The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Notes from a lecture at the inauguration of the Heidenheim branch.

We have gathered here today to celebrate the inauguration of the Heidenheim branch. Friends from various regions have come together for this celebration to show their support for their local friends.

Over the years, a number of people have come together here in this city whose inner urge has brought them together for joint spiritual work in a spiritual scientific spirit.

Everything in life has an effect. If a person succumbs to an error or a lie, even if he is not aware of it in his ordinary consciousness, it is still present in the subconscious, where it acts as a destructive force not only for the individual person but for the whole evolution of the world. Likewise, when man unites with the forces of truth, it continues to work as a life-creating force for the whole evolution of the world and of humanity.

There are three decisive points in our seven cultural epochs for the further development of humanity. These are:

The first call that went out to humanity with a thundering voice from Mount Sinai, as the commandments of Jehovah!

The second call in the wilderness by John the Baptist, when the Baptist said to those who wanted to hear him: “Change your minds, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”!

The third call, my dear friends, is that which is proclaimed from the spiritual worlds as a new revelation through spiritual science or theosophy!

The child at conception, when the soul descends from spiritual spheres into this world of physical laws, is a memory and a symbol of the moment of the first thunderclap from Sinai in the laws.

And when the child, in the first years of his life, experiences the moment when he begins to use language but does not yet think about learning it, learning language without yet using his dormant thinking abilities, this is, in the individual human being, the time of the second call to humanity through John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness.

When, in a later period of his life, the child begins to understand language by using and developing his powers of thought, this is the reflection of the third call to humanity through spiritual science: the new revelation for understanding what is set forth in the Gospels as the Gospel of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Spiritual science brings man, as a new revelation from the spiritual worlds, an understanding of what was announced by the second call of John and was laid down in writing after the Mystery of Golgotha. Through spiritual science, the third call of our seven cultural epochs, man is brought to an understanding of what the Christ Jesus said: “Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the earth cycle.

Just as only a small number of people heard the second call at that time, so it will also be only a small number in our time that hears the third call. But, my dear friends, should the call pass by without being heard, the evolution of humanity could not take place in the way intended by the high spiritual beings.

In retrospect, we may consider it an infinite mercy that there were people at that time who heard the second call, and we owe thanks to these souls that the development of humanity could continue as a result. Those who understand how to read the signs of the times know what it means to hear the third call of the living new revelation or to let it pass unheard. There was a time when it was said that there were only two paths for man: if he does good, he will receive eternal bliss after death; if he does evil, he must be cast into eternal damnation. — Spiritual science proclaims something different. My dear friends, we know that the human being is a complex creature, that he consists of a physical body, an etheric or life body, an astral body and an I. When a person begins to believe in a spiritual world, to imbue themselves with powers of faith, these powers of faith are a power of the astral body. Thus the astral body is the “body of faith”.

Through faith in the body of faith, man struggles up to the powers of love. These are the powers of the etheric or life body. Thus the etheric or life body is the “body of love”. If people could not penetrate to the spiritual worlds through the power of faith, their powers of imagination and thought would become ever more barren, empty and ossified. Man would be unable to rise to any power of love. What would man be without love? — He would have to suffer loneliness, he would be unable to have any connection with his fellow human beings and fellow creatures of nature. Man must be able to develop love, that alone gives him true vitality, by renouncing selfishness and shaping himself into true, unegoistic love in the love or etheric body.

When we look at nature, we learn to recognize the truth of the reincarnation of the individual soul. Look out there. What kind of feeling would you have to have when the plant world dies in the fall, when you would have to think: Everything is dead, it will never sprout, germinate, or bloom again! — It is often said: We do not know what tomorrow will bring. Yes, but is that really so? Do we really know nothing about tomorrow when we perform our work today with zeal and the most sacred sense of duty? We know that tomorrow the sun will begin its course again and conclude it in the evening. We know that the world order continues. Indeed, how would a person feel if he never knew whether the sun would shine the next day, whether the forces of day and night, rain and sunshine, whether the regulated rhythm of the stars would cease tomorrow or take a different form every day? Man would have to go to work without courage or strength if he did not know that he would resume work the following day and continue working on what he had started.

Just as spring follows winter and what rests as the dormant germ of plants within themselves is reawakened, so the soul that leaves the physical body will revive the germ that has been left behind and resume its life on the physical plane and continue its and humanity's development. Thus the forces of love give rise to the forces of hope. The physical body is the “body of hope”. What would man be without hope for the morrow, for the completion of the work he has begun, without hope of reunion with those he has loved in life? Thus the New Revelation of the Christ-message, theosophy or spiritual science, may proclaim the teaching of reincarnation despite the enlightened science and scholarship that is spreading throughout the world and wants to deny the supersensible worlds. Even if we are ridiculed and pitied for still being so superstitious, looking at what is happening in nature can be proof for us of what spiritual science proclaims.

If the third call were to pass unheeded, my dear friends, the development of humanity would be unable to progress, and those who would later look back on this time, when we ignored the call, would have to lay the blame at our door. But just as we look gratefully to the human souls who heard the call of St. John at that time, so will later people look gratefully to the souls who heard today's, third call, so that humanity may be led forward.

Just as the first few Christians had to hold their devotional meetings with the dead in the Roman catacombs, while above in the arena the people who set the tone at the time were wallowing in sensuality and throwing these first Christians to wild beasts or torches, as they did to them, but how these tone-setting people were suddenly carried off, so today we have to gather in rooms that our friends make available to us, or in rooms that are spiritual catacombs. But today's dominant materialism will also be swept away, and spiritual science will be allowed to lead humanity forward when the third call is heard. Who can say whether one or other of those who are here among us did not hear this call of John at the time? We have all heard this second call in one way or another and must hear the third in order to give humanity the opportunity to be led further.

In order that the teachings of the new Christ-Revelation may be heard in this city, the spiritual powers have brought together a number of people through an inner urge of the heart. Those high spiritual individuals who are called to make this call to humanity through their messengers are the guides of humanity.

Today we want to look at something that I would like to call the relationship that can develop between the individual human soul and what we mean by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Today, wherever one hears about this spiritual science, one often does not yet look hard enough at how different this relationship of the human soul to spiritual science is supposed to be from the relationship of any other knowledge, any other insight, to this human soul. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is indeed such that it speaks to the human soul in a completely different way than any other knowledge. Through any other knowledge, one gets to know this or that; one learns something about one or the other in the world; one then knows more than one knew before. Spiritual science does not relate to the human soul in such a way that it would only convey something that one knows afterwards. Spiritual science appeals to much deeper impulses of the human soul than mere knowledge, than mere thinking. Spiritual science seizes, or at least wants to seize, the deepest being in us, which, coming from spiritual worlds, moves into our human earthly being at birth and which this human earthly being then leaves in death to pass over into the spiritual worlds to other tasks. Only when we have a true intuitive grasp of this relationship between spiritual science and the outer world, and between the spiritual science and human life, shall we be able to comprehend the full significance of spiritual science for the human soul.

We do not understand the human being fully if we do not realize: that which lives in me as a human being, that which develops in me as a human being through the fact that I have taken on a physical body through birth, that which accompanies me in the course of my life, first as an inexperienced child, then more experienced, more skillful, what takes place in me as fate, everything that is present in my body and in my life, it is actually the transformation of a spiritual-soul being that lived in the spiritual-soul before the human being was conceived or born. And it is this spiritual-soul element that dwells in the body that is actually addressed by what is meant as spiritual science.

