The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Socialistic thinkers believe that what they designate as the socialistic economic order is an immediate and causal continuation of what has gradually arisen within the economic order during the past centuries of human development. Those. who now adopt the proletarian socialistic conception of life, think as it were, that the capitalistic economic order must gradually, and of its own accord, pass over to the socialistic economic order, for the simple reason that the socialistic economic order is already contained within that which has developed through capitalism during the past centuries. In order to define this train of thought more precisely some people say: When any human order, or any life-structure has reached its culminating point, the summit of its development, then it already contains the seed of the following course of development.

You see, from an external aspect, from a statistical aspect as it were (and socialistic scientists above all love statistics),. there is a great deal in what I have explained to you as the socialistic order. The process can shortly be characterised as follows: In certain spheres, modern technical engineering has led over into industry a process which was formerly entrusted to the individual human being, and which could be fully surveyed by him. As a very characteristic example, it suffices to consider the modern steel industry; quite a number of manipulations had to be comprised within it. Finally, these all culminated in the production of certain goods, which could only be produced by amalgamating certain complicated processes. Great masses of capital are needed in order to run the gigantic industrial concerns which modern economic life has called into existence, great accumulations of capital, against which the economic life of earlier times appears ridiculous. This accumulation of capital enables individual owners, or group of owners of such gigantic concerns to employ a large number of workmen. Through the fact that these industrial concerns have taken on such a gigantic size, they are able to assemble and to employ a large number of workmen. Moreover, the conditions of transport have led, to the circumstance that these large concerns cannot isolate themselves, because they must reckon with competition, so that, in a certain way, they had to amalgamate, thus creating still larger groups of employers and of workmen belonging to certain definite spheres of life. Modern socialists believe that the modern socialistic idea has led to the socialisation of industry, and that the accompanying phenomena of this socialisation must necessarily continue the whole process.

The continuation of this process would be that a community of workmen is no longer brought together by individual employers, but that they are instead employed by a common body, the State, the Commune, or Syndicates. Consequently, the socialistic process which has already been called into existence by the technical economic life of modern times, can continue in a regular way.

The above idea has a tremendously suggestive influence upon the modern proletariat. If the conditions of social: life are to be understood, it is also necessary to study the soul constitution of the modern proletariat. There we find that such ideas exercise a strong, suggestive power over the minds of modern proletarians, which consists therein that workmen believe that they are completely at the mercy of their employers. They think that they can only escape from this bondage if they have a share in the activities of the employers.

It is characteristic trait of modern men (and this is due to many reasons) that they have a predilection for one-sided thoughts. Yet many conditions of the present can only be healed if modern men lose this habit of surrendering to one-sided ideas, and if they learn to consider things from all sides. If we view the development of capitalism end the technical economic life of the present merely from the aspect that it must finally culminate in the socialisation of industrial life, we simply apply modern natural-scientific ideas to economic life. I have already explained this to you yesterday, from another standpoint.

But if we merely consider things from a natural-scientific aspect, if we merely apply to them the natural-scientific forms of thought developed in modern times, certain impulses necessarily fall away, remain unnoticed. Of course, when such things are explained, many things can be misunderstood and consequently contested. But you know what methods are required, particularly from a spiritual-scientific aspect, so that it will not be difficult for you to see that the following explanations throw light upon things only from one aspect, namely from the aspect which is required in this particular case.

The purely natural-scientific aspect, which considers things only in accordance with the law of cause and effect, can be applied both to a sound and to an unsound organism. A sound organism can be studied from a physiological aspect, and by following natural science it will always be possible to ascertain the connections of cause and effect, But if this abstract connection of cause and effect is maintained, this same manner of thinking can just as well be applied to a diseased organism, it can be studied in this way from a pathological aspect. Even in a diseased organism, everything can be found to be in accordance with the law of cause and effect. But if we base a sequence of events upon this one-sided, abstract foundation, the law of cause and effect, then the impulse which must in one case be designated as impulse of health, and in the other case as the impulse of disease, necessarily falls away, remains unnoticed. It is not contained in such a manner of contemplating things. This has no serious consequences in natural science itself, and in tasks immediately connected with natural science. But if the natural-scientific way of thinking is applied to the study of social processes, it can have very serious consequences, for it is not possible to distinguish without further ado the difference between something that is sound or unsound in the course of human development. This is impossible

It must be emphasized that the way in which people now face social questions, which have become so urgent, does not enable them to distinguish whether a process is sound or unsound, whether it should be furthered of healed. Indeed, we can say that the deep tragedy of the present has befallen humanity, because people cannot see this difference, which has just now been characterised to a certain extent.

If we consider the development of humanity during the past three or four centuries, if we study above all the development of what has been designated as capitalism, another standpoint must be borne in mind, as well as the one that smaller industrial concerns were swallowed up by the gigantic industries of modern times, etc. We must, for example, face this question, which is a decisive on: What position does the capitalistic production take up within the social process of humanity as a whole?

Things can only be judged in the right way if we compare the modern capitalistic production to the craftsmanship of past times, and if we make this comparison from a certain definite standpoint. The artisan of olden times produced his goods and delivered them to the consumer, and the money which he thus earned enabled him to live, provided the foundation for his existence.

If we study the life of such a craftsman and the industrial process of the past, if we go back to about 1300 B.C., we shall find that people were paid for the goods which they had made, or else they exchanged them for other goods. The articles which they manufactured, provided the foundation of their existence.

In a certain sense, this economic life was a restricted one, but it was closely linked up with the individual human being., Lad every form of production was therefore linked up with personal skill, personal diligence, and the personal ambition to do something as well as possible, and so forth. Significant moral impulses were connected with economic life in those days of simple craftsmanship.

During the past three to four centuries all this changed. After a period of transition, which went from the 15th century to about the 16th/17th century, a complete change took place during the past three to four centuries. For, what may be designated as the capitalistic production, as capitalistic industry, only developed during the past three to four centuries.

If we wish to understand that which really lies at the foundation of the social question, if we do not only base ourselves upon that which people think, the following characteristic must be borne in mind: For a capitalist, in so far as he is a member of the capitalistic economic order, the essential point is not that of providing for his own existence, of forming a life foundation through his capital, but the essential point is for him that of increasing his capital, of seeing to it that it grows. This increase in capital constitutes the profit. Consequently, the aim of the capitalistic economic order is not that of earning money enabling the capitalists to meet their cost of living, but its aim is that of making profits, of increasing the capital. This is its characteristic trait, and this gives capital, as such, a high degree of independence.

When the process of production or the industrial process grows in the course of the years through the accumulation of capital, when this industrial process grows and forms the incentive of accumulating capital, then the chief element in this economic process really becomes separated from the individual human being from every personal element. If we wish to understand the social question, we must bear in mind above all the following standpoint: that the economic process becomes emancipated from the personal element, from the individual human being.

Unfortunately to-day only a small minority belonging to the cultivated classes really feels inclined to deal with such things; for if people were to occupy themselves with such matters they would see that the human being has, as it were, become separated from everything which constitutes the economic process. Tell me, where can we find to-day genuine pleasure in the production of goods, and with the exception of a few restricted circles, where do people find true enjoyment in the production of goods? The decisive element of past economic orders, that, for instance, a man felt the keenest pleasure in every key made by his own hands, and that he saw a point of honour in making it as perfect as possible—this belongs to the past. The human beings have become separated, as it were, from the economic process as such. Only in the artistic field or in that which is related to the sphere of art, we may still come across that element which once permeated craftsmanship.

Even in spiritual life, we cannot say that man is still connected with what he brings forth. Think of all the professors who are active in his or in that field; and ask yourselves whether they are really humanly connected with what they produce!

But these are facts which are intimately connected with the capitalistic economic order, which extends its influence over everything. The concluding remarks of yesterday's lecture will have shown this to you.

The fundamental character of the capitalistic economic order reveals that in regard to his personal aspirations, man is; as it were, cut off from the economic process which has become more and more objectivated, This has brought about a far-reaching result, which influences the whole socialistic conception of today, for it has given rise to the belief that it is necessary to establish this unnatural separation within the economic order of the present time, so that the human being himself is cut off from that which interests him. Where do we find people to-day who think that it is necessary to re-establish the connection between the human being and that which he produces?

We do not find them anywhere. On the contrary, people think that the economic process should be distanced as far as possible from man, should be separated from the human being. What is the result of this? All that is connected with the human personality; the needs of the human being as such, have to satisfied in other spheres. This is the consequence of that prejudice which is designated as the socialistic ideal.

Let us now consider what this socialistic ideal really means to-day among large circles:

There are four points which recapitulate everything that constitutes the socialistic ideal, as far as the structure of the social organism of humanity is concerned. In the first place, the socialistic ideal aims at appropriating all industrial concerns for the community, no matter whether this community is the State, the Commune, or a Syndicate. In other words, industrial concerns or means of production which are private property are to be eliminated, so that these concerns are run by a community.

The second aim of the socialistic ideal is that production be regulated according to the requirement, or the demand, that is to say, production should no longer be regulated by the free market, where offer and demand hold sway, but when there is a demand for some article in this or in that direction, a corresponding branch of production should be opened, with the provision that the State, the Commune or a Syndicate determine, as it were, that this article is needed and that the community accordingly opens an industrial concern for the production of this article.

The third point is the democratic regulation of the conditions of work and pay.

The fourth point is that profits belong to the community.

This constitutes more or less the four points of the socialistic ideal, which we have now set before you.

You see, millions and millions of people see in these four points the aim of their ambitions. In view of these facts, it is absolutely necessary to ask ourselves: How can we make people realise that these four so-called ideals are absolutely impossible within a real human community?

If thirty years ago there had been as much zeal for social questions as is the case to-day in countries where the old governments have been chased away (a genuine interest in social questions has not yet awakened in countries where. the old governments still exist);we might even say, if thirty years ago people had shown the same interest for social problems which they show for them to-day, matters might have taken another course of development, a better course of development. But unless people are near to drowning, no genuine interest can be awakened to-day for social questions. What the leading men of the so-called intelligent bourgeoisie have missed in this direction, during the past two or three decades, is immense. And they continue in this direction, they go on ignoring this, but in another sphere.

What is needed to-day, above everything else, is that people should realise that not only the individual human organism, but also the social organism, must now be understood in a spiritual-scientific manner. Meaningless abstractions must be abandoned. For a connection can be found with deeper human interests, with deeper human impulses, and these are beginning to work in the present epoch of human development.

The sleepiness of modern humanity is immense, and an awakening is urgently needed. Where spiritual science is at all noticed to-day, we frequently hoar the strange view that people who believe, do not need spiritual science, that it is not needed by those who are Christians in the good old meaning. We also hear the argument that faith is simple and spiritual science complicated, so why should simple faith be replaced by something so complicated. Yet this comfortable adherence to faith, this truly nefarious simple faith, the comfortable argument, “We don't need to think of such things, we don't, need' to investigate truth, for we have it through faith”, this is, in a deeper sense, responsible for the catastrophic events of the present. Again and again it must be emphasized that this easy way of thinking is the cause of the present catastrophe!

Great would be the misfortune if not enough people could be found whose hearts and minds are inclined to devote themselves to the investigation of truth, in earnest fruitful, inner thought-activity!

The time of mere belief in the spiritual world is past; it is no longer possible, at present, to be bone-lazy and to believe that we shall be saved by spiritual powers about whom we do not concern ourselves, confiding in the fact that they will do their best to save us: The essential point for the progress of human development is that we should not content ourselves with mere belief in God and in divine beings, but that we should allow God and the divine beings to be active within us, so that the forces of the spiritual world flow into our own deeds, into everything which we do in everyday life. From morning to night, our actions should be done in such a way that a divine-spiritual power is contained in them. This spiritual power will only permeate our actions if it is contained, above all, in. our thoughts. The task of modern humanity is to take in God's essence not only as a content of faith, but as an active force. We should not only think of God, but we should think in such a way that God lives in our thoughts. This is the essential point! If we surrender to such an ideal, we shall surely develop the required interest in things for which the great majority of modern men unfortunately has shown no interest whatever during the past decades.

The chief point is to find the possibility to make people understand that a change is needed in the field of thought. The whole way of thinking must be transformed. It is high time for this. The intellectuals have neglected to work in this direction, and as a result, the most repulsive instincts of humanity are now awakening in the whole civilised world, at least in a great part of the civilised world. The most repulsive human instincts are waking up! Do you think that it will be easy to drive away these instincts, when they have reached a certain climax, a certain culminating point ? A long, longtime will elapse before they die of their own accord. These instincts in humanity can only be controlled or subdued through the influence of good teachings or by good example, for a certain length of time. This beast in man breaks through, because the nobler human instincts have been neglected. Here we have come to a point which 'renders it necessary that we should speak of the moral aspect of the social problem of the present time.

I have already explained to you that the increase of capital, the growth of capital, which I designated as characteristic trait of the capitalistic economic order, because it does not strive after achievements, but after gain and profit:, separates the human being from that which he produces. This separation of the human being from that which he produces, is an essential characteristic of the whole course of development of modern humanity.

In the surrounding world, we generally find that one phenomenon does not appear without another, and that different phenomena are connected in different ways. You cannot walk over a soft ground without impressing your footmarks upon it. This is an example which can be applied everywhere, in order to show that in the world of reality one thing is always connected with another. The m0dern world has been driven in the direction of capitalism and increase of capital. And this development of capitalism is on the other hand connected with the lack of interest which modern men have for the deepest impulses of the human soul. This lack interest in the deeper things of life characterizes modern humanity.

We have oh the one hand the emancipation of the human personality from .the economic process, and on the other hand the fact that the human personality which has thus been separated from the economic process has become withered and dry; the most intimate qualities of man's soul-spiritual being have grown dry and withered. Both these things are connected. Both factors have given rise to that terrible activity which exists in a modern metropolis, where capitalism has set up its thrones. We have there, on the one hand, the influence exercised by capitalism, and on the other, the lack of interest in the most intimate questions concerning man's innermost being.

In the external phenomena these things are to a great extent hidden and they only become manifest to a closer observation. Of course you may say: There are many people who are not involved in the modern capitalistic process. To be sure, there are but a few who are directly involved in it, but indirectly, the whole of modern humanity, particularly civilised modern humanity, is involved in the capitalistic process, through the fact that the existence of many people depends upon the capitalistic economic order. An artist who would, in the past, have worked for a prince or for the Pope, must now work for the capitalist. If you follow the threads which lead, as in the case of art, from different spheres of life into capitalism, you will see that capitalism stretches out its tentacles in every direction, particularly in the direction of spiritual life.

Of course, these things contain many unconscious elements, which do not immediately manifest themselves if we merely look upon the surface of life. Let me now characterize to some extent an unconscious or subconscious process, for the objectivation of the process of production and its emancipation from human aspirations, must in a certain way be explained and justified. People. always need justification for their actions, and when they wish to justify themselves, they do not bother about investigating the truth, for their chief aim is to justify themselves.

Let us take tin example. The Entente “won” the war—this victory had to be justified. Consequently the things which were said about the Entente were not said because they were true, but because the victory had to be. justified. It is the same in the case of individual men. Do most people care at all for a real investigation of truth? No, their chief interest is to justify the things which they do. And this is the aim of capitalism: it seeks above all to justify its existence. But it can only justify it by turning its attention to the most material economic process in its mirrored reflexion, the increase of capital. If the capitalistic economic order is to justify its existence in the physical world, it must, however, do away with every soul-spiritual interest. Soul-spiritual things must be reserved to a special sphere. Let clergymen preach as they like of things connected with faith—I may believe and others may believe, or I may not believe and others may not believe—clergymen talk of things pertaining to quite another world. But in the real world in which we live, things do not take their course in accordance with the sermons of clergymen; they follow the capitalistic course of development.

Extreme capitalism thus has on the one hand this terribly abstract moral-spiritual life, which seeks to separate itself entirely from all the external realities of existence. There is, however, another attitude in modern life which has exercised just as evil an influence: as materialistic capitalism, namely that attitude which induces people to say: “What do I care about Ahriman! Let Ahriman be Ahriman; I devote myself to the impulses of my innermost soul, I surrender to the spiritual world. I seek the spiritual world within my own being; my chief interest is the soul and its concerns. What do I care for Ahrimanic things, such as credit, money, income and property! What do I care for the difference between profit and assets, etc! I care for the things which concern my soul!” But even as man unites within himself body, soul and spirit, which are linked together during the life between birth and death, at the impulses which we may find through our soul's innermost structure are connected, in external physical life, with the impulses contained in the external economic order. Those who are merely devout, even devout in spiritual science, are just as much responsible for the catastrophes of the present time as the capitalists with their materialistic attitude and mentality; they are just as guilty as the capitalists, through the fact that they enclose spiritual-scientific truths within their own abstract limits and are not willing to permeate everyday reality with penetrating thoughts.

This fact has again and again induced me to tell you that the Anthroposophical spiritual movement should not be regarded as something which gives you the opportunity to listen to Sunday afternoon sermons, which caress the soul because they speak of an everlasting life, and so forth, but the Anthroposophical movement should be taken as a path which enables us to cope in a real, concrete way with the modern problems of life, the burning problems of the present. One of the first requirements is this: to understand from where we must set out, and that everything will be of no use whatever unless people find access to a really unprejudiced way of thinking.

Now, at the conclusion of my lecture, let me express something which I shall explain further tomorrow, from a practical. social aspect. What I shall tell you now, is apparently far away from socialistic thoughts, from thoughts concerning the socialistic question, but tomorrow you will see that apparently distant connections: are in reality closely related, so that we shall be able to throw light on the four points which I have designated as the parts of the socialistic ideal. People frequently say that opinions differ, that there are different convictions in life, for one believes this and the other that… Does it not seem as if one person may cherish this thought, and the other that idea, and that the ideas of both can be justified? Apparently it is so, but in reality this is not the case at all. Taking into consideration the circumstance that in a higher meaning every characterization of something is, as it were, a photograph from one aspect only, so that things can be viewed from many sides—by taking for granted that this must be considered, we nevertheless find that in the innermost-depth of their being all men have the same view concerning one and the same thing. We cannot find two people in the world (as stated, the above condition must be taken for granted) who do not have the same opinion. But why do they speak of different opinions? Because egoistic prejudices insert themselves between truth and that which people gather from their inner being; emotions and egoistic prejudices distort things and turn them into caricatures. People only differ in regard to their emotions, but not in regard to concepts and ideas. If a real concept has once been gained, we cannot think of it differently from others, who have also gained access to this concept. It is the greatest soul-frivolity to think that we are entitled to have subjective opinions. We do not have the right to cherish subjective opinions, but as human beings it is our duty to go beyond our subjective views to objective truths! In order to have a clear outlook in this point it is necessary to bear in mind all the sources of error which result from human emotions. A man may believe that he is fully convinced of something. Yet the reason why he believes that he is fully convinced of something may frequently be the fact that he is too lazy to penetrate into the idea. Indeed, my dear friends, it is necessary to indicate this inner moral side of human nature, if we wish to indicate that which the present time really needs

The present time is, above all, filled with pride and with emotions, even in regard to what is designated as objective science and it is not at all inclined to discover the judgment contained in, real ideas, in real concepts. But what will be our goal, if the burning social riddles which now confront us, are to be solved emotionally, out of human emotions?

You know that there are imaginations, inspirations and intuitions In reality, everything connected with economic, economic-juridical questions, should be grasped through imaginations, it is contained in imaginations. In the case of most people, these imaginations can only well up from unconscious depths, in the form of vague notions. But these are better than the constructed ideas which now come to the fore so eloquently and play a certain role. Everything contained what we may call spiritual life, the spiritual life which we have characterised as a part of the future social structure, is based upon inspirations. And ever thing which may exist apart from the human being, which must indeed be separated from him, that wherein all human beings must be equal, equal—so to speak—before the law—all that can only be based upon intuitions. This constitutes as it were the foundation of the political organism.

Imagination: Economic organism.

Inspiration; Spiritual organism.

Intuition: Political organism.

This is how inspiration, intuition and imagination must work together in order to shape the conditions of life. And we should bear in mind that this is so. For then we shall realise that in reality the social questions which do not only confront us to-day, but which burn like fire, can only be solved with the aid of spiritual-scientific methods. The essential point is that we should discard carelessness and laziness of thought, and really set out in the direction of that which connects the human soul with reality. This alone can lead as to the goal which we must reach in the present time. To-morrow we shall characterize and discuss the four parts of the so-called socialistic ideal from this standpoint.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1977. It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume Goetheanism as an Impulse for Transformation ... Human Science and Social Science.

It seems that it would be useful to consider matters concerned with the social life of the present in the light of our recent studies of Goethe. The nineteenth century represents a very significant turning-point in the history of mankind, particularly in relation to the social life of our own time. The middle of the century brought a much greater change in ways of thinking than is generally appreciated. When considering this change one could certainly start from personalities who were not German, for example Shaftesbury and Hemsterhuis. But these examples from England or Holland would not lead us so deeply into our theme as the study of Goethe can do. At the present time, when so much—far more than people realise—is tending towards the destruction of all that springs from middle Europe, it may be of use to link up with these things, which should live on in humanity in a way quite different from the way imagined by most Germans today.

If one looks at the present situation honestly and without prejudice, one cannot help feeling oppressed if one remembers a saying by Herman Grimm—the saying of an outstanding man who lived not very long ago. For this one need not be a German, but one needs to have some feeling for the culture of middle Europe. Herman Grimm once said that there are four personalities to whom a German can look if he wishes to find, in a certain sense, the direction for his life. These four are Luther, Frederick the Great, Goethe and Bismarck. Grimm says that if a German cannot look in the direction given by these four personalities, he feels unsupported and alone among the nations of the world.

In the nineties many people had no doubt at all that this remark was correct (though I was not one of them), but today it can give us a feeling of oppression. For one must admit: Luther does not live on effectively in the German tradition; Goethe has never been a living influence, as we have often had to emphasise, and Frederick the Great and Bismarck belong to conditions which no longer exist. Thus—according to Herman Grimm's remark—the time would have come already in which a German would have to feel unsupported and alone among the nations of the world. People do not feel deeply enough to realise fully in their soul what this signifies: less than three decades ago something could be taken as a matter of course by an enlightened spirit—and today it is quite impossible. If present-day men were not so superficial, many things would be felt much more deeply. It can sometimes be heartbreaking how little the events of the world are felt.

Looking back before the nineteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, we can observe a significant impulse. It was the impulse working in Schiller when he wrote his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; this was the time, too, when Goethe was stirred by his dealings with Schiller. They led Goethe to express the impulse which lay behind Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters” in his own tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” You can read about the connection between Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters” and Goethe's fairy-tale in my recent small book on Goethe.

When Schiller wrote these “Letters”, his intention was not merely to write a literary essay, but to perform a political deed. At the beginning of the “Letters” he refers to the French Revolution and tries in his own way to say what may be thought about the will behind it, and behind the whole revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. He had no particular expectation as to what would be achieved through a great political change, of which the French revolutionaries hoped so much. He hoped much more for a thorough self-education of man, which he regarded as a necessity of his time.

Let us consider once more the basic conception of these “Letters.” Schiller seeks to answer, in his own way, the question: how does man achieve real freedom in his social life? Schiller would never have expected that men would be led to freedom simply by giving the right form to the social institutions in which they lived. He asks rather that by work upon himself, by self-education, man should reach this condition of freedom within the social order. Schiller believed that man has first to become inwardly free before he can achieve freedom in the external world. And he says: Man has his existence between two powerful influences. On one side he faces the influence coming from physical nature; this Schiller calls the influence of natural necessity. It includes everything produced by the sense-nature of man in the way he desires and so on. And he says: If a man obeys this influence, he cannot be free.

Opposed to the influence of the senses there is another—the influence of rational necessity. Man can commit himself to follow rational necessity, as the other pole of his existence. But then he cannot be a truly free man, either. If he follows in a logical way this rational necessity, it is still something that compels him. And if this rational necessity is consolidated into the laws of an external State, or something of that kind, in obeying such laws he is still compelled. So man is placed between reason and sensuality. His sensuality is a necessity for him, not a freedom. His reason is also a necessity, though a spiritual one; under it, he is not free.

For Schiller, man can be free only if he does not follow in a one-sided way either the influence of the senses or that of reason, but succeeds in bringing the influence of reason into closer accord with his humanity; when, that is, he does not simply submit like a slave to logical or legal necessity, but makes the content of the law, the content of rational necessity, truly his own.

Here Schiller, in comparison with Kant, whom unfortunately he otherwise followed in many ways, is a much freer spirit. For Kant regarded absolute obedience to what he calls duty—that is, rational necessity—as the highest human virtue. “Duty, thou great and sublime name ”, Kant says, on the only occasion when he becomes poetical, “having nothing that flatters or attracts us...” Schiller says: “I serve my friends willingly, and unfortunately I like to do it. And so it often worries me to find that I am not virtuous.” That is his satirical comment on Kant, who would regard serving one's friends as a duty. Schiller means that while an unfree man may serve his friends as a duty, in obedience to the “categorical imperative,” a free man carries his humanity so far that he does it because he likes to do it, out of love, as an inner matter of course.

Thus Schiller seeks to draw down rational necessity into his human realm, so that a man does not have to submit to it, but is able to practise it as a law of his own nature. The necessity of the senses he seeks to raise up and spiritualise, so that the human being is not simply driven by his sensuality, but can ennoble it, so that he may give it expression, having raised it to its highest level. Schiller believes that when sensuality and reason meet at the centre of his being, man becomes free.

It seems as if present-day man is not properly able to share what Schiller felt when he described this middle condition as the real ideal for human beings. If a mutual permeation of rational necessity and the necessity of the senses were constantly achieved, Schiller held, this ideal condition would be expressed in the creation and appreciation of art.

It is very characteristic of the time of Schiller and Goethe to seek in art a guide for the rest of human activity. The spirit of Goethe rejects everything Philistine and seeks for an ideal condition which is to be achieved in the likeness of genuine art. For the artist creates in a visible medium.  Even if he creates in words, he is working in a sense-perceptible medium. And he would produce something terribly abstract if he gave himself up to rational necessity. He must learn what he is to create from the material itself, and from the activity of shaping it. He must spiritualise the sense-perceptible by giving matter form. Through the formal pattern (Gestalt) that he gives it, matter is enabled to have an effect, not just as matter, hut in the same way that the spiritual has an effect. Thus the artist fuses spiritual and perceptible into one creation. When all that men do in the external world becomes such that obedience to duty and to the law comes about through an inclination akin to that of the artist, and when all that comes from the senses is permeated by spirit, then for individual human beings, and also for the State and the social structure, freedom is achieved, as Schiller understands it.

So Schiller asks: how must the various powers of the soul—rationality, sensuality, aesthetic activity—work together in man, if he is to stand as a free being in the social structure? A particular way for the forces of the soul to work together is what Schiller thought should be aimed at. And he believed that when human beings in whom rational necessity permeates sensual necessity, and sensual necessity is spiritualised by rational necessity—when these human beings form a social order, it will turn out to be a good one, by necessity.

Goethe often talked with Schiller, and corresponded with him, while Schiller was writing his “Aesthetic Letters.” Goethe was a quite different man from Schiller. Schiller had tremendous inner passion as a poet, but he was also a keen thinker. Goethe was not in the same way a keen abstract thinker and he had less poetic passion, but he was equipped with something that Schiller lacked: with fully human, harmonious instincts. Schiller was a man of reflection and reason; Goethe was a man of instinct, but spiritualised instinct. The difference between them became a problem for Schiller. If you read his beautiful essay on “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” you will always feel that Schiller might just as well have written, if he had wanted to become more personal: On Goethe and Myself. For Goethe is the naive poet, Schiller the sentimental poet. He is simply describing Goethe and himself.

For Goethe, the man of instinct, all this was not so simple. Any kind of abstract philosophical talk, including talk about rational necessity, sensual necessity and the aesthetic approach—for these are abstractions if one contrasts them with one another—was repugnant to Goethe in his innermost being. He was willing to engage in it, because he was open to everything human and because he said to himself: A lot of people go in for philosophising, and that is something one must accept. He never rejected anything entirely. This is most evident when he has to talk about Kant. Here he found himself in a peculiar position. Kant was regarded by Schiller and many others as the greatest man of his century. Goethe could not understand this. But he was not intolerant, or wrapped up in his own opinion. Goethe said to himself: If so many people find so much in Kant, one must let them; indeed, one must make an effort to examine something which to oneself seems not very significant—and perhaps one will find a hidden significance in it after all. I have had in my hands Goethe's copy of Kant's Critique of Judgement; he underlined important passages. But the underlinings became fewer well before the middle, and later disappear altogether. You can see that he never reached the end.

In conversation about Kant, Goethe would not let himself become really involved in the subject. He found it disagreeable to talk about the world and its mysteries in terms of philosophical abstractions. And it was clear to him that to understand the human being in his development from necessity to freedom was not as simple as Schiller had believed. There is something very great in these “Aesthetic Letters,” and Goethe recognised that. But it seemed to him too simple to ascribe all the complications of the soul of man to these three categories: rational necessity, aesthetic impulse, sensual necessity. For him there was so much more in the human soul. And things could not simply be placed side by side in this way.

Hence Goethe was stirred to write his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which not only three but about twenty powers of the soul are described, not in concepts, but in pictorial forms, open to various interpretations. They are headed by the Golden King, who represents (not symbolises) wisdom, the Silver King who represents beautiful appearance, the Bronze King, who represents power, and Love who crowns them all. Everything else, too, indicates soul-forces; you can read this in my article.

Thus Goethe was impelled to conceive this path for the human being from necessity to freedom in his own way. He was the spiritualised man of instinct. Schiller was the man of understanding, but not in quite the usual sense: in him understanding was led over into perception.

Now if we consider honestly the course of history, we can say: this way of looking at things, developed by Schiller in an abstract philosophical way, by Goethe in an imaginative and artistic way, is not only in its form, but also in its content, very remote from present-day men. An intimate older friend of mine, Karl Julius Schröer, who was once responsible for examining candidate teachers for technical schools, wanted to examine these people on Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters:” they were going to have to teach children between the ages of ten and eighteen. They staged a regular agitation! They would have found it quite natural to be questioned about Plato and to have to interpret Platonic Dialogues. But they had no inclination to know anything about Schiller's “Letters on Aesthetic Education,” which represent a certain culmination of modern spiritual life.

The middle of the nineteenth century was a much more incisive point in man's spiritual history than people can realise today. The period before it is represented in Schiller and Goethe; it is followed by something quite different, which can understand the preceding period very little. What we now call the social question, in the widest sense—a sense that humanity has not yet grasped, but should grasp and must grasp later on—was born only in the second half of the nineteenth century. And we can understand this fact only if we ask: why, in such significant and representative considerations as those attempted by Schiller in his “Aesthetic Letters” and represented pictorially by Goethe in his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, do we find no trace of the peculiar way of thinking we are impelled to develop today about the structure of society—although Goethe in his “Tale” is evidently hinting at political forms?

If we approach the “Aesthetic Letters” and the “Tale” with inner understanding, we can feel the presence in them of a powerful spirituality which humanity has since lost. Anyone reading the “Aesthetic Letters” should feel: in the very way of writing an element of soul and spirit is at work which is not present in even the most outstanding figures today; and it would be stupid to think that anyone could now write something like Goethe's fairy tale. Since the middle of the nineteenth century this spirituality has not been here. It does not speak directly to present-day men and can really speak only through the medium of Spiritual Science, which extends our range of vision and can also enter into earlier conditions in man's history. It would really be best if people would acknowledge that without spiritual knowledge they cannot understand Schiller and Goethe. Every scene in “Faust” can prove this to you.

If we try to discover what main influence was then at work, we find that in those days the very last remnant, the last echo of the old spirituality, was present in men, before it finally faded away in the middle of the nineteenth century and humanity was thrown back on its own resources. It lived on in such a way that a man like Schiller, who thought in abstractions, possessed spirituality in his abstract thinking, and a man who had spiritualised instincts, such as Goethe had, had it living in these instincts. In some way it still lived. Now it has to be found on the paths  of spiritual knowledge; now man has to find his way through to spirituality in freedom. That is the essential thing. And without an understanding of this turning-point in the middle of the nineteenth century, one cannot really grasp what is so important today. Take, for example, Schiller's way of approaching the structure of society. Looking at the French Revolution, he writes his “Aesthetic Letters,” but when he asks, “How should the social order develop?”, he looks at man himself. He is not dealing with the social question in a present-day sense.

Today, when the social question is under review, it is usual to leave out the individual human being, with his inner conflicts, his endeavours to achieve self-education. Only the social structure in general is considered. What Schiller expected to come about through self-education is expected to come through alterations in outer conditions. Schiller says: If men become what they can become at the midpoint of their being, they will create a right social structure as a matter of course. Today it is said: If we bring about a right social structure, human beings will develop as they should.

