The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Goetheanum, which has been under construction in Dornach for the past ten years, no longer stands there; the building has been lost to the work of the Anthroposophical Society, and what an appalling loss it is! One need only weigh what the Goetheanum has meant to the Society to form some idea of the enormity of that loss and of the load of grief brought upon us by the catastrophic fire of last New Year's Eve.

Until 1913, when the foundation stone of the Goetheanum was laid in Dornach, the Anthroposophical Society served as the guardian of the Anthroposophical Movement wherever it had established branches. But then the Society began to feel that it needed a central building of its own. Perhaps members here will appreciate especially keenly what the Society as a whole has lost in the building that became its home, for in Stuttgart the Society has its own building. We have been privileged to carry on our activities in it for many years, and Stuttgart members therefore know from experience what it means to work in a building of their own, conceived as a suitable setting for the Anthroposophical Movement.

Up to the time when the Anthroposophical Society felt moved to establish its center in the building at Dornach, its only way of carrying on its work—except, as has been said, in Stuttgart—was in meetings. It had to rely solely on words to convey the possibility of a connection of man with the spiritual world such as has become a necessity for present day human evolution. Of course, the medium of the spoken word will always remain the most important, significant and indispensable means to that end that is available to the Movement. But additional ways opened up to us with the building of the Goetheanum. It became possible to speak to the world at large in the purely artistic forms striven for in it. While it is true that people who lack a sense for what anthroposophy has to offer through the medium of words will also evince little feeling for the artistic forms they perceive in the Goetheanum at Dornach, it is nevertheless true that people of our time tend to find it easier to approach things with their eyes than to rouse themselves to inner activity through what they hear. The Dornach building thus vastly widened the possibility of conveying the spirituality so needed by the human race today. In its visible forms and as a visible work of art, the Goetheanum spoke of the secrets of the spiritual world to an immeasurably greater number of people than had previously been able to learn of them through spoken words. Anyone with enough goodwill to look without prejudice at the building and at the anthroposophy underlying it found in the Goetheanum proof positive that anthroposophy is not tainted with sectarianism, but rather addresses itself to the great task of the age: that of taking up and embodying in every facet of our civilization and our culture the rays of a new spiritual light now available to humankind. Perhaps it was possible for an unprejudiced person to detect a sectarian note in one or another of the many meetings held in rented lecture halls. But that became impossible for people of goodwill as they looked at the Dornach building, where every trace of symbolism or allegory was studiously avoided and the anthroposophical impulse confined itself to purest art. People had to see that anthroposophy fosters something of wide human appeal, not something strange and different, that it is trying to fructify the present in a way that has universal human meaning in every realm of modern endeavor. The Goetheanum whose ruins are now so painful to behold had become in this sense a powerful means of expressing what the true nature of the Anthroposophical Movement is. We tried to carry our intention of keeping to the universally human into every least detail of the building. We strove to achieve pure art, for such a striving is profoundly part of the anthroposophical impulse. So the Goetheanum became a means of communicating the lofty concerns of the Anthroposophical Society even to people who had no interest in the Society as such.

This is the way things were for almost ten years. But a single night sufficed to end it.

To speak these two sentences in sequence is to be plunged into feelings that defy expression. Anything that could be reported of the work and worries of the past ten years falls into insignificance beside the irreparable loss of this vital means of showing what the Anthroposophical Movement is.

Now that the Goetheanum is gone, everyone who loved it and had a real sense of what it signified longs to have it rebuilt in some form or other. But the very thought of rebuilding should remind us that ten years have passed since the building was begun, and that the Anthroposophical Movement is of a nature that attracts enemies. In these grief-stricken days we have been given a further taste of what enmity means. Yet, on the other hand, the catastrophe also brought to light what hosts of true friends the Goetheanum had made for the Anthroposophical Movement. For along with messages from members, so gratefully received by me—messages in which they wrote of their grief and anguish—there were many from individuals who, though they had remained outside the Society, wanted to express their fellow-feeling in the matter of our catastrophic loss. Much warmth toward our cause came to light on that occasion.

Indeed, it was love that built the Goetheanum, and at the end, too, it stood under the sign of love. Only a boundlessly sacrificial spirit on the part of those who, when we began building in 1913, had long been devoting themselves to the movement, made the building possible. Immeasurable sacrifices were made—material, spiritual and labor sacrifices. Many friends of the Movement joined forces in Dornach and worked together in the most selfless way imaginable to bring the building into being.

Then the terrible war broke out. But even though the building tempo slowed down considerably during those harrowing years, no breach was made in the cooperative anthroposophical spirit of the members who were working together. The Dornach building site was a place where representatives of many European nations at war with one another worked and thought and carried on together in peace and loving fellowship. Perhaps it can be said, without any intention of boasting, that the love built into this building will stand out when historians come to record the waves of hatred set in motion among civilized peoples in the war-time years. While that hate was raging elsewhere, real love prevailed in Dornach and was built into the building—love that had its origin in the spirit. The name anthroposophy bears is justified: it is not mere learning like any other. The ideas it presents and the words it uses are not meant as abstract theory. Anthroposophical ideas are not shaped in the way other kinds of learning have been shaping ideas for the past three or four centuries; words are not meant as they are elsewhere. Anthroposophical ideas are vessels fashioned by love, and man's being is spiritually summoned by the spiritual world to partake of their content. Anthroposophy must bring the light of true humanness to shine out in thoughts that bear love's imprint; knowledge is only the form in which man reflects the possibility of receiving in his heart the light of the world spirit that has come to dwell there and from that heart illumine human thought. Since anthroposophy cannot really be grasped except by the power of love, it is love-engendering when human beings take it in a way true to its own nature. That is why a place where love reigned could be built in Dornach in the very midst of raging hatreds. Words expressing anthroposophical truths are not like words spoken elswhere today; rightly conceived, they are all really reverential pleas that the spirit make itself known to men.

The building erected in Dornach was built in this reverential spirit. Love was embodied in it. That same love manifested itself in renewed sacrifice during the night of the Goetheanum fire. It was spirit transformed into love that was present there.

I cannot speak at this time of the deeper, spiritual aspects of the Goetheanum fire. I can understand someone asking questions close to his heart such as, “How could a just cosmos have failed to prevent this frightful disaster?” Nor can I deny anyone the right to ask whether the catastrophe could not have been foreseen. But these questions lead into the very depths of esoterics, and it is impossible to discuss them because there is simply no place remaining to us where they can be brought up without at once being reported to people who would forge them into weapons for use against the Anthroposophical Movement. This prevents my going into the deeper spiritual facts of the case.

But what was cast in the mould of love has called forth bitter enmity. Our misfortune has unleashed a veritable hailstorm of ridicule, contempt and hatred, and the willful distortion of truth that has always characterized so large a part of our opposition is especially typical of the situation now, with enemies creeping out of every corner and spreading deliberate untruth about the tragedy itself. Our friends present at the scene of the fire did everything in their power to save what simply could not be saved. But ill-wishers have had the bad taste to say, for example, that the fire showed up the members for what they were, that they just hung about praying for the fire to stop of itself. This is merely a small sample of the contempt and ridicule we are being subjected to in connection with the fire.

I have been warning for years that we will have to reckon with a constantly growing opposition, and that it is our foremost duty to be aware of this and to be properly vigilant. It was always painful to have to hear people say that our enemies in this or that quarter seemed to be quieting down. This sort of thing is due to people's willingness to entertain illusions, unfortunately all too prevalent among us. Let us hope that the terrible misfortune we have had to face will at least have the effect of curing members of their illusions and convincing them of the need to concentrate all the forces of their hearts and minds on advancing the Anthroposophical Movement. For now that the wish to build another Goetheanum is being expressed, we need to be particularly conscious of the fact that without a strong, energetic Anthroposophical Society in the background it would be senseless to rebuild. Rebuilding makes sense only if a self-aware, strong Anthroposophical Society, thoroughly conscious of what its responsibilities are, stands behind it.

We cannot afford to forget what the bases of such a strong Anthroposophical Society are. Let us, therefore, go on, on this solemn occasion, to consider the way a strong Anthroposophical Society, aware of its responsibilities, should be conceived in the situation we are presently facing.

Until 1918, my dear friends, the Anthroposophical Society was what I might call a vessel to contain the spiritual stream believed by leading members to be vitally needed by present day humanity. Up to that time the only additional element was what grew out of the heart of anthroposophy, out of anthroposophical thinking, feeling and will. Even though the Dornach building was everything I have just described—an expression of the Anthroposophical Movement in a much broader sense than words can ever be—its every least detail came into being out of the very heart of anthroposophy.

But anthroposophy is not the concern of a separatist group; sectarianism is abhorrent to it. This means that it is capable of making whatever springs from its center fruitful for all life's various realms. During the hard times that followed upon the temporary ending of the war in Europe, friends of the Movement saw the tragic shape of things that prevailed on every hand in the life about them, and they realized how essential new impulses were in every realm of life. Much that grew out of the Anthroposophical Movement after 1919 took on a very different character than it would have had if anthroposophy had gone on shaping its efforts as it had been doing prior to that time. It is certainly true that anthroposophy is called upon to make its influence felt in every phase of life, and most certainly in those fields where friends of the Movement, motivated by anthroposophy, have sought to be fruitfully active. But external events have somehow brought it about that much that has been undertaken did not, in fact, spring directly from an anthroposophical spirit, but was instead founded and carried on alongside and unrelated to it. So we have seen a good deal happen since 1919 which, though it cannot be called unanthroposophical, has nevertheless been carried on in another sort of spirit than would have prevailed had the Anthroposophical Movement continued to pursue the course it was following up to 1918. This is a fact of the greatest importance, and I ask you not to misunderstand me when I speak about these matters as I must, in duty bound.

I am most decidedly not referring to such appropriate undertakings as Der Kommende Tag, [DER KOMMENDE TAG. A public corporation serving economic and spiritual concerns in Stuttgart. It was to demonstrate cooperation between economic and cultural institutions. Founded in 1920 and liquidated in 1925, the enterprise became a victim of inflation and other unfavorable events.] undertakings that came into being in close connection with the Anthroposophical Movement, even though they carry on their existence as separate entities. What I shall have to say does not apply to this type of enterprise. Please, therefore, do not take my words as reflecting in the least on the standing of such undertakings in the material sphere as these, for they have every intention of proceeding along lines entirely in harmony with the Anthroposophical Movement. What I am about to say refers exclusively to the Anthroposophical Society as such, to work in and for the Society.

This Anthroposophical Movement, which is partially anchored in the Anthroposophical Society, has been able to demonstrate its universally human character especially clearly here in Stuttgart, where it has proved that it did not spring from some spiritual party program or other but had its origin rather in the full breadth of human nature. Unprejudiced people probably realize that the proof of anthroposophy's universally human character is to be found here in Stuttgart in one area in particular: the pedagogy of the Waldorf School. [The first “Free Waldorf School” according to the pedagogy of Rudolf Steiner was founded at Stuttgart in 1919. At present, there are some seventy Waldorf Schools in many countries.] The proof lies in the fact that the Waldorf School is not an institution set up to teach anthroposophy, but to solve the problem of how to teach for the best development of the whole wide range of human capacities. How can education best serve human growth? Anthroposophy must show how this problem can be solved. A sect or a party would have founded a school for teaching its views, not a school based on universally human considerations.

The universally human character striven for in the Waldorf School cannot be too strongly emphasized. One can say in a case like this that a person who is a genuine anthroposophist is not in the least concerned with the name anthroposophy; he is concerned with what it is about. But it is about universally human concerns. So when it is brought to bear on a certain goal, it can function only in the most universally human sense. Every sect or party that sets out to found a school founds a sectarian school to train up, say, Seventh Day Adventists or the like. It is contrary to the nature of anthroposophy to do this. Anthroposophy can only give rise to universally human institutions; that is what comes naturally to it. People who still treat the Anthroposophical Movement as a sect despite these facts are either unobservant or malicious, for the Waldorf School here in Stuttgart offers positive proof that anthroposophy is concerned with what is universally human.

But circles within the Society should also pay close heed to this same fact. The way the Waldorf School was founded, the whole spirit of its founding, are matters for the Society's pondering. This spirit should serve as a model in any further foundings related either to the Anthroposophical Society or to the Movement. Perhaps we may say that the Goetheanum in Dornach and the Waldorf School and its procedures show how anthroposophical activity should be carried on in all the various spheres of culture.

To make sure of not being misunderstood, let me say again that I have used Der Kommende Tag as an example of something that has its own rightness because of the way it was set up, and it is therefore not among the institutions that I will be referring to in what follows. I am going to restrict my comments to what is being done or contemplated in the way of anthroposophical activity within the Anthroposophical Movement itself. I want especially to stress that the Movement has succeeded in demonstrating in the Waldorf School that it does not work in a narrowly sectarian, egotistic spirit, but rather in a spirit so universally human that the background out of which its pupils come is no longer discernible, so universally human have they grown. It is superfluous, in the case of the Waldorf School, to ask whether its origin was anthroposophy; the only question is whether children who receive their education there are being properly educated. Anthroposophy undergoes a metamorphosis into the universally human when it is put to work. But for that to be the case, for anthroposophy to be rightly creative in the various fields, it must have an area—not for its own but for its offsprings' sake—where it is energetically fostered and where its members are fully conscious of their responsibilities to the Society. Only then can anthroposophy be a suitable parent to these many offspring in the various spheres of culture and civilization. The Society must unite human beings who feel the deepest, holiest commitment to the true fostering of anthroposophy.

This is by no means easy, though many people think it is. It is a task that has certain difficult aspects. These difficulties have shown up especially strongly here in Stuttgart too since 1919. For though on the one hand the Waldorf School has thus far preserved the truly anthroposophical character I have been discussing, we have seen just in this case on the other hand how extraordinarily difficult it is to keep the right relationship between the Anthroposophical Society as the parent, and its offspring activities. This may sound paradoxical, but if I go into more detail you will perhaps understand me also in this.

The comments I am about to make are not intended to reflect in any way on the worth of the various movements that have sprung up since 1919 in connection with anthroposophy; all I have in mind is their effect on the Society, so no one should mistake my words for value judgments. I am speaking exclusively of effects on the Society. The enterprises that I shall be referring to have not always been conceived by those responsible for them with what I might call up-to-date feeling for the spirit of the commandment, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord giveth thee.’ The moving spirits in these projects have often—indeed, usually—been members of the Anthroposophical Society. The question now arises whether these members, active in fields connected with the Society, have always kept the parental source clearly in mind, competent though they undoubtedly are in their chosen fields. Is the effect of their professional activity on the Society desirable? This is a very different question than whether the persons concerned are professionally competent. Speaking radically, I would put it thus: A person can be the most excellent Waldorf School teacher imaginable, one wholly consonant with the spirit in which the Waldorf School grew out of the Anthroposophical Movement to become a universally human undertaking. He can carry on his work as a Waldorf teacher wholly in that spirit. The school can shape itself and its work in the anthroposophical spirit all the better for not being a school to teach anthroposophy. The individual Waldorf teacher may make most excellent contributions to it without necessarily doing the right thing by the Society as a member. I am not saying that this is true in any given instance, just that it could be true. Or let us say that someone can be an able officer of Der Kommende Tag, a person with the ability to make it flourish, yet prove most inadequate to the needs of the Anthroposophical Society. But the failure to give the parent entity what it needs in order to foster all its offspring properly is cause for the greatest anxiety, for really deep worry about the Anthroposophical Movement.

My dear friends, the fact that this situation prevailed in a certain field was what forced me to speak as I did about the Movement for Religious Renewal¹ in my next-to-last lecture at the Goetheanum. I most certainly do not mean to criticize the Movement for Religious Renewal in the slightest, for it was brought into being three and a half months ago with my own cooperation and advice. It would be the most natural thing in the world for me to be profoundly delighted should it succeed. Surely no doubt can exist on this score. Nevertheless, after it had been in existence for three and a half months, I had to speak as I did at that time in Dornach, directing my comments not to the Movement for Religious Renewal but to the anthroposophists, including of course those attached to the Movement for Religious Renewal. What I had to say was, in so many words: Yes, rejoice in the child, but don't forget the mother and the care and concern due her. That care and concern are owed her by the Movement for Religious Renewal, too, but most particularly by the members of the Anthroposophical Society.

For what a thing it would be if the Society were to be slighted, if anthroposophists were to turn away from it to an offspring movement, not in the sense of saying that those of us who have grown together with the Anthroposophical Movement can be the best advisors and helpers of an offspring movement, but instead turning away from the Anthroposophical Movement of which they were members with the feeling that they have at last found what they were really looking for, something they could never have found in anthroposophy! Though there is every reason to be overjoyed at the parent's concern for the child, it must be clearly recognized that the child cannot prosper if the mother is neglected. If anthroposophists who join the Movement for Religious Renewal leave much to be desired as members of the Anthroposophical Society, we would face exactly the same situation as would have to be faced in the case of a Waldorf School teacher who, though a first-rate man in his field, contributed too little to the Society. But this is just the fate we have been experiencing since 1919, little as the fact has been noticed.

We have witnessed the well-intentioned founding of the Union for the Threefolding of the Social Organism. [UNION FOR THE THREEFOLDING OF THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. The Union had its seat in Stuttgart and published the weekly review, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus.] This Union was largely responsible for the failure to get a hearing for the threefold commonwealth in nonanthroposophical circles. What it did do was to try to hammer the threefold impulse into the Anthroposophical Movement, which was already permeated by everything basic to it, and this in a far deeper way than could ever be matched by its quite external, exoteric expression in the threefold commonwealth. We had the sad experience of seeing that some anthroposophists who worked so zealously and intensively at this task became less valuable members of the Society than they had been.

Such has been our fate for the past four years. The situation has to be described as it really is, because it will take a strong, energetic Anthroposophical Society to justify any thought of rebuilding the Goetheanum. We must remind ourselves how significant a phenomenon it was that Stuttgart was just the place where an excellent beginning was made in a wide range of activities. But to be realistic we need to ask the following question (and I beg you not to misunderstand my speaking of these basic matters on the present solemn, sad occasion).

To avoid any misunderstanding, let us return to the example of the Waldorf School. It is of the first importance to grasp the difference between spreading anthroposophy by means of words, in books and lectures, and concerning oneself with the welfare of the Anthroposophical Society as such. Theoretically, at least, it does not require a society to spread anthroposophy by means of books and lectures; anthroposophy is spread to a great extent by just these means, without any help from the Society. But the totality of what comprises anthroposophy today cannot exist without the Anthroposophical Society to contain it. One may be a first-rate Waldorf teacher and a first-rate spreader of anthroposophy by word and pen in addition, yet hold back from any real commitment to the Society and to the kind of relationships to one's fellow men that are an outgrowth of it anthroposophy. Must it not be admitted that though we have a superb Waldorf School and a faculty that performs far more brilliantly in both the described areas than one could possibly have expected, its members have withdrawn from real concern for and a real fostering of the Society? They came to Stuttgart, have been doing superlatively well what needed doing in both the areas mentioned, but have not committed themselves to serving the Anthroposophical Society; they have failed to take part in its fostering and development.

I beg you to take these words as they are meant. We have had people working energetically and with enthusiasm on the threefold commonwealth. The more active they became in this field, the less activity they devoted to the Society. Now we face the threat of seeing the same thing happen again in the case of able people in the Movement for Religious Renewal. Again, in an especially important area, resources of strength could be withheld from the Society. This is a source of deep anxiety, particularly because of the immeasurably great loss we have just suffered. It makes it necessary for me to speak to you today in the plainest language possible.

For clarity's sake and in order somewhat more adequately to characterize the way we need to work in the Society, I would like to point out another thing that I will have to describe quite differently. In the past four years, during which the Society has seen so much happen, there has been a development with two different aspects. This double way of evolving is characteristic both of the movement I have in mind and of the Society. I am referring to the student, or youth movement.

Let us recall how it began a short while ago. At the time it called itself the Anthroposophical Union for Higher Education. [ANTHROPOSOPHICAL UNION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION publicized in 1920 the two courses on Higher Education given at the Goetheanum in the fall of 1920 and spring of 1921.] It is hard to press these things into any sharply defined form, since they are alive and growing, but we can try. What were its founders (and more especially its godfather, Roman Boos), more or less consciously aiming at? Their goal was to bring the influence of anthroposophy to bear on study in the various scientific fields, to change and reform tendencies that those individuals active in the movement felt were going in the wrong direction. The movement was conceived as affecting what went on in classrooms in the sense that young people studying in them were to introduce a new spirit. That is the way the program adopted at that time should be described.

Then, a little later on in fact, quite recently—another movement made its appearance. I don't want to call it a counter-movement, but it differed from the earlier one. It appeared when, here in Stuttgart, a number of young students came together to foster a concern for universal humanness, humanness with a spiritual-pedagogical overtone. It was not their purpose to bring the influence of anthroposophy directly into classrooms, but instead into another setting entirely: into man's innermost being, into his heart, his spirit, his whole way of feeling. There was no talk, to put it radically, of giving a different tone to words used in the classroom; the point was rather that, here and there among the young, there needed to be some individuals who experience their present youth and their growing older with a different kind of feeling in their hearts because the impulse to do so springs from their innermost being. Since they were not just students but human beings as well, and were growing older as human beings do, they would carry their humanness, conceived in the universally human spirit of anthroposophy, into the classroom also. These young students were not concerned with academic problems encountered in classrooms, but with the young human beings in them. The place was the same in both instances, but the problems were different.

But the Anthroposophical Society can do its work properly only if it is broad-minded enough to be able to find its way to the innermost being of everyone who turns to it for help in his searching and his striving.

Among the various exercises to be found in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, you will discover six that are to be practiced for a certain definite period of time. One of these is the cultivation of a completely unprejudiced state of mind. Indeed, dear friends, the Anthroposophical Society as a whole needs to cultivate these six virtues, and it is essential that it strive to acquire them. It must be so broadminded that it reaches the humanness of those who turn to it, and so strong that it can meet their needs. One of the problems of the Society showed up in the fact that when I came here a short while ago and found the young people in the picture, the Society had completely withdrawn from them, making a patching up of relationships necessary.

