The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It might seem as if, in the events of the great world catastrophe, which today is at the “Versailles” stage, the topic: the future of capital and human labor, seems somewhat unfounded. However, following the events in their depths, one might perhaps point out that these two topics: world catastrophe and that to which today's reflection is to be devoted, are intimately connected. For it must be more or less clear to anyone who has observed the events of recent years with an open and alert mind that something of what could be called world capitalism on a large scale has led to this so-called world war, that this world capitalism behaves, as you painfully know today, in its own way within the so-called conditions of peace, and that through a large part of the civilized world today, what could be called the demand directed precisely against capitalism is already going like a mighty historical opposition. Thus, the contradiction between capital and human labor is perhaps the deepest, most significant problem of our time. Capitalism ultimately rose to what can be called, and often has been called, imperialism. Human labor gasped under the rule of this imperialism. And if you take a closer look at the most significant characteristic of capitalism, you will find that it effectively came to an end in the terrible world catastrophe. What is one of the main characteristics of the capitalist world economic order? It is this: that man's working life, his enrichment, is based on the so-called profitability, the investability, of capital. Now I ask you: how much of the causes of the horror of the catastrophe can be traced back to the investability of capital on a large scale? To what extent were the struggles actually fought for the expansion of the investability of capital by certain imperialisms? And so it is already apparent, and will become more and more so, that from the depths of humanity rises and will rise the demand: How do we come to a reorganization of human existence, after those forms which the world economic order under capitalism, imperialism, has assumed, firstly, to such a high degree have shown themselves to be a disaster for humanity, but secondly, have long been leading to their own destruction? And so, with what we are discussing today, we are actually discussing the contrast between capital and labor, a declining world economic order on the one hand, and a rising world economic order on the other.

In discussing this question here, I ask you to bear in mind that it is necessary, from the points of view from which we are speaking here, to first speak clearly about the comprehensive, the great impulses, so that then, on the basis of understanding these great, comprehensive impulses, we can go into the details. For no one who, in this day of the great reckoning of the world, wants to avoid turning to the great, comprehensive impulses can possibly think of making a healing contribution to the rebuilding of the world. Whoever today calls great, comprehensive points of view impractical, actually expresses, whether he wants to or not, that by remaining in his so-called practical, in his small, he does not want to participate in what is really necessary for the development of humanity. Therefore, allow me today, in connection with my last two lectures, to dwell on somewhat more comprehensive impulses, so that next Friday I will be able to discuss only details that arise from the comprehensive plan of the threefold social organism in a fully clear way. These details could not be discussed without first fully unrolling the blueprint.

If we want to get to know the demands that arise from the broadest sections of the population today, and which at the same time express significant historical necessities, then we first of all need to have the good will to listen to what is most necessary in the light of the new situation, in order to give the people's particular demands a form that can be integrated into the reality of human development. Circumstances in recent years have changed so much from what they used to be that they appear to be something completely new, and yet many people today still cannot let go of old habits and old ways of thinking, and they have no ears, at least no willing ears, for what is most urgently needed. Today we are indeed faced with demands that do not originate from this or that source and cannot be propagated by this or that source. We are today actually faced with the demands of the broad masses of the people, which arise from the depths of human feeling, human experience and human will. In this time, above all, trust is necessary, trust among people, trust of people in those who have something to say about the demands of the time. Above all, it is trust that is not based on something personal, but trust that is based solely on the matter at hand. Today we are noticing something very significant. It can be said that if one knows how to gain access to the broadest masses of the people, it is relatively easy to gain trust. However strange it may seem, it must be said: Today it is all the easier to gain trust the more one speaks to those people who, due to the previous economic, legal and intellectual order, have been uprooted, so to speak, with regard to the human necessities of life, who rely on the strength of their own person, on the strength of their work, to make a living.

It is remarkable how the most comprehensive impulses are received with understanding by those who have personally experienced the inadequacies of human development in recent times. It is more difficult to speak to those who today are still, as it were, standing there with the remnants of the old economic, legal and intellectual order; who carry over into the new era what they have acquired, inherited or otherwise appropriated from the old order. They are attached to their possessions and to their ideas. And it becomes difficult for them to find anything practical except for that which enables them to preserve, at least to a certain extent, what they have acquired, inherited or otherwise appropriated. Today, many people, and all the more those who belong to the latter category, lack not only the opportunity to seek trust in order to achieve a new beginning through trust between people, but they even lack faith in this trust; they lack faith that the understanding of those who want to understand great impulses is genuine and honest. I do not wish to criticize, I only wish to discuss facts, but facts which make it so extremely difficult to advance today by means of that which alone can advance us - the power that lies in man for the understanding of other men. Today it is infinitely difficult to popularize this basis of all real socialism: understanding of one man for the other. For it is a strange fact that in our time, when the call for socialism sounds so significant, so magnificent, it is in this time that the strongest anti-social instincts live in the depths of the human soul. This is why, clouded by these anti-social instincts, it is actually very difficult for few people today to gain sufficient, realistic, truly practical insights into what is necessary for the further development of humanity. What has been discussed in the previous lectures and what will be discussed today and next time has not been plucked out of the clouds. It has been taken from real life. For much of what is required by the impulses of the threefold social organism is, in the secret desire of many people, actually already there, already there in the sense that it wants to move from the depths of the soul to the surface, that it wants to fight for its existence, and that only the institutions of our present-day intellectual, legal and economic order want to hold back these forces that are pushing to the surface. The world-wide struggle between capital and labor, which is now agitating the world, makes one particularly aware of the strange phenomena whereby people today are working out of their old state economic order to counteract what wants to fight its way up for their own good. Do not expect me to start with some more or less satisfactory definition of capital and human labor. In reality, one does not fight against concepts and ideas, in reality one has to fight against forces and people. In reality, however, one also often has to fight against delusion, inadequacy, even blindness. In this respect, things are extraordinarily strange today.

This brings me to the second point to be considered, apart from the socio-psychological fact of seeking trust. From the great mass of the proletariat and the socially minded, the call arises, and it has been arising for a long time, for some kind of socialization of the means of production, which, after all, are essentially the same for the proletariat as for capital. Anyone who, in the sense in which I have dealt with it in my last two lectures here, engages in the development of social and socialist ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may come to the conclusion that there is something in this call for socialization of the means of production that corresponds to the most justified thing that one can see in the more recent development of humanity. But for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the facts as they have changed through the world catastrophe, it will not be difficult to see through how inadequate many of those ideas, party opinions and the like that have also asserted themselves on the socialist side have become, now that the facts arising from the world catastrophe are loudly and powerfully demanding expression and seeking to be shaped. Now the questions must be raised: How can we shape social life? How does the path lead to what is presented as a good goal: socialization of the means of production? How do we arrive at such ideas that not only show us the goal that can satisfy demands born out of suffering and deprivation, but that also open up the path to that goal for us? That is the task of the threefold social organism: to find the way to an end that the broad masses of humanity recognize as their own, feel as their own, and to a certain extent understand as their own. I must again and again emphasize that what I have to say here is not derived from some vague theory, nor is it the product of erudition. It has its source in real life and its present far-reaching demands. But one sometimes wonders how the times, how human thoughts relate to something that has been taken straight from the depths of life. In the form in which the call for socialization sounds today, it comes from a significant world-historical rallying cry, from the so-called Communist Manifesto of the ingenious Karl Marx. And basically, what has been experienced to date and what will continue to be experienced in terms of social and socialist impulses will be branches and shoots of what is given at the root with this Communist Manifesto. But it is remarkable that in the same year that the Communist Manifesto appeared, an honest, realistic book was published. And the thoughts in this book arose from the soul of a man who already knew life and who would have been inclined to profess himself a socialist completely even then, if he had been able to do so based on his knowledge of life. It is Bruno Hildebrand who wrote the book at that time, a seemingly unassuming book, but a symptomatic book, a book that should be thoroughly considered: “The National Economy of the Present and the Future”. I mention this here today in my introduction for a very specific reason. If you take everything that has been put forward by the opponents of socialism since the Communist Manifesto, you can clearly find it all in the work of Bruno Hildebrand from 1848. What is actually the basis of the impulse of this remarkable man? He said to himself, I have to imagine what a social order would look like if it were purely socialist! He visualizes such a socialist social order to a certain extent. If he could consider it possible, as everyone can tell from the man's explanations, then he would immediately profess it. He cannot consider it possible according to his views. Why? Not because he believes that some people who have acquired, inherited or otherwise obtained wealth will suffer, but because because, as a thinker of reality, a genuinely practical thinker, it becomes clear to him that those who want socialism as they imagine it would have to feel unhappy in such a socialist social order in no time. And why should they feel unhappy? The man gives all this. He shows how many of the legitimate human powers would naturally have to disappear if a socialist structure were to take hold of human society. He shows how it would be impossible to establish the relationship between capital and labor in the long term, especially in a socialist society.

Now, one is in a very strange position when faced with such a realistic examination. One says to oneself, but now, the historical necessity of socialism does exist. Socialism must come, and it will surely come. Should one want that which may also bring people into misery, at least not into happiness, who want the new order? That is the question that can weigh like a terrible burden on people today who look deeper into human development. What we are called upon to do today, prompted by the forces inherent in human development, cannot be clearly understood from any agitational or demagogic background, but only from a sense of bitter seriousness and sacred responsibility towards the demands, the legitimate demands of humanity.

The questions that arose from these foundations are the questions that ultimately emerged for the foundation of the impulses of the tripartite social organism. The socially structured human society stood there as a future perspective, based on real life. But in the quest not simply to speak out of illusions and demands, but in the quest to arrive at something that can truly benefit humanity, the question had to be asked: Why is it that what is historically necessary, what must certainly come to pass, can at the same time appear as something that disturbs humanity in terms of the noblest forces? Such a prospect cannot deter those in positions of responsibility from recognizing the necessity of a social structure for the social order. But it can drive him to investigate how to ensure that good and not evil may come of it, so that the free human nature, developing in all directions, may come into its own, and not a human being withered and dried up inwardly must live in the historically necessary. This leads to a more exact, life-oriented study of this social organism. And there it becomes evident that if one simply wants to transfer the old state order, the old state content, into the new social order, if one would develop the old unified state into the new social order, then what the opponents of socialism, if they are well-meaning opponents, would argue, would come about. The murky picture is immediately illuminated when one realizes that One must first remove the actual legal or state or political sphere and the sphere of human spiritual culture from the economic organism, in which we have become more and more involved, so that the state and spiritual organism have become servants of the economic organizations. If you leave these inside, you sail away, hypnotized by the idol “unity state”, and if you want to socialize, then the objections apply. If we separate the newer human culture, the legal or political or state life on the one hand, and the spiritual life on the other, from economic life, in which more and more of human culture has been concentrated, then the possibility remains in the freed economic cycle to socialize in a healthy way. And at the same time, the possibility arises to socialize in a healthy way in the other two areas as well.

I wanted to draw attention to this for the simple reason that today, when these things are discussed, people are so easily persuaded that what is being said has, as it were, come about overnight. What is meant by the threefold social organism is not such an idea. It is something that has arisen out of living together with social reality. Because only if you have the prospect of the tripartite social organism that you characterized recently and the one before that, does the possibility arise of casting the right light on such impulses in the newer development of humanity and on their design in the present and into the future, which are necessary for capital and human labor. Among the confusing and unjust forces of modern times, views have emerged that do not always point in the right direction. For example, it can be said that those who have thought about how to help human development have expressed the strangest ideas about what they actually mean by capital and its effects. There is an economist, Roscher, who includes the state in capital; there is an economist, Thänen, who includes people in capital. I could give you a long list that would prove to you how people view the economic world and have the strangest ideas about what is active in economic life. Therefore, we will perhaps get a clearer picture of what is actually moving and stirring humanity today than we would from the ideas of such people and perhaps also the ideas that we can form ourselves, by pointing out the fundamental impulses of the unleashed struggle between capital and human labor. First of all, we can point to the beliefs of both sides. For basically, two economic creeds are pitted against each other.

What does the capitalist actually believe? The capitalist believes that he lives off his capital, or if he is economical, that he lives off the interest of his capital. That is his belief. He does not think much about this belief, because he does not suspect that no one can live off capital and interest. And he also does not suspect that there is a certain justification when a very significant political economist, who even became a Prussian minister for once, uttered the words that capital is the fifth wheel on the economic wagon. You really have to consider what that actually means. It means nothing less than that human society does not actually need what is considered capital today. But in reality, this capital feeds many people, very many people. These people are all nourished by the fifth wheel on the economic wagon, that is, they feed themselves in such a way that if they did not feed themselves, the economic wagon would also move, only they themselves would have to do something other than feed themselves from capital, namely work. You see, that sheds light on the capitalist's belief. It is very difficult to fight against this belief, as it is generally very difficult to fight against religious beliefs, for the simple reason that religious beliefs are intimately connected with human nature. And no matter how often you tell the capitalist: your capital does not create life, as long as your capital is not transformed by the social order into a power, into the power that you have over other people through your capital, who work and provide you with a living through their labor. Anyone who looks at these things thoroughly will realize that capital only has any significance when viewed from the standpoint of this question of power. So much for the moment about the capitalist's creed.

Now, the creed of the laborer, at least of the laborer who has developed into the modern age under the soul-destroying capitalism, this creed is: I live from my labor! In today's social order, it is just as much a mere belief, an unjustified belief, that one can live from one's work as it is an unjustified belief that one can live from some capital, although the belief that one can live from one's work has at least a certain limited truth. It is just that it is not completely true within our social order. For within our social order, which is based on the division of labor, in order to be able to live from this labor, a threefold activity of the human being is necessary, which proceeds from the spiritual culture of the time in the broadest sense. Firstly, there is the inventive activity that leads to the means of production, and secondly, there is the organizational activity that leads to the harmonization between the means of production and human labor. Thirdly, there is the speculative activity that leads to the utilization of what is produced with the help of labor on the means of production, and to the transfer of the products to the corresponding members of human society. Without this threefold spiritual activity, labor is unfruitful in the social organism based on the division of labor. But this points us from the outset to what, as I said, sheds light in a certain way on what is needed today. We just have to look at what is there in the right light. Today's society works under the influence of capital. The worker feels quite rightly when he regards the means of production as the essence of capital, that is to say, that which must be created by human labor and does not lead directly to consumption, that is, is not a direct consumer good, is not a direct luxury, but what serves to produce consumer goods and luxury goods. Socialism seeks to bring these means of production into a social order that is different from the one into which they came under the influence of the capitalist economic order of modern times. Now, strangely enough, one can say that it is already apparent that in a certain sense the means of production are something in themselves, that they can be separated from people. Just compare how, in the older economic forms, what the human being needed as a craftsman to produce was grounded in his or her humanity. Now compare everything that is done on a large scale today with the help of modern means of production, how it can be separated, as it were, as a material good from human individuality. We know that when a sum of means of production that make up a business is sold – it can be sold by a person or a corporation to another person or another corporation, both of whom may have nothing to do with these means of production other than to draw their royalties, their profit – it shows how, to the greatest extent, the means of production are detached from their owners. Here we have something that exists in reality, which in the future only has to be turned into its opposite in a corresponding way, and then we come to a real socialization of the means of production. I have tried to indicate such a thing in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life”.

Two things must be achieved. Firstly, a closer bond must be established between the managers of a business and the means of production. A manager or a consortium of managers must be the one who, through his intellectual work, whether it be planning, calculating or inventing, intervenes in the business through the means of production and participates in it. The greatest possible trust must be placed in such a consortium, which is united by its entire intellectual structure and intellectual abilities with the means of production of a particular enterprise, by those who, as manual laborers, have to work with these means of production. In the future, the craftsman, the manual laborer, and the person who does not derive the profit that arises from the means of production, but who, through his intellectual abilities, through his intellectual work, which he has oriented towards the type of specific means of production, is solely entitled to manage this company, these means of production. But this manager has only as long to manage the production means as he can justify the management by the connection between his abilities and these production means.

This is where a point begins, where, however, those who can only imagine that at least the essentials of the old remain, begin to look perplexed. And yet, when the time comes that someone who has grown together with a certain set of means of production through his abilities can no longer maintain this state of being, then the social organism has the obligation to transfer these means of production to another person or group of persons without purchase. This means nothing less than that in the future there will be a coming together of – let's call it capital or whatever we want – of capital and human abilities without purchase. Capital will then only have the meaning of what is needed to initiate large businesses. In the future, capital will come into being through a person who is capable of running a particular business. This capital will only come into being through the trust that other people have in him, who will give him what they work as surplus labor beyond their needs. He will be able, so to speak, on behalf of a group that trusts him, but that means the general public of the social organism, to build up such a business, which today can only be built on private capital and private capital gains. But once the business has been set up, the possession of the means of production no longer applies. After the means of production have been set up, the worker faces the person who is the technical or other intellectual director of the business. The means of production do not belong to anyone; the possession of the means of production ceases. And the moment the collaboration of the company with this manager is no longer justified by the special abilities of the manager, the manager is obliged to transfer the means of production to another consortium, to another group of people. Directly or indirectly! This achieves for the future what I must call the circulation of capital and the end of private ownership of capital! Capital will be incorporated in a healthy way into the socialized social organism. It will circulate in this social organism, as blood circulates in the human or animal organism, where it must not be used by one organ alone, but must circulate through all the organs. Free circulation of capital! That is what is really required for the future.

In such a social organism, in which capital circulates freely, only real freedom of labor is possible. For just as private capital ownership is in fact a fifth wheel on the cart in relation to social functions, so human labor power, as the counterpart of capital, has been placed in a dilemma under the rule of capitalism. What is necessary for the recovery of human society is achieved through the circulation of capital that no one owns. What is paid out today, what is extracted from the means of production, what people call their capital or their pension in mortgage certificates, in mortgage bonds or bonds and so on, is absolutely unnecessary in the real process of human development of the social order. It is removed from this social order, and that removes the people who remove it from this social order, making them more or less parasites and those who generate the great forces of discontent within the social organization. Some people will, of course, find everything I have explained here about the circulation of capital highly impractical. I believe that. But to find something impractical, in this case, means nothing more than not wanting to let go of what is the fifth wheel on the wagon of the economic order, that is, having become accustomed to finding only what has proven practical for oneself, for one's own selfishness. But in the future, human beings will have to give themselves over to the social organism with their entire being. It will not be enough for people to sit in their rooms and fantasize about love for their fellow human beings and brotherhood and think very highly of themselves while doing so, and then cut the coupons, which they can only cut because the people in the mines and factories work for them in need and misery so that they can do themselves good in their sermons of philanthropy, love for their fellow human beings and brotherhood.

This talk, this good behavior, must come to an end. The organization of human society in such a way that it truly meets the demands of good behavior is what is now going through the world as a call. What has emerged under the newer capitalism, what has developed more and more, what has now, so to speak, arrived at the pinnacle of its consciousness, namely its class consciousness, is the social group of people that, for the time being, basically consists only of the working population, of the proletariat. What needs to be done with regard to this social group? Well, this social group has, in a sense, practiced self-help, and it has also achieved many things for itself, which it has wrested from the capitalist-led state, the purely capitalist economic order, and so on. Cooperatives and trade unions have emerged to organize the social group – initially, the masses of workers were anarchic, not in their attitudes, but in their grouping, initially anarchic. But as long as we were under the old economic order, these attempts at organization could not achieve any real goal. Despite all the praise of workers' protection, workers' insurance, even international workers' protection and so on, none of these things were suitable for properly organizing the social groups that live as the proletarian population. Because something was left behind in all these attempts at organization: the opposing capital and its representatives remained. And so it emerged, as it still is today, that there was a struggle between one social class, the supporters of capitalism, and the other social class, the proletariat. Struggle, competition, that is what emerged. And we have seen what we have come to through this struggle, through this competition: the unionized worker must wrest his wage increase or something else from the representatives of capital through the union. What the proletariat feels today clearly expresses how little the previous organization was able to fulfill what lies within the proletariat as a demand.

In earlier lectures, I have already pointed out what the main point is. One could say that two main points of socialism as a whole lie in two demands, to which a third then arises as a matter of course, as a self-evident consequence. They lie, firstly, in the demand, which has already been discussed today in the context of capital, in the demand that in the future the capital invested in the means of production should no longer be property. Capital is divested of its property character. Secondly, in the future, labor must no longer be a commodity. That is to say, in the future socialist or social society, in the healthy social organism, the wage relationship will cease to exist. Labor or labor power must no longer be a commodity. The person who does manual labor produces as a partner with the intellectual worker in the way that has already been characterized. There is no labor contract, there is only a contract for the division of services. This can only be achieved if the worker faces the supervisor as a completely free human being, that is, if he is able to determine the extent, time, and type of his labor on a completely different basis than that of the economic order, if he is free to dispose of himself as a whole person before entering into a contractual relationship.

I know that today's pigtails cannot yet imagine what has been said as something practical. But fifty years ago, many things could not be imagined as practical that have become practical in the fifty years since. The worker enters into the contractual relationship as a free human being who can say: Because I can determine the character of my labor on a basis independent of economic life, I will now approach you and work with you in the way my labor is regulated. What we produce is subject to a division of labor with you!

You see, therefore it is necessary that in the future the actual state, the actual social legal field, be detached from the economic field. By doing this, it will be possible to regulate everything that can be regulated as law on democratic ground, independently of economic life. Economic life itself can only be organized on the basis of experience and the real foundations of that economic life. But labor power can already be organized when the worker enters economic life at all. If that is the case, then in the future there will be, on the one hand, circulating capital or the circulating means of production, which are not the property of any one person, but are actually there for general use, and which can always come to the most capable through the institutions that I have just described. On the other hand, there will be human freedom, not only in terms of all kinds of ideal goods, which the manual laborer cannot count as his own today, but above all in terms of human labor power. Then the economic life will be relieved of the wage relationship, for then there will only be goods in the economic life, or, for that matter, we can call them products. Then what is capital, wage and market today will face each other in a different way. Then, as you have seen, capital will have ceased to exist, and so will wages, because there will be achievements that the worker produces together with the supervisor. The concept of wages will cease to have any meaning.

But what is now the market will also take on a different form. Today, the market, although it is already organized in many small ways, still has something anarchic about it. The market regulates the mutual values of goods, and that is the only value that should exist in economic life in the future, because human labor has a value that cannot be compared to anything else and must not be counted among economic values. What economic values there are will be the comparative values of the goods. Under the circumstances described, it will be possible for the goods to acquire such comparative values that give the greatest possible number of people, that is, all people who work, a standard of living that is as close as possible to the general, not to a group prosperity. This can only be achieved if the market ceases to be what it is today, if it is thoroughly organized, if the most comprehensive economic experience, the calculation of the various economic fundamentals, leads to a determination of commodity values that are not subject to the anarchic conditions of supply and demand, but are oriented towards human needs, as determined by experience. This can only be achieved if this economic life, if the market, or rather the markets, are transformed into associations, into cooperatives and so on. This cooperative structure, this structure not only on the basis of such cooperatives as have already been tried, but the interweaving of the entire economic life with a cooperative structure, will only be possible if, on the basis of experience in economic life, an intuitive knowledge of the relationships between producers and consumers is acquired. There are also some signs of progress in this respect. You can familiarize yourself with these in the writings of Sidney Webb, for example, where great things have been achieved in cooperatives, insofar as great things can be achieved within the current economic system, which still exists outside these cooperatives. But if the economic system is changed in the way I have suggested, then the point is that the cooperative structure must be brought about not according to subjective demands, but according to what the economic structure itself yields. I would just like to make a certain remark so that you can see that things are not left hanging in the air. It will be obvious to anyone who takes into account the nature of economic life as described in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' that the question arises: how, for example, can we limit cooperatives? If we want to limit them arbitrarily or for reasons outside of economic life, then we will always end up with false pricing and, as a result, false influences on people's lives. Now there is a very definite law that can lead to the development of a cooperative structure out of reality. You can start by considering the two currents of economic life, production and consumption. You can imagine consumer cooperatives where people join together who want to buy economically so that they take advantage of everything that can be exploited for buying by joining together as consumers.

On the other hand, producers can join together; this has already happened to a great extent within our economic system, and this is where the production cooperatives come from. Now, both types of cooperatives have very different tendencies. If you study consumer cooperatives, you will find that consumer cooperatives are primarily interested in buying as cheaply as possible and secondly in having as many people as possible in their ranks. They never resist the expansion of their cooperative if they have their true interests in mind. The production cooperatives have the opposite characteristics. The participants will fear competition if they expand, and they have every interest in selling as expensively as possible. This indicates that in the future, salvation can only come from bringing together people with consumption and production interests, in consumption-production or production-consumption cooperatives, where not only consumption will regulate production but where even the size of the cooperative will be regulated, in that consumption tends to make the cooperative as large as possible, that is, to expand and grow, while production tends to set limits to the cooperative. In this way the social structure is created out of the essence of things, out of reality itself. I could cite innumerable cases from which you would see that anyone who is capable of thinking in terms of reality, anyone who really wants practical ideas in their head today, will find the foundations of true, genuine socialization that is beneficial to people in the beginnings that already exist in reality.

But all that I have told you presupposes the real threefold social order. There will be no capitalists in the modern sense, arising purely out of economic life. There must be people who grow out of a free spiritual life, as I have characterized it in previous lectures, out of a spiritual life that will not produce abstract intellectual products that are alien to life, but that will unfold spiritual material that, on the one hand, rises to the highest heights of the spirit and, on the other hand, trains people to become truly practical human beings. At all levels of intellectual life, people who are alien to life because they only know will not be educated, but people who can think, who can dispose.

A cycle will take place within the limits that I have already indicated today, within which the administrations of the spiritual organizations will send their most capable people into economic life, as I have explained in my book, and economic life will send its people into the spiritual organizations, so that they may deepen there the knowledge they have gained through their experience in economic life or, as teachers, instruct the growing youth in economic life.

A living cycle, carried by human beings themselves, will take place between the three limbs of the social organism. The three-part organism will not disintegrate into three separate areas. The human being, who will live in all three parts, will become the living unity.

In the future, the human being, with his or her social interests and powers, will form the very basis of all life. The human being will be much more important than today, when the apparent unified state still divides humanity into classes and estates and does not allow people to be full and whole human beings. Today, people still believe that if they have a constitution, then a great deal has been achieved. In the future, people will understand that a constitution is nothing if the people are not there who, in their own liveliness, carry the forces to mutually compose, if I may say so. That is what matters, that one understands what I recently hinted at: Gladstone, the English statesman, once said that the North American free state had the most advantageous constitution. Another Englishman, who seems to me to be more ingenious than Gladstone, said in reply: But these North Americans – that was precisely his view – could have a much, much worse constitution, even a terrible one; they are the kind of people who will make the same out of a good and a bad constitution! That we must put the human in the place of what is separated from the human, that is what must be achieved. From a living spiritual life will come the living leaders of the enterprises. Capital is no longer needed! Alongside such living leaders will stand the free worker as a whole human being. He will know how to answer yes when he raises the question: Does the social order give me my human dignity? And a market that is not anarchic but organized will be able to bring about a just balance in the value of goods. Many details need to be said about all these things. Today I could only sketch out an outline, and you could ask many questions. I know that some of today's words cannot yet be fully understood. Next Friday, details, evidence and further explanations will be provided to show you that this is not something that is carelessly thrown into the world, but something that is intended to provide what is justifiably demanded with the call for socialization.

What is justifiably demanded, but perhaps not yet clearly recognized by those justifiably demanding it.

What is given with the tripartite organism is not intended to be like the description of a house. No matter how beautiful the description of a house may be, one can object that such a description is of no use at all; the house must be built. But there is a difference between a beautiful description of a house and a construction plan. And a construction plan is intended to be everything that is given as impulses for the tripartite division of the social organism. However much it may be misunderstood today, it will be the one thing that alone can lead humanity out of the chaos and confusion into which it has been brought. I know that I can still be misunderstood today. Some say that this is a new party formation. It is not even remotely a new party formation. What is at issue here is what follows from the very development of humanity, which has nothing to do with any kind of party formation.

And anyone who believes that they can see into this development of humanity and recognize what the time itself demands also exposes themselves to the misunderstanding, even from those who want to misunderstand or perhaps misunderstand in good faith, that they personally want something. For he knows that what is objectively striven for cannot be so easily inserted into the development of mankind in the face of people's prejudices and preconceptions. Today, however, we live in a time, especially here in Central Europe, where we have to look at what the last excesses of the old capitalist competitive labor have brought. And we in Central Europe are experiencing particularly painfully the consequences of what the leading circles, the leading circles so far, have brought upon humanity. We are experiencing it in pain and suffering, we are experiencing it in these days with bleeding souls. We may say that days of trial are clearly evident. In such days one may give oneself to the hope and faith that in the face of unusual experiences, unusual thoughts will also be understood, that in the face of great suffering, great courage will not be found for small, but for great reckoning.

That is why I believe and why I say what I have to say, even in these days of suffering, out of this belief: Through suffering, pain and trials, we will find the courage, the boldness, the understanding for a new construction. The construction must be done not only by transforming old institutions, but by transforming all our thinking, all our habits of feeling, by transforming our whole inner man.

Final remarks after the discussion

Dear attendees! Although I am completely convinced that he is not even aware of how he actually came to his assertions, and although I do not in the least want to deny him a kind of goodwill, what the second speaker has discussed here makes me feel that, piece by piece, he has each time what I said, sometimes by a quarter, sometimes by half, sometimes completely reversed, and then polemicized against his own assertions, discussed with them, in order to arrive at something that has nothing at all to do with what you heard from me today or yesterday. It happens very often that one creates the possibility of discussion through such preconditions, and so I would like to discuss only a few individual points from this perhaps quite unconscious discussion practice. For example, the gentleman who spoke before repeatedly dwells on the opinion that I advocate tyranny or the supremacy of the intellectually gifted. How does he make it clear that, according to what I have discussed, one consequence could be that the intellectually gifted should rule? Now I do not know whether the speaker has also heard what I said here recently, or whether he knows what is in my book. Otherwise he would know that the underlying principle of all the impulses I am talking about is that all human talents find their appropriate social place. It is precisely a matter of the structure of such a social organism, which does not give priority to any particular talent, but which makes it possible for each talent to find its appropriate place. This cannot be achieved by anything other than the thorough selection and development of the various talents in places where people understand talents and where talents can be managed in the right way. The spiritual organism will have to see its main task in developing talents. Read my book carefully. Do not add a single adjective to what I say, but take what I really say as it is. Then you will see that in the field of spiritual life not only spiritual talents are developed, but all talents down to the most physical ones. The spiritual organism is not there to create a spiritual aristocracy, but to develop all talents. Apart from the fact that I pointed out last time that a spiritual gift cannot really exist without at the same time offering the possibility of developing a manual gift when necessary. In short, the speaker has not made the slightest effort to break out of previous thought habits and really muster the will to rethink, but has criticized, according to what has been customary up to now, something that consciously strives out of what has been customary up to now. But that seems to me to be what must be overcome above all. People who, even if they have good will, do not make the effort to understand what the other person is saying and wanting, are precisely the ones who have led us into today's situation. And painful as it is for me, I must say: I can only see in the previous speaker one of those people who do not want to let us out of the confusion. Before the great world catastrophe, one could understand such people for my sake, because in those days the great test and the great questions had not yet come to humanity. But today we should truly not want to stop the course of development by our stubborn thinking. That is what makes me so anxious when people come up with all kinds of old stereotyped ideas and even want to frighten people by saying that the other person is a thought anarchist or something similar; I did not understand the adjective. These are things that can be frightening. One must counter what can really be inferred from what has been said. According to the imagination, what the speaker said can be inferred from the threefold structure, but read my book and you will see that every possible precaution, if I may say so, has been taken to ensure that what appears to be inferred here cannot be inferred at all.

