come. But we also see what impulses of doom are indulging themselves. There must be something wrong, and that is what is wrong, that we have lost the living spirit. It is only with this living spirit, which does not merely enter into our scientific, abstract thoughts but permeates our entire human being, that we will solve the great difficult social questions of the present, as far as they can be solved in any age.

Anthroposophy, which is so often rejected, seeks to be nothing other than the spiritual activity, the spiritual life that leads people to recognize and actively embrace this living spirituality, this spiritual co-creation, so that mankind, imbued with this knowledge, with a will, with enthusiasm that comes from this spiritual life, can fully grasp the present and live into the future, as is necessary for the further welfare and development of humanity. Much of this is already sensed by humanity today, but it lives in the unconscious depths of human souls. Anthroposophy seeks to advance to a full understanding of what humanity needs for its inner realization and for its social goals in the present and especially in the future.

Among the many spiritual endeavors of the present day, which those who are interested in them can find in literature or elsewhere in the world, is also the theosophical one, which can also be called the spiritual-scientific one. Its task is to educate human thinking, feeling and perceiving in a special way. Someone who reads about this world view in articles and books or hears something about it can easily develop a prejudice against it. Many believe that Theosophy is nothing more than a rehash of old superstitions and that it contradicts all healthy scientific sense. Others approach Theosophy with a certain fear, because they believe that this school of thought is behind the founding of a religion, a sect. Others believe that Theosophy leads people away from practical life, into a dreamy, fantastic realm, alienating them from the everyday. Still others believe that Theosophy wants to introduce an oriental religion here.

Today's topic may give cause to show, by considering a question of interest to humanity in the broadest sense, how Theosophy is able to raise the question to a higher point of view, but also to provide the means to solve the question. This touches on something that, in the deepest sense of the heart, concerns our contemporaries. Theosophy cannot be mixed up in all the fanaticism that is so often displayed when considering such questions. Of course, when considering such questions, one might think that Theosophy leads away from life. But those who think so do not take into account that the point of view that stands above party politics is a match for every position in life, every standpoint in life.

We must point out a little of what Theosophy wants in more detail, what it strives for. Theosophy wants to work quite differently from other spiritual endeavors, differently in terms of its content, and differently in the way it approaches people. Theosophy rests on two firm pillars. One of these pillars is that behind the external physical world, which is perceptible only to the external senses, there is a supersensible, spiritual world, and the other of the pillars is that there are dormant abilities in man, through which he can, if they are developed, get to know the spiritual world. When this is stated, we often hear the objection on the one hand that the idea of a supernatural world belongs to a childlike way of thinking that humanity had in earlier ages, because they did not yet know anything about scientific law. Today, however, when humanity has come to penetrate the world of law, it is no longer appropriate for people to believe in a world of supernatural facts. A simple comparison needs only be made. It is so easy to say today that science has shown us that, to a certain extent, man does not need spiritual beings that confront him. It is true that science cannot yet explain everything, but the ideal is to penetrate this world with its methods and tools.

Theosophy would have no prospect of really intervening in the spiritual life of humanity if it wanted to go against the facts of science. But even if the facts of science are true, it does not contradict the fact that spiritual processes are behind them. A clock can be explained on the basis of mechanical processes, but does this mean that because we can explain the clock from within itself, the clockmaker, the spiritual power behind it, is dispensable? No scientific explanation can explain the spiritual beings behind the phenomena. No scientific explanation can make the consideration of the spiritual background, of the supersensible in the world, superfluous.

The objection that the human capacity for knowledge is insufficient to penetrate the supersensible world cannot be taken seriously either. Theosophy speaks of a supersensible world in exactly the same way as the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte spoke to his audience in 1813 of a spiritual world. He said that this world requires a completely different sensory tool. Then he compares the knowledge of the spiritual world with the world of colors and light, which is inaccessible to the blind-born because he lacks the organ for it.

We can expand Fichte's example of the blind-born. We imagine a blind-born being operated on in this space and suddenly becoming sighted. A new, previously unknown world of colors and light would open up for him. Now, Theosophy says: Just as a new world appears for the operated blind person after he has received the organ to see, it is also possible for the organs that Goethe called spiritual eyes to be awakened in a person.

If we look around at our literature today, we encounter what could be called the man's point of view or the we's point of view. How often do we read the assertion: One can recognize, we can recognize, or one cannot know, we cannot know anything about it, etc., etc. People do not realize the profound illogicality of claiming such things. Logically, everyone should only claim that they can say something about what they know. Only perception decides, only experience decides, about what is present.

There have always been people who could see into the spiritual worlds. They were called initiates or seers. There is something, an experience, which can be compared to what the blind person experiences when he is operated on successfully, only in a much more magnificent way, where organs are awakened in man for the spiritual worlds, which he then perceives himself. To explore these spiritual worlds requires seership, initiation, awakening.

But when someone who knows something about the higher worlds recounts the facts, then anyone who brings with them a healthy sense of truth can understand them. Today, there are already many people who recognize the truth of this theosophical worldview from spiritual intuition, from a healthy sense of humanity, from a sense of truth. In this sense, Theosophy speaks of the spiritual worlds as being all around us, just as light and color and radiance are around those born blind, who simply cannot see them. The facts that the seer shares with the world today are drawn from this spiritual world. The theosophist does not want to secure anything from agitation or from any kind of teaching profession. Theosophy does not approach the world as a worldview sometimes does, in the sense that it assumes that those who cannot see it are stupid. No, the theosophical researcher only wants to be a storyteller, and he is aware that it is best to use persuasion as little as possible. Those who are persuaded to accept Theosophy are of no value to it. Truth must arise from the human soul itself. If Theosophy brings the truth, each soul must agree with it of its own free will.

In accordance with these prerequisites, let us first consider the nature of man in general, and then, from the spiritual world of facts, recognize the nature of man and woman. What the senses perceive of man is only one aspect of the human being. If we apply this to man and woman, we may ask ourselves: Does materialistic thinking recognize everything about man and woman? Could there not also be something hidden in them that cannot be observed externally?

It is precisely with such a question that the practical application of the theosophical world view must come to our minds. Who would deny that in the last century, research into sensual things has reached a peak that must be admired even by the theosophical world view? But let us review what those who claim to be scientifically educated have said about the relationship between men and women in the last century. I will cite only a few judgments as examples of what one arrives at when one does not know the spiritual.

A naturalist said: If we consider everything in a woman, then the basic character of a woman is gentleness. — Another said: If you know everything that comes to us in a woman, then you have to summarize it in one word – that is, anger-fortitude. Another, an anthropologist, summarized his view of women in the word: Women are characterized by feelings of devotion. Another said: Those who really understand women know that the most prominent thing in a woman's character is the desire for power. Yet another tries to sum it all up in one word: Women form the conservative element in human development. Another says: He who really understands history will find that all revolutionary ideas originate with women. In philosophy, this kind of thinking that summarizes everything and takes individual points of view is called synthetic thinking. One philosopher says: All of a woman's thinking is reduced to synthetic thinking. — An English philosopher, on the other hand, says: Women only possess analytical thinking.

This should show us how much consensus and certainty there is in the judgment of science. These contradictory judgments cannot satisfy people. But in reality, people long for the answers of spiritual science to the great questions of existence. Today, some people already have important intuitions about what lies behind external facts. Recently, a book by a young man caused a great stir: 'Gender and Character' by the unfortunate Weininger. In fact, there is already substantial good scientific research today, which Weininger, for example, published in a tumultuous and amateurish manner. A strange view confronts us here, one that contains a hint of the truth. Weininger says: Actually, there is something masculine in every woman's character and something feminine in every man. — That is a hint of something true, but it is completely corrupted by being immersed in a materialistic worldview. Weininger distinguishes between a masculine and a feminine substance, which are mixed up in all human beings. He comes to a strange conclusion about the feminine. Weininger characterizes the female as having “no ego, no individuality, no freedom, no character.” But he sees the masculine in every woman and the feminine in every man. So these things are mixed up in everyone. We see, then, that here it is like with Munchausen, who takes himself by the scruff of the neck; it is a view that dissolves itself.

Through Theosophy we see that what the senses perceive in man is only a part of man; it is the physical body that man has in common with all visible beings around us. More strictly than any science, Theosophy stands on the ground that what man has in the physical body of matter and forces is the same as the matter and forces of all physical nature. But these substances and forces are so composed in man that they would disintegrate if they were left to themselves. The crystal is maintained by its own substances and forces. But in man and in every living being, the etheric body or life body lives as the second link in his being. What is it? It is a constant fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. The moment a person passes through the portal of death, the physical body is abandoned to chemical and physical substances and forces. Together with all plants and animals, the human being has the second link of his being, the etheric or life body.

But there is still a third link of the human being, which spiritual science recognizes through its methods. Much closer than the bones, muscles and nerves that are enclosed in the human skin, there is a sum of joy and pain, urges, desires, passions and sensations, up to the highest ideals. Spiritual science calls the carrier of all this the astral body. Man only shares this astral body with the animal world.

Then there is a fourth element of the human being that makes man the crown of earthly creation. There is a word in the German language that man can only say about himself, that no one else can say to him. Anyone can say “chair” to a chair and “table” to a table, but there is only one thing that each person can say about themselves: that is the little word “I”. This is something so important that all school psychology has no idea of the importance of this fact. This name cannot be spoken to me from the outside like the name of any other thing in the world. Everyone can only pronounce the name themselves. That is what is special about the name that is referred to by the little word “I”. The name “I” can never sound to our ears when it refers to ourselves. Sensitive natures have always felt this. Jean Paul recounts how, as a child, he first realized: “I am an I”. He says that he looked into the most hidden holy of holies of his being. All religions, all world views that have looked into the essence of things have recognized the importance of this fact. That is why religions have named this the unspeakable name of God. The God himself lives on in the soul when man says “I” to himself; shivers of awe went through the assembly of the Hebrews when the Old Testament priest pronounced this name: “I am in the innermost soul, I am, Yahweh.”

It is easy to reproach Theosophy with making man into a god. But anyone who claims that a drop taken from the sea is the sea itself is saying something nonsensical. The drop is not the sea, but it contains sea substance. Therefore, we do not make the ego of man into a god, but into a drop or spark of the divine essence.

When this ego works on the other parts of the human being, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, higher parts of the human being arise from it. What condenses at the center of the being, what enables the soul to make the word “I am” resound from the human breast, that is what makes the human being the crown of the other beings.

Let us now consider the state in which we all find ourselves during the night, the state of sleep. Sleep is also called the brother of death. As Voltaire says, all truths that emerge into the world for the first time are treated like the envoys of educated states at the courts of barbarians. They only gradually gain recognition. Let us compare the state of consciousness during the day with the state of sleep, where all joy and all suffering sink into an indeterminate darkness. This is because when a person falls asleep, the astral body with the ego is lifted out of the human being. In sleep, the four members of human nature are separated in twos. In death, it is different, for then not only does the I separate with the astral body, but also the etheric or life body separates from the physical body. In death, it also leaves the physical body, which is then a corpse. The etheric body or life body is the fighter against the decay of the physical body. During the night, the I is lifted out with the astral body. What is it that enables a person to see through the eyes and to hear through the ears during the day? Eyes and ears are the instruments of the astral body. The moment a person awakens, the astral body and the ego descend into the etheric body and the physical body. In the morning, when he wakes up out of the darkness, he recognizes the world around us in form, sound, color, shine and light.

Why does man not perceive the world during the night in which he lives during the night? Today it is already possible for individual people to perceive this world, the actual home of the soul in which it lives at night. From this world, the human being returns to the physical world in the morning.

In everyday life, the human being takes on such an appearance that his I and the part of his being that is the carrier of pleasure and suffering submerges into the two sheaths, which give him a set of instruments for perceiving the physical world. This is also how man appears to us when we consider the question of the nature of man and woman from this point of view. When we observe the human being as he stands before us, with his physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, then for spiritual science the matter presents itself in such a way that the physical body only has the outwardly determined characteristics in man and woman. The etheric body has the polar, opposite characteristics. For man the etheric body has feminine characteristics; for woman the etheric body has masculine characteristics.

If we are good observers, we see that the man who shows masculine qualities for sensory perception also shows precisely the opposite qualities. When the corresponding qualities appear in a woman, they appear with a distinctly masculine character. Because every man has female qualities in his etheric body and every woman has male qualities, these terms, “male” and “female”, are not exhaustive in their sensory meaning. Those who believe that if you know the physical body of a person, you know everything about that person will not be able to explain why you sometimes find anger in a woman, sometimes docility.

If we now consider the human being as a whole, we see that the sexual is only linked to the physical and etheric bodies, and that when we wake up in the morning, we take it on as our tool just like the other organs of the physical body. We can look into the nature of the human being with the help of spiritual science and see where the sexual begins. It is only present in the physical and etheric bodies. It leaves the person during sleep at night.

At the moment when the I leaves the person with the astral body, the terms male and female completely lose their meaning. The opposition that manifests itself in the physical world as male and female does not exist. In the spiritual world, this opposition is the opposition between life and form, indeed between life and death. When we penetrate into the spiritual worlds, this contrast is ever present: the contrast between the ever-advancing life and the perpetual inhibition of life; the sprouting tree is one and the bark the other.

We can consider this using an example from artistic creation. Let us imagine the Juno Ludovisi, that wonderful image of a woman. In the wonderfully broad forehead, in the peculiar expression, in all the flatness of the face of this Juno, something is expressed that makes us say: In this form, the spirit is fully developed. But it has become entirely form. Everything has flowed into the form. The spirit, which otherwise flows away, the life, had to be captured in a moment. That is the one extreme of existence, where the form becomes so solid that it captures life in a moment. The other extreme is the sculpted work of art, which is close to this Juno Ludovisi, the Zeus, with the peculiar forehead, the peculiar mouth. It is a characteristic form, not really a beautiful form. We can say to ourselves, life is still in it; the form can be different at any time.

These two opposites of life flowing forth and life unfolding and dying into form, are, in the higher world, the male and the female. From the female comes form, which strives towards sculpture; in the male lies the form that makes change possible. Here we see how what meets us externally in man and woman is a reflection of the supersensible. Only when this is understood can full understanding, unclouded by any antagonism, arise between the two sexes. This transsexual understanding is only given through a view like the theosophical one.

Our culture to date has been a male culture. Why have we ended up in today's science, in which everything stems from the external sense perception, from the passive devotion to external experience? Today, people are forbidden their own inner spirituality. This is because this culture is a male culture, because science has become so feminine. It was that which arose from the female etheric body of man. In Theosophy we have a world view. We must find the strong source of certainty in our inner abilities. Theosophy is masculine. And the strange thing is: today it is mainly women who are interested in Theosophy. This is because women have an active male etheric body. Theosophy wants to raise humanity to a higher level than that on which these questions about man and woman are usually negotiated. Today, these questions are usually only discussed from the lowest point of view. And this will be taken to extremes the more sensual ideas gain influence. Only Theosophy can bring people salvation and truth in this area. Genuine cooperation between the sexes will bring it about.

Real insight and true knowledge can only come from elevating ourselves above the everyday. Theosophy aims to be a remedy for human culture. It will have proven itself when it helps people. Theosophy must prove itself in real life. Schiller expresses in beautiful words the uplifting of the human being above the everyday:

Only the body lends itself to those powers
That weave the dark fate;
But free from every temporal power,
The companion of blessed natures
Walks above in the corridors of light
Divinely among gods the form.

It has been some time since it has been possible to have a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill such a task. In recent times, you, my dear friends, have attentively and eagerly acquired the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate for us to speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze to the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to utilize what we have acquired in spiritual knowledge, namely about the human being and his development , to utilize it, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, for anthroposophists in particular, should take on a special form through their insights, through the perceptions they can gain from the spiritual-scientific world view. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is progressing, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and each age has its special task. We can distinguish between larger and smaller ages in the historical development of humanity, and in each age there are very special moments when it is necessary not to fail to penetrate the actual task, the actual mission of that age. We may note that in the successive periods of time, tasks are set for people from the spiritual worlds, tasks that are very special for this or that age, and for us humans it is then a matter of doing the right thing, of knowing something about these tasks, of absorbing into our soul a realization of these tasks. We really live in an age in which it is urgently necessary for a number of people to gain knowledge again of what is to be done today or in our presence, preferably in the spiritual realm. I would like to begin by bringing two periods of time that are very close to us to your mind's eye, two periods of time that are close to us because one of them belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and products still extends into our present; but the second period has hardly begun. We are standing at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or period of humanity, standing, so to speak, at the boundary. Therefore, it is of very special importance to understand these two periods a little. The one period covers approximately that epoch which began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science it is said that this period covers the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that covers the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we are again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the observance of which is extremely important for the immediate future of humanity. Let us now try to form a rough idea of what happens at the beginning of a new period. When one period ends and another begins, something is ending and something is beginning. Something is decaying and something is germinating, as if rooted, like a new dawn for a sunshine that is preparing as the sunshine of a new age. And the peculiarity of such a transitional age – you know that people speak of transitional ages in different senses, but we are really dealing with a transitional age today in a very meaningful sense – is that new forces of culture must be added to humanity.

To characterize this, I will consider a great task for all of humanity; that is the advent of Christianity. If we form an idea of the way in which Christianity arose, we have to say: Actually, it was rejected by precisely those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those who were at the forefront of culture had reached a state of decline. Try to imagine Roman culture in decline and try to imagine the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, naively but with fresh energies faced the culture, with a lively sense of what was to come, which one did not really count among the highest blossoms of the culture of the time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest layers of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper leading circles, when it has developed for a time, must come down, but especially because science, with its concepts, ideas and so on, arrives at a point where it cannot develop further, something new, something popular, must intervene. We have put a major turnaround in front of us. In a sense, we are facing another turning point today. What has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has actually reached a point where everyone who is insightful must say: it really cannot go any further – the scientific concepts and ideas that are being pursued today in official currents are on the verge of decay. And the whole way in which spiritual life is approached, where the great currents of this spiritual life flow, is in full decline. I would like to describe with a few stark words how this decline could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

If you took part in this life, as it was expressed in literature, through books and the like, in science, then you grew up with a seriousness, with a seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned, that is no longer understood. The tone of weekly magazines, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual current regarding how to relate to drama, poetry, and so on. That has changed, as one thought back then. In those days there was also a certain way of writing poetry, in which one satisfied less strict demands, for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, for a joke. Sometimes there was quite a bit of talent in it. In particular, the students at their assemblies performed plays in which there was quite a bit of talent. Now one got a little older and could look around at the literary currents, and one found among them esteemed products that were, however, exactly the same as what had previously been considered only good for the day. That became literary maturity for the intellectual movement. In order not to cause too much offence, I do not want to mention any names. Today we are already at the point that we have nothing but printed trivialities in the broadest sense – entire bookstores are filled with them. Just thirty to forty years ago, one would have been sorry for the ink to write them down. When a person is going through such a change, they do not judge things starkly enough, but this is how cultural history will have to characterize our late 19th century. Indeed, we are facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we should not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement, what is to bring something new to human development, finds little support among what is today called the official intellectual life; if the members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-wits who call themselves Theosophists, who are basically quite uneducated people mostly — and so on. These are necessities that are present in every transitional age. Fresh forces must come from below, and what springs up in this way will then become necessary for the later age in order to really create an ascending movement. Now I said: we have seen two ages go by. The age from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an age that sought to internalize all the soul forces of man, all the forces of man. This tendency to introspection was to be seen in all fields during this time; external natural science was less practised, people's attention was less directed to the outer laws and phenomena of nature. In the starting point of Augustine himself, in which we see our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being prefigured in a certain way, we find the idea of the influence of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch continued, what strange phenomena we encounter: the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler and many others. Although outer science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a genius-like intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such people as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. Phenomena such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme present themselves to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain length of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is replaced by something that appears to be a counter-image in a certain way.

In fact, the following centuries are a counter-image to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. Times are coming when natural science has achieved such infinite triumphs. The great phenomena of a Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei occur, right up to those of the 19th century such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin and so on. A vast amount of external facts is brought to light.

And yet, people at the beginning of the new epoch were different from those of later times. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a significant impact on physical science, was a pious man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of Kepler's three laws, which are basically nothing more than time and space laws clothed in mathematical formulas, something quite mechanical, oh, this Kepler - he spent much more time than on such explain how things were in the great world at that time, when the mystery of Palestine took place on earth; how Saturn, Jupiter and Mars were related to each other when Christ Jesus was born. Kepler's great thoughts were directed towards this. He was able to give mankind what he had to say about the science of the stars in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in his deepest heart, remained his property in an age that only served the outer life.