I am speaking a bit radically, but that may help to make my meaning clearer. I wanted, in this example, to show how important it is for the Society to be able to meet life's challenges.

Now let us turn our attention to another matter. For quite some time past, able members of the Society have been at work in the most varied branches of scientific endeavor. I am truly speaking with the greatest inner and outer restraint when I say that we have absolutely top-notch scientists who are not being given the appreciation they deserve from us. They have taken on the responsibility of developing the various branches of science within the Society. In the Society's beginning phase it had to approach people purely as human beings. It simply could not branch out into a whole range of different fields; it had to limit itself to speaking to people from its innermost heart, as one human being speaks to another. Its task was first to win a certain terrain for itself in the world of human hearts before going on to cultivate any other field. Then, since anthroposophy has the capacity to fructify every aspect of culture and civilization, scientists appeared as a matter of course in the Society and were active in their fields. But again, my dear friends, it is possible for a member to be a first-rate scientist and yet ignore the Society's basic needs. A scientist can apply anthroposophical insights to chemistry and physics and the like in the most admirable way and still be a poor anthroposophist. We have seen how able scientists in these very fields have withdrawn all their strength from the parent society, that they have not helped nurture the Society as such. People who, in a simple and direct way, seek anthroposophy in the Society are sometimes disturbed to hear, in the way these scientists still speak with an undertone reminiscent of the chemical or physical fields they come from, for though chemistry, physics, biology and jurisprudence are still connected by a thread with the universally human, the connection has become remote indeed. The essential thing is not to forget the parent. If the Society had not fostered pure anthroposophy in its innermost heart for one and a half decades, the scientists would have found no place in it to do their work. Anthroposophy provided them with what they needed. Now they should consider how much their help is needed in so fostering the Society that some return is made to it for what anthroposophy has contributed to their sciences.

This will perhaps help us to look more closely at what has been going on in a wide range of activities and then to admit a fact that, though it may sound trivial, is actually anything but that. Since 1919, anthroposophy has given birth to many children, but the children have been exceedingly neglectful of their mother.

Now we have to face the frightful disaster of the fire that has left us looking, broken-hearted, at the Goetheanum ruins there in Dornach. We are also confronted by an Anthroposophical Society that, though its roster of members has recently grown a great deal longer, lacks inner stability and itself therefore somewhat resembles a ruin. Of course, we can go on holding branch meetings and hearing about anthroposophy, but everything we now have can be wiped out by our enemies in no time at all if we are not more thoughtful about the problems I have laid before you today.

So my words today have had to be the words of pain and sorrow. This has been a different occasion than those previously held here. But the events I have described and everything that has gone with them force me to end this address in words of sorrow and pain as profoundly justified as my expression of gratitude to those whose hearts and hands helped build the Goetheanum and tried to help at the fire. They are as called for, these expressions of pain, as is the recognition of everything heart-warming that our members far and near have lately been demonstrating. Their purpose is not to blame or criticize anyone, but to challenge us to search our consciences, to become aware of our responsibilities. They are not intended to make people feel depressed, but rather to summon up those forces of heart and spirit that will enable us to go on as a society, as the Anthroposophical Society. We should not let ourselves turn into groups of educators, religious renewers, scientists, groups of the young, the old, the middle-aged. We must be an anthroposophical community conscious of the sources that nourish it and all its offspring. This is something of which we must be keenly aware. Though the Dornach flames have seared our very hearts, may they also steer us to the realization that we need above all else to work together anthroposophically. Let me express this wish to you today, my dear friends, for the special fields too would lose the source of their strength if they were unmindful of their parent. We will certainly have to admit that, due to the difficulties inherent in such relationships, the parent has often been forgotten by just those of her offspring who were most obviously her progeny. But despite the fearful enmity we face, we can perhaps accomplish something if we change our ways before it is too late, as it soon may be. We must realize that we are going to have to work anthroposophically in the Anthroposophical Society, and that our chief common task is to forge a connection between man and that radiant spiritual light from heavenly worlds that seeks him out at the present moment of his evolution. This is the consciousness and this the task to which, while there is still time, we need to be steeled by the Dornach fire whose flames we feel in our very hearts.

Let us bring this about, dear friends! But let me ask you to take with all due weight as well what I have had to say to you today with a sore heart. May my words call forth the strength to work, the will to work, the will to pull together in the Anthroposophical Movement especially. Nobody should take personally the statement that he has been an outstanding contributor to the work of Der Kommende Tag, the Waldorf School faculty, the Movement for Religious Renewal, and so on. May everybody—those both in and outside special fields, the old, the young, the middle-aged—be mindful of the parent society that has brought forth and nurtured them all and in which, as a member of the Society, every specialist must join forces with everybody else. Specialization has flourished far too strongly in our midst, only to decline again because the parent was not kept sufficiently in mind. May the Dornach fire kindle our will to strengthen ourselves to serve the Anthroposophical Society and to work sincerely together with clear purpose!

• 1. MOVEMENT FOR RELIGIOUS RENEWAL. The Christian Community with its center at Stuttgart. The next to last lecture at the Goetheanum on December 30, 1922, is contained in the book, Man and the World of Stars, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1963.

A week ago I commented here on the grievous event of the Goetheanum fire and other current concerns of the Anthroposophical Society. Today I planned to speak about purely anthroposophical matters, but I find it necessary to say a few introductory words about Society problems. I was able to attend at least the second part of yesterday's meeting, and saw how easy it is to misunderstand matters involving the nature of the Society such as were brought up by me last week. It is not a moment too soon to correct these misconceptions. My introductory remarks tonight will nevertheless still have to do with an anthroposophical view of life and perhaps on that account prove worthwhile to this or that listener.

I am mainly interested in going on with yesterday's discussion about judgment-forming in the Society. A challenge was issued, quite independently of anything I said, to the effect that every member should form his own independent judgments about matters affecting the Society. Now of course nothing could be truer. But we need to concern ourselves with the fact that when a challenge of this kind is presented one has to consider the whole context of what is under discussion, no matter how right the isolated statement may be in itself nor how fully I agree with it in principle. Something can be perfectly true but it may not necessarily apply in a given instance. Every truth can be presented as true in itself, but it is colored by the context in which it is brought up, and in the wrong place it can lead to the gravest misconceptions.

Now the point of view on judgment-forming was expressed in connection with my lecture of December 30th last in Dornach, in which I discussed the relationship of the Anthroposophical Society to the Movement for Religious Renewal. The comment was made that members should make their own judgments and not be influenced by mine. Of course they should! But in the form in which this advice was presented, it was and is profoundly at odds with the state of mind that comes from a real grasp of anthroposophy. For the anthroposophical world conception is not based on merely exchanging the view of things prevailing today for a different view similarly arrived at. As becomes evident in the whole posture of anthroposophy, it is not enough to think differently about all sorts of things, but—far more importantly—to think these different thoughts in a different way, to feel them with a different attitude of soul. Anthroposophy requires that thinking and feeling be utterly transformed, not just changed as to content.

Anyone inclined to test the great majority of my lectures in this respect will find that I keep strictly to what I have just expressed, and that it lies in the very nature of an anthroposophical view of the world to present things in such a way that hearers are left wholly free to form their own judgments. If you go through most of my lectures, including those on subjects such as that treated in the lecture of December 30, 1922, you will find their chief content to be simply facts, that they present facts, either those of super-sensible realms, of the world of the senses, or of history, and that their presentation is such that the reader can always draw his own conclusions about them, completely uninfluenced by me. Indeed, one of the lecture cycles held in Dornach even carries the sub-title, “Presentation of Facts on which to base Conclusions,” or the like. Since this is the case, the results are such as to remove any justification for saying that people were told what to think. For one person will draw one conclusion from my lectures, another a quite different one, and each thinks his is the right view of the matter. Each could be right from where he stands, because I never try to pre-determine the outcome, but simply to provide facts on which conclusions can be based. I thus deliberately expose myself to the danger that a series of facts I am presenting can be quite variously interpreted. For my interest is solely in communicating facts, and anybody who wants to look into the matter will find that the only time I express a judgment is when something needs to be corrected or refuted.

This has to be the case. A world view such as that based on anthroposophy must always be keenly conscious of the time context to which it belongs. We are now living in the age of consciousness soul development, a condition of soul wherein the all-important thing is for individuals to draw their own conclusions and learn to give facts an unprejudiced hearing, so that they can then make fully conscious judgments. The style of my presentations springs from an awareness that man has entered upon the development of the conscious soul. This accounts, as I said, for the varying conclusions that can be drawn from my words. I try to present the facts as clearly as possible. But there is never any question of “should” or “shouldn't.” Anthroposophy is there to communicate truth, not to propagandize. This has often been emphasized as, for example, in my refusal to take sides about vegetarianism. When I describe what effects a vegetarian diet has on people and what the effects of meat-eating are, I do so merely to present the facts, to make the truth known. In the age of the consciousness soul, anyone really acquainted with the facts of any case can confidently be left free to form his own judgments. It is essential to an anthroposophical view of things to be really clear on this point.

So, taking my style from the Anthroposophical Society rather than from the Movement for Religious Renewal, I tried in my lecture at Dornach on December 30, 1922, to show what the relationship between the two groups is. On that occasion I followed my general rule of merely presenting facts, and anyone who reads the lecture of that date will see this to be true. What action to take was a matter left to everyone's free weighing. The lecture makes this clear, and I expressed myself on the subject here a week ago as plainly as could be.

The matter of context has to be taken into consideration if one is to make really responsible assertions of an anthroposophical nature. One cannot make the remark that people should form their judgments independently of Steiner at utterances based in the strictest sense on anthroposophy. For except when Steiner is refuting or having to correct a statement, his hearers are even being forced by the way he puts things to form their own judgments; they are given no chance to adopt his.

An overall view of things anthroposophical is far better served by emphasizing this than by what some were emphasizing here yesterday, and the inappropriateness of what was said could encourage many seeds of misunderstanding. It is exceedingly important that I state this here, because it is a matter of anthroposophical principle.

There is a further matter to consider. In forming independent judgments it is not enough to be sure they are one's own. One must be equally sure, before expressing them, that one has taken all the pertinent facts into consideration. Anybody can draw his own conclusions. The point is to arrive at the correct ones when a sufficient overview of the facts of the case permits it or when facts that obviously do not apply have been discarded. I must therefore emphasize—and I bring up these introductory problems in duty bound, not because I have the least desire to do so—that what was said yesterday about all kinds of reports about the Movement for Religious Renewal having been carried to Dornach, so that my words could have been influenced and my opinions shaped thereby, is simply incorrect. The lecture in question was completely unrelated to any such reports, as fair-minded reviewers will see for themselves.

A third item was brought up in connection with my lecture, namely, that one faction was having chances to be heard while the other had none. If I am not mistaken, the Waldorf School faculty was named as a case in point, because I meet regularly with it. The truth is, however, that the matter had never even been discussed with the Waldorf faculty up to the time of giving the lecture. Here again is an example of a judgment made in ignorance of the facts. It might easily be thought that, since I meet frequently with the Waldorf faculty, there had been frequent discussions of the matter. But pedagogical matters naturally form the agenda of such meetings; anthroposophical gossip definitely has no share in them.

As I said, I stress these things in duty bound because they have to do with the nature of anthroposophical work, and we are at the point of at least trying to put that work on a healthy basis in the Society. Of course I was able, right after the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal, to hand over to appropriate persons the task of giving the Society all the necessary information about it; I didn't have to do this myself. That was apparent to anyone who heard the closing words I spoke on the occasion of launching the Movement for Religious Renewal. It is always a terrible thing for me to be forced to break off communicating facts in order to say the kind of things that I was compelled to say yesterday. But as things are now, the whole weight of everything connected with anthroposophical activities is burdening my soul, and unless something really adequate is done to clear up just those misunderstandings that are escaping notice because they are not as crassly evident as others, our anthroposophical work cannot progress. But the work must progress; otherwise, we would obviously have to leave the situation of the Goetheanum as it is. Resuming work on it depends entirely on strengthening the Society and freeing it of misunderstandings that sap its very lifeblood.

That lifeblood is sapped when, for example, no attention is paid to the principle involved in speaking of ethics in the sense required by the Spirit of the Time for the age of the developing consciousness soul and delineated by me in the Philosophy of Freedom. At the time I wrote it, I did not exactly relish exposing myself to the reproaches certain to issue from narrow-minded quarters because of my repudiation of authoritarian ethics. But every sentence I set down was formulated in the way I am always at pains to do, taking the greatest care to leave the reader free, even in relation to the development of thought and feeling under discussion in the book mentioned. So I must point out how out of place it is to bring up the question of a lecture like that of December 30, 1922, influencing the conclusions drawn by members of the Anthroposophical Society. There might be many other occasions where such a question could be raised. But it creates misunderstandings to raise it in connection with the lecture referred to, and to do so disregards the fact of my sacred concern to avoid influencing people's judgment by what I say on the subject of vitally important aspects of activities within the Society.

So I have again expressed my intention of formulating what I have to say in such a way that nobody's judgment can be influenced. It is therefore unnecessary to warn those who attend my lectures to preserve their freedom of judgment.

Now let me continue in the spirit of my previous comments and go on to consider how a spiritual-scientific judgment is arrived at. I am speaking now of judgments that express spiritual-scientific truths.

It can give one a strange feeling to observe how little aware people are of the seriousness with which the communication of spiritual truths is weighted. All one has to do to form and express judgments about things of the everyday world of the senses is to practice observation or logic at a given moment. Observation and logic are perfectly adequate bases for forming judgments about sense-derived and historical data. In the realm of spiritual science, however, they are not adequate. There, it is not enough to deal just once with forming a particular judgment. What is required is something quite different, something I shall call here a twofold re-casting of a judgment. This re-casting usually takes more than a short period of time; indeed, the period tends to be quite a long one. Let us say that one forms some judgment or other on the basis of methods you are familiar with from descriptions given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and in the second part of An Outline Of Occult Science. Following these procedures, one arrives at this or that conclusion about spiritual beings or processes. At this point one is obligated to keep this conclusion to oneself and not to express it. Indeed, one is even obligated to regard it simply as a neutral fact which, for the time being, one neither accepts nor rejects. Then, perhaps even years later, one comes to the point of undertaking the first re-casting of this judgment in one's own soul life; one deepens and in many respects even transforms it. Even though the content of the judgment may remain the same after its re-casting, it will have taken on a different nuance, a nuance of inner participation, perhaps, or of the warmth one has spent on it. In any case, it will incorporate itself in the life of the soul quite differently after this first re-casting than on the previous occasion, and one will then have the feeling of having separated oneself in some way from the judgment. If it has taken a matter of years to accomplish the first re-casting, one cannot, of course, have been turning the judgment over in one's mind every minute of the time. The judgment naturally disappears into the unconscious, where it carries on a life of its own quite independently of the ego. It has to have this independent life. One must stay away from it and let it live all to itself. Thus the ego element is eliminated from the judgment, which is then turned over to an objective faculty in oneself. When one first makes an observation and draws a logical conclusion from it, the ego is invariably involved. But when—possibly after a lapse of several years—a judgment is re-cast for the first time, one has the distinct experience of its emerging from the soul's depths to confront one like any other fact of the surrounding world. All this time it was out of sight. Now one comes across it again, one re-discovers it, and it seems to be saying, “The first time you formed me imperfectly, or even incorrectly, but now I have corrected myself.”

This is the judgment the true spiritual scientist seeks, the kind that develops its own life in the human soul. It takes a lot of patience to re-cast it because, as I have said, the process of re-casting can take years, and the conscientiousness that spiritual science demands means keeping silent while letting things speak.

But now, my dear friends, after re-casting a judgment in this way and experiencing its emergence out of an objective realm, one has the strong feeling that it occupies a place somewhere in oneself despite its objective recovery. So one can still feel that, in view of the responsibility one has to let the thing speak while remaining silent oneself, one should not express this kind of judgment on a spiritual-scientific matter. One therefore waits again, and perhaps again for years, for the second re-casting. As a result, one arrives at a third form of the judgment, and one will find a significant difference between the process that went on in the period between the first forming of the judgment and its first re-casting and the process it underwent between the first and second re-casting. One notices that it was comparatively easy to recall the judgment in the first time-interval described, while in the second it is extremely difficult to summon it up again, into such soul-depths has it descended, depths into which the easy judgments gleaned from the outer world never descend. Re-cast judgments of the kind I mean sink to the deepest levels of the soul, and one finds out what a struggle it costs to recall such a re-cast judgment between its first and second re-casting. By judgment I mean here an overview of the whole area covered by the fact in cases where the facts are of a spiritual-scientific nature. When one then arrives at the third form of the judgment, one knows that the judgment has been in the realm of the thing or process under study. In the period between its first forming and first re-casting it remained within one's own being, but in the second such interval it plunged into the realm of the objective spiritual fact or being. One sees that in its third shape the thing or being itself gives back the judgment in the form of a certain outlook one now has. Only now does one feel equal to communicating this view or judgment of a spiritual-scientific fact. The communication is made only after completing this twofold re-casting and thus arriving at the certainty that one's first view of the matter has pursued a path directly to the facts of the case and returned again. Indeed, a judgment of super-sensible things that is to find valid expression must be sent to the realm where the relevant facts or beings dwell.

No one with a right approach to presentations of basic and significant spiritual-scientific facts will find this hard to understand. Of course, a person who reads lecture cycles just as he would a modern novel will not notice from the way it is presented that the all-important thing, the real proof, lies in this twofold re-casting of a judgment. He will then call such a statement a mere assertion, not a proof at all. But the only proof of spiritual facts is experience, experience conscientiously come by and based on a twofold re-casting of judgments. Spiritual things can be proved only by experiencing them. This does not hold true of understanding them, however. Anyone with a healthy mind can understand any adequate presentation. But to be adequate, it has to have supplied that healthy mind with all the pertinent data, so pertinently arranged that the very manner of the presentation convinces of the truth of a given conclusion.

It makes a strange impression to have people come and say that spiritual-scientific truths ought to be as susceptible of proof as assertions about facts observed in the sense world. A person who makes such a demand shows that he is unfamiliar with the difference between perception of things spiritual and ordinary experience on the physical or historical level. Individuals who acquaint themselves with anthroposophy will notice that the single truths it presents fit into the picture of anthroposophy as a whole, and that this whole in turn supports the further single truths they hear. These further truths then illuminate things heard in the past. An increasing familiarity with anthroposophy is thus constant growth in experiencing its truth. The truth of a mathematical statement can be discerned in a flash, but it is correspondingly lifeless. Anthroposophical truth is a living thing. Conviction cannot be arrived at in a single moment; it is alive, and goes on growing. Conviction about anthroposophy might be compared to a baby just starting out in life, uncertain at first, scarcely more than a belief. But the more one learns, the more certain one's conviction becomes. This growing-up of anthroposophical conviction is actually proof of its inner aliveness.

We see here, furthermore, that what one thinks and feels about the concerns of anthroposophy is not only different from what one thinks and feels in other areas today, but that one must think differently, feel differently, take a different approach than is usual elsewhere. This different approach or attitude is basic to an understanding of anthroposophy, and it forms the basis for an anthroposophical fructification of all the various fields of life and learning.

This fact will have to be kept particularly clearly in mind by scientists coming into the movement. They should not only make it their goal as scientists to develop a different picture of the world than that striven for by external science, but should also be aware that their chief responsibility consists in bringing an anthroposophical frame of mind and an inner aliveness to bear on the various scientific fields they enter. This would keep them from resorting to polemics against other types of science, and instead help them to proceed in the direction of developing aspects of those sciences that would remain undeveloped without anthroposophy. I must stress this in a time of crisis for our Society, a crisis due in no small measure to the way scientists have been conducting themselves in it.

I must add here that the battle over atomism that the journal Die Drei [DIE DREI: an anthroposophical journal.] has been waging can only mean the death of fruitful scientific exchange. This debate should not be carried on with resort to the same kind of thinking practiced by opponents and with a failure to see that in certain vital points their assertions are correct. The all-important thing is to realize that physics is just that field of science that has brought out facts quite ideally suited to serving as the foundation of an anthroposophical outlook, provided one takes physics just as it is, without polemics. As we have seen in the polemical debate in “Die Drei,” polemics unrelieved by an anthroposophical approach can only lead to unfruitfulness.

I had a further reason for stressing this: I want to make it fully clear as a matter of principle that everything that is done in the name of anthroposophy cannot be laid at my door! I respect people's freedom. But when harmful things happen I must be allowed to exercise my own judgment about bringing them up. Complete independence must be the rule in anthroposophical concerns, not opportunism. Least desirable of all is the comradely spirit so frequently met with in discussions about scientific questions.

Now, my dear friends, as I often point out, we have to be clear when we are presenting anthroposophy that we are now living in the age of consciousness soul development. In other words, rational and intellectual capacities have become the most outstanding aspects of man's present state of soul. Ever since the time of Anaxagoras, a philosopher of ancient Greece, we have been sifting every judgment, even those based on external observation, through our intellectuality. If you examine the rationalistic science of today, particularly mathematics, which is the most rationalistic of all, and consider the rationalistic working over of empirical data by the other sciences, you will form some idea of the actual thought-content of our time. This thought-content, to which even the youngest children are exposed in modern schools, made its appearance at a fairly definite point in human evolution. We can pinpoint it in the first third of the fifteenth century, for it was then that this intellectuality appeared on the scene in unmistakable form. In earlier times people thought more in pictures even when they were dealing with scientific subject matter, and these pictures expressed the growth forces inherent in the things they thought about. They did not think in abstractions such as come so naturally to us today.

But these abstract concepts educate our souls to the pure thinking described in my The Philosophy of Freedom. It is they that enable us to become free beings. Before people were able to think in abstractions they were not free, self-determined souls. One can develop into a free being only by keeping the inner man free of influences from outside, by developing a capacity to lay hold on moral impulses with the aid of pure thinking, as described in the The Philosophy of Freedom. Pure thoughts are not reality, they are pictures, and pictures exercise no sort of compulsion on us. They leave us free to determine our own actions.

So, on the one hand, mankind evolved to the level of abstract thinking, on the other to freedom. This has often been discussed here from several other angles.