For example, the speaker claimed that the interests of the professions would be in conflict. That is a matter of course. But precisely by separating intellectual life, by separating legal life, this is resolved. I have taken up a lot of your time today with what could be called an introduction: if socialism is realized and it leaves everything in the social organism that brings about what I have described, then this will happen. Of course, in the social organism that the speaker envisions, this would be included. In the threefold social order, precisely what he wants to introduce into the economic order is taken out of the economic order. It seemed to me that the speaker, although he professes to believe in the council system, is a representative of the court council mindset, which once made a similar objection to me, not from the people's council system but from the court council system.

The matter does not have the foreign policy side that the speaker painted, but a completely different one. The only remedy for our foreign policy situation, which has led us into this catastrophe, should have become apparent when foreign policy matters were discussed - I cannot, of course, discuss everything in one lecture. What we can achieve above all by means of the threefold social organism, even if it is only implemented by one state and not in neighboring states that still retain the old capitalist order, is the previous game of interests.

It is indeed a peculiar feature that every state can carry out the threefold order independently of the others, and that, for example, through the interplay of interests, which will be quite different will be quite different from the present one, when economic interests alone also work across borders as economic interests, that then those sources of conflict which have led to the wars that are technically called resource wars will be eliminated. The privy councillor who made this objection told me: Yes, so far a large proportion of wars have been resource wars. If your system is realized, then there will no longer be any resource wars, so your system contradicts reality. I had to tell him: If you had said that in confirmation, I would understand it; that you say it to refute it is peculiar. So I have to say: The only help against the mood that exists on the side of the Entente is that we break down this mood, this resentment, into three parts. That is what this threefold division would bring in this area for the current foreign policy. I would advise the speaker to study the foreign policy that follows from the tripartite division from a point of view broader than that of a court councillor; then he would be able to spare himself the completely useless definition of whether the tripartite organism is anarchistic or the like. He would be able to see how true it is, as I have already hinted at here, that the same people who are enthusiastic about unity need to be told: a rural family consists of a man, a woman, children, a farmhand and three cows, and they all need milk. Do they all have to give milk? No, only the three cows have to give milk, then everyone will have milk. It is necessary that the entire organism is structured in the right way; then the members will also work together in the right way to form a unity, and what arises on the one soil will also be able to work in the right way on the other members.

Because the previous speaker did not take this into account, he would have to decide the endowment through universal suffrage. Well, you can decide the filling of positions, you can decide all sorts of things through universal suffrage. But how you would like to administer the talents through universal suffrage, I ask you to think through thoroughly, and you will see if I follow the method of the previous speaker and outline the consequences - but I only recognize this method as a sophistic method, so I will not go into it further - but if I were to outline the consequences to you, then you would see what would come of it. If you democratized talent, you might not call it thought anarchy, but you would call it something else.

Similar things have been said many times. I was particularly surprised to hear the expression “spiritual capitalism”. I don't know what that means, especially how it might be used after a lecture in which the circulation of capital was discussed in the way I discussed it. Intellectual owners – yes, honored attendees, just try to think with realities! Imagine the social organism – the speaker has not described it as he imagines it – according to the few hints the speaker has made. Then you will have to say: What is it exactly, if, let us say, intellectual workers work alongside manual workers under some kind of socialist order? I do not know what kind of difference it is supposed to make to my economic organism that the intellectual worker works alongside the manual worker. I have expressly stated: ownership ceases at the moment when the capital is realized, that is, when the means of production are there. How one can then speak of intellectual ownership is completely beyond me. From the particular experiences mentioned by the esteemed speaker, one can of course derive anything one wants. One can of course derive a great deal from the atrophy of the soul and the like. I did not find it very tasteful when the speaker concluded by saying that he would leave the middle class to me so that the proletariat would be all the more assured to him. Well, there is no need to get involved in such things, because whether you ultimately see it as an inflammatory phrase or not is entirely a matter of taste.

But what has been said with regard to trust and with regard to believing in trust – well, you see, I must say that today it is truly not a matter of criticizing the relationship that we have come to know from the old conditions, but today it is a matter of establishing new conditions. If someone were to tell me today, whether for the first time or the hundredth or the thousandth time, that he does not believe there is trust, but has had to struggle with mistrust in so-and-so many cases, then I would say to him: Nothing will get better if we do not try to create this trust, because we have to work with trust today. All the other threads that have been used to draw the masses together are failing. The threads of the future can only be those of trust. If mistrust were to be allowed to take hold tomorrow or the day after, we would just have to wait for what comes after tomorrow and the day after, because if good things are to come, they can only come out of trust. The trust that I mean and that we must work on, this trust will have to come from the souls. This trust must be created, it is more important than anything else, even today. Then, when this trust is created, the relationship between those who work with their hands on the means of production and those who work intellectually will be right. Then this trust makes impossible what the speaker has painted as a horror.

This is precisely what is so terribly lacking today in these socially turbulent times: the will to build on trust. Oh, this trust will be there, the more and more trials come upon people, and I would have to despair of humanity, at least of the rebuilding of healthy conditions, if I could no longer believe that one person will be able to find their way to another through trust. Because, dear assembled, socialize as much as you want, talk about socialization as much as you want, but one thing must underlie this socialization: the socialization of souls. Those who do not seek the way to the socialization of souls may socialize externally as much as they want, but they will lead people into more anarchistic conditions than what the previous speaker wanted to present as a kind of anarchism. And there is no other name for soul socialism than trust. But this trust must be worked at. And today, is this trust not a little shaken? Dear attendees, I have been connected with the social movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for a long time. I have worked in it; I know it. What the honorable speaker said before, one could have heard over and over again against what I said today. Apart from the threefold social order, the same objections that the previous speaker has raised today have already been raised by others in 1898 and 1899. But it is most necessary that we move beyond the old ideas, that we can relearn, that we do not remain with the old. As painful as it is for me to say, I believe that those who cannot overcome their old prejudices are holding us back the most. And those gentlemen who use the method of first turning the sentences halfway or completely around in order to then polemicize against their own, always have an easy time of it, because of course not everyone will understand, after hearing a lecture just once, how the things are meant, how they must be understood if they are placed in reality. For precisely those things that do not correspond to theories, not merely to good will, but that stem from a conscientious, responsible life experience and observation, precisely those things cannot be exhausted in an hour, but only suggestions can be given for them. But I have always said that these suggestions, since that time, and it has been quite a long time since I have spoken of the threefold order, may well turn out quite differently in their realization than what I myself say about these details, for example. What matters to me is that the building plan is taken from reality and can be lived into reality, that it is realistic. And because I believe that it is not subjective human

will that imagines it must realize these impulses, but because observation of the developmental forces of humanity in the present and in the future itself leads to it, I believe that it will find understanding. And I hope that I must say once again, from our sorely tried time and from our painful situation we will still find understanding for much for which we perhaps cannot yet imagine finding understanding at all today.

I have often had the opportunity to speak here about the so-called threefold social order, which is supposed to be the way to fulfill the current demand for socialization. Today, I would like to take the liberty of adding a few details to supplement and explain what I said in the previous lectures. I am well aware that even what I will be able to present today will not yet be what everyone imagines by way of the practical advice that is called for. But I would like to say that it will be recognized more and more that the impulses that want to be put into the world under the name of the threefold social organism are practical impulses to such an extent and of such a kind that, as with all truly practical impulses, it is necessary to apply a certain instinct for reality to what is put forward. For only that which does not want to be a preconceived program, which is thought and felt from the outset in such a way that it is formed out of reality and thought into reality, can basically only be understood by someone who takes the trouble to put himself in the position of how such things appear when he wants to lend a hand in realizing them. It is easier to have some preconceived party program and demand its realization than to listen to reality itself and discern what that reality demands. The tripartite social organism seeks to solve the problem of socialization in such a way that everything that happens in the direction of its impulse must first prove itself in practice, by being directly applied in reality. On the one hand, the present time is just as little accessible to impulses of this kind as, on the other hand, it needs them precisely for the most essential demands of the time. The impulse towards a threefold social organism wants to tackle the facts which can be subject to real socialization in an honest and open way. Above all, it does not want to destroy all the fruits of human culture that have resulted from the great developmental advances of modern times. It does not want to dismantle, it wants to build. He does not want to destroy certain lines of business that have emerged and that definitely meet human needs, for example, by socializing them in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the facts of the matter. For such a realistic program, if we had another word, I would not call it a program, one must indeed muster the goodwill to understand, because it is very easy to misunderstand what is actually meant by this three-part social organism. What is meant is, above all, what can be deduced from our practical life, from the way it has developed through technical and industrial progress, from what has been created in the way of means of production and knowledge about production.

But today a truly practical impulse in this direction must be based on something quite different: it must be based on a true understanding of the human being. Therefore, I must emphasize again and again, the threefold social organism is not about establishing any new classes or other groups of people and their differences, but rather about merely threefolding everything that takes place around people in the world. In future we shall have a separate economic administration, a separate legal administration, and a separate spiritual administration. But the same human beings will be active in the economic organism, in the spiritual organism, and in the legal or state organism. It is precisely this threefold organism that will enable man, through his continuous interaction, to establish the necessary unity of human social life. Anyone who wants to understand this in the way it actually is today must, above all, realize that it means something when a person is brought from one sphere of life to another. The same people will work in the economic organism, which will have its own administration and organization. The same people, of course not at the same time, will be active in the legal and spiritual organism, at least through their relationships with the spiritual organism.

Now one could say, yes, but what significance does this structure have? Only someone who wants to close their eyes to the true reality would raise such an objection. I will give you an obvious example. Until very recently, anyone who had a little knowledge of life would have said that merchants were a completely different breed, I would say, based on their way of life, than, say, stiff bureaucrats. Now, something very strange has happened recently under the influence of the so-called war economy. Merchants were brought into the bureaucratic government offices, and lo and behold, these merchants became the most beautiful bureaucrats in the bureaucratic government offices. Now, that is an undesirable example of human adaptation to what man is placed in, but this perhaps unsympathetic example points to a general human phenomenon. Man behaves in a certain way because of the circle in which he works. If we reorganize the entire life of human society in such a way that the three most essential branches of life have their own administration, let us say, their own representation, their own organization, then the person who has to live in such a sphere as one of the members of the social organism will work out of the spirit of that sphere. He will be able to contribute to the whole of human life in a way that would never be possible if everything in social life were mixed up and confused. However, creating clarity in such a field requires dedicated observation and practice of life. And if what is being striven for in the future for the good of humanity is not based on such devoted observation and practice of life, we will only end up in more confusion and chaos, but not out of it. Above all, if we want to create something healthy in the individual, we must be able to devote ourselves to what the immediate present can actually teach us with regard to social life. We must not ask: What have we thought for decades about socialism, about socialist programs? - and then, in this thinking, completely overlook what is around us in the immediate present, but we must have the ability to really look at this immediate present. This immediate present has brought something up that should surprise most of all those who have thought about socialism before.

Anyone who is familiar with the thinking about socialism, even among the socialists of past decades, must say that the events of the present must come as a surprise if one only wants to take things in their true sense and truthfully, openly and honestly, especially today. If we look beyond mere appearances and try to see what holds the germ of the future in a phenomenon, what is the most striking and significant phenomenon in the life of social demands of the present? I believe that anyone who has really taken a proper look at what is actually happening cannot find any other answer to this question than: the most striking phenomenon is the so-called soviet system. And I would like to say that one should have the ability to pay proper attention to the tremendously significant symptomatic phenomenon of the soviet system. For in a certain respect it can be said that the emergence of this system of councils is precisely what should have surprised traditional socialism the most. Traditional, old socialism should have listened attentively to this system of councils; it should have said to itself, this is actually the refutation of much of what I have thought. The council system refutes many old ideas about socialism. One need only recall, I would say sketchily, what traditional socialism has always emphasized and unfortunately still does: People do not make social upheavals, evolution does. It has been said that economic forms will gradually be transformed, primarily through the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few capitalists, so that, to a certain extent, the old type of society itself grows into the new one.

Then came the world war catastrophe, which shook humanity. It poured out on the one hand over capitalism, which was driving itself into its own destruction. But it also poured out over the truly justified aspirations that arise from human nature, which are called the social movement. What has actually emerged from this social movement? People have emerged who, in the most diverse ways, as councils, as people's councils, want to take further development into their own hands, who want to intervene in development out of their own human resolve, their human insight, and their human will. If one were to have a sufficiently developed sense of discernment for the facts of reality today, one would perceive what has been indicated as an enormous surprise. But it seems almost as if precisely in those circles that have settled down so well into the old ideas of socialism, this power of discernment would be difficult to achieve. The November events have occurred. What has announced itself in the East - I will speak neither approvingly nor disparagingly about it - as the system of the Soviets, has also occurred in Central Europe. One was forced to think of something that could be called, by what was there through the November events: the realization of the social aspiration to which one has devoted oneself for a long time and from which one has promised oneself so much for a long time. There, very strange phenomena have come to light. One need only recall a few events in this, our present, strange transitional period, and one will immediately notice how little the old habits of thought were suited to the new phenomenon, which should actually have been surprising. I will highlight one example. A very clever person, full of enthusiasm for social ideas, gave a lecture in Berlin on socialization. He discussed certain very general ideas about socialization, the kind that were current when socialism still justified criticism, but could only criticize, when it was not yet called upon, as it has been since November, to intervene in events. He had very definite general ideas about what socialization should look like, and I believe – because it is perfectly clear to someone who can discern the human soul between the lines of what is said – that the man must have said to himself: What I have imagined in general program sentences cannot be done! — When something cannot be done, then today one says — it was also said in the past, but today it has become very characteristic —, well, people are not yet ready for it, it will come later. Yes, later, according to this man's views, true socialism will come. But what comes until then? He has now worked out a broad socialization program, it is the engineer Dr. Hermann Beck in Berlin, and he calls what is to be achieved in the transition period social capitalism. We have thus happily arrived at a situation in which the events that have occurred do not lead us to envision as an ideal what has always been called for: a real overcoming of the damage done by capitalism. However, one must learn to distinguish between real socialization and what is often striven for today, namely the transformation of private capitalism into state and municipal capitalism. That is not socialization, that is fiscalization or something similar. Do not confuse socialization with fiscalization. What needs to be looked at today – if you have a sense of reality, you will – is, as I have already indicated, the way in which people who want to participate in social events stand out, and this is expressed in the so-called council system. But no one who wants to make the transition from capitalism to socialism based on abstract principles, on some ideology or on some utopian premise can cope with this system of councils.

The striving for the system of workers' councils shows that it is unwise today to attempt socialization from above. The only way today is to work together with those who aspire to the council system, to create an exchange of views and experiences in ideas that are directly human. That is why I said, when I spoke here on Tuesday, that it is necessary today that we learn to understand the reality of trust, that we learn to really create with those who come from the working people and strive for certain goals. It is much more important today to listen to what those who come from the working class have to say than to reflect on how some law or the like should be based on some ideas. What we need today, what must be real reality today, is to recognize that what is to happen must come from the people. It is therefore more important to establish a living connection with the broad masses of the people than to hold meetings among ourselves upstairs. Holding meetings at the top only leads us to continue the old damage, because what wants to be realized today must come directly from the people, and the symptom that history wants this is the system of councils. And in addition, this system of councils has basically already emerged in two forms, and just as the proletariat's ordeal has necessarily led to the threefold social order because the proletariat has experienced physical and mental hardship in the three spheres of life, so too does the remarkable phenomenon of the system of councils already point to the threefold social order. At first this system of councils presents itself in such a way that on the one hand so-called workers' councils arise, but on the other hand another form of council is already emerging, the form of council that is now appearing as a demand for works councils.

Those who have an instinct for what is emerging from the times can already know today that the system of general workers' councils points to the political side, the state side, the legal side, and can only be developed if we 'can go towards a legal life separate from economic and spiritual life. Such things come about, I might say, with unavoidable historical ambiguity, in that they break away from humanity. But the question must be asked: how can that which asserts itself in this way be shaped on a healthy soil that makes a real organization of human society possible? Just as the system of workers' councils points to the independent legal basis, so the institute of works councils points to the independent economic basis, for it is in this that the practice of impulses for the tripartite social organism is to be sought, so that it is not built into the air with a program, but is built on soil and land, out of the historical reality, which one only has to observe correctly. There is really no need to discuss whether the councils are a reality or not. They are partly a reality, they will become more and more so, no one will be able to drive them back again, they will arise in even more diverse forms than they already are. Realistic thinking demands that we create the ground on which these councils can be worked with.

The one area in which the threefold social organism wants to create is the economic area. The esteemed listeners who have heard earlier lectures of mine will know that what is at issue here is to shape this economic ground in such a way that the so-called wage relationship disappears on its own, that the regulation of the type and time and the like of human labor is removed from the economic cycle and transferred to the legal state, where decisions are made about the time, type and measure of human labor. What remains on the economic plane is what is revealed in reality as the production of goods, the circulation of goods, and the consumption of goods. You will also have gathered from earlier lectures that economic life is about an organization that consists of associations, mainly of those associations that together regulate the conditions of consumption and production. It has often been said from the socialist side: In the future, production cannot be for profit, but must be for consumption. It is therefore self-evident that the consumer interest, which has not played a conscious role in the economic process itself to any significant extent, must come to the fore in economic activity. Cooperatives will have to be formed in which both the consumer interest and the dependent production relationship are represented. In these cooperatives, the main thing will be to always find out, within the practical work, how large such a cooperative must be. The size of such a cooperative cannot be derived from the boundaries of the state structures that have emerged in the course of modern history – for the simple reason that these state structures have emerged as closed administrative bodies for reasons quite different from the conditions of production and consumption, and because other boundaries arise as soon as people associate socially in relation to relations of production and consumption in such a way that the regulation of relations of production and consumption results in the mutual value of commodities, which makes a healthy life possible for the broadest sections of the population. In order to accomplish such tasks, we will have to develop a genuine economic science, one that cannot be conjured out of thin air, nor even out of subjective human experience, but out of the experiences of collective economic life. Within these experiences, one will have to observe how cooperatives that are too small lead to the members of these cooperatives having to wither away in terms of their economic situation; cooperatives that are too large must also lead to withering away in the economic life that is provided by the cooperatives. Once the relevant law, which underlies economic life, is clearly recognized, it will be expressed in the following words: Too small cooperatives promote the starvation of the participants in these cooperatives, while too large cooperatives promote the starvation of the others in the economic life associated with these cooperatives. Therefore, it will be a matter of avoiding this twofold atrophy of human needs. That will be the guideline for the work to be carried out by all sections of the national community. For it cannot be determined by any mathematical calculation how large such a cooperative must be; it must have a certain size in one place and another in another. It must regulate its size according to the actual conditions. These actual conditions are to be determined by those who are directly involved in economic life. They cannot be regulated in any other way than by disregarding any state legislation on economic life, leaving this economic life to its own vitality, so that it can be shaped by the continuous living interaction of the councils. One cooperative must be enlarged according to the circumstances at a certain time, while another must be reduced in size. For the social organism is not something that can be defined by a constitution or determined by laws that have been established once and for all; rather, it is something that is in a state of perpetual life, just as a natural organism basically is. Therefore, what is the measure of economic life can only be expressed at most in more or less short- or long-term contracts that are concluded, but never in any limitation or definition of the powers of the councils that are part of economic life.

You can still say today, and rightly so, that he is telling us about the extent of the size of a cooperative, but where is the evidence for this? Yes, that is precisely because we have not yet achieved an economic science that must be based on economic experience in the most eminent sense, that cannot be constructed, that cannot be gained from the idea, but only from life. I can tell you that no one who has truly studied economic life with selfless devotion comes to a different conclusion than the one I have expressed to you. For it is the peculiarity of social laws that they can never be proved in the same way as natural laws, but that they must be proved directly in their application, and that therefore only those who have a certain instinct for social reality can have a sense for them. This is so difficult in the present time that we are confronted with facts which require this instinct for reality, but people are so reluctant to develop this instinct for reality that is present in every human soul.

The second task that will arise in the future will be a price regulation arising from the laws of economic life, which will represent the mutual value of the goods. For it is only through such a price regulation, observed in economic experience, that the basic law of all socialization can be realized. This will make it possible to fulfill the basic principle of all socialization, which, after all, basically consists of nothing more than ensuring that what a normal person can achieve through normal human labor based on his or her abilities is equal to what the society in which he or she lives provides for him or her, so that everyone can receive from society the equivalent consumption for what he or she produces. In addition, of course, there is what the community must provide for those people who, due to illness, old age or abnormality, must be supported by society itself. This is not achieved by wage struggles or the like, but only by ensuring that the economic cycle is such that prices are formed in a healthy way, not too low and not too high. Prices themselves, ladies and gentlemen, can be said to be irrelevant. It just always depends on earning what things cost. But that would only be the case in societies that merely produce land products. The moment a society has to simultaneously produce products for which man-made means of production are needed, there is a necessary normal price that must not be exceeded or fallen short of.

In this respect, we could learn an enormous amount from history if we could look at history today on the basis of real insights into economic laws, rather than economic fantasies, as is often the case in the economic histories of recent years. For example, it is extremely instructive for people who are honest in this regard that we have already reached the point in the most important regions of Central Europe that a kind of normal pricing system exists over large areas. That was around the fifteenth, towards the middle of the fifteenth century. This normal pricing - please read about it in the histories that at least give some clues about it - which at that time extended over a large part of Europe, only became possible because the old serfdom and semi-slavery, the old hereditary leasehold and the like had gradually given way to better conditions, better conditions, by no means ideal conditions. But then an event occurred that undermined this economic development. It is impossible to say what it would have meant for European humanity if this event had not occurred. Of course, I do not want to engage in bad historical construction, nor indulge in historical criticism, but only point out these things for a better understanding, because what happened had to happen. One cannot even imagine the favorable economic development that would have followed if what had already been prepared around the middle of the fifteenth century had found a straightforward continuation. But it was cut off by the radical introduction of Roman legal concepts; it was cut off by the fact that economic life was disturbed precisely from the legal point of view. Anyone who is familiar with this phenomenon at its very roots has in it an enormously strong historical proof of the necessity of separating actual state life from economic life. Old habits of mankind led to a certain sympathy for these Roman legal concepts. In the Baltic region, from which so much reactionary thinking has emanated, there were people at the Diet who said: According to Roman legal concepts, which we must reintroduce because they are the right ones, the farmers should actually become slaves again.

Today, when we are facing not a small reckoning but a great one, as I said before, we must see through such things with a healthy eye of the soul, see through them in all their consequences for the present. But if we want to shape our economic life independently in this and many other ways, we will need a real organization of the council system. It will be a matter of introducing into the factory the system of workers' councils, which today is longed for and hoped for, which some people are already trying to set up based on a certain understanding of the times, so that it so that it can be an intermediary between the workers and the managers of the future, in the sense that I characterized it in my last lecture here and as I presented it in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question'. That will be the first task for which the works councils will have to come up with, to really be able to mediate for those contracts that have to be concluded between the workers and managers of the future, who will no longer be capitalists. But all these things can be prepared today. All these people who are part of such a council can already take on functions today, even if they can only be transitional functions. Furthermore, the works council will, above all, have to mediate in everything that arises from the company and is of general interest in the context of life in a unified economic entity. But other things will also be necessary for this system of works councils if we do not want to continue to individualize economically, which the working class in particular would soon come to resent. If we want to socialize the whole of economic life, the unified economic entity, then we will need many other types of councils. I would just like to point out from the types of councils that there will be a need for transport councils and economic councils. The factory councils will be close to the production conditions and production needs of the working people. The economic councils will be close to the consumption conditions.

This will create an economic body that, above all, will represent a real system of councils. Such a system of councils, which does not prevent – that is what will be important in its practical design – the initiative of the individual in economic life from being decisive in the individual case. But that can really be developed if trust prevails. If the initiative of the individual were undermined by, say, the soviet system, then all internationality of economic life would be lost. This internationality of economic life would be particularly lost – people today have little idea of the extent to which this would be the case – if, instead of socialization, nationalization were to be introduced, that is, state capitalism, if economic life were to be merged with state life. If the state were to manage the economy, as some strive for – anyone who is familiar with the actual circumstances knows this – then it would be impossible to control the complicated conditions that the internationality of economic life necessarily creates. If you set up a real system of economic, transport, works councils and similar councils, which will truly not take as many people out of the working population as the current bureaucracy, then, if you can still manage to avoid undermining the initiative of the administrative people in the practical implementation, then all the fine apparatuses of internationalism can be fully maintained despite socialization. Then, if the councils are real councils, that is, institutions that set the direction of life, then the councils, through their coexistence with the administrators, will bring it about that the administrative man, whom they trust, can also take the initiative in their sense in detail. The broad lines of the institutions will always emanate from the council. The day-to-day activities will be taken care of by the council. In this respect, anyone who can imagine economic life as separate from the rest of society, and taking into account all the circumstances , which are present today, to institutions which do not reduce the achievements of the old culture, but which make it possible to bring about a dignified existence for all people within these achievements.

You may ask what means the economic life, separated from the state, will have to carry out the measures it has taken, in a sense against the resistance of individuals? Today, however, it is thought that such measures can only be implemented by means of coercion. In this respect, we have not yet deviated very much from the old habits of thought. I do not know how many people have noticed that such old habits of thought continue in a strange way. If, for example, I read a certain passage from a certain speech today, many people will be astonished. This passage, taken from an address to troops in Danzig, reads: “The troops shall see the man who stands up for their weal and woe and advocates military discipline and order. If the right military spirit lives in the troops, I will repay loyalty with loyalty.” You will say, in which old imperial speech did you find that? No, it is from the speech that the Reich Minister of Defense Noske gave to the volunteer troops in Danzig. This is how old habits of thought take root. But it is essential that we move beyond the old habits of thought. Today, people do not yet realize how they are muddling along in the old habits of thought, how little they have come out of the old things. So naturally some people ask, who can only imagine that what is decided upon as a measure will be carried out by some kind of state or even military force: What means does the economic body have to enforce what is born out of its womb in the way described? — In the future it has a very effective but at the same time very humane means, the boycott. The boycott, which does not even need to be imposed by coercion under such conditions as I have described, but which simply arises by itself. If a cooperative exists for any business and branch of consumption and someone wants to go over to the other side, he will not be able to produce, precisely because of the law that the circle from which he produces will then be too small. And in a similar way, other conditions for thwarting economic measures through the obvious boycott can be eliminated. If someone were to believe that the recalcitrant could then come to such a large cooperative that he could compete, he need only reflect on the real laws of economic life and he will know that by the time he would come to this competition, he must have perished long ago.

You must seek this as the practical life behind the threefold order, that this threefold order takes account of reality and seeks to create a foundation for this reality. Of course, we shall have to take certain things seriously that today still go against human habits of thought. We shall have to take seriously what I have already explained in earlier lectures, namely the emancipation of spiritual life. We shall have to realize something with this spiritual life that has always been implicit in the call of socialist thinkers, but is poorly understood today. It was always inherent in socialism that it would lead to something new, but people have never thought about it clearly. Time and again, the adherents of socialism have said: competition and profit-making must be replaced by objective administration. That is quite right. This must be done especially in the field of intellectual life. It will, of course, be necessary for this intellectual life to be able to administer itself. Purely from the observations on human existence, one will be able to create something truly fruitful for the future through a mass pedagogy. I know that I am perhaps saying something crazy to many people today by saying: If we want to socialize in a healthy way, then we must, above all, express human strength and potential in such a way that the human being can stand powerfully in reality throughout his normal lifetime.

This will be particularly evident in the free administration of education. In other areas, it has already been shown in a less than pleasing way, in that the conditions of promotion in the old state have led to the fact that the highest council positions were usually occupied by old men who then wanted as little as possible to do with the matter. In the future, the necessity will arise from the self-government of the mind that these old gentlemen will have the most diverse leading tasks. But for that they need to be young and fresh. Our state school undermines youthfulness. This youthfulness has certainly not been found in the Reich Railway Office – it was called the Reich Railway Office because the posts were mostly filled by old men. It will be necessary for us to shape the very first stage of school teaching, which can only develop in a free spiritual life, on the basis of a thorough anthropology, so that the human powers of thought, feeling and will are not developed in such a way that later life is unable to maintain them, but weakens them. During the years in which the human being develops thinking, feeling and willing, we must shape all of this in such a way that we create a foundation for life. What can be achieved in the years of youth can never be made up for by the human being later on. But only if school life is administered according to the most intrinsic laws of human life, not according to the state corporation, can it be possible that the strength of his power will not be weakened throughout his entire life. And for social life it will be necessary in the future not only to acquire knowledge through school institutions, but also to learn to learn, to learn to learn from life. It still looks strange today when one says that a properly organized school system will provide us with very different people in the future than we have today.

You see, it is necessary for new things to arise, things that are not even thought of now. People today still look perplexed when you talk to them about wanting intellectual life to follow its own laws. They cannot imagine anything other than an intellectual life administered by the state because they have no idea of what the human being is in human society. Matters are serious today, and those who want to take things lightly will not achieve what is so necessary for us today: the recovery of the social organism. We must see again and again how strangely people continue in their old ways of thinking, how they at best bring themselves to say, “What he says is so unclear to us.” Of course, such things, which must have the power to give birth to a long-lasting reality, must first be accepted as something that is unclear, because one must get used to acquiring a new, realistic view of life by dealing with them. Today we have the duty to reflect on our deep instincts. When we reflect on them, we will be able to recognize with clarity what appears to be unclear. When many people today say that the impulses of the threefold social organism are unclear, it is often due to the old, wrong school education, which has prevented people from coming to a truly concentrated thinking, from coming to the conception of realistic thoughts. And so, on the one hand, one is obliged to say what is necessary, but on the other hand, one has to fight to prevent all kinds of prejudices from wanting to create new things in the world out of old habits of thinking. When people today keep asking: What is the way? How do you do it? — I would like to know what would be a clearer way than that of the threefold organism, if only one wants to follow it. But just think of what has to happen first if one wants to go down this path. The government, which has continued to develop from earlier developments, will have to say to itself one day: We reserve for ourselves all those departments that relate to legal life, public safety and the like. With regard to intellectual life, culture, education, technical ideas on the one hand, and with regard to economic life on the other, to industry, trade, commerce and so on, we will become a liquidation government. This requires our time as something immediately practical: the insight that governments that come from the old practices and habits can pull themselves together to say such things as those just mentioned; to cast aside intellectual and economic life to the left and right, so that these can shape and administer themselves.

Only the initiative can lie with the previous governments, because they have already developed out of the old conditions, but they must have the selflessness to become liquidation governments to the left and to the right. This requires a great reckoning. Those who call this impractical, I can understand, because they cannot rethink what centuries have hammered into their heads. Today, however, we are faced with the necessity of hammering out of our heads what centuries have hammered into it. Today we are faced with the necessity of taking things with the utmost seriousness, because only this utmost seriousness is the truly practical thing to do. This seriousness will then unite with the necessary insights that I have mentioned to you with regard to the organization of economic life, the size or smallness of these or those cooperatives, price fixing and so on. But these are tasks that arise in the concrete, in the practical, and to which we must resolve, for these are the foundations of a real socialization, the foundations for a truly social shaping of human life. This is what the councils want, even if they cannot yet say it, as they strive to emerge from the greater community of the people. Therefore, people should have been surprised by the council systems, especially all those who believed that they had already come far enough in what is called socialization. Today we are experiencing strange things.

This afternoon, I had to read a remarkable sentence that I would like to say had to be received by me with the strangest feelings in these serious times. There I read the following sentence in connection with the impulses of this three-part organism. You don't really want to believe it:

“The present struggle is not about finding an idea or putting the right man at the helm, but about how the socialist idea must be translated into reality. It is not about beautiful plans, but about execution.”