Or take Newton. Where would you not refer to Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where would it also be emphasized - when Haeckel, for example, talks about the epoch-making phenomenon of Newton - where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that in his quietest and most sacred hours he wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse in his own way? But he could not give it to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in the age dedicated to the external summarization of natural phenomena. And this age has just expired with the last third of the 19th century.

Now an age is beginning that must necessarily be a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counter-image, which is to continue to work in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific world view, which in turn must bring a deepening of the human soul. But each age must work differently than the one before. It would be wrong to simply study as it was done correctly from Augustine to Calvin. We may let such phenomena have their effect on us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in the past. Is there anything else, apart from what man can think in the abstract, from which one can recognize that man is really compelled and forced to grasp the world anew in every age?

If you study Paracelsus today, for example, you will find that he is an unfathomable spirit for today's trivial external research, a spirit who has particularly looked deeply into the secrets of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about healing this or that form of illness will be able to learn something quite tremendous and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us assume that a physician who is at the level of the real level of the spiritual life of our time would delve so deeply that he would want to apply what would result from Paracelsus' instructions. For certain great things, quite correct things would arise, but the physician of the present day could no longer acquire some of them. For if he were to apply some of the remedies indicated there, it would not help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. Things outside do not obey our arbitrary knowledge, which moves in steps. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, as Paracelsus learned. And if we most faithfully do as he did, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

Now I would like to characterize in a few broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not left to the hand of man alone to give this culture a direction. The old views would not fit the change in the real circumstances. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of saying what course things are taking, it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

We are standing at the dawn of a completely new human life and thinking. Three things are of particular importance and significance in human spiritual life: firstly, religion; secondly, science; and thirdly, the way people live together, the feelings and perceptions that people develop for each other, and what takes place in the social sphere. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to follow in the successive epochs what forms these three must take, that which comes into consideration as religion, as science or social life. And there are certain demands that man simply must understand, that are beyond his control.

Why must religion, science and social life change from epoch to epoch? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn that human nature consists of different parts for the sake of learning that. We do not learn that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body and an astral body with sentient, intellectual and conscious soul so that a few people can have something to do with it and can acquire these classifications. We learn these classifications because they have a far-reaching significance for human life. And you can sense this far-reaching significance if you think back to the culture that was Egyptian-Chaldean, for example, when it was the sentient soul that was primarily important. There, the higher beings primarily worked through this. And in the Greco-Latin period, in the time of the emergence of Christianity, everything that came from the divine-spiritual heights and worked into humanity worked on the mind soul. And today it works on the consciousness soul. We understand nothing at all about the relationship between the human being and the great forces of the world if we do not know how this human nature is structured. What are we preparing today by devoting ourselves to spiritual-scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the consciousness soul that is cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all useful thinking, this thinking according to the principle of usefulness, is based to a certain extent on the development of the consciousness soul. But something like the light of the spirit self is already pushing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that rushes down into decay and one that rises to future glory. The one that rushes down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. At the same time, it is the source of great discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This too has its beneficial effects. Certainly, for a long time to come mankind will benefit from that which is, after all, heading towards decay. But the kind of thinking that invents balloons is the thinking of decay. And the thinking that deals with the structure of humanity is the thinking of the future of humanity.

But these two do show a common transition. We can see that in all fields. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous turnaround has taken place. If you follow the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to the individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial and speculative genius of the Rothschilds that introduced money everywhere and led it back again to and from the money centers. And if we follow the history of the great banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions took place entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. This has changed. We just do not talk much about it yet because it is only just beginning. Today, the consciousness soul no longer exclusively rules in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of grouping prevails: the share capital, the company, the association, that which is supra-personal.

Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today and what will come more and more. Today it is almost irrelevant who stands as a personality here or there. What human beings have worked into the circulation of money is already working without personality, is already working by itself. In a descending current, you have the spread of the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decay; and we have it in the current of ascending life, where we seek that which the individual capable personality has achieved, where we seek to gain the help of those powers through inspiration, which will give us the inspirations from the spiritual world again. There, too, we go from the personal to the superpersonal. Thus, there are common characteristics for the ages with regard to both the declining and the ascending currents. In particular, however, one must be careful not to take into account in any age what authority is present in that age. As long as one does not have spiritual insight, one can go very far astray.

This is particularly the case in one area of human culture, in the area of materialistic medicine, where we see how exactly that is decisive, which the authority has in its hands and more and more lays claim to, where that wants to lead to something much, much more terrible and dreadful than any rule of authority of the much-criticized Middle Ages. We are already living in it, and it will become ever stronger and stronger. When people mock so terribly at the ghosts of medieval superstition, one might well ask: Has anything changed in relation to that? Has the fear of ghosts gone away? Don't people fear many more ghosts today than they did back then? It is much more terrible than is generally believed what goes on in the human soul when it is presented with the fact that there are 60,000 germs on the palm of the hand. In America, it has been calculated how many such germs are in a single male mustache. Should we not, then, decide to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today's bacillus ghosts are too puny, too indecent ghosts, to justify the fear that is only just beginning and that makes people, especially here, in the field of health, fall into a terrible belief in authority. We must say that we see the character of the transition period everywhere. We must only look at the phenomena in the right way, and we see this character everywhere.

Now we ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings and revelations of theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must it become in the future and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spirit self can be guided over into the consciousness soul in the right way in the spiritual sense? The prophetic stars, that is, the teachings of spiritual science, tell us the following about this future form: According to the whole way in which people have tried to bring religion into the currents of humanity, in the past centuries, religion is an amalgamation of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

What then is religion in reality? It is something that we must characterize as an attitude of the human soul: an attitude towards the spiritual, towards the infinite. Basically, we can characterize it well if we start with the basics of these attitudes, which then only have to be developed to the highest degree. If we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel something joyful for the glories that reveal themselves through the flowers and grasses, through that which is reflected in the landscape, which glistens in the dew. If we can muster such an attitude, if our heart opens up, then it is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies for the infinite that is behind the finite, for the spiritual that is behind the sensual. When our soul feels in such a way that it senses communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what is alive in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within us, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

But now the necessary development of the times has brought about a situation in which what should basically be impulses that direct human feeling and perception from the transitory to the non-transitory has been combined with certain ideas and views of what it is like in the realm of the supersensible. But through this religion has become connected in a certain sense with what is actually spiritual science, with what must actually be regarded as science. And today we see how religion in this or that form can only be maintained in this church belief if very specific dogmas are maintained at the same time. But this produces what can be called the rigid dogmatic adherence to certain ideas about the spiritual world. Such conceptions should naturally progress as the human mind progresses. And it is this progress that should give the truest religious feeling the greatest joy, for it shows the greater the glories of the divine spiritual world and the greater their significance.

True religious feeling would not have consigned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, it is great for God to send people of this kind down to earth and to reveal such things through them. - In this way, the field of scientific research would necessarily have been recognized alongside the religious field, a field that extends to both the external and the spiritual world. This must progress, it must be suited from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which progresses. In regard to this scientific research, a great change occurred when the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei, things looked very strange at the teaching institutions and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest thing for his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a very strong misunderstanding of his spirit, and in the end they no longer understood it at all, had no more idea of what he meant. Nevertheless, they always taught according to him.

In order to show you how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to go into more detail about an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked from a time when there was still an awareness that a body of ether was present in human nature, not just blood, nerve cords and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would get a very different drawing from what today's anatomists find and draw of this human being. How one draws it today was not given much importance in the time in which Aristotle created, because the etheric human being was still known. If you wanted to draw that, you would have to see a center here where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there, important rays, but then going to the brain and having to do with the whole way a person thinks. Thinking is regulated when we look at the etheric body, from a center near the physical heart. Aristotle described this to illustrate the peculiar nature of thought. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the word for 'nerve' with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle meant the physical nerve cords when he described the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic period, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that something completely wrong was learned. It was said that the main nerves emanate from the heart. Now came the scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and then people came to the conclusion that the nerves emanate from the brain, namely the physical cords. And then they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno were opponents of Aristotle. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to the teachings of Aristotle, but to what they dreamt up about Aristotle. Thus it could happen that when Galileo showed a friend of his, who was an Aristotelian, the nerves running to the brain on a corpse, this friend preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observations. He believed in what he had imagined from the teachings of Aristotle. We see, then, how the stream of spiritual science was diverted in Aristotle's time into material science, the merits of which are not to be denied, and which has worked and continues to work for the benefit and salvation of humanity. But now we are in a time when we have to come up into the spiritual.

We are on the threshold of a time when science will again have to learn to understand the spiritual reality, when science will have to become what is called pneumatology in occultism, that is, spiritual teaching. What was science in the past century? The teaching of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection with real spiritual life. Science is on the verge of becoming pneumatology, of returning to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create an atmosphere for the spiritual, only in those ages can science and religion work in harmony when science works the spirit into pneumatology. Then science can be the right interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

What is beginning is in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has passed in the various Protestant religious denominations: how they have tried not to let any scientific thinking into the area that should be dedicated to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant said that he had to suspend knowledge so that he could have free rein for faith in freedom, immortality and God.

At that time, science was directed towards the external, sensual physical, it knew no interpretation of the supersensible, the spiritual. Therefore, what had been handed down in sacred documents had to be preserved as unadulterated as possible. This had its good justification. Now we are facing a different age, where theosophy guides us into the spiritual world, and now we will see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is emerging is to be achieved by science being supported and enlightened precisely by theosophy. Religion and science will work together again in the next age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable for everyone. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel course of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, produce what could be called individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in an individual religious way. It is preordained for our age that that which can be common science in the spiritual will serve as an interpreter and guide in the religious realm in the most individual and personal way.

Again, it is shown in a remarkable way how, even here in decline, the personal moment points to something super-personal. The signs of decline also show this. And how does this pointing to a super-personal reality show itself in certain church conditions? What was it, then, when in a certain church those who are its custodians appealed to inspiration? [...] The things must be seen in relation to their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the religious life of the various denominations, points to this shining of the spirit self into what we call the consciousness soul, in both the ascending and descending sense.

This is particularly evident in the third of the three areas of human spiritual life. There will be a spreading of knowledge, knowledge of which today's practice of life has no real idea. One principle of this realization will be that the happiness of an individual human being can never be bought at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal moment will be transferred into the transpersonal, and the egotistical into the trans-egotistical, into that which connects people. Gradually, a person will not want to be happy without knowing that others are equally happy. This mood, which is the opposite of our current way of life, is being prepared. There is only one way to create this mood, and that is through the realization of the real human essence and its composition, as spiritual science gives it to us. One must know man if one wants to be man.

We see these three things at the starting point of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It should teach us to understand everything that must come. Now I want to say radically how people can relate to this. I will hypothetically assume for a while that what is today Theosophy and still represents a very small current would be seen by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and reverie, and that it would be suppressed. Those who hold the anti-theosophical point of view would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, because anti-theosophy is heading towards science. Then it would be impossible to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary development of science, religion and human life practice, written in the stars. Then people would exclude themselves from understanding these things. In which case, what would people be like? People would then be on Earth like a herd of some kind of animal that had ended up in completely alien climatic conditions that it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away and gradually perish. In this way, people would all fall prey to decay, decadence, premature destruction. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become more beast-like, which would be much worse than extinction, so that only the base passions and instincts and desires would really still be alive; that people would only desire to eat this or that, and they would use all their thinking to be able to produce that food. They would build factories to produce the best flour and the best bread, ships and balloons to bring fruit from the most distant regions and to deliver the products they want to enjoy. They would use tremendous ingenuity for the “rise of culture” – that is what they would call it. They would use infinite intelligence and mental power for this, but only to set the table in the end. Just think about what the phrase “rising culture” means from this point of view! Isn't the essential thing that infinite mental power is applied to it? If we only use it to telegraph: I need so many sacks of flour - then great intellectual power is used to produce something that ultimately only serves what we might call the animal in man. Materialism has led to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us assume that people would be eliminated. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: Now we have had a generation that did not understand the mission on earth. So we have to send down another generation, a generation of souls that will accomplish the mission on earth.

But small circles will already find understanding for what spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the earth mission will be completed by people, and that which our fifth post-Atlantic culture, dedicated to the consciousness soul, will replace as the sixth, will already be achieved by a small circle of people who will spread throughout the rest of humanity. But this can only be achieved if people's free will intervenes. For once the ego has taken hold in human nature, man must also develop free will for the development of the ego. So it depends on each individual whether he wants to show understanding for spiritual development, or whether he wants to steer the descent that humanity is taking today.

A way of life must be developed that is based on the principle that the happiness of the individual cannot be attained at the expense of the happiness of another. If man does not want to understand this, he promotes the downward, withering, brutalizing development of humanity. Today we as human beings stand before this decision in a certain respect: to want or not to want spiritual science, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do, we should feel that through our karma we have been placed like a new material in the development of humanity, like those who are to give up their powers as elementary powers, who must work their way up.

When we feel this way, we already have a practical sense of theosophy, a practical feeling, and we are aware of what we are actually doing when we develop the seemingly insignificant activity that we develop in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby, a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a newly emerging age.

I wanted to show you how things are interrelated so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Think for a moment about the sentence that man is a self-conscious being, that he must therefore know what he is, and only by knowing himself in his essence can he fulfill his destiny in the world; that therefore all those who do not want to know anything about the essence of man do not have the will to place themselves in the world in the right way. Do you remember how a spirit spoke that had an inkling of much of what is emerging today as Theosophy? Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures 'On the Destination of the Scholar'. When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that now this will reach people who will just say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is being said here? Yet Fichte was well aware that life is constantly guided by ideas.

Let us point out one example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is basically building all the tunnels and bridges in our time. The spiritual is everywhere the guiding force in all of life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote, learn to strengthen ourselves in our theosophical consciousness when people say, “Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical.” Fichte says in response: We know that ideas cannot be directly translated into life, and so do those who hold this against us. Perhaps we know it even better. But the fact that others do not want to know anything about ideas at all merely proves that the wise world government, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent Nature, in which they believe, give them, at the right time, rain and sunshine, good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts. In a way, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as Theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding for what must come. May a kind nature give them what Fichte said, but also what they need in spirit, what they believe they do not need. May the spirit give them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too will see spiritual science not as a reverie, but as an important impulse for humanity!

The two previous lectures were devoted to considerations intended to show how that tremendous change, which entered into the whole soul constitution of civilized mankind with the fifteenth century—that is, with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period—continued to have an effect on outstanding personalities. Let me introduce today's lecture with a brief summary of these preceding considerations. I showed how intensely a personality such as Goethe sensed the continuing vibrations of the great change, how he sensed that it was a concrete experience to find intellectual reasoning entering into the human soul. He sensed that it was necessary to come to terms with the intellectual element of the soul and he also had an inkling of the direct intercourse between human beings and the spiritual world which had preceded this intellectual stage. Even though it was no longer as it had been in the days of ancient atavistic clairvoyance, there was nevertheless a kind of looking back to the time when human beings knew that it was only possible for them to find real knowledge if they stepped outside the world of the senses in order to see in some way the spiritual beings who existed behind the sense-perceptible world.

Goethe invested the figure of his Faust with all these things sensed in his soul. We saw how dissatisfied Faust is by stark intellectualism as presented to him in the four academic faculties:

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end ...

He is saying in different words: I have loaded my soul with the whole complexity of intellectual science and here I now stand filled with the utmost doubt; that is why I have devoted myself to magic.

Because of dissatisfaction with the intellectual sciences, Goethe invests the Faust figure with a desire to return to intercourse with the spiritual world. This was quite clear in his soul when he was young, and he wanted to express it in the figure of Faust. He chose the Faust figure to represent his own soul struggles. I said that although this is not the case with the historical Faust of the legend, we could nevertheless find in Goethe's depiction of Faust that professor who might have taught at Wittenberg in the sixteenth or even in the seventeenth century, and who had, ‘Straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, led his scholars by the nose ‘these ten years long’. This hypothesis allows us to see how in this educational process there was a mixture of the new intellectualism with something pointing back to ancient days when intercourse with the spiritual world and with the spiritual powers of creation was still possible for human beings.

I then asked whether—apart from what is given us in the Faust drama—we might also, in the wider environment, come up against the effects of what someone like Faust could have taught in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. And here we hit upon Hamlet, about whom it could be said: The character which Shakespeare created out of Hamlet—who in his turn he had taken from Danish mythology and transformed—could have been a pupil of Faust, one of those very students whom Faust had led by the nose ‘these ten years long’. We see Hamlet interacting with the spiritual world. His task is given to him by the spiritual world, but he is constantly prevented from fulfilling it by the qualities he has acquired as a result of his intellectual education. In Hamlet, too, we see the whole transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Further, I said that in the whole mood and artistic form of Shakespeare's plays, that is, in the historical plays, we could find in the creativity of the writer of Shakespeare's plays the twilit mood of that time of transition. Then I drew your attention to the way in which Goethe and Schiller in Central Europe had stood in their whole life of soul within the dying vibrations of the transition, yet had lacked, in a certain sense, the will to accept what the intellectual view of the world had since then brought about in the life of human beings. This led them back to Shakespeare, for in his work—Hamlet, Macbeth and so on—they discovered the capacity to approach the spiritual world; from his vantage point, they could see into the world of spiritual powers which was now hidden from the intellectual viewpoint.

Goethe did this in his Götz von Berlichingen by taking the side of the dying echoes of the old time of the fourth post-Atlantean period and by rejecting what had come into being through intellectualism. Schiller, in the dramas of his youth, especially in Die Räuber (The Robbers), goes back to that time—not by pointing to the super-sensible world, but by endeavouring to be entirely realistic, yet putting into the very words characterizing Karl Moor something which echoes the luciferic element that is also at work in Milton's Paradise Lost.¹ In short, despite his realism, we detect a kind of return to a conception of reality which allows the spiritual forces and powers to shine through.

I indicated further that, in the West, Shakespeare was in a position—if I may put it like this—to work artistically in full harmony with his social environment. Hamlet is the play most characteristic of Shakespeare. Here the action is everywhere quite close to the spiritual world, as it is also in Macbeth. In King Lear, for instance, we see how he brings the super-sensible world more into the human personality, into an abnormal form of the human personality, the element of madness. Then, in the historical dramas about the kings, he goes over more into realism but, at the same time, we see in these plays a unique depiction of a long drawn-out dramatic evolution influenced everywhere by the forces of destiny, but culminating and coming to an end in the age of Queen Elizabeth.

The thing that is at work in Shakespeare's plays is a retrospective view of older ages leading up to the time in which he lives, a time which is seen to be accepted by him. Everything belonging to older times is depicted artistically in a way which leads to an understanding of the time in which he lives. You could say that Shakespeare portrays the past. But he portrays it in such a way that he places himself in his contemporary western social environment, which he shows to be a time in which things can take the course which they are prone to take. We see a certain satisfaction with regard to what has come about in the external world. The intellectualism of the social order is accepted by the person belonging to the external, physical earthly world, by the social human being, whereas the artistic human being in Shakespeare goes back to earlier times and portrays that aspect of the super-sensible world which has created pure intellectualism.

Then we see that in Central Europe this becomes an impossibility. Goethe and Schiller, and before them Lessing, cannot place themselves within the social order in a way which enables them to accept it. They all look back to Shakespeare, but to that Shakespeare who himself went back into the past. They want the past to lead to something different from the present time in which they find themselves. Shakespeare is in a way satisfied with his environment; but they are dissatisfied with theirs.

Out of this mood of spiritual revolution Goethe creates the drama of Götz von Berlichingen, and Schiller the dramas of his youth. We see how the external reality of the world is criticized, and how in the artistic realm there is an ebbing and flowing of something that can only be achieved in ideas, something that can only be achieved in the spirit. Therefore we can say: In Goethe and Schiller there is no acceptance of the present time. They have to comfort themselves, so far as external sense-perceptible reality is concerned, with what works down out of the spiritual world. Shakespeare in a way brings the super-sensible world down into the sense-perceptible world. Goethe and Schiller can only accept the sense-perceptible world by constantly turning their attention to the spiritual world. In the dramas of Goethe and Schiller we have a working together of the spiritual with the physical—basically, an unresolved disharmony. I then said that if we were to go further eastwards we would find that there is nothing on the earth that is spiritual. The East of Europe has not created anything into which the spirit plays. The East flees from the external working of the world and seeks salvation in the spirit above.