In a short time the whole way of feeling about this has turned round. Schiller or Goethe could not have believed that through self-education men could bring about a right social structure if they had not been able to feel in man himself the universally human qualities that social life requires. In every human being they saw an image of human society. But this was no longer effective. In those days beautiful, spiritual descriptions of the best self-education could be written—it was all an echo or in a sense a picture of the old atavistic life, but the power to achieve real results was not in it. And today's way of thinking about the best social conditions is equally powerless. It places man in an invented, thought-out social structure, but he is not effectively present there. We must look at human society in general, we must look out at the world and find ourselves there, find the human being.

This is something that only real Spiritual Science can do, in the most far-reaching sense. Take what is objected to most of all in my Occult Science: the course of evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth; everywhere man is there. Nowhere do you have the mere abstract universe; everywhere man is in some way included; he is not separated from the universe. This is the beginning of what our time instinctively intends, out of impulses that remain quite dark. The time before the middle of the nineteenth century looked at man, and believed it could find the world in man. The time after the middle of the nineteenth century looks only at the world. But that is sterile; it leads to theories which are entirely empty of man. And so Spiritual Science is really serving those dark but justified instincts. What men wish for, without knowing what they want, is fulfilled through Spiritual Science: to look at the external world and to find there the human being. This is still rejected, even regarded with horror; but it will have to be cultivated, if any real recovery in this connection is to come about in the future.

At the same time there must be a development also in the study of man. A real understanding of the social organism will be achieved only when one can see man within it. Man is a threefold being. In every age—except for our own—he has been active in a threefold way. Today he concentrates everything upon a single power in himself, because he has to stand entirely on the single point of his own self in this age of consciousness, and people feel that everything proceeds from this single point. Each man thinks to himself: If I am asked a question, or if life puts a task before me, I myself form a judgment, out of myself. But it is not the entire human being who judges in this way. The human organism has a “man in the middle,” with something above it and something below it; and it is the “man in the middle” who has the capacity to form a judgment and to act on it at any moment. Above is Revelation: what is received through religion or some other form of spiritual revelation and viewed as something higher, something super-sensible. Below, underneath the faculty of judgment, is Experience, the totality of what one has passed through.

Present-day man takes little account of either pole. Revelation—an old superstition that must be overcome! To experience, also, he pays little attention, or he would be more aware of the difference between youthful not-knowing and the knowing that comes through experience. He often gathers little from experience because he does not believe in it. Most people today, when they have grey hair and wrinkles, are not much wiser than they were at twenty. In life a man may get cleverer and cleverer, and yet be just as stupid as before. But experience does accumulate and it is the other pole from revelation. In between stands immediate judgment.

Today, as I have often said, one reads critical judgments written by very young people who have not yet looked round in the world. Old people may write lengthy books and the youngest journalists may review them. That is no way of making progress. Progress can be made when what is achieved in later life is taken as a guide, when age is held to be more capable of judgment through the experience that has been acquired.

Thus man is a threefold being in practical life. If you read my book, Riddles of the Soul, you will find that revelation corresponds to the head of man, the man of nerves and senses; immediate judgment corresponds to the breast man; experience corresponds to the man of the extremities. I could also say: the man of the life of nerves and senses, the man of the rhythmical life, and the man of metabolism. No consideration is given today to this threefold nature of man, and so there is no recognition of what corresponds to it in cosmic terms. This cannot be discerned because of the general unwillingness to rise from the sense-perceptible to the super-sensible.

Today, when a man eats—that is, unites external nourishment with his organism—he thinks: There inside is the organism, which cooks the stuff and takes from it what it needs, and lets the rest pass away unused, and so it goes on. On the other hand, I look out into the world through my senses. I take up the perceptible and transform it by my understanding; I take it into my soul, as I take nourishment into my body, What is out there, what eyes see and ears hear, I then carry within me as a mental picture; what is out there as wheat, fish, meat or whatever, I carry inside me, after having digested it.

Yes, but this leaves out the fact that the substances used in nourishment have their inner aspect. The experience of food through our external senses is not related to our deeper being. With what your tongue tastes and your stomach digests, in the way that can be confirmed by ordinary scientific research, you can maintain your daily metabolism; but you cannot take care of the other metabolism, which leads for example to the change of teeth about the age of seven.

The essential thing in this other metabolism lies in the deeper forces at work in it, which are not observed today by any chemical study. What we take as food has a deep spiritual aspect, and this is very active in man, but only while he sleeps. In your foods live the spirits of the highest Hierarchies, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Hence in your food you have something cosmically formative, and therein lie the forces which provide imperceptibly for the change of teeth, for adolescence, and for the later transformations of the human being. Only the daily metabolism is brought about by the things known to external science. The metabolism which goes through life as a whole is cared for by the highest Hierarchies. And behind the sense-perceptible world are the beings of the Third Hierarchy: Angels, Archangels, and Archai. Hence we can say: sense-perception, Third Hierarchy: foodstuffs, First Hierarchy: and in between is the Second Hierarchy, which lives in the breathing, in all the rhythmic activities of the human organism.

The Bible describes this quite truly. The spirits called the Elohim, together with Jahve, are led into men through the breath. The ancient wisdom was quite correctly aware of these things, in an atavistic way. Thus you are led through a real study of man into a true cosmology.

Spiritual Science re-inaugurates this way of looking at things. It looks for man again in the external world, and brings the entire universe into man. This can be done only if one knows that man is really a trinity, a threefold being. Today both revelation and experience are suppressed; man does not do them justice. He does not do justice to his sense-perceptions, or to the foods he eats, for he regards them merely as material objects. But that is an Ahrimanic distortion, which ignores the deeper life that underlies all created things, of which foodstuffs are an example.

Spiritual Science does not lead to a contempt for matter, but to a spiritualisation of it. If anyone were to look at food with contempt, he would have to learn that Spiritual Science says, in a way that would seem grotesque to him: the highest Hierarchies, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, they are alive in nutriments.

In our time threefold man is put together in an unclear, chaotic way, and made into a single entity. In social terms, a precisely corresponding picture arises when everything is brought under the single entity of State legalism. In fact, society should be seen as a trinity, composed of three members. First, economic activity, the natural foundation of life. Second, legal regulation, which corresponds to the middle element in man, his rhythmic nature. Third, spiritual life. Now we can see a trend towards making these three realms into one. Economic life, it is said, must be brought gradually under the control of the State. The State should become the only capitalist. Spiritual life came long ago under the dominion of the State. On the one hand we have man, who does not understand himself, and on the other the State, which is not understood, because man no longer finds himself within the social structure.

These three elements—economic life, legal regulation, spiritual life—are as radically different as head, breast and limbs. To burden the State with economic life is as if you wanted to eat with your lungs and heart, instead of with the stomach. Man is healthy only through the separation and co-operation of his three systems. The social organism, too, can be healthy only when the three elements work independently side by side, and are not thrown together in a single entity.

All legal regulation, which corresponds to the breathing, rhythmic system in man, represents a quite impersonal element, expressed in the saying: All men are equal before the law. Nothing personal comes into this; hence it is necessary that all human beings should be concerned with this middle realm and that everyone should be represented there. People are inclined to stop at this point, leaving a certain sterility on either side. We have to breathe; but we are not human beings unless nourishment is added to the breathing process from one side and sense impressions from the other. We must have a State, which rules through law, impersonal law. But economic life, which is half-personal, wherever men participate in it, and spiritual life, which is entirely personal, must work into the State from either side, or the social organism will be just as impossible as if man wanted to consist only of breathing.

This must become a new, fundamental doctrine: that the social structure has three members. You cannot live as human beings without eating; you have to receive your food from outside. You cannot maintain the State without bringing it the necessary nourishment from what human beings produce spiritually. This spiritual productivity is for the State what physical food is for individual men. Nor can you have a State unless you give it a certain natural basis on the other side in economic life. Economic life is for the State exactly like the element brought to the breathing process in human beings through sense-perceptions.

You can see that real knowledge of man and real knowledge of the social structure depend upon one another; you cannot reach one without the other. This must become the elementary basis for social insight in the future. The sin committed in relation to man by leaving out Revelation and Experience is committed by Socialist thinkers today when they leave out of  account the half-personal element in which fraternity must rule and on the other side ignore spiritual life, where freedom must rule; while the impersonal element of the law must be ruled by equality.

The great mistake of current Socialism is its belief that a healthy social structure can be brought about by State regulation, and particularly by socialising the means of production. We must appeal to all the powers of the social organism if we are to create a healthy social structure. Side by side with Equality, which is the one aim today, and is absolutely right for everything which has the character of law, Fraternity and Freedom must be able to work. But they cannot work without a threefold social order. It would be just as senseless to ask the heart and lungs to think and eat, as it is to ask an omnipotent State to direct economic life and to maintain spiritual life. The spiritual life must be independent, and co-operate only in the same way as the stomach co-operates with the head and with the heart. Things in life do work together, but they work together in the right way only if they can develop individually, not when they are thrown together abstractly.

The facts of the present time really prove that this insight must be achieved. It is very much worth observing how people at the present time do not see the connection between materialism on the one hand and abstract thinking on the other, particularly in relation to the social question. One great reason for the rise of materialism is that the State has gradually taken possession of all the academic institutions which were originally free corporations. If you go back to the times when such things were founded, from an atavistic feeling originating in clairvoyance, you will see how the necessity of co-operation between these three elements was still felt. Only since the sixteenth century has everything flowed into one, with the rise of materialism.

In earlier times, if a man wanted to be an outstanding jurist, he went to a university distinguished for the law, perhaps to Padua; if he wanted to be an outstanding physician, he went to Montpellier or to Naples; if he wanted to be an outstanding theologian, he went to Paris. These institutions did not belong to a particular State, but to humanity, and represented an independent member of the social organism.

Again, every school that is immediately under the power of the State is an impossible institution, and in the end unhealthy. Every undertaking concerned with production is unhealthy when managed by the State. You cannot pour anything into the lungs, not even water when you are thirsty. If this happens, you see how unhealthy it is.

Today people pour all kinds of economic and even spiritual undertakings into the realm which should be responsible only for the legal regulation of existing affairs. The radical parties go as far as wishing to separate the Church from the State, because they hope that people will be really interested only in what the State does. Then, in this clever, roundabout way, the Church could be expected to fade away entirely. But if you suggest to these people that schools need to be independent in order to restore productivity to spiritual life, they will contradict this very vehemently.

Every arrangement which makes for an intervention from the legal side into the spiritual life must lead to sterility. And in the same way it is false if the legal organisation intervenes in the initiatives necessary for economic life. The police, security, everything which belongs to social rights—not private rights and not penal law, which belong to the spiritual life—all these belong to the system of legal regulations. Everything economic forms an independent system and must be organised cooperatively, in a way that is half-personal. All spiritual life must be a matter for human individuality; in no other way can it flourish.

Schiller describes the middle condition that lies for man between the demands of rational necessity and the demands of this sense-life, and he relates this ideal to the creation and appreciation of art. In his “Aesthetic Letters” he says boldly that man is fully man only when he is playing, and he plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the word. Schiller regards playing as the ideal condition, but of course you have to think of playing as Schiller does: that the necessity of reason is transformed into inclination, and inclination is raised to a spiritual level like that of reason. He calls the earnestness of life a game, in his sense of the word, for then one acts like a child who is playing, not obeying any duty but following one's impulses, and yet following them freely, because the necessities of life do not yet intervene in childhood.

A summit of human achievement is indicated in Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters”: man is fully man only when he is playing, and he plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the word. On the other hand, when we have to begin with the concrete reality of the entire cosmos in order to find man in it, it is necessary that we should say to ourselves: man will achieve real progress for humanity only when he can take the smallest things in everyday life, even the most everyday game, and understands how to raise them into the great seriousness of cosmic existence. Therefore it has to be said: a turning-point in the history of mankind has come in this present time, where earnestness is knocking most solemnly at our doors.

Automated Translation

It has often had to be emphasised here that when the truths of Spiritual Science are put into words it is very easy for them to be misunderstood in some direction. I have spoken to you also of the very varied reasons for this ready misunderstanding of the knowledge and conceptions of Spiritual Science. It must frequently be repeated that naturally it is very easy to find here or there, among those who have had little opportunity for acquiring spiritual depth, that statements concerning Spiritual Science are made on insufficient grounds, and so on. It is also extraordinarily easy when the facts of Spiritual Science are given out to say: “How does so and so know that; where does he get his knowledge?”—when these same people are not even willing to investigate the origin of facts they themselves often advance concerning it and form their judgment entirely in accordance with their own knowledge. It is not difficult to say: “How can he know that? I don't know it” and then to declare in a high and mighty way: “What I do not know no one else knows, others can at best only believe it.” Such a judgement comes about merely because one refuses to go into the sources from which, particularly at the present time, the knowledge Spiritual Science has to be drawn.

Among the misunderstandings arising in this way we may include the belief that Spiritual Science wishes to pronounce sentence, sentence of wholesale extermination, upon all the striving of the age, in so far as this striving proceeds from personalities outside the pale of Spiritual Science. Here too lies mere misunderstanding. Spiritual scientists who seriously and adequately pay heed to present world conditions are very ready to enter into the attitude of mind, the mood of soul, of their contemporaries, and will ask themselves the question: “What is going on in the souls of my seriously minded contemporaries in the direction where we have to look for the improvement of much that both deserves and needs to be improved?” What, however, must above all be borne in mind as a particularly striking fact at present is that just in the case of those who make the most earnest endeavours, there is often a refusal to enter upon concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, recognition of the spiritual world, which can appear to men as a reality and not merely as something to be disclosed through a sum of concepts. Today most men prefer to remain with their experiences altogether in the sense world, and at best they allow that a spiritual world can be disclosed by means of concepts and ideas. They do not want to set out on an investigation where there is any question of penetrating to the spiritual world in actual experience. This aversion to spiritual reality is a characteristic feature of our time; it it is a feature of our time to which attention must be paid particularly by those of us who try to take our stand on the ground of spiritual Science.

By quoting to you from the thoughts of Walther Rathenau, (see Z-269) I have recently shown that the spiritual scientist is indeed able really to appreciate the direction modern thought is taking, within the limits, that is to say, of what is estimable in this thought. But the rejection of the really spiritual that should arise in our time is nevertheless extraordinary. This rejection can be fully experienced when one pays heed to what is being thought. To many people this has appeared as the most shattering feature of the present world situation. For there are men who understand how to estimate all the seriousness of the present time, who have for some time understood how to estimate it. Here too I beg you, my dear friends, not to consider this the superior attitude of a number of anthroposophists; I beg you not to suppose that Anthroposophy as such is claiming to judge the seriousness of the times better than people outside the Anthroposophical Movement. For one could wish that many more inside the Anthroposophical Movement would feel moved by what is so critical in the present state of the world. Within our own ranks today far too many are to be found who in spite of the seriousness of the times have no mind to face up to this seriousness, preferring to be occupied with their own worthy selves instead of being aroused to some interest in the great questions pulsing throughout mankind.

At the outset of our considerations today, I will take an example that may be said to have come my way by chance; if the word is not misunderstood, and there is no need for any misunderstanding. It is an article which, it is true, is out of date today since it was written when the so-called war was still in full swing. Thus the article is not up to date. Also it is not exactly impressive in other ways, for most of the things discussed are treated very one-sidedly. But it comes from a man—and this can be seen from the whole character and way of writing—who is giving his most earnest thought to what should now happen, and what the world has to expect from the events. This article gives a picture of the gradual trend of behaviour on the part of the western powers, the central powers, the eastern powers, during the catastrophe of these last years. Although in a one-sided way, it shows the great dangers from this catastrophe threatening both present and future. The writer has a certain world-outlook. He considers the world not only from the point of view of land frontiers; the world from the point of view of frontiers is also discussed among men today, and if they can satisfy themselves that some particular thing does not happen within their own territory, they make their mind easy. The author of this article has a wider outlook than that of the village pump, he grasps something of world perspective. And in the summing up of his ideas we come to a very remarkable passage. He says; “A fearful destiny beckons to the white races which seems to me an absolute certainty unless a period of the supremacy of great wisdom succeeds that of passion and delusion. For some time we have actually been living in an age very similar to that of the migration of peoples. The tempo has been tremendously increased by the world war. What corresponds to the German races who invaded the civilised lands of olden times from outside, are the rapidly rising lower classes of the people who both in blood and cultural heritage are very different from those who previously held the power. This migration of peoples—it is better to refer to it thus than to call it a war—is good in so far as it necessitates a widening, a widening of the cultural basis and a raising of levels as a whole. But this would be very dangerous were it to come about too rapidly. And this danger will be increased the longer the world war lasts.”

The article is now out of date. The danger has not diminished, but since all his arguments were based on the then existing thirst for war, they are now superannuated. For us here, however, the first part of what I read out must be of special interest—“a fearful destiny beckons to the white races and seems to me an absolute certainty unless a period of the supremacy of great wisdom succeeds that of passion and delusion.” For, as an abstract truth, this is in fact undeniably right. And when anyone expresses the opinion that the only salvation for mankind lies in turning to a supreme science of wisdom and not to any other political or social quackery, we must give recognition to such a fact, such a tendency of thought. At the same time, however, we may not forget that just those men who, it must be admitted, are deeply moved by the earnestness of the times, when it comes to saying: In what do these wise ideas consist that are to succeed the old deluded ideas? It is just such men who immediately fall back on any kind of deluded ideas that have become mere fine words. That is the tragedy, the fearful destiny, of our time, that men indeed became alive to the fact that it is necessary to turn to the spirit, and are then overcome by fear and anxiety when they should turn to it. Then they are at once ready, once more to seize upon the old delusive ideas which have driven mankind to the present fearful destiny. My dear friends, we need only take this example of a widespread tendency in ideas. Were you to ask a law abiding upholder of the Roman Catholic Church whether he was inclined to the belief that the old conceptions have brought us to this time of catastrophe and that they must be got rid of, do you think that he would really be disposed to recognise the necessity for reshaping the ideas that were unable to save men from this dreadful catastrophe? No! He would say that were men to turn again in the right way to Roman Catholicism they would at once became happy. And the reflection would not even enter his head that they have had 1900 years in which to practise their Roman Catholicism and yet have fallen into the catastrophe, that the least we must learn from the catastrophe is the need for a fresh impulse. This is only one example among many. Particularly where this point is concerned it is above all necessary frankly to focus attention on existing conditions.

You see today even for a recognised member of some church or other it is easy to say that Haeckelism or materialism is devil's work and must be rooted out lock, stock and barrel. This is the reverse of what is able to lead men to a sound attitude of soul. Yes, my dear friends, it is very easy to speak thus but when it stops there and no investigation is made into the conditions in question, it is impossible to arrive at any sound solution for the present time, much less for the near future. For if you take any world outlook materialist in feeling and ask yourself: where does it come from historically? If you really wish to get to the root of this, in the end you will be unable to help saying that fundamentally it comes from the way in which Christianity has been preached during these 1900 years by the various Christian churches. Those whose insight goes deeper know that Haeckel's doctrine would have been impossible without the preceding Christianity of the churches. There are people who have remained at the standpoint of the church, as it was, let us say, in the Middle Ages; they continue to uphold the ideas professed by the church in medieaval times. Others have developed these ideas. And among those who have developed them is, for instance, Ernst Haeckel. He is a true child of the conceptions fostered through the centuries by the various churches. This has not arisen outside the church; in the fullest sense it has originated entirely within the teachings of the church itself. Certainly the connections of these things will only be recognised aright if one is endowed by Spiritual Science with a little insight to give one clear vision.

Today, therefore, I want to dwell on one particular point, though some of you may say it is too difficult, but nothing ought to be too difficult for us and we are meant to gain insight.

Now look—if today you read philosophically inspired writings of well-educated learned Catholic men you will find, in all passages where a certain point comes into question, a quite definite outlook developed; and it may be said that you find this outlook developed try the very best of these scholarly Catholics. In passing I should like to point out that I am not at all in the habit of undervaluing the literary training of the Catholic clergy for example. I quite realise (and I have spoken of this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel) the superior schooling shown in the philosophical writings of many Catholic theologians, compared with the writings of those men of philosophical learning who have not made a study of Catholic theology. In this respect one must own that the literature, the theological literature, of protestant learning, of the reformed churches, lags far behind the excellent philosophical training of Catholic theologians. Through their strict schooling these people possess a certain ability to form their concepts really plastically. They have what the famous men of non-Catholic philosophical literature, for instance, have no notion of, that is, a particular faculty of seeing into the nature of a concept, the nature of an idea, and so on. To put it briefly, these people are scholarly. One need not even take one of Haeckel's books, one can take one of Eucken's, to confirm this playing about with concepts, this dreadful treatment of the most important concepts, a treatment merely on the level of a cheap novelette! Or, to give another example, we might take one of Bergson's books that always promote the feeling that he is catching hold of concepts but is unable regally to come to grips with them—like the famous Chinaman who wanting to turn round always catches hold of his pigtail. This absolute confusion in the world of concepts, shown by the people who lack training is never to be found when you come to the philosophical literature of the Catholic Clerics. Thus, for example, in this connection, a book like the three volume History of Idealism by Otto Willmann, a thorough going Catholic who makes his Catholicism evident on every opportunity, takes a much higher place than most of what is written in the realm of philosophy on the non-Catholic side. All this may be quite well recognised while still taking the standpoint that must be taken in Spiritual Science. An inferior spirit may decide differently in this matter, may perhaps be of the opinion that because good schooling is shown, the whole thing is of more value.

In this polished Catholic philosophical literature one point will always confront you, a point that has an extraordinary way of hoodwinking the modern thinker. It is the point that always comes into evidence when there is question of the difference between man and animal. I think you will agree that the ordinary readers of Haeckel, the ordinary upholders of Haeckel, always proceed to minimise the difference between man and animal as much as possible, to arouse as much belief as they can that men as a whole is only to a certain extent a more highly developed animal. This is not done by the Catholic men of learning but they always bring forward something that appears to them as a radical difference between animal and man. They raise the point that the animal gets no further than the ordinary conception it acquires of an object by first smelling it, of another object by smelling that or inspecting it, and so on; that the animal always stops at mere detailed, unindividual ideas, whereas man has the capacity for forming deduced abstract concepts and of summing things up. This is indeed a fundamental difference, for when the matter is grasped in this way man is really definitely distinguished from the animals. The animal noticing only details cannot develop what is spiritual; abstract concepts must live in the spiritual. For this reason one has to recognise that in man there lives a soul specially adapted for forming abstract concepts; whereas the animal with its particular kind of inner life has no power of forming these abstract concepts.

Whoever an this point keeps in mind the corresponding Catholic statements will say to himself: Here is something tremendously significant, that through good philosophical training on this decisive, fundamentally decisive, point, the distinction can be shown between man and animal. Modern men do not in the least appreciate the significance of such a matter. When, for instance, the uproar was set going for which Drews was responsible, namely, the discussion whether Jesus ever lived, when at that time a great gathering took place in Berlin about the problem “Did Jesus ever Live?” the Catholic theologian Wasmann¹ also spoke. Naturally he could only say things that the others considered very reactionary. But in spite of the fact that speeches were made at the time by the shining lights of protestant theology in Berlin strictly speaking in those speeches only two utterances, and what supported them, seemed to me really on a better level, not on a present-day level but on a rather higher level. One was an exposition launched by—now I do not wish to say anything derogatory, I am actually praising the man—a learned idler of the first water. (I don't think I can praise him more than by calling him a learned idler of the first water.) Through his intellectuality and the special information he possessed on the most varied subjects, through his great knowledge, the man might have been able to do a great deal. But when I had something to do with him—eighteen, nineteen years ago for fifteen years he had been writing a Revision of Logics and I think he must have been writing it ever since, for in the meantime I have never come across this Revision of Logic. At that time he said something that is quite correct—at the present time men actually become quite frightening when they begin to think—that is they were quite frightening then. One need listen to only two or three propositions, either in a scientific or non-scientific talk, and immediately the most terrible lack of logic can be observed. What (said he) men must observe so that they do not arrive at the most horrible delusive conceptions usual nowadays, can be written on a quarto sheet (so he thought); it is only necessary to take note of this quarto sheet. I am sure I do not know if he will present this quarto sheet as his Revision of Logic! As I said, this Revision of Logic had then gone on for fifteen years since when eighteen, nineteen years have passed; I do not know how for it has got by now. But I want to give him a word of praise by calling him a witty, intelligent do-nothing, because I mean by this that were he not a witty do-nothing ha could do tremendously much. At that time he said something very fine: The Catholic Church one day had to hear that the comets which consist of nucleus and tail are heavenly bodies like the others and move in accordance with laws like other heavenly bodies. As in face of existing facts it could no longer be denied that comets are also heavenly bodies, the Catholic Church decided to allow that the laws of celestial space should also be applied to comets; but they first gave way only where the nucleus was concerned and not the tail. Now in this he was wanting to express merely symbolically that as a rule the Catholic Church is prone only to yield to absolute necessity just as it was not until 1827 that it allowed its adherents to recognise the Copernican world-outlook. But when the Church had to give way to what was most necessary it did at least hold back the tail in the matter! This is an observation which I found highly descriptive of the situation.

The other observation, however, was made by the investigator of ants, the Catholic Wasmann, who not only does excellent work with ants but is a well-trained philosopher as well. He said: “Really gentleman you can not understand me in the least for none of you knows in reality how to think in terms of philosophy. No one who thinks philosophically talks as you do!” And in point of fact he was quite right. There is no doubt that he hit the nail on the heed. Now there is a neat little publication by Wasmann concerning the difference between man and animal which puts forward in clear outlines what I have just now indicated, that is, man's faculty to think really in abstract concepts, a faculty which the animal certainly is not supposed to possess. This is something extraordinarily deceptive, my dear friends, for in a certain way it is convincing for anyone who has schooled his thinking to the point of being able to grasp the whole bearing of such an assertion.

But now let us look at the matter from the point of view of Spiritual Science, there the whole affair will meet you in its true meaning. For you see when we start from Spiritual Science, from the conceptions and experiences in connection with it which can be acquired in the spiritual world, we see, on the one side that without the considerations of Spiritual Science we may arrive at the delusive statement or which I have just spoken, and that it must actually hold good for anyone who will not become a spiritual scientist just because he has had a good training in philosophy. This is seen on the one hand. On the other hand one sees the following—sees it simply by observing things in the world—that when with the hypotheses of Spiritual Science man and animal are compared, it becomes apparent that man confronts the objects in the world in a series of single observations afterwards forming abstract concepts by all manner of thought processes in which he reunites what he has seen as separate entities. It may also be admitted that the animal does not possess this kind of abstraction, it does not practise this activity of abstraction. The curious thing is, however, that the abstract concept is not lacking in the animal, that, in its soul the animal is actually living in the most abstract concepts which we men only form with much difficulty, and that the animal does not see things separately as we do. Where we excel is just in our freer use of the senses and in a quite definite kind of co-operation between senses and inner emotions and will-impulses. We have that advantage over the animal. The sureness of instinct possessed by animals rests on the very fact that the animal from the start lives with those abstract concepts that we have first to form. We differ from animals in the emancipation of our senses and in their freer use where the outer world is concerned, also in being able to pour will into our senses which the animal is unable to do. What we men do not have but must first acquire, namely, the abstract concept, is just what the animal does have, strange as it may seem. It is true every animal has only a limited sphere but in this sphere it has this kind of concept, however odd this appears. Man's attention is directed to one dog, two, three dogs, and he then forms the abstract concept “dog”. The animal in this sphere has the same abstract concept “dog” that me have, it has the quite exact concept without needing to form it. We have first to form it which the animal has no need to do. The animal, however, has no capacity for distinguishing with precision one dog from another or for giving it any precise individuality through sense-perception.

Thus you see, my dear friends, if we do not acquire the faculty for going into the real facts through Spiritual Science, we deceive ourselves in a certain respect concerning what is most essential. We believe because men must develop the capacity to form abstract concepts that through such concepts we are to be differentiated from animals who do not possess this capacity. But the animal has no need of the capacity, since it has abstract concepts to start with. The animal has an entirely different kind of sense-perception from that of man. It is just the outer sense-perception that is quite different.

In this connection a most profound change in human conceptions is needed. For men have informed themselves about all kinds of scientific concepts that have become popular today. Wither they have learnt them in some school through direct tuition or they have received the information from any doubtful source: what I am referring to is those newspaper articles that circulate scientific conceptions throughout the world. Men are under the domination of these scientific conceptions. Where what I have been referring to is concerned, men are absolutely dominated by what I might call an instinctive bias towards the belief that animals really see their environment in the same way as men do. When a man takes his dog for a walk he instinctively believes that the dog is seeing the world in the same way as he does himself, that the dog is seeing the grass, the wheat, the stone in the same colours as he does. He also thinks—if he can think at all—that he can deal in abstractions and therefore has abstract concepts which, however, the dog doesn't have; and so on. Yet it is not so. This dog running beside us is living just as much in abstract concepts as we are. In fact he is living in them with greater intensity. And he has no need to acquire them, for from the start he is living in them to a high degree. It is not the same however, with external perception; which gives him quite a different picture. You need only be attentive to certain things that can be observed in life. These are certainly not always taken sufficiently in earnest. I could give you quite a number of examples to show you in this direction how men from pure instinct think upside down. For instance I was once going down a street in Zurich, I think it was, after a lecture held at the evening meeting of one of our Groups. A coachman was waiting there whose horse refused to answer to the rein and showed signs of shying. The coachman said it was afraid of its own shadow. He of course saw the horse's shadow thrown on the wall by his lamps and supposed that the horse saw the shadow just as he did. Naturally he had no inkling of what was going on in—can I say—the horse's soul, nor what was going on in his own soul. He sees the horse's shadow but the horse has a vivid sense of being in that bit of space in the etheric body where the shadow is formed. This is a quite different process of inner perception—a very different process. You see, you have here the collision between the old way of thinking back to the most elementary, the most instinctive perception of naive men, and what must come into men through the new Spiritual Science. It is true you will first seriously have to take stock of what lies at the root of this. For with regard to such things the crass materialism of a Vogt or Moleschott, a Clifford or Spencer, and so on, differs far less from the handed down creeds of individual religions than does the new way at thought underlying Spiritual Science. Today certain materialists actually think that there is not much difference between man and animal. They may same time have also heard it ring out (even if the bells were not ringing together) that man can form abstract concepts which nevertheless are different from the usual conceptions of the senses. But they say to themselves: Abstract concepts! Perhaps those are nothing very important, nothing very essential; fundamentally men do not differ from animals. Modern materialism as a whole is actually the creation of Church creeds. This must be faced in all seriousness and it will then be seen that it is a question of a fresh kind of conception for the soul of man if we are not to prefer going back to the old conceptions with the idea that all will then soon go well!

But can we say that men are able simply to forbear from turning to the real life of the spirit and at the same time go on? No those are quite right who says “a fearful destiny is beckoning to the white man which seems to me absolutely certain unless a period of the supreme rule of wisdom succeeds that of passion and illusion.” People should recognise, however, that the greater part of the scientific conceptions throughout the world today fall under the category of illusion. This should be thoroughly understood. In their stream of development men have come to the point which we have often described by saying that, since the fifteenth century, mankind has been in the epoch of the consciousness soul. And this development of the consciousness soul takes place in the way I have often described. Let us look at very important characteristic in the development of the consciousness soul.

Last time indeed I pointed out to you that everything perceived by the spiritual investigator, that is to say, everything lying in mankind's development which is raised by him into consciousness, even when not recognised, goes on in man's subconscious. Men go through certain experiences while developing towards the future. They go through these experiences unconsciously When the do not draw them up, bring them into consciousness, as they are meant to do in this epoch of the development of the consciousness soul. But it is just in this epoch that much that would rise in man's subconscious is thrust back again.

Among other things there comes to man in an ever greater degree a certain part of that experience which may be called “the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold”. Undoubtedly, my dear friends, if men with to enter the spiritual world in full consciousness, to develop Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, they must enter the sphere of the supersensible world with fuller experiences, with quite different experiences. It might be said they must pass the Guardian of the Threshold with greater thoroughness than the whole mass of mankind are obliged to do in the course of this epoch of the consciousness-soul. Up to a certain degree, however, by the end of the development of the consciousness-soul man must in some measure have passed the Guardian of the Threshold. He can let this happen the easy way by passing in a state of unconsciousness. But Spiritual Science is there to prevent this happening. It has to draw attention to what is now taking place in the evolution of mankind. Whoever holds people back from Spiritual Science is doing no less than forcing them not consciously but unconsciously to approach the Guardian of the Threshold who appears on mankind's horizon in this particular epoch.