Now I ask you, my dear audience, how can you execute if you have nothing to execute? Such things are said today in good faith, out of a good opinion. But they are nothing more than a symptom of how little sense and understanding people have for what has to happen. Someone presents the plan of a house, and someone objects: It is not the plan of the house that matters, but the execution. — It may well be asked: Where is your plan? Where does it show itself? — We would remain silent if your plan showed itself, for we speak truthfully only through the facts.

That such things are possible today, that such thinking is possible in the face of the seriousness of the times, is what makes one sad again and again when one thinks of the possibility and necessity of what has to happen. We must be seized today, especially we here in Central Europe, by the seriousness of the situation. For only by breaking ourselves of today of thinking and speaking outside of things - because we never look into things - only by doing so will we avert the great disaster. Today, one needs the opportunity to create out of the broadest masses of humanity. If anyone attempts to do so, he is told that he is suggesting things to the masses, for the masses do not understand them. The ruling circles have no idea what the masses already understand in their fresh minds, things they themselves do not understand because they do not want to understand anything. These things are a problem for our time, and I do not shrink from speaking about them, no matter how many objections are raised about suggestion and the like, because basically I only say what would come from the hearts and souls of people themselves if they were to become clear about what lives in these hearts and souls. I only want to clarify what lives in the hearts and souls. But many people today do not want to know anything about that because they shy away from living with those who clearly carry the demands of the time in their hearts. However, you can find out a lot about this from all sorts of voices of the time. Recently, for example, a gentleman wrote in the widely read magazine 'Die Hilfe' (Help) - and it is not a socialist magazine, but it aims to be a social magazine; similar views can be found in socialist magazines today - that we cannot socialize now. He does not consider the possibility that he does not know how to do it, but of course he does not attribute the reason why he has no idea how socialization should be carried out to himself, but to the others. In his article, he says quite naively: “Capitalism has simply corrupted our people... Yes, anyone who had a nation of healthy, happy, kind-hearted people who were eager to work and for whom fraternity was a living concept and not just a slogan like ours could dare to introduce communism overnight.”

Now I ask you whether anyone in the world would need to introduce communism if we lived in a social order in which people are healthy, happy, cheerful, kind-hearted and in which only fraternity lived. You see, that is today's world of thought. People have no idea what they said just a short time ago. They would truly have no need to think of an ideal of socialism if people were as they should be, as they are supposed to be, precisely through socialization.

People always forget one thing: if the natural organism is healthy, then a person does not feel what the health of the natural organism is. Then he must first seek in health, but then he can feel the harmony of his soul, or the joy of his soul, for that matter. But if the organism is sick, then he feels pain, then the pain of the organism is part of his soul experience. Then no one can come and say, “I cannot make you healthy,” because I could only do so if you first felt healthy in your soul, if you had harmony and joy in your soul. We must strive for a healthy social organism. That is what matters. We must not ask, as the gentleman I just spoke of did, “But where shall we get the people from?” Mankind must first be educated for socialism! — Think of the Munchausen hero who wants to lift himself up into the air by his hair. No, socialism should be there to educate people.

It is easy to call people immature when one is unable to develop mature impulses oneself. Our task in the present is not to accuse humanity, but to create conditions that will no longer require us to accuse humanity to the extent we do today. Therefore, the impulse we are talking about here sets itself the task of examining the conditions of a healthy social organism. We shall not make any progress until there is an awakening of understanding for this threefold social organism. Then I would like to see, if in a sufficiently large number of people - and that is what matters today - there is understanding for what is to be done, which government can resist such understanding! Under any other circumstances, we will not make any progress with all the experiments.

Today, the effort must be made to create understanding in the broadest circles. This can happen faster than one might think. And it must happen faster than one might think, because only those who are immature themselves speak of people's immaturity. We have no time to waste dreaming that it will take a long time to socialize. If one recognizes the practical possibility of basing social life on the three fundamentals of the spiritual, the legal, and the economic, then one will realize that one can carry out a real socialization on these three fundamentals. But one must resolve not to cling to old prejudices. We must make up our minds to really relearn. The same gentleman I have already told about, says the beautiful sentence: “Any renewal that tries to rush ahead of this development,” he means the development towards kind-hearted, friendly, contented people, “must fail because it finds no support in the people's feelings.” — In the feelings of this gentleman, it certainly finds no support. Such sentiments must simply be ignored if they cannot be improved, because humanity must not be held back any longer by old prejudices and old habits of thinking. Today we need to go deep within ourselves, to reform and revolutionize our feelings and our thinking. Then we will find the resonance in the people. We need not suggest anything to people; we need only find the clarity for what they legitimately want. We need only do the work of trust and not shy away from this cooperation with the broad masses, then we will truly serve the demands of the present time.

Today, I want to say once again that everyone must take themselves by the word: I must learn to understand what needs to be done from the phenomena of the time, from the loudly speaking facts, before it is too late. And it could very soon be too late, which would then be most regretted by those who have not taken the trouble to transform themselves, out of the abilities they have acquired, so that they can really understand these new demands of the time and place themselves at their service. To be able to place oneself at the service of the times, even if we have to relearn in the deepest part of our being, that must become the task of all people, before it is too late!

Closing words after the discussion

Since, in principle, hardly anything has been said in the discussion against my statements except by one of the honored speakers, it is also unnecessary for me to say much in detail in the closing remarks. I do not wish to go back over the arguments of the speaker who has contradicted me. I think it is certainly a strange way of putting things to say that one should refute things that are quite incorrect in comparison with what is in my book. A discussion cannot be conducted in such a way that one asserts inaccuracies or fallacies during the discussion and then demands that one refute what one never deigned to assert. I would like to point out just one thing. It has already been said by Mr. L. and it is also my conviction that, as far as Karl Marx is concerned, anyone who really knows Karl Marx will have to say that Karl Marx has always allowed himself to be taught by the facts of history, contemporary history, in such a way that there is no doubt that anyone today who would not be able to answer the question: What would Karl Marx think under today's conditions? — You see, there is a very, very strange word from Karl Marx that comes to mind when someone like Mr. W. refers to Karl Marx in such a strange way. Marx had many contemporaries who were his followers, who called themselves Marxists, and Karl Marx said something very strange, but it has a very deep meaning for these Marxists: As far as I am concerned, I am not a Marxist. Such a saying should really make you think. Sometimes you have to ask yourself what the followers of a certain view actually believe. A view, such as that put forward by Karl Marx, is meant by its creator to flow into the full movement of time. And only those who are able to take it up in such a way that they are able to transform it for their own time will understand it in a later age. That is enough on this point. Now, because three questions were asked, I would just like to make a few comments about these three questions. All three questions relate to foreign policy. Of course, I could answer them individually, but perhaps it would be better not to answer these three questions in particular in the form in which the questioner wants them, given the events that are still pending. It is necessary to withhold information about current events, although it is not likely that what I am saying here will be in the newspaper tomorrow. But it is better if certain things are not spoiled by being talked about. But I will tell you the following about it, so that you do not think that something can be withheld lightly with regard to answering this question. You see, what is now presented as the threefold social order was initially treated as a foreign policy matter during the terribly difficult war period. At a time when it was out of the question to tackle socialization within Germany just before the end of the war, when the only question was what Germany would do in response to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, for example, if there was to be a possible end to the terrible events? Today, even more than in the past, I am of the opinion that much could have been helped if people had shown understanding for that foreign policy, which, in addition to socialization, lies in this threefold structure of a healthy social organism. That, I would say, is precisely what stands before me today with such sadness. This structure would, I believe, have been the only way to avoid such a terrible end to the war as we have come to. May that lack of understanding which the relevant circles showed in the past not also become what those who matter, the broadest sections of the people, make it theirs today. If only we could find the hearts of the broad masses of the people more than we could find the hearts of those who, instead of seeking some kind of sensible foreign policy under the influence of these impulses, have wreaked havoc at Brest-Litovsk and in the aftermath.

I cannot give you a second lecture on foreign policy now. But one day we will study the real causes, the more distant and more proximate ones, of these unfortunate European events of the last five years. In the future, we will study, for example, the web of so-called causes of war that led to the Austro-Serbian conflict. Interwoven into this conflict as foreign policy are chaotic economic and political causes. And anyone who, like me, has spent half their life, that is three decades, in Austria, who is familiar with Austrian conditions, knows that this was bound to happen from the unfortunate development of these Austrian conditions, because these conditions could only have been maintained if the economic and political-legal conditions could have been disentangled at the right time, also in relation to foreign policy. You see, I came to Vienna once during the war. Various people approached me and said, emphasizing only the economic side of the causes of the war: “Oh, this war with Serbia is only a pig war.” Of course, this only expresses the economic cause in terms of one area, but it was present. In addition, there were the political and even the cultural causes, even if they lay in different languages, of which Austria officially had thirteen. In short, as I said, I would have to give a very detailed lecture if I wanted to show you how these things have crossed the former state borders, which I call an inorganic, chaotic jumble of the three branches of life, which must first be separated in the future. So today, for easily understandable reasons, I can only hint at all this.

You see, what is now called war guilt, what is now called the terms of peace, which are the subject of the question at hand here – well, is that an impossibility when you think of the realization? No, that is not an impossibility, but mere nonsense, because it is something like sailing into a dead end. It is absolutely incomprehensible how people in Versailles can even imagine such things. Of course, one might not look clearly enough, not concretely enough into the circumstances, but just consider this. Let us leave aside the war debt. Let us assume that which has arisen from the old conditions, the debts that are to be repaid within the German borders themselves. So let's leave the war guilt aside for the time being. Then, for the next few years, the mere interest, listen carefully, ladies and gentlemen, the interest, as I believe, is 28 billion marks annually. So not only is it impossible, but it is really nonsense. Things that cannot be realized.

This is a typical phenomenon of the present time: we have sailed into something under the influence of the old conditions, and it can only develop further if we build something completely, completely new, from completely new foundations. Now, people will very soon be convinced that they have to build on completely new foundations. Those who today still do not want to know about the threefold social order will have to learn it from the field of foreign policy, when it becomes impossible to escape the calamities if we do not manage to establish international relations that go beyond all political and spiritual conditions and arise out of the necessities of economic life. Of course, this must be studied in detail. If it is studied, it will be seen that recovery can only come if we try to build international economic relations on the basis of the tripartite structure of the social organism, at least for us. It is no obstacle that the Entente states do not have a tripartite structure. For us, it would only be necessary for us to make progress, to get some air and the possibility of life again, that Russia and the Ukraine could also enter into the tripartite division to the east.

But anyone who, on deeper grounds, is familiar with the intentions of the Russian national soul also knows how much has actually been achieved by the peace of Brest-Litovsk and how it would have been possible, had not so much been buried, to win adherents with this threefold organism, especially in Russia. This is something for which, of course, ways must be sought to make up for it. But for those who do not take things according to programs, not according to preconceived ideas, but as they present themselves in reality, including in foreign policy, there is only one possibility, to gain strength over a sufficiently large territory in Eastern and Central Europe, so that we find the possibility of not being harmed by the fact that in the West there is that intention, which is expressed in the dreadful peace conditions. I would like to point out to you that the impulses of this tripartite division were first thought of during the course of the war as a foreign policy, and that is what can weigh heavily on us today: After these terrible and bloody experiences, are we to go back to the way things were during the war? At the time, I tried to make it clear how people would have reacted quite differently to everything else if there had been a manifestation in this direction, which of course would not have been worded as one has to speak about these things now, according to the demands of the times. But that is something one would wish for, that now that a new era has dawned, this new era would understand these things better than they were understood by those people who were the last stragglers of the old era and who, because they were these stragglers, led European humanity into terrible misfortune. May as many people as possible now open their hearts, so that they may not be among the stragglers, but may be the forerunners of that which alone can help, namely, that which really cures the inner organism. And the healthy inner organism will also find the ways and means to assert itself in the right way on the outside.

In a series of lectures, I tried to explain the extent to which the present should strive for a division of the social organism into an area of the spirit with independent administration, an area of law on a democratic basis, and an independent economic area. The idea and practical formulation of this view of the threefold social organism, when it attempted to place itself in today's cultural and intellectual life, was expressed to those people who could be expected to have learned something for their work in relation to human development from the loud and clear facts of the last four to five years and also from our present. And one should actually believe that in the present time everyone living with a truly awakened soul should learn from these facts that speak loudly and clearly about the reorganization of social matters. Naturally, the idea could not actually arise in the mind of the bearer of this threefold thinking that those who, by virtue of their entire mental makeup – mentality is what one has been accustomed to calling it in recent times – want to hold on to old programs, to old party opinions, will readily profess their support for this idea of the threefold order of the social organism. For what must one actually have within oneself in order to grasp this idea as one that has really been plucked out of the life of the present in a practical way?

You have to be able to say: the terrible events of the world war catastrophe have shown how the old views on economic life have driven this economic life of humanity into external institutions, which, in the end, by combining the individual institutions into the great state imperialisms, had to lead to the world catastrophe. They were driven to this because economic life developed in a certain sense in such a way that it was, I might say, left to its own driving forces; that we neglected to arrive at truly comprehensive economic ideas which could have lived through themselves through economic measures. A man who is officially responsible for the reorganization of economic life in the Reich Ministry, Wichard von Moellendorff, recently stated that it was his conviction that, under all circumstances, even if the world war catastrophe had not occurred, or had not occurred in the form in which it did, economic life would inevitably have driven itself into a crisis of the most terrible kind, to the detriment of humanity and of nations, for the simple reason that this economic life lacked truly fruitful guiding ideas. And the forces that operated in the states and in the legal conceptions of nations were closely allied with this economic life. In the final analysis it had come about that only economic interests were reflected in the legal systems of the nations. And we had to experience that in 1914 the mutual relations between the states ran into such unclear currents that basically no state power, even with the most earnest goodwill, was actually in a position to avert the terrible threat at that time.

So it might seem that for economic life as for state life, there is much to be learned from the course of events that led to the impossibility of their own destruction for the inner drive that says: A new idea, a new willpower must be found if humanity is to flourish in its development; a new idea for economic life, a new idea for political or legal life. And is not, after all, the whole of political and legal life and of economic life based on the spiritual powers that humanity can unfold, that humanity can cultivate in the growing generation, and which can then intervene in the economy and in the legal life as rational thoughts? Can we not also say that intellectual life also shows how we have arrived at a critical epoch, and how we can learn from it, that we must reflect on and contemplate its further fruitful development and on a new foundation for it?

In the three most important areas of human life – economic, political and legal, and spiritual life – the big question arose, the question of the world war catastrophe and its aftermath. People should actually be around who have learned from the course of events. The fact that humanity's new phase of development cannot be mastered with old thoughts and old party opinions should actually be a basic conviction of the modern human being, based on the world of facts itself. It is out of this attitude, out of this conviction, that the lectures have been given so far here by me. In today's lecture and the one the day after tomorrow, I would like to add a few things to what has already been said, which could serve as a supplement to what has been said so far, from a more spiritual point of view today and from a more practical point of view the day after tomorrow. One thing has emerged that is, in essence, extremely instructive in view of the conviction and attitude just expressed.

What I would characterize as a strange alliance has emerged, a kind of coalition from the far right to the far left. In terms of their opposition to what has been presented here as the basic ideas of the tripartite social organism, Spartacists, independents, majority socialists, the Civic Party and extreme reactionaries are marching in complete agreement with each other today. It could hardly have seemed better, as it could have, to let the Spartacists and the bourgeois and the reactionaries converge in their attitudes.

This peculiarity therefore exists, that basically, at least in form and in attitude, the most amicable harmony reigns from left to right. From the extreme left, we could hear the following judgment about what has been said in these lectures very recently. We could hear that people agree, completely agree, with my criticism of the previous economic order, that they also completely agree with the threefold social order, that they even believe that this threefold order must come about, but – now comes the other thing: they will summon up all their strength to fight tooth and nail against what has been said here in criticism of the previous economic system and about the threefold social organism.

Strange things – one declares one's full agreement with the matter and at the same time declares that one must fight the matter at all costs! Similar arguments can also be heard from the extreme right. So there could perhaps have been no better opportunity for those who, whether from this or that hole of old views, wanted to come together to fight against that which absolutely does not and will not compromise with old views.

Today, by way of introduction to what I will have to say in detail the day after tomorrow, I would like to draw attention to a side of the modern social movement that has actually always been misunderstood, and which has been taken into account precisely in the formulation, in the conception of the idea and the practice of the tripartite organism. Today, I would like to touch on the spiritual basis of the current development of humanity, because I have to be aware that this spiritual basis is of the utmost importance and that the misunderstandings that arise with regard to what can and should be socially desired today stem precisely from the failure to take this spiritual basis into account.

And there is another reason why it is necessary, urgently necessary, to place a movement that today merely wants to be economic or, at most, political, on a spiritual foundation. For anyone who follows today's events as they unfold, not only on the surface, but who tries to penetrate deeper into what is actually happening in the depths of the development of nations today, must surely say to himself: the mighty, the terrible terrible, blood-drenched battle that has taken place is only a wave that has arisen from something in the depths of human nature, something that has been building for a long time. It is an inner restlessness in human nature that is showing itself almost everywhere in the world. One could feel it all these years since the outbreak of this world catastrophe by the facts, as more and more populations across the continents joined in what was actually taking place, joined in such a way that sometimes one truly did not know why, or that the reasons they put forward for joining made a very dubious impression. One could see from this that something elementary lies in this world catastrophe, something that is emerging from the depths of human existence over the whole earth. And it seems to me that nowhere is there more opportunity for a real recognition of what is actually taking place in the depths of humanity than in Central Europe, which has recently found itself squeezed between the whole of the Orient and the whole of the Occident.

This prompts us to ask: What is actually at the root of this? And it should be understandable that the understanding of such things must be based on a certain inner contemplation of the circumstances, on a certain experiential grasping of the facts, that something like instinctive, intuitive contemplation is needed to understand these things. Therefore, one should be understood when one draws attention to what arises from such a view, so that one encounters, I would like to say, what is happening to people. It will not be too much to say today that what has developed out of the world war catastrophe in terms of moods through Central Europe towards the East, towards Russia, towards Asia, and what is developing in terms of moods towards the West and across to America, if one understands that one sees in it only the continuation of that elementary restlessness of humanity that first found its horrific expression in the world war catastrophe. That was, as many have said, the most terrible external armed conflict that has taken place since the time when people have been talking about history. And this armed conflict has been waged with the most physical means by a large part of contemporary humanity. But we can see emerging, rising out of what has produced this armed conflict, something that will take hold of humanity with equal significance and equal impact, and we are actually only at the beginning of it. If what we have experienced was the most terrible armed conflict, then we will also experience - all the signs, which are present in the moods of the people, show it - the greatest spiritual battle, the greatest, the most terrible spiritual confrontation between the East, the Orient and the Occident. We are at the beginning of great and comprehensive spiritual struggles for humanity. And what is now taking place in social demands seems only to be the wave of a spiritual struggle of humanity that has been driven to the surface. Even those contemporaries who have already reached a respectable age will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle of humanity. In particular, however, the younger generations will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle that encompasses humanity. And what we can say to these growing generations about what we learn from the events, much, very much, will depend on the shaping of human development in the future. Today, the coming event is first announced by something that is outwardly connected with things: half of India, more than half of India, is half starved, and from starved India, the call goes up from a thousand and a thousand souls today: “Away from England!” This must not be judged merely from the political point of view that one is accustomed to from elsewhere today; it must be judged from a broader, more incisive point of view, one that is effective in the development of humanity. For what lives in the Orient is imbued with the heritage, with the heirloom of ancient spiritual life, which has only declined.

Expressed through the deeds of men, the heritage of ancient Oriental spiritual life will come into conflict with the spiritual aspirations of the Occident as far as America, and it remains to be seen whether those forces in the Anglo-American population that their tenacity and generous comprehension of their own selfish national interests have dealt with Central Europe in the well-known way, whether they will also be able to cope with Asia when, driven by the hunger of India, quite different forces will speak than those which the West has heard so far? This is only a hint of what is alive in the cultural atmosphere of the earth today. Because this is alive within, it is not enough today to judge what is actually happening from the traditional political and economic concepts. Therefore, it is necessary to extract the impulses for a new development of human conditions from a spiritual understanding of what is taking place in human moods across the whole earth today. Today, we must not only look at how the proletariat of Russia or Central Europe or the Entente is faring, although these are of course the most pressing questions for us.

Today, we must not just look at how certain people want to sit on their money bags. Today, if we do not want to miss the most important event, we must see as essentially involved in the social forces of the present that which the still half-asleep Orient will pour over the world. It is not necessary to say more than a few words, but when these few words are taken with all the weight that they carry for the spiritual development of mankind, then in these few words one will hear something that has a say in the reshaping of human development. The Orient, in so far as it is the cultured Orient – if we may apply this Occidental expression to the Orient – the Orient lived through thousands of years and, basically, to this day, yes, today, especially in its most spiritually minded representatives in the view that reality, true only that which man can experience spiritually and soulfully within himself, that which rises within the human being as inner soul content, that which can fill the human being so that he draws his true human consciousness from this inner soul content. This is true reality for the Orient, as far as it is the educated Orient. And the external, physical-sensual world, the world in which we work, the world in which the land for our work lies, in which we place the means of production for our work, this world is for the Oriental the Maja, the great appearance, that which is not real, which lives like a minor planet of the true spiritual-soul reality that arises only within. The Oriental is one with this view. He lives with it in his social community. This view fills him at all times, whether he withdraws in solitude for contemplation or whether he lends a hand in the oriental way to his fellow human beings in the physical world. One must consider such things if one really wants to see the world that presents itself to us in people living east of us, because basically, in Russia, it is already beginning to be as I have just characterized it. It only reaches its culmination, its peak, when one looks further east. On the other side, we see a completely different human disposition, a completely different inner life, when we cross the Rhine to the west, when we look in particular at the Anglo-American world. But on the other hand, everything that actually characterizes the attitude and the state of mind of the Western world is increasingly being shared by the basic character of Central European people, and there it reaches its peak in the attitude and state of mind of the present-day socialists, of socialists of all colors, basically.

We can find it again and again when we look at the people of the West and now also the people of Central Europe, as we have just looked at the people of the Orient. We will recognize what underlies the West when we grasp it in the way in which it has come to expression most clearly and most radically, when we grasp it precisely in the modern socialist mentality. What now prevails, no longer as a theoretical view but as a fundamental mood of the soul, is that the only reality is that which surrounds us in the physical, sensual world, that which we grasp when we do our work in the physical world for our fellow human beings. What is expressed in the land on which our work is done, what is expressed in the means of production with which our work is done, that is the only reality, and what appears in human souls as right, as custom, as art, as science, in short, as spiritual life, is only a result, a smoke, so to speak, of this single sensual-physical reality; this is, as every socialist thinker of the present day is firmly convinced, ideology. Ideology is the same thing seen from within, just as the Maya is for the Oriental. The Oriental says: physical sensuality, the physical world around us, the economic world, material existence, is Maya, it is an ideology, and reality is solely that which arises within the soul. And the Westerner says: Reality is only that which surrounds us externally, what is in the economic life, and an ideology, a maja, is what arises inwardly in the soul. If we know how such a basic mood of the soul actually makes a person, how it places him in life, then we see in what is happening today as a mood within the human race on earth this great, powerful contrast that I have just described. And this contrast has an enormous historical impact. From this contrast, not only a struggle between nations will develop, not only a race war, but a struggle of humanity, in which we and those who follow us will be placed. He who can see in the present mood of humanity the preparations for this struggle of humanity will not fail to be able to let himself be fertilized by what is really going on in present-day humanity in terms of the ideas and forces necessary for a social world view. What can be grasped in the present, I would like to say, as two abstract thoughts, but what will become reality, will grow out of fighting forces, although of a different form than the physical fighting forces of armed combat were, but to fighting forces that challenge the inner strength, the inner resistance of man to an even greater extent than the past armed combat did.

And further: a remarkable parallelism arises when one follows the moods that have just been indicated to you with more or less abstract but very real thoughts. We look towards the Orient and rightly ask ourselves today: What has become of the mood that created the greatest spiritual wealth in the ancient world of the Orient? Those in the know are aware of this. What has become of all this for today's cultural humanity of the Orient? The man of the Orient is weighed down in mystical-dark rapture, in half-sleepiness. That which used to give strength to the Oriental under the influence of the thought “sensuality is Maya, inner soul is reality, divine reality” used to give the Oriental strength and power, today it gives him weakness, it makes him a fatalist, someone who surrenders without will to the fate of the world. This is the fruit of a spiritual life that was directed specifically at the human, spiritual and soul. If one paints the corresponding counter-image of the Occident, then one says something highly, highly uncomfortable for very many people today – I am well aware of this – something that strongly provokes their antagonism. But I have often said: We are not living in the time of the small, but in the time of the great reckoning, and one must not shy away from telling people the truth.

We have seen how, in a certain higher development, what has been prepared for centuries in the West has found a particularly characteristic expression in modern socialism. Through Western development, the human mood has gradually emerged that actually sees the only reality in the physical-sensual world of economic life. And the leading and governing circles, that is, those who were there before, were the first to feel that the physical-sensual world and its material economic factors are the only reality, that the other things that arise in the soul are Maya, ideology. Socialism merely articulated what others also felt but did not dare to express. Under socialism, it has only emerged that the whole world of law, of custom, of art, of science, all that is called the spiritual life of man, is an ideology, a maja, for the newer humanity of the West. How did this basically genuinely Western view come to this climax? It has come about because more and more has emerged within modern economic life that which is referred to as modern private capitalism. This modern private capitalism has created the mood in economic life that has ultimately transformed our entire social system into a kind of acquisition society. Bit by bit, we have seen it come about over the last few centuries, how the current economic conditions have arisen from earlier ones. Even if people today do not pay attention to it, in earlier centuries there was a much greater interest in the objects and products of the environment, in everything that was part of the law and the economy, than there is today.

There was a much deeper factual interest than there is today. Owning this or that object because it has this or that form, because it has this or that origin, because it bears this or that signature, that was a human interest in earlier times to a much greater degree than it is today, where this objective human interest in external arrangements is often clouded and obscured by the fact that people arrange their home according to what they acquire purely for the sake of money and capital in the competitive struggle for survival. Torn away from the admiration for the beauty of what people create, torn away from the value of something simply because it was made by a human being, the interest of a large number of people today is in being able to see from their annual balance sheet whether they are in an active balance with their surroundings. That is a somewhat radical way of putting it, but it is the economic signature of the present. And this economic signature has given rise to another with regard to the concept of human labor. If we look back just a short time, we find how people, so to speak, allowed their work to grow together with their products. You can feel this when you are in a museum, standing in front of old door handles, old locks, even old boots. You can tell from the objects how the work of man has flowed into them. Today, the work of man is separate from the product; that is why most of the products that people delight in are so ugly. Today, human labor is something that has market value only in that it is rewarded with a certain payment. Today, human labor is what is calculated primarily according to its market value. And so, with regard to the administration of goods, the capitalist competition for the administration of goods, and with regard to his relationship to his work, man has become detached from the world. He stands, as it were, beside the machine, stuck in the soul-deserting capitalism of modern times, without connection to the external reality that he sees around him, which he cannot deny, and which has even become the only reality for him. And he cannot believe that what arises within him, the spiritual and soul-like, torn away from nature and economic order, is anything other than a Maja, an ideology. This is what the modern economic order has done.

The modern proletariat has grown into this modern economic order, has been pushed into it, especially over the last three to four centuries, gradually pushed in to the extent that it is in it today. This detachment from external reality has reached a climax in the development of humanity in modern times. One could demonstrate this in detail, how man has gradually, I might say, been alienated from himself. You see, today one can speak with countless members of the proletariat – if one has learned to think and feel with the proletariat, then one hears from their mouths also that which moves them above all – but then one hears you often hear: Above all, it must not be the case that we work all day and work with our hands and that our souls remain empty, because we come home tired in the evening and can do nothing but fall down and lie down. We want a reasonable working hours. And from what has been done with the working hours of people in recent centuries, which has now improved, the demand for an eight-hour working day emerges: 6 X 8 is 48, the 48-hour week. This is something that people who work want to achieve today. People talk about it: yes, of course, something like that is being striven for, humanity must move forward, but in the old days people had it even worse. In the old days, people had to work even harder, they were even more like beasts of burden. – I can share with you a decree from King Ferdinand I of Austria from the year 1550. In this decree it says: Every worker shall – and I ask you to pay particular attention to the following words – every worker shall work as has been the custom for many years, mornings and afternoons, with the exception of Sunday and Saturday afternoons, half a shift, that is, four hours. That makes 1550 hours for the year: 5 mornings of 8 hours (a half-shift in the morning and a half-shift in the afternoon, each of 4 hours) and 1 half-shift on Saturday of 4 hours, which adds up to 44 hours in the week for the year 1550. And of these 44 hours in the week, it is said: each laborer should work “as has been the custom for ages.” It is pointed out that this is the old custom. The modern age has not only brought us what is so celebrated from the progress of humanity; the modern age has also brought us the fact that we have to reclaim what already existed. These things should, I think, make us think! And under the influence of such things, especially the influence of the endeavor to extract as much as possible from work, this clinging of the Western man to physical sensual reality as the only reality has arisen. From this arose the feeling that the spiritual and soul is Maya, is ideology. But this has also brought about the modern proletariat's being placed in mere economic life. And so the great error of the modern proletariat has arisen. This modern proletariat was harnessed into economic life by the leading and guiding circles. They had to say to themselves: In this economic life, the soul is desolate, in this economic life, spirit is only smoke and sound, maya. We must have a different economic life. We must reshape economic life. From the reshaped economic life will emerge a spiritual life that is not a class spiritual life, but a universal human spiritual life.

It is not surprising that the modern proletariat has fallen prey to this error, because it was completely pushed into economic life. What it had was only born out of economic life. For the proletariat, the other world was a Maja, an ideology. As a proletariat, it could believe nothing other than that the only economic life it knew was merely to be transformed. Then everything else would fall into place by itself. Instead of – and this could not be the case at first, it could only arise from the lessons of the bloody world war – instead of saying to themselves, it is our situation that is to blame for the fact that we have only and solely entered into economic life, that this economic life has made the spiritual life dependent on itself, so in the future the spiritual life must no longer be dependent on the economic life, it must be freely based on itself - instead of drawing these radical conclusions, the proletariat drew the other: a different economic life will certainly arise, that will certainly produce a different spiritual life.

Today we are facing a great turning-point: either the proletariat will bring about its own misfortune if it remains only in the economic sphere and wants to transform only that, or it must realize what other people must realize with it , namely that spiritual life, as it is projected by the threefold social organism, must be taken out of the state and economic life, so that it is detached from them and placed on its own feet, in its own self-government.

And what has become of it? Through these influences, which I have just characterized, what has become of this Occidental belief that the spiritual-mental is Maya, the ideology, and that the outer economic life is the only reality? This has become what then found its ingenious expression in Marxism, because ingeniousness is also characterized by the fact that it produces not only the greatest positive achievements of humanity, but also the greatest errors. The view has become: Since you can't conjure into reality with the mind, with the thought, with what you ideologically develop – because only spiritualists believe that you just need to have a thought and then machines will move – since you can't work with thoughts, can't produce physical products, you can't control economic life with thoughts either. Therefore, economic life moves forward by itself alone. And if that is the only reality, then it must produce by itself what is to be achieved for humanity. Hence the Marxist doctrine – even if it is not stated by Marx, because Marx was not a “Marxist”, as he himself said, in the sense of many of his followers – hence the doctrine that at most can be promoted by man, what is brought about by the production process, by the economic-material process, by the external institutions themselves, but that all real progress actually takes place independently of man through the economic forces and factors themselves. This has developed into Western fatalism, into the belief that external reality will take care of itself without humans. The capitalists, for example, will concentrate the means of production more and more; the concentration of the means of production is taking place, and when these are sufficiently concentrated, they will automatically enter into the new socialization. The expropriation of the expropriators will take place. Fatalistic belief, combating as utopian all that is aware and convinced that man is the one who makes history, that what is to become action must first live in human thought – the drowsiness of the Oriental from his ancient spiritual life goes parallel to the fatalism of the Western majority in the belief that economic conditions will do it, one has only to wait and see how the development takes place. Is it not the case that we are clearly at a major turning point in human development? Fatalism in the East – fatalism among the most advanced people in the West. Fatalism here, fatalism there. A new force must flourish from what is in decline on both sides. How can we muster faith in the further development of humanity if we are unable to believe that something can arise from this mutual fatalism that will bring new impulses and new developmental forces for humanity? It is out of this faith that the ideas for the threefold social organism arose. Out of this belief, out of this belief in progress and in the development of humanity, arose the consideration of the world from two points of view: How does one engage with modern institutions, especially in economic life? How does one engage with modern spiritual life, so that it does not remain an appendage of economic and state life, but so that it becomes a free impulse in the development of humanity?

