The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Considering the seriousness of the times, it seems to me that if I were to speak about Pentecost today in the way it is ordinarily spoken of, it would be unchristian—although such unchristian performances are quite the accepted thing. All who have been speaking here for the renewal of our education and school life, have spoken in the real spirit of Pentecost—endorsing as they have, so earnestly, our movement for the threefolding of the social organism. For in the liberation of the spiritual life, in the emancipation of the schools, lies the truest spirit of Pentecost for our present day—that Pentecost spirit which has entirely disappeared from the ordinary so-called religious and confessional streams of this age.

It is our sincere hope that an emancipation of the spiritual life, such as we are striving to achieve, will bring about its renewal—a thing of which mankind is so sorely in need. But one will only be able to comprehend what must be done to our schools and to our education in order to bring about a renewal of the spirit, a pouring out of the true Pentecost spirit, if one realizes how deeply the anti-Pentecost spirit has trickled into public life, into men's so-called spiritual intercourse with one another.

If one speaks in these times as one must on an anthroposophical basis, then one even—I underline it three times—even hears this reproof: that the word “German” and the word “Christian” or “Christ” are never mentioned in the course of one's remarks.

My dear friends, if we cannot find within ourselves the answer to such foolish chatter we have not yet get to the heart of the anthroposophical world-conception! It is the direct result of our distorted pedagogy; it illustrates what absurdities have trickled into our souls through our education. We must above all things gain a knowledge of the connection between the perverted chatter of our age and our perverted educational life; this knowledge must pour down in manifold fiery tongues upon the heads of our contemporaries.

A great deal is being said in our time about the unimportance of the word, and that “in the beginning was the deed”. My dear friends, an age like ours will even find a false use for the Gospel; the word has become mere chattered phrase and the deed, thoughtless brutality. An age like ours turns away from the Word with reason, because in the word that it knows it can only find phrase—and the deed that it knows is only thoughtless brutality.

There is a deep connection between our educational life and this fact which I have mentioned. We bear within us two sources of perverted humanity: a perverted Hellenic and a perverted Romanism. We do not understand Hellenism as it related to its own time and place. We can, hardly comprehend why the noble Socrates and Plato tried with such courage to cure the Greeks of their unconquerable love of illusion. The Greeks always wanted to escape from the seriousness of life, and sought their satisfaction in illusions. Socrates and Plato, the Greek lawgivers, had to point with great severity to the reality of the spirit, to save the Greeks from falling more and more into the failing of their race, that of withdrawing comfortably by means of illusions from the seriousness of life. The Greeks allowed “the loafer Socrates” to go on talking about the seriousness of life as long as he seemed harmless. But as soon an they realized what was really contained in his words they gave him hemlock to drink.

Socrates spirit of earnestness is not the spirit of this age. We inherit rather that spirit of Hellenism that poisoned Socrates; and we revel in it. We even consent to the poisoning of the pearl of world-literature, the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, when we allow the word “Word”—of which the Old Testament said that when man lets it become one of his illusions heaven and earth will fall—we allow it to be taken literally. St. John's Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word”. The man of today is content to take the word “Word” as a mere phrase. But something stands written there that is destined to scatter all his illusions which he drags into the phrase. The heaven end earth of our illusions would collapse if we were earnestly willing to understand the “Logos” that shines forth from this sentence, and that should be experienced in it.

Thus our culture has tried to ameliorate the severities of life either by mystic comfort or by brutal action. That is what we must see today, what we must realize above all things. Today we must drive out of men's souls from the first moment of education up through the highest schools, what Socrates and Plato sought to expel from Hellenism when they said to the Greeks: “Beware of illusions; the spirit alone has reality! There is living reality in ideas, which is not what you, with your elusive phrases, want to see in thee?”

We will get no further if we keep chattering about ethics and religion! For the Gospel is itself a fact in the evolution of the world. It has become today mere babble; and therefore it is accompanied by thoughtless, brutal action. We must fill our souls with what can really inspirit us when we speak. We must find a way to make the heart speak behind the lips. We must find a way to penetrate our words with our entire being; otherwise the word becomes a seducer, tempting us with illusion, alluring us from the earnestness of reality. We must put away forever the spirit which lures us to go church in order to be lifted there out of the earnestness of life, and to hear this gratifying phrase trickled out to us: that the Lord God will make it all right, He will deliver us from our evils. We must look within ourselves, within our own souls, for forces which are divine forces, which have been implanted in us during the evolution of the world in order that we shall use them, in order that we shall he able to receive God into our individual souls. We should not be listening to all this preaching about an external God, which allows our souls to lie in indolent repose on Philistine sofas, of which we are so fond when it is a question of spiritual life. Our education must find away out of the “Greek Phrase”, as one may call it today. It must also find a way out beyond the “Roman phrase”.

The “spirit of law” which our age still worships today was right for the Romans. For what was this spirit of law? A deep meaning lies hidden in the legend of the founding of Rome. Brutes were held together in order to combat the worst animal-human instincts. That is what the Roman laws were for, to herd wild animals together. But we should realize that we have become men, and we should not worship that spirit of law which arose from a legitimate Roman instinct to tame brutish human passions. The Roman spirit that still prevails in us today as our “spirit of right” is universally of such a character as to intend that wild human passions shall not rule in freedom, but shall be held in full restraint.

Christian! the complaint is that that word is not used in the lectures we are giving. But we continually forget a very Christian saying of Paul that reads as follows: “Sin came through law, not law through sin. “If there were no law, sin would be dead”. Of course that may be worth nothing for our time, because men have become unchristian. But it is a saying of which one must learn the dear significance. This is the true Christian spirit: to take out of the State—which men regard today as All-containing, All-embracing, and which is our inheritance from Rome—to take out of it the spiritual life and the economic life, and to make them free. But men do not want the Christian spirit, and therefore they want to make themselves feel comfortable by using “Christ” and “Christian” as often as possible as phrases.

Likewise they want to hear the word “German” as a mere phrase as often as possible. A true German spirit prevails in Goethe. The recent un-German spirit of middle Europe has in its enlightened representative, the Berlin Academy of Science, coined a phrase which I have mentioned here before: the glory of these men, the spiritual leaders of today, consists in this, they regard themselves as “the scientific bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns”! The man who coined that phrase has also given a lecture, in the scientific phraseology of the present day, entitled “Goethe and no End”, in which he endeavored to trample to the ground Goethe's whole natural-scientific spirit. He took great pleasure in saying: “Goethe's Faust character might better be inventing an air pump to keep Gretchen upright, than all the silly things he does in that book”. That is in the spirit of the time—trampling on the true German spirit which never takes the word “German” in vain—just as the “modern” Christian spirit (and that means unchristian spirit) has been always to require the words “Christ” and “Christian”, and to disregard this other saying; “Thou shalt not speak the word God is vain”. One should have a feeling for what is Christian, and not be constantly wanting to have one's ears filled with chatter about Christianity.

That is “the spirit of Whitsuntide” today. One can hardly say that if it were not cherished and cultivated it would find much fruitful ground upon which to fall. One has plenty of opportunity to see how this Whitsuntide spirit is everywhere misunderstood. The following fact, for instance, that has actually come to light, in a remarkable illustration of the spirit of our time (if I may descend for a moment to an everyday matter): Our Union for the Threefolding of the social organism started forth to make seed-words grow into deeds, and in order to be understood snatched up the words of a certain person for quotation. Then this person talked also on his side, about socialization, using words which could very well be used if socialization was being talked about, and which at the same time could very well be quoted by our Union for the Threefolding of the social organism, because as words, if they were the thought-seeds of actions, then would actually mean what we want to say. But then, what happened? From the side from which these words originally came, the course of action which should naturally follow these words was violently attacked. What, does this indicate, was under the surface of the man's thought? It was this: Woe to you if you regard our words as anything else but chatter and phrase! The moment you take our words seriously, we are your enemies! That is the outcome of on educational system that has grown up in this age under the wing of the State. That on the one side. On the other hand is this pleasing denunciation: We are in complete agreement with what Steiner says, his whole ides for fighting existing capitalism; we agree with his Threefold Commonwealth; but we are fighting him because we will not be preached to by a spirit-seer!

It does not seem unreasonable to ask ourselves: What can be attempted in an age that wants nothing else but phrases or thoughtless brutal action, that refuses everything else, but that nevertheless bears within it the seed out of which real men can be developed? People do not want to have to think; they prefer thoughtless class war. They utter beautiful phrases and do not want their thoughts to become deeds. And if someone takes their phrases seriously he is violently attacked.

We must ask ourselves noel, seriously: ! Have men who are born in the midst of such a spirit the right to pour out phrases—oily phrases—about the Pentecost wonder? My dear friends, the slime that is poured out today about the Pentecost wonder comes from the dame glands as the poison with which some want to choke everything today that comes from the spirit, poison by which they encourage in themselves on the one hand unreal phrase, and on the other hand thoughtless, brutal action. The unreel phrase is the religious chatter of the world; the brutal unspiritual act is militarism, the fundamental evil of our time. Until one realizes how thoroughly these two things are ingrained in our perverted educational life, one cannot think fruitfully about what ought to be done. Everything else is simply a quack remedy.

What must be done, my friends, must be done out or reality. For reality carries the spirit within it; whereas a denial of the spirit makes everything an absurdity. And if in our time anyone tries to indicate spiritual realities, he is branded a “visionary”, and “spirit-seer”. It is because a feeling for reality is universally lacking.

The comparison of the social organism with the human or any other organism, has also become a phrase, in our time, and avery cheap one at that. If one wants to use a comparison without resorting to phrases, one must present the fundamental knowledge for it as it is given in my book Riddles of the Soul. What sense is there today in speaking of the threefold social organism until its spiritual foundation, the threefold nature of the human organism, consisting of nerve-sense faculties, rhythmic faculties, and metabolic faculties, is presented to men as real natural-scientific knowledge? But men are so indolent that they will not allow the conceptions they have acquired from their perverted school-training of the present day to be corrected by that which originates in true reality.

Our official science, that is, the science that is accepted everywhere as authoritative, cherishes another hoary conception. Even modern science kneels in idolatrous worship before everything that is thrust forward as highest culture. To what else, then, should it have recourse when it wants to explain something especially mysterious, than to something to which just at this time kneels the lowest? Thus, the human nervous system has become for science a collection of “telegraphic lines”; it sees the whole nervous activity of men as a remarkably complicated telegraph system. The eye perceives; the skin perceives. Then what has been perceived on the outside is carried to the telegraph station called “the brain”. And sitting in the brain is some being or other—of course modern science would not have anything to do with a spiritual being—anyway, through some kind or being that has become a phrase because one acknowledges no reality there, the perception announced by the sensory nerves is transformed through the motor nerves into movements of will. And this distinction between sensory and motor nerves is stuffed into our young people, and upon it the whole conception of man is built.

For years I have been fighting this absurd distinction between sensory and motor nerves, first of all because the distinction is nonsense. For, the so-called motor nerves exist for no other reason than that for which the sensory nerves exist. A sensory nerve, a sense-nerve, is the means by which we are to perceive what is going on in our sense-organization. And a so-called motor nerve is not a “motor” nerve but is also a sensory nerve; it only exists so that I shall perceive my own movements, which originate in something quite other than the motor nerves. Motor nerves are inner sensory nerves for the perception of my own will-impulse. The sensory nerves exist in order that I may perceive the external things that are happening to my sense apparatus. And in order that I may not be merely an unconscious being walking, hitting, grasping, without myself knowing anything about it, the so-called motor nerves exist thus not for the exertion of will, but for the perception of what my will is doing. The whole idea of a distinction has been invented by modern science out of the distorted intellectual knowledge of our time, and it is truly scientific nonsense. That is one reason why I have been fighting it for years.

But there is another reason why this nonsense must be uprooted, this superstition about motor and sensory nerves, between which there is no other difference than that one is sensitive to what is outside the body and the other to what is inside the body. This is the other reason.

No one in any kind of social science can acquire a correct understanding of man in his relation to work if he builds up concepts on this false differentiation between sensory and motor nerves. For one will get most curious notions of what human work is, of what happens in man then he works, when he brings his muscles into movement, if one does not know that the man's bringing his muscles into movement does not depend upon his so-called motor nerves but upon the immediate connection of his soul with the outer world. I can do no more then just indicate this fact to you, because today men do not yet have the slightest understanding for it. Education has not yet produced even a primitive capacity for the understanding of such things because it still works on the basis of this mad distinction between sensory and motor nerves. When I confront a machine I must confront it as a whole man; I must set up a relation above all things between my muscles and this machine. This relation is all that a man's work really depends upon. It is this relation that one must understand if one wants to know the social significance of work,—this very special relation of men to work. What is our concept of work today?

The process that goes on in man when he is, as we say, “working” is no different, whether he is exerting himself at a machine, or chopping wood, or engaging in sport for pleasure. He can wear himself out just as thoroughly, he can consume just as much working-power, in some sport that is a social superfluity as in chopping wood which is social necessity. And the illusion of a difference between sensory and motor nerves is the origin psychologically of man's conception of work today—while in reality one can only gain a true conception of work if one considers, not how a man exerts himself in work, but in what sort of relation to his social environment he is placed by his work. I believe you do not really comprehend that, because the concepts one might have today of these things are so distorted by our education that it will be a long time before one can find any transition from the concept of work that is socially absurd and from the concept of sensory and motor nerves that is scientifically absurd. It is in these very things that we must look for the reason why our thinking in so impractical. How can humanity think practically about practical things when it is a victim of this absurd concept: that we have a telegraphic apparatus strung up in us by which wires go to someplace or other in the brain and are then switched on to other wires—sensory and motor nerves! It is from this unscientific science of ours, which arises from a distorted school system, and to which people are intrigued into pinning their faith—it is from this that the impossibility arises of thinking socially.

That is what we should recognize today as the Pentecost spirit. It would be wiser to pour that out in single streams on the men of the present day, than to use the kind of quack ointment that it is thought today will better this thing or that. When one says today that mankind must learn anew and think anew, people believe at most that one is employing that same phrase that they themselves employ—and that is easy to understand because people at once translate what one says into phrases and utopias. But does it not make a difference whether some popular orator says “Mankind must learn new lessons”, or whether someone says it who knows that through the habit of artificial thinking mankind has created such depths of false thoughts that they even reach down into the structure of the human nervous system, so that today men have a deeply rooted superstition about sensory and motor nerves because their authorities impose it upon them. It must be made clear to the world that one is speaking from a basis of reality—and saying very different things about this reality—when one talks on the ground of the anthroposophical movement about “thinking anew” and “learning anew”; it should be the task of the Anthroposophical Society to make that clear. For today the phrase has won such power that as far as the words themselves are concerned anyone who is unable to distinguish between reality and phrase can refer you, for instance, to the editorial of today's Stuttgart Daily and say: Look there, there is also preaching about “learning anew”. But it is not a question of comparing words, for then we fall into word-idolatry; today we must see what the reality is, and protect ourselves fro the danger of falling into phrase idolatry. How many times have I regretfully had to disagree when such phrases as this have been uttered: Look there, someone has again spoken from the pulpit “quite theosophically”—as people say. These things are so bad because they show how little capacity exists today for differentiating between a knowledge of reality and a smug use of phrases. With the Pentecost festival this admonition should pour down upon human souls: “Away from you phrases back to reality!” We talk today in the field of science, the field of art, the field of religion—in fact, we talk everywhere—in phrases which stick in the throat and do not include the whole man; just as man's belief today is that his sense impressions stay somewhere up in his brain and do not also register his motor activities. Everything is connected in the most intimate way, and until there is a change in those thought habits which official science has created in our time, which scientific popery has imposed upon us, there will be o real Pentecostal renewal—for all other renewal is only on the surface and does not pour forth, as it must, from real inner depths. If our school life and education are really to experience a renewal we must become awake to such things as have been discussed here, and protect mankind from the diseases which so easily can arise in it today, because of its inheritance from Romanism.

The love of illusion that is so widespread today must be fought against. The man of today feels comfortable when he can delude himself about reality, when he can say to himself: Not Christ in me, Who arouses my strength, Who liberates powerful forces within me—not that do I profess; but the Christ Who is external to me, and Who mercifully frees me from my sins without my having to do anything about it out of my own earnestness or my own powers!

My dear friends, again and again in numerous letter I have had this Christ-Jesus creed held up to me, in contract to what Anthroposophy must do and wants to do. And again and again I have been confronted by the request to “popularize” in trivial phrases, “so that people can understand it”, that which today must be stamped with severe accuracy out of the reality of the spirit because the time demands it. But the moment anthroposophical truths were cut up into trivial phrases they would become just phrases, such as all the phrases that are so cheap in the present day; they would be brought down either to trivialities of the street or to the Philistinism of modern science. Again and again I have found the courage not to do either—either to reduce anthroposophical teaching to the trivial phrases of the street (which is called “popularizing”) or to talk so that the scientific people would understand me. I have received these two admonitions many times. My dear friends, I should then have to talk so that I would find an echo in the scientific senselessness of the present day. It would be especially agreeable to me when people behave as a professor in Tübingen did recently out of the scientific conviction of the present time. It seems to me, truth reigns in external events, for that affair is the best proof of how necessary it is for the spiritual life to be completely transformed. Especially, if one wants to find a transition to the true Pentecost spirit, from babbling words to seed-bearing words, then one must earnestly again and again examine one's old habitual concepts in order to see what it is that one does not want to make new concepts for—what it is that can be chattered about perhaps while still clinging to one's old concepts, but not comprehended by them.

Apropos of' the value or words today, there is no great sense in pointing out that in certain circles the proletariat has sufficient goodwill to understand the Threefold Commonwealth ideas even better then the middle-class understands them. If the middle class would only have the same “goodwill” is what many would like to say today. The proletariat laughs at this urging the middle-class to have “goodwill”—and he is justified in laughing. He is better prepared to understand than a man of the middle-class. But it is on quite a different basis that he is prepared to understand these things, and he laughs when when anyone says one appeal to the goodwill of the middle-class in order to set understanding; he laughs especially when one says one could expect a result from this appeal. For he knows quite well that his better understanding comes from something quite different: that in the morning if he does not work he finds himself in the street: he is bound up with the social order, I might say, at points only—not throughout a straight line as is the middle-class citizen of today: he understands out of his humanness because the present social order has brought it about that he has other than human interests, for he is nothing else the morning he is thrown out on the street, but just a man. That is what his better understanding springs from.

As to the middle-class citizen, especially the state-official: the state takes him in hand as soon as possible—not too early, because then it is still considered indelicate, and so the state leaves him to mothers and wet-nurses. But as soon as he gets beyond this first indelicate period he is taken at once into the care of the state and trained, prepared—not to be a man, but to be a state-official. Then the strings are tied, so that he is connected with the social order not at points, like the proletarian, but by a long line; through strings on all his interests, he is fastened up to the social order that exists through the state and that is supported by the state. He is trained in all his behavior to be the correct expression of the social order. Then he is fed, and he is satisfied. He is not only fed, but he is so taken care of that he does not have to take care of himself. And then, when he is no longer able to work, the state sees that he gets a pension so that without having to do anything about himself he is properly supported by the Powers that trained him in the first place to be their loyal expression. This lasts until death. Then he is still taken care of, this time by a religion which gets its salvation not from the inner forces of the soul, but from a mercy that comes in from the outside; this religion sees to it that his soul is “pensioned” after death. That is the precise content of state wisdom and religious wisdom. No wonder that a man of the middle-class, citizen of both state and heaven, hangs on to that with which he is bound up so thoroughly.

There is the contrast: personal interest on the one side, but then also personal interest on the nearest corner of the other side. It is in opposition to the personal interest on the other side that that a number of men attain today that which mankind must attain in this age of the consciousness soul, and of which I have often spoken: establishing oneself as an individual human being. The proletarian has only an opportunity of doing that, of establishing the fact that he is first of all an individual, when he has not been drawn into a contract with all the others. The more he is drawn in, the worse it is for him.For here on this side are men who similarly are set up in their positions by the proletarist: they are the the men who have any kind of official position in the labor unions. Even if their positions are called by other names, they succumb easily to the same grand manners as the middle-class citizens, and they fight whatever arises as a possible hindrance to these airs. And so they gradually acquire the habits of the middle-class.

One talks today in the proletarian world of labor unions. In England about a fifth of the whole laboring population is economically organized. That is relatively many. Thus the present English laboring class, in the modern spirit of organizing, has grown quite neatly into the middle-class way of thinking. In Germany only an eighth are organized, the others are unorganized workers. And it is the unorganized workers today who stand on the ground of personality; they are the real driving powers, it is they who have preserved the consciousness of what it means to remain just a man, without the pensions—without even, the pension which I have rationed for one's later spiritual life. These men who stand in the external economic sphere upon their own individuality are, I might say, the psychic channel for that which must arise today as an historical necessity, for that which makes the proletarian demand of today at the same time a world-historical demand.

The modern economic order has harnessed the proletariat to factories and capitalism, where it is easier for them to understand what the demand of the time is, than for the middle-class man who hangs on with all his strings to his maintenance and his pension, and who does not want to think. If he were to think, if he were to analyze the age correctly, it would not be possible to speak as a Tübingen professor did recently, who brought up this argument during the discussion after one of my lectures: It has just been said that the proletarian's “existence worthy of a man” is undermined because the proletarian is paid wages for his work; is not Caruso paid wages when he sings, and at the end of the evening is given 30 or 40 thousand marks for his work? Or—the selfless gentleman continued—do I not also receive wages?—I feel none of this “unworthy of a man” business when I pocket my salary! Nor does Caruso feel it when he collects his 30 or 40 thousand marks… That is the gist of what he said. And he went on to say: the only difference is this, that in one case the wages are more, in the other, lees, but that is of no importance—in reality it is all the same!

My dear friends, that is the spirit which blossoms out of the educational life of today! It is the same spirit that says: We are becoming a poor nation , we will not be able to pay for schools and educations, the state will have to step in and pay for them. Now, to one who thinks so shortsightedly, one will have to reply: But what does the state do when everybody is poor, and it must suddenly become the Croesus who will pay the debts that all of, us cannot pay? First, the state takes away in the form of taxes whatever everybody has: it seems to me it can hardly manufacture as a Croesus what the people themselves do not have. That is what these classes of people have to learn. It is also what those persons must learn to understand who are supported by the state out of the pockets of those who stand economically on the basis of their human individuality. As long as they have not learnt to understand it through the necessity of life, it is impossible to put it into their minds. And so it seems to me, a great number of people today want to conjure up an age in which one can also be thrown on the street if one is not willing to bring about another social order through an impulse of thought. It could very easily happen that the state pensions of which I have spoken could no longer be paid—in which event, I believe, the people would not so much, either, of those other spiritual pensions that are paid today to the soul after death by the religious community that has become so dependent upon the material powers.

But now when something arises that is not willing to be mere phrase, but insists upon being seed-thoughts for action, people cannot accept it as anything other than phrase. They cannot perceive that a real concept of work depends upon actual knowledge of life, even of single details such as the scientific absurdity existing in the distinction between motor and sensory nerves.

It is necessary today that at least a few men see into these depths. Today it is absolutely necessary that individuals should not let themselves be fooled into saying: We will socialize the outer economic life, but we will not touch the schools, especially the high schools and colleges. They must remain as they are. That is the very worst thing that could happen, for the state of affairs that has prevailed until now will, if it remains as it is, will only become worse. Socialize economic life, and leave the spiritual life as it is, and in a short time out of your apparent socialization you will have a much greater tyranny and much worse conditions of life than ever before. Today of course the economic pressure which exists is the cause of frightful eruptions in the social organism. Is this now to be succeeded by place-hunting, by the worst kind of bureaucracy? Do men who have now (although a little late) finally learnt that they cannot depend upon “throne and alter”, actually believe that it would be any safer to depend in the same way upon the state treasury and state budget? Capitalism has known how to bring the altar around gradually to a respect for power that really no longer exists but that lives on in phrase, into corporation idolatry and corporation place-hunting.

What mankind needs for a renewal of the spirit is the courage to realize that the spiritual life of humanity has become today religious chatter on the one hand , and on the other , thoughtless, brutal action, militarism. The typical man of this modern capitalistic age feels most himself when he is engaged in cutting his coupons, averting his eyes while he does it from what really takes place through that action. On the one hand the gospel made into chatter about love of neighbor and brotherliness, and he sits there comfortably with his scissors, cutting it all to pieces: he does not need to see the reality of what he is doing, because on the other hand he knows that he does not have to protect his business himself: the state does that by manufacturing swords. We have experienced this covenant between business life and state life in modern times: it is precisely what brought the world catastrophe upon us. This “state” of which men have been so proud: what has it been else then the great Protector of economic life as it is carried on under capitalism? My dear friends, one would like to hope that the patriots of the past, whose patriotism in their sense one would not question, ( for they were “good” patriots, they coined the word from a patriotic phrase, and it was very disastrous in the age just past to point out that this patriotic phrase had a very real foundation, that the state reverenced by patriots was after all just a protector of banknotes?)—one would like to hope that these patriots do not suddenly “unpatriotize” themselves and now that their gold is probably bettor protected by the Entente powers, speedily trim their patriotism! I will not say anything in particular about such a possibility, but I should like to draw your attention to the ease with which the patriotic phrase can be transformed into its opposite. There are plenty of examples about us.

These are the things that must be said today, while celebrating Whitsuntide, in regard to the necessity of renewing school and educational life. For the unctuous talk that has been given to mankind should he poured out no longer. Men must accustom themselves to words that point to the realities of the present day. Then it will be possible for the real Pentecost spirit to descend among us, for little tongues of fire to reach into all that arises in the future out of the emancipated spiritual life, into the lowest school as well as the highest, so that in the future the liberated spirit, which is the real Holy Spirit, can bring about the spiritual evolution of mankind.

One is talking perhaps of something that the religious chatterer of today does not think of as exactly “Christian”. But mankind will have to decide whether the Christian talk of the man of today originates in that spirit which Peter denied his Lord three times, or whether it crises out of the spirit that said, “What I have revealed to you is not merely confined to one age, but will stand through all ages. And I will not cease to declare the truth to you; I will be with you until the end of the earth, time.” Those who can hear only the spirit of the past today even in Christianity, will be the phrase makers, the chatterers. Those who accept the living spirit today even for the transformation and rebuilding of the social order,' will be those perhaps in whom one will able to see the true Christ.

May this age grow out of a truly comprehended Pentecost spirit.

This evening I want to speak to you about the cultural life of our present time; and especially about the basis of the work we are doing here (Waldorf School, etc.) and of our aims. I shall possibly have nothing specially new to say to you to-day, but I am going to give you a kind of comprehensive survey; that is the sort of thing that ie necessary at the present time.

The keynote from which I want to speak to-day is to indicate that a really genuine spiritual deepening is necessary for mankind at the present time—a spiritual deepening brought about by means of those new methods of obtaining spiritual knowledge which are accessible to men of the present age,and which I have often described.

We have said again and again that men will not be able to make any further progress in matters social, if understanding of the facts in social life does not arise as the result of a spiritual deepening induced by the new methods of acquiring spiritual knowledge which are essential to it. It has already been indicated with what earnestness this spiritual deepening should be sought with the help of these new methods of acquiring knowledge—and that only those have a true understanding for the needs and demands of the present time, who are able to take seriously to heart all that the call towards spiritual deepening entails, and who, moreover, have come to the absolutely firm conviction that in the very nature of things there can be no possible kind of compromise with any older methods of entering the spiritual worlds. Endeavour to compromise here only leads to side tracks. Do you think it could truthfully be said that in our time men who presume to be leaders in this or that sphere of life, really know what a serious striving after the Spirit is? Such men must not have a feeling merely for theories about the Spirit, but for the real living power inherent in the Spirit; but when one speaks of this living spiritual power to-day it is to many people absolutely and utterly incomprehensible.

I will just illustrate what I mean by an example, Not very long ago I got a letter from a man who takes an active interest in spiritual things. I am only going to quote the contents as an illustration and so shall give no name. It says that this man had got hold of my “Appeal to the Cultural World” and that he entirely agreed with the idea of the “Threefold Commonwealth.” The writer goes en to say that he had got certain useful information from my book on the “Threefold Commonwealth” and that he had repeated them in public. But then he saye that the Committee of the Threefold Commonwealth League had sent him a copy of the lecture which I gave to the workers at the Daimler Company, and although he says that he does not venture to criticise the essential details cf the lecture, on the next page he finds a great deal to grumble at because the tone of the lecture should, in his opinion, have been different—he feels aggrieved that middle class culture, as it has existed up to now, ie spoken of in rather a derogatory way—and so on. I need not go into details. Very well, now,what is the cause of thie? Let us consider the thing as it really is. Here is a man—and it after all a good thing that such men exiets—who theoretically agrees with what is to be found in the “Appeal to the Cultural World” and has absorbed something of what is contained in the book on the “Threefold Commonwealth;” who, moreover,agreee with what I said in the lecture to the Daimler workers, but who criticies the “tone”—considers it “demagogic” and so on. Theoretically, the man agrees with much of the lecture; but it is no use at all to-day to agree with a thing theoretically. This man really hast no perception of the true state of the case; he has no discernment in reference to the manipulation or application of the thing. If I sit in Dornach and write an “Appeal to the Cultural World” I have before my minds eye such men of the present day who can respond to such an appeal I do not write down any theoriee I may have evolved—I write in living, vital relationship with those who can,and who would be able to understand and grasp it. It is an understanding which comes as the result of a vital connection, a relationship wherein there is ever present in the mind, the Spirit which rules at the present time. And again in the “Threefold Commonwealth” I do not write in order that the words may stand there in little printed letters on paper, eventually to be criticised by theorists. I write for humanity as it is to-day, in a way that is in acccrdance with reality. Suppose, now,I go into a hall where the workers of the Daimler Company are sitting. I know perfectly well how I ought to speak to these people; I know how to put things to them because I speak from out of the living Spirit! Anyone who does his work from out of the Spirit gives no sort of academic lecture! In academic lectures people have “thought thinge out,” and give their personal opinions to their hearere. But a man who stands within the Living Spirit, speaks out from hie heart—not up to the stars!

It may well be said that men who themselves are able to follow a thing theoretically have as a rule no idea that anyone who wishes, to be active in the Spirit must work outwards from within that same Spirit in which he actually lives at that moment. External criticism there may be—but I assure jou that the lecture which I gave to the Daimler Company, was understood by those who were present. If I had spoken as my correspondent would have had me speak, those men wculd certainly have laughed me out of the hall. To-day it ie no longer a matter of preserving these ancient (for they are ancient now) theoretical customs in order to be able personally to agree or disagree with something; it is rather a matter of having a living, vital conception cf the working, of the nature and essence of the Spirit which exists there in actuality. And so again I have to repeat that the question of outward similerity in the words and sentences is not the point. What is of importance is this: from which realm of the Spirit comes that which is spoken? Men of the present day have still very very much to learn about these things. For there is a general belief among men to-day that when they have got hold of the content of anything, they have also absorbed the thing itself, whereas, as a matter of fact, to absorb the content of anything many only mean that one has got hold of the text and it is possible still to be far, far away from the Spirit of it.

It is very specially necessary to know just what Spiritual Science teaches with reference to social matters, shall flow into our present day materialism. Otherwise the connection of Anthroposophy with social life will not be understood. To-day we are living, to a greater extent than we realise, within a stream of materialistic culture in every department of life, and when as often to-day, we hear it said that here and there this materialistic culture is being overcome, that is an error. In words here and there, there may be a fight against materialism, but from out of the Spirit, no—there is no fight. Some idealistic academic manifesto may be issued—or a book written—but both may very likely themselves be the product of the spirit of materialism. Above all things it is necessary to-day to realise what has brought about present materialism, for if we do not realise how we have fallen into it, we shall never be able to raise ourselves out of it!

Well, now, wherein consists the real corruption of the materialistic impulse of our time? It consists in this, that things soon burst into flame when some spiritual truth is emphasised or brought forward as the result of living experience of spiritual reality. For example, suppose someone, as a result of practical knowledge, made certain statements about the animal kingdom; suppose be wished to make comprehensible the fact that in the animal kingdom and its evolution, spiritual forces are working. It is quite possible that through his knowledge of the spiritual forces which work in the animal kingdom, he might nave to speak in such a way which would immediately make some group of Evangelical or Catholic Theologians- blaze up and criticise him root and branch without once really examining what he said, just because he had ventured as a result of his knowledge of the animal kingdom, to speak of the Spirit! Or again, one might speak. of the necessity for bringing spiritual forces into the social life of humanity, because only by first recognising them and then incorporating them into the social order can any true reconstruction come about. At once the desire for attack, for aggression, which is characteristic of the followers of Karl Marx and other Socialistic is revived—just as in the other case the particular peculiarities of the Protestant or Catholic Priests. And the tone of the things said by both sides is not very different! It should be noticed however, that one attitude has been cultivated in a sentimental-theological religious atmosphere (I say that quite kindly) and the ether in a more tempestuous, uncultured atmosphere! I do not say, remember, that the last is worse than the first but that fundamentally the attitude proceeds from the same thing in both cases.

