The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we want to look at the social organism once more, and in such a way that we bring it into parallel with the human natural organism. When such a parallel is made, it must be taken as a means of understanding some things better with reference to the social organism. On the other hand, you must not be too obtrusive to the outside world with such parallels, because the latter today has a strong distrust of such parallels and believes that one wants to play an idle game with analogies. Then people want to reject it. This will be especially necessary for you to consider. From a spiritual-scientific point of view, the parallel, which we have already drawn several times, and which we will pursue today from a certain point of view, definitely leads to the goal, definitely enlightens. It clarifies many a social phenomenon in the present. But I would like to ask you to keep it more in the background until the common prejudices against a parallelization of the human natural organism with the social organism have run their course. I myself use this parallel to the outside world. But I refuse to play an idle analogy game. That is what I did in my Zurich lectures on the social question, and that is what I am doing in the paper that will now appear on the social question. But this caution is not always used by connoisseurs of the anthroposophical worldview. That is why I expressly urge caution. Now, with this restriction, let us once again consider the social organism from a certain point of view today.

We divide the ordinary natural organism into three parts, into the head system, we can also say the nervous-sensory system, into the lung-heart system, we can also say the rhythmic system, and into the metabolic system. All activity of the human organism is exhausted in these three systems. What goes on in the human body can be brought under one of these three categories. It is remarkable that each of these systems has its own connection with the outside world. From this it can be seen that it is not arbitrary to divide the natural human organism into these three systems. The nervous-sensory system is connected with the external world through the senses, the respiratory system through the respiratory organs, the metabolic system through the nutritional organs. Each of these systems stands by itself in a segregated relationship with the external world.

Now, in the same way, we can divide the social organism into three members - into a first, second and third member - so that they are independent. In the social organism we then have to distinguish as the three members the economic system, the state system or legal system and the system of spiritual organization.

I. Head system Economic system

Nervous-sensory system

II. lung-heart system state system
Rhythmic system

III. metabolic system spiritual organization

I ask you to take into account what I have written on the blackboard, because it is very important. The head of the social organism is the economic system. The rhythmic system, the circulation system, the lung-heart system, that is the state system. And the metabolic system, that is decided in the spiritual organization. That is why I always said: If one wants to imagine the matter correctly, one must imagine, in relation to the human natural organism, that the social organism is upside down. If one plays an idle analogy game, then one will believe that the spiritual organization in man corresponds to the head system. This is not the case. The mental organization corresponds to the metabolic system. We can say that the social organism nourishes itself from what the people in the social organism accomplish spiritually. The social organism has its head endowment in the natural basis. If a certain people lives in a rich area with many ore mines, with rich mineral resources, with fertile soil, the social organism is gifted, to the Genialı it can be gifted. If the soil is barren, if there are few mineral resources, then the social organism is foolish, untalented.

So you don't have to just analogize, but you have to just, when you make the parallel, go to the right thing. You know, one must also go against the mere playing with concepts out of the spiritual-scientific experience and look for the right thing in other fields. If people merely play a game of analogy, they will say, for example: One can compare the waking state of man with summer, the sleeping state with winter. You know that this would be quite wrong. I have repeatedly explained to you that if you draw this parallel, seasons and human life, then you must just the other way round regard the summer as the sleeping state and the winter as the waking state of the earth. Thus you must regard economic life as the head of the social organism. And that which people accomplish spiritually - mind you, in the effect on the social organism - you must regard as the food of the social organism.

This matter is extraordinarily important in order to understand our time in particular. Our time, I emphasized yesterday, basically has a hard time with any solution of the social question, and that is because predominantly antisocial drives are present in the present humanity. Anti-social drives are present in the relationship of individual human being to individual human being. Sometimes, however, the antisocial instincts conceal themselves, hide themselves. For example, today they are hidden behind the national aspirations that are intensively asserting themselves across the earth. With these national aspirations one associates today something which is still taken for granted, whereas the self-evident thing for the real development of man in our time consists in the fact that an international element should begin in the most decisive sense. But there it is still difficult to talk to the people of today. For other nations, all people usually see that the international should begin; only for their own, usually not. If one wants to talk about these things with people today, one encounters what I once encountered in another field many years ago on the floor of the Anthroposophical, then Theosophical Society.

I had to explain that animals have group souls, and that when the animals die, they enter into the group souls, that they do not have an individual re-embodiment. Then a lady, who had a dog, which she loved very much, replied: With all other animals this may be the case, but for this, her dog, it does not apply, he had already acquired such a decided individual soul that he will experience a personal reincarnation. It was very difficult to approach the lady. But later, when this lady was gone and they were still together for a while, another lady said: She could not understand how such a clever woman could not see that her dog had no individual soul; she had understood that right away! But her parrot, it has an individual soul! That is a completely different matter! - This is a very instructive example of how people judge when things are touched which are directly connected with their personality.

But there are the most different reasons why in the present time certain obstacles arise to what one can reasonably call socialization. If you look over various things that you know from our anthroposophical spiritual science, it will be clear to you that spiritual life has first gone in a descending line within human development. Certainly, people today are proud of their far advanced spiritual development; however, in what they think, what they feel, there is actually no spirit.

Look back only to the third post-Atlantean cultural period to go no further. The source from which people drew at that time may certainly have been atavistic clairvoyance, but out of this atavistic clairvoyance people gained a broad wisdom, a wisdom which was spiritually substantial. Today's people look back with a certain arrogance on what the Chaldeans, what the Egyptians have produced. This arrogance is very, very unjustified. However, what is brought to light philologically and scholastically about the wisdom of the Agyptians and Chaldeans is not very productive. But that is, after all, "the master's own mind". It does not reach the deep insights that the ancient Egyptian priests, the ancient Egyptian mystery leaders, the Chaldean priests, the Chaldean mystery leaders had through their clairvoyant wisdom, which, however, still had atavistic overtones. Even within the Greco-Latin culture there was more wisdom than in what people think and feel today, what flows into their ideas, into their concepts of the spiritual. Basically, today man has become poor in spiritual life. And a particular impoverishment of spiritual life has occurred precisely since the advent of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, since the middle of the 15th century. A tremendous amount of real spiritual life has been lost.

And more and more the human mind became, so to speak, parched. Therefore it limited itself more and more to creating pictures of the outer sensual life. Man no longer wants to believe in real revelations from the spiritual world, nor does he want to hold on to them. But the spiritual content that man develops in himself has not only a subjective meaning for him. In so far as what man develops inwardly spiritually has a meaning in the life of man to man, in so far what man has in his head, has in himself, is at the same time food for the social organism; the social organism feeds on it. Therefore you will understand that he who speaks of the social organism with understanding must say that this social organism has been starving since the middle of the fifteenth century. The decline of the real spiritual life means a gradual starvation of the social organism, the social organism on all territories. And one may already say: The social organism has become a rather lean personality today and threatens to become even leaner and leaner. If today someone should design a symbol of the social organism, expressed by the human personality, he would have to design a lean personality, not a fat one. A well-fed little monk, for example, should not be painted today as a symbol of the social organism.

If you take this into account, then you will also be able to understand that, on the contrary, while the stomach of our social organism, which we actually fill with our spiritual achievements, is quite empty, today it is precisely the head, namely the economic life of the social organism, that is the one that is particularly active. The social organism today thinks very much, the social organism develops abundant intellectuality. It is perhaps a somewhat dangerous comparison, but it should actually be made. You know, too much malnutrition, when there is a strong intellectuality, at the same time brings this intellectuality somewhat into disorder. Now, one must not believe that our social organism has the tendency to go crazy. But many things that happen today, and for which not only people are responsible, but already that which pulsates through the world as social thinking, shows itself pathologically in this social organism. And it is precisely for this reason that we speak of the necessity of bringing the social organism to health, because we feel how sick it is. But we want to refrain from this for the time being, as I said, even though the comparison has to be used once. The comparison had to be used for the reason that you may see that human development really proceeds in a lawful way, that it is not merely because people subjectively want this or that to happen, but that what happens is subject to a continuous lawfulness, we have once entered the period when the social organism suffers from hunger, and when it thinks too much, when it develops its head system too much.

This does not mean that today there is too much economy. There is much too little farming. Mankind would have to produce much more, but this will only happen when the social organism is properly divided into its three parts. But economic life is really thought of as if it were all alone in the world. When I look at the social organism from this point of view, how it unilaterally wants to negotiate everything, everything according to the head of the social organism, according to the economic life, then I always have to think how from a certain confusion of the social organism with the individual human organism the Austrian poet Hermann Rollet - it is now a very long time ago - once expressed to me a great concern about the future of mankind. Hermann Rollet was a very dear man. He compiled that beautiful book about the Goethe portraits. He alone was, as it was fashionable in the seventies, eighties of the last century, a very enlightened man and therefore proud of how far people have come with their head culture today. And he once expressed to me his deep concern about what will become of people if they become more and more clever, if they think more and more. The head will develop more and more at the expense of the other organism. And he meant that the human beings would really have to roll over the earth as mere heads, as spheres, if the earth continues to develop. Thus he expressed a real concern. And this concern does not apply to the individual human being. But it does apply in a certain way, at least for today, to the social organism, which has its head in the economic system, and which threatens to become more and more head.

What I am saying to you is a very, very practical thing for today's life. I have now spoken several times in proletarian circles. The proletarian world itself understands you well, but it is held back for the time being by its leaders. They are not deeply involved in individual thinking, but in what passes over to them from social thinking, from the thinking of the social organism. If one puts forward in these circles what is appropriate and absolutely necessary today, that the social organism must be divided into an economic organization, into a political-legal or state organization, and into a spiritual organization, one can be quite sure that the program will be answered: Yes, but everything must result from the economic system, what is the use of the other links? If the economic life is put on its right basis, then the rights and then also the spiritual life will arise by itself. - People are not aware of the fact that this is not individual thinking, but that this is thinking which rushes through their heads from the social organism. Above all, it thinks too much, that is, it thinks only in terms of economy. It cannot yet decide to develop its heart and lungs, namely a real separate state. He cannot even become clearly aware of his stomach, that is, of the necessity of the intervention of the individual human faculties in the social organism.

I want you to understand that such talk today, which only wants to accept the economic system, is deeply rooted in human development, and that it will therefore take strong forces to bring about a reversal in this way. Think for a moment that it will become necessary for spiritual life to be emancipated, to be turned in on itself, that people will have to understand: From the lowest school up, everything must be separated from the state and be able to develop independently of economic life. Today, neither the bourgeois circles nor the Social Democrats want this. From their point of view, the Social Democrats will rightly point out again and again that healthy economic life in former times was supported by two pillars, by intellectual life and by state life. Popularly, this is expressed by saying that human economic life must be supported, as it has always been, by the throne, state life and the altar, spiritual life. Some say this with 'disgust, those who are still in old ideas say it with enthusiasm: Throne and altar are necessary. In more recent times, the throne has sometimes become a presidential chair, but this makes a difference only in the outer aesthetics; and the altar has sometimes become a Wertheim cash box, but this also makes only an outer difference. It is actually not a profound difference in terms of feeling. Newer people often like the Wertheim cash register as much as older people liked the altar.

Now this still points back to a time which in a certain way had sense and receptivity for the free spiritual life. Think, it is not so very long ago that the free colleges, the universities, were absorbed by the state. The universities used to have their own prestige, their own honor. They were autonomous, autonomous bodies. They have completely lost this autonomy. They educate public servants, good, well-behaved public servants in all fields. On the other hand, there is a hypertrophy of the social head system, the economic life. Everything is thought out by the economic system, and the perspective of office and machine instead of throne and altar is not a perspective that points to things that can make the social organism viable! I have often said to you that the world would become a big bookkeeping, which would be led by a kind of workshop life. The very individual human faculties that form the nourishment for the social organism would atrophy and be paralyzed if the throne and altar were replaced by the office and the factory, the office and the machine.

But all this is connected with the fact that the present human life together, i.e. the individual life, triggers in man above all a thinking which is oriented towards the economic life, which has only sense and interest for the economic life. This has come about in more recent times because modern technology has taken hold, and with modern technology the modern type of capitalism. First of all, the leading circles became dependent on what one could call the social mind oriented only to the economic system. I have pointed out again and again how man has been absorbed, so to speak, by the objective social mind, by the flooding by the mere head system with which the social organism around us thinks. We are caught up in this thinking today.

You know, I have often pointed out to you, how the human personality with its own thinking has been gradually eliminated even in capital life. Today the objective capital is the one which works over the earth. The human personality has actually been eliminated where capital is operating properly. Soon one is at the bottom, soon at the top, soon everything is lost, soon everything is gained again, and the shares work for themselves, work more and more for themselves. I usually use a sym'ptom as an example. In the first half of the 19th century and into the last third, the individual bankers were the decisive ones. But then, for the big companies, it became more the corporations. America, which is somewhat lagging behind in its development, has just now made the transition, will now make the transition from far-reaching individuality to the objective effect of capital, and will probably show this phenomenon to a quite outstanding degree. But the individual banker was so powerful that one already hits his position in social life well if one pays attention - I think it was in the forties, I have already told it here once - how the finance minister of the King of France went to Rothschild to - well, what does a finance minister do? -to pump him for the state of France. Rothschild was just busy with a cobbler or a carpenter, and this business was as important to him as the finance minister of the King of France, perhaps even more important. The finance minister lets himself be announced. The servant goes in, comes back and says: "Mr. Rothschild asks you to wait a little, there is a carpenter in there. - What, a carpenter? I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France! - The servant replied: Mr. Rothschild says you would like to wait. - But the minister tears open the door and rushes in: "I am the finance minister of the King of France! - Please, take a chair, I have to deal with the gentleman here first. - But, I am the Finance Minister of the King of France! - Well, please, take two chairs!

Through something like this you can see, although it is only a symptom, the personal power. Personal initiative has more or less ceased in this form and was in the process of ceasing before the catastrophe of the war broke out in the field of economic life. That which thinks in the economic life itself, the social intelligence, got the supremacy over the individual intelligence of the single people. At first, this social intelligence, this social mind born out of economic life, out of the hypertrophy of economic life, is very sober. And that is just what should strike the connoisseur of social life from a higher point of view, how sober today the thinking born out of economic life has become. First of all, a kind of new groupthink appears among people. But this groupthink is uncommonly sober. It was born out of the bourgeoisie during the capitalist period, has developed into philistinism, has spread widely as philistinism, and has now taken hold of socialist thinking as its most sober product.

On this point, my dear friends, there is something very, very remarkable to be said. The circumstances that have taken place have brought it about that the largest part of the proletarian masses is free-spirited, unbelieving. The number of people leaving the church in these circles is very, very large. Those who do not leave often do so only because they do not consider the matter very important. But one often hears something else. One often hears it emphasized that the proletarian's substitute for the old religions is precisely the socialist doctrine. This is possible only out of a certain enthusiasm, not out of a true enthusiasm; for, of course, socialist teaching, thinking only from the standpoint of economic life, is something terribly sober and cannot somehow assume a religious character.