To put it differently. From about 1413, for the 2160 years that the epoch of the consciousness soul lasts, mankind in one incarnation or another will have to pass the Guardian of the Threshold and, if only partly, go through what can be experienced in connection with the Guardian. Man can be forced by materially minded men to pass by unconsciously or he can in freedom make the resolve to listen to Spiritual Science and thus experience something in passing the Guardian of the Threshold, either through his own vision or through sound human understanding. And in thus going by the Guardian of the Threshold something will be experienced that enables men to form correct, pertinent conceptions about the concrete supersensible world—above all conceptions enabling them to direct this conceiving, this thinking, in a certain free, unprejudiced direction conducive to reality.

To make thinking in accordance with reality so that it can actually enter into the impulses lying in events and does not live merely in abstractions like modern science, which has knowledge only of external processes—I have often described this as the greatest achievement of Spiritual Science. To know certain things about the spiritual world is becoming a necessity for men. And through this they must be able to judge their position in the world from the point of view of a spiritual horizon, whereas their judgment now has only a physical horizon. You are already judging something in a new and right way when, for instance, you bring the thoughts to fruition in you that animals do not lack abstract ideas but actually live in those that are very abstract, and again, that man is differentiated from the animal by the development of his senses which are freed from the narrow connection with life in the body. It is only through this that one arrives at suitable conceptions concerning the difference between man and animal. This is outwardly expressed by the organisation of the senses in animals standing in a very pronounced relation to the whole life and organisation of the body. The bodily organisation in the animal extends very considerably into the senses.

Let us consider the eye. It is quite well known to natural scientists that the eyes of lower animals have in them organs filled with blood (take as example, the habellifom and ensiform processes) which in a living way establish a relation between the inner eye and the entire organisation: whereas the human eye has no such organisation, being much more independent. This growth of independence in the senses, this emancipation of the senses from the organisation as a whole, is something that only arises in the human being. For this reason, however, the whole world of the senses is much more in connection with the will in man than in the animal. I once expressed this morphologically in a different way drawing your attention to the same fact from a different point of view, as follows. If we take the threefold organism, the organs of the extremities, breast, head, and if I draw it as a diagram, in the animal this is the head organism, this the breast organism and this the organism of the extremities (see diagram). The head is immediately above the earth, the earth is under the head organism in all animals, approximately of course, according to the nature of the being. The spine is above the earth's axis or the radius of the earth.

In man his head stands on his own breast organism and extremities organism. In man the breast organism is under the head organism, as in the primal the earth is under the head organism; man stands with his heed on his own earth. In the animal there is a separation between the will-organism that is, the extremities organism, the rear extremities, and the head. In man the will, the will-organism, is inserted directly into the head and the whole into the radius of the earth. For this reason the senses are, as it were, flooded by the will and this is characteristic of man; thus he is in reality distinct from the animal because his senses are flooded by the will. It is not the will but a deeper element that flows through the senses in the case of the animal; thus there is a more intimate connection between the organisation of the senses and the organism as a whole. Man lives far more in the outer world, animals live far more in their own private world. Man in his use of the tools of his senses liven much more in the external world.

Now consider, my dear friends! We are at present living in the age of the consciousness soul; and what does this mean? It means, as I have shown you several times, that we are pressing towards a time when consciousness will become a mere reflection, when only reflected images will be present in consciousness; for the age of the consciousness soul is also the age of intellectuality. (see Lecture IV) And in this intellectual age man actually first arrives at developing his faculty for abstraction to an absolute art. In this age of intellectualism and materialism the most abstract concepts are formed.

Now we may think of two people; one a well trained philosopher, as well trained as Catholic theologians are. Holding his particular views this man ought to say what he will not sir recognising the dilemma in which we find ourselves because centuries of Christianity have brought about materialism; this he finds unpleasant. He must, however, actually Bays man in the age of the consciousness soul can best form abstract concepts, and in this way has raised himself as far as possible above the animal.

But the spiritual scientist may also come along and sort what is characteristic of man in this age of the development of the consciousness soul is his particularly strong faculty for being able to form abstract concepts. Where does this take him? It actually takes him back into the animal kingdom. And this explains a very great deal. It also explains to you how the fact of man being prone to get as near animals as he can, arises just because he there meets the abstraction of the concept. Moreover it makes clear to you something else that arises frequently today in the carrying on and conduct of life. Science will become increasingly abstract and man in his social life will increasingly wish to live like beasts of the field, simply attending to his most ordinary needs, hunger and so forth. The spiritual scientist shows up the inner connection between the faculty for abstraction and the animal nature. At all events man roes through the experience of this inner connection in the age of the consciousness soul. If he is hindered in the way already described, he goes through the experience unconsciously. Innumerable human beings go through What the depths of their soul tells them: you are becoming more and more like an animal and just by going forward you will become ever more so. Man will have this fright on his path of progress. It is this too that causes men to keep so willingly to the old conservative concepts.

Should this be? And should this unconscious appearance of animal nature hold man back from going forward when he comes to the Guardian of the Threshold? No, this should not happen—but something else has to take place. By going beck during his apparent progress, this backsliding of of man's must so happen that it is not simply a matter of going forward and then back (as it certainly would be were man to develop only a faculty for abstraction), for then man would come back to the earlier stages of his development, he would return altogether to the animal. No, there must be a going backward, but like this (see diagram); an advance must take place, a going upward that must lead into the spiritual.

What we lose by entering into abstractions we must deprive of power by filling our abstract reflected images with the spiritual, by taking up the spiritual into our abstractions. By that we go forward. Man, in front of the Guardian of the Threshold is consciously or unconsciously faced with the formidable decision either through abstract concepts to become more animal than the animal and, to quote Goethe's Faust ‘rub his nose in any filth’; or, on the other hand, the moment he enters abstraction to pour into his abstract concepts what streams out of the spiritual world in the way we have described during these last days. (see Z-269) Then man will begin to estimate rightly his place in the world, for then he understands how he is caught up in evolution. Then he knows why in a Certain point of this evolution—just through abstractions, the danger threatens him of sinking back to the animal. When man in primitive culture epochs stood at the animal stage He was distinguished from the animal not by his abstract concepts but by his senses. The animal had better abstract concepts. It is only now that man can develop abstract concepts at need, animals have much better ones. Once I gave another example of this when I said: How long ago in evolution is it since man tried to make paper? The wasp has been able to do it in building its nest, for millions of years! And just look at what comes to light through animals in the way of active, effective understanding, in wisdom, intellectuality and the faculty for abstraction, even though it appears one-sidedly in the various animals! Men foolishly call this instinct; but when you look into the matter, my dear friends, you will know that there are very few men indeed today who with all their faculty for abstraction come so far with this faculty that they get beyond the one sidedness of the present animal types.

Thus man is placed before this important decision, either to return to the animal condition, in a very great measure to be “more animal than any animal” to use Mephistopheles' expression from Faust—Ahriman Mephistopheles would like to attain this in man—or he must accept the spiritual. (See Lecture V.)

A certain intensity of conception is indeed necessary if man wishes to know what is indicated for him in the progress of time, in the necessities brought about by time. Here man must go deep into world-evolution. And he must not shrink from preparing himself through the concepts of Spiritual Science for the more difficult concepts, the concepts bearing reality. For it is natural, when for the first time anyone hears the kind of things I have been saying today, for him to say: This is pure madness!—That is quite easy to understand. But, my dear friends, we can also imagine that some one may regard very much of whet has been done for years by the clever as pure madness, and accordingly hold the great majority to be mad. But then he would be able to understand why this great majority should take him—an exception—for a madman. For in a company of madmen it is not themselves they hold to be mad but the clever people.

By reason of this, man learns however to make his whole perception of the world fruitful. He learns to make fruitful just what in reality has always distinguished him from the animal. Strictly speaking man is thoroughly unobservant about his own faculties, and he will become so increasingly if he develops only intellectuality in the age of the consciousness soul. If we go back to earlier ages we frequently find among talented men that they still had a certain sense also for their surroundings. If we take the conceptions that these men of old formed about certain animals, for example, these are often full of good sense. The conceptions in modern books on Zoology from the standpoint of abstractions are often quite honest and worthy of recognition, but full of sense, my dear friends, they certainly are not. I should like to ask you, in the first place, whether among the conceptions given out today in schools there are really any capable of leading you into the actual life of the animals? Moreover do not men today notice the timid gaze with which whole herds, whole groups of animals look out into the world—the timid, intimidated gaze? O, we shall learn to see it again when through our faculty of abstraction we have been driven to the Guardian of the Threshold, and are able once more to have sympathy with the animal—not the sympathy often produced artificially but a sympathy corresponding to to an elementary inner experience. It can be said that a peculiar intimidation, as it were, a timid outlook upon the world, is widespread among all the higher animals, all the warm-blooded animals. I was walking once with a university man and at a certain place on our way we saw deer, stags, scampering away from anything and everything. This man said to me: “Something must be the reason for this; formerly men must have tormented animals, shooting them and so on, so that the animal souls have become accustomed to fear men.” But there are other things besides men that animals fear.

Thus people look for the reason why certain animals are afraid. There is no need to look for the reason, my dear friends. Fear is, of course, a quite general universal characteristic of animals. When animals are not afraid it is just because they have been trained and given different habits in some particular way. Fear is innate in the animal because the animal has in a high degree the faculty for abstraction, for abstract concepts, and lives in them. For you must realise that the world you acquire after long study, when you have learned to live in the abstract—this is the world in which the animal lives. And the world here in which man lives in his senses is for the animals, in spite of animals possessing senses, for them far more unknown than for man—and man himself has fear of the unknown. This is thoroughly in accordance with deep truth, The animal gases into the world with timidity; this has definite import. Recently I have spoken of it in an article on “The Ahrimanic and Luciferic in the Life of Man” in the recent number of the publication “Das Reich”: men are afraid in face of spiritual life; how is it that they become so afraid? It comes about by their having at the present time to meet the Guardian of the Threshold in the subconscious. There they come to the decision of which I have spoken; there they approach the animal. The animal is afraid, the animals are going through the region of fear. The connection is thus. And the condition of fear will increase more and more if men do not take serious pains really to learn about, really to take to themselves, the world they have to meet—the spiritual world.

There are only quite a few men in these days into whom something of former atavistic conceptions of world reality have penetrated through the general illusive conceptions. When the animal is observed in its whole connection with the development of nature, when its organisation is looked at in relation to the ordering of nature, what exactly is the animal? You see when the old Moon evolution was in existence, in regard to outer organisation there was still no differentiation between the higher animals and man of today. The differentiation is a product of earth evolution only. Man has gone through the normal evolution of the earth, but the animal has not; the animal dried up, as it were, during the Moon evolution. Its organisation does not fit in with earth evolution, whoever has seen into this—in modern times a few people, Hegel among them, have instinctively seen into this—whoever has done so can answer the question: what exactly is the animal in the form of its organisation? Nature becomes sick and the sickness of nature is the animal, especially the higher animal. In the animal organisation there holds sway the sickness of nature, the sickness of the whole earth. This development of disease in the earth, this unhealthy falling back into the old Moon evolution, is the higher animal nature, not so much the lower animals but those that are higher. But this also is something that, in the decisive moment of passing the Guardian of the Threshold, man meets unconsciously unless he wills to do so consciously.

And if you compare what I have just been saying with the different ways in which the American West, the European centre, and the East meet the Guardian of the Threshold of which I spoke in lectures some time ago, (see R. XLVII) if you compare these you will see how it is possible to get one's bearings where what is happening to mankind on earth is concerned, if only one will go right into these things. Then it will be grasped that in admitting these conceptions man would really arrive finally at thinking differently about himself and his relation to his fellows. Today all serious people should at some time consider the question that can arise in such a sentence as the one referred to: “It seems to me a certainty that a fearful destiny beckons to the white races unless a period of the supreme dominion of wisdom succeeds that of passion and delusive conceptions.” Where these wise conceptions are to be found, how they are to be obtained—these questions Spiritual Science is quite ready to answer (see R. 40)—And Spiritual Science, my deer friends, would like to give the answer to the most important questions of the day. And when anyone comes who feels as deeply as this man what is necessary for the times, he may be told: If you wish no longer to be afraid that a fearful destiny is beckoning to white men, then begin to observe the world and its phenomena in the way of Spiritual Science!

• 1. Erich Wasmann, born 1859 in Meran, became a Jesuit and late a priest. He investigated the life of Ants and among other works wrote The Souls of Men and Animism 1904.

It is perhaps important and especially a propos where the kind of considerations now in point are concerned, to look back on many things connected in former times with some particular spiritual stream. For you have seen that it is a question of spiritual events that lie at the basis of the physical world, making it necessary at present for man to take a new standpoint in relation to the whole understanding of his connection with the world and with the rest of mankind. Yesterday we pointed out how much must be differently understood which, apparently well founded, shines forth here and there into the spiritual life of mankind. You must really be clear, my dear friends, that when impulses founded in this way are taken seriously then, as life goes at the present time, opposition arises against this seriousness and against these impulses generally, the opposition of hate, the opposition of envy, of fear, which proceed from the pettiness of men and so on. Only a deep understanding of things can help to clear away the many hindrances to which the adherent of such a spiritual revolution is exposed. For this deep understanding is well adapted to strengthen the soul, so that this soul is a match for much that always makes itself felt precisely in opposition to the most earnest endeavours in world activity. And so we wish today to enlarge in many ways upon what was said yesterday.

I pointed out yesterday how man, just by standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, can be absolutely objective towards other spiritual streams, how he certainly has no need to misjudge other spiritual streams. From this standpoint I said that on certain points, compared with many of the statements made today by philosophers and theologians outside the Church, through their training the representatives of the Catholic clergy are superior. Just at present we live at a time in which everyone wishing to take the questions concerning a world-conception seriously should come to an understanding about these things. The different currents of world-conception and the social currents of the present day both require this. Without very fundamental observation, the temptations arising from the scholarly approach cannot be properly fathomed, cannot be recognised in their actual lack of significance in the light of the greater demands of the present. The temptation to fall in with the objections of scholarly opponents of the endeavours of Spiritual scientists today is not to be underrated. It is true that if men have sufficient power of discriminations if they would bestir themselves to go into the facts concerning the basis of Spiritual Science, the broad base on which it stands, they would be less exposed to this temptation. But such power of discrimination is rare. What as Spiritual Science, according to how we understand it, wishes to join in with the world current accounts for many kinds of attacks, including those, for example. from the standpoint of the Catholic faith. It is necessary to grasp such things at this time because in the chaos that is about to break upon us, unfortunately far too little appreciated, far too little heeded by men—in this chaos many different things of a disconcerting nature will proceed from what is contained in the Catholic doctrine.

Now today I should like to make you familiar with the kind of judgment about some particular spiritual scientist that an orthodox Catholic may pronounce if he has reason to assume this spiritual scientist to be an unintelligent reader or listener. One of the most common objections against what we here mean by Spiritual Science is its being pantheistic. One of the chief objections made, for example, in the articles by the Jesuit, Zimmermann, in the publication “Voices of the Time” is this—that Spiritual Science is Pantheism.

You know how often I have spoken about this point. You know how I have said that the only wad of overcoming this commonplace Pantheism, so dominant in many places today, is to put in its place the concrete spiritual world of which Spiritual Science speaks. It is naturally not intended, on the part of those from whom the objections come, to go deeply into the truth; taking into account all the prejudice belonging to certain religious partisanship, their efforts go much more in the direction of bringing forward what has a definite suggestive or hypnotic effect. Pantheism is indeed the view that in everything spread out in Nature, spread out anywhere in the phenomenal world, there lives the divine, that, in a way, nature herself is to be looked upon as direct revelation of the divine. It is just this which I have always attacked—this watered-down Pantheism that is forever talking of how behind the outspread world of phenomena there is spirit, spirit, spirit. I have always called your attention to how this is much the same as refusing on the physical plane to recognise tulips, roses or lilies as anything but plants, plants, plants. Spiritual Science goes straight to the individual, concrete spiritual beings and does not speak in the pantheistic general may about the spirit. Another characteristic of Pantheism lies in saying: Pantheism has no wish to separate outer nature from the divine spiritual but would mingle both together. Now, my dear friends, one must indeed be a Jesuit to make it appear that it is believed where the actual ranks of the beings of the higher hierarchies are spoken of in this way as being individualised among themselves and having a personal and superpersonal existence in themselves—it is believed that there can be any question of the mingling of this hierarchical world as a whole with external nature. Whoever can think in accordance with reality will be unable to make anything at all of the accusation of Pantheism, where such a description of the world of the hierarchies, and the connection of the individual beings of the hierarchies with nature, is concerned.

There is a further thing that is quite unique and is given particular prominence in the articles from “Voices of the Time”, namely, that in sir Spiritual Science it is said—and this is supposed to be heretical in the Catholic churd—that the divine is living in man's soul, that the soul of man is itself a drop in the ocean of this divine. Such and similar utterances are collected there and established as heresies within the Catholic confession.

Thus it is shown how the teaching that a divinity should live immediately in the soul is heretical and to be condemned. Now faced with this a reasonable man might say: There is no need for you to draw my attention to such foolishness. But, my dear friends, that is not important, that is not the question. But it must be a matter of these things playing a real part in the world, that where men would deceive themselves these things should play a really powerful part, and that we must already be alive to such things. But they are connected with something besides. And now we will turn our attention from any particular attack that has been made. Let us imagine a man, a Jesuit, who has either been made apathetic where his own reflections are concerned or consciously lives in them—what I mean is, he knows that for himself he has no need to reflect about things but has only to judge the faithful according to the sense of the officially recognised creed. For once we will look at the kind of pronouncements such a man can make about the path of Spiritual Science. I an simply telling you here the average—I should not like to say opinion for opinion does not meet the case, but average utterance of an official representative of the Roman Catholic Church about the path of Spiritual Science, as this would come from a modern believer.

He would perhaps say: The Catholic Christian would not dare take such a path as the one recommended by Spiritual Science for gaining insight into the supereensible. For all the Church Fathers and every exponent of Church doctrine—the cleric of today would perhaps say—condemn such a path. By such a path man is supposed to acquire the special faculty of rising to the supersensible world. That, however, is heresy, that should never be an aim at all. All that may be striven for by an orthodox Catholic is what their teachers of religious doctrine hold to be the legitimate vision. This 'legitimate vision' is that the present day hall-marked cleric of Rome considers valid. What does ne understand by it?

You will be able to form a concept of what he understands by it when you distinguish between two kinds of gifts which, in the sense of the orthodox Catholic Church, man can receive as a believing Catholic. The one kind of gift is the so-called gratiae grate detae, what is given through grace, the supernatural gifts of grace, one might say the Greek charisms. The other gifts are those which may be called the universal human gifts. The gifts that ae out of the ordinary, the charisms are bestowed by God in a way that is out of the ordinary upon men who are out of the ordinary. The Maid of Orleans would perhaps be given as an example. These gifts cannot be striven for, they are bestowed as special gifts of grace upon outstanding men and may not be striven after, accouding to the dictates of the Church. What may be striven for, however, is a certain enhancement of the general life of the soul which does not bring men to any extra-ordinary faculty but to a raising og the faculties that are universal and human. Such a raising of universal human faculties has nevertheless the effect—so says the Roman Catholic Church today of making man capable of being permeated with the Holy Spirit.

Therefore this is what we say: The ordinary mortal thinks something, feels something or does something. According to the dictates of the Church, according to the dictates of the State, he has in duty bound to do these things in a certain ways with his ordinary mortal reflection he can endeavour to perform his action in accordance with the Church, in accordance with the State: in the opinion of the Church this is the same as being in accordance with God. He may also notice, however, if in other things he is an ordinary Catholic Christian, that the Holy Ghost often intervenes in his acting, thinking, feeling, and that because the Holy Ghost is working in him the practice of certain virtues becomes easy which otherwise is difficult. This, however, may not be striven for in such a way that man would go beyond the ordinary point of human endeavour, and develop special faculties for penetrating to the supersensible worlds all striving of such a kind is reprehensible.

Now here I have described the objections an orthodox, hallmarked, Roman Catholic cleric would make to what is found, for example, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. He would say: man strives for special faculties that would place him in a position to unite himself in a certain way with the spiritual world. But he may not do this. He must remain perfectly passive until he notices that in his mind and soul there enter impulses of the Holy Spirit. He may not bring about ax qualitative change in his behaviour, only an enhancement, as it were, a facility in becoming virtuous, a facility in other faculties exercised ter man on the external physical plane.

You can read this kind of thing today not only against our Sairitual Science but against all man-made endeavours towards producing a human being who sees a spiritual world ground him just as rhynical men with his physical senses, sees around him a physical world. This is familiar even among those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of Christian belief dictated by Rome. And it in widely recognised that anyone thinking differently about the things I have just been describing to you, is a heretic. In giving such a description it must alters be made clear that these things still have tremendous influence today upon millions of human beings. We must not be so egoistic as to think that because one has ceased to believe in thaw oneself (and this too is only a matter of belief) there is no further need to worry. This is exactly what is such a pity today, particularly where the social movement is in question, men are so egoistic that they look only to the needs of their own soul and have no wish to extend their gaze to what unites men, to what is permeating millions and millions of men, as a drivinfr impulse which, when it then breaks forth, can appear in the font we nee things now arising in the word, Today it is necessary to be quite clear about the sources of these things and the necessary attitude to take towards the things themselves.

Now these clerics stamped with the mark of Rome as a rule appeal to the Fathers of the Church. They go back to the Church Fathers of earlier centuries and from their sayings take what they believe to be in harmony with all I have just described. Now, naturally, I cannot read out to you for hours at a time the doctrines of the Church Fathers; I should like, however, to draw your attention to something in this direction, namely, the attitude to these things that can be taken by man in this age of the consciousness soul which began with the fifteenth century.

First, therefore, we must keep in mind that the way into the spiritual world, as Spiritual Science understands it, is held to be heretical; so says the modern cleric recognised by orthodox Rome. In the second place we have to remember the accusation against Spiritual Science—that it speaks oft man being able to partake of the divine; this also is heretical, as once more stated today by the Catholic cleric approved by Rome.

Let us be willing to look for once rather more closely at what an outwardly—not inwardly as we shall soon see—an outwardly well-reputed Church Father, outwardly well-reputed also by Rome, says about a matter like the vision of which I have previously given you a description. John of the Cross,¹ for example, speaks about what vision should be for orthodox Catholic Christians who through this vision my be said to get beyond the mere general belief of the Church and rise to a kind of higher perception of the divinity pulsing through the world. The Catholic Church today allows a man through vision to get beyond purely general belief. But it forbids him to get as far as superphysical faculties, that is, faculties leading into the super-physical world in the same way as external senses lead into the world of the senses. Now St. John of the Cross says: “The time has come (he is referring to the time of vision) when the reflection and contemplation undertaken previously by the ordinary powers of the soul should gradually cease, when the soul sees itself bereft of its former enjoyments and palpable delights.”

Thus St. John of the Cross admits the state in which ordinary reflection is silenced, the reflection by which man comes to terms with the things of the physical plane that are perceived by the senses and understood by the intellect. He admits, therefore, that man deprives himself ordinary contemplation which the soul experiences in such contemplation and in such relation to external nature ceases. This he admits.

Condemned to a state of barrenness and aridity (he goes on to say) the soul can no longer deliberate by means of the intellect.

Thus, by shutting off his senses, by stopping the activity of his intellect, (and this is necessary for the attainment of vision) man with his soul comes to a kind of barrenness and aridity. By this he really comes to that participation in the divine, held by St. John of the Cross to be permissible. When therefore the soul no longer reflects with the intellect or even finds any physical support, then the senses are no longer enriched. The spirit has the advantage without receiving anything from the senses. It can thus be seen that in this state, God is the principal agent.

Now let us go minutely into this matter. St. John of the Cross says: Man can reflect, he can take up outer perceptions through his senses, the soul can become passive, the soul of itself does nothing further. Thereby God becomes the principal agent in the soul. He Himself instructs the soul and gives it suitable knowledge. In visions he presents the soul with wholly spiritual possessions, more particularly knowledge and love of God, without the soul having to reflect or enter upon other exercises which are no more possible to it than formerly.

Take these words of the canonised John of the Cross, one who is still recognised today in Rome as an orthodox Father of the Church. Take these words first in relation to the accusation of Pantheism recently made against Spiritual Science for having spoken, for example, of the life of soul as being like a drop in the ocean of the divine, therefore having itself a divine nature, which today according to preaching and believing clerics is heresy. But, my dear friends, St. John of the Cross describes the possibility of coming to a passive condition of the soul when reflection and sense perception are shut off and God is the chief agent, when, in his own words, God presents the soul during vision with wholly spiritual benefits Himself, instructing the soul, imparting to it an infusion of wisdom.

Now I ask you: What sense have these words if it is said further that the human soul is never brought into a real connection with the divine Being? What does the statement mean that God Himself is alone active in the soul, when it is supposed to be heretical to speak of men coming into direct, conscious connection with God? When anyone says: the soul is related to the sum of the divine-spiritual like a drop in the ocean that is of the same nature an the water of the ocean as a whole—should this be understood as unpermitted Pantheism if truth held good, and when at the same time it is recognised, for example, that an orthodox Father of the Church, St. John of the Cross, admits the possibility of God Himself taking over the chief activity in the soul? To recognise how far truth is the governing factor in official circles you must keep consciously in your soul the following fact—that, at the sane time, such masters are appealed to as St. John of the Cross who really teaches Pantheism (if one is to call it Pantheism) in a far more marked way than Spiritual Science. But this is held to be heresy! So, what is one to do? St. John of the Cross is allowed to pass for a Church Father of authority, and people are deceived by being told that Pantheism is forbidden. But this means further that nobody may assert it to be heretical if it is said: God is so directly present in the soul that the human soul can be conscious of this!

No, my dear friends, people today should not be loose in their thought; they dare not think loosely if still greater misfortune is not to befall mankind. Today men should be able consciously to keep the fact before them that it is possible officially to convey this kind of misrepresentation of the truth throughout the world.

Another utterance of St. John of the Cross is: ”Priceless are the inner benefits imprinted by this silent vision into the soul when it is unconscious. In short they are nothing but the extraordinarily tender and most mysterious anointing by the Holy Ghost who, as he is God, acts as God.”

“The Holy Ghost acts as God immediately in the soul,” says St. John of the Cross (this was Catholic doctrine at the time of John of the Cross before the age of the consciousness soul) “And works upon, and inundates the soul in secret with such a measure of riches, gifts and graces that it is beyond description.”

And now I would ask you: what are we supposed to understand when one of those who write about heresy today says it is heretical to assert that God is identical with the human soul!

This is the position of things. But men are so little awake that they pay no attention today to how the truth is 'managed'. in the final analysis it rests on man having troubled so little about what has been given out as truth in the world, that so fearful a catastrophe should have fallen upon it. And it rests on this also that truth can be hated in the way it is still hated at present by certain people.

Today in Rome the approved clerics take particular pains constantly to emphasise that no difference should be said to exist between the ordinary faculties the faithful develop by belief, and the enhancement of belief that is expressed in vision. No difference is supposed to exist or at the most a difference of degree; for when a real difference is striven for, this is heretical. But St. John of the Cross says: “The difference consists in man seeing only darkly through belief, whereas with perception of the soul theveils are removed from Him”. (He means God). At the time when St. John of the Cross wrote these things down, before the age of the consciousness soul, this was Catholic doctrine. What today holds sway as Catholicism where these things are concerned is only the shadow and no longer the light. It is really very beautiful how John of the Cross describes for that age the mystical path of Knowledge, the way into the tensible. He says: “The narrow portal is the night of the senses. To pass through it, the soul has to get free from itself and cast its shell.” At that time these things were said not in the way that Rome speaks, but rather as Spiritual Science speaks. Spiritual Science is the real continuation of the noble strivings to enter the spiritual world as they appear in John of the Cross. But Spiritual Science is the continuation suited for the present age: it reckons with the progress of mankind

The narrow portal is the night of the senses. To go through it the soul must become free of itself and cast its shell. And by then taking beliefs which has nothing to do with the senses, for its guide, the soul travels along the narrow path to the second night—the night of the spirit.

And very beautiful is the description by St. John of the Cross of the union with the divine-spiritual: “The union is accomplished when the two wills, namely, the will of the soul and the divine will, become one.”

It could not be more clearly expressed that a divine will exists holding sway over the world, and a will belonging to the soul, both of which merge in vision. But today that is said to be heresy. Truth would be honestly upheld were it said: Today St. John of the Cross is no longer a saint but a heretic. This is what the cleric of Rome would be bound by duty to say if he wished really to uphold his assertions.

Thus, St. John of the Cross says that union is brought about by the two wills, that of the soul and the divine will, becoming uniform, which means, when there is nothing in the one will that is opposed by the other.

But then in the sphere of the orthodox Roman Catholic clericalism it is definitely intended that the path of individual knowledge should be barred to the mere believers and also to the bumbler clerics. Today, therefore, while misrepresenting people like John of the Cross, people such as John of the Cross are constantly having attention drawn to them. It is pointed out that John of the Cross would at that time have only allowed vision to be resorted to if men first received three signs. The first of these signs by which the soul felt itself summoned to vision, that is, to mystical vision, would be inability to contemplate and to make use of imaginative powers, antipathy towards outer contemplation. Thus when the soul feels loath to receive sense-perceptions and to reflect, the time has arrived when it should give itself up passively to the will of God.

The second sign would be perceiving that one no longer desired to employ the imaginative power of the senses in special outer and inner imaginations. Thus the first sign is becoming tired, the second is ceasing to have desire. The third inner sign would be the sensation of most intimate joy felt by the soul in being alone, therefore without sense-perceptions and reflection, but with attention focussed purely on the divine.

Now, my dear friends, you will not read what is in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds intelligently without saying to yourself something which it is true, is modified to suit the time, namely: with those three signs I can now first find myself completely in harmony. There is absolutely nothing against the three signs. One has only to meet them with understanding in accordance with existing conditions. Let us then consider the three signs, which John of the Cross sets up as signs on receiving which the soul may turn to mystical vision, and thus to the path into the spiritual supersensible world.

The first sign would be the inability to contemplate and use one's imaginative power, reluctance towards contemplation. We must remember how these words were written before the age of the consciousness soul was fully established. Than when the age of the consciousness soul is established man turns his gaze upon nature as she is presented to him by modern science. But the historical development of mankind must still be reckoned with. We have to reckon that the men around St. John of the Cross were not soaked and steeped in the conceptions that shower in all directions out of modern natural science. St. John of the Cross had only those about him who led a life of devotion to the Catholic Faith, who took their world outlook from this Catholic Faith and were preached to from the pulpits of Catholic Churches. One has to speak differently to such men from how one speaks in the twentieth century to men soaked through by scientific conceptions. For what does it actually mean to be permeated by a scientific outlook? Whether they admit it or not all men are that nowadays down to the last peasant in the last cottage, if he is not just an illiterate, and even illiterates are permeated by scientific conceptions in the form of their thought. Anyone who looks at the world today in the way it must be looked at in the sense of the modern world, if he has a living need for knowledge must, because scientific conceptions inform him only about what is dead, must come to see that scientific observations make it impossible for him to be satisfied with them. There arises exactly what St. John of the Cross describes as the first sign. This sign is produced by the scientific kind of conception. At the time he wrote it was granted to few, today it is granted to all who even begin to think. We must take note of this difference. Were St. John of the Cross to write today he would say: Certainly at that time to those men who felt incapable of observing things outwardly and of setting the imaginative power in movement, mystic vision had to be recommended. Today everyone given up to unprofitable conceptions of science, at a definite point of time becomes capable of abandoning these conceptions, particularly when in their souls they have a longing to find some kind of path to the divine-spiritual. St. John of the Cross spoke to very few candidates; today all thinking men are candidates. This exactly represents the progress of mankind. Thus when man who lives in the scientific age feels this longing today, it is the fulfilment of what St. John of the Cross accepted as the granting of the sign.

The second sign is man's perceiving that he no longer desires to use the imaginative power of the senses for special outer or inner imaginations. My dear friends, the moment science can do no more than afford man a view, a perception, of how he has developed from what is animal, the soul in reality begins to perceive that the desire has flown simply to observe in the outer world what the senses reveal. For these reveal that man has descended from the animals; one no longer has any desire in that direction. And bemuse the time has come—formerly only for the few, now for all thinking men—in the actual sense of John of the Cross one turns to what is the idea behind evolution, that is, one turns to the path into the spiritual world.

The third sign is the experience of joy in the depths of the sea en feeling itself alone in its contemplation of God. Now this inward joy will certainly be felt, as soon as they find their way into the supersensible world, hy all who in this scientific age have absorbed only those concepts offered them by science.