I believed that in the early 1890s the world would understand from the events of the time the impulse to point to the depths of human nature, from which a new, liberated spiritual life can gradually develop. And I tried to express this belief in my Philosophy of Freedom, which was first published in 1894. I did not reprint this Philosophy of Freedom even though it had long been out of print, because I could see that the ideas contained in it were not met with understanding, at least not during the decades immediately preceding the world war catastrophe. In particular, there was no response in Central Europe, where people were always saying, “We need the sun,” but they did not want to include the longing for a spiritual sun in this saying. And it was only when the belief arose that people could gain a new understanding of spiritual freedom from the lessons of the terrible world war catastrophe that I was impelled to produce the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” that is now available. For in what has been expressed, again and again, from subconscious, not conscious, depths of human nature in modern times, which is particularly expressed in the things that the modern proletariat now feels, although it cannot yet consciously express them because it has been deprived of education to do so, there is a threefold. There is the dark feeling that the external institutions of legal and economic life have taken on a form in which I, as a human being, am so constrained that I am merely inhibited, and that there is basically no point in of free will in the modern competitive market, where everyone must either acquire capitalistically or by wage labor, where all connection is dead between what man must do, that is, what he works, and what is then the product. There is no sense of connection: I am connected to the world in such a way that my will is free. One felt an inhibition of the will. And then, when one looked at one's relationship to other people: to a climax seems to have come under modern capitalist competition, under the forced labor of the newer times in the wage relationship, to a climax seems to have come what one can call a dwindling of trust from person to person. In the most extreme sense, anti-social instincts have taken the place of the old social instincts, which at least still existed in some form. These anti-social instincts have finally led to a lack of understanding between the modern classes of humanity, and have created the abyss between the proletariat and the non-proletariat, which is so difficult to bridge in modern times. This has given rise to the second experience of the inner man in modern times, the oppression with regard to the sense of right and wrong. And to this was added a third, which I already hinted at at the beginning of my discussion today: People saw each other exchanging their economic goods, they saw what lived in the exchange of these economic goods being entered on the left and right side of the books. But, as even Mr. von Moellendorff had to admit, no thought was given to the institutions of economic life. The third experience of the soul: It was as if one were plunged into darkness when looking into the maelstrom of modern markets, where the real thing for people was only what was acquired in a capitalist way. These have been the three experiences in modern times: the inhibition of free will, because there was nothing in which one could develop free will; complete oppression of the sense of right and obscuration of thought with regard to the external institutions of legal and economic life.

That was the feeling that gave rise to the impulse – it may have been weak and clumsy, it may still be weak and clumsy today, I readily admit – that gave rise to the impulse to seek the essence of the free human being, the human being who feels so integrated into the human order that he can say to himself: I lead a dignified human existence. The impulse to seek the essence of this free human being, the essence of the free spiritual human being, in the sense that all people can be such free spiritual human beings within the institutions of modern legal and economic life. One thing emerged above all others. People ask so easily and have asked again and again for centuries, and philosophers have speculated about it and countless opinions have been formed about it: Is man free according to his will, or is he not free? Is he a mere creature of nature who can only act out of the mechanical impulses of his inner being? The question has always been approached wrongly because more and more in the West the feeling for the actual reality of spiritual life has faded. For the Orient, the question of freedom or unfreedom has almost no significance; it plays no role at all there. In the West, it became the fundamental question of world view and ultimately even of political life, yes, of criminal law and so on. And one thing was not realized – you can read in detail about the individual steps that lead to this train of thought and this realization in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” – one thing was not realized, namely that the question “Is man free or is he not free?” actually makes no sense at all, that it must be put differently, that it must be put like this: Is man, from his birth onward, through an education appropriate to his nature, to be developed in accordance with education and schooling in such a way that, despite external legal and economic institutions, something can arise within him as an experience that makes him a free being? Yes, that not only makes him a free being inwardly, but that develops the power of freedom in him to such a strength that he can then also set up the external legal and economic life in his own way? This arose as a basic impulse in modern developing humanity, on the one hand the democratic urge for equal rights for all, on the other hand the social urge: I will help you as you should help me. But one felt: such a social order with “equal rights for all” and with “help me as I want and must help you,” such a social order can only be established by people who, as free people, as free spiritual people, develop a true relationship to the whole of reality.

One must first understand that man is born neither free nor unfree, but that he can be educated and developed towards freedom, towards an understanding of freedom, towards experiencing freedom, if one brings him into contact with that spiritual life that imbues him with forces that first set him free in his development as a human being; that one can develop up to the point where our thoughts are no longer abstract, unreal, ideological, but thoughts that are grasped by the will. This is what I tried to present to the world as a realization in my Philosophy of Freedom: the marriage of the will with thoughts that have become inwardly free. And from this marriage of the will with the inwardly freed thoughts, it is to be hoped that the human being emerges who also develops the abilities, in living together with others, that is, in a social community, each for himself and each socially with each other, to produce such legal and economic orders that one accepts as necessary, just as one accepts the necessity of having to carry one's physical body, of obeying its laws, and not being free to grow one's right hand on the left side and vice versa, or one's head in the middle of one's chest. We do not fight against what is naturally reasonable out of our freedom. We fight against what is inhuman and unnatural about human legal and economic institutions with our freedom when we have come to the appropriate awareness, because we know that it can be done differently. And we know and want to know, as modern people, that every human being should work democratically on this transformation of the external economic and legal order to such a rationality that it does not impair our freedom any more than it impairs the natural lawfulness of our physical body. To understand this, however, one must have a heart and mind for the reality of spiritual life, because the kind of spiritual life that is an appendage of state and economic life, the kind of spiritual life that one acquires only if one is the son of rich people or has received state scholarships, or for the sake of acquiring a state position, this kind of spiritual life does not make one free. A spiritual life that stands on its own, that works out of its own strength, that is free, and that produces, in contrast to those moods, those three moods: inhibition of the will, oppression of the sense of right, obscuration of thoughts, which are present when the will is unfree, the other mood: the free development of the will in spiritual life.

If what I have described here in a series of lectures comes about as a free spiritual life, a spiritual life with self-administration of the pedagogical-didactic in the threefolded social organism, then the human being will no longer feel his will inhibited, but will be surrounded by an atmosphere generated from this free spiritual life, so that he will say to himself, this free spiritual life also accepts my will as a free one. And from the understanding of the self-governing spiritual life will emerge what the new social impulses are, which consist in the mutual, true, objective tolerance and understanding of one person by another in the field of the second link of the social organism, the constitutional state, where every person, provided they are mature, faces every other person as an equal. And thirdly, as we shall see in more detail the day after tomorrow, there will emerge a structure of economic life such that those who work in this economic life, from the highest intellectual worker to the last manual laborer, will participate socially as independent, free human individuals, so that the time when people were plunged into darkness at the thought of economic life will be replaced by the time when the reasonable action of works councils, the economy will be regulated by the rational activity of workers' councils, transport councils and economic councils, where the individual human being will no longer be at the mercy of the hazards of supply and demand and the crisis-prone nature of the capital economy, but where the individual human being will stand in life as an economic agent alongside other human beings; where fair distribution of prices and work will arise out of reason, so that we can place ourselves as free human beings in that which is once necessary in economic life. And just as we place ourselves in the body in its natural necessity, so man will achieve his freedom in modern democratic socialism, in modern social democracy.

To achieve this true humanity, it is necessary to overcome the old party patterns, the old party opinions, which, in the face of today's human demands, are nothing but mummies of thought and judgment. Truly, those who constantly speak of the fact that I want to use what underlies the threefold social organism to promote myself, know me badly. Oh, I would much rather have remained in quiet Dornach, where I worked before coming here, on a work that is very close to my heart, and I stand here only against my subjective will, out of the realization that today, in the face of the old party programs and party thoughts, which are mummies and which gather in the holiest unity from the extreme right to the extreme left, that it is a duty to work against these mummies as far as I can. I admit that it may be weak, then it may be fought factually and something better may be put in its place, but as a duty one must feel it towards the old and towards the new facts, to put a new thing before humanity. It does not seem to me at all as if humanity would not long for this new thing, as if humanity would not actually want this new thing to appear. For what is the real aim of this idea, this practice of the threefold social organism? They want people to finally understand that we are living in a time of great reckoning, in which the three main areas of human life, spiritual life, political or legal life, and economic life, have been set in motion and have become restless, and that we need a reorganization, a transformation of these three areas of our general human life.

So what does the idea of the threefold social organism want? Perhaps with weak, insufficient, or defective forces, then one may improve them objectively, may deal with them objectively. It wants a formulation of what is to become reality in order to bring about the necessary transformation of political life, economic life, and spiritual life.

Now, the Social Democratic Party Congress is meeting in Weimar, the party congress of the party that professes to want to transform modern life in the appropriate sense. And a minister, even the Reich Minister for Socialization, spoke the following words to the Social Democrats in Weimar: We need not only a political revolution, but also an economic and spiritual one. Whoever finds the formulation that also mobilizes the spiritual and moral forces in the people will bind them to his banners. The League for the Threefold Social Organism may still be insufficient, then it will be happy to make way for others who can do better, but the fact that at least the same direction must be taken as the League for the Threefold Social Organism is acting in, is admitted before its party members even by the present Reich Minister for Socialization, Wissell. And from his words: We need not only a political, but also an economic and spiritual revolution —, one may well hear that we at least, even if we cannot do it in a sufficient sense, at least we want what these people must also want when they are clear about the demands of the present in a spiritually clear moment. But then, if that is the case, it must not happen, as I very much fear it will, that people of Mr. Wissell's ilk, when they get hold of the writings of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, do as other party members do: they say, “Well, we agree completely, but we will fight it tooth and nail.” We would agree if someone came along who did it better so that we could step down. But that is not the point. The point is not to fight things that you yourself have to describe as necessary, but if you want to do something about them, to do it better. And you can be sure that the appearance of this idea of the threefold social order is based on the attitude that arises, firstly, from the necessity of this threefold order in the present, and that arises from the realization that something must happen before it is too late. Therefore, she calls out to all those who want to fight this threefold order of the social organism: All right, we'll step down, but you do better if you yourselves have to admit that the threefold order of the social organism is a necessity!

Closing remarks.

No one wishes to join the discussion. Dr. Unger therefore asks Dr. Steiner to say a few final words.

Dr. Steiner: Dear attendees! I would just like to point out that despite some resistance, which has come precisely from party circles, it is nevertheless a success that some impulses in the field of economic life have already come from the Federation for the Threefold Social Order, and that, after all, some things have already happened in the direction of taking economic life into hand, of taking economic institutions into hand on the part of the people involved in this economic life. What form this should and must take will be discussed further the day after tomorrow. But the matter must not be taken in such a way that if one of the three limbs of the social organism shows a little that it is actually taking effect, then the others can sleep. If something is conceived as seriously as this threefold social order, then the one-sided success of one part of it is the greatest failure of the whole. Nothing endangers the threefold social order more than if only the advancement of one area, such as the economic, succeeds. Therefore, the present most serious concern of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism is that a spiritual movement should join the economic movement, within which we stand as the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism, whether it is called a “cultural council” or a “spiritual council” or whatever, it is unimportant, that a large number of people should join, we have once distributed an appeal here “To All People,” because culture is actually a matter for all people —, an association of people, then, for whom the reorganization of our school and education system, in particular, is close to their hearts, so close to their hearts that they see how the free development of human physical and spiritual abilities is inhibited in the school system, which is clamped by the state. Therefore, the Federation for Threefolding fights for the liberation of the school system, for the self-administration of the school system from bottom to top. For this to happen in the right way, it is necessary that as many people as possible demand this self-administration of the entire educational system, indeed of the entire spiritual life, in public. To avoid the one-sided pursuit of economic forces from becoming a failure, it is the concern of the alliance to now bring together people who will work on this liberation of the school and spiritual life, the educational system. In doing so, there should be no dogmatism whatsoever. On the contrary, the more opinions are expressed and the more intelligent ideas are brought forward, the better. We shall not become inflexible in any self-made dogma, but shall be open to everything that may come from an informed mind. But anyone who believes that the new formations today also include those of intellectual life should actually feel the inclination, feel the necessity, to join others in such a union of people to form a kind of intellectual or cultural council, or whatever one wants to call it.

We have by no means failed to approach the positive as much as we can with our forces. There is a project here in Stuttgart that will probably be implemented as early as the fall: with the help of teachers who understand a truly humanistic concept of development conceived in the sense of a spiritualized anthropology, to bring about a truly comprehensive school that is not based on state omnipotence but on the development of the free human being. We hope that we will be able to bring such a school into existence here in Stuttgart for a small group – it should not be a “class school”, it will be a proletarian school – a school that, as far as it is already possible under today's conditions, will strictly reflect the views of the threefold social order in its pedagogy and didactics. The aim will be to develop the human being so that he grows into a truly free spiritual being. The aim will be to develop the forces that one has to develop in a human being between the ages of seven and fifteen in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing are cultivated to the full extent that they can be cultivated in these years of life, so that later life and its destiny cannot break these forces again. For anyone with sufficient psychological insight will notice how much of our present time, how much of the damage of our present time depends on the fact that thinking, feeling and willing are not developed with sufficient strength in the corresponding very young years of life, so that they cannot be broken later by the blows of fate in life. More than one might think, the undeveloped powers of the soul are crushed by our present-day cultural conditions; and more than one might think depends on these things in our circumstances, in relation to our decline.

I only want to point out this one example so that you can see that we are not visionaries, not ideologues, but that we want to work practically in all areas as far as our limited strength allows. But in order that such things may not remain isolated, and that by degrees our whole spiritual life may become free, it is necessary that many people with many opinions, many insights and knowledge and practices should join us in the cultural council or similar organization. This is what I did not clearly express in today's lecture, but it was the underlying desire that there should also be enough people in this spiritual link of the three-part social organism who, working together in this field, might achieve something of what is necessary in our time, which is not a small reckoning but a great one. For we do indeed need a transformation of conditions in the economic, political and spiritual spheres. If we cannot bring ourselves to work actively in this direction before it is too late, then it will have to be too late! And that would be the most terrible thing that could arise from this world war catastrophe. But if it leads many people to the realization that we must develop the strong will to reshape all three areas of life, then, even if not for the immediate present, then at least for the future of humanity, something great will come out of this will, and thus something great will come out of the disaster of the world war, even if it is not in the full sense. And we, as Germans, wedged between the Orient and the Occident, have this great task, to understand what is most in danger of falling asleep there and there and to awaken it from the center. And I believe that this is the best patriotism today, which will ultimately prevail against all that threatens us from the murky swamps of Versailles, in that what can prevail in the center between the East and the West will be that we will let arise from Germany's great time - from our Lessing , Herder, Schiller, Goethe, from the great period of our German philosophy, which summarizes German essence in its own way, the philosophy of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, from the period of the German Romantics - that we allow to emerge, to shine forth, what our task is after the terrible experiences of the last years. This task is to awaken a spiritual life that is capable of shaping the material world reasonably and humanely and an economic life, a material life, that is capable of giving people the freedom to live a free spiritual life!

Those of you who heard the last lectures given here will have understood from what was said in them that it is an absolute necessity of our time that the Science of Initiation, the real science of the spiritual life, should permeate the whole evolution of our present civilized society. I have already said much concerning the obstacles which hinder the permeation of our civilization, both present and in the future, by the science of the spiritual worlds. First, above all things, there is that feeling which I have often characterized as fear of spiritual knowledge. At the present time one has only to say such a thing openly for it to be received on all sides as a kind of insult. According to the views of most people, how can it be conceivable that in this age in which such splendid progress has been made, men should be afraid of any kind of knowledge? People today undoubtedly believe that with their powers of cognition they are in a position to comprehend everything, practically everything. The fear, however, of which I am speaking and of which I have so often spoken, does not lie within the consciousness of mankind. In his consciousness man persuades himself that he is courageous enough to face any kind of knowledge. But deep down in that part of the soul of which men know nothing, and of which indeed they wish today to know nothing, there lies this unconscious fear. And because men have this unconscious fear, all kinds of reasons rise up from the depths of their soul which they call logical, and they give out these reasons as logical objections to Spiritual Science. These are not logical objections. They are only the outcome of that fear of the science of the spirit, a fear which rules unconsciously in human souls. As a matter of fact, in the hidden depths of his soul-life everyone knows far more than he thinks, but he does not want this knowledge, which is rooted in the depths of his soul-life, to come to the surface, because in the presence of it he is afraid. Above all things man surmises one thing about the super-sensible worlds; he surmises that in all that he calls his thinking, in all that he designates as his world of thought, there is something contained of a super-sensible world. At the present time, even persons of a materialist turn of mind cannot altogether drive away the dim feeling that in the life of thought there is something contained which somehow indicates a super-sensible world. And at the same time man surmises something else about this thought-world. He divines that this world of thought relates itself to an actual reality, just as the image seen in a looking glass relates itself to the reality reflected by the looking glass. Just as the image in the looking glass is no reality, so man has to admit that his own world of thought is no reality. In that moment where man has the courage, the fearlessness, to admit that the world of thought is not a reality, in that moment he is also seized with yearning for a knowledge of the spiritual world. For after all, one would like to know what it is that is really there, but of which one only sees the reflection.

What I have just said has an important polaric counterpart. When through the Science of Initiation we cross the threshold of the super-sensible world, over into the spiritual world, then everything which man experiences here as sensible reality is transformed to a mere picture, to an appearance. We mount up into the super-sensible world and just as, let us say, here on earth the super-sensible world is a mirror-picture, existing only as a mirror-picture, so in the super-sensible world the earthly world exists only as a mirror-picture. He, therefore, who speaks from the Science of Initiation, speaks quite naturally of the realities of the sense world as of “pictures”. Now, human beings feel this; they feel that that on which they can stand so comfortably, that which they can breathe in so comfortably, which they can see so comfortably without having to do anything else than, at most, open their eyes when they get up in the morning and rub them—all this becomes a mere picture. They feel this and they begin to feel insecure, much as a man might who, taken for a walk, is led to the edge of an abyss and is then seized by the dizziness of fear. On the one side therefore, the human being feels that his thinking in the sense-world is a mere sum-total of pictures. On the other side he feels—and he feels it even if he deceives himself through that unconscious fear—that that which is told him of the super-sensible world makes this physical world a mere picture. As I have said, this is felt by men, and therefore they struggle against that which comes from the Science of Initiation. They rebel because they think that the secure foundation of existence falls away from them when their soul-life is, as it were, transformed to a mere picture.

Of course, it is not everybody in our present age who, quite unprepared, can go through that which has to be gone through by one who actually directly enters the world of Initiation. For anyone who enters the world of Initiation must not only know in it what every human being today should strive to know, but he has to live in it as well. He has to live in it, just as a man lives with his body in the physical sense world. That means he has to go through, as it were, by proxy what is only to be gone through in the physical sense-world at the moment of death. He has to gain the power to live in a world for which the physical, sensible part of him is not adapted. If we cut our finger we feel a certain pain, a discomfort. Why do we feel discomfort when we cut our finger? For the simple reason that the knife cuts the skin and muscle and nerve, but does not cut the super-sensible etheric body. If we have an uninjured finger, our super-sensible etheric body is adapted to it. If we cut the finger (and we cannot cut the etheric body) the super-sensible uncut etheric body is not adapted to it. That is the reason why the astral body then feels pain. The pain comes from non-adaptability to the sensible corporality. But when man crosses the threshold and enters the super-sensible world, then in his whole body he is no longer adapted to the sensible body. He gradually feels something similar to what he felt locally when he cut his finger. And this, my dear friends, this has to be thought of as enhanced to an unlimited degree.

Naturally, then, one cannot imagine what would come over human beings of the present-day, who often are so brave in their consciousness, and so sorry for themselves in their souls, if they suddenly received the power to live in the super-sensible world, if they had to experience everything which comes from non-adaptability to the super-sensible world.

But not only are human beings today so far advanced that with their healthy human understanding they can comprehend everything related by those who know the life in the super-sensible, but this knowledge of the super-sensible, this receptivity towards the science of the super-sensible, is an absolute, an unconditional, necessity for the healthy human understanding of the present age. Only this knowledge of the super-sensible can throw light upon all that is so chaotic, so destructive, in our modern surroundings. We are living in a world in which things are making their appearance, in which things are working themselves out, of which we must say: “They cannot go on like this, they must undergo transformation.” But human beings today have absolutely no insight into that which lives around them. To see through that which lives around man today is only possible through the Science of Initiation, is only possible when all the life of our present age can be compared with all the phenomena of life which have marked the evolution of mankind in the course of centuries, of millennia.

There has come a time when it must be said publicly that if any fruitful impulse is to be brought into life, into life with its modern destructive phenomena, it can be no other than the principle of the Three-fold Division of the Social Organism. By this means the eyes of men's souls will be directed to the three basic streams of our present life of civilization.

These three basic streams, as most of you today are fully aware, are the stream of the Spiritual Life (in the full meaning of the word spiritual), and that of the Political Life of Rights, and that of the external Life of Economy and Industry.

When these three basic streams of life are placed before the soul of man, when the name for each of these streams is uttered, in each case a great sum-total of the phenomena of Life is really included.

Let us now pass briefly before our spiritual vision these three streams in their sequence. We have today a Spiritual Life. In one way or another each individual has a part in this spiritual life: One, perhaps because his way of life is conditioned by economic circumstances or civic status, goes only to an elementary school; another perhaps is taken further on in our educational institutions. And that which is learnt in this way by human beings lives on at work amongst us in our social life. By this means we are linked to our fellow man.

Today the time has come when the question has to be put searchingly: “Where has this whole spiritual life come from, and what was it in the course of its descent, in the course of its evolution, which gave to it the character which it bears today?” If we go back to the real origin of this spiritual life, we must pass through certain stages on the way. That which characterizes the life of our schools, elementary and higher—I am leaving out the intermediate stages for the present—all goes back to a far-distant past. People usually do not know how far it goes back, e.g., in the case of the elementary school, that that goes back to the time of ancient Greece. Fundamentally our spiritual life today is nourished by impulses which existed in ancient Greece in a somewhat different form, and which have only been changed since then. But these impulses did not originate even in ancient Greece. They originated far away in the East. Thousands of years ago at their source in the East they had certainly another form than they had in ancient Greece. In the East these impulses belonged to the Wisdom of the Mysteries. If we leave aside our legal-political life, which is entangled chaotically as in a knot with the spiritual life, and also leave aside the life of industry, of economics; if we separate, abstract from these our spiritual life, then we can go back, mounting the path to certain Mysteries of the East, the origin of which lies undoubtedly thousands of years ago. That, however, which for us today in educational institutions is a dry barren abstraction, devoid of life, was then something altogether living. And if we transport ourselves in spirit back to those Mysteries of the East to which I am now referring, we meet as the leaders of these Mysteries men who may be designated as a kind of union of priest, of king, and at the same time, strange as it may sound to people today, of industrialists, economists. For in those Mysteries—I shall call them the “Mysteries of Light or of the Spirit”- an all-embracing knowledge of life was pursued, a knowledge which, in the first place, aimed at directing the study of the nature of man by means of the facts of the world of the Heavens, and the world of the Stars. But this knowledge was also a wisdom which aimed at regulating the rights of man's communal life in accordance with the knowledge thus acquired. Thus from these Mystery centres instruction was given for the tending of the cattle, for ploughing the fields, for laying the water courses, and so on. This Science of Initiation of hoary antiquity had an impelling power for social life; it was something which gave scope to the whole man. It was in a position not merely to say lovely things about the good and the true, but also by the Spirit itself it could rule practical life, could organize it and give it form.

Now the path which these Mystery leaders took and, which so far as was possible to them, showed to the people who belonged to such a Mystery, was a path leading from above downwards. First, these Mystery leaders strove for a revelation of the spiritual world, then grasping the spirit in the concrete in accordance with the basic principles of atavistic clairvoyance, they worked down to the political life, to the political shaping of the social organism, then down to economy and industry. That was Wisdom, with impelling force for life itself. By what road did this wisdom with its impelling life-force actually come among mankind?

If we go back to the ages before the Mysteries to which I am now referring became authoritative, we find in the regions of civilized humanity people with a primeval atavistic clairvoyance, human beings who, if they spoke of the needs of life, could invoke the impressions of their heart, of their soul, of their inner vision. These people were spread over the regions now called India, Persia, Armenia, North Africa, South Europe, etc. One thing, however, we do not find in the souls of these human beings. It is that which today we consider our proudest soul-treasure—Intellect, Reason. The inhabitants of the civilized world of that time did not yet need reason. What our reason does today, was done by those human beings out of the promptings of their souls, and these promptings were guided and directed by the leaders whom these men had. Later there came into these regions another human race, quite a different race from the earlier population. In the Sagas and Myths, and indeed also in history, we are told that from the highlands of Asia certain people came down in very ancient times who brought a form of civilization to the south and south-west. Spiritual Science is required to establish what kind of men these were who came down upon those earlier human beings, who simply from their own inner promptings received the guiding powers for daily life. Through investigation by Spiritual Science we find that those who brought in a new population-element combined two qualities, one of which the earlier people did not possess. The original inhabitants had atavistic clairvoyance without reason, without intelligence. Those who came down amongst them also had something of the clairvoyant power, but at the same time in their souls they had received the first germ of intelligence, of reason. They brought, therefore, into the civilization of that time, a clairvoyance impregnated with reason. These were the first Aryans, of whom history tells us, and out of the mutual opposition of the ancient early people living by atavistic powers of the soul, and those who impregnated the ancient soul-powers with reason, out of that opposition there arose the first distinction into Caste, external, physical and empirical, which still works on in Asia, and of which Tagore, for instance, speaks.

The most prominent members of the race, who possessed at the same time ancient soul-vision and the intellect which was dawning in humanity, were the leaders of those Mysteries of which I have just spoken, the Mysteries of Oriental Light. From these proceeded the Mysteries of Greece. Thus we may say: From the Mysteries of the East there went forth later the stream of the Spirit, that living wisdom with its living practical impulse of which I have just spoken. In the course of time it came over to Greece. Its influence is still to be traced in the most ancient Greek civilization. But in the progress of Greek civilization the influence became weakened, the leaders lost their ancient soul-vision, and reason more and more freed itself from the old clairvoyance. Thereby the leadership of this civilization lost its meaning, because this once only had meaning as long as the leaders were endowed with spiritual soul-vision as well as intelligence. History tells us that that which had a meaning in ancient times is preserved into a much later epoch. Thus we find humanity in the later Greek civilization still grouped in a way which had a meaning for that ancient time, when the leaders of the Mysteries were actually messengers of the Gods. That which once was wisdom with an impulse for life, was transformed into Greek logic and dialectic, into the wisdom of the Greeks, wisdom which is already strained thin compared with its old Oriental origin. In the old Oriental times every one knew why there were people who obeyed when the leaders gave them directions in economics. In Greece we find the division into masters and slaves. The division of mankind was still there, but the meaning had been gradually lost. And that which for the Greeks still had much meaning, for at least they knew that it came from the ancient Mysteries, was still more weakened as it passed into our modern life of education. In our modern life of education, everything has become devoid of living connection. We pursue today an abstract science. We find no longer a connection between this abstract science and external life. The stream from Greece has gone into our Colleges, into our elementary and secondary schools, into the whole popular cultural life of modern humanity. One curious thing may be observed today. We meet among the men with whom we are surrounded some whom we call “noblemen”, “aristocrats”. We try in vain to find the reason why one person is an aristocrat and another is not, for mankind has long stripped off that which distinguishes the aristocrat from the non-aristocrat. The aristocrat was the leader in the old Oriental Mysteries of Light. He could be the aristocrat, because from him came everything which had a real living impulse in political and economic affairs. The wisdom has become watered thin, the divisions into which it made groups of people have become an external abstraction without meaning for those whose lives are cast in it. From that stream proceeded what we call Feudalism. In external social life this Feudalism lives on, tolerated by some, perhaps vexatious to others, meaningless. No one thinks any more about the meaning, because it is not to be found in life today, but in our modern age of chaos the feudal origin of our abstract science and knowledge shows itself pretty clearly. And when our modern Spiritual life became entirely the spiritual life of the journalistic world, a term was invented which really is a verbal atrocity. Through this term men sought to bring about a transformation of our life, but it was merely the expression of an utterly rickety spiritual life—they invented the term, “spiritual aristocracy”. If anyone tried to explain exactly what is meant by this term he could only say: “It is that which now squeezed dry to the uttermost had once upon a time in the Mysteries of the East, an impelling force which worked down into the furthest limits of practical life.” The term in those days had a meaning, but today it has lost all meaning. And if anyone wishes to describe our Spiritual life, he has to think of a desperately tangled coil of wool where all the threads are twisted together. There are three threads in particular which are entangled. One of them I have just described to you. Our essential task is to unravel the tangle.

Let us now turn the eyes of our soul to the second stream. This second stream had another origin, which also lies far back in the evolution of mankind; it, too, was essentially united with the Mysteries, and in particular with the Mysteries of Egypt. I called the first stream “the Mysteries of the East” or “the Mysteries of Light”. I shall call this second stream “the Mysteries of Man”. These Mysteries were directed above all to obtaining at the Egyptian source, that Wisdom which gives the power to organize human communal life, to establish a relation between one human being and another. This stream from the Mysteries spread through the South of Europe, and then, just as the first stream went through the life of Greece, this second stream found its way to the people of Rome, a people lacking in imagination. I might call it “the stream of Rights”. It took its path through Rome. All that which, bit by bit, in the course of human evolution has been inoculated as Jurisprudence, as legal distinctions in Equity, is the attenuated remnant of knowledge of these Mysteries of Man.

The second thread in our tangle of civilization has come to us in this way, but very much changed, transformed after having passed through the unimaginative mind of Rome. We shall not understand modern life, until we know that men even today are still unproductive both in the life of Spirit and in the life of Rights; until we know that both of these have been received by us from outside—the first after it had traveled the long way from the Mysteries of the East through the Mysteries of Greece, the second, the long way from the Mysteries of Egypt through Rome. Present-day humanity has been sterile with regard to both the life of Spirit and the life of Rights. We could bring forward many cases to prove this assertion, but it will suffice if I point out paths taken by Christianity.

When Christianity sought to enter the world, where had Christ Jesus to appear so that what He had to give to the world could find a foothold? He had to appear in the East. It was in that which lived in the East that He had to place what He had to give to humanity. The Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. What mankind knows about it is in process of evolving. What people first had to say about the Mystery of Golgotha was clothed in that which was still left to them from the Mysteries of the East. They surrounded the Mystery of Golgotha with the Science and Wisdom of the Mysteries of the East, and with that Wisdom they tried to understand it. In the early Greek Fathers of the Church we find there is still something of this Christianity.