But from this you will see that the seriousness which I have often spoken to you in these lectures is also really, one might say, a sacred commandment of world history. If, on the one hand, we follow the human development since the age of the consciousness soul by means of spiritual-scientific observation, and if, on the other hand, we take into consideration what we encounter precisely within socialist thinking, proving the anthroposophical view, then we say that a tremendously important phenomenon of the social organism is its gradual starvation. It 'starves to death, if real spiritual life does not come into people, if spiritual life does not take hold of people! Just as the individual man must starve if he does not have food to enjoy, so must a social organism starve if men do not come to spiritual life. It is really upside down, the social organism. The individual man needs food in order to live; the social organism needs human talents, human gifts, human inner revelations, so that from these gifts, from these inner revelations, may come forth that which alone can make the social organism healthy!

Remember, as I have often emphasized: You cannot build something like the Gotthard tunnel today if you do not know differential and integral calculus as the director of such a construction. But it comes from Leibniz, the English say: from Newton; well, they may say it. But whether it is one or the other: Not only the one who puts the stones on top of each other built the Gotthard tunnel, but Leibniz or Newton helped to build it. This is only one example of how out of the spiritual life also the most all-material really comes into being. If you eliminate the spiritual individual abilities, you also destroy the economic life. It can never be a question of establishing a world bureaucracy, by which quite certainly the free initiative of the spiritual faculties is eliminated! This world bureaucracy, which is the ideal of Trotsky and Lenin, would of course starve the social organism.

Just who honestly means it with the social question in the present, must emphasize again and again: What is necessary above all is a free development of intellectual science. This is not somehow the introduction of something impractical into the present life, but it is the most practical thing of all, because it is directly, really necessary. Precisely because the individual abilities of people have been suppressed for so long, precisely because of this, the objective events in 1914 hit people over the heads. There was nothing in the heads but sometimes even great ideas. The objective events hit people over the heads. Individual abilities had declined. People could not master the external life. Their concepts, their ideas, their imaginations were too narrow. They could not extend themselves over the objective events. And there was not the slightest bit of mutual understanding left. So these last four and a half years had to be the great disciplinarian of mankind, teaching them that it was necessary that spiritual life really flow into the social organism as food.

These connections are understood when one is able to really consider the social organism in this respect as a tripartite system. One must learn to understand that in the social organism the economic life must independently cultivate its external relations, that state body must enter into connection with state body and spiritual life with spiritual life. One unified state system should not negotiate with another unified state system. It must be like in the human organism, where each of the three systems develops its special relations with the outside world. By regulating the international relations of the people in such a way that, as it were, one member only ever enters into correspondence with the other member, the best way is to work against such conflicts as, for example, broke out in 1914. Just think how much more complicated it will be when two territories come into conflict, because initially the conflict can only arise between state system and state system. It cannot be fought out, because the spiritual organization and the economic system, if they are freely centralized in themselves, still have to have their say.

One must only be clear about how differently life will be organized when this threefold structure comes into being. On the other hand, however, we must be clear about how thoroughly people today are prejudiced against such rethinking and relearning. If one wants to raise the question again and again: Why is there so much resistance to spiritual science? - It is not the difficulty of comprehension, as we have often emphasized, but only the inability of people to make the decision to change their habits of thought, as these habits of thought have gradually formed in the last decades, even centuries. It is much more comfortable for people to muddle along in a straight line. It is therefore no wonder that at present people are again thinking of the expression coined in Bern to found a "superstate", the League of Nations with a superparliament. Not true, the old states have worked so favorably, have shown what they can achieve in the last four and a half years! Now, to establish "supra-states", "supra-parliaments", that is quite a sign that people do not want to slip out of the old thinking nets, that they want to stay inside in these old thinking nets. While the individual state must be broken down into its three members, people want the opposite. They want to weld the whole earth - with the exception of those who are now excluded for the time being - into one big state. They want the opposite of what is founded in the forces of development of the time. For this reason, those who are involved in spiritual science should really understand and also incorporate it into their will that a strong push is necessary against that which is still going in the completely opposite direction today. This onslaught is necessary. This must be said again and again. And since we must get used to looking at things inwardly, it will be good to try quite often to experience the social from this point of view, which I have characterized again today, meditating inwardly, because this can stimulate our will.

We will continue to talk about this tomorrow. Tomorrow at five o'clock there will be the public eurythmy performance here, and I think that at half past seven or a quarter to eight I will continue this lecture.

Today we want to point out some facts of the supersensible life, which can prove to you from a special point of view, how important and more and more significant it becomes for the evaluation of what happens here in the physical world, to look at the supersensible, superphysical processes which are always connected with the physical processes on earth. We are indeed at the end of an age and at the beginning of a new age, you know that something similar is said about every age. But this can be said of this expired and of the now beginning age in a completely different sense than of any earlier age. For we have events behind us, catastrophic events, of which mankind has become more and more aware that they have not been there in this intensity since historical life was recorded. The past age was one in which people here on earth cared as little as possible about the supersensible world. If you want to take such a matter very seriously, you must not confuse what one could call external church and lip service with a real orientation towards the supersensible world. It is not very difficult to see that what people have regarded for centuries as a certain religiousness is more an external thing, that it is not a real orientation towards the supersensible world. Until our days people have lived with a certain lack of concern for the supersensible world. And the change of the times demands from mankind today a reorientation towards the supersensible worlds. People must learn to look to these supersensible worlds again, but in a different way than is often imagined today. People want to stay with the ordinary comfortable belief that does not cost much inner effort. Those who have remained with this comfortable faith are the greatest enemies of true contemporary progress. The churches, which resist the new ways to supersensibility, are in truth already today the instigators that more and more materialistic and materialistic impulses are coming into mankind. It is necessary today to learn in a very concrete way to look into the supersensible worlds. We are standing in the age in which, for example, the great, tremendous change must take place, that the people become from thinking automatons to really thinking people. It is not true that it is terrible to say such a thing, because the people of today naturally consider themselves to be thinking people, and if you ask them to become thinking people first, they more or less consider it an insult. But it is nevertheless so. Since the middle of the 15th century, more and more people have become thinking automatons. People today, so to speak, leave themselves to the thoughts, they do not control the thoughts. Just think what it would mean if the same thing would happen to you with regard to other members of your organism, what happens to most people at present with regard to the organs of thought. Ask yourself whether today's man can be very inclined - I say can be - to begin arbitrarily with a thought, to conclude arbitrarily with a thought? Thoughts are bubbling through people's heads today. They can't resist them, they give themselves to them automatically. There one thought rises, the other goes away, that twitches and flashes through the head, and the people think in such a way that one could actually best say, it thinks in the people. Think if the same thing would happen to people with regard to their arms and legs, if they would control them just as little as they control their thinking. Think if a person would behave on the streets today with his arms as he behaves with his thinking organ! You can imagine all the thoughts that twitch through a man's head when he walks across the street, and now think that he would continually wave his hands and arms as he does with his thoughts, or even with his legs! And yet, before this epoch we stand, before which men must learn to have as much power over their thoughts, that is, more precisely, over their organs of thought, as they have power over their arms and legs. Man is entering this age. A certain inner discipline of thinking is that which is to take hold and from which people today are still quite far away.

We have entered the fifth post-Atlantean period since the middle of the 15th century. Before this period expires, people have to learn to control their thinking as well as their arms and legs. Then the real task of this fifth post-Atlantean period will be accomplished for those people who can do it. You see, it is a matter of seriousness if one wants to consider that which, so to speak, is coming up on the horizon of the development of mankind in the present age. Now, however, with what I have just indicated, something essentially different will be connected with this mastering of thinking. The more people begin to master thinking, the more they will be able to imagine, to have imaginations. And imaginations are needed by people, because only through them can the social instincts develop into the anti-social instincts that are so often at work today, so that through imaginations people gain the ability to really put themselves in the place of other people, of their fellow human beings. One cannot put oneself in the place of one's fellow human beings by mere abstract thinking. Abstract thinking makes people stubborn, abstract thinking makes them listen only to their own opinions. And above all, abstract thinking causes man to shut himself off more or less from that mobility which one needs in order to be able to live with the spiritual world. That one cannot easily live with the spiritual world today, you can see from a very specific phenomenon, which is extraordinarily frequent today.

You see, for example, our "Appeal" has now gone through the world. It has been understood by a number of people - that is obvious. Everywhere in the world people have found themselves here or there who have understood it. But a whole number of other people have admittedly not been able to understand him. It is even difficult to imagine what that means, one does not understand the call, because there is nothing in it that actually every person could not understand from the beginning. Yet many find it incomprehensible. Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that today the real spiritual education has reached an extraordinary low level, because people are no longer able to keep up with thoughts that interrupt their thought automatism. People today are accustomed to automatically follow the thoughts once they get going. Just observe the typical people of the present, you will be able to tell them golden things - if then the people themselves are to say something, again that rolls off, what they are used to say since childhood. To put new thoughts into the heads of the people, that becomes extraordinarily difficult today. Whoever has a little bit of life experience, as a rule, always knows what most people will say to one thing or another that appears in the world today. That's how automatic people's judgments have become, how automatic their thoughts have become. Thought automatism is what interferes most with what is demanded of people today by the forces of development. People like formulas, they like what they are used to. The further you go westward, the more you hear, when some sentence is coined: Yes, you can't say that! - How often people say, when something German, for example, has to be translated into Dutch or English or French: That's not English, that's not Dutch, that's not French! - The reverse cannot be said. In German, everything is possible. You can put the predicate at the beginning, in the middle, at the end - it is always German. One can hardly use the expression that a way of speaking is not German in the sense of saying that something is not Dutch, not English, not French, and so on. Certainly, there are certain habits of thought that express themselves in the sequence of sentences; but one can just as well use another sequence of sentences than the one that is written in the grammar. There is actually nothing wrong in this respect, and it is only a philistrosis, a philistinism, if there is often talk of the false and the incorrect. The automatism of thinking is often expressed very clearly in language. People today should be attentive to such nuances of life, because such nuances are extremely important for the understanding of our time. So, when the automatism of thinking ceases and the mobility of thinking takes place again, the possibility of imagination will be awakened in the souls of men.

One more thing will have to be fought, and that is the ignorance of our age. The ignorance of our age is extraordinarily great. People do not understand all kinds of things, simply because they do not fit into their automatic thinking. Preachers are usually found so generally comprehensible, because they basically say nothing else than what has been purred off countless times in the thinking automatisms of the listeners. People find it especially nice when they can think like that inside: Oh, what he says, I have always said inwardly - haven't I said it? - How often do we hear this saying today, and how aptly do we find that of which we can say: Didn't I say it myself? - It is hardly necessary to hear what one has already said oneself. It is quite a waste of life if one always wants to listen to what one has already said oneself. However, one does not have it so comfortable when listening to the spiritual-scientific. Most people cannot tell themselves that they have already said it themselves. And because it does not fit into the thinking automatism, people today find it so difficult to understand. The most uneducated people today are often in the very circles where you would least look for them. The specialization of science has led to a situation in which scientists are plowing a certain field. They drill into it with their automatic thinking, and they are often the most uneducated people. Today we have university professors who actually cannot understand the simplest things, who are really the most uneducated people, about whose uneducation one is deceived only because they so often say: Such a thing is too little popular for the people! - One hears such things also in other fields. How often one can hear, for example, from theater directors of our big cities: One must give more generally understandable things, otherwise the people do not understand. - Mostly, this is based on the fact that the theater directors themselves do not understand better, while the people who go to the theater would actually be happy if they were offered something different. It is necessary to look a little bit at the background, if one wants to understand our time in that, in which it is necessary to continue this time a little bit.

All these things are important for gaining a judgment about what can contribute so that people come to the imaginations so necessary for social life. When these imaginations gradually appear in the souls of men, then these souls will get into a mood which will find it unbearable to know that spiritual life, education, school system, university system are dependent on the state order or on the economic order.

A time will come when the imaginations of individuals will be so strong that these people will feel, within a spiritual life ordered according to state or economic conditions, like a man who is bound and confined to a track so that he can move in only one direction. The people who develop imaginations will feel fettered in the education which depends on the state and economic life and which is considered as the ideal today. The forces of development of the time are strongly speaking in this respect, my dear friends. If today's conditions were to continue, there would gradually be a strong discrepancy, a disagreement, between what people demand in terms of free spiritual life through the external condition of their souls, and what would be there if all education were constricted to state conditions. Perhaps it is only a caricature of a forerunner, when in individual cities of Central and Eastern Europe the schoolboys and schoolgirls expedite the educators and elect the board members from their own ranks, but it is a mood that cannot be overlooked, a mood that goes to the point of discarding that which must not be allowed to continue. It is such a weather light of a new time, which one must not only condemn, which one should already understand a little correctly in its impulses. That is one thing. People will be more and more dependent on having a free spiritual life. Why? Because in the fifth post-Atlantean age we are approaching a sensuous-supersensuous arrangement of the world, in which those spirits of the higher hierarchies, whom we call Angeloi, descend deeper than before, enter into a much more intimate communion with men than was the case before. The relations between the sensual and the supersensual world are to become more intimate from the present age. People shall not only receive the rain from the clouds, but they shall also learn to perceive from higher regions the inspirations of the angels mingling more and more among the souls of men.

In this way the spiritual life which is liberated will indeed become one which, through freedom of thought, will receive that which comes down as influences from a supersensible world. To establish a spiritual life built on itself, emancipated from the life of the state and the economy, is not an external program; it is something that must be learned in connection with the inner forces of human life that continue to develop mankind. Therefore one can say: If one demands such a social orientation, as it is striven for by our threefolding, one does not demand something in the sense of a program, but something which is demanded by the revelations of the spiritual world, which will speak ever more clearly and distinctly to mankind, and which will at the same time tell how mankind lives itself into its ruin, into morbid conditions, if it does not want to hear that which reveals itself out of supersensible worlds for the salvation, for the recovery of mankind. And apart from the fact that the angels in this way get involved in more intimate fellowship with the people - in Middle Germany this getting involved of noblemen with people of the people is called "making oneself common", thus the angels will make themselves common in the future -, also the archangels will do this. There will be other impulses; even if they will speak much more quietly, if they will speak like silent inspirations, they will come, these inspirations. And these inspirations will in the future establish the inner substance of the future states, which on the one hand will have established the spiritual life, on the other hand the economic life, which are therefore real states under the rule of law, established on their own. The states which were founded, for example, in the third post-Atlantean, in the Egyptian-Chaldean age, can be called theocratic, just as the old Hebrew state can be called a theocracy. But these theocracies have gradually disappeared. Theocracies, however, shall again come to earth. In the earthly legal life one should feel the rule of the archangels. We have said that the opposite of the supersensible life of man is expressed in the legal life. But in this legal life, which is the most unspiritual as it lives on earth, the guidance and direction of the archangels, the Archangeloi, who are again becoming more intimate with man, should mingle.