Now one might perhaps believe that it is not necessary for a person to occupy himself with this spiritual-soul element within him, because this spiritual-soul element will already find its way in the world. But that is not the case. That which is spiritual and soul in us takes hold of us and is in us, and is to some extent wrapped in our body, in part in our abilities, in part in our destiny. And one could say: It is precisely in the present developmental cycle of humanity, in which humanity has now arrived and in whose sense it will continue to develop towards the future, precisely in the sense of this present and the future, that the human being, as a spiritual principle of his body, as a spiritual principle of his life and his abilities, as a spiritual principle of his destiny, redeems what has become incarnate in him. We cannot escape the spirit. The spirit lives in us. We can leave it out of consideration, but it still lives in us. We can look at the laziest, most comfortable, most casual person who has never made an effort in his life to bring something that lies as a religious or spiritual disposition in his mind to independent development, who has remained quite dull, so to speak. We can look at him: he is not spiritless. To speak of people as spiritless is just an incorrect word. There are no spiritless people; nor is it possible to be spiritless in life. For the spiritual and the soul are our endowment when we enter the physical world from the spiritual worlds; they are allotted to us according to what we have gone through before we descended to this present life on earth. We cannot be without spirit, but we can disregard the spirit within us. We can, as it were, sin against it, we can refuse to want to redeem it. We can want it to merely slip into us, to shroud itself within us: then it is present in us, but we have not liberated it within us, we have not redeemed it.

In this way, too, we must gradually learn to look at people's lives. And our view of life will become quite different, and in the course of time it must become quite different. We can find people in life who have become dull and unfeeling. We will not say that they are spiritless, but we will say that they have committed the sin of burying their spirit during their lifetime, of leaving the spirit in its enchantment, of letting the spirit slip into the flesh, into the merely outward course of life, of letting the spirit degenerate in fate. When we are born, we can only become human beings if the spiritual-soul individuality descends from spiritual-soul worlds. And when the child appears in its first organization, it is still an imperfect image of the spiritual individuality. This lies within him. It can be ignored, or it can be disenchanted, or it can gradually be brought out of the flesh, out of the course of life, out of fate. But it is man's task, and in the future it will increasingly become man's task, not to let the spirit degenerate. We cannot kill the spirit, but we can let it go to rack and ruin by forcing it to take a different path than the one it takes when we bring it out.

If we endeavor from one day on to learn something about the spiritual worlds, to feel something about the spiritual worlds: we actually bring it out of ourselves. The other is just a suggestion. We get it out of ourselves. Whatever you have ever said to yourself about spiritual science, you have drawn from within yourself, because it is within your deepest inner being and wants to come out. And it is meant to come out, and it is a sin against the order of the world to leave the spirit within mere flesh, because there it goes astray; there we abandon it to a fate that it should not take. We liberate the spirit by bringing it out of the flesh. And by consciously permeating ourselves with the spirit, we release that which wants to be released from the underground of existence. One will understand this more and more. It will be increasingly recognized that materialism does not simply prevent the emergence of a [different] theory or allow a false theory to emerge, but that materialism consists in allowing that which wants to enter into the knowledge and perception of the human soul to flow down into coarse matter and to proliferate in coarse matter. This is the question that humanity must decide in the near future: whether it wants to let the spirit proliferate in matter – in which case the spirit becomes a deformity, it leads to diabolical, devilish, Ahriman delusion, or whether humanity will want to transform the spirit into thoughts, into feelings, into impulses of will: then the spirit will live among people and achieve what it wants to achieve by entering into the life of the earth through people. For that is what the spirit wants: to enter into the life of the earth through man. We should not hold it back. And every time we resist becoming acquainted with the spirit, we hold it back: it must, as it were, plunge down into matter, must make matter worse than it is. For the spirit has its allotted task: it is to enter into earthly life through the development of the human soul; there it has a beneficial effect. If it is pushed back into matter, then it has a devastating effect in matter, then it has a bad effect.

If you take this as the essence of spiritual science, you will see that it has a lot to do with our human life. Spiritual science does not want to be a theory like other theories, but wants to give people the opportunity to release and liberate the spirit that is enchanted in human nature, to work in the world what wants to be worked by the spiritual worlds. That is certainly also the reason why many people still very energetically reject spiritual science today. People gladly accept other science because this other science flatters the pride, the vanity of people, but it does not make the claim to be something real, but it merely makes the claim to give thoughts, to to educate the intellect, perhaps also to teach people some useful moral concepts; it does not claim to get to the core of the human being, to be brought from worlds in which a task is assigned to the spirit. I would like to say: only through spiritual science does human knowledge become serious, and people shy away from that. They would also like to have spiritual science only as something that splashes along at the surface of existence. People are afraid that it will get to the core and essence of man. That is why they do not want to accept spiritual science. If they would accept spiritual science, then many things in social life, in historical life, would have to change in the very near future, then people would have to think differently in the most everyday life. And that is what matters. That is why it is also the case that one can take in the other science, but one remains the same throughout one's life, one only becomes richer in knowledge. One should not take in spiritual science without it transforming one, and one cannot take it in without it transforming one. It slowly and gradually makes one into a different person. One must have patience, but it makes one into a different person, because it appeals to completely different human tasks, and it appeals to something completely different in human nature.

Let us take a look at human nature and see how diverse this human life is. The human being devotes himself to three currents: as a conceiving human being, as a feeling human being and as a willing human being. In imagining, feeling and wanting, what we can experience is actually exhausted. Now, all three impulses of the human soul, imagining, feeling and wanting, stand in a very specific relationship to what spiritual science actually wants to address in the human soul, in the core of the human soul.

Let us first take imagining. Imagining is certainly shaped by ordinary science and by what is increasingly being taken from this ordinary science and applied to child-rearing and is therefore so important for the whole development of human destiny, including for practical life, because it is intended to permeate the child. Imagining is not shaped by ordinary science. It is not so very long ago, a few centuries, that this has been the case in the most eminent way, which is why people do not notice it today. But it will not be long before what I am saying now can be observed in an almost comprehensive way. Scientific concepts, as they are taught today to the youngest people, to children, can be absorbed throughout one's entire life without becoming different in terms of one's imagination through absorbing so many concepts in the sense of today's science. One remains the same. Not only that, but it cannot be denied that one becomes more and more limited, even in intellectual terms, through the ordinary scientific concepts that are increasingly becoming part of general education. The mind, in so far as it is a thinking one, loses the flexibility to adapt to living conditions that are much more complicated than what a person can absorb through ordinary knowledge.

You see, it goes deep into the heart when you have some opportunities to see into life today. Those who have become completely accustomed to the concepts that science can provide today are increasingly unable to grasp the vital social interrelations and social demands. They are virtually pushed aside by real life. And that is why I have said here and elsewhere in recent days: Make parliaments and state assemblies out of people who are educated in the sense of today's world view. You will see what these scholars decide, who think scientifically! This is quite certainly suited to corrupting people in terms of social institutions, because in this area of social life, only unfruitful thinking can be done from a scientific point of view. It is the same in many, many respects. One loses a certain flexibility of mind through this merely intellectual knowledge. This will change as soon as you engage with the concepts of spiritual science. Try to realize how differently you have to tune your mind if you want to grasp what is offered in spiritual science and if you want to grasp what is offered in the education of the outer world today. Certainly, spiritual science encounters so much resistance because it requires more agility, more fluidity of mind, to find one's way into it. In what is available today in popular literature - or even its offshoots, which flow through the channels into journalism, where people then absorb information in their Sunday papers - people can move around with extraordinary ease. And if they go to today's lectures, where people are spoon-fed information in words and pictures, so that they don't even have to think, don't even have to set their minds in motion, you will find nothing in all of this that frees the mind to think, to imagine. It loses its freedom. The mind becomes narrow and limited. Our intellectual education is the path to spiritual limitation. Certainly, our intellectual education has made great strides in the fields of science and technology, but it is the path to limitation; it narrows thinking, imagination. And one must appeal to something quite different in the imagination if one wants to understand spiritual science. Therefore, when people approach spiritual science today, they are afraid to take the first step! When they have read only a few pages, some say: I lose myself there, I do not get any further, it goes into fantasy! - It does not go into fantasy at all, but the person in question has only lost the opportunity to really free his thoughts, to plunge into reality with his thoughts, when they are not leading the external sense world by the hand.