I was able to clothe all this in an Imagination by saying to you: Let us imagine Faust as Hamlet's teacher, a professor in Wittenberg. Hamlet sits at his feet and listens to him, after which he returns to the West and accustoms himself once again to the western way of life. But if we were to seek a being who could have gone to the East, we should have had to look for an angel who had listened to Faust from the spiritual world before going eastwards. Whatever he then did there would not have resembled the deeds and actions of Hamlet on the physical plane but would have taken place above human beings, in the spiritual world.

Yesterday, I then described how, out of this mood, at the time when he was making the acquaintance of Schiller, Goethe felt impelled to bring the being of man closer to the spiritual world. He could not do this theoretically, in the way Schiller, the philosopher, was able to do in his aesthetic letters, but instead he was urged to enter the realm of Imagination and write the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Then Schiller felt the urge to bring the external reality of human life closer to the spirit—I might say experimentally—in Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp), by letting a belief in the stars hold sway like a force of destiny over the personality of Wallenstein, and in Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) by letting a destiny run its course virtually entwined with a belief in the stars. These personalities were impelled ever and again to turn back to the time when human beings still had direct intercourse with the spiritual world.

Further, I said that Goethe and Schiller lived at a time when it was not yet possible to find a new entry into the spiritual world from out of a modern soul constitution. Schiller in particular, with his philosophical bent, had he lived longer and finished the drama about the Knights of Malta, would have come to an understanding of how, in an order like this, or like that of the Templars, the spiritual worlds worked together with the deeds of human beings. But it was not granted to Schiller to give the world the finished drama about the Knights of Malta, for he died too soon. Goethe, on the other hand, was unable to advance to a real grasp of the spiritual world, so he turned back. We have to say that Goethe went back to Catholic symbolism, the Catholic cultus, the cultus of the image, though he did so in an essentially metamorphosed form. We cannot help but be reminded of the good nun Hrosvitha's legend of Theophilus² from the ninth century, when Goethe in his turn allows Faust to be redeemed in the midst of a Christianizing tableau. Although his genius lets him present it in a magnificently grand and artistic manner, we cannot but be reminded, in ‘The Eternal Feminine bears us aloft’, of the Virgin Mary elevating the ninth-century Theophilus.

An understanding of these things gives us deep insight into the struggle within intellectualism, the struggle in intellectualism which causes human beings to experience inwardly the thought-corpse of what man is before descending through birth—or, rather, through conception—into his physical life on earth. The thoughts which live in us are nothing but corpses of the spirit unless we make them fruitful through the knowledge given by spiritual science. Whatever we are, spiritually, up to the moment when earthly life begins, dies as it enters our body, and we bear its corpse within us. It is our earthly power of thought, the power of thought of our ordinary consciousness.

How can something that is dead in the spiritual sense be brought back to life? This was the great question which lived in the souls of Goethe and Schiller. They do not bring it to expression philosophically but they sense it within their feeling life. And they compose their works accordingly. They have the feeling: Something is dead if we remain within the realm of the intellect alone; we must bring it to life. It is this feeling which makes them struggle to return to a belief in the stars and to all sorts of other things, in order to bring a spiritual element into what they are trying to depict. It is necessary for us to be aware of how the course of world evolution is made manifest in such outstanding personalities, how it streams into their souls and becomes the stuff of their struggles. We cannot comprehend our present time unless we see that what this present time must strive for—a new achievement of the spiritual world—is the very problem which was of such concern for Goethe and Schiller.

What happened as a result of the great transition which took place in the fifteenth century was something of which absolutely no account is taken in ordinary history. It was, that the human being acquired an entirely different attitude towards himself. But we must not endeavour to capture this in theoretical concepts. We must endeavour to trace it in what human beings sensed; we must find out how it went through a preparation and how it later ran its course after the great change had been fulfilled in its essential spiritual force.

There are pointers to these things at crucial points in cultural evolution. See how this comes towards us in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.³ You all know the story. You know how crucial it was for the whole of Parzival's development that he first of all received instruction from a kind of teacher as to how he was to go through the world without asking too many questions. As a representative of that older world order which still saw human beings as having direct intercourse with the spiritual world, Gurnemanz says to Parzival: Do not ask questions, for questioning comes from the intellect, and the spiritual world flees from the intellect; if you want to approach the spiritual world you must not ask questions.

But times have changed and the transition begins to take place. It is announced in advance: Even though Parzival goes back several more centuries, into the seventh or eighth century, all this was nevertheless experienced in advance in the Grail temple. Here, in a way, the institutions of the future are already installed, and one of them is that questions must be asked. The essential point is that with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period the situation of the human being changes. Previously it was inappropriate to ask questions because conditions held sway about which Goethe speaks so paradoxically:

The lofty might
Of Science, still
From all men deeply hidden!
Who takes no thought,
To him 'tis brought,
'Tis given unsought, unbidden!

In those times it was right not to ask questions, for that would have driven away the spirits! But in the age of the intellect the spiritual world has to be rediscovered through the intellect and not by damping down the processes of thought. The opposite must now come into play; questions must be asked. As early as Parzival we find a portrayal of the great change which brings it about in the fifth post-Atlantean period that the longing for the spiritual world now has to be born out of the human being in the form of questions to be formulated.

But there is also something else, something very remarkable, which comes to meet us in Parzival. I should like to describe it as follows. The languages which exist today are far removed from their origins, for they have developed as time has gone on. When we speak today—as I have so often shown—the various combinations of sounds no longer remind us of whatever these combinations of sounds denote. We now have to acquire a more delicate sense for language in order to experience in it all the things that it signifies. This was not the case where the original languages of the human race were concerned. In those days it was known that the combination of sounds itself contained whatever was experienced in connection with the thing depicted by those sounds. Nowadays poets seek to imitate this. Think, for instance, of ‘Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt’.⁴ Poetic language has here imitated something of what the poet wants us to see externally. But this is mere derived imitation. In olden times every single sound in language was felt to have the most intimate connection with what was happening all around. Today only some local dialects can lay claim to giving us some sense for the connection between external reality and the words spoken in dialect. However, language is still very close to our soul—it is a special element in our soul.

It is another consequence of the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period that this has become deposited as something very deeply sensed within the human soul, again a fact which is left out of account by both philology and history. The fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean period human beings lived more within their language and that in the fifth post-Atlantean period this is no longer the case, brings about a different attitude by human beings towards the world. You can understand that human beings with their ego are linked quite differently to what is going on around them if, in using language, they go along with all the rushing of waves, the thundering and lightning, and whatever else is happening out there. This becomes ever more detached as the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period progresses. The ego becomes more inward, and language together with the ego also becomes more inward, but at the same time less meaningful as regards external matters. Such things are most certainly not perceived by the knowledge of today, which has become so intellectual. There is hardly any concern to describe such things. But if what is taking place in mankind is to be correctly understood, they will have to be described.

Imagine what can come into being. Imagine vividly to yourselves, here the fourth post-Atlantean period, and here the fifth. The transition is of course gradual, but for the sake of explanation I shall have to talk in extremes. In the fourth post-Atlantean period you have here the things of the world (green). The human being with his words, depicted within him, here in red, is still connected with the things. You could say he 'lives over' into the things through the medium of his words. In the fifth post-Atlantean period the human being possesses his words within his soul, separated off from the world.

Imagine this clearly, even almost in grotesque detail. Looking at the human being here in the fourth post-Atlantean period, you might say of him that he still lives with the things. The things he does in the outside world will proceed to take place in accordance with his words. If you see one of these human beings performing a deed, and if at the same time you hear how he describes the deed, there is a harmony between the two. Just as his words are in harmony with external things, so are his deeds in harmony with the words he speaks. But if a human being in the fifth post-Atlantean period speaks, you can no longer detect that his words resound in what he does. What connection with the deed can you find today in the words: I have chopped wood! In what is taking place out there in the activity of chopping we can no longer sense in any way a connection with the movement of the chopper. As a result, the connection with the sounds of the words gradually disappears; they cease to be in harmony with what is going on outside. We no longer find any connection between the two. So then, if someone listens pedantically to the words and actually does

what lies in the words, the situation is quite different. Someone might say: I bake mice. But if someone were actually to bake mice, this would seem grotesque and would not be understood.

This was sensed, and so it was said: People ought to consider what they actually have in their soul in conjunction with what they do externally; the relationship between the two would be like an owl looking in a mirror! If someone were to do exactly what the words say, it would be like holding up a mirror to an owl. Out of this, in the second half of the fourteenth century, Till Eulenspiegel arose.⁵ The owl's mirror is held up in front of mankind. It is not Till Eulenspiegel who has to look in the mirror. But because Till Eulenspiegel takes literally what people say with their dry, abstract words, they suddenly see themselves, whereas normally they do not see themselves at all. It is a mirror for the owls because they can really see themselves in it.

Night has fallen. In past times, human beings could see into the spiritual world. And the activity of their words was in harmony with the world. Human beings were eagles. But now they have become owls. The world of the soul has become a bird of the night. In the strange world depicted by Till Eulenspiegel, a mirror is held up before the owl.

This is quite a feasible way of regarding what appears in the spiritual world. Things do have their hidden reasons. If we fail to take note of the spiritual background, we also fail to understand history, and with it the chief factor in humanity today. It is especially important to depart from the usual external characterization of everything. Look in any dictionary and see what absurd explanations are given for Eulenspiegel! He cannot be understood without entering into the whole process of cultural and spiritual life. The important thing in spiritual science is to actually discover the spirit in things, not in a way that entails a conceptual knowledge of a few spiritual beings who exist outside the sense-perceptible world, but in a way which leads us to an ability to see reality with spiritual eyes.

The change which took place, between the time when human beings felt themselves to be close to the spiritual world and the later time when they felt as though they had been expelled from that world, can be seen in other areas too. Try to develop a sense for the profound impulse which runs through something like the Parzival epic. See how Parzival's mother dresses him in a simpleton's clothes because she does not want him to grow up into the world which represents the new world. She wants him to remain in the old world. But then he grows up from the sense-perceptible world into the world of the spirit.

The seventeenth century also possesses a kind of Parzival, a comical Parzival, in which everything is steeped in comedy. In the intellectualistic age, if one is honest, one cannot immediately muster the serious attitude of soul which prevails in Parzival. But the seventeenth century too, after the great change had taken place, had its own depiction of a character who has to set out into the world, lose himself in it, finally ending-up in solitude and finding the salvation of his soul. This is Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus.⁶ Look at the whole process of the story. Of course you must take the whole tone into account, on the one hand the pure, perhaps holy mood of Parzival, and on the other the picaresque, comical mood. Consider Simplicissimus, the son of well-to-do peasants in the Spessart region. In the Thirty Years’ War their house is burnt down. The son has to flee, and finds his way to a hermit in the forest who teaches him all kinds of things, but who then dies. So here he is, abandoned in the world and having to set off on his travels. He becomes immersed in all the events and blows of fate offered by the Thirty Years’ War. He arrives at the court of the governor of Hanau. Externally he has learnt nothing, externally he is a pure simpleton; yet he is an inwardly mature person for all that. But because externally he is a pure simpleton the governor of Hanau says to himself: This is a simpleton, he knows nothing; he is Simplicissimus, as naive as can be. What shall I train him to be? I shall train him to be my court fool.

But now the external and the internal human being are drawn apart. The ego has become independent in respect of the external human being. It is just this that is shown in Simplicissimus. The external human being in the external world, trained to be the court fool, is the one who is considered by all and sundry to be a fool. But in his inner being Simplicissimus in his turn considers all those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. For although he has not learnt a thing, he is nevertheless far cleverer than all those who have made him into a fool. He brings out of himself the other intellectuality, the intellectuality that comes from the spirit, whereas what comes to meet him from outside is the intellectuality that comes from reasoning alone. So the intellectualists take him for a fool, and the fool brings his intellectualism from the spiritual world and holds those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. Then he is taken prisoner by some Croats, after which he roams about the world undergoing many adventures, until finally he ends up once more at the hermitage where he settles down to live for the salvation of his soul.

The similarity between Simplicissimus and Parzival has been recognized, but the crucial thing is the difference in mood. What in Parzival's case was still steeped in the mind-soul has now risen up into the consciousness soul. Now caustic wit is at work, for the comical can only have its origin in caustic wit. If you have a feel for this change of mood, you will be able to discover—especially in works which have a broader base than that of a single individuality—what was going on in human evolution. And Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did indeed secrete in Simplicissimus the whole mood, the whole habit of thought of his time. Similarly you can in a way find the people as a whole composing stories, and gathering together all the things which the soul, in the guise of an owl, can see in the mirror, and which become all the tall tales found in Till Eulenspiegel.

It would be a good thing, once in a while, to go in more detail into all these things, not only in order to characterize the various interconnections. I can only give you isolated examples. To say everything that could be said I should have to speak for years. But this is not really what matters. What is crucial is to come closer to a more spiritual conception of these things. We have to learn to know how things which are presented to us purely externally are also connected with the spirit. So we may say: That tremendous change which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period can be seen everywhere, vibrating through the cultural and spiritual evolution of mankind. As soon as you step back a bit from this turning- point of time, you come to see how all the different phenomena point to the magnititude of the change.

Only by taking the interconnections into account is it possible to understand what lies hidden in the figures brought by spiritual and cultural life out of the past and into the present. Take Lohengrin, the son of Parzival. What does it mean that Elsa is forbidden to ask after his name and origin? People simply accept this. Not enough deep thought is given to the question as to why she is forbidden to ask, for usually there are two sides to everything. Certainly this could also be described differently, but one important aspect may be stated as follows: Lohengrin is an ambassador of the Grail; he is Parzival's son. Now what actually is the Grail community? Those who knew the mystery of the Grail did not look on the Grail temple as a place solely for the chosen knights of the Grail. They saw that all those who were pure in heart and Christian in the true sense went to the Grail while they slept—while they were between sleeping and waking. The Grail was seen as the place where all truly Christian souls gathered while they slept at night. There was a desire to be apart from the earth. So those who were the rulers of the Grail also had to be apart from earthly life. Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, was one of these. Those who desired to work in accordance with the Grail impulse had to feel themselves entirely within the spiritual world. They had to feel that they belonged entirely to the spiritual world and certainly not at all to the earthly world. In a certain sense you could say that they had to drink the draught of forgetfulness.

Lohengrin is sent down from the Grail castle. He unites with Elsa of Brabant, that is with the people of Brabant. In the train of Heinrich I he sets out to fight the Hungarians. In other words, at the instigation of the Grail he carries out important impulses of world history. The strength he has from the Grail temple enables him to do this. When we go back to the fourth post-Atlantean period we find that all these things are different. In those days spiritual impulses played their part together with external impulses that could be comprehended by the intellect. This is hardly noticeable in the way history is told today.

We speak quite rightly today of meditative formulae, simple sentences which work in the human being's consciousness through their very simplicity. How many people today understand what is meant when history tells us that those required to take part in the Crusades—they took place in the fourth post-Atlantean period—were provided with the meditative formula ‘God wills it’ and that this formula worked on them with spiritual force. ‘God wills it’ was a kind of social meditation. Keep a look out for such things in history; you will find many! You will find the origins of the old mottos. You will discover how the ancient titled families set out on conquering expeditions under such mottos, thus working with spiritual means, with spiritual weapons. The most significant spiritual weapons of all were used by knights of the Grail, such as Lohengrin. But he was only able to use them if he was not met with recollections of his external origins, his external name, his external family. He had to transport himself into a realm in which he could be entirely devoted to the spiritual world and in which his intercourse with the external world was limited to what he perceived with his senses, devoid of any memories. He had to accomplish his deeds under the influence of the draught of forgetfulness. He was not allowed to be reminded. His soul was not permitted to remember: This is my name and I am a scion of this or that family. So this is why Elsa of Brabant is not allowed to question him. When she does, he is forced to remember. The effect on his deeds is the same as if his sword had been smashed.

If we go back beyond the time when everything became intellectual, so that people also clothed what had gone before in intellectual concepts, imagining that everything had always been as they knew it—if we go back beyond what belongs to the age of the intellect, we find the spiritual realm working everywhere in the social realm. People took the spiritual element into account, for instance, in that they took moral matters just as much into account as physical medicines.

In the age of the intellect, in which all people belong only to the intellect, whatever would they think if they found that moral elements, too, were available at the chemist's! Yet we need only go back a few centuries prior to the great change. Read Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue,⁷ who was a contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Before you stands a knight, a rich knight, who has turned away from God, who in his soul has lost his links with the spiritual world, and who thus experiences this moment of atheism which has come over him as a physical illness, a kind of leprosy. Everyone avoids him. No physician can cure him. Then he meets a clever doctor in Salerno who tells him that no physical medicine can do him any good. His only hope of a cure lies in finding a pure virgin who is prepared to be slain for his sake. The blood of a pure virgin can cure him of his illness. He sells all his possessions and lives alone on a smallholding cared for by the tenant farmer. The farmer has a daughter. She falls in love with the leprous knight, discovers what it is that alone can cure him, and decides to die for him. He goes with her to the doctor in Salerno. But then he starts to pity her, preferring to keep his illness rather than accept her sacrifice. But even her willingness to make the sacrifice is enough. Gradually he is healed.

We see how the spirit works into cultural life, we see how moral impulses heal and were regarded as healing influences. Today the only interpretation is: Ah, well, perhaps it was a coincidence, or maybe it is just a tale. Whatever we think of individual incidents, we cannot but point out that, during the time which preceded the fifteenth century, soul could work on soul much more strongly than was the case later; what a soul thought and felt and willed worked on other souls. The social separation between one human being and another is a phenomenon of intellectualism. The more intellectualism flourishes and the less an effort is made to find what can work against it—namely the spiritual element—the more will this intellectualism divide one individuality from another.

This had to come about; individualism is necessary. But social life must be found out of individualism. Otherwise, in the ‘social age’ all people will do is be unsociable and cry out for Socialism. The main reason for the cry for Socialism is that people are unsocial in the depths of their soul. We must take note of the social element as it comes towards us in works such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich. It makes its appearance in cultural works in which it can be sensed quite clearly through the mood. See how different is the mood in Der arme Heinrich. You cannot call it sentimental, for sentimentality only arose later when people found an unnatural escape from intellectualism. The mood is in a way pious; it is a mood of spirituality. To be honest about the same matters in a later age you have to fall back on the element of comedy. You have to tell your story as Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did in Simplicissimus, or as the people as a whole did in Till Eulenspiegel.

This sense of having been thrown out of the world is found everywhere, not only in poetic works arising out of the folk element. Wherever it appears, you find that what is being depicted is a new attitude of the human being towards himself. From an entirely new standpoint he asks: What am I, if I am a human being? This vibrates through everything. So from the new intellectual standpoint the question is asked over and over again: What is the human being? In earlier times people turned to the spiritual world. They truly sought what Faust later seeks in vain. They turned to the spiritual world when they wanted to know: What actually is the human being? They knew that outside this physical life on earth the human being is a spirit. So if he wants to discover his true being, which lives in him also in physical, earthly life, then he will have to turn to the spiritual world. Yet more and more human beings are failing to do this very thing.

In Faust Goethe still hints: If I want to know the spirit, I must turn to the spiritual world. But it does not work. The Earth Spirit appears, but Faust cannot recognize it with his ordinary knowledge. The Earth Spirit says to him: ‘Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, not me!’⁸ Faust has to turn away and speak to Wagner. In Wagner he then sees the spirit which he comprehends. Faust, ‘image of the Godhead’, cannot comprehend the Earth Spirit. So Goethe still lived in an age which strove to find the being of man out of the spiritual world. You see what came once Goethe had died. Once again people wanted to know what the human being is, this time on the basis of intellectualism. Follow the thread: People cannot turn to the spiritual world in order to discover what the human being is. In themselves, equally, they fail to find the answer, for language has meanwhile become an owl in the soul. So they turned to those who depicted olden times at least in an external fashion. What do we find in the nineteenth century?⁹ In 1836 Jeremias Gotthelf: Bauernspiegel; in 1839 Immermann: Oberhof, Die drei Mahlen, Schwarzwalder Bauern geschichten; George Sand: La Petite Fadette; in 1847 Grigorovich: Unhappy Anthony; in 1847-51 Turgeniev: Sportsman's Sketches.