And the spirits of time will become the bearers, the administrators of the economic cycle of man, they will rule more and more in the economic life, when this economic life will be really organized. An associative life it will become. Since the middle of the 15th century, people have developed a tendency to look only at the production of goods, at the accumulation of goods, at profiting. A reversal is necessary. In the future, when the economic cycle will be self-sufficient, it will be much more important to distribute goods among people and to consume goods. Associations will be formed, which in turn will regulate production after consumption. If a sparse beginning is made with such a thing today, it will be little understood or impaired by other impulses today.

Just think how we tried some time ago to bring bread among the people by not producing in a blind way from one place and then putting that on the market, but by asking consumers, who were to be recruited from the Anthroposophical Society, to take the bread. That would have been a consumer cooperative, which would have been supplied in this way from a certain place. At one point the abstract principle of supply and demand would have been overcome. There would have been carried out in another way, as it must come more and more, the principle that is produced to the extent that can be consumed. This is the only sound principle of national economy. But as I said, today such things are still difficult to implement on a small scale. But this is what we must strive for in economic life. Social democracy expresses this in the words: Until now, production has been for profit; in the future, production must be for consumption. But the way social democracy wants to realize this principle would lead to a paralysis of the real social organism. The principle is justified, but it is not yet thought of today in the sense in which it can be realized for the salvation of the social organism.

Thus, out of that which, I would like to say, flows towards us from the future: first, the necessity of independent spiritual life, through which the Angeloi make themselves more intimate with man; second, independent state life, through which the Archangeloi make themselves more intimate with man; third, independent economic life, through which the Archai make themselves more intimate with man. Thus the forces of development of mankind are approaching. The most rapid progress must be made in the independent spiritual life, for this, if mankind is not to meet with a great calamity, must be ready, that is, independent, by the end of the fifth post-Atlantean period. At the end of the sixth post-Atlantean period a new spiritual theocracy must be ready, independent, and at the end of the seventh post-Atlantean period a real social community must be fully formed, in which the individual would feel unhappy if all were not quite as happy as he, if the individual had to buy his happiness with privations from others. From other points of view we have already touched on these things several times.

From a spiritual-scientific point of view, one must see the supersensible development behind what one wants to demand for the development in the physical world. The time is just beginning when people will only see the sensual correctly when they see the supersensible. Above all, it is necessary for the understanding of the very near present that the view of the repeated earthly lives is not only understood in abstracto, but that it is comprehended quite concretely. If one merely knows that man goes from incarnation to incarnation with intervening lives in the purely spiritual world, then one knows only the abstract. One should not be satisfied with this. The knowledge of this abstract can give one a certain satisfaction, but practical for the world becomes only that knowledge which progresses to the concrete. Such a concrete knowledge, which is connected with the repeated earth lives, leads, for example, to the realization that there is a certain connection between the experiences that people have had here on earth, before they have passed through the death gate, and after-death experiences. After they have passed through the death gate, people actually continue in a certain way the life they led here until death, and what people have gone through on earth has a very strong effect when they have passed through the death gate. So think of it quite vividly: People go through the death gate, they bring with them into the supersensible world that which they have united with their souls here; that lives itself out there in a very, very real way. It is not indifferent what man, by passing through the death gate, takes with him into the spiritual world. For that which man takes into the spiritual world through the death gate becomes an important experience for those who shortly thereafter descend into physical life through birth. A kind of important, essential meeting takes place between those who died a while before that time and those who are born afterwards. Those who are born have important experiences with those who died shortly before. So to speak, how the earth was before these, who are coming up now, went through the death gate, this is not experienced, but experienced by those who are about to descend. They are also prepared in a certain way for their descent by what those who go through the death gate shortly before this descent bring up into the spiritual world.

We have passed through a very materialistic age. Until 1913, a large part of mankind left this world through death in a certain thoughtless acceptance of material interests. Until 1913, 1914, by far the majority of people did not enter the spiritual world very much. There were souls in the spiritual world who saw these arrivals. The souls who were to descend later, in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, saw these arrivals come up with the soul remnants of the materialistic age. This has been transformed in these souls into a terrible longing.

You see, this is the peculiarity of the children who have been born since the year 1912 or 1913, that they carry the remnants in their childlike soul life, in their smiles, in their tears, that they carry the remnants in their childlike soul life of a longing which they went through before they descended through birth into earthly existence. And this longing has been transplanted into them by the people who have come up. They have brought up little spiritual. This terrible lack of spiritual things, which people have brought up into the spiritual worlds in this time, has caused in a large number of children, who have already been born since 1914, or who will be born in the next years, the longing not to find again the conditions on earth, which those have left, who have thus ascended.

At the bottom of the life of the present time, one saw a strange force emanating from those who wanted to be born. One can express this force as the longing to wipe away that which has gradually accumulated in materialism on earth. Of course, such forces which work in such an intensive way in a certain direction, as they come into discrepancy with other forces, can be used by all kinds of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in this or that direction. But think out what I have just said, and you have one of the backgrounds lying behind the sensual phenomena: The longing to wipe away the more and more materializing time. There you have one of the forces which strives for the annihilation of this age which is becoming more and more materialistic. One can say: Among the forces which have worked in the development of mankind, even if out of a deep tragedy, for the destruction of the culture swimming into the more and more material, among these forces are the longings of the children who have been born since the year 1913. They have not wanted to appear in a world that offers the continuation of what has been since then.

This is the other side of the desolate destruction that has occurred, this is the other side of the call to learn from the contemplation of the materialism of the past age. This is the impulse that should pour into our longing for real socialization. Thus we must understand our time from the supersensible facts, must strive more and more not to stop in the sensual, but to ask: What supersensible forces play into the sensual life? - A great call goes through this age from the supersensible worlds. At the end of the seventies, behind this sensuous world, the victory of Michael over those powers which I have often characterized to you took place. Thirty-five years men were allowed to live, until the year 1914; in this middle of their lives the crisis had to break in. For if no crisis had come, even those who were born at the end of the seventies and had got beyond the middle of life would have become more and more rigid in the automatism of thought which, because it is an automatism,

is banished to the physical life. Henceforth, these thirty-five-year-olds were not allowed to continue in the same state of the age. Those who are born since then, on the one hand they have to look tragically to the destruction of that into which their fathers and their mothers lived, but for their total soul life it is better that way. The others, however, lack to understand the necessity that supersensible worlds command the turning back from all that people have considered as the modern civilization, and the living in spiritual worlds. Yes, my dear friends, it is the spirit that demands understanding from us for a new dawning age. Those people alone will be able to contribute something to the further development of humanity who do not ignore this call of the spirit. Let us speak this loudly within ourselves. Then alone are we in reality inside what the anthroposophical spiritual movement should be and alone can want.

We will continue to speak about this next Friday at seven o'clock.

Translated by Peter Stebbing

What is called the social question asserts itself in the most decisive manner in our time, as a historic challenge. However, at the same time, it has to be said: Our present age is little prepared to approach the social question in its true form with active comprehension. On this point one has only to avoid yielding to illusions. We have often had to indicate the profound chasm existing in our time between the leading classes and social ranks and the proletarian masses. In the course of recent historical developments, the leading classes and social ranks have allied themselves with certain interest groups and have neglected to cultivate a generally human understanding. The proletarian masses have increasingly had to regard themselves as excluded by virtue of their entire life situation from what the leading classes have essentially concocted for themselves. As regards the division into classes, the situation in ancient Greece, for example, could be said to have been still more unfavorable. At that time there was the large number of slaves who not only partially, with regard to their capacity for work, but with respect to their entire humanity, were viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Yet it would be wrong even so to see it as a matter of looking at this alone. Well into modern times a sharp class distinction and class division has certainly persisted, though it has existed more in terms of the external aspects of life, as expressed in one's social status.

More recently—and precisely this is of significance—a kind of cultural commonality closely connected to the egoistic interests of these leading classes has spread far and wide—in which the great proletarian masses are unable to participate. One need really only consider how little the cultural life of earlier ages assumed this direction. In ancient times there were single individuals to be sure, Mystery leaders, students of the Mysteries imbued with the higher elements of spiritual life, but this spiritual life did not take the form it does today—such that the human being undergoes a bourgeois education, donning superior civic garb as compared to the worker's overalls, while relegating the worker to only a proletarian education. One need but think of how Christianity endeavored for centuries to imbue humanity with a common spiritual life, aiming to represent all human beings as equal before God. In the same way, if you look back for that matter to the cultural life of the ancient Hebrews, there were of course the scribes and Pharisees, single communities that stood out, that were in possession of a certain spiritual life, but what they gave out of this spiritual life, they gave in the same way to all classes of people. Class division concerned other matters than cultural life itself. And it should not be forgotten that throughout the Middle Ages the content of spiritual life lay in something quite different than it does today. The content of spiritual life in the Middle Ages resided in the images to be found in the church, where everyone could see them, where the highest nobility could see them, where the last of the poor could see them. Spiritual life united people from above and below.

Then came more recent times that essentially replaced the old pictorial element with what is literary. Ever less understanding showed itself for the pictorial, for what is of an imaginative nature. More and more, people sought educational development by means of literature, by means of the written and printed word. And this written and printed word increasingly took on the form that made it possible to a certain extent that, alongside the proletarian, universally-human feeling, an upper stratum emerged in education. This soul-duality in social life has manifested itself ever more in recent times and has laid the basis, more than anything else, for the profound social chasm that now has such frightful consequences.

In addition, it transpired that in this fifth post-Atlantean time-period involving the development of the consciousness soul, human beings became more and more egoistic. In a sense, a pinnacle had to be attained in evolving the human personality. By virtue of this development of the human personality, human beings became less and less capable of understanding each other in reality, of entering into each other. We have finally arrived in this present age at the point where it has become almost impossible for one person to be convinced of another. On that account, spreading ideas is so easily sought on the path of violence. How often have I not emphasized here and elsewhere in our Society, that nowadays, on the basis of no prerequisites of any kind, everyone actually has his standpoint. Today someone can be a presumptuous young whippersnapper and still have his standpoint with regard to even the most mature way of thinking. The feeling that a point of view for judging life is to be won by way of maturation, by way of extended experience, this sense has reached the point of disappearing altogether. Entering into the other person, becoming convinced of what lives in the soul of the other person—this has retreated more and more. Hence people understand each other so little—indeed to an ever-diminishing extent.

Further, in the course of the last centuries human beings have turned away more and more from spirituality. I recently emphasized here once again that one should not deceive oneself in that people still go to church, maintaining they have religion. This “religion” signifies extraordinarily little as compared with the connection the human being needs and ought to seek, between the sense world in which he lives between birth and death, and the supersensible world. The greater part of what people claim for themselves today as religious content is after all nothing more than a living in words, a living in language. And having stressed yesterday and the day-before-yesterday, how abstract this life in language has become, it need not surprise us that religious life, expressing itself for the most part for people in language, has become abstract and hence materialistic. For, everything abstract leads human beings continuously to what is materialistic. And the question that should in fact imbue us inwardly and resonate throughout our entire life: “What is the human being in reality?” is one that points to something barely approached by the average person today. I ask you to consider, after all, that in order to answer the question, “What is the human being?” one needs, in a devoted manner, to enter into the whole world; for the human being is a microcosm, a little world, and only becomes comprehensible if conceived of as born out of the entire world. Understanding the human being presupposes understanding the world. Yet, how little is a real understanding of the world actually sought (and hence a real understanding of the human being) in a natural scientific age that enters purely into what is external. If nowadays such considerations are deemed to have nothing to do with understanding the social question, it nonetheless remains true that everything I have set forth here is intimately connected with understanding the social question. This will only gradually be acknowledged once again in reaching the point of wanting to enter lovingly into what is spiritual. Today, the intention is solely to solve the social question on the basis of externalities. It will only really be solved, however, in seeing spiritual experience as the basis of all human striving, feeling and willing—in being able to pose the question once again: How can a true relationship be established between the world in which the human being lives between birth and death, and the world in which he lives between death and a new birth?

You will already be more or less familiar with the “Group Statue” which is to depict the trinity for the worldview of the future: “The Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman.” You may have become aware that the attempt is to depict this Representative of Humanity in a way that otherwise corresponds only to the human countenance with its features. The human countenance with its features is an expression of the soul-life. With respect to the human being, we speak of physiognomy, of certain external gestures, and we recognize this mobility expressing itself in physiognomy and gesture as being connected to the soul life. In the Representative of Humanity of our group statue the aim was not only to portray the countenance in so far as it assumes a physiognomic expression in the human being between birth and death. The further attempt was, as it were, to portray the human being as a whole according to the principle by which nature builds up the human countenance—making every formation, every limb, so to speak, an extension of the countenance. Why something like this? Because in our time the endeavor has to take hold once more of calling forth a common understanding between beings that live only as soul-spiritual beings, and beings that live here on the earth in human physical bodies. Let us remind ourselves as before, of what the dead learn of our language—what they perceive, in so far as they perceive anything of our earth.

On the earth we first of all have the mineral kingdom. We have this mineral kingdom to a certain extent in the form of crystals, and we have broken-up, amorphous minerals as they are called. Basically, of the earth element the dead see only crystal forms and those of the earth's formations that result in regular figures, seeing them as empty voids. You can read about these things in my Theosophy. Of the plants the dead do not see in the first place the forms we see with our eyes. It is actually rather difficult to point to what the dead see of the plant world. For them, the whole of the earth's plant world is like a vast body, but they do not see the green plant forms that we see, only a certain movement, the growth process of the plants. They see precisely what escapes the human being. They see the earth as a great unified organism and the “hair” so to speak, growing spiritually out of the earth—for the plants are spiritualized. Again, of the animal world—I am referring to the outer sensible forms—the dead see only the running of the animals over the earth, not the individual forms of the animals, but their spatial alteration.

And, in as much as they can be accounted physical forms, what do the dead see of human beings? Well, the dead see nothing at all of human beings, with the exception of just a few parts. They perceive the soul, the spiritual, but the outer form not at all. Thus if we were to form the Representative of Humanity as a human figure appears on the earth, this figure would be quite imperceptible for the dead, as also for the Angeloi and Archangeloi. For all beings no longer possessing a body in which there are physical eyes, the human figure, portrayed purely according to its physical form is something invisible, something imperceptible. And only if you begin to express the soul element in the form, so that the external form does not correspond to the human form naturalistically in the here and now, only then do the dead begin to see the form. If you look at a normal, symmetrical face—as faces generally are not, but how people see them—of such a so-called work of art the dead see nothing at all. Our sculptural figure could only be made visible also for supersensible beings in being asymmetrical, in especially emphasizing asymmetry, that is, in containing something of a soul nature that otherwise does not come to expression naturalistically in the external form.

