The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The friends of our spiritual movement who are here in Ulm got together some time ago to cultivate the thoughts, aspirations and impulses of our spiritual movement here as well. We are here, friends from out of town, united with our Ulm friends today to commemorate this event together, which consists in the fact that friends of our movement have also come together in this city of Ulm. They have joined together in a serious time, in difficult times, in a time that speaks to the human soul through significant signs. And so it is appropriate on this occasion today to remember larger contexts, spiritual connections in the development of humanity, into which our spiritual movement will place itself for our time and for the near future. I would like to say: First we want to turn our gaze from what is connected with the very nearest human interests, including those in the spiritual, to the all-encompassing, that all-encompassing with which our movement is connected.

We know, of course, that those personalities of the present day who join together under the sign of our spiritual impulses must feel deeply in their souls and hearts that they want to seek something that another spiritual movement, another spiritual endeavor in the present time, and which is connected with what the soul of man must seek in our time and in the near future if he is to become truly conscious of his humanity. In this seeking, precisely as it is expressed in our movement, we find many opponents. And our opponents are precisely those who believe that they must protect the true interests of the development of humanity from this or that point of view, and protect it from what they consider to be such an aberration of the human spirit as is found in our movement. Thus many people of the present day who are religiously minded or apparently religiously minded believe that our movement is likely to lead away from what they need for real religious deepening.

Now, one could indeed reply to some of those who speak in this way, with a somewhat superficial but no less apt judgment: Has the Christian idea, for example, in the course of the last few centuries, managed to bring humanity to a height that could have mitigated, or I will not even say eliminated, the present terrible catastrophe? But those people who never want to learn from events, who learn nothing even from them, that religious life has been developing in their sense for centuries, even millennia, and now, despite this religious life, this catastrophe has been able to break out over the whole earth. But even if it is obvious to ask, we do not want to move our thoughts in this direction. Today, by way of introduction, we would like to raise another question that is perhaps given very little consideration, but which is in fact connected with very, very profound matters of the present.

Do you know which word is most unknown to contemporary scholars, to philological scholars, in terms of its origin and development? Do you know which word is most often found in even the most learned works when you seek advice, a word for which you cannot determine its origin, what it actually means, or what it means? The word for which you will most often search in vain in the scholarly resources, both in terms of its linguistic and spiritual origin, is the word “God.” No science today can give you any information about the linguistic and spiritual origin of the word God. That is a peculiar fact. For this fact does not merely point to externals, to something that is in this or that series of facts, but it points to something that is deeply, deeply connected with the human mind. People all believe they are saying something when they speak of the divine, when they speak of their turning to God. And with all the means of present-day learning, they do not even know how to somehow indicate the origin of the word God. This indicates that by far the greatest number of people in the present day who speak on religious or other spiritual subjects really do not know what they are talking about. If one would only go deeply enough into what is actually meant by people not knowing what they are talking about when they believe they are talking about what is most intimately connected with the human soul's striving! This is felt, if not clearly conscious, then instinctively by those who feel compelled to come to our spiritual impulses from the various spiritual confusions of the present. That these spiritual impulses, which come precisely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, are connected with the most urgent needs of our time, has been emphasized by me again and again in the times when the present severe thunderstorm has actually gathered for a long time.

I would like to remind you of a sentence that I have often spoken, as those friends who have been following our movement for years now know. I have often said that over the last three to four centuries, the earth and its various peoples have become one in commercial, industrial, banking and so on. I have pointed out how modern means of transportation and what, through modern means of transportation, has rolled across the whole earth until recently, has poured out over the whole earth a unity of economic, of external economic life, a unity, if we may say so, of physical life on earth. We had a unity of physical life on earth. A check written in New York could be cashed in Tokyo, Berlin, or wherever. In the years leading up to the war, I always added the following demand to this fact: Not only does the human body need a soul, but every body needs a soul and cannot live without one. What has spread across the earth as a physical body in commercial, industrial, or other ways, needs a soul, a soul that offers the possibility that people on earth understand each other spiritually as they understand each other commercially and monetarily. To give the earthly body an earthly soul is something I have often spoken of as desirable.

Now, something like this certainly does not develop in a day; it takes time. And what I am expressing here is not meant as a criticism of the time, but only as a description; it is intended to stir in human souls what the impulses of action, of thinking, of feeling, and of will should be. It is not meant to accuse, but to express what should happen. Therefore it is not meant in the form of a reproach, [when it was said] that people have neglected to form a common earth soul for this earth body in the last decades, in which the common earth body has developed particularly intensively. This earth soul can only be found if people are made to understand what is as common to people in a spiritual sense as the sun is in a physical sense, and what is to be spread among mankind through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

But this has been neglected until now. And in this present catastrophic time, we are experiencing it in the most terrible way, as has never happened before in the history of the development of humanity, which can be traced with documents, that humanity finds itself in a dead end, in a real dead end. And it will only escape from this deadlock if it decides to add to the physical culture of which humanity is so proud, the spiritual culture of the earth soul for our time and for the near future, which belongs to this physical culture.

One may resist these efforts to give the earth a new spirituality as much as one wants, but the truth will have to prevail under all circumstances. Humanity is now living in the midst of a terrible catastrophe. If humanity does not decide to truly adapt to the new spirituality meant here, then these catastrophes will keep recurring in ever new periods, perhaps in very short periods. This catastrophe and all its consequences will never be healed by the means that humanity already knew before this catastrophe broke out. Anyone who still believes this is not thinking in terms of the earthly development of humanity. And this catastrophic time will last as long as it can be bridged, apparently, for a few years in between, until humanity interprets it in the only correct way, namely, that it is a sign that people are turning to the spirit that must permeate purely physical life. Today this may still be a bitter truth for many because it is inconvenient, but it is a truth.

Let us ask ourselves what it is that has actually maintained some connection with the spiritual world to this day, despite the increasingly intense purely materialistic culture of the earth that has been occurring for three to four centuries. Anyone who has experience in this field knows that it is actually only a single fact that is still maintaining the connection with the spiritual world, and that this is a fact of great importance for humanity. A man who had been one of the most important leaders of the barren “Society for Ethical Culture” in recent years once told me one day that he had thought for a long time about how it could be that in our enlightened times, when humanity knows that salvation can only lie in understanding the material world, how it is possible that in these enlightened times there are still churches, churches alongside the various states. And he said he had come up with the reason why there are still churches. He clothed this solution, with which he meant to express a deep secret, in the following words: “The states administer life, the churches administer death; and since people have not yet ceased to think of death as something terrible, the power of the church lies in the fact that it administers death.” It is a truly materialistic way of thinking, because the man wanted to express that when people would finally have given up thinking of death as something terrible in people's lives, when they would have gotten used to letting death come over them like an animal, then the churches would have lost their power.

Now, of course, this saying is complete nonsense, absolutely brilliant nonsense; but looking at the intellectual life of the present day, it is not entirely unfounded. Sometimes, in order to understand itself, to express what it is in intellectual terms, the present day has to say nonsense. In the future, this will be cited as a special characteristic of our time: that the most ingenious people of the present were compelled, when they sought to express the character of the present, that is, the time around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, that they then had to say nonsense. But now, there is something true in this nonsense, namely the truth that for many people of the present time, it is almost the only connecting bridge to the spiritual world, that in a certain respect they either have a fear of death or cannot bear the thought that their loved ones have gone and cannot imagine them as being in a nothingness. Certainly, it should not be denied that these thoughts are still significant enough, that they are still connected with the deepest interests of the human soul. However, neither fear nor any other feeling about death can lead to a real connection with the spiritual world. For this, there must be real, true knowledge of the spiritual world, there must be understanding of the reality of the spiritual world. And this understanding of the reality of the spiritual world is not possible today other than by adding a spiritual-scientific attitude to the natural-scientific attitude.

If people do not know where the word of God actually comes from, what the divine actually is, what do people who speak of the divine today actually do out of need of this or that religious worship? Those people who often believe themselves to be deeply religious, pretending to worship the highest divine, what are they actually doing? It is not unimportant to ask yourself this question in a moment of seriousness. What does this question imply? This question implies: What is the God that most people of the present time speak of, who pretend to be of a religious nature?

Now, people reject it when we speak from the standpoint of spiritual science that there are other beings above us, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on, so that we see a hierarchy of spiritual beings, and that the way up to what is the highest divine is long. People of the present day do not want this epistemological modesty. They often express it by saying that they want no mediation between themselves and God; they always want to turn directly and immediately to the Most High God. But it is not a matter of what one believes about such a turning, but of what one really does in one's soul, what one really experiences in one's soul.

Take everything that a preacher of any recognized religious community tells you about the divine today, everything he talks about the divine. What does it refer to if you do not go by his words, but by reality? It refers to two things. Either what he talks about refers not to a higher being than to his angel, who stands as a guiding entity over each and every one of us. He worships this angel; he calls him the highest God. He who knows what words can really mean, he knows that everything that is said about God in modern sermons never refers to any higher God than an angel, or if not to an angel, then to something else. If one investigates the question of where such people get what they feel when they speak of their God, when they preach of their God in their churches, when they often even claim to have an experience of God in their souls, as some people of the present time do – they then call themselves with a certain pride “evangelized people” and the like – where one comes from, one arrives at the following: In their souls, such people feel the impulse of their own being, how this being has developed in a purely spiritual environment between the last death and birth. This spiritual being that has developed in us between the last death and our birth is now in our body, has taken up residence in our body. Much of what we now experience in life comes only from this being, from this prenatal being. Man feels this prenatal being as a spiritual one; it is this prenatal being with which he feels united. Yes, even so-called theosophists of the most varied schools of thought have repeatedly told people, in order to make something spiritually honeyed sound, that it is a matter of man uniting with his God within himself. But what man feels when he supposedly unites with his God is he himself, it is only his spiritual-soul being in the time between the last death and the last birth. And what numerous pastors and priests speak of when they speak of the God they feel in their soul is nothing more than that they sense their own ego, not as it develops here in the physical body, in the physical environment, but as it developed in the spiritual world between death and birth. They sense this, and then they begin to pray. And what do they pray to? To themselves.

This is the one that comes from many spiritual currents of the present so heartbreakingly. If you look at these things in reality, so you have to confess that people have gradually come to worship themselves unconsciously, without them knowing it. And once someone finds out, he expresses it in strange forms, as Friedrich Nietzsche has done. This must be made perfectly clear: either the person who does not want to recognize the hierarchies, the wonderful breadth and greatness of the spiritual world, merely worships his angel - which is also a form of selfish worship - or he worships himself. This is the spiritual form of egoism to which humanity has gradually come under the influence of the materialistic development of modern times. Now you will say: What is he telling us? That is not true! People do not say that they worship themselves, that they only worship their angel! - Of course they do not say it, but they do it; and what they say only happens in order to numb themselves to the fact that it is no less real. What is spoken today is often an anesthetic for humanity, because, of course, people do not want to admit to themselves what it is actually about. Today, people often find it too inconvenient to rise to the spiritual worlds through inner work. They do not want that. They want to penetrate to the spiritual worlds in a much easier way, as simply as one can. Therefore they deceive themselves, therefore they anesthetize themselves. But one cannot deaden one's senses with impunity. The world goes its course. The Divine-Spiritual is at work in the world, even if one does not want to acknowledge it. It is at work and weaving therein. And that is the most profound task of our time: to rediscover the connection with the real spiritual, to bring out of ourselves the spiritualized egoism that we have just described, to overcome it. That is what speaks so powerfully to the heart when one has grasped the actual deeper impulse of spiritual science for the present time. The world – as I pointed out earlier – will, through its mighty signs, force people to seek the spirit again. But there must be a certain core of striving humanity that can find its way into this spiritual striving, which alone can be the right and true and real thing for the present.

You see, the earth has gone through various tasks. It is not only the individual human being who has a task; the whole earth is constantly having its various tasks. In the period immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe, the people of Indian culture had a different task; a little later, the people of Persian culture had a different task; the people had a different task when the Egyptians and Chaldeans were in charge, and a different task when the Greco-Roman peoples set the tone. This continued until the 15th century. Another task has been assigned to us from the 15th century until today. And this task, which is now assigned to us, is quite different from any other task on Earth. One can characterize this task, which is presently allotted to mankind, which began with the 15th century and which will last into the 4th millennium, by pointing out the most essential thing that is happening on earth during this period.

If we look back to the time before the 15th century from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that until the 15th century everything that people did was imbued with a certain spirituality. External history tells us nothing about this, because it is a fable convenue that we learn in schools and universities. But if you really study what people have created in their daily lives, you will see that it is imbued with a certain spirituality. The characteristic feature of our epoch is that this spirituality has declined and must gradually be lost altogether if man does not add a new spirituality to the purely external, material culture. Through purely external conditions, the development of the earth is doomed to become purely materialistic. The spirit, which more or less came of itself in earlier epochs of earth evolution, must be added by mankind of its own free inner deed to what presents itself.

If we disregard what people can bring to earthly culture out of their inner freedom, out of their consciousness, and only look at what has arisen by itself in our fifth period, which has lasted since the middle of the 15th century, then it turns out that this is the period in which the Earth is gradually beginning to die for the whole cosmos, for the whole universe. The fifth period is the beginning of the death of the Earth. While all the earlier periods could contribute to the spirit of the universe through what arose from the Earth itself, all the brilliant culture that developed in this fifth period - the telegraph, the telephone, the railroad - has its great significance for the Earth, but no significance outside the Earth. Nothing of what arose in Egyptian or Greek civilization perishes with the earth; but what arises in our time on the soil of purely materialistic culture perishes with the earth when the earth itself becomes a corpse of the cosmos. That which the present material culture creates perishes with the earth. This time had to come. For people must become free. They did not have to be forced to find the spirit; they had to find the spiritual through a free act of consciousness. That is why this present period came, in which everything that we can find externally, of which we can be so proud, is only there for the earth, but is not there for the spiritual world. But that is why it is also the time that leaves it up to man to rise to the spirit, that refers man to his inner being, to his soul, to his heart, to his mind, when they want to become more spiritual, that does not force man to be more spiritual, but that leaves it up to man whether they want to decline with the outer declining culture, or whether they do not want to decline with this culture.