We have here the longing to find in simple people the answer to the question: What is the human being? In olden times you turned to the spiritual world. Now you turned to the peasant. During the course of two decades the whole world develops a longing to write village stories in order to study the human being. Because people cannot recognize themselves, at best looking in the mirror as if they are owls, they turn to simple folk instead. What they can prove in every detail, from Jeremias Gotthelf to Turgeniev, is that everything is striving to get to know the human being. In all these village stories, in all these simple tales, the unconscious endeavour is to achieve a knowledge of man. From this kind of viewpoint spiritual and cultural life can become comprehensible.

This is what I wanted to show you in these three lectures, in order to illustrate the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not enough to describe this transition with a few abstract concepts—which is what was naturally done at first. Our task is to illumine the whole of reality with the light of the spirit through Anthroposophy. These lectures have beenan example of this.

• 1 . John Milton, 1608-1674. English poet and puritan politician. His epic poem Paradise Lost was finished by 1665.
• 2 . Lecture Twelve, Note 7
• 3 . Wolfram von Eschenbach, c.1170-1220. One of the greatest medieval German poets. Parzival was probably written between 1200 and 1210.
• 4 . #8216;And it bubbles and seethes, and it hisses and roars’, Der Taucher by Friedrich von Schiller, translated by E. Bulwer Lytton in The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, Leipzig 1844.
• 5 . Till Eulenspiegel, a popular German peasant jester, was supposed to have died in Winn in 1350. The first extant text of the chapbook in High German chronicling his escapades was published in 1515. The name ‘Eulenspieger means, literally, ‘owl's mirror’. (Tr.)
• 6 . Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, d.1676. German writer. Simplicissimus, published in 1669, is said to be the greatest German novel of the seventeenth century.
• 7 . Hartmann von Aue, c.1170-1213. Middle High German poet. Der arme Heinrich (Poor Henry).
• 8 . ‘Thou'rt like the spirit’: Faust Part One. The Study.
• 9 . Jerennas Gotthelf (A. Bitzius), 1797-1854; Karl Immermann, 1796-1840; George Sand (A.A.L. Dupin-Dudevant), 1804-1876; D.W. Grigorovich, 1818-1883; I.S. Turgeniev, 1818-1883.

The first result of our meditation is that we get a feeling for the fact that we strive for and make a connection with beings of the higher hierarchies, and that this should express itself in such a way that we feel that we're entering higher worlds, that we've arrived at the place where we originated; that's the way we should experience it. This feeling of being taken into the spiritual world should be warm and alive. One who wants to enter this spiritual world must tell himself: Everything must change in an esoteric—his concepts, feelings and knowledge must change. Let's take men's egoism—it's Luciferic beings who gave us memory. And while we're frugal in physical life, we waste an awful lot of soul and spiritual forces. We must become economical with these forces and transform them into perception forces. To do this, we must practice self-knowledge. We spray out our feelings and sentiments too selflessly from morn to eve. Therefore we must first go through egotism in soul and spiritual things. An esoteric is in danger of increasing his egoism here, and so a moral and intellectual catharsis of a man must accompany all true esoteric work.

We must realize that something impossible is being demanded of us esoterics, and that we're striving towards this impossible thing. For all striving is a striving towards the impossible, and it's also impossible to be unegoistical.

We must try to have the right feeling about all developmental striving. A craving for knowledge and progress is not the right thing. We should earnestly feel that it's our duty to develop, for the divine spirit has placed forced in us that he develops without help from us, but he has also placed active forces in us that a man must develop through deeds. It's the greatest sin against the divine spirit not to develop these forces that the Godhead has placed in us for the benefit of human evolution and progress These forces in us are so strong that they lead us up into the spiritual world, although it may take a long time. Therefore an esoteric should tell himself: “I'll wait, because I know that the forces in me will sooner or later lead me up into the spiritual world.” They do this if we're devoted to the spiritual world in the right way.

The accessory exercises develop the qualities in us that are necessary for the physical plane; these are controlled thinking, actions one chooses oneself, equanimity, etc. That way we'll gradually have a chamber in our heart, in our soul, in which we keep our most sacred things, in which we're esoterics, whereas as men we stand outside in the life. And so conflict with ourselves can be taken for granted; we must become fighters when we become esoterics.

Meditators complain that thoughts storm in and disturb them, and to this one can reply that it's beings fluttering around who storm in on us ever more strongly. Here one can only say: Be glad that this is so; this is the result of meditation and it shows you that thoughts are a spiritual power. Courage, fearlessness and confidence are qualities that an esoteric needs on his path.

One result of meditation is that we get a feeling that we're making contact with beings in the higher hierarchies; we experience this as a warm, vital feeling of being taken into higher worlds, as an arrival at the place where we originated. The feeling of being admitted to the spiritual world must be warm and vital.

All concepts, feelings and knowledge must become different in an esoteric.

Memory was given to us by Luciferic beings.

People who are thrifty in physical life are often very wasteful in their soul-spiritual life. We should be economical with these forces and transform them into seeing forces. Only self-knowledge can lead us to this. We spray out our feelings and emotions too selflessly from morn to evening.

We must first pass through egoism in the soul-spiritual domain There is a danger that by trying to enter the spiritual world one will also become egotistical in the physical world. That's why moral and intellectual purification go hand in hand in a correct training.

We should realized that the impossible is being demanded of us esoterics and that we're striving for the impossible. All such striving is impossible, and being unegotistical is also impossible.

Greed for knowledge and progress is not the right thing for an esoteric. The right thing is an earnest feeling that it's our duty to develop, for the Divine Spirit has placed forces in us that he develops without our help; these are passive forces. But the Godhead has also placed active forces in us that a man must actively develop himself. And it's the greatest sin against the Divine spirit to not develop the forces that the Godhead has placed in us for the good of the evolution and progress of mankind. These forces in us are so strong that they lead us into the spiritual world—though it may take years and so we mustn't get impatient, but should tell ourselves: I'll wait, for I know that these forces do this—if we're just devoted to the spiritual world in the right way.

Accessory exercises develop qualities that are necessary for the physical plane, such as thought control, equanimity, etc.

Eventually we'll have a place in our heart or soul in which we preserve our most sacred things, in which we're esoterics, whereas in outside life we stand on the physical plane. Of course this doesn't happen without a battle. As esoterics we must become fighters.

Thoughts that storm in on us are the spiritual world's beings who flutter around us, and the more we try to keep them away, the more they storm in on us. We shouldn't complain about this. One can tell a pupil to be glad that this is so, for it's a result of meditation that shows that thoughts are a spiritual power. Courage, fearlessness and confidence are what an esoteric needs.

Dear attendees! When people of the present reflect on today's plight, today's misery, they first ask about the causes of this plight, this misery. And he also asks: How can we escape from the confusion, from the chaos of social human development that we have fallen into? Such questions will usually be directed towards the particular inclinations of today's man and towards the most immediate external causes, which lie in the terrible events of the last five to six years. Or their thoughts will be directed to measures that address the external factors in order to alleviate the suffering and chaos in which we find ourselves. However, many people will not be satisfied with what the very last few years can tell them. He will turn his attention to a longer period of time, to the last decades, perhaps centuries, during which, albeit less vividly for humanity, what has come to expression so terribly in recent years has prepared itself, as, figuratively speaking, a thunderstorm prepares itself over a long period of sultriness, and then suddenly discharges. But even here, we get stuck in seeking external causes and in seeking external measures to alleviate the misery. In a way, one-sidedly, with such thinking, with such a feeling, one is quite right. And to what extent one is right, what can fruitfully arise from an understanding of our world situation with regard to the external, I will take the liberty of talking about in more detail the day after tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen. Today, however, I would like to speak of those causes that were at work in the human inner life and that present humanity will have to consider changing if it wants to escape from the chaotic situation in which it finds itself.

Is it not, then, readily apparent to any observer who takes a somewhat closer and benevolent look at what is going on in humanity today, that we are in this age, in which we hear from so many hearts, from so many souls, we hear the call for a more social organization of our conditions than those we have had so far, is it not strange that, despite hearing this call, we see intense anti-social impulses prevailing everywhere in our present humanity? Yes, that is precisely the difficulty that confronts the serious observer of our world situation: the fact that one is supposed to direct one's energies towards a more social organization of our human life at a time when, from the depths of the soul, anti-social drives are rising up throughout our entire civilized world. This emergence of anti-social instincts is connected with the fact that it is very difficult for today's human being to fulfill a longing that is not even consciously, but more or less unconsciously, in his soul, but which, even if unconsciously, asserts itself so strongly in today's humanity that it often comes to the fore in a pathological way, both morally and even outwardly physically. The longing — as I said, it is not easily recognized, because for many people today it still expresses itself unconsciously — the longing is this: in a new way, in the way that people have been educated over the past decades, and even through the last three to four centuries, in the way of gaining a relationship to that which, as an inkling at least, if not as a fully articulated consciousness, lives in every soul, as an inkling of a superhuman being in our transitory, in our sensual human existence. One could say that today's human being is in search of the supersensible human being. And anyone who looks more deeply into the needs of our present time will, above all, feel that it is the first duty of the spiritual aspirant to meet this yearning and longing of contemporary humanity.

One of the most important tasks of our time is to satisfy this inner soul longing, which expresses itself in this yearning and longing. But the way in which people in the broadest circles still want to meet this longing today is not how I will speak to you this evening. What I will have to say to you is spoken from a point of view that I have been presenting for years now as anthroposophical spiritual science.

The task of anthroposophical spiritual science is to seek a path into the supersensible world for people who have absorbed the ideas, sensations, feelings and will impulses of modern times that have emerged from the scientific worldview. From this point of view, what can be said about present-day humanity is either found incomprehensible or unnecessary in the broadest circles today. The spiritual researcher is told: “You are offering something understandable; well, yes, but I won't be able to offer you anything that is so easy to understand, as many still offer today's people, who start from the inner comfort of the soul, which, with regard to the highest goals of spiritual human striving, exists in today's people. Everyone today admits that one must make some effort if one wants to get to know the scientific work that leads to knowing something, say, about the mountains of the moon or the moons of Jupiter; or about the cells of the organism. But when it comes to knowing something about the supersensible world, one rejects out of inner laziness the idea of going a similar difficult path. Today many still say: Man must come to the supersensible foundations of the human being and the world through simple confession or through simple, simple belief in the Bible. What anthroposophical spiritual science has to say is considered too complicated. But this is precisely one of the main problems of our time; one of the problems that underlie our confused social aspirations.

Those who are familiar with human life know that it is insufficient to remain at this simplicity of faith and confession; insufficient because if one cannot regard to the supersensible, if one remains in this comfort zone, then one cannot master the great questions of social life that are confronting humanity in our present time. We do not yet see it, but we will soon see how those who always want to remain with the “simple faith of the confession” cultivate the kind of thinking in humanity that is now manifesting itself in the social turmoil across Europe and in the civilized world in general.

They are calling on people to return to the simple faith of the confession, because they do not know that remaining with this simple faith has produced what appears today as chaos and confusion.

Therefore, anthroposophical spiritual science regards it as a first duty to speak to the present human being about these things from its very different point of view. When the present human being hears the intimation in his heart, in his soul, about the supersensible human being, then he looks up at himself in a kind of self-knowledge, away from the world. What presents itself to the human being, according to the state of the present consciousness? Today, when a person reflects on his own being, he expresses what presents itself to him when he reflects on his own being by saying: This human being consists of body and soul. And then the person believes that he gets to know his body by observing it with his senses; by then seeking to grasp the sensory observation with the thinking mind. And for that which man cannot attain by this path, he turns to current science, to natural science, to that which biology, physiology and so on have to say about the human body. And then man believes that he really knows something about the one part of the human being, about the human body, when he has taught himself in this way. And then he may also reflect on what lives in the depths of his soul as thinking, feeling and willing. But when he brings to consciousness what is in the depths of his soul, he is immediately confronted with the great mystery of the human being. For he must find that Yes, that which appears to me externally as my body is something quite different, something radically different, from that which reveals itself within my soul as thinking, feeling and willing. And then the human being asks: What is the relationship between what reveals itself to me inwardly as soul and what is external to me as body? And underlying this human puzzle lies something great and powerful in human nature. At the root of it lies the great question of the meaning of life; the question: How can I, if I believe that life should have a meaning, ever believe that what lives in what appears to me as the transient, sensual human body can arise and disappear with this external, sensual body? What is the relationship between the soul and this external, sensual body?

When this question confronts him, in most cases man cannot perceive it as anything other than a comprehensive mystery. And if he turns from his own, as a rule impotent, thinking about this question to those who, in accordance with today's thinking, want to scientifically determine the relationship between body and soul, he usually finds that they have no more to say than what he has already encountered in such a mysterious way: Philosophical and other worldviews leave the serious questioner in this field truly quite unsatisfied.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, therefore takes completely different paths to the supersensible, and it cannot speak about this supersensible in any other way than in a way that is very different from the way of external science. For hardly anyone becomes a true spiritual researcher who has not learned, learned in his own way, how impossible it is to recognize anything about the supersensible human being through ordinary reflection and ordinary external science. Not only must one speak differently when discussing these things from the standpoint of anthroposophical spiritual science than what the senses and the mind offer to man, but one must also speak in a different way. And that is precisely why one is still little understood today because this way is unfamiliar. What is understood better, at least one believes this, is simple, unadorned faith. But this no longer satisfies humanity, which has been educated over the last three to four centuries. If you want to hear the spiritual researcher talk about the very first starting points of his spiritual science, you will hear something different from him than you hear from those who have gone through the external science of nature today.

Isn't it the case that when someone who has become a “specialist” in some field, as they say, tells us about what he has gone through in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the observatory, that he he speaks about everything he is talking about with a certain calmness, so that one can see that his state of mind was quite even while he was working on this or that scientific subject in the laboratory or in the clinic or in the observatory. The spiritual researcher cannot speak to you in this way about his way of knowing. Ask him how he arrived at his insights, and he will not be able to speak to you of that indifferent research that is of the kind I have just characterized. Instead, the spiritual researcher will have to speak to you of the inner soul struggles, the suffering and pain that his soul went through in surmounting them before he could take any step towards the insights we will be talking about this evening. The spiritual researcher who has come to real knowledge of the supersensible has repeatedly faced inner abysses in the face of which it seems as if the soul must plunge into nothingness. And he knows how to tell what it means to muster all one's strength in order to develop that in the soul which carries the soul into those regions in which the real supersensible human being, not just an illusion, can be seen.

This is what the spiritual researcher really has to go through within himself. For he must have a different relationship to external nature and to himself than the ordinary researcher. I do not wish to be misunderstood, my dear audience, so I will say from the outset: the one who has become a spiritual researcher in the sense meant here does not disdain the natural science of the present day, which has achieved such great triumphs. On the contrary, he regards it as the fundamental condition for his spiritual research that he has first familiarized himself with the great and powerful results of natural science of the last few centuries. And he fully recognizes this natural science. For only in this way does he know how to look beyond this natural science in order to penetrate into the spirit to which the human being also belongs.

The natural scientist is right to speak of certain limits to his knowledge of nature. And it is precisely the most cautious natural scientists who have said that natural science always leads people to concepts and ideas that cannot be taken further in the study of nature. Hasty people then speak of such limits as a restriction of human knowledge in general. The cautious natural scientist knows that he cannot go beyond these limits with natural research alone. He will therefore, as long as he remains a natural scientist, stop at these limits; let us say, at such concepts that present themselves to natural research as unbridgeable gaps, such as the essence of matter, the essence of force, and many others; the natural scientist stops there. The spiritual researcher cannot do that. The spiritual researcher begins his work precisely where the natural scientist must stop, by fighting out inner struggles with what is the limit of natural science. The whole inner life of the soul must be brought into activity. And while the natural scientist stops at such limits, the spiritual researcher begins to find his way vividly into ideas and concepts and perceptions and feelings of such limits. Then he experiences something by delving ever deeper into that which science cannot or should not say anything about; then he senses what it actually means to live with the limits of natural knowledge.

What I am going to say now, my dear audience, can of course be seen as not being logically provable in the usual sense. For it is not something that has been thought up. It is what spiritual research experiences at a certain point in its development.

In this inner, living experience, the spiritual researcher comes to a great, shattering conclusion by experiencing what can be experienced at the limits of natural knowledge: He has to give himself the answer out of inner experience, out of his own experience, that we as human beings could never become social beings in our physical-sensual life between birth and death if we were to transcend the limits of natural knowledge. In a remarkable way, we are adapted to the way of the world as human beings. We would not have something – this is recognized by the spiritual researcher in experience – we would not have something in our human nature if we were not stopped by limits when we want to explore nature; we would not have something very essential; we would not have that which is a basic condition of our social, human coexistence; we would not have in us the power of love.

You see, dear attendees, that is the first harrowing experience on the path into the supersensible world, that you get to know human nature in such a way that you say to yourself: We must be limited in our view of nature, then from us in looking at nature, the power that submerges into everything without limits; then we humans would pass each other by in physical life, could not develop sympathy and antipathy, could not develop the most diverse nuances of love, without which life cannot be. In order for man to live between birth and death, it is necessary that he be limited with regard to his knowledge of nature. Within this limit, the power of love can then arise. But this also points the way in which the path can nevertheless be followed, which, in a sense, leads to the knowledge of the supersensible world.

We have the power of love in ordinary life because we are physical human beings to a certain degree; and this degree is more or less sufficient for our external social life – admittedly very little in some epochs, as in the present – but when it is fully developed, it is sufficient for our external social life. What is necessary with regard to this power of love and other things in order to take the spiritual path into the supersensible, I have described in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'; today I can only hint at a few fundamental things, but that shall be done.

Above all, it is necessary that when one has gone through what I have just mentioned, one can be imbued with a certain inner state of mind that a person in ordinary life has only to a very limited extent; I would call this state of mind 'intellectual humility'. If you go through what I have described, you come to say to yourself: No matter how talented you are in terms of ordinary thinking and research skills, you have to admit to yourself: You cannot penetrate into the supersensible world at all with these ordinary thinking and research skills. That is what a person wants. That is why he is intellectually immodest in ordinary life.

But it is precisely this intellectual immodesty that must first be combated. We must be able to say the following, for example. Let us assume that a five-year-old child has a volume of Goethean poems in his hand. With his abilities, he will not be able to do with this volume of Goethean poems what should be done with it by virtue of the essence of this volume of poems. Just as this five-year-old child faces the essence of this book of poems, so — we must admit in intellectual modesty — we face the world and ourselves in relation to the supersensible essence with our ordinary abilities to think, feel and research. Just as a five-year-old child must first develop the abilities that will enable him to approach the essence of a book of poetry, so too, in full intellectual humility, must the human being, if he wants to become a spiritual researcher, first develop ordinary thinking, ordinary feeling and ordinary will. And just as the soul and physical abilities of a five-year-old child are developed from the outside through his education, so anyone who wants to know something about the supersensible world from direct perception must take his soul development into his own hands. But that means, my dear audience, that one must be able to make the confession in a real inner soul modesty: The strength you need to recognize the supersensible must be developed within yourself. And it must be developed in detail.

As a rule, one will not come to this development at all if one is not made aware of it through the experiences I have already described today, that no matter how deeply one has penetrated into the outer world of natural phenomena, that with this thinking, with the achievements about the outer natural phenomena, one can know nothing about what is going on in the human body, in order, for example, to gain a relationship to what we, as thinking, call an important soul activity. There one must first bring this thinking to a completely different level than it is in ordinary life. One must develop this thinking further. This can be done if one performs certain

of the soul that one does instinctively and unconsciously in ordinary life, if one gets into the habit of making these actions more and more conscious. I will pick out two things from the many things that the spiritual researcher has to do in this regard. The first is that the spiritual researcher must develop the powers of attention and interest in a completely different way than they are developed in ordinary life. In ordinary life, we become aware of something when our senses are drawn to it. We then direct our attention to the thing when we are made aware of it by external impressions.