That is one thing: spiritual science appeals to the power in human nature that frees us from narrow-mindedness and enables our thinking and imaginative life to grasp not only a little but a great deal. I meant it very seriously when I said in a public lecture in Stuttgart these days: For the spiritual researcher, it makes no difference whether one is a materialist or a spiritualist; that is not the point, that is irrelevant. What is important is to develop sufficient spiritual strength to make real progress. Those who have this strength, this spiritual power, may be materialists, they find the spirit in matter and its processes if they are only consistent. And those who are spiritualists do not stop at saying: spirit and spirit and spirit...! but they delve into material life, into practical life as well, they allow their thinking to bear fruit even in their actions. Versatility, as demanded by today's life - and the life of the future will demand it even more - versatility is what will become of spiritual science in the near future. And that is what humanity needs as it works towards the future. Anyone who is familiar with life today and looks at the catastrophic events that are happening around us knows that one of the deeper causes of today's catastrophe is that people have become one-sided, despite all their high scientific education, that they lack the opportunity to penetrate things in a versatile way. They lack the flexibility of mind to immerse themselves in reality. Versatility is what is gained through spiritual science for the imagination.

Something is also gained for feeling through spiritual science. For the one who wants to think as spiritual science makes necessary, who must become accustomed to this much more mobile world, releases something that otherwise only lives [hidden] in the human being, so that it unfolds out of the human being. In our feeling, as we brought it with us at our birth, the rhythm of the world lives. More than we realize, the entire rhythm of the world lives in us. This can even be proven mathematically, but very few people know about these secrets of existence. Do not be afraid to join me in considering how the entire rhythm of the world lives in our own organism, in what goes on within us. You know that the sunrise moves a little further each year. If we go back in time, the so-called vernal point of the sun was in Taurus; then it came into Aries, but in Aries it moved further every year; now it is in Pisces. The sun does not rise at the same point every year on March 21; that's how it comes around the whole circle. And after about 25,920 years, the sun goes all the way around, apparently, of course, describing the whole ellipse. If it rises today at a certain point in Pisces, it will return there in 25,920 years. The strange thing is: if you consider these approximately 25,920 years as the great cosmic year, as the ancient Greeks did, and you now look for one day of this cosmic year, you have to divide by 365. What is one day of this great cosmic year? That is approximately 70 to 71 years. That is, on average, a human life when a person grows old. If you think of a human life as it is spent here on earth as one day, and take the whole Platonic year, it is 365 times as much. That is how long it takes the sun to make one revolution around the world: 365 days, of which a person lives through one in an earthly life. It is a beautiful rhythm, but this rhythm goes much further. Consider that we take about 18 breaths in one minute. These 18 breaths multiplied by 60 give the number of breaths in one hour; this multiplied by 24 gives the number of breaths in one day and one night. If you calculate 18 times 60 times 24, you get: 25,920. That means you take as many breaths in one day as the sun takes [Earth years] to go through its own year. The same rhythm is in your breathing inside that is in the course of the sun outside. And again, the strange thing is: you spend a day breathing 25,920 times in one day. Take a day and treat it as if it were a breath: in a sense, a day is a breath, because in the morning our body and our etheric body breathe in our ego and the astral body, and in the evening, when we fall asleep, we breathe out our ego and the astral body; it is one inhalation and one exhalation. How often do we do this in a single day, in about 70 to 71 years? We do this breathing, which means that we live – calculate it in a day – almost exactly 25,920 times. That is how many days we live in 71 years. The individual breath is therefore related to the breaths of the whole twenty-four-hour day like the advance of the vernal point in one year to the advance of the sun through 25,920 years. In relation to the great solar year of 25,920, a single human life on earth is like a day, a day of our life, a twenty-four-hour day occurs as many times in our 71-year life as there are years in the solar cycle. Imagine what it actually means that we are part of the wonderful rhythm of the sunlit cosmos, that our life, insofar as it is inner human life, is purely mathematically expressed in the great music of the spheres of the cosmos!

When a person begins to immerse himself in these things emotionally, only then does he feel like a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm. Only then does he feel how this whole great and infinite world of God has created its image in his human nature. But this is something to be sensed, to be felt. This sensing, this feeling, this feeling of oneself in the universe, this feeling of oneself in the whole spirituality of the world, that is something that ultimately comes to us from spiritual science! We open ourselves up to the world, whereas otherwise we close ourselves off in our narrowly limited ego. We are an image of God, but otherwise we know nothing; we begin to feel ourselves as the image of the divine world, as the microcosm in the macrocosm. We learn to know ourselves through feeling. This happens bit by bit, slowly. I would like to say: just as we go through this slow sequence of days through our lives, so does feeling with spiritual science bring forth this sense of the world. But man must acquire this sense of the world. For this feeling for the world will in turn inspire him to the great tasks that lie before humanity in the future. However strange it may still sound today, in less than fifty years people will no longer be able to build factories or cultivate the soil according to the requirements that will be placed on humanity if they do not have this feeling! The catastrophe we are currently facing is only an expression of the impasse into which humanity has entered. The world has moved on, but people have not yet come far enough with their thoughts and feelings; therefore, their thoughts and feelings are not sufficient to truly penetrate this world and make the work of humanity harmoniously concordant. Humanity will be condemned to develop more and more disharmony in social coexistence and to sow more and more seeds of war across the world if it does not find its way into harmony with the cosmos in feeling, in order to carry this into everything it does, even into the most mundane. Therefore spiritual science is already connected with that which must intervene directly in the course of the most extreme culture, or humanity will not come out of the impasse. In the future, factories and schools will not be maintained if concepts from the great tasks of the universe are not developed. These were already tasks today, but people have not taken them into account; that is why this catastrophe has come. The deeper causes already lie in what has just been said. These signs of God, which express themselves in these catastrophic events, must be taken into account by humanity. People must learn to develop a conscious relationship with the cosmos, because otherwise it will no longer be possible.

Let me give you an example that many people today will still consider foolish, some will denounce as insane: we have certainly made great progress, say in the field of chemistry, but we have done so without such a sense of the world as I have just expressed. In the future, this sense of the world will have to be developed as well: the laboratory bench will have to become an altar. The service to nature that is being developed, even in chemical experimentation, must be conscious of the fact that the great cosmic law is present over the laboratory table whenever one dissolves any substance with another in order to obtain a precipitate or the like. One must feel at home in the whole universe, then one will go about it differently, and then something quite different will be found from what people have found today, which is great but will not be able to bear the right fruit because it is found without reverence, without the feeling that permeates the harmony of the universe. How many people have abstracted what was called the music of the spheres in Pythagoras! Here you have a sense of the music of the spheres in the experience of the rhythm that runs through the universe. You don't have to imagine anything abstract, but something that goes into the living feeling (see note).