We can either understand a truth such as the one that has just been expressed, that is, what is absolutely necessary for humanity, from spiritual science – and everything that you find in spiritual science literature gives you the building blocks for understanding what I have now summarized. But people are still not very inclined to read the signs of the time.

Consider the following. Anyone who has looked around a little in the fields of human development in recent decades has been able to make very strange observations. If he has asked himself: How are people striving for ideals for the future, for spiritual renewal? - and when he went to really get to know these things, he found active striving, he found spiritual striving, spiritual activity, a sense that things must change on earth in the area that used to be called socialism in the working-class world, in the labor movement. Purely material, but correct ideals for the future, always asking how the world must be transformed, how something new must come, that was one thing.

If you ask in other areas than the field of socialism, our intellectual movement is still a very small group of a few, as people say, quirky, half-crazy people – if you ask among the clever people, among those who have really understood the ideas of the time, you will find the most outrageous intellectual barrenness everywhere in recent decades. Within church theology, the strangest discussions arose: Whether Jesus Christ ever lived at all or not, but in any case that he could not have been some extraterrestrial being; after all, the “simple man from Nazareth” was the only thing that people cared about. And otherwise? Yes, what did they find? In this time, when people have “gotten rid of all belief in authority,” when people only follow the principle: test everything and keep the best, they found the most blind belief in authority in what, as they say, science demands. Blind belief in authority in all fields! Blind faith in authority from the historical branch right into the medical branch. Nobody found it very convenient to somehow know a lot about what health depends on; you let the one who is an authority in this field take care of that. Simply the most terrible belief in authority! Clinging to the remnants and scraps of what had been saved from the past, what had been held on to out of convenience. No striving that would have emerged from the awareness that a renewal of humanity in spiritual terms is necessary!

At the same time, it became apparent to those who were able to observe spiritually that in the east of Europe, I would say under the sign of fire, something of a new spirit was announced through pure natural processes, so that under the most disgraceful external yoke in the east of Europe, a future time developed in the minds of even the dull inhabitants of this part of Europe. It is remarkable how, since the 9th century, the rest of Europe has been pushed back to the east by that which was to remain, which was not to be eaten away by the west, as it then appeared in the outer form of the so-called Russian Empire in the various centuries, inwardly preserving the old and, in the shell of the old, as in a chrysalis, preparing a new one for a later culture! One is tempted to say that mystery cults have been preserved within this Russian people, that this Russian people, which has little understanding of the abstract religious concepts of the West, but which has a deep, profound inner feeling for cultic forms, lives with these, and that these cultic forms bring the human soul to the Divine in a pictorial form. In the East, people feel in their own souls that which the Western religious leader bears the name of: “pontiff”, that is, bridge-maker, bridge-maker to the spiritual. But in the East, as much of the old as was necessary to keep the bridge to the spiritual at least open, untouched by the new, the new materialistic.

And now take today's signs of the times together with this! One would like to say: the most bitter irony of human evolution has been poured out precisely over Eastern Europe, the bitterest irony! The caricature of every higher human aspiration, which has asserted itself in Leninism, in Trotskyism, as the final caricature consequence of purely materialistic socialist ideas, is like a dress that does not fit the body, put on the people of the East. Never before have greater contradictions collided than the soul of the European East and the inhuman Trotskyism or Leninism. This is not said out of any sympathy or antipathy, it is said out of the realization that the greatest contradictions that have ever come together are brewing in the European East through the combination of the greatest contradictions that have ever come together. This should also remind us that the signs of the times speak meaningfully. This should show us that, above all, we must begin to take spiritual science so seriously that we want to enter into reality through it; because with it we can penetrate into the reality of the present.

Rabindranath Tagore gave a remarkable lecture to the Japanese on the spirit of Japan. He speaks as an Oriental, Tagore; but the Oriental is already speaking today in such a way that the European, if he wants to, can understand him a little. But just when one delves into what Tagore said about the spirit of Japan, what he wanted to say to the whole world, then one finds that this Tagore knows with all insightful people of the East: The East preserves an ancient spiritual culture, a spiritual culture that the sages of the East have carefully kept secret, which they have not allowed to come out among ordinary people. But it is a spiritual culture that they have incorporated into the social institutions until very recently. A culture that is spiritual through and through, but whose time is up. Hence the peculiar unnaturalness that confronts us, I might say, throughout the Asian Orient. People are adapting the Western forms of thought and culture to their old spiritual way of feeling. This is basically a terrible thing, because spiritual thinking, especially as developed by the Japanese, is flexible and penetrates reality. If it fraternizes with European-American materialism, then, if European materialism does not want to spiritualize, it will certainly outstrip it. For the European does not have the flexibility of mind that the Japanese have. They have this as a legacy of their ancient spirituality.

Now, as if by some wonderful wisdom, I would like to say, the Russian folk soul had been preserved from everything that leads to abysmal development, to decadence. But now it is to be poisoned by Leninism and Trotskyism. It is to be infected by that which would extinguish the spirit from all earthly culture if it came to power. Of course, that must not be allowed to happen. But if it is not to be allowed to happen, then success, spiritual success, depends on our deciding to regard spiritual science not merely as an abstract theory, not merely as a convenient means of developing a certain inner voluptuousness, a certain mystical ic dreaming in the soul, in which one feels comfortable, through which one pretends that one has nothing to do with the world - one despises this vile world, one feels one is in a spiritual beyond. But this is only selfishness, a higher selfishness, but still only selfishness. One should want nothing to do with such mysticism, such theosophy, but only with that spiritual comprehension of existence that really grasps the spirit, experiences the spirit, but wants to comprehend reality through the spirit.

Now we must recognize the subject as a task, as a serious task for the present time. But these things are sometimes inconvenient. And precisely because they are inconvenient, certain brotherhoods have kept them secret from the masses and guarded them. That time is past. It is time that people strive out of their conscious inner being in free spirituality. The things that have been kept secret for thousands of years must now be communicated to people. One must realize that in the East in old, bygone epochs, a spiritual wisdom already existed, but the time for this spiritual wisdom is past. Another spiritual wisdom must come. In this, people often want to be mistaken. How many people have appeared in our present time of searching and wanted to make things comfortable for the Europeans, because something like our spiritual science is much too difficult for them, because there you have to think; thinking is something so uncomfortable! You have to be spiritually awake; being spiritually awake is something so uncomfortable! So many people were found who wanted to spare the Europeans the trouble of seeking their own path to the spirit and taught them all kinds of oriental wisdom, Zarathustrian wisdom and all sorts of other things. The Europeans felt so comfortable when they did not have to seek the spirit themselves, but when the spirit was brought to them ready-made from ancient India. This was a narcotic, for they did not want to search the universe through the spirit. They wanted to anesthetize themselves by taking hold of an old means of knowledge. That was the mistake made in many fields after the East.

And another mistake has been made. This other mistake is connected with the fact that this more recent time, which is leading the earth to die off in its culture, so to speak, brings with it the unconscious necessity in people to seek their own inner being. The urge to seek and find this inner being is already there. Oh, there are more and more people who are out to search for their own inner being! The search for the inner being even disguises itself, masks itself, in the worship of God, which is either a worship of the angel or of one's own self. The search for the inner being will become ever more lively and lively in modern humanity. The more science and technology people in modern times embrace, the more vividly the counter-thrust of the search for the inner self will come. Today, people often search in the wrong ways, but they search for it. Those who search the least are those who are employed as official organs to search for the spirit; they search for the “limits of knowledge”. They seek to determine what man cannot know of the spiritual world. And so today we have spiritual leaders who, above all, endeavor to tell people how not to penetrate into the spiritual world, and a humanity that seeks but has no real awareness of its seeking.

This is the most striking phenomenon. If you really want to unravel the souls on earth, you will find that people who are laymen, who are in the midst of the trials and struggles of life, are searching for the soul everywhere. Ask about the leaders who should speak down to the people from the pulpits and lecterns in such a way that the search is satisfied. They will tell you that science does not allow you to cross the boundaries of knowledge, that man cannot penetrate into the spiritual world. Kant established the limits of human knowledge for all time, and anyone who does not accept this is a fool. This is the most striking phenomenon of the present time. But the urge is there in the widest circles, even if they are not aware of this urge to search within. Where such an urge exists, in the long run one will not be satisfied with mere limitations, but one will seek for something else.

Just as the East has sent the narcotic of an old culture, a culture that has passed away, the Far West is sending people another narcotic. This is what people will gradually come to realize: Anglo-Americanism is culturally the narcotic of modern times for the spiritual search within the human heart. On the one hand, Anglo-American culture has the task of organizing and spreading material things across the earth, but it combines this task, by virtue of an inner characteristic of the Anglo-American nature, with the task of numbing people through Americanisms in their search for the spiritual in the soul. The more Europe becomes orientalized, the more it will become numbed to spiritual knowledge of the world; the more Europe becomes Anglo-Americanized, the more it will become numbed to the search for the true spirit, the true self within the human soul.

These things are not said here to develop chauvinism, not to talk all sorts of tirades about this or that world mission, but because - in the most modest way - this must be seen through in order to understand the responsible situation of the Central European human being. For since the times of the spiritual deepening through Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, through everything that I have tried to describe in the book “Vom Menschenrätseb as the forgotten sound of German intellectual life, the Central European spirit has been called upon to lead humanity away from these two narcotics: from the narcotic of Orientalism, from the narcotic of Americanism.

To understand how the spiritual tableau is spread across the earth, to understand what is placed on our souls, for this spiritual science is intended to be a guide. Can people out there in the world know today what spiritual impulses can come from Central Europe into the world? Can they know that? Let us ask the question in a different way: Have we proved ourselves worthy of such spiritual seeking as was inspired by Herder and Goethe? My dear friends, meditation is rightly recommended to us in spiritual science. Do you know what a wonderful meditation would be that you could start with even the youngest children? Read Herder and see how he presents every sunrise in the morning as a new creation in a grandiose world picture. And read the countless images that Herder presents in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”. Forgotten, faded away! Just recently, a gentleman who is serious about Central European intellectual life said to me: I have never heard of any of this at Herder's!

Yes, we have a task; we must recognize this task. Listen today to a Chinese like Ku Hung-Ming. Listen to an Indian like Tagore. Do you think that these people have the opportunity to really understand what is going on in Central European intellectual life and what intellectual impulses are at work there? They look and say to themselves: Well, Goethe lived; even a Goethe Society has been founded to cultivate Goetheanism. But what has happened? In recent years, they have been looking for someone to lead this Goethe Society, to stand at the helm of this Goethe Society; the question has not even been raised: should it be a man who works in the spirit of Goetheanism, who could work for spirituality in the sense in which it is to be thought now, a hundred years after Goethe? No, a man who was a former finance minister has been placed at the head of the Goethe Society. The world sees him as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality. No one other than a former finance minister is seen as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality!

It is not enough to call out: Spirit, Spirit, Spirit! We must permeate reality with what we have gained from spiritual insight, but we must also lead this spiritual insight into reality. A task has been assigned to the Central European, and this task has begun. For spiritual science, as it is conceived here, is nothing other than the continuation of that which has emerged around the great turning point of the newer spiritual life, to which I have just pointed. It should have found a counterpart, the purely material socialist striving, which for decades was the only impulsive movement in a spiritual movement! It is never too late, but it must be understood at last, so that it does not decay, that which is precisely our task. It must finally be understood that one cannot get ahead with all the buzzwords, that a new spirit must take hold of humanity. But people today walk past the spirit. Life gives us countless examples of this.

One example among thousands upon thousands could be cited. Recently a remarkable essay by a very clever man appeared in a widely read German newspaper. This witty man gave a book a roasting in the collection “From Nature and the Spiritual World” that had unfortunately been published; he was horribly scathing about this little volume. And when one read this essay, one could not understand why the man was actually scolding. Because in this book, the development of astrology and the horoscope is discussed as a normal, well-behaved, upstanding university professor today, who does not participate in the “superstition” of astrology, would discuss it. And at the end he develops his view by describing Goethe's horoscope, and he actually makes fun of the fact that you can find all sorts of things in this horoscope. So a very good university professor wrote from today's point of view. You couldn't be a more decent university professor than the one who wrote the little book. But Fritz Mauthner rants like a pipe about this book, that someone is spreading superstition. He rants and rants and doesn't know why! A few days later, the author published a correction in which he pointed out: “I am quite in agreement with Fritz Mauthner, he makes fun of astrology and horoscopes, so do I! I only quoted the horoscope to show that you can read anything you want into it. So we are in complete agreement. The “Berliner Tageblatt”, of which Fritz Mauthner was once the theater critic, had nothing to add, because it did not think that Mauthner had misunderstood. Mauthner does not offer a word of clarification either. In short, two people who were absolutely in agreement came into the most furious conflict, and no one knew why. There was not the slightest reason for it.

That is the way it is in general in the present time, that is the characteristic of the present time! People no longer listen to what they have to say to each other; they also usually have very little to say to each other. But what they develop, what they have against each other, arises from something quite different from what they confess. One lives in a completely inexplicable way, in a completely irrational way, because one has become estranged from what reality is and can no longer enter into it.