But as a rule we do not exert ourselves out of the innermost power of our soul to strengthen the power of attention; something from outside awakens our interest. In ordinary life, it is always the case with a person that the interest aroused from outside makes his soul attentive. If a person now practices earnestly and worthily to be attentive, to pay constant and long attention to that which he wants to be attentive to only out of the inner power of thought, if he turns his interest to things that do not impose themselves on him, to which he turns out of his very own, innermost initiative , he does such exercises as I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” The path into the supersensible worlds is a long one, but if a person practices for a long time, he will finally notice that his thinking becomes quite different from what it is in ordinary life. He notices that this thinking begins to acquire an inner vitality. And he notices that he actually has a completely new kind of inner, living thinking in him, thinking that is set in motion from within. One really sees through what develops as a new thinking through effort, through a development; one really sees this when one patiently and gradually sees it arise in the soul: You have your old thinking; your thinking that more or less passively joins in with things, that continues even when you are not making an effort, when you are not somehow exerting your senses or your mind as the basis of this thinking. This thinking continues, it does not sleep. But as if standing above this thinking, observing it going on beside it, like a kind of dream, there then stands the other, the completely bright, never dreamy thinking, which one develops in the way I have just characterized.

Then one comes to an inner discovery, to an inner experience, which I would now like to describe as the second shattering event on the way into the supersensible worlds: one experiences inwardly that one's ordinary thinking cannot be distinguished from one's outer physical activity; but that the thinking that one develops through one's own power, that proceeds in such a way that one experiences it: It has nothing to do with any external physical activity; it has nothing to do with any nervous or other activity. When you think as I have just described, you know that you are moving in a purely spiritual element with your thinking, and you have your physical self beside you; you have really stepped out of your body. And now you realize that this human being, when it carries out its thinking in this way, when it carries out its inner soul activity, as it is often described in the everyday illusions of human beings. People also believe in many cases, based on today's popular science, that they are indulging in materialistic ideas: we have developed the nervous system into the wonderful brain; in this brain one can see how research in human development is progressing; with each stage of thinking, the brain develops further. And then people say: So thinking, imagining, arises through the activity of the brain, through the activity of the nervous system. And basically, people who know nothing of the independent bodiless thinking that I have just described to you cannot help it, if they are somehow religious, but think of the illusory body.

But the one who gets to know bodiless thinking knows from direct experience another. Let me give you an image: Imagine you are walking along a muddy path; on this path you find furrows; you find impressions in the softened soil that resemble human footsteps. Do you think that someone who now believes that down there, below the surface of the earth, there are forces at work that cause something like impressions of human footsteps to appear on the surface is saying something correct about this fact? No, the person who judges the situation correctly is the one who knows that the furrows have been pressed into the soft soil from the outside. The person who has come to know independent, bodiless thinking knows that the spiritual soul is as independent of the nervous system and the brain as the carriage rolling down the street is independent of the feet of the person walking down the street. Body-free thinking carves furrows into the brain. It is no wonder that, as thinking unfolds in the course of human development, the brain shows imprints of that which develops thinking everywhere. But it is a terrible illusion, one that misleads humanity, to believe that what the brain fears and thereby causes thinking in some way arises from within the nervous system. Only the living, body-free thinking that develops and unfolds out of intellectual modesty can provide insights into that which leads to the immortal human being.

Then, through this body-free thinking, one gets to know the first supersensible part of the human being, that which I have mentioned in my writings - names are not important, but one must have names for things - the etheric body or formative body. This is something that the human being carries within them, just as they carry their physical body, but it is something that cannot be grasped by the external senses and by ordinary thinking; it can be grasped when the human being develops this imaginative thinking - as I call it - which I have been talking about today. Then this imaginative thinking becomes a [mental organ] with which he sees the spiritual human content, the formative forces that permeate the human being, just as the human being has the physical body.

Thus one ascends to the first supersensible aspect of human existence. But one cannot ascend in this way without undergoing other experiences as one ascends to body-free thinking. From the relationship between the limits of knowledge and the power of love in the human being, of which I have spoken to you, you will be able to divine that there are deep, mysterious relationships between the powers of knowledge in the human being and social human life. If a person acquires supersensible thinking, as I have just described it, then he finds a new way in which social life, which takes place between human souls and human beings, is shaped.

We meet people in life. We develop a strong sympathy for some people and a less strong sympathy for others; we may even develop antipathy for some people. But a network of relationships with other people, shaped by the power of love, runs through our entire lives as we interact with others. If one learns to recognize the power of supersensible thinking, then this leads to the realization that the sympathies and antipathies we develop for the people we meet in the physical world come from the fact that we were already connected with these souls before we went through birth or conception. Through the development of thinking, the spiritual view of the world in which we have lived opens up from the physical life – we have lived spiritually and soulfully just as we live here physically and corporally – in which we have lived as in a spiritual world before we descended into the physical world through conception and birth. In our time, it is possible to see into the spiritual world from which we descended before our birth, through a powerful development of thinking out of intellectual modesty. It is neither speculation nor fantasy when we say from such knowledge: How you meet people here in life, soul to soul, is the continuation of how you met them, now entirely in the spirit, in the supersensible world, before those people who enter into relationships here descended into this sensual world. Just as man has been seeking out natural scientific connections in a new way for three to four centuries, so from today onwards he will have to seek them out - otherwise he will never feel his suspicions about the supernatural satisfied - he will have to seek out spiritual connections to the supernatural worlds.

It must be admitted that, when we speak in these terms today, we are still speaking of something quite incomprehensible and incredible to present-day humanity. But anyone who is familiar with the history of cultural development knows the significant way in which people relate to the great cultural advances. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century when a college of physicians and other scholars were asked whether railways should be built. They delivered the verdict – I am not telling a fairy tale, but something that is documented – that railways should not be built because they would undermine the health of those who travel in them due to the great vibrations during the journey. And if they are to be built after all, they said, if people are to be found who will travel in the railways, then at least large, high board walls must be erected to the left and right of the railway so that those who pass the railroad will not suffer from concussion. — Thus fear expressed itself against real progress.

Such fear lives unconsciously in humanity today before the supersensible. We will not be able to fight the anti-social instincts of humanity until we engage in this field, not believing that we get mental concussion when the supernatural is spoken of.

That, dear attendees, is the one link of the human being that looks into prenatal life.

In yet another way, man can take his development into his own hands through the modesty of his soul. This is when, as in the first case I described, he can further develop his thinking if he further develops his will. There is something again that the whole human being develops unconsciously in the course of his life. Let us just admit, my dear audience, that basically we change from week to week, from year to year, from month to month in the purely external development of the human being. We are always learning from life. Just look back at how different you are from ten or twenty years ago. But what we developed in ourselves then, we developed unconsciously. We did not learn to take our further development as human beings, our higher development as human beings, into our own hands. And again, there are methods – you can also read more about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by which one can learn continuously from life; whereby one looks at everything that presents itself in life in such a way that we intervene actively; then we say to ourselves: What we have done there – if we ourselves were higher, more maturely developed, we could do it better. If we constantly develop this modesty in relation to the will – our development can go on and on – and take the opportunity to take our will development into our own hands in the same way that we took our thinking development into our own hands in the way described above, then it turns out that we find our way into the supersensible world in a different direction. What we are now developing within us by further developing our willpower is that, as we go through life, we can always become our own spectator. We then become, as it were, as if we were floating above ourselves asleep at night and looking at our body lying in bed from the outside. Thus, through the inner development of the willpower of the soul, we learn to see ourselves in everything we do.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a strong human power. By immersing yourself in this power, you become independent of your body to a higher degree than simply by developing your thinking. In this way you get to know the higher supersensible being of the human being; that which I would like to call the body of movement, or - don't shudder back, it's just a name - the astral body of the human being. We learn to recognize what is supersensible in us by merely making an effort to move our hands, by working, by developing our will in our own growth, in our own human development. Then, in addition to the etheric body, we get to know the astral body of the human being, which, because we have it, uniquely and solely enables us to truly express the will in the outer world.

But when one experiences within oneself what willpower, developed in this way, actually is, then one looks into the supersensible world in a different direction. Then you first experience: You behave in one of two ways towards people you come into social contact with; you do them good or you do them little good; you do them something purposeful or inappropriate; you act towards them in such a way that they experience the consequences of your action. By developing the powers of will as I have just described, we learn to recognize that we experience what lives through the astral body, through the actual spiritual-soul. The expression 'body' is just an expression. What we develop there carries our supersensible being through the gate of death; and we will experience the continuation of what we have developed in our relationships with people here in the physical world in the manner just described in the spiritual world after death. That is to say, in the spiritual vision, there is an immediate insight into the world that we experience when we have passed through the gate of death. That which connects man with the spiritual world becomes visible when he develops the powers of his soul as I have described. But then, my dear audience, these two powers come together. The power that develops out of thinking, out of living thinking, and the power that develops out of the will, they enter into an inner marriage, as it were. And then, then the contemplation of one's own development becomes something new for man; then something quite new becomes what we call the history of mankind. Oh, the ordinary, external knowledge knows little about this history of mankind, only the external facts. But what is called history today is actually nothing more than a fable convenante. What lives in history, what advances humanity through history, is only really learned in its truth, with the forces that I have just described to you. There one learns to recognize how the spiritual rules in the historical development of humanity.

Now, I do not want to describe to you in abstract terms what I have to say in this field, but I would like to present to you what can have a direct bearing on the great tasks of humanity in the present day. The one who, as I am now doing, looks at more recent human history from the spiritually developed soul forces finds a significant turning point in the development of humanity in the middle of the fifteenth century.

You see, in life, things are often said that are actually illusions or one-sided truths. For example, it is often said that nature – and what is meant is basically the whole of world affairs – nature does not make leaps. In a sense this is true, but in another sense it is completely untrue. Nature is constantly making leaps. Look at a growing plant: the green leaf makes the leap to the colored petal, to the stamens, to the pistil and so on in further growth. So it has also happened in history, leaps and bounds continually; these leaps are not noticed because man does not follow the workings of history in a spiritual way, but only externally. The one who follows the development in history in a spiritual way can clearly see that since the middle of the fifteenth century the human spiritual condition in the civilized world has become quite different than before. We have to distinguish a long period of human development from our own, which began in the middle of the fifteenth century and in which we are still immersed in our developmental epoch. The immediately preceding developmental epoch began around the eighth century BC and lasted from the seventh century BC to the middle of the fifteenth century AD, which external history does not tell. If you look at history as I have described it today, it becomes clear that people were very different in the epoch that began in the eighth century BC and ended in the middle of the fifteenth century. People were so different then that I will briefly illustrate this with an image.

You all know, dear attendees, that today, as he develops in his childhood years, the human being goes through parallel stages with his soul and spirit in relation to his physical development. Just consider – and you can read about what this means in my little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' – how deeply the change of teeth towards the seventh year intervenes in what is developing in the child. And for those who are able to observe well, how important it is that what intervenes in the life of the child intervenes in the soul and spirit much more intensively than people usually believe. This is the first epoch in which, alongside physical development, the human being undergoes a parallel development in relation to his soul and spirit. Man ends the second epoch with sexual maturity in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Man develops quite differently between the seventh and fourteenth year. And again differently, but in such a way that he still has parallelism with physical development, up to the twenty-first year. And anyone who is able to observe closely in our time will see that today's humanity still shows a parallelism in terms of the spiritual and soul up to the age of twenty-seven. Then this parallelism ceases. Then, to a certain extent, we emancipate ourselves inwardly from the physical and bodily in relation to our spiritual and soul. Then these developments no longer go hand in hand. But what I am now describing as a characteristic of present human development, and on which everything that happens between human beings, everything in the human totality depends, was different before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was different throughout the whole long period, although it developed from the eighth century BC to the middle of the fifteenth century. For a much longer time, the human being was afflicted with a parallelism. Even into one's early thirties, one could still experience physical changes that corresponded to psychological changes, although not as strongly as during the change of teeth and sexual maturation. And anyone who really wants to understand what was there in the world with Greek culture, what entered human development with Greek culture, must know that what is usually called Greek human nature, what one perceives as the harmony of Greek culture, what has been felt in such a way that the offspring and also the aftermath of Greek culture are carried into our time, that this is based on this longer ascending developmental capacity of the bodily-physical of human nature. This goes parallel with that which the spiritual-soul qualities are. In the case of the Greeks and Romans, the spiritual-soul qualities were such that one can say: The powers of understanding and feeling developed more instinctively; instinctive feeling, instinctive logic, instinctive understanding, instinctive powers of research are found in that period.

Since the middle of the fifteenth century, the instinctive understanding has been replaced by the self-conscious powers of understanding and feeling. Everything in the state and in society, in the social organism, was different in the period from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD than it can be in our age. From the innermost core of human development, that which stands for today's humanity in the outside world developed. The newer natural science with all that lies in the human soul could never have developed, the new industrialism could never have developed if, around the middle of the fifteenth century, something had not happened in human development that can be called the transition from instinctive to independent soul and emotional powers. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, therefore, man has wanted to place himself at the apex of his personality out of his inner nature. From these inner impulses of human development follows that which is outer economic life, which is economic, industrial order, which is also a scientific direction of knowledge; follows that which can be characterized in such a way that one says: Man, because he was to become self-conscious since the middle of the fifteenth century, had to develop a kind of materialism more or less in the realms of the intellect and also in the practical realm. To a certain extent, he had to be abandoned by the instincts of spiritual life. But today the time has come again when man, self-consciously, must also rise from the attainment of orientation in the material to the conscious grasping of spiritual life, as I have described it.

Now, the best way to see what has changed in the development of humanity is to turn one's gaze to the most significant event that has occurred within this development in the course of the entire human evolution on earth, to the event that gives the actual meaning to the evolution of humanity and the earth, when one turns one's gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha, through which Christianity was founded.

What did humanity, which developed its soul and physical powers as I have described from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD, what did this humanity, which also remained capable of physical development, feel until the 1930s in the face of what mysteriously took place at the Mystery of Golgotha? With the powers of the soul that arise from the instinctive mind and instinctive soul, that arise from a body that, like ours, was only capable of development until the end of the 1920s, was capable of development until the 1930s, this humanity of the Greco-Latin age was able to look at the Mystery of Golgotha and feel a supersensible event in the event of Golgotha. This humanity of the Greco-Latin age could look at the mystery of Golgotha and feel a supersensible event in the event of Golgotha, which broke into human earthly development. In those days people instinctively understood that not just any man had lived in Nazareth or in Palestine at all, but that in this man Jesus of Nazareth a supersensible entity had lived, which the human beings before the development of Christianity could not look at because they were not yet connected with the earth. Through the event of Golgotha, a spiritual essence that had not previously been connected with human development on earth entered this human development through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Humanity, which was capable of development until the middle of the fifteenth century in the way I have described, understood this instinctively.

The development from the mid-fifteenth century to the present should have been different. There was no rule of instinctive understanding or instinctive powers of mind. Unlike the period up to the end of the 1920s, our bodies did not develop into our 30s; but instead of becoming independent today after about the 27th year, we develop the human personality to full freedom through the physical nature. But this education to freedom must find the spirit within itself. Therefore, it must look outward for a while and see only matter. If the spirit were to reveal itself to us through matter, we would have no need to educate ourselves to become spiritual. But under the influence of these human developmental impulses, even the truth of Golgotha has been subject to change. He who, inwardly, does not consider the prejudices of present-day external knowledge, but who inwardly considers the development of humanity's thoughts about Christianity throughout the centuries, knows that in the materialistic age that had to come over humanity since the middle of the fifteenth century, but that must be overcome again from today on, he knows that with that also the views on the mystery of Golgotha had to be materialized. We have already experienced it in the course of the nineteenth century and particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century that people, including theologians, were almost proud no longer to speak of Christ as a supersensible being who lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; but they found it better, as they say, for the enlightened man of the present to speak merely of the 'simple man of Nazareth'. They have lost the Christ and describe the man of Nazareth in materialistic terms, as if the Christ had not lived in him as a supersensible, supermundane entity. They describe him only as a highly developed human being, but still only as a developed “human being”.

Modern humanity also had to go through this test. But it is a test, ladies and gentlemen. And by finding our way out of self-conscious reason, out of self-conscious powers of mind, out of intellectual modesty into the supersensible worlds, as I have described it, we will also find our way back to a supersensible understanding of Christianity. We will consciously learn to look at the Mystery of Golgotha as the people of the Greek era did, as people until the middle of the fifteenth century instinctively looked at the Mystery of Golgotha, which broke into human development after the first third of that Greek-Latin period as the earth's actual meaning. It will be a significant event in the more recent development of humanity when, through the conquest of the spiritual world, through the knowledge of the supersensible human existence, man will also find his way to the mystery of Golgotha in a new way.

Then this new knowledge of Christ will be able to take hold in the souls of the whole civilized world. Then this new Christ idea will overcome what today adheres to the conceptions of Christ out of conventional narrow-mindedness, even out of narrow-mindedness of religious creeds. People, however they may otherwise stand in terms of races and nations, if the path to the mystery of Golgotha is confidently found, they will find this path throughout the civilized world. Then, starting from this impulse, something will come that is being sought today, but from a utilitarian point of view. Today we hear of people who cling to the external, to the pursuit of a League of Nations. And one of those people, who unfortunately were also quite overestimated in Germany at a certain time, one of those who lead people into such abstractions, one of those people is Woodrow Wilson. When one speaks as he does about the founding of a League of Nations, one speaks about something for which one does not first create the conditions out of reality. Those who today speak of the fact that a League of Nations should arise from the aspirations of individual peoples speak in such a way that one can see that they have never grasped the great parable of the Tower of Babel. For what does he actually want? He wants to continue building the Tower of Babel. He wants to leave the nations as they are; he wants to found the League of Nations through the very thing by which they have become nations out of the unified whole. This will result in an illusion, in an abstraction. But it is the other way around. Through a new spiritual life, it is necessary to establish that which can be common to all human souls: the realization of the spiritual center of human development; the realization of the supersensible nature of the Mystery of Golgotha in its significance for all humanity, without distinction of religion and race and nationality. From this perception, from this looking to the Christ-event, the unique Christ-event, will come the real power for the new League of Nations. And people throughout the world, throughout the civilized world, will not find harmony until they have found the path to a new Christianity out of a new conquest of the spirit, a new Christianity that can unite people throughout the world. So we see: This provides the insight that I was able to describe to you, that it leads beyond birth and death to the eternal, supersensible nature of the human being. We see that this realization leads at the same time to such a penetration of human development that it must be one of the most important tasks of the present time. And if one grasps human nature at such a depth that one does not merely encounter the outer human being that today's outer scientific knowledge encounters, if one grasps the human being in such a way that one, out of intellectual modesty, the strength to develop further, as one has developed from childhood to the point where one has arrived in ordinary life, then one also finds the words that unite people.

A strong chaos lives over the civilized earth, a terrible confusion. In every soul must arise the longing to find the way out of such confusion, out of such chaos, confusion and chaos are great. The power that must be applied to escape from them must also be great; it must overcome strong, great prejudices. Even today, for many people, the prejudice that must be overcome may seem too strong, the path to the new understanding of the supersensible event of Golgotha must be taken. For humanity today has before it – we will now have to illuminate this from the outside in the next lecture – two paths. One path goes to the left, the other goes to the right. We can take a one-sided approach by letting the pendulum swing between the two, that which has developed in materialism, in the egoistic personality forces, since the middle of the fifteenth century. But we can also go to the right and consciously conquer the spirit again from our industrial and scientific age. If we learn to recognize that social, supersensible life is inherent in the development of humanity, then what many today still consider a superstition or an illusion will become a realization, that which Lessing pointed out, namely, repeated earthly lives. Lessing, the enlightened man, was the first to point out, as in the dawn of modern times, in his 'Education of the Human Race', that human beings go through repeated earthly lives as long as the earth is in its development. Between these repeated earthly lives, he lives in a spiritual-soul world from which he descends into the physical world through birth or conception, and from which he then ascends again through the gate of death. To find one's way into the great that has already begun with such thoughts with Lessing, with Herder, with Goethe and so on, leads in the right direction. And we in Central Europe, we must now, since the time of external adversity and external misery has perhaps begun for us, [that must] already be said in our difficult time, we must learn to tie in again with those steps that were taken in Central Europe by the great German minds that I have just mentioned, into the supersensible world. And we must have the courage to take further such steps, to go further into the supersensible world. Otherwise humanity will fall back into what can be characterized in the following way.