Do you know what would happen if this broad-mindedness of the soul did not enter into the feeling? We have just said: flexibility of thinking, versatility of thinking and imagination, that is one thing that helps thinking and imagining. For feeling, broad-mindedness, an open mind towards the world, should prevail. The opposite – you can already see it approaching if you just look at the world with a little courage – is philistinism. What has the great, for many materialistically thinking people 'blessed' culture of modern times brought to people? At the bottom of the soul lies philistinism. Philistinism and banality will only be overcome by that open-mindedness, that broad-heartedness of soul, which feels itself as a microcosm within the macrocosm, which can have reverence for everything that, as divine-spiritual, permeates and pulses through the world. Just as narrow-mindedness, intellectual narrow-mindedness in the life of the intellect must be conquered by spiritual science, so philistinism and vulgarity in the sphere of feeling must be conquered by spiritual science. And a third aspect presents itself to us when we look at the will. In many cases, things are in their initial stages as far as the will is concerned. Only the psychologist, the expert on the soul, can see what is being prepared, but it will come! Of course, many people today believe otherwise, but anyone who is able to see through the deeper course of human development already notices that nothing is as widespread in general human life in the realm of will — much more so in modern times than in older times — as clumsiness. Clumsiness is something that threatens to develop into a terrible evil for the development of humanity in the future. I think that today we can already see it quite clearly: people are taught to do this or that in a one-sided way. If they are to prepare to do something that they have not learned by rote, they will not be able to manage it. How few people today are capable - if you will allow me to mention such things - of sewing on a trouser button if necessary in special situations. Few people are able to do anything else that is not directly related to what they have learned in the narrowest sense. This is something that must not befall humanity. People would allow what was in them as spiritual heritage to wither away when they descended from the spiritual world through birth to existence if they became as one-sided as the “blessed” culture demands in many ways. Those who only look at things theoretically do not see the connections. But anyone who truly embraces spiritual science with a sense of life is an enemy of one-sidedness, for spiritual science gives rise to a mood in the human soul that also tends towards versatility. If you do not merely take up spiritual science with your head, but if you put yourself in a position to absorb spiritual science so that this spiritual science pulsates in your soul like blood in the body, you will certainly also gain a certain versatility in adapting to your surroundings. You will gain the ability to do things that you would otherwise not be skilled at doing. The skill in the will develops, and the person becomes adaptable to the environment. Of course, you can say, if you want to say this: We certainly do not notice that the anthroposophists, who are united in the society, have become terribly more skilled or more able to cope with life. Many say that. Not I say it, but it is said. Yes, that stems from something else. The anthroposophical life in the soul does not yet pulsate in people as blood pulsates in the body, but the bad habit of taking everything only into the mind, into the intellect, has been brought in from outside. Spiritual science, too, becomes only a theory for many; it becomes only something that they think, but that is not their nature. If you only think spiritual science, it does not matter whether you read a spiritual science book or a cookbook. Perhaps a cookbook will be more useful. Spiritual science must become so serious that it really seizes the whole person in his whole soul. Then it goes out to the limbs, then the limbs become agile, the person becomes more capable of living. Then it is a matter of gaining an inner power of conviction, of not being satisfied with the outer conviction, but of gaining an inner conviction.

Those who are familiar with the inner value of spiritual science know that it is indeed capable of extending the physical life of a person, provided it is taken up with freshness and vitality. Of course people may come and say: Well, there is someone who only reached the age of forty-five, or even twenty-seven! Yes, but just ask the counter-question: How old would the person who reached the age of forty-five through spiritual science have become if he had not taken it up in the twenties? Just ask the counter-question! The external forms of proof do not apply to these internal things. Statistics and the like have no value if you want to take the inner being into account. Statistics are of great value in external life, but even there they are limited to the external and do not grasp what is the principle of life. You can see this quite simply: it is completely justified to set up insurance companies according to statistics and arithmetic; they base themselves on how long a person is expected to live and then they insure people accordingly. But it would not occur to you to then have to die when, according to the probability calculation, your year of death for the insurance company arrives! So for reality, you do not consider what is decisive for the external life to be decisive. All that statistics and probability calculations possess of value for the outer life ceases to have significance when the value of conviction for the spiritual begins. But you will only gain this if you take spiritual science itself as a living elixir of life. But then it becomes such an elixir of life that the human being fits into the circumstances.

Then the opposite will take place. I was once extremely saddened - you can say: that's a strange person to be saddened by it! - when I once lived in a house and the master of the house always had to weigh himself on a scale to determine exactly how much meat and how much vegetables he had to eat. He had to weigh every single meal! Imagine the loss of instinct that would ensue for humanity if everyone wanted to weigh their rice and cabbage at every meal. This uncertainty of instinct would come from purely intellectual science, because it can only show the external statistically. But it is not a matter of losing our instinct - and through intellectual education we do lose it - but of spiritualizing it; of becoming as sure as instinct usually is, but spiritually.

This is what I have to characterize as particularly significant, taking into account the will. Spiritual science creeps into the will, prepares it, so that the human being is prepared for his surroundings, without even noticing how he actually grows into what is around him. By growing together with the spirit, he grows into the environment.

You see, you have to learn to experience the spirit. But you do that through spiritual science. And humanity will need it more and more in the future to experience the spirit.

For how does man experience what is given to him through conception or birth? Imagine: a cannon is fired at some distance from you. You hear the bang. You see the light a little earlier. But now imagine the following: You are standing next to the cannon and, due to some event, you are shot out as fast as the sound. You would fly through the air at the speed of sound: you would not hear the sound; you would stop hearing the sound the moment you move at the speed of sound. That is why man does not notice the spirit, because he moves from birth to death at the same speed as the spirit works. The moment you absorb spiritual truths, you put yourself at a different speed than the body. Therefore, you begin to perceive the world in a different light. Just as you perceive sound because you do not have the same speed, so you perceive the spirit in the course of your life by bringing yourself to a different pace, creating inner peace, as you can read in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. Not living with the body, but creating a different pace! But this is something that humanity must acquire in the first place, something that is of tremendous importance.

People today take no account of how it actually was in earlier times. History is really a kind of fable convenante, but that is not what concerns us today. People were educated differently in earlier times. In earlier education, much more consideration was given to the life of the mind. This purely intellectual life has only really emerged in the last four or five centuries. In this, no consideration is given to the fact that the human being is a multi-part entity. The intellect is very capable of being educated in humans; it can develop, but unfortunately it is not capable of development throughout the whole of a person's life, and especially not in our present time cycle. It is bound to the human head, and the head remains capable of development only up to the age of twenty-eight at the most. A person needs to live three times as long as their head is capable of developing. Of course, we are intellectually capable of development in our youth, but we only remain so until around the age of twenty-eight. The rest of our organism remains capable of development throughout the rest of our lives; it also demands something from us throughout our lives. What is given to people today is only head knowledge, not heart knowledge. I call heart knowledge that which speaks to the whole organism, head knowledge that which is only intellectual and speaks only to the head. Now the head must stand in a continuous interrelationship with the heart, morally and spiritually as well. This cannot take place today because we give our children so little for the heart, so to speak, for the whole of the rest of the organism, and only give them something for the head. A person reaches the age of thirty-five. At most, he now has head knowledge; if he is lucky, he has the memory of the head knowledge he absorbs. He remembers purely intellectually what he has acquired. But ask whether today's teaching is able to achieve that later in life one not only remembers by heart what one has learned, but that one lovingly transfers oneself back to what one took in during one's youth with feeling; that one really still has something of what one was taught there, so that one can refresh it anew. But this must become the ideal of spiritual science in education, so that one does not just remember back. Now, today, people do not even do that. They take their exams and then forget what they have studied. But let us assume that people do remember back: is what people had at school a paradise to which one likes to be transported? Do you go back so far that you can say: As I think back, the morning of life shines in for me, and as I have now grown older, becoming older transforms it within me into something new; I have been taught in such a way that I can transform it, I not only remember it, I transform it, it becomes new to me.