Let us now consider how things stood with man before earthly evolution brought him to a capacity for abstract thoughts, and so to freedom. The humanity incarnated on the earth in earlier periods was incapable of abstract thinking. This was true of ancient Greece, not to mention still earlier periods. The people living in those early days thought entirely in pictures, and were therefore not as yet endowed with the inner sense of freedom that became theirs when they attained the capacity for pure (that is, abstract) thinking. Abstract thoughts leave us cold. But the moral capacity given us by abstract thought makes us intensely warm, for it represents the very peak of human dignity.

What was the situation before abstract thought with its accompaniment of freedom was conferred on man? Well, you know that when man passes through the gates of death and casts off his physical body, he still retains his etheric body for a few days thereafter and sees his whole life, all the way back to the moment of his first memory, spread out before him in mighty pictures, in an undetailed, comprehensive and harmonious panorama. This tableau of his life confronts a person for several days after he has died.

That is the way it is today, my dear friends. But in the time when people living on earth still possessed a picture consciousness, their experience immediately after death was that of a rational, logical view of the world such as human beings have today, but which those who lived in earlier times did not have in the period between birth and death.

This is a fact that proves a signal aid in understanding human nature. An experience that people of ancient as well as somewhat later periods of history had only after death, that is, a short looking back in abstract thoughts and an impulse to freedom, which then remained with them during their lives between death and rebirth, came, in the course of evolution, to be instead an experience that they had during life on earth. This constant pressing through of super-sensible experience into earthly experience is one of the great secrets of existence. The capacity for abstraction and freedom that presently extends into earthly life was something that came into an earlier humanity's possession only after death in the form of the looking back I have described; whereas nowadays, human beings living on the earth possess rationality, intellectuality and freedom, exchanging these after death for a mere picture consciousness in their reviewing of their lives. There is a constant passing over of this kind going on, with the concretely super-sensible thrusting itself into sense experience.

You can see from this example how anthroposophy obtains the facts it speaks of from observation of the spiritual, and how subjectivity has no chance to color its treatment of a fact. But once we arrive at these facts, do they not affect our feelings and work on our will impulses? Could it ever be said of anthroposophy that it is merely theory? How theoretical it would sound to say merely that modern man is ruled by freedom and abstraction! But how richly saturated with artistic feeling and religious content such a statement becomes when we realize that what gives us modern human beings freedom in our earthly experience and a capacity for abstraction is something that comes to us here on earth from the heavenly worlds we enter after death, but that makes its way to us in a direction exactly counter to the one we take to enter them! We go out through the gates of death into spiritual realms. Our freedom and capacity for abstraction come to us as a divine gift, given to the earth world by the spiritual. This imbues us with a feeling for what we are as human beings, making us warmly aware not only of the fact that we are bearers of a spiritual element, but of the source whence that element derives. We look on death with the realization that what lies beyond it was experienced by people of an earlier time in a way that has now been carried over into the modern experiencing of people here on earth.

The fact that this heavenly element, intellectuality and freedom, has been thus translated into earthly capacity makes it necessary to look up to the divine in a different way from that of earlier ages. The Mystery of Golgotha made it possible to look up in this new way. The fact that Christ came to live on earth enables him to hallow elements of heavenly origin that might otherwise tempt man to arrogance and similar attitudes. We are living in a period that calls on us to recognize that our loftiest modern capacities, the capacity for freedom and pure concepts, must be permeated by the Christ impulse. Christianity has not reached its ultimate perfection. It is great just because the various evolutionary impulses of the human race must gradually be saturated by the Christ impulse. Man must learn to think pure thoughts with Christ, to achieve freedom with Christ, because he will otherwise not have that relationship to the super-sensible world that enables him to perceive correctly what it gives him. Studying ourselves as modern human beings, we realize that the super-sensible penetrates into earthly life through the gates of death in a direction directly counter to that that we take on dying. We go one way as human beings. The world goes the opposite way. With the descent of Christ, the spiritual sun enters from spiritual heights into the earth realm, in order that the human element that has made its way from the super-sensible to the sense world come together with the cosmic element that has taken the same path, in order that man find his way to the spirit of the cosmos. He can orient himself rightly in the world only if the spirit within him finds the spirit outside him. The spirit that an older humanity found living in the world beyond death can be rightly laid hold upon by people living on the earth today only if they are irradiated by the Christ, who descended to earth from that same world whence rationality and intellectuality and freedom made their way into the experience of incarnated human beings.

So we may say that anthroposophy begins in every case at the scientific level, calls art to the enlivening of its concepts, and ends in a religious deepening. It begins with what the head can grasp, takes on all the life and color of which words are capable, and ends in warmth that suffuses and reassures the heart, so that man's soul can at all times feel itself in the spirit, its true home. We must learn, on the anthroposophical path, to start with knowledge, then to lift ourselves to the level of artistry, and to end in the warmth of religious feeling.

The present rejects this way of doing things, and that is why anthroposophy has enemies. These enemies have many strange qualities. I have been talking of such serious matters today that I don't want to end on a serious note, although these matters are a good deal more serious than is generally realized. But we should often consider what a contrast exists between the seriousness of genuine anthroposophical striving and the ideas about it entertained by a good many of our fellow men. Some of them are absolutely grotesque, though others would strike us as simply droll were it not for the fact that we have to put up a defense against them. Sometimes I also find it necessary to turn my own spotlight on the outer world, with everyone free to make of it what he will. So I am going to close today's weighty discussion with a comment that is not to be taken too weightily.

A little while ago, our friend Dr. Wachsmuth brought me in Dornach a rude pamphlet not only attacking anthroposophy, but making me and those close to me its special targets. He said at the time that he wasn't leaving the book with me because it would be insulting even to assume that I would read such a particularly crude piece of invention. I didn't see the book again. Dr. Wachsmuth took it away with him, and I gave it no further thought.

Yesterday I traveled through Freiburg, accompanied by Frau Dr. Steiner and Herr Leinhas. We stopped off for refreshments and were sitting at a restaurant table. Two men were seated at the adjoining one. One of them had a rather bulging briefcase and other such accoutrements. We took no special notice of these people, and they left shortly before we did. After their departure the waiter brought me a book, saying that one of the gentlemen had asked him to give it to me. Herr Leinhas asked who the men were, and was told that one of them was Werner von der Schulenburg. On the book's flyleaf stood the words, “With the author's compliments.”

You see, my dear friends, what can happen. Perhaps this will give you some idea what a conception of tact—not to mention other qualities—exists nowadays among those who parade their enmity.

I have found it quite impossible lately to pay much attention to my enemies. Anyone who has been following my recent activities will have seen how occupied I have been presenting new truths to add to the old. This takes time, which one cannot afford to let anyone interrupt and waste, no matter how savage the attacks become.

I have described to you today how much is involved in arriving at anthroposophical truths. If the Society becomes fully conscious of this, it will find some of the strength it needs for its current reorganization. That, my dear friends, is a vital need. Please do not take it amiss that I have harped on this theme so insistently today.

In view of the deliberations that have been going on here with reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society as their object, I would like to shape today's lecture in a way that may help my hearers form independent judgments in these decisive days. To this end I shall be speaking somewhat more briefly and aphoristically than I usually do when discussing aspects of anthroposophy, and shall confine myself to commenting on the third phase of our anthroposophical work. This evening I will speak for the same reason on the subject of the three phases of the Anthroposophical Movement.

We often hear references being made these days to the great change that came over Western spiritual life when Copernicus substituted his new picture of the heavens for the one previously held. If one were to try to state just what the nature of this change was, it might be put as follows. In earlier times man thought of the earth realm as the object of his study and the chief concern of learning, with little or no attention being paid to the heavenly bodies circling overhead.

In recent times the heavenly bodies have come to assume a great deal more importance than they used to be accorded. Indeed, the earth came to be thought of as a mere grain of dust in the universe, and man felt himself to be living on a tiny speck of an earth quite insignificant by contrast with the rest of the cosmos and its countless thousand worlds. But if you will permit me to give just a sketch of this matter for the sake of characterizing the third phase of our Anthroposophical Movement, it must be pointed out that by reducing the earth to a mere grain of dust on the one hand, man also lost the possibility on the other of arriving at valid judgments about the rest of the universe other than those based on such physical and more recent chemical concepts as may apply. Research that goes beyond this and devotes itself to a study of soul and spiritual aspects of the universe is ignored. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the whole stance of modern learning. Man loses the possibility of seeing what he calls his soul and spirit as in any way connected with what rays down to us from the starry world. You can judge from certain passages in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, how intent anthroposophy is on creating a renewed understanding of the fact that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. Anthroposophy aims at re-creating the possibility of knowing the cosmos as spirit.

In this quest anthroposophy encounters a serious obstacle on its path, an obstacle that I am going to describe without reservation.

People come forward, quite rightly proclaiming anthroposophy with great enthusiasm. But they emphasize that what they are proclaiming is a doctrine based not on their own experience but on that of a spiritual investigator. This makes for instant conflict with the way of thinking prevailing in present day civilization, which condemns anyone who advances views based on authority. Such condemnation would disappear if people only realized that the findings of spiritual research recognized by anthroposophy can be arrived at with the use of various methods suited to various ways of investigation, but that once they are obtained, these results can readily be grasped by any truly unprejudiced mentality. But findings acceptable to all truly unprejudiced mentalities can be made and still not lead to fruitful results unless those presenting anthroposophical material do so with attitudes required for anthroposophical presentations that are not always prevailing.

Let me be explicit. Let me refer to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, published about thirty years ago, and recall my description in its pages of a special kind of thinking that is different from that generally recognized as thinking today. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature, or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at the hand of nature, thoughts that, indeed, he has only recently developed the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh century, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of it—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did the Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader as he read to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relation to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing at the moment of awakening that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color-filled, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily motions to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, The Riddle of Man, where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thoughts. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit have on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking.) One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as a result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person; it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life-element of its thinking, and the thinking left to it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there, seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, though in that book I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works because matters like these have to be gradually developed, one finds that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into formerly passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we will. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily matter comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes a part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belong to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side given its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them, for it belongs to a different world than that that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see, but the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our will leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a grain-of-dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we re-discover elements in the universe that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its suffusion with will, and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the universe and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my more recent lectures have concerned themselves with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read, speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!

Now I want to try to improve the present state of things by speaking briefly about the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. A start was made with the presentation of anthroposophy about two decades ago. I say two decades, but it was definitely already there in seed form in such writings as my Philosophy of Freedom and works on Goethe's world conception. But the presentation of anthroposophy as such began two decades ago. You will see from what I am about to say that it did begin to be presented as anthroposophy at that time.

When, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, I gave my first Berlin lectures (those printed under the title, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age), I was invited by the Theosophical Society to participate in its work. I myself did not seek out the Theosophical Society. People who belonged to it thought that what I was saying in my lectures, purely in pursuit of my own path of knowledge, was something they too would like to hear. I saw that the theosophists wanted to listen to what was being presented, and my attitude about it was that I would always address any audience interested in hearing me. Though my previous comments on the Theosophical Society had not always been exactly friendly and continued in the same vein afterwards, I saw no reason to refuse its invitation to lay before it material that had been given me for presentation by the spiritual world. That I presented it as anthroposophy is clear from the fact that at the very moment when the German section of the Theosophical Society was being founded, I was independently holding a lecture cycle [From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. History of Human Evolution Based on the World Conception of the Orient up to the Present, or Anthroposophy, 1902–3. No manuscript of these lectures is available.] not only about anthroposophy but with the name anthroposophy included in the title. The founding of the German section of the Theosophical Society and my lecture cycle on anthroposophy took place simultaneously. The aim, right from the beginning, was to present pure anthroposophy.

That was the start of the first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement. It was first exemplified in those members of the German section who were ready to absorb anthroposophy, and further groups of theosophists joined them.

During this first phase, the Anthroposophical Society led an embryonic existence within the Theosophical Society. It grew, as I say, within the Theosophical Society, but developed nevertheless as the Anthroposophical Society. In this first phase it had a special mission, that of counterposing the spirituality of Western civilization, centered in the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Theosophical Society's course, which was based on a traditional acceptance of ancient Oriental wisdom.

This first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement lasted until 1908 or 1909. Anyone who goes back over the history of the Movement can easily see for himself how definitely all the findings made on the score of prenatal existence, reincarnation and the like—findings made on the basis of direct experience in the present, not of ancient traditions handed down through the ages—were oriented around that evolutionary development in man's life on earth that centered in the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse. The Gospels were worked through, along with a great deal else. By the time it became possible for the Anthroposophical Movement to make the transition over into artistic forms of revelation, as was done with the presentation of my mystery plays, the content of anthroposophy had been worked out and related to its central core, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time when the Theosophical Society was sidetracked into a strange development. Since it had no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it committed the absurdity, among others, of proclaiming to the world that a certain young man of the present was the reincarnated Christ. Certainly no serious person could have tolerated any such nonsense; it appeared ridiculous in Western eyes. But anthroposophy had been developed as part of Western civilization, with the result that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared in a wholly new light in anthroposophical teaching. This led to the differences with the Theosophical Society that culminated in the virtual expulsion of all the anthroposophists. They didn't mind that because it didn't change anthroposophy in any way. I myself had never presented anything but anthroposophy to those interested in hearing about it, and that includes the period during which anthroposophy was outwardly contained by the Theosophical Society.

Then the second phase of the Anthroposophical Movement began. This phase was built on a foundation that already included the most important teachings about destiny, repeated earth-lives, and the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual illumination fully keyed to present day civilization. It included interpretations of the Gospels that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present.

The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917, was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels. You need only consider such examples as my lecture cycles of that period, one held in Christiania in 1910 on the European folk souls, the other at Prague in 1911 on the subject of occult physiology, and you will see that anthroposophy's second phase was devoted to working out its relationship to the sciences and practical concerns of the day. The cycles mentioned are just two examples; the overall aim was to find the way to relate to modern science and practice.

During this second phase of the Society's life, everything centered around the goal of finding a number of people whose inner attitude was such that they were able to listen to what anthroposophy was saying. More and more such people were found. All that was necessary was for people to come together in a state of soul genuinely open to anthroposophy. That laid the foundation for an anthroposophical community of sorts. The task became one of simply meeting the interest of these people who, in the course of modern man's inner evolution, had reached the point where they could bring some understanding to anthroposophy. They had to be given what they needed for their soul development. It was just a matter of presenting anthroposophy, and it was not a matter of any great concern whether the people who found their way to anthroposophy during the Society's first two phases foregathered in sect-like little groups or came to public lectures and the like. What was important was to base absolutely everything on a foundation of honestly researched knowledge, and then to go ahead and present it. It was quite possible to do this satisfactorily in the kind of Anthroposophical Society that had been developing.

Another aspect of the second phase was the further development of the artistic element. About halfway through it, the plan to build the Goetheanum took shape. A trend that began with the Mystery Plays was thus carried into the realms of architecture, sculpture and painting. Then eurythmy, the elements of which I have often characterized in my introductory talks at performances, was brought into the picture. All this came into existence from sources to which access is gained on the path sketched in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sketched in sufficient detail, however, to be understood and followed by anyone really desirous of taking that path.

This second phase of the Society's life was made especially difficult by the outbreak of the frightful war that then overran Europe and modern civilization. It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period, when mistrust and hatred were flooding the entire civilized world. The fact that the Goetheanum was located in a neutral country in a time when borders were closed often made it hard to reach. But the reasons for believing in the sincerity of anthroposophical efforts were more firmly founded on fact, even during the war, than any reasons for mistrusting it afterwards. It can truly be said that the war period brought no real disruption of the work; it continued on. As I have already mentioned, a large number of individuals from many different European countries confronting one another in hate and enmity on the battlefields worked together in a peaceful and anthroposophical spirit on the Goetheanum, which we have now lost in the terrible disaster of the fire.

Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number of individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through. The Threefold Movement, later called the Union for Free Spiritual Life, the Union for Higher Education, and so on, had to be undertaken with the clear intention of putting one's whole being irrevocably behind them. It was no longer possible, in the third phase, to rest content with the simple presentation of anthroposophy and merely to foregather with people whose inner search had led them to it. Instead, a number of individuals wanted to undertake this or that project, and they did so. This created all kinds of groupings in addition to the original purely anthroposophical community.

One of them was the scientific movement. It was built on the foundation of relationships of anthroposophy to science that had been established during the second phase. Scientists made their appearance in our midst. They had the task of giving modern science what anthroposophy had to offer. But there should have been a continuation of what I had begun in the way of building relationships to contemporary science. Perhaps I may remind you of lectures I gave during the second phase of the Movement. I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics into anthroposophy. I did the same thing in the case of other aspects of learning. This attitude, this way of relating, should have continued to prevail. If that had happened, the result would have been a different development of scientific activity than the one we have been witnessing during this third phase. Most importantly, we would have been saved from what I described at the earlier meeting as fruitless argumentation and polemics. Then we would presently be faced with a positive task, and could say that anthroposophy does indeed have a contribution to make to science, that it can help science go forward along a certain path, and in what specific way that can be accomplished. The outcome would have been a different attitude toward science than that evidenced in a recent issue of Die Drei, indeed in several issues that I looked over in connection with the cycle of lectures on science given by me last Christmastide in Dornach. I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in such unfruitful polemics. I say this not for the sake of criticizing but to point out what the task of the scientists in the Society is.

Something of the same kind ought to be happening in other respects as well. Let us take a case in point; I called attention to it on the occasion of my last lecture here.

In the third phase of the Movement, we saw the Union for Higher Education come into being. It had an excellent program. But somebody should have stayed with it and put all of himself behind it, made himself fully responsible for it. My only responsibility was for anthroposophy itself. So when someone else starts an independent enterprise founded on anthroposophy, that project becomes his responsibility. In the case I am discussing, nobody stayed with that responsibility, though I had called attention to the necessity of doing so at the time the program was being drawn up. I said that programs of this kind should be started only if an iron determination exists to carry them through; otherwise, they ought never to be launched. In this case it was the group guiding the Society that failed to stay behind it.

What was the outcome? The outcome was that a number of young people from the student movement, motivated by an intense longing for true anthroposophy but unable to find what they were looking for in the Society, sought out the living source of anthroposophy. They said expressly that they wanted to know the artistic aspects of anthroposophy as well as the others. They approached Frau Dr. Steiner with the intention of being helped by recitation and declamation to experience what I might call the anthroposophical swing of things.

Another development was taking place alongside this one, my dear friends. In the third phase of the Movement, the spiritual worlds were being described in the way I described them at the beginning of my lecture today when I gave a short sketch of a certain matter from the standpoint of purely spiritual contemplation, from a level where it is possible to show how one develops a different consciousness and thereby gains access to the spiritual world. The first and second phases were concerned with relating the Movement to the Mystery of Golgotha, to science, to the practical conduct of life. The third phase added the direct portrayal of spiritual realms. Anyone who has kept up with the efforts that were made during these three phases in Dornach and here too, for example, anyone with a real feeling for the advance represented by the third phase over the first and second phases, anyone aware to what extent it has been possible in recent years to spread anthroposophy beyond the boundaries of Central Europe, will notice that we are concerned with bringing into being a really new third phase in direct continuation and further development of the first two phases. Had we not entered the third phase, it would not really have been possible to develop the Waldorf School pedagogy, which is based on taking man's eternal as well as temporal nature into account.

Now please compare the discussions of yesterday and the week before with what I have just been saying in the interests of frank speaking and without the least intention of criticizing anyone, and ask yourselves what changes these three phases of our work have effected in the Society. Would not these same discussions, identical as to content, have been just as conceivable sixteen or eighteen years ago as they are today, when we have two decades of anthroposophical work behind us? Does it not seem as though we were back at the founding of the Society?

I repeat that I have no desire to criticize anybody. But the Anthroposophical Society can amount to something only if it is made the nurturing ground of everything that anthroposophy is working to achieve, and only if our scientists, to take an example, always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics.

Teachers have a similar task, and, to a special degree, people engaged in practical life. For their functions are of the kind that draws the heaviest fire against anthroposophy, which, despite its special potential for practicality, is most viciously attacked as being impractical.

So the Society is presently faced with the necessity of being more than a mere onlooker at really anthroposophical work going on elsewhere, more than just the founder of other enterprises that it fails to provide with truly anthroposophical zeal and enthusiasm. It needs to focus consciously on anthroposophical work. This is a completely positive statement of its mission, which needs only be worked out in detail. If this positive task is not undertaken, the Anthroposophical Society can only do anthroposophy more and more harm in the world's regard. How many enemies has the Threefold Movement not created for the Anthroposophical Movement with its failure to understand how to relate itself to anthroposophy! Instead, it made compromise after compromise, until people in certain quarters began to despise anthroposophy. We have seen similar things happen elsewhere. As I said in my first lecture here, we must realize that anthroposophy is the parent of this movement. That fact should be recognized. If it had been, a right relationship to the Movement for Religious Renewal, which I helped launch, would have resulted. Instead, everything in that area has also gone amiss. I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that takes us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

Please do not take offense at my speaking to you as I have today, my dear friends. I had to do it. As I said in Dornach on January 6th last, the Anthroposophical Society is good; it is capable of listening receptively to even the sharpest parts of my characterization. But the guiding elements in the Society must become aware that if the Society is to earn its name in future, they must make themselves responsible for keeping it the conscious carrier of the work. The conflicts that have broken out will end at the moment when the need for such a consciousness is clearly and adequately recognized in a spirit of goodwill. But there has to be goodwill for that need to be brought out into the open and any fruitless criticism dropped. Furthermore, there is no use giving oneself up to comfortable illusions, making compromises in adjustments between one movement and another, only to end up again in the same old jog-trot. It is time to be absolutely serious about anthroposophical work, and all the single movements must work together to achieve this goal. We cannot rest content to have a separate Waldorf School movement, a separate Movement for Religious Renewal, a separate Movement for Free Spiritual Life. Each will flourish only if all feel that they belong to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I am sure that everyone truly concerned for the Movement is saying the same thing in his heart. That is the reason I allowed myself to express it as sharply as I did today. Most of you were already aware of the need for a clear statement that could lead to the establishment of the consciousness I have described as so essential.