Once again we are faced by the fact, the significant fact, that it is just our Spiritual Science of today that so thoroughly fulfils what, for his time and in his sense, was demanded by such a man as John of the Cross.

The stream of development flows on and today fulfilment has a different appearance from What it then had. There are other contributing factors. whoever looks today with an honest sensefor truth at the evolution of mankind, will say to himself: Because we have entered upon the scientific age, the feeling for super-sensible knowledge must be kept alive in men. Such demands as those of John of the Cross will be fulfilled without further adoif man treads the path marked out, for example, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. If he takes this way there will be revealed to him not what was revealed at the time when St. John of the Cross was writing, but there will be revealed to man what lies today on the path of human evolution. At this point we can no longer speak in the sense of pure positivist Christianityas did St. John of the Cross, for the serious fact lies before us, referred to both yesterday and many times previously that today in a certain respect man either consciously or unconsciously passes by the Guardian of the Threshold. There he comes to recognise that he must speak not only of a single divinity but of the divine hierarchies. There he comes to know how Ahriman and Lucifer are to be contrasted with the divine hierarchies. But, my dear friends, just as the Catholic Church wanted to hold men back from accepting the Copernican view until the year 1827, in a similar way it will want to keep men from the supersensible knowledge that is a necessity for our times. Why in this? It is because it does not wish men to be awake to what is streaming into the evolution of mankind from spiritual heights.

It is true that there may be some and there are some who with a certain honesty say the following: Man today is not prepared to approach directly with his soul what comes from the spiritual world; this only does him harm. Then when he meets the Guardian of the Threshold he will not be able to distinguish illusion from reality. Therefore let us give him a grizzly picture of setting out on the spiritual path so that he runs no risk. - Such people do not reckon with the necessities of the age, they reckon with a narrow, limited conception, but it is possible that they are sincere. The majority, however, of those who say things such as: “One dare not set out today on the path to supersensible knowledge” mean something else. From various directions a certain feeling of fear towards truth holds the truth back from flowing in. This feeling of fear, this anxious feeling, is present in the official upholders of widely extended religions; it is also prevalent in certain societies of Freemseons and similar brotherhoods. I have already drawn attention to this from another point of view.² There are, too, within these Societies some people who are honest from their point of view, but the force with which they hold up the progress of mankind is terribly strong. The following calls for attention. There are those, particularly in the higher grades of these Orders, who say: Man as a rule is not sufficiently mature to come to an immediate knowledge of the spiritual world, therefore he should be held back from direct entrance into the spiritual world. It is a forbidden thing to enter and man shold only be permitted to get as far as the practice of ceremonies prescribed in certain ancient rituals. He should be referred to all manner of symbols which do not lead him directly into the spiritual world but which as far as possible would indeed be symbols of great antiquity. I have told you that in this respect certain Masonic Orders, shall we say, hold to what is in contrast to the dearest impulse of most of the ladies. Most ladies you must know are young, most masonic societies would like to be as old as possible! Where possible, very ancient ritual is indicated or very ancient traditions. Not always, but very frequently it has an untrue intention, but sometimes it is honestly meant when it is said Rituals that are very old can do no harm when carried out by men today, for they are obsolete, they have become rigid, they are merely the shadows of what they have been. Besides, human souls have lived so long with rituals, with their symbols mid what these represent, that they have became habituated to them and will no longer receive shock from the impression of an immediately experienced truth. If people are made acquainted with what is thoroughly old, what still exists only as a shadow, they will be lass exposed to danger. All these things may be argued, my dear friends, but they have to collapse in face of the necessity belonging to this turning point of time. The evil that would come were man to throw back the breaking wave of the spiritual tide, would be greater than all the rest of evil beside. Our real duty in face of all those cosmic spirits who have to do with the evolution of mankind, is to make man realise what, simply throw present cosmic lrws in any case in the unconscious, is taking place in the soul of every man today. In the age of the consciousness soul it is an absolute necessity to call this up into consciousness. It is necessary, also, where what is arising with such power in social dew ads is concerned, that that is actually present in the soul of ran should be recognised. For, externally, existence becomes ever more like a mask, and elmsys merely phenomenal. The possibility absolutely exists for man to have such experience in his soul that he posses by the Guardian of the Threshold; but because of the materialism of the time his consciousness of this passing will be suppressed. What is suppressed, however, what is not conscious, not for that reason non-existent! In spite of all, it is there. Any man passes by the Guardian, but by reason of present education he suppresses this. What it then represents can be something quite different. It may be the deeds of Lenin, it may be the deeds or a member of some kind of Spartacus League. Heed must be paid today to the fact that we have arrived at the age when through the delusive impulses of materialism the passing through certain spiritual impulses may be outwardly masked in a way that is very highly dangerous to mankind.

The times are serious. But action will be in accordance with this seriousness if in man the honest will is only there to interpret with his sound human understanding that can be brought from the spiritual world through a real Science of the Spirit.

• 1. San Juan de la Cruz, born 1542, died 1591, studied under the
  Jesuits in Medina del Campo, became Abbot of the Carmelite Monastay at Menrezo about 1568; successfully defended himself on an indictment brought against him by the Inquisition, and founded the Monastery of Ban= in lam In 1581 the Order of the Carmelites hauled aver to his the direction of their pal Monastery at
  Granada. The Curia appointed him as Pro al Vicar of
  We-UM in lam, and in 1566 as Definitor. Through the discipline of his Order he acquired enemies vho, by their influmea vg Philip II, sumeoded in eausing, John of thi Woos to be co
  the Monastery of Ubede. In 1675 Benedict XIII canonised the "ecstatic Doctor."
• 2. See a XLVII, Leettlres 8 and 9.

From our considerations of yesterday you will have seen how easily the whole course of human evolution can be misunderstood and how it is particularly misunderstood from many sides today to the detriment of present knowledge as well as of the present social striving of mankind. (see Z-7.) Today we will for once call up before our souls some results of Spiritual Science of such a nature that they can throw light, it may be said, from another side on what becomes so enigmatical if looked at from the points of view holding good at present. Now I have told you that man can come to terms with this present time only if he makes up his mind to find his real bearings by starting on the path to the spirit. He must decide to look for a new relation to external nature since the old means to this end no longer suffice, and also find his way to a new relation to his fellow men, the old relation no longer being suitable, so that he sees what impulses are necessary for the modern social structure of mankind. If we wish to be successful in this, we must earnestly keep before our souls the following—that as man is placed in the world today, in earthly existence between birth and death, he sees but the outer manifestation of his own essential being and enters into actual relationship with merely the outer manifestation of his fellowmen. Life takes on a different form for the different epochs of mankind's evolution, and we exert ourselves really to study these things just in their relation to men of the present time. For the present age is a very critical one for men on earth. Up to the fifteenth century, and, since things do not change in a flash, one might say on into the present time, man is still actually more or less dominated by inherited concepts and impulses of the past. This fifth post-Atlantean epoch is indeed in a certain sense rather out of the ordinary where the evolution of men is concerned. For you certainly know that taking earthly evolution as a whole it divides itself into seven great successive epochs, of which the fourth was the Atlantean epoch and the fifth, our present one, the post-Atlantean. The sixth and the seventh should then follow.

In the Atlantean period there was a kind of crisis. For up to that time the whole of the earth's existence was a recapitulation of the earlier existence of Saturn, Sun and Moon. During the Atlantean period there was a kind of crisis but it is true only the beginning of a crisis. There was merely a preparation of things that were actually to be developed in the following evolution of the earth. So that up to Atlantean times man was really only what he had been in his different forms as man on Saturn, Sun and Moon. In Atlantean times, however, he had only intimations of what he was supposed actually to become as man of the earth; then he continues on, and now we are in the fifth post-Atlantean period. In the post-Atlantean period, throughout the old Indian end old Persian development, and so on, ever more definite relations were arising. But the Greco-Latin time, the fourth post-Atlantean period, gives us again even though in another form merely a kind of repetition of what existed on another level of existence in Atlantis. It is only now in the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the time since the fifteenth century, that man stands within his whole evolution in such a way that new impulses arise—impulses which are perceptible in his very being. Previously they were not so noticeable; now they appear in his being noticeably, nevertheless there are still only intimations of their presence. The terrible, catastrophic events of our time, the consequences of which—one can already foresee—will be shattering to mankind, are the expression of how new relations are making their way into mankind's evolution. I have already indicated how from a certain aspect these new relations can be described by pointing to the way in which an on-rolling spiritual wave is clearly perceived, arising from, as it were, a surging up into evolution of the Spirits of Personality.

Now we notice it after the manner of Spiritual Science we keep in mind this particular state of soul in which modern man is found here on earth, it is markedly noticeable today, according to the outlook of Spiritual Science, how man when he perceives or is outwardly active in his willing is really surrounded only by manifestations of the being of nature, and the being of his fellow men. He is not surrounded by the real beings into whom he must, as it were, grow in the course of evolution, into whom he will have grown at a later stage of evolution. As you know, man's position in the world is such that—to describe it broadly—he perceives the surrounding world in the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom and in his own human kingdom. This is what is visible around man. And in the visible human kingdom there is played out what comes from the will and what should find a certain ordering for the social structure.

Now people have reflected a great deal about man's attitude to his environment, though insufficient thought has gone into their reflections. But the result of these reflections has been worked into various theories of knowledge. We get very little, however, from these theories of knowledge. And what in schoolmaster fashion is given in these theories today to the young people, who are then supposed to speak to the world as philosophers, is really perfectly inadequate nonsense. For a true insight into what is really revealed in man's surroundings, a real insight, can only be gained when the matter is observed according to the way of Spiritual Science. You see, on one side man can look upon the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom; on the other side he can look on the animal kingdom and the kingdom of man himself. Both—mineral kingdom and plant kingdom as well as human kingdom and animal kingdom—unveil themselves to him in such a way that if now in a theoretical sense he is honest, in this unveiling, in this revealing, he notices contradictions. He is unable to make anything of the way in which on the one hand the mineral kingdom and plant kingdom, and on the other hand the animal kingdom and human kingdom reveal themselves to him. And when people believe they can succeed in doing so this comes from a certain dullness. Because they take life too easily they are unwilling to go into all the doubts which arise from observing the kingdoms of Nature. But now, when one presses on to knowledge, when one trains oneself in the direction given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, then to a certain extent a change takes place in our contemplation of the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as in our view of the connection with the animal and human kingdoms. Unconsciously men already have, to a high degree today, a feeling for this change, even if it does not enter consciousness. It remains indeed in the unconscious—just as I told you that today in the natural course of evolution man passes by the Guardian of the Threshold unconsciously. It is actually a certain fear of the truth which always unconsciously holds men back from really pressing on so that they come to this change. I am speaking in Imaginations, my dear friends, in Imaginations translated into words. In reality these things cannot be appropriately described in any other way. For when man brings to life within him what can be made living, when he applies himself to what is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, looking at the mineral and plant kingdoms with this transformed power of cognition, he will always experience something like fear. But you should not have to shudder nor get gooseflesh at the description of these conditions. People avoid them because they are afraid. From this you ought to understand that of course when picturing these conditions one can indeed get gooseflesh to a certain degree, and on that account people just get frightened. When such knowledge is acquired, on looking at the mineral and plant kingdoms, one always experiences something like the smell of a corpse; there is a corpse-like smell which characterises as if in a vivid feeling what is living in the mineral and plant kingdoms. On the contrary, When with transformed cognition we look at the animal kingdom and the kingdom of man, there is always a sensation that can be described by saying: actually (you will forgive me, I know, for putting this Imagination into words) actually so long as they are in a physical body men remain—even the most advanced of them—where what in reality is hidden within them is concerned, always children, thorough children. The simple truth is that far more lies hidden in a man between birth and death than he can develop outwardly, can bring to manifestation out of himself.

Therefore, because in supersensible knowledge there is always a gradual ascent from semblance to actual reality, you see that when looking at, observing the outer world as it now is, we actually have to do with semblance alone. For the corpse-like smell of which I have spoken and, forgive me, the childishness of men, are veiled. The corpse-like smell finds, if I may say so, too dull a nose in our physical men, the etheric nose not being sufficiently developed. And the childishness of men does not allow us to confess its presence because , as men, we are too conceited to do so. Yet this is how the matter stands. My explaining what I have just been describing one points at the same time to there being far more hidden in in man than can be given practical proof. The question may now be asked: If man does not perceive the reality in minerals nor plants, if he perceives no reality in animals either—not even in his own being as man, where then is his right setting on earth? Strange as it may seem we find him placed among beings who belong neither to the mineral and plant kingdoms, nor to the animal and human kingdoms, but lie between them. He bases his being upon a kind of plant-animal, or animal-plant. were there a being here on earth neither wholly plant nor wholly animal, but having mere plant nature where their inner organisation is concerned, and having the power to go around, to move about at will like the animals—now this is what I meant were there beings who on being examined anatomically would not be found to have muscles and blood within them but whose anatomy would resemble that of the plants, with only their cells and tissue, but if these beings were able to move at will like the animals, or were there wandering round our earth animals that on dying left plantlike corpses, then man in his whole attitude of soul would really belong among these beings. Here in his earthly existence man would really be able to comprehend such beings. But again the remarkable thing is that for their part these beings could not exist on earth, these beings are only to be found in other worlds. They could not flourish in earth existence. Thus, we may say that man really lacks the faculty for knowledge—and this particularly apparent today's—which enables him to penetrate directly into the being of minerals and plants. and also of animals and men. And the beings he would directly perceive in their whole constitution are just these which could not live on the earth. This is the remarkable position of man where his relation to nature around him is concerned.

But here on earth man stands also in a strange relation to himself. Man is on the one hand a being who has conceptions. When, however, he puts this faculty for conceiving, for having ideas, into action, in the conception he loses his own identity. And he actually has his identity, that is not able to make an appearance in the conception, only when something—his will—works up out of the unconscious. If the will were not to work up and we were to have no trace of it in us, could we have andy ideas about it. The whole world would seem to us ghostly. We should have a ghostly world before us, which about describes the world of scientific concepts; this would actually constitute our world. Imagine the world looking as it is described by natural scientists or zoologists; just think of it being nothing more than what is found in books on Botany and Mineralogy. Real Botany and Mineralogy contain far more than what we find in books. But imagine you were taken into a world described in books, where there was nothing more than what is described in books; it would indeed be a world of mere apparitions, a proper world of ghosts. The world not being one of ghosts is amply due to the will having something to say. Now look! Were you able to fly—I don't mean with a machine but were you able to fly yourself, if you had no need of earth under your feet and were you able to move freely without the earth—then you would come near to perceiving the world in this ghostly fashion. Even if you could only follow the world with your eyes when awake it would appear very ghostly, not so much so as when described by the natural scientist, but all the same it would appear very ghostly. You have a feeling of the solidity of world existence only because you stand with your feet on the ground. And this pressure of your feet against the ground gives you the feeling, akin to the will, but watered-down will, that you are not in a ghostly world but in one that is solid. Were you not to have this feeling, should you only see, the world would appear to you a very ghostly place. You do not tell yourself what is going on in the subconscious; in the subconscious something is going on that makes man say (in the subconscious he does say it): Yes, the world looks very like a ghost! Were it really what is presented by my eyes I should never be able to stand firm, I should have to sink down; and as I do not sink, the world is not as presented by my eyes. This conclusion is constantly being arrived at in the unconscious. The entirely ordinary, most everyday relation to the world is as complicated as this. It is always an unconscious conclusion that to a certain extent originates with the will. Thus in mere conception we actually lack—to use an erudite expression, a pedantic expression—we lack the subject, it drops out. That we have a subject and feel ourselves bound up with the world comes from the will.

Again, when we will, when we develop the will, the object is actually lacking. The object does not come into our consciousness at all as something properly solid. If I want simply to lift this little book from the left side over to the right, and actually do it—the real object of the will does not enter consciousness at all. You can see the passage of the book, the conception which takes its ghostly way into the will, but the actual object of the will does not enter consciousness. So that man when he makes conceptions and also when he wills (this again sounds grotesque because an Imagination is being clothed in words) man as a conceiver as well as a willer is—if you will forgive me—a cripple. He conceives in a ghostly way and wills incompletely. What man is in reality, is actually neither quite within his conception nor his will; once again it is in the centre between the conception and the will. But all this goes on in ordinary life without being able to enter consciousness. In the same way as the plant-animal is unable to enter external nature, what man actually is cannot enter his consciousness. For this reason I have often spoken to you of the fact from another point of view by saying: man perceives the real ego like a hole in life's events. You see we have to be clear that holes can also be perceived. Man knows nothing of sleep, he wakes, sleeps; wakes, sleeps; wakes, sleeps. But reviewing the course of his life he is faced by empty space in his consciousness, the hole in consciousness, and he sees just as if there were a white surface before him with black holes where really nothing is to be seen. Thus he looks at the holes that, during sleep, are there in consciousness. But it is also the same with our ego in waking life. Our ego is not in reality brought into consciousness: in the consciousness there is only a hole for this ego, and perceiving this hole is the only thing that makes us aware that we really have an ego.

These things, that appear to the insensitive men of today as sophistry, must gradually become an elementary consciousness in man. For in the future man will not be able to found life on dogmatic conceptions, as has been possible for him in the past owing to the still existing remains and after effects of atavistic clairvoyance. In future we shall have to base life on grounds that are easy to detect. It will have to be part of our everyday conceptions that mineral and plant kingdoms are observed after the manner of Goethe. For Goethe only examined the phenomenon, and did not believe that in the phenomenon there was revealed anything but, at best, the basic phenomena, the archetypal phenomena and that phenomena do not reveal in laws of nature which can be put thoughts. Goethe never looked for laws of nature, for this would have seemed to him very fantastic; he wanted to pursue the phenomena because the external world shows us in the mineral and plant kingdoms nothing but perceptions, appearances. Thus man has to look at the external world to become conscious of himself. In the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom I really see only the outer side, and when confronted by the animal and human kingdoms I actually see only something like an embryo of the complete being. That also must be so. For you see, in the mineral and plant kingdoms in reality there exist beings who, when observed by man, reveal only a certain side of themselves because it may be said they cannot reveal themselves in any other way. For in the mineral and plant kingdoms lives something man can only fully recognise if—please understand me, thoroughly he looks back to the world from which he came on entering physical existence through birth. Could you after birth with your thought keep possession of the consciousness that stretches backward before birth, could you, that is, look upon being born as an event in your life like—shall we say—the passing from the fifteenth to the sixteenth year, and were the backward-running thread of consciousness to remain unbroken—the consciousness being quite different before birth, before conception—without more ado you would get a view of mineral and plant kingdoms quite different from the one you get on looking from the standpoint of life between birth and death. For you would then say to yourself the followings I have come from the spiritual world through birth. I have entered this physical realm. Why should I have done this? Why should I not have remained in the spiritual realm? Why have I been enticed down to earth at all? For one may speak here of enticement. Then, if you were able to remember, you might says I have been enticed to earth for the reason that suddenly in the course of my development between death and a new birth, it seemed—I came into a sphere where it seemed—as if certain beings had flown away, as if they really should be there, were missing—and were not there. To put it bluntly, in the time just before birth in the spiritual world one is dogged by the feeling that one misses certain beings which actually belong there and are not there. Everything goes to show that these beings are lacking. And if one comes down through birth, these beings are there in the minerals and in the plants, but as though banished, as if these beings were banished from the world just left, as if they could not really flourish, would half die and thus create the corpse-like smell, would become half dead in the world one has entered. Before birth we long to know certain exiles. We only know there are banished beings, but where are they? Then we go into the physical world and perceive them, but they might be said to be embalmed, mummified. For in the world we have entered it is only possible for them to be embalmed, mummified, dried up. It is perfectly right, on being confronted by the mineral world and the world of the plants, that we should have the feeling we are looking at beings exiled from the spiritual world, from the regions in which we were before having to enter physical life.

And when we look at animals and men end see their childishness, then, if we can develop the power to see more deeply into being, we remember that these animals and men, as they actually are here in the world in which we live between birth and death are never finished, never actually bring to completion the whole of their life which is conditioned by their inner being. Anyone looking at animals in the right way, anyone who can look at them with full inward and living force of knowledge, knows well that animals are not immortal, but knows too that animals experience in their group souls the whole tragedy of this not being immortal. The group souls outlast the individual life of the animal but what there is here on earth of the animals is—as I recently sale—in reality sick (see Lecture 1), and this is so on account of its deterioration through belonging to s world from which it is banished. And in his outer physical form man also is an exile in this world. He therefore remains crippled and a mere child. Man remains a child, the animal in his general being, in his physical form, is dried up. For what belongs to animal and man is found when we go through death and enter directly into the spiritual world, which then after death we observe. For actually a circle is described in the life between death and a new birth. What remains hidden here of animal kingdom and plant kingdom, what causes us to perceive that animals and men—as far as men's physical forms are concerned—are exiles from the spiritual world, banished out of the spiritual world, is first perceived by us when we pass into the spiritual world through the gate of death. There we go through an evolution and as we approach ever nearer the cosmic midnight, described in my mystery play, (see The Soul's Awakening, scene 6) we become clear that something is missing, that what is missing has run away from the spiritual world; we pursue it through birth and find it on the physical earth in the mineral and plant kingdoms. On entering this existence through birth we are never really surprised about the mineral and plant kingdoms because they are what we have been expecting. Finding animals on the physical earth, too, and men with an outer form that recalls that of the animal though it is more perfect, is astonishing to us in some measure after being born with our gift of consciousness. We begin ia understand this, however, when we know that a beginning has been made with this outer form of animal and man, which only develops in the world we enter through the gate of death.

Now it might be said: For the abstract and completely dried up religious conceptions that still persist (these conceptions were once much more full of life and really gave men something) for these abstract, dried up conceptions still remaining in our age of consciousness, all that men perceive here in the physical world, all that they should conceive as underlying the world experienced by man between death and a new birth, comes upon them too abruptly. What man experiences between death and a new birth remains on this account so problematical for men today, and can so easily be denied by the grossly material mind, because men in arriving at the age of the consciousness soul, which means the age of the intellect, lives as I have explained only in what is reflected into his consciousness. Therefore, he is also only able to live in reflected images when he goes out beyond the perceptions to where, if he stands firmly on his feet, the will plays into him in the way I have previously indicated. If no will plays in however—and in the immortal life after death no will does play in—when there is no interplay of the will and man is restricted to placing before his soul, the reflected images of his conceptions of what the world is between death and a new birth, then this world will have no certainty and will be not only ghostly but without certainty. Indeed we can go as far as to say that if men obstinately cling only to science, if they fix, their attention only upon the ghostly world given them by science, then they are quite right in denying any life at all after going through the gate of death. For what is given by science is only pictures, apparitions. And even this comes to an end when we pass the gate of death. Science is unable to contain anything of what we experience in the realm after death and before birth. For, you see, in books on mineralogy, in books on botany, in everything connected with Physiology, Geology end so forth, in any of the conceptions you can absorb about plants and minerals, you can absorb only about beings who are living in banishment here in this physical world. Again, you can also perceive in the bodies of animals and men only what has been banished here—even with all the help of your books on Zoology and Anthropology, and, if you widen the field of your thought you can really put all knowledge in the same category—you are only able to perceive what is living down here in banishment. But when you reflect that before birth you feel the lack because they really are not there of just these beings experienced here after birth, that in animals and men you then experience what does not exist down here, you will understand that into the conceptual life of science nothing at all of immortal life can enter, and that since it lives in images science in its own domain has a perfect right not to trouble itself about immortal life. It in for this reason that, since the fifteenth century, in the epoch when the conceptions of science are dominating the whole of mankind, man has on the one side the robust, crude nature actually representing for him the whole of reality, and on the other side a realm that he wishes to reach with only the weakened mirrored images of the age of the consciousness soul. This comes before him as though he were saying to himself: Now that I come to see (this happens in the subconscious, for it is there he comes to doubt immortality) when I come to see that what I think are only reflected images, then were I to believe these reflected images would still be there after my death, including the images of my self, I should be just as stupid as if I believed that there were coming towards me out of my mirror here on the wall the men who appear to approach me—that they were not simply reflected but were actually coming towards me.

It is simply characteristic of this epoch of the development of the consciousness soul that if man will not advance to a spiritual comprehension of the world, then connection with the world into which he will enter once he has passed through the gate of death will vanish from him more and more. It will also disappear from his thought life, from his conscious life, but he will not cease to long for it. And even the most hardened deniers of immortality have in the depths of their will, where longing is born, the longing to experience something of the world man enters through the gate of death, the world from which he comes on passing through the gate of birth. They have a longing. The present time is sick with this longing. And the many illnesses of the present time are the expression of this longing holding sway in man, and of man's inability to find conscious conceptions for his longing. If anything is living in the sphere of the will which we are unable to master by conception (again one has to develop very fundamental concepts to speaker these things) when man cannot overcome by his conception what is living in the sphere of his will, then he starts to rage. This is the essence of raging, or frenzy, that something is living in the realm of the will that man cannot comprehend with his capacity for conception. And if man refuses to give in and agree to recognise the existence of the spiritual world, so that through the recognition of the spiritual world he comprehends what has already taken shape in the sphere of the will, than this raging will become ever greater and greater in the world; the raging which indeed presents itself today as the next stage for men after the—not forthcoming but always hoped for—conclusion of peace. This is not anything which can be talked about in the way things ere discussed at a bowling club where, according to the usual philistine conceptions, people come to an understanding as to the possibility of getting some kind of relief or redress. No, it is something connected with the deepest reality of human evolution. Man cannot struggle against the development in him of what enters the sphere of his will. He has no power over it. He is able only to make up his mind consciously to penetrate to the sphere of the spirit so that he learns to understand what is permeating the region of his will. By this means an ordered co-operative life for men can be developed in future in place of this raging.

You see, men turning to the spiritual world which will be revealed in our time by a special wave of events, is not an affair only affecting mean subjectively; it is an objective necessity for man to turn to the spiritual world in this age of the consciousness soul. For changes have even now entered human evolution.

Up to the time in the Mystery of Golgotha took place in earthly life, up to that time, everything man needed for standing here in the world with some measure of security came just through sleep. Before the Mystery of Golgotha man slept in a different way from what he now sleeps, whatever the physiologists may say. Those prophetic natures like the Hebrew prophets to whom such sublime things were revealed in dreams, exist no longer, therefore, in the same form. For today these things are not given to men by God in sleep. This used to happen. This is just the great crossing point in evolution. And pictures of the future were not given only to the prophetic natures but in the time of the Greeks men still had their thoughts given them during sleep. On waking, man brought his thoughts back with him. The structure of the human organism was still such that man could bring back his thoughts. For quite a while this went on working, for the fact is that men actually became headless in the fifteenth century—you will forgive mel To become headless means that the head could no longer he used properly, the head could no longer bring back thoughts out of sleep.

One of the results arrived at through Spiritual Science is that we recognise our head as an instrument to have been really of much less use and much more dried up since the fifteenth century than it was before that time. But it is only now that this has become so noticeable; and it will become ever more noticeable if some means is not found to compensate, s0 that the evaporation of the head is made good again by the spiritual world. For up to the present, up to the nineteenth century, the other nature, man's breast nature has always been accustomed to what the head was still getting from sleep during the Greco-Latin period. The breast nature was inured to this, and in their headless condition men were still receiving impulses as an after effect; they were still in the habit—or I might say men still had the gesture of the thought, the shadow of the thought. But this shadow too will pass away and men will have no thoughts at all if they leave their thinking only to their head. And this is really how the matter stands; it is shown by men's reluctance to think. They have less and less will to think. On the one side they want to have thoughts dictated by nature, for what they like best is merely to make experiments and let the experiments say what they themselves should be thinking. But men prefer not to do the thinking themselves. They even have no proper faith in it, for it is their opinion that what they think out lacks true reality. It is true that there is no reality if you take the mere thoughts. We can come to see, however, that thinking, not the thoughts but the thinking, must become active. And when thinking is made active, this means the spiritual world is coming into play. Today when you really begin to think actively, you can do nothing further than let the spiritual world play a part in you. Otherwise you do not think; you think as little as the scientist thinks today who prefers to let his experiments or his investigations dictate everything to him. Or you think so little as the modern students of sociology who, because they have no will to be active, because they do not come to grips with real social impulses which can be grasped only by being active, actually work with what can be discovered in history, what is inherited from the past. Think for once how men, because they themselves no longer have impulses able to create the social structure, have come down to looking back to the time when thoughts were still formed. The matter is then seen from only a false point of view. It was Rousseau who held up to men the natural state, because he had the feeling that in his day nothing could be gained unless men became active in their pursuit of knowledge of the higher worlds. Well, and even modern socialism likes to indulge in a study of mankind's primitive state; it is something that particularly interests the socialists. They study the original conditions of mankind, their primitive conditions, they study the most savage original peoples, primitive peoples, so as to understand how men are meant to live in social co-operation. This is recognised by all who are familiar with these things. Everywhere there is a certain fear of what is making its presence so inevitably felt as the first dawning of connection with the spiritual world, a certain fear of active thinking. This is why there is difficulty in understanding my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for example, which makes such demands on active thinking. In it the thoughts are different from the usual thoughts of today. And people often stop short when reading this book for the simple reason that they would like to read it as any other book is read. But the other books particularly popular today—well, I think you will agree, they are read in a comfortable easy chair where one can just let thoughts go by with as little trouble as possible. Many people do any reading they go in for just like that. Don't delude yourselves into believing that these men often read newspapers in a different way (present company, of course, always excluded); it is true that emotions are mixed up with this reading, and worries too. But even the newspapers that are devoured so sensationally are also read by letting the pictures slip by. Ah, but all one has tried to put into The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read just like that. There you have continually to give yourself a shake to prevent the thoughts sending you to sleep, my dear friends! For it was not written with the idea that you would simply sit in an easy chair; naturally you can sit, even rest your back, but then, just because you are physically at rest, you have to try with the whole of you to set the inner being of soul and spirit in motion so that the whole thinking begins to move. Otherwise you get nowhere but go to sleep. Many indeed do go to sleep and they are not always the least sincere; the insincere ones are those who read The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity just like any other book and then believe they have really followed the thoughts. They have not followed them, they have on the contrary just jumped over them as if they were the husks of words; they go on reading the words without taking in what actually follows from the words as the spark should be produced by flint and steel. But this is something that must be required of what has to take hold of the evolution of mankind in the present and the immediate future, for through it man will gradually raise himself to the spiritual world in the right way. By active thinking man's inner relations to the spiritual world will be kindled and then he will make ever greater progress. Today he can already get very far by carrying out such things as are described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But there too it is sufficiently indicated how pre-eminently necessary it is to develop coherent, connected thinking where there is no broken thread—when the thread of the thought is carefully followed.

In this longing, today more or less lacking in clarity and consciousness, to push oneself upward with unconscious thinking to the sphere of the spirit—and it is possible to do this—there is mingled a desire from the past, a weary desire, to go on thinking incoherently. Just recently I have drawn your attention to how contrary it is to men's sense of comfort to have to progress step by step in conscious thinking. They would much prefer to leave things more to the unconscious, and not in thought go on to the next point and then again to make a further step. Isn't it so? You see, Spiritual Science as we understand it here and as in a sane way it reckons with the unbroken sequence of the thoughts in the way you know—well, it is not that this Spiritual Science cannot be understood if thinking is made active, but men simply want to understand Spiritual Science in a different way from how they must understand it; instead of which they would like the thread to be continually broken. When you go deeply into what Spiritual Science gives you, when you plunge into it with real energy (have patience, in the present epoch only faint indications of this can as yet exist) then, already today, by developing the power of thought, by following in thought Saturn, Sun and Moon, as described in my Occult Science, you can follow this evolution up to where man stands there in the world, and you can press on to your own life, penetrate this life of yours with the thought which is thus made vigorous. Then you come to certain conceptions which, although not as you would like them to appear but entirely in the connection, in the coherence, of the thinking, enlighten you about their being, about their nature, about what they are and their character. By bringing to life what is said about Saturn, Sun, Moon and their corresponding details, and then about the evolution of the earth, applying all this to your individual selves, you would be able to progress to your own being; only you have to go on in your thought to the perception of yourself, not letting the thoughts be broken but keeping them coherent and connected. What in this way man begins rightly today enlightens him up to the stage where he should become clear about his own personal being. In this longing, still present more or less unconsciously in men, however, something else is mingled with the broken thread of thought, something calculated! Man would like to find out something of the kind about his being; what does he do? He takes old antiquated knowledge of which, it goes without saying, the venerable nature is certainly not to be disparaged, which, however, has need of explanation when applied in a new epoch—he calculates, reckons, breaks the thread of thought at any point, calculates constellation of the stars, and after that the thread of thought can break, and quite externally without any sequence in the thought this being of man as he appears on earth is supposed to develop without any thinking.