Whence comes the materialistic spirit of the present day? What has bred and cultivated it? Religious Creeds and avowals. And the fundamental reason why this materialism pulsates through the social world conceptions to-day is that they have been apt pupils of what has proceeded from religious creeds through the centuries. It was very much more significant than is usually recognised—that in the year 869, at the Council of Constantinople the Catholic Church cut out the Spirit from the Creed. Since that lime it has not been legitimate for catholic erudition to state that man has a spirit within him, but only that he has a body and a soul. This was so, through all the Middle Ages, and there was nothing which learned Catholics of the Middle Ages dreaded more than pronouncement about the Threefold nature of man, of man as body, soul and spirit; for the Council of Constantinople had laid down that man consists of body and soul, and although in the soul there may be certain spiritual, qualities and forces, it is not permissible to speak of an individual spirit. Then the scientists and philosophers came to believe as a result of this, that when they divided man up, into body and soul this was purely scientific without any kind of bias—whereas it was the influence of that Church Dogma laid down in the 9th century which led them to do so. Such professors as William Wundt are, as Psychologists, simply the pupils of Catholic Dogmatism—but as a rule nobody sees the real connection that exists.

Why is it that in discussions of universal science one may not speak of the Spirit? This has come about again as a result of this Church dogma. Neither may one mention “soul”—at least not what is truly “soul” because religious creeds have claimed for themselves the sole right to speak of the soul, and also of the spirit to the degree to which it is permitted by this dogma. It is a monopoly of theirs! And a man is not within his rights when he speaks of soul and spirit because such matters are a monopoly of those who speak to humanity from the standpoint of the religious beliefs and creeds. So there is nothing left to science per se, to Zoology, Physiology, Chemistry, Physics, to speak about except “materiel processes.” When something lights up and they speak of spirit—they are said to be interfering in what is a concern of religion! And so there was left to this unfortunate science nothing except matter, and it grew into materialism just because religious creeds deprived it of the possibility of concerning itself with the spiritual.

In this there is something of very vital significance. It is very important to recognise that the powers which have brought about materialism are the Ecclesiastical powers of the West. We owe our materialism to the Churches. And unless the Churches lose their power as directors of the religious life of man, materialism is bound to grow stronger and stronger. It is not possible to indulge in any illusion in this connection if the question of culture is to be taken really seriously; and to-day these things simply must be taken seriously. To-day men must not want to come to compromise after compromise in their lives, just because of their human frailties. If in external life we are compelled to make some compromise, we must be fully aware of it. We must never imagine that what we are doing perhaps under the pressure of external force is right: and deliberate compromises should not be made.

It is above all things essential to create a foundation, a basis for knowledge which is trustworthy. To-day things must be sharply and concisely defined. We live at a time when knowledge of the spiritual world simply must be taken seriously. The scientific knowledge of the 5th Post Atlantean period, beginning with Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus and having in the 19th century one of its most significant representatives in Julius Robert Mayer, follows the methods of natural science and sets to work from a scientific point of view, both are quite different from the methods and convictions of the creeds and religious avowals which have come over from ancient times. Between them there is, moreover, no possibility of union. A spiritual science which has really arisen out of modern culture must, however, be founded upon the same basic principles of knowledge as natural science. What is said in my book “The Mystics of the Renaissance” must be taken seriously. And if we do not see the spirit in ail that we observe in the world, then we are not taking that book seriously. Matter is nowhere present merely as matter. Concrete matter and concrete spirit are together, everywhere. And to-day when man says that below him in the world are the three kingdoms, animal, vegetable, mineral—he is stating a half truth only, if he does not recognise that just as from his body downwards exist the animal, vegetable and mineral Kingdoms, so upwards are to be found the three kingdoms of the spiritual hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. It is not correct to speak of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms as lower degrees towards the physical if it is not realised that up towards the spiritual exist the three other spiritual kingdoms. For man as he exists in the physical world is connected, through his body, with the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and through his spiritual and psychic being he is connected with these three higher kingdoms, which, for perfected human perception, are just as much spiritual realities as the three lower kingdoms are real for the physical senses. As long as man will not recognise that it is through a perception of external reality itself (unhindered as he must be by any religious avowal) that he comes to a realisation of the spiritual—he cannot understand that which must work as impulse at the present time. A statement for instance like this—that whales exist, does not prevent us from affirming at the same time something about the spiritual world. These are the things which must be deeply thought about to-day.

The fact of the matter is that we have entered upon an epoch of human evolution wherein man has become a different being from what he was in earlier periods of the Earth evolution. Of course Man, at some stage of development, was always to be found in the Earth. When the great Atlantean flood had subsided and the first Post Atlantean civilisation developed out of a much older civilisation, man's body was still evolving strongly upwards and forwards, this was still the case in the ancient Persian epoch, the ancient Egyptian-Chaldean period, and to a certain extent in the Graeco-Latin period, which lasted until about the middle of the 15th century. But since that time the progressive evolution, the forward evolution of the bodily part of man has been gradually ceasing. The purely corporeal evolution of humanity is finished. We cannot now say that in future the bodily evolution of man will proceed and progress as it did during the first, second and third and fourth evolutionary epoch, for that it will not do. For the rest of the Earth-evolution there will be no further evolution of the human body. It has passed the highest point of forward evolution and as a body, filled with the forces which build up corporeality, is facing not a progressive, but a retrogressive evolution. If by the methods used by spiritual science, we try to find out why this is so, we have to come to the conclusion that just as man to-day has entered upon a relationship to the animal world different from that which formerly was the case (man had for instance during the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch much more of the animal nature in him than he has to-day, he was more instinctive in an animal sense)—so he is developing another relationship to the three higher kingdoms of Angels, Archangels and Archai. Up to the time of our epoch, these three higher kingdoms had a special interest in concerning themselves with man. Humanity of the present must begin to realise that these things are realities. The .Angels, Archangels and Archai, were in the past vitally interested in man, but in our epoch this interest is ceasing—it began to cease in the middle of the 15th century at the beginning of the fifth Post Atlantean period. It was the ideal of these higher hierarchies to obtain a perfect human figure and this was not possible until our epoch, because man had not yet reached the summit of his bodily perfection. They had to wait. Humanity to-day with its confused ideas of Divinity which so easily make men into Atheists, cannot understand that these spiritual beings standing higher than man, had to wait until they had brought him to a point where a figure or image of his perfection was placed before their spiritual eyes. For this reason instinctive knowledge, perceptions, impulses of will, arose in men in earlier times as the result of the work of these Beings. Man could not of his own free will induce these things in himself—it was a more instinctive process—and it was the work of these Beings. And these Beings were vitally interested in the forward development of man because only when they had succeeded in bringing him up to the point at which he has been since the middle of the 15th century, had they the image or figure before them which was necessary for the sake of their own evolution. At the present time they have brought man far enough, and they are no longer interested in him from this particular point of view. It is for this reason that at the present time man is so bereft of the Spirit; the spirits have lost a certain interest in him which they formerly had. For this reason too he so easily becomes an opponent of all spiritual knowledge, because the spirits are no longer working on him. The spiritual beings of the Hierarchies immediately above us have lost their interest in this connection, and man must now, out of his own free-will, waken this interest again. As in earlier times through his body and his instincts he was instigated as it were to develop towards the spirit, now, and in future, he must develop towards the spirit out of his own free knowledge. He must, in a certain way develop out of himself new “substance” for the higher beings to use, by seeking for concepts which are their concepts, but which transcend that which is instinctive in man. Hence it must become possible for us to confront the spiritual world in a completely new way. This is a matter which must naturally be put before humanity it general in a more guarded form, and yesterday, at the Opening speech at the foundation of the Waldorf School, I tried to do this. But just because on the one side there must be discretion and caution, so on the other side these things must, be sharply, clearly and definitely pointed out. For if, there were nobody able to hear the truth about these matters to-day, it would augur very badly for the spiritual culture of modern times.

Now what, for instance, has ceased in reference to the nature of evolving humanity? In earlier times it was quite correct when it was said of a man that he was “gifted” that he had “natural tendencies to genius” and to seek for the primary conditions in his corporeal or bodily nature. It was right in educating a man to apply oneself merely to his bodily nature and by developing this in the right way, the man's genius proceeded from it. His natural qualities came out, but as we have seen, corporeal or bodily evolution has ceased and nothing will come by merely developing the body according to some kind of physical education. To-day it is to the soul that one must apply oneself. To-day one must take into account something which does net proceed from mere physical hereditary evolution, for nothing more comes out of that now; one must take into account that which a man has within him because this Earth life is the repetition of earlier incarnations. To-day we must face other men with the living consciousness that we have a soul before us. The “gifts” of the body per se, have, as it were ceased, and it would be nonsense to speak of them in regard to future humanity. In future it will not be possible to say that a man through his body has a talent for this or the other, but that through his soul he is gifted in one direction cr another. Now this is a point of tremendous significance in the life of present day humanity, for much of what was said in earlier times about man is false if it is repeated to-day. To-day when we read about methods of education which are not yet penetrated by spiritual science, we may knew that they have been built up out of old beliefs which in their time were justifiable—beliefs which had reference to the physiological “gifts” of men. But to-day these a are of no account and there is no sense in speaking of anything but gifts, or the soul.

Very well, then, we must begin to educate in a new way, for this is what the evolution of humanity demands at the present time. When we speak with old conceptions, we do not speak of anything which is applicable to modern times. Of course it sounds well to tell people to-day that it is right to regard Christ in the same way in which Luther regarded Him! But men of the present day cannot do this, simply because the Lutheran view of Christ has no reality nowadays and becomes falsehood when it is urged upon men. If man of the present day is to find Christ, he must find Him by direct perception. Just as through external perception we discover Nature, so through inner perception, we find the Christ. It is quite possible for that which spiritual science has maintained for many years to found an understanding of a social impulse at that point of time when it is necessary for civilised humanity.

Things must be considered in their relation to the whole. The superficiality of life is sufficient to show that it is necessary to-day to remind men that the most primitive impulses of their own religious faiths should be taken seriously. The Christians have a precept that the name of God must not be lightly uttered. But when someone comes and speaks of social matters, people say: he makes no mention of the Christ, therefore what he says is not Christian! But I assure you that a man is not necessarily Christian just because he utters the name of Christ in every third line he speaks! We should speak in such a way that men are permeated by what is said in a sense that is according to Christ's Will at the present time. But when one endeavours to speak in this way, from out of the Spirit of the time, people say: Oh, that man does not speak about the Christ. He ought to speak in a more inner way; and then this so-called “inner” element is brought forward in the most exoteric way possible! The opposition which we were faced with once, which suggested that after every five words or so there ought to have been some mention of this so-called “inner” element, was really the outcome of a kind of priggishness, an “old-maidish” outlook. I would, naturally, rather not bother any more about it; but it is necessary at the present time, to allude to it, because this kind of attitude does much harm to what has to be brought about. I should like to ask whether this priggishness really tries to get to the heart of that which must be proclaimed as spiritual truth at the present time. We must own that all we do individually, and all we teach individually, must be with the knowledge that humanity has within it evolutionary impulses which are different from what they were a comparatively short time ago; that, as a matter of fact, the guiding Spirits of the super-sensible world until a short time ago, were specially interested in bringing men to a certain point of perfection. But the image of man is completed, and out of his own inner being man must seek for the union with what is spiritual, in order that what he produces over and above his body and his corporeal “gifts” or “talents” may make him of interest to the spirits standing above him. If this is not done, then our civilisation and culture will stagnate and choke and rot. Anything which tries to revivify what is old cannot save us from that. The only thing that can save us from that is the courage to take hold of the spiritual with the same kind of attitude which men had at the beginning of the 15th century, when, in the face of the old beliefs, they began to build up natural science. The point I want to make is this; that we only set up a right relationship to the spiritual beings above us when we recognise that with the end of the 19th century man's former relationship with them ceased and that since the last third of the 19th century, it has become necessary for humanity to enter into a new relationship to the spiritual world. Let us be sure about this point. It is not necessary to be inhuman when we are sure of something, but we must be sure. As far as external life is concerned, it is not possible for man directly to participate in the collective metamorphosis of humanity. Men have been brought up to this through that which has remained over from old impulses, so it is with those men who from pulpits to-day preach the old creeds. Now of course we can look quite kindly in this kind of thing ,but oh! for goodness sake, do not let us take it seriously, as being truth in these present times! Our attitude should be; “Oh well, let them go on talking” We should not imagine that it is necessary to give any weight to discussions from such quarters except of course in a purely external way in answering their attacks and so on. [Translator's Note. The German of this paragraph is very obscure and colloquial and is very difficult to render in English.]

Now it would, as I have said, be more agreeable to leave such things unsaid, but this is impossible, because we are approaching such terribly difficult times. There is far too much tendency not to take these things seriously. Of course anyone can say that he cannot shake himself free from this state of things because of his position, or something, but, that is no justification, it is rather an acknowledgment that he is making a compromise. The important thing to-day is to champion the Truth even if one only believes this to be necessary from a consideration of external events. When one considers how it is that modern humanity has come to be immersed in such a fearful catastrophe as that of these last years , the cause is found to lie in nothing else than the fact that men are so far away from looking at the relationship between facts and words. There is a tendency to-day just to consider words and then to believe that one really knows something about the facts. There is a tendency to repeat phrases unendingly at the present time, and as a consequence of this, it is not realised that the facts are not necessarily there at all—even if the words are.

During these last weeks we have been working at the course of instruction for the teachers of the Waldorf School. There we are trying to transform dead pedagogic systems into a living art of education. And a truth which is often overlooked simply because people treat words as words and do not penetrate the reality, came vividly before our eyes. There came before us fat volumes of papers, printed stuff, marked “Official” on the outside. One volume is marked “Curriculum,” that is, a plan of instruction. And inside we are not only told that in such and such a class, of such and such a school, such and such things are to be taught, or (which would still leave an element of mobility) such and such a subject must be learned up to such and such a standard—but—one would hardly believe it—we are actually told how the instruction is to be given—how the material is to be treated. Such is to-day the content of official orders of Government!

What does this mean—if we look at it in its reality? Well, if you put it in this way that the official paper gives well-meaning instruction, in all good-will, how children should be taught, if you put it in this way, and do not think about it, it is easily to be got over. But if we think about it—which is a very uncomfortable job for most people of the present day—then we must realise that to-day pedagogy—didactics—are not taught in the training colleges so as to be grasped and understood, but they are set forth in laws—in State instructions; just as the Law orders people not to steal, so by official papers and instructions, people are ordered how to teach! And people do not realise what that involves. But as a matter of fact it is only by feeling what that means that we may find a starting point for an improvement of matters on healthy lines. It is really only in modern times that these things have come to such a pitch. But assuredly fifty people placed in positions where words are listened to as are the words of the members of the National Congress at Weimar—fifty people who felt what such a thing means—would do far more for the healthy improvement of the world's affairs than all the stale talk which has been going on at that place during the last few weeks.

There must, I say, be feeling for these things, and such feeling arises through the inflowing of the living forces of spiritual knowledge into human hearts and souls. Mere theory that only makes us agree with something in an abstract way and does not teach us how to take the Spirit really seriously, will not do. And to take the Spirit in earnest, means that when anyone enters a lecture hall he is one with the spirits and souls of those who are there. Confessions of faith, or creeds which are theoretically grasped are to-day of no account whatever. The one and only thing which matters for the healing of humanity, is the feeling and perceiving of one's own Self in the Spirit.

The object of beginning our social work here was to work from out of the Living Spirit. Up to now men have only got to the point of saying: Oh yes, I am in agreement with what the words say. Men are clever enough to-day to be able quickly to come to agreement with words and sentences; and anyone whose inner spiritual knowledge enables him to assert that those spiritual beings who up to now have been working in evolution, have got men to a point where he represents their ideal of perfection, would be the last to deny this cleverness. That men are clever, that they have critical faculties, that intellectually they have got very far, that in a certain sense they are even a perfect earthly creation—that is not denied, but just because they are all these things, they must liberate a new source of knowledge in themselves, a source that is entirely new. Of course one who knows spiritual life considers men to-day as being in a sense perfect beings. But just because they are perfect in a sense, and because their perfection has come about through beings other than themselves, they must begin now to do something of themselves.

It was this that caused me over ten years ago, to put moral science on a different basis, and in my “Philosophy of Freedom” to speak about Moral Fantasies—that is, about what has been created by man in the domain of the moral—because what has been, I knew that that which man develops instinctively out of himself, calling it “Ethic” has nofuture in front of it.

At the end of my address I have often said how pleased I should be, if, even in spite of the very imperfect way in which such matter must inevitably be put, I succeeded in getting some real response from the hearts of friends present. For it has never been a point with me to make this or that theoretically plausible, or clear to you, but to indicate what must be inculcated into humanity at the present time.

It is upon these principles that anthroposophical science, as I try to teach it, is based. If there were a question of anything else, it would be better to leave off working for anthroposophy, because of the simple fact that any single person who teaches spiritual science at the present time, is pelted with every possible kind of abuse. That is quite obvious, and it cannot be otherwise, because things are like this in the present transitionary epoch. The only thing to d do is to proclaim spiritual science, to give it out, just because one realises the urgent necessity of bringing to humanity what lives within it. We should not speak now merely of a “successive evolution” but of a sudden change or transformation in evolution. The development of a plant is by successive stages, but the transition of the leaf into the coloured flower petal is an abrupt one. In this sense there has been a successive evolution of humanity, but the transition from the time when the evolution of man was directed by divine spiritual Beings, who brought humanity to the point where he now stands, to the time when must bestir themselves into activity, is an abrupt one, and it simply must come about. And without the recognition of the abrupt transition there is no crossing the Rubicon of the miseries of modern culture. Whoever wishes for the sake of convenience to carry over anything from old channels, can never really enter the region out of which the impulses of the culture of the future can develop.

What has to be undertaken to-day is not the kind of thing that various people here and there think about, not at least if they are to have any prospect of success; they are rather the kind of thing that we are doing, for example, in our Waldorf School. In the Waldorf School something has been undertaken of which one cannot say otherwise than that to anyone who takes it really seriously, it becomes his deepest concern.

I, for example, acknowledge it quite frankly, that when I look at the spiritual constitution of the present, day, and see the necessity for collaborating with the establishment of such a school, there is something in my heart which I could describe by saying that, this Waldorf School belongs to that category of things which concerns me most of ail—and in my life I have concerned myself with many things! It was a thing which simply had to be undertaken. And I felt that I had to concern myself with it not merely because I had any idea that it might somehow prove not to be successful. It will succeed—but because of that we must take care that the right elements work towards its success. It would be quite foolish not to acknowledge that anxieties exist. But perhaps we have done something for this special task in that we have had the courage to be absolutely and unceasingly true and sincere. And in order that things should not be taken in a one-sided way, I wished to-day to speak as I nave done. Naturally, in the public address yesterday I could not strike the same note as to you to-day. I could not speak to the people who were gathered together in the public meeting, of the interest which the higher Hierarchies had in completing a perfect image of man, and that something new must now come about, etc. But if a tree is photographed from one side, in order to obtain a complete picture, it must also be photographed from its other sides, and so I had to add that which I have said to you to-day. In our day the Truth must be expressed in a way that is True. We must learn that we nave not only to advocate the Truth, but the Truth in a true way. We have come to a time in human evolution when it is possible for man to advocate untruly! In many places to-day truths are as cheap as blackberries—one has only to read them here and there. And in this connection human culture is, as it were, complete. But only these perform what is necessary for the future. who do not only do that which is easy. It is quite an easy matter to form a conception of even a new world concept, but those who do this and nothing more, accomplish nothing at all that works on into the future Truth must be expressed from out of the soul. To-day it is not merely a question of the verbal text, but of the spiritual “fluids” and currents which penetrate through the words. Men have to acquire a feeling for this nowadays, and they have none at the present time; they will read pages and pages without realising at all that the author of them is a liar. Oh, humanity must acquire the faculty for feeling what the source of Truth is, and not alone perceive the logic of the thing. Much more “inner” than those men think who to-day believe that they are speaking about inner things, is that which can make humanity really able to work and to act for the future.

For this reason it has been necessary for years that facts which have been described should have been put from as many different points of view as possible—because only so is it possible to understand them completely and vitally. We must equip ourselves with an inner longing to approach world mysteries and feel them inwardly in a true and vital way. My sole purpose to-day in what I have said, has been that you should learn to feel in yourselves the necessity for such a longing and also to make you feel what a sway Untruth holds in the world to-day among men of our age. It is Truth, TRUTH, which humanity must champion, with all the intensity of which hearts and souls are capable. There is very, very much to be learnt, from such an example as I gave you at the beginning of this lecture—one may fully agree with the verbal text of a thing, but not really get hold of it in any true sense, because it comes from out of the spirit. Try to understand the teaching in this way and you will be serving the task which the present time sets you. You will find out many other things as well, which you have not yet discovered and a great deal still rests in the bosom of the present which must be discovered for the healing of humanity. A great deal too has already been said and has not been discovered by humanity. Look deeply into these things, and you will find that this is so; if you try to understand these things aright, then you cannot fail to help in the spreading [of] the Truth among men—not merely in an externally logical form—but Truth in its essence. And then you will be members of that Order which humanity so sorely needs, whose motto is “Truly to advocate Truth” (Die Wahrheit wahr zu vertreten). It is possible to spread Truth in a false way and thereby often to do more damage than occurs through the spread of a lie. It is very well worth while to ponder on what this means, to cause harm through the proclaiming and assertion of Truth in a false way.

The best way to make ourselves familiar with ideas which can lead us, as men, into the spiritual world,is to try to obtain information through comparison of different facts which face us in the world.

What I would like to speak about today will be best explained if I start with such a comparison, i.e.—if I compare the consciousness which our present humanity should in accordance with the mission of our epoch, attain with earlier stages of consciousness attained by evolving humanity.

Just think yourselves back to the consciousness of the Greeks, to the ordinary consciousness which the Greeks had of Space. (Naturally I mean the consciousness of Space in a wide sense). You will realise without difficulty that in the consciousness of Space which the Greeks possessed only a portion of Europe was comprised—namely his own land and what bordered on it, a part of Asia and a portion of Africa, and that beyond this definitely limited region, the world was a kind of vague, indefinite quantity It might be said that what formed the horizon of the Greek's consciousness was the boundary of a something which was a vague infinity, at least to his consciousness. And this consciousness of the ancient Greek can be called (although the expression is naturally rather rough and ready, as such expressions always are because the consciousness of language is not adapted to express such things)—this consciousness which the Greek possessed may be called a land, or territorial consciousness. Now you know that the essential feature about the consciousness of humanity in the forward evolution of modern times has been that this territorial consciousness as it were, has developed into an Earth consciousness, that the surface of the Earth as it were, has shut itself off within definite boundaries. As a result of the disclosures of modern history man has imagined the surface of the Earth to be of a spherical shape. Speaking for the moment from the point of view of universal history, it may be said that simultaneously with the emergence of this Earth consciousness as a development out of a territorial consciousness, a panorama of what was outside and beyond the Earth came to be built up, a mathematical-geometrical panorama. The Copernican world-conception arose, and men have conceived of that which is outside and beyond the Earth in Space, in terms of mathematics, of geometry and of mechanics. The Copernican-Newtonian world-conception is, in its essential feature is a mathematical-mechanical picture of the world. Now, for every really thinking man, the question must naturally arise as to whether this mathematical-mechanical picture includes all that there is to be said about that which is beyond the Earth and can be perceived b by men in Space? It obviously does not include it all,,any more than the case when the old Greek confined himself as it were within the land or territory bounded by the horizon of his consciousness, and constructed what was beyond this, in phantasies. Of course the modern man does not clothe that which is beyond the Earth in such poetic phantasy as was the case with the ancient Greek with reference to what lay outside the territorial region comprised with in his consciousness, but the modern man encloses it in mathematical phantasy. Phantasy it is, none the leer for being mathematical. The essential feature in the attitude adapted by humanity in general of the present day is this; to conceive of the Earth as s great sphere in universal space, and to embrace what is beyond the Earth by mathematical and mechanical concepts, which for men who think very accurately, are merely mathematical and nothing else. The concepts which have been invented about all kinds of gravitational forces have been to-day abandoned by more thoughtful men and the world picture of what is beyond the Earth, is really only conceived of in terms of mathematics.

If we take all that we have been considering, during the course of many years, from the standpoint of spiritual science, the question must arise as to whether the time is ripe for this super-terrestrial concept of space, this mathematical and mechanical concept of space, to be ensouled by something else, by something empirical, something that can be experienced. For this mathematical-mechanical concept of Space is not empirical in any sense; the space-concept of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, is something that has been invented, devised, built up from a comparatively small number of observations. And you will realise since there is no possibility of investigating what is beyond the Earth with physical means that such an investigation can only come to pass by means of spiritual science And that it can do to-day. The mathematical-mechanical conception yields no really human factor in this picture; it simply says something to us in abstractions, which do not touch the substantial reality which we postulate. Everything that physics an astrophysics have to tell us today about the super-terrestrial universe, is cold, barren and without any real content. As a matter of fact we are just at that point of time when it is impossible for human evolution to advance any further if we do not progress beyond a concept of the world that is merely mathematical and mechanical. Just as the old Greek had a territorial, or a land consciousness, and man since the beginning of what is called the modern historical epoch, has developed an Earth consciousness, so from now onwards, there must be an expansion to a universal or cosmic consciousness. And today I would like to devote the hour during which we can consider these things, to certain brief, aphoristical suggestions, as to the nature of this world or cosmic consciousness, which must take the place of a consciousness which merely embraces the Earth. Of course a very great deal will have to be done in the future if we are to collect in more exact detail proofs and verifications of that which I am going to put before you today in a kind of aphoristical outline.

You know that the investigations of Spiritual Science are based up-an perceptions of the soul,and in my book An Outline of Occult Science a considerable amount of knowledge gained in that way,is given out. In that Look I gave as mush as is necessary for the general consciousness of humanity at the present time, but it must be extended; what is to be found in that book must be deepened and widened.

Now with reference to the coming cosmic or universal consciousness, we are, if I may make a comparison, in the position of someone who is travelling in a railway train. He looks out through the window of the carriage and gets accustomed to the idea that he sitting still an his seat. He forgets that the train is itself moving forward. The forward movement which he himself makes with the train, is something that he forgets. He only takes into consideration the movements which he makes, when he gets up, for instance, and in relation to other men who are likewise sitting in the train, changes his position. Now, what such a traveller experiences is something that is very limited in scope, and restricted, and it can be extended by the fact of a break in the journey at some town or other. What he has experienced in the train is not, of course, changed, but the content of his consciousness is increased every time he gets out of the train at some town and experiences what is possible in just that particular place. This is all summed up, as it were, into the content of his journey, and something concrete emerges out of the abstract idea of the journey. The travellers' inner knowledge of the experiences he has had in the different towns is a guarantee that he has gone some distance and has entered into a different set of circumstances. Through the experiences which he has had, he knows that he was not standing still and that he was only able to maintain the illusion of being at rest so long as he remained in the train itself.

Now this is something entirely different from what is often said in discussions on the Copernican world-conception. Of course on such occasions mention is made of all kinds of illusions under which man labours, for example, the illusion that he believes to be standing still on the earth, whereas as a matter of fact, he moves together with it, since it is itself moving. But what I mean here is not that. I want to point out something else, namely that man can acquire certain inner knowledge in the course of his life, and especially in the course of experiences which follow one upon each other which are comparable to the experiences which a man has in towns when he gets out of a train and into it again, and so in a certain sense pulls himself up in the inner experiences of his soul, and enters the full content of inner experience at that point. Therein can be found a guarantee, a proof, that while a man is in the world, he travels through space and experiences something which says to him; You, as man, are not at rest, you are in process of taking a real world journey! I want you to be clear in your minds that something like that which is suggested by this parallelism, is the case. The proof of it can of course only be found in the actual experience. Make it clear to yourselves that there can be in the life of the soul, different experiences, in consecutive periods of time which are a guarantee of the fact that one passes on to different points in universal, in cosmic space. We shall afterwards see that this is all said by way of comparison. We shall see too that the difference between the consecutive experiences indicate an element of space which is of much more qualitative a nature than the merely quantitative element which is usually in the mind when Space is spoken of. Anyone who has real inner experience, and not merely the abstract experiences which are frequently brought forward in so external a sense when mystical matters are being talked about, knows quite well that there is something in what I have just mentioned. Whoever has inner experiences is able to notice in the course of his earth life, differences in the content of his soul life at the ages of, say, 30, 40, or 50 years. If he thinks about these inner souls experiences, he knows that he has moved on the world, that he has sought out other places and that his inner, mystical (if I like to use that term) experiences have changed their character. I am here speaking of experiences which are only taken into account by those who do not look upon mysticism in an external, abstract way, but who look upon it as something concrete in inner experiences. The abstract mystic may talk from the age of 25 years, right up to the end of his life, of the “God within him”. But a man who knows how to understand inner experiences as a concrete reality, knows that these inner experiences change their nature and content, as if on a world journey, which is not the same as a tour around the earth. If I may again express myself mystically, we traverse universal space consciously through our inner experiences. But we only do it as it ought to be done, when we reflect upon our relation to the surrounding world in a much more definite fashion than is usually the case.

It is quite possible to look upon our relation to the surrounding world in such a way that on the one side we have only our sense perceptions in mind, and on the other our desires, our willing, our deeds, our acts. The fact of holding our sense perceptions in the mind, sets us in definite relationship with the outer world; we perceive through eyes and ears, certain facts of the external world—we are in living intercourse with the outer world. What happens—happens as it were, at the margin of our corporeality. To-day I will not go into certain physiological objections, or those of theories of cognition which could seemingly be brought against what I am saying, because what I want to do is to outline the nature of the consciousness which must be attained in contradistinction to the earth and the territorial consciousness already described.

Our sense perceptions then, place us in a certain relationship to external events. And again, when we act, we stand but from the standpoint of another pole of our being in a certain relationship to external events and occurrences. We are involved in them, involved in a real sense, for we have ourselves partly brought them about. Between these two extremes of our life as human beings, is to be found everything which goes on in the field of our consciousness; on the one side there is the relationship to the outer world given us by the senses, and on the other side, by our desires and acts.

In that we develop feelings and conceptions of what our senses perceive, we live an inner life. And willing is fashioned from feeling and perceptions which have either deepened or condensed, as it were, into faculties. So that between perception and willing lies that which we psychically experience. But now, what is present in sense perception, is only seemingly a unity. In sense perception we look at the world and it appears to us as something uniform, a unity perceived through the senses. But as a matter of fact within this apparent unity, a duality is contained. For anyone who is capable of real perception, a duality is contained within what seemingly is a unity; there is a continual dying and uprising again. The world without us is in a state of perpetual dying and again coming to birth. In every moment in the world, we live in something that faces death, and out of that death, life continually comes forth again. If you look at a cloud, or anything else in the outer world it appears to you as a unity; but that it is not, The fact is that something is dying in the cloud, and out of this death something is again being born. Out of what comes from the past, there develops something which goes forward into the future. In all that we perceive there is ever contained fuel that is burning away and dying out; and fire that is arising, newly created, passing over as living form into the future. Then through such a training as is given in The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Result, we learn how to separate these two poles of sense perception from each other, and to perceive actually the phenomena of death and coming to birth, then for the first time the world takes on a real aspect for us. When a man who is trained in the right way observes another man through the senses, he sees in that other man something that is continually dying and something that is continually arising again. Dying—coming to birth; dying—coming to birth, that is what we see when we have trained our powers of observation to some degree.