The Movement has now gone through three phases, during the last of which anthroposophy has been neglected in favor of various offspring movements. It must be re-discovered as the living spiritual movement demanded by modern civilized life and, most especially, by modern hearts. Please take my words as meant to serve that purpose. If they have sounded sharp, please consider them the more sincerely offered. They were intended not as an invitation to any further caustic deliberations but as a challenge to join in a Movement guided by a true heart for anthroposophy.

The development of conditions in the Anthroposophical Society makes it seem desirable to touch on at least a few of them again tonight. It was really never my intention to use lecture time to go into such matters as organizational and developmental aspects of the Society, for I see it as my task to work for pure anthroposophy, and I gladly leave everything related to the life and development of the Society to others who have assumed responsibility for it at the various places. But I hope to be able, at the delegates' meeting that will soon be held, to discuss at greater length the subject originally intended for presentation today. In view of the need evidenced by the way the Society's current concerns are going, you will perhaps allow me to make a few comments complementing what I said a week ago about the three phases of anthroposophical development.

Today, I want to bring out those aspects of the three phases that all three share in common; last week I concentrated, even though sketchily, on their differences.

I would like to start by discussing how a society like ours comes into being. I believe that what I am about to say could serve many a listener as a means to self-knowledge and thus prove a good preparation for the delegates' meeting.

It is certainly clear to anybody who keeps up with the way civilization and culture are presently developing that the times themselves demand the deepening of knowledge, the ethical practice, the inner religious life that anthroposophy has to offer. On the other hand, however, a society such as ours has to act as a vanguard in an ever wider disseminating of those elements that are so needed under the conditions that prevail today.

How is such a vanguard created? Everybody who has sought out the Anthroposophical Society from honest motives will probably recognize a piece of his own destiny in what I am about to describe.

If we look back over the twenty-one or twenty-two years of the Society's development, we will certainly discover that by far the greater number of those who approach the Society do so out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the spiritual, psychological and practical conditions they find surrounding them in life today. In the early days of the Society, which, when considered factually and not critically, might even be called its better days, something was taking place that almost amounted to flight from the life of the present into a different kind of life built on human community, a community where people could live in a way they felt in their souls to be in keeping with their dignity as human beings. This alienation from the spiritual, psychic and practical situation prevailing in the life around them must be taken into account as a factor in the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. For those who became anthroposophists were the first people to feel what millions and millions of others will be feeling keenly indeed in a not too distant future, that older forms have come down into the present from by-gone days in which they were not only fully justified but the product of historical necessity, but that they no longer provide what modern man's inner life requires and the dignity of full humanness demands.

Anyone who has a really open mind about these things and has come to anthroposophy in honest seeking will find, if he practices self-observation, that this drive to satisfy his soul needs in a special community rather than in just any other present day group of human beings is something that springs from the innermost core of his humanity, something he feels to be a special phenomenon of the present moment working its way to the surface of his soul from the eternal sources of all humanness. Those who have come honestly to anthroposophy therefore feel the need to belong to an anthroposophical community to be a real and deep concern of their hearts, something they cannot really do without if they are honest. But we must admit, too, that the very clarity (clarity of feeling, not of thought) with which people seek belonging in the anthroposophical community shows how little able the outer world presently is to satisfy a longing for full humanness. People would not feel so urgently impelled to seek anthroposophy if the soul's feeling of alienation from conditions existing in the world today had not become so particularly intense.

But let us go on and consider something else. What I have been describing thus far might be called a reversing of human will impulses. A person is born into a certain period and educated to be a man of his time. The result is that his will impulses simply coincide with those of all the rest of the human world around him. He grows up, and as he does so he grows without any great inner stirrings into the will tendencies of the surrounding population. It takes a deeply experienced inner revulsion against these habitual will impulses that he has adopted from the outside world to turn this erstwhile external will inward. When he does so, this reversing of the direction of his will causes him to notice the longing, experienced so keenly in our time, that wells up as though from eternal wellsprings, impelling him to seek a different belonging to the community of men than lay in the previous direction of his will.

Now everything that has to do with the will is intrinsically ethical and moral. The impulse that drives a person into the Anthroposophical Society is thus, in its will and feeling aspects at least, an ethical-moral impulse. Since this ethical impulse that has brought him into the Anthroposophical Society stirs him in his innermost holy of holies as it carries him to the eternal wellsprings of his soul life, it goes on to develop into a religious impulse. What otherwise lives itself out simply as a matter of response to externally imposed laws and traditional mores and as habits more or less thoughtlessly adopted from the life around one, in other words, everything of an ethical, moral, religious nature that had developed in the course of one's growing up, now turns inward and becomes a striving to make one's ethical-moral and religious being a full inner reality. But it is not consistent with full human stature for a person to couple his life of will and—to some extent at least—his life of feeling with the acceptance of just any haphazard type of knowledge.

The kind of knowledge that we may not, perhaps, absorb with our mother's milk, but are certainly receiving as inner soul training by the time we are six, and go on receiving—all these things that our minds in their learning capacity take in, confront the ethical, moral and religious elements in us as their polar opposite, though one perfectly harmonious and consistent with them. But they are by no means an inconsiderable item for a person who seeks to bring a religious deepening into his anthroposophical striving. The kind of life and practice that civilized man has developed in recent centuries is just exactly the kind from which an anthroposophist longs to free his moral, ethical and religious nature. Even if he makes compromises with the life about him, as indeed he must, his real desire is to escape from what the civilization of recent centuries has produced, leading as it has directly to the catastrophic present. It may be that this desire exists only as an instinct in many of those who seek out the Anthroposophical Movement, but it is definitely present.

Now let us recognize the fact that the factors accounting for the development of the religious and will impulses of recent centuries are the very same ones responsible for the direction and whole nuance of the modern life of learning. Only a victim of prejudice could believe and say that the modern way of knowledge has produced objective physics, objective mathematics, objective chemistry, that it is working toward an objective science of biology, and so on. That is pure prejudice. The real truth is that what we have had drummed into us from about our sixth year onward is the product of externally influenced will and religious impulses that have evolved during recent centuries. But when a person seeking anthroposophy wants to escape from these will impulses and from the religious forms in which man's moral life finds its highest expression, he cannot help asking at the same time for a way of knowledge in keeping not with the world he wants to leave behind but with the new world of his seeking. Since he has turned his will impulses inward, he must, in other words, strive for the kind of knowledge that corresponds to his in-turned will, that takes him ever further away from the externalized science that has been an outgrowth of the externalizing of all life in the civilized world in the past few centuries. An anthroposophist feels that he would have to be inconsequential and reverse the direction of his will again if he were not to change the direction of his knowledge. He would have to be a quite unthinking person to say, “I feel my humanity alien to the kind of life and practice that past centuries have brought us, but I feel quite at home with the knowledge they produced.” The kind of learning that the world he wants to escape from has acquired can never satisfy a person with an in-turned will. Many an individual may come to realize purely instinctively that the life and practice he longs to flee received their present form from the fact that man believes only in what his eyes see and what his mind makes of his physical observations. Seekers therefore turn to the invisible super-sensible realm as the basis of knowledge. Externalized forms of life and practice are outgrowths of a materialistic science, and a person impelled to regard these forms as subhuman rather than as fully human cannot feel suited by a science based on an exclusive belief in the external and material and what the mind concludes about them.

After the first act in the soul drama of the anthroposophist, the moral-religious act, there comes a second, one already contained in seed form in the first. It consists in a compulsion to seek super-sensible knowledge. That the Anthroposophical Society builds its content on knowledge received from super-sensible worlds is something that comes about quite of itself. Everything that the will thus experiences as its destiny, everything that the striving for insight recognizes as its seeking, is fused into one indivisible whole in the heart and soul of an anthroposophist; it is the very core of his life and his humanity. As such it shapes and colors his whole attitude, the state of soul in which he takes his place in the Society.

But now let us weigh the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and practice. He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but life's outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a single step or with one stroke. So his soul is caught and divided between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical Society. A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth or superficiality of the individual. But this very pain, this tragedy, contains the most precious seeds of the new, constructive life that has to be built up in the midst of our decaying culture. For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit is an outgrowth of pain and suffering. It is perhaps just those individuals with the deepest sense of the Society's mission who have to have the most personal experience of pain and suffering as they take on that mission, though it is also true that real human strength can only be developed by rising above suffering and making it a living force, the source of one's power to overcome.

The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one's will; secondly, in experiencing super-sensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one's time to a point where it becomes one's personal destiny. One feels oneself sharing mankind's evolution in the act of reversing one's will and experiencing the super-sensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time's true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness. The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”

What I have been describing here are the factors that brought the Anthroposophical Society into being. The Society wasn't really founded; it just came about. You cannot carry on a pre-conceived campaign to found a thing that is developing out of some genuine inner reality. An Anthroposophical Society could come into being only because there were people predisposed to the reversal of their wills, to the living knowledge, to the participation in the time's destiny that I have just characterized, and because something then made its appearance from some quarter that was able to meet what lived as those needs in those specific hearts. But such a coming together of human beings could take place only in our age, the age of the consciousness soul, and those who do not as yet rightly conceive the nature of the consciousness soul cannot understand this development. An example was provided by a university don who made the curious statement that three people once joined forces and formed the executive committee of the Anthroposophical Society. This donnish brain (it is better to be specific about what part of him was involved, since there can be no question in his case of fully developed humanness), this brain ferreted out the necessity of asking who selected them and authorized them to do such a thing. Well, what freer way could there possibly be for a thing to start than for three people to turn up and announce that they have such and such a purpose, and anyone who wants to join them in pursuing it is welcome, and if someone doesn't, why, that's all right too? Everyone was certainly left perfectly free. Nothing could have shown more respect for freedom than the way the Anthroposophical Society came into being. It corresponds exactly to the developmental level of the consciousness soul period. But one can perfectly well be a university don without having entered the consciousness soul age, and in that case will have no understanding for matters intimately allied to freedom.

I know how uncomfortable it makes some people when things of this kind have to be dealt with for the simple reason that they are there confronting us. They throw light, however, on the question of what must be done to provide the Society with what it needs to go on living. But since anthroposophists have to keep on being part of the world around them and can escape from it on the soul level only, they become prone to the special nuance of soul experience that I have been describing and that can run the gamut of inner suffering to the point of actual tragedy. Soul experience of this kind played a particularly weighty role in the coming into being of the Anthroposophical Society. Not only this: it is constantly being re-lived in the case of everyone who has since sought out the society. The Society naturally has to reckon with this common element, which is so deeply rooted in its social life, as with one of the lasting conditions of its existence.

It is natural, too, that in an evolution that has gone through three phases, newcomers to the Movement should find themselves in the first phase with their feeling life. Many a difficulty stems from the fact that the Society's leaders have the duty of reconciling the three co-existing phases with one another. For they go on side by side even though they developed in succession. Furthermore, in their aspect as past stages in a sequence, they belong to the past, and are hence memories, whereas in their simultaneous aspect they are presently still being lived. A theoretical or doctrinaire approach is therefore out of place in this situation. What those who want to help foster anthroposophical life need instead is loving hearts and eyes opened to the totality of that life. Just as growing old can mean developing a crochety disposition, becoming inwardly as well as outwardly wrinkled and bald-headed, losing all feeling for recalling one's young days vividly enough to make them seem immediate experience, so too is it possible to enter the Society as late as, say, 1919 and fail to sense the fresh, new, burgeoning, sprouting life of the Movement's first phase. This is a capacity one must work to develop. Otherwise, the right heart and feeling are missing in one's relation to anthroposophy, with the result that though one may scorn and look down upon doctrines and theories in other spheres of life, one's efforts to foster anthroposophical life cannot help becoming doctrinaire. This does serious damage to a thing as alive as an Anthroposophical Society ought to be.

Now, a curious kind of conflict arose during the third phase of the Movement. It began in 1919. I am not going to judge it from an ethical standpoint at the moment, although thoughtlessness is indeed a will impulse of sorts, and hence a question of ethics. When something is left undone, due to thoughtlessness, and that same thoughtlessness leads to a lot of fiddling around where a firm will is what is really needed, one can surely see that an ethical-moral element is involved. But I am not as much interested in going into that aspect of the subject today as I am in discussing the conflict into which it plunged the Society, a long-latent conflict. It must be brought out into the open and frankly discussed.

In the first phases of anthroposophical development, there was a tendency for the anthroposophist to split into two people. One part was, say, an office manager, who did what he had to do in that capacity. He poured his will into channels formed by the way things have developed in modern external life and practice during the past few centuries, channels from which his innermost soul longed to escape. But he was caught in them, caught with his will.

Now let us be perfectly clear about the will's intense involvement in all such pursuits. From one end of the day to the other, the will is involved in every single thing one does as an office manager or whatever. If one happens to be a schoolmaster or a professor instead of an office manager and is therefore more involved in thinking, that thinking also flows into one's will impulses, insofar as it has bearing on external life. In other words, one's will really remains connected with things outside oneself. It is just because the soul wants to escape from the direction the will is taking that it enters the Anthroposophical Society with its thought and feeling. So the man of will ends up in one place, the man of thought and feeling in another. Of course, this made some people happy indeed, for many a little sectarian group thought it a most praiseworthy undertaking to meet and “send out good thoughts” at the end of a day spent exerting its members' wills in the most ordinary channels. People formed groups of this sort and sent out good thoughts, escaping from their outer lives into a life that, while I cannot call it unreal, consisted exclusively of thoughts and feelings. Each individual split himself in two, one part going to an office or a classroom, the other attending an anthroposophical meeting where he led an entirely different kind of life. But when a number of anthroposophically thinking and feeling people were moved to apply their wills to the establishing of anthroposophical enterprises capable of full and vigorous life, they had to include those wills in the total human equipment needed for the job. That was the origin of the conflicts that broke out. It is comparatively easy to train oneself to send out good thoughts intended to keep a friend on a mountain climb from breaking his legs. It is much harder to pour good thoughts so strongly into a will engaged in some external, material activity that matter itself becomes imbued with spirit as a result of one's having thus exerted one's humanness. Many an undertaking has suffered shipwreck because of an inability to do that, during the Society's third phase of development. There was no shortage of fine intelligences and geniuses—I say this very sincerely—but the intelligence and genius available were not sufficiently applied to stiffening and strengthening the wills involved.

If you look at the matter from the standpoint of the heart, what a difference you see! Think how dissatisfied the heart is with one's external life! One feels dissatisfied not only because other people are so mean and everything falls so short of perfection, but because life itself doesn't always make things easy for us. You'll agree that it isn't invariably a featherbed. Living means work. Here one has this hard life on the one hand, and on the other the Anthroposophical Society. One enters the Society laden with all one's dissatisfaction. As a thinking and feeling person one finds satisfaction there because one is receiving something that is not available in the outer life one is justifiably so dissatisfied with. One finds satisfaction in the Anthroposophical Society. There is even the advantage there that one's thoughts, which in other situations are so circumscribed by will's impotence, take wing quite easily when one sits in a circle sending out good thoughts to keep the legs of friends on mountain climbs from getting broken. Thoughts fly easily to every part of the world, and are thus very satisfying. They make up for one's external life, which is always causing one such justifiable dissatisfaction.

Now along comes the Anthroposophical Society and itself starts projects that call for the inclusion of the will. So now one not only has to be an office manager in the outer world, though with an Anthroposophical Society to flee to and to look back from at one's unsatisfactory life outside—a life one may, on occasion, complain about there; one now faces both kinds of life within the Society, and is expected to live them there in a satisfied rather than dissatisfied state of mind!

But this was inevitable if the Society wanted to go farther and engage in actual deeds. Beginning in 1919 it did want to do that.

Then something strange happened, something that could probably happen only in the Anthroposophical Society, namely, that people no longer knew what to do with their share of dissatisfaction, which everyone naturally wants to go on having. For one can hardly accuse the Society of making one dissatisfied. But that attitude doesn't last. In the long run people do ascribe their dissatisfaction to it. What they ought to do instead is to achieve the stage of inner development that progresses from thoughts and feelings to will, and one does achieve just that on a rightly travelled anthroposophical path. If you look in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, you will see that nowhere is there a recommendation for developing thought that does not include aspects that bear on will development.

But modern humanity suffers from two evils, both of which must be overcome in the Society. One is fear of the super-sensible. This unadmitted fear accounts for every enemy the Anthroposophical Movement has. Our enemies really suffer from something that resembles a fear of water. You know, of course, that a fear of water can express itself in another, violently compulsive form, and so we need not be surprised if the kind I am referring to sometimes vents itself in a sort of phobia. Sometimes, of course, it can be comparatively harmless. Some people find anthroposophy a rewarding subject to write about; these books bring in money and appear on book lists. There must be themes to write about, and not everybody has one inside him, so it has to be borrowed from the world outside. The motives in such cases are sometimes more harmless than one might suppose. But their effects are not equally harmless.

Fear of super-sensible knowledge, then, is one characteristic of the human race. But that fear is made to wear the mask of the scientific approach, and the scientific approach, with the limits to knowledge it accepts, is in direct line of inheritance from man's ancient Fall into error. The only difference is that the ancients conceived the Fall as something man ought to overcome. The post-scholastic period is still haunted by a belief in the Fall. But whereas an earlier, moralistic view of it held that man was born evil and must overcome his nature, the intellectualistic view holds that man cannot gain access to the super-sensible with his mind or change his nature. Man's willingness to accept limits to knowledge is actually an inheritance from the Fall he suffered. In better days he at least tried to overcome error. But conceited modern man not only wants to retain his fallen status; he is actually intent on staying fallen and loving the devil, or at least trying to love him.

That is the first of the two evils. The second is the weakness, the inner paralysis that afflicts modern human wills, despite their seeming activity, which is often nothing more than pretense. I must add that both these ominous characteristics of modern civilization and culture are qualities that anthroposophical life must overcome. If this anthroposophical life is to develop in a practical direction, everything it undertakes must be born of fearless knowledge and a really strong will. This presupposes learning to live with the world in a truly anthroposophical way. People used to learn to live anthroposophically by fleeing the world. But they will have to learn to live anthroposophically with the world and to carry the anthroposophical impulse into everyday life and practice. That means making one single whole again of the person hitherto split into an anthroposophist and a practical man. But this cannot be done so long as a life lived shut away from the world as though by towering fortress walls that one cannot see over is mistaken for an anthroposophical life. This sort of thing cannot go on in the Society. We should keep our eyes wide open to everything that is happening in the world around us, that will imbue us with the right will impulses. But as I said the last time, the Society has not kept pace with anthroposophical life during the third phase of anthroposophy, and the will element is what has failed to do so. We have had to call away individuals who formerly guided activities in the various branches and assign them tasks in connection with this or that new enterprise, with the frequent result that a person who made an able Waldorf School teacher became a poor anthroposophist. (This is not meant as a criticism of any of our institutions. The Waldorf School is highly regarded by the world at large, not just by circles close to it, and it can be stated in all modesty that no reason exists to complain about any of the various institutions, or if there is, it is on an entirely different score than that of ability.) It is possible to be both a first-rate Waldorf teacher and a poor anthroposophist, and the same thing is true of able workers in the other enterprises. The point is, though, that all the various enterprises are outgrowths of anthroposophy. This must be kept firmly in mind. Being a real anthroposophist is the all-important thing. Waldorf teachers, workers at Der Kommende Tag, scientists, medical men and other such specialists simply must not turn their backs on the anthroposophical source or take the attitude that there is no time left from their work for anthroposophical concerns of a general nature. Otherwise, though these enterprises may continue to flourish for a while, due to the fact that anthroposophy itself is full of life and passes it on to its offspring, that life cannot be maintained indefinitely, and the offspring movements too would eventually die for lack of it.

We are dealing with enemies who will not meet us on objective ground. It is characteristic of them that they avoid coming to grips with what anthroposophy itself is, and instead ask questions like, “How are anthroposophical facts discovered?” or “What is this clairvoyance?” or “Does so and so drink coffee or milk?” and other such matters that have no bearing on the subject, though they are what is most talked about. But enemies intent on destroying anthroposophy resort to slander, and samples of it have been turning up of late in phenomena that would have been quite unthinkable just a short while ago, before civilization reached its lowest ebb. Now, however, they have become possible. I don't want to go into the specifics; that can be left to others who presumably also feel real heart's concern for the fate of anthroposophy. But since I was able to be with you here today I wanted to bring up these problems. From the standpoint of the work in Dornach it was not an opportune moment for me to leave, however happily opportune it was to be here; there are always two sides to everything. I was needed in Dornach, but since I could have the deep satisfaction of talking with you here again today, let me just add this. What is most needed now is to learn to feel anthroposophically, to feel anthroposophy living in our very hearts. That can happen only in a state of fullest clarity, not of mystical becloudedness. Anthroposophy can stand exposure to the light. Other movements that claim they are similar cannot endure light; they feel at home in the darkness of sectarianism. But anthroposophy can stand light in all its fulness; far from shrinking from exposure to it, anthroposophy enters into the light with all its heart, with its innermost heart's warmth. Unfounded personal slander, which sometimes goes so far that the persons attacked are unrecognizable, can be branded for what it is. Where enmity is an honest thing, anthroposophy can always reply on an objective basis. Objective debate, however, requires going into the question of methods that lead to anthroposophical knowledge. No objective discussion is possible without satisfying that requirement. Anybody with a heart and a healthy mind can take in anthroposophy, but discussions about it have to be based on studying its methods and getting to understand how its knowledge is derived. Experimentation and deduction do not call for inner development; they merely require a training that can be given anybody. A person with no further background is in no position to carry on a debate about anthroposophy without undergoing training in its methods.

But the easy-going people of our time are not about to let themselves in for any such training. They cling to the dogma that man has reached perfection, and they don't want to hear a word about developing. But neither goodness nor truth are accessible to man unless he acts in the very core of his free being to open up the way to them. Those who realize what impulses are essential to sharing with one's heart in the life and guidance of the Anthroposophical Society and who know how to assess its enemies' motives will, if they have sufficient goodwill, also find the strength needed to bring through to a wholesome conclusion these concerns with which, it was stated before I began this talk, the Society itself is also eager to deal.