But call to mind how art has become increasingly naturalistic in recent times. Perhaps I already related that I once knew a young person, a sculptor, who had even acquired a name for himself in his native country, who said—we were talking about artistic monuments—to my horror: “Well, the finest rendering of a human being would result from copying every detail of the person precisely, in stone or in bronze, or in some other material.” I replied, “That would be as far removed as it possibly could be from a work of art!” For in reality, a work of art should have nothing in common with such a mere reproduction. It should be anything but like the original. He could not understand that. A “casting” actually counted for him as the most perfect work of sculpture. But it could be said, much of recent art is formed on the basis of this way of thinking, as well as prevailing opinions on art. Whence, ultimately, is any other opinion on art to be derived? After all, on seeing a statue in marble or bronze or in another material, people have to experience something or other! And if they have no relation at all to a spiritual world, they can hardly come to any other judgment than in asking themselves, “Is that in accordance with nature, is there something like that in nature?” And if someone finds that nothing of the sort exists in nature, he then considers what art portrays as having no justification.

But, my dear friends, let us remind ourselves again and again, that it is actually quite absurd to replicate life naturalistically! To write dramas in the manner of Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) is ridiculous, since that can self-evidently, be done better in real life. In this respect, we cannot keep up with nature, after all. Whatever is gained from the spiritual world, on the other hand, is a valuable addition to nature. It represents something new placed into this world. But recent times have turned ever more to naturalism, amounting to materialism on a historical level.¹

All this stems from human beings turning away from spiritual life. A sound return to spiritual life is only possible in conceiving the relation of the sensible to the supersensible in concrete terms, such as we have now attempted to do in various fields, making clear to ourselves what the dead hears of speech and sees in the way of forms that exist for the earthly human being. If we make concretely clear to ourselves, in detail, what the relationships are for the sensible and supersensible, in the same way we do for something on the physical plane, then only do we gain a real idea of the connection between the sensible and supersensible! The emerging materialistic naturalism of recent times that has taken hold of people ever more forcefully since the 15th 16th century has killed the sense for this connection of the sensible and supersensible. Finally, natural science lets nothing count as valid other than sensible reality. In this manner, human beings have torn themselves away from a true, living, feeling-connection with the spiritual world.

In separate branches of civilization in the 18th century this took yet another turn. Within French culture, among the Encyclopedists (1751-80),² materialism yielded its ingenious results. This spread far and wide. And finally there came what leads most of all away from the spiritual world: the life in theosophical abstractions! This life in theosophical abstractions limits itself to saying, the human being consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and so on; the human being has a karma, the human being lives in repeated earth lives. It wants to teach these abstractions as something grandiose, while remaining stuck in words, leading in the end to the extreme arrogance prevalent in many theosophical societies. There one remains completely in words, in externalities. Only in passing over to questions such as, “What do the dead hear of what we say? What do the dead see of what we have here in our surroundings?”, only in proceeding to such concrete ideas do real thoughts reveal themselves concerning the spiritual world. The utmost extremes border on each other: empty words and blather such as “astral body”, ”ether body” and so on, behind which there is often nothing at all but words and pure naturalistic materialism.

It is absolutely necessary to acquire a feeling for these things, a feeling such that one demands to hear in concrete terms about the relationship of the physical and supra-physical world. And only in permeating ourselves with such definite ideas of the connection between the physical and the supra-physical world can we return once again to what in a different manner human beings of older epochs possessed—return, that is, to more wide-ranging world-interests. We can ask, why has so much misfortune broken out over the world? Well, the ultimate reason is that people's interests have become so narrow as to barely transcend the most everyday matters. Naturally, if the human being ceases to interest himself in the stars, he then begins to interest himself in kaffeeklatsch. If the human being ceases to survey the relation of the higher hierarchies in his own thoughts, the inclination arises in him to waste time in ordinary dilly-dallying. It is only necessary to look at what interests have occupied the leading circles of humanity over the last centuries. One need only take account of what these people do from morning to evening! And if one does so with comprehension, one will not be surprised that such a debacle has befallen humanity. Nowadays people are glad if they can gain a rough idea of something in just a few words! They are pleased if they can encompass this or that without any effort.

The historical development of humanity speaks in clear terms of the various possibilities for viewing things. There are countless examples in this respect. In recent years, for instance, German culture has frequently been reproached for having a Hegel³ with his theory of the state, i.e., for Hegel having said, the state in the end is something like a kind of god on earth. But it should be remembered that German culture had not only Hegel, but Stirner,⁴ not separated by many years at all from Hegel. While for Hegel the state was something like an ever-changing earth-god, for Stirner the state was worthless trash, something to be negated. The two lived in close proximity to each other. One can hardly imagine two greater extremes arising from the same cultural life. If one then wants to portray such a cultural life, then one has to do so as I did in my Riddles of Philosophy, for example, where the one thinker is accorded the same weight as the other. On first reading about Hegel, you might be led to believe I adhered to Hegel's viewpoint. Then, in reading about Stirner, you might assume I adhered to Stirner's viewpoint. With that, nothing else is implied than that we should train ourselves to acquire understanding for the many-sidedness of human beings, and gain inner tolerance. It should interest us, what is conceived by another soul quite differently than what we ourselves have thought. For we should have the feeling, this other thought complements our own.

Let us say there are a number of people, ten individuals (a sketch was made), I am one of them, the other nine are there. I now say to myself, I think about certain matters in one way, the second person in another way, the third again differently, and so on, all varying in some degree. All are right, none are right. If we sense the approximate arithmetical middle of all this, if in this context we feel able to take up everything with the same love, irrespective of whether we say it, or others say it, learning to feel ourselves within the totality, then we join in hastening toward the purpose that exists for the human beings of the future. We must strive for this “hastening.” We must strive for it simply in order to gain a feeling for true social life. We must learn to feel ourselves standing within what is comprised by the genius of language, by what is comprised by the life of rights, by the rights-genius. We must learn to stand within what is encompassed by the mutually shared economic genius. Only this living feeling of being within a totality that has to be consciously acquired in the age of the consciousness-soul—only this propels the human being toward humanity's future destination. However, we cannot attain this approach to the human being's future destination in any other way than by extending our interests ever further, in other words, in learning to overcome ourselves more and more. Yes, my dear friends, in taking counsel with oneself quite honestly, one will after all find in the end, that actually what is of least interest in the whole world is what one is able to think and feel about oneself within the narrow confines of the “I.” Indeed, in our age many people occupy their thoughts and feelings to a great extent within the most immediate boundaries of their “I.” Hence their life is so boring and hence they are so dissatisfied with life. We never become interesting in always only circling around this midpoint. In contrast to this, if we look out, always focusing on how the external world shines toward us, if we expand our interests ever farther, then our “I” becomes interesting by virtue of giving us a standpoint for observing the world. Then our “I” becomes significant through the fact that, just from this point of the “I,” only we are capable of seeing the world, as no other person can. Another person sees it from a different standpoint.

However, if we remain within ourselves, circling continuously around our own self, we contemplate in fact only what we have in common with all other people. And then, in the end every other person loses interest for us—and ultimately the whole world actually loses interest for us. A widening of interest is above all what is striven for by means of spiritual science. However, in order to experience this widening of interest it is necessary for us to educate ourselves to become receptive for what approaches us from outside, so that we really can take up something new. People do not reject spiritual science because it is difficult—it is not actually difficult—they repudiate it for the reason that it does not roll on in the well-worn trains of thought they are used to, since it requires them to engage in new trains of thought. People reject everything that calls for new trains of thought. One can encounter quite peculiar things in this respect. The content of the Aufruf⁵ which will be known to you, as also various things on the social question contained in the paper that is to appear in a few days' time, I communicated to certain personalities during the last horrifying years. It would really have been a question of these people learning from bitter experience to act of themselves as necessity demanded. In speaking to one or another individual of the need for cultural life to be placed on an independent footing, and not continue to be combined with the state and economic spheres, people listened. On many such occasions, it initially appeared as though they exerted themselves to arrive at a thought in this connection. In one's presence, while speaking, people are polite and do not conduct themselves as when they are only supposed to read something. Having thus given the matter a thought, the gesture of politeness (which has no truth to it) is over—and then the “thought machine” shuts off again, and one heard the same thing every time, “Oh yes, the separation of church and school is comprehensible!” That was the only thing they had actually heard, the one thing that has been said over and over again in one way or another for generations—well-worn trains of thought. The rest dissolves like sound and smoke.

Here we touch on things that need to change in our time. We should cultivate the devoted attitude that leads to receptivity for revelations that, as I mentioned here a while ago, would reveal themselves in our time to human beings from the spiritual world. How often, of late, one heard the words, “Simple, everything has to be simple!” The most sensible, the brightest people could be heard quoting Goethe, saying for instance, “The all-comprehending One, does He not comprehend you, me, Himself?” “A name is sound and smoke, feeling is everything”—and so on. It was all supposed to be very profound. But Goethe wrote this as Faust's instruction to a sixteen-year-old girl. That was forgotten! What was well suited to the heartstrings of the naive Gretchen became profound philosophical wisdom! People do not notice such things. But it is easier, self-evidently, to understand what is appropriate for the sixteen-year-old Gretchen, than what is not appropriate for a sixteen-year-old Gretchen, but for mature human beings. In our time, people should take account of such aberrations and break with all too many inherited notions. Reverberating through modern culture there has also been what contains seeds for the future. A while ago I quoted here a saying ofFichte, “The human being can accomplish what he should accomplish; and if he says, he cannot, he does not want to.” This is a most important saying, one the modern human being needs above all as a guideline. This is because the modern human being is not permitted to be a layabout, saying in regard to certain things, “I can't do that.” It lies in the nature of the modern human being that he can do far more than he often supposes, and that “genius” has to be for him more and more a result of diligence. However, one has to be capable of gaining belief in this diligence for oneself. As far as possible one has to rid oneself of every thought that one would be unable to do whatever it is one ought to do. It should constantly be kept in mind just how easy it is to claim that one would be incapable of doing something, merely because making the attempt would be uncongenial. And the more the modern human being makes this an everyday rule, the more will he attain the mood of the soul-spiritual. In more people than you might think, this mood will call forth the inner experience of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to say. What anthroposophical spiritual science wants to say is available, my dear friends, at least in regard to certain elementary matters. It is available for the human soul. One need only summon the courage to have it. In developing the corresponding mood, the social understanding and the social interest will develop. For when do we have no social understanding? We have no social understanding only when we have no interests that transcend our immediate concerns. Social understanding awakens at once when we take an interest in what lies beyond our immediate circle; albeit really and truly! Taking these things into consideration is quite especially necessary in the age of the evolving consciousness soul. It is necessary for the reason that in the age of the consciousness soul the cosmic powers point the human being to the “I”. Hence, the human being has to be all the more vigilant in transcending the “I”! Since so many antisocial forces rise up from the depths of the human soul today, the social element has to be consciously cultivated that we send down once again into subconscious depths. Most people today do not really know what to do with themselves. But that comes from only wanting to occupy oneself with one's one concerns. The moment we do not merely occupy ourselves with personal matters, but enter into a feeling relation to the whole world, then we begin to do what is right for ourselves.

These things are closely allied to understanding the social question. In many respects the social question is a soul question. But only someone standing within anthroposophical spiritual science will know to sense it rightly as a soul question. That is what I wanted to say to you today.

• 1. It should perhaps be noted that, in her recollections, Margarita Woloschin reports, “Once, after visiting an exhibition of modern art, Dr. Steiner said, ‘Non-representational painting is a protest against naturalism, but strictly speaking it is absurd.’—Trans.
• 2. identified with the rationalism of the Enlightenment
• 3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831
• 4. Max Stirner, 1806-56
• 5. The March 1919 “Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World” contained in GA 23 and GA 189

This lecture appeared in The Golden Blade, 1954.

From the two preceding lectures you will have realised that in finding it necessary to speak at the present time of the threefold social order, anthroposophical spiritual science is not actuated by any subjective views or aims. The purpose of the lecture yesterday was to point to impulses deeply rooted in the life of the peoples of the civilised world—the world as it is in this Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. I tried to show how, from about the year 1200 A.D. onwards, there awakened in Middle Europe an impulse leading to the growth of what may be called the civic social order, but that this civic social life of the middle classes was infiltrated by the remains of a life of soul belonging to earlier centuries—by those decadent Nibelung traits which appeared particularly among the ruling strata in the mid-European countries.

I laid special stress upon the existence of a radical contrast in mid-European life from the thirteenth until the twentieth centuries, culminating in the terrible death-throes of social life that have come upon Middle Europe. This incisive contrast was between the inner, soul-life of the widespread middle-class, and that of the descendants of the old knighthood, of the feudal overlords, of those in whom vestiges of the old Nibelung characteristics still survived. These latter were the people who really created the political life of Middle Europe, whereas the bulk of the middle class remained non-political, a-political. If one desires to be a spiritual scientist from the practical point of view, serious study must be given to this difference of soul-life between the so-called educated bourgeoisie and all those who held any kind of ruling positions in Middle Europe at that time. I spoke of this in the lecture yesterday.

We will now consider in rather greater detail why it was that the really brilliant spiritual movement which lasted from the time of Walter von der Vogelweide until that of Goetheanism, and then abruptly collapsed, failed to gain any influence over social life or to produce any thoughts which could have been fruitful in that sphere. Even Goethe, with all his power to unfold great, all-embracing ideas in many domains of life, was really only able to give a few indications—concerning which one may venture to say that even he was not quite clear about them—as to what must come into being as a new social order in civilised humanity. Fundamentally speaking, the tendency towards the threefold membering of a healthy social organism was already present in human beings, subconsciously, by the end of the eighteenth century. The demands for freedom, equality and fraternity, which can have meaning only when the threefold social order becomes reality, testified to the existence of this subconscious longing. Why did it never really come to the surface?

This is connected with the whole inherent character of mid-European spiritual life. At the end of the lecture yesterday I spoke of a strange phenomenon. I said that Hermann Grimm—for whom I have always had such high regard and whose ideas were able to shed light upon so many aspects of art and general human interest of bygone times—succumbed to the extraordinary fallacy of admiring such an out-and-out phrasemonger as Wildenbruch! In the course of years I have often mentioned an incident which listeners may have thought trivial, but which can be deeply indicative for those who study life in its symptomatological aspect. Among the many conversations I had with Hermann Grimm while I was in personal contact with him, there was one in which I spoke from my own point of view about many things that need to be understood in the spiritual sense. In telling this story I have always stressed the fact that Hermann Grimm's only response to such mention of the spiritual was to make a warding-off gesture with his hand, indicating that this was a realm he was not willing to enter. A supremely true utterance, consisting of a gesture of the hand, was made at that moment. It was true inasmuch as Hermann Grimm, for all his penetration into many things connected with the so-called spiritual evolution of mankind, into art, into matters of universal human concern, had not the faintest inkling of what ‘spirit’ must signify for men of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. He simply did not know what spirit really is from the standpoint of a man of this epoch. In speaking of such matters one must keep bluntly to the truth: until it came to the spirit, there was truth in a man like Hermann Grimm. He made a parrying gesture because he had no notion of how to think about the spirit. Had he been one of the phrasemongers going about masked as prophets to-day endeavouring to better the lot of mankind, he would have believed that he too could speak about the spirit; he would have believed that by reiterating Spirit, spirit, spirit! something is expressed that has been nurtured in one's own soul.