If you think and feel your way through such things, you will feel the importance, the significance of what spiritual science is, in your soul. Anyone who believes today that spiritual science is something impractical is on the wrong track. In fifty years' time it will no longer be possible to found factories or establish any kind of working community without permeating things with spiritual science, because it alone will find the way to reality. When people understand, really understand, that all the old catchwords lead to dead ends, that we need insight into the spirit that rules the world for the very most material life, then one will understand spiritual science, then one will not want to get into the spiritual world in an egoistic way through the “only bridge of death”, but then one will also draw life from death.

Perhaps someone who has seriously studied spiritual research is allowed to speak of such things in such an intimate circle. I, who have been writing about Goethe for more than thirty years now, have not wanted to write about Goethe in an outwardly philological or philosophical or other scholarly way, but rather, my aim has always been to offer, through my relationship with Goethe, a possibility to express in my books what Goethe now wants to say to humanity in a particular field that is close to me. I did not want to go to the dead Goethe to study him, but through what Goethe left behind, I wanted to find the way to the living Goethe. To the Goethe who speaks to our souls when we know that the dead are alive like us, that they live in the world in which we ourselves live, only that we walk around in the body, but the dead are among us in the spirit.

Do religious communities really believe that they live together with the dead? There is, admittedly, a selfish belief in immortality, and this should not be criticized. But only spiritual science can make fruitful the life of the dead. For it is through spiritual science that men will find the way to those with whom they were karmically connected and who have passed over into the other world and still cling to the world with a thousand and one threads. For in what happens here on earth, not only the impulses of the living work. Man does not cease to work for the world when he has passed through the gate of death.

We are only partially awake. When we perceive and form ideas, we are awake. When we feel, we are dreaming. Our feelings do not live more strongly in our consciousness than our dreams. And our will impulses, we oversleep them. We know how to remember dreams in our imagination, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not even know how our will works when we move our arm. We dream in feeling, we sleep in willing. Because we are sentient beings who feel and will, there is a world of spirit around us that we cannot see into in our ordinary consciousness. We are torn out of this world by perception and thinking. Because we are perceivers and thinkers and enjoy the physical world, we do not know that the dead walk among us. The dead walk among us. Man, when he has developed throughout his life, goes through the gate of death. He remains connected with earthly existence, the threads go down from him into earthly existence. We cannot feel and will without the dead who were karmically connected with us working in our feelings and wills. Spiritual science gives recognition of what looks in as a life not lost to the earth, which one otherwise believes in nothing, in a living way. The spiritual inclinations of the people of the East are also based on this. The peoples of the European center have the task, out of the freedom of the soul, to draw everything that the human being can consciously create out of the freedom of his soul into the fourth millennium. To do this, however, the outer material reality must be spiritually permeated. But it must not be immersed in Wilsonism, which is the opposite of all spirituality. In the East, what is preparing itself as the next culture must be released from those terrible contradictions, from that which does not belong together, which has developed from the grafting of Trotskyism and Leninism onto burgeoning spirituality. This next culture will be called upon each time something happens on earth to ask: What do the dead say about this?

Yes, it is a much more important thing today to know that this is something we are approaching in our development on earth. Today people are clever, they are so clever at twenty! They let themselves be elected to parliament at twenty because today everyone has their own point of view by the time they are twenty, they are fully formed human beings. That life from the age of twenty until we die is not given to us in vain, but that we are constantly growing, that new things are revealed to us, that when we have passed through the gate of death, wisdom continues, life continues, we become wiser, that is something that people must imbibe. And in the future, people will realize that the wisest people to ask about what is happening on earth are the dead.

The consciousness soul - if you read about what that is in my book 'Theosophy' - develops the present, the spirit self develops the nearest culture. The spirit self develops in that the dead will be the advisers of the living on earth. Today this is still considered a fantastic reverie, half madness. It will become a reality. There will come a time when people united on earth to do something worthwhile and meaningful for the evolution of the earth will not only consult the living but also the dead. It is not possible at present to go into detail about how this will take shape politically in the future and how it must be prepared. This can only remain a mystery. But one can already penetrate with the fact that this living consciousness must arise in humanity, that we are with the dead; that man should not only develop egoistic striving for immortality, but that living striving that lives in work, in action.

To become aware that spiritual knowledge would like to place the individual human striving into the all-embracing striving of the earth, I thought was particularly suitable to be considered on this occasion, when our friends have come together here to find the spiritual-scientific answers to certain questions of life. That it is not just about narrow-minded human soul needs, but that today, if we are serious about what spiritual science is, it is about the fate of earthly culture, to This realization is not arrogance, not megalomania; it can be done in all humility, but it must be done because there must be people today who truly understand the seriousness of human endeavor on earth. Immerse yourself in spiritual science, and you will find that however small a branch it may still be, it can make its contribution to what should come about in the development of humanity, what must come about if the earth is to reach its goal!

As in other places in Württemberg and Switzerland, I will take the liberty of speaking here about the most important and most pressing question of the present, the social question, and I will do so by referring to what has appeared in the appeal that went through the German lands some time ago, “To the German People and to the Cultural World”. The appeal, which advocates the threefold social order, may have come before most of you. The further explanations of what could only be briefly hinted at in such an appeal are given in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. Allow me to outline some of the things that need to be said about this appeal this evening.

The social question – this is clear to every human soul that is alert to current events – is that which has emerged in a completely new form from the tremendous, harrowing events of the world war catastrophe. The so-called social question or social movement, as we speak of it today, is at least more than half a century old. But anyone who considers what is announced today as a mighty historical wave and compares these things with each other may nevertheless say: this social question has taken on a completely new form in our present time, a form that no one should pass by.

How often have we heard the words in the last four to five years: This terrible world war catastrophe is something that people have not experienced since the beginning of what we call history. But still little, truly very little, is said today, when this world war catastrophe has entered into a crisis, about the necessity that completely new impulses are now also needed to restore life; that a complete rethinking and relearning is necessary - although actually the necessity for this rethinking and relearning is already outwardly apparent. For the old thoughts have led us straight into that terrible human catastrophe. New thoughts and new impulses must lead us out again. And where these impulses are to be found can be seen from a truly penetrating observation of the social demands that are emerging from more and more people's minds, and which can only be ignored by those who sleep through the times and wait for events to unfold until the old structure, as it were, collapses without substance.

Today, social issues are often seen as something highly obvious, sometimes as something highly simple. Anyone who judges not from gray theories, nor from individual personal demands, but from a truly broadened experience of the necessities of life in the present and the future, must see in this social question something into which many forces flow that have developed in the course of human development and, one can already say, have in a certain way been led towards their own destruction. To anyone who has an overview of these living conditions, the social question appears in three forms. It appears to him as a question of spiritual life, secondly as a question of legal life, and thirdly as a question of economic life. Now the last few centuries, and in particular the 19th century, and also the past two decades of the 20th century, have led to the belief that almost everything that belongs to the social question has to be sought in the economic sphere. The reasons why people see so little clearly are precisely because they think that they only have to find their way in the economic sphere and then all the others will follow by themselves. It will be necessary for the first parts of my reflection today to be devoted to an area of life that people do not want to talk about as a socially important area, even now, from either the left or the right, namely the area of spiritual life.

The demands that are called social come from the broad masses of the proletariat, who have undergone the threefold ordeal to the conditions of the present, which we will discuss later. And this proletariat has been almost entirely pushed into the mere economic life by the emergence of new technology and soul-destroying capitalism, as well as by the other cultural conditions. The demands of the proletariat arose out of economic life. Therefore, the social question of the present takes on an economic form because it arises first of all from the proletariat. But it is not just an economic question. The mere observation that traditional ideas are inadequate in the face of today's loud facts can teach us that within the social movement we are dealing not only with an economic and legal question, but above all with a question of the mind.

We are faced with a loud social fact across a large part of the civilized world. We have had party opinions and party programs, we have produced them. All thoughts, all party opinions now prove inadequate when faced with the facts. Today it is not a matter of continuing old party opinions, but of facing the facts directly and with complete seriousness and a sense of reality.

Let us first see how human life has developed in recent times, and then ran into disaster. Above all, we have to look at the deep, seemingly unbridgeable gulf that exists between the proletariat and the non-proletariat. If we look at the cultural life of this non-proletariat, what do we encounter? Certainly, this cultural life has been abundantly praised as a tremendous advance in the course of modern times. Again and again we have heard how, in this modern age, means of transport have brought people together across vast areas of the earth, which in older times, if prophetically described, would have been decried as utopian. Thought, it was always preached and praised, flies like lightning across distant lands and seas and so on. No one has grown tired of praising progress over and over again. But today it is necessary to add a different consideration to all of this. Today it is necessary to ask: Under what conditions did this progress come about? It could only come about by building on a foundation of the broad masses of humanity who could not participate in all that this culture has been so praised for, built on the foundation of broad masses of people who had to do their work for this culture of a few, which, in the form in which it was “created”, could only exist because these masses had no part in it. Now these broad masses have grown up, have come into their own, and are rightly demanding their share. Their demands are at the same time the great historical demands of the present for everyone who really understands the times. And when today the call for socialization of economic life is heard, he who understands the times recognizes in this call not merely the demands of one class of people, but at the same time an historical demand of human life in the present.

One peculiarity of the leading classes, who were the participants in the much-praised culture, is that in recent times they have missed almost every opportunity to somehow bridge the gap between them and the masses of the proletariat, who are increasingly coming forward with their legitimate demands. What was needed to bridge this gap was ideas that should have been incorporated into human, social life. It is a peculiarity of this newer intellectual life, which has been so widely praised, that it has become increasingly alien to real, true life. Individuals pursue only that life that directly encompasses them. For the broad masses of the people, no comprehensive ideas from our intellectual life, from our school education, could be found. Here is an example that, from the most diverse points of view, could be multiplied not tenfold but a hundredfold or more.

At the beginning of the century, a certain government councilor by the name of Kolb took a remarkable turn in his destiny. I am happy to mention this government councilor Kolb because the way he took his destiny into his own hands is worthy of honor, and because I have no need to say anything detrimental about it, which I do not do willingly. At one point in his life, Kolb did something that not many other government officials do. Most of them retire when they no longer want to do their duty; but he left his office, went to America, and got a job as an ordinary worker, first in a brewery and then in a bicycle factory. Based on the experiences that this government official had, he then wrote a book: “Als Arbeiter in Amerika” (As a Worker in America).

The book contains a remarkable sentence. It reads, for example: “When I used to meet someone on the street who wasn't working, I would say, ‘Why isn't the bum working?’ Now I knew differently: And now I know something else about many things as well; now I know that even the most terrible affairs of life still look quite good in the study.” That is a confession that deeply characterizes the social conditions of the time. A man who has emerged from our intellectual life, who has been entrusted with human destiny for many years — for as many years as are necessary to bring it to the government act — knows nothing of human labor, that is, he knows nothing of human life. He must first create a destiny for himself in order to know something of the life he is to govern, in which he is to be active from the leading classes. He must first, in order to know something of this life, get himself hired as a laborer and then come to completely different views of life.

Does this example, which could truly be multiplied, not indicate how our intellectual life, from which the leading people emerge, has become alien to the lives of the broad masses? The broad masses have seen, in the necessities of their bodies and souls, how the leading classes conduct economic life. They have seen that something is wrong, that these leading classes do not have the necessary spirit to guide economic life. Today the question arises: what needs to be different?

And in many other respects, one can still see how alien the leading class has become over the last few centuries from what should have been done to avoid drifting into a catastrophe. In the most serious and dignified manner, the leading circles discussed all kinds of beautiful things, such as charity, brotherhood among men, the way man must be good in general, and the like. But they had no connection with real life. At most, they would bring up the subject for discussion. Such an enquiry from the mid-19th century is not so insignificant today. It was initiated by the English government at the time among mine managers. The people who talked about human existence in their well-heated rooms should have experienced the coal they were talking about. They should have realized that the coal they were discussing their advanced morality and advanced intellectual life with had been brought up through mine shafts into which children of nine, eleven, thirteen years of age were sent underground before day, before the rising of the sun, and only came up again at night, so that the poor children almost never saw the light of day. It was easy to talk about human goodness and neighborly love in the context of the coals that were mined in this way. And many similar stories could be told. And the question must be asked: Did such events inspire the leading circles of humanity to really intervene in social life? Some people will reply today: Yes, but many things have improved. But to that I would say: What has improved has improved not because of the initiative of the ruling class, but because of the hard struggle of those who have suffered under these conditions.

These are the things that need to be brought to our attention today. We need to focus on what the worker, who works from morning till evening, can see at most from the outside when he passes our universities, our secondary schools. He is only familiar with what goes on in primary schools, and even there only what he can experience. He does not know how the objectives of primary education are determined from above, he only sees that those who cannot lead today's economic life emerge from these institutions.

This is the first aspect of the social question. Despite all the praise of our intellectual life, we have no intellectual life that is up to the great tasks of the time.

Let us look at economic life. When the social movement arose, we often heard the leading circles dismiss this social movement with the words: They want to divide. But what comes out of the division? Then everyone gets very little. — Then this objection fell silent; because on the one hand it is very true, but on the other hand it is very stupid. Recently, however, it has been cropping up again and again. But these things are not the point. Anyone who looks into the particular structure of our economic life today knows that the physical and mental misery of the broad masses of the proletariat has arisen from completely different causes. He knows that the inadequate development of intellectual life has not been understood in terms of bringing an ever-increasing technical activity in economic life into such a form that every person can have a dignified existence in it.

Of course, it has often been rightly pointed out that the modern social movement has emerged through modern technology, through machines, through soul-destroying capitalism. But it has been forgotten that all that has emerged could not be mastered by the spiritual life as it developed.