You see, even if the Church, the Roman Catholic Church as I described it to you yesterday, denies what today is most necessary of all, this can be made good just by taking anything like the description of the inner vision of John of the Cross and living today in the sense of the evolution that conforms with Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. What is contained in this book follows on today precisely from what a man such as St. John of the Cross wills; whereas the Catholic Church denies it and wishes even today to see the old way of John of the Cross applied to modern man, as indeed it is to so many people. Because they are too comfort-loving they do not want a life that is active in spirit, a life that has already reached a stage of energetic activity when conceptions are accepted such as those given by Spiritual Science. They would like these to be brought up to date in a more usual form of thought, preferring to remain with what is old and hoping that out of this lack of thought there might spring what should explain present-day mankind. Naturally this is no adverse judgment about what is venerable, but from every point of view it must be indicated that one should not venture to deny what is placed as spiritual necessity into the present evolution of mankind, the evolution beginning with the age of the consciousness soul. The important thing is for man really to understand what today is required of mankind in world-evolution. I believe that out of right feeling for the very things which men find irksome, and do not want, a better attitude towards Spiritual Science will be adopted more and more, and only when this better attitude to Spiritual Science has come about will the social life also be enriched. At this point man will be able to become clear about the life of mankind because he will then have the necessary strength of thought to enlighten himself concerning man's life. For where this enlightenment about man's life is concerned man of today suffers from a very precarious state of affairs. Whether you are a follower of Lenin or Trotsky, whether you are a Marxist or any other kind of thinker about the right form for the social structure of men, in each of these views there lives a state of affairs that is precarious and cannot be understood without the fruitful intervention of Spiritual Science. Doubtless you will admit that man has now entered the epoch of the consciousness soul. He has to develop consciously what arises as social structure. Otherwise nothing will go right. He has to take his place consciously in the world; it is really necessary that man should be conscious. But he should also consciously grasp the relation between men, life in society, the social life. An uncertain state of affairs hinders him in this. The fatal thing is that man can never have a conception of more than one man. And as neither two men (I mean physical men) nor two things (physical things) can be in the same place at the same time—which decides the law of impermeability—two men cannot be in human consciousness at the same time, the actual conception cannot be made of two men! simultaneously. It is very important to take note of this. We cannot live with another man without making a conception of him, neither can we develop any knowledge about the social life in common unless we make conceptions about other men. But today man, because he is able to conceive only of one man, generally prefers to conceive only of himself, to make a conception of himself as man. And social thinking is content to demand a co-operative life in which man's conception is always merely of himself. Man does not get away from the conception of his own self; he often talks of doing so, but in reality today he does not easily get rid of himself. It is only when he makes every effort to fulfil the requirements of Spiritual Science that he gradually finds it possible in some measure to get free of himself. For Spiritual Science sows in the world the seeds of thoughts having a very wide perspective, and this is how man grows into the habit of getting free from himself. As today, if he becomes a spiritualist, man grows more egoistic than he was before, if he would penetrate into the spiritual world on that other path, the path of Spiritual Science, he becomes more selfless. Spiritual Science, therefore, is not simply the handing over of knowledge, but spirit-knowledge is actually something unconditionally necessary for educating modern man in social life. It is for this reason that no cure will be forthcoming if a start is not made in this matter, it men do not really give heed to the necessity for first making a conception. There can be no social reform without schooling to begin with, without men first being instructed. And when this is neglected men miss the possibility of receiving concepts that embrace their longing. And, if I am to get at the root of the matter, men will became more frenzied than ever.

This is the inner connection, my dear friends. But it is desirable that this same inner connection should be perceived. One would wish above all things that this inner connection should be felt by everyone entering upon Spiritual Science and wishing to live in it up to some point or other. This is something that everyone will want to ponder who has the wish to take Spiritual Science and the Movement of Spiritual Science in earnest. It cannot well be overlooked, it cannot well remain unnoticed, that when we enter into relation with Spiritual Science this Spiritual Science makes certain demands on the human heart and mind to widen the interests beyond narrow, personal interests. It is really true that in talking of Spiritual Science one simply speaks of things which, if a right relation is to be established with them, makes it necessary for man to free himself from his most narrow interests! He need have no fear of becoming unpractical on that account: he becomes much more practical. It is just this belief that he is practical which has gradually been arrived at through being unspiritual. In reality the practical man of today is terribly unpractical. And these 'practical' men have actually landed us in the present catastrophe. Herein lies something of tremendous importance which man really must always take for granted if he wishes rightly to understand what has to do with Spiritual Science, namely that he must get free from his narrowest interests. He must rid himself of the immediately personal; for it does not help matters when people carry their narrow personal interests into the Anthroposophical Movement. That is always just the cause of any kind of mischief in the relation taken up towards Spiritual Science. It is also naturally the reason for what is still such a difficulty in our Movement, that people although often abstractly in theory, having the good will to come to Spiritual Science with their own thinking, feeling and willing, nevertheless do not bring all the necessary strength really to enter upon selflessness, which indeed must be called upon for understanding rightly what is said from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. Thus a kind of spirit-condition not easily found today in the world, but the opposite of which is prevalent in the modern world, must be demanded for the health of the Anthroposophical Movement, my dear friends! For the difference between the sincere presentation of the knowledge of Spiritual Science and all other knowledge arising at present, lies in this presentation of Spiritual Science being no personal affair, no personal opinion. Were I obliged to hold the view that I should lecture only about merely personal opinions and not concerning what is revealed today and just what is necessary for mankind, I should prefer to remain silent. For to uphold personal opinions and personal aspirations in a Movement that is anthroposophical is something impermissible. That should not be. A Movement such as is striven for here is justified only when there is the will to present merely what one is allowed to observe out of the spiritual world.

When you describe the appearance of any town you may, according to circumstance, make the description either interesting or tedious, but what the town looks like does not depend upon you. You describe something objective. What you yourself want, what is your own opinion, should come just as little to expression in Spiritual Science. What must take effect in Spiritual Science according to modern demands is all that is spiritually observed. Those who are able actually to will merely what is personal can for that reason only imperfectly understand what should hold good in a movement for Spiritual Science. They continually confuse what should hold good in a Movement such as is meant here with something else drawn, more than ever from the personal. How many there are who coming to Anthroposophy would like their own opinion to be justified by Spiritual Science. They are not always equipped with the open mind necessary for the acceptance of Spiritual Science. Very often they come to it with something quite different to this open mind. They would like this or that to be true, then in some way, while admitting that the investigator of Spiritual science may know something about the truth, persuade themselves that what one thinks oneself one says. Then they would be happy. But this fine distinction must be noticed; it is a fine distinction although a tremendously far-reaching one; there is a far reaching and important distinction between the one who wants to accept what is imparted by the spiritual world and the one who actually wishes only to have confirmation of what it pleases him to think. Only by the most punctilious self-examination, by conscientious self-examination, will the distinction be discovered. The distinction is often unnoticed by those who come to Spiritual Science; it must, however, be noticed. If it is noticed it will become apparent that through a Movement for Spiritual Science something of a new stream of life must flow which was not there before. It is really not possible for an Anthroposophical Movement to be like a mere soft current of air blowing towards anyone who brings to Spiritual Science the Philistine tendencies of his earlier life and then believes he will find what he is only too willing to acknowledge in Philistinism corroborated by Spiritual Science.

When we proceed in this matter earnestly, conscientiously, we shall not want merely to find corroboration of our actual individual opinion; and we shall also come to understand many things which might be said to be obliged to arise as new things in a Movement for Spiritual Science of this kind, things that must do harm if left unnoticed. In a movement in the act of arising like this Movement for Spiritual Science much can work harmfully that cannot cause so much harm in old, dried up Movements, no longer of use or of very little use. We have really to go into these fins points, my dear friends! You see, connected with the endeavour merely to see our own opinions, our own aspirations, justified by what is revealed through Spiritual Science, a remarkable technique of 'touching-up' is developed concerning what comes forth and comes forth perfectly naturally, within a movement such as ours. In this movement for Spiritual Science we must be alive to the fact that phenomena with men cannot be taken as if in a bowling club or something of the kind where men can reveal how verbose they have become in the ordinary world where nothing new is required of them. We must recognise in all earnestness that the aims of investigation into what is spiritual cannot find expression through our own conceptions; we must really prepare ourselves to receive the things. We should picture that something is wishing to flow into the world, something that should more and more widen itself out, so that everything should really be received in full consciousness. Many connections not yet perceived will be perceived later. This willingness to receive everything as in some sense a preparation, will certainly not be present in those who carry their personal aspirations into the impulse of Spiritual Science, for at the first possible moment they will get done with things, giving them the bent of their ordinary opinions. They do not mould their opinions in accordance with Spiritual Science, they mould the knowledge gained through Spiritual Science in accordance with their opinions. And so we often have given out the kind of thing I would like to describe in the following way.

Now you know that the Anthroposophist has to judge the world in a certain way, the world of nature as well as the world of human beings. Education in Spiritual Science consists indeed in our learning to judge afresh the surrounding world and our relation to it and in our learning to look more deeply, into the world. People very often remark when, let us say, the relation of three men is in question: The Anthroposophist B. has been criticizing the man A. And, my dear friends, as soon as we overstep the usual Philistine sphere, so largely around us today, two standpoints can be put forward where the formation of judgment between man and man is concerned: one of these standpoints is that of reason, the second being the standpoint of sympathy. Thus B's judgment of A may be in accordance with what arises from an inner necessity at same time to do something or other purely out of his—B's—sympathy for A. Should it now suit C to be antipathetic because he does not reflect sufficiently and does not assume that it may be possible for pure sympathy to come into the matter here, out of necessity, then, basing his judgment simply on reason he will say: whatever can he be doing that for? Or this inner necessity may speak in such a way that it is not sympathy that becomes dominant but, because of certain factors, reason. Yes, and when it suits the other better he lets sympathy have its say and gives as his verdict: what an unsympathetic person! How utterly without feeling the man is and what a prosy rationalist! He judges purely from the standpoint of reason. In this way the crudest misunderstandings arise in the case of just those who bestir themselves to grasp the inner nerve of existence, where they have at one time to do something based on reason, another time something just out of sympathy. And when it suits this other man (C) in accordance with the sympathetic view he condemns what is done from reason, and what is done out of sympathy he condemns from the point of view of reason, and he can always condemn or praise as he likes. By this path we never arrive at what is right, we only arrive at what is right if we begin by saying: I must consider the case, I must look into the causes why sympathy or reason have held sway here. It is things like this out of which the little misunderstandings in life arise which often grow to very destructive proportions in men's life in common. It is just this that our education in Spiritual Science should help us to overcome. For life is such that it expresses itself in a twofold way. And because it expresses itself in a twofold way one can always condemn at pleasure one of the two cases. This is very little taken into account, however, above all not taken into account where the teachings of Spiritual Science itself is concerned. This, too, must be placed in the world with definite intention. In an individual case either one or other of the two standpoints can be chosen according to convenience, if greater attention is not paid to the deeper grounds out of which the spiritual seeker is obliged to act. He may often be misunderstood. And if there is no agreement in what must be done out of inner duty in accordance with the facts, then it is possible to misunderstand everything, since the world has this dual form of expression.

You see we can fall into the following error for example. When anyone is eager to have what suits him substantiated, he may just fall into the worst form of belief in authority. Belief in authority can naturally make its influence felt, and this influence is actually frequent and of wide range in the very sphere where Spiritual Science also would be active, which wishes to make man into a perfectly free, self-reliant being. The other pole of the belief in authority, however, is hatred of authority. And fundamentally the man who does not feel himself drawn to Spiritual Science through entering into the facts revealed from the spiritual world, but wishes to have these truths conveyed to him by authority, wanting to believe in authority because it is easier than going into things—this man is terribly apt to spring over from his belief in authority, that always has in it a certain kind of love of authority, to hatred of authority. And all manifestations that have arisen in our particular movement of this leap from blind worship of authority, which sometimes has even appeared with a certain shamelessness in the moment of passing over to hatred, this passing from blind worship of authority to hate—all this is something inwardly present as a danger. It is very important to keep these connections in mind, for these connections make it terribly difficult today to create an Anthroposophical Movement so that it will prosper. It must be created in a successful way for the sake of mankind's welfare.

Now, my dear friends, in my life I have found quite a number of people who were spiritual people and were seeking in all sincerity away into Spiritual Science, into some kind of Spiritual Science, who were also in a way advanced in their development. A certain type among them was disillusioned, people who had been disillusioned by one or other of the modern spiritual movements and who then in some place or another came across us—how many are disillusioned today by the Blavatsky Movement, the Besant Movement or some other Movement. There we do not see the characteristic phenomenon that takes such curious forms in the Anthroposophical Movement; but there we have people, for example, who are to a certain extent spiritually advanced; then after some time one again comes across them but now they say: You are completely wrong! And these meetings are not infrequent. Spirituality today is not at all common but there are men indeed who say to one after a time: You are actually wrong, for, you see, the things you give out in Spiritual Science—there's no possible sense in publishing them! But men are not in inclined to accept them; they are certainly not sufficiently mature. All this can only serve one purpose to be developed in oneself and then kept to oneself. I have found many such people who say: It is a definite characteristic of the man who is really advanced spiritually that it no longer enters his head to speak about it to his fellowmen; he keeps the matter to himself. There is indeed no lack of such people in the world. I have never been able to come to an understanding with these people about what out of a certain inner ground I learn from the spiritual world. These men do quite useful work in a spiritual community but they have a hermit tendency, even when at the same time they remain in association with others. For it is possible to become a hermit in spite of wearing elegant shoes and leading an Hotel life. This one sees this double life being led by a number of people; they are indeed the modern Hotel dwellers; for all I care they may be well dressed but they lead this life as an outward mask to hide what is within them; they have their inner life of the spirit with no wish to share it with their fellow men. This seems to one to be doing what is not right, to be sinning against mankind. For one is right in saying that such men have en effect on the spiritual life, what they experience goes into the spiritual stream. Man is not a self-contained being, therefore what he experiences has value and its own significance in the spiritual world, but the question of time always plays its part there. Men like this who live in such a way nowadays, as many do whom I have known, bring about something indeed in the spiritual world which however only comes to maturity after a long time, in the later epochs of mankind. Then, however, can, and quite certainly would, were there always only those who as hermits develop their spiritual being, having no wish to teach what knowledge they have gained from the spiritual world, what they have developed in themselves—then by the time the fruits of these men are ripe, people outside would have so deteriorated that they would no longer be able to receive the knowledge! Earth evolution would be endangered: connection would be missed. We live indeed today at a time when certain spiritual truths such as those of which we have been speaking must unconditionally be imparted to mankind. Things will not be helped by the attitude expressed, for example, by one of my acquaintances who in a certain sense was spiritually advanced. He came to Berlin and I asked him whether he would come to hear a lecture of mine, just to see how the Movement was run (this is some time ago). He answered: No, holding lectures and talking to people serves no possible purpose! To sit together for half-an-hour and have a little talk I find very pleasant—but let us leave spiritual things alone when we can; everyone must settle those for himself! To pay a civil visit and pass the time of day is best for just those people who are seeking the spiritual. And this attitude is a prevalent one. It would be more comfortable, my dear friends, to live in accordance with such an attitude. And the word comfortable certainly does not describe what it is nowadays days to get up in front of people to impart what one feels impelled to impart as a duty. In an Anthroposophical Movement it should be borne in mind that work is done out of inner necessity, and what happens is not a matter of choice but the punctual observance of a duty.

I have used these words at the end of our studies today because I have wanted once again to take the opportunity of calling attention to what is necessary if a movement for Spiritual Science is to be taken nowadays as earnestly as it should be taken. For what can be made of an Anthroposophical Movement, if personal aspirations, personal ambition, is brought in, can cause much injury must cause much injury. Besides there is still the shadow side, namely, that whoever thinks to find only what is just personal corroborated through Spiritual Science cannot discern whether the other may not be acting also merely from personal ambition. And a terrible doom is then forthcoming. I wanted to give an indication of these things, my dear friends. We shall be speaking further next Friday.

We have been speaking of what hinders modern man from coming to recognition of the spiritual world, as it must be understood through the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy, and two things have been indicated as having been the cause of this hindrance. These two things are leak of courage, lack of strength where recognition of the spirit is concerned, and lack of interest about the actual form of the spiritual life. Now today I should like to go into these things from a point of view from which I have touched on them still more lightly. When such things are spoken of it must always be borne in mind that man's ordinary sound intelligence, as I have often said, suffices for understanding and receiving open-mindedly all things concerning Spiritual Science. If I may say so, through the fact that sound human intelligence; when rightly directed, is sufficient for the understanding of the things of the spiritual world today, in a certain sense through merely understanding, through open-minded acceptance, everyone may have all that the investigating Anthroposophist receives from the spiritual world. And with the courage and interest to receive these things with sound human intelligence, man has himself the possibility of rising slowly and gradually, in accordance with what his own karma permits, into the spiritual world. Already today it is necessary, and will become increasingly so for all men, to learn to understand the spiritual world, to learn to understand it with sound human intelligence in the way the spiritual world is spoken of in Spiritual Science. How far man can become ripe to look into the spiritual world himself is quite another question, a question that can be settled only by each individual in his own inmost soul, a question to which each one will settle in the right way in his inmost soul when he seeks to understand the things of the spiritual world simply through his sound human intelligence, and not through intelligence prejudiced by natural science or any thing else.

Now the next question that arises above all about this is why so many people today avoid making their sound human intelligence active so that it may understand, or be prepared to accept, what is derived from Spiritual Science? And something can be learnt about this question by hearing what the things and beings of the spiritual world actually look like when this world is entered by the spiritual investigator. In former times the Initiates were allowed to speak of a great deal about the spiritual world that was different from what has to be given out today. But naturally in those olden days much also could be said of a similar nature to what can still be said now. Thus, for example, it was always given out in a way that today is still right, what actually happens when a man seeks to enter the spiritual world before his soul is ripe to do so. Today this can indeed so happen that the man says to himself: What! Sound human Intelligence?—that is the last thing to bother about if one wants to understand the spiritual world! People are not fond of the effort entailed; they would much rather accept some particular thing through belief in authority. There is really far less liking today for sound human understanding than people imagine, and they would like to get round this need for sound human understanding by penetrating directly to the spiritual world in a way that they imagine to be easier, even though this is an unconscious opinion, namely, through all manner of brooding and things of that kind, which they call meditation. This preference for actually penetrating into the spiritual world without the help of sound human intelligence is indeed very common. Those initiated into such things however were already saying what is right concerning this in past times, and it continues to be repeated by Initiates today. When an attempt is made to penetrate into the spiritual world by anyone who is insufficiently mature in his whole attitude of soul, it happens all too easily that after some time he ruins his whole endeavour, brings it so near complete disaster, that he is left with a feeling like someone who, grasping a red hot piece of coal, is undecided whether to burn himself or let the coal drop. This is an experience arising very often in those who meditate. They do not seek to let their sound human intelligence prevail in the same measure as their zeal for the so-called exercises, which indeed in themselves naturally have their justification. It is always emphasised, however, that sound human understanding may not be excluded, it must be actively, diligently, applied. If for sometime it is sought to make a practice of excluding sound human intelligence and also of excluding the accompanying moral self-discipline that up until then has actually not been acquired, this characteristic feature will appear—that all this will be experienced as if someone were to touch a piece of glowing coal with his fingers, not only touched it but jumped back, thus men would jump away from the spiritual world. As I have said this is always emphasised. It is emphasised because it is an experience made in earlier ages by countless teachers of Spiritual Science in the form this took in atavistic times; it is an experience that can also be very prevalent today. This is emphasised; but today we must find out the reason why there should arise this sensation of touching and recoiling as if from glowing coals.

Now if we seek to understand this fact, we may be able to recall a basic truth of our Spiritual Science perfectly well known to us, namely, how we as men behave when we bear in mind our entire life in its alternating states of sleeping and waking. With the help of the old mode of expression, we might say that while we sleep we leave the physical body and the etheric body lying in the bed whereas with the Ego and the astral body we fly out, if I can put it thus, into the world that otherwise surrounds us; we do not inhabit our body when asleep, we are poured out into the surrounding cosmos. In this way when we are sleeping our consciousness as a man is slight. When the sleeping condition is unbroken by dreams which implies a certain increase in the intensity of consciousness, but when we keep in mind dreamless sleep, then our consciousness is so inconsiderable that we do not become aware of the infinite and important number of experiences gone through in the state between going to sleep and re-awakening. This is just that we really should keep in mind, and not the abstract words: In sleep, with our ego and astral body we are outside the physical body—no, we should bear in mind that our body is tremendously rich between going to sleep and waking up again: (Compare Z-233) we do not know it, however, because our consciousness is then weakened, because our sleep-consciousness is not yet as strong as the consciousness that is able to be united with the instrument of the physical body. In actual fact a tremendously intense experience takes place in ego and astral body within the world where we also are the rest of the time—an intense experience. Man, however, during his ordinary state on earth is protected from the immediate perception of this life, this life developed when we as ego and astral body force ourselves—if I may express it thus—through the same things to begin with in which we are when making use of our physical body and its organs. The life during the state of sleep is one of tremendous richness. But this life does not cease when we wake and plunge down into our physical body and etheric body. We are still connected through our ego and astral body with the world surrounding us in a way that the ordinary consciousness has no inkling of; only this remains quite unnoticed. We can now look at this precise relation more closely. It may be asked what actually comes to expression in this relation of our soul and spirit to our physical and etheric?

You see, for our present state of experience it would be a very bad thing were we henceforth always to have to perceive what in sleep we experience with the things outside in space and in time. We do not indeed do this, but were we to do it we should always have to go on doing it and could not do otherwise. Our body, that is to say, has a certain characteristic where these experiences are concerned. It may be said to weaken these experiences. Our body weakens all that in actual truth we experience with the surrounding world; we perceive only what has been weakened by our body and not our real experiences. Our real experiences are related to what we perceive of our environment through our body—and this is a very pertinent picture indeed because not only is it actually a picture but it corresponds to an occult reality—our body or the experiences of our body are related to our real experiences in the same way as the sunlight, that shines on a stone and is reflected back so that we can see the stone, is related to the actual sunlight streaming towards us from the sun overhead. Look at the stone the sunlight falls upon; you are able to look at the stone, your eyes can bear the reflected, thrown back light. When you turn from the stone to the sun and gaze straight into the sun you are blinded. It is approximately the same with the relation between our real experiences in connection with the world around us, and What we experience through the organs of our body. What we experience in reality with our environment has the strength of the sunlight, and what we experience through the organs of our body has of this strength only the weakened form which the weakened light of an object reflected back to us has of the strength of the real sunlight. In our innermost man we are sun beings, but so far we cannot endure what it entails to be sun beings. Therefore as with our external physical eyes we have to look at the softened down light of the sun because direct sunlight blinds us, we must also perceive our environment through what results in a softened down form from our body and its organs, because we should be unable directly to face what in reality we experience of our environment. As men we are actually as if we were blinded by a sunbeam and what we know of the world and of ourselves has not our real being in it, not as things would be experienced in streaming sunlight but in light thrown back from objects, light that no longer blinds the eyes. You can gather from this that when you wake up in the world that ordinary consciousness cannot endure, you have the feeling you are in sunlight as if you really would live with the sunlight. And in the actual experience, in the actual practical experience there is indeed a very concentrated sunlight.

There you have the facts about what is often said—that people throw away the experience of Spiritual Science as if it were a red hot coal. You come to a region of experience where you have experiences like that of the soul when your finger is burnt. You jump back and do not want to burn it. Naturally you need not twist round what I say. Nobody can come to spiritual experience by having his finger burnt. On that account I say like the soul experience when one burns a finger, for in Spiritual Science things must always be expressed with exactitude.

The real state of affairs is that entrance into the spiritual world is certainly not at first anything providing man with an empty kind of happiness; entrance into the spiritual world is such that it has to be bought with that inner, one might say, unhappiness, experienced when one is burnt by fire. (Naturally there are many other experiences of the same kind). To begin with man experiences spiritually with the things, beings and events of the spiritual world, exactly the same as, for example, when he burns himself. The real experiences of the spiritual world have to be acquired through these painful experiences. What gives happiness from these experiences of the spiritual world, what gives satisfaction to life, is the afterglow in thought. Those who have these experiences imparted to them and grasp them through their sound human intelligence, can have this just as well as anyone who enters the spiritual world. Certain individuals, however, must naturally enter the spiritual world, otherwise it would not be possible for anything at all to be experienced of the spiritual world.

These feats to which I have referred must be borne in mind. Fundamentally it is not very difficult just from the external facts to gather what I have been speaking of. You will find everywhere the spiritual world is spoken of seriously—not in the way of charlatanism but seriously—that the passing over is spoken of not as being made through pleasant but through painful experiences. And you know how often I have said that whoever in life has acquired a little real knowledge of the spiritual world looks back, but not resentfully, on the sorrow, on the suffering of his life. For he says to himself: The joys, the exhilarating moments of life I accept thankfully as a divine gift and I rejoice over the destiny that has brought me these exhilarating moments of joy. But all that I know comes from my pain, my knowledge comes from my suffering. Everyone who has gained actual knowledge of the spiritual world will see this. Only in this way are we allowed to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world while here on the physical earth.

And now you will be able to realise why people Shrink from understanding the spiritual world in spite of the fact that this understanding is to be acquired simply with sound human intelligence. Usually the only thing they do not recoil from in their understanding is what they would not recoil from in external life. Now you would naturally be most stupid and unreasonable if you wilfully burnt your finger just to find out what it was like. Added to which, if you burn your finger you pay so little heed to what your soul is experiencing that you do not gain any real experience of what it is like to burn your finger. Us, there is indeed a psychological fact rightly grasped only when seen in the light flowing from this knowledge. Now in that I am going to say I am not speaking here to you individually, for naturally I am not expecting each of you to do this, I only believe, of Course, that each of you will have heard of such things, you will have heard of them from others and remarked them in others. You will perhaps have remarked that people cry out when they burn their fingers. Now, my dear friends, why do many people cry out on burning their fingers? They cry out for the simple reason that by thus crying out the soul experience may be drowned. People cry out and make a noise at any kind of pain to make things easier for themselves. Ay crying out you will not be able to experience in full consciousness the whole extent of the pain; it is really drowning the suffering, sending it outside. In short, in ordinary life man has not much experience of the things that will be experienced in the spiritual world; nevertheless it is clear that these things can be understood with sound human intelligence because everywhere in the external physical world they have analogies through which we gather our experiences. It is certainly not the case that things of the spiritual world are incomprehensible; we must, however, make up our minds to strengthen certain qualities of our soul, for example, courage. We must have the courage not usually possessed when we do something and then recoil because it is painful. We must have this courage, for penetrating to the spiritual world always means pain. Therefore we have to strengthen certain forces of the soul, this is necessary. But many people today do not,want to strengthen their qualities of soul in the systematic way that is recommended, for example, in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. They have no wish to do this; they have no wish to enhance certain attributes of their soul. Were they to enhance them then in their capacity for forming concepts , in their sound human intelligence, there would easily prevail what is needful for understanding through this human intelligence he experience of the fingers in the spiritual world that, in the sense in which I have described it, is a painful experience. We are actually living in an age in which this strengthening of the human attitude of soul is a necessity, for otherwise mankind cannot reach their goal, and because catastrophe on catastrophe will have to arise bringing us finally to chaos.

Now, however, while discussing these things just at a time when it is particularly necessary, I have placed strong emphasis on something else. This is, that with the weakening of the attitude of soul existing among men today, there can be excellent scientists in the modern sense of the word. For even with the intelligence, that is not sound human intelligence but human intelligence carried to a high pitch through the authority of science, the external part of our physical environment can be particularly well understood. It cannot be understood inwardly, spiritually, but directly understood in its external aspect. What is not possible for people with the concepts given by science, with just what people today are accustomed to when applying their thought, is however to bring order into the social structure of man's cooperative life which is gradually becoming chaotic. To put it differently: Present social demands, and social demands for the near future, will never find their solution through what may be referred to as the thinking about nature and natural phenomena. It is on this very point that our contemporaries have terribly much to learn; in this very point again our contemporaries do not fall in with what must be told them by Spiritual Science out of its most intimate understanding of the being of our universe. Indeed, in spite of all the opposition which today will be forthcoming more and more, Spiritual Science must say just on this point that even with any amount of bungling around and doctoring up in the sphere of social questions no bungling around or doctoring up will lead to anything better; it will lead on the contrary to still greater social confusion than is already present in individual spheres of world existence unless it is recognised that insight into social questions can come only from the spiritual understanding of world existence. Social questions must be solved with knowledge of Anthroposophy—anything else in this sphere is dilettantism.

Thus we must turn to something else if we are to speak about things from a certain point of view. What largely holds men back from pressing forward to Spiritual Science is lack of interest in the spiritual life. This lack of interest in spiritual life is prevalent among modern scientists. They are indifferent about the spiritual life. They deny it or give laws to everything they can observe through the physical senses, everything that allows of investigation by means of microscope or telescope; but they take no interest in what is revealed every time there is real deep observation of nature, namely. that the spiritual holds sway behind all-phenomena of nature, all facts of nature. This lack of interest in the spirit is particularly noticeable today in those who would meddle in social affairs. And again there is a particular reason for this.

Now, my dear friends, from all kinds of things that I have spoken about lately, you will have gathered that when confronting each other as man to man we are in a very special inner life of soul. I have gone quite deeply into what kind of mood of soul we are in when as man we are face to face with another man. I told you that actually standing face to face with another man always has a soporific effect on us. Where the innermost qualities of our human nature are concerned we actually go to sleep in the presence of another man. It is not to be wondered at that outward behaviour deceives us as to this falling asleep. For we certainly see the other man with our eyes, offer him indeed our hand and touch him, do all kinds of things; but still this does not alter the fact that the other man causes us to fall asleep in the depths of our human being. Just as we are asleep to nature at night, something is sent to sleep in us by the presence of another man. When this goes to sleep, however, it does not cease to be active. Thus in social life there are always taking place between men activities about which, just because they are together with their fellows, people are unable to have any clear consciousness. People fail to notice in ordinary consciousness exactly what is of most importance in the social life, because their actual capacity for conceiving the most important things in social life has fallen asleep and they act out of instinct. It is no wonder that as in the forming of conceptions the intellect is most easily lulled to sleep, the most chaotic instincts should be taken as perfectly justified in modern social life because clear thinking about these things is sent to sleep simply by men being together. The moment a man enters the spiritual world, however, what was sent to sleep wakes up, and it becomes clear what is holding sway between man and man. For this reason the solutions can also be found of the so-called social questions and social demands. Thus, as I have already said here, it is possible to find these solutions only beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

And what mankind will want to have in future through the so-called solving of social problems, if it is to be a real solution, can be found only on the path of Spiritual Science, that is to say, the science of the superphysical, since all the most intimate foundations of human life in co-operation are of a superphysical nature. (cf. Z-234)

But then, if we wish to experience spiritually the things that have to do with man, mankind, and also with the human social structure, into our whole capacity for conception, into everything we experience, we must bring something which you will realise at once is hardly present today in ordinary consciousness. There is just one thing here in the physical world in the way of sensations, of feelings, that each of us must have if he does not want to investigate the social laws, the social impulses, in an unreal but in a fundamental way. This is only found in a limited form here in the physical world, only indeed when an absolutely healthy, absolutely right, relation exists between a father, mother and child, in the interest between father, mother and child. It is not to be found in anything that can be experienced between men anywhere else in the whole round world, Certainly not in ordinary consciousness.

Now while you are getting clear in your mind about, let us say, the mother's love (you can do it too in this fundamental way) about the love developed in the mother immediately she bears a child—this love of the mother for her child which obviously springs from the very sources of nature—try to become clear about this mother love, and then ask whether this mother love is dominant in any scientific investigations ordinarily carried out by the well-informed, even by those who are doing research work in social science. This mother love must be there in the thoughts developed about the social structure if these thoughts are to have reality in them and not unreality. The only form of thought in human life that could be right socially is what is thought out socially and with mother love.

And now take the various social reformers and social thinkers. Try for once to let work upon you such writings, for example, as those of Carl Marx, or people of his ilk, Schmoller or Reacher or anyone else you like, and ask yourself whether these, while thinking out their so-called social and political laws, in this devising of social and political laws, let themselves be influenced by what is there in the mother's love for her child when this love takes a healthy course. This must have attention drawn to it, my dear friends! A sound solution of the so-called social problem is possible only if this solution is forthcoming from thinkers able to develop mother love in solving their problems; you will understand what I mean by this. The solving of present-day social demands depends on this very human matter. It is not a matter of sagacity nor ordinary cleverness nor of belief in what is learned; it is a question of enhancing the capacity for love to the degree to which mother love can be developed, or we might also say the direct, intimate love in the common life of father, mother and child.