To point to another manifestation of the same kind, when the civilization of the West had spiritually become utterly sterile, and a spiritual restorative was sought for, through one of its representatives, what happened? In England and America a few people came together and borrowed the Wisdom from the conquered and enslaved people of India. That is to say, they went once more to the East to seek there the spiritual stream, to seek in the East what remained of that ancient spiritual stream. From this arose Theosophy of the English-American dye, which sought to draw water from this source, but in the form it has assumed at the present day. It is the sterility of modern Spiritual life which strikes one most forcibly, especially in Western lands.

The second stream, then, is that which is concerned with Politics and Rights, and which passed through Rome. In it we find the origin of our life of Politics and Rights. This stream which has flowed into, and is still active in our life of Rights, only came by the side-channel of the Roman world. Hence, in our civilization, that which passed into our Spiritual life also has been received by way of the Roman political-legal system. This accounts for so many anomalies. Even Christianity, which spread in the West on Roman lines, took on a form conditioned by this fact. What did the religious element become on its passage through the Roman world? It became that great System of Law which we call the Roman Catholic religion. There, God with his attendant gods, is essentially a Being who rules according to the Roman conception of justice, only He is in the super-sensible world. Here we find established the ideas of debt, of default, which are really only legal ideas, ideas which never existed in the Mysteries of the East or in the Greek philosophy of life. In this Christianity the juristic concepts of Rome are established. It is a religious stream saturated with legalities. Everything which finds expression in life can assume a form of beauty, but we must confess that even that juristic-political scene in which the God of the World becomes the Judge of the World, and winds up the whole evolution of the earth by a legal Act, even that magnificent painting of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, is only a glorious expression of Christianity saturated by legalism. It is just this Christianity saturated by legalism, which finds its culmination in the “Last Judgment”.

We must unwind the tangle of our spiritual, political, and industrial life so that we may see what is really contained inside it. For we live in a chaotic civilization. Three streams are working in it; we must separate them from one another.

The third stream which has come into our chaotic civilization, originated more in the North. Much has filtered into it also, but in another way. This stream has been preserved till today, especially in the social organization of England and America. I shall speak of this stream as “the Mysteries of the Earth”, the Mysteries of the North or of the Earth. Now this stream which developed first as primitive spirituality out of the Mysteries of the Earth, took a different course from that of the essentially Spiritual life of the East. I have said that in the East the path led from above downwards, first revealing itself as the Mysteries of the Heavens and of the Light, then passing down into Politics and Economics. Here, in the North things rose out of Economics, out of the life of Industry. The origin has, of course, vanished from ordinary modern life. We notice it at most in ancient customs which still survive here and there; such customs as are described in accounts of ancient Nordic civilization, of which the English civilization is a branch, e.g., processions through the villages at a certain season of the year, with the bull, which has to fertilize the herd of cows, crowned with wreaths. That is to say, from below upwards there arose a longing after the Spiritual life. The path leads from below upwards. Everything, even that which existed as primitive spirituality, was taken from the industrial-economic life. All the festivals originally were connected with the life of Economy, of Industry, all expressed something of the meaning of the life of Economy. Just as in the Oriental civilization the path led from above downwards, so here, in the North, the path had to lead from below upwards. Mankind had to be raised from below, out of Economics, through the life of Rights, into the Mysteries of the Spirit. Mankind has not as yet advanced very far on this path from below upwards.

If we investigate the Legal life, the life of law and justice, as it has developed in the regions of Western Europe, we find it completely orientated to Rome. If we investigate the Spiritual life, we do not find it so plainly orientated to the East as that Indian Theosophy is of which I have just spoken. But we do find that that which has survived as innate Spiritual life which was not taken from the East, nor saturated with legalities from Rome, we do often find this original Spiritual life struggling to release itself from the Economic life, and with hard labour working itself free.

Let us take a characteristic example. Such philosophers, such students of natural science as Newton, Darwin, Hume, Mill, Spencer, can only be understood if we see how they developed out of the Economic life, how they endeavoured to take an upward path. Mill, for example, as a national economist, can only be understood if we understand the economic conditions surrounding him. We can only understand the English philosophers if we clearly grasp the economic basis of their environment. That basis is something inseparable from the third stream, the stream of “the Mysteries of the Earth”, the stream which works its way from below upwards. This, the third stream, is as yet quite unrefined.

Here then, in the tangle of our so-called civilization, we have the three threads chaotically at work. Always in a certain sense there has been a revolt against this tangle, in the West at least. In America, where the Economic life is derived from the Mysteries of the North, we find theories built up scientifically, but devoid of Spirit, alien to Spirit. America obtained her Legal-Political life by way of Rome. Spiritual concerns were borrowed from the East. In Central Europe, too, there was a good deal of revolt, and various endeavours were made to grasp these things in their primitive clarity; in the Spiritual life with most penetration in what I must call Goetheanism. Goethe, who sought to get rid of a Law-code in the sphere of natural science, Goethe is characteristic of this revolt against the purely Oriental life of Spirit. For the legal element has entered into natural science too. We speak of “Laws of Nature”. The Oriental would never have spoken of the Laws of Nature, but of the Rule of Cosmic Will. The term “Natural Law” was derived from the side-stream of Jurisprudence. It crept into nature knowledge as through a window and became “natural law”. Goethe wanted to grasp the pure phenomenon, the pure fact, the primal phenomenon. Until we purge our Natural Science from its dependence on Jurisprudence, we can never reach a purified cultural life. For this reason Spiritual Science everywhere lays hold on facts, and indicates so-called “laws” as secondary phenomena only.

We find also a certain revolt against the Roman system of Rights, a revolt which is still in the minds of many persons inclined to socialism. For instance, a Prussian minister, Wilhelm van Humbold, in his fine treatise on “The Limits of State Action”, shows stirring within him something of this impulse to free the Cultural life and the life of Economics from the mere life of the State. In that little book there lives the impulse to strip off the political from the other directing forces. Thus in German philosophy, too, there lives this revolt against that which is merely “old”. But only through a healthy insight into that which the Science of Initiation can give concerning the origin of our present cultural life, can man gain a sure foot-hold; only through such insight can healing, can health, come into the evolution of human civilization.

In the East of Europe especially, there has always been a feeling for the necessity of a right co-operation of the three elements in our present life of culture. Of these three streams the one most characteristic in expression is that which came from the North to the West. In the West everything is overpowered by the Economic-industrial life. Of the legal element there is much in Central Europe, whilst much of that which arose from the Mysteries of the East, the Mysteries of Light, is to be found in Eastern Europe and Asia. There, where the caste system still prevails, we find something of the meaning of that old Feudalism which came forth from the Spirit. The life permeated with legalities has bred the modern Bourgeoisie. The Bourgeoisie is the outcome of the stream of Rights. These things have to be seen with perfect clarity now; and the impulse towards this clear recognition lies already in the unconscious part of man, but it is only Spiritual Science which can bring this longing, this impulse, to real clarity.

In the nineteenth century, again and again, we can see how men strove amid all the confusion of very indefinite impulses, to reach ideals for the future. Men wanted especially to put an end to the abstract relations which prevail today between man and man. The life of the Spirit has been watered down so that it lives in us as an abstraction; and the life of Economics is grasping and struggling to find the way upward from below.

In Eastern Europe, where things of such disturbing, devastating significance are now working themselves out, it was shown for the first time in the much-confused nineteenth century how men attempted to prepare for the revolt against this chaos of civilization. The Russian revolutionaries of the second and last third of the nineteenth century, attempted in particular to fertilize the remnant still left in the East of an early stage of Spiritual life, with that element in Central Europe which had already revolted against tradition. We find among such Russians in their correspondence with each other, how they point out that already in Central Europe, the intellect, the pure abstract life of reason has endeavoured to permeate itself with a certain spirituality. Again and again there appears some such sentence as the following: “In German philosophy the attempt has been made once more to raise the intellect, which has lost its ancient soul-vision, to a certain spirituality.” In Eastern Europe they wanted to make themselves intimately acquainted with this attempt in Central Europe, and this intimate knowledge reflects itself in the way these Russian revolutionaries write to one another. They greatly esteemed the philosopher Ivan Petrovitch. They spoke much of his philosophy, how he had raised himself to pure thought, attempting to bring Spirit again into the dialectic play of thought of Western Culture. They tried to draw conclusions from his philosophy. The better to mark their own feeling of relationship to him, they called him not “Hegel”, but “Ivan Petrovitch”. In their endeavours we see foreshadowed that which later on had to work so destructively.

In our age, clear thinking must spread over the whole earth. Everything must be done to help forward the victory of clear thinking. But we must be quite conscious of all that is against us when we make the attempt to reach this clear thinking, and that, amongst many other things, we have against us man's love of ease. We must wean ourselves from the habit of regard for the comfort of men. For mankind needs the Spirit, and the triumph of the Spirit is not brought about by the comfortable paths so often trodden today. Today men fight against the coming in of Initiation with the most significant weapons.

I was recently informed of something which is significant in historic culture. You will correct me if I make a mistake, for I was not there myself. At a meeting where a Protestant clergyman was in the chair, one of our friends made some quotations from the Bible. The truth of these did not please the chairman, who then used the expression, “Here Christ is wrong!” Have I repeated that correctly? (Assent.) Today when one can no longer justify one's own view, it is man who is infallible, and the Christ who is wrong! We have come as far as this.

All these things bear witness to the true character of that which is stirring as Spiritual life in mankind today. Where Spiritual life has reached the most utter abstraction, it can no longer keep within the sphere of truth. But we must become aware of what really exists.

The periodical, The Threefold Social Organism, recently published a notice of a gathering held here at Stuttgart, where from the Roman Catholic side, but in harmony with the Protestant, opposition was made to the teaching given as Spiritual Science. And the leading cleric is reported to have said that no discussion was necessary because people can inform themselves concerning the doctrines of Dr. Steiner from the writings of his opponents, but the writings of Dr. Steiner himself may not be read because the Pope has forbidden it. In fact, this is the latest decree from the Holy Congregation, and it applies especially to Catholics—the decree that it is forbidden to Catholics to read Anthroposophical writings. Roman Catholics, therefore, are officially bound to seek information upon what I teach from the writings of my opponents, but they are not allowed to read what I write myself. Anyone on the other side who knows the whole constitution of the Roman Catholic Church, how the individual is so dovetailed into it that he is only a representative of the whole organization, must in all earnestness, out of the depths of his soul, bring forward the question regarding the moral aspect of such a procedure. Is such a procedure to be reconciled in any way with human morality? Is it not profoundly immoral? Such questions must be put bravely today, without any leniency. We are living in a serious time, and may not go on sleeping in the easy comfort-loving, lazy way. We must express ourselves unreservedly about these things. If we show the immorality of modern untruth in the right light, it will bring about a healing.

Recently an article by a doctor in Sociology was brought to me. It began somewhat as follows: “What a distance there is between the clear thoughts of Waxweiler and the obscure thoughts of Dr. Steiner! But then, this Dr. Steiner was the intimate of William II, and it has been suggested that he helped William II with important advice, especially in recent years. So one can even call this man the Rasputin of William II.” His next sentence runs: “We will not make ourselves the transmitters of such a rumour.” And there are today many people with this mentality, people forsaken by every spirit of truthfulness, and whatever they say is beyond the sphere of truth.

We see two things here. First, the moral degradation of a man who makes himself the bearer of this rumour, and then his fine logic when he says, “Because I spread this rumour among my readers, I do not make myself a spreader of this rumour.” Countless people think in this way. What they say has no reality in it. I cannot say, “I say something because I do not say it.” This is what Monsieur Ferriere says, the man who wrote the article from which I have just read. We cannot enter into relationship with such morally degenerate individuals. I can only maintain, and I hope that it will be brought before this writer's notice, that I have had the following relationships with William II. Once about 1897, I was sitting in a theatre in Berlin, in the middle of the front row, above, and William II sat in the Royal Box, and I saw him, as far away as from here to the end of this room. The second time was when he walked behind the coffin of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, and that was quite far away. The third time was in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, where, with his following, with the Marshal's baton in his hand, he rode through the streets, all the people shouting “Hurrah!” after him. These are all the relationships with William II, I have ever had. I have never had any others nor sought them. Thus assertions arise today, and much of what you read on paper in printer's ink is of no more value than that dirty rumour which is used to make Anthroposophy a heresy in Latin countries. Today such things have to be traced to their origin. It is not enough to take them as mere parlance. People must accustom themselves to go to the origin of what is affirmed.

A sense for the true origin of facts in the external world will only develop in mankind out of a deepening in real Spiritual Science.

When I have had occasion in recent years to speak on any of the great yearly festivals, Christmas, Easter or Whitsuntide, I have felt bound to say that we have no right, especially under the conditions that obtain today, to commemorate these occasions in the old accustomed manner; we have no right to forget the widespread suffering, the widespread sorrow of the times, and to recall only the greatest Event which took place in earthly evolution. It is our duty, standing as we do on the ground of our Spiritual conception of the World, so fully to realize all that which indicates decline in human civilization today, that this realization permeates our thoughts even round the Christmas tree. It is clearly our duty so to receive the birth of Christ Jesus into our hearts, into our souls, that we do not close our eyes to the fearful deterioration that has overtaken the so-called culture of mankind.

At this very time it is for us to bring forward the question: “Has not the thought of Christmas also suffered the fate of being seized by the forces of general deterioration?” When Christmas is spoken of today are we still conscious of that of which man ought to be conscious when he raises his thoughts and feelings to the contemplation of the festival of Christ? Are men in general conscious of the true meaning of what entered human evolution at the Mystery of Golgotha?

We light up our Christmas trees, we repeat the customary words and phrases associated with the Christmas festival, but all too often we avoid opening our eyes fully, we avoid awakening our consciousness fully to the need of saying to ourselves: “Here, too, there is decline. Where art Thou, O Christ-Power, Thou who canst actively bring about a new ascent?” For it must have been very clear to you in the lectures which for many years have been given in our circles, that only by the power of Christ will it be possible to permeate declining civilization with that impulse which can give it a new uplift.

In these days we must often think of men, in the middle of the nineteenth century, or towards the last third of it, who, from a certain materialistic mentality, spoke quite differently from the way many men speak today. They spoke more honestly than most men do today. I should like to recall to you one personality, a truly materialistic mind—David Friedrich Strauss. You know that his book, The Old Faith and the New, is a kind of Bible of materialism.

Among the questions Strauss asks in this book is the following: “Can we still be Christians?” He answers this question, and the unusual thing about his answer is that it comes from a mind fundamentally materialistic, but at the same time honest.

David Friedrich Strauss constructed a world-edifice of thoughts, of ideas, formed entirely according to materialistic, physical laws. He placed man within it in a world-order in which human nature contained none but physical laws. From these convictions, Strauss answered the question “can we still be Christians?” with an emphatic “No”. For men who held the views on natural science which Strauss held in accordance with the consciousness of his times, could not be Christians.

Thus a fatal, but entirely honest opinion is expressed in this “No” of David Friedrich Strauss, and the feeling often occurs to us today: Would that the official advocates of this or that religious faith were as honest as was David Friedrich Strauss. Could they but see that though they use the name of Christ they are really active opponents of Christianity.

My dear friends, we dare not surrender ourselves in these days to a love of ease, nor close our eyes to the essentially important happenings of the present time. It may not seem to you to be associated with Christmas, though it does indeed seem so to me, when I refer to an experience which came to me through a kind of spiritual investigation of an actual fact of the present day.

You all know those persons who to a great extent are responsible, especially in Central Europe, for the dreadful conditions into which we have drifted, so far as any human being can be called responsible for these things. What did these men do when misfortune broke over Europe? They wrote books! We had books written by all kinds of people.

Now, the following experiment can be made with the help of Spiritual Science. The question can be asked, but strictly in accordance with Spiritual Science: “What forms of thought speak to us from the greater part of these self-vindicating books?” I have tried from every side to answer this question conscientiously. I have asked myself: “Of what kind are the thought-forms of these men on whom so much of the fate of Central Europe depends?” If we do not proceed in the abstract, but enter into things in the concrete, we compare one thing with another. In this way a comparison came to me when I asked myself the question: “About what period in the normal course of evolution in Europe were such thought-forms cultivated as those which we find in the leading personalities during the world war?” After conscientious scrutiny of the facts it was made plain to me that men thought in this manner about the time of the Roman, Julius Caesar. There is no difference between the soul- and thought-life of Julius Caesar at the time, let us say, of his Gallic wars, and the way in which such modern personalities form their thoughts. This means that these men have remained in a life of thought entirely unaffected by Christianity, for Caesar lived before the Mystery of Golgotha had broken into evolution. Even if the name of Christ Jesus is sometimes on their lips, the soul-life of these men has developed in such a way that it has nothing to do with concrete Christianity.

As the result of our many-sided studies we know that if anything develops in its own period, it is fundamentally good for humanity, but that it is otherwise when this thing remains stationary and comes to the front later. When this happens, when for instance that which was suited to the time of the Caesars continues to play a part in the twentieth century, that which was suitable to Caesar's day is transformed into something Luciferic. For that which ought to have worked properly in another period becomes, if it remains stationary, Luciferic. It is indeed essentially Luciferic.

We may now ask: “How is it that people whose fate has placed them in a leading position, have in their lives remained behind in this way?” If this question is to be answered we must turn our attention to those who claim to fill their spiritual life with the Christ-impulse, but who really work in an anti-Christian direction. Let us turn our attention to many official representatives of religious creeds, men who pretend to speak according to the Gospels, but who are opposed to everything that really tells of the living Christ in our day. The most anti-Christian persons are frequently found today among the clergy, among the preachers of the so-called Christian creeds.

If among other writings people would investigate a book—regarded by many as setting the fashion—a book entitled Das Wesen des Christentums (The Nature of Christianity), by Adolf Harnack, they would find an answer to this question. If the name of Christ were struck out of this book and replaced by the name of a God generally little known, a God who permeates and controls human life just as he permeates and controls Nature; if the name of Christ were struck out and replaced by the name of Jahve of the Old Testament, this book would be nearer the truth than it is, and would then have some meaning.

The fact is that Adolf Harnack knows nothing of the real Being of Christ, that he has not the vaguest idea of the real Being of Christ, that he worships a universal, indefinite God and then labels this universal, indefinite God with the name of Christ. And who is Adolf Harnack? Adolf Harnack has become the fashionable theologian of the circles which have provided the ground for the spiritual tendencies of those persons of whom I have been speaking. It is because no true revelation regarding the Christ comes any longer from the representatives of the creeds, that we no longer find in the events of the present day, among the men bound up with these events, any understanding for the true revelation of the Christ.

It hardly means anything to thousands, to millions of people at the present day, when they speak of the festival of Christmas; for they know nothing of the Being of Christ in the sense that is so necessary for our time. We must look into these things if in a deeper sense we will to understand the original causes of the downfall in contemporary events, and in the life of mankind within these events.

I have frequently spoken to you here of that important event which came to pass in the last third of the nineteenth century, the event through which a special relationship was established between the Archangelic Power, that Being whom we call the Archangel Michael, and the destiny of mankind. I have reminded you that since November, 1879, Michael has become the Regent, as it were, of all those who seek to bring to men the beneficial forces necessary to their healthy progress.

My dear friends, in our day we know that when such a matter is indicated, the indication refers to two different things: first, to the objective fact, and second, to the way this objective fact is connected with what men are willing to receive into their consciousness, into their Will. The objective fact is simply this, that in November, 1879, beyond the sphere of the Sense World, in the Supersensible World, that event took place which may be described as follows: Michael has gained for himself the power, when men come to meet him with all the living content of their souls, so to permeate them with his power, that they are able to transform their old materialistic intellectual power—which by that time had become strong in humanity—into spiritual intellectual power, into spiritual power of understanding. That is objective fact; it has taken place. We may say concerning it that since November, 1879, Michael has entered into another relationship with man than that in which he formerly stood. But it is required of men that they shall become the servants of Michael.

What I mean by this will become quite clear to you through the following explanation. You are aware that before the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished upon earth, the Jews of the Old Testament looked up to their Jahve (or Jehovah). Those who, among the Jewish priests, looked up in full consciousness to Jahve, were well aware that they could not reach him directly with human perception. The very name, Jahve, was held to be unspeakable, and if it had to be uttered, a sign only was made, a sign which resembles certain combinations of signs which we attempt in the art of Eurhythmy. The Jewish priesthood, however, was well aware that men could approach Jahve through Michael. They called Michael the countenance of Jahve. Just as we learn to know a man when we look into his face, just as we draw conclusions about the gentleness of his soul from the gentleness of his countenance, and about his character from the way he looks at us, so the priesthood of the Old Testament, through the atavistic clairvoyance which flowed into their souls in dreams, desired to gain from the countenance of Jahve, from Michael's connection with Jahve, that which it was not yet possible for mankind to gain.

The position of this priesthood towards Michael and Jahve was the right one. Their position towards Michael was right because they knew that if a man of that time turned to Michael, he could find through Michael the Jahve-power, which it was proper for the humanity of that time to seek.

Other Soul-Regents of humanity have appeared since then in the place of Michael; but in November, 1879, Michael once more took the lead, and can become active in the soul-life of those who seek the paths to him. These paths today are the paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge. We may speak of “the paths of Michael”, just as well as of the “paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge”.

But just at the time when Michael entered in this way into relationship with the souls of men, in order again to become their inspirer for three centuries, at this very time the demonic opposing force, having previously prepared itself, set up the very strongest opposition to him, so that a cry went through the world during our so-called war-years, in reality years of terror, a cry which has become the great World-misunderstanding which now fills the hearts and souls of men.

Let us consider what would have become of the Jewish people of the Old Testament, if instead of approaching Jahve through Michael they had sought to approach Him directly. They would have become an intolerant people, a national self-seeking people concerned with the aggrandizement of their own nation, a nation thinking only of itself. For Jahve is the God who is connected with all natural things, and in the external historical development of mankind, He manifests His Being through the connection of generations, as it expresses itself in the essential qualities of the people. It was only because the ancient Jewish people desired at that time to approach Jahve through Michael, that they saved themselves from becoming nationally so egoistic that Christ Jesus would not have been able to come forth from among them. Because they had permeated themselves with the Michael power, as this power was in their time, the Jewish people were not so strongly impregnated with forces given over to national egoism, as would have been the case had they turned directly to Jahve.

Today Michael is again the Regent of the World, but it is in a new way that mankind must become related to him. For now Michael is not the countenance of Jahve, but the countenance of Christ Jesus. Today we must approach the Christ-impulse through Michael. In many respects humanity has not yet struggled through to this. Humanity has retained atavistically the old qualities of perception by which Michael could be approached when he was still the intermediary to Jahve; and so today humanity has a false relationship to Michael. This false relationship to Michael is apparent in a very characteristic phenomenon.

During the years of the war we heard continually the universal lie: “Freedom for individual nations, even for the smallest nations.” This is an essentially false idea, because today, in the Michael period, the all-important matter is not groups of men, but human individuals, separate men. This lie is nothing else than the endeavour to permeate each individual nation not with the new force of Michael, but with the force of the old, the pre-Christian time, with the Michael-force of the Old Testament. However paradoxical it may sound, there is a tendency among so-called civilized nations at the present day to transform what was justifiable among the Jewish people of the Old Testament, into something Luciferic, and to make of this the most powerful impulse in every single nation.

People wish today to build up the republics of Poland, of France, of America, etc., upon methods of thought suited to Old Testament times. They strive to follow Michael as it was right to follow him before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men found through him the Folk-God Jahve. Today it is Christ Jesus whom we must strive to find through Michael, Christ Jesus the Divine Leader of the whole human race. This means that we must seek for feelings and ideas which have nothing to do with human distinctions of any kind on the Earth. Such feelings and ideas cannot be found on the surface. They must be sought where the spirit and soul-part of man pulsate i.e., along the path of Spiritual Science. The matter lies thus, that we must resolve to seek the real Christ upon the path of Spiritual Science i.e., upon the Michael-path. Only through this striving after spiritual truth is the real Christ to be sought and found; otherwise it would be better to extinguish the lights of Christmas, to destroy all Christmas trees, and to acknowledge at least with truth, that we want nothing that will recall what Christ Jesus has brought into human evolution.

Pre-Christian ways of thinking speak to us from the memoirs of our contemporaries i.e., ways of thinking which in our time are anti-Christian. When men, who are held to be representative, make pronouncements such as Wilson has done in the Fourteen Points, from such pronouncements there resounds nothing but pure Old Testament mentality, a mentality which in our time has become Luciferic.

Whence comes this, my dear friends? What really lies before us? When we travel back through the periods of human evolution prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, we find, early in the course of Oriental civilization, within that civilization out of which the Chinese civilization of today has developed, a human personality who was the external incorporation of Lucifer. Lucifer really did walk the earth at that time, in a human body. He it was who brought that human light which we find at the foundation of the ancient pre-Christian wisdom, with the exception of Judaism. In the art, the philosophy, and the statesmanship of Greece, much was still active which had proceeded from this Luciferic incarnation thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must endeavour clearly to understand, that that which today we call human understanding is always, so long as we have not spiritualized it, a gift of that Lucifer. We must not hold merely, in a matter-of-fact, bourgeois way, the one-sided idea that anything Luciferic is dreadful, and we must get rid of it. The more we seek to get rid of Lucifer, the more we are dominated by him, for it was necessary during thousands of years of human evolution to enter into the inheritance of the incarnated Lucifer. Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. And a time will come in the future when, just as Lucifer was incorporated in the East in an earthly personality, to prepare for Christianity among the heathen, so in the West there will take place an earthly incarnation of Ahriman himself. This time is approaching. Ahriman will appear, objectively, on the earth. Just as truly as Lucifer has walked the Earth, and as Christ has walked the Earth, objectively, in human form, so will Ahriman walk the Earth, bringing with him an extraordinary increase of power to the earthly human understanding. We men have not the task of hindering in any way this incarnation of Ahriman, but it is our task so to prepare humanity beforehand, that Ahriman may be estimated in the right way. For Ahriman will have tasks, he will have to do this and that, and men must value rightly and make a right use of that which, through Ahriman, comes into the world. Men will only be able to do this if they are able to adjust themselves now in the right way to that which Ahriman is already sending to the Earth from the Worlds beyond in order that he may control the Economic life upon Earth without being noticed. This must not be. Ahriman must not control the Economic life on the Earth without his being noticed. We must thoroughly learn to know his particular qualities. We must be able to oppose him with full consciousness.

During the time I am lecturing here at Stuttgart I shall point out much that we must carefully note in human evolution up to the time of the Ahriman incarnation, so that when this comes to pass we may know how rightly to assess it. Today I shall only call your attention to one thing more. In this respect many of the modern interpretations of the Gospels are just as bad as the worst materialistic conceptions. When the representatives of so-called religious societies accept the Gospels today simply as they are written, and when every new revelation is rejected, such devotion to the Gospels, such a way of furthering Christianity, is really the best way to prepare for Ahriman's appearance on earth. A great many of the exponents of the so-called creeds of today are working intensively for Ahriman; they leave unnoticed the truth: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the Earth-age,” when they declare heretical all that proceeds from the immediate vision of the Christ today. They leave this truth unnoticed because it is more comfortable to take the Gospels in a literal way only, that is, to hold to what they deem to be the literal interpretation of the Gospels.

Mankind must be protected by wisdom from regarding the Gospels in this way, for the four Gospels, as regards external physical understanding, do contradict one another. He who does not press forward today to a spiritual interpretation of the Gospels, spreads abroad an untruthful interpretation of these Gospels, for he deceives men as regards the external contradictions which are to be found in the four Gospels. He who deceives man regarding the things that concern him most vitally, best furthers the progress of Ahriman.

It is most important for man at the present time to place Christ in the centre between Ahriman and Lucifer. The Christ power must permeate us. But as men we must always seek the balance between the mystic enthusiasm which tends to lift us above ourselves, and the materialistic understanding which by its bourgeois heaviness drags us down to earth. At every moment we must seek the balance between the Luciferic impulses which lift us up, and the Ahrimanic which drag us down. In the effort to gain this balance we find the Christ. When we strive to gain this balance, then alone can we find the Christ.

By a strange coincidence, a remarkable thing happened in human evolution at the time when materialism entered into it. I shall mention (concerning it) only two documents: Milton's “Paradise Lost” and Klopstock's “Messiah”. In these poems the Spiritual Powers are described as if a Paradise had been lost, and man had been driven out of it. The work of both poets is based upon the idea of Duality in the Universe, upon the opposition of good and evil, of the Divine and the Diabolical. It is the great error of modern times that World-Evolution should be represented as a Duality, whereas it should be represented as a Trinity. One set of forces are the upward-striving Luciferic forces which approach man in mysticism, in sentimentalism, in fantasy—in what in fantasy is degenerate, fantastic; these forces dwell in man's blood. The second are the Ahrimanic forces which dwell in all that is dry, heavy, (speaking physiologically) in the bony system. The Christ stands in the middle between these two. His is the third group of forces. Lucifer's is the first, Ahriman's the second, and in the centre, between the two, is the Christ-force.

What then has happened in more recent days? Something has taken place to which men should look up with true spiritual-intellectual fervour, for unless they understand what it is that has happened they cannot enter in the right way into the Christmas festival. We read today Milton and Klopstock, we read their descriptions of the Supersensible World. What do we find? Everywhere we find Luciferic qualities ascribed to Beings who are called Divine. Writers such as Milton and Klopstock describe the fight between Luciferic qualities which appear to them Divine, and Ahrimanic qualities. And a great part of that which modern humanity describes as Godlike, is simply Luciferic. They do not recognize it for what it is; just as little as they recognize that which is Ahrimanic for what it is.

The same thing appears in Goethe's Faust, where we find Mephistopheles contrasted with “the Lord”. Goethe, too, was unable to distinguish between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. Consequently his Mephistopheles is a kind of mixture of the two. I have already pointed this out in my little book Goethe's Standard of the Soul (Geistesart).

True followers of Goethe do not merely quote literally from his works, as do so many academic persons and the like. If we faithfully travel the path that Goethe has taken, so that we are able to recognize the things wherein he must have changed, especially if we follow his Conception of the World beyond the year 1832, we are able to speak of a Goethe of the year 1919, now soon to be 1920.

The way must be found calmly to admit that in the materialistic centuries, much that is Luciferic is hidden behind what is called Divine. There is much by which men seek to spread religion at the present day that reaches humanity only as words born on the wings of Lucifer.

Only when men are once more able to recognize this Dualism—the Luciferic that would lead them above themselves, and the Ahrimanic that would lead them down below themselves—and turn from these to what is truly Christ-like, only then will they again celebrate in the right way the Christmas event, that event by which we should recall how that which gives its own particular meaning, its true meaning to the Earth, entered into human evolution.

Today we cannot help thinking sometimes of Leonardo da Vinci, of Leonardo, who once as you know, painted in Milan his great picture, the “Last Supper”—Christ with His Disciples around Him. Leonardo was a long time painting this picture—twenty years. He wanted to put a great deal into it, and could never finish it, because he was always making a fresh attempt to paint the figure of Judas in the right way. Now under the State organization of Milan, the abbot of the monastery for which the picture was being painted was his immediate employer. When later a new abbot came, a sharp resolute man, not so patient as his predecessor, he went to Leonardo and told him sternly that the picture must be finished forthwith. Leonardo replied that he could now finish the picture, for since the new abbot had come he had a model for Judas. In a short time he had painted the face of Judas as we see it in the picture.

Just as at the beginning of the new age the face of Judas appeared to Leonardo on the ground of a positive faith, so we in our day have frequent occasion to write on our hearts and souls the fact that He whose birth we commemorate at this holy season, is betrayed most of all by many of those who declare that it is in accordance with their creed that they prepare this festival. We know that the Christmas Festival itself is one of those that has been adopted in the course of Christian evolution, that it was not till the third or fourth century that people began in these December days, to commemorate the birth of Christ. The event of Golgotha had already taken place some centuries before, when those whose thoughts were centred upon that Event, adopted something so incisively new, at that time, as the institution of the Festival of Christmas. Much, much later it was still possible for new things to be implanted in Christianity. Many of those who called themselves true Christians, fought at the time against these innovations. Today there are very many such people at work, who will not advance in the way their own creed advanced when it accepted in the third and fourth centuries the institution of Christmas; people who hold rigidly to that of which they say, “it stands written”, people who turn away from every living revelation.