The background mood out of which I shall be addressing you today is not the same as that that prevailed on earlier occasions when I was privileged to speak here. Since New Year's Eve 1922, that mood is conditioned by the dreadful picture of the burning Goetheanum. The pain and suffering that picture inevitably causes anyone who loved the Goetheanum because of its connection with anthroposophy are such that no words can possibly describe them.

There might seem to be some justification for feeling that a movement as intent on spiritual things as ours is has no real reason to grieve over the loss of a material expression of its being. But that does not apply in the case of the Goetheanum we have lost. It was not an arbitrary building for our work. During its erection, a process that went on for almost ten years, I often had occasion to explain that a structure that might suitably have housed some other spiritual or similar movement would not have been appropriate for our Anthroposophical Movement. For, as I have often said, we are not just a spiritual movement, which, as its membership increased, found itself with a number of people in its ranks who wanted to build it a home in some conventional style or other. The point here was that anthroposophy is built on a spiritual foundation that is not one-sidedly religious or scientific or artistic. It is an all-embracing movement, intent on demonstrating every aspect of mankind's great ideals: the moral-religious, the artistic, and the scientific ideals. There could, therefore, be no question of erecting any arbitrary type of building for the Anthroposophical Movement. Its design had to come from the same source from which anthroposophical ideas receive their shaping as an expression of the spiritual perspective gained on the anthroposophical path of knowledge, and it had to be carried out in artistic harmony with that outlook. For almost ten years many friends worked side by side with me trying to incorporate and demonstrate in every single line, in every architectural and sculptural form, every choice of color, what was flowing from the wellsprings of anthroposophical investigation, anthroposophical life, anthroposophical intention. That was all incorporated there, and the building was intimately associated with the artistic and scientific striving in the Movement. Friends who attended eurythmy performances in the Goetheanum will surely have felt how, for example, the architectural forms and decoration of the auditorium harmonized with and responded to eurythmic movement. It was even possible to have the feeling that the movements of the performers on the stage there were born of those architectural and plastic forms. If one stood on the podium speaking from the heart in a truly anthroposophical spirit, every line and form responded and chimed in with what one was saying. That was our goal there. It was, of course, a first attempt, but such was our goal, and it could be sensed. That is why those who worked on the Goetheanum at Dornach have the sensation that the very feelings they put into their efforts went up in the flames of New Year's Eve. It was just this intimate connection of anthroposophical feeling and will with the Goetheanum forms—forms that were artistically shaped by and for spiritual contemplation and that can never find a substitute in any thought forms or words—that makes our grief at the loss we have suffered so immeasurably deep.

All this ought to become part of the memories of those who grew to love the Goetheanum and to feel the intimate connection with it just described. We must, in a sense, build a monument to it in our hearts in memory form. Even though the very intimacy of our connection with it is the reason why we are now shelterless, we must seek the more intensively for a shelter in our hearts that will replace the one we have lost, We must try with every means at our disposal to rebuild in our hearts, for all eternity, this building that has been lost as an external source of artistic stimulation. But the terrible flame into which all the lesser flames of New Year's Eve were drawn is there in the background of every effort yet to be made in the field of anthroposophy. Though living, spiritual anthroposophy came to no harm in the fire, a great deal of work that we had been trying to accomplish for anthroposophy in the present day world was brought to naught.

I do believe, though, that if what we experienced on that occasion becomes properly rooted in our members' hearts, the grief and pain we suffered can be turned into strength to support us in everything we are called upon to accomplish for anthroposophy in the near future. It is often the case in life that when a group of people find themselves faced by a common disaster, they are united by it in a way that gives them strength and energy to go on together in effective common action. Experience, not grey theories or abstract thoughts, should be the source on which we draw for the strength needed for our anthroposophical work.

My dear friends, I want to add these comments to those I will be making in connection with the theme I have had to choose for this conference, to a description of the conditions that must prevail in anthroposophical community building. I would like to include them not only because they are graven on my heart, but because they point to a fact on which we would do well to focus our attention in these coming days. A great deal of sacrifice and devotion went into the work on the Goetheanum. The impulses from which that sacrifice and devotion sprang have always been there to count on in the two decades of our work, wherever anthroposophy really lived. They were born of hearts filled with enthusiasm for anthroposophy, and the Goetheanum was the product of deeds done by anthroposophically-minded individuals. Though, for a variety of reasons, we are thinking—are having to think—today about how to regenerate the Society, we should not forget on the other hand that the Society has been in existence for two decades; that a considerable number of people have undergone experiences of destiny in their common work and effort; that the Society is not something that can be founded all over again. For history, real history, history that has been lived and experienced, cannot be erased. We cannot begin something now that began twenty years ago. We must guard against any such misconceptions as these as we proceed with our current deliberations. Anyone who has found his way into the Society over the years certainly sees plenty to find fault with in it, and is justified in doing so. Many a true and weighty word has already been uttered here on that score. But we must still take into account the fact that the Society has been effective and done things. There are certainly people enough in the Society who can express the weight of their grief and sorrow in the words, “We have suffered a common loss in our beloved Goetheanum.”

It makes a difference whether a person joined the Society in 1917 or later, and whether one's relation to it is such that these grief-stricken words issue from long and deep experience in it. That should influence our deliberations. It will do much to tone down the feelings that some of our friends had good reason to express here. I heard someone say (and I certainly felt the justice of the remark), “After what I have listened to here I will go home unable to continue speaking of anthroposophy as I used to when I was still full of illusions.” Part of what that sentence conveys will disappear if one considers how much those individuals who have been anthroposophists for two decades have gone through together, and how much they have had to suffer with each other recently, because that suffering is the product of a long life in the Anthroposophical Society. The load of worry we are presently carrying cannot wipe out all that human experience; it remains with us. It would still be there even if events here were to take a much worse turn than they have taken thus far. Are we to forget the depths for the surface? That must not be allowed to happen in a spiritual movement born of the depths of human hearts and souls. What has come into being as the Anthroposophical Movement cannot rightly be called sunless. Even the sun sometimes suffers eclipse.

Of course, this should not prevent our dealing with the situation confronting this assemblage in a way that enables us to provide anthroposophy once again with a proper vehicle in the form of a real Anthroposophical Society. But our success in that depends entirely on creating the right atmosphere.

It will, of course, be impossible for me to cover the whole situation today. But in the two lectures I am to give I shall try to touch on as much of what needs to be said as I possibly can. Some things will have to be left out. But I do want to stress two matters in particular. Those are the pressing need for community building in the Society and the symptomatic event of the entrance into the Anthroposophical Movement of the exceedingly gratifying youth movement. But in anthroposophical matters we have to develop a rather different outlook than prevails elsewhere. We would not have taken our stand on ground that means so much to many people if we could not see things in a different light than that in which the modern world habitually views them.

Community building! It is particularly noteworthy that the community building ideal should be making its appearance in our day. It is the product of a deep, elemental feeling found in many human souls today, the product of a sense of definite relationship between person and person that includes an impulse to joint activity.

A while ago, a number of young theologians came to me. They were preparing to enter the ministry. They were intent above all else on a renewing of religion, on a renewal permeated through and through by the true Christ force, such as to be able to take hold of many people of the period in the way they long to be taken hold of but cannot be by the traditional confessions as they are today. I had to bring up something that seemed to me to have vital import for the development of such a movement. I said that a suitable method of community building must be found. What I had in mind was to develop a religious and pastoral element capable of really uniting people. I told these friends who had come to me that religious community could not be effectively built with abstract words, the usual kind of sermon, and the meagre remnants of a divine service, which are all that most contemporary churches have to offer. The prevailing intellectualistic trend that is increasingly taking over the religious field has had the effect of saturating a great many present day sermons with a rationalistic, intellectualistic element. This does not give people anything that could unite them. On the contrary, it divides and isolates them, and the social community is reduced to atoms. This must be easy to see for anyone who realizes that the single individual can develop rationalistic and intellectualistic values all by himself. Simply attaining a certain cultural level enables an individual to acquire increasingly perfect intellectual equipment without depending on anyone else. One can think alone and develop logic alone; in fact, one can do it all the better for being by oneself. When one engages in purely logical thinking, one feels a need to withdraw from the world to the greatest possible extent, to withdraw from people. But the tendency to want to get off by oneself is not the only one man has. My effort today to throw light on what it is in the heart's depths that searches for community is called for by the fact that we are living in a time when human nature must go on to develop the consciousness soul, must become ever more conscious.

Becoming more conscious is not the same thing as becoming more intellectualistic. It means outgrowing a merely instinctual way of experiencing. But it is just in presenting anthroposophy that every attempt should be made to portray what has thus been raised to a clear, conscious level in all its elemental aliveness, to offer it in so living a form that it seems like people's own naive experiencing and feeling. We must make sure that we do this.

Now there is one kind of community in human life that everyone over the entire globe is aware of, and it shows that community is something built into humankind. It is a type of community to which a lot of attention is being given in modern cultural and even political and economic life, and this in an often harmful way. But there is a lesson of sorts to be learned from it, though a primitive one.

In a child's early years it is introduced into a human community that is absolutely real, concrete and human, a community without which one could not exist. I am referring to the community of human speech. Speech is the form of community that we might say nature presents to our contemplation. Speech—and especially our mother tongue—is built into our whole being at a time when the child's etheric body is not yet born, and it is our first experience of the community building element. We can lay it to the rationalism of our age that though people nowadays have some feeling for languages and nationality and conceive folk groups in relation to the language they speak, they do so from the political-agitational standpoint, without paying any heed to deep and intimate underlying soul configurations, to the tremendous aspects of destiny and karma attached to a language and to the spirit behind it, all of which are the real and intrinsic reason why human beings cry out for community. What would become of us if we passed one another by without hearing resounding in the other's words the same life of soul that we ourselves put into those same words when we use them? If everybody were to practice just a little bit of self-knowledge, we would be able to form an adequate picture, which I cannot take the time to develop now, of all we owe to language as the foundation of a first, primitive building of community.

But there is a community building element still deeper than language, though we encounter it more rarely. On a certain level, human language is indeed something that unites people in community life, but it does not penetrate to the deepest levels of soul life. At certain moments of our life on earth we can become aware of another community building element that transcends that of language. A person feels it when his destiny brings him together again with others whom he knew as children. Let us take an ideal example. Someone finds himself in later life—in his forties or fifties, say—in the company of several companions of his youth or childhood whom he has not seen for decades but with whom he spent the period between his tenth and twentieth years. Let us assume that good relationships prevailed among them, fruitful, loving relationships. Now imagine what it means for these individuals to share the experience of having their souls stirred by common memories of their youthful life together. Memories lie deeper than experiences on the language level. Souls sound more intimately in unison when they are linked by the pure soul language of memories, even though the community experience they thus share may be quite brief. As everyone knows from such experiences, it is certainly not just the single memories that are summoned up to reverberate in the souls of those present that stir such intimate soul-depths in them; it is something quite else. It is not the concrete content of the particular memories recalled. An absolutely indefinite yet at the same time very definite communal experiencing is going on in these human souls. A resurrection is taking place, with the countless details of what these companions experienced together now melting into a single totality, and what each contributes as he enters into the others' recollections with them is the element that awakens the capacity to experience that totality.

That is how it is in life on earth. As a result of pursuing this fact of soul life into the spiritual realm, I had to tell the theological friends who had come to me for the purpose described that if true community were to come of the work of religious renewal, there would have to be a new form of worship, a new cultus, suited to the age we live in. Shared experience of the cultus is something that quite of its own nature calls forth the community building element in human souls. The Movement for Religious Renewal understood this and accepted the cultus. I believe that Dr. Rittelmeyer spoke weighty words when he said from this platform that such a development of community could conceivably become one of the greatest threats to the Anthroposophical Society that the Movement for Religious Renewal could present. For the cultus contains a tremendously significant community building element. It unites human beings with one another. What is it in this cultus that unites them, that can make a commonality out of separate individuals atomized by intellectuality and logic, and that most certainly will create commonality? For that is surely what Dr. Rittelmeyer had in mind, that this is the means of building community. Since community, however, is also a goal of the Anthroposophical Society, the Society will have to find its own way of building it if the Movement for Religious Renewal is not to pose a threat to it from that angle.

Now what is the secret of the community building element in the cultus developed for the Movement for Religious Renewal with that specific end in view?

Everything that comes to expression in the various forms of worship, either as ceremonial acts or words, is a reflection, a picturing of real experiences, not earth experiences, of course, but real experiences in the world through which man makes his way before he is born; in other words, experiences of the second half of his path between death and rebirth. That is the part of the cosmos he passes through from the midnight hour of life after death to the moment when he descends again into life on earth. In the realm thus traversed are found the beings, the scenes, the events faithfully reflected in all true forms of worship. What is it, then, that a person is experiencing in the cultus in common with others whom some karma or other has brought together with him? For karma is so intricately woven that we may ascribe all encounters with our fellow men to its agency. He is experiencing cosmic memories of pre-earthly existence with them. They come to the surface in the soul's subconscious depths. Before we descended to earth, we and these others lived through a cosmic lifetime in a world that reappears before us in the cultus. That is a tremendous tie. It does more than just convey pictures; it carries super-sensible forces into the sense world. But the forces it conveys are forces that concern man intimately; they are bound up with the most intimate background experiences of the human soul. The cultus derives its binding power from the fact that it conveys spiritual forces from the spiritual world to earth and presents supernatural realities to the contemplation of human beings living on the earth. There is no such reality for man to contemplate in rationalistic talks that have the effect of making him forget the spiritual world, forget it even in subconscious soul depths. In the cultus he has it right there before him in a living, power-pervaded picture that is more than a mere symbol. Nor is this picture a dead image; it carries real power, because it places before man scenes that were part of his spiritual environment before he was incarnated in an earthly body. The community creating power of the cultus derives from the fact that it is a shared, comprehensive memory of spiritual experiences.

The Anthroposophical Society also needs just such a force to foster community within it. But the ground this springs from need not be the same for the Anthroposophical Movement as for the Movement for Religious Renewal. The one by no means excludes the other, however; the two can co-exist in fullest harmony provided the relationship between them is rightly felt.

But that can be the case only if we acquire some understanding for a further community building element that can be introduced into human life. Memory, transposed into the spiritual realm, rays out to us from the form the cultus takes. The cultus speaks to greater depths than those of intellect: it speaks to man's inwardness. For at bottom the soul really does understand the speech of the spirit, even though that speech may not be fully consciously perceived in present day earth life.

Now, in order to grasp the further element that must come to play a corresponding role in the Anthroposophical Society, you will not only have to contemplate the secrets of language and memory in their relationship to community building; you will also have to consider another aspect of human life. Let us study the condition in which we find a dreaming person and compare it with that of someone going about his daytime activities wide awake.

The dream world may indeed be beautiful, sublime, rich in pictures and in significance. Nevertheless, it isolates people here on earth. A dreaming person is alone with his dreams. He lies there asleep and dreaming, perhaps in the midst of others awake or asleep, the content of whose inner worlds remains completely unrelated to what is going on in his dream consciousness. A person is isolated in his dream world, and even more so in the world of sleep. But the moment we awake we begin to take some part in communal life. The space we and those around us occupy is the same space; the feeling and impressions they have of it are the same we have. We wake at hand of our immediate surroundings to the same inner life another wakes to. In waking out of the isolation of our dreams we awaken, up to a certain point at least, into the community of our fellowmen, simply as a result of the way we are related to the world around us. We cease being completely to ourselves, shut in and encapsulated, as we were when absorbed in our dream world, though our dreams may have been beautiful, sublime, significant. But how do we awaken? We awaken through the impact of the outer world, through its light and tones and warmth. We awaken in response to all the various impressions that the sense world makes on us. But we also wake up in ordinary everyday life in the encounter with the external aspects of other human beings, with their natural aspects. We wake up to everyday life in the encounter with the natural world. It wakes us out of our isolation and introduces us into a community of sorts. We have not yet wakened up as human beings by meeting our fellow men and by what goes on in their innermost beings. That is the secret of everyday life. We wake up in response to light and tone and perhaps also to the words someone speaks in the exercise of his natural endowment, words spoken from within outward. In ordinary everyday life we do not wake up in the encounter with what is going on in the depths of his soul or spirit, we wake up in the encounter with his natural aspects.

The latter constitutes the third awakening, or at least a third condition of soul life. We awaken from the first into the second through nature's impact. We awaken from the second into the third at the call of the soul-spiritual element in our fellowmen. But we must first learn to hear that call. Just as a person wakes up through the natural world surrounding him in the right way in everyday life, so do we wake up rightly at a higher level in the encounter with the soul-spirit of our fellowmen as we sensed light and tone on awakening to everyday life. We can see the most beautiful pictures and have the most sublime experiences in our isolated dream consciousness, but we will scarcely be able to read, for example, unless highly abnormal conditions prevail. We are not in a relationship to the outer world that would make such things possible. We are also unable to understand the spiritual world, no matter how many beautiful ideas we may have garnered from anthroposophy or how much we may have grasped theoretically about such matters as etheric and astral bodies. We begin to develop an understanding for the spiritual world only when we wake up in the encounter with the soul-spiritual element in our fellowmen. That is where the first true understanding of anthroposophy sets in. Yes, it is indeed necessary to base our understanding of anthroposophy on what can be called a waking up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of another person.

The strength needed to achieve this awakening can be created by implanting spiritual idealism in human communities. We talk a lot about idealism these days, but it has become a threadbare thing in the culture and civilization of the present. For true idealism exists only where man reverses the direction he takes when, in presenting the cultus, he brings the spiritual world down to earth; when, in other words, he consciously makes himself capable of lifting to the super-sensible-spiritual, the ideal level, what he has seen and learned and understood on the earthly level. We bring the supernatural down into a power-permeated picture when we celebrate the ritual of the cultus. We lift ourselves and our soul life to the super-sensible level when our experiences in the physical world are experienced so spiritually and idealistically that we come to feel we have experienced them in the super-sensible world itself and that what we perceive here in the sense world suddenly comes all alive on being lifted to the ideal level. It comes alive when properly permeated with our wills and feeling. When we ray will through our inner being and infuse it with enthusiasm, we carry our idealized sense experience in a direction exactly opposite to that taken when we embody the super-sensible in the ritual of the cultus. Whether the anthroposophical community be large or small, we can achieve what I am characterizing when, infusing living power into the spiritual ideas we form, we put ourselves in a position actually to experience something of that awakening element, something that doesn't stop at idealizing our sense experience and leaving it at the stage of an abstract thought, but that endows the ideal with a higher life as we live into it and make it the counterpart of the cultus by raising it from the physical to the super-sensible level. We can achieve it in our life of feeling by taking care to imbue everything we do for anthroposophy with thoroughly spiritualized feeling. We do this when, for instance, we feel that the very doorway we reverently enter on our way to an anthroposophical assemblage is consecrated by the common anthroposophical purpose being served in the room it leads to, no matter how mundane the setting. We must be able to feel that everybody joining with us in a communal reception of anthroposophy has the same attitude. It is not enough to have a deep abstract conviction of this; it must be inwardly experienced, so that we do not just sit in a room where anthroposophy is being pursued, a group of so and so many individuals taking in what is being read or spoken and having our own thoughts about it. A real spiritual being must be present in a room where anthroposophy is being carried on, and this as a direct result of the way anthroposophical ideas are being absorbed. Divine powers are present in sense perceptible form in the cultus celebrated on the physical plane. Our hearts and souls and attitudes must learn similarly to invoke the presence of a real spiritual being in a room where anthroposophy is being talked of. We must so attune our speaking, our feeling, our thinking, our impulses of will to a spiritual purpose, avoiding the pitfall of the abstract, that we can feel a real spiritual being hovering there above us, looking on and listening. We should divine a super-sensible presence, invoked by our pursuit of anthroposophy. Then each single anthroposophical activity can begin to be a realizing of the super-sensible.

If you study primitive communities, you will find another communal element in addition to language. Language has its seat in the upper part of man. But taking the whole man into consideration, you will find that common blood is what links members of primitive communities. Blood ties make for community. But what lives there in the blood is the folk soul or folk spirit, and this is not present in the same way among people who have developed freedom. A common spiritual element once entered groups with common blood ties, working from below upward. Wherever common blood flows in the veins of a number of people, there we can discern the presence of a group soul.

A real community spirit is similarly attracted by our common experiencing when we study anthroposophy together, though it is obviously not a group soul active in the bloodstream. If we are able to sense this, we can form true communities.

We must make anthroposophy real by learning to be aware in anthroposophical community life that where people join in anthroposophical tasks together, there they experience their first awakening in the encounter with the soul-spiritual element in their fellows. Human beings wake up in the mutual encounter with other human beings. As each one has new experiences between his encounters with these others, and has grown a little, these awakenings take place in an ever new way as people go on meeting. The awakenings undergo a burgeoning development.

When you have discovered the possibility that human souls wake up in the encounter with human souls, and human spirits wake up in the encounter with human spirits, and go to anthroposophical groups with a living awareness that only now have you come awake and only now begin to grow together into an understanding of anthroposophy, and on the basis of that understanding take anthroposophical ideas into an awakened soul rather than into an everyday soul asleep to higher things, then the true spirit of community descends upon the place where you are working. Is truth involved when we talk of the super-sensible world, yet are unable to rise to awareness of a spiritual presence and of this reversed cultus? We are firmly grounded in our understanding of things of the spirit only when we do not rest content with abstract spiritual concepts and a capacity to express them theoretically, but instead grow into a sure belief that higher beings are present with us in a community of spirit when we engage in spiritual study. No external measures can bring about anthroposophical community building. You have to call it forth from the profoundest depths of human consciousness.

I have described part of the path that leads to that goal, and tomorrow we will follow it further. Descriptions of this kind are intended to show that the most important thing for any further development of the Anthroposophical Society is that it become absorbed in a true grasp of anthroposophy. If we have that grasp, it leads not only to spiritual ideas but to community with the spirit, and an awareness of community with the spiritual world is itself a community building force. Karmically preordained communities will then spring up as an outcome of true anthroposophical awareness. No external measures for achieving that can be indicated, and a person who offers any such is a charlatan.