The soul content of human beings will become full of life when the principles of spiritual science renew our entire education and our entire spiritual culture. And then the effects of early aging in humanity will become increasingly rare. Anyone who follows the development of humanity knows that before the 15th century, the oldest people were not as old as the youngest people today. The prevalence of old age is increasing to a devastating extent. This old age can only be controlled by creating the right mood, by giving us in our youth what can be transformed in old age, what can become new to us; what we not only remember but transform because we think back to a paradise. As a real elixir of life, spiritual science will also bring this into our immediate lives. The school will become something completely different. The school will become a place where people are aware that they have to take care of the whole of human life. Because what is offered to the child comes out in a completely different way in old age. Certain things are offered to the child in the form, let us say, of learning to look up with admiration and reverence. This comes to expression in later life. In middle age it remains more withdrawn, but in old age it comes to expression in that it gives us the power to have a beneficial effect on children. Or as I once said in a public lecture: Those who have not learned to fold their hands in childhood cannot bless in old age. The inner feeling that is connected with folding the hands reappears in us, as if transformed, in later life in the ability to bless. Today, if we only follow today's education, we have no idea what we are giving the child for later life, in the age from seven to fourteen and even earlier, and especially beyond the age of fourteen, with what is offered to today's youth. This is terribly serious, because it lays the foundation for all the megalomania that is being instilled in young people today, for all the arrogance and prejudice, as if one could somehow already have a “point of view”! Today, even the youngest people say, “That is not my point of view.” Everyone has a point of view. Of course, it is not possible for someone to have a point of view at the age of twenty. This awareness is not encouraged today.

All these things can be summarized by saying that what lives in the human being will in turn be brought to reality. Reality is placed in a healthy relationship to the human soul. This is what the ideal of spiritual science must become in relation to the human soul and reality. Especially on the big plan of life, people today speak without any relationship to reality. Those who understand the relationship that must live in the human soul in relation to reality can sometimes suffer torments purely because of the form that today's thinking has. The child then, when the teacher thinks like that, endures these torments unconsciously. An example: a very famous professor of literature gave a lecture on taking up his post, at which I was present. He began: We can ask this, we can ask that. He listed a series of questions that were all to be answered during the semester, and then he said, “Gentlemen!” I have led you into a forest of question marks. I had to imagine a forest of question marks! Imagine what it is like for a person to stand before a forest of question marks without being able to visualize it! This is something that is often underestimated. What must be aimed at is a vital relationship to reality.

Recently a statesman said the words: Our relationship with the neighboring monarchy is the point that must become our political direction in our entire future life. - So imagine: the relationship of one country to another country is a point, and the point becomes a direction. One cannot think more unrealistically! But imagine what a configuration the entire inner life has, which is so far removed from reality as to turn out such empty phrases! But such an inner life is also just as far removed from the outer social life; it does not merge into the social life. What it dreams up does not become real. In spiritual science it is impossible to think as unrealistically as the conceptual shells that have been gradually developed in recent times. The present time is so conceited that it imagines itself to have become particularly practical. But it has only become schoolmasterly, out of touch with life. And a future age will characterize our age by the fact that, strangely enough, the world schoolmaster had a highly impressive effect on so many people: Woodrow Wilson, who is not connected to reality by a thin thread in his thinking either, but for whom all words correspond to unreality. But they are admired by those who are only a little hindered by the fact that they are at war with him. But there are many members of the Central Powers today who admire Woodrow Wilson! In the future it will be especially difficult to understand how political programs, without any relation to reality, can be found in which the crazy ideas of world treaties and peace treaties between nations and so on are laid down. If only it could have been done so easily! The abstract thinkers since the Stoics have been thinking about these things! What today emerge as Wilsonian ideas were there for those who know the subject, ever since there have been human beings. A healthy mind says, of course: because it was always there and could not be realized, it is unhealthy! Today's thinking has become alien to reality, which is why it takes no pleasure in such unreal thoughts.

Things are connected with the deepest principles and impulses of life. And the fact that there is so much confusion and chaos today stems from the fact that humanity has arrived at a way of thinking that it believes can master the practice of life, but which is basically very far removed from true reality. A union with true reality in a vigorous thinking, which develops such strong powers that it can penetrate into reality, that is what must come to mankind from spiritual science as an ideal. But to do this we must begin with the small. We must develop in the child not only an understanding of the abstract concept, but also of the real, the conceivable. We ourselves must first have the connection with it. He who wants to teach the child the idea of immortality in the image of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, but who does not himself believe in this immortality, teaches the child nothing. But anyone who is familiar with the field of spiritual science knows that the butterfly is the real image of immortality created by the spirit of the world. We ourselves believe in this image, and we choose nothing other than that in which we ourselves believe because we know it or strive to know it. In this way we seek to submerge ourselves in reality, to overcome the egoism that still wants to have something abstract in thinking. We seek to penetrate the spirit of reality, and in doing so we will find the paths that are necessary for newer humanity, and are all the more necessary because they have been most abandoned by those who call themselves practical people. They are not the practical people, but those who have become impoverished and who impose their impoverishment on humanity through brutality. Help in this difficult situation will only come if humanity seeks the spirit and through the spirit, reality.

This is what I wanted to share with you today as something that we must appropriate as a feeling for the relationship of the human soul to the world, as it arises from spiritual science as the fundamental mood of the soul. And more important than the individual spiritual-scientific truths is this fundamental mood with which we then go through life when it has been kindled in us through spiritual science.

We are living at a time when one can see what anthroposophic Spiritual Science—as it is called—has really been striving after for years. To a certain extent the fiery signs of the times can be regarded as proving the necessity that led to the birth of this movement and has kept it before the world for some years now. And perhaps the best result of our anthroposophic strivings would be a conviction of this necessity in the hearts and souls of those taking part. Though this or that event in the external world may take on a stormy character, though that which is striving to develop from out of the depths of human evolution may have this or that appearance, the essential nature of what is happening to-day can only be grasped if we look at those events which escape the ordinary human powers of perception still usual among us. Such events are only really perceptible when we study the world from a spiritual point of view.

I should like to start by mentioning one such phenomenon which almost escapes notice among the manifold stormy events of to-day. It is regarded as something insignificant and unimportant, but it is an actual fact for one who, from spiritual sources, has acquired the ability to study life as it actually is.

It may sound an extraordinary statement, but it is nevertheless true, that for some seven, eight or ten years now a real student of human life can observe quite a different expression on the faces of new-born babies. Many people, it is true, do not notice this, for the most important things of life pass unheeded to-day. But one who has acquired an eye for such things knows that very many children born during the last seven to ten years wear a melancholy expression. It is as if they ‘held back’ from the world. One might say that even from the first days of life, from the first week onwards, something different can be seen in the physiognomy of these children. And if we investigate this remarkable fact that seems so strange to the man of to-day, we find that the souls entering the world through birth bear within them from before conception and birth that which gives their faces this melancholy expression. Hidden though it often be behind all their smiles, it is nevertheless there in the faces of these children, almost from birth. It was not there formerly. In these souls there lives—though it is quite unconscious, of course—a “reluctance” to enter life. Souls entering through birth to-day feel a kind of hindrance, a difficulty, in entering the physical world.