Why is that so? With the advent of the machine, industrialism and capitalism, a certain tendency took hold of humanity, which expressed itself in the fact that it was considered progress to have the state absorb the spiritual life as far as possible. Nationalization of the spiritual life was seen as great progress. And today you still meet with the sharpest prejudices if you object to this nationalization of the spiritual life. Those who have their sympathies in today's intellectual life point out with a certain pride how much further one has come with the spirit than in the old, dark Middle Ages. Well, we certainly do not want the Middle Ages back. Not back, but forward we want to go. But another question must be raised. It is said that in the Middle Ages intellectual life, especially science, followed in the train of theology or the Church. Today we have to ask: Whose train does present-day intellectual life follow – or perhaps something else? Here is another example, which could be multiplied not only a hundredfold but a thousandfold. Again, I may speak of a person whom I hold in high esteem because I am convinced that he was an important naturalist. At the same time, he was the Secretary General of a learned society that is at the forefront of German intellectual life. In one of his well-delivered speeches, he wanted to express what these German scholars, who have the great honor of being members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, consider their highest honor. When something like this is described, one would naturally like to point out an historical fact that is not insignificant. This Berlin Academy was always something that could, in a sense, intellectually express the impulses of the Hohenzollerns. A Hohenzollern of the 18th century was once faced with the necessity of appointing a president to his Academy of Sciences – I am not telling you a fairy tale, but an historical fact – and he believed he was honouring this Academy of Sciences most by giving it his court jester as president. But the great scholar of the late 19th century says that the learned gentlemen of the Berlin Academy consider it a great honor to be the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns.

We must look at such things as symptoms of the times. We must look at what intellectual life has become in its dependence on state power and the capitalist power associated with it. For if one can grasp inner impulses not out of some prejudice but out of the necessities of life, out of reality, then one will say, contrary to all the prejudices of the time, that intellectual life can only regain its strength if it is detached from state life, if it is left to its own devices. Everything that lives in spiritual life, especially the school system, must be handed over to its self-administration, from the highest level of the administration of spiritual life to the teacher of the lowest school level. In the administration of spiritual life, nothing but the forces of this spiritual life itself can be decisive. Those who are active in this spiritual life and experience it inwardly must form the body that administers this spiritual life and puts it completely on its own feet.

This is the first point of what is here called the threefold social organism. Such a spiritual life will be able to relate to life in a completely different way than the antisocial spiritual life in which we have gradually found ourselves, and from which it seems we have no desire to escape.

Someone who really has experience in this field is well placed to speak about it from that experience. For many years I taught at the Workers' Educational School in Berlin, founded by Liebknecht. So I know how to find the sources of a spiritual life that is not the preserve of a privileged class and represents a luxury spiritual life, but from which one can speak to all people who have the urge to achieve a dignified existence for soul and body. And I know something else from this practice of my life. I know how the workers understood me, always understood me better when I spoke to them from a free spiritual life that is there for all people, not for a privileged class. Because the workers believed that they had to go along with this or that, there were also times when I was led to guide the workers through museums or similar institutions, through sites where the evidence of a culture could be seen that existed only for a few, that did not represent a folk culture, a folk spiritual life. There I saw how the gulf also existed in the spiritual and mental life and how people basically could not really take in inwardly what had been created on the soil of a culture for a few. This is a misconception that many people still subscribe to today. They believe that they are promoting the education of the people when they throw chunks of what has been created at universities, secondary schools and other educational institutions from our culture, which is only born out of the social sentiments of a few. What has been done to promote such popular education! Public libraries, adult education colleges, public theaters, and so on. But we shall never get rid of the error which consists in believing that what is intellectually demanded by the emotional life of a secluding minority can be transplanted into the broad masses of the people. No, the time demands a spiritual life which embraces everybody in a social way. But this can only come into being when those who are to take part in it, with all their feelings, with all their social foundations, form a unity with those who create this spiritual life; when they are not thrown scraps, but when the whole mass of the people works uniformly in a spiritual way. But for this to happen, the spiritual life must be freed from state and capitalist constraints. Naturally, in a short lecture I cannot present all the arguments – not even all that is contained in my book on these key points of the social question – that could be adduced in favor of the necessity of detaching intellectual life, especially the school system, from the state and economic life and placing it on its own feet. But this is the first requirement for the threefold social order: a spiritual life that develops out of itself.

There is no need to fear such a spiritual life. There is no need to fear even if one has a low opinion of people, perhaps to the effect that they will fall back into the old illiterate state, or the like, if parents are free to send their children to school or leave them out without state coercion. No, the proletariat in particular will become more and more aware of what it owes to school education. And it will not leave its children out of school, even if it is not forced to send its children to school, but has to send them there of its own free will. And in particular, the advocate of the comprehensive school need not fear that a free spiritual life will be disturbed by the school. Nothing else can arise than the unified school if the free spiritual life is promoted.

That is what needs to be said first about the separation of spiritual life from state and economic life.

The second area of life that needs to be considered when studying today's social question is the legal life. People have developed the most diverse views about this legal life. But anyone who is able to observe and feel this legal life from reality says to himself: to give definitions or scholarly explanations of the law is just as absurd as trying to give scholarly instructions about what blue and red colors are. One can talk about blue and red colors with anyone who has a healthy eye. But about the sense of right, about the right that every human being has because he is a human being, one can talk to every awakened human soul. And with awakened human souls, with ever more awakened human souls, one is dealing with the modern proletariat.

With regard to this legal basis of life, however, modern humanity, insofar as it belongs to the ruling circles, has had a strange experience. These ruling circles could not help but spread a certain democracy over life. They needed a skillful proletariat to stage their capitalist interests, a proletariat that received certain soul forces. The old patriarchal life was of no use in the modern capitalist economy. But now something extremely unpleasant turned up for such a one-sided, capitalist democracy. You see, the human soul has the peculiarity that when you develop individual abilities and powers in it, then others will automatically come to the fore. Thus, the leading mankind wanted to develop only those soul powers that make workers able to work in factories. But it turned out that the souls awoke from the old patriarchal conditions, and that in them especially the awareness of human rights awoke. And then they looked into the modern state, which was supposed to embody the law. They asked themselves: Is this the soil in which the law really flourishes? And what did they find? Instead of human rights, class privileges and class disadvantages. And from this arose what is called the modern class struggle of the proletariat, which is nothing more or less than the great, justified demand for a dignified existence for all people.

This is the second aspect of the social question, the legal question. Its true significance cannot be recognized without also considering the third aspect, the economic question. Two things have seeped into economic life that simply do not belong there. These are capital and human labor, whereas economic life should only include what takes place on the goods market. I think that recent years, and especially the present, could teach people very clearly that the most important thing in the proletarian social movement is the proletarian himself. But today, as things are, the proletarian man cannot be judged by someone who, because the times suggest it, deigns to talk about the proletariat based on a variety of ideas. No, only someone whose destiny has led him to think with the proletariat and feel with the proletariat can judge these things. You have to have seen for yourself how, over decades, the proletarian world came together in the hours that could be wrested from the evening after hard work to educate itself about the economic movement of the new era, about the meaning of labor, of capital, about the meaning of commodity consumption and production; you have to have seen what an enormous need for education developed in the proletarian people, while, on the other side of the divide, within the higher classes, people visited their theaters and devoted themselves to many other activities, and at most managed to look down from the stage at the proletarian misery. Then the proletarian developed; he developed out of his spiritual life. And anyone who says today that the proletarian question is merely a question of bread and stomach must be given the answer: It is a shame that it has come to this, that the proletarian question has become a bread-and-butter question, that people did not look at something else earlier, namely, that the proletarian's entire striving has given rise to the demand for a dignified existence, for an existence in which he does not have to allow his body and soul to wither. For all proletarian demands have ultimately emerged from this, not from a mere bread-and-stomach issue. But while the proletarian was trying to come to his senses, while he was dealing with the economic systems of modern times, he developed an awareness of his own position as a human being in this human life. From his point of view, he was able to look at the way of life of the leading circles. He was told that history was a divine world order, or a moral world order, or the world order of the idea. He saw only that the ruling circles, within their world order, lived as the surplus value that he had to produce allowed them to live. That is why the words of the Communist Manifesto struck so deeply into the minds of the proletarians and made them aware of their situation. Despite all the progress of modern times, despite all the so-called newer freedoms, the proletarian is condemned to sell his labor power like a commodity on the labor market and to have it bought. This gave rise to the demand: The days are over when a person can sell or buy a part of himself. His feelings, which he perhaps could not always express clearly, led the proletarian back to ancient times, to the times of serfdom. And he saw how the purchase of his labor power has remained from those ancient times. For nothing else but this lies in the wage relationship. He said to himself: Goods belong on the market. You take the goods to the market, sell them and go back with the proceeds. I must sell my labor power to the employer, but I cannot go to him and say, “There is my labor power for so and so much money, and then I will go away.” I must deliver myself! — You see, as a human being, you must go with your labor power. That is what the proletarian perceives as an existence unworthy of a human being. |

The big question arises: What has to happen so that labor can no longer be a commodity? People today, insofar as they belong to the leading and guiding circles, basically give little thought to labor. These people open their wallets and pay with banknotes of a certain denomination. Whether they ever stop to consider that in the bills they give, or perhaps cut up into coupons, there is a decision to appropriate so many laborers from the proletariat, that is the big question. In any case, they do not give in to thoughts strong enough to intervene in social life.

The point is that human labor cannot be compared in price to any other commodity; that human labor is something quite different from a commodity. Human labor must be removed from the economic process. And it cannot be removed unless economic life is regarded as a part of the social organism, separate from the actual legal or state organism, from the political organism. Then what I would like to make clear to you by means of a comparison can occur. Economic life borders on the natural foundation on the one hand. You cannot manage a closed economic area in any way you like. You can use the soil by technical means or the like. But within certain limits you have to submit to the natural foundation. Imagine a number of large landowners, i.e. capitalists in their own right, who would say: If we are to achieve this balance, or even a better one, we need a hundred rainy days in summer, with sunny days in between, and so on. This is a complete plate, of course, but it does draw our attention to the fact that, on the one hand, we cannot change the natural foundations; we cannot demand, through our economic life, that the forces of nature in the ground prepare the wheat grain in a particular way. We must submit to the forces of nature; they stand beside economic life. On the other hand, economic life must be limited by the life of the law, that is to say, just as little as the forces of nature depend on the economic situation on the goods market, so little must human labor depend on the economic situation on the goods market. Human labor must be taken out of economic life like a force of nature and placed on the ground of the law. When it is placed on the legal ground, then everything in which one person is equal to another, in which only real human rights develop, in which labor law can also develop, can develop on this legal ground. The measure, type and time of work will be determined before the worker enters the economic process. Then he will face the one who, as we shall see in a moment, will not be the capitalist but the labor manager, the spiritual co-worker, as a free human being.

No matter how good the words may be about the so-called employment contract, as long as it is a wage contract, it can only lead to the dissatisfaction of the worker. Only when contracts can no longer be concluded for labor, but only for the joint production of the labor manager and the manual laborer, when a contract can only be concluded for the joint product, will a dignified existence for all parties arise from it. Then the worker will stand vis-à-vis the labor manager as a free partner. That is what the worker is basically striving for, even if he still cannot form a clear idea of it today. This is the real economic issue for the proletariat, the real economic demand: the liberation of labor power from the economic cycle, the establishment of the right of labor power within the second link of the three-part social organism, the legal basis.

And on this legal basis, another thing must be given a new form. This is precisely the thing that, when it comes to its reorganization, still makes today's people look very, very puzzled, namely the reorganization of capital. With regard to private property, people today think socially at least to a certain extent, and in fact in the area that seems to them to be the least difficult, in the spiritual area. For in the intellectual field, at least in principle, something social applies in relation to ownership. No matter how clever or talented a person is, he certainly brings his abilities with him through birth, but what we achieve that is socially valuable, intellectually as well, we achieve it by being within society, through society. In the intellectual field this is recognized by the fact that, at least in principle, nothing of what one produces intellectually, and from which one also receives the benefit, belongs to the heirs for thirty years after death. The time could be shorter, but at least it is recognized in principle that what is intellectual property must become the property of the general public at the moment when the individual with his individual abilities is no longer there to administer it. Intellectual property must not be transferred in an arbitrary manner to those who then have nothing more to do with its creation.

Now you say today that it is an historical requirement that it must become similar to material capital in the future! Tell that today to people who are within the capitalist education, then you will see what kind of perplexed faces they make! Nevertheless, one of the most important demands of the present is that capital should no longer be placed in the social process in the same way as it is today. The point is that in the future, everyone must be able to manage the means of production in a particular field based on their individual abilities. And the capital is actually the means of production. It is in the worker's own interest to have a good spiritual leader as a manager; because this is the best way to apply one's work. The capitalist is then just a fifth wheel on the car, he is not necessary at all. That is what must be realized. It is therefore necessary that in the future the means of production in a particular economic sector or for a cultural purpose are raised; but since the individual abilities of the person or group of people who have raised the means of production no longer justify personal ownership, these means of production , as I have shown in my book The Essential Points of the Social Question, must now pass to quite different people, not to the heirs, but to quite different people who now have the greatest ability to manage these means of production only in the service of the general public.

Just as blood circulates in the human body, so in the future the means of production, that is, capital, will circulate in the community of the social organism. Just as blood must not accumulate in a healthy organism, but must flow through the entire body, fertilizing everything, so in the future capital must not accumulate in any one place as private property. Rather, when it has served its purpose in one place, it must pass to whoever can manage it best. In this way, capital is divested of the function that has led to the greatest social damage today.