When this continual dying and coming to birth becomes objective to us, when we really see it and do not merely imagine it in an abstract way—when we see continually in a man, a corpse and a child coming into being (and it can be actually seen in this picture)—in that moment we have within our range of vision, the three hierarchies of of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. The world is full of real substance. It is no longer a unity such as we used to see when we look at nature. We cannot observe this dying and coming to birth, this Prana and Shiva of nature, without finding the whole of nature transformed and resolved as it were, into the activities of the spiritual beings of the three Hierarchies immediately above man. And so it is at the other pole of our being. In our deeds and acts there is again a continual dying and arising. But at this pole it is much more difficult to perceive it. A long and arduous training is necessary, but it can be done. And we then are within range of wisdom of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Through meditation then, we perceive what is between the two poles: we are able to contemplate that Being Whom, as I have told you, is to be found midway between these two poles. Everything becomes more vital, more living in our epoch as we gradually acquire this way of thinking.

But by rising to this height of contemplation, our soul life changes considerably. 'hen we really have got to the point where we see in our surroundings the activities of spiritual beings, then, at the same time we get to a point where we are able concretely to observe the differences in the soul life of the different epochs of which I have already spoken. And then when we have learnt (it is difficult to learn, but it is possible)—to take account of these inner changes in concrete inner experiences—then we see ourselves to be travelling through universal, or cosmic space. And then we know, not by means of external mathematical considerations, not by the sequence of inner experiences, that we together with the earth have changed our position in cosmic space. And then cosmic space becomes a very different thing to the mathematical-mechanical space conceived of by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. It becomes something that is inwardly vital and living, We learn to distinguish movement which we make as men in universal space. We learn too, to distinguish a movement which is made from left to right—that is an actual movement which we make with the Earth from another movement which is an ascending one as it were; we realise that in turning, we also ascend in space. Yet a third movement—a “forward” movement I might call it—an onward movement. This is not the same thing as moving an the Earth but is something which is done together with the Earth which can be proved by inner experience. We can prove to ourselves that when we turn from left to right, we ascend and at the same time go forward. So, by inner experience, we observe a threefold movement made, not in relation to some other heavenly body but a movement in an absolute sense in space.

Now of course you will say that the present consciousness of humanity is very far away from the conception that man in this sense is a world traveller and that he can quite well prove to himself the reality of this world journey. Yet there is a means whereby such consciousness can be acquired, however far away from these things human consciousness nowadays may be. What I have described is a reality, even if men to-day know nothing about it. Their ignorance can be compared to the belief which may be held by a man in a railway train who imagines that he is sitting still, whereas he is moving forward with the whole train. Now why is this belief general? In the first place the purely mathematical and mechanical Copernican world conception has for the last three or four hundred years had a more lulling to sleep than an enlightening influence an men. I have often said that this purely mathematical-mechanical world conception is really based upon a mistake which is quite fairly obvious. It presents a convenient picture of space but really no more that that. In the well known work of Copernicus about the revolutions of the heavenly bodies in space, three tenets are to be found, but modern science bases itself only an the first two, and takes no account of the third. Copernicus knew something more than what is admitted by modern astronomical science. And this “more” he concealed in his third tenet -but no account is ever taken of that third tenet. The observations made do not agree with the Copernican system, but modern science disregards this. Today when under certain conditions a man investigates empirically where some star or other ought, according to the correct reckoning set forth in the Copernican system to be found at a particular point of time it is not there. But then there is the so-called Beseel correction, and it is applied in order to obtain the right result. The application of this “correction” is only necessary because the third tenet of Copernicus has not been taken into account. Because of this, a kind of convenient mathematical-mechanical world conception or world picture has come into existence during the last three to four hundred years. It is not in accord with many things, but of course today anyone who mentions this fact is put down as a fool! It is scientific to believe that the various facts are quite in accord with each other. Humanity has been lulled to sleep by the Copernican conception of the world with reference to certain facts—facts which are nevertheless substantiated by inner experience. Human consciousness is dulled and in the future men will have to see to it that this state of things does not continue.

I have often remarked that men do not wish to understand spiritual science with their own “healthy” sense. This is really only a result of certain educational prejudices which hold sway at the present time. It is very frequently the case nowadays that when the occultist gives out his experiences people say: Oh well, it may be so, but the only people who can know that are those who have gone through a certain “mystical” training as they describe it. Now that is right to a certain degree, but not entirely right. I have repeatedly said that up to a certain point, everyone today can recognise as fact, through his own consciousness what is, for example given in my Outline of Occult Science. There is no need to take it merely an authority. Everyone can understand it by means of an ordinary healthy human intelligence But How? It could be understood by anyone who had been sent to the Waldorf School from his seventh to his fifteenth year. In that school the forces of his soul would have been healthily developed through methods which correspond to reality, and then, if he had gone to a more advanced school, the elasticity of' his soul forces would have enabled him to absorb what people ordinarily begin to learn after the age of fifteen. That would be one way of getting men who would realise that reality is only given by what is substantiated by spiritual science—and that everything else is nonsense. The fact that men will not admit this, does not originate from any impossibility to understand spiritual science without training, but arises because our school education between the seventh and fifteenth years is of such a kind as to kill out and stultify certain forces instead of waking them into activity. It follows that men resist the acceptance of facts given by spiritual science, although they would readily accept many of them if their psychic powers were developed in a healthy way. Powers of the soul which have been developed in a healthy way are not dead and benumbed as appears to be the case in the majority of men of our modern times; they are mobile, fluidic, elastic, and anyone in whom they had been rightly developed between the ages of seven and fifteen would be irritated at the modern way of learning things. Today people are satisfied with many things because certain incorrect theories have made the illusions far greater than they really need be.

I have often quoted a characteristic example. Children in their 12th, 13th, and 14th years are told that lightning comes from friction in the clouds and it is admitted at the same time that the clouds are wet. Of course they are; but then when it is a matter of producing the electric spark which is the earthly replica of the lightning, it is found necessary to keep the electrical apparatus and everything belonging to it perfectly dry in order that no water of any kind is present; so that it comes to this—the only thing that is present when the lightning originates, is removed and yet the lightning is the same phenomena as the electric spark! Children and grown up people are quite satisfied to be lulled to sleep with all kinds of hypotheses of this kind. There are innumerable examples of the same kind where people will accept obvious nonsense simply on authority and yet in our days there is much talk of the laying aside of all authority—people say that they are no longer credulous of' authority. Yet as a matter of fact if they had been so credulous it would have been quite impossible for the Marxian-Socialistic world conception to arise in our epoch, for it is far more credulous of authority even than ancient Catholicism!

It is today one of the most essential cultural tasks,to overcome that which in so retardative a way interferes with men's powers of understanding—and to substitute for the present system a healthy educational organisation. It is one of the most important social talks to work for the removal of impediments to human understanding. And then men will not be so obstinate and perverse about accepting what spiritual science has to say; they will rather be irritated by much that orthodox science has to say today, that is if their development has been a healthy one. They will very soon learn to see through all the contradictions. There is instinctive opposition nowadays to the establishment of healthy educational conditions, for it is felt that if they were to be established the authority of modern science would be undermined in a drastic way. It is essential that fluidic soul forces should again be produced in humanity and they will emerge quite naturally as a result of the knowledge which Spiritual Science is able to impart. As a result of these elastic soul forces humanity would be able to understand what is meant when it is said that man is within a movement which is absolute; men would furthermore understand how a world consciousness can grow out of an earth consciousness.

To speak in pictures for a moment, but the picture is really a good one—it is as if a man learns to feel himself as a traveller through universal space—a traveller whose movement consists of a rotation combined with a forward movement and a movement from below upwards, If we sketch the result of these movements—moving upwards in rotation, moving forward in this upward spiral movement—the curve will represent the path of the earth through cosmic space, not mathematically and dynamically as it is built up through the Copernican- Newtonian world conception—but as a result of inner observation. This is the way in which it ought to be arrived at for then we get something that is not abstract like the Copernican-Newtonian world conception, but very concrete—something that is actually super-sensible experienced empirically, if one may be allowed to use this tautology. The importance of this kind of cosmic consciousness does not lie in the fact that through it a man begins to feel things more in accordance with the truth than is now the case when he believes the Copernican world conception and the path of the earth as conceived of by it, to be correct, but very much else is dependent upon it. I makes on inwardly a different man. A man learns to feel himself not merely a citizen of the Earth but of the Universe, of the Cosmos. The world expands,as it were, for anyone who comes near the forces which are actually operative in these movements. In the rotary movement from left to right are to be perceived the activities of the Angels; in the ascent from below upwards the activities of the Archangels; and by the advance in universal space forward are to be seen to movement of the Archai, the forces of the Time Spirits. By taking up into his consciousness this absolute movement through the cosmos man turns his gaze into a spiritual space and becomes aware of the fact that physical space is only an abstract image of this concrete, spiritual space, in which the activities of the higher Hierarchies are to be found.

It follows from what I have just said that such a consciousness is connected with something else. Anyone who has an idea that there is something of this kind bound up with the real being of man must necessarily realise what terrible harm is performed by modern education in that it allows certain forces to be paralysed in our children up to their fifteenth year and they then as students develop into something that is a natural result of these paralysed forces. It follows that young people between the ages of 15 and 21 absorb things that are not at all what the present time demands. And in their souls there exists things that are very different from what they ought to be. I assure you that by giving unctuous exhortations to children up to fifteen years old and then again later at an age when people used to have ideals as young men and girls of 20 years of age—you will attain absolutely nothing at all; or at least only that the young people at our Universities and High Schools become what they are today—which there is no need for me to describe any further! The only way to obtain real results is by giving free play to forces which should be active during student days, which nowadays are simply paralysed. Education today is a problem touching the whole of humanity. It is a problem not for arbitrary ideals, but for the whole of humanity, a problem which must be understood in the light of the very deepest demands of the present time. At most today men have a presentiment that muck ought to be different—let us say, for example, in medicine, possibly also in the realm of law and judicial matters, but that feeling when it arises is promptly squashed by the lawyers! Men have a kind of feeling that many things are not what they ought to be, but that they cannot be changed. The aim of mankind must be directed at the right period of life to the awakening and not to the paralysing of forces within them. The life period between the seventh and fifteenth years is not there for nothing. During this period, perfectly definite forces out of human nature which must be reckoned with when it is a question of education or giving instruction at this time of life. When anyone has this in view in education it is a very different thing to working arbitrarily: without any such aim. Certain things will be observed which today pass by entirely unnoticed.

I have called attention to these matters in the article which will appear in the next number of the Waldorf magazine treating them from several different points of view. I have intimated that we can no longer today be satisfied with pedagogics modelled as they often are in perfectly good faith and with the best will in the world. Certain methods and principles and standards are drawn up—in good will perhaps, but without any real insight—and it is believed that these standards of pedagogics can be learnt. Herbart and his followers have this belief to-day that just by “learning” pedagogy it is possible to become a good teacher. Now even in the case where a set of standard rules is the most perfect imaginable—the rules are almost as worthless for teaching as a well-written book on aesthetics is worthless to the artist. It is quite certain that well written books on aesthetics do not make a man into an artist—and a science never makes a true teacher. It is not necessary to learn physiology in order to be able to feed oneself; a man can feed himself by a science that is quite different from physiology. Physiology is there for another purpose and if it is brought into the question of correct feeding, it comes in as a makeshift. It was always a horror to me to meet men at table who had scales near them in order to measure out and weigh every morsel that they put into their mouths and eat at a meal. That is am example of where the science of physiology interferes in a most destructive way in the process of feeding. Ah yes, you may well laugh at that; but those who because of their scientific prejudices feel such a thing to be justifiable, would laugh for quite another reason considering what I have said to you today to be the most god-forsaken dilettantism. He may laugh at these things from diametrically opposite points of view.

Well now, a cut and dried system of Pedagogics can never produce real teachers. And why? It is drawn up in such a way that its fundamental rules have to be accepted and then education is of no benefit at all. What is desirable is to forget pedagogics altogether when one goes into a classroom; to forget everything that may be known about academic pedagogics! Every time it should grow naturally out of a wide knowledge of what man and humanity is. Nobody can be trained to be a teacher by the mere fact of learning pedagogy; pedagogy can only be stimulated in men when they have acquired a knowledge of the nature of man. We should disregard pedagogics as a science as it were, and at most regard it as artists regard aesthetics, being quite conscious of the fact that aesthetics and its laws can never teach how to paint. An artist in Munich once said to me when I was speaking to him about aesthetics and Carriere—who was a celebrated authority on the subject: “When we were in the Art School we used to call Carriere ‘an old grunter on aesthetic rhapsodies!’”(Wonnegrunzer). Now it has not occurred to students as yet to give the same kind of appellation to theoretical pedagogics, for the general idea is that in pedagogics it is possible to make use of things which cannot be used in art. But as a matter of fact, the two things are the same. Into pedagogic training there should be brought that element which is to be found in our spiritual teachings—knowledge of Man, insight into the nature of humanity and that is able to stimulate a living relationship with the human being which is developing out of the child. Pedagogy should be born afresh every moment in the teacher; the impulse to teach and instruct in a certain way arises as the immediate result of having any particular child in front of one. This will produce quite a different kind of atmosphere from what prevails in the school room today, just because it is created not by cut and dried rules of education, but because it flows of itself out of life—living life as it were! If education were to arise out of life in this way, then those forces which ought to be present at the age of fifteen will not be paralysed, and a man will enter upon his later life with forces that are fluidic in his soul-forces of a kind which are necessary in order that something similar to what happened at the transition of the Middle Ages to modern times—when territorial consciousness was transformed into an Earth consciousness, may come to pass in our epoch—in order that out of an Earth consciousness there may grow a world consciousness, a cosmic consciousness. Outer experiences will not produce this; it will only come through the development of susceptibility for inner consecutive experiences of the soul. Today man has not the faintest consciousness of the dissimilarity of there souls experiences.

Now what is the position to-day? Men are children; they act like children influenced by their environment. Then the child becomes an adult; the concepts become more abstract, the experiences richer; that is the case with everybody. But with the soul it is not the same as is the case with regard to the external bodily part of us. We get a more sharply defined countenance when we reach a certain age; we have no longer the round curves of childhood; we get white hair and wrinkles, and we very often get bald! In short, the external bodily part changes. We cannot, however, say that the inner soul nature changes in this way—at most it gets more and more crammed full—but it does not grow in such a way that it changes from the point of view of thee external world. Old age and childhood have a wrong relationship to each other. Man today has no consciousness of things of which I have often spoken to you; for instance that an old man can bless and that the blessing of an old man has a special significance—a significance which is not there in the case of a middle aged man. Men of today have no consciousness of such things—simply because it is not known in our days that if one is to be able to bless rightly in old age, one must have learnt in childhood how to fold the hands (in prayer or veneration) For the power to bless in old age arises out of the folding of the hands in prayer in childhood. The soul element has the same relationship to blessing and the folding of the hands in prayer as grey hair has to the the hair of childhood. This inner change enters the sphere of knowledge of modern humanity in a very limited sense; but it must do so again to a greater degree. Men must again come to a point where they can understand life in its different metamorphoses. Otherwise we shall never get out of the terrible state of things which, for instance, makes it possible for anyone who is 18 or 19 years old and has a little talent, to become at that age, a Feuilletonist. [A journalist responsible for the critical and literary articles which sometimes appear in a newspaper below the leading articles. The feuilletons are usually divided from the rest of the newspaper by a line.] People who read the feuilletons produced by these men have no idea that they have been written by someone only 18 years old—and take them quite authoritative utterances. But if a man writes feuilletons at the age of 18 he does not develop any further. It also comes about that men when they are only 20 or 21 years old are considered mature enough to go into Parliament, or to become a town councilor! They are supposed to be capable to do this kind of thing. It is in these cases considered to be unnecessary at the age of 40 years to try to be a more accomplished person than was the case at their age of 20, for everything that the world can offer and what can be offered to the world, has already been attained! At the age of 20 one chooses or is chosen and the thing is finished! But men will first understand the wor1d in a concrete sense when they again realise that life is something which undergoes concrete transformation. Then that abstract socialism of which we hear so much today, will disappear and something concrete will take its place.

So you see that the growth of a cosmic consciousness out of an earth consciousness will be of great significance, especially because of what is produced in men by their feelings; for the important thing in such matters is not what a man knows but how he feels. There are certain things associated with life which can be understood only when this cosmic or universal consciousness is reached.

There is a great deal of abstract talking today about the ages or generations as they follow each other in life. We think something in this way—I mean those of us who have reached a certain age, for I except young people from this; a man has capabilities of a certain kind; he lives in such and such a way; his childhood was spent in such and such a way. People are really very short-lived, for they get angry with children when they do the same things as they did at the same age; they do not understand that children of to-day do the same kind of things as they themselves used to do; they expect those who are now children to be as well behaved as they are as grown up people, and do not realise that good manners and behavious have first to be acquired. But apart from this, there is something else. Men generally imagine that children now must be just the same as they were when they were children—a generation ago; children, who are born now must be just the same as I was in the year 1860! Now that is nonsense. For we are in an absolute sense, further on in cosmic space and those who are babies now are born at a different point of space. Suppose you travel from Stuttgart to another town today—you will have had something to eat in Stuttgart today and tomorrow somewhere else. You cannot have a meal in Stuttgart when you travel. And the children who are born in our time, cannot have the same psychic constitution as those of us who have reached a respectable age had when we were children. We must realise that childhood itself changes. This is connected with our absolute movement in universal space—of which mathematical space is only a schematic image. There is a tendency today to take ever thing in an absolute sense and it is a matter for rejoicing when this is not so. I was recently very pleased in Berlin when a man came to see me who had read—well,what shall I say the “discussions” of the Threefold Commonwealth which appeared under the title of A False Prophet in the paper called Die Hilfe. I do not know whether any of you read that effusion. This man was an American and he said to himself that there was something interesting about it. And he came to see me with Herr Pfarrer Rittlelmayer and explained that in spite of the feeble style, he had realised that it was a matter of interest. Among the questions which he—all of which were quite understandable—was the following, which specially pleased me; “One can see that the Threefold State is necessary for modern times and that it must be put in the place of the old uniform State; is it your opinion that the Threefold Commonwealth is the final and conclusive solution of the social question?” I answered him: “Most assuredly not; but in the course of historical development it has come about that in past centuries the State as a unity has been more in evidence and now the times demand a threefold Commonwealth, a time will come when the Threefold Commonwealth will have to be replaced by something different. That will not however, be for about three or four hundred years and then it will be necessary again to consider what should take place of the Threefold Commonwealth”. Now that is the opposite of chiliastic thought, the opposite to the thought that imagines the kind of empire which has lasted for a thousand years to be right for all time. It is the opposite of thinking which imagines that once a blessed existence is obtained for humanity it must remain for all time. Life in the world is not so easy as that. What is essential is that what is right for a particular epoch should be brought about and then substituted at the right time by what the following epoch demands, That is the essential point, that is organic thinking in contradistinction to mechanical thinking—and mechanical thinking is what holds sway at the present time; men really imagine that there is one absolute right for all time. One thing is right for Stuttgart, another for New York, another for Australia, One thing is right for 1919, another for 2530. I assure you that the evolution of humanity is not so simple as to possess one absolute Right. Things are always right for particular places and for particular times; there must be concrete thinking which arises from the facts and relationships. And that will happed when humanity is conscious of its absolute movement in universal space. a consciousness which, however, can only be induced through inner experiences, through inner life.

I have again to-day called your attention to something which should indicate to you how things must be looked at with reference to the penetration by spiritual science of our modern culture. Anyone who understands such matters,will see that humanity's love of ease resists spiritual science, for everything else is far more convenient, far easier, Spiritual science is terribly inconvenient! Spiritual science does not permit of our thinking out a certain condition of things which can remain for ever; it forces us to think out what is good and right for the centuries immediately following, perhaps even for a still shorter period of time. But this cannot be thought out by abstract concepts of the intellect about humanity, but only when a real effort is made to understand the special characteristics of the particular epoch, and to realise thereby what it demands. That may be inconvenient, but that is the reality. Men today like the settle down comfortably into cultural evolution, especially those men whose aim it is to be leaders in it!

I will give you an example of the understanding which persons of authority at the present time have of' spiritual science. I won't relate the story in detail in case someone might get offended, but in a certain town a man had occasion to lecture about Anthroposophy in a private High School. He was lecturing about modern world conceptions and he wanted to include an address about Anthroposophy because he considered it historically necessary—you see people try nowadays to be really “all round”. Now how did this man set about it? The plan of the lectures, the programme,was drawn up at the beginning of the tem and a certain hour was allotted to “Anthroposophy” just as in certain hours the subject was Darwinism, a particular hour was set aside for “Steiner's Anthroposophy”. This was all drawn up at the beginning of the term. Now this man, when he put Anthroposophy into the programme, had not the very least idea of what was to be found in a book about Anthroposophy. When the evening for this particular lecture came round, this man went to someone who had my books, and in the morning selected the most important of them in order to get information, in order to be in a position to give his lecture an Anthroposophy in the evening. It is very convenient to familiarize oneself in such a way about a world-conception, and then to give it our authoritatively. Such a thing as this is by no means rare in our modern days, and it deserves to be mentioned. For very, very much of what is said and lectured about and written about in the present day has no greater “depth” than this and it is accepted credulously. Then out of this credulous acceptance it built up what people have in their heads and in their souls about the different world conceptions. We must not close our eyes to facts like this which show the most terrible superficiality, we must be quite clear that to-day it is essential first of all to consider who the person is who is speaking “authoritatively” an certain matters.

The stimulation of this consciousness in the present time is more important, my friends, than all the substance of what I am able to tell you; it is a consciousness which makes us realise how terribly necessary it is to consider what degree of depth there is behind that which is given us, and told us. If one speaks of these things of course many people are hurt. And particularly it is said about Anthroposophists and Theosophists that they ought to have more forbearance, to judge with greater kindliness and not to be so critical, because to be so critical hurts people. But one asks oneself whether it is real charity to ignore the fact that such men who acquaint themselves in the morning with what they have to lecture upon in the evening should be let loose in the sphere of education. In questions that arise out of actual life, the important thing is how they are put. It is important to put the questions in the right way, for then only can the right point of view result.

I have tried to bring home to you today that earth consciousness must change into a cosmic or universal consciousness just as a territorial consciousness changed into an earth consciousness; but I did this in order to indicate much that in the realm of feeling is essential for the bringing about of healthy relationships in our civilisation of today.

And Oh! this must come about. If one could only shake sleepy humanity of modern times into a realisation of this! But it isn't by any means easy nowadays. Much may be said in this direction but men avoid making themselves fundamentally familiar with such a point of view. It is not enough merely to bring forward anthroposophical theories. It is absolutely essential to make one's penetration sharp for what is necessary for our time and not shut oneself up in preconceived ideas, We must open ourselves out toward that which has to be wrestled with, in order that from the point of view of a true charity one may be able to strike actively at the present time. If something is done in this direction by stimulating the souls and hearts of men, more is attained than by the most comprehensive theories imaginable.

It makes one's heart bleed to realise the truth of what was said by Herr Molt recently, that there are people today who say: “We would rather be a province of the Allies before we will think of anything like the Threefold Social Organisation”. This attitude is unfortunately widely spread. And a great many other things are connected with this kind of attitude because as a matter of fact another attitude can only arise from a spiritual deepening. Our modern time can only grow to be healthy through such spiritual deepening.

What I am going to say today is intended to deal with primary and secondary education, and to deal with it in such a way that what is of essential value can be useful for the present time, the grave times, in which we are now living. I believe you will have seen for yourselves that what could be given only as outline in my book The Threefold Commonwealth has many deep contributing factors—indeed very many, if we take into consideration all that arises from the new shaping of the world. So that actually in everything that must be said on this subject, preeminently where fresh activity has to be aroused, only guiding lines can be given to begin with instead of anything of an exhaustive nature.

When we look at the times in which we are living—and we need to do so for we have to understand them—it must constantly strike us what a gulf there is between what must be called a declining culture and a culture that may be described as chaotic, but all the same on the up-grade. I expressly draw attention to the fact that today I am wanting to deal with a special aspect of my subject, and therefore ask you to take it in connection with the lectures as a whole, once they are brought to completion.

I should like to start by drawing your attention to something that is clearly noticeable, namely, how the culture based on bourgeois social contract is in rapid decline, whereas we are witnessing the dawn of another culture based on what is largely not understood and represented by the proletariat. If all this is to be understood—it can be felt without being understood but will then lack clarity—we must grasp it in its symptoms. Symptoms are always a matter of detail; I ask you to remember this in what I am saying today. I shall naturally be forced by the subject itself to take details out of their context, but I shall take pains so to shape this symptomatology that it will not be able to work in the way of agitators or demagogues, but will really be shaped by the relevant circumstances. We may meet with much misunderstanding in this direction today, but that we shall have to risk.

Now in the course of years I have often asked you to bear in mind that, on the ground of the world-outlook represented here, it is perfectly possible to be a real upholder and defender of the modern natural scientific approach to the world. You know how frequently I have referred to all that can be said in defense of this approach! At the same time, however, I have never failed to point out what a fearful counterpart it has. Quite recently I reminded you that this can be seen at once when anyone, as a result of what we call here the symptomatic method of study, points to some particularly telling example and goes to work quite empirically. Now in another connection I have had to sing the praises of a recent remarkable work by the outstanding biologist Oskar Hertwig, Das werden der Organismen—Eine Wiederlegung der Darwinischen Zufallstheorie. Then, to avoid misunderstanding after the publication of a second book of his, I have had to remark how this man has followed up a really great book on natural science with a quite inferior work on social conditions. This is a fact fraught with meaning for the present time. It shows that even on the excellent foundation of the natural scientific approach to the world, what is pre-eminently necessary for an understanding of the present times cannot arise, namely, knowledge of the social impulses existing in our age. I want today to give you another example to bring home to you with greater emphasis how, on the one hand, bourgeois culture is on the decline and can be saved only in a certain way; how, on the other hand, there exists something that is on the ascent, something that must be carefully tended with understanding and judgment if it is to be a sarting point for the culture of the future.

Now I have before me a book that is a symptomatic and typical product of the declining bourgeoisie. It appeared immediately after the world war with the somewhat pretentious title The Light Bearer. This light bearer is admirably adapted to spread darkness over everything which today is most necessary for social culture and its spiritual foundation. A remarkable community of people have foregathered, who in separate articles have written remarkable things about a so-called rebuilding of the social organism. Naturally I can quote only certain passages from this rather voluminous work. To begin with we have a scientist named Jakob von Uexkull, really a good typical scientist who—and this is the important point—has not only a certain knowledge of natural science, is not merely well versed in it, but in his research work is recognised as an accomplished scientist of the day. He feels impelled, however, like others bred in the scientific tradition, to treat us to his views upon organising the world socially. He has learnt about the 'cell-state' as the organism is often called in scientific circles. He has certainly learnt to develop his mind, with which he then observes the social life. I want to refer you just to a few instances from which you may be able to see how this man, not from his knowledge of natural science but as a result of his scientific method of thinking—really quite correct but wholly absurd for practical life—how he now looks at the structure of modern society: he turns to the social organism, to the natural scientific organism, the organism as it is in nature, and finds that "the harmony in a natural organism can at times be disturbed by processes of disease"—and referring to the social organism goes on to say:

“All harmony can be disturbed through disease. We call the most terrible disease of the human body cancer. Its characteristic is the unrestrained activity of the protoplasm which, without considering the preservation of the organs, goes on producing more and more protoplasmic cells. These press upon the bodily structure; they cannot, however, fulfil any function themselves for they are lacking in structure.

“We recognise the same disease in the human community at large when the people's motto: liberty, equality, fraternity, replaces the motto of the state: compulsion, diversity, subordination.”

Now here you have a typical scientific thinker. He looks upon it as a cancerous disease when the impulse towards liberty, equality and fraternity arises out of the people. In place of freedom he wants to put compulsion, in place of equality, diversity, in place of fraternity, subordination. This is what from the 'cell-state' he has learnt to adopt as his method of viewing things, and which he then applies to the social organism. The rest of what he puts forward too is not without significance when considered from the symptomalogical point of view. He goes so far as to find something in the social organism that corresponds in the natural organism to the circulation of the blood, not at all in the way I have described it in various lectures, but as he himself pictures it. He goes to the length of looking upon gold as blood circulating in the social organism and says: “Gold possesses the faculty of circulating independently of commodities, finally reaching the collecting centres represented by the great banks (Gold heart)”. Thus this scientist seeks a heart for his social organism and finds it in the collecting centres of the great banks, “which can exercise an overwhelming influence on the movements of both gold and commodities”.

Now I particularly stress that I have no intention of making fun of anything here. I want just to let you see how a man, who from this point of view has the courage to think things out to their logical conclusion, is actually obliged to think. If today many people deceive themselves about our having during the last three or four centuries brought evolution to the point of making this kind of thinking quite intelligible, then it is evident that these people are asleep in their souls, that they give themselves up to cultural narcotics which prevent their looking with wide awake souls at what is concealed in bourgeois culture. For this reason I have shown you a symptom that sheds light on this light bearer, sheds light on the elements of present-day culture, in so far as, out of the scientific method of thinking, this culture understands the social life. In a further examnple I want to show you how different a result we experience from what we meet within the spiritual sphere.

Among those belonging to the society just mentioned there is a man with a more spiritual bent, by name Friedrich Niebergall. Now this Friedrich Niebergall is quoted because his attitude towards certain things we consider of value is most sympathetic. But I should like to say here that what matters is the nature of the sympathetic attitude with which from such a side certain matters are approached. If we know this, and if we are not mere egoists but understand the great social impulses, perhaps we do not value this sympathetic attitude very highly; and it would be good if in these matters we were not to give ourselves up to illusion. We know, some of us at least could know, that what we carry on here and call spiritual science, or anthroposophy, we have for some time considered to be the true spiritual foundation of what today is on the ascent. Here, it is true, extremes meet; and I have always been forced to experience how some of those very people who participate in our anthroposophical endeavors turn to other movements they feel to be closely akin, but which differ from our endeavors in that they belong to the worst phenomena of the bourgeois decline, whereas spiritual science has from the first been strongly opposed to all that is behind this. So we find confused together in a certain Johannes Müller, who has no power of discriminating the different streams—like Niebergall for example—we find in this Johannes Müller a phenomenon showing just the characteristics of our decadent culture; and on the other hand (you know I do not say these things out of mere foolishness) you find mention of my name. It is true that all kinds of elegant things, most elegant things, are said about what I try to accomplish. You must, however, realise how in all that is put forward in anthroposophy my every effort is directed towards taxing man's understanding and fighting in a pronounced way against anything in the way of nebulous mysticism or so-called mystic theosophy. This could be done only by approaching the highest spheres of knowledge with clear insight, lucid ideas, which will be striven for when through natural science we have learnt, not the natural scientific outlook of today, but true thinking. After the gentleman in question has declared how fine much of anthroposophy is, he adds: “Round this basis of practical truth there then springs forth a confused medley of alleged knowledge concerning the life of the soul, of mankind and of the cosmos—as once was the case in the all-embracing gnostic systems offered out of the secret wisdom of the East to an age seeking in like manner inner depths and peace of soul.” It is not possible to say anything less to the point than this. For the fact that the author describes this as confused nonsense, a confused medley, rests solely on his lacking the will to adopt the mathematical method of our spiritual science. This is generally the case with those wishing to gain conceptions from a knowledge that is on the decline. The result of disciplining inner experience by mathematical method appears to this author therefore to be a confused medley. But this conf used medley that brings into the matter mathematical clarity, perhaps indeed mathematical dryness, is what is essential, for it preserves what is meant to be pursued here from all fantastic mysticism, all nebulous theosophy. Without this so-called confused medley there can be no real foundation for the future life of spirit. It is true that by reason of our social conditions there had to be a struggle to make it possible for spiritual science to be carried on in the very modest dimensions it has reached today. We had to struggle with what very often appears as a result of most people—who now have time, and nothing but time, for the affairs of spiritual science—still having those old habits of thinking and perceiving which are on the decline. Hence, we have to struggle so hard against what easily spreads in a circle such as ours, namely, sectarianism, which naturally is the very opposite of what is meant to be cultivated here, and against every kind of personal wrangling which, it goes without saying, leads to the systematic slandering that has flourished so exuberantly on the soil of this movement.