Now it is a fact that man undergoes an important experience in the spiritual world before entering the physical world through conception and birth, and the effects of this experience are active in his coming life. Here on the earth men die; they pass through the gate of death, laying aside their physical bodies and taking their souls into the spiritual world. These souls still bear within them the effects of all they have experienced in the physical world. After passing through the gates of death human souls appear, on the whole, as the after-effects of what they have immediately experienced in earthly life. Now such souls meet those who are about to descend into a physical body. (This is actually the case. I can only tell you of it, for these things can only be brought from the spiritual world through actual experience of them.) This meeting between those souls who have just passed through the gate of death and those who are just about to enter the physical world through the gate of birth is an important event. Its effect is decisive in many respects. In a certain sense, its function is to give the descending souls some idea of what they will encounter here. It is from this meeting that the “impulse” is derived that stamps the peculiar expression of melancholy on the faces of children entering the world to-day. They do not want to enter the world of which they have learnt through this meeting. For they know how, in a sense, their “spiritual plumage” will be ruffled by what mankind, immersed in materialistic thoughts and feelings, views and deeds, is experiencing on the earth to-day.

This fact (which, naturally, can only be established spiritually) and other things beside throw a strong light on our whole age. The present times can only be understood on such a basis, and we ought to strive for such an understanding.

I have started from something which can, of course, only be apprehended through spiritual perception. But other events of to-day are speaking to us loudly and clearly and can strike everyone who, though without spiritual vision, does not go through life half asleep. We have seen the great catastrophe of the World-War extend over the world during the last four or five years, causing great harm; we can turn our thoughts again and again to the outward and visible causes of this terrible catastrophe (as, I believe, everyone who is not asleep must do); we can study the course of this catastrophe and, finally, the events which have followed from it over large areas of the globe. One thing must be clear to every soul that is really awake. Consider the peculiar fact that this catastrophe of the world-war burst over Central Europe, for example, actually without anyone knowing how it all came about. This was indeed the case. People ask how it arose, pronounce this or that person guilty—and then, when they imagine they have laid the blame at somebody's door, repeat again and again: Yet it cannot be like that; there must have been some other factor at work.

People tell themselves that a great social movement has developed out of the catastrophe of the world war. Whether they belong to a party or not they try to understand what ought to be done in the present social catastrophe. Yet all the thoughts they form about it are only “thought-mummies” in the face of current events—thoughts that are powerless before the storm of events and quite inadequate to their true character. And if we look more closely at all this—especially now when all kinds of memoirs are being published by persons who, apparently, were directly concerned in the outbreak of the world-catastrophe—we have to ask ourselves: Were these people really “within” the events of four or five years ago? Did they really know what they were doing? Had they any conception of the far-reaching consequences of what their intellects had thought out? People ought more and more to admit to themselves to-day what the Russian Minister Suchomlinoff admitted at his trial. Speaking of the three or four hours in which he made his most important decisions, he said: I must have lost my reason then; I must, indeed, have been mad!

Such things are very significant. They point to the wide-spread mental confusion among those concerned. And one who is really in a position to see through the terrible nature of present world-events, discovers what people will come to see more and more, namely: that there was not so very much moral failure, but all the more intellectual blundering through sheer incapacity to grasp world-events.

It is just the same to-day. How helpless, in the main, is the great majority of people in the face of world-events that have come upon them. A most serious question is presented here. What really lies at the base of all this?

At the base of this lies something which is extraordinarily difficult for our materialistically-minded age to grasp, namely: that just since the historical moment in which the wave of materialism rose especially high, the strongest spiritual force that has ever willed to enter human life from the spiritual world is now seeking to enter. It is this that is characteristic of our age. Since the beginning of the last, third of the 19th century the spirit—the spiritual world—is willing to reveal itself to men in all strength; yet men have gradually reached a point in their development when they are only willing to use their physical bodies as instruments for receiving anything at all in the world. Their materialistic outlook has accustomed them to consider—even to maintain on theoretical grounds that the physical body is the instrument of thinking and, indeed, of feeling and willing too. Men have persuaded themselves that the physical body is the instrument of all spiritual life. They have not persuaded themselves of this without grounds; they have good reason for this, namely: That man in the course of his evolution had gradually come to be able to use only the physical body. It had really come about that only the physical body could be used as the instrument of spiritual activity.

So we stand to-day at the infinitely important juncture in human evolution where, on the one hand, the spiritual world is willing to reveal itself with great power, while, on the other, man must find the strength to free himself from his greatest entanglement in what is material and come to a new reception of spiritual revelations.

To-day man is confronted by the greatest trial of his strength—his power to work his way in freedom to the spirit which is approaching him of itself, if he does not shut himself off from it. The time is past when the spiritual could reveal itself to man in all sorts of subconscious and unconscious processes. The time has come when man must receive the light of the spirit through a free, inner deed. All the confusion and want of clarity in which men are living to-day come from the fact that men must receive something that they do not yet want to receive: an entirely new understanding of things.

The old ways of thought, the old ways of regarding world-events, came to full expression in the terrible catastrophe of the world-war. Its infinitely significant warning signs are nothing but a call to re-model our ways of thinking, to try a new way of regarding the world, for the old way can only lead again and again to chaos and confusion. It is time we realised this. It is time we realised that the leading statesmen in 1914 had come to a point at which nothing more could be achieved with the old methods of thought. Because of this they led humanity into misfortune. People must impress this fact strongly upon themselves, or they will not form a strong resolution really to meet the spirit and the life of the spirit in freedom and inwardness of soul.

The lamentable thing about the time in which we are living is that we see things being revealed everywhere which cannot be understood with previous points of view and previous conceptions of life; yet people cling firmly to these old points of view and conceptions of life and simply do not want to come to new modes of conception. The anthroposophic view of the world wanted to prepare mankind for such new modes. Fundamentally, the anthroposophic view of the world had no real opponents except inner comfort and laziness of soul. People cannot rouse themselves to bring the inner forces of their souls to meet the spiritual wave invading our life so powerfully to-day.

I have just said that people are no longer accustomed to use anything but their physical bodies for thinking. It is this that had led to the materialistic view of the world. Now there is one thing that simply must be understood to-day. Nature, as studied by natural science to-day—that science which has achieved so many triumphs—can be understood with the instrument of the physical brain or of the physical body in general. But one cannot understand human life with this instrument of the physical body. We can only understand human life if we can rise to a thinking that is not produced by the physical body alone. It is this thinking that should be cultivated through the anthroposophic view of the world. Of course people say they do not understand the anthroposophic outlook—what is given in our books or presented in lectures. And we can quite believe them. But what does this mean? It only means that they want to se their physical brains for understanding. They do not want to learn another kind of thinking than that which can lazily find support in the physical brain. The anthroposophic view of the world cannot, of course, be understood with such thinking. It is not that one would have to be clairvoyant in order to understand it. But one must train oneself to a thinking that is not bound to the physical brain. What is to be found in anthroposophic literature and can be acquired with the healthy human understanding—for the healthy human understanding is not bound to the brain—gradually develops a thinking, a feeling and a willing that are adequate to the needs of to-day. It is a fact that what the present requires of us cannot be understood by the instrument of the physical body; it must be apprehended, through the instrument of the etheric body, i.e., with the body of formative forces underlying the physical body.