If humanity wants to go only to the left, then it will continue to develop that which had to come over humanity for a time so that the human being could develop his free personality. From a different point of view, I already described this in the early nineties in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. In order to achieve freedom, man had to develop what led him into the newer age in such a way that he mechanized his spirit. He only overlooks that which is machine-like in the outer world and comprehends it. If he stops at this, he cannot awaken his soul to what I have described today as awakening out of intellectual and volitional modesty; then, in addition to the mechanization of the spirit, there is the vegetarianization of the soul, the drowsiness of the soul. But then, because the body becomes ignoble if it is not glowed through by the spirit-illuminated soul, animalization occurs for the body in addition to the drowsiness of the soul. Then the social demands arise out of the animal instincts. This can be seen in the present. We have a mechanized spiritual life. But we also have the drowsy, plant-like soul, the vegetative soul, with regard to the supersensible human being. And we have what is currently emerging in Eastern Europe, on the large-scale Russian folk soul, as this folk soul is killing; emerging like a new set of social demands, but which is nothing more than the speech of animalized man. That is the third.

If we really want to find a way out of today's chaos and confusion, then we must look without prejudice at the fact that we in Central Europe, and that Western civilization have developed the mechanization of the mind and the drowsiness of the soul, and that as a result, in the East, the animalized passions , which man today only fears but must learn to understand in order to overcome them, so that he can come out of this illusionary, this corrupt socialism of the East and into a true socialism, which we want to talk about the day after tomorrow, a socialism that is permeated by the spirit and the soul. It is necessary for human beings not to go the way of mechanizing the spirit, of making the soul become like that of a vegetable, of animalizing the body, but to go the way that leads them to a penetration of the supersensible human nature and the supersensible nature of the world in general. That he may receive from his higher developed self-consciousness of modern times in his spirit the light, in his soul the warmth, the spiritual, and thereby in his body the ennobling that will lead to real social love, to genuine brotherhood. Only if we find the way to the illumination of the spirit, to the spiritualization of the soul, to the ennobling of the body, only then will we be able to enter into a better future. Then it will not be external matter, the economic process, but spirit and soul that will lead us into this new order. However, the spirit can only guide man if man meets the spirit halfway; if man allows his intellect to glow with humility through the spirit; if man allows the soul to be permeated by what he can experience as spirit. And do not believe that everyone in our time should become a spiritual researcher themselves, although to a certain extent anyone can become a spiritual researcher today; as I explained in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. But while in all other fields one can only look to the belief in authority of scientists in science, what people would like to claim is not true: that supersensible truths, when they are researched, can only be found to be true on the basis of belief in authority. No, human nature is so created that if it only removes the prejudices that the last four centuries have piled up before the human soul, then every single human soul, even if not yet today, will be able to look into the supersensible world and accept what the spiritual researcher has investigated. What the astronomer or the physiologist investigates is accepted by other people. Today, based on common sense, every soul can find the path into this supersensible world through the mere revelation of those who have researched this supersensible world. Then this soul will also find the path into a true social life. Because this social life can never be based on mere natural necessity, on mere external economic or economic necessity. The purified social life can only be based on freedom. But the freedom of external life can only be based on that highest freedom, which must be developed in the innermost part of the human soul. All external freedom may only be in the future, so that humanity may emerge from confusion and chaos. All external freedom may only be the direct announcement of the inner liberation of the human soul.

May man find the way to this inner liberation through the path of the spirit and of soul-searching, so that he can also find it to the outer social liberation.

Dear attendees,

In my lecture the day before yesterday, I tried to show the path into the supersensible world that can be taken by modern humanity and which, from our present-day consciousness and stage of human development, we ourselves demand as a requirement, even if we have so far only sensed this inner soul fact rather than consciously followed it. A challenge to go into the supersensible world by other paths than those we have been accustomed to understand until now.

Not so much because I believe that the direct experience of the content, especially in the form of the supersensible world view that I spoke of the day before yesterday, must also underlie the thoughts and impulses of the reorganization of our external public, namely social life, but because I am convinced that in order to penetrate the supersensible from the point of view of today's man, such a transformation of the entire soul life is necessary, as it must take place, in order to solve the great problems, [in order] to solve the social problems of the present, because, simply, as I believe, thinking, feeling must be trained in such thoughts and ideas about the supersensible, as they have been mentioned, I preceded the lecture here last Saturday with today's lecture. Because, my dear attendees, I do believe that a way out of the confusion and chaos of the present social structure is only possible if we look with full awareness and without fear at the radical transformation that we are currently undergoing with regard to our public life. I do not believe that anyone who sees the World War catastrophe as a mere event that interrupts the course of human development, so to speak, and that can subsequently continue in the same way, I do not believe that anyone who views this war catastrophe in this way is inclined to muster the thoughts and feelings that are necessary today for someone who wants to participate in what is necessary to build. It seems to me that only those who, in this world-catastrophe, can truly recognize the collapse of an old spiritual and world view, and who at the same time can recognize the new demands that have not yet taken on a definite form from which one can expect the necessary for the future, but which already announce at least parts of what we have to strive for. But those who are still steeped in the old way of thinking, who have become accustomed to the old social spirit in their thoughts, who are rooted in the old institutions with their habits of life, still cannot bring themselves to really accept that a fundamental transformation is necessary. And still those who come forward with their new demands, honestly and sincerely, cannot bring themselves to look at the reality of life as thoroughly as is necessary to strip these demands of the character of the factions, of the character of abstract programs, and to think them out, to feel them out of the immediate reality of life. Only when humanity has come to see the terrible abyss that has opened up between two sections of the population today will it be on a par with intellectual life and its demands. In fact, we are living in such a transitional period today that we must bring all the details, all the individual characteristics of a downfall before our soul; that on the other hand we must carefully examine everything that asserts itself in a more or less vague way as new demands.

And so, my dear audience, our gaze is not initially turned to what I spoke about last Saturday when we look at the phenomena of the time. Rather, our gaze is directed to that link in life that is, so to speak, opposed to the actual spiritual current of humanity, but from which all the new demands of the present time arise, and where the collapse of all habits of thought and life becomes apparent; our gaze is turned, if we want to understand the actual character of the time, to economic life. And within this economic life, I think it is quite clear that two views of humanity, two ways of feeling humanity, are asserting themselves, between which there is an abyss, and which today can understand each other less than such currents of humanity have ever understood each other within the development of humanity. There is no inclination to look everywhere for what is really characteristic. Above all, there is no inclination to look at the economic life of the present in such a way as to recognize in it forces other than the purely economic ones, which assert themselves both in the collapse and in the new ascent that is to be hoped for. But a comprehensive view must not shy away from drawing attention to these other forces. Therefore, today I will need to speak not only about economic life, but also about everything else that is part of economic life and which must undergo the same renewal and transformation as economic life itself. I will therefore have to speak to you today about the fundamental challenge of our time as a threefold one. I will have to speak of the social question as a spiritual or cultural question, I will have to speak of the social question as a legal or state question; I will have to speak of the social question as an economic question.

But has not this economic life developed in recent times in such a way that we can say: it basically floods everything, and we have become completely dependent with regard to external public life, also with regard to intellectual life and with regard to legal life, completely dependent on the shaping of our economic life.

Let us first look at what we can call the spiritual culture of the present day. This spiritual culture of the present day has received much praise. Time and again, and rightly so from a certain point of view, it has been emphasized how far humanity has come in terms of the development of spiritual life and spiritual culture. Again and again, people have pointed out how magical our intellectual culture must appear to someone who lived a millennium ago and surveys the human intellectual life of that time. Again and again, people have emphasized how, with the help of human resources, thought can now travel at lightning speed across the whole earth. And again and again, the way in which the boundaries that used to be drawn between the individual cultural areas have been overcome in modern times has been emphasized – and much more of the same.

But little consideration has been given to something that is connected, intimately connected, with the basic character of our newer intellectual life. It is connected with this fundamental character of our newer spiritual life that only a small minority of people can participate in this actual spiritual culture. This spiritual culture is such that only this small minority can find their way into what emerges in the most diverse fields of newer spiritual life when it is about the actual spiritual development of this culture, through their thinking habits and their entire way of feeling. We have a rich literary life, a rich artistic life. We have the most diverse world views. We have a developed ethic and so on, and so on. But all this encompasses human impulses, human ideas, human feelings that arise from the particular soul-orientation of a few. And these few must conquer this spiritual life in that the great mass of people simply cannot participate in it. Anyone who takes a broad view of what is actually happening in our culture today knows full well that, on many sides, there is a good will to use all kinds of folk art events, adult education centers and the like to communicate to the great majority what is spiritually conquered by a minority. However good the intentions in this area may be, they do not lead to the goal that they should actually achieve; basically, they only lead to a cultural lie. For, ladies and gentlemen, the nature of intellectual life is such that one can only participate in any form of it if this intellectual life flows from the most original human perceptions and experiences of life. But now our humanity is divided into a small minority, whose habits of life give rise to today's intellectual life, and the great mass, which is devoted only to manual labor, to the external economic life, and within this external economic life develops habits of life, the inner soul condition, and can find no real inner access to what the soul of a minority calls its spiritual life. Today, however much goodwill we may have, we communicate what we produce in the way of science and art through popular events for the masses. We are under a great illusion if we believe that this mass of people can truly absorb into their souls that which a minority is able to regard as its spiritual property. My dear audience, one must actually speak from life experience about this. And so, with reference to what I have just mentioned, please allow me to make a seemingly personal remark, but one that is meant to be symptomatic of what I am discussing here. For many years I was a teacher at a workers' education school. My students were all members of the proletariat. During that time, I tried to present within this workers' educational school what I could directly present from person to person, what I could express in the fields of history and natural science, so that what I expressed was always different from what was presented only last Saturday here in other fields as generally human. And I was actually always well understood, in that I reshaped history in a general human sense, in that I reshaped knowledge of nature in a general human sense. But, as a result of a certain contemporary fashion among the students and the school management, there was also a need for me to lead the students through galleries and the like, for example. And there it turned out that I actually felt like someone who was speaking to people about something, as if I were a complete stranger to them. If I expressed what I took directly from the soul of the people in the school lesson, we understood each other. If I spoke to the people about what the minority had produced as their culture, as their intellectual life, then the message was actually a lie, because people did not find access to what came from completely different psychological backgrounds through their habits of thought, through their feelings. In the ruling circles, people's thoughts were not directed towards such facts and phenomena. Hence the gulf, the abyss between the spiritual culture of the minority and the soul life, the life of the proletarian, who was completely caught up in the economic cycle. What did those who belonged to the minority know, basically, in the last three to four centuries, but especially in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, of what was going on in the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat? He directed these broad masses to work, to work that was created entirely in the direction of the minority culture. But he did not seek access to people, he did not seek access to hearts and souls. This was especially noticeable when he was sought, as happened in the case cited by me.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is approximately what can be said from the spiritual side with regard to the characteristics of one stage of human development. And if you then take a closer look at this spiritual life, this cultural life of the minority, then you have to say that this cultural life, because it is the life of a minority, is alien to the whole of contemporary human life. Despite all our arrogance, we live in an abstract culture; a culture that does not penetrate into the reality of human life. Therefore, it is not surprising that this culture produces a thought life that is actually unrealistic. A thought life that is out of touch with the whole person has the peculiarity that it can also submerge into reality. And if you will allow me to make another personal comment, again only meant as a symptom, it is the following:

In January 1914, I was obliged to summarize, deliberately at the time in Vienna before a small gathering, because a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time, I was obliged to summarize what had formed in me as an idea, which I was telling, about the whole [course] of this modern cultural life and its way of thinking, what I had to form as an idea about the direction in which this cultural life is heading. And I had to summarize these insights, I believe I may call them that, at that time – that is, in the early spring of 1914 – about what is brought into the world of men through the contradictions in this intellectual life. I had to summarize it by saying: Our social conditions, right up to the highest levels, give the impression of a social disease, a social cancer, to anyone who observes them impartially, and this must express itself in a terrible way throughout the civilized world in the near future.

That was the opinion of an “impractical idealist” back then, as they say today; the opinion of someone who wants to decide something about reality from their own point of view. Today, we can be reminded of such a view of reality when we consider how, on the other hand, those who had emerged from the intellectual culture of the minority with its unrealistic sense of reality thought at the time about what was to come. Let us recall that in January 1914, a directing statesman summarized his views, despite the responsibility that weighed on him, in the words he said at the time to a parliamentary body: “We live in a general relaxation of political conditions,” he said, “which gives us hope of maintaining peace in Europe in the near future.” And he added: We are on the most friendly terms with the Russian government, which, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, is not getting involved in the lies of the press pack. And we certainly think – the statesman in question spoke as a statesman of Central Europe – we certainly think to continue our friendly relations with Poland. And he adds, so at that time: negotiations are in progress with England that promise the very best for European peace. They have not yet been concluded, but they will bring about desirable conditions.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the train of thought of a person who is well-informed about the present and who lived at the time of the terrible world catastrophe that followed, which killed thousands and thousands of people in Europe and left three times as many maimed. The lesson to be learned from this global catastrophe is that, to the very depths of the soul, the culture of the minority has lost its sense of, its instinct for realities. These things are to be taken more seriously than ever. And they will only be taken seriously if we do not want to ignore the fact that the ideas that emerged from this unrealistic basis were simply not suited to bringing fruitful ideas into our economic life. People still do not want to admit this today. But this is the most important fact of economic life in modern times: the ruling circles have lost the comprehensive ideas of this economic life, and therefore, for a long period of time, this economic life has run its course throughout the entire civilized world as if it were running mechanically by itself. And the catastrophe of the world wars is nothing more than the result of allowing the economy to be driven into its own contradictions and destruction. This was due to the fact that within modern spiritual culture these thoughts were not taken from reality and therefore could not master and control this reality. Thus the leading and ruling circles pursued an economic policy which, by maintaining old institutions, actually destroyed life. But they never took the trouble to organize this economic life on a human basis. But within this economic life there arose something from the hearts and souls of those who, through their work, were merely harnessed to this economic life. And by looking at this, we come to the other side of the abyss; to the side where those stand who could not participate in the indicated way in the spiritual culture of the minority, who, since the advent of modern technology and modern capitalism, have been completely harnessed with all their humanity to this technology, to this capitalism that is emptying of meaning.

Now I would like to say: everything that I have characterized as a minority spiritual culture, as a certain attitude towards the broad masses of working proletarians, and as an attitude towards the mechanical course of economic life, which is noticeable on the one hand, has found its echo on the other. And this echo develops slowly, little by little. Only then will one do justice to the present time if one sees in this world catastrophe the leading of the spiritual and economic life ad absurdum, which I have just described. But now, from the other side, for more than half a century, there has been the sound of what once ended in the words, the world-shattering words: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” And the catastrophe of the world wars has brought about the era in which everything that has since taken hold in the hearts and souls of the broadest circles of the proletariat under the influence of that from which that call arose has been realized. It has brought all this about and summarized it in a new way.

Therefore, the present is even more permeated with the necessity of pointing out with understanding what stands like an echo on the other side of the abyss. There we see that the proletarian masses look at the intellectual culture of the minority, which was to be given to them through all kinds of popular events and everything that is connected with the minority's intellectual life and habits, and there we see that the proletarian masses look at all this because they could not participate in it; and they found it understandable when their ingenious leader, who is just as great in his truths as he is great in his fallacies, when Karl Marx gave them the word, which characterized their relationship to the life of the minority in a way that could be misunderstood, generally misunderstood, but all the more understandable to the hearts of the masses, in the words “surplus value” and “labor performance”. And more or less clearly, large masses of proletarians were seized by the awareness, one might say, not to understand everywhere, but to feel: What we have as a relationship between what elevates religiously, what satisfies artistically, what warms as a worldview for the minorities, that is, we create the basis for this intellectual culture of the minorities by generating the capital base through the added value, through what is taken from what we have produced, from the proceeds of our products, beyond what is only compensation for our labor. And we must not judge the present time merely from the external standpoint of political economy; we shall not do justice to it; we must also judge it from the standpoint of the mass psychology of humanity. Here it is not a matter of whether one can discuss a word like surplus value more or less accurately, but rather how such a word works in the masses; how it arouses feelings, what hopes it inspires. These hopes are entirely in line with what I have just characterized. And more and more closely and more and more accurately did these proletarian masses see what their share is in that which lives as a spiritual culture, and what as a spiritual culture also guides legal and economic life. And that is why they also understood a second word, which was coined for them from the same source; they understood the word about the labor power of man, which can be bought as a commodity on the labor market, just as other commodities can be bought and sold. It may be that intellectually they did not grasp what was meant by this, but they felt it. By being made aware of this word, and hearing it from sources that were more or less clear or obscure, they sensed their way back to ancient times, when slavery still prevailed and when the whole human being could be bought and sold on the labor market like a thing or an animal. And they looked to the somewhat later period of serfdom, when fewer, but still enough human strength and labor were harnessed in bondage. And they sensed something of that personality consciousness that has gripped the hearts and souls in the development of humanity, as I explained the day before yesterday, since the middle of the fifteenth century. And they sensed: The time is past when something like a commodity, like a thing, can be sold by man. And they felt: the leading, guiding circles have failed to see the moment when the labor force must be stripped of the character of the commodity. And in one way or another, more or less clear or unclear, this demand “stripping the labor force of the character of the commodity” arises. Such was the answer to the lack of understanding shown by the leading, leading circles for the great masses of the proletariat.

And another point was also made, which must be taken into account if, in as naive a way as Woodrow Wilson does, one treats the social question of the present day only as a production question. It is certainly a production question, but the fact that it has only become a production question is precisely the fault and the neglect of the leading and guiding circles. What has developed in humanity over the last three to four centuries, ladies and gentlemen, is not only the newer economic life with its expanded technology and its capitalism. It is also a very specific direction of intellectual life. This spiritual life is not only the spiritual life of the minority, as I have characterized it, but a very specific direction of the spiritual life has moved into humanity.

When we look back to earlier times, there was also a religious, artistic spiritual life; a spiritual life that is now more or less regarded as a fantasy life. We do not want to talk about that now. But it was a spiritual life that provided people with a living world view, with an inner momentum; it placed people in the development of humanity and in the social order in such a way that each person could, in some way, find the answer from this spiritual life, how they are connected as spirit, as soul, with the spirit, with the soul of the world. He received the answer to the question: Do I have a dignified existence in the whole world? This possibility ceased under the influence of what came from modern science to meet man. This newer scientific attitude and orientation has ultimately lost all connection with the foundations of existence; it is directed only at the exterior of existence. In the end, one no longer had the feeling: a super-sensible element shines into your thoughts, into your ideas – but one had the feeling: the thoughts, the ideas are only thoughts, only ideas. One did not admit this to oneself; one retained the gesture of the old religious, the old artistic and other world-view feeling; but what one shaped anew was formed in such a way that it could not fulfill man as a whole. The proletarian, who had been snatched from the social situation in which he had formerly lived, to the machine, into soul-destroying capitalism, the proletarian, he truly could not believe in what had been revealed to the leading, guiding circles as the content of this spiritual life. They still spoke in the old formulas, which speak of a divine world order, a moral world order, expressing itself in the historical becoming of humanity. The proletarian was trapped in the mere economic order, in capitalism, which orients and guides this mere economic order. He felt nothing but: what is developing in the newer intellectual life is mere phrase, mere ideology; only the economic life has truth; only the economic order has truth! And so the view resounded again and again, especially in the leading thinking people of the proletariat: everything spiritual, everything artistic, everything religious, everything scientific, everything legal, everything moral is something that rises like a smoke from the only real, from the economic basis of existence, which is the only reality.

Yes, with such a view it is possible to think, it is possible to know – what is usually called knowing – but it is not possible to live with such a view, because the soul becomes desolate with it, because the soul is finally withdrawn from everything that can answer the question: Do I live a dignified human existence? The soul is driven to a mere brutal belief in the external product and its effectiveness. This ideology, it did not educate the proletariat! This disbelief in the spirit, the proletariat did not educate it. All this is the last legacy that the proletariat has inherited from the leading, guiding circles. It has inherited it in good faith, believing that it must be the newer worldview. And everything that has become soul-destroying in the hearts and minds of the proletarians comes from this side. And so we see what it looks like on the other side of the abyss. And we become aware that the proletariat, when it looks at the intellectual life that the modern age has brought forth, has finally said: In the end, it is only the smoke and sound of what is rising from the economic life, the actual basis of human life, the life of the leading, guiding circles. We want nothing to do with that!