Now these matters have been understood to some degree during the two decades of anthroposophy's development, and quite a good many members have also understood them in a spiritual sense. I will perhaps return to this subject and discuss it more fully tomorrow when I continue with these reflections and go on to point out a further goal. For now, I would like to add just a few words on matters that may have been occupying you after hearing my description of the spiritual bases of anthroposophical community life. On the one hand, things in the Anthroposophical Movement are really such as to necessitate my describing them as I have done. The Anthroposophical Society may present this or that appearance in a given phase. But anthroposophy is independent of anthroposophical societies and can be found independently of them. It can be found in a special way when one human being learns to wake up in the encounter with another and out of such awakening the forming of communities occurs. For one undergoes ever fresh awakenings through those with whom one finds oneself foregathered, and that is what holds such groups together. Inner, spiritual realities are at work here.

These matters must be increasingly understood in the Anthroposophical Society. Every consideration brought up in connection with the Society's welfare ought really to be pervaded with forces intimately related to anthroposophy itself.

It was deeply satisfying to me, after spending weeks attending larger and smaller conclaves where preparations were being made for these delegates' meetings, and listening there to debates reminiscent of the ordinary, everyday kind of rationalistic considerations in which parliaments and clubs engage, to go to an assemblage of young people, a meeting of young academicians. They, too, were pondering what ought to be done. For a while the talk was about external matters. But as time passed, it changed, all unaware, into a truly anthroposophical discussion. Matters that first appeared in an everyday light took on aspects that made anything but an anthroposophical treatment impossible.

It would be ideal if, instead of dragging in anthroposophical theories in an artificial, sentimental, nebulous way, as has so often happened, a down-to-earth course were to be pursued. Taking life's ordinary concerns as a starting point, the discussion should lead to the conclusion that unless anthroposophy were called upon, no one would know any longer how to go about studying such subjects as physics and chemistry. This spirit could serve to guide us.

But no solution will be found by tomorrow evening if things go on as they have up to this point; they can only lead to a state of tremendous, tragic chaos. The most important thing is to avoid any sentimental dragging in of all sorts of matters, and instead fill our hearts with anthroposophical impulses, conceived in full clarity.

As things are now, I see two parties, two separate groups of human beings sitting in this room, neither of which in the least understands the other, neither of which is able to take the first small step toward mutual understanding. Why is this the case? It is because what one side is saying issues inevitably from the experience of two whole decades, as I explained briefly earlier today, and the other side takes no interest whatsoever in that experience. I say this not in criticism, but in a spirit of concerned pleading. There have been occasions in the past when well-meaning people, in their own way genuinely enthusiastic about anthroposophy, have simply cut across our deliberations with such comments as, “What possible interest can these reports have for us when they keep on being served up at a moment when the important thing is that people unacquainted with the great dangers the Society faces want to learn about them?” Here, on the one side, we see an elemental, natural interest in the life of the Anthroposophical Society, a life that may have certain familial characteristics, but that has the good aspects of the familial as well. On the other side we find no interest in that life, and instead just a general conception of an Anthroposophical Society.

As things stand today, both points of view are justified, so justified that unless we can quickly develop a wholly different form of discussion, the best thing we could do (I am just expressing my opinion, for the decision will have to be made by the Society) would be to leave the old Society as it is and found a union of free anthroposophical communities for those who want something entirely different. Then each party could carry on in the way that suits it. We would have the old Society on the one side, and on the other a loose but closely related confederation of free communities. The two societies could work out ways of living together. It would be better to solve the problem this way than to continue on in the hopeless situation that would present itself tomorrow evening if the discussion were to go on as it has thus far. So I ask you to put on the agenda the further question whether you would not prefer to avoid the false situation that would develop from keeping the two groups welded together, regardless of whether things stay as they have been or undergo some modification. If the situation remains as it is, with each side failing to understand the other, let us go ahead and set up the two suggested groups within the one movement. I say this with an anxious, a very anxious heart; for surely no one will deny that I understand what it is to feel concern for our anthroposophical undertaking and know what it means to love it. But it is better to have two devoted sisters, each going her own way and united only by a common ideal, than to settle for something that would again lead in short order to a state of chaos.

My dear friends, you simply must not let yourselves overlook the fact that it is the various single enterprises that are causing our troubles. That should have been worked out in clearest detail. I am certainly not stating that the last Central Executive Committee accomplished a great deal more, materially, than the one before it, not any more, that is, than I accomplished when I was similarly active at the center in my role as General Secretary. But that is not the question. The real question is: What should have happened, anthroposophically speaking, after all the various enterprises were started here in Stuttgart? This will have to be answered. We cannot at this point dissolve what has been brought into being. Once these enterprises exist, we must find out how to keep them flourishing. But if we fail, as we have in the past four years, to learn how to go about this in an anthroposophical spirit, if we introduce enterprises as foreign bodies into the Anthroposophical Movement, as we have done, these institutions that have been in existence since 1919 will ruin the whole Anthroposophical Movement. They will ruin any Central Executive Committee, no matter what name it is given.

We should therefore keep our discussions objective and impersonal, and try to reach some clarity on what form the Society ought to take, now that it embraces all these institutions, and among them one as wonderful as the Waldorf School. Not a single word has yet been spoken on this subject, for those who are most familiar with what is going on in Stuttgart have thus far kept fairly silent. I would particularly like to hear what the two members of the Central Executive Committee would say to this. [The members of the Central Executive Committee were Ernst Uehli, Emil Leinhas, Dr. Carl Unger.] (I am not including Herr Leinhas, the third member, as he was the only one who helped me in a problematical situation and who continues to help. Indeed, for his sake I hardly like to see him go on devoting himself to the Central Executive Committee, ideally fitted for it though he is.) It is not a question of these two gentlemen defending themselves, but simply of saying what they think about the future shaping of the Anthroposophical Society, which is capable of amalgamating the enterprises that have been in existence since 1919; otherwise, it would have been an irresponsible deed to launch them. We cannot leave it at that, now that they exist.

These are very, very serious questions. We have to deal with them and discuss them objectively and impersonally. I meant what I said objectively, not as an attack on any member or members of the Central Executive Committee. Nobody is being disparaged, but in my opinion these problems, thus again sharply enunciated by me, had to be brought up. If the two proposed societies are to be established, the group that would be a continuation of the old Anthroposophical Society could make itself responsible for the projects the Society has undertaken, and the other group, that feels no interest in them, could pursue a more narrowly anthroposophical path.

This is what I wanted to put before you in a brief sketch. Tomorrow at twelve I shall speak in detail about matters of business.

I would have liked to follow my usual procedure in lecturing to the kind members of the Anthroposophical Society and to have addressed this gathering on purely anthroposophical matters. The whole course the meetings have taken, however, and the things that have been happening in the past few days have made me decide to confine my comment to questions of immediate interest to this assemblage. I hope there will be other opportunities to speak on more specifically anthroposophical subjects, if not to all of you at once, then at least on several occasions to smaller groups.

The goal of this pair of lectures is to show how anthroposophy can really become wisdom to live by, how it can influence our day-to-day intentions and attitudes. I shall, therefore, devote myself to laying an anthroposophical foundation on which to approach the problems we shall be dealing with here. Yesterday I spoke from that angle about community building in the Anthroposophical Society; today I want to continue and to add something on the subject of the contribution that an anthroposophical view of the world makes to living life in a more adequate way than one could do without it.

In order to show you the opposite side of the matters discussed yesterday, I am taking as my starting point something well-known to everybody familiar with the history of societies built on foundations similar to those on which our own sciety is based. A little later on I will also characterize some of the differences that distinguish the Anthroposophical Society from every other. But for the moment I want to point out that there have been a great many societies that have based their existence on one or another method of attaining insight into the spiritual world, though the level reached was influenced considerably by various historical settings and the particular characteristics and capacities of the groups of people who participated. One finds every shading and level in the wide variety of societies, which covers the whole range from a really serious and significant level down to that of charlatanism.

But one thing is well-known to anyone acquainted with the history of such socities. That is, that a certain moral atmosphere is always created—and indeed, necessarily so—when certain conditions exist. One could describe this atmosphere as being that of a real, genuine striving for brotherliness among the members of such a society. This goal is usually listed among the precepts or in the statutes of these societies, and—as I said—necessarily so, brotherliness being one goal and insight into the spiritual world the other.

Now the thing that people familiar with the history of such societies know is that these societies built on brotherliness and spiritual insight are the worst beset with conflicts. They present the widest opportunities for fighting, for partings-of-the-way, for splitting up into separate factions within the larger group, for group resignations, for sharp attacks on those who stay and those who leave, and so on. In short, human strife is at its most rampant in groups dedicated to brotherhood.

This is a strange phenomenon. But anthroposophical insight enables us to understand it. What I am presenting in these two lectures is also part of the system of anthroposophy, if you will forgive me the pedantic term. So, though this lecture will not be a general discussion, it will still be an anthroposophical one, shaped with special reference to our meetings.

If we return to the matters brought up yesterday, we find three levels of experience among the phenomena of human consciousness. We find people either asleep or dreaming, who, in a state of lowered consciousness, experience a certain world of pictures that they take to be real while they are sleeping. We know that these people are isolated from others inhabiting the physical world in common with them; they are not sharing common experiences. No means exist of conveying what they are experiencing. We know further that a person can go from this state of consciousness to that of everyday awareness, can be awakened to it by external nature, and this includes the natural exterior of other people, as I described yesterday. A certain degree of community feeling is awakened simply as a result of natural drives and the ordinary needs of life, and languages come into being in response to it.

But now let us see what happens when these two states of consciousness get mixed up together. So long as a person continues in completely normal circumstances and is able, by reason of a normal psychic and bodily condition, to keep his isolated dream experience separated from his shared experience with others, he will be living acceptably in his dream world and in the world of reality. But let us assume that, due to some psychological quirk, and it would have to be considered such, a person finds himself in a situation where, though he is in a day-waking state of consciousness involved in a common life with others, he is not having the same feelings and ideas as his companions. Let us assume that the pathological condition he is in causes him to project into his waking consciousness a world of feelings and ideas similar to those of dream life. Instead of developing logically ordered thoughts, he produces a pictorial world like the picture world of dreams. We call such a person mentally ill. But for the moment the thing of chief interest to us is that this person does not understand the others, and unless they are looking at him from a medical pathological angle they cannot understand him either. At the moment when the state of mind prevailing at this lower level of consciousness is carried over to a higher level, a person becomes a crass egotist in his relations with his fellow men. You need only think this over to see that a person of this kind goes entirely by his imaginings. He comes to blows with the others because they cannot follow his reasoning. He can commit the wildest excesses because he does not share a common soul world with other human beings.

Now let us move on from these two states of consciousness to the two others. Let us contrast the everyday state of consciousness, to which we are guided by the natural course of external events, with that higher one that can, as I showed yesterday, awaken through the fact that a person wakes not just in the encounter with the natural aspect of his surrounding but also in the encounter with the inner being of the other person. Though one may not ordinarily be fully and immediately aware of it, one does waken to such a higher level of consciousness. Of course, there are many other ways of entering the higher worlds, as you know from my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But for the period of time one is privileged to spend with others in that way, one can find oneself in a position to understand and witness things one would otherwise not understand or witness. One is presented with the possibility of living in the element that those who know the spiritual world describe in terms applicable to that world—the possibility of speaking of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego, of repeated earth lives and their karmic aspects.

Now at this point there is a possibility of the whole state of mind of ordinary consciousness being carried over into the spiritual world one thus enters and applied to it. This is the same thing that happens on another level when the state of soul of a person absorbed in dream pictures is projected into ordinary life: one turns into an egotist in the most natural way. This occurs if one fails to realize that everything in the higher worlds of the spirit has to be looked at in an entirely different way than one looks at the sense world. One must learn to think and feel differently. Just as dreamers have to switch over into a totally different state of consciousness if they want to share a life with others in an ordinary state of waking, so must there be similar awareness of the fact that the content of anthroposophy cannot be approached with the attitude of soul one has toward the things of ordinary experience.

That is the root of the problem of reaching any understanding and agreement between the everyday consciousness, which is also that of ordinary science, and the consciousness anthroposophy makes possible. When people come together and talk back and forth, one with the ordinary consciousness exemplified in the usual scientific approach and the other with a consciousness equal to forming judgments that accord with spiritual reality, then it is exactly as though a person recounting his dreams were trying to reach an understanding with someone telling him about external facts. When a number of people meet in an ordinary state of consciousness and fail to lift themselves and their full life of feeling to the super-sensible level, when they meet to listen in a merely ordinary state of mind to what the spiritual world is saying, there is a great—an immeasurably great—chance of their coming to blows, because all such people become egotists as a natural consequence.

There is, to be sure, a powerful remedy for this, but it is available only if the human soul develops it. I am referring to tolerance of a truly heartfelt kind. But we have to educate ourselves to it. In a state of everyday consciousness a little tolerance suffices most people's needs, and social circumstances put many a situation right again. But where the ordinary everyday state of mind prevails, it often happens that people talking together are not even concerned to hear what the other is saying. We all know this from our own personal experience. It has become a habit nowadays to give only scant attention to somebody else's words. When a person is part way through a sentence, someone else starts talking, because he is not the least interested in what is being said. He is interested only in his own opinion. One may be able, after a fashion, to get by with this in the physical world, but it simply cannot be done in the spiritual realm. There, the soul must be imbued with the most perfect tolerance; one must educate oneself to listen with profound inner calm even to things one cannot in the least agree with, listen not in a spirit of supercilious endurance, but with the most positive inner tolerance as one would to well-founded utterances on the other person's part. In the higher worlds there is little sense in making objections to anything. A person with experience in that realm knows that the most opposite views about the same fact can be expressed there by, let us say, oneself and someone else. When he has made himself capable of listening to the other's opposite view with exactly the same tolerance he feels toward his own—and please notice this !—then and then only does he have the social attitude required for experiencing what was formerly merely theoretical knowledge of the higher worlds.

This moral basis is vital to a right relationship to the higher realms. The strife that I have described as so characteristic of the societies we are discussing has its root in the fact that when people hear sensational things, such as that man has an etheric and astral body and an ego as well as a physical body, and so on, they listen for sensation's sake but do not undertake to transform their souls as these must be transformed if they are to experience spiritual reality differently than they would a chair or a table in the physical world, and one experiences even these objects differently in the physical world than one does in dreams. When people apply their ordinary soul habits to what they think they are understanding of teachings about the higher worlds, then this inevitably develops strife and egotism.

Thus it is just by grasping the true nature of the higher worlds that one is led to understand how easily societies with a spiritual content can become involved in conflicts and quarreling, and how necessary it is to educate oneself to participation in such groups by learning to tolerate the other person to an immeasurably greater degree than one is used to doing in situations of the physical world. To become an anthroposophist it is not enough to know anthroposophy from the theoretical side: one's whole approach has to be transformed in certain ways. Some people are unwilling to do this. That resulted in my never being understood when I said that there were two ways of occupying oneself with my book, Theosophy, for example. One way is to read or even study it, but with the usual approach and making the judgments that approach engenders. One might just as well be reading a cookbook as Theosophy for all the qualitative difference there is. The value of the experience is identical in both cases, except that reading Theosophy that way means dreaming rather than living on a higher level. When one thus dreams of higher worlds, the impulses one receives from them do not make for the highest degree of unity or the greatest tolerance. Strife and quarreling take the place of the unity that can be the reward of study of the higher worlds, and they keep on spreading. Here you find the cause of the wrangling in societies based on one or another method of gaining insight into the spiritual world.

I said that the various paths described in part in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds lead into the spiritual world. Now when a person has to concern himself intensively with seeking knowledge of those higher worlds, this requires his developing a certain attitude of soul, as you will understand from what I have been explaining in this pair of lectures, though in quite another connection. A true spiritual investigator has to have a certain attitude of soul. One cannot find one's way to truth in the spiritual realm if one is constantly having to give one's attention to what is going on in the physical world in ways quite proper to that sphere, if one has to occupy oneself with matters requring the kind of thinking suited to the physical realm.

Now you will agree that a person who gives his fellowmen a reliable account of things in the spiritual world, a person justified in calling himself a spiritual investigator in the sense in which the other sciences use that term, needs a lot of time for his research. You will therefore find it natural that I, too, need time to do the research that enables me little by little to present anthroposophy or spiritual science in an ever widening perspective in my lectures.

Now if one goes one's way alone, one can of course make time for this within the framework of one's destiny. For a person who is a genuine spiritual investigator and wants to give his fellowmen a trustworthy account of what he discovers in the spiritual world will, as is natural, form the habit of ignoring his opponents. He knows that he has to have opponents, but he is not bothered by their objections to his statements; he could think up the objections himself. So it is natural for him to take the attitude that he is simply going to go his own positive way without paying much attention to anyone's objections, unless there is some special reason to do so.

But this attitude is no longer tenable when one has joined forces with the Anthroposophical Society. For in addition to the responsibility one feels toward the truth, one has a further responsibility in relation to what the Society, of which it is often said that it makes itself an instrument of that truth, is doing. So one has to help carry the Society's responsibilities. This can be combined to a certain extent with the proper attitude toward opponents. Until 1918 that situation obtained with the Society and myself. I paid as little attention as possible to objections, and did so, paradoxical though this may seem, as a consequence of maintaining the tolerance I have been describing. Why, indeed, should I be so intolerant as to be constantly refuting my opponents? In the natural course of human evolution everything eventually gets back on the right track anyhow. So I can say that up until 1918 this question was justified, to some extent at least.

But when the Society proceeds to take on the activities it has included since 1919, it also takes on the responsibility for them. Their destiny becomes involved with that of the Society, and the Society's destiny becomes involved with that of the spiritual investigator. The spiritual investigator must either assume the burden of defending himself against his opponents—in other words, of occupying himself largely with matters that keep him from his spiritual research, since they cannot be combined with it—or else, to get time for his research, turn over the handling of opponents to those who have accepted a certain responsibility for the peripheral institutions. Thus the situation in our Society has undergone fundamental changes since 1919, and this for deeply anthroposophical reasons. Since the Society, as represented by certain of its members, decided to launch these institutions, and since the foundation on which they are all based is anthroposophy, that foundation must now be defended by people who do not have to carry full responsibility for the inner correctness of the material that genuine research has to keep on adding, day by day, to the previous findings of spiritual investigation.

A large proportion of our opponents consists of people in well-defined callings. They may, for example, have studied in certain professional fields where it is customary to think about things in some particular way. Thinking the way he does, such a person simply has to oppose anthroposophy. He doesn't know why, but he has to be an opponent because he is unconsciously on the leash of the profession in which he has had his training and experience.

That is the situation in its inner aspect. From the external standpoint, the question whether what has been established as the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish or decline requires that these opponents be dealt with.

But the real leaders of the opposition know full well what they are about. For there are some among them who are perfectly familiar with the laws that govern spiritual research, even though their view of those laws and that of anthroposophy may differ. They know that their best means of keeping a person who needs peace to pursue his spiritual research from doing his work is constantly to bombard him with hostile writings and objections. They know very well that he cannot give his attention to both refuting them and carrying on his research. They try to put obstacles in his path with their opposition. The mere fact of their putting these attacks in writing is the hostile act. The people who know what they are doing are not so much concerned with the contents of such books as they are with using them as weapons to hurl at the spiritual investigator, and they are particularly intent on tricking and otherwise forcing him into the necessity of defending himself.

These facts must be looked at completely objectively, and everyone who really wants to be a full member of the Anthroposophical Society ought to know them. A good many people are, of course, already familiar with what I have just been saying. The trouble is that some informed members habitually refrain from mentioning any such matters outside their circle.

Experience has long shown that such a course cannot be maintained in the Society. The Society used to publish lecture cycles labeled, “For members only.” Here in Germany, and probably elsewhere too, one can go to public libraries and borrow these same cycles. All the cycles are available to non-members. One can tell from writings of our opponents that they too have them, though it may sometimes have been difficult to get hold of them. But people of this sort are far less apt to shy away from difficulties than is sometimes the case with anthroposophists.

The secrecy that many societies still find it possible to maintain is simply out of the question in the Anthroposophical Society, due to its special character as an institution based on the most modern concept imaginable. For its members are meant to remain free individuals. They are not bound by any promises; they can simply join the Society as honest searchers after knowledge. I have no desire to make secrecy an aim. If that interested me, I would never suggest setting up a loose confederation of groups alongside the old Anthroposophical Society. For I predict, though without implying condemnation, that a great many more escape channels will be opened to the world at large by such a confederation, allowing egress to material that older members believe should be kept in their own cupboards. But the innermost impulse of anthroposophy cannot be grasped by people unwilling to see it put to work in complete accord with the most modern human thinking and feeling. It is, therefore, the more essential to understand what the prerequisites of such a society are.

Now I want to bring up something that I will illustrate with an example taken from my own experience, though not in a spirit of foolish conceit. Last summer I gave a course of lectures at Oxford on the educational methods of the Waldorf School.¹ An article appeared in an English journal that, though I cannot quote it verbatim, made the following point. It began by saying that a person who attended the lectures at the Oxford educational meetings without prior awareness of who Dr. Steiner was and that he had some connection with anthroposophy would not have noticed that a representative of anthroposophy was speaking. Such a person would simply have thought him to be a man speaking about pedagogy from a different angle than the listener's own.

I was exceedingly delighted by this characterization because it showed that there are people who notice something that is always my goal, namely, to speak in a way that is not instantly recognized as anthroposophical. Of course, the content is anthroposophical, but it cannot be properly absorbed unless it is objective. The anthroposophical standpoint should lead, not to onesidedness, but, on the contrary, to presenting things in such a way that each least detail can be judged on its own merits and its truth be freely recognized.

Once, before the Oxford lecture cycle was delivered and the article about it written, I made an experiment that may not seem to you at all significant. In June of this year I attended the Vienna Congress and gave two cycles comprising twelve lectures.² I undertook to keep the word anthroposophy out of all of them, and it is not to be found there. You will also not find any such phrase as “the anthroposophical world view shows us this or that.” Of course, despite this—and indeed, especially because of it—what was presented was pure anthroposophy.