Here you will be right in making an objection. You will say: Yes, on earth matters are so arranged that the social structure has in a certain sense the family as its unit, and on earth the family as such is undoubtedly fully justified, yet the whole of mankind cannot be one family! This is an objection that naturally will be forthcoming at once. If we are to think out social laws with mother love, however, the consequence would actually have to be the whole of mankind becoming one family. Naturally that cannot be, Whoever knows what a real thought is, a real thought with nothing of the charlatan or abstract about it, will have to admit that of course nobody is immediately capable of behaving to every child as though it were his own, that every child cannot behave to all other women, all other men, as it would to its mother or father. Thus all mankind cannot become one family. That is perfectly right, my dear friends, but just because that is right another necessity arises for us. As we live here as physical men on the physical earth we should by no means be able to succeed in making all mankind into one family; whoever wanted this would naturally be wanting an absurdity. But we could arrive at it another way and in another way indeed it must happen. As physical men we should not be able to stand in the relation of father, mother and child. But when there takes root in mankind the knowledge that spirit and soul live in every human being, that a divine spiritual being shines forth from the eyes of everyone, and the message of a divine spiritual being rings in his words, when in other words man's immortal soul is no longer recognised simply in the abstract, then, my dear friends, the moment will have arrived, not indeed where physical man is concerned but with regard to what man hides intimately within him as his baling of soul and spirit, when we shall be able to behave to one another as if all mankind were one big family. But this will not happen until people meet each other with immediate feeling and it is recognised: When I look people in the eye the infinite shines towards me; when I hear them speak it is not only physical sound speaking but the divine spiritual being of their soul—if this becomes direct experience, just as we experience any blue or red surface, then we shall feel that man when expressing himself is of a divine spiritual nature, and shall learn not to recognise simply with blind faith that a man has an immortal soul, but we shall directly perceive this immortal soul in what he utters. For in this way we shall be able to enter into connection with the soul and spirit of each human being. This is something that will alone make the solution of the so-called social question possible, the one and only thing. Therefore we find this solution of the social question in the recognition of man's divine spiritual nature, in the recognition that what goes around on the earth as the human physical body, is only the outward expression of what lights up in every man out of the eternal. We can have the same relation to what lights up in every man out of the eternal, as we can have in the right relation of the smallest family unit. This is possible, possible in every sense. When recognising this we can capture that love for all men which is as great as the love of family.

There is naturally no point in the objection, which would be superficial too, if we remarked about things in the following way: Yes, but there are also bad people. There are also bad children, my dear friends, whom we even have to punish, but there is love in our punishment. The moment we see the divine spiritual light up in human beings, when we see it is necessary we shall punish, but punish lovingly; above all we shall learn one thing which might be said to be practised only instinctively, that is, to meet other men as if we both belonged to the same family. When we meet another man in this way we punish but we do not hate the man; even when we punish him we do not hate the human being who is our son, but we hate his wrong doing. We love the man, we hate his misdeeds and his faulty training, and we know how to distinguish in him between the man and what has overcome him. When people have once understood the great, the infinite, difference existing between human love, and hatred of the misdeeds that assail mankind, a right relationship can be established among men. When we fellow our inmost human nature there is never any possibility for our hating anyone. Naturally we have much cause to hate human crimes, misdeeds, human weakness of character, human lack of character. Where we largely go wrong in our social behaviour is as a rule in bringing against the man what should be brought against the misdeed, the crime. We do this today instinctively, but must become conscious that the development of mankind today lies in the direction of distinguishing between hatred for the misdoing and the love that all the some can be felt for the man.

Oh, my dear friends, more would be done to solve the burning social demands of today by recognising truths of this kind than by much else going around the world as social quackery or social theory. In face of the materialism that everywhere employs what is grossly material, it is difficult to make any impression when speaking of such things as these, for the simple reason that people today are largely materialistic in their instincts, which is a more harmful matter than their holding materialist theories. Crime, lack of character, cannot be seen and do not exist materially. But because people want to hate what is material, they associate the material man with their hate and there arise countless misunderstandings.

What arises from this as a bad misunderstanding is that sometimes from some kind of misunderstood sensations and feelings, man is confused with what he does in another direction also. There is carelessness in judging what a man does when it is said: Oh, we do not want to hurt the man, now and then one has to overlook things for sheer love of one's fellows. If a verdict is given in the matter by turning ones's eyes towards the wrong doing and not confounding the man in his inmost life of soul with his misdeed, then indeed the right judgment will be arrived at. It is less trouble on the one hand, if you dislike someone, to mete out so-called justice to him; it is also easy because it suits us to excuse failings which may cause harm in the external world. In the common life of mankind a very great deal hangs on the way we are able to separate what ought to arouse our antipathy from the immediate being of man as man.

My dear friends, I have often emphasised that what is spoken here about these connections is not meant as a criticism of the culture and conditions of the times; it is simply a description of them. Therefore you will also understand when I say that mankind of so-called western civilisation, the people of Europe with their American cousins, for a time must go through the stage not only of taking things materialistically in accordance with science, but also of taking life itself materialistically confounding men with their deeds in the way referred to. This has to do with the education; for the right development of other qualities to be possible, men, must in this sphere, too, pass through the stage of materialism. Men, however, who have remained behind at earlier stages of culture have preserved a great deal of these former cultural stages in which there was still atavistic clairvoyance. And atavistic clairvoyance has since resulted in quite definite trends of feeling and attitudes of soul. We people of Europe can only be a match for what assails us from certain directions, if we reflect upon the arguments put forward today. For let us not forget this—that thinkers looked upon as very enlightened as, for example, Immanuel Kant, speak—not indeed out of a certain basis of Christianity but of the church—a thinker of this ilk speaks of human nature being fundamentally evil. And how widespread is this error—for it may indeed be called so—that human nature in its actual depths is evil: In the civilised world of Europe and its American sister country it is said that if human nature is not under control it is evil. This is actually a European opinion, an opinion of the European Church.

There is a race of men who do not hold this view, who have preserved another view from former times, for example the Chinese people. In the Chinese world-conception, as such, there rules the proposition, there rules the principle, that man is by nature good. Here is a mighty difference which would play a much greater part than is thought in the conflict that will develop between men. To be sure, speaking of these things today, people believe one as little as they would have done had the war we are now engaged in been spoken of in 1900. Yet it is true all the same that a struggle is also being prepared between the Asiatic and European peoples. And then quite other things will play a part than have been played, are played even now or will be played later, in the catastrophic struggle we are in the midst of today.

There is really a great difference in the whole way of experiencing whether the Chinese have the conviction that man is by nature good, or the European holds that human nature is fundamentally weighed down by evil—from the standpoint of the world-conception of the people there is a great difference in which way a man thinks. How a man thinks is expressed in the whole of life's temperament, in the entire attitude of the life of soul. For the most part men have their attention riveted on the outer features of life's conflict and they generally pay little heed to what is lying in the depths of the inner nature.

There is just one thing I should like to mention. You see, the fact that the European, although he may not generally admit it, is always at heart convinced that man is actually bad and has to be made good only through education and restraint, restraint by the State or any other kind, this outlook, from historic necessity, is closely connected with something else. It is connected with—not with the fact itself but with the qualities of feeling underlying the fact—connected with European people having developed through this a certain life of soul in the form we call logic and science. From this you will find it comprehensible that those who really know the Chinese—I don't mean Europeans who know them but those who, Chinese themselves, (cf. The Karma of Vocation) have got to know Europe too, as for example, Ku Hung Ming, often mentioned by me here—that these Chinamen lay stress on there being no equivalent in the Chinese language for logic and science. Thus for what we Europeans call science, for what we call logic, the Chinese have no word at all, since they do not have the thing, because, what Europeans believe to be Chinese Science is something quite different from what we call science and what we call logic, something entirely different from what we Europeans think to be logic in the Chinese soul. So different are men on earth! Attention must be paid to this unless attention is focused on this no discussion of the social problem can bear any fruit. But when heed is paid to such a matter the spiritual horizon becomes wider. And this widening of the spiritual horizon is particularly necessary for the sound understanding of Spiritual Science.

And when many different questions are asked concerning all these things—we have already touched on two today and could still touch on a third—when it is asked why today people in accordance with custom still keep their distance from the truths of Spiritual Science this reason is found among others, that the horizon, the spiritual horizon, of modern man is a very narrow one. However much man may boast of his spiritual horizon today, however greatly, the fact remains that this spiritual horizon is very narrow. Its narrowness is shown in particular by the extraordinary difficulty modern man generally has in getting out of himself where certain things are concerned. And this not only has an effect on his understanding, it influences also his whole life of sympathy and antipathy.

I should like to refer to a fact, a fact well known to quite a number of you, that is to say, the effect of this fact is well known to a number of you; this fact I have already mentioned to you once and should like to mention it again. Now you know that a certain relation existed some years ago between the so-called Theosophical Society and those who today form the Anthroposophical Society. I experienced something remarkable in connection with just those members of the Theosophical Society who were prominent. Already by the beginning of this century, as you know, I had published communications from the so-called Akashic Record, information which I venture to say rested upon personal experience, as does all the rest of what I impart out of the spiritual world. (see Atlantis and Lemuria) When these communications were read by a prominent member of the Theosophical Society people could hardly understand how it arose. I was asked how these communications were received? And it was really impossible to come to any kind of understanding, for the actual methods of anthroposophical research suitable for the present age were totally unknown in that circle. There, more mediumistic methods were used for investigation. Really what was wanted was the name of the medium or medium-like person responsible for these Akashic Record communications. That they were actually the result of the direct observation of a certain human attitude of soul projected into the supersensible, was considered an impossibility! The narrowness of man's horizon speaks in things of this kind. Even in so momentous a sphere, people consider possible only what they are accustomed to, only what is easily understood.

Now I have quoted this instance just because if one is narrow-minded it is really quite im possible to press on to Spiritual Science. In everyday life, however, this narrow-mindedness is the common thing today, always to relate everything back to just the personal, accustomed standpoint. This is what must above all be considered by those very people who are attached to our Movement for Spiritual Science. My dear Friends, I am now going to say something that perhaps there would be no need to say in this way were the things to be said intimately, systematically, but which it is necessary to say when it comes to the external conditions of life. You see, those who take a more particular, active interest in our Movement know indeed how many attacks are made on the sources of this Movement, how bitterly it is persecuted, how many come to hate it who were formerly keen adherents, and so on. Last time indeed I spoke about these things from various points of view. Now it will not be superfluous, from certain aspects, to make clear the reasons for such hostility, such antagonism. I talked to you about the reasons for the antagonism seen here and there last time. Such hostility very frequently becomes particularly strong, however, when appearing among people who also belong, let us say, to some occult society. The hatred that develops in many adherents of one or another society against what is seen here as Spiritual Science, sometimes is really strikingly conspicuous, at times even taking grotesque forms. And it is not superfluous, my deer friends, to pay attention to these things, for we should pay attention to everything that makes us take our membership of this Movement very seriously. It is very true that nowhere is there more charlatanism in the world than where spiritual matters are represented in all kinds of societies. It is easy, therefore, because of so much charlatanism in the world to be suspicious of what arises as a Movement for Spiritual Science. Then those who want to, can easily find support if they say: Yes, once a Society appeared which maintained that it spread abroad all the wisdom of the world—then it was shown up as mere charlatanism! And now another has arisen, again it has proved to be charlatanism'! This must be admitted; there is infinitely much of this charlatanism in the world. Here the capacity for discrimination must come in to distinguish the true from the false.

But another case can arise; something, for example, in the nature of uncertainty may enter the soul. This uncertainty can consist in the following. A man of this kind may come to know what goes on here. Now if he has not an open mind, if he pursues what is personal, he may arrive at the following divided mood of soul. It is possible for him to foresee all manner of danger and to say: Dear me, how is this? I have so often heard of these societies, occult or whatever else they may be; I have never come across in them any knowledge, any real knowledge. It is true, every possible thing is talked of, it is in their books and given out in their ritual, but there is no stream of living knowledge. Now is this Anthroposophy of the same kind or is it something different? And he can find himself in a divided mood of soul. You see, in common parlance, when it is not possible for anyone to go deeply into what is actually living here, it may be said: Is this the kind of swindle that I really find more pleasant since it does not ask so much of one?

My dear friends, the things I give out here are not so unreal as that! Above all they are spoken because I want to point to the necessity for earnestness, dignity, and the capacity for discrimination. I have said this repeatedly, so that the unpleasantness should not arise which very often arises, namely, that the real life of spirit is all around, whereas because it is less trouble people actually prefer to hear it talked about. What calls forth so much antagonism is just the fact of what I have emphasised in my book Theosophy being true here—that only spiritual experiences are spoken of. The antagonism of the Theosophical Society also actually first arose when they noticed our claim to speak of real spiritual experiences. That could not be borne. People are preferred who repeat what has been given in their lectures and repeat it with a certain zeal, but independent spiritual investigation was, fundamentally, the great sin against the Holy Ghost of the Theosophical Society. And this independent spiritual investigation is not as yet to be so easily found in the world today. Once again I have wanted to intimate this at the end of what we have been considering. And it will indeed be necessary for you, my dear friends, really to my heed to these things with a sound mind but also with all earnestness. The times are grave and the remedy for the times that we wish to receive from the spiritual world must also be grave.

We should like to go on speaking of these things tomorrow.

Wishing to bear in mind the importance for the present time of penetrating into the world in accordance with Spiritual Science, we should not fail to notice that this penetration, as we may have gathered from the various studies made here, will bring with it an essential increase in man's understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And it may be said: whoever in his whole soul, his whole heart and not just by ordinary intelligent reflection, unites himself with the knowledge gained by anthroposophical research, when in any other way he is connected with modern culture, will have repeatedly to ask himself what attitude to the Mystery of Golgotha is taken by anyone to a certain degree changed through knowledge derived from this anthroposophical research? From very various points of view we have surveyed this most important of all events for mankind. Today we will try to look at it in such a way that we shall be striving to follow the stream flowing from this mystery down into the most recent times. The fruitfulness of anthroposophical knowledge can be shown in a certain sense by its success, or at any rate its ability to succeed, in rightly understanding in a similar way what has happened both in the world and in mankind up to the present. Whereas human observation otherwise generally recoils in fear from having recent history permeated by what is spiritual.

In contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha we shall have our attention drawn above all to the impossibility of this Mystery of Golgotha being grasped, being understood, if we wish to start out from a material study of world events. It is only when we try to grasp a spiritual event spiritually that we arrive at area understanding of the eatery of Golgotha. It is true that you may say the Mystery of Golgotha is for all that like other historical events a physical event of the physical world. But only recently I have pointed out to you that knowledge at the present time, when sincere, cannot say this. It cannot recognise the Gospels as historical records in the same sense as other historical records, neither can it accept in the same sense as historical records the few highly contestable historical notes which, in addition to the Gospels, we have about the Mystery of Golgotha. These cannot indeed be taken like the historical accounts about Socrates or Alexander the Great, about Julius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus and people of this kind. And I have often emphasised that just what creates the special relation of Spiritual Science to the Mystery of Golgotha is that Spiritual Science will establish the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality at the very time when every other method of mankind, all other paths of mankind, will be found to lead to nothing when trying to draw near to the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality. For the Mystery of Golgotha must be understood spiritually as a spiritual event. And it is only through spiritual understanding of the Mystery at Golgotha that the external reality of this Mystery of Golgotha can be grasped. (see The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind)

Now what is of most significance in the Mystery of Golgotha? In spite of all the so-called liberal theology of Protestantism the most significant part of the Mystery of Golgotha is the thought of Resurrection. The saying of Paul is still undoubtedly true: “And if Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain”. In other words, it is necessary for Christianity, true, real Christianity, to have the possibility of understanding that Christ Jesus went through death and overcame this death after a certain time by livingly re-uniting Himself with earthly development. It goes without saying that in relation to its inner law this belongs only to the spiritual worlds.

Now I have also pointed out to you something that, when looked at purely from the point of view of reason, might break our hearts because it represents one of these contradictions there must always be in life, which logic would always like to clear away—the Christ was put to death. The most guiltless One who ever trod the earth was put to death through the guilt of man. We can gaze upon this human guilt and regard it in the way human guilt, such great human guilt, is regarded. This is the one side of the matter. But next we have to look at the other side and say to ourselves: And had Christ not been crucified, had He not passed through death, it would not have been possible for Christianity to arise. This means, the greatest human guilt was necessary for the greatest blessing to enter the evolution of the earth, for the evolution of the earth to acquire its meaning. We could speak of this point in paradox—had men not taken upon themselves the burden of that guilt, that greatest of all guilt, the significance of the earth would not have been fulfilled. And in this way we characterise one of those great, fundamental contradictions life provides, which the logic of the world would do away with. For what is logic meant for? Logic is meant to do away with contradictions wherever they are found. Logic today however does not yet know what it is doing by this. With the removal of the contradiction, logic kills the life in human understanding. This is why people do not arrive at any living understanding when they want to give merely abstract, logical form to this understanding. And because of this a man comes to a living understanding only when he is willing to rise above logic to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Looked at superficially, the Mystery of Golgotha gives this picture—that at a certain point of time, in a little mentioned province of the world-wide Roman Empire, the man Jesus was born, lived thirty years in the way we have often described and was then permeated by the spirit of the Christ; as Christ-Jesus he lived on another three years, during the last year going through death and rising again. This event at first remained unnoticed anywhere in the whole Roman Empire. Throughout the centuries this event worked in such a way that the culture of the civilised world not only was absolutely transformed but entirely renewed. This is to begin with the external side. We penetrate to the inner side by trying to become clear how this Mystery of Golgotha arose out of Judaism and within the midst of the heathen world. In its religious conception Judaism has something radically different from any heathen religious conception. It may be said at once that Judaism and paganism exclude each other as the two poles of all religious conception.

Let us therefore first consider paganism. All paganism—whether or no what I want to say is, in paganism, more or less hidden—all paganism starts out with the idea that for human perception the divine-spiritual is in some way to be found in nature. Pagan religion is at the same time essentially the perception of nature. In the heathen the contemplation of nature is always there as a more or less unconscious basis: he feels that even man arises out of the becoming and the weaving of the phenomena of nature, that as man he feels himself related in his whole existence in his whole evolving, with what is there in nature and what is coming into existence through nature. Then, to crown what he is able to gain by his perception of nature, the heathen seeks to grasp as it were with his soul what is living in this nature as divine and spiritual. We see this in those ancient times by the way which man out of his own bodily nature becomes able to grasp the divine spiritual, in visions, in atavistic clairvoyance. In the lofty Culture of Greece we see how man tried in pure thought to grasp the divine spiritual. But everywhere we see man as a heathen tries to prepare a path for himself leading straight from the observation, the contemplation, of nature to the crowning point of her edifice—the perception of the divine spiritual within nature.

Now if one goes deeply into the essential being of all paganism—today I can only give an outline of these things—it will be noticed that a perception such as this cannot bring us to a full understanding of the moral impulses in the human race. For however hard it is sought to recognise from nature the divine spiritual impulse, this divine spiritual impulse remains without morality as a content. In the culturally advanced pagan religion of the Greeks we see that the Gods cannot be said to have had much moral impulse.

Naturally everything is expressed in a more or less masked way, the reality clothing itself in some kind of metamorphosis: but to all intents and purposes it is quite possible to say that in Judaism the matter, the very basis of the matter, shows itself as the polar ic opposite of the pagan religion. If we would put it tritely, Judaism might be called the actual discovery of the moral impulse in the evolution of man. The characteristic feature of all ancient Jewish religion lies in the essential pulsing and weaving of the Jahve Impulse into mankind in such a way that its weaving and coming into being bring the moral too into the development of mankind. But this caused a difficulty to enter into this Jewish religious conception which the pagan religious conception did not have. This difficulty lay in the inability for Judaism to arrive at an intelligent relation to Nature. The God Jahve, Jehovah, waves and weaves through the life of man. But when man then turns his gaze to the Jahve God who brings about human birth, then punishes bad and rewards good actions in the course of life, and when he next turns his gaze away from the Jahve God to the events of nature into which man also is interwoven on earth, then there is no doubt it becomes impossible to bring the events of nature into harmony with the working of the Jahve God. The whole tragedy of this impossibility of reconciling what happens in nature with the impulse of the Jahve God is expressed in the great and powerful tragedy of the Book of Job. In this Book of Job we are particularly shown how, purely in the course of nature, the just can suffer, can be brought to misery, and how in contradiction with what nature brings, the just man has to believe in the justice of his Jahve impulse. The whole underlying tone, however, the deeply tragic underlying tone, which might be said to ring in the human soul of the Book of Job with a feeling of isolation, from nature, from the cosmos, shows us what difficulty exists between the simple conception of what the Jahve-Being actually is, and an unprejudiced contemplation of what presents itself to the human gaze, to everything in human life, as the course of natural events in which won is interwoven. And yet this Jahve-God, this Jahve-impulse, what is it for those who really grasp the Old Testament but the essential innermost being weaving in the human soul itself? Whither is the ancient Hebrew conception driven by being so polarically opposed to the outlook on nature prominent in paganism?

The old Hebrew conception is with necessity driven by all this to the idea of a being in addition to the Jahve impulse, a being having a part in human nature as this human nature is in the present time of world existence, namely, the serpent of Paradise, Lucifer. Satan, a being who, opposed to the God, the Jahve God, is obliged to play a part in what man has become in earthly existence. A believer in the Old Testament must look upon the Jahve-God as the innermost impulse to which he directs his veneration and devotion. But it is not possible for him to ascribe to this Jahve impulse the only share in bringing about man; he has to ascribe a substantial share in man to the devil, as he was called in the Middle Ages. But it is mere dilettantism to believe that it is very scholarly to establish the contrast between the Jahve-God and the devil, the old serpent, as though it were the same as, for instance, the contrast between Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Persian religion. The basis of the Persian religion is indeed of pagan nature and Ormuzd and Ahriman confront each other in such a guise that we can rise by way of the perception of nature to their essential being in the world-outlook. And the whole process of the world struggle, represented by the Persian religion in the battle between Ormuzd and Ahriman, is a process such as has been taken up by the other pagan religions into their religious conceptions. What in the Old Testament is thought of as the contrast between the Jahve-Impulse and and the satanic impulse, on it meets us in the Book of Job, is a moral contrast; and in this book of Job the whole picture of this contrast is permeated through and through by a moral tone. There a spiritual kingdom is in fact indicated, in which are the good and the evil and this is rather different from the Kingdom of Nature. It may be said that at the time the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching human evolution, mankind had not come to the point of having done with these two main streams—the pagan way to the divine and the Jewish way to the divine. Both of these, however, had reached their highest point of development. For it must not be forgotten, again and again we must remind ourselves, that such a refinement of spirituality, such a height in the conceptual life of man, as had developed in the paganism of the Greeks is unique in human evolution. Neither has it since been reached again nor was it there before. On the contrary, a firm, clear hold on the moral Jahve-impulse through natural events, such as is found in the Book of Job, is also unique and not to be discovered anywhere else. In this particular direction the Book of Job is indeed one of the miracles of human evolution.

When the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was coming near, mankind had arrived as it were at a dead end. They could go no further. They had conceived, or had tried to conceive, Nature in the old sense, on the one hand, on the other hand the moral world in the old sense. It was impossible for them to advance. In their outer form both had in man's view reached the highest point and there was no higher point to be gained. And now world-evolution actually resulted in contrasts. It does not move forward so simply, so easily, in such a straight-forward ascending development as the modern theory of evolution would have it. This modern theory of evolution imagines, first, what is simple then rising in a straight line—and so on and so forth. But this evolution is not like that; another evolution lies at the basis of this one, in that certain evolutionary impulses reach their highest point, but at the same time as these impulses are approaching the highest point, others are descending to the lowest depths. There are always these two streams flowing—the one to the highest outer development and at the very time one is coming to this highest outer development the other is coming to its greatest inner development. And at the same time men have arrived on the one hand at a certain height, where the pagan conception is concerned, and on the other hand at a certain height in regard to the Jewish conception, what developed inwardly in mankind on earth was only to be reached through such an event that indeed happened historically, although outwardly it took the form, as it were, of a world symbol.

Thus, it could only be the death of the spirit that was to give the earth its meaning. Highest life, as this life developed in the course of ages, highest life brought to its zenith, at the same time inwardly, spiritually, implied the necessity of death. Only out of death could new life then proceed. This death on Golgotha is therefore the necessary contrast, and the greatest contrast to the abundant life acquired at this time in the world-outlooks of the areas and the Jews.

It is true that the matter can be represented from the most varied standpoints. We have already done this. But the following, for example, can also be said: the old world-outlooks all more or less based on atavistic clairvoyance, outlooks which were first advanced to pure thought by the Greeks—all these ancient world-outlooks were finally aimed at discovering man here on the earth. And particularly in Greece, and in another way in Judaism, this is exactly what happened at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Going farther back in former times it is found that to a certain extent man in that he was thinking about himself was nearer the divine not having yet come to a conception of himself. At the time the Mystery of Golgotha took place man had arrived at his own conception of himself. For when such a thing comes about there arises one of those events when in a certain measure through its on force the event changes into its opposite.

Now if you watch a pendulum swinging from left to right you will find the following. I have often used this illustration. Whereas the pendulum swings here it falls back again here through gravity; and having sunk to here through gravity, at this point because the pendulum cord is in exact opposition to the direction of gravity the latter cannot work; but the pendulum does not remain still. And why? It is because by falling down, as the physicist expresses it (and we can apply the same expression though it is not correct spiritually) the pendulum has gathered so much inertia that through its own inertia it swings to the other side.

This inertia is exhausted, reduced to nil, the moment the pendulum has swung out as far to the left as it did to the right. The agent towards the left comes about through the pendulum's own inertia but is then exhausted. This is a universal law in any process in the world at all, namely that something happens and in happening nullifies the impulse to happen. And so the moment pagan and Jewish culture had reached their zenith the force that had brought them there was exhausted and brought to naught. And the entrance of a new impulse into the world was needed to lead evolution onward.

This impulse was the Christ, for Whom in the way we know, the vessel of Jesus was prepared. So we can put it thus, that had a man been able, at the point in our reckoning of time which might be called zero, to see right into what was actually taking place inwardly in mankind, he would have had to says mankind at this moment meet the tragic destiny that the forces given them at the outset of earthly evolution had been brought by the time at which we have arrived to their highest development where the inner constitution of soul was concerned, but that at the same time these forces had been exhausted. Men were faced with the death of the culture that at the beginning of earth evolution took the course of the impulse which the men of old had received as mankind's heritage. Then anyone thus experiencing mankind's fate could look to the hill of Golgotha and see the external historical symbol, the dying body of Jesus, the dying representative at mankind, and from the Resurrection could take hope that a new impulse would not abandon mankind on the earth but would lead them onward. This impulse, however, could not arise out of what it was possible up to then for earth to give mankind. In other words looking to Golgotha and on Golgotha experiencing the possibility of mankind's further development, men had to aspire to something the world was not able to give. To look up to something coming as a new impact into the evolution of the earth—this is what had to be done, or would have had to be done at that point of time by anyone with an intimate vision into the affairs of mankind's evolution. This is what happened and this was the significance of it. It is a matter of external history whether certain events have been more or less grasped. The essential for Christianity is that this happened, and took place as an objective fact. Christianity is not a doctrine. Christianity is the perception of this objective event being played out in earthly evolution.

And now let us look at the remarkable way in which this perception of Christianity was spread abroad. Recently I have expatiated on this fact from another point of view. Today we will observe only how the conception of the Christ impulse, that has come into earthly evolution, spread out over the lands of Judaism, of Greek paganism, of Roman paganism, If without prejudice we observe the historical development we cannot help saying—Christianity most certainly did not take such thoroughly deep root in Judaism, but in spite of the Gospels having been written out of the Greek spirit, neither did Christianity take deep root in Greece, and when we come to the Roman Empire it quite decidedly did not do so there. You need only take what is left of the Christianity out of the Roman Empire, namely Catholicism, and out of this Roman Catholicism merely take the Mass, in its way great and powerful, it is true, and you will see what a peculiar significance underlies this very spreading of the Christian conception throughout the old Roman Empire.

For what strictly speaking is the Mass? The Mass, as well as other ceremonies of the Catholic Church, are indeed in their magnificence, in their incomparable greatness, taken from the pagan mysteries. You have only to look at the Catholic ritual and to understand it correctly, and you have in this ritual a reproduction of the way of initiation in the old pagen mysteries. The chief parts of the Mass—Gospel, Offertory, Transubstantiation, Communion—represent the path of those seeking initiation in the Ancient pagan mysteries. The Christ impulse had to be clothed in the form of the old pagan mysteries to be spread abroad throughout the regions of the Roman Empire. You can reed in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact how what has been experienced in the conception of Christ-Jesus was represented to those entrusted with the results of Initiation in the old pagan mysteries. There we are shown how on Golgotha, on the scene of world-history, there took place what otherwise was always presented as individual human experience on another plane, in the secret depths of Mystery Initiation, Thus we see that the secret of Christianity in its diffusion over the civilised countries of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, known to us as the Greco-Latin epoch, is steeped in pagan ritual. What was received in the Christ-impulse as idea, lived on in the sacrifice of the Mass. To all intents and purposes it still lives on today in the Catholic sacrifice of the Mass. For he is an orthodox Catholic who experiences Christ-Jesus in all His mystery when at the altar they elevate the Host, the Bread transformed into the body of Christ. In this ritualistic action the true Catholic who experiences the pagan form of Christianity feels what he is intended to feel. This is not an immediate relation to Christ-Jesus; here we have a relation in which through the form of the pagan ritual it is sought to come on, to press on to man.

It is only when having passed through the civilised lands of the south which imbued it with paganism or Judaism it arrives among the barbarians of the north, that Christianity first arises in a quite different form, a form that is intimate and human. For this reason the prevalent attitude of these northern barbarians to Christianity was such that they accepted it in a much more primitive form. And for a long time these barbarian Arians (cf. R. XLVII.) of the north, kept aloof from the complicated conceptions simply embodied in the pagan ritual, and represented Christ-Jesus to themselves more or less as an idealised man, as an idealised man raised to the level of the divine, as the foremost brother of mankind, though still a brother. The relation of the Christ to some kind of unknown God did not much interest them; on the contrary, what interested them extraordinarily was how human nature stood in relation to the Christ nature, what immediate connection the human heart, the human mind, is able to have with the ideal man Christ-Jesus, And this was bound up with the outlook concerning the external social structure for mankind. Christ became a special King, a special Leader of the people. How in their imagination they would follow a leader in whom they had trust so they wished to follow Christ-Jesus as the outstandingly illustrious Leader. Something here arose that might be described as seeking a personal relation to Christ Jesus in contrast to the complicated relation of the south, which could only be expressed by the imaginative picture realised in the ritual.

Now what brought this about? Indeed, my dear friends, these barbarian peoples to whom Christianity penetrated in the north are the germ of what later was to arise in human evolution as the fifth post-Atlantean period. They were not completely men by the time the people of the fourth post-Atlantean period had already come to a comparatively high point. They absorbed into their still primitive human nature what can only enter a highly developed mankind in the form of the realised imaginations of the ritual. The barbarians' hearts and minds absorbed intimately, personally, what in a changed human nature was received in lofty spirituality, nevertheless in the south received only in a pagan form.