Now whoever studies the life of spirit today from symptoms such as these will soon come to the point of saying: What is particularly needed in the sphere of spiritual endeavour is a return to original sources. The clamor for a new form of social life is always heard at a time when people harbor the most widespread anti-social impulses and anti-social instincts. These anti-social impulses and instincts are particularly evident in people's private intercourse. They are to be seen in what men give or do not give—to each other. They are to be seen in the characteristic way people ignore the thoughts of others, talk others down, and finally pass them by. In our day the instinctive capacity really to understand the people we meet is extraordinarily rare. The following also is a disappearing phenomenon—the possibility of people nowadays being convinced of anything unconnected with their social status, education or birth. Today people have the most beautiful thoughts, but it is very difficult for them to be enthusiastic about anything. In thought they pass by all that is best, and this is a deeply rooted characteristic of our age. As consequence of this fact—you know that recently I have talked of logic based on fact as being important for the present time in contrast to mere logic of thought—as consequence of this a longing exists in men today to have recourse to authority and the pronouncements of feeling rather than by their own inner activity to work through to things. Those today who talk a great deal about freedom from authority are the very people who, at heart, believe in it most firmly and long to submit themselves to it. Thus we see, only it is generally unnoticed because most people are asleep, a rather questionable tendency among those who, without finding any way out of it, are involved in this cultural decline, namely the tendency to sink back into the bosom of the old Catholic Church. Were people to realise what lies in this tendency to return to the Catholic Church they would be much astonished. Under the present conditions, if this tendency were to increase, at no very distant date we should have to witness a mighty swing over to the bosom of the Catholic Church by masses of the people. Whoever is able to observe the special features of our present culture knows that this is threatening us.

Now whence does all this arise? Here I must draw your attention to an essential phenomenon of our present social life. The special feature of what in the last few centuries has increased to ever wider dimensions, and will increase further in those lands which will preserve their civilisations throughout the present chaos—this special feature is the technical coloring of the culture, the particular technical shade taken on by the culture of recent times. Were I to speak exhaustively on this subject, I should have to point in detail to all that now is referred to just in passing; and one day I shall do so. This technical culture has indeed one quite definite quality; this culture in its nature is through and through altruistic. In other words there is only one favourable way for technical accomplishments to be wide­spread, namely, when the men actively engaged in them in contrast to egoism, develop altruism. Technical culture makes it increasingly necessary—and those who are able to observe these things see the necessity on every fresh advance of technical culture—for work organised on a technical basis to be entirely free from egoism. In contrast to this there has developed at the same time what has had its origin in capitalism, which must not necessarily be linked to technical culture or remain so linked. Capitalism, when it is private capitalism, cannot work other than egoistically, for its very being consists in egoistic activity. Thus in recent times two streams meet in diametrical opposition to one another: modern technical life which calls upon men to be free from egoism, and, coming from the past, private capitalism, which can prosper only by the assertion of egoistic impulse. This is what has made its way into our present situation, and the only means of extricating ourselves is to have a life of spirit which has the courage to break away from the old traditions.

Now today there are many people concerned with the problems of future primary and secondary education, school education, and of professional training for human beings. Especially when we are studying the question of primary and secondary education we must say to these people: Well and good, but with the best will in the world, can you interest people at large in primary and secondary education if you do nothing to change present conditions of education and matters of the spirit? Have you the material for the work? What actually are you able to do? With your principles—perhaps socialistic in a good sense—you may be able to found schools for a great mass of the people and to found institutions for their higher education. You may organise everything of this kind to which your good will impels you. But have you the material really to organise for the benefit of the people what you want with good will to extend to them? You tell us that you found libraries, theatres, concert halls, exhibitions, lecture courses, and polytechnics. But the question must arise: What books do you have in your libraries? What kind of science is dealt with in your lectures? You place on your library shelves those very books which belong to the bourgeois culture that is on the decline; you hand over the scientific education in the polytechnics to men who are products of that bourgeois culture. You give the nature of education new forms, but into these new forms you cast what you have absorbed of the old. For instance you say: For a long time we have been trying to give primary and secondary education a democratic form; up to now the various states have been against this for they want to educate men to be good civil servants.—True you are opposed to this education of good civil servants; you allow the people to be educated by them, however, for up to now you have nothing else in mind but these civil servants whose books are on the shelves of your libraries, whose scientific method of thinking you propagate by means of your lectures and whose habits of thinking permeate your colleges.—You see from this that in these serious times the matter must be taken far more profoundly than it generally is today.

Now let us just look at certain details to have at least something clear before us. We will begin with what we may call primary and secondary education. Under this heading I include everything that can be given to the human being when he has outgrown the education to be acquired in his family, when to this must be added the education and instruction obtained at school. Those who know the nature of man are clear that school education should never be a factor in the evolution of the human being until approximately the change of teeth has taken place. This is just as much a scientific law as any other. Were people to be guided by the real nature of human beings instead of by mere dummies, they would make it a regulation that school instruction should not begin till after the change of teeth. But the important question is the principles upon which this school instruction of children is to be based. Here we must have in mind that whoever is able to bring his thoughts and efforts into harmony with the ascending cultural evolution can really do nothing today bµt recognise, as inherent in the principles holding good in school education and instruction, what lies in the nature of the human being himself. Knowledge of human nature from the change of teeth until puberty must underlie any principles in what we call primary and secondary education. From this, and from a great deal of the same nature, you will realise that, if we take this as our basis, the result will be the same education for everyone; for obviously the laws which hold good in human evolution between approximately the seventh and fifteenth years are the same for all human beings. The only question we need answer concerning education and instruction is: To what point have we to bring human beings by the time they reach their fifteenth year? This alone may be called thinking in terms of primary and secondary education. At the same time this alone is thinking in a modern way about the nature of instruction. The consequence of this today will be that we shall no longer ignore the necessity of making an absolute break w1th the old school system, that we shall have in all earnest to set to work on organising what, during the years specified, is to be given to children in accordance with the evolution of the growing human being. Then a certain basis will have to be created—something that , when social goodwill exists , will not be a nebulous idea for the future but something practical which can be immediately acted upon. The basis for this will have to be created in the first place by a complete change in the whole nature of examination and instruction of the teacher himself. When today the teacher is examined, this is often done merely to verify whether he knows something that, if he is at all clever and doesn't know it, he can read up in a text book. In the examination of teachers this can be entirely omitted, but with it will go the greater part of such examinations in their present form. In those that will take their place the object will be to discover whether the man, who has to do with the education and instruction of the developing human being, can establish with him a personally active and profitable relation; whether he is able to penetrate with his whole mentality—to use a word much in fashion—into the soul of the growing human being, into his very nature. Then the teacher will not just teach reading, arithmetic or drawing; he will be fit to become a real moulder of the developing human being.

Thereupon, from all future examinations, which will take a very different form from their present one, it will be easy to discover if the school staff are really creative in this sense. For this means that the teacher will know: I must help this pupil in some particular way if he is to learn to think; another in another way if he is to unfold his world of feeling.—For the world of feeling is intimately bound up with the world of memory, a thing few people know today, most modern professors .being the worst possible psychologists . The teacher must know what to give to his pupil if the will is to unfold in such a way that the seeds, sown between his seventh and fifteenth years, may bring about the strengthening of the will for the whole of his life. The cultivation of will is brought about when everything that has to do with practical physical exercises and artistic pursuits is adapted to the developing being. Whoever is a teacher of those who are in process of development will concentrate all his effort on enabling the human being to become man. In this way he will discover how to utilise all that is conventionally called human culture—speaking, reading and writing. All this can best be utilised in the years between seven and fifteen for the development of thinking. However strange it may seem, thinking is the most external thing in man, and it must be developed on wha tever establishes us in the social organism. Consider how the human being on coming into the world through birth lacks any propensity towards reading and writing and how these belong to his life as a member of a community. Thus, for the development of thinking we must, comparatively early, have good instruction in languages, naturally not in what was spoken formerly but in languages as used today by the civilised peoples with whom we have contact. This efficient teaching in languages would naturally not consist in teaching the grammatical anomalies as is done today in the grammar school; it must be started in the lowest classes and continued. It will be important too that teaching should be given in a conscious way to unfold the feeling and the memory bound up with it. Whereas everything relating to arithmetic and geography—of which children can absorb an extraordinary amount when it is given them rightly—stands between what has to do with thinking and what has to do with feeling, everything taken into the memory has more to do with pure feeling, for instance, the history that is taught, the myths and legends that are told. I can only touch on these things.

But it is also necessary in these first years to give particular attention to the cultivation of will. Here it is a matter of physical exercises and artistic training. Something entirely new will be needed for this in these early years. A beginning has been made in what we call eurythmy. Today we witness a great deal of physical culture that is decadent and belongs to the past; it pleases many people. In its place we shall put something that so far we have had occasion to show only to the employees of the Waldorf—Astoria factory through the sympathetic help of our good Herr Molt; we shall put what—if it is given to the growing human being instead of the present gymnastics—promotes culture in both body and soul. It can so develop the will that the effect remains throughout life, whereas cultivation of the will by any other means causes a weakening of it when vicissitudes and various experiences are met with in the course of life. In this sphere particularly, however, we shall have to go to work with common sense. In the way instruction is given, combinations will have to be made little dreamt of today; for instance drawing will go hand-in-hand with geography. It would be of the greatest importance for the growing pupil to have really intelligent lessons in drawing; during these lessons he would be led to draw the globe from various sides, to draw the mountains and rivers of the earth in their relation to one another, then to turn to astronomy and to draw the planetary system. It goes without saying that this would have to be introduced at the right age, not for the seven-year-olds but certainly before they reached fifteen, perhaps from the twelfth year onwards, when if done in the right way, it would work on growing youth very beneficially.

What in a didactic and pedagogical way I have just now been discussing concerning primary and secondary education will, in accordance with the logic of facts, have a quite definite consequence, namely that nothing will play a part in teaching that is not in one form or another retained for the whole of life. Today, as a rule, only what is included among the faculties plays its part rightly—what is done by learning to read is concentrated in the faculty of reading, what is done in learning to count is concentrated in the faculty of arithmetic. But just think how it is when we come to things having rather to do with feeling and memory. In this sphere children today learn a great deal only to forget it, only to be without it for the rest of life. In future, stress must be laid on this—that everything given to a child will remain with him for life.

We should then come to the question: What is to be done with the human being when having finished with the primary and secondary school he goes out into life? Here it is important that everything unsound in the old life of spirit should be overcome, that at least where education is concerned the terrible cleft made by class distinction should be abolished.

Now the Greeks, even the Romans, were able to devise for themselves an education that had its roots in their life, that was bound up with their way of life. In our time we have nothing which binds us in our most important years with our quite different mode off living. Many people, however, who later take up positions of authority, learn today what was learnt by the Greeks and Romans, and thus become divorced from life today; added to which this is spiritually the most uneconomical thing possible. Besides, we are today at a point in human evolution—if people only knew it—when it is quite unnecessary for preserving our relation to antiquity that we should be brought up in their ideas. What people in general need of the old has for a long time been incorporated in our culture, in such a way that we can absorb it without years of training in an atmosphere foreign to us. What we should imbibe of Greek and Roman culture can be improved upon, and this has also been the case; but that is a matter for scholars and has nothing to do with general social education. What is to be imbibed from antiquity for our general social education, however, has been brought to such a stage through the work of great minds in the past, and is so much in our midst, that if we rightly absorb what is there for us we have no need to learn Greek and Latin to deepen our knowledge of antiquity; it is not in the least essential and is no help at all for the important things in life. I recall how, to avoid misunderstandings, I found it necessary to say that, though Herr Wilamowitz is most certainly a Greek scholar of outstanding merit, he has nevertheless translated the Greek plays in a way that is really atrocious; but, of course, these translations have been acclaimed by both the press and scholars. Today we must learn to let people participate in life; and if we organise education so that people are able to participate in life, at the same time setting to work on education economically, you will find that we are really able to help human beings to a living culture. This, too, will enable anyone with a bent towards handicraft to take advantage of the education for life that begins about the fourteenth year. A possibility must be created for those who early show a bent towards handicraft or craftsman ship to be able to participate in what leads to a conception of life. In future, pupils who have not reached their twenty-first year should never be offered any knowledge that is the result of scientific research and comes from scientific specialisation. In our day, only what has been thoroughly worked out ought to have a place in instruction; then we can go to work in an out-and-out economic way. We must, however, have a clear concept of what is meant by economy in didactic and pedagogical matters. Above all we should not be lazy if we want to work in a way that is economic from the pedagogical point of view. I have often drawn your attention to something personally experienced by me. A boy of ten who was rather undeveloped was once given over into my charge, and through pedagogical economy I was enabled to let him absorb in two years what he had lacked up to his eleventh year, when he was still incapable of anything at all. This was possible only by taking into account both his bodily and his soul nature in such a way that instruction could proceed in the most economical way conceivable. This was often done by my spending three hours myself in preparation, so as in a half-hour or even in a quarter to give to the boy instruction that would otherwise have taken hours—this being necessary for his physical condition. If this is considered from the social point of view, people might say that I was obliged in this instance to give all the care to a single boy that might have been given to three others who would not have had to be treated in this way. But imagine we had a social educational system that was reasonable, it would then be possible for a whole collection of such pupils to be dealt with, for it makes no difference in this case whether we have to deal with one or fourteen boys. I should not complain about the number of pupils in the school, but this lack of complaint is connected with the principle of economy in instruction. It must be realised, however, that up to his fourteenth year the pupil has no judgment; and if judgment is asked of him this has a destructive effect on the brain. The modern calculating machine which gives judgment the place of memorising and calculating is a gross educational error; it destroys the human brain, makes it decadent. Human judgment can be cultivated only from and after the fourteenth year when those things requiring judgment must be introduced into the curriculum. Then all that is related, for example, to the grasping of reality through logic can be begun. When in future the carpenter or mechanic sits side-by-side in school or college with anyone studying to be a teacher, the result will certainly be a specialisation but at the same time one education for all; but included in this one education will be everything necessary for life. If this were not included matters would become socially worse than they are at present. All instruction must give knowledge that is necessary for life. During the ages from fifteen to twenty everything to do with agriculture, trade, industry, commerce will have to be learnt. No one should go through these years without acquiring some idea of what takes place in farming, commerce and industry. These subjects will be given a place as branches of knowledge infinitely more necessary than much of the rubbish which constitutes the present curriculum during these years. Then too during these years all those subjects will be introduced which I would call world affairs, historical and geographical subjects, everything concerned with nature knowledge—but all this in relation to the human being, so that man will learn to know man from his knowledge of the world as a whole.

Now among human beings who receive instruction of this kind will be those who, driven by social conditions to become workers in a spiritual sense, can be educated in every possible sphere at schools specially organised for such students. The institutions where people today are given professional training are run with a terrible lack of economy. I know that many people will not admit it but there is this lack of economy; above all validity is ascribed to the most curious conceptions belonging to the world-outlook that is on the decline. Even in my time I have experienced this—people have begun to press where it is a question in the universities of historical and literary subjects, for fewer lectures and more "seminars"; today we still hear it said that lectures should be given as little space as possible on the programme but seminars encouraged. One knows these seminars. Faithful followers of a university tutor gather together and learn strictly in accordance with the ideas of this tutor to work scientifically. They do their work under his coaching and the results of the coaching are forever visible. It is altogether another matter if a man, in the years when he should be learning a profession, goes of his own free will to a course of intelligent lectures, and then has the opportunity of embarking upon his own free exposition—though certainly this would be connected with what the lectures contained. Practical application can certainly be included in the programme but this exaggerated emphasis on seminars must be stopped. That is just an undesirable product of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the emphasis was on the drilling of human beings rather than on leaving them to develop freely.

Now when we are discussing this stage in education it must be said that a certain educational groundwork ought to be the same for everyone, whether he is destined to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher; that is one aspect of the matter; in addition to this, everyone must receive what contributes to the general culture of man, whether he is to become a doctor, a machine maker, architect, chemist or engineer; he must be given the opportunity of receiving general culture, whether he is to work with his hands or his head. Today little thought is given to this, though certainly in some places of higher education many things are better than they were. When I was at the Technical College in Vienna a Professor was giving lectures on general history. Each term he started to give his general history; after three or perhaps five lectures he ceased—there was no longer anyone there. Then, at this college, there was a Professor of history of literature . Thus there were the means to receive what was universally human besides specialised subjects. To these lectures on the history of literature, which included exercises in rhetoric and instruction on how to lecture, like those given, for example, by hand—to these lectures I always had to drag someone else, for they were held only if there was an audience of two. They could be kept going, therefore, only by a second being dragged in, and this was someone different practically every time. Except for this, the only attempt to provide students with the information they needed about conditions in life was by lectures on constitutional law or statistics. As I said, these things have improved; what has not improved is the driving force that should exist in our whole social life. This will improve, however, when there is a possibility for all that constitutes the universally human not to be made intelligible only to those with a definite professional view but intelligible from a universally human aspect. I have often been surprised how distorted my lectures on anthroposophy have been by my audience; for if they had taken them in a positive way they could have said: we won't bother about the anthroposophy in these lectures, but what is said about natural science, which receives great praise when coming from the ordinary natural philosopher—that is enough for us. For as you all know these lectures are always interspersed with general information about nature. But there are many people who are not interested in taking things from a positive angle, preferring to distort what they have no wish to accept. What they refused to accept, by the very way in which the thoughts were formed, by the whole mode of treatment, as well as the necessary interspersing of natural science, could be taken as contributing to universal human knowledge, which the manual worker could receive just as well as the scholar, and which was also generally intelligible as natural science. Just consider other endeavors towards a world-outlook. Do you imagine that in monistic gatherings, for instance, people can understand anything if they have not a scientific background? No, and if they have not, they merely gossip. What here we pursue as anthroposophy is something that can change all knowledge of nature, and even of history, so that everyone will be able to understand them. Just think how intelligible to everyone what I have shown to be a great leap historically in the middle of the fifteenth century can be. That, I think, is intelligible to everyone. But it is the groundwork without which there can be no understanding at all of the whole social movement in our time. This social movement is not understood because people do not know how mankind has developed since the middle of the fifteenth century. When these things are mentioned people come forward and declare: Nature does not make leaps, so you are wrong to assume there was such a thing in the fifteenth century. This foolish proposition that nature never makes a leap is always being harped upon. Nature continually makes leaps; it is a leap from the green leaf of a plant to the sepal which has a different form—another leap from sepal to petal. It is so too in the evolution of man's life. Whoever does not teach the history that rests on senseless conventional untruth, but on what has really happened, knows that in the fifteenth century men became different in the finer element of their constitution from what they were before, and that what is brought about today is the development of what they have grasped in the centre of their being. If there is a desire to understand the present social movement, laws of this kind in historical evolution will have to be recognised. You have only to call to mind the way in which matters here are dealt with and you will say: To understand all this no special knowledge is necessary; there is no need to be a man of culture; everyone can understand it. This indeed will be what is demanded in the future—that no philosophies or world-conceptions should be propagated which can be understood only by reason of a form of education belonging to a certain class. Take up any philosophical work today, for example, by Eucken or Paulsen, or anyone else you want information about, take up one of those dreadful works on psychology by university professors—you will soon drop it again; for those who are not specially trained in the particular subject do not understand the language used. This is something that can be set right only by universal education, when the whole nature of education and instruction will be absolutely changed in the way I have tried to indicate today.

You see, therefore, that in this sphere too we can say: here we have a big settling-up—not a small one. What is necessary is the development of social impulses or, rather, social intincts, through instruction, through education, so that people do not pass by one another. Then they will understand each other so that a practical living relation is develcped—for nowadays the teacher passes his pupil by, the pupil passes his teacher. This can happen only if we run our pen through what is old—which can be done. The facts of the case do not prevent this; it all goes back to human prejudice. People cannot believe that things can be done in a new way; they are terrified that their life of spirit may lose what was of value in the old way. You have no idea how anxious they are on this score. Naturally they are unable to take all this in; for instance they cannot see all the possibilities created by having an instruction that is economical. I have often told you that provided this is done at the right age it is possible from the beginning of geometry—the straight line and the angle—up to what used to be called the pons a sinorum, the Pythagorean theorem. And on my attempting this you should have seen the joy of the youngsters when, after three or four hours work, the theorem of Pythagoras dawned upon them. Only think what a lot of rubbish has to be gone through today before young people arrive at this theorem. What matters is the enormous amount of mental work wasted, which has its effects in later life; it sends its rays into the whole of life, right into its most practical spheres. Today it is necessary for people to come to a decision in these matters—fundamentally to re-organise their way of thinking. Otherwise—well, otherwise we simply sink deeper into decline and never find the path upwards.

I do not propose today to link up with what I was saying here last Sunday in the manner usually intended when people speak of continuing a subject. On that occasion I tried , as far as this was possible in a mere outline, to show in a general pedagogical and introductory way how we are to conceive the organisation of a life of spirit, a life instruction, independent of either the economic life of that of the State. I tried, too, to show how, once this independence is established, the various branches of instruction have to be applied in a new way, in order to give what must reveal itself to teacher and educa tor some kind of anthropological and pedagogical form or, perhaps it is better to say, a kind of anthropologically pedagogical activity. On the same occasion I remarked that one essential in the future will be the training and particularly the examining of a prospective teacher or educator to discover whether his personality is fitted for the task.

I will reserve the direct continuation of these matters for a later occasion and try to pursue my main subject in quite another way. I shall try to put before you clearly how it is necessary for me to think out of the evolutionary forces of the age—and how today we should have to speak at teachers' conferences, for example, or at somethigg of the sort, where people really desire to serve their times. At present it is a fact that, if we want to emerge from utter confusion and chaos, many things will have to be spoken of quite differently from how the present thinking habits prompt us to do.

Today even at teachers' conferences people talk—as can be proved by striking examples—on the old hackneyed lines, whereas it would be possible to introduce a really liberal education for the future, only if educators and teachers were able to rise to the level from which they could survey the very great task s at present facing us, insof ar as, out of the very nature of education and instruction, these tasks lend themselves to logical development. True, the manner in which I shall speak to you today will not be what I should like to hold up as a standard or even a pattern. But what I want to do is to indicate the angle from which we should speak to teachers so that they may themselves receive the impulse to get to work on an education having free play. It is just those who do the teaching who must rise to the level of the great and all-embracirg tasks of the age; they must be first to gain insight into the nature of the forces concealed behind present world events; they must see which forces have to be recognised as coming from the past and therefore needing to be superseded, which forces need to be specially cherished as having their roots in our present existence. These matters must be looked at today culturally and politically, in the best and most ideal sense, if we are to create a foundation for the impulses which will have to exist in those who are teachers. Above all, people must become aware that at every stage of instruction and guidance our education has suffered impoverishment and the reasons for this must be understood. The principal reason is that education has lost its direct connection with life. The educationalist today talks of many things which have to do with method, above all of the tremendous benefits that education is to derive from State control. Apparently, in his almost automatic way, he will still be speaking of these benefits when in theory he will in part have accepted the concept of the necessary threefold social organism. There has never been an age when thinking has been so automatic as it is now, and this is particularly evident where ideas on education are in question. These ideas on education have suffered under something that up to now we have been unable to escape; we must, however, escape from it. There are indeed questions today that cannot find so easy a solution as the following: Judging from past experience this or that will be possible. Then doubt will immediately take possession of the hearts and minds of men. Today there are innumerable questions which will have to be answered by: Is it not imperative that something should happen if we are to extricate ourselves from confusion and chaos? Here we have to do with questions of will, where the often apparently justified intellectual doubt regarding the validity of experience can settle nothing. For experience has value only when worked upon in a suitable way by the will. Today, though very little worked upon thus by the will, there is much in the way of experience. In the educational sphere itself a great deal is said against which, from the purely intellectual and scientific point of view, not much objection is to be made, and which from its own point of view is quite clever. But today it is important to understand the real issue—above all to understand how alien from real life our education has become.

I should here like again to refer to a personal incident. In Berlin about twenty-three years ago a society was formed concerned with college education. Its President was the astronomer Wilhelm Forster. I too belonged to this society. We had to hold a course of lectures most of which were given on the assumption that all it was necessary to know were certain stereotyped things about dealing with the various branches of science, about grouping these into faculties, and so on. I tried—though at the time I was little understood—to draw attention to the fact that a college should be a department of life in general, that whoever wants to speak about college education ought to start with the question: From the standpoint of world history, in what situations are we in life at present in all its different spheres, and what impulses have we to observe in these various spheres of life in order to let these impulsesstream into the college, thus linking it with the common life? When we work out such things, not in the abstract but concretely, countless points of view are revealed which, for example, help to reduce the time to be expended on any particular subject, and new ways of dealing with the various subjects are discovered. The moment any proposal is made for this reduction simply out of the ideas with which education works today, everything falls to the ground; the educational centres in question become mere institution s for training people who have no real connection with the world.

Now what are the intrinsic reasons, the deep lying reasons, for all this? Whereas in recent times thinking on the lines of natural science has made such wonderful progress, this fine method of thinking, which on the one hand has come to look upon man as purely a being of nature, has—to speak truly—cut off all knowledge of the real man. We have spoken quite recently of the tremendous importance of this knowledge of man's being for the right kind of teacher—the knowledge that recognises the real nature of the living human being, not in the formal way in which he is so often represented today, but in accordance with his inner being, particularly in accordance with the evolution of that being. There is a symptom, to which I have often referred here, showing how dreadfully foreign man's real being is to the modern educational movement. When a thing of this kind is said it may perhaps be considered paradoxical; it must be said today, however, for it is of the utmost importance. The loss of any real knowledge of man has produced that dreary, barren effort that is a branch of what is called experimental psychology against which, as such, I have no complaint. The so-called intelligence tests are a horrible travesty of what is really beneficial in the sphere of education. I have perhaps often described how, by certain physical contrivances, experiments are made with the avowed object of testing the memory, the understanding, of a human being, in order to register whether the particular person's memory and understanding are good or bad. In a purely mechanical manner, by giving part of a sentence and demanding its completion, or by some other device, it is sought to form an idea of the abilities of a growing human being. This is a symptom of how the direct relation between people—which alone is profitable—is a forgotten factor in our culture. It is a symptom of something cheerless which has been allowed to develop; but today it is admired as being remarkable progress—this testing of intelligence, this offspring of what are called in modern universities psychological laboratories. Until people see how necessary it is to return to a direct intuitive knowledge of man by studying the human being himself, particularly the growing human being, until we get rid of the unhappy gulf in this sphere between man and man, we shall never be able to understand how to lay the foundations for an education that is really alive and for a life of the spirit that is free. We shall have to purge all our educational establishments of this desire to experiment on the human being in order to satisfy the pedagogues. As groundwork for a reasonable psychology, I consider experimental psychology of value; in the form in which it has crept into education and even into the courts, however, it is a pervesion of the sound development of the evolving human being, between whom and his equally evolving fellow there is no yawning chasm. We have brought matters to such a pa ss that from what we strive after culturally we have excluded everything human; we must retrace our steps and once again unfold what belongs to man. We have also to find the courage to make an energetic stand against much of what in recent times has aroused growing admiration as a great achievement; otherwise we shall never make any advance. This explains how those today, who leave college with the intention of teaching, and proceed to educate human beings, have the most misguided conceptions about the real nature of man, and do not acquire the true conceptions because, in place of them, the kind of superficiality has arisen which we see in these intelligence tests. This will have to be recognised as a symptom of decline. We must seek within ourselves the capacity for judging the abilities of a human being, since he is a man and we ourselves are men. It must be understood that, because of this, every other method is unsound, for it destroys the fulness of what is immediately and vitally human—so necessary a factor in beneficial progress.

Now today these things are not seen at all. It is of primary importance that they should be seen if we are to progress. How often these things have been spoken of here; sometimes they have provoked a smile. But people have no notion that the reason for speaking of these things so frequently today is that they are an essential part of our life of spirit. There is nothing to be gained today by listening to what is said here as if it were a novelette; the important thing is to learn to distinguish between what is merely perceived, observed, and what may contain within it the seed to action. The culminating point of all the anthroposophical endeavors here is the building up of the idea of man, the passing on of the knowledge of man. It is this that we need. We need it because, from the very nature of the times, we have to overcome three forms of compulsion, the survivals of earlier days. First, the most ancient compulsion which masquerades today in various forms—the compulsion of the priesthood. We should make more progress in our study of the present situation were we today to recognise these disguises of certain obsolete facts and of the ideas and impulses unfortunately still living on in the thinking of the peoples of Europe, America and even in Asia—the modern disguises of the old priestly compulsion.

As our second compulsion we have something that develops later in man's historical evolution, also disguised in various ways today—the political compulsion.

And thirdly, coming comparatively late, there is the economic compulsion.

Out of these three compelling impulses men have to work their way; this is their task for the immediate present. They can get free today only if, to begin with, they clearly perceive the masks which in various ways disguise what is living in our midst, the masks which conceal the three compelling impulses among us.

Above all today the teacher must look to the level on which these things can be discussed, where, by means of the light gained from these things, we can illuminate contemporary evolution and thus become aware how one or other of these compulsions is lurking in some contemporary fact. Only when we find the courage to say: It is because teachers have isolated themselves, withdrawn into their schools, that such ill-judged ideas have been thought out as this testing of human efficiency by experiment—which is merely a symptom of much else... But everywhere today, where either general or special educational methods are spoken of, we see the result of this withdrawal behind the school walls where teachers have been banished by the State; we see this remoteness from real life. None of the principal branches of life, namely, the spiritual, the rights or political, and the economic, can develop fully at the present time—I say expressly at the present time, and particularly in this part of Europe—if these three branches do not stand each on its own ground. For the extreme west, America, and for the extreme east, it is rather different but, just because this is so, we ourselves must be aware of this. We shall have to think ultimately in concrete terms and not in abstract ones; otherwise, where space is concerned, we shall arrive at some theoretical Utopia for mankind throughout the entire earth, which is nonsense, or a kind of millennium in historical evolution—also nonsense. Thinking concretely in this sphere means thinking for a definite place and a definite time. We shall have something more to say about this today.

The attention of the teacher must be directed towards the great world phenomena; he must be able to survey what is there in our present spiritual life, and what changes have to be made in this present life by bringing out of the growing human being something different from what has been cultivated in him of late years. What has been cultivated of late years has, among those in educational circles who should have been active as teachers, led to terrible specialisation. On occasions such as speech-days, gatherings of scientists and other meetings of experts, we have often heard the praises of this specialisation vociferously sung. Naturally it would be foolish on my part were I unable to see the necessity for this specialisation in scientific spheres; but it needs to be balanced or we just create a gulf between man and man, no longer meeting our fellow men with understanding, but as a specialist confronting him helplessly as another kind of specialist. This gives us nothing on which to bare our belief in a specialist but the fact that he bears the stamp of some existing body of knowledge. We have been very near bringing this specialisation from the school into life. Whether the present vicissitudes will preserve us from the unhappy fate of having psychologists brought into the courts in addition to all the other experts, as many people wish, so that experiments can be made on criminals in the same way as they are made on our young people—this remains to be seen. I have less to say against the matter itself than against the way in which up to now it has been dealt with.

This is how things are under State control in the sphere of education, of school instruction.

Now after the short time in which people were talking of the inherent rights of manor, as they were then called, natural rights—no matter whether these were contestable or not—after this comparatively short time, came the age when people began to be shy of discussing these natural rights. It was taken for granted that whoever did so was a dilettante; in other words anyone was a dilettante who assumed the existence of something that established rights for man as an individual human being; the only professional way was to speak of historical rights, that is, of those rights which had developed in the course of history. People had not the courage to go into the question of the actual rights and on that account confined themselves to a study of the so-called historical ones. This especially is something that a teacher must know. Teachers must have their attention drawn, particularly during their conferences, to how in the course of the nineteenth century the concept of natural rights has been lost, or lives on in rights today in disguise, and how a certain wavering, a certain inner doubt, has persisted in face of what is merely historical. Whoever is acquainted with the conditions knows that the principal impulse today goes in the direction of historical rights, that people are at pains—to use Goethe's words—not to speak of inherent rights. In my lectures here I have frequently focus sed attention on how we must openly and honestly come to a final settlement in this matter. Hence we should not shrink from giving a true account of what has to be abolished, for nothing new can ever be set up unless there is a clear concept of what has impaired man's habits of thinking and perceiving.