Terrible as is the state of sleep of people at the present day—of people who with their non-moral thoughts soil, too often, things which are seeking to enter the Spiritual life—the most terrible of all is the case of those who betray the true spirit of Christian evolution from out of the very faith itself.

It is in this earnest mood that I wished to present the lights of the Christmas tree to you today; next time I hope to speak of them in another connection.

From the views which have been presented here for some time, and more particularly from the considerations which have come before us these last few days, we see how essential it is for the further cultural evolution of mankind that what we may call the knowledge of Initiation should stream into it. We must say, absolutely without reserve: The deliverance of mankind from a downward evolutionary course depends entirely upon its turning to a revelation which can only come through Spiritual knowledge.

Although it might be said, with a certain amount of feeling or logic, that it would be difficult in our time for wider circles of people to accept such knowledge, which at first can only be given out by few who have reached the height of being able to see into the Spiritual World, all such objections, even when apparently justified, will not contradict the clamorous fact that without accepting that which is here called Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, civilization must sink into the abyss. The work of the Heavenly Powers upon the earth must cease if their further cosmic evolution is not united with mankind. The healing of mankind can only be brought about if a sufficiently large number of people permeate themselves with what we are trying to say here. For only he who will not, who absolutely will not look into what has happened in the whole world as the result of the last catastrophic years, only he can close his eyes to the fact that we are at the beginning of a process of destruction, and that nothing can bring us out of this process of destruction except something new. For what we seek within the destructive force itself can never be anything but a force of destruction. A power for building afresh can only be obtained from a source not belonging to earthly evolution up to the present time.

Now the results of the inflow from such sources are fraught with most significant difficulties. You have often been told that the Science of Initiation cannot be given to mankind haphazard, without preparation, because a certain receptivity is necessary. You have heard this continually; but it is exactly against this attitude of mind that man continually transgresses. Let us take a simple example. One of the first, most primitive demands relative to the acceptance of the Science of Initiation, is that every one should seek to strip off what we call Ambition, particularly when it expresses itself as a judging of others by one's self. Now, it is easy to see that this is exactly what takes place in the Anthroposophical Society. What would be the use of keeping silence about such matters? It is readily admitted that such is the case, but nevertheless the most fatal things in this direction exist within the Anthroposophical Movement, and mutual envy is on the increase. I shall merely indicate this aspect. Today I must speak of other great difficulties in the entrance of the Science of Initiation into our earthly civilization.

In the first place, that which belongs to the Mystery of the Will of Man must be pointed out to humanity in a comprehensive way. This Mystery of Man's Will has been veiled from modern culture especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, since the rise of the fifth post-Atlantean age. The modern theory of the universe knows the very least possible of the Will. We have often characterized this. A man when awake never experiences consciously the real nature of his Will. When awake he experiences consciously the nature of his Conceptions, when in a dreaming state he experiences the nature of his Feelings, but he is sleeping, even when he is awake, partially, with reference to his Will. We go through the world as so-called waking beings, but are only awake with regard to conceptions and ideas, we are only half awake in our life of feeling, and completely asleep in our Will. Let us not delude ourselves about this matter. We have ideas about what we will, but only when the Will becomes idea, when the Will is reflected by the intellect, can we experience it in our waking consciousness. What goes on in the depths of man's being, even if he only raises his hand, which means bringing his Will into operation, of this the ordinary man knows absolutely nothing. This means that the Mystery of Will is to the modern man entirely unknown, and with this is to be connected the fact that our entire modern civilization—especially that which has come about since the fifteenth century—is absolutely intellectual, a culture of the understanding; for the culture of Natural Science is an intellectual culture. The Will plays the least possible part in everything that we grasp with our intellect, our understanding. When we think, when we form ideas, the Will of course plays a certain part in the formation of the ideas, but only in a very fine state. Man does not notice how the Will pulsates in his perceptions and how in other ways the Will is working within him.

For man in this new age the Mystery of the Will is completely veiled by our exclusively intellectual culture. Only when we seek, through those means given by Spiritual Science of which I have often spoken to you, to investigate the Will, that is, when we try with the help of Imagination and inspiration to make those forces active which enable man to see into the workings, the machinery which is set going by Man's Will, then we notice that in our physical life between birth and death, the Will as a living entity is not bound up with constructive processes but only with destructive processes. I have often explained this. If constructive processes alone took place in our brain, if for instance, only that took place which results from the action of the life-forces upon our food, we should be unable to evolve a soul- and spirit-life by means of the apparatus of the nerves and the brain; only on account of the destructive process which is continually going on in our brain do the soul and spirit take root in what is being destroyed. It is just here that the Will works. Man's Will is essentially something which during our physical life works to a certain extent for the death of man. With reference to our head organization, we are continually dying; in every moment we die. We only live because the rest of our organization works against this continual dying in our heads, for which our Will is mainly responsible. Independently of us, there is continually taking place in our head, that which takes place objectively in the outer world when we pass through physical death.

Our corpse, in so far as we are human individuals and enter the world of soul and spirit through the gate of death, ceases to be a matter of importance to us, but it is of great importance to the Cosmos. This corpse in some way or other, it does not matter whether by cremation or burial, is given over to the elements of the Earth; there, in its own way it carries on what our human Will does partially to our nervous system, to our sense-organization in our life between birth and death. We have perception and thought because our Will destroys something in us. We give our corpse over to the Earth, and by the help of the disintegrating corpse, which only continues the same process which we partially carry on in life, the whole Earth thinks and has perception. I characterized this from another point of view a few months ago. That which continually takes place in the Earth through the interchange between the primal earth-substances, through the union (of these substances) with the dead human bodies, is an activity in all respects comparable with the activity of the Will which between birth and death is practised by us continually, unconsciously, while the working, the destroying like a corpse, goes on in our nerve and sense system. Between birth and death the Will, because it is united with our Ego, works through the destructive forces within the bounds of our skin. This same Will works cosmically through our corpse, in the thinking and forming of ideas by the whole Earth, after our death, when we have given our corpse over to the Earth. Thus, we are cosmically united with what we may call the Soul-spiritual process of the whole Earth existence. This conception is a very difficult one, for it places man concretely into that which is Cosmic in our Earth existence. It shows the relationship of man's Will to the manner of working of the universal Cosmic Will within the Earth existence, in the destruction, in the bringing about of death conditions.

But just as our further evolution in the Spiritual World after we have passed through the gates of death, is dependent upon our having left the corpse behind, upon the fact that we no longer work with these forces, but with others, so the healthy further evolution of the whole Earth depends on whether humanity on this Earth unites itself not now with forces of death, but with forces of life, forces which evolve in another direction than do the forces of death. To speak of this today when men are filled with personal ideas and feelings is indeed something fraught with bitterness, for the seriousness of such a truth is only experienced in the most limited degree. Man is unaccustomed to taking in these great truths with the deep earnestness with which they must be taken. Nevertheless, the further question must be asked: “How is that which lies in the Will of man as I have described it, related to the processes of destruction in outer nature? How is that in man's Will which I have described as its own particular characteristic, connected with these destructive forces in outer nature?” Here is something which stands before the man of today as the greatest illusion. What does the man of the present day really do when he looks at Nature? He says, “Here a natural process is taking place. It has arisen from another process which produced it and this again from another which caused it.” And so man finds a chain of causes and effects in the working of Nature and he is very proud when in this way he can grasp what he calls leading threads of casualty to be found in the outer world.

What is the result? If we ask some geologist, physicist, chemist or any right-thinking scientific investigator, his honest opinion, he will often be reluctant to give you the last consequence of his own World-Conception. But ask him if he does not think that the earth as we know it—stones, plants and many animals, too—would have evolved just in the way it has done, had Man not been present, he will reply: “Certainly. No houses would have been built, no machines, no flying machines would have been made by cows or buffaloes, and so on, but everything else which we can see is not the work of man, would be present from beginning to end just the same as if man had not been there, for a chain of causes and effects is found within external nature.” That which takes place later is the result of that which went before. According to present-day thought man has nothing to do with the formation of the chain. This view contains exactly the same mistake as the following. I write a word on the board. Every letter arises only because I have written it, and not because the previous letter has given birth to the next one. It would be utter nonsense to say: From the preceding letter there arises the following one. A thoroughly unprejudiced investigation of that which is essential in the processes of Nature convinces us of the mistake we make when we give ourselves up to the great illusion of modern science: Effects are the result of their causes. It is not so. We must look elsewhere for the true causes, just as we must seek in our intellect the reason of the letters following each other. Taken in the wide sense where do the primal causes for external happenings in Nature lie? That can only be determined by spiritual perception; these causes lie in Mankind. Do you know where you must look if you wish to gain an insight into the actual primal causes of the course of Nature on the Earth? You must investigate how the human Will, quite unknown to present-day consciousness, is to be found in the centre of gravity in man, that is, in the lower part of his body. Only a part of the Will is active in the human head; the chief part of the Will is centred in the rest of his organism. That which comes into existence in the course of external nature is dependent upon man's relation to his unconscious Will. So far we have only been able to cite one significant example as to the course of Nature, but it serves for the course of Nature as a whole. I have often pointed out that during the Atlantean epoch man gave himself up to a form of black magic. The consequence of this was the Glaciation of the civilized world. In a comprehensive sense, the whole course of Nature really is the result of the activity of Will, not in single individuals, but of the various forces of Will working together in humanity as a whole; forces which arise from—the human centre of gravity. If a being adequately developed, a being, let us say, from Mars or Mercury, wished to study the course of the Earth, i.e., wished to understand how the course of Nature went on there, this being would not describe Nature as one of our learned men would describe it, but looking down upon the world he would say: The Earth is there below me; I see there many points; in these points are centred the forces from which the course of Nature proceeds. But these points would not lie for him in outer Nature, but always within man. He, looking from without, would find that he must look upon the centre of man if he wished to find the cause of what takes place in the course of Nature. This insight into the connection of the human Will with the course of Nature as a whole must become an integral part of the Natural Science of the future, for Mankind. With such a Natural Science man will feel his responsibility in quite a different way from what he does at the present day. Man will rise from being a citizen of the Earth to being a citizen of the Cosmos. He will learn to look upon the Cosmos as a part of himself.

Directly our attention is called to such things, knowledge of them takes possession of us. This knowledge does not work in such a shadowy way as our intellectual knowledge does. It is taken far more from realities, and therefore it works in a much more living way. And because the way in which it works is so much more real than the shadowy knowledge of modern man, it is all the more necessary that man should take seriously what is revealed to him through this knowledge. One cannot be a citizen of the Cosmos on one side in the sense described above, and on the other side remain the old Philistine whom the last few hundred years, i.e., the period since the middle of the fifteenth century, has produced in the man of today. We cannot on the one hand consciously want to take a part in the processes of the Cosmos, and on the other hand wish to gossip with our fellow beings as is done so much in restaurants and clubs in this bourgeois age since the fifteenth century. At the same time another Ethics, another moral impulse must surge through mankind if the Science of Initiation is to enter in real earnest. For all that prepares in the wrong way, for the appearance of Ahriman on our earth, as I have told you, works especially strongly as a force hindering the entrance of the Science of Initiation. I have spoken recently about these facts, in order to give some indication of the spirit which should pervade our Christmas Festival this year. I will now only briefly recapitulate.

Looking back over the evolution of our earth we find, preceding our modern materialistic civilization, the Greco-Latin, which goes back to the eighth pre-Christian century. We see, about two hundred years after the beginning of this Greco-Latin time, something rising up, which we might describe as the old Life of Wisdom of earlier times percolating through the land of Greece. Nietzsche felt this to a remarkable degree, even if pathologically. From the beginning of his spiritual activity he felt himself an opponent of Socrates, and he was never tired of speaking of the greater value of pre-Socratic Greek culture than of the post-Socratic. It is certainly true that with Socrates a great age came in for Mankind, an age which reached its climax in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But this age of Socrates has now run its course, has rightly come to an end. The Socratic age is that in which pure logic and pure dialectic arose from the earlier instinctive Wisdom. The rising of pure logic, of pure dialectic, out of the ancient clairvoyant Wisdom is the chief characteristic of our Western culture. This logic, this dialectic, has also impressed its stamp upon Christianity, for the theology of the West is a dialectic theology. But what rises in Greece as dialectics, as thought reduced to abstraction, goes back to the Mysteries of the East. Among these Mysteries were those which founded that civilization which later became the Chinese. Within the early Chinese civilization Lucifer was incarnated in human form. We must not conceal the fact from ourselves that Lucifer once lived in a physical body, as Christ during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha walked on earth in a physical body. But it is only a narrow-minded misunderstanding of the Luciferic incarnation if we look upon everything that has come through Lucifer as “Touch-me-not”. From Lucifer, for instance, has arisen the greatness of Greek culture itself, that unique ancient art, the artistic impulse of mankind, as we ourselves still look upon it. But in Europe all this has hardened into mere words, empty of content. It was through Luciferic wisdom that Christianity was first grasped in Europe. The important point is that in the Greek wisdom which developed as Gnosis in order to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, the old Luciferic Wisdom had cooperated, had given the old Gnosis its form. The fact that the Mystery of Golgotha had clothed itself in what Lucifer had given to the evolution of the earth, was the greatest victory for Christianity at that time. But when this Luciferic culture, to which, through the incarnation of Lucifer man was given over, was ebbing away, there flowed in gradually, that which was preparing for the coming incarnation of Ahriman in the Western World. When the time is ripe—and it is preparing itself—Ahriman will incarnate in a human body in the Western World. This fact must take place just as the others have taken place—viz. that Lucifer has incarnated and that Christ has incarnated. This fact is predetermined in the evolution of the earth. The all-important fact is simply this: to keep the fact in mind, that we shall rightly prepare ourselves for it, for Ahriman will not begin to work only when he has incarnated in a human body; he is now preparing his appearance from the super-sensible world. He is already working from thence into the evolution of mankind. From that side he is seeking his tools through which he prepares for what must come.

Now, it is essential for the favourable working of that which Ahriman will bring to humanity—he will bring advantageous gifts just as Lucifer did—that man shall take the right attitude. The all-important thing is that man shall not through sleeping miss the coming of Ahriman. When the incarnation of Ahriman takes place in the Western World we shall simply see inscribed in the local Register, the birth of John William Smith (of course, this will not be the name) and people will look upon the child as a citizen in comfortable circumstances like any other, and they will sleep through what has in reality taken place. Our University professors will certainly not trouble whether man sleeps through it or not. For them what has taken place will be merely the birth of J. W. Smith. But in the Ahrimanic age it is all-important that men should knower that they have here to do only externally with J. W. Smith, that inwardly Ahriman is present, and that they must not deceive themselves through sleepy illusion about what has happened. Even now we may not yield to any deception. These things are in preparation. Among the most important means which Ahriman has to work with from the other side, is the furthering of abstract thinking in Man. And because men cling so firmly today to this abstract thinking, they are working in the way most favourable for the coming of Ahriman. You must realize that there is no better way to prepare for the fact that Ahriman is endeavouring cunningly to capture the whole Earth for his evolution, than that man should continue to live an abstract life, steeping himself in abstractions, as he does in the social life of today. This is one of the ruses, one of the clever tricks, by which Ahriman prepares in his own way for his lordship over the earth. Instead of showing men today out of conclusive experience, what has to happen, leaders offer them theories on every subject, including the social question. To those who give out these theories, knowledge gained by means of experience is abstract, because they have no inkling of what real Life is. All this is preparation from the Ahrimanic point of view.

But there is also another form of preparation for Ahriman which can happen through an erroneous view of the Gospels. This, too, is something that must be made known at the present day. You know quite well that today there are very many men, especially among the official representatives of this or that form of religious confession, who are fighting to the uttermost against that new Christ knowledge which is arising among us out of the Science of Initiation. Such men, if they do not swear allegiance to mere Rationalism, accept the Gospels; but what do these men really know of the true nature of the Gospels? These are the men who, during the nineteenth century, have applied to the Gospels the historical-scientific method of the outer world. What has come from the Gospels through the scientific method of last century? Nothing else, except that the conception of the Gospels has gradually become completely materialized. Our attention was first drawn to the contradictions in the four Gospels. Then from the recognition of these contradictions came the slide downwards. Finally, what is the outcome of this Gospel investigation? What else is it but, I might say, lifting the Gospels off their hinges? What does such an investigator as the theologian, Professor Schmiedel of Basle, seek in the Gospels? He seeks to prove that they are not simply products of fantasy brought forward only to glorify Christ Jesus. And so there follow a limited number of now-famous points unfavourable to the Christ. These, he maintains, would have been omitted if the Gospels had only been written for the glorification of Jesus. We are, therefore, left with the feeling that he admits all the objections that are brought against Christ Jesus, so as finally to save for the Gospels a little label of this world's Science. Even this little label will give way. Man will gain nothing from this worldly Science. He will gain nothing as regards the genuineness of the Gospels from the way these people point it out. To have the right relation towards these Gospels we must know why they came into being, that is, we must know their real purpose. This knowledge can only be obtained through an understanding fructified by Spiritual Science.

If we sink ourselves in the Gospels, if we absorb their content and force, then we gain from them a soul-content. No outer historical science will explain the riddle of the Gospels; but we can sink ourselves in the Gospels, and then we receive a soul-content. This soul-content, however, is a great hallucination—certainly a most spiritualized hallucination, the hallucination of the Mystery of Golgotha. The highest that is to be gained from the Gospels is the hallucination of the Mystery of Golgotha, neither more nor less. Now, it is just this secret which is known to the more modern Catholic Church. For this reason the Gospels are not allowed to be studied by the laity, for it is feared that men will discover that they cannot have through the Gospels historical knowledge of the Christ Mystery, but only a hallucination of this Mystery of Golgotha. I might also say, an Imagination; for the hallucination is so spiritualized that it is an actual Imagination. But more than an Imagination is not to be gained from the content of the Gospels in themselves.

What is the path from Imagination to Reality? The path will be opened up through Spiritual Science, not through that which is outside Spiritual Science, but through Spiritual Science alone. That means that the Imagination of the Gospels shall be raised to Reality through Spiritual Science. It is of the most extreme importance to Ahriman so to prepare his incarnation that through Spiritual Science man shall not follow this path of Imagination in the Gospels on to the Reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as it is in the greatest interest of Ahriman that man should keep up the love of abstraction, so it is in his greatest interest that man should cherish more and more a form of piety built upon the mere Gospels. When you think over this, you will realize that a great part of the creeds existing today is the preparatory work of Ahriman for his purposes in this earth existence. In what way could one serve Ahriman better than by resolving to make use of an external power commanding those who believe in, and submit themselves to this power, not to read any anthroposophical literature? No greater service could be done to Ahriman than to make sure that a great number of people do not read anthroposophical literature. I have already mentioned in these lectures who the people are that have resolved upon this course. The only way to present certain facts today is to place them unreservedly in the light of truth. It must be realized today that the progress of the World has a certain relationship to cosmic periods, limited through the Luciferic incarnation, which in time and space, lies before the Mystery of Golgotha. But in the way of this progress the incarnation of Ahriman in the West places itself, so that the forces in opposition are strengthened. The incarnation of Ahriman, in a future not very far distant, can be helped on its way just as well by an obscured worship of the Gospels as by abstract thinking.

Many people today experience an inner sense of comfort in shutting themselves off from these serious facts. Anthroposophists should not feel in this way; on the contrary, they should develop a definite impetus to do as much as possible to spread Spiritual Science among mankind. It is quite wrong to think as is so often done that we should come to an understanding with such people as those of whom I have spoken. It is foolish to believe we can come to an understanding with such people for they do not desire it. The point is to make clear to the rest of humanity what sort of people these are. We must speak out about such people. All that is possible has been done so that they can come to an understanding with us. They only need to read without prejudice what is there, to give it their serious attention. We must strictly discriminate between those persons who do harm to the progress of human evolution and other people to whom we must go and tell how such harm is brought about. The attempt to come to an understanding with the former has absolutely no sense and no meaning; for these men would outwardly incline to an agreement if they no longer had followers to support them. Then they would be ready of themselves to come to an understanding. The urgent need before us is exactly this, to open people's eyes. Only, unfortunately, too often within our own circle, the endeavour is made to come to a compromise in this respect, and the courage needed for unconditional acknowledgment of the truth is lacking. We must not ever be under the illusion that we can come to an understanding with this one or that one, who does not wish in any way to come to an understanding with us. What is required of us is courageously to stand up for the truth as far as we are able. This seems to me especially the outcome of an understanding of what is bound up with the evolution of Mankind.

On New Year's Eve it is always fitting to remember how past and future are linked together in life and in the existence of the world, how past and future are linked in the whole life of the Cosmos of which man is a part, how past and future are linked in every fraction of that life with which our own individual existence is connected, is interwoven through all that we were able to do and to think during the past year, and through all that we are able to plan for the coming year.

The thoughts which, almost in answer to an inward need, we call up before our souls in reviewing what we have done during the past year, and what we intend to do next year, should be pervaded with adequate earnestness and dignity, in accordance with the spirit of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, so that we may illumine these thoughts with the Higher Light which we can receive from Spiritual Science, through contemplation of the great Cosmic events. How does this human life of ours stand with regard to past and future? It is like a mirror. Indeed, comparison with a mirror approaches reality far more than it may seem to do at first. Striving a little to attain self-knowledge is indeed like standing before a mirror. We stand, looking into a mirror and there in that mirror lies the past, of which we know its reflection is in the mirror. Behind the mirror lies that into which at first we cannot look, just as it is not possible to see in space, what lies behind a mirror. Perhaps the question should be raised here: What is it that corresponds in our world-mirror to the silver covering at the back which turns the transparent glass into a mirror? In the ordinary mirror the glass is coated behind so that we cannot see through it. What constitutes the coating of the world-mirror that reflects the past for us, and at first keeps the future hidden from our gaze? The world-mirror is coated with our own being, with our own human being. We have only to bear in mind that with the usual means of knowledge we are really unable to see ourselves, to see what we ourselves are. We cannot see through ourselves, we see through ourselves just as little as we see through a mirror. When we look into ourselves, many things are mirrored back to us, things which we have experienced, things which we have learnt; but our own being remains hidden from us, because we can see through ourselves at first just as little as we can see through an ordinary mirror. Looking at the matter generally, or I might say, in the abstract, we may consider this comparison with a mirror as I have just described it. But when we come to details modifications are needed. Trying to look back on our life through this mirroring process (for looking back on our life, on what our inner soul reflects, is a mirroring process), we must confess: What we see mirrored there, is only a part of our experiences. When you try to look back on your experiences, you will find that these experiences are continually subject to interruptions. You look back on what the day has brought you; but you do not look back on what the preceding night has brought you. The experiences of the night are an interruption. You look back on yesterday, you do not look back on the night before yesterday, and so on. Stretches of nighttime, not filled in by thoughts upon our experiences, are continually inserting themselves. It is an illusion to think that we survey our entire life when looking back upon it; we only piece together to some extent, what the days contain. In reality, the course of our life comes before us with continual interruptions.

We might now ask: Are these interruptions in the course of our life necessary? Yes, they are necessary. Were there no such interruptions in the course of our life, or, to speak more correctly, in the retrospection upon our life's course, then, as human beings, we should be quite unable to perceive our Ego. We should see the course of our life filled merely by the world outside, and in our life there would be no ego-consciousness at all. That we are able to experience, to feel our Ego, depends on the fact that our life's course is continually being broken up piece-wise. It is precisely with respect to this ego-perception, brought about by interruptions in the course of life, that present-day humanity faces a critical period. When a human being of today looks back on life and, as has just been explained, attains his Ego through this looking back, this Ego of present-day man is, in a certain respect, empty, we only know that we have an Ego. In earlier periods of earth evolution men knew more. Just as in ordinary daily life, the dreams of an individual dimly emerge out of his nightly experiences, so the clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions of the human beings of earlier periods emerged out of the Ego. These clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions were dreams only in their form; what they contained was reality. We may say: The Ego of present-day man has been emptied of the clairvoyant-atavistic content which was the support of men of past ages, permeating them with the conviction that they had something in common with a divine element, that they were connected with something divine. Out of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, there arose in man's sentient life that which condensed into religious feeling and religious veneration towards those beings to whom religious cult and religious sacrifice were dedicated. How does the case stand today? Today the Ego is empty of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, and when we look back on the Ego it is more or less only a point in our soul-life. The content of this Ego is a firm point of support, but it is nevertheless only a point. Now, however, we are living in an age in which the point must again become a circle, an age in which the Ego must again receive a content. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has made a mighty inroad into our Sense-world, in order that the Ego may again receive a content. This is why, ever since the seventies of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has willed to re-enter our physical existence through revelations in a new way. What we are striving for in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is this: To receive with goodwill all that is seeking to enter through spiritual revelation from another world—from a world, however, which bears within it this world of ours—and to clothe these revelations in terms by which they can be communicated to man. These revelations are nothing less than that which definitely (in a certain respect) guarantees the future of mankind. It is not, indeed, a direct glance behind the mirror, but it is a guarantee for this, viz., that when we as human beings, hasten to meet the future i.e., hasten to step behind the mirror—which means facing the future—then that which we have to do in the future will be able to come to pass in full power, if we have first tested our forces, if we have first strengthened them through that, which, by means of Spiritual Science, reveals itself to us out of the Spiritual World.

Just as in the past, man's Ego was filled with an atavistic clairvoyant content, which guaranteed his connection with the divine, so today our Ego must be filled with a new spiritual content, received in full consciousness, a content which gives us again the link uniting our soul with the divine Soul-being. The men of the past possessed an atavistic clairvoyance. The last inheritance of this atavistic clairvoyance is abstract reflection, the abstract power of cognition possessed by modern men. It is a much diluted remnant of the early clairvoyance. The man of today can feel that this dilution, this logical dialectic dilution of a former atavistic clairvoyance, is no longer able to support his soul. Then the longing will arise within him to receive something new into his Ego. But that which has formed the end in the evolution of mankind from primeval times up to the present, must now be made the beginning. In olden times, man had clairvoyant revelations and did not understand them. Today man must first understand, must exert to the utmost his intellectual power, must exert to the utmost his reason. If he so exerts it through that which lies before him in Spiritual Science, then mankind will again develop the power of receiving the Spiritual clairvoyantly. This is certainly something that most people today wish to avoid, viz., to make use of their healthy human reason in order to understand Spiritual Science. Were it possible to avoid the use of man's reason, it would also be possible to avoid altogether the entrance of spiritual revelations into our earthly world.

Thus past and future are linked together on this New Year's Eve, this Cosmic New Year's Day. For today, what is impending is indeed a kind of Cosmic New Year's Day. The future stands before us as a formidable question, not an indefinite abstract question, but as a concrete question. How can we approach that which, as a question put to mankind, in the form of a spiritual revelation, is striving more and more since the last third of the nineteenth century, to enter our earthly world? And how are we to place it in relation to revelations of the past? These questions should be livingly experienced. Then we should feel how important it is to direct our longings towards that which is presented here as Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Then we should realize the earnestness and the dignity of the striving for Spiritual Science. It is especially needful to have this feeling at the present time. For we are not dealing with any kind of arbitrary human will (“Willkur”); we are dealing with something that as Cosmic knowledge wills to reveal itself to us from out of the world's evolution; we are dealing in very truth with what the gods will to make of man. But here we are faced with the fact that when we on the one hand turn towards the spirit, on the other hand those who wish only to worship the past, are drawn away by the Spirit of contradiction, by the Spirit of opposition. And the more we try with all our might to grasp the spirit of the future state of man, the more surely will the people of the past be possessed by the spirit of opposition. It is to be noticed among people of today that religious feeling is seeking to assume new life. Groping attempts are numerous. The attempts of Spiritual Science must not be groping. Through such attempts the real, concrete world of the Spirit ought to be grasped. Almost like a premonition of what it ought to be, we are faced by those who say: “Mere religious tradition is not enough for us; we want to have an inner religious experience, we do not only want to hear the message that, according to tradition, Christ lived and died in Palestine so many, or so many years ago—we want to experience in our souls the Christ-experience.” In many quarters we find such ideas arising among men, among people who believe that something of the Christ-experience has arisen in the depths of their souls.

These are groping attempts, often even questionable attempts, because at the same time people are content in the egoism of their soul, and then turn away from all inclination to the Spirit. These longings after inner spiritual experience are there nevertheless, and even groping attempts towards such inner spiritual experience, towards a new interest in the spiritual world, should be recognized. But the spirit of opposition will surely arise.

To judge by what he himself has printed, such a representative of the spirit of the past has recently uttered quite remarkable words at Stuttgart, contrasting attempts, groping attempts, to rouse a new religious interest, a new religious experience, with attempts to reach a really new concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, as in the case of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In the Shepherd-Play, performed at the Waldorf School, one of the shepherds, who has had a spiritual vision, says that he very nearly lost his power of speech. When I read the last page of Gogarten's Spiritual Science and Christianity, I must say that I very nearly lost my power of speech, for it is indeed surprising that anyone should say such things in the present age. It is things such as this that, on the Cosmic New Year's Eve, should stimulate contemplation of the comparison of the past with the inevitable future. What does this representative of religion really say? I do not know if the full import has been realized. He says: “Today—I ought to say at all times—the chief task is to safeguard the elementary feeling of piety of which I have spoken. It is almost wholly lacking today. We are occupied with religious ‘interests’ with religious ‘experiences’. Since Anthroposophy provides such good material for ‘interest’, and is such a good medium for ‘experiences’, people are helpless and without power of resistance when they meet it. People know even less of that fundamental, elementary bond, the bond brought into life by piety, which drives away every religious ‘interest’, and scatters every religious ‘experience’, the bond between God and creature. And because man knows little of this bond, he knows still less of that other bond, the unconditioned direct union between God and man.”

Here in the name of religion we see every religious interest repudiated, every religious experience scattered. A wholly undefined “bond” which cannot of course be differentiated, and which the speaker does not wish to differentiate, takes the place of religious interest, and of religious experience. We do indeed lose our power of speech when a teacher of religion says: “True piety must drive away every religious interest and scatter every religious experience.” We have gone so far that we are unable to realize what it means when an official representative of religion says: “Away with religious interest! Away with religious experience!” You see, apart from the fact that Gogarten does not know that he himself would be quite unable to speak of religion at all, if in the past there had never been atavistic religious interests and religious experience; apart from the fact that he as official representative of religion, could never have stood before an audience had not religion entered into the evolution of mankind, through religious interest and religious experience; apart from all this, everything I have told you just now proves what I told you before, that in the present day the very people who consider themselves the true representatives of religious life, work for the destruction of all that is essential in religion. Have these men lost every possibility of understanding what pertains to the human soul? Can these men no longer understand that when man turns his attention to anything, attention is guided by interest, and that everything entering the consciousness of man is based on experience? It seems as if human beings no longer speak from such consciousness at all, but only from a spirit of opposition. We should bear this in mind in all seriousness when we look into the mirror which so mysteriously unveils the past and conceals the future—though in a certain way the mirror unveils the future, too, in the way I have described.