And the other consciousness arose in the proletarian: these leading, guiding circles have separated themselves from us by taking possession of the old structure of economic life and shaping the life of the minority from it. But they have left us to be a second-class class, and our relationship to them is not that of man to man; our relationship to them is actually that of a disadvantaged class to a privileged class. And it is a cliché when they speak of the divine, the moral world order, of the ideas that live in history, of the spiritual powers, because all this comes from the economic order. And from a different economic order must come that which satisfies us as they are satisfied by their spiritual and other culture, their culture of life in the minority! What is called “historical materialism” arose out of these feelings.

From the threefold path, the proletariat has learned how a gulf has arisen between itself and the leading, guiding circles, in the way of the spiritual life in the way I have mentioned. But then, as this intellectual life developed and the minority had to draw in the broad masses of the proletariat for its work, something else arose. What is called the newer human formation had to be more or less carried into the broad masses. What was the result of this? Yes, a special fact emerges. The fact that when one quality of the soul develops, another develops at the same time. One of these was the one that developed through the intellectuality of the proletariat, in that democratic education, education of the people, was carried into the proletariat. But as this quality developed, something else developed as a general human world consciousness. There has been much talk about this consciousness today. For those who look at the things of this world impartially, this consciousness today is an elementary emanation of the human being itself. Just as one cannot really discuss color with someone who does not have a healthy eye, one cannot discuss what is a universal human right with a human soul that has not awakened. But it was possible to discuss these universal human rights with the proletarian soul, which was increasingly awakening from patriarchal conditions. And a clear awareness arose of the right that man has by being human. From this consciousness the proletarian looked at what the ruling and leading circles had taken over from the state and made it into a living right. And he found not this human right, but the right of favored classes and the disadvantage of other classes. That was what ate deeper and deeper into the souls of the proletarians. And that was the cause of the second ordeal, the legal process, and the third was what necessarily resulted from the proletarian being completely harnessed into economic life and capitalism; that he could not, like the others, find the [leisure] and rest from work, could not find human development through education to participate in what beautifies the life of the minority. That was what he felt, while he had to say to himself: I am only harnessed into economic life; I am basically only a wheel in economic life. The whole of human life is for me a running off of this economic life. I am harnessed like a machine into this economic life.

That is the third ordeal that the proletariat went through. This threefold suffering of the proletariat, if properly followed and compared with what lives on the other side of the abyss in the way I have characterized, leads to seeking that which must first be striven for from our present-day consciousness, again in a threefold way: in the life of the spirit, in the life of right or state, and in the life of the economy. And that in relation to these three ways of life, something must be striven for from the consciousness of modern humanity, is evident in three fundamental demands of modern times, which have been clearly expressed, but which have nevertheless remained more or less generalities and have not been fully incorporated into our modern life.

Over the past few centuries, the call for liberalism has been rising more and more in human consciousness. Today a word that is no longer held in high regard. Likewise, the call for democracy is rising. And thirdly, the call for socialism is becoming ever clearer and clearer. From this or that side, one could not resist the one or other impulse expressed in these three; but one nevertheless tried to remain in the old conditions and to let what is announced in these three expressions flow into the old conditions, to press it into them. They simply took the old unified state and tried to shape it in a liberal, democratic and social way. Today we live in an age in which it must be recognized that the error lies in living under the suggestion of this unified state and believing that what is expressed in liberalism, democracy and socialism can be pressed into this unified state.

Let us take democracy, which has emerged as an impulse as the middle way in modern humanity. Does not the call for democracy express everything that I have just characterized as emerging from the human sense of right and wrong? Does not the call for democracy express the impulse for something that makes every human being equal to every other human being in the world? Is there not something in it that says that every mature human being has a say in everything that simply affects the position of the human being in the world? Once this has been thought out, the necessity for the development of a democratic state order arises. Democratic state orders are developed in which every person of legal age deals more or less directly with every other person of legal age through representation, and in which each person is to be equal to the other. In the course of modern development, it was impossible to resist what lives in humanity as such an impulse of democracy. And they tried to permeate what they took over historically as the old states with this democratic element in the modern parliaments. They did not realize that two elements of life do not fit into this democratic element, especially if it is to be understood honestly and sincerely. As true as it is that every mature human being must decide on everything in which each person is equal to the other, and as true as it is that this must be experienced and regulated from the standpoint of democratic parliamentarism , it is just as true that the moment this democratic element is allowed to decide on the one hand over economic life and on the other hand over intellectual life, it leads to impossibilities.

Let us first consider economic life. Economic life is based on the fact that the individual human being works his way into the economic knowledge of the individual profession and branch of production in the course of his life. Only someone who is not just theoretically, but through having experienced it, is inside a profession or branch of production, only such a person can decide what is necessary in that profession or branch of production. Only those who have grown together with any profession through which this or that is produced can be trusted in this economic life. In short, any branch of production in economic life, harnessed to democracy, becomes an impossibility, because then the one who does not understand it and does not understand it or who is involved in one economic sector, decides by majority, he decides over those who are involved in completely different sectors, of which he understands nothing. We have seen how terribly this lack of understanding of the relationship between democracy and economic life has manifested itself in those states that have proven to be least mature, above all, in the sub... [gap in the transcript]. But anyone who has lived there for half their life, three decades of life, and has been involved in Austrian political life, knows where the damage lies, which has ultimately led to the fact that such terrible horrors have befallen Austria, that Austria has collapsed so terribly in this world war catastrophe. Because, you see, when people in this patriarchal-clerical Austria in the 1860s worked to get out of the old conditions, to at least take the modern call for liberalism and democracy into account by means of a people's representation – how was this people's representation shaped? They were formed in such a way that four electoral curiae were created: large estates, cities and markets, chambers of commerce and industry, rural communities; all economic curiae. The representatives were people who had to represent the economic interests of individual groups. These people now formed the Austrian parliament. What did they actually do there? What did they strive for? Nothing other than the mere transformation of economic interests into human-legal conditions, into state conditions, into security conditions. The state's mutual human relationships should arise from what was decided in the interest of individual economic circles. It was believed that only economic interests needed to be transformed in order to create legal interests. Anyone who has been able to follow the development of Austria knows that in this construction of state life out of mere economic conditions, the damage that must necessarily lead to ruin has arisen. And as with this example, so could be substantiated by numerous examples for other states, that it is impossible to forge together that which emerged as a democratic demand in modern times with that which has been shaped in economic life.

The same question arises with regard to intellectual life and intellectual culture as a whole. It is impossible for decisions to be made on a democratic basis about what is actually at stake in intellectual culture. In the case of intellectual culture, it is essential that everything that arises, let us say, from unknown sources as human, individual abilities and talents, be developed according to purely spiritual principles; according to those principles that look impartially at what can develop spiritually and individually in the human being, right down to the physical working capacity. But in modern times, the entire care for this development of the individual human abilities has been relegated to the state. This has come about through quite understandable historical facts. In more recent times, when it became necessary to wrest the state side of the church's educational system from certain underground sources, it was justified to hand over certain branches, namely the public branches, the branches of education and instruction, to the state, to which one had to adhere, as the spiritual life. Time and again, it turned out that this spiritual life became a mere copy of the state; that ultimately, in what people produced spiritually, it was not what lives that springs from the direct nature of the human being, what the spiritual produces in the human being, but that what emerged in the spiritual life was what corresponded to the interests and needs of the state. No wonder that eventually – and the world war catastrophe showed this terribly – no wonder that this intellectual life remained free in a few individual branches, in art or the like; that the rest of the intellectual life became nothing but a copy, a reflection of the utilitarian demands and interests of modern states. And as the modern states have become more and more economic entities due to the increasing complexity of economic life, intellectual life was ultimately only an expression of economic life.

The proletariat saw what recent times have done to intellectual life. The proletariat saw this and believed that this was the absolute truth, that intellectual life always only emerges from economic life. That is the great error of the modern proletariat, to take an appearance for something absolute. That is the great error of Marxism, that it does not look at the fact that precisely through the development of the last three to four centuries, on the way I have indicated, the spiritual life has been absorbed by the state, which has increasingly become an economic body, and that we are under the effect of this fact today; but it is not right to say: Let us change the economic life, then a different intellectual life and a different legal life will come. Rather, it is necessary today to say: the spiritual life must be made free again; the spiritual life must be torn away from the state order; the spiritual life must be placed on its own ground. In the future, only that which emerges from the spiritual foundations of the human being may be expressed in the spiritual life. The spiritual life must not be a mere mirror image of the state or economic life.

On the basis of these documents, what first emerged in my appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World” and then in my book “The Key Points of the Social Questions in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future” has now been developed and is represented by the Federation for Social Threefolding in its various branches. What this book seeks to do is to dispel the suggestion that the social organism must be a unified state, which, on the one hand, is completely submerged by economic life and, on the other, absorbs spiritual life.

No, what is necessary for the future is to place economic life on its factual and professional basis, to lift this economic life out of the democratic parliament. Only then will it be possible to socialize this economic life when this economic life is placed on its own ground in such a way that those people who are of the same profession, of the same profession as manual laborers, as intellectual workers, join together in associations; when those people who comprise certain consumer and production circles join together in other associations. When such economic communities arise, linked together by federal foundations, then negotiations will be conducted from profession to profession, from consumerism or rather linked together with production branches to other branches. Then it will no longer be possible for a parliament based on democratic principles to decide on economic interests with a majority of people who decide only out of self-interest or ignorance. Then, from profession to profession, from branch of production to branch of production, the interests of economic life will be served by free economic behavior. Then nothing else will occur within this economic life than that which will lead to the fair regulation of the mutual prices of commodities. Then nothing else will assert itself in this economic life but the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities. Above all, everything that must be administered on a democratic basis must be eliminated, above all human labor and capital. Where does human labor lead us? Today, human labor is at the center of economic life. I have pointed out that the proletariat is aware that the wage relationship in economic life is treated like other commodities. The commodity labor power is bought through wages. Labor power must be removed from economic life in terms of its dimensions, in terms of its nature, and then only the mutual value of the commodity will be contained in the prices of the goods. Then the price of the goods will not contain what is contained in the wage situation today. Then, in the field of economic life, decisions will only be made about the price of the goods, which is separate from the human being. Then, in the field of legal or state life, political life, security life, decisions will be made about the extent, type and time of human work. The regulation of human work will be a legal relationship. The regulation of human labor will not be such that the economic coercive relationship has an influence on it. Rather, only that which is decided on the basis of democracy will have an influence on the determination of the human labor force, where every person who has come of age decides on what is due to every person who has come of age. The regulation of the human labor force belongs in the democratic legal order. If this human labor is regulated by democracy, then the worker enters the economic body as a person who freely disposes of his labor and does not conclude an employment contract, which can never contain justice, but a contract for services with those who, as spiritual leaders, are involved in this service. Then the contract is simply concluded on the basis of the earnings and the services provided. Then the regulation of labor is completely separated from economic life.

In the light of their prejudices, this seems completely incredible to people today, to the extent that even a thinker like [Rathenau] believes that such a detachment of the labor force from the economic cycle is not possible. It is possible precisely because what depends on natural conditions is not included in the economic cycle; what the soil yields and what climatic conditions determine must be accepted in economic life. What raw materials are in the soil and how they can be extracted must be accepted as given. This cannot be decided according to so-called economic cycles. In the same way, in the future, it will no longer be permissible to decide, on the basis of economic conditions, what the worker receives. This will be decided by mature people on democratic ground. With this decision, the worker will enter into the economic cycle and conclude a contract in which his labor provides a basic condition, like the natural conditions themselves. The economic process will be constrained on the one hand by natural conditions and on the other by legal conditions. This is what the broad masses of humanity unconsciously demand. One need only understand this unconscious demand; one need only raise it into consciousness and formulate it; then one will perceive with clarity what is so terribly confusing in life today, which manifests itself as social ambiguity. What this path, the threefold social order, is pointing to, is a real path to clarity about the abstract demands that are being raised today. If someone says: Abolish the wage relationship! —, then one can say that for a long time. As long as one does not show a way to overcome this wage relationship, it remains an abstract demand that only has a disturbing effect, that only arouses the elementary instincts of human nature, but that leads to nothing. The moment one realizes that, with regard to public institutions, economic life must be completely separated from legal life, that labor law, as a prerequisite for economic life, must be developed on the basis of democratic legal life, one can show an economic path that can be taken every day from any starting point. For it is impossible to follow such a path tomorrow if one only has the good will to do so. And the same applies to the capital conditions that are currently wedged into economic life.

Oh, people have actually already completely forgotten what the origin of capitalism actually is. The origin of capitalism is diverse. For example, it is based on the fact that in older times land was conquered and thus passed into private ownership, and those over whom the conquests extended came into dependency, into ownershiplessness. It is based on the fact that from what resulted from the conquests as property, the possibility was offered to bring the power conditions of modern times, the means of production, into the private, selfish possession of the individual. In view of what has just been mentioned, the proletariat in turn formulates a demand: the abolition of capital. In its naivety, it does not realize that the words “abolition of capital” actually say nothing, even if they are repeated over and over again. They express what they feel is fair, but they do not take into account that these modern conditions are such, in their economic and other configurations, that one must work with capital in modern social life. Even if you transform the whole modern state into a large cooperative, as some socialists want, nothing else but capital could work in it either, only instead of today's private owners, the [bureaucratic] official would take their place. And those who today, as proletarians, raise this demand would very soon notice how they are much worse off under these newer conditions than under the present ones. Here, by thinking out of reality, one must think quite differently about the conditions of capital. One must also be clear about the fact that it is ultimately the fundamentals of human abilities that lead the individual to have a certain superiority over others. The fact that the individual has acquired a certain superiority makes it possible to collect the means of production and the means of production that made him the leader and that enabled him to transfer to others what he achieved as the leader. Those who think this through carefully, who judge it according to reality, judge it impartially, know, my dear attendees, that all capital is based on the ability of the individual human being, and that this individual ability of the human being must not be eliminated. If you replace the individual, capable person who manages the production processes with the abstract generality, it will only lead to the dismantling or depletion of economic life, not to its reconstruction. But that does not mean that the old institutions should live on, that, as is currently happening, what is capital or the means of production should always be transferred again in the sense of the old order. Rather, it can be replaced by the old order, by which, little by little, those people come into possession of capital in the form of money capital and rent, who no longer have anything to do with production, with the application of individual abilities in the management of economic life, come into possession of capital. What must be opposed to the old economic order is directed against this. It must also be quite possible in the new economic order that capital is concentrated through the abilities of the individual human being, but that only as long as this individual human being, who has brought together these capitals, that is, means of production, remains the head, or in any case remains in a context with these means of production, as his individual abilities can be connected with it. Then, in the ways I have indicated in my book The Core of the Social Question, the capital, or the sum of the means of production, passes through legal transfer to those who in turn have the best individual abilities. This introduces what I call the circulation of capital in the social organism. This circulation of capital, or of property, has always been admitted on spiritual ground, at least in principle, to a certain extent. If today one expects of people that what they admit on spiritual ground should also occur in the field of material possessions, then they certainly make astonished faces. What I produce spiritually remains spiritually mine and the property of my heirs only for a certain time; then it passes into the public domain, in which everyone who has the individual ability to do so can administer it. Similarly, in the future, what is acquired as material property must be transferred to the person who can best manage and administer it through individual abilities. Then there will be harmony between the physically and spiritually working. Then capital, which always originates from individual abilities, will not be able to pass over to those who do not justify ownership through individual abilities. Rather, individual abilities will always remain connected with the management of the means of production. Then the person who has work to do under such management will say to himself: My work thrives best when the circulation of capital takes place in this way, that a sum of means of production always passes to the one who has the best abilities; for he manages my work best.

It is certainly not the case that the impulse for the threefold social order should be accused of false idealism. Those who say that it will take other people to carry it out do not take into account that this impulse for the threefold social order is based on the people we have at present. The manual laborer has an egoistic interest in always having the best leader at hand. But this can only be achieved if the means of production are circulated in this way. But this requires, ladies and gentlemen, that we break with the principle that the means of production are a commodity like those goods that are consumed directly by human needs. A means of production, that is, one in which capital is invested, may only be able to claim capital as long as it costs something until it is finished. The locomotive may only be considered capital until it is finished. Then it ceases to have an external commodity value. Then it only passes to the one who knows how to manage it best in the interest of the whole through transfer or through legal relationships. Land will be... [gap in transcript] from the very beginning.

Today, people still oppose such things out of prejudice, which is rooted not only in habitual ways of thinking but also in the habits of life associated with old institutions. But those who cannot bring themselves to realize that the terrible catastrophe of the world wars calls upon us to think not in terms of a small reckoning, but in terms of a great reckoning, will only contribute to further decline and to destruction, but never to escape from destruction. Thus we see that simply economic life, in which only the production, circulation and consumption of goods may occur, must be separated from the regulation of labor, from the administration of capital. And what must occur in our entire life through this detour that I have just described? That capital, that is, the means of production, must always be administered by the person who has the individual abilities to do so. What must come about is the detachment of the spiritual life from our economic and legal life. This spiritual life must be placed on its own ground. So that in the future, no longer will some experts, merely harnessed into state bureaucracy and torn out of the spiritual life, participate in the administration, but that this spiritual life will be organized from factual foundations entirely by itself, through its self-administration. In the future, the life of the social organism must be shaped in such a way that the spiritual life is administered by those who are at the same time somehow directly involved in the production of this spiritual life. If we look at this spiritual life in particular, on the basis of education and teaching, then only those people who participate in education, from the lowest elementary school teacher to the highest university teacher, must be part of the spiritual organism. In the future, anyone who teaches in any field will only have to teach so much that they still have time left over from this teaching to help administer. That is to say, the production of the spirit and the administration of spiritual life will be carried out in one combined activity. No state school system, no connection between intellectual life and economic life; completely self-contained, so that the lowest elementary school merely aims to artistically acquire knowledge of man or anthropology in the broadest sense, so that from the age of six to fourteen, the child is taught in such a way that this teaching leads solely to the development of the strengths that the child needs in life. This will automatically lead to a unified school, not one that is dictated by the state. Everything that is built up will arise from general human needs. For example, at the secondary schools, the design will be such that at certain school levels, teaching is geared to the fact that the person who has received the teaching is suitable for entering into this or that state system. The opposite must happen: that the school levels are designed according to pedagogical-didactic, spiritual principles, and people will have achieved this or that at 17, at 19 years of age, and the state will have to ask itself: how do I use people who have been educated according to spiritual principles? The state will have to adapt to the spiritual life. The universities will have to have autonomy; they will be the administrators in the highest sense of the spiritual teaching and education system itself.

I can only sketch out all this. It should only be expressed that in this field of spiritual life, a struggle of spiritual efficiency with spiritual efficiency must really take place. Furthermore, that which can be called comprehensive liberalism must be allowed to develop.

In the sphere of state life, in the sphere where decisions are made about the transfer of capital, about the administration of labor law, that which has emerged as democratic impulses will come to fruition.

In the economic sphere, what serves the circulation of goods and human abilities will give full rein to the socialization that has emerged in recent times; the individual spheres of economic life will be linked according to objective principles, where only goods and their production are administered, not people. Then it will be possible to produce in the economic life out of associations, which get to know the needs of the people in a liberal way, not through statistics or other connections, but which get to know them in a liberal way. It will be possible to produce in such a way that the abstract demands of the proletariat are transformed into more concrete demands, into a real path. The proletariat has emphasized that in the future production should not be for profit, but for consumption. But consumption is only possible if the associations of the socially organized economic cycle really create such connections between producers and consumers that production is not based on the randomness of supply and demand on markets, but on a careful, understanding, and appropriate study of needs. It will be necessary to understand and, above all, follow the laws of economics quite differently than they are followed in today's random relationship between supply and demand. We will have to know that at the moment when too many workers are employed in a branch of production, production in that branch of production is too cheap. Human labor is being wasted. Workers must be directed through negotiations and contracts to other branches of production. If too little is produced somewhere, the article will become too expensive; then other workers will have to be directed into that branch of production.