But the very clever people who speak from a capitalist point of view rightly say: All economic activity consists in giving up existing goods so that goods can be obtained in the future. That is quite right; but if we are to manage in this way – that is, by means of the past, the seeds are laid for the economy of the future, so that the economy does not die – then capital must participate in what the properties of goods are. Again, today there are extremely puzzled faces when one speaks of these demands of the future. Real goods, however, have the peculiarity that they are consumed. In consumption, they gradually follow the path of all living things. Our present economic order has brought capital to the point where it does not follow the path of living things. All one needs to do is to have capital, and then this capital is torn out of the fate of everything else that is involved in the economic process. Aristotle already said that capital should not have any young, but not only does it have young, but the young grow up until they are large; one can state the number of years until the capital doubles if it is only left to itself. Other goods, for which capital is only a representative example, have the peculiarity that they either wear out or can no longer be used if they are not put to use at the right time. Capital must be forced to share the fate of all other goods, insofar as it is monetary capital. While our current economic life aims to double capital in a certain period of time, a healthy economic life would make mere monetary capital disappear in the same period of time, so that it would no longer be there. Today it is still considered terrible to tell people that after a reasonable period of time, rather than doubling in fifteen years, monetary capital should no longer exist, because what is contained in this capital must participate in the process of wear and tear. Of course, some of what is involved in saving or the like can be taken into account.

So today we are not faced with small accounts, but with large accounts. And we must have the courage to admit to these large accounts. Otherwise the social order, or rather the social disorder, the social chaos, will descend on us. People today are little concerned about the fact that they are basically dancing on a volcano. It is more in their interest to continue with the old as lightly as possible, while time demands of us not only to change some institutions, but to rethink and relearn right down to our very habits of thought.

When labor and capital are removed from the economic process, with capital flowing to the community and labor being returned to the right of the free human being, then the economic process consists only of the consumption, circulation, and production of goods. Then the economic process has only to do with the value of goods. And then, within this economic process, which as a member of the healthy social organism is now left to its own devices, something may come into being of which one can then say: production is not merely for the sake of production, but for the sake of consumption. Then those cooperatives and associations will arise that are formed from the professional guilds, but that are formed in particular from the consumers, together with the producers. Out of these corporations will arise what is today entrusted to the chance of the goods market. Today, something decides on the goods market that is completely removed from human thought and judgment: supply and demand. In the future, the corporation must decide what conditions the formation of prices and the value of goods from the goods market. In this way alone will a person produce so much that what is produced has the value of all the goods he needs for his needs until he has produced an equal amount of goods again. That will be a just economic life. That will be an economic life in which the price of one type of goods does not disproportionately outweigh the prices of the other types of goods. Today, when wages are still included in the economic process and the worker is not the free partner of the spiritual leader, today the situation still exists that within the economic process the worker, on the one hand, must repeatedly fight for an increase in his wages; on the other hand, the fact that a hole is closed opens another: wages increase, food becomes more expensive, and so on. This only happens in an economic process that is polluted by capital and wage relationships. In an economic process in which corporations, cooperatives, determine the value of goods, and not according to supply and demand, which are subject to chance, but rather based on reason. In such an economic process alone can every human being find a dignified existence. The masses of proletarians basically long for such an economic process; that is their true demand in economic life.

In some areas, this demand is already being more clearly recognized. Take, for example, the question of works councils, which has now been so distorted by legislation. If the works councils are to become what the proletarian really demands, they must not be allowed to trail behind the state in every direction, just as intellectual life used to, but must be able to develop a truly beneficial social activity within economic life. For this, however, economic life must be placed on its own ground; for this, something other than these works councils must come into being; for this, transport councils and other councils must come into being; these must arise out of economic life, and they will create constitutions out of economic experience.

I know that many people today say: Education does not yet prevail in economic life to achieve what we want to achieve. Such are the words of people who always speak of ideals so that they do not have to implement what is possible in reality. That is the talk of people for whom ideals are something that should not be aspired to, so that they do not need to strive for what is most immediate. He who knows that the knowledge that comes from experience, from practice, is infinitely more valuable than anything that can be carried down from above, also knows that such a works council should not be set up only for individual companies, but must be inter-company. The works councils must connect the individual companies with the very different companies, mediate the connection, they must develop into a works council, a transport council and an economic council. If this grows out of the economic life, then one will come to the fact that these councils are not there for mere decoration, but that they become the human factor, the figures of economic life itself. But that is what is needed.

What I call the threefold social order did not arise out of some clever idea, out of a grey theory, but out of a real observation of the necessities of life in the present and the future. And it is truly a pity that today there are so few people who are able to turn their eyes to this vital necessity, to reality itself, out of the spiritual life that has developed up to now. People today slander what is most practical by saying: it is ideology, it is utopia. What is actually at the root of this? Some say: the socialization of the means of production is necessary. I agree. But I also say: it is necessary to know the way to get there. Today I have only sketched out what I mean. We need not only goals today, but also the paths and the courage to take them. Many people tell me that what I say is difficult to understand. Well, to understand what I am saying, more is needed than what people are usually willing to expend for understanding. It is necessary to look into real life, not to judge life from some subjective demands. It is necessary to also rise up, to summon the inner courage to think radically in certain things, as our time demands of every alert human being.

However, in the last four to five years, I have seen that people have understood things that I have not understood. They have even put things that they claimed to understand, when they came from certain places, into beautiful frames so that they could always look at them. Things that came from the great headquarters and the like, but understanding had to be commanded first. No one can be ordered to understand what should be understood out of an inner courage to live. Now the time has come when people should no longer allow themselves to be ordered to understand, but must be able to gain a real judgment from their life experiences, from their unprejudiced observation of life, about what is necessary before it is too late.

But today, strange things are happening. I do not like to talk about personal matters, but today it is these personal matters that dominate life. In April 1914, I was obliged to express my judgment on the social situation in a small gathering in Vienna (and intentionally in Vienna; as you know, the catastrophe of the world war originated in Austria). At that time, it was not only the social situation of the proletariat, but the social question of the whole of Europe. I pointed out that the social situation in Europe was tending towards a malignant growth, and indeed the world war then arose from it. — I was obliged to summarize my judgment about this in the words — in April 1914, note the date: anyone who looks into our social conditions, how they have gradually developed can only come to a great cultural concern, because he sees how a carcinoma is developing in social life, a kind of cancer disease that must break out in the most terrible way in the near future.

So at that time I had to point out what world capitalism was driving people into in the near future. Anyone who said this at the time was, of course, denounced as an impractical idealist, a utopian, an ideologue, because the practitioners spoke quite differently at the time. What did the practitioners say about the general world situation? They did not speak of a cancer disease. They spoke much as the German Foreign Minister did to the enlightened gentlemen of the German Reichstag in the spring of 1914 – they must have been enlightened, because they had been appointed, after all: We are heading for peaceful times, because the general relaxation is making gratifying progress. We have the best relationship with Russia; the St. Petersburg cabinet is not listening to the press pack. Promising negotiations have been initiated with England, which will probably be concluded in the near future in favor of world peace. The two governments are in such a state that relations will become ever closer and more intimate. – Thus spoke the practitioner, who was not scolded for being an idealist. And the general relaxation of tensions progressed to such an extent that what followed was something we have all experienced so painfully. It can be quite a shock to hear something like what was said recently at the League of Nations conference, where people talked about all sorts of things out of old habits of thinking. The only thing they did not talk about in a way that was somehow appropriate was the greatest movement of the present, the social movement, which is the only one capable of founding a real league of nations.

Then, sometimes, out of old habits of thinking, very clever people give very particular answers. Recently in Bern, a very clever gentleman answered me - I never want to underestimate people's cleverness -: I cannot imagine that something special comes out of a threefold structure, everything must be a unity. Law cannot arise only on the political plane, and so on. What is necessary is that the law develops on the basis of the law, then economic life also has the law, then spiritual life has the law. And if you say that the unity of the social organism is being cut, then I say: that is not the issue for me! The issue is not to cut the horse in two, but to put the horse on its four legs. The point is not to cut up the social organism, but to put it on its three healthy legs, on a healthy legal life, a healthy economic life and a healthy spiritual life. Then this unity, which is worshipped today as an idol as a unified state, but which must be abandoned if socialism is wanted.

For more than a century, people have repeatedly spoken of humanity's great social ideal, of the greatest social impulses: equality, freedom, fraternity. Of course, very clever people of the 19th century have repeatedly proved that these ideals cannot be realized because they were only seen under the hypnosis of the unitary state; hence the contradiction. But today is the time when these ideals must be realized, when these three impulses of social life must be grasped. And they can only be realized in the threefold social organism. In the spiritual life, which should stand on its own ground, individual abilities must be developed as they do on the ground of freedom. In the field of law, that which makes every human being equal to every other human being must prevail, and by means of this law every adult person can, through himself or through his representative, regulate his relationship with other people, including his working relationship. And in the field of economic life, that true brotherhood must prevail which can only flourish in cooperatives, whether they be consumer or producer cooperatives.

In the tripartite social organism, freedom, equality and fraternity will prevail because it has three parts: freedom in the realm of spiritual life, equality in the democratic realm of legal life, and fraternity in the realm of economic life.

Today I have only been able to hint to you from individual points of view what needs to be considered in today's very serious times; what is most necessary to consider if one seriously wants to help to get out of confusion and chaos, so as not to get deeper into confusion and chaos. What is necessary today is not to think only of small changes, but to have the courage to admit to ourselves that today great reckonings are due. Anyone who can truly look with an alert soul at what is only just beginning today must say to himself: We will not have long to deliberate. Therefore, we had better take a path that can be embarked upon every day. And what is given by the threefold social organism can be taken up every day. Only those who want to delve deeper into the practice that brought us the world catastrophe will want to call what is truly practical an impractical idealism.

If healing is to occur in social life, it will be necessary to thoroughly abandon the superstitious idolization of practice, which is nothing more than brutal human egoism. We must commit ourselves to an idealism that is not a one-sided idealism, but a true practice of life. Those who are sincere about our time will ask themselves today: how do I get on the path to a remedy for what we face as social damage? And it would be desirable for more and more people to come to this path before it is too late. And it could be too late very soon.

Closing words

After a discussion in which mainly party and trade union officials had spoken, Rudolf Steiner took the floor again:

I would have preferred it if the speakers had addressed the issues I had raised. Then we could have made the discussion fruitful. But that did not happen. So I will just point out a few things and draw attention to them.

Some speakers have said that nothing new has been presented in my considerations. Well, I know very well the development of the social movement. And anyone who claims that the essentials of what has been presented today from the experiences of the whole reorganization of the social situation through the world catastrophe is not something new should realize that they are saying something absolutely untrue. In reality, the situation is quite different: The speakers have not heard the new thing. They have limited themselves to hearing the few things that were taken for granted because they were correct when they were put forward as a critique of the usual social order. They have been accustomed for many years to hearing this and that as a slogan: that is what they heard. But what was said in between, about the threefold social order, about what can be achieved in every respect through this threefold social order, about that the speakers have heard absolutely nothing. And that is probably why they remained silent in their discussions about what they had not heard. I understand that. But I also understand that a fruitful discussion cannot actually come out of such a thing.

For example, we heard a speaker who, as if he had not experienced the last five to six years, talked at length about the old theories that have been discussed so many times before this catastrophe. He dutifully repeated all the theories about surplus value and so on, which are certainly correct but have been advanced countless times. He just forgot that we live in a completely, completely different time today. He forgot that, for example, only a few months before the German surrender, highly respected socialist leaders were still saying: When this world catastrophe is over, the German government will have to take a completely different position towards the proletariat than before. The German rulers will have to take the proletariat into account in all government actions and in all legislation in a completely different way than before. But the Socialists also said: the Socialist parties will have to be taken into account.

Well, things turned out differently. Those in power were plunged into the abyss, and the parties were there. Today they face a completely different world situation. In the face of this new world situation, however, one should not simply ignore new ideas and only listen to the parties that are naturally heard because they have always been considered as long as there has been a social movement. Instead, one should acquire the ability to respond to what is most urgently needed in the present day. Otherwise we face the great danger that basically has always existed in the old, customary world order: when something came along that looked at facts, that was taken from reality, it was declared to be ideology; it was declared to be philosophy, that it had nothing to do with reality, and that it paved the way for reaction. It would be the worst if the Socialist Party were to fall into a kind of reactionary paralysis, if it were unable to move forward with the facts speaking so loudly.

That is what matters today. Marx coined a nice phrase after he got to know the Marxists – it happens to many people who strive to bring something truly new into the world: As for me, I am not a Marxist. And Marx always showed – I am just reminding you of the events of 70/71 – how he learned from these events. He always showed that he was able to keep pace with the times. Today, when the time is ripe, he would certainly find the possibility of recognizing the real solution to the social question in the threefold social order. There is constant talk of new paths, and when a new path is shown, which admittedly takes real courage, it is said: No path is shown, only a goal is shown. One would like to ask: Has anyone already thought of this way, which makes it necessary for a kind of liquidation government to come into being? That is what is in fact very unusual for people, given their habits of thinking. The old governments, including the Socialist government, think of nothing but that they will be the beautiful, brave continuation of what the government used to be. What we need is for this government to keep only the initiative in the center, the supervision of the security service, hygiene and the like, and for it to become a liquidation government on the left and right: namely, by leaving intellectual life free, so that it passes into independent administration, and by putting economic life on its own feet.

This is not a theory, not a philosophy, this is a pointer to something that must be done. And for this to be done, it is first necessary to understand its necessity. This means gradually abandoning the old habit of only wanting to listen to what one likes and not wanting to listen to what is unknown.

When speakers appear who get tangled up in strange practical contradictions and don't even realize it, they show how actually impossible it is to find a practical way. One speaker managed to say today: Real political power still rests on economic foundations today. And then, after adding something – it is no longer so noticeable – he said: The first thing is that we gain political power in order to conquer economic power. So on the one hand, he declaimed: He who has economic power also has political power. And immediately afterwards, after a few sentences, they say: We must first have political power, then we will also get economic power. With such speakers, however, it will not be possible to take practical action. You can only take a practical path if you are able to think straight and not confuse the paths of thought.