Among those who of recent years have been talking a great deal about the spirit, without a notion of its real nature, are the theosophists—the majority of them at any rate. For it can truly be said that of all the vapid nonsense that has been uttered of late, the theosophical brand has been the most regrettable and also in a certain respect the most harmful in its effects. But a statement like the one I have made about Hermann Grimm—not thinking of him as a personality but as a typical representative of the times—raises the question: how comes it that such a true representative of Middle European life has no inkling of how to think about the spiritual, about the spirit? It is just this that makes Hermann Grimm the typical representative of Middle European civilisation. For when we envisage this brilliant culture of the townsfolk, which has its start about the year 1200 and lasts right on into the period of Goetheanism, we shall certainly perceive as its essential characteristic—but without valuing it less highly on this account—that it is impregnated in the best sense with soul but empty of anything that can be called spirit. That is the fact we have to grasp, with a due sense of the tragedy of it: this brilliant culture was devoid of spirit. What is meant here, of course, is spirit as one learns to apprehend it through anthroposophical spiritual science.

Again and again I return to Hermann Grimm as a representative personality, for the thinking of thousands and thousands of scholarly men in Middle Europe was similar to his. Hermann Grimm wrote an excellent book about Goethe, containing the substance of lectures he gave at the University of Berlin in the seventies of the last century. Taking it all in all, what Hermann Grimm said about Goethe is really the best that has been said at this level of scholarship. From the vantage-point of a rich life of soul, Hermann Grimm derived his gift not only for portraying individual men but for accurately discerning and assessing their most characteristic traits. He was brilliant in hitting upon words for such characterisations. Take a simple example. In the nature of things, Hermann Grimm was one of those who misunderstood the character of the wild Nibelung people. He was an ardent admirer of Frederick the Great and pictured him as a Germanic hero. Now Macaulay, the English historian and man of letters, wrote about Frederick the Great, naturally from the English point of view. In an essay on Macaulay, Hermann Grimm set out to show that in reality only a German possessed of sound insight is capable of understanding and presenting a true picture of Frederick the Great. Hermann Grimm describes Macaulay's picture of Frederick the Great in the very apt words: Macaulay makes of Frederick the Great a distorted figure of an English Lord, with snuff in his nose.

To hit upon such a characterisation indicates real ability to shape ideas and mental images in such a way that they have plasticity, mobility. Many similar examples could be found of Hermann Grimm's flair for apt characterisation. And other kindred minds, belonging to the whole period of Middle European culture of which I spoke yesterday, were endowed with the same gift. But if, with all the good-will born of a true appreciation of Hermann Grimm, we study his monograph on Goethe—what is our experience then? We feel: this is an extraordinarily good, a really splendid piece of writing—only it is not Goethe! In reality it gives only a shadow-picture of Goethe, as if out of a three-dimensional figure one were to make a two-dimensional shadow-picture, thrown on the screen. Goethe seems to wander through the chapters like a ghost from the year 1749 to the year 1832. What is described is a spectral Goethe—not what Goethe was, what he thought, what he desired.

Goethe himself did not succeed in lifting to the level of spiritual consciousness all that was alive within his soul. Indeed, the great ‘Goethe problem’ to-day is precisely this: to raise into consciousness in a truly spiritual way what was spiritually alive in Goethe. He himself was not capable of this, for culture in his day could give expression only to a rich life of the soul, not of the spirit. Therefore Hermann Grimm, too, firmly rooted as he was in the Goethean tradition, could depict only a shadow, a spectre, when he wanted to speak of Goethe's spirit. It is thoroughly characteristic that the best modern exposition of Goethe and Goetheanism should produce nothing but a spectre of Goethe.

Why is it that through the whole development of this brilliant phase of culture there is no real grasp of the spirit, no experience of it or feeling for it? Men such as Troxler, and Schelling too at times, pointed gropingly to the spirit. But speaking quite objectively, it must be said that this culture was empty of spirit. And because of this, men were also ignorant of the needs, the conditions, that are essential for the life of the spirit. Here too there is something which may well up as a feeling of tragedy from contemplation of this stream of culture: men were unable to perceive, to divine, the conditions necessary for the life of the spirit, above all in the social sphere; For the reason why the social life of Middle Europe has developed through the centuries to the condition in which it finds itself to-day is that it had no real experience of the spirit, nor felt the need to meet the fundamental requirement of the spiritual life by emancipating it, making it independent of and separate from the political sphere. Because men had no understanding of the spirit, they allowed it to be merged with the political life of the State, where it could unfold only in shackles. I am speaking here only of Middle Europe; in other regions of the modern civilised world it was the same, although the causes were different.

And then, in the inmost soul, a reaction can set in. Then a man can experience how in his study of nature the spirit remains dumb, silent, uncommunicative. Then the soul rebels, gathers its forces and strives to bring the spirit to birth from its own inmost being! This can happen only in an epoch when scientific thinking impinges on a culture which has no innate disposition towards spirituality. For if men are not inwardly dead, if they are inwardly alive, the impulse of the spirit begins of itself to stir within them. We must recognise that since the middle of the 15th century the spirit has to be brought to birth through encountering what is dead if it is to penetrate into man's life of soul. The only persons who can gain satisfaction from inwardly experiencing the spiritualised soul-life of the Greeks are those who, with their classical scholarship, live in that afterglow of Greek culture which enables the soul-quality of the spirit to pulsate through a man's own soul. But men who are impelled to live earnestly with natural science and to discern what is deathly, corpse-like in it—they will make it possible for the spirit itself to come alive in their souls.

If a man is to have real and immediate experience of the spirit in this modern age, he must not only have smelt the fumes of prussic acid or ammonia in laboratories, or have studied specimens extracted from corpses in the dissecting room, but out of the whole trend and direction of natural scientific thinking he must have known the odour of death in order that through this experience he may be led to the light of the spirit! This is an impulse which must take effect in our times; it is also one of the testings which men of the modern age must undergo. Natural science exists far more for the purpose of educating man than for communicating truths about nature. Only a naive mind could believe that any natural law discovered by learned scientists enshrines an essential, inner truth. Indeed it does not! The purpose of natural science, devoid of spirit as it is, is the education of men. This is one of the paradoxes implicit in the historic evolution of humanity.

And so it was only in the very recent past, in the era after Goetheanism, that the spirit glimmered forth; for it was then, for the first time, that the essentially corpse-like quality in the findings of natural science came to the fore; then and not until then could the spirit ray forth—for those, of course, who were willing to receive its light. Until the time of Goethe, men protected themselves against the sorry effects of a spiritual life shackled in State-imposed restrictions by cultivating a form of spiritual life fundamentally alien to them, namely the spiritual life of ancient Greece; this was outside the purview of the modern State for the very reason that it had nothing to do with modern times. A makeshift separation of the spiritual life from the political sphere was provided by the adoption of an alien form of culture. This Greek culture was a cover for the spiritual emptiness of Middle European life and of modern Europe in general.

On the other hand, the need to separate the economic sphere from the Rights-sphere, from the political life of the State proper, was not perceived. And why not? When all is said and done, nobody can detach himself from the economic field. To speak trivially, the stomach sees to that! In the economic sphere it is impossible for men to live unconcernedly through such cataclysms as are allowed to occur, all unnoticed, in the political and spiritual spheres. Economic activity was going on all the time, and it developed in a perfectly straightforward way. The transformation of the old impenetrable forests into meadows and cornfields, with all the ensuing economic consequences, went steadily ahead. But into economic life, too, there came an alien intrusion, one that had actually found a footing in the souls of men in Middle Europe earlier than that of Greece, namely the Latin-Roman influence. Everything pertaining to the State, to the Rights-life, to political life, derives from this Latin-Roman influence. And here again is something that will have to be stressed by history in the future but has been overlooked by the conventional, tendentious historiography of the immediate past, with its bias towards materialism—the strangely incongruous fact that certain economic ideas and procedures are a direct development from social relationships described, for example, by Tacitus, as prevailing in the Germanic world during the first centuries after the founding of Christianity.

But that is not all. These trends in economic thinking did not go forward unhampered. The Roman view of rights, Roman political thinking, seeped into the economic usages and methods originally prevailing in Europe, infiltrated them through and through and caused a sharp cleavage between the economic sphere and the political sphere. Thus the economic sphere and the political sphere, the former coloured by the old Germanic way of life and the latter by the Latin-Roman influence, remained separate on the surface but without any organic distinction consistent with the threefold membering of the body social: the distinction was merely superficial, a mask. Two heterogeneous strata were intermingled; it was felt that they did not belong together, in spite of external unification. Inwardly, however, people were content, because in their souls they experienced the two spheres as separate and distinct.

One need only study mediaeval and modern history in the right way and it will be clear that this mediaeval history is really the story of perpetual rebellion, self-defence, on the part of the economic relationships surviving from olden times against the political State, against the Roman order of life. Imaginative study of these things shows unmistakably how Roman influences in the form of jurisprudence penetrate into men via the heads of the administrators. A great deal of the Roman element had even found its way into the wild Nibelung men in their period of decline. “Graf” is connected with “grapho”—writing. One can picture how the peasants, thinking in terms of husbandry, rise up in rebellion against this Roman juridical order, with fists clenched in their pockets, or with flails. Naturally, this is not always so outwardly perceptible. But when one observes history truly, these factors are present in the whole moral trend and impulse of those times. And so—I am merely characterising, not criticising, for everything that happened has also brought blessings and was necessary for the historic evolution of Middle Europe—all that developed from the seeds planted in mid-European civilisation was permeated through and through by the juristic-political influences of the Roman world and the humanism of Greece, by the Greek way of conceiving spirit in the guise of soul.

On the other hand, directly economic life acquired its modern, international character, the old order was doomed. A man might have had a very good classical education and be an ignoramus in respect of modern natural science, but then he was inwardly on a retrograde path. A man of classical education could not keep abreast of his times unless he penetrated to some extent into what modern natural scientific education had to offer. And again, if a man were schooled in natural science, if he acquired some knowledge of modern natural science and of what had come out of the old Roman juristic system in the period of which I have spoken, he could not help suffering from an infantile disease, from ‘culture scarlet fever’, ‘culture measles’, in a manner of speaking. In the old Imperium Romanum a juristic culture was fitting and appropriate. Then this same juristic principle, the res publica (i.e, the conception of it), was transplanted from ancient Rome into the sphere of Middle European culture, together with the element of Nibelung barbarism on the other side. One really gets ‘culture scarlet fever’, ‘culture measles’, if one does not merely think of jurisprudence in the abstract, but, with sound natural scientific concepts, delves into the stuff that figures as modern jurisprudence in literature and in science.

We can see that this state of things had reached a certain climax when we find a really gifted man such as Rudolf von Ihering at an utter loss to know how to deal with the pitiable notions of jurisprudence current in the modern age. The book written by Ihering on the aim of justice (Der Zweck im Recht) was a grotesque production, for here was a man who had made a little headway in natural scientific thinking endeavouring to apply the concepts he had acquired to jurisprudence—the result being a monstrosity of human thinking. To study modern literature on law is a veritable martyrdom for sound thinking; one feels all the time as though so many worms were crawling through the brain. This is the actual experience—I am simply describing it pictorially.

We must be courageous enough to face these things fairly and squarely, and then it will be clear that we have arrived at the point of time when not only certain established usages and institutions, but men's very habits of thought, must be metamorphosed, re-cast; when men must begin to think about many things in a different way. Only then will the social institutions in the external world be able, under the influence of human thinking and feeling, to take the form that is called for by these ominous and alarming facts.

A fundamental change in the mental approach to certain matters of the highest importance is essential. But because between 1200 and the days of Goetheanism, modern humanity, especially in Middle Europe, absorbed all unwittingly thoughts that wriggled through the brain like worms, there crept over thinking the lazy passivity that is characteristic of the modern age. It comes to expression in the absence of will from the life of thought. Men allow their thoughts to take possession of them; they yield to these thoughts; they prefer to have them in the form of instinct. But in this manner no headway can be made towards the spirit. The spirit can be reached only by genuinely putting the will into thinking, so that thinking becomes an act like any other, like hewing wood. Do modern men feel that thinking tires them? They do not, because thinking for them is not activity at all. But the fact that anyone who thinks with thoughts, not with words, will get just the same fatigue as he gets from hewing wood, and actually in a shorter time, so that he simply has to stop—that is quite outside their experience. Nevertheless, this is what will have to be experienced, for otherwise modern mankind as a community will be incapable of achieving the transition from the sense-world into the super-sensible world of which I spoke in the two preceding lectures. Only by entering thus into the super-sensible world, with understanding for what is seen and apprehended in the spirit, will human souls find harmony again.

The year 1200 is the time of Walter von der Vogelweide, the time when the spiritual life of Middle Europe is astir with powerful imaginations of which conventional history has little to say. Then it flows on through the centuries, but from the 15th and 16th centuries onwards takes into itself the germs of decline with the founding of the Universities of Prague, Ingolstadt, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Restock, Wurzburg and the rest. The founding of these Universities throughout Middle Europe occurred almost without exception in a single century. The kind of life and thinking emanating from the Universities started the trend towards abstraction—towards what was subsequently to be idolised and venerated as the pure, natural scientific thinking which to-day invades the customary ways of thought with such devastating results.

Fundamentally speaking, this gave a definite stamp to the whole mentality of the educated middle class. Naturally, many individuals were not deeply influenced, but all the same the effect was universal. Of salient importance during this period was the increasing receptiveness of people to a form of soul-life entirely foreign to them. Side by side with what was developed through those who were the bearers of this middle-class culture, which reached its culmination in Goethe, Herder and Schiller, alien elements and impulses were at work.

I am speaking here of something profoundly characteristic. In their souls, the bearers of this culture were seeking for the spirit without a notion of what the spirit is. And where did they seek it? In the realm of Greek culture! They learnt Greek in their intermediate schools, and what was instilled into them by way of spiritual substance was Greek in tenor and content. To speak truly of the spirit as conceived in Middle Europe from the thirteenth right on into the twentieth century, one would have to say: spirit, as conveyed by the inculcation of Greek culture. No spiritual life belonging intrinsically and innately to the people came into being. Greek culture did not really belong to the epoch beginning in the middle of the 15th century, which we call the epoch of the evolution of selfconsciousness. And so the bourgeoisie in Middle Europe were imbued with an outworn form of Greek culture, and this was the source of all that they were capable of feeling and experiencing in regard to the spirit.

But what the Greek experienced of the spirit was merely its expression in the life of soul (Seelenseite das Geistes). What gave profundity to the culture of ancient Greece was that the Greek rose to perception of the highest manifestation of soul-life. That was what he called ‘spirit’. True, the spirit shines down from the heights, pulsing through the realm of soul; but when the gaze is directed upwards, it finds, to begin with, only the expression of the spirit in the realm of soul.

Man's task in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, however, is to lift himself into the very essence of the spirit—an attainment still beyond his reach in the days of Greece. This is of far greater significance than is usually supposed, for it sheds light upon the whole way in which medieval, neo-medieval culture apprehended the spirit.