Thus we see the germ of Christianity falling into southern hearts and into hearts of the barbarians of the north quite differently. These northern barbarian hearts are far less mature than the hearts of the southern peoples, and the Christ impulse sinks into this immaturity. And we are faced by the remarkable fact that in the whole south, throughout Christianised Judaism, throughout the Christianised paganism of the Greeks, the Christianised paganism of Rome, Christianity so permeated the spirit that before the coming of the Christ impulse that was approaching man, the Christ conception was determined and was given form in the way it was possible to form it according to the old experiences of the soul. For these ancient people had a significant life of soul, a life of soul, in a certain sense, of grandiose development. The northern barbarians had a primitive, simple soul-life, accustomed only to what was nearest the soul, to the closest relations of a personal kind between man and man. And into these close relations there streamed the Christ impulse. These men had no conception at all of scientific knowledge as it was developed among the Greeks, nor had they any political views concerning the structure of the State, as formed by the Romans. There was nothing of this kind among the northern barbarians. Their conceptual life of soul could be said to have been so far disengaged. They could not think much. They could hunt, they could fight, they could do a little tilling of the ground, they could do something else too—well, you have only to read about the old barbarians of the north; but they could not develop any kind of organised science. They had no conceptual life before the coming of the Christ impulse, conceptions could only come to the people with the Christ impulse. Therefore it may be said that to men in the south Christ came in such a way that He to come to had to standstill in face of the Conceptual life which they brought to meet Him. These men of the south erected a gateway. “You must first pass through this”, they said to the Christ. This gateway was still what had been built out of the old traditional conceptions. The barbarians of the north had no such gateway, there was no barrier to admission, the Christ impulse could enter freely. Between the people or peoples who lived their lives there in the north as barbarians, these peoples to whom the Christ came, and Jesus himself as the individual man to whom Christ came, there is only a difference of degree. In Palestine Christ came to the individual man Jesus. Then the impulse spread itself out over the southern lands; everywhere in these southern countries was the gateway of the conceptual life, where the impulse could not enter as it entered into the man Jesus. In the way the Christ impulse came to the northern barbarians it could not, it is true, enter every individual man—they were no Jesuses—but it was able to enter the folk souls; these in a certain relation accepted it as the Christ. And between the folk souls and the Christ a process took place similar to the one between Jesus and the Christ. (cf. R XLVII.)

This is the inner secret of the journey of Christianity up through the southern lands to the barbarians of the north. But they had not progressed very far, these northern barbarians. And even when the Christ had been able to make a direct entry there was nothing very grand in the dwellings He could set foot in. Primitive, the most primitive conceptions, were there. I might say: what in the south was already highly developed had been unfolded as if beneath the aegis of world evolution, but the evolution of a previous stage—what was highly developed in the

south during the fourth post-Atlantean, the Greco-Latin culture stage, in the north was still quite embryonic, waiting on till later. Thus it may be said: we have the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage, the fifth post-Atlantean culture stage; (cf. R XLVII.) we know that the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage runs from 747 years before the event of Golgotha to the year 1413 of our era after which it still goes on; we live now in the fifth post-Atlantean culture epoch. Take any point of the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage, let us say a point during the fifth century before the event of Golgotha, when evolution was already advanced in the Greco-Latin countries; it was, however, very backward among the northern barbarians. It was awaiting the later development; the same point only arrived for them much later. In other words, in the north, even though they finally came to a higher stage, men were much later in arriving at the same point as was reached earlier by men in the south. It is important to bear this in mind. For only by remembering this do we see how the inner evolution, the inner development, of human life takes form throughout the earth.

Only consider to what a height this Graeco-Latin culture has come by the time the great—one cannot call him merely a philosopher but the great man Plato arose in this Greco-Latin culture, Plato with his raising of the human myth into the kingdom of ideas. When he spoke of ideas, it was not to the abstract ideas spun by modern men Plato looked up. Plato's ideas are the very being of the spirit itself. Whoever really knows in Plato on whet heights this old Greco-Latin culture of the fourth post-Atlantean culture period stood. During the time the great Plato was towering above all that was Greece, the northern barbaric culture still had much to pass through until, for its part, it had brought forth out of its own flesh and blood, if only for the fifth post-Atlantean period, the same as had been produced out of Greece in the lifetime of Plato.

We may ask when it was that the barbarian natures of the north, out of their own flesh and blood, first worked themselves up to the heights on which Plato had already stood at an earlier epoch? An the answer to the question is, at the time of Goethe! What in the Greek civilisation was Platonism, is Goetheanism for the fifth post-Atlantean period. For how many years go by, my dear friends, in one culture period? You know that if you take 1413 years after the Mystery of Golgotha and 747 years before, that gives us one culture period, 2160 years, a little over 2000 years. This is about the time that passed between Plato and Goethe, a rather long culture period lies between these two.

And while we consider Plato, one thing stands out concerning him that lights forth from the rest of ancient culture in a grandiose way. There meets us what lies in Plato's words when his philosophy ascends to religious inspiration and he says: “God is the Good”, where he has the feeling that the perception of nature in accordance with ideas must be bound up with the moral ordering of the world—the divine is the good. With these words the promise of Christianity enters Greek civilisation.

But with these words there would also be an indication of a promise with Goethe in the north—an expectation of a renewal of Christianity. Who could look inwardly upon Goethe either in any way but as having within him the promise of a renewed understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha? The boy Goethe, the seven-year-old boy, still stood like a pagan before nature, and lived again all that once lay in Greece. He takes a reading desk, places on it all kinds of stones and bits of rock representing nature's processes, lights a pastille from the direct light of the sun through a burning-glass and thus offers his sacrifice to the great God of nature. Purely pagan worship of nature, nothing lives in this of Christ-Jesus, in this lives the God who can be contemplated in nature. And Goethe is sincere to the innermost fibre of his being. Outwardly he does not acknowledge any God, any divine Being, with whom he cannot inwardly unite himself in all sincerity. To agree with the conception of God given him by a priest is for him an impossibility; to learn outwardly what does not surge up from his inmost soul is an impossibility. Thus, still in the year 1780, there springs forth from his inner being his Hymn to Nature. that wonderful Hymn in prose to nature which begins:

“Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, unable
to step out of her, unable to get into her more deeply.
She takes us up unasked and unwarned into the circle of
her dance and carries us among till we are wearied and
fall from her arms . . . (see George Adams translation: A. Q.)

Everything is nature. We belong to her, she drives us along with her. Even what is unnatural is nature, The greatest philistinism has something of her genius. It is she who places me here and she will not hate her work. The profit is hers, the debt is hers.

This outlook itself springs forth from his intimate inmost being because Goethe is so honestly seeking it in the way it has to be sought by him as representative of his stage of humanity in which there is nothing Christian. You find a wonderful leaning towards God in the whole prose-hymn to Nature, almost as though he were still the seven-year-old boy erecting his pagan altar with its products of nature; but you do not find anything Christian. For Goethe stands as the honest representative of mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean period which for him stood as the period of waiting. But Goethe clearly expresses that it is not possible to remain at the stage of paganism, when on the one hand, in his morphology and his colour theory he comes to his grandiose outlook on nature, an outlook that is at the same time scientific. But this is also expressed from another aspect when he has to go beyond this perception of nature, beyond this paganism. From this point of view take the inner impulse of Faust, take from this point of view particularly all that Goethe has secretly introduced into his fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, take everything about the re-birth of man expressed in this fairy tale—and then try not just to remain on the surface but to press on to what was living in Goethe's mind, then, my dear friends, the idea will come to you: here in the soul of a man is living a new Christ impulse, a new impulse for transforming mankind, brought about by the Mystery of Golgotha, a striving after a new understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha. For the whole fairy tale of the Green Snake end the Beautiful Lily breathes forth this mood of expectation.

Where Plato stands in the culture of the Greeks, Goethe stands in the fifth post-Atlantean period. The question “Where does Goethe stand” leads us on to say: As Plato with the definition of the Divine as the Good pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha as a key to understanding the fourth post-Atlantean period, in all that rings forth from his fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe was pointing to the fresh understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha that had perforce to come. This is the answer to the question of where Goethe stands. What is there that up to most recent times one can picture as spiritualising all that happens to mankind? The outer historical understanding that just counts up men and events one after the other, says actually nothing at all that can touch upon the real inner being of man. But if we look at the inner side of what happens, if we see that at the same point as Plato stood for the fourth post-Atlantean period, Goethe now stands for the fifth period, then there is revealed to us the spiritual wave that up to the present day has been creatively surging into the world. During very recent times history for modern man has in general became thoroughly unspiritual in the way it is grasped. Goetheaism is at the same time a mood of expectancy in which one is waiting for a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We come to an understanding of what happened as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, only by trying to penetrate to the depths of the events affecting mankind. (cf. Karma of Vocation.) My dear friends, as ennobling conceptions can be called up in the human heart if anyone tries today to renew certain experiences that were aroused in paganism—for example if we look up to the conception of the great Isis of the Egyptians. Certainly even up to the time of Plato the conceptions about the Egyptian Isis as the impulse holding sway throughout nature still resounded towards men. If today we hear about Isis, if we hear about Isis without powerfully experiencing anew what people felt in those times, we are left with the mere words. If we are honest it is all mere words. If we are not intoxicated by the sound of words simply words are there—the matter does not grip the heart. what can modern man do if he wishes to awaking the same conceptions within him that in ancient days were aroused in human hearts when Isis was spoken of?

Modern men can let work upon him Goethe's Hymn in prose to Nature. There man is spoken to in the same way as when Isis was spoken of to those men of old. And what sounded to those men of old when Isis was spoken of rings still directly from the hidden depths of the cosmos.

Let us for once think what wrong we do, wrong to world evolution as well as to our own hearts, when we do not wish to hear in this way, when we prefer to take up a purely external attitude, because the way in which the men of old spoke about Isis has round it a glory of the past. When Isis was spoken of by those ancient people there sounded forth from the words a primeval holy secret. And language in our time ought to speak of this secret, truly, actually speak of this secret deeply in the same way as it came from the lips of the Egyptian Priests when they sang about Isis. We should not fail to recognise when deep things hold sway in the new life of spirit. In this way, too, we shall once again feel ourselves true men when we are not prosaic in our feeling, when what is holy sounds towards us in the way it will sound forth out of the newer impulse of historical evolution. Then when we prepare ourselves by paganism, as one might say, through something of the nature of the hymn in prose, with all the widening of soul we can get from this, with all the deepening of soul that makes itself felt within us, with all the ennobling of soul we can experience, we shall sink deeply into what there is in many of the scenes in Faust or in the fairy tale of The Green snake and the Beautiful Lily, where we shall find expressed the mood of waiting for a new understanding among the most modern people of the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is an indication of something about the finding of Goethe and Goetheanism that I wanted to give you, not in the form this discovery often takes but a discovery that really finds the Goethe spirit in the whole course of human evolution, for the understanding of the immediate present, for the strengthening of the impulse we need if we would take our right place today and in the near future, in which we must take our place not sleeping—as I have so often emphasised—but awake, if we do not want to sin against the progress of man's evolution.

More of this tomorrow.

Last night dear Frau Dr. Leyh died. I believe from the very fact of her expending so much energy in playing her part in this organisation during the last weeks of her life on earth, in spite of severe illness that made it hard for her to come up and down here—I believe that from the keenness with which she shared in our work you will have been able simply through these facts, particularly when you have so constantly seen her here, to feel what a delightful and precious personality has left us if one is to speak in the terms of outer space.

Those of our friends who tended her devotedly during the last days of her earthly life, who stood by her in friendship and devotion, have shown in every case of this standing-by, in all the help given her, how fond they had become of this personality. I need not dwell at length on what we all feel in our hearts. Those who have now had the opportunity of knowing this personality so well in her intimate circle, not only during her suffering of the last weeks but all through her spiritual striving, her wonderful spiritual struggles, which came to such a grand conclusion that even on her last day she was deep in many great ideas about our world-outlook—those with her in her intimate circle, and also those less intimately connected with her (as I said, I need not labour this) will send their thoughts towards the spiritual region
where henceforth our good friend will be. They will be following her and will use every moment possible to be together in spirit with one whom physically they have been permitted to be so closely connected with in the spirit of our world conception, in times when the friend who has gone could joyfully follow but also in times when she had to follow only with sorrow, what our Anthroposophical development wills.

In token of this, my dear friends, we will rise from our seats.

Yesterday I wanted to make it clear that, looked at from one side, the actual content, the deeper content, of the Christ impulse that has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has not been entirely imparted to mankind either all at once nor during the relatively long time that there has been a Christianity up to now. During the whole of the future, ever more and more of the content of the Christ impulse will be imparted to mankind; in fact there is deep truth in the saying of Christ Jesus; “For, lo, I am with you away even unto the end of the world.” And Christ did not mean that He would be inactive among men but that He would be revealing Himself actively, entering into their souls, giving souls encouragement, giving them strength; so that when these souls know what is happening within them they find the way, they are able to find the connection with the Christ and feel themselves strong for their earthly striving.

But just in this age of ours, this age of consciousness, it is necessary for all this to be clear, as far as may be today, and as I have said the content will flow forth in an ever clearer and richer stream for men. For this very reason it is already necessary today to make clear to ourselves what actually belongs to the revelation of the Christ impulse. To come to a right understanding on this point we must first be permeated by the knowledge that the human race has really developed, really changed, in the course of the earth period. One can best describe the change by saying that when we look back into very ancient times on earth, times long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find on close scrutiny that the bodily nature of man was more spiritual than it is today. And it was this bodily nature of man that allowed the visions to arise which in a certain way revealed to atavistic clairvoyance the supersensible world. But this faculty, this force, for making oneself acquainted with the spiritual world by atavistic clairvoyance, became gradually lost to mankind. And just at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching there was indeed a crisis. This crisis showed that the force in connection with the revelation of the spiritual had sunk to its lowest degree in man's bodily nature.

Now from that point of time, from that critical point, there had to arise a strengthening of the soul and spirit, a strengthening of the power of soul and spirit, corresponding to the weakening of bodily power. Here in the earthly body we have to count on our body as an instrument. Man would simply not have been capable of acquiring in his soul and spirit the new strength necessary to meet the lowering of his bodily forces, had he net received help from a region that was not of the earth, a region outside the earth, had not something entered the earth from outside—namely, the Christ impulse. Man would have been too weak to make any progress by himself.

And this can be seen particularly clearly if we look at the nature of the old Mysteries. What purpose did these old Mysteries serve? On the whole it may be said: the great masses of our forefathers (which means of ourselves, for in our former life we were indeed the very men we now call forefathers) these men in very ancient days were furnished with a much duller consciousness than that of today. They were more instinctive beings. And the men of this instinctive nature would never have been able to find their way into a knowledge that is nevertheless necessary for man's good, for his support, for his growing powers of consciousness. And certain personalities initiated into the Mysteries, whose Karma called them to do so could then proclaim to the others who led a more instinctive life the truths that may be called the truths of salvation. This instruction, however, could only be given in those olden days out of a certain constitution of the human organism, the human being, a constitution no longer existing. The Mystery Ceremonies, the organisation of the Mysteries in their various stages, depended upon a man becoming a different person through the Mysteries. Today, this can no longer really be pictured because through external arrangements (recently I have given an account of these in the Egyptian Mysteries) (cf. R LII.) it is not possible at the stage we are in today. By bringing about certain functions, certain inner experiences of soul, the man's nature really became so transformed that the spiritual was liberated in full consciousness. But the pupil in the Mysteries was prepared to begin with in such a way that this spiritual did not become free in the chaotic condition that it does today in sleep; a man could really perceive in the spiritual. The great experience undergone by Mystery pupils was that after initiation they knew about the spiritual world as a man through his eyes and ears knows about the physical world of the senses. After that they were able to proclaim what they knew of the spiritual world.

But the time came when a man's nature could no longer be straightway transformed in this manner by such doings as those in the ancient Mysteries. Man did indeed change in the course of history. Something different had to come and the different thing that came was actually what at a certain stage man had experienced in the Mysteries, the inner resurrection, enacted as historical fact on Golgotha. Now this had happened historically. A man, Jesus—for outwardly as a man going about He was the man Jesus—had gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. Those who were His intimates knew, however, that after a certain time He appeared among them as a living being (how this was we will not go into today) and that therefore the resurrection is a truth.

Thus we may say: In the course of human evolution the fact once came about that at a certain place on earth the news was proclaimed that through a force coming from beyond the the earth, the Christ impulse, a man had triumphed over death: and thus the overcoming of death could actually be one of the experiences, one of the practical experiences, of earthly existence. And what was the consequence? The consequence was that in the historical evolution of man there had taken place something intellectually incomprehensible, something which should now develop in a special way, something belonging to the progress of man. For it is incomprehensible to the human intellect that a man should die, be buried and rise again. To save the evolution of the earth something therefore was necessary, something had to happen, in the physical course of earthly evolution that is incomprehensible to the understanding which can be employed quite well where nature is in question, but incomprehensible to the intellect that is applied to nature. And it is only honourable to admit that the farther men progress in the development of this intellect—and development in the consciousness age is pre-eminently development of the intellect—the more incomprehensible must the event of Golgotha become for this intellect that is above all directed to external nature. We can put it like this—anyone only conscious of the way the ordinary intellect is applied when directed to Nature, must in honesty gradually come to own that he does not understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But he must give himself a shake for nevertheless he must understand. This is what is essential—to give oneself a shake, and simply think oneself out above the sound human understanding. This is essential, it is something that necessarily must happen—to give oneself this shake so as in spite of all to learn to understand something apparently incomprehensible precisely for the highest human force.

There must be ever more and more a going back—the greater the development of the intellect upon which the flourishing of science depends, the more the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha will have to retreat before the intellectual development. It was for this reason also that in a certain sense historically chosen for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha—in the way I have explained the Mystery of Golgotha to you—it was not the cultured Hebrews, nor the cultured Greeks, nor the cultured Romans, who as I said yesterday converted it into different conceptions, but above all it was the northern barbarians, with their primitive culture, who in their primitive souls received the Christ Who came to them just as He came to Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed in the sense of what I was discussing with you yesterday it may be said: The Christ came first to the man Jesus of Nazareth in the event of Golgotha. There mankind was shown—the mankind of the Hebrews, the mankind of the Greeks, mankind of the Romans—the most important of all happenings in earthly existence. But after that Christ came once again, united Himself with the men who peopled the East and the North of Europe, who by no manner of means possessed the culture of the Hebrews nor of the Greeks, nor of the Romans. There He did not unite Himself with individual man, there He united Himself with the folk souls of these tribes. Yesterday, however, we had to emphasise that these tribes gradually evolved. They had to a certain degree to overtake at a fifth stage what at a fourth stage had been accomplished by the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin peoples. And yesterday we dwelt on the fact that it was only at Goethe's epoch that the epoch of Plato was reached for this later time. In Goethe himself, for the fifth post-Atlantean period, the Platonism of the Greeks of the fourth post-Atlantean period was repeated. Yet in Goetheanism man still had not come to the point at which he already faced the entirely new form of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha, but, as I said yesterday, he was in a state of expectation.

This attitude towards the Mystery of Golgotha on the part of more recent mankind can be particularly well studied if one comes to a real understanding of the personality, but for the moment the personality of soul and spirit of Goethe. It is absolutely in accordance with Spiritual Science for us to ask the following question: Where do Goethe and those who belong to him, the various minds who were in connection with him, stand as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth; where does Goetheanism stand with regard to mankind's evolution, with regard to understanding the Christ impulse? We might first consider how Goethe actually stood within European evolution.

Now it will be well here to recall something I have often said to you during these years of catastrophe, it will be just as well to go back to the answer to the question—where are the European periphery tending with their American off shoots? We should not forget that whoever turns his gaze without prejudice to these civilisations on the periphery of Europe, knows that in what English culture consists, in the cultures too of France, Italy, the Balkans, as as there has been progression here, but even behind the culture of Eastern Europe, all this has been rayed out from the centre of Europe; all these cultures have been radiated out. Naturally it would be dreadfully prejudiced to believe that what today is Italian culture, Italian civilisation, is anything but what has been radiated throughout Italy from mid-Europe, but absorbed into the Latin nature, still there in the language and outer form. It would be shocking prejudice to think that English civilisation is intrinsically different from what has streamed out from mid-Europe, and actually merely appropriated again in its language and so on in another way, in reality far less than the Italian or French way. But all that France, England, Italy and, even in mare respects, what Eastern Europe is, has been rayed out from central Europe. And in this centre there has now remained what indeed we have just found left after the streaming out of these cultures, what has remained as the womb out of which Goetheanism has evolved. We are faced today by this fact, a fact to be calmly accepted, that what has rayed forth into the periphery is working with all its power to bring to naught, to
nullify, even where soul and spirit are in question, everything existing in mid-Europe from which it has streamed. There will come a time when the world will look in a quite different way from how it does today upon this monstrous phenomenon in human events, where the world is reedy to set up as idols fourteen corpses of western thought. At some future date mankind will realise that there came about what may be called the absolute desire to exterminate what thus radiated out in all directions. It goes without saying that the tragedy of this fact will bear its fruit.

For connected with this fact, we see appearing in a further step forward of Europe's evolution, with the exception of the period during recent decades when other forces may be said to have held sway, all that prepared a way for itself and developed throughout the centuries by reason of the personal characteristics of those who in the most various directions developed these civilisations—we see all this streaming forth from the whole of Central Europe. How little inclination mankind has today for forming unprejudiced judgment on this point: I think I may say that, at the time the last traces were to be found of what assured the matter a fully scientific basis, I myself actually stood in intimate connection with it; my old friend, Karl Julius Schröer, was studying the various dialects, the various languages and the various natures of those sections of the people looked upon as German nationals of North Hungary, of Siebenburg and formerly of the various districts in Austria. Whoever observes here all that refers to the unpretentious dictionary and grammar of the Zips-German of Siebenburg Saxony in Schröer's studies which, in personal collaboration with him in the studies he was then making concerning the spread of mid-European culture, I was permitted to comment upon, whoever does this may say that he was still connected with a knowledge unhappily no longer even noticed today amid the confusion and turmoil of events. But let us look at this Hungary where, you must know, purely Magyar culture has been-supposedly established in the course of recent decades, since the year 1867; let us look there, not with political unreality, political delusion, political hatred, let us look in conformity with the truth. It will then be discovered that in the regions that afterwards, later, were supposed to be magyarised as countries of the Magyars, men from the Rhine were moved in—like the Siebenburg Saxons, men from further west, like the Germans of Zips, men out of modern Swabia, like the Germans of Bana. All this is the leaven forming the basis of the Magyar culture over which is now simply poured what then in reality was only developed very late as Magyar culture. At the basis of this Magyar culture, however, though perhaps not in anything expressible in language, but rather in the feelings, in the experiences, in the whole national character, there has always flowed in what has for centuries come from Central Europe.

Astonishing as it is, were you just to take the whole of European history, you could make a study of this in all the periphery regions of Europe. In the east the Slav wave came up against what radiated from the centre, and what radiated from the centre was pushed aside by the Slav wave—in the west by the Latin wave. And through a tragic chain of events, having, however, an inner historical necessity, the periphery then turned against what still remained in the womb of the centre, turned in such a way that from this turning a fact becomes clear—it may be believed or not, it may easily be mocked or scoffed at or not—what remained in mid-Europe grew out of Goetheanism, grasped by soul ant spirit in its reality and its truth, all this no longer meets with any understanding in the best intelligence of the periphery. Of this it might be said: The actual substance of what is the essence of mid-Europe is spoken of everywhere, even in the American countries, as though people had no notion of it. People may have no notion of it, but world history will bring it to the surface. This is what can give one strength in a certain sense to be able to hold fast to it.

It is true, my dear friends, on Silvester eve I gave you here a picture worked out by a man who is well able to make a calculation about the future relations of central Europe. (see Z 269.) If everything is fulfilled, even if only part is fulfilled, of what the periphery countries are wanting, these relations cannot be otherwise. But out of all this, the extermination of which for external existence has been decided upon, indeed the extermination of which will be fulfilled above everything else during the next years, the next decades—for so it has been determined in the councils of the periphery powers—within all this there has been the last shaping of what we described yesterday; there was within it the last shaping of what is nevertheless important as a leaven for the evolution of men. It must flow in, this evolution simply must go on of which I gave you a picture in what has to do with the Magyars. This radiating will indeed continue.

But particularly in central Europe all that during the last decades has certainly been very little understood there, will have to be grasped. Something of the nature of what lies in the aims of the threefold ordering of social existence, as I have presented it, will have to be understood. It will be central Europe itself that will be called upon to understand this threefold ordering. And perhaps if this centre of Europe has no external state, if this centre of Europe is obliged to live tragically in chaos, there will then be the first beginnings of understanding that we have to overcome those old outlooks for which the periphery of Europe is at present struggling, for these old outlooks will be unable to be maintained even by the European periphery. The old concept of the state will vanish, it will give place to the separation into three parts. And what constitutes Goetheanism will indeed have to enter this external life. Whether or not it is given this name is immaterial. The essential thing is that Goethe's world-outlook foresees what simply must be made clear also where the forming of human society is concerned. But all this can be discovered only if we take the trouble to understand this representative, this most representative being of all Germans—Goethe. For he is such a perfect representative of the German nature just because he is so entirely without national Chauvinism or anything at all reminiscent of Chauvinism or nationalism, as understood today. There must be an attempt to understand this man who represents all that is new, this most modern man, at the same time this most fruitful of men in his being for all that is spiritual culture. It cannot be said that mankind have yet reached a high point in their comprehension of Goethe. In his environment Goethe felt very mush alone. And even were Goethe one of those personalities who accustom themselves to social intercourse, who even develop a certain adroitness and grace in society so that a possible relation is set up to their environment, even were this so, the real Goethe living in the inner circle of Weimar and later in outward appearance the stout Privy Councillor with the double chin—the man who inwardly lived in this stout Privy Councillor felt lonely. And in a certain way he may be said still to be alone today. He is alone for a quite definite reason and must feel himself alone. This feeling of cultural isolation, this feeling of his that he was not understood, perhaps underlay his remarkable saying of later years: “Perhaps a hundred years hence Germans will be different from what they are now, perhaps from scholars they will have grown into human beings.”

My dear friends, this saying must touch us in the very depths of our soul. For, you see, we may look at the last years of the eighties, for example. When after the death of the last of Goethe's grandchildren in Weimar the Archives of Goethe and Schiller and the Goethe Society were founded, these were founded by a gathering of men—truly I want to say it in the best sense of the word—by a gathering of scholars. In fact the Goethe cult was organised by men, by personalities, who really had not grown out of scholars into men. One may even go farther. You know how much I revere Herman Grimm, the art historian, the subtle essayist (cf. The Story of My Life, also E.N.43.) and I have never made any secret of my admiration nor spoken to you in any different way about my admiration for Herman Grimm. I have also unconditionally admitted to you that I consider what has come from Herman Grimm's pen about Goethe as the best book as biography, as monography, that has been written about him. But now take this book of Herman Grimm's; it is written out of a certain human affection and width of outlook, but take it as giving a picture of Goethe himself which arises when you have let the book have its affect upon you. What is this figure Goethe? It is just a ghost, a ghost rather than the living Goethe. If these things are taken earnestly and in a spirit worthy of them one cannot help feeling that should Herman Grimm meet Goethe today, or had he met Goethe during his life time, because he harboured fervent admiration for him in the tradition built up about Goethe, he would have been ready at any moment to say: Goethe is predestined to be the spiritual king not only of mid-Europe but of all mankind. Indeed Herman Grimm, had it come his way, would have even gone to great lengths to serve as herald, had it been a question of making Goethe king of all earthly culture. But neither can one get free of the other feelings Had Herman Grimm got into conversation with Goethe, or Goethe with Herman Grimm, Herman Grimm would hardly have found it possible to understand what was in the depths of Goethe's being. For what he portrays in his book, although undoubtedly the best he knew of Goethe, is nothing but the shadow thrown by Goethe on his surroundings, the impression he made upon his age. There is nothing here, not even the slightest suggestion, of what lived in Goethe's soul—but merely a ghost out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not what was living deep down in Goethe.

This is a remarkable phenomenon which must be pondered in the soul in all seriousness and with due consideration. And if we look away from all this well, not Goetheanism but Goethe-worship that even a hundred years after Goethe is in reality far more scholarly than human, if we look back at Goethe himself, beneath much of what is great, much of what is grandiose confronting us in Goethe, we see one thing above all. Much, curiously much in Goethe—just take The Mysteries Frau Dr. Steiner recited here a short time ago, take the Pandora, take the Prometheus Fragment, (cf. E.N. 36) or some other work, take the fact that The Natural Daughter is only the first part of an incomplete trilogy, or the fact that in this fragment there was expressed something of the very greatest that lived in Goethe, and you have the strange, the quite strange, fact that when Goethe set himself to express what was greatest he never brought it to a conclusion. This was because he was sufficiently honest, not outwardly to round off the matter, to bring it to perfection, as a poet, an artist, will even do, but simply to leave off when the inner source of strength became dry. This is the reason wily so much remained unfinished: But the matter goes further, my dear friends. The matter goes far enough for us to be able to say: In an external way Faust is certainly brought to a conclusion, but how much in Faust is inwardly unsound, how much in it is like the figure of Mephistopheles itself. Read what I have said about Faust and about the figure of Mephistopheles in the recently published booklet on Goethe, where I spoke of how Goethe in his Mephistopheles set up a figure that in reality does not exist, for In this figure the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman merge into one another and interweave in a chaotic way. And in the course of the week you will see presented here the last scenes before the appearance of Helen, before the third Act of the second part of Faust, something completed in Goethe's advanced age, something, however, on the one hand impressive, deep, powerful, on the other hand though finished to outward appearance, inwardly quite unfinished. It contains everywhere hints of what Goethe was hankering after, which however would not come into his soul. If we regard Faust from the point of view of its human greatness we have before us a work of gigantic proportions; if we look from the point of view of the greatness that would have lived in it had Goethe in his time been able to bring forth all that lay in his soul, then we have a frail, brittle work everywhere incomplete in itself. (see R LV.)

What Goethe left to those coming after him is perhaps the most powerful testament. That they should not only acknowledge him, that they do not acknowledge him today as a great scholar, or even as a man of certain culture, is easy to understand but Goethe did not make our attitude to him as easy as that. Goethe has to live among us as if he were still alive; he must be further felt, further thought. What is most significant in Goetheanism does not remain where Goethe was, for in his time he was not able to bring it into his soul out of the spiritual, and only the tendency is everywhere present. Goethe demands of us that we should work with him, think with him, feel with him, that we should carry on his task just as though he were standing behind each one of us, tapping us on the shoulder, giving us advice. In this sense it may be said that the whole of the nineteenth century and up to our own time, Goethe has been given the cold shoulder. And the task of our time is to find the way back to Goethe. Strictly speaking nothing is more foreign to real Goetheanism than the whole earthly culture, external earthly culture, with the exception of the modicum of spiritual culture that we have—nothing is more foreign than the earthly culture of the end of the nineteenth century or even of the twentieth century. The way back to Goethe must be found through the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

This can be understood only by one who can go straight for the question: where did Goethe stand actually and in reality? You have from Goethe the most honest human avowal (I spoke of this yesterday) that he started out from paganism as it also corresponded to Platonism. The boy erected for himself a pagan altar to Nature, then the man Goethe was most strongly influenced not by all that was derived from the traditional Christianity of the Church, this fundamentally always remained foreign to him because his world-outlook is a world-outlook of expectancy, of awaiting the new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Those who in the old, traditional sense embraced the faith of the Christian Church in comfort, or even wished within this Christian Church to carry through all manner of purely outward reforms, were not in reality, closely related to him inwardly, where soul and spirit are concerned. Actually he always felt as he did when, travelling with the two apparently good Christians Lavater and Baswdow; two men who represented a progressive but at the same time old ecclesiastical Christianity, he said: “Prophets to right, prophets to left and the worldling in the middle.” It was his actual feeling between two of his contemporaries that he thus gave voice to; as opposed to the Christians around him he was always the definite non-Christian for the very reason that he was to prepare mankind for the Christ mood of waiting.

And so we see three men in a remarkable war having the very greatest influence upon his spiritual culture. These three men are actually thorough worldlings in a certain sense; ordinary Christian ministers were not popular with Goethe. The three personalities having such a great influence upon him are, first Shakespeare. Why had Shakespeare such a decisive influence upon Goethe? This was simply because Goethe aimed at building a bridge from the human to the superhuman, not in accordance with any abstract rule, not out of an intellectuality open to influence, but out of what is human itself. Goethe needed to hold fast to the human so that within it he might find the passage over from the human to the superhuman. Thus we see Goethe making every effort to model, to form the human, to work out of the human as Shakespeare did to a certain degree. Look how Goethe took hold of The History of Godfried Von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Berlichingen's autobiography; how altering it as little as possible he dramatised this history and moulded the first figure of his Götz von Berlichingen; how then he formed a second figure out of him, this time more transformed, having more shape—then a third. In a way Goethe seeks his own straight forward path which holding to Shakespeare's humanity, but out of the human he is wanting to form the superhuman.

This he first succeeded in doing when, on his Italian travels (read his letters), he believes he can recognise from what is near to him, from the Greek works of art, how the Greeks pursued the same intentions, the divine intentions, according to which nature herself proceeds. He goes on his own path, his own individual, personal,true, path of experience. He could not accept what those around him said—he had to find his own way.