You will not get anywhere by rigidly adhering to any objections, such as: The tendency towards laziness makes it necessary to force people into a unified school. All those who were in power in the past have put forward similar arguments. We have seen people in government who were truly no smarter than those they governed. But they still managed to put it this way: if we don't force people to do this or that, they won't do it voluntarily.

It is a strange phenomenon that such things are now also coming to light on socialist soil. What is really needed is the very thing that is at issue here: the opportunity to develop an understanding of what is necessary, not to stick to long-established theories and the like. That is what is always called for. When people say: the power must be seized!, they mean a gray 'theory'. Because once you have seized power, you also have to know what to do with that power. You can't get ahead any other way. Seize power – if you are in power and you don't know what to do, then all that power is for nothing. The point is that just before you come to power, you know clearly and distinctly what you are going to do with that power.

If, on the one hand, it has been said that the revolution of November 9 was a success, then it might just as well have been a failure. And if, on the other hand, it is said that foreign countries view the revolution as a fraud, this is precisely because power has been seized and those in power do not know what to do with it. But now it must finally be known what is to be done with power. But if everyone sticks to the old party opinions, then they may call for unity. There is one method of calling for unity, and that is to really see where the damage is. In this way, the threefolding impulse seeks to bring about unity. It is simply objectively defamatory to say that a new party or a new sect should be founded. It is nonsense. And if the resolution has been adopted by numerous assemblies, I am completely reassured that this resolution will never be complied with. If it were complied with, the result would be that the current rulers would very soon be shown the door. There is no need to fear that some kind of unity might be disturbed. But there is another way to destroy unity: to insist on one's principles and then to say: if you don't follow me, then we are not united. That is also a way of preaching unity when you actually mean: we can only be united if you follow me. Quite a few people actually think that today.

As I said, I am sorry that I cannot go into details, because actually not a single speaker in the discussion really touched on the issues that were raised in my lecture. It was even said at the end that I had philosophized. With such philosophizing, as this speaker did, one can indeed call everything a fruitless philosophy. But whether one can really arrive at something that can help with such philosophizing, as developed by the last speaker, is very much in question.

What is given in this threefold social organism was first given as an impulse during the terrible catastrophe of the war, when I believed that the right time had come. At that time, when we were still far from the monster of the Brest-Litovsk Peace, it seemed to me to be just the right thing to do, in contrast to what actually happened, to seek a balance in the East, starting from this impulse of threefolding. Nobody understood this. That is why what was subsequently triggered by the Brest-Litovsk Peace happened. Today it is really important that people are found who do not do it the way all those to whom this threefold social order was spoken about during the war, at that time of course with reference to foreign policy.

In the next few days, a brochure will be published about the guilt for the war. The world will learn what actually happened in Germany in the last days of July and the first days of August 1914. It will then be seen how the great misfortune befell us because we did not think for ourselves, because we let the authorities think for us, because we were satisfied to let the authorities do the thinking for us. That is what led to the fact that on July 26, instead of leading to a reasonable policy, politics had reached the zero point of its development. The world must learn about these things one day. It will learn about them in the next few days through the memoirs of the most important person who was active in those days, in July/August 1914. Then we will see what has been missed because only some people in authority thought in their own way, and that the others basically had their convictions dictated to them.

Now, we have heard the matter many times. The war profiteers were followed by the revolution profiteers. But there was also another consequence. The war talkers were followed by the revolution talkers. And the ratio of revolution talkers to war talkers is roughly the same as that of revolution profiteers to war profiteers.

We have to get beyond the chatter. And we have to get beyond the fact that we cannot be guided politically by any authority, whether they are socialist or other personalities. We have to become discerning people. We cannot become discerning people if we sweep aside everything that can really be based on the demands of the day.

I do not go into such things that have been brought up and that are nothing more than absolute distortions of what has permeated my considerations. The fact that I want to bridge the contradictions with goodwill is an objective slander. I certainly did not speak of bridging the contradictions with goodwill. I spoke of the institutions that are to be brought about. What does the independence of intellectual life, economic life, and legal life have to do with goodwill? It has to do with the objective description of what is to come.

I agree with anyone who says that first of all people want power, but I am also quite clear about the fact that whoever has the power must know how to use it. And if we just want to rush forward and leave the unenlightened masses behind, then we will not only end up in the same conditions, but in much worse conditions than those that already existed.

You can find something else philosophically and feel tremendously practical when you say: The French are exhausted, they can't give us bread, England is also emaciated by the war and can't give us bread, America is too expensive for us. But we can get bread from Russia! —- Well, for the time being the English have much more bread than the Russians themselves, despite all the false reports. The claim that we can expect bread from Russia is one that is not based on fact.

What is important is that we now truly understand the situation as it is. That we say to ourselves: we were unable to socialize with the old intellectual life, we need a new intellectual life. But that can only be the intellectual life detached from the constitutional state. We need a foundation on which labor is withdrawn from the struggles. That can only be the independent state under the rule of law. And we need a balancing of the value of goods, and that can only happen on the basis of an independent economic life. These are things that one can really want. These are things that are not just revolutionary phrases. These are things that, if one has the courage to bring them about, truly want to bring about a very different state of the world than it is now.

I believe that if you think about it long enough, you will come to understand what is contained in the threefold social order. And it can be introduced in a relatively short time. Now, when this healthy threefold organism is in place, our circumstances will be very much revolutionized. When the world moves towards the introduction of the threefold social organism, then we shall have no need to 'thunder' about world revolution, for it will then take place in an objective way. Thunder is not what it is about. What it is about is finding germinal thoughts that can develop into real social fruits.

Today, however, we do not need a lot of talk, but we do need to agree on what needs to be done. We are not dealing with ideologies, utopias or philosophies in the threefold social organism, but with something that can be done, that is a plan for real action, not a description of a future state, but a plan for work. We need a plan for every house, we need it for social reorganization. Those who are always cutting back, be they socialists or other people, will not lead to this, but only those who are inclined to really move forward. I fear that those who have heard “nothing new, only old” today will not lead us out of chaos, but into it.

We want to take a serious approach today to the acceptance of that which is so unusual, so new, that it is not even heard when it is said, but rather find its own phrases. Today, new habits of thought are necessary, a change in thinking is necessary. Humanity must appeal to new habits of thought, to new ways of thinking, before it is too late. And I say it again: if humanity does not have this inner courage, it could very easily soon be too late.

When people see the present distress and misery, they ask what has caused it, and usually they look for the causes in external circumstances. They will first look back at the painful years that have passed, four to five years. Perhaps he will also gradually become aware that what has been so painfully experienced in the last four to five years has been preparing itself over a long period of time, through decades, indeed through centuries of recent human development, just as a thunderstorm prepares itself through the sultriness of the whole day, without its formation being noticed, and then discharges itself. But even those people who look further back in this way to the causes and reasons for our present plight and our misery in this age, they will look more or less at external circumstances. They will also think of appearances when it comes to getting out of the confusion and chaos of this age, of external measures and institutions.

To a great extent, this view is correct. I myself have tried to express the extent to which this is the case, in accordance with my own convictions, in the lecture I was allowed to give here in Ulm a few weeks ago on social issues. But there is another side to this way of looking at things. We need only be attentive to what is a significant contemporary phenomenon in our present time with regard to the inner human life, the human soul life. In line with what I just mentioned, we are rightly striving for a more social organization of the external conditions of life than has been granted to humanity in the last three to four centuries. But is it not noticeable that we are striving towards this social organization from a very strange human state of mind? Do we not notice that basically human souls in the present are permeated with antisocial drives, with antisocial instincts, with little possibility of mutual understanding? And it is out of these antisocial states of mind, and all the more so because they are present, that we must strive for a more social organization of external life than that which the antisocial instincts of our present human life had developed during the last three to four centuries. If we consider the question from this point of view, we find that these antisocial tendencies of the present time are actually connected with the fact that we have lost the way to the innermost core of man's being, the way to that innermost core of being that every human being actually senses within himself, even if more or less brightly or only instinctively and obscurely: the supersensible human being. However strange it may sound, people today do not know exactly what their deeper, darker soul craves. It longs for a realization of the supersensible essence of the human being. And in the difficulties that our age in particular is experiencing in advancing to a satisfactory realization of this innermost human nature - in these difficulties lies much of what then expresses itself externally in confusion and chaos, as little as people want to admit this even today. Many people, however, think that the question I am talking about should be answered in a completely different way from the one I will give you tonight.

Since I have to discuss this question from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science, I will not be able to answer it in the convenient way that is sought by many people today, and which is popular in the broadest circles of humanity. When people today are told about the Mountains of the Moon and how one informs oneself about them through physical instruments and physical measures, they believe that acquiring knowledge about the Mountains of the Moon is a complicated matter. The human being overcomes himself and admits that one cannot penetrate to knowledge of, say, the Moon Mountains or the moons of Jupiter or the like in a completely comfortable way. But when it comes to the supersensible world, when it comes to the spiritual existence of the human being himself, the broadest circles today still behave quite differently. They find it too difficult to speak in the way I will have to speak to you today. Even today the widest circles say: Better than this apparent science is childlike confession or childlike belief in the Bible to enter the supersensible worlds. They insist on that which they find comfortable, on the childlike simplicity of the belief in confession or in the Bible, when it is a matter of the highest thing to which man can aspire on the path of the soul, and they reject that which does not lead man along this path in such a comfortable way. But even today people do not see certain inner connections that exist between this striving for comfortable spiritual paths and between our anti-social instincts and the difficulties of getting out of these anti-social instincts. If people realized the connection between what they have been told and believed from certain quarters: that you can seek the paths to the supersensible through childlike, simple creeds, and if they realized the connection between this assertion and this belief and between what is expressed today in terms of anti-social impulses, then one would certainly learn to think differently about what the widest circles today find to be a 'convenient way into the supersensible worlds'. 'But it is not out of some kind of intellectual quirk that spiritual science shows modern man other ways today, but it shows these ways because it feels it has an obligation to do so in view of the needs and tasks of present-day humanity. If present-day humanity were to recognize itself in its very depths, it would say to itself: With regard to supersensible striving, we can no longer be satisfied with the old ways. This lives today as a longing in many souls, and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to meet this longing.

As already mentioned, people today do ask more or less clearly or more or less unconsciously about the relationship between soul and body; if they have not already come so far as to deny everything of a soul nature, because doubt has always arisen in response to this question, doubt that has wearied them. But what does the modern person fundamentally know about soul and body? He observes the body in such a way that he applies his senses, his external physical mind, or, for that which he cannot directly learn through the senses and the mind, he resorts to natural science, which, through its investigations, is supposed to tell him what the laws are, what the inner nature of this human physical body is. On the other hand, man inwardly perceives that which he calls thinking, feeling and willing. This becomes an inner experience for him. To this thinking, feeling and willing he also attaches certain inner longings, desires and hopes, he attaches the belief that this inner life, living in thinking, feeling and willing, has not only the temporary significance for the world that the life of the physical body has. But then the question arises for the human being that gives rise to the great doubts: What is the relationship between what I perceive inwardly as soul in me, as thinking, feeling and willing, and what I see outwardly in myself and in others as the outer physical body, the laws and essence of which science seeks to explain to me? And if the human being cannot explain this relationship between the soul and the body to himself, then he may well turn to those who, based on certain scientific foundations, have the opportunity to investigate this relationship more deeply. And lo and behold, today's man, who is so eager to have everything explained to him by scientific authority, must then realize that in this question he can be helped little by the scientists he so seeks. If he takes anything at hand in which the researchers in this field have expressed themselves, he will usually find that they say about this question just as uncertainly as he carries within himself. All kinds of hypotheses and conjectures can be found. But something that seizes the human being in such a way that, if only they can truly take a position on it without prejudice, they might get a sense of the truth, is rarely found today. The task of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to find this.

But we cannot advance along the same paths by which we arrive at external science to that which I must now speak of as a spiritual science, as a real spiritual science. Imagine someone telling you about the paths of research they have taken in the chemical or physical laboratory, in the clinic, to research external nature. You would usually hear from such a researcher, who can justifiably believe that he has become an expert in his field, that he has gone his research ways with a certain calm, with a certain inner equanimous soul mood. There is not much excitement to be found on today's research paths.

But anyone who wants to tell you about the path he took to his insights into the supersensible human being cannot speak of such calmness, of such an inner, equanimous mood of the soul. If he is to tell you about what he went through to arrive at these insights, he will have to speak of inner struggles, of inner soul-searching, of difficult efforts, of repeatedly standing at the precipice of doubt. He will have to tell you about what he had to overcome in abundance, what he had to go through to arrive at what provides information about the actual supersensible human core of being. For one only really enters upon the path to knowledge of the supersensible human being when one has familiarized oneself with everything I have already indicated: when doubts arise when considering the question of the relationship between body and soul, so that one that can only arise from a certain intellectual modesty – while most people today, in such matters, have not at all intellectual modesty, but on the contrary, terrible intellectual arrogance.

But if one really makes an effort with ordinary thinking, with all the ordinary powers of the soul that one otherwise has in life, to approach these questions about the nature of soul and body, then one gradually realizes that one must be modest, that one cannot approach these questions with ordinary human thinking. And gradually, through inner experience, through inner discovery, one comes to realize that with this ordinary human thinking and feeling, one's approach to the supersensible is comparable to the abilities of a five-year-old child when, for example, it is presented with a volume of lyric poetry. This child cannot do anything with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. We must first develop his abilities further, then he can do something with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. So we must say to ourselves with regard to the thinking abilities that we have for our ordinary lives, with regard to the powers of knowledge that we have for our ordinary lives: you cannot use them to recognize the actual essence of the world and your own existence; you are initially confronted with this essence of the world and this essence of your own existence in such a way that you can do with it as little as a five-year-old child can with a book of poetry.