What, then, was required in order to reach a concept, an inward experience, of the spirit appropriate for the modern age? It is precisely by studying a representative figure like Hermann Grimm that we can discover this. It is something of which a man such as Hermann Grimm, steeped in classical lore, had not the faintest inkling—namely, the strivings of natural science and the scientific mode of thinking. This thinking is devoid of spirit; precisely where it is great it contains no trace of spirit, not an iota of spirituality. All the concepts of natural science, all its notions of laws of nature, are devoid of spirit, are mere shadow-pictures of spirit; while men are investigating the laws of nature, no trace of the spirit is present in their consciousness.

Two ways are open here. Either a man can give himself up to natural science, contenting himself—as often happens to-day—with what natural science has to offer; then he will certainly equip his mind with a number of scientific laws and ideas concerning nature—but he loses the spirit. Along this path it is possible to become a truly great investigator, but at the cost of losing all spirituality. That is the one way. The other is to be inwardly aware of the tragic element arising from the lack of spirituality in natural science, precisely where science appears in all its greatness. Man immerses his soul in the scientific lore of nature, in the abstract, unspiritual laws of chemistry, physics, biology, which, having been discovered at the dissecting table, indicate by this very fact that from the living they yield only the dead. The soul delves into what natural science has to impart concerning the laws of human evolution. When a man allows all this to stream into him, when he endeavours not to pride himself on his knowledge, but asks: ‘What does this really give to the human soul?’—then he experiences something true; then spirit is not absent. Herein, too, lies the tragic problem of Nietzsche, whose life of soul was torn asunder by the realisation that modern scientific learning is devoid of spirituality.

As you know, insight into the super-sensible world does not depend upon clairvoyance; all that is required is to apprehend by the exercise of healthy human reason what clairvoyance can discover. It is not essential for the whole of mankind to become clairvoyant; but what is essential, and moreover within the reach of every human being, is to develop insight into the spiritual world through the healthy human intelligence. Only thus can harmony enter into souls of the modern age: for the loss of this harmony is due to the conditions of evolution in our time. The development of Europe, with her American affinities on the one hand and the Asiatic frontier on the other, has reached a parting of the ways. Spiritual Beings of higher worlds are bringing to a decisive issue the overwhelming difference between former ages and modern times as regards the living side-by-side of diverse populations on the earth.

How were the peoples of remote antiquity distributed and arranged over the globe? Up to a certain point of time, not long before the Mystery of Golgotha, the configuration of peoples on earth was determined from above downwards, inasmuch as the souls simply descended from the spiritual world into the physical bodies dwelling in some particular territory. Owing to physiological, geographical, climatic conditions in early times, certain kinds of human bodies were to be found in Greece, and similarly on the peninsula of Italy. The souls came from above, were predestined entirely from above, and took very deep root in man's whole constitution, in his outer, bodily physiognomy.

Then came the great migrations of the peoples. Men wandered over the earth in different streams. Races and peoples began to intermix, thus enhancing the importance of the element of heredity in earthly life. A population inhabiting a particular region of the earth moved to another; for example the Angles and Saxons who were living in certain districts of the Continent migrated to the British Isles. That is one such migration. But in respect of physical heredity, the descendants of the Angles and Saxons are dependent upon what had developed previously on the Continent; this was a determining factor in their bodily appearance, their practices, and so forth. Thus there came into the evolutionary process a factor working in and conditioned by the horizontal. Whereas the distribution of human beings over the earth had formerly depended entirely upon the way in which the souls incarnated as they came down from above, the wanderings and movements of men over the earth now also began to have an effect.

At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, however, a new cosmic historic impulse came into operation. For a period of time a certain sympathy existed between the souls descending from the spiritual world and the bodies on the earth below. Speaking concretely: souls who were sympathetically attracted by the bodily form and constitution of the descendants of the Angles and Saxons, now living in the British Isles, incarnated in those regions. In the 15th century this sympathy began to wane, and since then the souls have no longer been guided by racial characteristics, but once again by geographical conditions, the kind of climate, and so forth, on the earth below, and also by whether a certain region of the earth is flat or mountainous. Since the 15th century, souls have been less and less concerned with racial traits; once again they are guided more by the existing geographical conditions. Hence a kind of chasm is spreading through the whole of mankind to-day between the elements of heredity and race and the soul-element coming from the spiritual world. And if men of our time were able to lift more of their subconsciousness into consciousness, very few of them would—to use a trivial expression—feel comfortable in their skins. The majority would say: I came down to the earth in order to live on flat ground, among green things or upon verdant soil, in this or that kind of climate, and whether I have Roman or Germanic features is of no particular importance to me.

It certainly seems paradoxical when these things, which are of paramount importance for human life, are concretely described. Men who preach sound principles, saying that one should abjure materialism and turn towards the spirit—they too talk just like the pantheists, of spirit, spirit, spirit. People are not shocked by this to-day; but when anyone speaks concretely about the spirit they simply cannot take it. That is how things are. And harmony must again be sought between, shall I say, geographical predestination and the racial element that is spread over the earth. The leanings towards internationalism in our time are due to the fact that souls no longer concern themselves with the element of race.

A figure of speech I once used is relevant here. I compared what is happening now to a ‘vertical’ migration of peoples, whereas in earlier times what took place was a ‘horizontal’ migration. This comparison is no mere analogy, but is founded upon facts of the spiritual life.

To all this must be added that, precisely through the spiritual evolution of modern times, man is becoming more and more spiritual in the sphere of his subconsciousness, and the materialistic trend in his upper consciousness is more and more sharply at variance with the impulses that are astir in his subconsciousness. In order to understand this, we must consider once more the threefold membering of the human being.

When the man of the present age, whose attention is directed only to the material and the physical, thinks of this threefold membering, he says to himself: I perceive through my senses: they are indeed distributed over the whole body but are really centralised in the head; acts of perception, therefore, belong to the life of the nerves and senses—and there he stops. Further observation will, of course, enable him to describe how the human being breathes, and how the life passes over from the breath into the movement of the heart and the pulsation of the blood. But that is about as far as a he gets to-day. Metabolism is studied [in] all detail, but not as one of the three members of threefold man: actually it is taken to be the whole man. One need not, of course, go to the lengths of the scientific thinker who said: man is what he eats (Der Mensch ist, was er isst)—but, broadly speaking, science is pretty strongly convinced that it is so. In Middle Europe at the present time it looks as if he will soon be what he does not eat!

This threefold membering of the human being, which will ultimately find expression in a threefold social order because its factual reality is becoming more and more evident, manifests in different forms over the earth. Truly, man is not simply the being he appears outwardly to be, enclosed within his skin. It was in accordance with a deep feeling and perception when in my Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation”, in connection with the characters of Capesius and Strader, I drew attention to the fact that whatever is done by men on earth has its echo in cosmic happenings out yonder in the universe. With every thought we harbour, with every movement of the hand, with everything we say, whether we are walking or standing, whatever we do—something happens in the cosmos.

The faculties for perceiving and experiencing these things are lacking in man to-day. He does not know—nor can it be expected of him and it is paradoxical to speak as I am speaking now—he does not know how what is happening here on the earth would appear if seen, for example, from the Moon. If he could look from the Moon he would see that the life of the nerves and senses is altogether different from what can be known of it in physical existence. The nerves-and-senses life, everything that transpires while you see, hear, smell, taste, is light in the cosmos, the radiation of light into the cosmos. From your seeing, from your feeling, from your hearing, the earth shines out into the cosmos.

Different again is the effect produced by what is rhythmic in the human being: breathing, heart movement, blood pulsation. This activity manifests in the universe in great and powerful rhythms which can be heard by the appropriate organs of hearing. And the process of metabolism in man radiates out into cosmic space as life streaming from the earth. You cannot perceive, hear, see, smell or feel without shining out into the cosmos. Whenever your blood circulates, you resound into universal space, and whenever metabolism takes place within you, this is seen from out yonder as the life of the whole earth.

But there are great differences in respect of all this—for example, between Asia and Europe. Seen from outside, the thinking peculiar to the Asiatics would appear—even now, when a great proportion of them have lost all spirituality—as bright, shining light raying out into the spiritual space of the universe. But the further we go towards the West, the dimmer and darker does this radiance become. On the other hand, more and more life surges out into cosmic space the further we go towards the West. Only from this vista can there arise in the human soul what may be called perception of the cosmic aspect of the earth—with the human beings belonging to it.

Such conceptions will be needed if mankind is to go forward to a propitious and not an ominous future. The idiocy that is gradually being bred in human beings who are made to learn from the sketchy maps of modern geography: Here is the Danube, here the Rhine, here Reuss, here Aare, here Bern, Basle, Zürich, and so forth—all this external delineation which merely adds material details to the globe—this kind of education will be the ruin of humanity. It is necessary as a foundation and not to be scoffed at; but nevertheless it will lead gradually to man's downfall. The globe of the future will have to indicate: here the earth shines because spirituality is contained in the heads of men: there the earth radiates out more life into cosmic space because of the characteristics of the human beings inhabiting this particular territory.

Something I once said here is connected with this. (One must always illumine one fact by another). I told you that Europeans who settle in America develop hands resembling those of the Red Indians; they begin to resemble the Indian type. This is because the souls coming down into human bodies to-day are directed more by geographical conditions, as they were in the olden days. In our own time, the souls are directed, not by racial considerations, not by what develops out of the blood, but by geographical conditions, as in the past. But it will be necessary to get at the roots of what is going on in humanity. This can be done only when men accustom themselves to concepts of greater flexibility, capable of penetrating matters of this kind. These concepts, however, can be developed only on the foundation of spiritual science. And such a foundation is available when the spirit can be brought to birth in the human soul. For this, man needs a free spiritual life, emancipated from the political life of the State.

I have now given you one or two indications of what is astir in humanity, and of the need to strive for a new ordering of social life. Social demands cannot nowadays be advanced in terms of the trivial concepts commonly employed. Men must have insight into the nature of present-day humanity; they must make good what they have neglected in the study of modern mankind.

Translator Unknown

Today I shall have to start in a very pedantic way, because I shall have to throw light on our age, illustrating a general characteristic by means of an example. I should like to describe to you a characteristic of our age, consideration of which is extraordinarily important for anyone who is going to study this age in a spiritual-scientific sense, i.e. with the eyes of the soul open. And so I should like to make a start from a single example, as it were empirically. This could appear to be pedantic. But this example is a symptom of a quite, quite universal quality of our present epoch. I am speaking of a certain confusion of the soul, which arises from a superficiality which is very significantly active in our age. Thus I should like to make a start from a quite concrete example of this.

Perhaps at least some of you will recall that an English telegram plays a great part in the uncountably many discussions about the events which led up to this war-catastrophe, and that this telegram has been construed—after the event—in a quite definite way. Today I shall not be going into the causes of the war: today I am only talking about this formal quality of our age—superficiality. This has nothing directly to do with all that we have said about the events of the year 1914.

There has been much talk of a telegram which was composed in London, sent to St. Petersburg, and played a remarkable role there. In spite of the belief that this telegram had its origin in an agreement between the English Foreign Secretary, Grey and the German Ambassador, Lichnowski, it has been held to be the cause of the Russian mobilisation which immediately followed. And it was often looked on as a riddle how in the world it was possible that a telegram, which was sent to St. Petersburg and was the immediate cause of mobilisation there, could have been produced in agreement between the German Ambassador in London and Sir Edward Grey.

People saw a proof of the existence of this telegram (which has been much talked-of but which, nevertheless, is not found in the English “blue book”) in the formulation of the proposal which Sasonov is supposed to have made immediately on receipt of this telegram—though he really acted without regard for a proposal which did originate in England and in the form of which the German Ambassador really had taken part. Mobilisation was at once put in hand in Russia without any regard at all for this proposal.

As I said, I am not speaking of the causes of the war, but in the first place I am merely emphasising that it was a great riddle how it could happen that, on receipt of just this telegram, Sasonov formulated his proposal regarding Austria and Serbia, how he could have agreed to mobilisation, and so forth. The then Reichstag-deputy (and now Socialist minister) David is included among the people who have talked a lot about this telegram. Not only has he delivered a speech in the Reichstag and thus spoken before a great number of men who obviously should have been informed of the facts of such a matter at so serious a time: he has also written a very sensational article about this telegram in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Thus it was a mysterious affair. Now I shall write on the blackboard for you—you see I a proceeding in a very pedantic way today—the form which the proposal of the Russian Foreign Minister Sasonov took on when this telegram was received. (Appendix I.)

As has been said, the present German Minister David also refers to this formula drawn up by Sasonov, and in his article in the Frankfurter Zeitung he makes a special point of underlining the words “I replied that I accept the English proposal”.

This sentence is supposed to be taken as evidence that the English proposal, which had been formulated between Lichnowski and Grey in that telegram and about which there had been so much talk, is accepted. In the widely-read article in the Frankfurter Zeitung the greatest importance is placed on the statement that Sasanov replied, in a strange way: “I replied that I accept the English proposal”.

But now mobilisation followed on this. From this it was to be concluded that the telegram contained an English proposal for mobilisation.

I remark: this underlining is not found in the original formula, but this underling is extraordinarily significant of what I call the confusion of our time. If people underline something today, they obviously want to draw attention to it and to see in what has thus been underlined the principle substance of the matter. But, as I have said, it is simply not underlined at all in the original formula. One has only to read the formula correctly. Accordingly to the treatment of the matter in detailed articles, what is in question is a formula in which reference is made to a proposal which is said to be contained in a telegram. Now let us look at this formula in a precise way. “Commissioned by his government, the English Ambassador transmitted to me the wish of the London Cabinet that some changes be made in the formula which I yesterday proposed to the German Ambassador”. The formula of which Sasonov is speaking here is the one which Sasanov himself has composed on the preceding day. Grey desired an alteration in this formula. (See Appendix 2). Sasanov makes this and says “I replied that I accept the English proposal”—i.e. that he has today agreed to alter the formula which he had composed yesterday (Appendix 3). Thus the sentence refers to the fact that he is changing into this shape the formula which he composed yesterday, the formula which—as that of the preceding day—formed the basis of this same one, and this sentence refers to the alteration. The proposal refers to the fact that he was to alter his formula.

That is to say: that telegram (which, moreover, is not contained in the English “blue-book” does not exist at all. The telegram is a phantom, and the supposition that it exists arises from the fact that the Sasanov formula has been falsely read, because the superficiality of the present time has not taken the trouble to follow up in an orderly way what there is in the sentences. Think: in the most serious way affairs of the present time it is possible for people to talk about something which does not exist at all because, in their superficiality, they no longer understand what they read! This is only a concrete example of what is happening on innumerable occasions today, that men, who have their words written and printed, cannot read, that the readers, thousands and thousands of readers, do not at all perceive how those who have their words written and printed cannot read and how they talk about things which are not there!