The spiritual world which is striving to reveal itself to men, only finds expression in their deeply unconscious feelings. Men are dominated by an unconquerable fear of the spiritual world. When they say they do not understand spiritual science this is really only an excuse. The truth is, they are afraid of the revelations of the spiritual world. It is only because they will not admit this fear that they say they do not understand spiritual science, or that it is not logical—or they make other excuses. In truth, they are afraid and therefore seek all possible excuses in order to escape from the great problems. How glad people are when they can escape the great tasks and riddles of present day life! When one spoke, maybe from this or that angle, of important problems of our age, people grew uncomfortable. Then perhaps they went to see the plays of Ibsen in which some of the great problems of the age find partial expression. But they did not need to take these seriously; all that is “merely” dramatic art. People grew uncomfortable when one spoke to them directly of the penetration of the physical world by the spiritual. Now Björnson had treated of this in his dramas, but one had no need to believe it; it was “only” art. People felt an unconquerable fear of taking these things seriously.

Again, class differences became greater and greater, the gulf between the governing and proletarian classes became wider and wider. The social question produced riddles; one talked of these but felt uncomfortable about them. Yet people went to the theatre to see Hauptmann's “Weavers,” though they felt no need to take a serious attitude to the problems it presented. One let oneself be stirred a little by the abysmal depths in human life, but there was no need to take it seriously, for it was “just” art. People took refuge in something that they did not need to take seriously. This is a phenomenon that is characteristic of the psychology of the age. What lies behind this?

Behind this lies the fact that men, in accordance with the will on the part of the spiritual world to reveal itself to them, ought to have striven to take seriously certain things which cannot be grasped through the instrumentality of the physical body, but only through “imaginative” forces—just as art itself can only be grasped by “imaginative” forces. Man's physical body is built up like a natural product; it is a work of nature. Man's etheric body is built up like a work of art; it is a real work of plastic art—only, it is in constant motion. And what man receives (for his enjoyment) from understanding a work of art, must be intensified and clarified, must become perception which he takes seriously, i.e., “Imagination,” “Inspiration” and “Intuition.” Man then understands what is willing to reveal itself to him to-day. For behind present events waits concealed what can only be understood spiritually. One should feel deeply that the spiritual revelation trying to enter our present world can only be grasped through spiritual science itself i.e., through that thinking and feeling, through those inner impulses of will which can be trained by spiritual science and belong to the same region of soul as artistic perceptions—though these are not taken seriously and remain mere mirror-images.

At one time I tried to draw attention to something that is urgently needed by the present age. Naturally it was not understood because of the philistine character of our science—that terrible monster of official, academic science. My book “Philosophie der Freiheit,” which appeared in 1892, contains a chapter entitled “Die Moralische Phantasie” (Moral Imagination). In terms of Spiritual Science one could say “imaginative moral impulses.” I wanted to point out that the domain usually reached only in artistic fantasy must now be grasped by mankind in all earnestness, for it represents a stage that man must attain in order to receive the super-sensible which cannot be grasped by the brain.

At the beginning of the nineties I wanted to point out, at least in regard to man's moral perceptions, that the super-sensible must now be grasped in all earnestness. One should realise all this to-day; one should feel that the thoughts, the inner impulses of soul that were carried over into the catastrophe of the world-war and into the present period of social upheaval are no longer of any use. We need new “impulses” (or springs of action). If one comes to-day with a new “impulse,” it is the last thing that people understand. For if one brings a new “impulse,” whose source is entirely within the spiritual world, and presents it as a remedy for the evils of our age, complaints are heard on all sides, from the extreme right to the extreme left, that it is all incomprehensible. Of course one does not understand it if one wants to retain the old forms of thinking. But to-day it is necessary to overcome these old forms, re-modelling one's whole soul inwardly. All external revolutions, no matter how agreeable to this or that party or class, lead into the worst of blind alleys and will bring the greatest misery to mankind if not illuminated by the inner revolution of the soul. This means throwing off one's absorption in the purely materialistic view of the world and preparing actively to receive the spiritual wave that is willing to invade human evolution as a new revelation. The revolution from matter to spirit is the only salutary revolution; all others are only like diseases of childhood—scarlet-fever or measles—afflicting the early stages of what is trying to come to healthy expression in the emergence of the spirit at the present time.

A strong inner resolution is necessary to-day if we are to be equal to the demands made upon us by our present age. Let us consider in all earnestness that it is a spiritual world that is trying to invade our life. Spiritual forces are there and we should make our decisions, our deeds, our whole thinking dependent on them. This is demanded of us to-day! Much is changing in the present time. Let me point to something symptomatic which also sounds strange when spoken of, but appears of the greatest importance when viewed spiritually.

I have just spoken to you of the etheric body as a necessary instrument for a certain spiritual understanding of what in art need only remain a mirror-image. Now we know from Spiritual Science that in addition to the physical body and “etheric body” we possess an “astral body”—or whatever you like to call it. It is the psychic element proper and is essentially more spiritual than the “etheric body.” At the time of his physical development man was naturally more “remote” from this than from his “etheric body.” For the “etheric body,” underlying, as it does, the physical body, has a kind of “form” [Bildgestalt] even though it is a “form” in constant motion. The “astral body,” however, is really formless. When we speak of it, we are speaking of an “image” or “picture” which, we know, is only intended to “represent” the “astral body,” for this is really formless. The “astral body” has been changing during the last three to four centuries and is very different in modern man. The human beings of the past had “astral bodies” that were, comparatively speaking, permeated with all kinds of spiritual forces; the spiritual feelings and impulses at work in their lives were due to this spiritual element in their “astral bodies.” To-day our “astral bodies” have becomeempty. They are remarkably empty, and this is because, at the present time, when the power of the spiritual world is striving to reveal itself from without (to a certain extent), man is to receive this external spiritual world. Hence his “astral body” has gradually become empty. He ought to fill himself again with what is revealing itself from without. This has a quite definite effect on man. And now I am coming to a fact which, as I have already said, sounds so very strange when one speaks of it just as strange as when one speaks of the child's melancholy countenance. Nevertheless it is a fact.

The most important event in the series that led to the outbreak of the catastrophe of the world-war fell—so far as Berlin was concerned—on the 1st [of] August, at some time between a quarter past three in the afternoon and eleven or twelve o'clock at night. Various people were concerned—people belonging, of course, to our materialistic age. Now for the materialistically-minded man of to-day that is the most unfavourable time for making decisions. For we have come to a very, very important point in human evolution. The man of to-day cannot form sensible decisions at all if he does not wake up with them in the morning. This is true, however strange it may sound, and men will recognise it more and more from external acts. It is not necessary that we should be conscious of these decisions; in our sub-consciousness we live through in the night what we can experience on the following day. Man has not yet got so far as to be able to survey it prophetically, but that is not the point. If you harbour a thought at 3:30 or 6 o'clock, it may be a thought that you have already had in the night and now arises in you again. If, however, a thought arises that you have not already formed in the night but which is produced from out of the events of the day, it cannot be a reasonable thought in the case of the man of to-day. The man of to-day has to draw his most important impulses from the spiritual world. These do not come from the physical world at all. To-day we cannot but be “unreasonable” if we do not bring our decisions with us, if we do not appeal to this life in the spiritual world. When our “astral body” is free at night, i.e., outside the physical and “etheric” bodies and together with the spiritual world, that which is most essential takes place; it is prepared for the Reason of the day (and more so than in the case of our ancestors). The moment of waking should be sacred for the modern man. He should feel: I come from the spiritual world and enter the physical; all that is good, all that makes me capable of being a reasonable man, I have experienced between falling asleep and waking up, through intercourse with the spiritual world, through intercourse with the dead I have known in life and who have died before me—in short, through intercourse with those who are no longer in a physical body. I experience it when I am with them in the purely spiritual world. From this experience I ought to draw the fundamental mood of sacred regard for the moment of waking; this fundamental feeling will then make it possible for me throughout the day to say in one case “Here I am helped by a spiritual impulse” and in another case “Here I receive no help; this must not be decided before tomorrow.”