Now I am not making the philistine, pedantic recommendation that anthroposophists should always avoid using the word “anthroposophy.” That is far from my intention. But the spirit that must inspire us in establishing right relations with the rest of the world can be found by looking in that general direction. That spirit should work freely in leaders active in the Society; otherwise I will again be held responsible for unanthroposophical things that are done in its name. Then the world would have some justification for confusing the one agent with the other.

Here too the objective spirit of anthroposophy needs to be properly grasped and, above all, manifested in what is done. We will first have to undertake some degree of self-education to that end. But self-education is needed in anthroposophical circles; countless mistakes have been made in the past few years for want of it, with the launching of the peripheral institutions contributing to the problem. I state this simply as an objective fact, without meaning to accuse anyone personally.

If the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish, every single one of its members is going to have to become fully aware of these facts. But this cannot happen under present day social conditions unless an effort is made to set up a lively exchange, even if only in the form of some such medium as a news sheet conceived as a link between the Society's various centers of activity. But again, that would require every such circle, even if not every individual member, to develop a living interest in the concerns of the whole Society, and particularly in its ongoing evolution. There has been too little of this. If the Anthroposophical Society did not exist, there would presumably still be a certain number of books on anthroposophy. But one would not have to be concerned, as a society is, with the people who read them. These people would be scattered all over the world, singly or in groups, according to their karma, but one would not have to have any external contact with them. The spiritual investigator is not in any fundamentally different situation, even in a society such as ours was up to 1918. But the situation changed at the moment when the Anthroposophical Society assumed responsibility for things that existed on the physical plane.

I am putting all this in a much more plain spoken way than I have on other occasions. But say them I did, in one form or another, when the peripheral institutions were being launched. I couldn't, of course, whisper them in every member's ear, and I don't know whether it would have helped if I had done that. But the Society existed and had leaders. They should have seen to it that conditions in the Society were such that it could include the various institutions without jeopardizing spiritual research.

I will call this the negative aspect of community building in contrast to the positive aspect I presented yesterday. I would like to add that everyone interested in creating community of the positive kind that I described from the standpoint of the prerequisites of its existence must be aware of the matters discussed today in relation to the Anthroposophical Society's life and progress. They must all be taken into consideration as affecting the various areas of anthroposophical life.

In this connection let me cite the following instructive example. I come back again to the tragic subject of the ruined Goetheanum. In September and October 1920 we held a three week course there, the first of the so-called High School courses. Yesterday, I described how the Goetheanum was built in a definite artistic style that was the product of an anthroposophical approach. How did this style originate? It came into being as a result of the fact that persons to whom we cannot be grateful enough undertook, in 1913, to build a home base for what existed at that time in the way of anthroposophical works in a narrower sense, and what, again in that narrower sense, was still to issue from anthroposophy. They wanted to create a home for the staging of mystery plays, for the still germinal but nevertheless promising art of eurythmy, and, above all, for presentations of anthroposophy itself as these projected cosmic pictures derived from spiritual-scientific research. That was my intention when these persons asked me to take initiatives in this connection. I saw it as my task to erect a building designed in a style artistically consonant with the work that was to go on in it. The Goetheanum was the outcome.

At that time there were no scholars or scientists in our midst. Anthroposophy had indeed taken some steps in a scientific direction. But the development that was to include activity in the various professional fields among the Society's functions had not yet begun. What developed later came into being as a direct outgrowth of anthroposophy, exactly as did the Waldorf School pedagogy, the prime example of such a process.

Now an artistic style had to be found to suit each such development. It was found, as I believe, in the Goetheanum. The war caused some delay in building. Then, in 1920, I gave the course of lectures just referred to. It was given at the behest of the professionals who had meanwhile joined the Society and were such a welcome addition to it. They arranged a program and submitted it to me.

In my belief, complete freedom reigns in the Anthroposophical Society. Many outsiders think that Steiner is the one who decides what is to go on in it. The things that go on most of the time, however, are such as Steiner would never have thought up. But the Society does not exist for my sake; it exists for the members.

Well, I sat there, all attentiveness, at this lecture series of September and October 1920—this is just an aperçu, not a criticism—and let my eyes range over the interior of the Goetheanum. In the Goetheanum Weekly I described how, in eurythmy for example, the lines of the Goetheanum continued over into the eurythmists' motions. But according to the original intention, this should have been the case with everything done there. So I let my inner eye test whether the interior decoration, the architecture, the sculptured forms, the painting, harmonized with what the speakers were saying from the podium. I discovered something that people did not at that time have to be faced with, namely, that everything I may call in the best sense a projection of the anthroposophical outlook, everything that had its origin in pure anthroposophy, harmonized marvellously with the Goetheanum. But in the case of a whole series of lectures, one felt that they should have been delivered only when the Goetheanum reached the point of adding a number of further buildings, each so designed that its style would harmonize with the special studies and activities being carried on inside it. In its destiny of almost ten years, the Goetheanum really shared the destiny of the Anthroposophical Society, and one could readily become aware, by feeling out the way the architectural style harmonized or failed to harmonize with what went on in the building, that an inorganic element had indeed insinuated itself into the pure ongoing stream of the anthroposophical spiritual movement.

Now this is not said to blame anybody or to suggest that things should have been done differently; everything had to happen as it did, naturally. But that brought another necessity with it: The necessity of bringing about a complete rebirth of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and so on, through anthroposophy, to give consciousness the quick forward thrust I described it as needing. For the ordinary way of looking at things simply does not provide a basis for anthroposophical presentations. But that forward thrust was not always in evidence. Its lack could be felt in the testing that the artistic style of the Goetheanum gave it; in the Anthroposophical Society it manifests itself in the phenomenon of the clouds that have gathered and hung over us these past days. Now that a most welcome destiny has brought science into the anthroposophical stream, we face the immediate and future task of bringing it to rebirth through anthroposophy. No purpose is served by losing ourselves in all kinds of meaningless polemics; the urgent task is rather to see to it that the various disciplines are reborn out of anthroposophy.

We had to make do somehow during the period when substitutes were the order of the day. I was often called upon, in response to a need somewhere, to deliver cycles of lectures to this or that group on subjects which, had anthroposophical life been progressing at a normal tempo, might better have waited for future developing. Then these cycles became available. They should have been put to use in the first place as a means of helping the various sciences to rebirth through anthroposophy. That lay in the real interests of anthroposophy, and its interests would have coincided fruitfully indeed with those of the Anthroposophical Society.

People have to know all these facts. You see, my dear friends, in the course of the various seminars held here and there under the auspices of the High School, I repeatedly assigned problems that needed solving. At the last address I gave in the Small Auditorium of the Goetheanum during the scientific course, which was held at the end of 1922 and was to have continued there into 1923, I gave the mathematical physicists an assignment. I discussed how necessary it was to solve the problem of finding a mathematical formula to express the difference between tactual and visual space. There were many other occasions when similar matters were brought up. We were confronted with many urgent problems of the time, but they all needed to be worked out in such a thoroughly anthroposophical way as to have value for every single group of anthroposophists, regardless of whether tactual and visual space and the like meant anything to them. For there are ways in which something that perhaps only one person can actually do can be made fruitful for a great many others when it is clothed in some quite different form.

Thus, the difficulties that have proliferated are a consequence of what I must call the exceedingly premature steps taken since 1919, and, in particular, of the circumstance that people founded all sorts of institutions and then didn't continue sharing responsibility for them—a fact that must be stressed again and again. These difficulties have given rise to the problematical situation now confronting us.

But none of them can be laid at the door of anthroposophy itself. What my kind listeners should be aware of is that it is possible to be quite specific as to how each such difficulty originated. And it must be emphasized that it is most unjust to dismiss anthroposophy on account of the troubles that have arisen.

I would, therefore, like to append to the discussion of just such deeper matters as these a correction of something that was said from this platform yesterday; it disturbed me because of my awareness of the things we have been talking about here. It was stated that people were not aware that the Anthroposophical Movement could be destroyed by our opponents. It cannot be. Our opponents could come to present the gravest danger to the Anthroposophical Society or to me personally, and so on. But the Anthroposophical Movement cannot be harmed; the worst that could happen is that its opponents might slow its progress. I have often pointed out in this and similar connections that we must distinguish between the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society. My reason for saying this was not that the Society no longer needed to be taken into account, but that the Society is the vessel and the Movement its content. This holds true for the single member as well as for the Society. Here too, full clarity and awareness should reign. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with the Anthroposophical Society. Nor should the fact go unrecognized that developments of the past three or four years have meant, for members, a close interweaving of the unfolding destiny of anthroposophy with the Society's destiny. The two have come to seem almost identical, but they must nevertheless be sharply differentiated.

There could, theoretically, have been a Waldorf School even if the Society had not existed. But that could not have happened in reality, for there would have been no one to found and steer and look after the school. Real logic, the logic of reality, is quite a different thing than abstract logical reasoning. It is important that members of the Society understand this. A member ought to have some rudimentary realization, even if only on the feeling level, that insight into higher worlds has to be built on an awareness that super-sensible experience differs greatly from experience of the ordinary physical world. Something in the physical world can seem just as right as a dream content does to the dreaming person. But the carrying over of things of one's dream life into situations of everyday waking consciousness nevertheless remains an abnormal and harmful phenomenon. It is similarly harmful to carry over into the consciousness needed for understanding the spiritual world convictions and attitudes quite properly adopted in ordinary waking consciousness.

I can give you an instructive example. As a result of the way modern man has become so terribly caught up in intellectuality and a wholly external empiricism, even those people who are not especially at home in the sciences have taken up the slogan: Prove what you are saying! What they are stressing is a certain special way of using thought as a mediator. They know nothing of the immediate relationship the soul of man can have to truth, wherein truth is immediately apprehended in just the way the eye perceives the color red, that is, seeing it, not proving it. But in the realm of reason and intellect, each further conceptual step is developed out of the preceding one. Where the physical plane is concerned, one is well advised to become a bright fellow who can prove everything, and to develop such a good technique in this that it works like greased lightning. That is a good thing where the physical plane is concerned, and a good thing for the sciences that deal with it. It is good for the spiritual investigator to have developed a certain facility in proving matters of the physical world. Those who acquaint themselves closely with the intentions underlying the work of our Research Institute will see that wherever this technique is applicable, we, too, apply it. But if you will permit me the grotesque expression, one becomes stupid in relation to the spiritual world if one approaches it in a proof-oriented state of mind, just as one becomes stupid when one projects a dreamer's orientation into ordinary waking consciousness. For the proving method is as out of place in the spiritual world as is an intrusion of the dream state into the reality of waking consciousness. But in modern times things have reached the point where proving everything is taken as a matter of course. The paralyzing effect this trend has had in some areas is really terrifying.

Religion, which grew out of direct vision, and in neither its modern nor its older forms was founded on anything susceptible of intellectual-rational proof, has now become proof-addicted rationalistic theory, and it is proving, in the persons of its extremer exponents, that everything about it is false. For just as it is inevitable that a person become abnormal when he introduces dream concerns into his waking consciousness, so does a person necessarily become abnormal in his relationship to higher worlds if he approaches them in a way suited to the physical plane. Theology has become either an applied science that just deals practically with whatever confronts it or a proof-minded discipline, better adapted to destroying religion than to establishing it.

These, my dear friends, are the things that must become matters of clear and conscious experience in the Anthroposophical Society. If that is not the case, one takes one's place in life and in human society simply as a person of many-sided interests who functions sensibly at all the various levels, whereas from the moment one concerns oneself with the material contained in innumerable cycles, one cannot exist as a human being without spiritual development.

The spiritual investigator does not need to rely on proof in meeting his opponents. Every objection that they might make to something I have said can be taken from my own writings, for wherever it is indicated I call attention to how things stand with physical proof as applied to super-sensible fact. Somewhere in my books one can always find an approximation of the opponents' comments in my own statements, so that, for the most part, all an opponent need do to refute me is to copy passages out of my writings. But the point is that all these details should become part of the awareness of the members. Then they will find firm footing in the Society. To occupy oneself with the anthroposophical outlook will mean finding firm footing, not only in the physical world but in all the worlds there are.

Then anthroposophical impulses will also be a fountainhead of the capacity to love one's fellowmen and of everything else that leads to social harmony and a truly social way of life. There will no longer be conflict and quarreling, divisions and secedings among anthroposophists; true human unity will reign and overcome all external isolation. Though one accept observations made in higher worlds as truth, one will not wander about like a dreamer in the physical world; one will relate to it as a person with both feet set firmly on the ground. For one will have trained oneself to keep the two things separate, just as dream experience and physical reality must be kept separate in ordinary life.

The key need is for everyone who intends to join with others in really full, genuine participation in the Anthroposophical Movement within the Society to develop a certain attitude of soul, a certain state of consciousness. If we really permeate ourselves with that attitude and that consciousness, we will establish true anthroposophical community. Then the Anthroposophical Society, too, will flourish and bear fruit and live up to its promise.

• 1. Spiritual Ground of Education Oxford, August 16-25, 1922. Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 2. The Tension Between East and West, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1963.

[Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner arrive in Stuttgart in the evening and are received by the “Circle of Seven” at the Anthroposophical Society's house at Landhausstraße 70. No minutes were kept of the first session, which took place that same evening and lasted all night. Marie Steiner reports in her 1947 edition from memory, adding: “It's a bit awkward to rely only on one's own memory after decades; one should be able to check it against that of others.”:]

The purpose of this first meeting was to present the disagreements that had arisen between the board and the other leading figures, but especially to examine the complaints of the young people. Dr. Steiner angrily rejected the very personal talk about Dr. Unger's shortcomings and wanted to know why his assignment had not been fulfilled and the board had not provided an answer. ¹ Nobody knew anything about it. Uehli had kept quiet, simply forgotten the matter.² Now it became more than serious. Dr. Steiner did not hold back his indignation. He demanded energetically that the board should be clear about its tasks, review the situation and make the expected proposals to him at the next meeting, which would have to be worked out by then. The night would have to be used for this.

Elsewhere Marie Steiner reports on this meeting as follows:

The first of the intimate meetings was of crucial importance. It had been requested by a group called the “Circle of Seven” and was intended to dismiss Dr. Unger. Dr. Steiner asked for the list of names and asked in astonishment: But Dr. Unger's name is missing! — He was not invited, they replied. You are not going to bring charges against Dr. Unger, Dr. Steiner replied indignantly, without giving him an opportunity to respond? They acknowledged this with shame. Mr. Uehli was the first speaker; he spoke at length, but without substance. The most serious thing he said was that the youth did not want to work with Dr. Unger; they could not find a relationship with him and wanted to work among themselves as a separate society. Other complaints were that Dr. Unger looked at the newspaper when he spoke to people, and the like. The whole thing had no real basis; one sank into the insubstantial. Dr. Steiner remained silent. I ventured to say, “Oh, Mr. Uehli, would you please restate your complaint?” He did so, and the whole matter suddenly disintegrated like a blown bubble. But Dr. Steiner gave vent to his indignation: I am called upon for something like this, something that is based on gossip, antipathy and competitive envy!³

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner's lecture in Dornach, February 9, 1923 (in this volume on page 113).
• 2. Uehli said the following about this in a letter dated January 16, 1948, to Emil Bock: “It is not true that I ‘ignored, overlooked or perhaps overslept’ the task Dr. Steiner gave me at the time. [This refers to Marie Steiner's formulation in her retrospective account, cf. page 21 of this volume.] What is true is that I had to see myself as incapable of executing it. What happened in January-February 1923 in the Thirty Circle, that not one of us, not even I, was able to accomplish even a part of what Dr. Steiner expected and demanded of the Thirty Circle, I had gone through that beforehand in weeks of torment and oppression, and that is why I could not carry out the task in the form given to me. ... In the tragic conflict in which I found myself at the time, I formed the Circle of Seven as a way out, in order to discuss the situation of the Society with Dr. Steiner.
• 3. The result of this night session was the resignation of Ernst Uehli from the Central Executive Council.

and the new participants: Carl Unger and the two Waldorf teachers Paul Baumann and Dr. Herbert Hahn. The following are proposed as the new board: Emil Leinhas, Dr. Hahn, Paul Baumann, Dr. Kolisko, who replaces Ernst Uehli, who has resigned from the central board.

The meeting begins ¹ with a proposal concerning the future composition of the Central Executive Committee, from which Mr. Uehli has withdrawn. The Committee of Seven has been expanded to include three members: Dr. Unger, Baumann and Dr. Hahn were invited to the meeting. Dr. Kolisko is the spokesman; he is provisionally taking over the place of Mr. Uehli on the Central Board. It is said that it is necessary to cultivate more concrete relationships with young people and that Dr. Unger cannot find his way to the young; their way does not connect with his.

In response to the proposals and resolutions put forward by the four gentlemen to place anthroposophy more intensively at the center of their work, Dr. Steiner remarked that this was the only way to deal with the opposition in the youth circles. Even if the youth, who have been tendentiously influenced in this direction, find Dr. Unger's lectures too dry, this should not be a reason for him to become inactive; the work of Dr. Unger is also urgently needed for the branch.

The gentlemen also discuss the fact that the members and branches in the periphery should be given information about the burning issues of society. The representatives of the branches would be asked to come to important meetings in Stuttgart in the near future. Communication with the religious renewal movement should be sought. A new attitude towards the opposition is recognized as necessary.

Dr. Stein: We want to work together. I believe that Dr. Unger can also work with us.

Dr. Unger: The most pressing tasks are summarized in these proposals. What makes you think that there will be trust?

Dr. Steiner: I would like to raise a question regarding the proposals that have been made. It does not matter that a number of personalities now have the things that have been formulated here in their heads and are expressing them; because these four walls here are listening very silently! At first, it may be thought that things will go extremely well; but one must start by wanting to understand whether this is a reality. Lack of trust has been much discussed. How would you imagine summoning the thirty-strong circle of Stuttgart-based personalities on Monday to present the finished proposals? Can you imagine what the assembly would make of these things? Can you imagine nothing but agreement? What about the first meeting of the committee of seven? —You can't say that Mr. Uehli, for example, was there last night. He wasn't really there. He came to make his positions available. I didn't get the impression that Mr. Uehli brought the committee of seven to me either. I didn't get that impression. I did have the impression that Mr. Uehli was only dragged along. Really, I did not have the impression that Mr. Uehli brought this circle to me. I could not have had that belief.

First, Mrs. Marie Steiner speaks. Then several people comment on the situation as they see it.

Dr. Steiner: This representation would be a small opiate. If we begin in this way, without clarity, we are basing it on something that is not true. How could one have come to the conclusion that Mr. Uehli brought about this committee of seven? — There has been so much talk of active energy that has now been awakened by becoming aware of what happened during the first sessions. Not everyone present was aware of this. Mr. Uehli was not really there; nor can it be said that Mr. Uehli was present when the results of the first evening were discussed.

Several people describe their impressions and resolutions.

Dr. Steiner: If something is to happen now, it is important that it be built on a living foundation, as it were. Those who are rousing themselves must say: What is necessary for society as a whole has not happened so far, and we must do it now. Otherwise it is not enough; they must be imbued with the realization that things cannot go on like this. Even in a circular letter it must be said: It cannot go on like this. Everything must be justified and substantiated. It must be quite clear: Do we want to keep the old leadership, or do we want something new?

Take the example of “Religious Renewal” that you brought up on the agenda. This “Religious Renewal” is an event. One day, Dr. Rittelmeyer and Emil Bock appeared and launched this thing. It started from the various meetings that were held with prominent figures in the religious renewal movement. The leading personalities drew their conclusions from all these meetings. Mr. Uehli was present at all these meetings. It was not Mr. Leinhas who was called upon, but precisely Mr. Uehli. He knows exactly what it is all about. The other course participants had begun their action, but the member of the Central Board had sat down on the curule seat! ¹From this emerged the porridge that you now have to boil down.

Another lively debate ensues. Dr. Steiner concludes it with the following words:

Dr. Steiner: So we would meet on Monday with the thirties group and with people you want to involve as well. Right, the thirties group is the first periphery for now. The point now is to determine who else should be there.

Names are mentioned and the meeting is closed.

• 1. In Marie Steiner's edition - based on the protocol of Karl Schubert - marked “Shortly after January 8, 1923”. The exact date could only be determined now.
• 1. Uehli was not only a member of the Central Board, but also a teacher of religion for the free religious education of the Waldorf School. Because of these two functions, he had been invited to the lecture courses for the religious renewal movement. Rudolf Steiner had expected it to be a matter of course that the Society would be informed by the Central Board or by Uehli respectively. Since this did not happen, Rudolf Steiner provided this information himself in his two lectures given immediately before the fire at the Goetheanum (December 30 and 31, 1922). After the fire, the following message from the Central Board appeared in the “Mitteilungen” (no. 2, January 1923), which it had published:
  "The appearance of the movement for religious renewal has caused difficulties and misunderstandings in many circles of the Anthroposophical Society. Shortly before the beginning of their public work, the three members of the Central Council of the Anthroposophical Society [Dr. Carl Unger, Emil Leinhas, Ernst Uehli] had a conversation in Dornach with the four leading personalities of the religious renewal movement [Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Emil Bock, Werner Johannes Klein, Gertrud Spörri] about the two movements working together. In the light of this discussion, the Central Council had decided to bring a brief account of the historical development and tasks of the religious renewal movement to the attention of the members at this point. This account was to be sent out immediately after the conclusion of the events taking place in Dornach over Christmas and New Year. The devastating event of the destruction of the Goetheanum by a maliciously set fire has meanwhile penetrated into all hearts as a terrible pain. The last lectures Dr. Steiner gave at the Goetheanum were on the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society and Movement. On December 30, 1922, the day before the catastrophe, Dr. Steiner spoke about the religious renewal movement. Instead of our presentation, which was already prepared, we will present a free rendering of this lecture.”

Before the session, a branch assembly had taken place in which a report was given on Rudolf Steiner's Dornach lectures of December 30 and 31, 1922, on the position of the religious renewal movement. Dr. Carl Unger had reported on Rudolf Steiner's address of January 6 (see page 73 of this volume) and explained that, speaking of the criticism that was being expressed about the work in Stuttgart, he did not want to be an obstacle to the progress of anthroposophical work. A discussion of the possibility of recognizing and combating the cause of the criticized unmethodical behavior was scheduled for the next branch evening.