The second mind that had an enormous influence upon him, was that of a decided non-Christian, namely, Spinoza. In Spinoza he had the possibility of finding the divine in the way this divine is found a man wishing to make a road for himself leading from the human to the superhuman. Fundamentally Spinoza's thoughts bear the last impression of the intellectual age of the old Hebrew approach to God. As such, Spinoza's thoughts are very far from the Christ-impulse. Spinoza's thoughts, however, are such that the human soul as it were finds in them the thread to which to hold when seeking that way. There within men is my being, from this human being I seek to press on to what is superhuman. This way that he could follow, that he did not have to have dictated to him, that be could fellow while following Spinoza, this path Goethe in a certain sense, at a certain stage in his life, looked upon as his.

And the third of the spirits having the greatest influence upon him was the botanist Linnaeus. Why Linnaeus? Linnaeus for the reason that Goethe would have no other kind botanical science, no other science of the living being, but one which simply placed the living beings in juxtaposition, in a row as Linnaeus has done. Goethe would have nothing to do with the abstract thinking that thinks out all kinds of thoughts about plant classes, species and so on. What he considered important was to let Linnaeus work upon him as a man who placed things beside one another. For from a higher standpoint than that of the people who follow up the plants in an abstract way, what Linnaeus conscientiously placed next to each other as plant forms Goethe wanted to pursue after his own fashion, just as the spirit makes itself felt in this side by side arrangement.

It is just these three spirits who really could give Goethe what was lacking in the intimate circle of his life at the time, but was something he had to find outside; it is just these spirits who had the strongest influence upon him. Goethe himself had nothing of Shakespeare in him, for when he came to the climax of his art he created his Natural Daughter, which certainly contained nothing of Shakespeare's art but strove after something entirely different. He could, however, develop his inmost being only by educating himself in Shakespeare. Goethe's world-outlook had nothing in it of the abstract Spinoza; what was deep within Goethe, however, as his way to God could only be reached through Spinoza. Goethe's morphology had nothing of the placing side by side of the organic being, as in the case of Linnaeus, but, Goethe needed the possibility of taking from Linnaeus what he himself did not have. And what he had to give was something new.

Thus then did Goethe develop and came to his fortieth year, brought up on Shakespeare, Linnaeus and Spinoza; and having gone through what in the way of art Italy could show him he said when there about these works of art: “Here is necessity, here is God”. And as he lived in the spirit of his epoch there took place in him in a strong but unconscious way, also, however, to a certain extent consciously, what may be called his meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold.

And now, bearing in mind his passing the Guardian of the Threshold in the early nineties of the eighteenth century, compare words sounding like prayers to Isis in ancient Egypt, reminiscent of the old Egyptian Isis, such as those in the Prose-Hymn to Nature just recited to you by Frau Dr. Steiner—compare these words in which Goethe had still a quite pagan feeling, with those that as powerful imagination meet you in The Fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, there you have Goethe's path from paganism to Christianity. But there in pictures stands what Goethe became after going through the region of the Threshold, after he passed the Guardian of the Threshold. It stands there in pictures which he himself was unable to analyse for people in intellectual thoughts, which all the same are mighty pictures. Whither are we obliged to go if we wish to understand the Goethe who wrote the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily? Consider what is written about the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in the little book on Goethe already mentioned. (see Goethe's Standard of the Soul) When we really look at this we are confronted by the fact that Goethe created this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily as a mighty Imagination, after passing the Guardian of the Threshold.

This fairy tale of The Green snake and the Beautiful Lily that has sprung from a soul transformed, sprang forth after the soul found the bridge from pagan experience as it still finds utterance in the Hymn in Prose. “Nature! we are surrounded and enveloped by her, unable to step out of her, unable to get into her more deeply. She takes us up unasked and unwarned into the circle of her dance, and carries us along till we are wearied and fall from her arms” . . . “Even the unnatural is Nature . . . Everything is her life; and death is merely her ingenious way of having more life . . .” and so on and so forth.

This pagan Isis mood is changed into the deep truths, not to be grasped at once by the intellect, lying in the mighty Imaginations of The Green Snake end the Beautiful Lily where Goethe set down uncompromisingly how all that man is able to find through the external science of Europe can only lead to the fantastic capers of a will-of-the wisp. He shows also, however, that what man develops within must lead him to develop the powers of his soul in such a way that the self-sacrificing serpent who sacrifices his own being to the progress of human evolution can became the model which enables the bridge to be built from the kingdom of the physical world of the senses to the kingdom of the superphysical; and between these there rises the Temple, the new temple, by means of which the supersensible kingdom may be experienced.

Certainly, in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily there is no talk of Christ. But just as little as Christ asked of a good follower that he should always just be saying Lord, Lord! is he a good Christian who always says Christ, Christ! The manner in which the pictures are conceived, the way the human soul is thought out in its metamorphosis in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, the sequence of the thoughts, the force of the thoughts—this is Christian, this is the new path to Christ. For, why is this? In Goethe's day there were a number of interpretations of this fairy tale and since then in addition to those there have been many more. We have thought to throw light on to the fairy tale from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. My dear friends, I may, (here in this circle I may venture to speak out about this) I have the right to speak about this fairy tale. It was at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century when the knot of this fairy tale untied itself for me. And I have never since forsaken the path that should lead farther and farther into the understanding of Goethe, with the help of the mighty Imaginations embodied In the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It may be said that the intellect that leads us quite well in our search for scientific truths, this intellect that can quite well guide us in acquiring an external outlook on nature and its conditions, at this precise moment so favourable to such an outlook, when anyone wishes to understand the fairy tale, this intellect is found absolutely wanting. It is necessary here to let the intellect be fructified by the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Here you have, transformed for our age and its conditions, what is necessary to all mankind for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha.

For understanding the Mystery of Golgotha the intellect must first be re-forced; it must move itself, jerk itself. No jerk is needed for understanding external nature. It has become ever more impossible for Latin culture as well as for the German—for the Latin because it is too greatly decedent, for the German culture because up to now it has not sufficiently evolved—it has become ever more impossible out of mere intellectuality to school the soul so far that it can find the new way to the Mystery of Golgotha. When, however, you develop the possibility in you, can you re-shape the forces of the soul so that they begin in a natural inner speech to find the passage over to the pictorial for which Goethe strove, then you school the forces of your soul so that they find the way to the new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what is important.

Goethe's significance does not lie only in that he accomplished; it lies above all In what he does to our soul when we fully surrender ourselves to the profoundest depths of his being. Then gradually mankind will be able even consciously to find the path an which to pass the Guardian of the Threshold, the path Goethe fortunately, took while still, unconscious, and on that account was unable to finish just those works in which he wished to express all that was deepest in him. In this soul of Goethe's there lived a shimmering and glimmering of what was conscious and what was unconscious, what was attainable and what was out of reach. When we let such a poem as The Mysteries work upon us, or when we let Pandora work upon us, or any of the things Goethe left unfinished, we have the feeling that in this very incompletion there lies something that must free itself in the souls of those following after Goethe, something that will have to be completed as a great spiritual picture.

Goethe was lonely. Where it was a question of Goethe's real being he was lonely, lonely in his evolution. Goetheanism contains much that is hidden. But, my dear friends, even though the nineteenth century has not yet produced human beings out of scholars, whereas Goethe struggled through out of a scholarly to a human world-outlook, evolution must indeed go forward with the help of Goethe's impulse. I said yesterday and repeat today that the force bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha once united itself in a little known province of the Roman Empire with the man Jesus of Nazareth, and then with the Folk souls at central Europe after that, however, this force became inward. And out of what was weaving there inwardly in central Europe came such results as we find in Goethe and the whole of Goetheanism. But it is just the nineteenth century that has had a great share in letting Goetheanism lie in its grave. In every sphere the nineteenth Century has done everything possible to leave Goetheanism in its grave.

The scholars Who in Weimar founded the Goethe Society at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century would much rather have belonged to those who buried Goetheanism than to those who could raise any thing of this Goetheanism from the deed. Quite certainly the time has not come for Goetheanism to be able to live yet for the external life. The time depends on what we have often spoken of, namely, on the renewal of the human soul through Spiritual Science. Whatever may come to this Europe that now in a certain sense would bring about its own death, the grave which above all, first of all, the lack of thought in modern culture is digging, this grave will nevertheless also be a grave from which something will rise again. I have already pointed to the fact that the Christ spirit united itself with the folk souls of middle Europe; Goetheanism arose in the bosom of these folk souls. A resurrection will come, a resurrection not to be conceived as political, a resurrection that will have a very different appearance—but resurrection it will be. Goetheanism, my dear friends is not alive, Goetheanism for outer culture is still resting in the move: Goetheanism must however rise again from the dead.

Let the building that we have sought to set up on this hill bear testimony to the sincerity of our purpose, with the necessary courage for the present time to undertake the bringing to life of G0etheanism. For this, it is true we should need the courage to understand and penetrate in its ungoethean way what has up till now called itself Goetheanism. We should have to learn to acclaim Goethe's spirit to the same degree as the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have disowned it, denied it in every possible sphere. Then the path of knowledge acquired through Spiritual Science, a path that is to be found unconditionally, will be connected with the historical path of the resurrection of Goetheanism. But it will also be connected with what can come from this resurrection of Goetheanism, that is, the impulse towards a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that right understanding of the Christ which is necessary for our particular age. Perhaps the pathfinder of the Christianity necessary for mankind in the future will be recognised as the decidedly non-Christian Goethe who, like Christ Himself, did not ask for the constant repetition of “Lord, Lord . . .” but that man should carry his spirit in his heart, in his mind; and that in Goetheanism it should not always be a matter of “Christ, Christ . . .” but all the more that what has flowed into men as reality from the Mystery of Golgotha should be preserved in the heart, so that this heart should gradually change abstract and intellectual knowledge, the present knowledge about nature, into something by means of which the supersensible world is seen, so that men may be given the force for a deeper knowledge of the world and for a shaping of the social structure that is worthy of the human being.

In some of the lectures I have recently held here I have dealt from several aspects with the now urgent, burning social question. Everyone who does not sleep through the events that weave themselves into his life, can be aware that this so-called social question has long been, and continues to be, an urgent and burning one for all mankind. From lectures I have held here and also from extracts of some given publicly by me in different parts of Switzerland, it can be seen how far in man's modern necessities of life, and in his most recent development, this social question has taken a definite form, a most incisive form, for life. In our Anthroposophical Movement, therefore, it behooves us to arrive, from our point of view, at a judgment about human destiny especially in regard to the social question, a judgment which in a way possible to us could be put into actual effect.

For a considerable time certain of our members have endeavoured to make their powers of use in our difficult times. Many things have been considered and put under review. Naturally for each of us it is possible to intervene in affairs only in the way his fate, his karma, and his position in life allow. As a result of the various aspirations among us, the following has now evolved. Three well-known members, who set themselves the special task of working in Stuttgart to meet the demands of modern life, Herr Mott, Dr. Bock, and Herr Kühn, came to me early in February and decided to put into practice, as far and as suitably as possible, what we have been able to learn from our world-outlook and conception of life. When we are dealing with a matter not of mere consideration but of practical application, the question can only be what at a definite point of time is suitable, what answers the purpose, what in a certain relation is the fitting thing with which to begin. If one does not make a suitable beginning one will rush in where angels fear to tread and, as a rule, accomplish nothing. For us at the present moment it is a matter of doing something in accordance with what has gone before, something the hard-pressed German people will find justified. In the events of the present day, above all appears one thing that is most significant—the existence of a deep gulf between the classes of men. On one side of this gulf stand the circles that have hitherto more or less led men's destiny; on the other side, the proletariat pressing forward with the reality of their social claims. The proletariat, it is true, appears to the observant in two forms, the workers themselves, and their leaders. I have often shown here how all the thoughts, aspirations and impulses in the heads of the leaders, by the help of which they gain their influence over the workers, are fundamentally a legacy from the middle-class thinking of the previous century. We have spoken of this here from various points of view, and sought to confirm it.

Now one of the most significant phenomena is this deep gulf between the two human groups. In recent days this has been clearly visible to those who follow the history of the times; on the one side Paris, where the standpoint of the formerly leading circles of mankind prevails, where man's destiny and that of the present time are dealt with; on the other side, Berne with its Conference in which lives everything that is divided from the other by the deep gulf. Whoever has carefully followed what has issued from Paris and what on the other hand has been attempted in Berne, at the socialist Congress, could not but confess that the essential thing, the significant and lasting thing, that will make itself felt in human evolution, is not the result of what is thought and hoped for in Paris or Berne, but the fact that in these two places two such very different social languages have been spoken. To be really honest one has to confess that here we have two totally different languages, languages up to now mutually incomprehensible.

On due consideration this significant phenomenon may strike everyone as justifying what I have so often said here, namely, that if we are to understand these things and share in the working out of possible solutions, many root causes must be looked for that are deeper than those sought today by either side. Time and again we have the opportunity of seeing what I referred to two days ago in a public lecture at Basle—that the social question, the social movement, is already an actual question, a question of present events for a great part of civilised mankind, in as deeply decisive a way as anything in the history of mankind. It presents itself in this way to all those of insight. And how often have I pointed out here that the deeper causes are to be found only through those considerations of reality that result from the Movement here for Spiritual Science, Anthroposophy—the deeper causes also for the social study of life and of things.

At the beginning of the year [ Note 1 ] I pointed out something I believe to be significant, namely, that today it is possible for mankind to be thoroughly pessimistic not just from emotional reasons but on actual social grounds. At the time, I read to you an excellent article by a man [ Note 2 ] who in this way is really able to estimate social matters. I have told you that it is profitable to think pessimistically only when one is not conscious of the other side of the fact—that help can be found by turning to the spirit. For that, a consciousness must be cultivated more and more that there is only ground for belief in destructive forces, which can produce terrible results in the coming decades, if men refuse to turn to the consideration of the realities arising from Spiritual Science. Naturally we do not mean by this the dogma of some spiritual movement or other, what we mean is an appeal to any forces of the spirit that alone can heal and help at this critical juncture in human evolution.

Thus, in a particular way, because it is not called forth arbitrarily but by observation of the forces of the times, the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy becomes in the anthroposophical members the needed healing power in the highest sense. It is not indeed the programme of one individual or of several individuals, but the result of observing what the spiritual leadership of the world dictates as necessary for mankind's present progress. It is on that account only that we can speak of Spiritual Science, of Anthroposophy, otherwise it would obviously be presumptuous. But what springs from true modesty need not be deterred when making itself felt, by the reproach of the presumptuous.

What has come from Paris can be said to be in keeping with an attitude towards life that in the last four-and-a-half years has led ad absurdum. From Berne has streamed what seems salvation to many, but has originated in an insufficiently deep source. From Paris there flows what occasions fear in almost all mankind; from Berne was meant to stream what in a great number of men can arouse hope and belief. And these two things speak quite different languages; there is no possibility of mutual understanding across the abyss. That will come only from the soul's inner appeal to Spiritual Science.

From such impulses arose the thought first at least to speak to the understanding of part of mankind. For it is a question of understanding. I have continually emphasised that in our social chaos we shall make no headway until we succeed in our appeal to the understanding of a sufficiently large number of men before instincts become too uncontrolled. This is what inspired my lectures in Zurich, Berne and Basle. Recently, various people with whom I have talked have given frequent opportunity for discussing how to approach the understanding and whether it be possible to discover the way before there is complete disaster? Now the latter question is one that cannot be raised by anyone who thinks in realities. For anyone thinking in realities does not speak with hypotheses about what is possible or not possible, but seizes on what he considers necessary to be done. When one one sets out on some road, a first step has to be taken; and we should not think, when the first step seems incompatible with the desired goal, that this step is useless. On a long road the first step can only take us a very short way. When going towards a specified goal it is first simply a question of not going in the wrong direction, either to right or left of the goal. Secondly, having once started on, the path, it is a question of having the will to keep to it and not to stumble against anything either left or right. If we would take our stand on realistic ground, we must also be in touch with what is happening at the time, what is already there, and not build castles in the air. Our though must be linked with something showing that from a certain direction a real stream is flowing. The first step may often seem most unfortunate, and only after a time perhaps turn out to be otherwise.

Now the three men previously named—Herr Mott, Dr. Boos, Herr Kühn, have discussed this matter with me. Since a spiritual appeal is to be made to the understanding of mankind, it must first be asked where anything of the sort has been seen to have an effect on men's thinking. You may remember an appeal made to the so-called world of culture, issued by ninety-nine German personalities, for the most part professors, or so I believe. Judged from the point of view of reality and not of emotion, this appeal can only be considered very clumsy. Yet for the most part they were professors: The appeal made an impression, however, and influenced thought in an unfortunate way. And it still haunts us. Being in a certain sense a reality it was a reality that had a worse effect than many others for it set waves in motion.

This makes one wonder how it might be in the present urgency to send out an appeal in contrast to this untimely set of antiquated notions, an appeal to man's understanding, arising out of the real conditions of modern human life. First, arising out of the facts themselves, an appeal to the German people, who have experienced the fate of seeing swept away the whole framework of a State in which they had hoped to realise their appointed task. They should be appealed to in a way to make them see that facts are speaking to them and not just a collection of words or some particular opinion or idea. Whereas perhaps the greater part of mankind would be loath to listen as long as old forms still remain, it can be assumed that the Germans would be more likely to listen, because no longer able to remain on the old ground they must perforce seek out a new basis for their life's task. For men are like that; so long as anything of the old remains—when it is not just a matter of clothes—they will unquestioningly hold firmly to it, unconscious of any sign that this is no longer possible. No one believes what a part love of comfort plays in the inner life of man.

Out of these thoughts I have composed a sort of Manifesto, and imagine it may be listened to by those souls who, where our own particular cultural questions are concerned, can be brought to an understanding based on reality. Above all I hope it may be understood by those Germans who are intelligent; to these it is addressed. But I mean it to be read by the enemies of Germany also, as something that has been considered and found fit by the people of Germany to be translated into reality. I thought of the ninety-nine signatures; if another ninety-nine of the Germans of the old Germany and of the old Austria can be found, and if the ninety-nine could perhaps be increased by a few personalities having an understanding of the present necessities of life—people in neutral countries, in Switzerland for example,—then something positive might be done in contrast to the former negative undertaking of the ninety-nine.

I beg you to understand me aright. This is first and foremost an appeal to the German people. But it is thought that what will be discussed in this form among the Germans themselves should be heard by the whole cultural world. I shall read this appeal here. The ideas will be known and familiar to you, since we have often discussed them. It is not meant to give advice, but it should show people that there is a way and how this way may be found. Certainly the presentation can be criticised as too short. But it is not a question of a textbook, it is an indication that there is something within mankind that can be of help.

The Appeal is addressed: “TO THE GERMAN PEOPLE AND TO THE CULTURAL WORLD”

The German people believed the structure of their empire, set up half a century before, to be secure for an unlimited time. At the outbreak of this catastrophic war, in August 1914, they saw this structure firmly established and imagined it would prove invincible. Today they see only its ruins. After such an experience must come reflection, heart-searching. For this experience has shown that the thoughts prevailing for half a century and more, especially those holding good over the war years, to have been tragically misleading. The question necessarily, arising in the souls of the German people is: where lie the reasons for this tragic error? This question must promote inner reflection in souls, and on their power for such reflection depends the very survival of the German people. Their future depends upon how far they are able to consider the question in all seriousness: How did I fall into this error? If today they face this question, the knowledge will dawn on than that, half a century earlier they founded a realm but omitted to set it the tasks arising from the essential nature of the German people. The realm was set up. In its early years all efforts went to the adjustment, as far as life allowed, of demands remaining over from the old tradition and yearly arising from new needs. Later men went on to confirm and increase their outer predominance in material strength. With this they combined measures concerned with the social claims born of the times, measures that certainly took into account the needs of the day but lacked the larger aims which should come from knowledge of the evolutionary forces to which modern man must turn. Thus the realm was established in a world-connection that lacked a real goal to justify its survival. The course the catastrophe of the war took has revealed this in a tragic way. Until the very outbreak of hostilities the world outside Germany could not see in the conduct of the realm anything to suggest that its rulers were fulfilling a world mission of historic import, not to be lightly swept aside. The failure of the rulers to find such a mission has necessarily given rise in the non-German world to the opinions that to those of insight have been the deeper grounds for the German downfall.

For the German people infinitely much now depends upon their impartial judgment of this state of affairs. In misfortune there must arise the insight which, in the last fifty years, has not been willing to show itself. Instead of the feeble thinking about day-to-day demands, a greater impulse must arise towards an outlook on life that with vigorous thought strives to understand the forces at work in evolution, and devotes itself to these with courageous will. There must be an end to the petty desire to sweep aside as unpractical idealists all those who pay heed to evolutionary forces. So too must cease the pride and presumption of those who imagine themselves to be practical people, who through their narrow vision in the guise of the practical have brought about disaster. Heed must be paid to what the truly practical men—decried as idealists—have to say about the present requirements of evolution.

The ‘practical’ men in all directions have for a long time seen that quite new human demands are being made, but they have tried to fit them within the frame of ordinary traditional thinking end organisation. The economic life of the day has produced demands that private initiative seems incapable of satisfying. One class of men consider it necessary that private enterprise should in individual spheres be transferred to companies; and this would be carried out wherever it appeared profitable according to the outlook on life of this particular class. The drastic transference of all individual work to associations became the aim of another class who, through the development of modern economic life, have no interest in retaining the handed-down aims of private persons.

In all the endeavours in connection with the modern demands of mankind up till now, there is something in common. They press for the socialisation of private undertakings, and count on the latter being taken over by the community (State, Commune) that has sprung from conditions having nothing to do with modern demands. Or men think in terms of newer associations, such as companies, that are nevertheless not formed in complete accordance with these new demands but copy old forms,out of traditional habits of thought.

The truth is that no associations formed in the sense of these old habits of thought can take up what one would like to see accepted. Prevalent forces press towards recognition of a social structure of mankind having something quite different in view from what is customary. Until now the social communities have for the most part been formed out of man's social instincts; the task of our time is to penetrate the forces of these instincts with full consciousness.

The social organism is membered in the same way as the natural organism. And as the natural organism must manage its thinking through the head and not through the lungs, so in the social organism the membering into systems must be such that no system can take over the task of another; all must work together but maintain its own independence.

The economic life can thrive only in developing as an independent member of the social organism in accordance with its own laws and its own forces, and avoids creating confusion in its structure by allowing itself to be absorbed by another member, the political member, of the social organism. The member that works politically must have a completely independent existence alongside the economic life, just as in the human organism the breathing system exists alongside that of the head. Their mutual work cannot be carried on beneficially if the two systems are under a single set of laws and administration; each must have its own, working, however, in a living way with the other. For the political system must destroy the economic life if it wants to take it over, and the economic system loses its forces of life when it becomes political.

To these two members of the social organism must be added a third, completely independent and formed out of the possibilities of its own life. This member is all that is produced spiritually, in which the spiritual part of the two other spheres also have a share. The spiritual part must be given over to them by the third member that is provided with its own laws and administration, but this spiritual part cannot be governed nor influenced by the other spheres more than member organs of a whole organism are influenced by one another.

Already today what has been said here to be necessary for the social organism can be quite scientifically substantiated and developed. Here there can only be given the guiding principles for all those who would follow up what is necessary.

The establishment of the German Empire happened at a time when these necessities were first appearing to modern humanity. Its Government did not understand how to give the Empire a task through insight into these necessities. This insight would alone have given it the right inner structure, it would also have given its foreign policy a competent direction, and enabled the Germans to live in common understanding with other peoples.

Insight must now ripen out of misfortune. We must develop the will for a social organism that is possible. It is not a Germany that no longer exists that should have to face the world outside, but a spiritual, political and economic system in its representatives must have the will to negotiate as independent delegations with those who have cast down that Germany which has been made into an impossible social form through the confusion of the three systems.

One fancies one can hear the ‘practical men’ becoming eloquent over the complexity of what has been said and finding it troublesome even to think about the working together of three corporate members. This is because they have no wish to know of the real demands of life, preferring to fashion everything according to the easier demands of their own thinking. They must come to see that they must accommodate themselves in their thought to the claims of reality or they will have learnt nothing from misfortune and in what arises further, will go on repeating the past ad infinitum.

While I was lecturing in Zurich, Basle and Berne, Herr Mott, Dr. Boos and. Herr Kühn were busy in Germany obtaining signatures for the Appeal. And in Austria others were similarly employed.

So far, although it is only a short time since we began, we can be well satisfied with our progress. For we have an Appeal as well supported as the former unfortunate one. And in the lectures recently given in Zurich—held there because Switzerland is the pivot for the connections of the civilised world—my object was to show that here and there people were to be found whose understanding was ripening. Thus, naturally it was important to learn the results before the last Zurich lecture. By 11th February I could make the happy announcement that about a hundred names had been collected, exclusive of those in Switzerland and Vienna. The news came from Germany where our fiends had been working everywhere, in a suitable way, to make this thing a reality. At the same time I received the following telegram from Vienna: “By midday 11th, 73 signatures, more certain tomorrow”. And on the following day: “Total 93 signatures”. That could be announced from Vienna, and more signatures were reported later. Results so far have been satisfactory. What we need next will be to find among them a number of signatures of well-known personalities capable of making the Appeal public, so that it is seen by those it concerns. For in a case of this kind much depends upon this. It actually concerns everyone today. And it may indeed be said that in the subconscious of man's soul something is calling upon him to understand such an affair as this. As I have told you in the course of these lectures, the idea appearing in this form is no new one to me. At the time when this catastrophic war was taking a decisive turn, I tried to help, on this necessary impulse towards reality wherever it came to my notice. I have described to you how this took place. I told those who had to do with the matter that this is not just a programme, not just an ideal, but that it should be considered as something having evolutionary force for modern mankind, something that certainly will be made a reality in the next ten, twenty or thirty years. It is not a question whether it is realised but solely how it is realised. I said to many of these people: You now have the choice either of having recourse to reason and of bringing about something through that, or of undergoing cataclysms and revolutions. It did not take long for people to be convinced that this was no false prophecy. It is hard, however, for the easy-going man of today to find the way from a certain understanding to that courage in life which, in accordance with his situation, is necessary for him to carry on the matter into the realm of reality.

Here in Switzerland, too, several signatures have already been obtained. We have always to consider here that in the first part of this Appeal something is said of the necessity for the German people to reflect about themselves and the errors in which they have been implicated. Thus, it has been said that it is impossible for the Swiss to give instructions across the frontier to the Germans. I do not believe that today we should still think like that. Before 1914 such things might have had a certain significance as old mummified thought, but now they have lost that significance. In these times the narrow-mindedness that comes from judging on national grounds must cease. The misfortunes of the last four-and-a-half years should have taught men this. Today even in Switzerland one should be able to think differently from the way one did four-and-a-half years ago. For here, too, something should have been learnt if thinking is to correspond to the picture we get by following the last four-and-a-half years with a little insight. They really appear like centuries which have been poured over mankind. And it seems most remarkable that people today have been willing to set up a new world-order, a new map of Europe, out of old national prejudices of a former age, or out of mummified thought, which really by 1914 should have come to an end. This map-building in Europe will be very quickly upset by other forces, the only ones with power at the present time and the only determining forces for what is called politics, that is, the social factors. For today all the rest is a mask. That, however, is the reality. The Europeans will very greatly deceive themselves if they form their judgments and criticisms out of ancient mummified, thinking.

Of course the objection can be made—I myself could easily give you a whole catalogue of objections—that with this impulses are given to all the States; that this can only come to pass when all States make a beginning. No! One single so-called State can make a beginning; it is indeed so, one single State can begin. And the beginning once made, the State will have done something for all mankind. It is indeed a misfortune for the German people that its Empire should have been set up at the start of more modern history, when at the time of its foundation the necessity already existed for the Empire to be given this as its task. And because the Empire did not accept this task it has never been understood why it should have any place in the world. Had it undertaken the task everything would have happened differently, for then men would have had before their very eyes the conditions of their existence and seen this existence justified.

Today people make their decisions out of mummified thoughts. There are many in Europe who cannot free themselves from mummified thinking and today regard the world-famous personality, Wilson, as a savior—perhaps out of some fear, it is difficult to express it. Nevertheless, if people should think without condemning Wilson, and put their question on a basis of fact, they must ask themselves why he has become such an influential man in his own country. This is because he is against all other Parties, and out of sound American instinct has carried out a policy utterly opposed to that of a great part of Europe. A great part of Europe wants to steer towards a community, the politics of a social community, in which the individual forces of liberty will go under. Wilson owes his election and his influence entirely to the circumstance that as an American democrat he has contributed to the release of the individual forces in economic life.

Let us suppose that Europe realised the ideal of Bolshevism, the ideal of the Berne social democracy, which means the social democracy of the Socialist Congress. What would be the consequence should these people achieve what they are dreaming of? Europe would take on a form so that despite every national prejudice all free forces would of necessity flood over into free America, where Wilson has become great by means of his opposite policy. Between Europe and America terrible competition would have to arise, making it impossible for anything to happen but pauperism in Europe and wealth in America—not from any injustice but out of the foolishness of European social politics. That would be the shape of things if Europeans do not, in accordance with their task, interpret and bring to realisation the social forces so that they meet the demands of a healthy social organism.

In this Appeal we have not to do with something merely thought out, but we are indicating forces everywhere present in what is reality, forces that must be brought to realisation, without which the fate not only of Germany and Austria but of all Europe can be simply a fall into poverty, suffering and alienation. from the spirit. We are living in serious times from which we cannot escape by trivial thinking. In men there lives something that attracts them to what is said in this Appeal, something that can already be observed. Because this is so, because one can hope to find the way to the hearts and souls of men, we are seeking now to reorganise what, as I said, was a necessary form to be sought during the catastrophe of the war, into the form necessary for present-day conditions.

I only hope no one thinks that this kind of Appeal has a significance that is absolute. I spoke of this to someone—concerned with it later—in January, 1918, as it was then drafted, and ended by saying: This can of course take on many different forms according to the different conditions prevailing at the time. It has nothing to do with a theory, nor a programme, nor an ideal, but with what has been thought out of reality. I said further that because the thought comes out of reality, for me it is nothing Utopian. Utopians who set up their programmes imagine everything to be bad that is not carried out according to their plan. It does not strike me at all in this way. It may happen, for example, that such a matter touches men's souls, and because they consider it practical they begin to put it into practice. And today it can be said quite clearly that a beginning has been made to put it into a practical form, suitable for life everywhere. I can quite well imagine that nothing may remain of all I have said here and in the lectures in Zurich, Berne and Basle, but that everything will take on a different form. For anyone who thinks in realities it is not a matter of his forms and phrases being put into practice, but that they should somewhere be laid hold of by reality. Then it will soon be seen what becomes of it. Perhaps it will go another way, there is always that possibility, but it is certain that the result must be in conformity with the conditions. For it is not any abstract ideal, any programme striven for, but simply a seizing hold of the forces of reality. What we are concerned with here should be as far removed as possible from all fantasy, from all dogmatising. Therefore I was much astonished when a well-known personality, whose signature one of the three friends mentioned above had undertaken to procure, let it be known that he would have thought, in making the appeal, I should have addressed it more to men's spirit, and went on to say that mankind's salvation could only come by their finding the way back to the Spirit.

Thus people want one always to be repeating spirit, spirit, spirit! But that is not what is of importance; what matters is that the Spirit should be shown and proved able really to give form to the facts. They are fundamentally dangerous who keep on speaking of the spirit without giving any indication of its reality; for they refer to it simply in the sense of an ideology. We have reason to be thankful that in the midst of our society personalities have been found with understanding, active understanding, at what is aimed at here, so that they will also actually do something. One hears constant echoes of this.

Our friend, Dr. Boos, after in my last lecture in Zurich I had referred to the results of our Appeal, issued an appeal on his own account that, from among the audience, people willing to take a practical part in this matter should come forward and give their addresses. The result of that evening, too, was extraordinarily satisfying. There were of course objections but I could well understand them. They were, however, of a nature to make one see that men today do not take their stand upon reality, they are carried away by enthusiasm. And this applies precisely to those considered the most practical. Hence, at Zurich, in a lecture when speaking of enthusiasts, I gave General Ludendorf as a good modern example. That is the type, the representative, of an enthusiast, a man who may be good or bad, but to my thinking bad at understanding strategy, and in regard to everything else remote from life and all reality, having no idea of the conditions of the reality in which he should have been active. He was an abstract idealist in a way that only a socialistic utopian can be. One should pay good heed to this insane concept of the ‘practical man’ which has done such harm to mankind. This being practical, up to now in such favour, is nothing but enthusiasm carried into actual fact through brutality, an unrealistic way of thinking, and it is above all this that must vanish. What has to come must be created spiritually, and the bearer of this will be the Anthroposophical Movement.

This is what I wanted to tell you on this eventful evening of our Lecture Cycle, as something that has proceeded out of the inner being of our movement.

Notes:

1. Lecture of December 31, 1981 not translated

2. Walther Rathenau