It may well be said that our mid-European culture is a particularly forcible example of how a really positive idea of the State has broken down. There was an attempt to build it up again in the nineteenth century. It foundered, under the influence of the idea of purely historical rights, which made their impulses felt without this being noticed by those concerned. Whereas these people believed they were pursuing science in a way that was free from all prejudice, it really amounted to their pursuing it in the interest of the State or for some economic purpose. Not only into the carrying on of science but also into its content, and especially into all that has became practical science, there has flowed what has come from the influence of the State. Hence today we have practically no national economy because a free thinking, established on its own basis, has been unable to develop. Hence, too just where the most important laws of the economic life are concerned, there is today an utter lack of understanding given laws relating to genuine political economy are mentioned. We can see especially clearly into what confusion education has been thrown—education on a grand scale—for it has no connection with life, it has withdrawn from life into the schoolroom. A really living study of anything can never arise if we show merely what is to be experienced outwardly, without showing the way in which it should be experienced. The one thing cultivated today, namely, the worship of merely outward experience, leads simply to confusion, especially when it is a conscientious worship. We need the capacity to cultivate the inner impulses which lead us to the right experiences.

You will remember that last Friday I called your attention, in the necessarily brief way for lectures such as these, to how, by studying the conditions of European economy at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, we were able to gain a clear idea of the forming of associations in future from impulses arising out of production and consumption. But to this point of observation, which underlies the whole of European life and proceeds from what is so clearly to be learnt in the general change-over to our modern age at the end of the fourteenth century, we come with the right point of view only by studying anthroposophy in its deepest aspects. The essential facts are not falsified by this, but we are directed to that point in evolution where is revealed in clear symptoms what lies rather beneath the superficial stream of evolution, and what is to be looked upon as the actual driving element. For this reason, what is inherent in the scientific method has been hidden from modern pedagogy and scientific didactics; pedagogy and didactics were thrown back upon chance and chance dictated in what sphere they were to be found. What we need is inner guiding lines to direct us to important truths; the directing lines which can be found by studying Goethe's world conception, through which such an infinite amount may be learnt. This is not just to be built up nor looked for intellectually, it must be sought in an inter-weaving of man with the world. This is something lost to us, as may indeed be seen in our present wish to fathom the individual being of man in the superficial way this is done in the educational side-line we call experimental psychology.

What is pre-eminently necessary today is for a light to be kindled in those who are responsible for the education of children concerning the very root of our modern development. If we now stand at a point where the main direction of life has to be changed, it is absolutely necessary to see into what has happened in the course of evolution up to now. The first thing to go under was the elementary impulse towards a free economic life of the state; then in the last third of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth,—particularly in Central Europe, we trampled on our life of spirit, made it into something of secondary importance. How much, for instance, of the great impulse of Goetheanism has flowed into the kind of life of spirit we want today? Nothing, or practically nothing! People talk in a superficial way of Goethe; of the immensities concealed in the very way Goethe perceived the world, nothing has sunk into the general consciousness. As I have frequently told you the Goethe Society at Weimar showed themselves lacking in all sense of responsibility by placing at their head not a man who had understanding of Goethe, but a superannuated Prussian Minister of Finance!

Thus have we let ourselves sink into utter forgetfulness of our spiritual past. Nowhere in present day consciousness do we find what, through Goethe, gave the German life of spirit its characteristic stamp. It is all effaced, reduced to the level of a parasite. Editions of Goethe have followed one upon another, but nowhere do we meet with Goethe's spirit. Whoever sees through all this must say: In the realm of economy this is bad, in that of politics it is bad, but it is worst of all in the spiritual realm. In this way we have begun by ruining our political consciousness; after that we have ruined all connection with our own life of spirit. I do not say this from pessimism, I say it because, out of insight into what has happened in the past, there must arise what is to happen in the future.

Then—well, then came what is called the world war. After the collapse of the political life, which in its collapsed condition was nevertheless kept going, after the collapse of the life of spirit comes the economic collapse, the magnitude and intensity of which is even today not realised, because it is believed that we are at the end or at any rate in the middle of it, whereas we are merely at the beginning. This economic collapse—it can be studied in everything that played a part in producing the world catastrophe. If we would go into the pertinent details of the question of the Baghdad railway before the world war, for example, you would see there the most unhappy consequences of linking the political with the economic life. If you follow the single stages of the Baghdad transactions, with which the unfortunate Helfferich is specially connected, you see economic capitalism on the one hand forming combination on combination, on the other hand the interference of the national-political machinations of chauvinists, machinations which differ according to whether they work in from the east or from the west. In Germany, my dear friends, we observe the loss of all sense of action as the lifo of the spirit has been lost; the sense of action has disappeared with the real life of the State, and what remains is merely the economic life. Everywhere from the West we see economical-political aspirations playing in, wearing the mask of chauvinism or nationalism, the mask of the economical-political; whereas from the East we have the spiritual-political masquerading in various forms. All this is united in a confusion of threads which then lose themselves in the absurdity, in the impossible situation, of the Baghdad question. This question of the Baghdad railway, this whole procedure shows clearly the impossibility of any further development of the old imperialism, of any further development of the old political system.

Now what in the will to build this railway we see here as a great political problem of world importance, is seen again in incidents during the war. Things, however, have never been observed so that, guided on the right lines, people have come to the point where outer events can betray their inner connections. So Kapp squealed, Bethmann Hollweg raised an outcry while there was silence on the part of the spiritual leaders of Germany. That was indeed the situation. Kapp who represented agriculture squealed, not knowing which way to turn between war economy and the problems of the land. Bethmann Hollweg, who had no head for politics, raised an outcry, no longer having anything reasonable to say on the matter; and those Germans who were at the head of the spiritual life were silent because they had withdrawn into the schoolrooms of Germany and were no longer in touch with real life, having no notion of how in real life things should be managed.

I don't know how many of you remember all this. What I am giving you is no highly painted version but the situation in its actual colors. Kapp did squeal, Bethmann Hollweg really raised an outcry against the terrible way in which he, poor man, was attacked in the Reichstag; and those who were supposed to know something of the matter in question said either nothing or what, because it had no connection with life, amounted to nothing. The lines on which economy was developing could be shown up in all their absurdity only by a great, conspicuous world affair. Indeed, many people have never noticed the pass to which we have come also in what concerns the State. They had their Hohenzollerns, their Hahsburgs, their Romanoff Czars. That because of their impracticability, already in a most decided form the elements of disintegration were present within the empires of Hohenzollems, Habsburgs and Romanoffs, could be ignored, for it was possible for these empires to be held together in an umatural frame, already in process of disintegration because, within the State, there was no longer any real impulse.—On the part of the socialists today we frequently hear it emphasised that the State must cease. No one has done more to prevent a judicious administration of the State than those who represented the European dynasties in the nineteenth century. By deluding ourselves, and refusing to be conscious in various ways, it is possible to ignore the fact that we have trodden the life of spirit underfoot, as far as its achievements in the nineteenth century are concerned. This cannot be done to the economic life. When the State is starved people are offered the consolation of public holiday and royalty is feted with paper flowers. For example, it is no fabrication but an ascertainable fact that on the Hamburg bridges well-dressed women, souvenir mad, violently precipitated themselves on the cigarette ends William II had thrown away. Neither is it an idle tale that this same William II was not averse to such flattery but that it tickled his vanity; he delighted in such displays.

Thus, in the sphere of the economic life we have ultimately experienced the remarkable phenomenon which can be characterised only by saying that agriculture squealed, that there was an outcry on the part of the political life, and industry preened itself with satisfaction, workers included—to the extent to which they formed part of industry—until they arrived at the front, where they learned another tune and spread abroad other views on returning to their homes. It is obviously untrue when today it is said that collapse started in the home. Collapse started at the front because the men there could no longer endure the conditions. Such things must be known, especially by those who want to educate others. Henceforward they dare not sit in a comer without any understanding of life; they have to know what must happen. Far more important than keeping to any school time-table today would it be for the instructors of youth to hear discussions about this cultural and historical phenomenon, and to have revealed to them what shows itself so clearly in the sphere of the economic life under capitalism.

You know the saying ascribed to a certain society—a saying approved on one side, disputed on the other—“The end justifies the means.” In the economic life under capitalism another impulse has shown itself during the world catastrophe, and that is: The end has desecrated the means. For everywhere among the declared ends and aims—this is revealed also in that very question of the Baghdad railway—the means were desecrated, or, again the means desecrated the ends.

These matters must be known today and must be studied unreservedly. My present observations have an educational purpose insofar as I believe that from the aspect from which I am speaking today—not perhaps in accordance with the way in which I speak—teachers must, above all, have each stage elucidated. We have to outgrow what previously has prevented teachers hearing of these great world events. Because of this we are experiencing today the comfortless fact of how entirely ignorant a great part of the population were politically. Today we meet people—in this instance I cannot politely say “present company excepted”, at least not in all cases—who do not know what has been going on for decades in the most external affairs, for instance in the workers' movement; these people have no notion what form the struggles of the proletariat have taken during these decades. Now an educational system that turns out into the world men who pass one another by, and know nothing of each other, must surely be a factor leading to collapse. Are there not in the middle class today those who scarcely know more about the workers than the fact that they wear different clothes, and details of that description; who know nothing of the struggles going on in trades unions, in associations, in political parties, and have never taken the trouble to look into what is taking place all around them? Now why is this? It is because people have never learnt to take lessons from life, because they always learn some particular thing. They think: Ah, I know that, I am a specialist in that sphere; you know something else and are a specialist in some other sphere.—People have become accustomed to this without ever getting beyond what they have absorbed as knowledge at school, considering this as an end in itself, whereas the important thing is learning to learn,—Learning to learn, so that, however old one is, one can remain, up to the very year of one's death, a student of life. Today even when people have taken their degree, as a rule they have exhausted their powers of learning by the time they are out of their twenties. They are unable to learn anything more from life; parrot­wise they reel off what they have absorbed up to then. At most they have, now and again, an inkling of what is going on. Those who are different are exceptional. It is important that we should discover an educational method where people learn to learn, and go on learning from life their whole life long. There is nothing in life from which we cannot learn. We should have different ground beneath our feet today if people had learnt how to learn. Why nowadays are we socially so helpless? It is because facts are confronting us on a level to which men have not grown. They are unable to learn from these facts because they have always to confine themselves to externals. In future there will be no education that bears fruit if people will not trouble to rise to the great points of view in human culture.

Now whoever views the world today out of a certain anthroposophical back ground frequently discussed here, knows how to think concretely about all that is in it. He looks to the West, he looks to the East, and out of this concrete observation he can set himself problems. He looks towards the West into the Anglo-American world in which for many decades, perhaps even longer, there have played the great political impulses so damaging at present to central Europeans. Nevertheless these impulses are on a grand scale; and all the great impulses in the political life of the present time have originated from the Anglo-American peoples, for they have always known how to reckon with the historical forces. When during the war I tried to bring this to the notice of certain people sayinq: The forces coming from there can be withstood only by forces arising in the same way from historical impulses,—I was ridiculed because there is no belief, among us here, in great historical impulses. Whoever knows how to study the West rightly, insofar as it is Anglo-American, finds there a number of human instincts and impulses coming from the historical life. All these are of a political-economic nature. There are important impulses in an elementary form within Anglo-Americanism, which all have a political economic coloring; ever one there thinks so politically that this political thinking is extended into economics. But in all this there is one peculiar feature. You know that when we talk of economy we are demanding that, in the economy of the future, fraternity should hold sway; it was driven out of the imperialist-political economic strivings of the West. Fraternity was left out, eliminated; hence what lived there assumed its strongly capitalist trend.

Fraternity was developed in the East. Whoever studies the East in accordance with its nature, so entirely of soul and spirit, knows that out of the people there really springs a sense of brotherliness. Whereas what was characteristic of the West was a boom of the economic life destitute of brotherliness and tending therefore to capitalism, in the East there was brotherliness without economy, these two being held apart by us in Central Europe. We have the task—a thing the teacher must know—the task of synthesising the brotherliness of the East with the non-brotherly but economic way of thinking belonging to the West. We shall be socialists in a world-embracing sense if we bring this about. Let us now bring the East into a right line of vision. You find there, from very ancient times, a highly spiritual life. That it should have died out can be maintained only by those who have no understanding for Rabindranath Tagore. Men there, in the East, live a spiritual political life; and what of the opposite pole? It is to be found in the West. For this spiritual-political life of the East lacks something—it lacks freedom. It is a subjection that leads to the renunciation of the human self in Brahma or Nirvana. It is the reverse of all freedom. On the other hand, the West has made a conquest of freedom. Standing between East and West it is we who have to unite these in a synthesis, which is possible only by keeping freedom and fraternity quite distinct in life, but at the same time preserving balance between them. We must not understand our task, however, in such a way that what is suitable for one is suitable for everyone; for abstract thinking of that kind is the ruin of all striving after reality. All thinking in accordance with reality comes to grief when people believe that one kind of abstract ideal can be set up over the whole earth, or that an ordering of society holding good today will do so to all eternity. This is not only nonsense, it is a sin against reality, for each part of space, each section of time, has its own task, and this must be realised. But then we must not refuse through laziness to gain knowledge of the true, concrete human relations; and we must recognise our task by learning to study facts in accordance with their meaning. The primary and secondary education of recent days has led us very far from this kind of study; it has no wish to know anything of this concrete approach to phenomena, for at this point the region begins where men today feel uncertain of themselves. Instead of describing they would rather define. They would like today to take up images of the facts instead of accepting images of the facts as mere symptoms of what is expressed in the deeper lying impulses.

I am speaking today in such a way that the content of all I say is meant to be drawn from the region out of which anything about education must issue. Those who can best enter into what is said from this region make the best educators and teachers; not those who are asked what they know of any particular subject—knowledge of that kind can be found in a textbook and read up before a lesson. The important thing in future examinations must be to discover what those who aspire to be teachers are as men. A life of spirit of this kind applied to education, out of its very nature, creates the necessity of not being trained for cultural life one-sidedly but as spiritual workers standing fully within the three branches of the nature of man. I am not saying that anyone who has never worked with his hands is unable to see the truth rightly and never ta ke s a right stand in the life of the spirit. The following should be the aim—for man to go in and out of the three spheres of the threefold social organism, that he should form real relations with all three, that he should work, actually work, in all three. We need have no fear that the possibilities for this will remain hidden. A feeling for this, however, must arise particularly in the heads of those who in future will be teachers of the young. Then another feeling will come to life, a tendency to go beyond specialisation to what we try here to bring about through anthroposophy. We must come to the point of never breaking the thread of our study of the universally human, of our insight into what man actually is; we must never be submerged in specialisation in spite of having our specialists. This, it is true, demands a much more active life than most people today find pleasant.

I have often experienced an extraordinarily discordant note at conferences of specialists or technical conferences. People foregather there with the express purpose of furthering their special subject. Now this frequently is done for hours, with great diligence and keenness. But I have repeatedly heard a very strange expression—the expression "talking shop". Time is requested when shop is no longer to be talked, when no one is to speak any longer on his special subject. Then, for the most part, the silliest rubbish is talked, the most boring rubbish, but no shop. There is a certain amount of malicious gossip; many subjects are discussed, sometimes very interesting subjects—though that is looked at askance—in short, everyone is relieved when the talking of shop is over. Doesn't it show how little connection people really have with what they actually do, and what they are supposed to do, for mankind, if they are so pleased to get away from it? Now, I ask you: Will leaders of men who want to esca pe their particular profession as soon as possible ever be able to face up to a population of manual workers who enjoy their work? When today in their complacent way, they talk about the wrongs existing among the manual workers, you must not question the manual workers, you must question the bourgeoisie who have created the wrongs—these are the real sinners. Those who as manual workers are tied to the desolation of capitalism cannot attain joy in their work, when above them stands a class who perpetually have the wish to escape from what should make for their happiness. These are the ethical by-products of recent educational methods. It is something which must above all be realised and above all undergo change. There is much here that will have to become different in the customary thinking of those who teach.

What am I wanting to tell you in these remarks? I want to make clear to you how thorough-going today we have to be in our indications of what is to come about; how thoroughly necessary it is to leave the realm of the trivial, the terribly trivial content to which we have confined our thinking, and not only our thinking but also our life of feeling and will. How should the will prosper—and we need our will for the future—if it has to remain in the light of this petty habit of thinking, this petty quality of our ordinary thinking and feeling?

How much is entirely lacking that we must have for the future? For one thing we must have a real people's psychology. We must know what there is in the growing human being. We have blotted out this knowledge and in its stead have acquired tests that experiment with human beings because of the inability to apprehend their characteristics intuitively. All kinds of apparatus are supposed to reveal what the human being has in the way of abilities. We do not trust in ourselves to discover these things. And why? Because we do not approach them with interest; because we go through the world with our soul asleep. Our soul must wake up and we must look into these things. Then we shall see that much of what today is looked upon as great progress is really absurd. This poor pedagogue of the primary and secondary school is sent out like a human tame rabbit unable to see what is really going on in the world. The rabbit then proceeds to educate human beings, who because of this very education pass by their fellow men without any feeling for what lives in their souls. Thus, it is today, irrespective of the fact that among many of the middle class there is obviously no will to enter into the great contemporary questions and impulses, and that those today who have any will are not of much use because they know absolutely nothing about what is necessary, having slept through the time during which the proletariat day by day, for decades, have been schooling themselves politically. It is indeed very seldom that, when it is a matter of discussing the great questions of the day, we find proletarians making the excuse of not being able to afford the time to look into them; they make the time. But if you inquire of any bourgeois group, they have so much to do that they cannot afford the time to study contemporary matters—they all have far too much to do. That, however, is not the real reason; as a matter of fact they have no notion at all what it is they are supposed to study. They do not know how to go to work beca use this was never included in their education.

Now these are not just so many pessimistic remarks, nor are they intended as a sermon; they are a pure statement of fact. What is more, we have experienced that, when men have been forced to it by life, they have educated themselves in this matter. In cases where people should have been able to educate themselves out of their own impulse, it has all come to nothing, nothing at all has happened. It is on this account that we find ourselves in our present wretched condition, on this account that we hear about anything tried-out today not only expressions of ill-will, which are frequent enough, but all the unintelligent nonsense arising from ignorance of life, because no school has ever thought of teaching its pupils how to learn. Knowledge in individual cases always trickles to people through the protecting walls of comfort, but this does not have the same result as when the human being has free access to the phenomena of life with unimpeded senses.

The sad events of the present time might show us an infinite amount in that very sphere where people go on talking in the old way, and where it appears as if the clockwork of the brain had been wound up and was obliged to go on ticking. Conferences on external matters proceed today still in the same way as they proceeded before the war catastrophe. A great proportion of the people have learnt practically nothing from these terrible events, because they have never learnt how to learn. Now they will have to learn from dire necessity what fear has not taught them. In the past I have referred here to an utterance, quoted in what I wrote on the social question, of a most unassuming but cultured observer of life, Herman Grimm. “In the nineties of last century this man said: When we contemplate the life around us today and consider whither it is heading, whither it is rushing headlong, particularly in these ceaseless preparations for war, it is as if the chief desire was to fix the day for general suicide—so utterly hopeless does this life appear.” People are wanting, rather, to live in dreams, in illusion, those above all who think themselves practical. But today necessity is calling us to wake up; and those who do not wake will not be able to take part in what is essential, essential for every single man. Many do not even know how to put their hand to the plough in this matter.

This is what I wanted to say as a kind of exposition of what should be discussed today at teachers' meetings. It is what should be developed particularly by those who have the task of educating youth, those who should be looking towards what the future is to bring. When we continue these studies we shall go more into the details of education, details of primary and secondary education.

It is of outstanding importance today for us to recognise clearly the deep connections within the ordering of human society. In course of time people have become satisfied in many respects with what I would call superficial conceptions, conceptions based on what lies on the surface of existence. These conceptions lead them to consider one thing right, or let us say they lead to a certain thing being considered right by one man and wrong by another; but with these views of what is right and wrong we do not get anywhere. Nothing comes of them because, though thoughts may be formed about what lies on the surface, they do not produce any rational result when transformed into reality. Reality is not willing to put up so complacently as human heads with superficial opinions. These are a cancerous growth peculiar to the present age; and a further cancerous growth is men's refusal to gain sufficient self-knowledge to enable them, when the occasion arises, to say: All these things are done to further our personal interest and we should not make them masquerade: as a social aim; when we want to do something for ourselves we should not say that it is part of some social activity. We meet with a great deal of this kind. In diverse ways there has been an increase in what has existed for many years, namely, what people here have wished to do has continually been converted into the personal interest of some particular circle; it then being said that it is a consequence, an outcome, of what was wished from this quarter. I am just calling attention to the necessity for people nowadays to be willing to see more deeply into matters, thus ridding themselves of superficial conceptions.

Now nowhere is this necessity so urgent as in the sphere of education, and nowhere is the goodwill for it more lacking. For if we really think socially it is necessary in the educational sphere to focus our attention upon even the most elementary things; you may perhaps have gathered this from the two previous lectures of this series. But today especially I should like to know that this is realised as something meant to run through my whole lecture. Just look at what is experienced today by human beings, by small children, at all stages of school life. When a small child enters a school, in what goes on there everything is taken into account except the needs and the impulses of the developing human being; and with the advance from class to class this evil goes on increasing. Already at an age when such things should not be tolerated, the following, for example, may happen. The young pupil arrives at school for the first lesson of the morning. For this first lesson there is perhaps put down, for the convenience of the college of teachers, let us say mathematics, arithmetic, then Latin, then there may follow religious instruction. After that there perhaps come music or singing, perhaps not that but geography. You cannot do anything more destructive to the human heart and mind than arranging in this way for young people's powers of concentration to be so thoroughly undermined. What we must begin upon when reforming the sphere of education socially is pre-eminently the time-table, that arch-enemy of everything to do with genuine education; the time-table that continues throughout all stages in a school is what must be our first object of attack. If we think at all of restoring our education to health, we have to take care that in future the growing human being shall concentrate on one subject as long as it is necessary for his particular state of development. Thus, by careful study we must discover at what age it is necessary to give the growing pupil mathematical concepts, for example, and concepts of physics. Here we must not choose that worst of all methods—the giving of three or four weekly lessons on these subjects; we must on the contrary put aside a whole period for the pupil, which means that for a certain period of his life he has to concentrate on one thing without interruption. Out of a knowledge of man that is genuinely psychological, from the educational point of view, we must be clear, for example, at what age pupils should receive instruction in arithmetic. At that age arithmetic must be the first consideration, and the entire day devoted to focussing attention on the subject. Naturally I don't mean that the youngster should do nothing but mathematics from morning to evening; I mean it in the sense of what I found necessary when I was given a psychopathic child of eleven to educate. In this case I tried to set to work in an economic way; I arranged with all those responsible for the education of the child that I myself should have the say in respect of the time during which I wanted his soul to concentrate especially on a certain subject, and that I should be the one to draw up the plan for all the child did. Thus a definite time was to be given to the piano, a definite time to singing, and so on. It is not a question of filling the soul with teaching matter, but of so organising the whole development that the soul itself can concentrate upon one thing at a certain age, and that, before going on to any other subject, it is possible to reach a definite end in some individual branch of human culture. Let us say therefore: We have to consider how much arithmetic is to be given a human being at any definite period of life, so that at the end of that period the young developing child can have the feeling that it has made a step forward in the subject. Then only should a move on be made to another subject.

Thus, you see that what now constitutes the groundwork of our education, up to the highest stages of college life, bears within it the most harmful element of our whole education. There can hardly be anything more contrary to good sense than for the student on entering college to experience what I did in my day, that is, having to listen:

From 7 to 8 in the morning to philosophy
From 8 to 9 in the morning to history
From 9 to 10 in the morning to history of literature
From 10 to 11 in the morning to constitutional law.

Now in all this there is no intention, as there ought to be, of avoiding confusion in the mind of the developing human being; the only consideration is the convenience of the school authorities. This can be seen by the most unprejudiced of us.

Here we have a great and obvious task. It is a task, however, that, granted the present habits of thinking, wi11 not meet in general with much desire to set to work on it. This is what is meant when we say that now is the time for reorganisation on a big scale. Most people are prone to believe that this reorganisation is helped on by high-sounding words, but it is helped only when courage is forthcoming for big changes, and when we do not shrink from facing up to the opposition these changes arouse.

There is something else which today is very generally considered indispensable, something of particularly great significance for the lower classes in a school—the so-called government inspection of schools. There can be nothing more disastrous in a suitable development of the life of spirit than this official or semi-official inspection. What is needed in school affairs for the life of spirit—whoever look s deeply into things can see this—what is necessary for really thriving progress, calls for continuous watchfulness coming from the living nature of the instruction itself. This cannot and should never be gauged by any school inspection from outside. As long as he remains at his post, anyone to whom, with all necessary precautions, the administering of the life of spirit has been entrusted, should never have his methods, or anything of that kind, interfered with. This is something many people do not yet grasp, and lack of understanding for it is at the same time lack of understanding for one of the basic conditions of all life that can bring maturity to the human spirit. From this you see in what a thoroughgoing way we have to lay hands on what people today take as a matter of course—what they even ask to have in a more pronounced form. For there is scarcely one social party programme which does not dwell on the official or semi-official inspection of schools. This is not finding fault with any person or with any part, but simply pointing to what has resulted from the wrong direction gradually taken in the life of spirit.

We can make a special study, my dear friends, of this perverted life of spirit if we look at the higher classes in a school. How has our higher education actually developed? This indeed could be observed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately all those within the German life of spirit who enabled it to come to any definite significance in the world, had already arrived at maturity before this more recent system had destroyed the foundations of real spiritual development. Goethe indeed sufficiently abused the impediments even he met with during his school career. We should just picture what a different account Goethe would have given in his Poetry and Truth of Professor Ludwig and others, if in his eighteenth or nineteenth year the restrictions of the present higher educational centres had been imposed upon him. We must reflect on such things today. What actually is it that has been gradually abolished? Now when the grammar school, which today in accordance with modern demands is looked upon as a bugbear, was the only centre of preparation for higher education, when it still bore the stamp of the old monastic school—for its time not at all to be despised—it retained what we might describe by saying: The student absorbed something which gave him a general world-outlook. In the syllabus of these schools there figured what is called philosophy. It is true that this was cultivated only during the last two years; for the most part what belonged to the second year was taken in the first and vice versa, but at least something was there—the last remnants of what flourished in the old colleges, namely, that the first years spent by a student at college afforded a possibility of gaining some kind of world-outlook and qualified him to enter upon study for a special calling. For in reality no one can be fitted for a special calling who has not, through preparatory instruction, become capable of an intelligent, perceptive opinion about human affairs in general. Today it is considered superfluous to give people in a true form concepts that are logical or psychological. No one, however, can profitably study any branch whatever of the higher life of spirit, who has not previously experienced these logical and psychological conceptions, and thus qualified for this study. The more recent cultural life of spirit has abolished all these things. It has no longer any wish to look at man at all; this new culture seeks to train the life of spirit out of impulses quite foreign fo that life.

Now this has led to all that is found in our common cultivation of the spirit, which no longer bears the stamp of a united culture. It has split us asunder and so far has been unable to master what must be mastered. Anyone having experience in this sphere knows what wide praise has been given to the specialisation of recent times. It ha s constantly been pointed out how our cultural life has been so much extended that a man can have a thorough and profitable grasp only of special branch of knowledge. Something has been indicated here which, from one aspect, might be called self-evident, but out of inner laziness people have accepted it with alacrity. Men need today just to confine themselves within the limits of some special subject to be hailed as qualified men of culture. Naturally, anyone having culture at heart cannot hope and cannot wish that specialisation should give place to a general dilettantism. The aim must be for all education, all school-life, to be so organised for the human being that at a lower level of his consciousness it is always possible for him to connect his specialty by thread s of intelligence with the general culture. This can happen in no other way than by giving every college a foundation of the general culture of mankind. The pedants today will here protest and ask what is to become of professional training. We should just prove how economically we can proceed with professional training, when dealing with specialities , if we can work upon human beings with an all­round culture—if we can work upon men who really have something human in them. Through the perverse conditions of our modern culture we have reached the point where a man in his special subject can be a most highly developed being and, at the same time, colosally stupid where the great problems of man kind are concerned, understanding absolutely nothing about them. We have in our midst nowadays this curious phenomenon—that someone who has only passed through the primary school, and perhaps has not done this very satisfactorily, and has been dragged rather than brought up, has more sensible things to say about general human conditions than the man who has passed through higher education and excels in his own sphere. Today we must fight this phenomenon if we have any idea of sending into the depths those impulses which alone can bring improvement, impulses which do not lead merely to the superficial measures sought by those unwilling to take the path demanded by reality if anything is to happen. Naturally today we have let the evil go so far that we no longer have the personalities fit to build the foundations for a college of the kind, and are in the terrible situation of possessing no teachers for general human culture. For, my dear friends, it has come to this, that our colleges lie half asleep on the outermost fringes of culture. The following can be experienced—that in our colleges, during the hour appointed for some particular science, a professor gives his lecture from a notebook and the student listens. He—the student—will then buy himself a copy of some kind in order to read it up for his exam. This is quite a usual procedure. But what is it in reality? In reality the young man when he sits there listening is completely wasting his time, for actually he gets the information needed by reading the copy he has bought. Merely by that he would have done everything in the matter that has any reality. This means that the professor taking his place at the reading-desk and reading from his notes is an entirely unnecessary factor, absolutely superfluous.—Now it will be easy to say: Here is a fellow longing for the suppression of all professors. But no, that is not the case. I most certainly do not long for the suppression of professors; I am only calling attention to how professors nowadays give their lectures with no regard to the fact that printing has been invented, and that what they give out in their lectures penetrates a student's brain-box better when read in a printed book. All the same, I point out that the best one can gain from a well written book is hardly worth a tenth part of what comes from the immediate personality of the teacher in such a way that a connection arises between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the one who is taught. This can happen, however, only in a life of spirit with a basis of its own and its own administration, in which the individuality can fully develop and traditions do not hold sway for hundreds of years—as in universities and other centres of higher education—and where the individual man is able to be himself in the most individual sense. Then from this instruction by word of mout h will come something of which we can say: We have broken with everything coming to men even through the arts of printing and illustration, but jus t by doing so we gain the possibility of developing quite new teaching capacities, which today are dormant in mankind. All this belongs, indeed pre-eminently belongs, to our present social questions. For only if we have the heart and mind for it shall we be able to enter into what is necessary for our present age.

Now let us look at what for the general social situation arises from the perverted nature of our higher education. Yesterday in a public lecture I had to draw attention to how, strictly speaking, neither in the national economy of the bourgeoisie nor in that of the proletariat have we any reflection of the real social conditions, because we simply have not had the ability to arrive at a true social science. What then has arisen under the bourgeoisie in place of social science? Something of which people are very proud and never tired of praising, namely, modern sociology. Now this modern sociology is the most nonsensical product of culture that could possibly have arisen; for it sins against all the most elementary requirement for a social science. This sociology seeks to be great by taking no account of anything that could lead to social will, social impulse, merely noting historically and statistically the so-called sociological facts, to prove, or so it appears, that the human being is a kind of social animal living within a community. It has furnished strong evidence of this, unconsciously it is true, furnished it by not advancing anything but the most insipid sociological views which are the common property of everyone—mere trivialities. Nowhere is there the will to discover social laws and how they must effect the social will of man. Hence in this sphere the force of all life of spirit is crippled. We must calmly admit that all levels of society today that are not proletarian lack anything in the way of social will. Social will is non-existent just because, where it is meant to be cultivated, namely in centres for higher education, sociology has replaced social science—an ineffective sociology in place of a social science which pulsates in the will and stimulates the human being. These matters have their roots deep in the cultural life; it is there that they have to be sought if they are ever to be found. Let us reflect how different our situation would be in life if what we have previously discussed here were to be carried out. Instead of our gaze being turned back to the most ancient epochs of culture, which took their shape from quite different communal conditions, from the age of fourteen or fifteen upwards, when the sentient soul with its delicate vibrations is coming to life, the human being must be led directly to all that touches us most vitally in the life of the time. He should have to learn what has to do with agriculture, what goes on in trade, and he should learn about the various business connections. All this ought to be absorbed by a human being. Imagine how differently he would then face life, what an indepedent being he would be, how he would refuse to have forced upon him what today is prized as the highest cultural achievement, but which is nothing but the most depressing phenomenon of decadence.