The punishment for failure to acknowledge a spiritual world, for the failure to acknowledge what people call “ghosts”, is simply that they themselves, in their superficiality, create phantoms. Anyone who looks into the world with sound perception today finds wherever he goes, the most desolating consequences of this terrible superficiality, which takes the form of a real confusion of people's thoughts. And the saddest thing is that if one emphasizes and discusses these matters they make no special impression at all on the men of the present-day, because superficiality and absence of thought have sad to say, already become a universal quality of mankind. The consequences of the superficiality in the whole life of our present age are terrible. We must look in this way at the soul-life of our time. We cannot take phenomena of this particular kind seriously enough, significantly enough. In our time, everyone who is trying to instruct himself by the available means should be continually saying to himself: you must try, with inner, critical sense, to examine the things which are whirling around in the world and which confuse life enormously and muddle it up because they come into the human soul through every possible channel and work there as impulse.

I have proceeded from a concrete example in order to show you how leading personages are brought by their superficiality to a point where they not only talk about something which does not exist at all but even write page-long explanations about it, and how personages who are called on to make a speech on world-affairs can utter such stuff before gatherings (and similar stuff is being uttered in this way in equally illustrious gatherings throughout the world) without the hundred of deputies, who are there to represent their people, noticing nothing about it.

These things must certainly be taken very seriously. And it is one of the bitterest aspects of the present age that it is just in the last four and a half years that men have disaccustomed themselves, even more than was the case before, from looking precisely and exactly at what in reality is. Positivism does not consist in having an uncritical mind. Positivism consists in seeing things as they are, and not living according to fantastic ways of thinking which create pure phantoms instead of reality. This is really urgent just now, and concerns every single human being in every single position in life. And something of the kind can happen in every moment to every single human being in every single position in life.

Now I could reproduce not merely hundreds but thousands of such examples, and this thousand fold repetition would simply be evidence of the fact that it is a universal quality of mankind today to bring itself into confusion as a result of superficiality, because there exists a certain antipathy against entering into reality. The causes of this are to be sought in the depths of our human development. Do not take my words as though I wished merely to criticise the present age in commonplace fashion the important thing is that this wave of confusion has been let loose over mankind as a result of impulses from outside the earth, as a result of impulses from the spiritual, from the Ahrimanic side. This is important in connection with the grotesque example of confusion which I have just described.

On the other side, there are plenty of men who take account of this confusion today in the most comprehensive way. There are very many people who know how they have to deal with present-day human beings in order to be able to take advantage of their confusion. Men who are evil-natured but who are setting out to make use of spiritual forces are bringing into the world just what takes account of this confusion, this unwillingness to enter into facts.

What do we not see happening today! If only one reckons just a little with the element of confusion, it is easy to impose anything at all on human beings today. Here is an example. Some time ago there appeared a Russian book which contained in the first part (I am not speaking now about the rest of the contents of the book) some pretended minutes of the sessions of some sort of Mystery Society, the leaders of which gave lectures about the most incredible things. This Mystery Society is—one could say—just like a sort of devil in the midst of mankind. Almost the opposite of all that is good and wholesome for men could gave proceeded from this Mystery Society. And these minutes were supposed to be proof that such a society does exist. These minutes were even supposed to have been found in extraordinary proximity to where we are, and they are included in a book, but one which is written from the Russian point of view. As I have said, I do not wish to speak about the remaining contents of the book, but one need only read very little of these minutes, and to have some knowledge of the world, in order to know that one is dealing with one of the most clumsy, falsely-presented swindles. The are simply invented minutes, i.e. something which has been falsified, which has been written down in order to establish the existence of such a society. These things are simply make up in order to work on the confusion of human beings. The confusion of human beings is enormously dangerous in our time because, as I have already said, it does not merely depend on what can be found as impulses within physical-earth life but because spiritual forces of an Ahrimanic nature are present and playing into it. We must make ourselves thoroughly conversant with these matters. What is really in question is not the carrying on of anthroposophical Spiritual Science in the sense that one knows all the subjects which form the content of Spiritual Science. The essential thing is much more that one should become on better terms with reality, fuller of insight, more capable of judgment regarding life and the world as a result of having received anthroposophical Spiritual Science, because this makes necessary a kind of judgment which is simply not applicable to the ordinary physical world.

Now I have said that a wave of confusion is passing over the world. Why is this so? Recollect that our present-day 5th post-Atlantean epoch, the age of the consciousness-soul, began in 1413. Since that time mankind is before all else striving to develop the consciousness-soul. If one speaks in this way about this epoch of ours, one is speaking as a man who stands within the development of the earth. For something is manifesting itself in the physical development of the earth which, expressed in words, runs just like this: since the middle of the 15th century mankind has been in the age of the development of the consciousness-soul.

But now we could put the question from another point of view as well, one which we must again and again adopt when dealing with Spiritual Science. We could also put it from the point of view of the discarnate souls who are living between death and a new birth. It is of great importance for many things which must be spoken of by anthroposophical Spiritual Science always to consider, in addition to our own point of view, that the discarnate souls of men and even that of the other spirits of the various spiritual Hierarchies. It is only by this means that we can rightly check whether we are bringing to expression the judgments which we make as earthy men—which must, of course, always be one-sided—in the right spiritual-scientific way. Anyone who now surveys this period of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch by means of spiritual-scientific investigation finds that, from a quite definite point of time, the life of the living, who are taking their stand to an ever greater extent on the basis of consciousness, the summit of the personality.

At first we can only consider in how far this life of the dead changes in intercourse with human beings living on the earth. With regard to the relationship of the living towards the dead it is, to be sure, so extraordinarily difficult to bring anything into human consciousness because what we experience there is certainly remarkably different from what can be experienced here within the physical circumference of the earth. Human beings are accustomed to form their ideas within the physical circumference of the earth must be corrected in the light of our experience with discarnate souls. In these, we experience in an extraordinarily living way the relationship of the dead to human speech.

At first, however, it is difficult to understand how the fact works which I have indicated here in those recent lectures in which I said to you that nouns are hardly understood by the dead. (The Social Question as a Question of Soul: The Inner Experience of Speech. 28-30 Mar. 1919. Dornach.) I have described to you how the other parts of speech are understood by the dead, but there are also, nevertheless, distinctions within these. It is clearly perceptible that human speech, as it is spoken here on the earth, is becoming less and less intelligible to the dead. Certainly the dead understand verbs: they also understand prepositions. They understand everything in which we are compelled to develop pictorial representations. But, generally, the ability to comprehend what can be grasped in speech, the understanding of it, is becoming ever more lost to them.

Before all else, something stands out with quite special clearness—of course, only for certain men: that, the dead understand nothing at all of what we call “Natural Science”, what is carried on as Natural Science here on earth. If we talk to the dead about all other imaginable things, we find understanding. But if we dress up what is supposed to be suitable for the dead in a natural-scientific form of presentation, the dead person merely experiences it as pain. This is of extraordinary significance and confirms what can be learned from other spiritual sources, that everything which is done here with regard to knowledge of nature is really only produced by means of the physical human organism. And as soon as a human being leaves this physical organism after death, everything which he had developed in the physical organism about nature as Natural Science is no longer of any value to him. It has no importance for him. He no longer accounts it: it no longer exists.

One can acquire very clear ideas about these things. Take a purely natural-scientifically written book by a real natural-scientist, let us say about botany. Read a chapter, and try to impart to the dead what is written purely in the sense of the Natural Science of today: it gives him a pain. He does not know at all whence this pain comes. He has absolutely nothing in common with it: he cannot receive it. But in the moment when you recall to yourself how you once saw a dandelion—of which, perhaps, the investigator of nature is speaking—and you set the yellow colour of the dandelion before you in a living way, and its peculiar, indented leaves, in the moment when you really inwardly feel what your eye sees, then the dead begins to understand it. But you must, of course, feel it, for the visual image does not exist for the dead.

This is very remarkable. The dead person can share with earthly human beings their pleasure about a green meadow. He cannot share the ideas of Natural Science about a green meadow. It is true that the natural-scientists of the present-day say that they can form no idea at all about what is living. But then, at some time in the future, some especially perfect Natural Science must find out, from all possible combinations of atoms, how living matter is put together. But if you grasp ideas about what is living, for example Goethe does in his Theory of Metamorphosis, and make this kind of idea living in yourself, then, once again, the dead person understands it. These, again, are ideas which the dead understand.

For a quite definite, spiritual historical fact lies at the basis of all that I am explaining to you here. The development which I have just characterised really only began to appear about the year 1721. If you go back to the time before 1720 and immerse yourself in the writings about nature which were produced then—most people do not notice such things, but it is, nevertheless, the case—you will see that people then speak in a much more living way about nature. The way in which in one speaks about nature today—I may now say, unintelligibly to the dead—really only began in the early part of the 16th century. Only then did this wave break in on mankind. Previously, men found themselves under the necessity of writing about nature in a much more living way, so that the dead with the living took place. Only since then have scientific ideas been such that they are ideas for earthly men alone and only for so long as these are in the physical body, no longer forming any bond upward into the spiritual world.

This is an extraordinarily significant fact in the history of spiritual development. For now, certainly, you can easily imagine how we are entering on a process in which the discarnate will be out adrift from the earth as a result of the Science which is the one and only thing which men are prepared to accept as valid, as a result of what appears to them as the most valuable thing of all. Just imagine this with great vividness! For it is of no avail to shut one's eyes—I mean one's spiritual eyes—to such things. Imagine that, at universities over the whole earth, everything is being gradually effaced which is not admitted by so-called exact Natural Science. The universities are thus islands on the earth where everything which is not exact Science is being effaced in the completest possible way. But as a result these universities become places from which the Spirit—that is to say, everything essential which exists in the Spiritual—flees. They are islands in the culture of mankind where unspirituality, the unspirtual life, is to the greatest extent taking its origin. Looked at from another point of view, surely, the universities are simply our spiritual centres. But think how we earth-men really talk. Since the 18th century we designate as our spiritual centres the very places where the Spirit receives its dismissal, where the Spirit is least of all to be found! Today is no longer the time to close our eyes to these things; we must contemplate them much more—I should like say—coldly, in conformity with true reality. If we look away from things like this, we are shutting our eyes to what must be understood if we are to look into the heart of the true reality of the time.

This development which began in the 18th century has reached its culmination in our time. Now it is necessary to return to the other spiritual wave, as a result of which a real spiritual life can develop in mankind.

There is only one type of spirit which has a special inclination, as it were, to saturate themselves in what is thus unspiritual on our earth. These are the Ahrimanic spirits. The ordinary, discarnate souls of men in the life between death and a new birth feel this nature-knowledge—I should like to say—negatively, so that they feel it as a pain: they thus have a sort of negative experience. The Luciferic spirits have a terrible fury at it; they just hate it. Only the Ahrimanic spirits have an inclination for it and seek to reach their aim just through nature-knowledge, so that this forms a bond of attraction for the Ahrimanic spirits.

Now Ahriman is just the Spirit of Illusion, of Deceit. And I pointed out to you at the time when I explained this that since the beginning of the 18th century the Ahrimanic influences have become ever greater and greater. But as a result this wave of confusion has come upon humanity, which has seized on human beings like a whirlpool and which displays itself in the colossal superficiality of which I gave you an example at the opening of today's lecture.

We must know this kind of thing because it is just anthroposophically-oriented Spiritual Science which puts us into the position to protect ourselves against this confusion. One way to take care of ourselves against it is to be critical, attentive towards what can approach us from every direction in order to throw us into confusion, as happened in the case which I quoted, without being noticed by the greater number of people.

Yet another thing must be observed: we cannot, so to say, get away from a universal world-phenomenon which is with us as things now stand. This wave of chaos is quite clearly with us today. It is of no help whatever to shut our souls' eyes against it. Only one thing is of assistance—to draw our attention to it! And we become attentive if we first of all always say to ourselves regarding what refers to the spiritual worlds the chaos is there, it will keep us from the right knowledge of the Spiritual World! If we always have a sort of suspicion, when people speak to us about the Spiritual World, that what they say might be erroneous, if we accustom ourselves to observe the utmost caution, we shall certainly by no means fall into the wave of chaos which holds sway at the present time. We must find courage to pass through this chaos and to raise ourselves above it, while we partake very, very much in real, sound common-sense. This sound common-sense will only be ours if we are primarily on our guard against a mistake which is so common in the present time: at the present time, when men have attained a certain age, they really wish only to admit the validity of what is already familiar to them.

It is a very nearly universal phenomenon that men who have attained a certain age can hardly be convinced of anything new. If they meet with an opinion, they only ask themselves whether they have already thought of it and if this is the case they are in agreement with it, but if they have not yet thought of it then it is false or abstract to them. In short, this is then a reason why they have nothing to do with the matter. But, in contrast to this, present-day men have the serious task—I will not say always to let themselves be convinced of new things, but at least to let themselves come in contact with new things without presupposition or prejudice, to participate in the new things which are entering the world.

It could appear as though this were a trivial remark. It is not so, because what I have described is sinned against to such an extraordinary extent at the present time. Much would improve if more power of conviction could develop in the intercourse of human beings with one another, if human beings were not so antipathetic towards one another, not so pigheadedly fixed in their own opinions which they received during a certain period of their lives What is the reason for this? At the same point of time when natural-scientifically oriented ideas made their appearances, a quite definite process begins in the development of mankind, which is based on the following.

As you know, man has a physical body, which is embedded in an etheric body; we need not consider the rest today. The intimacy of the connection between these—I am not now referring to the fact that they occupy the same space but to what is dynamic in the connection—changes in the course of earth-evolution. The intimate relationship between the etheric head and the human physical head which, for example, existed in the centuries of Greek culture no longer have existed since the 3rd century B.C. Since this time, the old, intimate relationship between man's etheric head and his physical head has been lost. On the other hand, a really intimate relationship has until now remained in being between the human physical heart and the etheric heart. Since the year 1721, this relationship has been loosening to an ever-increasing degree.

If the physical heart is here (see diagram) and the etheric here, then in earlier times the etheric heart and the physical heart were more a single entity. Now the etheric heart can be excited to activity in an etheric way: the two are no longer so inwardly, dynamically bound together as they were before.

Later, still other human organs will loosen themselves from the etheric. But, with regard to human development as well, something very important results from the fact that the heart is gradually separating itself from its etheric part, and will have completely separated itself in the third millenium, about the year 2100. We can describe the characteristics of this by saying since the recent past, humanity must seek in the path of spiritual life something which in former times came about of its own accord as a result of the natural relationship between the physical heart and the etheric heart. This etheric heart, separated from the physical heart, will only gain its correct relationship to the Spiritual World if man seeks spiritual knowledge, if man seeks anthroposophically-oriented spiritual thoughts. These must be sought to an ever greater extent.