Only when one has developed this mood in one's soul, when one has conquered intellectual modesty so that one says to oneself: You must not remain with the way you can think now, feel and will now - only then does one stand at the starting point of the path into the supersensible worlds. For anyone who has something to say about the supersensible worlds must not only speak about something different from the ordinary external sense world, but must speak in a different way. This means, however, that one can only become a spiritual researcher if one first takes into one's own hands the faculties of thinking and cognition that one has for ordinary, everyday life and for ordinary science. Just as a child is educated by others, and its abilities developed by others, so must one take one's own inner soul abilities, first of all one's thinking ability, into one's own hands and develop them further, from the point of view at which thinking comes naturally in life.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have described in detail the systematic structure of the thinking process by which man can take his thinking ability into his own hands and develop it further than it has been developed by ordinary life and ordinary science.

This evening, due to the limited time, I will only be able to present the fundamentals of the matter. I will only be able to show you how to further develop this thinking, how to take it into your own hands and how to advance it further and further. The following is a prerequisite for this: If you want to educate yourself about the external physical being of a person, as I said earlier, you should turn to natural science. Now, this natural science is not to be disparaged. The spiritual researcher fully recognizes the great triumphs of natural science in modern times, just as the natural scientist can only recognize them himself. He recognizes this natural science as justified; he is all the better a spiritual researcher the better he is able to appreciate the value and significance of natural science. But precisely for this reason the other side must also be stated: if one asks this natural science, it initially presents one with the limits of knowledge. You are all well aware that it is precisely the level-headed natural scientists who speak of such limits of knowledge. Certain concepts, certain ideas are presented to the person who asks about the nature of things, about power, matter, etc. These concepts change from time to time, but certain limits always remain, beyond which the natural scientist says: You cannot go. The natural scientist is right in his field if he stops at these limits. The spiritual researcher cannot do this. But he must not want to go beyond these limits through mere speculation or mere fantasy.

When the spiritual researcher approaches that which science cannot recognize and where it has driven the boundary posts for knowledge, there the great inner soul struggles begin for him, for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher must fight inwardly with what the natural scientist presents as fixed boundary concepts. And here this struggle becomes a first great experience. He overcomes these limitations in his inner experience by struggling, and by overcoming them, a realization dawns on him with the experiences, which is important, fundamentally important for everything that is to lead to the knowledge of supersensible human nature. By devoting himself to this struggle with the limitations of natural knowledge, he realizes how peculiarly the human being is adapted to life. For the spiritual researcher must ask himself, from his experience, what prevents him from looking into the inner nature of things in a purely scientific way? There he discovers something most remarkable, I might say, something most distressing. If nature were transparent, if it did not set limits for us, then we human beings would not possess a quality in our life between birth and death that we absolutely need for our social existence in this life. If man could see into the inner nature of nature, he would have to do without the soul power of love! Everything we call love from person to person, what we call love and brotherly feelings from person to person, what glows in the soul when we approach another person socially, we could not have if nature did not set limits for our knowledge of nature.

This is a truth that cannot be proven logically. Just as little as one can logically prove that there is a whale or that there is no whale – one can only be convinced by seeing it with one's own eyes – so one cannot prove that one would have to do without love if knowledge of nature had no limits. But as an experience it presents itself to him who really struggles into spiritual knowledge. There you see what secrets our human existence holds. It is such a secret that man must pay for limited knowledge of nature by developing love. And vice versa: he must pay for his ability to love by initially having no unlimited knowledge of nature.

But this also shows us what the one who really wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, to which man himself with his innermost core of being belongs, has to overcome. One of the basic principles for the paths up to the supersensible human being and to the supersensible world in general is that one's ability to love, one's devotion to all beings in the world, must be greater than it is in ordinary life between birth and death, so that one does not lose love when one now tries to shape one's thinking more and more so that it becomes different from the way one thinks in ordinary life. It must be a preparation for the spiritual path of knowledge, to make oneself much, much more capable of love than one has to be for the ordinary social life. One gradually realizes that one actually only gets to know the world in one's full human nature as long as one is in the physical body, through love, through no other method of research.

But if you want to penetrate into the spiritual world, you must at the same time develop your thinking higher than it develops naturally in human nature. This is achieved by systematically applying certain inner soul activities, which in life are otherwise only applied incidentally, by forcing yourself to do so. Today I can only give you a small excerpt of what you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” But I can at least hint at what this higher development of human thinking is based on.

You know that when something from outside stimulates us in some way, we become aware of it. We hear a sound and we are interested in what is happening in the direction of that sound. So being interested in something and turning our attention to it are inner soul activities that are usually stimulated in people from the outside world. What is important when entering the spiritual path of knowledge is that we apply such forces as the forces that lead to attention and interest in us, for example, by meditating on an idea for a very, very long time, as they say, by putting our soul completely into this idea. In the ordinary, natural course of life, attention and interest in this idea are lost. But if you deliberately immerse yourself in such an idea with all your soul, and remain in it, so that you maintain from within the attention that is in danger of fading, that you maintain from within the interest when it is in danger of fading, through the length with which you devote yourself to the idea - and if you keep doing this, then you invigorate your thinking; your thinking becomes something quite different from what it used to be. Then one comes indeed to a thinking that is full of inner activity, but in which one must also exert oneself, as one must exert oneself in an external manual labor. One comes to a thinking that relates to ordinary thinking as ordinary thinking relates to the thinking of a five-year-old child, for example, in relation to lyrical poems. But one comes to a kind of thinking of which one says to oneself: if one has achieved it, then one had to exert an inner strength in order to achieve it, which really took the physical, which also cooperates, so that one feels it like a fatigue from hard external work, to which one has devoted oneself for years. If one learns to recognize that one can work at something in one's soul that costs as much effort as chopping wood costs for me, then one comes to grasp the living thinking in one's soul, while ordinary thinking only accompanies external phenomena, external experiences. Think about how you actually think in ordinary life: you do your work in ordinary life, and your thinking runs along dreamily alongside this outer life. Try to make this thinking more strenuous by reading a difficult book, and you will notice that just when thinking wants to be inwardly active, it must tire, like any other activity. But what is developed from within through this activity must be pushed further and further with the thinking. When it is pushed further and further, one notices that a great change is taking place in thinking. Then one learns to recognize something of which one had no idea before: one learns to recognize that one lives in a thinking of which ordinary thinking is only a reflection, an image: one learns to know a thinking that lives inwardly, a thinking that is completely independent of the tool of the brain, of the tool of the body. However grotesque, however paradoxical, however insane it may appear to present-day humanity, in this way, which you will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, the human being can come to know very precisely: by thinking, by developing the soul activity of thinking, you live outside the body with your thinking, while ordinary thinking is tied to the instrument of the body, to the nervous system. But one also learns to recognize exactly how little the inner soul being, which one grasps in one's thinking, is bound to the instrument of the brain. For one does not develop this inner soul being in the first place, but one only gets to know it. I am not talking to you about something that is being developed anew today, but about the knowledge of the supersensible human being. One learns to recognize the great error to which ordinary natural science and external popular opinion about thinking succumb, especially in our materialistic age.

Natural scientific thinking says: the brain is the instrument of thinking. But that is an error, just as it would be an error if you were to see wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps in a muddy country lane and then to reflect – let us assume for the moment – on the forces at work from below, from the earth, that have produced the wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps. That would, of course, be foolish. You cannot see from the structure of the earth itself how the furrows were formed. You have to realize that a cart has driven there, that people have walked over it with their feet, that this has left an impression. In this way you come to see the error of science with regard to the human soul life when you really get to know thinking that is independent of the body. There you learn that what is in the brain as nerve furrows does not have the forces in the brain itself that produce the soul; rather, you learn that all these furrows are driven in — like furrows in soft earth driven in by carts and footsteps — that these furrows are dug in by soul activity independent of the body. And now you also understand the error that can arise in science. Such traces arise in the brain for everything that is engraved there; you can follow them all; but this did not arise from the body, it is engraved into the body.

But it is not always easy to grasp this active being. In order to get even a brief glimpse into this human thinking, which is independent of the body, one needs what could be called presence of mind, because it does not last long, such a glimpse of the spiritual into our ordinary perception. One can prepare oneself well – you will also find something about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by developing in everyday life what can be called presence of mind, rapid orientation in situations and the ability to act quickly in a situation. If we develop this quality more and more, we prepare ourselves to see what can appear out of the spiritual, the supersensible world, and what we otherwise do not see because we do not have time to muster the necessary presence of mind while it occurs; because we do not have time to look at it before it is over. But if you really learn to look into the spiritual world in this way, if you learn to recognize what lives in the human being and can be grasped in this way through developed thinking, then you see not only into the ordinary human life of everyday life, but then a completely different perspective arises.

There is one thing that this spiritual knowledge does not have: it is not memorable in the ordinary sense. The one who wants to tell you something from the spiritual world must always create the conditions to see it. He cannot just develop a memory for his earlier spiritual vision. But even if that spiritual insight, I would like to say, passes quickly like a fleeting dream that is soon forgotten, it contains within itself a meaningful memory. And at this point something must be said that will naturally strike the people of the present time as highly peculiar. But it certainly did strike people as peculiar when they were told that there are not just glowing points up there, but countless worlds spread throughout space! Just as men centuries ago were slow to believe it, but became so accustomed to it that today it is a matter of course for them, so what the spiritual researcher presents as his experience through his developed thinking will still seem unusual today, but it will have to be a matter of course for the coming centuries. And one of the tasks of our time will be to develop people's understanding for such an expansion of human knowledge and human perception. In the moment when man has an inwardly living thinking and knows that with this thinking he is independent of the body, he looks back - while he cannot have the ordinary memory in this moment - to the spiritual-soul that he has gone through in a purely spiritual world before he united with the physical human body through birth or conception and thereby descended from a spiritual world into the sensual world. The view expands beyond the life one has been living since birth; life expands into the contemplation of the spiritual world from which we have descended to our physical existence.

This also gives a new meaning to our entire social life. In our social life, we relate to this or that person. We quickly develop an affinity for one person, while with another we do not find ourselves so quickly united in sympathy. The most diverse relationships arise with other people here in this life between birth and death. If, as a spiritual researcher, you learn to recognize life as I have just indicated, then you will find that what attracts you to one person and what more or less alienates you to another person – in short, what arises in your relationships with others – is the result of what we have lived through with other souls in another world before we descended to this physical existence. Everything we experience in the physical world is a reflection of experiences in the spiritual world. In this way, human spiritual endeavor in our time will be able to give rise to insight into the spiritual world from this physical world.

There may still be many people today who cannot relate to such a view. But one can still think about such people. When the first railroad was built in Germany, a council of physicians and other scholars were called together to decide whether or not to build railroads. These learned gentlemen delivered the verdict that railways should not be built because traveling would be harmful to health and only fools would want to travel in them. In any case, a high board wall would have to be erected so that those along whom the railroad passes would not get concussions. Today there are people who, figuratively speaking, believe that one gets a concussion when the spiritual researcher speaks of the insights of the supersensible world. But the development of time will overcome these prejudices as it has overcome other prejudices.

What I have described to you is one way of crossing over from the physical world into the superphysical world. One must struggle with the limitations of knowledge of nature. But one must also come to terms with another limitation if one is to enter the spiritual world and gain insights into the supersensible nature of the human being. Just as one must come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of external nature, one must also come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of one's own being.

A great many people despair of finding satisfaction for their inner soul life in their old religious traditions and turn to so-called mysticism, believing that if they delve deeper and deeper into their souls, their inner soul life, their human nature, will become clear to them. Many people believe that what they truly are as human beings can arise mystically. The spiritual researcher must also learn this limit. He must be able to be a mystic, just as he must develop knowledge of nature. But he must not stop with mysticism, just as he must not stop with knowledge of nature. He must learn that mere mysticism leads to nothing but illusions about the supersensible human being, but not to a real knowledge of this supersensible human being. A true spiritual researcher is truly not an illusionist. He does not succumb to any illusions about what he has to recognize as reality. Therefore, unlike the ordinary mystic, he does not set out to conjure up all kinds of fantasies from within himself. No, there he knows one thing again: by struggling with his own inner being, by going through his own personal struggle, he knows that what mystics find is basically nothing other than what has made an impression on their souls since birth. They may have only grasped it dimly, it may not have come to their perception quite clearly, but it has remained in their memory.

Scientific research has already made some very interesting observations in this regard. I will briefly share one with you that is recorded in scientific literature, but which could be multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold. A natural scientist passes a bookstore window. His eye falls on a book. And as he looks at the title of the book, he has to laugh. Just imagine, a naturalist has to laugh when he sees a serious book title! He cannot explain to himself why he has to laugh. Now he closes his eyes because he thinks he will be able to figure it out more quickly if he is not distracted by the external impression. By closing his eyes, he hears in the distance what he had not heard before, as long as he was distracted: a barrel organ. And by continuing his investigation, he realizes that the organ is playing a melody to which he once danced. At the time, it made no strong impression on him; he was more interested in the dancer, or even in the dance steps. The impression of the melody itself was weak at the time, but still strong enough to resurface in later life when the researcher hears the same melody from the organ!

The spiritual researcher is very familiar with such things and their essence, for he has no illusions. He knows that when some mystic speaks of experiencing the divine human within himself, of experiencing something that brings him together with his eternal self, then it is the 'sounds of the barrel organ': he has once taken something in, that has transformed itself – for such things transform themselves – that rises as reminiscence. In the path of ordinary mysticism you find nothing but what you have once absorbed, and you can give yourself up to the most terrible illusions by wanting to be a mere mystic.