It is only on the soil of a self-governing life of spirit that, for example, art can flourish. Genuine art, my dear friends, is an affair of the people; genuine art is essentially social in character. Whoever studies buildings of the Greek, Roman or Gothic styles in the way this is often done today, knows little of what really comes into question. He alone realises what lies in the Greek, Roman and Gothic architectural styles who knows how, when these prevailed, the whole social structure was to be found in the architectural forms, the direction of the lines, in what they portrayed, and how this art went on vibrating in the human souls. What a man did day by day, down to the very movements of his fingers, was a continuation of what he saw when looking at these things, in which he was able to absorb the real, true nature of the architecture. We need today to bring about the marriage between life and art which, however, can flourish only in the soil of a free life of spirit. How it is to be deplored, my dear friends, that the schoolrooms for our children are veritably a barbaric environment for their young hearts and minds. Imagine every schoolroom, not decorated in the way often thought artistic today, but shaped by an artist in such a way that each single form is in harmony with what his eye should fall upon when the child is learning his tables. Thoughts that are to be socially effective cannot work socially unless, while they are being formed, there flows into the soul as a side-stream of the spiritual life what comes from a really living environment. For this, however, art needs to take a quite different course during children's growing years from what is now accorded it. Anyone today, especially anyone who feels within him the artistic impulse, has no possibility of really drawing near to life. If he feels the impulse to become a painter, for example, he is urged on by lif to produce as soon as possible a realistic picture, as of a ham, for he imagines it to be of importance to create something that satisfies himself. Obviously this is important; but the first question is whether the impulse towards inner satisfaction has found its way out into life in such a way that our greatest inner satisfaction comes from asking life: What is it that one has to create? and from the conscientious feeling that one is in duty bound to repay life for what one ha s taken from it. Today, art is not served by painters providing people with landscapes they do not understand; on the contrary, art is thrown to the dogs. In this way we have an unnecessary luxury-art, side-by-side in life with an environment showing traces of barbarism. Just imagine that conditions were such (I endeavored to deal with this in my book on the social question) that production costs were to accrue only until the article was complete, when this would go free of excess profit on the market. Think how by this every individual egoistic interest would be eliminated, how there would of itself spring up instinctively, intuitively, in all those who are creative, the tendency to create for men at large, how they would seek the possibility of creating for all mankind instead of creating, as is done today, what is unneeded, just for the benefit of the capitalist. The task is, above all, to socialise in such a way that the life of spirit is not trodden underfoot in the process.

On this point those with any authority have not yet the most elementary impulse to discover what is right. Nowadays they are scandalised by bolshevists and others. But the bolshevists are not responsible for their own existence. Who is? Those in authority! For they have felt no impulse to found a real people's culture. There would be no bolshevism had the authorities done their duty; apart from the fact that bolshevism is not what people in authoritative circles paint it, in order to make it into an object of horror and to justify their armaments. But this is merely a digression.

Today it would be necessary, particularly for those in leading circles, in all honesty to face oneself. But indeed there is very little inclination in this direction today.

That which is a necessary factor for the bettering of the soul has in truth not yet been torn from the soul through man's evolution; it might still be there; it could be even in the German people, indeed to a special degree. But the German people have long since left off developing the germinal forces of individual thoughts, individual feelings, individual impulses. In the lowest classes of a school impulses are inoculated which make of the naturally great-hearted German people a governmental automaton, a machine blindly following the dictates of their government. There is a connection between all that confronts us in such a terrible way today and this mistaken education, this education which does not make for the independence and freedom of man because in itself it is neither free nor independent. This education feels more at ease the closer it is bound to the State, and its we11-being increases when in innumerable conferences the resolution is adopted: We have every confidence in the Government—which now, in Versailles, is doing its best to destroy us. These resolutions are adopted at innumerable assemblies. We stand firmly behind our Government.—Whereas in truth in the Government there is hardly a man who has the right to be there—the first requirement being to admit openly and freely that everything happening there is merely the continuation of the harm done in the provinces of Germany in that unhappy year 1914. Into these things flow the faults of our education al system; and these faults haw deprived people of their ability rightly to estimate the events in life.

As I have already said, just as a reasonable school system, thinking more of concentration than of a wretched timetable, would give the human being an independent power of understanding and reason, so a real permeation by social art of our community through education would give us a true culture of the will. For no one can have will who has not had it drawn out by a genuinely artistic education. To realise this secret of the connection between art and life—especially with the will element in man—is one of the very first requirements of future psychological education; and in future all education must by psychological. To judge from how things are at present, when all psychology has been driven out of ordinary folk, the founders of our future psychology will have to be the artists, who still retain a little of it, whereas otherwise it has vanished from our culture. Even in scientific education no particle of it is left. But a psychological approach to life would be possible if the individual really worked for everyone and everyone worked for the individual; for then productive power would be so organised that time would be left for an education of this kind. Much of the humbug talked today would be unnecessary if we had the will to talk seriously and candidly, and if we achieved the only thing that can serve the life of spirit, namely, the mutual interplay of manual labor and work of the spirit, which must in future be our aim. Then, all over the earth, if everyone (it would not be possible for everyone but we can get some way towards the ideal would take a share in manual labor, no one would need to work at it daily for more than three or four hours. At least we get this result when reckoning approximately. Daily manual labor over and above three or four hours is not a necessity in human evolution—today this can be said dispassionately as a quite objective fact—it is a result of our having countless idlers in our midst and also people who live on private incomes. We must face these things as they really are. For the improvement of these conditions does not depend upon making some little change here or there, but upon organising our education, our primary and secondary education, so that through education, through the very nature of our schools, human beings learn how to use their judgment.

Affairs today are such that our system of education rears young human plants with no power at all to judge what is going on around them. Hence all the information, coming for example from Versailles, is so nonsensical, because no one can judge what is the relative importance of things, nor from what motives an opinion is formed by people about what is necessary for them on the grounds of their particular nature. When therefore these things are spoken of they meet with no understanding; were it possible for only a particle of what is inherent in the threefold social organism to enter human understanding, it would be seen how what threatens us from the West is a drowning of all political and spiritual life in the economic life, and how what presses upon us from the East, including Russia, is men's cry for the life of spirit to be freed from that of economics. Two poles confront each other, West and East, and we in the middle have the task of looking to the West and avoiding its errors, of looking to the East and ourselves cultivating what must otherwise be imposed upon us, not in the course of centuries but in a few decades, because if men will not impose tasks on themselves others will impose them. Ours is the task here in Central Europe of cultivating what can be cultivated only out of the threefold social organism. Today, were eastern culture to predominate, the earth would be inundated by a vague mysticism, inundated by a theosophy with no reality. Were predominance to arise in the West, we should be dominated, tyrannised over by a purely material life. Then the task should be ours to ward off from mankind two terrible sources of harm by a rational threefold State, giving independence to the economic life and to the lif e of the spirit, and making it impossible for the State to drive these things so far that we ourselves are crushed between East and West.

Now an objective picture of the West reveals today above all how alive we must be to all that comes from the Latin peoples. Nothing could be more dangerous for us than to delude ourselves about how profoundly it is rooted in the French to work for our destruction. If we prevent France from doing this then what threatens us from the side of the English can easily be overcome. For this, however, the powers of discrimination and judgment are needed. Above all, it is necessary to understand that with a few exceptions all those from Germany,—I don't know how this is to be expressed without wounding someone—who today in Versailles are negotiating the fate of Germany, are nothing more than instruments for these negotiations. These things today must indeed be faced as plain facts, faced by our inner judgment without the slightest concession.—If we understand this today we receive the first impulse particularly needed for primary and secondary education; we see what has been brought to the surface in man by his present education which now is forming man's destiny.

Naturally it is easier today to form the most trivial judgment about what is meant here than, aroused in this way, to look at the different human spheres for what is right.—When some time ago I spoke in our Dornach building of the threefold social organism, a short while afterwards a most strange plan emerged; perhaps I may quote it as a grotesque example of the way in which people today have been educated.—Well, we have our building, where a number of people are occupied, others are connected with it who have nothing to do but just live in the neighborhood. And in this building the threefold social organism was described. Now in certain heads there sprang up the idea, self-evident today, that a beginning would have to be made somewhere, and it was wished to begin with a social experiment, these people having in mind, in the most depressing sectarian way, a little area where depressing seedlings of egoism could be made to sprout so that they could then boast that socialisation had somewhere made a start. Thus, a beginning was to be made by those grouped around the Dornach building to form a social State when the threefold social organism could enter upon the scene. Plans were drawn up for this. The only thing to be done was to say to these good people: Whatever is this intended to be? If you are taking this seriously the first thing is to make your economic life independent. For that, you would naturally have to protect cows, milk them, and do all that obviously is imposed by an economic oasis. Then because men from outside must be connected with this economic oasis, it is quite possible for them to become fine parasites of yours, for any establishment shut off in this sectarian way breeds parasites. In such an economically shut-off domain it is only possible to create a social centre for egoism; who it is exclusive it lives at the cost of others. It is simply the direst form of capitalism. As for the life of rights—well, if you set up a Court of Justice and you sentence anyone who has been up to mischief, I should just like to know what the Swiss state would say to your Threefold Commonwealth. Then, for the life of spirit—since we have had an Anthroposophical Movement, it is precisely for the life of spirit that in face of resistance we have been striving on all sides toward s independence. We shall have this as long as we exist, but you do not see that this is already taken in hand. There is so little understanding for this that it may be thought not to have been attempted. It is not a question today of saying: A beginning must be made somewhere. A beginning of that sort is for the most part only a depressing capitalist individualisation. To found such a colony it is necessary to begin on a capitalist footing, and this is very far from what is meant from a really socialistic point of view. This is no criticism of any individual effort, for I am the last person to be unaware of the difficulties met with by the individual when embarking on the great tasks of the present time. There is something else, however, that I would impress upon your hearts: Don't bury your heads in the sand when you want to individualise anything on a capitalistic basis, but acknowledge that modern conditions still oblige you to individualise for your own advantage in a capitalistic way. Admit the truth, I beg, for truth will be the basis upon which all social life must be founded. Truth should not be forsworn in anything that is said. We should never, even in the forming of our sentences, confront mankind with what is untrue.

Throughout the land today you hear the cry for schooling free of charge. What does this really imply? But the cry throughout the land should be: How can we get a form of socialism in which everyone is enabled to contribute in the right way towards educational affairs? Free schooling is nothing less than a social lie, for behind this is hidden either the fact that surplus value finds it way into the pockets of a little set of people who then found a school and thus gain mastery over others; or sand is strewn in the eyes of the public so that they should not realise that among the coins they take from their purse there must be some that go to the upkeep of schools.—In all that we say, in the very shaping of our sentences, we must conscientiously strive after truth.

The task is great, but the greatness of the task must be vividly before us. What is set before anthroposophy as an ideal, what has been in this small movement for some decades, naturally, my dear friends, cannot be realised by everyone. One man has to consider his calling, another his wife, the wife her husband, while another has the education of his children to think of. This must be admitted unreservedly by each of us so that he may realise how far he is from what is really in question. For the anthroposophical ideal is of such a nature that it necessitates the absorption of the whole man. Today this is impossible for many. But they should not delude themselves with the nebulous idea that they have done enough; they should acknowledge the truth about themselves. On the other hand they should be permeated by the thought that the cultivation of our life of spirit is a matter today of the first importance. No one can form a right conception of what is necessary for the life of spirit, including the social life, who has not the courage to admit that radical change must go as far as reforming our obnoxious time tables; it must deal with many trifles; for it has been an accumulation of trifles which has brought about the terrible havoc existing in our present culture.

(For a different translation of this lecture, see: The Proclamations to the Magi and the Shepherds)

Let us begin to-day by considering certain questions connected with this time of festival, with this season which yearly renews the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, renews also a direct experience of it in our feeling.

We really have three such times of festival in Christian tradition: the Christmas, the Easter and the Whitsuntide festivals. And we may say that, each in a different way, these three festivals bring man into connection, into relationship, with that in which the Christian tradition sees the meaning of all earth-evolution. These three festivals also differ as regards the human soul-forces. Christmas appeals more to the feeling and in a certain sense is the most popular festival, because to understand it requires a deepening of the feeling-life, and because it is the most readily approachable for the large masses of humanity. The Easter festival, which requires that we raise ourselves to an understanding of the real Mystery of Golgotha, of the entrance of a super-sensible Being into human evolution, is the most challenging to the human powers of understanding. It is a festival which lifts human understanding to the highest level, and which, although it is also generally celebrated, cannot however be popular in the same sense as the Christmas festival.

The third, the Whitsun festival, establishes a relationship particularly between the human will and the super-sensible world, the world to which the Christ-Being as such belongs. The carrying over of will-impulses into execution in the world is brought to human consciousness through a right understanding of the Whitsun festival.

Thus what we may call the secret of Christianity is given form in these yearly celebrations. The way in which the Christmas mystery touches man can be brought before our consciousness in the most manifold ways; and with the recurrence of the Christmas festival during the course of the years, we have considered the Christmas-Thought from the most varied standpoints. This time let us call to mind something which can become clear to any one who considers the Christmas mystery in the light of the Gospels.

In the Gospels we find a twofold announcement of the birth of Christ Jesus. One annunciation is made to the poor shepherds out in the fields. An Angel announces the birth of Christ Jesus to them—in a dream, or however one may wish to call it. Here we have to do with the perception of this event through inner soul-forces, soul-forces which, in the case of these shepherds in the vicinity where Christ Jesus was born, were in a special condition. And a second annunciation is set forth in the Gospels, the annunciation to the Three Kings, the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are told that they followed a star which announced to them the advent of Christ Jesus on the earth.

Thus we are shown two ways by which this earlier humanity reached what we may call its higher knowledge. This is another example of something which is never properly grasped in the present age. To-day we usually conceive of human beings as possessing thought and perception, and we imagine this thinking and perceiving, in fact, all use of the inner soul-forces, to have been in all past centuries and millenia essentially the same—only more primitive—as it is to-day. We know from anthroposophical spiritual science how the soul-constitution of man has changed with the passage of time; how differently in ancient times—for instance, seven or eight thousand years after the beginning of the post-Atlantean period, or even earlier—humanity regarded its own life and the nature of the surrounding universe. Moreover we know how this soul-constitution underwent many changes before it became that reasoning analytical faculty existing to-day, which in its approach to the outer world knows only the purely sense-perceptible aspect of things. This evolution takes its starting-point from a certain ancient instinctive clairvoyance and proceeds through the state found in our modern soul-condition, to return again in future to a clairvoyant perception of the world which will be permeated by full human consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth the ancient instinctive clairvoyance was already greatly dimmed. Men's souls were indeed differently constituted than they are to-day, although they no longer had the old clairvoyance; gone also were their old wise ways of fathoming the universe. The ancient wisdom-teachings as well as the old instinctive clairvoyance had grown very dim as the Mystery of Golgotha approached humanity. But remnants of both still existed, and we are clearly shown in the Gospels, if we rightly understand them, that this was the case. Such remnants were still present among single favoured individuals. We may recognise as such the poor shepherds out in the fields, who in the piety of their hearts possessed a certain clairvoyant capacity of a dreamlike nature. And we also recognise as such the Three Magi from the East, who are pictured as standing on the topmost rung of human society, and had retained from ancient times a capacity gained from a certain stream of wisdom, giving them insight into the course of world-events. Thus, on the one hand, the poor shepherds could be approached in a kind of dream-experience, in inward perception, by the event of Christ Jesus' birth, while, on the other, the Three Magi from the East developed a science which enabled them, by the study of world-phenomena, the appearances in the heavens, to be aware of significant events taking place open the earth quite beyond ordinary human ken.

Thus there are pointed out to us two quite definite, but widely differing, modes of knowledge. Let us turn our attention for the moment to what was present as the last remnant of an ancient stream of wisdom in the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are shown clearly that these Wisemen were able to read the riddles in the movements of the stars. In the existing descriptions we are made aware of an ancient knowledge of the stars whereby access was gained to the mysteries of the starry worlds and wherein the secrets of human events were also revealed. This ancient knowledge of the stars was something quite different from that of to-day. Our astronomy is in a certain sense also prophetic; it can prophesy eclipses of the sun and moon and so on, but it is merely mathematical and mechanical. It only speaks of space and time-relationships in so far as these may be represented mathematically, whereas the ancient wisdom of, the stars perceived in these movements something of higher significance, remote from space and time, taking place in the inner life of man. If we examine the science of humanity in olden times, we find its content essentially one of this wisdom of the stars. Men sought in the stars for a deeper understanding of earthly happenings. For to them the starry world was not the abstract mechanical thing it has become for modern humanity. For them the starry world was something full of life. They felt the presence of an essential Being in the universe, in the case of every planet. By means of an inner soul-language, in a certain sense, they even spoke with the individual planets, as we to-day speak merely from man to man in external words. People were conscious of inward soul-experience which was a reflection of what was going on out in universal space in the movement of the stars. This was a living, spiritualized way of looking at the universe. And man felt himself connected as a soul and spirit with this universe. This wisdom of the world was fostered in schools, in what may be described as Mystery schools, where the pupils were prepared in a careful, intimate and inner way to gain an understanding of the movements of the stars such as might illuminate human life upon the earth.

Of what nature were these preparations? These preparations for a knowledge of the starry heavens and their influences were of such a character that, even then, in the age of instinctive clairvoyance, the pupil was led to develop a more wide-awake life than normally. The large mass of mankind had a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, corresponding to a state of soul which was less wide awake than the one normal for us to-day. In ancient periods of human evolution people were not able to think as clearly as we can now. Geometry and mathematics as we know them could not then exist. The whole of life between birth and death had more of a dreaming character; but just because it was dreamlike it had a far more lively way of perceiving the surrounding universe than does our waking life to-day. And the strange thing was that the pupils of those ancient Mysteries existing 2000 years, or even 1000 years, before the Mystery of Golgotha (such men as the Magi may be counted among the last remaining disciples of this training), were trained in a knowledge which was very similar to our geometry and mathematics. Euclid was the first to give geometry to humanity; but he merely communicated it to humanity in general. What Euclid gave in the way of geometry had already lived in the Mysteries for thousands of years as something communicated only to the most carefully selected Mystery-pupils. It had a different effect then than in later times. It may seem strange and paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that what our children learn as arithmetic and geometry was taught in the Mystery-schools to selected individuals who were considered specially endowed and so accepted in the Mysteries.

To-day we often hear reference made to the mysterious matters supposedly taught in the Mysteries. Actually, in their purely abstract content, these mysterious matters are none other than those taught to children to-day. They are nothing else; and their Mystery-character lies not in the fact of their being unknown to us, but in the different way in which at that time they were taught. It is quite a different matter to call upon the reasoning of children through the content of geometry in an age in which, from the moment of awaking until falling asleep again man lives in a wide-awake consciousness, than it was to present these matters to specially selected human beings, whose consciousness was more mature, during the age of ancient instinctive clairvoyance and dreaming consciousness.

Our modern conceptions of these things are by no means always accurate. For example, there is a poem to Varuna in Oriental literature describing Varuna as appearing in the air, as wafting like the wind through the woods; Varuna appears in the lightning flashing out of the dripping clouds; in the human heart when the will is roused to action; in the heavens when the sun moves across them. Varuna is to be found on the mountains in the juice of the Soma.

What the juice of the Soma is, modern books profess not to know. To-day in our great learning we agree that we do not know what the juice of the Soma is, although there are people who drink it by the quart, and certainly know it very well from a certain standpoint. But it is a different matter to know these things—from the standpoint of the Mysteries than from the standpoint of waking consciousness in profane feeling.

You can read to-day of the Philosopher's Stone, which was accounted precious in an age when the nature of substance was somewhat differently regarded than it is to-day. Again the historians of alchemy will tell you that the Philosopher's Stone is quite unknown. Here and there in my lectures I have indicated that the Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most human beings; they simply do not know its qualities, or why it is so named. But since it is used by the ton, it is very familiar to most human beings.

The facts are simply upon occasion quite different from the concepts we hold of them with our present-day abstract, theoretical grasp of things, so remote from life and reality. There is not even a true grasp of what it might mean to take in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry with quite another soul-constitution than we have to-day, with a mature soul-condition. I have referred to this particular type of Mystery-schooling in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”; but just such important things as these are usually not properly understood, they are not ordinarily understood in their real significance. The fact that the way in which people were approached with things constituted the very kernel of the Mysteries in ancient times is something which should be grasped. And it was thus also in the case of such purely mathematical considerations, the content of feeling and the human fullness of which Novalis still sensed when he felt mathematics to be like great poetry—something which most people now-a-days will not agree with. And it is to such grasping of the world, permeated as it was with feeling, but poured into mathematical mould, that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was thus brought to a mathematical understanding of the universe, he developed just such a world-outlook as that possessed by the Wisemen from the East, as they are described to us.

The mathematics of the universe, which have become so thoroughly abstract to us, revealed at that time something really living, because the revelation found completion in what was brought to understand it. Thus what sprang as science from an ancient culture, and was still preserved in its last fragments to the Magi, made possible the one annunciation, through the channel of the teachers of wisdom, through external science, the annunciation experienced by the Magi.

On the other hand, it was possible for the inner experience of the secrets of humanity to develop in human beings who, like the shepherds in the fields, had a special predisposition in this direction. In such cases the inner forces of man had to reach certain heights; then what took place in the world of men became direct imaginative perception, an instinctive, imaginative picture-perception. Thus, through inner vision, the poor shepherds in the fields partook in the annunciation: “God makes revelation of His Being in the heavenly heights, and His peace shall be with all men of good will.” Thus did the secrets of the universe speak to the innermost being of the poor shepherds in the fields, as well as to the utmost heights attainable to human wisdom at that time, to the Wisemen of the East. Thus the great mystery of earthly life was imparted from two different sides.

What did these Wisemen of the East experience? What was the special development brought about in the souls of these pupils through the introduction of mathematics into their soul-condition, when this was found especially mature and ready? Kant speaks of mathematics as being “a priori” truth. With “a priori” he means a truth which is present within us before our external, empirical knowledge, before our experience of it existed. This is mere word-wisdom; nothing at all is said with this “a priori”! A meaning attaches to it only when it can be shown by spiritual science that mathematics is something that rises up within us, that rises to consciousness out of man's inner being.

Whence does it come? It proceeds from the experiences we went through in the spiritual world before birth, or conception. There we lived in the great wide universe. There we experienced what could be experienced before we had bodily eyes and ears. There we had “a priori” experience, when considered in relation to our life on earth. These “a priori” experiences rise in an unconscious way out of our inner being into the sphere of consciousness. Unless modern man has a premonition of this, as had Novalis, he does not know that when he does mathematics, experiences of the time before conception and birth are rising up within him. But for a person with true insight into these matter the mathematical capacity is in itself a proof of man's life in the spiritual world before conception. As far as those are concerned for whom this is not a proof of pre-natal existence, the fact remains that they do not think thoroughly enough about life's phenomena and have no idea what the true origin of mathematics is.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who possessed that wise outlook, still extant in its last fragments in the Wisemen of the East, had the clear impression: “When we study the stars and apply our mathematical forms and reckoning to them, we are spreading out again over the outer reaches of universal space what we actually lived in before our birth.” And it seemed to such a pupil of the ancient Mysteries as though he must say: “Now I am living on earth; my eyes look out into universal space and see my spatial surroundings. In these same phenomena of the spatial universe I lived before my birth; there I myself counted from star to star what I now merely copy and symbolize in mathematics. With my innermost forces I moved from star to star, living in what I now merely draw.”

Thus they experienced again all they had gone through before birth, or conception, and consequently it was holy to them. They realized that they had lived in a spiritual world before they walked on earth. This knowledge of the world in which man lives before he descends to the earth was present in its last remnants in the Wisemen of the East, and by its means they knew of the advent of the Christ-Being.

Whence came this Christ-Being? He came out of that time which we live through between death and rebirth, and He united Himself with the life we live through between birth and death. For this reason the science that concerns itself with the world we live in between death and rebirth can unveil such a mystery as the Mystery of Golgotha. And out of this science announcement was made to the Magi of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery.

As man lives here on the earth and concerns himself with gaining knowledge of his surroundings, with developing impulses for his actions, for his social life, he has still another unconscious experience. He knows nothing of it; but just as he experiences the after-effects of his pre-natal life, so does he also experience what passes through the gates of death and becomes the content of life after death, namely, the forces already present like a seed between birth and death, which only come to their full blossoming in the life after death. These forces worked with great intensity in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And they worked in their last remnants in the poor shepherds in the fields because of their special piety. Moreover, it is in these forces especially that we live between falling asleep and awaking, when our souls are outside of our bodies in outer space. The soul then lives as it will live consciously in future when it has laid aside the physical body after death. These forces, which under special conditions can penetrate from the world of sleep and dream into waking life, were once very active in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And these the poor shepherds experienced, receiving through them a revelation of the Mystery of Golgotha from a different quarter than that from which the annunciation came to the three Magi.

What does one experience by means of the forces peculiar to man between death and rebirth when, as in the case of the Wisemen from the Orient, they are kindled in the life between birth and death? One experiences what takes place beyond what is earthly. One is borne away from the earth out into the world of the stars where we live between death and rebirth. This was the world into which the Wisemen of the East were led away from the earth out into cosmic space.

And what does one experience by means of the forces which rise up from the inner being of man, especially in the world of dreams? One experiences what goes on within the earth. Here the Tellurian forces, the forces of which we partake because we live in our bodies, are at work. These forces work particularly in what we live through between falling asleep and awaking. Here, too, we are in the outer world, but essentially in that outer world belonging to the earth.

You will say that this is a contradiction of the truth that we are outside of our bodies. But it is not a contradiction. We always perceive only what is external to ourselves; that wherein we live is never perceived. Only people who are especially ignorant about certain subjects, and who are bent on establishing a knowledge consisting solely of phrases, are capable of skipping lightly over such matters with their phrases and of saying, for example, that the point is not to found a science of the spirit upon knowledge gained outside man, but to add to natural science a science derived from man's inner being.

With such a torrent of phrases Darmstadt wisdom-schools may indeed be founded, but one may still remain a mere phrase-maker even when founding schools of wisdom. For rightly understood, the matter is as follows. We may indeed say that, to arrive at the super-sensible, the world must be described from within; but we must first get into the inner being and then look at what is external from outside the body, by looking back upon the body. Keyserling's talks concerning observation from the standpoint of the soul do not attempt to enter man's inner being, they merely use phrases.

The fact really is such that when we are in the condition experienced between falling asleep and awaking, we look back, we feel our way back, as it were, into our bodies. We feel what is of the earth in our bodies; for they are of the earth. The poor shepherds in the fields really, felt the revelation of the earth through their bodies when in a dreamlike condition, they perceived what was happening in the form of the perception of an angel's voice.

These are the two absolute contrasts: the Magi with their knowledge of the heavens, and the shepherds with their earth-revelation. And it corresponds completely to the Mystery of Golgotha that the revelation came from two such different quarters. For a heavenly Being, as yet untouched by earth, was descending to it, and this descent had to make itself known by means of the wisdom of the heavens, which knew that something heavenly was descending.

In the shepherds' wisdom we learn to know the earth by feeling our way into its weaving life as it perceived the descent of the heavenly Being. It is the same annunciation, only from another side. Wonderfully unified, we thus see what, although it was one and the same event, was announced in a twofold way to men.

And when we see how humanity received the event of Golgotha, we must say that, in regard to this and other matters, there were only the merest remnants of the ancient wisdom left to man. I have already shown how the Mystery of Golgotha was grasped in the first centuries of Christianity with the help of the fragments of an ancient wisdom known as Gnosis. From then on it became more and more a matter of trying to penetrate into the nature of the event of Golgotha with analytical reasoning powers alone. And in the 19th century naturalism gradually made its appearance in the confessional sphere. The super-sensible content of the event of Golgotha was no longer grasped at all, Christ became merely the “wise man of Nazareth”, naturalistically conceived. A new, spiritual grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha became necessary. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha must not be confused with the way in which human understanding has dealt with this fact.

Now a soul-constitution such as the shepherds in the fields and the Wisemen of the East possessed still existed in its last fragmentary form at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. But all this changed in the course of human evolution. Everything changes and undergoes metamorphosis. What then became of the wisdom of the Eastern Magi? It has become our mathematics, with its knowledge of the heavens! The Magi possessed a super-earthly science based on sublime recollections of pre-natal life. All this has been shrunken and cramped into our mathematical, mechanical grasp of the heavens, so that we apply nothing but the laws of mathematics and mechanics to their phenomena. What we have in the way of mathematical astronomy is all that still rises up out of our inner being as the modern metamorphosis of what the Magi once possessed.

And looking at our external sense-knowledge, which is merely a perceiving with eyes and ears, we find it to be the externalized inner knowledge of the shepherds in the fields. What could once convey to the shepherds in the fields the inner secrets of earthly existence now permits only of that cold, natural-scientific observation of the outer world which is the offspring of the shepherds' wisdom. The child bears but slight resemblance to its mother. And our mathematics, our astronomy, are the offspring of the wisdom of the Magi.

Humanity had to go through this development. Our scientific researchers, sitting in their laboratories and clinics, have very little in common with the shepherds but theirs is a direct metamorphosis of the shepherds' wisdom. And our mathematicians likewise are in direct line of descent from the Eastern Wisemen. The outer has become the inner, and the inner, outer. And so we have indeed grown remote from the Mystery of Golgotha. We must become aware of this fact. We have become far removed indeed from such understanding. Perhaps many of those who call themselves preachers and ministers of Christianity in the official sense are the most remote from it of all.

The forces of knowledge, faith and feeling that live in man to-day can never penetrate through to the true being of the Mystery of Golgotha. It must be found entirely anew.

The wisdom of the Magi too has become dry mathematics, perceiving the heavens only in designs. It has become an inner thing. But inwardness must take on life once more. What was once outer must be built up again from within.

And now let us try to understand the content of a book such as my Occult Science from this standpoint. The Magi had a real penetration into the starry heavens; they saw what was spiritual there because they had insight into human pre-natal experience. This has become abstract in our mathematics. But the very same forces out of which we develop mathematics can be brought back to life, and intensified as imaginative vision. Then there is born from out our inner being a world which, although we create it within us, we see as the outer world, as though: containing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We see the heavens in inner vision just as the Eastern Wisemen externally perceived the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. The external has become an inner thing, has become mathematical abstraction; and in like manner the inner must be widened out until it becomes a universe around us, until inner vision leads us to a new astronomy experienced within.

Only by thus reaching out for a new understanding of the Christ can we fill the festival of Christmas with a certain meaning. Has the Christmas festival any meaning for most human beings nowadays? It is a very beautiful custom, scarcely 150 years old, to have the Christmas Tree as a symbol of the Christmas festival. The custom of having a Christmas Tree came into being only in the 19th century. What is this Christmas Tree really? It is not so easy to find its meaning. In making the effort to find it, and by discovering how the Christmas Tree gradually came into use, how it grew from being the little branch, carried on St. Nicholas' arm on the 6th of December, into being our Christmas Tree, we come to realize that this Christmas Tree is also directly connected with the Tree of Paradise.

Human consciousness thus looks back here to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. What does this signify? This is one aspect of the way we make the Mystery of Golgotha known to-day. We turn back from the Mystery of Golgotha to the creation of the world, to the beginning of the world. We fail to grasp the meaning of the world's redemption, and instead turn back to the God who created the universe. This is expressed in the gradual disappearance of the real Christmas symbol, of the manger—so sublime a part of the Christmas plays of earlier centuries—and in the appearance of the Christmas Tree which is really the Tree of Paradise.

Thus the old Jehovah-religion again took the place of the Christ-religion; the Christmas Tree is the symbol of the reappearance of the religion of Jehovah. This Jehovah-religion makes its appearance in many shapes and forms to-day. For Jahve was once rightly worshipped as the one and only God in an age when his people felt themselves to be a unified folk, content within their limits, and living in the expectation of some day filling the entire earth. In our age people talk of Christ Jesus, but really worship only Jehovah. For, as we saw during the war, the people of the various nations talked of Christ, but were really concerned with the original God, Jehovah, who lives in the forces of nature and heredity.

On the one hand, the Christmas Tree, on the other, the national gods so remote from Christianity—with these humanity has turned back from grasping the Mystery of Golgotha to lay hold again on something belonging to a much earlier period. There has been a retrogression into the ancient Jehovah religion in the adherence to the nationalistic principle, in the announcement that the various peoples would follow their national gods.

You see, what must be taken into consideration is that in the annunciation, to the shepherds, and in the annunciation that came to the Magi, there is a human element common to all men. For the earth is the common property of all. The earth-annunciation received by the shepherds was one which could make no national distinctions and differentiations. And the Magi, who received a sun-annunciation, an annunciation from the heavens, also received a purely human element. For after the sun shines upon the lands of one folk, it shines on the lands of others also. Heaven and earth belong to all in common. With Christianity, a common human element is roused in all humanity.