Now the extended thirty-strong circle meeting requested by Rudolf Steiner took place with about 60 participants.

Dr. Steiner: After almost ten years of work and just as many years of worries, the Goetheanum has become our undoing, and I do not need to describe to you here the pain of this downfall, if only because great pain cannot really be expressed in words. But I would like to say a few words today before these proceedings.

It must be said that with the intention of building the Goetheanum, the Anthroposophical Society, from whose midst this building emerged, took on a different form than it had before. The building was a means of speaking to the world in general today. It was a stepping forward into this world; and it was necessary to see to it that the building was constructed in such a way that it could actually be used to speak to the whole world today. And in a sense, that is what the building has done. I might say that only now has the right opportunity arisen to tear the Anthroposophical Movement out of its sectarian nature and give it the importance that, according to the nature of the matter, has always had to be spoken of since its inception.

Now, of course, a true word about the terrible Dornach catastrophe can hardly come about unless it is spoken of from deeper foundations. But that cannot be. In recent times it has become almost impossible for anything I have said to be mentioned within even the narrowest circles of the Anthroposophical Society without our opponents taking it out of context and echoing it back to us in a distorted way within a very short time. It has become impossible to speak esoterically about deeper matters today because the words do not remain within the circles in which they are spoken. And so I must say that, apart from the fact that it is not appropriate at this present moment to speak about the spiritual side of the Dornach catastrophe, it will probably not be possible at all to speak about this spiritual side. Various people may have many thoughts as to why this could have happened. But, as I said, I must unfortunately leave these things unspoken.

Another aspect of this so infinitely painful event immediately confronts us. And since we must not allow ourselves to be weighed down by the pain, this other side is our first concern. This is what, I would say, could be immediately assumed from the night of the fire; namely, the way the echo of the world sounds to us after the disaster has struck us. The opponents use the disaster to forge further weapons for this antagonism. We see from the scorn and derision with which we are met everywhere, something like the tips of new offensive weapons, which are to become ever stronger in the near future. And we should look above all at what lies ahead for us.

That is why I had to emphasize in Dornach, and this brings me to the purpose of our meeting today, which is to deal with the future, that when it is thought of building something else in Dornach or elsewhere – something definite cannot yet be said – that could be an outward emblem of the anthroposophical movement, that it is a matter of consolidating the Anthroposophical Society. For in a sense the building at Dornach, which spoke loudly to the whole world, lacked the background of the protective Anthroposophical Society. Basically, the Anthroposophical Society fell apart from the moment the building began. Not that the number of members had become smaller, but precisely the way in which it had spread in recent years, which was necessary and gratifying, had done extraordinary harm to the cause itself. And the building would have needed the support of a strong Anthroposophical Society.

Now, my dear friends, what needs to be said in this regard has already been said by smaller bodies during my two attendances, and it should be the subject of today's negotiations. I myself would just like to say what needs to be said from my side in advance so that today's meeting does not remain incomprehensible from my side. In the course of the debate, which I do not wish to delay, only what has been a heavy concern on my mind for some time and which led me to a conversation with a member of the Executive Council when I was here in December [on December 10] should be said. This conversation was mainly concerned with the necessity of tackling the tasks that had arisen for the Anthroposophical Society from its membership. Not so much through what I myself had to do. It had become necessary to draw attention to the fact that in view of these tasks and the situation that had gradually developed, there were only two things left for me to do, since I could not continue to stand by and watch. Two things, one of which was that I had to say to Mr. Uehli, as the representative of the Central Board sitting in front of me: I assume that the Central Board will discuss the Anthroposophical Society in the very near future, so that, initially, for itself, reinforced by prominent personalities here, it will give me its opinions, and suggestions, which I will then listen to in order to see whether it is possible from within the Society, through its present leadership, to really consolidate this Society. So I said: I expect the Central Board to approach me in such a way when I am in Stuttgart the next time that they present me with their proposals. Otherwise I would be forced to continue to ignore the Central Board and to address the entire membership directly, in an attempt to make a start on consolidating the Society. I would deeply regret it if this step were necessary, and so I propose to the others.

I had to leave at the time and awaited the appropriate consequences of my request. Well, my dear friends, then the time passed with the preparations for everything that was to take place in Dornach: the science course, the Christmas plays, the eurythmy. During December I was unable to come over again. And then came the catastrophe. A large proportion of our friends here were over in Dornach. And I should not omit to mention this: on the night of the fire, as always when it comes down to doing the necessary, the membership did not fail, but worked in such a way that it met every ideal. |

Now I learned from the Central Committee that the first step to be taken was to address the members with the announcements concerning the religious renewal movement. This should be a first step, and further steps should follow. It was natural to find this understandable, because I had explicitly designated Stuttgart as the place where these things had come to a head. And so it was all right.

Now, however, after the catastrophe had affected us, a meeting of the members was to take place at the instigation of the central committee. And just before the meeting was to begin, I was asked [on January 5 in Dornach] what should happen at it. I replied: If one wants to speak in this situation, one must speak about the consolidation of the Society. Mr. Uchli said that this should take place in Stuttgart in a smaller group. I assumed that one cannot speak about it without having informed oneself about the most important things.

The next day the meeting was held [on January 6 in Dornach], and on this occasion I gave a speech that Dr. Unger reported to you [on January 9 in Stuttgart]. Then I arrived last week and a circle had somehow come into being that held a night session with me on Tuesday of last week [January 16th], in which the things were expressed that can be communicated to you by the personalities concerned. And I was basically faced with the situation that what I had asked the central committee for had not happened, but that a free group of leading personalities was waiting for me and negotiating the consolidation of society. The next day [January 17], Dr. Unger was also consulted. This afternoon I remarked to the same group,¹ Human contact has been lost to such an extent that the following question should be considered: whether, in order to revive this contact, a real meeting should be convened in which people could express their thoughts and desires. The question arises as to whether things can continue as they are, with the leadership simply dictating to the rest of society. Should the new leadership not come to an understanding with those who are to follow? When I consider that the matter here was still so immature that I had to ask this afternoon to convene this circle because one cannot say between four walls: We are making four people the new board. The response was full of well-meaning conventional statements, but it was not decidedly one way or the other. It was the expression of good intentions, but it was not the expression of a strong will.

Things like the ones I have expressed, even if I don't want to say anything bad about those involved, are quite real. I am absolutely in a position to be able to say: Here in Stuttgart there is a huge number of the best talents. The misfortune is that people do not want to apply their talents in an appropriate way. There is no lack of ability. Enlightened minds are here. If I tried to point out achievements, it is a reason for many to almost trample these achievements underfoot. That is the inner opposition. I would like to know who is in a position to say that Dr. Unger does not have the very highest abilities. There is no objection to his ability. The will must be found! It is not done with words of thunder, but with the content of the will. One must begin to study the things.

Another example is this: everything is done for the religious renewal movement. Mr. Uehli is involved. And after the matter is finished in Dornach on September 17,³ On September 17, 1922, he does not go to Stuttgart to take the appropriate measures, assuming that something important has been created, but he sits on his curule seat and does nothing. Then, at the end of December, a child is born terribly late.⁴ We are facing this today. This will cause many people who have taken up this or that position to suffer pangs of remorse. — And further: It does not matter at all that one bears a title, but that one does something. Much has been neglected. It is not a question of time, but of interest and discernment. One must have the will to look at things in terms of their importance, their significance or insignificance. A great resonance would be necessary. This consolidation must not be brought about in a bureaucratic way, but in a factual and human way.

Emil Leinhas speaks.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps someone outside will consider the causes of these things; without that, one cannot move forward. It is a spiritual movement. One must go back to the spiritual causes of things. Rightly so, one can be terribly amazed at the successes of the religious renewal movement. One is suddenly taken aback by the popularity of these people. But no one goes back to the causes, to how the whole thing developed, how this religious renewal movement came about. If these methods continue, the Anthroposophical Society will be left standing like a plucked chicken, because all its feathers will be plucked. It may still have the original juice. —— The lectures are locked up; and then the others come to me [wanting to read them], and I have to say that they have been locked up. That is how far you get with this. Now this [religious] renewal movement has formed. Imagine if you had had the strength to absorb it in the Anthroposophical Society! But Dr. Rittelmeyer and Emil Bock left [the Society].

It was a good thing that the “Movement for Threefolding” was pursued here in Stuttgart. How was it pursued? An office was set up. What were the local groups? The branches of the Anthroposophical Society. The local groups were ruined by the Stuttgart bureaucracy. The bureaucracy of the threefolding movement undermined the branches directly from Stuttgart. If religious renewal now takes hold of the branches, it is doing no more than the threefolding movement has already done. I must confess that I remember with a certain horror how this movement inaugurated itself here. The threefolding movement has not done anything new. One recalls how the threefolding movement established itself here with no small fanfare. It cannot continue unless someone comes forward and says: We want to thoroughly sweep away the methods of 1919. — Here it is a matter of realizing these things: why, for example, one writes a letter; and why for a fortnight the heads of the “authorities” do not talk to each other. If things do not change, they will come to a halt. They will not change unless you face things realistically and call a spade a spade. What has happened so far will not change things. It is essential that you speak and act differently, and quickly, so that not everything I have said is thrown to the wind again. I didn't know why I was supposed to be here at all; ⁵ my words were thrown to the wind. With the exception of the one case that was handled excellently, it was as if they were saying to me: “Don't do anything!” It is only the seriousness of the situation that makes it necessary for me to speak in this way.

I want to evoke a sense of what is necessary. I truly don't want to teach anyone a lesson. Today, one can't help but point out the seriousness of the situation. If the Anthroposophical Society continues to behave this way, in five years you won't sell a single anthroposophical book anymore. The Anthroposophical Society has become a serious stumbling block. A complete turnaround must take place.

• 1. Circle of Seven, that there could be no question of deciding anything in the abstract, but that those who want something have to be rooted in something real, in the real intentions of the membership. And I therefore asked that the next wider circle be convened, so that there would be not just talk about it, which would be nice, but so that it could be shown whether any of it [what is being talked about] is really rooted in the people of the society.

  I hope that tonight there will be an honest debate, both on the part of those who have taken the initiative so far and on the part of the others. It is impossible to be satisfied with deluding ourselves: it will work out. — Rather, it is a matter of all the things that underlie the fragmentation of society actually coming to light, of the way in which people want to work in the future coming to light, so that society can continue to exist. Because it cannot continue as it has until now. It would be no use to build a house, because the way things are now, society would no longer exist before it was finished, it would have fallen apart into its atoms. It is a matter of speaking in the most definite way possible, so that it can be seen to what extent society can be carried out of its own bosom.

  Emil Leinhas: Members from the most diverse layers of society have been summoned for this evening in order to deliberate on the situation of the Society. A smaller circle has discussed the necessary questions in contact with me, with Dr. Unger and Mr. Uehli. A resolution has been worked out which will be read out this evening.

  Eugen Kolisko: Dr. Steiner's address [January 6] led to the task for members to take care of the leadership of the Society and the way this leadership has been handled since 1919. There is strong criticism of the Central Council and much mistrust. There is no understanding with the youth and also no harmonious cooperation within the Central Council.

  Proposals are made to reorganize anthroposophical life by creating a trust organization. A statement to the general membership is to be given. Dr. Unger is willing to resign. Mr. Uehli has resigned. Leinhas, Hahn, Baumann and Kolisko are proposed.

  Dr. W. J. Stein explains that he and his friends are willing to work together, as they have promised each other. It would be very good if it turned out that there is a willingness to work together in very broad circles.

  Paul Baumann: Kolisko is my guarantee that no clique will emerge.

  Several speakers speak out in favour of Eugen Kolisko; some ask Carl Unger to remain on the board. There is a back and forth of the most diverse opinions, and other proposals for an expansion of the board follow.

  Paul Baumann: Dr. Unger is encumbered by the people who particularly want to support him, who are his clique. Dr. Unger explains that he does not want to be in the way if another group wants to do it. Only if this group does not succeed would he feel obliged to take matters back into his own hands. It is necessary to test whether the group will be trusted.

  Emil Leinhas reminds the meeting of Dr. Steiner's remark to Mr. Uehli that he would be obliged, if nothing happened, to address the members directly in a circular letter.

  Jose del Monte: The gentlemen proposed except for Mr. Leinhas are very young in the Society; they would not find much trust among the older members. Dr. Unger should be included after all.

  Several other proposals are made.

  Dr. Steiner: Apart from questions of personalities, this meeting today should show how things will change in the future from within the Society itself. Today, reference has repeatedly been made to a group that has met here in Stuttgart as an extended group to take care of the various anthroposophical affairs. I have put forward various ideas in this circle that cannot be resolved to the very end. It could be of interest, and this is really meant without malice, that My word has been heard only once when I spoke in this circle about the need to advocate for the order of affairs over there in Switzerland, namely that since then Mr. Leinhas has devoted himself to the demands made at the time in an intensive way. This has created a difficulty for the central committee. I could not wish that Mr. Leinhas devote himself to the business of the central committee. He really had enough to do for the whole person. At the same time, it is important that the “Kommende Tag” does not appear unmethodical by not continuing to work on it, as is the case with things that are started and then abandoned. The fact that Mr. Leinhas has to be a leading figure is obvious from the nature of the matter. I emphasize this explicitly, that this was the only case where one was interested in the things I brought up. It is a great oddity that I have spoken of such an extraordinarily important matter and it is claimed from two sides that the things did not happen. So that this cannot continue like this is self-evident and proves how much it was an urgent necessity to express this.

  The things that have been discussed here have not been heard. The most important matters have not been echoed at all. It cannot go on like this. I emphasize one thing: after all, from 1901 to 1918, things were not done carelessly in the Anthroposophical Society. They came about; and so it can also be said that the Central Board emerged from history. It has this piece of history behind it. It is burdened with everything we have heard this evening. You must bear one thing in mind: it is quite impossible to bring about change merely through abstract discussions. Positive impulses of will must emerge. After what has been said this evening, I must say: I expected that something would be said about the matter, not that all kinds of proposals would be made and the like. Of course it is impossible for three Waldorf teachers to form a new leadership, as has been proposed. If this tone is used, we will not get a new leadership. There must be some visible sign that work is being done from a different impulse. As long as this is not the case, it is not possible to hand over the society to a new leadership. Something that emerged between 1901 and 1918 and that has not outgrown the era of project-making cannot be brought to a successful conclusion by simply continuing with the projects. This must be taken seriously. If this seriousness does not emerge this evening, this discussion cannot lead to a result. The majority have remained silent in order to be discontent afterwards. Saying a few words will not help. The point is that we have come together here so that the things from which a new impulse arises can be heard. No one has been called upon to just sit, and everyone must have an opinion that can become an impulse. If the discussion continues in the same vein as before, we will get nowhere. Old members who come to such important meetings merely as observers show no interest in the progress of the anthroposophical movement.

  A large number of members speak.

  Adolf Arenson: There would always have been an opportunity to have confidence and take initiatives.

  Miss Waller: It would be worth considering whether something better would not come about if Dr. Steiner were to continue on his own.

  A number of other personalities speak out.

  Dr. Noll: The consolidation has been missed. Everything will fall apart if Dr. Steiner does not get in touch with the branches.

  Dr. Krüger, Mr. Ruhtenberg, Mr. Kühn and Mr. Leinhas speak.

  Dr. Steiner: I don't know what Dr. Krüger meant by “encapsulation”. I think he can only mean the “Stuttgart system”. I will illustrate the “Stuttgart system” with two examples. It was a long time ago. Even if it no longer occurs in places where it did, it still occurs in other forms. The matter in question was that someone had something to discuss with someone at 17 Champignystraße. One was in his office on the third floor, the other on the ground floor. The gentleman in question on the third floor addressed himself to the other in such a way that he dictated a letter into the typewriter and had this letter put into an envelope. The letter was left lying until Monday morning; it was delivered on Tuesday.

  I spoke with Mr. Uehli on December 10. Mr. Uehli is a member of the central committee and a colleague of Dr. Unger; the two gentlemen run the central committee. This important message was discussed again in only an inadequate form on December 24 [and, above all, without Dr. Unger]. I ask myself: Is this so submerged because the two gentlemen did not discuss it? These are the things that happen in Stuttgart and that lead to the fact that one speaks of a bureaucratization. One encounters isolated people who have lost their way. That is the Stuttgart misfortune, that is the isolation of each from each. We have to tap into the hot porridge. Try to answer the question: How can the individual reach out to the other? I cannot believe that anything beneficial can grow out of discussions.

  The following speak in favor of the new board proposal [Emil Leinhas and the three Waldorf teachers Dr. Herbert Hahn, Paul Baumann, Dr. Eugen Kolisko]: Dr. Mellinger, Dr. Palmer, Jürgen von Grone, Mr. Kieser, Miss Völker, Dr. Streicher, Mr. Benkendoerfer.

  Dr. Steiner: Those who can imagine it should imagine what it means: three Waldorf teachers must take the lead. This cannot come from the Anthroposophical Society. Nor can it come from the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School, which is carefully maintained as a non-ideological school, has every reason not to send a single teacher to the board. It is a painful fact that only Waldorf teachers have seen the light. On the other hand, I have not noticed that Mr. Uehli was actually on the committee. The circle that came to meet me consisted only of Waldorf teachers. It is a painful event that only they have had a brainwave. They have realized the matter from their own resources. If a Waldorf teacher is on the board, that is already a lot. But the board cannot be formed as you suggest. A wider circle can collaborate. So, it is desirable that as many Waldorf teachers as possible are on the board. As soon as you make this suggestion, you show that you have not properly assessed the situation. There is only confusion. The fact that there are only Waldorf teachers is proof of the Stuttgart compartmentalization. The Waldorf school should not be a clique; it is a body. Here, those who are banished to the same room put their heads together. If they work in Stuttgart in this way, nothing will ever come of it. I am convinced that many of those who have come here work well outside. But in Stuttgart they become something special. The filing system must be overcome from within. A certain government was already tearing down; people imagined that they could govern. This already occurred in 1919, where things that were intended to be taken seriously were done in the form of “meddling”. Study how these things have developed, and just look at the sudden fuss that arose. Some of it was exasperating. And the fruits are now showing. Especially since 1919, the “Stuttgart System” has driven us into misfortune due to a certain lack of seriousness about the things that have been undertaken bit by bit. This “Bund für freies Geistesleben” (Federation for a Free Intellectual Life) is just one example of this. It consists of nothing more than a piece of paper with twelve names on it.

  It is questionable whether the convening of the assembly should not be considered today.

• 2. Presumably, the intention of a general members' assembly had already been discussed, which was then realized at the end of February as a delegates' assembly.
• 3. On September 17, 1922, the Circle of Primordial Priests was founded. Ernst Uehli, as a member of the central council, had been authorized by Rudolf Steiner.
• 4. See under Notes.
• 5. “With the request for help, they turned to R. Steiner.” From Marie Steiner's notes of the first sevens session. Reaction to the meeting of January 22, 1923, from a member

Dear Dr. Steiner,

Stuttgart, January 23, 1923

I thank fate for allowing me to attend yesterday's meeting and to gain insights into things that one may have felt for but not known in their reality.

For a long time now, I have felt the need for renewal in the Anthroposophical Society. I know that the icy coldness that prevails in it in the relationship between people is an expression of the wrong attitude, which results in fragmentation and cannot cope with the struggles outside. If we had lived by even a small portion of social principles, many attacks and perhaps the worst incident at New Year would have been avoided. Yesterday, I was forced to say that we are not authorized to make accusations against the leadership. I believe that this is impossible under the impact of the findings and facts and should only be done by the doctor. Yesterday evening might have yielded better results if, in addition to what the doctor had to say about the personalities of the board and their mistakes, we had also dealt with and expressed our own suggestions for consolidating the society. I had to ask myself whether it was a good idea to immediately name the three personalities who were nominated for the new election – whether it would not have been better to call for an unprejudiced new election in the relatively small circle without immediately singling out certain personalities, which would have immediately led to a position being taken. My immediate feeling that the society should not be led by three Waldorf teachers was confirmed by Dr. [...]. However, the group from which these proposals arose has, despite all their good intentions, shown that their potential leadership will also require supplementation. This consideration again made me realize how difficult it is to find the right board of directors, because we are all only more or less able to contribute, and it is only by complementing each other that we can become suitable. I therefore thought that a force like Dr. Unger, whose clear and decisive representation, which we have once again experienced on recent significant occasions, will be difficult to replace, and I thought that if a more fortunate addition were chosen instead of Mr. Uehli, the bureaucratization that we all feel bitterly about could be eliminated. So I asked for the re-election of Dr. Unger. I also wished to advocate the election of a woman to the board because I believe that women have a specific role to fulfill in society and that a representative on the board is necessary. I wanted to bring all this up yesterday, but it turned out that I could not speak. Allow me, dear Dr. Unger, to do so today, in this way. Not because I consider what was said important, but for the sake of clarification of what I said yesterday.

May I say a few words about religious renewal. I certainly do not want to deny that the board is to blame for the confusion among the members of the Anthroposophical Society. But each member had a greater responsibility for himself. For Dr. Unger had already touched on this sense of responsibility at the very beginning of the religious renewal. So, as a member of the Anthroposophical Society, I have to say to myself: If the doctor shows leniency towards us members of the Anthroposophical Society in this matter, then this leniency is more burdensome than the accusation against the leadership of our Society. This protection is proof of our immaturity. Many anthroposophical friends believed that they would receive esotericism through the ritual of the religious renewal - the longing for this is great. I also acknowledge this longing, although I know that esotericism could be found and that it is only my weakness that prevents me from finding it.

Oh, dear Dr. Schuessler, enthusiasm is there, but so much else is missing to make us suitable, and it is one of the most bitter sufferings to find ourselves unsuitable, as we did yesterday, when the doctor's call comes to us. — The heart is overflowing, but the hands that are supposed to do deeds are empty. — But I want to!

In deep admiration, Lia Stahlbusch