That is a way of conducting one's life spiritually, really reckoning with spiritual factors. Of course, in a materialistic age men do not reckon with spiritual factors for they are always so “clever.” They believe that nothing more than the instrument of the physical body is required in order to be clever. They do not appeal to what can be revealed to them when they are separated from their physical body and are together with the spiritual world in their “astral body.” Nothing but the will to conduct life spiritually, the will to allow spiritual decisions, spiritual impulses, to play a part in what we do in the physical world can make humanity healthy again.

This is what man should really consider thoroughly to-day. The anthroposophic view of the world cannot consist in a number of abstract concepts which we receive, studying them and resting content that we have a different view of the world from that of others. No; our whole thinking and our whole feeling must become different, so that we realise that we must let our life be penetrated by the light of the spirit. Humanity's present misfortunes have come from its refusal to entertain the spiritual—an attitude that has been cultivated to the utmost. The catastrophe of the world-war has, more than any previous event, arisen from external, purely material causes. It has therefore been the most terrible catastrophe of all. Man should learn from it that he was driven into it by his previous thinking, feeling and willing; he will not come out of it—though it will assume other forms—until he boldly determines to undertake the inner transformation of his soul.

The facts which I have put before you are indeed facts: the melancholy expression on the faces of children, the necessity of using our etheric body for gaining an understanding of the world, and the necessity of appealing to the moment of waking, to what remains of the previous sleep and glows on, as it were, in us.. It will be more and more necessary for man's future evolution that he should let the spirit play an active part.

One should understand that the anthroposophic view of the world is not intended as something sensational for “psychic idlers”—and many of our present day mystics are just that. One should see in it not a kind of dessert supplementing life's external, physical enjoyments, but something connected with the deepest impulses of our cultural life. The latter cannot become healthy unless fructified by the anthroposophic view of the world. We should engrave this fact deeply upon our souls when we have learnt to know this anthroposophic view.

With the above words I wanted to describe, from a certain point of view, the present decisive moment in human evolution. Of course it is quite easy, if we judge with the thoughts of the age, to condemn as mere foolishness the important things that are most in need of being said to-day. People believe themselves Christians but have not even understood the saying that what is wisdom with man is often foolishness unto God, and that all foolishness—perhaps folly and madness—before men can yet be wisdom unto God. Indeed, people to-day forget so easily the inner impulses and like to cling to the empty phrase. When one speaks to men to-day and utters the word “Christian” or “Christ” or “Jesus” after every fifth word, one is considered to be speaking in a Christian sense, even if what one is saying may be very unchristian. But if we hold we are making known what the Christ is revealing to our souls to-day, and if in doing so we take account of the commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”—a saying that has been carried over into Christianity—people find it unchristian. They repeat, in parrot fashion, the Ten Commandments, but take the name of their God in vain every moment and believe themselves to be specially Christian in consequence. So, too, one is not regarded as a true German if one has not always the word “German” on one's lips; though to-day the important thing is to see that the deepest forces of the German people have been, as it were, trampled under foot during the last thirty years and must be raised again by a spiritual deepening. We look to the West and find a civilization that strives to become completely materialistic, though it has, at least, a certain inner surety of instinct and on this account cannot completely drown in materialism. We look to the East and find a cultural life that despises the West and us too, for the Eastern culture still clings to an ancient spirituality and is renewing it in a certain way. We stand between these and are called to find the right path between Western materialism, and Eastern spirituality (which is not suitable for us). We in Central Europe should become conscious of our great responsibility and conscious, too, how much our sense of responsibility for this position has been lost in the last decades. What has our spiritual life become? An appendage to the political life and to the economic life. The state as trustee of the spiritual [cultural] life, especially of education, has destroyed the spiritual life. The economic life on which we depend for our daily bread has further destroyed us. We require a free spiritual life, for only into such can we introduce that which the spiritual world would reveal to mankind. This stream of spiritual life must descend! But it will never reveal itself to the servant of the state, the state professor; and it will never reveal itself to one who, in the spiritual life, is the coolie of the economic life. It will only reveal itself to him who has daily to struggle with the spiritual life and stands within the free life of the spirit. Our age requires the life of the spirit to be set free from the shackles of the state and of economics.

These things which are being made known to-day in another form through our “Threefold State” proposals, are the Christianity of to-day; they are, spiritual revelations clothed in external forms. They are what men need; they alone offer men a real basis and a real possibility for learning anew to transform their thinking. It is this that is so necessary for mankind to-day. We have had to wage war with a country that possesses an instinctive political life of great perfection and has long possessed many colonies with which it has industrial ties. We have fought as a country with an industrialism that was only developing and which wanted to possess colonies. For these strivings we required “spirit” [Geist]—and no one had committed the sin against the Spirit more than those who took a leading part in the economic life of Germany during the last three decades. For their programme was: rejection of the spiritual life, surrender to mere chance, blind chance. It is as if the World Spirit had wished to give the German people the greatest lesson by imposing the greatest test. This nation was to be shown the Spirit cannot be ignored. But it appears as if this is being learnt with difficulty, for this nation is still inclined to condemn everything else rather than lack of consciousness of responsibility towards the spirit. The lamentable events occurring in this domain to-day show that men's souls are still asleep. There is a total lack of conscious realisation how ill-fitted for their task are the men who guide the destiny of the German people and have to represent it before the West. There is simply no realisation that the whole delegation_, to Versailles is senseless because of the men taking part. The will not to see events as they are is still a witness to the fact that men's souls are asleep; otherwise they would have said long ago: The delegates to Versailles whom we have sent are as unfitted as possible to understand the present moment of world history. One will only judge these things correctly when one becomes conscious of responsibility towards the spirit—when one recognises that we are living in a very important moment of the world's history and that it is our duty to take things very seriously. In certain fields there is much talk about this, that and the other, and it is more comfortable to say: those who hold the responsible positions will manage somehow. But nothing good can come if those who hold responsible positions to-day still harbour the old thoughts. Whether they be old-fashioned aristocrats, or decadent aristocrats, or Marxian Socialists who know nothing about the world but, at most, have absorbed something of Marx' “Kapital”—whoever they be nothing good can come if they do not develop the will to turn their souls from the old to new thoughts. The revolution of the 9th [of] November, 1918, was no revolution, for what has changed is only the external stucco. But what is trying to change can be seen most clearly in those who now wear the outward stucco instead of those who wore it previously. It is necessary to see what lies at the base of all this. But thoughts are necessary, and for these one must have the will; and this will can only come when trained through active intercourse with the spiritual world. On this account active intercourse with the spiritual world is the sole real balsam that humanity needs.

This is what I wanted to put before you in a form in which it must appear to one to-day in face of contemporary events. I wanted, as the opportunity was given us to speak together again, to put this before your souls so that ever more and more and in ever wider and wider circles within our Anthroposophic Movement a striving might arise which can not only give the single individual an inner feeling of comfort but can bear fruits for the cultural life of the whole of humanity.

It is a deep satisfaction to me to see how many more friends of our Anthroposophic Movement are present to-day than a year ago. May the Spirit now quickening the development of the world and of humanity bring it about that in another year there may be as great, or even a much greater, increase in our numbers. For the more human souls there are who become convinced by this Spirit of the need for the new thinking, feeling and willing, and for a new sense of responsibility, the better it will be.