This fact is pointed to in the twofold annunciation of the Christmas story. Such matters which were fully understood when man's soul-constitution was an entirely different one, will only be comprehensible to-day with the help of spiritual science.

We should inscribe this into our hearts to-day when we think of the Christmas festival. To-day, in thinking of the Christmas Mystery, we have need to look for a birth. We should not merely busy ourselves with idle talk about the Christmas festival and our own feelings, but should look for what must be born anew in this our age. For truly, real Christianity must be born anew. We need a cosmic Christmas festival for humanity.

This is the 2nd of 18 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities, in 1921. The title of this series of lectures is: Man's Responsibility for World Evolution through His Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth and with the Stars Above.

The urgent task before us at the present time is to apply the knowledge and impulses contained in Spiritual Science to life, but to apply them in a really effective way. Again and again it must be emphasized that in face of the burning needs of the age, theoretical knowledge of the truths underlying human life and cosmic existence is by no means sufficient. Everything depends upon understanding conditions as they actually are in practical life—in other words, to understand life itself in the light of the principles of Spiritual Science. For many centuries men have grown accustomed to look at only one fragment of reality. And the inevitable consequence of this was the attitude of mind which has culminated in the catastrophic events of the present time. Men are utterly lacking in that understanding of existence which is demanded of them at their present age of evolution.

As students of anthroposophical Spiritual Science it will certainly not be difficult for us to be convinced of the truth of repeated earthly lives nor of the fact that in spite of the full reality of freedom, the destiny of a human being has its origin in a previous earthly life. But when it is a question of coming to grips with the concrete realities of life, we slip into the kind of thought that has been customary during the last few centuries and which is utterly incapable of explaining the intricacies of human life. Although this kind of thinking can explain certain phenomena of nature, it is entirely at a loss when confronted with the intricate complexities of the life of man. As a matter of fact it is scientific thought that has remained farthest of all in the rear of the actual demands of life today, and yet science exercises a very powerful influence upon the thinking of the masses of the people. In speaking thus of the influence of scientific thought, I am not referring to those individuals who are working in or are in some other way connected with particular branches of science. I am thinking of the masses of the people who, when they are faced by the weightiest problems of life, swallow what is told them by men who appear by the force of outer circumstances to be qualified to judge of such things. And then people base their actions upon the opinions of the recognized authorities although they are utterly devoid of any real understanding of human life. The teachings of Spiritual Science must be applied in every branch of existence, above all in those branches of knowledge which form the basis for a true understanding of life.

When a man comes to Spiritual Science today he begins to understand the principles underlying the fact of repeated earthly lives. But suppose he wants to inform himself about things that are actually happening in the world. He may turn perhaps to history, or rather to the fragmentary history that forms part of popular education. But this is all written from the point of view of thought that is merely capable of explaining the things and phenomena of Nature, and nothing more. The spiritual aspect of history is ignored and when anyone nowadays tries to interpret certain facts and events of history, he is more or less obliged to fall back on what happened in the last generation, in the second and third generations back, and so on through the centuries. To take a concrete example: How does a German set about learning his history? He thinks of the men who have lived in Middle Europe, of whom he himself is one. He reads the story of what happened to them, what happened to their fathers, forefathers and so on, through the generations. He goes backwards in time, perhaps to the Middle Ages, and imagines that he is following the tracks of one continuous stream of human life which leads back then to the migrations of the peoples and so forth. And so he tries to explain what is happening to mankind at the present time by what happened in these earlier generations. He becomes familiar with the stream of history as it expresses itself in the consecutive generations, and the only idea that is really clear to him is that of heredity. Sons have inherited certain qualities and characteristics from their forefathers or are benefiting by what was instituted by their forefathers. It is only a matter of going back in time from the present to the preceding generations.

Yes, but if we look at the matter in the light of Spiritual Science, can this be said to be the whole reality? Why should souls living in bodies of the present generation necessarily have been incarnated in Middle Europe in their earlier lives? Is it not possible that they were incarnated somewhere quite different, under entirely different conditions? The forces which these souls bring over with them from their earlier incarnations into the bodies of the present generation work no less effectively than the forces of the blood that has been transmitted by heredity through the generations. These forces are working as well as the inherited physical characteristics. We must not fall into the error of thinking that it will ever be possible to understand either the human beings or the events of the present age so long as we have eyes only for a fragment of the reality. We must say to ourselves that in the men of the present age souls are incarnated who in earlier incarnations lived in quite different regions of the earth. And when we try to follow up the destiny of these souls, we are not necessarily led back through the generations at all. In other words, we cannot understand what is happening on the earth if we do not apply in an absolutely concrete way the truth of repeated earthly lives.

It is not possible to be an honest believer in reincarnation on the one side and on the other to accept history as it is expounded nowadays, for to do that would be to make a sharp distinction between outer life with all its traditions, and what we regard as the essential reality. More and more we must realize how necessary it is to be able to find evidence in life itself of the things we have recognized as spiritually true. And it is for this reason, my dear friends, that I have no hesitation in speaking about certain results of investigation which may seem highly improbable to a great many people, but for all that must be made known today. It is right that they should be made known, because humanity is inwardly yearning to know the whole reality and because degeneration is bound to set in if men are afraid to face the whole reality.

It is, of course, quite true that most people fight shy of taking the truths of Spiritual Science in all seriousness. These truths seem so startling and so utterly remote from their accustomed lines of thought that they merely dabble in Spiritual Science and never reach the point of really coming to grips with it. They have not the courage to apply these truths neither in practical life nor even in their study of problems of practical life.

At this point, before we proceed any further, let me repeat something I have said on many previous occasions; namely, that those who want really to make any headway in spiritual research must be on their guard against ordinary associations or combinations of ideas, for what presents itself to the mind is usually the opposite of the truth, or at all events diverges very widely from the truth. It is precisely the deeper truths which seem at the outset strange and improbable, because they can only be discovered by real knowledge and real experience.

And so in all seriousness we will ask ourselves this question: Why has civilization led human beings into the present catastrophic condition of life? What has Spiritual Science to say about this? I must emphasize here that certain details which I have given on previous occasions are quite correct but for reasons which will be quite obvious to you, it is only possible to deal adequately with a vast subject by constantly adding other details.

I have said before that many souls living at the present time were incarnated in a previous life during the early centuries of Christendom, in regions more to the South of Europe. Many of these souls are now incarnated in Middle Europe. This is a perfectly correct statement but it applies only to a certain number of souls. What I propose to tell you today must be taken as referring to a considerable portion of the present population of the earth.

This brings us to the question—and the answer I shall give is the outcome of real and very strenuous spiritual research—this brings us to the question: Where were the souls of the greater part of the population of Western Europe, of Middle Europe and far over towards Russia in their earlier life on earth? If we investigate this problem conscientiously with the methods of Spiritual Science, the fact emerges that we are here concerned with souls whose life in the spiritual world since their last death and their present birth has been of comparatively short duration. Our investigation leads us over to the West, to lands in which, after the discovery of America, large numbers of Europeans founded colonies and exterminated or at all events kept the original population in a state of subjection. We are led back to the centuries of the conquests of America and to souls incarnated at the time of these conquests in bodies of the American Indian race.

Now you will not be able to understand what I have to tell you unless you have a true picture in your minds of the nature of these Indian peoples who were gradually exterminated by the colonists from Europe. They were not, of course, cultured people in the sense in which we think of culture today. But there was a certain quality in these souls which expressed itself in a universal, pantheistic form of religion. Their hearts were turned in aspiration to a great Spiritual Being and their religion was thoroughly monotheistic. I am speaking here of the leading stock, not of the more degenerate branches. These people had a living and vivid experience of one great Spirit Universal behind the world of nature and the deeds of men. We must try to understand this mood of soul and altogether get rid of the preconceived notion that these Indian peoples were the half animal savages which they are generally supposed to have been.

Broadly speaking, the souls once living in those exterminated Indian peoples are incarnated today in the men of Western Europe, Middle Europe and on towards Russia. We shall never get to the truth if we cannot accept what seems so strange and improbable a statement. These were souls who had had no contact with Christianity in former incarnations and because of this it follows that the souls of a large proportion of Europeans today had not received the impulse of Christianity before their present birth. Christianity is something that has been acquired from outside, assimilated as it were with the sounds of language and speech. Before we can understand the way in which Christianity lives in the souls of Europeans today we must realize that, broadly speaking, it was not a Christian impulse at all which lived in these souls in an earlier incarnation, but a pantheistic impulse, connected with the worship of one great Universal Spirit. Here and there among these European peoples there are, of course, other souls, whose earlier incarnations during the first centuries of Christendom were in the more Southerly regions of Europe and in Northern Africa. And of these two categories of souls, the present population of Western and Central Europe and the lands well on towards Russia mainly consists. The way to study these things is to observe how the souls of men express themselves in our present age, what their aspirations are and in what way they think. We shall never understand these European peoples until we realize that although the blood kinship runs back through the consecutive generations, say to the age of Charles the Great and even earlier, the souls now living in these European bodies were once incarnated in far-off America, in the bodies of a race which was conquered by colonists from Europe.

Another fact, too, emerges as the result of spiritual investigation. We can look back to the peoples who lived in the Southern regions of Europe and who received Christianity in a form altogether different from that of today. In those times Christianity was still imbued with elemental, deeply inward forces of soul. It worked as an imponderable force in the whole of life and was still entirely free from the abstract intellectualism of Theology. It was a force that worked upon the deepest and most fundamental feelings of the people. And these souls who lived in the Southern regions of Europe at that time and received Christianity in this form, are, speaking broadly, incarnated at the present time, in Asia. The period spent by these souls in the spiritual world between death and rebirth was somewhat longer than in the case of the others, because the character of the impulse they received in their early Christian incarnation was such that it tended to prolong the period of life in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Many of these souls who were permeated by the Christian Impulse at that time are incarnated now in Japanese bodies. We shall never be able to understand the curious culture of Japan—which presents so many enigmas today—unless we realize that a great many souls now incarnated in Asia were imbued in a very special way with the Christian impulse in their earlier incarnation. They have carried over these Christian sentiments into Eastern bodies and have been surrounded from childhood by the decadent forms of ancient Oriental culture which have remained in the language and other forms of civilized life in the East. Certain elements of the true Christian impulse have lived on in these souls, in spite of all that has been dinned into their ears and has presented itself to their minds and hearts from a degenerate Oriental culture. We can find evidence of this in the most highly developed and most highly educated Orientals, and, indeed, we can only understand them in the light of this knowledge. Think, for example, of a personality like Rabindranath Tagore. We shall never understand what such a figure really signifies until we realize that in Rabindranath Tagore there lives a soul who in a previous earthly life imbibed from early European Christianity a certain warmth of feeling which pours out in all his utterances and deeds. This warmth of feeling is always there, but on the other hand the rather coquettish style of Tagore is the outcome of the influence of decadent Orientalism. There is a curious duality in the personality of Rabindranath Tagore. If our outlook is healthy and natural we shall invariably discern in his works an element of Eastern coquettishness and yet we shall be attracted by an irresistible warmth of soul.

It is quite useless today to dabble superficially in the idea of repeated earthly lives and merely take it as a theory. It must be applied to life in a concrete way, although this is still far from people’s liking. At the bottom of their hearts they are afraid to know and face their own being, and make no attempt to see in actual life any concrete expression of their abstract beliefs. They are embarrassed at the prospect of confronting their own true being. They do not want to show themselves to the world as they really are, and that is why they put up every obstacle they can to hinder investigation into reality. The widespread confusion, and innumerable problems with which modern life is fraught is explained to some extent when we take into consideration the things I have put before you here.

And now let us think of peoples inhabiting another part of the earth. When a seer has made the investigations of which I have been telling you, another question forces itself upon him; namely: What has become of the souls who were incarnated in Asia round about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha? In spiritual research one always finds that some problem in actual life gives the impetus to investigation. Life itself indicates the line of investigation, and then the faculty of vision is kindled. One problem leads us to a particular region, another to a different region and it is finally quite obvious that there is meaning and purpose in it all. Having investigated the destiny of the souls once incarnated in the Indian peoples of America, one is led to enquire into the destiny of those souls who were living in Asia, in Asia Minor and in Africa about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and in the earliest centuries of Christendom. I am not now referring to those who actually received the teachings concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, but to those who did not receive them; namely, souls through whom the ancient culture of the East lived on.

People have not, as a rule, any very correct idea of the character of this old Oriental culture at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Today, of course, it has become altogether decadent, but at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it was often of a lofty spiritual order. A great many men were able to form very clear and definite conceptions of certain facts and events of the spiritual worlds. Those faculties which can be awakened in one who has allowed the Christ Impulse to pour through the fibers of his being, were not, of course, possessed by the souls of whom I am now speaking, but for all that they had a deep understanding of the spiritual world which they envisaged in pictures. Their conception of the universe was of a lofty spiritual order and had the effect of making them think that the spiritual world was the only world worthy of their aspirations. Their inclination was to shun and flee away from the material world. They were men who indulged in a great deal of speculation, but their speculations were to some extent still nourished by forces of the old, instinctive clairvoyance. They spoke of how the world had come into being, passing through different stages of spiritual evolution in the remote past. They spoke of Aeons in successive ranks, entering into denser and denser states of matter, resulting finally in the structure of the outer physical world. In short, they were men who gazed deeply and reverently into the spiritual world. This attitude of soul prepared them for a lengthy life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, and it was a very long time before they brought themselves to descend again into new bodies. It was a very long time before the urge arose within them to come down again to the earth. These souls—a considerable number of them at all events—are incarnated today in the peoples of modern America. The whole constitution of the Americans today with all their astuteness in the practical and material sides of life, is due to the fact that in an earlier incarnation their souls were given up to spiritual contemplation of the universe, but that they then descended into very hard and dense material bodies. Fundamentally speaking what they are seeking to do now is to let their earlier experiences of the spiritual world live themselves out once again in a subtle and uncannily astute handling of affairs connected with the material world. We can understand why the American mind approaches everything connected with the material world in such an eminently practical and thoroughly scientific way, when we know that this characteristic is to be traced back to an age when the attention of these souls was turned towards the spiritual world. Material life has now taken the place of the spiritual world and although the people of America are quite unconscious of it, what they are really trying to do is to understand the spiritual in the garb of the material. Their attitude of mind now is the materialized counterpart of spiritual experiences through which their souls passed in an earlier incarnation.

You will soon realize how useful it is to try to understand the actions and behavior of men of the present generation in the light of such facts, for only so can you ever hope to grasp the whole reality. We live in a world of pure abstractions when we study merely the history of consecutive generations.

Be quite clear on one point, my dear friends. The vast majority of men at the present time do not want self-knowledge. They are not courageous enough to get out of the groove of physical, sense observation, whether it be in history or in anything else. Think of all that is inculcated into the minds of children in the instruction they are given at school. It is quite obvious that human beings today are being wrenched away from the realities of life just because they are taught only one small fraction of reality. When people are asked today to take the fact of repeated earthly lives in all seriousness and to look a little further than outward appearances, they draw back as if something were going to burn them. One comes across incredible statements made, for instance, by leading scientists. It is of course still too soon to speak in public lectures of matters such as I have been speaking of today, but even in public lectures one has to go pretty far.

We may as well realize at once that in most cases it is quite impossible to find a point of contact with modern modes of thinking. The modern mind is altogether perverted by the kind of thought that is current in our present age. But on the other hand it is urgently necessary that a sense for reality should find its way into life. Without this sense of reality we shall make no real progress. And for this reason those who are sincere students of the truths of anthroposophical Spiritual Science must not be afraid of applying to actual life, teachings like that of repeated earthly lives, which in the abstract they may understand quite well. All the same, it is absolutely right to refrain from uttering the bald, dogmatic form of a truth until the proper time has arrived. It is right, for example, that our Waldorf School shall be prevented from becoming a school for the promulgation of any specific view of the world. It is not essential for children to get hold of the abstract idea of repeated lives on earth, but without actually expounding this as an idea in the abstract, it is quite possible to throw light on history and, furthermore, to make history intelligible when one has this idea in the background. The minds of children who are taught history in this way—perhaps without ever having heard of the theory of reincarnation—will be quite different, simply because their teachers have been able to speak intelligibly of life as it is at the present time, knowing and understanding the way in which souls from remote regions of the earth enter into the stream of blood flowing through successive generations.

Our task today is not only to speak about the spirit, but to bring understanding of the spirit to a point where the working of the spirit can be seen in concrete, material existence. Our sciences are abstract even when they dabble in the most concrete phenomena of external life, for these material phenomena themselves are nothing but abstractions when their spiritual foundations are ignored.

Again we find people saying: The only thing to do is to believe in those who claim to have vision of the spiritual world, for initiation science is not so easily acquired as other kinds of knowledge. Initiation science is not for us. Such a point of view is fundamentally the same as that of a certain Professor who said: “After all, when it comes to things that do not directly concern me—the birth of Alexander the Great, for instance—I can accept them without having experienced them myself. But I must either have experienced personally or be able to experience things that directly concern me before I will acknowledge them as truth. Nothing will make me accept these things merely on the basis of the experiences of others.”

I should like to ask such people whether or not they have to accept the date of their own birth on the authority of others. The date of their birth is something that concerns them most intimately, but whether it can ever be a conscious experience—that is quite another matter! There is surely no alternative but to accept it on the authority of others!

That is one thing that may be said about the rejection of the principle of authority—as it is called.

If we would only try to open up the path which leads through healthy human intelligence to the understanding of the teachings of Spiritual Science and take these teachings really seriously, we should soon discover that healthy, free minds can, after all, find their way to truths such as those of which I have spoken to you today—strange and questionable as they may at first appear to be. Of course, if the faculty of healthy reason has to confront such obstacles as are erected when history is studied merely from the point of view either of inherited characteristics or of events occurring in a continuous, unbroken stream—if human intelligence is obstructed by prejudice in this way, then it will not be possible to get very near to reality. The moment we give healthy reason free play, and when we begin really to want to understand, we shall be able to perceive what is living in the souls now incarnated upon the earth. Understanding will not come from a study of heredity alone, nor from a study of the blood flowing through the generations. Everything depends upon our having the courage to approach these matters. But when once the courage is there we shall get beyond abstractions to a concrete understanding of the truths themselves.

My dear friends,

In the last lecture here¹ I called your attention to the fact that the conditions obtaining all over the civilised world can be understood in the light of knowledge of the incarnations of the souls now living in the bodies of the different peoples. I said that the truths of Anthroposophy must be recognised in the world of outer reality and that we must cease to think of the historical evolution of mankind merely as a straightforward working of external forces which flow through the generations. Let us realise once and for all that events such as they are at the present time cannot be explained by the forces working through the blood of consecutive generations. Present happenings can never be intelligible to us until we realise that the souls now in incarnation have come from quite other regions than those inhabited by the physical forefathers of human beings living at the present time. In the last lecture I tried to throw light upon this subject and today we will consider the whole situation from another angle.

I shall, of course, have to speak of many things which have been dealt with in other lectures from different points of view, but the deepening of our inner life is essential if we are to prove equal to the tasks confronting us today. The tasks of the present age will be altogether too much for humanity if only a few scattered individuals here and there have any real inkling of their vastness. We are living at a time when the impulse for what ought to come to pass must go out from large numbers of human beings, and we must therefore work to the end that as many souls as possible become conscious of the needs of the day. Men must begin to tread the upward path, they must come to the point where they desire this upward path, for not to desire it means the onset of degeneration.

Now in addition to what I said in the previous lecture about the incarnation of souls into the bodies of the present age, there is another point to be considered.

In spiritual research it becomes quite obvious that a great number of souls who must now come down from the spiritual worlds into physical bodies, look upon their incarnation with a certain antipathy and disinclination. At the present time—and this fact is at the bottom of many of the conditions in which the world now finds itself—there is a certain element of insecurity in the prospect of incarnation into a physical body. In saying this, of course, I am referring to the experiences of the soul—experiences which have preceded incarnation into a physical body and which do not form part of the content of ordinary memory. I am speaking of something of which most men today are quite unconscious, but it can nevertheless become conscious, if the knowledge born of spiritual investigation is brought to bear on the events and phenomena of the present age. This application of spiritual knowledge to what is happening all around us today is a task we must take very, very seriously to heart.

The present age is different in many essential respects from ages gone by. You know well that I never like to speak about an ‘age of transition’. That is a mere slogan, for every age is an age of transition. The point is what it is that is in transition. To say that an age is one of transition means very little, for the important thing is to recognise the nature of the impulses that are coming over from the past into the present and must be overcome, and to know what must be prepared for the future. The conditions of life in this 20th century in which we are living are such that the souls now incarnated in physical bodies are destined to have very significant experiences in their earthly life. Their experiences will be significant and, in a certain respect, decisive. If you think of all that can be experienced at the present time and attempt to compare this with the experiences of human beings of an earlier age, you will very soon realise that no comparison is possible between the events of this present age and those of earlier times of which historical records tell us.

Many examples could be quoted in confirmation of what I have just said, but I will give one only. Speaking from the spiritual point of view of that particular region of the earth where we ourselves are living, one cannot help saying that there is really something terrifying in the rapidity with which changes have taken place in Middle Europe since, shall we say, the middle of the 19th century. These changes are still going on, but as a rule people do not notice what has happened and is actually happening. Those who have any insight will be able to discern an extraordinary difference in the thinking of men of Middle Europe seventy or eighty years ago and their thinking today—and the difference is most of all marked in the life of feeling and perception. Men’s attitude of soul has changed in a most extraordinary way. And there is something more to be said. The truth is that people sleep through the most important happenings—at any rate the majority of people sleep through them. None the less the events happen—whether they are noticed or not.

There are well-meaning writings today, emanating from the pens of English and American authors who profess the greatest sympathy with their follow-creatures in Middle Europe and with their material needs. Such sympathy is all right in its way but Middle Europe must be very wide-awake to what really lies at the bottom of it. For when we consider the conditions of outer life and realise that Middle Europe today stands more than ever in the key position between the East and the West (and by the West I mean those regions where Anglo-American culture predominates) it seems that Middle Europe is threatened with utter ruin, so far as her spiritual life is concerned. Please do not misunderstand me. It is quite possible to be full of sympathetic understanding of the material crisis—indeed that is not at all difficult in these days of dire distress—but to understand the spiritual crisis is quite another matter. And it is the spiritual crisis of Middle Europe that is the crux of it all today. Leaving aside what is said out of prejudice, what you yourselves might say out of prejudice, let us try for once to realise what lies in the womb of current events in respect of the spiritual destiny of Middle Europe. Is not everything tending in the direction of the utter extermination of the spirituality which belongs essentially to Middle Europe? When one faces this fact fairly and squarely, one is surely conscious of an impulse to do one’s very utmost to enable the true spirituality of Middle Europe to live and prosper. If impulses for strong and effective action are lacking, then the East and the West will come together above the head of Middle Europe—come together, to begin with probably in terrible enmity, but finally in an impulse which truly cannot be for the well-being of Middle Europe. This impulse will then grow into a world culture, a world-civilisation.

Now what I am saying here is connected with the antipathy which the souls now descending to the Earth feel towards their incarnation in physical bodies, as physical bodies are today. I told you in the last lecture that many souls who were incarnated in earlier times in Middle Europe are living at present in Eastern bodies. These souls were by no means delighted at the prospect of incarnating in such bodies. Nor did the souls now living in the West, in America and in many parts of England who as you know, were incarnated in Oriental bodies a long time ago—nor did these souls enter their incarnation with anything like the same willingness as they felt in earlier times of earthly evolution. Neither in the East nor in the West are souls living in their bodies in quite a normal way—if one may put it so. This is quite obvious when we study modern civilisation in the light of Spiritual Science.

And now let us think of the human beings incarnated at the present time in the East, and of the kind of bodies in which these souls are living. These souls who are now living in the East and even in the Eastern part of Europe especially the most representative among them—have within them, as a consequence of the antipathy they felt towards their incarnation, the tendency not to enter fully into the arena of earthly events, not to be deeply engrossed in facts and happenings on Earth. There is an inborn disinclination in the souls of the East, precisely in the most outstanding men, to acquaint themselves with and join in with the outer forms of the culture that has grown up in Middle Europe and in the West, with its natural science and its technology. And again, in utter contrast to what was precisely the best quality of soul in the men of Middle Europe in earlier times, it is quite apparent that many souls living there today have also been infected with this disinclination to enter fully into the facts and conditions of life as they are at the present time. This disinclination is due to the circumstances attendant upon incarnation. But let us for once observe life in our age, entirely without prejudice. There are so many today who in quite a wrong way like to hark back to the old spiritual conceptions of the East, who want to take refuge in a mystical life, who would like, in other words, to introduce into our altogether different existence conceptions which were right in ancient Oriental civilisation but have now become decadent.

Mysticism dreamily aloof from the world—that is one thing that is so harmful at the present time. Moreover, it exists in many different forms, my dear friends, it exists in those who are enamoured of anything savouring of Eastern spiritual life. It exists too in a form less patently evident but to which we should be fully alive. Over the whole of the civilised Earth today, from East to West and from West to East, men have fallen into strange grooves in regard to something that is intimately connected not only with culture, but with life in all its branches—namely, speech. The further East we go, the more do we find evidence of the fact that no real endeavours are made to bring speech right down to the physical plane, to let speech be imbued with definite impulses of the soul. There is a tendency to be careless about words, not to be wholly in them, to let speech be carried away by feeling. There is an unwillingness to make speech conform to conditions as they actually are on the physical plane, to let its forces stagnate in a realm of ecstatic, inner experiences. It is symptomatic at the present time, my dear friends, that there are so many who look with scorn upon efforts to make speech really plastic and adaptable. Such people consider this altogether too intellectual, too blatantly expressive of conditions as they are on the physical plane. They would prefer speech to be pervaded with an element of obscurity, and they think that no language can be poetic unless it has this quality of twilight obscurity, as it were. When someone tries to make every word or sentence voice a reality that has been actually experienced, he is not looked upon with favour, for people prefer to chatter on without having really lived with the actualities for which speech ought to be a means of expression. This unwillingness to live in the world of stern realities is very characteristic of large numbers of people today. And the same tendency is more or less common in the languages themselves, the further we get to the East.

On the other hand, the languages of the West have a different characteristic. Efforts are made in the West to bring language into line with actual reality, to get at the realities by means of language, but the language itself is not kept sufficiently plastic. It does not fully adapt itself to what it sets out to describe. This is connected with other tendencies of the West, for the West is, after all, the home of that kind of observation and thinking which never gets as far as man himself. Take Darwinism, for example. And here I am not speaking of the Darwin fanatics, but of Darwinism in its essence. Darwinism is a splendid help towards promoting an understanding of the animal kingdom and makes it clear that man stands at the summit of the animal kingdom, but it does not even try to comprehend the being and nature of man. And in the West too we find the strangest conceptions of social life which really exclude man himself from the picture altogether. In Western economics the essential factor is not man as man, but what attaches to him in the way of outer, material possessions. The personal possessions of a human being really constitute the individuality in the realm of national economies—not the man himself at all. In the West people do not speak of the freedom which has its source in the living being and nature of man. They only speak with conviction of economic freedom—nothing more. And it has been so since the time of Adam Smith and even before that. People talk about economic freedom, about what a man is able to throw into the scales of civilisation because he possesses something: they talk about the things he can enjoy in the world because his possessions make him economically independent, and so on. But one never hears mention of what man really is, of the force that springs from his innermost being—namely of his real freedom.

All these things are indications of much deeper truths. The souls who incarnate with a certain antipathy today in Eastern bodies because outer conditions force this upon them, do not want to let the faculties of knowledge inherent in these bodies come to grips with Earth realities. They prefer to keep their consciousness remote from Earth reality. Such an attitude of soul is eminently Luciferic, and it is this Luciferic element that comes over from the East.

On the other hand, the souls incarnated in the West have a predominantly Ahrimanic tendency. They will not take possession of their bodies in such a way as to enable the senses to interact freely and open-handedly, as it were, with the world. They sink so deeply into their bodies that these bodies are not entirely permeated with the spiritual forces. In other words, the soul lives in a body but does not permeate it fully. There can be only one outcome of such a condition—a condition where the soul is living in a physical body but the senses act as a hindrance to a free relationship with the world around. If a man’s senses function freely and enable him to open himself to the world, then he perceives not only material reality, but the spiritual which is there behind this material reality. This underlying spirituality cannot be discovered if the soul does not fully permeate the body, that is to say, does not reach as far as the periphery. Such is the tendency of the West. And because of this, many Western bodies are so constituted that as the bodies grow on to maturity, the indwelling souls cannot fully express themselves. And when this happens the bodies can become the dwelling places of beings of quite another order—beings who lull to sleep the qualities and forces that are inherent in the human soul. One tendency or mood of soul emanates from the East, and this other from the West. The nature of the tendency which comes over from the East is to preserve ancient and more instinctive modes of feeling, perception and aspiration in man—instinct which do not allow him to come fully down to Earth or really get to grips with the situation as it actually is upon the Earth. And in the West, the tendency is to ignore the ever evolving spirituality that is implicit in all existence and to remain stationary at the point of evolution that has been actually reached. The tendency of the West is to conserve the present state of humanity, to conserve its materialistic consciousness and its materialistic modes of life and action. The tendency of the East is to prevent man from really getting down to material life on Earth, to prevent him from living in the present with alert and wide-awake consciousness. And so from both sides—from the East and the West—influences are at work to prevent man from fully and consciously understanding the present. And these influences are strengthened by a terrible fear which, all unconsciously, is taking possession of mankind. Everyone who can put aside prejudice in his observation of the present age of weighty decisions must face these decisions with alert and wide-awake consciousness. Now it is possible in two ways to spare oneself from facing the decisions that have to be made in this age. One way is to become a fanatical mystic or theosophist and reiterate in a superficial way the phrase: “Ex Orient Lux”—“Light from the East.” This attitude induces a feeling of inner bliss, a desire to flee away from actual happenings. People imagine that they are rising above these happenings. They congratulate themselves on being wonderful mystics or theosophists and they look down with scorn on everything that is going on around them in what they regard as the inferior world of matter. This is the harmful tendency at the one extreme, whereas at the other extreme—which is connected more with Western influences—there are the rank materialists. Being afraid to face the decisions with which the present age is fraught, the materialists declare that man is merely the product of physical and physiological processes, that it is pure nonsense to talk about decisions, and that to speak of the spirit is mere superstition. Men flee from spirituality on the one side and from materiality on the other.

And so today we find two extremes in the life of soul: on the one side materialism which is Ahrimanic, and on the other side mysticism which is Luciferic. Originating in the West and spreading over towards the East there is the tendency of thought which takes matter as the basis of the mechanistic natural science which has such a potent influence upon the whole of our culture. Originating in the East and spreading over towards the West, there is a tendency which influences just as many minds today. And one can only hope that Anthroposophy will not be harmed by those who expound it as if it were fantastic mysticism. This other tendency, the tendency to let the mind linger in realms far removed from earthly realities, is exemplified by the comparatively recent ideas of theosophy. Theosophy has tried to dig up from the East teachings which have long since become antiquated and are no longer suited to the human being as he is today.

These are the two extremes which may well unite, in spite of an apparently bitter opposition caused by outer circumstances and inner contrast. And it is because of the existence of these two streams of influence that the spiritual life of Middle Europe has fallen upon such evil days. Trivial though these words may sound, they express a truly tragic state of things to which we must be fully alive. To put it rather drastically, one would say that Middle Europe ought to represent the higher synthesis, the harmony of these two extremes at a higher level. And it is only this harmony that will promote progress in the human race. Streams of spiritual life have come to the surface in Middle Europe from deep foundations, in spite of the fact that they were overpowered, to begin with, by an intellectualism which manifested itself in German idealistic philosophy. The philosophy of Fichte, Hegel, and finally, Schelling, represented the apotheosis of a stream of spiritual life which could have led on into true Spiritual Science, but the time was not ripe for it.

Nowadays it really seems as if all the world had conspired to nip this impulse in the bud. Let me put it in this way: From the East and from the West, Lucifer and Ahriman swore to each other to make this synthesis impossible of realisation. For just think of it: here, in this central region of the Earth there have been men who although they were in many ways brought to a standstill by the conditions of the times, strove none the less for pure spirituality, and at the same time for a true knowledge and understanding of Nature. In Goethe, for instance, there is a wonderful alternation between his perpetual desire for a spiritual conception of the world and his eagerness to observe the outer phenomena of Nature. How strenuously Goethe endeavoured to find concordance between what the spirit whispered to him and what nature revealed to him. And it is precisely this attitude of soul that is rooted in Middle Europe as a whole.