It is precisely this limitation that the spiritual researcher must overcome. Through experience one comes to know that what cannot be proved “logically” can be attained by the spiritual researcher through direct experience: one learns to recognize that one may not learn to know oneself by looking inwardly. For if one could see through oneself inwardly, one would in turn lack a human soul power that one must have for ordinary life if one could see through oneself inwardly. If one could see through oneself inwardly, one would not have the power of memory in ordinary life. And that this power of memory, the power of memory, is healthy, depends on whether we are healthy at all in our soul life. If our memory, our recollection, is disturbed, the ego is disturbed, a terrible mental illness occurs. So that we have to say: just as man, in order to have love, must have limits in his knowledge of nature, so too, in order to have memory, he must be placed in the impossibility of coming to the higher human being through mere inner contemplation.

But one can also ensure that this ability to remember is more firmly rooted in human nature than in ordinary life, which can also be done through exercises such as those I have described in the book mentioned.

In the same way that you can move towards consciously elevating your thinking, as I have described, you can also move towards conscious self-discipline by always noticing: You are doing this or that badly, you have to learn from life. In this way, you can take your will development into your own hands, just as you took your thought development into your own hands. When you take your will development into your own hands, something develops that, so to speak, illuminates the otherwise dark will in which you find yourself in ordinary life: you feel everything that you feel as will, interspersed with thoughts. In a sense, you are the spectator of your own will and action. When one comes to be the observer of one's own will and actions in such a tangible, spiritual and soul-like way, then what one receives as a higher willpower coincides with what developed earlier as thought activity. And now another faculty comes into play: one now beholds in one's own human nature something that appears so independent of all physical activity that one knows: What you carry within you, you carry out through death into the spiritual world. Through the culture of the will, one comes to know the spiritual life that a person lives after death, just as one comes to know, through the culture of thought, the spiritual life that a person has experienced before birth or conception. As you can see, spiritual research cannot speak in the usual way about the supersensible human being, but must relate how one experiences being able to look at the life of a person before and after death.

By penetrating into the world of one's own human existence in this way, one encounters social life in a new form. One observes how one experiences this or that together with other people, how one enters into relationships with other people, how one becomes friends with other people or is connected or disconnected again through other circumstances in the world. One learns to recognize that everything that takes place in the physical-sensual world is only the beginning of something that develops further as we pass through the gate of death. The relationships of the soul that are formed here between human and human find their continuation when the human being passes through the gate of death. The life that joins death becomes a very concrete reality in that we know that we are connected to those people here through our relationships in the sensual life, even beyond death.

These are things that still seem strange to people today, but they must be mastered by the tasks of our time. If they are, then something quite different will come to the fore. Then man will recognize in a completely different light what he today calls his own human development, what he today calls history. If one develops abilities such as those of which I have spoken, then one also looks differently into the historical of humanity than the fable convenue indicates, which is called history today and which must become something completely different in the future. I will give you an example at the end of my discussion to show you how the human being of the future must penetrate into the historical development of humanity itself.

We do not usually notice it, but at a certain historical point in recent times, a major turning point occurred in the development of humanity. That was in the middle of the 15th century. We usually say that nature does not make any leaps. It is a saying that is generally believed, although it is false. Nature is constantly making leaps. Consider the development of a plant, how a flower with stamens and pistils develops from a leaf, and finally the fruit! In the same way, historical life also makes leaps. And such a leap occurred in the middle of the 15th century, which we only fail to recognize because we look at history so superficially. The expanded human gaze, which overcomes, as it overcomes the experiences between birth and death, also that which is only presented in external history, in external facts, and it looks into the spirit of historical activity. And so this view shows that we have been living since the middle of the 15th century in the age that will last for a long time, which replaced another age that began in the 8th century BC and lasted until the middle of the 15th century. century. This era, from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, encompasses everything that was the magnificent Greek culture, what was Roman culture, and the after-effects of Greek and Roman civilization. And since the middle of the 15th century, we have, as I will characterize it in a moment, our modern culture with modern humanity.

How do these two cultures differ? They differ in something that people in the present time do not yet want to see and acknowledge. Before the 15th century, going back to the 8th century BC, man was capable of development in a completely different way than today. I can make this clear to you in the following way. Think about what the human being is like in the years before he changes his teeth around the seventh year, and how that marks a turning point in his life! You can read more about this in the small booklet on 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. You will see what it actually means for the more precise observer of human nature, what the child goes through with the change of teeth. There is a parallelism between the outer development of the body and the inner development of the soul. Then, in turn, there is a next point of development at the time of sexual maturity, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then the parallelism between body and soul becomes less clear, but for present humanity it continues until about the twenty-seventh year. In the twenty-seventh year, one ceases to feel this connection between spiritual-soul development and bodily development strongly. This remarkable fact that the human being completes his physical development at the age of twenty-seven has only emerged since the middle of the 15th century. It was different in the previous period. What can be recognized here through spiritual research is an infinitely significant human developmental truth. In Greek and Roman times, human beings were at such a stage of development that until the age of thirty-three or thirty-five, there was a parallelism between their physical and spiritual-soul development. The Greeks developed qualities such as these, although not to the same extent, until well into their thirties, as evidenced by the change of teeth and sexual maturity. This is what constituted the remarkable harmony of soul and body in the Greeks. The progression that human history shows is that we have less and less of the years of youth, less and less of what emancipated us from the physical and bodily in our earlier years. But this also requires a completely different position of the soul-spiritual to the world being in the human being. In the long period from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, human beings developed more of an instinctive mind and an instinctive emotional life. Everything that lives in this period is permeated by this instinctive life of mind and soul. But since the middle of the 15th century, man has developed a more conscious mental and emotional life and with it the demand to place himself on the level of the free personality. This demand of human nature to place itself on the level of the free personality is only developing in history since the middle of the 15th century.

This also explains how the great events in human development fall differently depending on whether they occur in one or the other epoch. In the epoch that preceded our own, in which man remained capable of physical development well into his thirties, the greatest event in the development of the earth occurred in the first third of this epoch: the event that actually gives the development of the earth its true meaning, the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, the founding of Christianity. In the first third of the Greco-Latin era, what is like the central event of the whole human development on earth took place. The way it took place in the human race at that time, it could only be grasped naively by humanity in the age in which instinctive powers of mind and instinctive powers of the soul were present. It was only through these instinctive powers that people were able to relate to the great event in the right way during that period, because they did not yet behave consciously, but naively. They said to themselves: This is not just something that is done by human beings, something superhuman has broken into earthly development. The Christ, the superhuman being, has united with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What happened at Golgotha is, in its physical facts, only the outer expression of something supersensible that has taken place in the development of the earth.

In those days, therefore, it could be grasped instinctively. This has changed since the middle of the 15th century. Since the middle of the 15th century, the instinctive mind, the instinctive power of mind, has been transformed into conscious mind, into conscious powers of mind. This made it possible to develop natural science to the high level it has reached, but also to develop industry, and to develop the materialism of the age, which had to be there as an adjunct to place the free personality at the top. But this materialism must be transcended by seeking the path to the spiritual world in a new way, as I have described it today. The age became materialistic in the epoch in which the consciousness soul of man developed from the earlier instinctive soul. Then, in addition to external materialism, the materialism of theology also emerged. Consider how, in wide circles, even theology, the religious view, has been grasped by materialism; how man of the age of consciousness became incapable of recognizing the supersensible in the event of Golgotha, how he came more and more to drag it down into the sensual; how he finally became proud of it, how even numerous theologians became proud of no longer seeing in the Christ the supersensible entity that descended to earth in the body of a human being, but only seeing the “simple man from Nazareth,” who is indeed somewhat greater than other people, but is nevertheless merely a human being. That in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the death and resurrection of Christ, the greatest fact in the evolution of the world and of humanity is presented to us, has not yet dawned upon the materialistic age. Religion itself has become materialized. Simple religious belief will not be able to stop this materialization of religion. It can only be stopped by the conscious knowledge of the spirit, of which I have spoken today. It will in turn arise from the realization that in Jesus of Nazareth there lived a supermundane, a supersensible being, which since that time has united itself with the evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha will be placed in the sphere of human contemplation through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; but now it will be placed in such a way that it will be freed from the narrow-mindedness of the individual denominations.

What will develop as the spiritual outlook of the supersensible human being, as I have described it today, will make it possible for it to live in every human being across the whole earth, without distinction of race or nationality. From there, however, the path to the mystery of Golgotha will also be found, and all people across the whole earth will understand this Christ event, learn to comprehend it. In our time people enthuse about the so-called League of Nations; one enthuses about this League of Nations in the utopian way in which it originated in the abstract thinking of Woodrow Wilson. It will not be able to arise in this way. It needs a foundation of reality, and this must proceed from the innermost part of the human soul. That is the task of the present time. Only in this ability of the soul, which leads to the path of knowledge of the supersensible human being and unites people of the whole earth, only through such knowledge, which can look at the Christ event as a supersensible event, only in such an impulse, which works across nations, which works across all borders through nations, lies the real power for a future true League of Nations across the earth. In this way, Christianity must strike its new roots into human culture.

This shows you the other side to what I was allowed to say here in the previous lecture. This shows you the side that corresponds to the human inner soul life, which in turn will ignite social instincts in the human being when it fills him. To receive this spiritual science, one does not need to believe in authority as one does to receive the other scientific knowledge that is conveyed, say, from the observatory about astronomy, from medicine about the nature of the physical human being. That must be accepted on authority if one does not want to become an astronomer or a physiologist and so on oneself. But you do not have to believe what the spiritual researcher tells you on authority. You do not have to be a spiritual researcher yourself, just as you do not have to be a painter to find the beauty in a picture. You can absorb spiritual science through your common sense without being a spiritual researcher yourself, if you just sweep away the prejudices that have developed from today's materialism. Because everything in spiritual science is stored in the depths of the human soul, it can be understood without belief in authority. And this understanding, this trust in the revelations of spiritual science, is something that must be lived into the tasks of our age. Then this age will experience a renewal. Then this age will be given the ferment for what, as an external institution of a new structure, will have to play a corresponding role.

For what do we see when we really try to understand the nature of the present time? I would say: We see two paths, one on the left and one on the right. One of these offers us the possibility of stopping at the views that mere natural science has brought, and from this view, which natural science has brought, to now also proceed to social views; thus to start from the belief that one can understand social life with the same faculty of thought with which one understands nature. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did that, and so do Lenin and Trotsky. That is why they arrive at their conclusions. People today do not yet realize that natural science stands on one side, and that its ultimate consequences find expression in social chaos and social decline. The terrible faith that now seeks to destroy all truly human culture in Eastern Europe, this terrible faith of Lenin and Trotsky, arises from the other faith, that the paths of scientific knowledge must also be followed in social life. What has happened under the influence of this newer materialistic-scientific faith? Our entire spiritual life has been mechanized. But because our spiritual life no longer rises to thoughts about the supersensible human being, because it mechanizes itself on the external mechanistic view of nature, at the same time the souls are vegetarianized, made plant-like, sleepy. Thus we see that in addition to the mechanized mind, we have a vegetarianized soul in modern cultural life. But if the soul is not warmed through by the spirit, if the spirit is not suffused with supersensible knowledge, then animal qualities develop in the body. Today these animal qualities live in anti-social instincts and want to become the executioners of culture in Eastern Europe. Then, under the guise of wanting to socialize, the most anti-social thing develops; then the bodily life becomes animalized alongside the mechanized spirit and the vegetated soul. The wildest instincts and drives arise as historical demands. That is the path that leads left.

The other way, the right way, is to enter into the view of the supersensible human being, the supersensible world, as presented in today's message. This view also sees the development of the human being in the supersensible light, and penetrates to the truly free spirit.

In my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I wanted to describe freedom as the basis for human progress, and to show how man can experience his true inner freedom by grasping the spiritual life. Only the spirit that permeates man can truly become free. The spirit that only permeates nature and seeks to shape all social life according to the pattern of modern natural science becomes mechanistically unfree. And the soul, permeated only by this spirit, sleeps like the plant. The soul that is warmed through by the true, pulsating will of spiritual knowledge of supersensible human nature steps forward in social life. It learns to recognize the supersensible human being in the other person. It learns to see the divine in the archetype in every person. It learns social feeling towards every person. It learns how, with regard to this innermost soul, all people here on earth are equal. And in this soul, warmed by the spirit, equality can develop in the other way on the right. And when the bodies are imbued and spiritualized by the supersensible consciousness, when they are warmed through, when they are ennobled by what the soul absorbs, by being awakened by the spirit, not remaining vegetated, then the bodies will not become animalized either; then the bodies become such that they develop what, in the broadest sense, can be called genuine love. Then, then the human being knows that he enters into his earthly body as a supersensible being, that he enters into this body to develop love in this body, to develop love towards the spirit. Then he knows that there must be brotherhood in the earthly body, otherwise the individual cannot be a whole, a full human being in unbrotherly humanity.

Thus the continuation of the old way leads us to the mechanization of the spirit, to the vegetarianization of the soul, to the animalization of the body. The path that is to be shown by spiritual science leads us to the true social virtues, but to the social virtues that are permeated by the spirit and warmed by the soul; that are carried out by the ennobled human body.

Thus spiritual knowledge of the supersensible human being leads us to found the future on a beautiful new building on earth: freedom in spiritual life. The spiritualized human being will be a free human being. Equality in the soul life warmed by the spirit: the soul that takes in the spirit will perceive and treat the other soul that it encounters in social life as truly equal, as if in a great secret. And the ennobled body, the body ennobled by spirit and soul, will become the vehicle of truest, most genuine human love, of true brotherhood. Thus the social order of man in freedom, equality and brotherhood will be able to take place through the correct understanding of body, soul and spirit.