In short, in the future there must be in socialist, capitalist economic life what is now being established through the efforts of the Federation for Threefolding as the institution of the free [works councils], to which the traffic councils, the economic councils, this whole system, will later be joined. But this is not a political system, because the political must be based on democracy. This system of councils, rooted in economic life, which is only concerned with the proper administration of economic life, is the system that will emerge to the surface of modern life, not through the arbitrary demands of individuals, but through the legitimate demands of the times. The institute of the advisers will be such a body, which does not rule by bureaucratic or democratic coercive laws, but which rules by negotiations from person to person, from council to council, from economic association to economic association. If the labor force is distributed across individual branches of production in such a way that every commodity, every good that people need, is produced in such a quantity as is needed for it. Then such prices arise, then in economic life there is that which can form the basis for fair prices to prevail in economic life, whereas, since we have wages in economic life, which, as a commodity, corresponds to the labor force, you can increase wages, ... [gap in the transcript] the prices of goods also increase because no just legal relationship can be established as long as something is included in economic life that does not belong in it, namely human labor, which belongs in legal life.

Thus we see, my dear attendees, that in the future what has had such a suggestive effect on people must be structured as a unified state, in the three-part social organism, in the independent spiritual life, administered according to its own requirements; in the democratic state or political life, in which it is decided, directly and indirectly, by each mature person, what concerns him as an equal to every other person. This also includes property and working conditions. In the future, economic life, in which only appropriate administration by economic associations and bodies takes place, will be the third independent element. These three areas will get along with each other. It is well known, for example, that members of the intellectual professions have concerns and cannot live because the state does not pay them enough. It will become clear in the future that, just as the proletariat must be paid as teachers, only that the path must be different. The spiritual corporations will belong to the economic body in the same way as they belong to the economic body as consumers, and the appropriate relationship will have to be established. This regulation will only be one reason why the individual elements of legal, economic and spiritual life will come together harmoniously, precisely because each one can really work in its own field of expertise.

And there is no need to be afraid of how international relations will judge these things. What I have presented here first arose from a consideration of the international conditions that led to our terrible war catastrophe. Anyone who has studied the development of modern humanity over the decades that preceded this catastrophe knows, for example, how the Balkan issues arose from the interweaving of the three areas of intellectual or cultural life, political or legal life and economic life down there in south-eastern Europe, insofar as they affected the relationship between the Balkans and Austria; that they then led to the outbreak of the world war from this side. First of all, there was the general cultural question of the cultural and intellectual conflict between the Slavs and the Germans. To what extent there was a legal question when the old conservative Turkish element was replaced by the Young Turkish element, the Turkish-Bulgarian question, for example, the history of the Sanjak railway, if you study it, you can see that there were economic interests from Austria to the Balkans. If these circumstances could have been organized out of their own foundations, something else would have emerged than this tangle of circumstances. It was this tangle that brought about such international conflicts. You can also study the problem of the Baghdad Railway. There, too, you will see how the cultures of the nations involved are constantly intermingled with the political, legal and economic aspects. And again and again we see how the economic becomes more powerful than the cultural, and thus again and again another state is on top, for example with the problem of the Baghdad Railway, and so on. It is precisely in international relations that this interweaving of the three areas, which on the ground of each social organism must become three links, plays a terrible role. The only hope for the development of humanity in the future lies in the threefold social organism, in an independent spiritual life with its own administration, in a democratic legal life, in an independent economic life that administers itself from within through its own nature in associations and corporations, in cooperatives. And anyone who studies what is hidden in this terrible, horrific war catastrophe and in what has now emerged from it, need only look to the East and they will find that behind these conditions, which prevailed in the East and which today lead to such terrible exploitation out of misunderstood social impulses, live the great spiritual impulses of the Russian and other Eastern peoples. These spiritual impulses are smouldering beneath the surface today, and they must first work their way up again from what has been superimposed by prejudices of civilization and what lurks as a threatening social spectre from the East towards Central Europe. To prevent this from happening in Central Europe, efforts should be made to ensure that in Central Europe, what is being confused in the East is not confused, but that in Central Europe, intellectual life, state or legal life, economic life are separated.

And let us look to the West. These Western states have essentially brought it about that economic life is developed. They permeate the world economy; they expand private competition to the great imperialistic conditions. That which prevails there one-sidedly as economic life corrupts state and spiritual life. Here in Central Europe, these three areas must be separated. If we have not yet grasped this through the lessons of the terrible catastrophe of the war, we will grasp it out of the necessity into which the threefold unnatural foundations of modern development have brought us, since the time I mentioned the day before yesterday, around the middle of the fifteenth century, began. People longed for a spiritual life, but a new spiritual life did not arise. The spiritual life was not placed on the own ground of the modern spiritually producing personalities. Only the Reformation and the Renaissance, a renewal of the old, came up. Today we live in a great, important time. Today we must not be content with a renaissance of an old spiritual life; today we must appeal to a completely new spiritual life. But this cannot flourish in the shadow of economic life, in the shadow of a state order. It can only flourish if it is free to stand on its own.

Let us look to the East; there we can see how it was initially intellectual life that had an effect, with economic and legal interests only hiding behind it. At first, it was the case that the Banat peoples were to be liberated from Russia. This was based on genuine popular instincts. Confounded with this was what should not be confounded with it.

And then the French Revolution, one sees the same thing happening there. This French Revolution was a different kind of Renaissance. People thirsted for human rights. Rights only came into humanity, a renaissance of state life, to which we also devoted ourselves in Central Europe in the nineteenth century.

But a new legal life is demanded of man as such. In the sphere of the legal life, we have no need of a renaissance, of Roman or other legal conceptions. We need a thorough separation of the legal life from the intellectual and economic life, from which no relationship of power, either spiritual or physical, of one man over another, may arise. Only that which places all mature men on an equal footing may arise from the democratic state. From all this an economic life has developed, in relation to which it is believed that it is sovereign. In Eastern Europe, it is intended to regulate legal-political life and spiritual life from mere economic life. In this way it will be possible to achieve a mere administration of goods, but only such an administration of goods which, instead of founding a new human right, breaks down the old rights and cannot replace them with anything; which, instead of founding a new spiritual life, lets the old spiritual life fade away and finally seep away, and transforms everything into the mechanism of an economic life. Only when they have overcome the old order, which was rightly called the service of throne and altar, will people see whether they have achieved something better. But this service to the throne and the altar must not merely give way to service to the office and the machine in the mechanized economy; rather, the future must bring us an independent economic life in which the individual corporations and associations and cooperatives join together fraternally in genuine socialization. But this can only be built up if it is supported by a democratic state in which man finds his rights as an equal alongside other equals. And economic life, which otherwise would dry up and become rigid, can be stimulated when there is a free spiritual life constantly producing forces and sending them into life, which do not produce a reality-strange world of ideas and science, a reality-strange spiritual culture, but which produce a spiritual culture that can be applied to all areas of life. We have imitated the Renaissance in its love of all things Greek, but the Renaissance created a spiritual life for itself. We need a spiritual life that is suitable only for our present time. And, however strange it may sound, the more spiritual, the more practical this spiritual life will be; and the more we will be able to really intervene in state and economic life. Only it will be the spirit that can fertilize capital; that calls upon labor, the same service for the same service for all. Not as it is today, where production is merely for the market. Only then will we understand what it actually meant when, in the course of the nineteenth century, very clever people reflected on the great motto of the end of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality, fraternity, and said – truly not out of prejudice – that liberty must contradict equality, and that ultimately, everything that lives in liberty and equality is incompatible with fraternity. It turned out that there are contradictions between what one perceives as freedom, as equality and as fraternity, that is, between the three great, public ideals of humanity. How is it possible that three ideals can stand, as if born out of the innermost, most honest striving of the human heart and soul, and yet contradict each other? The reason for this, ladies and gentlemen, is that these three ideals have so far been established from the point of view of the unitary state. As long as we believe that these three ideals, liberty, equality, fraternity, must live in the unitary state, we will find contradictions in them. The future must understand that this unitary state must not bundle together three areas of life that must be administered from different bases. The future must understand that this unitary state, as a social organism, must be divided into three areas, and that in the future the spirit must prevail in freedom. That man must live as the owner of his human rights in democratic equality. That work for the needs of the people must be done in associations, in cooperatives, in short, through brotherhoods on a large scale, out of economic brotherhood. Only when we are no longer under the influence of the unitary state will we be able to hear the call of the future clearly enough.

If we have so far been somewhat shy in Central Europe about directing our thoughts, our feelings, our habits of life to the three spheres of life in their true form – since Versailles, since we have been living under the prospect of much adversity and misery still We will perhaps find our way back to those forces of our Central European culture from which emerged in earlier times what we call German idealism, which can also live in areas other than the artistic and intellectual fields. It is a mere prejudice to believe that practical men are those who, coming from ancient times, had too short thoughts for economic life, so that this economic life of modern times is sailing towards destruction. Those who are ridiculed today as impractical idealists will be seen in the future as true practical men. For public affairs, people will turn to those who have developed these forces, to the forces that Lessing, Goethe and Schiller have brought forth in us. But then one will work out of these healthy forces of Central Europe into the development of the future of humanity in such a way that the threefold social organism will stand on its three healthy foundations, which can be characterized by the fact that in the future the spirit must live in freedom, in free development; that everything that makes each person equal to every other person must live in democratic equality; that legal life must live in the sun of this democratic equality; that economic life, regulated associatively and managed factually in a federative way, must live under the principle of fraternity. Only then will the future of humanity flourish in Central Europe. This Central Europe should radiate something that can be a model for East and West. It should radiate from Central Europe what will benefit humanity in the future. So what should happen will have to happen from this Central Europe, and we will have to say of this event:

Freedom for the mind,

Equality for the law,

Brotherhood for economic life!

Discussion [not reported]

Closing words

Dear attendees,
I must say that I have the greatest respect for the first speaker in this discussion in terms of his very beautiful social will, but that I nevertheless – since I have something to say about what he presented today – I must find it disturbing that he, too, has brought up something that I consider a very unfortunate sign of our time. Please do not be offended, esteemed attendees, if I express this openly and honestly, even to a valued discussion partner. I had to discuss what Dr. Einstein said, let's say, in the 1880s, for example with [Adler and Pernerstorfer] or similar people. These things, which Dr. Einstein has again brought up today, are, so to speak, only the typical phrases of what has developed as a social-democratic party order for more than half a century in the civilized world, but especially in Central Europe. We know this very well. And precisely when one knows it very well, perhaps even knows it somewhat differently than Dr. Einstein, then in the present time one is faced with an enormous problem, to which I have, as best as possible in the brevity of a lecture that was already too long, pointed out something.

What is presented as a social-democratic program was suitable – I said in the lecture that when it comes to such things, which are, so to speak, great cultural-educational means, it does not matter so much whether one can discuss them, whether one can prove or disprove them, but rather how they work in terms of education. And in what was the Social Democratic program, what, in a sense, Dr. Einstein listed in his summary, that is such an educational tool. And I am familiar with all the various currents, the individual perceptions and thoughts that have found their way into the hearts and souls of the proletarians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in this way. Above all, however, we must not forget how this program has led to the establishment, within our modern economic and political life, of the notion, let us say, of the self-development of this economic and political life. It was so easily imagined: that which emerged as capitalism became private capitalism, it will concentrate more and more into large capital holdings, and then the transformation of capitalist society into a socialist one will happen by itself.

Today, we still see talk of positive impulses, of germinal thoughts leading to action, and this self-development is held up to us. It is intimately connected with what Dr. Einstein regards as the correct socialist program. But the whole situation with regard to what has just been mentioned has become somewhat different for the truly unbiased observer of current world events due to the world war catastrophe. Today we are not dealing with a self-perpetuating economic or political development; we are dealing with the fact that old cultural currents - as I expressed it in the lecture - have led themselves into self-dissolution. Today we are not dealing with some program, but with the fact that people are faced with a collapsing economic order and have to rebuild it.

Today we are faced with the proletarian human being with his subjective demands and subjective impulses. It is therefore necessary not to get stuck in general phrases, such as “socialization of the means of production”, but to show: how can we make the means of production function in a truly progressive way? And for me, the problem was to apply all these abstractions, including what Dr. Einstein said, to a concrete reality and to always ask: what can be done without dismantling, but by what is there, further develop it; not by ruining the cultural development, but by developing it in such a way that the legitimate demands, which I have also enumerated today in my lecture, can be satisfied for the broad masses. That was the task: not to stand still with the old socialist party programs, which are still floating around today like mummies of party officials, but to move forward in the spirit of the lessons that this world war catastrophe has taught us. That is what it is about, that the abstract, the non-realistic of social democracy must again be transformed into that which is conceived in terms of the three-part social organism that is being implemented today. It is a strange thing when some speaker appears who describes ideology and the fact that ideology has entered into the hearts and souls of people as desolate for the soul, when a speaker who sees in ideology a harmful legacy of the proletariat on the part of the former ruling circles, then a speaker who says: This speaker only wants a new ideology. That means falling back into old dogmatics; it means not wanting to go along with what honestly endeavors to bring the old into a truly contemporary form. That today it is being said again that the old remedy at the beginning, if not at the end, is a transfer of the means of production into the ownership of the totality, on the other hand, it must always be objected: What is this totality? I have explained to you in concrete terms how this transfer to the service of the whole comes about through the circulation of the means of production. It is an empty concept that never contains a germ of action if one only talks about transferring the means of production to the service of the whole. Because how this whole can function with the means of production is what matters. This is something that anyone who does not remain mired in the old dogmas will recognize. They will not want to impose a new ideology here; rather, they will see how an attempt is being made here to finally implement honest and well-intentioned abstractions in realistic thoughts and realistic social will.

I see in those who do not want to develop under the impression of our difficult, distressing and painful times, but who only want to remain with the old dogmas, I see in them - without wanting to offend anyone personally, least of all Dr. Einstein, of course - a terribly conservative mind. And I am glad that at least there are people today, especially in the proletariat, who go beyond these conservative leaders and demand that we look beyond the heads of the leaders for what can finally lead to the goals. If, like Du Bois-Reymond, you proclaim your 'ignorabimus' in the face of the limitations of nature, proclaiming an ignorabimus against this threefold social organism; or if you say, 'We cannot wait', then you are actually saying that you are substituting a nothing for that which, of course, cannot be exhaustively characterized in a short lecture. But today it is necessary not to get stuck in empty abstractions, not to just keep talking: because the pressure gauge is at 95, we need the revolution. But what is the revolution, after all, if we don't think about what we actually want to achieve through a revolution? If people only ever talk about conquering the machines, then the question must be asked: What do they do with these machines when they have them? That is the question. We have often had the example in the development of mankind that people who had machines did not know what to do with them. Should the demand for machines be sought from the vague abstractions, and then it be experienced that one does not know what to do with them?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have had to explain this to you, especially in connection with a point of view that I appreciate, like that of the person who spoke about it in the usual way. I have been accustomed to this since the 1980s, and what I have learned from it for myself has been incorporated into what I advocate today as the threefold social order.

To those who have objected that we cannot wait, I would simply refer them to my book “Key Points of the Social Question”, in which I explain in detail how what I have outlined today can be put into practice. then he will no longer say that we have to wait so and so many years, but he will say: we can bring about development in such a direction, as envisaged by the threefold social order, from today to tomorrow, from every point of spiritual, economic and political life. We just have to move in that direction, and the rest will follow. But we need courage for that. It takes less courage to keep talking about how the revolution must come, that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be striven for, and so on, than to really get to work on the details. Because this courage includes overcoming old habits of thinking.

My dear audience, when you go into more detail about what the threefold social order is, you will no longer say: practical work should be done and not lectures given forever! Practical work has been indicated piece by piece in the very will of the threefold social order.

And when it is said: we need other people, yes, then one does not know what relationship exists between the social in which the human being lives and between what the human being does. You see, the other day a magazine that also calls itself a social one wrote that socialization should not be rushed because people are not yet mature today. When I hear or read something like that, I always think that those who talk like that are not mature themselves. Because if we had those people who were now fully mature in this sense, then we would no longer need socialization, then people would truly live freely and equally and fraternally. Then we would not have the whole social question. The issue at hand is something else. I would like to mention a fact that occurred in a certain area. During the so-called war economy, it was necessary to employ merchants in the bureaucracy, for example, because they were specialists. The merchants still differed considerably from the bureaucrats when they were outside. But a strange fact occurred: after a few months, these merchants were more bureaucratic than the bureaucrats. Thus the environment had rubbed off on them. This will happen if you do not give each individual link in the social organism the character I have mentioned today. Then a social minority will be created in which people who used to be quite different can develop further in the sense of human ennoblement. I would like to know how one could think of social ideals if one were always to move in the circle: We need other people to achieve other conditions. If we keep going round in circles, we will never be able to achieve other conditions. The point is to create the conditions under which people can develop ethically and spiritually! This is another feature of threefolding: it does not go round in circles but goes straight for the facts; it aims to intervene directly in reality.

If someone says that I should have said this ten to fifteen years ago, when it would have been new, then I would reply that it is no different today than it was ten years ago. But how do you know that what I am saying today, perhaps less clearly formulated, I did not say ten to fifteen years ago? I would like to tell you something about that. I have already mentioned that I was a teacher for many years at the Workers' Education School founded by Liebknecht. There I tried in particular to show people how the materialistically oriented teaching only abstracts from the historical development of the last three to four centuries. At that time – that is, at the beginning of the present century – I had a fairly large number of students. When I had few students, the party bigwigs paid little attention to what I said to the people. When the number of students grew and grew, these party bigwigs became unpleasantly aware of what was being taught in a central workers' education school. As a result, a large number of students were called together one day and some party leaders were sent to the people. I said at the time: You want to be a party of the future, you want to establish future conditions. I would now like to know where freedom of teaching is to prevail today if you always want to suppress it, if you want to teach party dogmatism here. One of these leaders stood up and said, in contradiction to his entire group of hundreds of students: We cannot tolerate freedom of teaching; we know of no freedom in this area, we only know reasonable constraint. That is the [experience] I had at the time. It showed me that one must continue to work first, but that one must wait until one can meet with understanding. That is why I must also refuse today when it is said: You don't need a new party! You certainly don't need one. I really don't know where it could be inferred from the lecture that I want a new party. I have spent my whole life studying the various social conditions in all circles and all walks of life. But I have never been involved in parties. And I am glad of that. And do you think that now, at the end of my sixth decade, I would like to put myself in the shoes of a party, after saying what the parties have actually achieved and where they have brought our political life? I appeal to the intellect and reason of each individual and not to parties; I always have to say that when I am told that what I am saying is difficult to understand. I know it is taken from reality. And that which is taken from reality requires a certain instinct for its realizability. This certain instinct for realizability cannot be absorbed from abstract party-line opinions. But we should also learn from the past. Unfortunately, we have experienced it enough in Central Europe that people have accepted what they have been ordered to accept from any side, for more than four and a half years. We have experienced it: if only from the great headquarters or from somewhere else the opinions that one truly could not understand well with one's own reason, if one could repeat them, then one saw them. You didn't ask yourself: should this be understood or not? You took orders to understand. Now it is a matter of understanding something that you are not ordered to understand, but to understand out of the freedom of the human soul. And only this appeal to the direct freedom of the human soul leads us forward. I am not thinking of a party, but I am thinking of all those people who today, out of necessity and misery, want to save themselves – a reasonable judgment of common sense: they will not flock to a party. But perhaps they will be the bearers of what we need for the future, what we must strive for if we want to emerge from confusion and chaos.

Newspaper article about the eurythmy performance in Mannheim, July 27, 1919

[...] This lecture on Saturday was followed yesterday, Sunday morning, in the Musensaal by a presentation of eurythmic art that originated at the School of Spiritual Science “Goetheanum” in Dornach and whose foundations were also explained by Dr. Steiner in a short address. The aim is to find physical expression of the soul's movement that is not a symbol of this movement but a direct transposition of it to the body, much as in a poem not only the content but also the sequence of words themselves, and further in the word not only the meaning but also the pure sound has its spiritual significance. Dr. Steiner, as the accompanying reciter, knew how to shape the verses perfectly in line with this intention. Dr. Steiner himself emphasized that what was seen in the Muses' Hall is only the beginning. However, one cannot share his view that it is an independent art form. A varied program with poems by Steiner, Hebbel, Goethe, with grotesques by Morgenstern and so on, as well as with musical works by Walter Abendroth, L. van der Pals, M. Schuurman and J. Stuten was presented. Some of it was deeply moving, especially when Natalie Papoff was in the foreground; one was never overcome. There is a lack of technique in many respects, and it is obvious that then the higher, spiritual can only show as if behind a curtain. The blue flower, will-o'-the-wisps and the aesthetic weasel were among the best. The audience was not exactly enthusiastic, but very friendly.