And yet we have seen this attitude of soul overpowered and gradually succumb to the influence of the West. We have seen it in our science which has become utterly ‘Westernised’—if I may use this expression—inasmuch as its methods reject spiritual altogether. Science is sometimes willing to acknowledge a belief in the spiritual but it is utterly unwilling to do anything to spiritualise the methods it employs in research. And then think of those who work on the principle of obstructing all true aspiration. What have we not had to endure from such people within a civilisation, be it remembered, which produced a work like Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters—a work which could have given a most wonderful impetus to the life of soul and Spirit. And yet within this same civilisation, men turned in large numbers to the twaddle of American mystics, of Ralph Waldo Trine² and others. Compared to the real spiritual substance of Middle Europe, this kind of writing is inferior in the extreme, for it is nothing but an egotistical striving for inner well-being, not for a genuine upliftment of the spiritual life. This is one example of the strength of the tendency which desires that the inherent qualities of the soul in Middle Europe shall be overshadowed and subdued by Western influences.

Obviously, my dear friends—and to Anthroposophists it will certainly be obvious—obviously this is not meant to imply anything against individuals. Equal respect is due to human beings all over the wide Earth. But is that which lives in individual men the same thing as the culture which pervades these souls and forms the atmosphere of civilisation as a whole? Is it correct to say that when one deprecates the nature of the spiritual influences of the West he is thereby casting aspersion upon individual men in the West? No, indeed, he is merely pointing to what is there in the West as a spiritual atmosphere.

But on the other hand there are very many in Middle Europe too who love to get hold of some fragment, whatever it may be, of ancient Eastern wisdom. This craze for dabbling in Oriental wisdom is a source of great pain to men of real understanding. Even in the case of the Bhagavad Gita, which is comparatively easy to understand, we must be quite clear that what a man of Middle Europe can get from the Bhagavad Gita today is at most something he himself reads into it. It is not the true wisdom of the East at all, for the East itself no longer possesses that. Many people are delighted to think that they can meditate on some passage taken from the Bhagavad Gita, but in essence they can get nothing of any real significance. They are merely falling back on something which gives them a sense of inner exaltation and well-being, because they are not courageous enough to absorb the spiritual atmosphere which in these middle regions of the Earth could work as a balancing factor. One cannot help saying that the advent of Eastern theosophy, as it is called, contains elements which for some considerable time now have been a harmful influence in Middle Europe. This, of course, does not imply that certain Eastern terms or certain Eastern concepts should not be used, or that one should not try one’s best to understand the East. It refers to quite other things, namely to those things I have been trying to indicate today.

Let it be clearly understood that devotion, no matter whether it be to the blatant materialism of the West, or to the masked materialism of Ralph Waldo Trine or Christian Science³—for these things are nothing but materialism from the other side—devotion to such things and to forms of mysticism will inevitably lead to retrogression in the realm of spiritual life. The elements that would be capable of furthering progress are there already, although they are under the surface of Middle European civilisation, overlaid by the influences that are striving to come together from the East and from the West.

As you will realise from my writings and lecture courses, the Bible and the New Testament in the form in which we have them today, have suffered essentially the same fate as other writings emanating from the East. We have the Bible, but not in its true form. Its true form can only be revealed through Spiritual Science because Spiritual Science alone can quicken the living intelligence that is essential for penetrating to the heart and core of such writings. And as soon as one tries to make the Bible and the New Testament really living, the official representatives in this domain today—men like Traub⁴ and his type—they are the very first to tell the world that it is all fantastic and thoroughly evil.

Here in Middle Europe there have been men who on the one hand possessed real insight into the widespread world of Nature and on the other have genuinely aspired to the Spirit. And this is what is so necessary today, for only in this way is progress possible. In the realm of knowledge it is just as essential on the one side for men to deepen their insight into Nature, as it is essential on the other to deepen their understanding of Spiritual Science. The whole truth is not to be found on the one side alone. The concordance of both impulses in the soul—this alone reveals the whole truth. And it is just the same in practical life. Progress will never be brought about by a one-sided religious life remote from the affairs of the world, or by the methods of cut-and-dried routine which govern our public life today. Only those can make progress who on the one hand adjust themselves to the practical measures demanded by affairs of the outer world and on the other hand are willing to combine the demands of the outer, material world, with qualities that can be developed in Spiritual Science. Education in Spiritual Science will promote skilfulness—not a superficial skilfulness but a skilfulness which means that our actions will be irradiated by an inner spirituality and determined by a definite attitude of soul. Only so can we hope to prove equal to the tasks confronting us at the present time.

Many people are averse to Spiritual Science today because for one thing it is not afraid to speak frankly and openly of spiritual facts; and also because it speaks, just as physics speaks of anodes and cathodes, of the fact that souls come down into earthly bodies from the spiritual world in moods either of sympathy or of antipathy. Because Spiritual Science directs its attention on the one side to the phenomena of nature and on the other to spiritual facts, it is rejected by many, many people. Spiritual Science is rejected by those who have eyes only for the outer world of nature because they can get nothing from it whatever and think it mere words. It is rejected too by those who like to bask in a world of vague, mystical thoughts and old religious traditions, for such people have made no contact with life as it actually is in the present age. Spiritual Science is also ignored by those whose ideas are altogether lacking in substance and who spin out words and phrases after the style of many modern philosophers and of some, indeed, who found modern ‘Schools of Wisdom’ as they are pleased to call them. But, my dear friends, a lip-wisdom which refuses to penetrate into the facts of nature is no use at all. Vague, fantastic mysticism is no use either, nor can we make any headway whatever with a spiritless science which tries to fathom the things of nature. What we need is a synthesis, a union of both streams, for that alone can give us the reality.

It must be remembered that in Middle Europe the forms which language has assumed imbue it with an inherently plastic quality. The language itself gives the impression that it is one with the innermost being of man, with the whole attitude and mood of his soul. And on the other side, the fundamental forms of the language of Middle Europe strive to pour themselves outwards, really to lend themselves to the flow of events in the outer world. In the language of men like Goethe and Hegel, the germ of this quality is quite clearly evident. And it is a germ that is capable of infinite development.

It is not to be wondered at that Spiritual Science is scorned either deliberately or unconsciously by those who have been infected by Eastern or Western influences. But from its side, Spiritual Science must never cease to realise its task and mission. It has been a duty on my part to speak to you as I have spoken today and it is the duty of those who stand within the Anthroposophical Movement to be absolutely clear about the purpose and aim of Spiritual Science. In Anthroposophy we ought not to be afraid of speaking of spiritual facts, of the supersensible world as a reality, just as we would speak of the physical world as a reality.

Education in Spiritual Science should strengthen the soul and help man to realise fully and clearly the practical necessities of life today. Everyone who stands within the Anthroposophical Movement ought to be quite clear that our practical undertakings must develop with an inner necessity out of our ideas and conceptions of the Spirit. For over against the errors of the world, Spiritual Science must stand in the right light, and we must show the world what its real purpose is. There cannot be too many opportunities for doing this today, for innumerable opportunities when Spiritual Science could have been put in the right light are constantly allowed to slip by.

You may think that I have tried to deal with these matters from too many different angles. But the thing that is important is not that we should be able to listen to one interesting fact after another out of the spiritual worlds, but that we should be able to impregnate the material world itself with the impulses awakened in us by a knowledge of these facts of the spiritual worlds.

It is essential today for wide-awake souls to be fully conscious of the dangers that are threatening the evolutionary process of humanity—dangers arising from the influences which try to keep men’s minds in a state of mystic vagueness on the one hand and on the other from the influences which tend to press humanity down into Ahrimanic materiality. For the tendency of false mysticism, false intellectuality, aloofness from the world which makes a man like to live in a kind of doped consciousness without striving for complete outer clarity and inner light—all these influences, tinged as they are by false Orientalism, lead to inner untruth. They lead to inner untruth just as the Western influence which would drive men to materialistic conceptions and a materialistic attitude to life leads to the outer lie.

On the one hand mankind today is in danger of giving way to inner untruth as the result of false mysticism, and conservatism in regard to ancient religious traditions, and on the other hand it is in danger of becoming outwardly untruthful as the result of materialism. And be it remembered that phrases and slogans are the beginning of direct untruthfulness. Students of Anthroposophy must really be alive to these dangers.

This is what I wanted to impress upon you today as a thought which is not meant to be a theory but a thought that glows with warmth in the soul and gives an impulse to life by its very warmth. Spiritual Science is not what it desires to be if it does not fill the soul with warmth and through this warmth become an active impulse in the whole of life.

If we follow these indications as best we can, my dear friends, our united efforts will be able to achieve something of which the age stands in the direst need.

And now I have one more thing to say which causes me considerable pain. None the less it must be said.

It is no longer possible for me to have private interviews and conversations, for as things are I cannot lead the same kind of private life as before. The work that has to be done takes up the whole of the day and very often a great deal of the night and it ought to be quite evident that there is no time left for private talks. It would seem, however, that some people find this very difficult to understand. There is however a very good way of getting over this state of things—and I admit its difficulty—namely, to work with all our might at the tasks confronting the Anthroposophical Movement. The reason why certain individuals nowadays are so overworked is that we have so few members who really work effectively. People imagine that they can help by working as they like. But the fact of the matter is, my dear friends, that from every point of view we have too many workers for the positions we might be able to create—not too few. Instead of running after positions that have already been created, we must work so well that wider and wider fields of activity will be opened up. That is the only attitude which will help us to make progress.

As I say, it is very painful to me to be obliged to refuse personal wishes, but it is an absolute necessity. Many private affairs will have to be discharged in a different way until more favourable times arrive. There is too great a tendency among us to cling on to conditions which were all very well in their time but which cannot exist again until we become more capable of fulfilling the tasks before us.

We must really get to understand one another in this respect for if we do not, our movement will not prosper. There is far too little realisation of the fact that mutual consultation and self-help is necessary for the spread of the movement today. Just think what it would mean if I had to have personal interviews with everyone who is sitting in this room. Do you imagine, if that were so, that the tasks before us could ever get done? Perhaps many will say that they do not understand what I am saying, but there are certainly some here who know quite well why I have been obliged to say these things.

• 1. Past Incarnations of the Peoples of Today, Stuttgart, 6 Jan 1921 (GA203)
• 2. Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958) was an American ‘New Thought’ writer and philosopher. The New Thought movement was a new religious movement in the United States in the early 19th century which accumulated wisdom and philosophy from a variety of origins, such as Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures and their belief systems.
• 3. Christian Science was founded in 1879 in the United States by Mary Baker Eddy, who wrote in 1875 the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which outlined the theology of Christian Science.
• 4. Friedrich Traub (1860-1939) was professor at Tübingen University in Germany and author of the book Rudolf Steiner als Philosoph und Theosoph (Rudolf Steiner as a Philosopher and Theosophist), published in 1919.

Our consideration during my presence this time will be to contemplate the vital earnestness embedded in anthroposophical knowledge needed for the great task of our time. When we say “with regard to the great task of our time” we don't need to think of something drifting over our heads which has been organized by some person in authority but we should be clear today that whatever weaves between people in everyday life contains, or is permeated to some extent, with something which belongs to the great task of our time. This should obviously be one of the primary implications of the Anthroposophic world view moving through our souls. This Anthroposophic world view directs us towards recognizing the existence of the spirit within everything, not existing somewhere in abstract heights, but living within the existence surrounding our everyday lives. This is what we must learn to apply to the great task of life and to every small daily experience and action.

When we consider life today from this angle we can ask ourselves: what are the components of life surrounding us from the reference point of spirituality? We have the remnants of ancient knowledge in various forms which was passed traditionally by word of mouth to adherents gathered in communities and their faith in the everlasting nature of the human being. In the most varied forms, most differentiated nuances, this most varied knowledge of this faith was brought to people. Humanity lived within this faith with the belief that all their soul needs were satisfied through this way. Besides this belief of confessions respective to their followers of that time, we have a popular addition today which originated from science, attributed to the present educational institutions. This science was gradually skilled by only considering sense-physical matter, at most penetrating it with inadequate spiritual suggestions, the latter now on the wane. The tendency is increasing towards regarding science as the only physical sense perceptible observation which at best can be combined with the mind.

Wherever we look at today's civilized world we get the impression that people create from two sources: on the one hand out of what is taught as so-called serious, exact knowledge, accepted on authority because on authority everyone accepts knowledge if they have not themselves worked within the subject of the knowledge in question, and therefore this knowledge is mostly accepted. Besides this, people surrender to their popular publications regarding how they should think about facts regarding astronomy, physics and chemistry, about biology, zoology, mineralogy, botany, history and so on, and more besides, submitting to it all and agreeing to be informed in such a way that they can say: All this must be true because it originates from the people who are in control of things through familiar instances of authority and so we accept whatever else flows from their various declarations. Proposing the creation of a bridge between the two is kicked out, because these declarations mostly instruct people to keep knowledge and faith separate and in no way try and merge them. Rising out towards a conscious penetration of these facts is rarely found. Efforts are necessary throughout to recognize scientific authorities arriving through the usual channels to presenting exact knowledge. However, one is inclined not to research these things in order to prove how they really relate to their creation through their scientific methodology.

On the other hand one is disinclined to research the origins of knowledge propagated through tradition which today is offered by official representatives. Awakening fully consciously towards what actually is presented rarely happens. When it does happen it very seldom results in seeing the issue in its true light. Should we accept it offends someone if we oppose what is termed dogma within the Catholic or Protestant denomination, regarding this dogma as “nonsense,” then we are opposing it for the sake of it and at the same time rejecting traditional confession, without finding the possibility to replace it with an alternative.

An example of dogma—I want to refer to a central dogma—is for instance that of the Trinity, the threefold personality of the godly Being. Whoever finds a dogma such as this presented through the denominations, finds it easy to some extent to oppose it according to today's scientific way of thinking. This expression can easily be revealed as “nonsense” in such a dogma. Whoever does go back to the way such a dogma was created will find that dogmas of common confessions have for a long time been propagated within humanity and that the point of origin of these dogmas, often characterized as humanity's earlier evolutionary steps according to instinctive clairvoyance, atavistic clairvoyance, are there, by looking into the spiritual world. Out of such clairvoyance these dogmas have emerged and one can say that something like the Trinity dogma has emerged out of deep, thorough insights within the structure of world existence. At one time this dogma of the Trinity was a deeply recognized truth. It presented a deep insight into the relationship of reality. However this was during ancient times when within the soul's abilities the powers of an instinctive clairvoyant knowledge fitted within such a dogma. This dogma then spread itself. It no longer fits into the current teachings of human soul forces. As a rule each person who has experienced this dogma from its origins has since then gone through several earthly incarnations. Souls had various experiences during these incarnations. In the outer world this dogma has been retained, transmitted from one generation to the next. Today it has taken on a form through words used to proclaim it which no longer can be understood. Now these souls are born again and come across this dogma in church. There is no human relationship between on the one side what the confession of the human soul is met with and on the other side what the soul from within itself strives to experience and to know. What works so badly at present is not that the dogmas are false but that the dogmas are in a form trapping the truth which in today's time are obsolete and thus the dogmas no longer offer what the soul of today needs. Thus we can say: these dogmas are preached today as if breathed by the wind.—Even those who inwardly confess to them do not apply these confessions as soul truths because they don't understand them for the most part. By accepting something which is not understood, creates an inner falsehood. As a result of this inner untruth so much damage has been done through the falsehoods in the world.

The results of untruthfulness within humanity in the last few years have really been immeasurable. Basically it shouldn't surprise us that this is so, from the simple basis that when the soul lives in falsehood the ego can be recognised as not having any sense of truthfulness in outer life. This should be kept in mind by all those who believe today that they should uphold traditional declarations. This is quite a serious situation with which we need to deal in this area.

Regarding dogmas, one could say the souls who have experienced various earthly lives where these dogmas were current, have grown out of them since they were formulated. Just as I have mentioned in the last two lectures that we need to be serious about these things, so we must during the examination of repeated earthly lives be serious. Vitally serious.

Just look from the same point of view at what humanity is given today through physical science. Here knowledge is being formed from purely physical sense perceptions. This has to be joined with what lives in the soul which has to fill itself with something which is merely sense perceptible material.

Examine how a living person stands within his or her life. They carry within them a soul which has gone through earthly lives and now don't find any connection to outer religious declarations. They connect however in certain areas of their life with what today is recognized as scientific. The question must be asked: What happens in the human soul when it connects with this recognised, merely physical sensory aspect of observable science? The soul, now integrated in the physical organism, had during an earlier incarnation incorporated quite a different relationship to nature, to the environment and the relevant world which cannot today be found in this knowledge. Only relatively few presently incarnated souls can be discovered who were not sufficiently incorporated in their former life in such a way as to relate to a definite knowledge containing spiritual imaginations, as I mentioned about natural phenomena, by incorporating a spiritual element. The sheer abstract science which has developed over the last three to four centuries didn't exist before. Not so very far back the kind of natural science existing then was such, even though it contained a sense perceptible element, it also contained within it something permeated by the spiritual. As a result many people who don't accredit it with anything special, presently with physical sense perceptible science don't find anything satisfactory about science, so they leave it lying and don't bother about it, or go digging and researching all kinds of tomes, what Basilius Valentinus or some or other person had handed out for natural science. It is true that all kinds of spirituality lived within the imagination about nature it at that time, but today, deep respect is only stirred within those who engage with it and just because it is not understood it is regarded most profound.

The important thing here is that even today's incarnated soul has no real relationship with ancient wisdom and with what goes on through the rest of life which is already fed, even grafted in school, in some or other form coming from sense perceptible observations. What is really presenting itself here if one considers the inner aspect?

Within our body we have the soul which has been in previous lives yet we come to some extent into our body without having any relationship to what the soul had experienced in a previous life. Throughout various earthly lives—as a necessity for the development of freedom—the soul developed in such a way that it was emptied of all it had absorbed before, in order not to have a relationship any longer to anything taken up earlier and thus have available capacity for what is actually living in the world at present. Our soul no longer brings with it anything from former earthly lives. We do bring results of our moral qualities with us but basically not what has lived in us from earlier earthly lives from which any kind of innate knowledge of world secrets could result. Today souls do not enter bodies in the same way it happened in Greek times. Souls who incarnated during the Hellenistic time entered life with still some old empowered knowledge which enlivened the body with soul spiritual life forces. Today this is not the case. Today the soul enters the body in a way which is consumptive. To an ever increasing degree this is the case; the souls which are born today has some destructive influence and lame the body, gradually dragging death forces through it. If evolution is to continue this way it will lead to the undermining and decline of earthly life. People would become weaker and weaker in their will forces. People will appear less and less able to have a grasp for detecting active impulses. People will gradually go through life like automatic detectors. How sad this is that we have to see the future in this way, and how seldom it happens that people are inwardly fired up through lively ideas. How often we find that people at present can be said to suffer from a soul sclerosis, turning out dead ideas and only allowing their minds to accept tradition and thus becoming machines.

It is really like this: if we go with an unprejudiced attitude through life and observe how people are placed in life, we can basically not differentiate, one person from another, amongst dozens of them. We can actually not tell them apart. We talk to A, to B, and then with C and they all say the same thing. Each one individually believes in having said something particular, but we can't find any particular difference between them, they all say the same thing. We actually only have one kind of human being in a variety of copies, and we can ask ourselves: Are we not being deceived—isn't what we talked about today the same as yesterday's conversation?—This corresponds completely to the observation of consecutive earthly lives in relation to our present earthly life. The soul no longer brings with it what it had in earlier lives, which went from one earthly life to the next and ever again appear, although with a decreasing power which is like an innate wisdom. That is no longer there. When we consider such souls and their connection to the external, sense perceptible scientific observation, then we see they are packed with transitory wisdom; with a wisdom which when expressed in imaginative ideas, is regarded as transitory. In order to conceal this fact by a terrible illusion, the old “Law of conservation of matter” in the nineteenth century was reinvented by the “Law of the conservation of energy.” This law was made up to conceal that there is nothing which can be conserved in nature, that everything is transient, even matter and energy. Nothing is left over for the soul when it is reincarnated in the future as a human machine; the soul being crammed with sensory observation and scientific material, because this fails to exercise anything alive and gives no fructifying power to the soul.

The soul born today comes over from an earlier earthly life, eager to be fructified by something which in turn will help it progress in its next earthly life. However the absorption of knowledge stemming only from the perishable offers a soul death; murders the soul. This is something which must be considered in all earnestness today, when the idea continues that non-understanding can relate to obsolete dogma, that only laming, deadening can come through non-spiritually penetrated scientific knowledge, and that the soul must experience a second death, suffer a soul death. It depends on individuals and on humanity, to rejuvenate their souls. Humanity dare not choose some comfortable passive attitude and say: I am an everlasting being, and the everlasting kernel of my being will preserve me forever through all circumstances.—This doesn't correspond to the effect of reality. The everlasting kernel within human beings exists of course but it has to be fructified in this decisive age if it doesn't want to be destroyed. There is no other way to keep the soul alive than to break free of mere sensory scientific observations and to justify a true spiritual science and to see how in all sensory observations the spirit is alive even in relation to physical facts. It comes down to not only registering purely sensory material but to promote what lives in everything that is sensory and penetrate it with spiritual imagination which actually lives within it and must not be excluded. As a result the souls coming out of a previous earthly life can take up this spirit-filled natural science, become fructified and thereby enable their vitality to be carried forward to the next incarnation. The continued existence of the soul, its health, in fact the continued existence of the soul life itself, the aversion to the soul death of humanity depends upon the spiritualization of our natural knowledge!

From of these facts and not out of any kind of prejudice today we are required to spiritualize natural science. When so many human beings turn against this spiritualization then this attitude, while ignorant about the actual meaning of these facts, are spurred on by minds we all well know about, in order to assert themselves so much more in their human nature, thus reducing what souls bring with them from earlier incarnations. Out of the entire grain of our present lives where the spiritual is being composed out of not only spiritual science but also sense perceptible knowledge, it is apparent in the most absurd sense that repeated antagonistic acts are against the intention to spiritualize natural science. It can't be stressed often enough how necessary it is in our time to deeply and inwardly understand such things—and if I dare use such a word—modify such facts. We can't take this seriously enough that today there's a rejection of spiritually permeated scientific knowledge, whether it comes across in the manner which I've heard mentioned—I don't know to what extent it is connected to the truth—through a decision by colour supporting students who boycotted lectures in the last weeks or if it appears in some other form. Today one can collect a whole jolt of writings opposing spiritual science. Dark, unsavoury streams validate that these things like to slumber and yet relatively soon they will become strongly apparent. Today it is much more comfortable to be unaware of things than being aware of them. However we no longer stand at a point where we can undo the past and remain uncommunicative to the world. This can no longer be allowed. The only way now is forwards. However this forward striving is connected to an active participation which can take on ever more evil forms—one can no longer call them discussions, but let us do so—“discussions” of the time. Only if we succeed from a strong basis, only if each one does his or her part and can come together, representing spiritual science and not be shy, everywhere unreservedly characterize it in an unconcealed manner where hidden aspects let hostility rise against spiritual science, only then can we hope to survive. It deals far less with only the literal interpretation of hostility against spiritual science, being caught up and acting defensively against it. It is certainly in one way or another necessary but it is not enough. Ultimately it is only a secondary appearance—when out of foolish misleading or misunderstanding ill-willed hostility rises against spiritual science. This is to some extend something secondary which naturally needs to be placed in the right light. Secondary it's obvious—I have recently mentioned it in an open lecture—what such people like Frohnmeyer have to say regarding the main statue group in Dornach, which can be experienced as a Christ figure: “In Dornach can be found a `Statue of the ideal human being' with above a `luciferic' trait and below one with animal characteristics.”—It is certainly necessary to point this out but ultimately not only to merely defend spiritual science but from a far deeper, more meaningful foundation. Whoever is capable of presenting such a terrible falsehood in the world, damages humankind in everything which is written and spoken, where it works instructively on mankind. Not only is it most significant that such a bludgeon of a lie is spoken but it is most significant that a person today is capable of such a strong lie as a symptom of paths mankind followed earlier. Attacks on spiritual science are recognisable according to how today's sense of truth is grasped. As a result, wider field work should be carried out in the spiritual realm. This is what it comes down to. We dare not shrink back from encountering this lack of a sense of truth on all fronts. Humanity must learn to understand that only with a real sense of truth can one work into the future when the soul has to find the way through this incarnation into the incarnation of the next age. Today this doesn't involve some kind of formality but actually the real life of the soul through consecutive earthly lives. If you search you will find the connection between every earlier characterized falsehood in thinking—in outer encountered confessions of the soul, without an inner connection with the truth—and the falsehood of the outer world. Actually it is quite an amazing phenomenon that such falsehoods come to the fore so strongly particularly in those—which doesn't mean I want to say they are not present in colleagues of other faculties—who pose as teachers of mankind, who should be the great Keepers of the Seals of religious truths.

This is the primary responsibility of today's humanity who strives for some kind of relationship with a spiritual life: to seek out cultural historical falsehoods. It is extraordinary how deeply these cultural historical falsehoods are taken up. They are a characteristic of our time. From out of politics where it has sown its foul marsh plants it has finally penetrated into other areas. Already the condition has arisen that people can hardly differentiate between truthfulness and falsehood in relation to certain phenomena of life. You see, step by step a certain life phenomenon plays into falsehood in daily life which plays a role in both daily life as well as in the greater affairs of life. Finally falsehood today itself has sprung from the same tendency, unconcerned whether it appears amongst enlightened men—certainly lit by a strange light—who gather in Geneva, or whether it appears in various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossipers. Whatever has lived as spirit in Geneva's various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossiping found it a popular falsehood, and I might mention in parenthesis—those present should not take it as evil—those who are within the Anthroposophical movement haven't quite been ratted out. This untruthfulness is a cultural phenomenon of the present and needs to be examined. Above all it should in no circumstances be excused but should be characterized before the contemporaries are revealed. We repeatedly experience that when something appears out of a pressing urgency and point to these things, that individuals within the anthroposophical movement, while finding these things uncomfortable, while they must live within this falsehood and as a result experience the characteristics of falsehood and find if highly uncomfortable some way or another, always take this characteristic of untruth as evil.

These things I have spoken about today should be thought about in relation to my two or three previous lectures related to the reincarnation of souls into today's civilised world, as well as to the interests present in part of humanity, that decisive element which wants to connect with humanity in the present age, and not to allow it to come close to humanity, can give an understanding of the immense seriousness of the task of our time within which we stand.

These present tasks are permeated with the deepest earnestness. Because of this, because it is so essential to examine these points of view on our home ground, I had spoken about things in conclusion and how painful it is for me that today so much time is taken into account without the simultaneous possibility of continuing the earlier anthroposophical work, as it was accessible just before this need—a requirement it is indeed—to work through these things which have often been spoken about and even today do actually exist. If we should want to place ourselves really in the right relationship with these things then it is necessary, imperative from out of the spiritual beings of present tasks.

Today we must make it increasingly clear: Our friends have engaged themselves in the anthroposophical movement in manifold ways since its inception at the start of the twentieth century. The anthroposophical movement is something which is not only a reality on the physical plane but which forms an uninterrupted ingredient of the spiritual worlds, a direct part of the spiritual world. Obviously outer practical participation is also a part of the spiritual worlds but not in the sense as it is within the anthroposophical movement. Regarding this, I want to say a few words.

The anthroposophical movement continues in its spiritual aspects whether the people representing it are hardworking or lazy; whether they make the effort to work progressively or against progress, going forward quicker or slower, yet they remain present in their spiritual reality. Because it has become necessary to bring about practical things in life which have grown out of the demands of the present, it appears different with these things. These things must be done at their allotted time, because it is impossible to cope with them when they are not completed at the right time. For things in practical life it can be so that when done in a slow trot, they simply happen too late. Within the anthroposophical movement one has in many cases become accustomed to things happening slowly or quickly. It is becoming more often the practice that what has been acquired here is being applied to things where the same practice is unsuitable. This is precisely what lies at the foundation of what I have recently wanted to characterise, by my indication to create a renewed possibility for that from which everything finally flows namely the anthroposophical movement, and maintaining it as such. How long have I already pointed out that it is not possible to have personal interviews now? Yes my dear friends, we have in the last days of the past week—very few people really work in practical matters—we have filled our days until three in the morning. People still turn indignant when their wishes are not taken into account after a personal meeting. However I'd like to know where the time should come for that. It has to be understood. For this reason no kind of casual manner should exist in anthroposophical life—just the opposite—a life enforcing strength comes from the anthroposophical life. As you are guaranteed that such empowerment comes from anthroposophical life, then other necessities will impact on practical life by themselves. Above all else this re-strengthening must come. This empowerment must come in such a way as to drive out all dreaminess from the soul. Whatever is brewing in some or other island of life, not bothered by what is going on in life today, is exactly what lames the pursuit of real tasks. These tasks are paralyzed when people on the one hand remain blind, sleepy towards what is happening in outer events around them and on the other, their salvation, even though this is more the lust of their soul becoming involved in all kinds of alien mystical problems on their island of life.

I'm touching on something extraordinarily important, something which is a direct application of ideas regarding the great tasks of our time and our own movement.

Every one of us must work together towards the enlivening of the anthroposophical movement. We can only work towards the strengthening of the anthroposophical movement when we cultivate a free and open insight for what causes decline in the greatest part of our cultural life. Anthroposophists for the most part don't worry about the appearances of decline. They don't get anything out of turning to the force permeating our civilization today which steers it towards the abyss. Despite it not wanting to be heard on the one side, on the other side it is again forgotten, I have to ever again point out that things do not improve on their own. Today's contemplative brooding, which is a kind of transcendental demonstration with many, is something which harms us tremendously. Instead of shaking up the will and saying to yourself: `I will do this'—contemplation persists whether here or there the relationships are such that something could be done.

My dear friends, at the beginning of the (20th) century the way the anthroposophical movement was thought about is not the way you would think about it today. Clever people who appeared at that time would have stipulated how things must work, and the cleverer ones would have distinguished between Schwabing and Munich, and everyone could hear the grass grow which indicated who could procure which area. Then some came who had discovered extraordinary relationships in Hannover and Frankfurt. This was encountered all over the place. If someone had really listened then no one would have taken a single step. At the time it was already a wicked thing but today, where much is dealt with in everyday practical life, it is even more evil because today it is not about tracking down such grass growing but that we engage our will forces to do something, to really work. It is of course tremendously easy to say: `I sense the transcendental atmosphere of this or that place, that one could do this or that ...' It is much easier than doing something. One should hardly ever apply the external and as far as possible bring about the inner approach. This is something which of course can't be stressed enough.

With anthroposophical seriousness encouraged, the real power can be cultivated in our relationship to external things and these must be encountered with real interest. We need to know after all what is going on in the world—and there are many things that do advance. Yet in our circles it is amazing how few are concerned with what is happening.

I want to highlight a deplorable fact. This fact has many causes but there is only enough time today to list a few. Clearly the subscription to our magazine for three-foldness hasn't increased by a single one. In addition our membership comprises thousands and thousands of members. It is really very sad that such a fact must be recorded. Yet this is a fact and this is only one of them. Do you believe that it is quite true to say that the opponents are the other guys and they are at their posts everywhere? These machinations are spreading around us. I say these things not without care and not without caution for what we should incur today, when we don't summon all the individual strengths we have. We need them. We must be steeped in so much anthroposophy that we can get to it or we will be too late. On the other hand I don't see that what has to be undertaken is being done, to then only lapse by saying that we got to it too late.

There is much beauty in the advancing, above all in the participation, of some students in our striving. From this very area the most fruit can develop when these things are met with real, true understanding but we must be clear about how these things should be met. Nebulous mysticism is out of the question. It depends on how something is met out of one's inner life's diligence.

So this and much more can be said today but I think that whatever else you need can be discover within yourselves when you develop a train of stimulated thought and take it further. In order for you to develop further is the issue I want to pose as my preliminary wish at the conclusion of this last agreement. Now the times are such that I can't express such a wish in what is to be fulfilled in years to come but that I can only look for the weeks when I can be here again. Basically the situation is like this, that we really use our time, that actually not a single week can be lost because we have not used it.

Therefore my dear friends, I would like to say two things in conclusion: first I want to express the wish that what I have said today must be understood until our next meeting, and secondly, that our next meeting can take place as a result of things which have been aligned with this wish. With this in mind I wish you farewell!