It is the aim of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science to serve religious interest, and to give a content to religious experience. With what result? In the course of this year (1919) the question was brought forward before the Holy Roman Congregation whether the teaching that is termed theosophical is in keeping with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and whether it is permissible to belong to theosophical societies, to attend theosophical meetings, and to read theosophical papers and periodicals. The answer was: “No”, in every case, No, “in omnibus”. This is the spirit of opposition, of contradiction, and the Jesuit Zimmermann interprets it more particularly by applying this veto of the Holy Roman Congregation to Anthroposophy also. I need not set Zimmermann's writings before you in detail. You all know the wind that blows from a certain quarter against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and that it is the breath of the Spirit of contradiction. The Spirit carried in this wind can be felt in the following words, penned by that same Zimmermann, who for years spread abroad the lie that I was a renegade priest: “Through the defection of their General Secretary, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who took along with him most of the members, the Theosophical Society picked up again to some extent in the course of years, and now owns about twenty-five lodges, one-fifth of which are certainly somewhat dormant, and publishes at Dusseldorf, as its official organ, Das Theosophische Streben (The Theosophic Endeavour). The followers of Steiner, who named his theosophy ‘Anthroposophy’ after his exit, complained recently that he was becoming unproductive, that he had no new ‘visions’, that he always lectures upon the same things, that he would soon have to throw himself into something new, etc.” This paves the way for another article dealing in the same intelligent fashion with the “Threefold Social Organism”. You see what Spirit of truth backs up this Jesuit? A Jesuit does not merely represent his personal opinion, but the opinion of the Catholic Church. He speaks only as a member of the Catholic Church. What he says represents the opinion of the Catholic Church. We must judge such things from a moral point of view. We must ask whether anyone who deals with truth as this man does—a man, moreover, held in high esteem by a particular religious community, can be held in high esteem by the true spirit of humanity.

As long as questions of this kind are not considered with due earnestness, we have not arrived at the right understanding of the Cosmic New Year's Eve. At the present moment, it is essential to reach this right understanding. It is essential for us to extend our sympathies—alas, our sympathies often arise from egoistic sources—to the great human relations, and to feel for the whole of mankind that human sympathy which impels us to make a spiritual movement like this effectively fruitful for the evolution of mankind. May you experience, my dear friends, at this very time, that it is the Spirit of the Cosmos itself, which for decades has been seeking entrance. May you experience during the coming night, that this Spirit which seeks to enter humanity, shall here so be served that the souls of those, who will to feel with and who will to think with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, may feel their union with this new Spirit which wills to enter the world—the Spirit which alone can bring to the earthly world, the world that is destroying itself—the new upbuilding impulse out of Heaven. In this hour, a symbolic hour every year, demanding that we experience it as the decisive hour between past and future—in this hour may you unite your souls with the new Spirit; may you so experience in your souls the contact of the past year with the coming year, that the Cosmic Year which is passing away, may contact itself with the dawning Cosmic Year.

But the passing Cosmic Year will still send many an after-effect into the future; destructive forces into the spheres of Spirit, of Equity, of Economics. Therefore it is all the more needful, that as many men as possible shall be seized in the innermost depths of their souls by the New Year of the Spiritual Future, and shall develop a Will which may be the foundation of a new spiritual world, a world to be built into the future evolution of mankind. Those who care for the future of mankind are not those who would kill religious interest, who would do away with religious experience, but those only, those alone who can see how, through the intellectuality of our age, the old religious interest has faded away, the old religious life has been crippled. Those only care for the future, who see how a new interest must seize mankind, how new religious experience must spring up in mankind, so that man may bring into the Cosmos new germs for a future existence.

Meeting you today with New Year Greetings, I should like to express the wish that each one of you may realize in the depth of his soul how great and insistent are the demands of the present moment as regards the evolution of mankind, and that, as a result of this realization, each one in his own place may co-operate as far as he can, in bringing to fulfilment that of which mankind stands in such need. At this time of year, expressing as it does symbolically the meeting of past and future, I should like, by way of introduction to our New Year contemplation, which rightly is also a contemplation of the whole course of time, to recall some passages from essays which I wrote more than thirty years ago and which are shortly to be published. Although connected with personal experiences, these essays have a definite significance if we want to look into the whole spiritual condition of the present day. My purpose in writing them was, as you will notice, to rouse the conscience of the German people, to give expression to that which could be perceived even then, as fundamentally lacking in the spiritual life of the German nation. I will read to you some passages from one of these essays entitled “The Spiritual Mark of the Present Day”. These passages refer to what was taking place more than thirty years ago, to a past which was then the present. I wrote in the very midst of the spiritual life prevailing at that time, amid symptoms which showed themselves most markedly in the life of thought of the German nation. I wrote: “It is with a shrug of the shoulders that our generation recalls the period when a philosophic current ran through the whole spiritual life of the German people. The mighty impulse of the times, seizing men's minds at the end of last century (i.e., the eighteenth century) and the beginning of this one, and boldly facing the highest imaginable tasks, is now looked upon as a regrettable aberration. If anyone dares to raise an objection when the conversation turns upon Fichte's fantasies, or Hegel's insubstantial play of thoughts and words, he is regarded by his listeners as a mere amateur, who has as slight an idea of the spirit of modern scientific investigation, as he has of the thoroughness and seriousness of philosophic methods. Kant and Schopenhauer at best are tolerated by our contemporaries. It is apparently possible to trace back to Kant the somewhat scanty philosophic crumbs used by modern science as foundational; and Schopenhauer, besides his strictly scientific works, also wrote a few things in a light style, on subjects accessible to people with a limited spiritual horizon. An open mind for that striving towards the loftiest heights of the world of thought, an understanding for that soaring of the spirit which in the realms of science went parallel with our classic period of culture—this is lacking now. The serious side of this phenomenon only appears when we take into consideration that a persistent turning away from that spiritual goal implies for the German people the loss of their own Self, a breaking away from the Spirit of the Nation. For that striving sprang from a deep need in the German nature. It does not enter our mind to wish to deny the manifold mistakes and one-sided fallacies which Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken, and others, committed in their bold inroads into the kingdom of idealism. But the impulse which in all its grandeur inspired them should not be misunderstood. It is the impulse most fitting for a nation of thinkers. The German nation is not characterized by that living sense for immediate reality, or the outward aspect of Nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their wonderful and imperishable works of art. Among the Germans there is instead, an unceasing urge of the spirit toward the cause of things, toward the apparently hidden, deeper origins of the Nature which surrounds us. Just as the Greek spirit found expression in its wonderful world of plastic forms, so the German, more concentrated within himself, less open to Nature but on that account more with his own heart, cherishing intercourse with his own inner world, sought his conquests in the world of pure thought. The way, therefore, in which Fichte and his successors looked upon the world and life was truly German. This is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received; this is why, for a time, they held the whole life of the nation enthralled. This is why we must not break with their spiritual leading. Our solution of the difficulty should be to overcome mistakes, while continuing the natural course of development on the lines laid down at that time. Not what these spirits found or thought to find, is of lasting value, but how they faced the problems.”

At the time when this essay was written the German nation had to be shown these truths, which were threatening to disappear from their field of vision. We were living then in another age than the present, an age in which, had we willed it, it might still have been possible for certain circles to unite with the spirit, then at the beginning of its decline, and thus to prepare the way for an all-pervading and lasting development of the human impulse. Indeed, at that time it ought to have been possible to find such people, amongst those who called themselves leaders of the nation, amongst those who prepared the younger generation for later life. There were no experiments, then, of the kind now coming to the fore in Russia. At that time (in Germany) those who educated the young, still had the chance of turning back to the aims and intentions of the old spiritual life, causing it to rise again in the new form. But no one was willing to listen in the least to any voice urging that a real, spiritual striving should rise to life again amongst men. Every opinion that had taken firm hold amongst the lower or higher ranks of the nation's teachers during the preceding thirty years, was an attack directed against the aims and intentions of a spiritual world-conception.

I should recall that when I wrote this essay, I had already published my views on Goethe's World Conception, on Goethe's scientific ideas. I had pointed out two great dangers in the domain of thought, in the field of active scientific investigation. I coined at that time two expressions defining the two great foes of human spiritual progress. On the one hand I spoke of the “Dogma of Revelation”, and on the other hand of the “Dogma of mere Experience”. I wished to show that the one-sided cultivation of the dogma of revelation, as it had developed in the religious confessions, was just as pernicious as the continual hammering upon the so-called dogmas of experience, i.e., continually insisting only upon all that the external sense-world, the world of material facts, offers to scientists and sociologists. In the course of time the task arose of rendering these thoughts more concrete, of pointing out the real forces behind this or that phenomenon.

What, then, lies behind in everything brought to our notice when the dogma of revelation is mentioned? Today, in an all-embracing sense, all that lies behind what we term Luciferic influences in the course of mankind's evolution. And behind the dogma of experience, lies everything that we term, again in an all-embracing sense, the Ahrimanic influences in human evolution. In the present age, he who wishes to lead men only under the influence of the dogma of revelation, leads them in the Luciferic direction; he who wishes instead to lead men, as scientists would do, only according to the dogma of external sense-experience, leads them in the Ahrimanic direction. Is it not a fitting New Year's contemplation in these serious times of ours, to review the last thirty or forty years, and to point out how necessary it still is today to repeat the call of that time, to raise it anew, but far more strongly? The outward course of events during these last thirty or forty years has shown clearly the justification of that call; for he who without prejudice looks at what has happened, must say to himself: “There would not be today's misery and want, had that call become a reality in the hearts of the people of Central Europe at that time.” At that time it sounded in vain. Today the Holy Roman Congregation meets it with the Decree of the 18th July, 1919, and the chief clergy announce from their pulpits that Anthroposophy is not to be read in my books because the Pope forbids it. Information concerning it can be obtained from the writings of my opponents. This pronouncement takes place simultaneously with negotiations for the establishment of a Roman Catholic Nuntiate in Berlin under the auspices of a Berlin Government with socialistic leanings! Here, again, is something that shows the spiritual mark of the age. Would that today one could really appeal to the innermost heart-forces of those who are still capable of feeling something of the spiritual impulses in human evolution, so that they may wake up, so that they may see how things really stand. The all-important thing today is that man should be able to find himself. But to find our own Self requires confidence in our own strength of soul. Little is attained amongst men today, by appealing to this confidence in their own strength of soul. People want, on the one hand, the support of something which constrains them from within to think and to will what is right, or, on the other hand, the support of something which constrains them from without to think and to will what is right. In some way we always find these two extremes in men; they never wish to pull themselves together, to strive with active forces towards the balance between these two extremes.

Let us reconsider this spiritual mark of the present day, about to become the social and material mark. Let us reconsider it to some extent. We hear the old Marxist call rising in the East of Europe: “A social order must be established among men, where everyone can live according to his individual capacities and needs; a social order must be evolved where the individual capacities of each man can be taken into full consideration and where the justifiable needs of every single person can be satisfied.” Taken in the abstract, no objection whatever can be raised against this saying. But on the other hand, we hear a personality like Lenin saying: “Among people of today such a social order cannot be founded; it is only possible to establish a transitory social order; it is only possible to establish something which is injustice”—of course in the widest sense of the word. Injustice is indeed present to an absurd extent in everything that Lenin and his followers establish. For Lenin and his followers believe that only by passing through a transitory social order, can a new human race be produced, a race not yet in existence; only when the race is there, will it be possible to introduce the social order where everyone will be able to employ his capacities, where everyone will be able to live according to his needs. This, then, is what they are aiming at: the formation of a race of men not yet in existence, in order to realize an ideal which, as I have said, can be justified in the abstract.

Ought not enough people, when they hear of such a thing as this, be able to find themselves, and to grasp the whole seriousness of the present world-situation? Is it not time for this drowsiness to cease, when something of this kind appears before us pointing most significantly to the mark of the present day—this drowsiness which causes us to close our eyes a little, so that we do not grasp the whole significance of such a matter? Nothing will help us to reach a concrete insight into these things, except to abandon the paths of abstraction in the Spiritual life. And for this we must first really acquire the feeling that where there is only a flow of words and phrases about spirit and soul, there the talk is mere abstraction. We must be able to feel when spirit and soul are spoken of as reality. For example, speaking of human capacities: These arise as manifestations from out of man's inner being as the individual grows up. Through some of its leaders, mankind feels itself induced to develop accordingly these capacities and forces, which come to light in the growing human being. But in this domain our feelings are to be trusted only if we definitely perceive in the manifestation of these forces and capacities, a manifestation of the Divine; if we can say to ourselves: Man has come into this World of sense-realities out of a spirit-soul World of Being, and that which externalizes as human forces and capacities, and which we develop in ourselves and in others, comes from a spiritual world and is now placed in a physical human body. Now, consider the spiritual meaning of that which has been explained in this place for decades; it will show you that with the incorporation of human capacities and forces in the physical human body, Luciferic beings were given the possibility of approaching these human capacities and forces. No work whatsoever can be done in the sphere of human capacities and forces, be it in the form of self-activity or in the teaching of others, or in the furtherance of general culture, without coming into contact with the Luciferic forces. In that region which man has to go through before he enters physical existence through birth or conception, the Luciferic Power cannot directly approach the human capacities and forces. Embodiment in a physical human frame, is the means by which the Luciferic Powers are able to reach human capacities and forces. It is only if, without prejudice we look this fact in the face, that we assume a right attitude in life towards everything that surges up from human nature as individual capacities and forces. If we close our eyes to what is Luciferic, if we deny that it exists, then we succumb to it. Then the soul falls into that mood which desires above all to deliver itself up to some coercion from within, so that through all kinds of mystic or religious forces it can unburden itself of the necessity of calling upon its own free Self, or of seeking for the Divine in the world, within the development of its own free Self. Men do not want to think for themselves, they want some indefinite force from within to manifest itself, according to which they can argue logically. They do not want to experience truth; they only want to experience that inner force compelling them from within, manifesting itself in proof which does not appeal to experience, but appeals instead to a Spiritual Power which over-rules man, which compels him to think in this or in that way about Nature or about mankind himself. Men deliver themselves over to the Luciferic Powers, by calling up within themselves this inner compulsion, this inner power.

The means which can be used so that man shall appeal to this inner compulsion, so that he shall not rise to the free, upright position in the spiritual world, is to force him to think that there are no such three members of human nature as Body, Soul and Spirit; to forbid him, as actually happened in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, to think that man consists of Body, Soul and Spirit, and bid him to put away all thoughts concerning the Spirit. These are inner connections which may not be overlooked any longer. We must face them today clearly and without prejudice. In the year 869 A.D., it was decided to forbid the belief in the Spirit in man. It was in that year that the downward slope towards Lucifer began in European civilization. And today we have the full result. Long enough has mankind yielded to the inclination not to experience truth, but to allow the compulsion of argument, of impersonal argument, to work upon him. As a result, mankind has fallen into the other extreme. There has been no real comprehension of human capacities and forces, no one wanted to own that, as I have just explained, Luciferic forces live in human capacities and forces, when these are embodied in a physical human frame. That false point of view—the ruling one in humanity today, concerning individual capacities and forces in human nature—has been the outcome.

Human needs, needs arising first out of his purely physical nature, constitute the other pole of man. In his Letters on aesthetics, Schiller has characterized these needs very finely, contrasting them with man's abstract logical power. He calls them the basic needs (“Notdurft”), whereas he characterizes logical compulsion as the other power, a power straying into spiritual regions. During that great period of German evolution, a personality such as Schiller, was on the point of grasping rightly the polaric contrasts in man. The time was not yet ripe for saying more than what Schiller, Goethe, and others like-minded had said. The necessity of building further upon this beginning has been laid upon our present age. If we continue to build, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science will arise. He who is only acquainted with the one-sided power of proof in the spiritual sphere, only learns to know in life the one-sided power of natural instincts in human needs. It is easy to imagine that when man with his capacities and powers enters the physical sense-world through conception or birth, and Lucifer hovers over him and from that which man himself ought to possess takes something on one side, the head-side of the man's being, there remains in man an inferior kind of power for the exercise of his independence in the sphere of his needs. Through that which Lucifer on the one hand takes for his own, Ahriman on the other hand attains the possibility of making his own that which works in the needs of human nature. The dogma of mere external sense-experience has paved the way for the complete Ahrimanization of mankind's sense-life of instinct during the last third of the nineteenth century. Modern man stands before a terrible fact today because he does not recognize that salvation lies in the state of balance between the two extremes, between capacities on the one side, and needs on the other side. The materialistic spirit in man makes him look on the body alone as that which produces capacities i.e., man looks merely on the Luciferic primal force of capacities. The capacities become Luciferic owing to their entrance into a human body. If man believes that capacities spring from the body, then man believes in Lucifer, and if man believes that needs spring from the human body, then man believes only in the Ahrimanic side of such needs.

And what experiment is being made in the East of Europe today under the guidance of the West? (This guidance is not only evident through the fact that Lenin and Trotsky are the spiritual disciples of the West, but also through the fact that Lenin was dispatched into Russia in a sealed railway carriage by Dr. Helphand, the German official who accompanied him. So that what is termed Bolshevism, is an article transported into Russia by a German Administration and the German military command.) What are they trying to attain in the civilization of Eastern Europe? An attempt is being made to do away with everything human, with everything embodied in a human body as human, and to harness together Lucifer and Ahriman, with the civilization they represent. Were this to be realized in the East, then the Manufacturing Company of Lucifer and Ahriman would create a world excluding everything beneficial to the individual human being, and man himself would be dovetailed into this Luciferic-Ahrimanic civilization as part of a machine in the complete working of the machine. But the parts of a machine are lifeless and allow themselves to be fitted in, whereas human nature is inwardly alive, permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. It cannot fit into a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic organization, but will perish in it. Only an understanding of Spiritual Science can grasp what is really taking place today in this materialistic world which has but the haziest notions of spirit. It is only the insight of Spiritual Science and its living earnestness which can explain what the fact implies that, during the last thirty to forty years, the essential nature of the German people would not turn back to that German spirituality pointed out in my essay, but that in this German world of culture, we have at last come to this, that men of authority have felt it to be the right thing to send to Russia (in a sealed railway carriage), through a man who stood in their service, the inaugurators of Lucifer and Ahriman. In our days, it will not do simply to look around and then go to sleep peacefully, in the presence of what is actually taking place in the depths of the spirit of the present time. We ought to feel that we must say: “We have forsaken and trodden under foot that which in the age of Schiller and of Goethe was created within the Spiritual life of Germany. And we have the task of beginning where they left off and of building on further.” No better New Year's thought can enter our souls than the resolution to make this our starting point.

I told you the following some years ago: In the sixties and seventies of last century an educationist, Heinrich Deinhardt, lived in Vienna, the place where my essays were put together. This man's spirit led him from the standpoint of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics to take an active part in pedagogics, a science that was then under full sail, following the materialistic lead of his day. In some fine letters, printed at the time, explanatory of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics, Deinhardt wrote that man should be educated to recognize the compelling necessity of logic, and of the basic needs (“Notdurft”), which only live in instinct. Deinhardt was one of those who raised the warning cry: “We must prevent by means of education what is bound to happen otherwise.” He could not yet speak with the concepts of Spiritual Science, but he did point out in his own words the inevitable coming of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic culture if the Science of Education, the Art of Education were not determined by this balance. Heinrich Deinhardt had the misfortune to be knocked down in the street and to break his leg. Quite a simple operation might have put it right again, but the doctors found he was so undernourished that the injured parts would not heal. So this man, who could look so deeply into the events of his day, died owing to a slight accident. Yes, in Central Europe, men whose will was directed to bring forth something out of the spiritual, were left to starve! This example could be multiplied many times. Those who write like the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, whom I mentioned yesterday, will probably not die of hunger. Those will not die of hunger who wrote the following: “In No. 6 of the weekly paper, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Orgaeismus (The Threefold Social Organism) it is boasted that the ‘new impulse’ (a pet phrase of the Anthroposophists and of the Dreigliederung people) rests upon the fullness of Steiner's spiritual knowledge. The head of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart founded the ‘Free Waldorf School’ for the children of employees and managers, a school founded on the impulses of all the thoughts that had come from Dr. Steiner's Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In that school ‘Anthroposophy is to be the artistic method of education’.” Those who mock and tread into the dust what is being willed out of the spirit will surely not die of hunger, even in these hard days.

But it is indeed necessary to receive into our souls New Year impulses that prevent us from passing by sleepily and heedlessly, what is actually going on, impulses that make us accept sternly the stern intention of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In our own ranks, too, I see many who would like to doze over things that reveal themselves out of full compassion, out of compassion for that which is happening in our times and which, left to itself, must lead to downfall! There are persons lacking courage who join the Anthroposophical Society and then say: “Yes, Spiritual Science is something I like, but I do not want to have anything to do with social activity; it has no place in it.” Such members might take an example from our adversaries. The Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, follows everything we do. He concludes the article mentioned above, with the sentence, “The weekly paper, The Threefold Social Organism—e.g., No. 8, of course holds the opinion that the ‘Church is conspiring’ against the historical task of the self-determination of the individual.” In other articles, too, the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, shows how seriously he takes all we do.

It would be well if those who are in our Society would also take things seriously, in the right way. The spies who are on the outlook for any weak spot which they can expose in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and in all that proceeds from it, are not few in number. I think you know that I am not so foolish as to tell you what follows, out of mere vanity, and so I venture to refer to it. On the side of our adversaries the wish naturally arises to find a point of attack here or there. It is well, therefore, to read the following passage in Dr. Rittelmeyer's essay: ‘Steiner, War and Revolution’: “I happened to have a talk recently with a young Swedish scientist in economics, who had had the strict schooling of the economists of Cassel. He told me that he had read Steiner's book very carefully, from end to end, with the expectation of unmasking him as an amateur; but he had been unable to find any mistake.” In our circles we ought to consider such matters more seriously. The foundation on which we ought to build is the knowledge: Here something is willed, something that has nothing to do with the rambling talk of Theosophy, current elsewhere. Here we build upon the same strict insight into things as is demanded from any other accepted science. Were this really felt, then we should understand why the event took place which Father Zimmermann terms a defection. You know that it was no defection, but that we were thrown out because it was impossible to bring any earnestness into that society of mystic wishy-washy talk, no real earnestness was wanted there. They only wished to go on chattering in the same way they had chattered for years, particularly in connection with subjects about which all possible things can be said with no knowledge of the spiritual world. What our age most sorely needs is the greatest earnestness in the sphere of Spiritual life.

Today, New Year's day, with my visit drawing to an end, I wished to speak to you again of this deep earnestness. My most heartfelt desire is that into our ranks may come the New Year wish—it is a wish each one can shape for himself—that through the souls and hearts of our friends, eyes may in some degree be opened to that which is needed so sorely, to that which, out of the Spirit alone, is able to help humanity. No salvation is to be found in any external organization. Something new must be stamped upon human evolution. These facts must become known, and to feel that these facts must become known is indeed the most worthy New Year's thought that could rise in your hearts. This year, 1920, will hold in store many an important decision, if enough people can be found who are able to recognize the needs of mankind, as I have pointed them out today. 1920 will bring misery and suffering if such men cannot be found, if those only take the lead who wish to work on in the old way.

The challenges presented by our age really have to be faced by every individual human being today. I have made it quite clear on a number of occasions that to understand the way individuals need to face those challenges we must be aware of how human evolution progresses all over the globe. The whole course of human evolution can only be clearly understood if we gain more profound insight into the powers that intervene in the course of earth evolution as a whole and also in human lives.

I have used a number of different approaches to show that as human beings we are part of an ongoing evolution that may be said to be taking its normal course. Spiritual science enables us to follow its progress over extended periods of time. I have also pointed out that there are certain powers that have different goals for mankind than the powers who desire to guide humankind in the normal course of evolution, a course during which the earth repeatedly comes to physical manifestation. Some of those powers we would call luciferic, others ahrimanic. I have spoken of this a number of times. It is necessary to take a very serious view of these things today, but our hearts and minds cannot really achieve this serious mood unless we pay proper attention to the way these luciferic and ahrimanic powers intervene directly in human lives.

As you know, a new era in human evolution started during the 15th century, very different from anything that went before. Thinking of this you will want to be aware of the many ways in which life is different in the present age, which had its beginning in the 15th century, if we compare it to the preceding age. We may say that one particular feature of the present age is that intellectual thinking has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humankind has to undergo a major process of education in the course of Earth evolution. Part of it is this training of the intellect. Human beings had to find out, as it were, how human life can be lived when the emphasis is on intellectual thinking. They could never have been raised to be truly free individuals if the intellectual principle had not become part of them. We have no clear idea today of the extent to which people differed from us before the middle of the 15th century, particularly in this respect. We tend to take the things we are given for granted, without giving them much thought. We are now generally dealing with the peoples of civilized countries who are inclined to think with the intellect, and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this. That is not the case, however, Before the middle of the 15th century people were thinking in a different way. They simply did not think in the abstract terms in which we think today. Their thinking was very much more vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them. They were much more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul. We are living very much in our thoughts, though we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of the source from which this way of thinking, the intellectual approach which we take so much for granted, has evolved. We shall have to go a long way back in human evolution to get a real understanding of the origins of this way of thinking, this intellectualism. Another question we must ask ourselves is whether anything still remains of the human activity out of which our thinking has evolved.

You know that older evolutionary forces persist into later ages and continue to be present side by side with those that are normal to the age in question. This also applies to our thinking. Reminders, echoes of thinking, of an activity similar to our thinking are experienced in our dreams, when a whole world of images emerges from our night time sleep. Experience teaches us to distinguish between the world of thoughts we evolve between waking up and going to sleep and the world of dream images which we experience in an entirely passive way. If we go back to earlier times in human evolution we find that the further back we go the more does the life of the soul during waking hours come to resemble the mental activity we know in our dreams today. Present-day thinking is the fruit of later stages of evolution. During earlier stages along this path the human soul developed activities more akin to dreaming. If we follow this dreamlike activity of the human soul a long way back we find ourselves going beyond Earth evolution as we know it. We come to a time when the earth had taken a physical form in the cosmos that preceded the present one. We have got used to calling it the Old Moon evolution. Human beings were part of this as well, but in an entirely different form. During that Moon evolution, i.e. the time when the earth materialized in a form that preceded the present one, the human being, the true ancestor of modern man, was still completely etheric. His soul became active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images. The peculiar thing about this was that it related to the outer world in a way that is quite different from the soul activity we know as thinking. I would say that when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves rather isolated within the world. The world is outside us, it has its own processes. We reflect on those processes in our minds, but just when we think we are reflecting most profoundly on those external processes we actually feel ourselves entirely outside them. Indeed we often feel that we are best able to think about those external processes if we keep ourselves well isolated from them, withdrawing into ourselves. The human ancestor who was dreamy in his thinking, if I may put it like this, did not have that feeling. Developing in his way in his dreams what we develop in our way when we are thinking, he knew himself to be intimately bound up in everything he experienced with what went on in the world. We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking. Our human ancestor did have the feeling that the powers alive in a cloud were also alive in his thinking. This ancestor said—and I must translate what he said into our language, for his language was a silent one compared to ours: The powers that are alive and active in the cloud out there produce images in my mind. He saw himself no more isolated from the great universe in which the cloud revealed its essential nature than my little finger is able to think itself isolated from the rest of me. If I were to cut it off it would wither; it would no longer be my finger. The human ancestor felt that he could not exist apart from the universe that belonged to him. My little finger might well say: The blood which pulses through the whole of the body also pulses within me; the whole of my organic life is governed by the same laws as the organic life of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same as the power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. That is how the human ancestor felt himself to be closely related, intimately bound up, with the whole world.

We need to feel isolated from everything that goes on outside us in our thinking, as though the umbilical cord has been cut and we are separate from the essential origins and causes of the existing world. In ordinary life we are not aware of the pulses beating throughout the universe. Our thinking has grown abstract. Our thinking tells us nothing, as it were, of what is alive and active within it. This provides the actual potential for the freedom of human beings, a freedom where we do not feel that something is thinking in us but that we ourselves do the thinking.

The human ancestor was unable to form ideas independently of the universe as a whole. The human ancestor felt himself to be bound up with the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature. He knew that power was also wielded by entities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body, though human beings might feel that they had citizenry of the universe in common with them. The ancestor was not aware of ‘forces of nature’; he felt himself to be in communion with nature spirits. Today we may say that everything that happens in nature follows the laws of nature, and we are part of that nature. For the human ancestor who lived in a far distant past it was natural to say that everything that happened in nature outside himself happened out of will impulses of the spirits of nature. We say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to gravity, and according to the law of gravity the gravitational pull decreases at a rate that is proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. We call this a special case of a law of nature. When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

Certain spiritual powers who may be said to be involved in human evolution thus developed a relationship to human beings. This would normally cease the moment Earth evolution proper began for the human being. At that point human beings would be released from the tutelage of those spiritual powers, powers they had felt to be flowing and floating into them during the Old Moon stage. So we must ask ourselves what it was that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits with whom they had felt at one, however dimly. It happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature. In those far distant times of which I have just spoken, human beings did not yet have the mineral kingdom within them. Their organization would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs, for it did not yet include mineral elements.

To grasp this without getting caught up in preconceived notions we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom. People tend to be superficial in their thinking about such things. We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation. Then, however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone. In reality it is not the actual plant we see. A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception. Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the qualities of an image. Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organization soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom. I have a plant before me. It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom. The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces. I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not perceptible to the senses, has absorbed. That is how it is even with a plant. When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the minerals contained within them and not about the plants themselves. It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

During the Old Moon stage, then, human beings did not have this mineral inclusion. Human beings living on the present earth have been made in such a way that they need the mineral kingdom, having absorbed the mineral kingdom and its forces into them, as it were. What significance does this have for human nature? In the first place human beings acquired a mineral body for thinking in images the way they did at the earlier stage. As evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking. This happened at a relatively late state, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, having been a long time in preparation.

Modern intellectual thinking is based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them. As human beings we need a mineral body first and foremost to be able to think. The older form of thinking in images had been based on what we call the third elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought. Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function. We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities. People, even people of good will who may admit that there is more to life than is apparent to the senses, tend to stick too close to the human form. This anthropomorphism takes over whenever people try and create an image in their minds of anything that is above the human sphere. It is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Buechner¹ of being anthropomorphists. We have seen more than enough of this kind of thing. We have seen the legal way of thinking evolve in the Western world, with earthly misdeeds and crimes judged by earthly judges who impose penalties, and so on. The rewards and punishment meted out for sins, i.e. for something belonging to a sphere beyond this earth and seen more as imperfections in the Christian faith, have gradually come to look more like the proceedings in an earthly court of law. The religious ideas of the West have a great deal of human jurisprudence in them. We let the gods mete out punishments of the kind we know earthly courts of law impose. If we truly wish to get beyond the merely human we must firmly decide not to think in entirely human terms. We must think beyond anything anthropomorphic, and that indeed is what really matters in human life. That is the approach we must use if we want to see clearly that the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace. We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress. They simply do not. We have to accept that as a fact. The original intention was that they should only influence dreams within the human sphere and everything related to dreaming. In the context of today's lecture we refer to them as luciferic spirits. Their proper sphere would be everything that has to do with dreaming and anything related to this. They are not satisfied with this, however. They haunt the human way of thinking that has evolved out of their own sphere, human thinking now bound to the mineral sphere. When we allow anything that normally rules our dreams, the life of the imagination, to enter into our thinking we fall prey in our thinking to luciferic nature, to the influence of spirits that should only have influenced the old form of thinking in images that belonged to the human ancestors. They have retained their power and instead of limiting themselves to our dreaming, our life of the imagination, our creative artistic work, they are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times. Our thinking is still greatly influenced by elements coming from this source, by the luciferic principle.

It is justifiable to ask in all seriousness what powers are these that have such an influence on our thinking. These influences arise from the sphere where we human beings are still rightfully dreaming and rightfully asleep above all else. They come from the sphere of our feelings and emotions. We experience our feelings the way we normally experience dreams and we experience our will the way we experience sleep. There we are still rightly cocooned in a world which becomes a luciferic world as soon as it evolves in our thinking. We therefore will not manage our evolution as human beings properly unless we make the effort to evolve other thoughts as well, thoughts increasingly independent of mere feelings and emotions, of anything arising in us out of dreamlike inner experience even when we are fully awake. Theoretical principles will not help us achieve this, only life itself can do so. We find, however, that the mental habits humankind has acquired put up great resistance to the cultivation of mind and soul that is needed. We must be on the lookout for this resistance. We find that in the present time in particular people are not prepared to listen to anything that does not arise from their own inner prejudices, their feeling of how things should go, their personal preferences. They are not in the habit of listening to anything which in a way has been decided independently of human beings, requiring merely their consent. I should like to give you a brief example which I used on one occasion to explain to someone that there is an important difference with regard to what human beings are thinking.

Many years ago I gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany—today it is no longer in southern Germany—on the wisdom taught in the Christian faith.² —As you know, it is always necessary to limit the subject matter presented in a particular lecture and one can only speak within that context. When people hear just a single lecture, such a single lecture will impress one person in one way and another in a different way, particularly if one has been objective and dispassionate in presenting the subject. It certainly would not be possible for anyone to get an idea concerning the total philosophy that lies behind a single lecture if they just listened to that one lecture. If the wisdom taught within the Christian faith is the subject for example, it will of course be impossible to conclude from the contents of the lecture what the speaker thinks about the connection between light and electricity, say. It is therefore possible for something to happen the way it did on that occasion. I spoke about the wisdom taught within the Christian faith and two Roman Catholic priests were in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said: ‘No objection can be raised to what you have been saying’—this by the way was many years ago now—‘but we have to say that whilst it is true that we say the same thing we do say it in such a way the everybody can understand it’. My reply was: ‘Reverend fathers, surely it is like this: You or I may have some kind of inner feeling that we are speaking for everybody, but that is not the point, for that is a subjective feeling. After all it is perfectly natural—if we go entirely by our feeling I, too, must believe that I am speaking for everybody, just as you think you do; that is self-evident; otherwise we would do it differently. But we are now living in an age when our belief that something is justifiable does not count. We need to let the facts speak for themselves. We must learn to look to the facts. Subjectively you believe you are speaking for everybody. But now let me ask you about the facts. Does everybody still come to your church? That would show that you are speaking for everybody. You see, I speak to those who do not come to your church to hear you speak. My words are for those who also have the right to hear of the wisdom taught in Christianity.’ That is how we must take our orientation from what the facts have to tell.

It is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings. If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking. We would not have gone through the truly dreadful campaign of untruthfulness that has gone around the world in the last five years, the final consequence of something that has long been in preparation, if people had learned to pay rightful attention to what the facts have to tell and not to their emotions, with nationalists the worst in stirring up such emotions.

On the one hand there is the absolute necessity today to do something about our thinking and to comply even if something goes against the grain. On the other hand people dislike having to be so true to reality that one looks to the facts for guidance.

We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do no train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world. Once you have got at least to some extent into the habit of liking to hear the facts you will often suffer tortures when people of the present age want to tell you something. Very often the kind of thing you hear people say is: ‘Oh, someone said something and that was frightful, quite terrible!’ Terrible in what way? You say is was terrible but that only tells me how you felt about it. I really want to hear exactly what it was. ‘Well, it really was terrible what was said there…’ And these people simply do not understand. All the time they want to describe their subjective feelings concerning the matter, whilst you want to hear an objective report of what they actually saw. It is especially when people tell you something someone else has told them, that it is quite impossible to tell if they are simply passing on what they have heard or if they have actually looked into the matter they are talking about. This is an area where one has to remind people again and again that truthfulness concerning the knowledge to be found in supersensible spheres can only be achieved if we train ourselves as far as possible to adhere closely to the facts in the sense-perceptible world. That is the only way in which human beings can overcome the luciferic elements that stream into their thoughts—by learning to base ourselves on the facts.

On the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences, on the other to ahrimanic influences. It had to be said that thinking here on earth evolved from earlier stages of human soul life when human beings absorbed a mineral body, as it were. This mineral body is indeed the organ for the earthly way of thinking. It does however bring it predominantly into the sphere of the powers we call ahrimanic.

We can of course become aware of the need to base ourselves on the facts, on a real world that will get us out of the habit of being swayed by our subjective emotions. We must not, however, fall prey to the kind of thinking that is nothing but an inner activity arising from the mineral body. Here we come upon a truth that many people find highly unpalatable.

You know how some are idealists or spiritualists and others are materialists. There is plenty of discussion in the world as to which is the right approach, spiritualism or materialism. All these debates are of no value whatsoever for certain regions of the human organization. Human beings can develop in two ways. We can use the mineral body we have absorbed into ourselves as the instrument for our thinking, and indeed we have to use it, otherwise we would merely be dreaming. But we can also rise beyond this instrument in our thoughts; we can develop a spiritual point of view, spiritual vision. If we do this we will of course have been thinking with the aid of our material organization, but we will have used this to reach a further stage of human development, ascending to the world of the spirit as a result. On the other hand we can stop at the point where as earth beings we let our mineral body do the thinking. It is perfectly able to do so. That in fact is the danger, and materialism cannot be said to be wrong in its views, particularly where thinking is concerned. This mineral body is no mere photographic print. It is able to think for itself, though its thinking is subject to the limits of life on earth. We need to raise the experience our mineral body is able to give us into the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception.

It is therefore possible to say that it may indeed be true that human thoughts are merely something exuded by the human mineral organization. That may indeed be right, but human beings must first do it right.

Human beings have the freedom to develop on earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not get to the point where mineral inclusion leads to the development of thinking activity. Animals cannot choose to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view. Human beings are at liberty to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view; all it needs is the will to do so out of a materialistic attitude to life.

Human freedom is such that people are indeed free to make materialism come true for the human kingdom, that is, they can take a course that will lead to human beings on earth concerning themselves only with material things. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it is a matter of choice if we become materialists. If we are strong enough to bring to realization what people are told is a materialistic attitude then this attitude will be made to come true by human beings.

This influence on human beings comes from ahrimanic powers. They want to keep everything connected with Earth evolution at the point which has been reached for human beings by that very Earth evolution—that is the point of having a mineral organization. They want to make human beings perfect, but only as far as their mineral organization is concerned. The luciferic powers want to keep human beings, who now have acquired a mineral organization, at the earlier stage that was right for them before they acquired a mineral organization. So we have two powers pulling at the traces, luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic spirits want to get human beings to a point where they finally cast off their mineralized bodies and go through an evolution that has no relevance in earth life and has merely been an episode in earth life. The luciferic spirits aim for the gradual elimination of everything relating to the earth from the whole evolution of mankind. The ahrimanic spirits aim to take firm hold of this earthly, mineral aspect of human beings, isolate it from progressive evolution and let it stand on its own. That is how luciferic and ahrimanic spirits are pulling in different directions.

It is absolutely vital that having presented the large outline we now come to apply this to ordinary everyday life. We do not consider a U-shaped bar of iron to be a horse-shoe when it is in fact a magnet. In the same way we really should not consider human life to be entirely the way it may appear on the outside. If you shoe a horse with magnets you fail to realize that a magnet has more to it than a horse-shoe. Yet it happens quite often nowadays that people speak of human life exactly like someone who shoes his horse with magnets rather than with horse-shoes. People have no hesitation in speaking of positive and negative electricity in the inorganic sphere, or of positive and negative magnetism, yet they hesitate to speak of luciferic and ahrimanic elements in human life. These are just as effective in human life as positive and negative magnetism are in the inorganic sphere. It is just that the idea of positive and negative magnetism is more easily understood. It does not take as much effort to grasp it as it does to grasp the idea that there are luciferic and ahrimanic elements. That is also the reason why we shall only learn to deal with the empty talk one hears today, empty talk that turns into lies, by knowing that it is luciferic by nature.

Similarly we shall only learn to deal with everything that shows itself here and there as the materialistic point of view by knowing that it is ahrimanic by nature. In future mere external characterization will not get us anywhere when we want to understand human life; all we would be doing is talk around the subject and commit the most stupid of errors when we try and apply such ideas to real life. One thing we would not be doing is to see human life in such a way that social impulses can be gained from our knowledge of human institutions. This has a very much to do with the utter seriousness required when looking at everything connected with evolutionary trends where humankind is concerned. We cannot gain understanding of the life we are now living unless we raise our vision from earthly concerns to spheres beyond this earth. There is a particular point to this.

Looking back into earlier stages of human evolution—though not as far back as those I have spoken of earlier—people generally base themselves on such historical documents as are available. There are historians—well-known names—who say that the history of humankind is made up of everything to be found in the written records. If you start from such a definition of history, like the historian Leopold von Ranke, you will obviously arrive at a particular kind of history. The art of writing is itself part of history, however, it has evolved from something else, and in real terms one cannot do anything with this kind of definition.

We need only go back as far as Chaldean-Babylonian times, to ancient Egyptian times, and we shall find that at that period of human evolution human beings still related to the cosmos in a very different way. People today have no real idea of what it meant to connect one's life to the course of the stars, the planets, and their position relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac. These things have become an empty abstraction nowadays. Do you think a modern astrologer delving into ancient astrological writings to compile his horoscopes—if at least he does search through the old writings, and does not produce new ones; the new ones are terrible!—has even the slightest idea of the living connection which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans felt to exist between human beings and the movements and positions of the stars viewed from the earth? Everything is different today. It has to be said that an important part of human evolution since those times has been the narrowing down of human awareness to the physical world. What did those Egyptians know of the earth? It was the ground under their feet. They knew more about the heavens. They moved in the vertical in gaining their experience. The ancient Greeks did not yet go into the horizontal either; they, too, gained their experience by going vertically. The vertical came to be reduced as the horizontal started to spread. The maximum limitation human beings experienced in their knowledge of the heavens came with the great increase in knowledge of the earth that came when men sailed around the globe and found that having sailed away to the west they would return from the east. It was necessary for human understanding in the vertical direction to become obscured. Human beings had to be isolated from the universe so that they could find within themselves the only power that can lead to human freedom. Moral impulses will arise out of this human freedom in their turn.

Human beings therefore no longer relate to the spheres beyond the earth in the vertical fashion the ancient Greeks and Chaldeans did. We have had the training that only a horizontal surface can give and must now ascend again in moral, ethical terms. We must learn how human life is influenced by powers that do not show themselves in the course taken by the world that exists outside us. Those are the luciferic and ahrimanic powers.

People tend to put their minds to other things, however, and sometimes I also have to tell you something relating to our spiritual movement that takes its orientation in anthroposophy. This has accepted the task of working out of the full seriousness the time demands and listening to the language spoken from the cosmos beyond this earth, as it were, a language which tells us that we must once again come to see the way the human being is connected with the whole cosmos. Again and again, however, things make themselves heard in this work—please forgive the abrupt change of subject—which even today draw attention to some very peculiar points of view taken by people who oppose our aims of furthering the progress of mankind. Let me read you a passage from a letter that is really typical. As I said, please forgive the abrupt change of subject but we are obliged to inform you of all kinds of things that are going on at the present time with the purpose of undermining and destroying this movement which endeavours to take up the challenge of the present age.

There is someone in Norway³ who had made it his task to destroy our movement. To assure himself that he has a right to do so, this man is writing to leading figures—that is how one does these things nowadays. He wrote to a publication called Politisch-anthropologische Monatsschrift [Political Anthropological Monthly]. This journal sent him the following information: ‘Dr Steiner is a Jew of the purest water. He is connected with the Zionists, indeed associated with them, and works for the Entente.’ The editor added that they—i.e. people of this kind—'have had their eye on him for some time.’

I just wanted to tell you this in conclusion, as yet another case among the many one gets today, with a new one coming up almost daily. That is the attitude anthropologists are now taking to the efforts being made in the anthroposophical field.

• 1 . Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, German philosopher. Referring to Feuerbach's anthropomorphism, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly quoted from his book Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), e.g. in a lecture given in Dornach on 15 October 1921 (Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie, GA 207, English title Cosmosophy).
  
  Ludwig Buechner, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 2 . ‘Die Weisheitslehren des Christentums in Lichte der Theosophie’ (The wisdom taught in the Christian faith in the light of Theosophy),Colmar, 21 November 1905 (no written record in existence).
• 3 . Details not known.

It has been said on a number of occasions, and also two days ago when I presented the subject from a slightly different point of view, that it is important for us to consider the evolution of the human race in the light of spiritual science and grow aware of the gravity of the present moment. We shall then have to act out of our realization of the gravity of the situation, irrespective of our position in life.

Today I should like to add some further building stones to an edifice that seen in its entirety can show us the present-day tenor of the human mind and spirit and how we shall have to work for the further progress of humankind by taking this state of mind and spirit as our basis. To begin with let us refer to things which in the main are already known to us.

We know that the human race in its present state of civilization has by and large descended from the human race that evolved before disaster befell the continent of Atlantis. It has been said on a number of occasions that Atlantis occupied an area between present-day Europe, Africa and America that is today covered by the Atlantic Ocean. We know that under the influence of that disaster—in the course of its preparation and later as it proceeded—the peoples of that time migrated first in an eastward direction, populating Europe and then Asia as they moved on, and that the European and Asian peoples of the present day are in fact the descendants of the peoples of Atlantis. We also know that civilization then took the opposite route and people coming to colonize Europe brought civilization with them, as it were: cultural contents that had first been achieved in Asia. These then spread further from a number of centres in Europe. Thus I would say that the physical basis for modern civilization is provided by the peoples of Europe and Asia, descendants of the ancient Atlantean race that moved from the west to the east. Civilization itself however moved from east to west. These two movements can only be properly distinguished on the basis of spiritual-scientific investigation. The two are confused in conventional anthropology and it is not realized that only the culture, the civilization, has been transplanted from east to west, whilst the physical basis comes from migrations that proceeded from west to east.

People always have some relationship to the locality where they live. We relate in some way to the soil under our feet, to everything this soil produces, to the way the soil comes to expression in climatic conditions and provides a habitat. You can conclude from this—and spiritual science fully confirms it—that the peoples who went further into Asia in the course of those post-Atlantean migrations inevitably had to develop in a different way from those who had remained in Europe. In ordinary terms this means that the soil of Europe had a different effect on the descendants of the Atlanteans than the soil of Asia. In a way, we can define the difference between the populations of Asia and of Europe. The difference is that particularly during the earliest periods of post-Atlantean civilization, during the 9th, 8th, 7th and 6th millennium BC and the millennia that followed, the people of Asia adopted intellectual thinking, thinking as we know it, in a different way. This type of thinking did not fully emerge until the 15th century, as I said on the last occasion, but it was in preparation for centuries and indeed millennia before that.

This form of thinking as we know it today only developed in very recent times, assuming its true character in intellectual thinking as the soul itself became inwardly active. But the whole of our evolution, particularly in post-Atlantean times, has been tending towards this intellectual approach. It is significant that the post-Atlantean population of Asia accepted all that we may call intellectual more into its soul elements. We can say that due to local conditions the peoples of Asia were specifically predestined for the early stages of intelligence to enter into their souls. The most remarkable aspect of Asian civilization is that the soul element as such became the instrument for adopting the intellectual principle.

It was different with the people who had remained in Europe. Quite specifically the situation was that physical development, the physical organization that later on was to become the real instrument of intellectual development, evolved in such a way that even at an earlier stage it became the essential characteristic of these peoples, constituting itself in a way that was particularly suited to be the vehicle for the intellectual principle. If we therefore wish to characterize the descendants of the Atlanteans' earliest descendants, that is ourselves, we have to say that the Asian peoples got more into the habit of thinking with their souls; the Europeans got into the habit of thinking more with their bodies. That is in fact the major difference between the civilizations of Asian and Europe. If you want to show up the clear difference which exists between the kind of intelligence apparent in the Vedic writings or Vedantic philosophy and other cultural streams in Asia compared to European culture you have to say to yourselves: Asians are thinking more with their souls, Europeans more with their bodies.

The people of Asia may thus be said to have taken the intellectual element into a higher aspect of their human nature, with the result that an advanced civilization developed much earlier. This however was a civilization of the soul that had fewer abstract concepts, a culture that found its own ways to higher things, using the human soul and spirit to reach the soul and spirit of the world without resorting to abstract concepts. That is where the spiritual nature of Asian civilization lies—inasmuch as it is essentially a civilization based on soul qualities. The peoples of Asia largely left their bodies unused when it came to thinking; they merely carried their bodies with them through life on earth. The life of the mind was nurtured entirely at soul level. You cannot understand the peculiar nature of Asian culture unless you look at it from this point of view.

Europeans were basing their thinking more and more on the physical body. That is also why the foundations were more strongly laid among them than in Asia for a culture in which freedom can be the central principle. The people of Asia, endowed with intelligence at soul level, still were more part of the whole cosmic organism. The human body specifically isolates itself from the rest of the cosmic organism. Using it as the instrument for our intellectual life we become more independent, though this independence is more bound up with the body than is the case with the people of Asia who have developed intelligence within the soul principle and are consequently less independent.

As the time approached in the history of humankind that was to bring the Mystery of Golgotha, an advanced culture of soul and spirit had evolved in Asia. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had already reached its culmination and was in the early stages of decline. Do not let us deceive ourselves: European ideas do not make it easy to grasp the great culture which had grown out of the soul and spirit of the Asian peoples. When people who are thoroughly European in their way of thinking, people for whom the physical body is the instrument of thinking, want to get Europeans to appreciate Asian ideas, as Deussen⁴ has done, for example, the outcome in no way represents the contents of Asian civilization of soul and spirit, for everything alive in it has been translated into European thought. It has even happened that interpretations of certain spiritual streams in India caused a sensation in Europe—those published by von Garbe⁵ for instance, yet it was nothing more than European materialism producing a garbled translation of Asian soul and spirit culture. Publications of this kind contain a trace of the real spirit of ancient Asia. It is necessary to point this out very firmly because, as I have said before, belief in authority has reached an extreme degree and people really have nothing in them that permits them to acknowledge the validity of something, except the fact that it has been written by university professors. There is of course no real inner reason why Deussen's or Garbe's botchwork should be considered important in any way, except that there is this belief in authority in Europe which is going sadly astray. People are no longer in a position even to find any kind of inner reason; they merely believe one thing or another to be right because some outer authority says so. It does not help to avoid saying the truth about these things—even if it means making more enemies—for the gravity of the present situation absolutely demands that there shall be no compromise where certain things are concerned and that the truth must be clearly stated.

The advanced culture of the spirit in Asia was already to some extent in decline when the event of Golgotha occurred. This event of Golgotha—it cannot be sufficiently stressed—was first of all taken in and understood by minds that were the product of Asian culture. It is important to distinguish between the Mystery of Golgotha as a historical event that happened in the Near East at the beginning of Christian era and the notions people have of this Mystery of Golgotha. At the time when the event occurred, Europe did not have the capacity to grasp it fully, for it was an event that could only be grasped in soul and spirit. European civilization, however, had spread by using physical matter as its instrument. The event which occurred at the beginning of our Christian era could not be directly grasped in a civilization based on physical and material things. Asian civilization on the other hand had an intellectual life based on soul and spirit and out of this was able to find concepts with which to grasp the event of Golgotha. The event that happened in Palestine was thus poured into the conceptual world of the Orient. In that form it travelled westward through Greece and Italy and came to Europe as a tradition.

People can be given something in an external way that they cannot yet grasp in their hearts and minds. Things may come to them in the form of a tradition or through the written word. Europe initially was given the explanation, its understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, out of the oriental tradition. Christianity was understood in the light of oriental wisdom, a wisdom of soul and spirit that was truly great at a time when the Mystery of Golgotha, and the way Christ related to the whole of Earth evolution, were still perceived gnostically. It dwindled more and more as Europeans were increasingly blending their own unique characteristic into this tradition. They had to bring their particular characteristic of an intellectual life bound to the physical body into the way they saw these things. The following happened, particularly in Europe: In early times the human bodies of Europeans were very much the instrument of their kind of elementary intellectual thinking, but then this body gradually began to die. Physical evolution of European humanity until the 15th century and even to this day consisted in the physical body growing more and more dead. Our physical bodies are growing denser and denser and more and more bony. We cannot demonstrate this with the methods of ordinary anatomy and physiology, but it is true. We no longer have bodies as inwardly alive as those of people living in the 1st, 3rd and even the 10th and 11th centuries. Our European bodies of today have grown bony, paralyzed, compared to those ancient bodies that were inwardly alive. Thus you have on the one hand a tradition designed for the soul and spirit of Asian people who preserved the ecclesiastical creeds, and on the other hand a more and more European body that increasingly felt those Asian traditions to be alien and in the end no longer found itself able to take in the ideas coming from Asia.

From the middle of the 15th century onwards the influence of the bony European body has been such that in the end that old tradition only survived in empty outer phrases among religious communities. For many centuries the tradition had been so much alive that little regard was paid to the Gospels and people took their cue from life itself. As the European body came to die off people felt impelled to say: Let us cast off the old tradition; we want to put our faith only in the Word, the Word as it is written. People believe they have the Word when in fact they only have a poor translation of it. It gradually came about—though no one is willing to admit it—that really all one had was the outer shell of the Word of old that once held within it the tidings of the Mystery of Golgotha in the garb of oriental wisdom, a wisdom of soul and spirit.

This oriental wisdom is little understood by the people who generally interpret or translate the Gospels; they understand little, if any of it. The point is that it is necessary to see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light. However, unless we Europeans get beyond what a dying physical body is able to give we will be unable to do so. We must develop through spiritual science and come to grasp the spiritual world in a way where we are independent of this body. Our future salvation entirely depends on our ability to grasp the spiritual world in this way, independently of our physical bodies, going straight for the spirit. It will have to be different in essence from the oriental culture of soul and spirit, which came as though of its own accord as human beings evolved. Europeans of the present time will need to achieve it by their own efforts. They will have to nurture spiritual science. They will have to create an educational system where from the bottom rung upwards spiritual science is not presented as a theory but flows into everything we do as we teach and train the children. Spiritual science should also flow into higher education and should be alive in everything connected with art, literature and so on, everything that is our common cultural life. This European culture must provide for the nurturing of spiritual science itself. On the basis of such a spiritual science the Mystery of Golgotha will then be seen in a new light. We shall have to say that those were the old times when the Mystery of Golgotha was only interpreted in the light of the wisdom of spirit and soul that belonged to the Orient. A new wisdom will have to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in a new and living way.

We have spoken about these things quite often and in many respects. It is necessary, however, that they take hold of our soul from all sides. It is necessary that we come to experience a seriousness that absolutely fills our hearts and minds with the realization that new insight has to be gained into the Mystery of Golgotha. This is something that makes the seriousness that is required particularly in Central Europe even more austere.

Looking with more profound insight at what has become cultural life in the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th century particularly in Central Europe you really have to say this: The bodies of people in Central Europe were already dying, but they still were so much alive that the people were able to rise to a world of ideas more alive than ever seen before in the evolution of humankind. Nowhere else did human minds rise to abstract ideas in such a way that whilst living in these abstract ideas one was not in the sphere of death but in the sphere of life. That was achieved in Goetheanism, for instance, and by German idealist philosophers. It is not something to be found anywhere else in human evolution. It was also in a way a culmination, one merely has to get this quite clear in one's mind. People today no longer want to know how Schelling, for instance, to take just one of the Goetheanists, moved in a sphere of abstract thoughts and yet, whilst speaking in quite abstract terms, was alive in the way he moved in the sphere of abstract thoughts: as alive as people usually are when they speak of food and drink. The same applies to Fichte. This was an area of human evolution where we are especially aware of an ability to descend into the sphere of concepts and ideas in a way that was very much alive. Something quite special exists therefore for this Central European population, special in the whole context of human evolution in more recent times. They have their own characteristics that enable them in particular to take up the vocation of humankind for the present day: namely, to enter into spirituality again. These characteristics only came to be submerged beneath other things in the second half of the 19th century.

It is terribly painful to be aware of a very sleepy human being in Central Europe today walking over the graves of Lessing and Goethe and Herder and Schelling. This human being considers its role to be that of a soul asleep. If we were to pick up the thread of the writings and thoughts of those great minds, not in an external way but entering into the spirit in which they wrote, we would find the element that can raise Europe to the heights. Europe cannot be made to rise to the heights by Gospel words repeated parrot-fashion in the churches that no one understands. Europe can only be made to rise if people seek to grasp the spiritual worlds by developing further what Herder, Goethe and others have been working towards. There is however hardly any awareness of this at the present time. It is a sad sign of the times for example that in a cultural community which possesses treasures like Fichte's Goal and Purpose of the Human Being, Schelling's Bruno and Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man ⁶ —there are many more I could mention—that in such a cultural community people could follow a trend that led to the inane and superficial Americanisms of Ralph Waldo Trine ⁷ and the like. We have things that are much more sublime but we let them sleep and turn to other things.

The further we penetrate into the actual life of the mind and spirit the more it becomes apparent that something new is emerging in the life of humankind today. Central Europeans are far from understood by Western Europeans; Western Europeans are far from understood by Central Europeans, even in ordinary life. People are not aware of this, however. They think they understand each other. They do not realize that they are not communicating their thoughts. I am not referring to the way Americans and Europeans fail to communicate, but Central and Western Europeans. You come across some odd things in this respect.

The last time I was here I told you that vilification is rife not only within Germany but also outside its borders.⁸ I told you about this man Ferriére,⁹ for instance, who spread one of the strangest tales in a Swiss-Belgian journal, saying that it was of course generally known that I was ‘Rasputin’ to William II¹⁰ and had a major share in all the bad advice William II was given in those terrible days. This slanderous story came to be widely known particularly in French-speaking Switzerland and I therefore defended myself by writing down the truth of the matter, stating the bare facts. I said that I had only ever seen the former emperor briefly and from a distance, had never spoken with him at all and never sought to contact him even through others. These are the bare facts I stated in a letter to Dr Boos¹¹ who then gave Mr Ferriére the necessary set-down. The matter was published in the journal in question together with Ferriére's reply. This went more or less as follows: Once again the great difference between the Latin and the Germanic mind is demonstrated. The Germanic mind takes everything so seriously. ‘My readers’, Ferriére wrote, ‘will of course not have been deceived; they will have realized that what I wrote was intended to be plaisanterie and not méchanceté.¹² Apart from that let me state that it is possible to learn that something we may have heard from people whom we think we can believe need nevertheless not be true, even if it is a widely believed rumour. I am taking note of this.’ And so on.

That was the elegant reply the ‘Latin mind’ was able to give, with a plaisanterie concerning the Germanic mind. At least one has the satisfaction that these things have come to the fore; very often they are not even noticed.

They assume even greater significance where a more profound view is taken of the world, at the point where they relate to initiation knowledge and everything connected with this. This is a sphere where it is indeed necessary to mention these things just for once, though some people consider it highly dangerous to touch on them even today. I want to talk to you today about a matter that in the opinion of representatives of initiation knowledge, Western representatives in particular, should not be discussed.

Western representatives of initiation knowledge will tell you again and again that it simply will not do for anyone to spread initiation knowledge they have gained for themselves. You will find that when genuine initiates in the West present initiation knowledge in books available to the public they always deny having personal experience of the things of which they are writing. You will find that it is quite typical—such things have appeared particularly in America—to have a preface, that is part of the whole technique, which says the following: ‘None of these things are my own, of course, for if they were just my own I would not mention them’. Take a look, you will find this kind of thing in many documents published particularly by Western initiates. If you ask why it is done like this you will be given an answer that within certain limits is certainly true for Western initiation science. You will be told that anyone learning something directly from the spiritual world, who knows the secrets of the spiritual world, cannot tell another person that he has it from personal experience—these will be the words used to answer the question—for if he betrays the fact that he has initiation knowledge from personal experience he becomes dependent for life on the person to whom he betrayed his secret.

This attitude has its roots in the essential nature of Western initiation science. The effect is that anything to do with initiation is discussed in a very superficial way among Western initiates in their societies, and that there are indeed initiates moving around among Western humanity of whom nobody knows that they are initiates. This is an attitude that has to be overcome in the new age; it cannot hold true in Central Europe, and the spirit which must arise in Central Europe will have to fight this attitude. It will have to fight it by coming to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in the new and spiritual way I have talked about. It will have to come to understand the presence of the Christ in human life.

Here lies a major secret. The usual initiation knowledge in Western countries is far removed from Christianity; otherwise the Theosophical Society would not have excluded or caricatured the Christian faith and presented a purely oriental, pre-Christian Indian wisdom as something new. It is a peculiar characteristic of this Western initiation knowledge that its initiates only have something of their initiation if they have at least one pupil who reiterates their ideas. There is no point whatsoever in having initiation knowledge just for oneself. If your eyes look straight ahead you will not see a single object. In the same way you will not encounter your own ideas of the spirit as a Western initiate unless you can see your own ideas repeated by someone else. There are all kinds of indications of this, but it is not properly realized.

Indeed, if this is the case then it is true that someone who betrays to another person the fact that he is an initiate will be in the power of that other person for the rest of his life. The other could then refuse to serve him and say: I am not going to repeat your ideas. That implies some degree of dependence. That essentially is a characteristic of the initiation knowledge I have frequently referred to in other respects, referring to it as the dominant initiation science in the West.

There is only one way out of this dependence on one's followers and that is to be in communion with Christ, who can truly be found on earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. We are not then in communion with a human being who is not perceptible to the senses but with the first among brothers who has come among men, with the living Christ walking among us. If we are in a communion with Christ the way we had to be in communion with other persons in pre-Christian initiation, we need not be afraid to share our own wisdom with our fellow human beings. There is no other way in the present time in which original initiation wisdom can be directly communicated than by being in communion with Christ. There is no other way. A genuine initiation wisdom of the present age will have to look for such communion with Christ.

If this initiation wisdom were not there to be found we could make no progress in social understanding. It is no longer possible to evolve social ideas nowadays unless we base ourselves on initiation. Yet we have need of social ideas. A social system born wholly out of Western initiation wisdom would depend on that initiation wisdom being kept secret even at its lowest levels—certain higher levels cannot be made known today because people must have the necessary preparation. Keeping things secret in this way is not compatible however with the principle of people being equal, a principle modern Europeans and indeed the whole civilized world consider important today. So you see that exactly when it comes to initiation wisdom a colossal difference shows itself between the Central European and the Western mind. The difference becomes even more apparent in the case of initiation wisdom than in the situation where people talk above each others heads in the present time and believe humankind can be brought to an abstract uniformity. That cannot be done. Human beings are differentiated and this differentiation shows itself particularly if one takes a more profound look at initiation knowledge. This is an important subject and it will no doubt be necessary for me to explain it in more detail during the time I am here. When it comes to genuine spiritual insight one simply cannot be slipshod about things, and a lack of seriousness concerning the truth is unacceptable. It simply will not do. Truthfulness is of the essence.

• 4 . Paul Deussen, philosopher and Sanscrit scholar.
• 5 . Richard von Garbe, Sancrit scholar.
• 6 . Johann Gottlieb Fichte, German philosopher. Die Bestimmung des Menschen 1800.
  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling German philosopher. Bruno, oder über das göttliche and natürliche Prinzip der Dinge. Ein Gespräch (Bruno, or concerning the divine and natural principle of things. A dialogue).
  Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, German dramatist, poet and historian. Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (letters on aesthetic education) 1795.
• 7 . Ralph Waldo Trine, American writer.
• 8. Stuttgart, 21 December 1919. In Weltsilvester and Neujahrsgedanken GA 195. English in The Cosmic New Year. London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1938.
• 9. A. Ferrière. La loi du progres economique et la justice sociale. Suisse-Belgique Outremer juillet-aout 1919; 1: 3-4
• 10. Grigoriy Efimovich Rasputin, reputed ‘holy man’ who influenced the Tsarina and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
  TN. William II (1859–1941), third German emperor and ninth king of Prussia.
• 11. Dr Roman Boos. anthroposophical lecturer, writer in the field of social sciences. Pioneer of the Threefold Movement.
• 12. plaisamerie—joke; méchanceté—spitefulness, malice.