Now something most remarkable is present in our time. How often is it said when reference is made to anthroposophical Spiritual Science: yes, but this has a systematic interconnection, this is complicated, one must do a lot of thinking about it! Christianity, they say, makes all this much simpler: it has Faith! But this faith, which does not want to soar up to real thoughts about the Spiritual World, is extraordinarily dangerous just since the time of the separation of the etheric heart from the physical heart. For this faith, which does not want to gain a real understanding of the Spiritual World, which really only wants to develop a simple relationship-in-feeling towards the Spiritual World, is materializing the heart of mankind, is a means by which culture is being led into materialism in a sphere where one would not think that this would occur. It is just the religious people who are so dreadfully materialistic in our time, because the lean on mere faith. Faith must be soaked through and spiritually permeated by real ideas about the Spiritual World, and it is an Ahrimanic trick to impress this on people in the age of confusion—that they are not by any means to come to a real vision of the Spiritual World, but are to remain stationary in mere faith.

Something also indicated by this, which is of untold importance in our time. What I have said today at the beginning and what I am now saying at the end of today's explanation are interlocked. Only look in an unprejudiced way at the dreadful absence of thinking, at the boundless superficiality out of which our sad circumstances have developed: look deeply into what can be stated spiritual-scientifically—the separation of the etheric heart from the physical heart, and from these explanations derive impulses towards that seriousness which, in our time, in so necessary for further development. The men are becoming ever more and more numerous who, as a result of superficial confusion, really no longer know what they are talking about. In the case of a man like David it is quite clear he does not know what he is talking about, for he is talking about something which does not exist at all, and that because he no longer knows how to read. And on the other side the men are becoming ever more numerous who want to fish in troubled waters, who are exploiting the confusion in men's hearts and minds in order to drop into these all sorts of things which further their aims—for one can implant all sorts of impulses into confused spirits. Among the spirits which still have a relationship with the confusion on earth are the spirits of deceit, the Ahrimanic spirits. And one can implant into human beings the opposite of what is reasonable and healthy if one takes account of the confusion existing in them.

Translator Unknown

If we allow thoughts such as were discussed yesterday to pass through our souls, we do so in consideration of the seriousness of our time which, as we know, is unfortunately not universally felt now, not even felt by a great number of our contemporaries. This seriousness of our time will only be felt if a greater number of human beings attain to a feeling that a path to spiritual knowledge is necessary—yes, a path which measures up to the needs of our time—and that this path to spiritual knowledge is the only real cure for the shortcomings and sickness of our time. The question must really arise in us: in what do the basic causes of what is wrong in our time lie? Wherein lie the real causes of the sicknesses which afflict our time? And though the inclination exists in very many people today to seek these shortcomings and sicknesses or our time elsewhere than in Man himself, yet it is endlessly important to have insight that the only path which can lead to a goal is to seek the shortcomings in Man himself.

If we survey the present time, we see storm-signals shining over from Eastern Europe. We cannot say, today, that European humanity is inclined really to fix its attention on these storm-signals. People still always find it uncomfortable to form real judgements about the great affairs of mankind. In such a case, the thought which points to what has been neglected can be useful over and over again. For if, even to a small extent, we see what has been neglected, we will thus perhaps be prevented from being guilty of similar negligence in the future. Storm-signals have been shining over from the East for a long time—that East of which we have often said here that the germs of the 6th post-Atlantean culture lie in it, in spite of all that may be going on there. They were not, to be sure, written in such bloody writing as are those of the immediate past, but they have, all the same, been such so should have been attentively observed. Here, indeed, attention has for years been drawn to many a thing.

In the first part of our lecture today, I should like to touch on a matter which has already been brought forward here from one side or another. If one looks at what has been living for a long time in Eastern Europe, one could summarise it in a question which is extraordinarily characteristic for our present time. This runs: What is Man, really? What part does Man play in the universe? Among the various groups of the population of the earth, it is in Eastern Europe that this question has been taken in the most serious way in recent times. The West has much to do, apart from reflecting on the question: What is Man, really? It is certainly much dealt with in a theoretical way, but this kind of theoretical discussion is worth nothing unless it is permeated by real spiritual life.

I only wish to quote something which points to the question about the real being of man, a question which is longingly posed in the East. They are important words which can be heard over here from just that part of Europe. I have once before referred to a saying like this. Among those who developed views about the Social Question in recent times was Bakunin, one of the most gifted of men, the later opponent of Marx. He comes forward out of East-European ideas and impulses, and is in contrast to Marx, who has dealt with social life and the Social Movement entirely out of West-European ideas. Everywhere in Bakunin something of a philosophy of life shines through, a deeper comprehension and outlook of life. And thus a very important saying is uttered by Bakunin, which will throw light on the question what is man, really?, by setting in contrast the idea of Man and the idea of God.

The saying of Bakunin arose in him out of the experience of modern life. Deep in human nature—so thought Bakunin—lies the impulse of freedom, the impulse to be a free man. For what would one like better in life than to be a free man! In this way, perhaps, one could express the longing of a man who thinks as Bakunin does. This longing-impulse of the inner nature of Man arises in opposition to a God who oppresses a Man, because this oppression would not be compatible with human freedom. (See: R.S.—"The building at Dornach as a sign of historical development, and the impulse towards artistic transformation", p. 77).

Freedom must be fundamentally conceived, as I have attempted to do in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. If it is not so fundamentally conceived as is done there, people will always oscillate between the longing for freedom and the perception of present-day life, which realises anything but freedom.

Bakunin looks up, as it were, to the thousand of years of the old religious experience of the divine which mankind has had, and contrasts these with the concept of freedom. He says: "If God exists, then Man is a slave, but Man can and should be free, therefore God does not exist. I challenge every one of you to escape from this circle, and now you may choose which you will do. Thus, if God exists, there would be only one way in which He can promote human freedom—by ceasing to exist. As a jealous lover of human freedom, which I look on as the absolutely fundamental condition of all that we honour and adore in mankind. I alter Voltaire's saying, and say: If God really exists, one would have to remove Him". (Michael Bakunin, God and the State, according to the manuscript of 1871 translated by Max Nettlau.)

This is a saying which should really make a more significant impression on men that many a world-event which seems, from its external nature, more suitable to make an impression on the sensations of mankind. According to Bakunin we have to choose, and as modern men we can choose thus or thus, for nothing fundamentally compels us to do anything else but choose. Now one can certainly say that the men of today do not choose at all but, in matters of spirit and soul, vegetate without thoughts in this dilemma, in this circle.

Another saying from the East, which Gorki has made one of his heroes utter, runs: "I will write a little book. I will call in the Song of Death, the Prayer of Death, for there are such prayers. We utter it about dying. And this society, on which the curse of inner weakness weighs heavily, will take hold of my book as though it were musk before it dies".

This is such a saying as can be set before modern mankind from a certain point of view. Modern mankind is seeking only for all sorts of soporifics, soporifics of the soul and spirit, so that it shall not need to take this kind of saying all that seriously as it deserves. And in the East just that queer school of philosophy exists which has drawn from life a sort of conclusion in conformity with existence—the sect of the Barefooted Philosophers speak to these words: "In myself there is something not in other. Consequently, I have not come to the world in such a way as befits a man. I find myself on a definite path. And not only I: many of us are the same. We become peculiar men, and fit ourselves into no order. Who among us is guilty? We ourselves are guilty, before ourselves and before life".

Not single men, but man, were speaking this way in the East, and when once the history of these last years of confusion in Europe can be written on the basis of external facts as well—which is not yet possible today—people will certainly find how great a share this kind of world-outlook has in the whole destiny of our time, but how, on the other side as well, this kind of world-outlook is founded on what I described yesterday as the confusion, the superficiality, the thoughtlessness of our age.

Here we must ask ourselves, over and over again: in what details does what I already mentioned yesterday come to expression, namely that our age, especially since the beginning of the 18th century, is as it were peering through a wave of confusion, a wave of tangled thoughts which are forming of their own accord and bringing man into confusion! Enlightenment about this can only be found on the basis of a real Spiritual Science. What is spreading in the easiest way among a certain kind of men today! Thoughts, so-called thoughts! It is true that there are always thoughts which come to expression in words, ideas which can obtain quick dissemination today on printed paper. In particular it is thoughts, of the kind about which men are proud in the highest degree, thoughts about material life, perceptible to the senses, such as Natural Science (which, as you know, is thoroughly well popularised) is bringing forward everywhere today.

Comparison should be made how great a difference exists between the soul-life of man living up to the 15th or even to the 16th century and that of present-day man. At that time they communicated thoughts to one another they did not every morning read printed paper with thoughts which a man carried with him throughout the day, for the most part without being aware of the fact. What impression does it really make on a man if every Sunday he hears a sermon after he has been reading his newspaper from a quite different substratum of thoughts? As a result, a certain type of education is spreading. But, in our age, this type of education is quite without real spiritual content, for real spiritual content can only return to mankind through a spiritual culture.

Now thoughts, of the kind particularly propagated in recent times, are of no value whatever to mankind because they cannot be brought into connection with the supersensible life. All thoughts—this is a drastic thing to say, but it is true—which cannot be brought into connection with the supersensible life are really harmful to men. In this lies one of the principal sicknesses of our time, that thoughts are propagated from all sorts of foundations, especially from the popularisation of natural-scientific ideas, thoughts which people cannot then bring into connection with the supersensible life, and which are therefore harmful. Thoughts should really always be brought into connection with supersensible life. They work destructively, negatively, on human life if they are not brought into connection with the supersensible. For the fundamental question: what is man, really?, cannot be answered at all without the relationship between the thoughts produced in Man and the supersensible. Because, as matters stand, Man has the supersensible in his being; it always remains a barren thing for him, something unsatisfying in the deepest depths of his soul, if he cannot bring into connection with the Supersensible thoughts which are certainly produced in a supersensible way. Now the longing for a reply to the question what is man, really? will never cease to exist in the human soul. This longing can never be eradicated. It can only be stifled. Man can, as it were, dim down his consciousness so that it does not reach as far as the question: what is man?. For this question will show its disturbing effects in man in all sorts of nervous and other conditions. But it cannot be blotted out of human souls.

Now it was just the 19th century which was altogether unsuitable in its whole culture for answering this question in a way satisfying to men. Great impulses of the age always express themselves in significant symptoms. Such a significant symptom for the whole of recent spiritual like is the appearance of Friedrich Nietzsche. It is, indeed, very sad that narrow-minded people and Philistines of the present-day have attached themselves to Nietzsche as hangers-on, and that no glance has been cast at the real phenomenon of Nietzsche, or at any rate only by a few people.

I have always expressed myself in such a way as to say: in Nietzsche is represented the modern man who has suffered in his soul in the highest degree, and has even been ruined as a result of the culture of the last third of the 19th century. I have often said that this 19th century culture was brought forth by others. Schopenhauer has brought forth a certain part of the culture of the 19th century: Nietzsche has suffered from this as a follower of Schopenhauer. Richard Wagner has brought forth a part of the 19th century: Nietzsche has suffered from this as a follower of Wagner. There was the renewed Voltairism, the free-spirituality of the last third of the 19th century. Haeckel, Büchner, Feuerbach and others brought forth this free-spirituality of the last third of the 19th century: Nietzsche has suffered from it. Within the whole of recent cultural life, the fact that this culture must lend itself to absurdity was expressing itself in the last third of the 19th century. Art ran on into values which one could only comprehend if one did so as leading to their own dissolution. To an ever greater extent, Science came to teach, as the highest wisdom, its own invalidity when faced by the Supersensible. Nietzsche suffered from this. He suffered from Schopenhauer, from Richard Wagner, from the once-again-resurrected Voltairism, he suffered from the whole culture of the last third of the 19th century, and out of this suffering he at last coined two grandiose, conquering but despair-awakening ideas, that of the Superman and that of Eternal Recurrence.

Why Superman? Because he had no possibility of answering the question: what is Man? Superman is for Nietzsche simply the strong, great means of producing an illusion, the means for making people insensible to the impossibility of coming to a comprehension of Man out of the culture of the 19th century.

One must really represent to oneself the whole seriousness of the idea of Eternal Recurrence to Nietzsche! Just imagine: we have already existed innumerable times, just as we are sitting and gathered here, and so we shall be again on innumerable occasions. Every one of us has on innumerable occasions gone through what he is going through at the present time, and will go through it again on innumerable occasions. There is no evolution which would allow our thoughts to go on to an ascent, to progress. Eternal Recurrence!

Because he cannot come to a comprehension of Man, he comes to the idea of the Superman: because he cannot think of any real progress in the development either of mankind or of the cosmos, Eternal Recurrence. Nietzsche has reached these results. The others, who perhaps laugh about these results, do not come to them owing to their thoughtlessness. For either man reaches these results or one must turn to Spiritual Science, which does not speak of the Superman but of what has developed through Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-epochs throughout the earth's evolution, and beyond into the cosmic metamorphosis of our earth, which does not speak of Eternal Recurrence but is in a position to speak of real progress. You need only read about this in my Occult Science. But where is the inclination today to consider these things in their full seriousness? Is it not infinitely more important for most men today than these great, world-embracing affairs?

From all this kind of presupposition we must ask: but what lies before us? We do not easily come to what really lies before us. Today I should like to touch on a particular point of view. If one exerts oneself to take a good look at the experience of those people who have just gone through the gate of death, or who did so a short time ago, who thus stand at the beginning of the life which is led between death and a new birth, one notices something very peculiar. I freely admit to you that for a long time this perception, of which I am now speaking to you, was quite inexplicable to me. When one has found a fact like this one only comes gradually to a solution. It is the fact that a great number of human beings who are going through the gate of death in our present age are extraordinarily surprised by what they experience after death, that they are surprised by something unknown to them which confronts them there.

I have spoken to you of the experience of those who have gone through the gate of death. Into many a thing which is more easily comprehensible, with which one comes to terms more easily and about which it is easier to speak, something just mingles itself which one cannot describe otherwise than by saying: it surprises the dead that anything of this kind is there. There arises in the consciousness of the dead person the feeling that he would not really have thought that such experience would come before his soul. This is on the one side. On the other side, it appears to older deceased persons—it is the case to a smaller extent to those who died young—that the strangeness and surprising quality which comes before the soul arises in some way from those same people who have gone through the gate of death. It is thus something of which he is aware that it arises from himself, especially if the person in question has died at a more advanced age.

Although one notices this fact, one still has considerable difficulty in finding an explanation of it. One only finds this if one quite seriously takes account of another fact which must be considered in connection with it: that the human being of today experiences a great number of things of which he either knows nothing at all, or about which he creates all sorts of illusions for himself. Together with conscious experiences, there comes to a man a great total of unconscious experiences which he either does not notice at all, even though they are occurring to him, or to which he gives a quite false interpretation.

It is, you see, a general characteristic of the man of today that he likes to interpret his experiences. The modern man does not like to give an account of himself in accordance with truth. He would like, on one side or the other, to colour what is connected with his attitude towards the world. Just let us examine ourselves in this direction, and ask ourselves how often we really confess to ourselves that we are wrong about anything. Where we should confess to ourselves that we are wrong, in most cases we will interpose something else which makes us insensible to what we ought to have said to ourselves, namely that we were wrong. But this is only one of the phenomena which could already show us, from outside, that we are subconsciously much today about which we form illusions in our consciousness.

If one dies at a greater age, then one has a great quantity of these kind of sub-conscious experiences. And it is these sub-conscious experiences which come to meet us after death, transformed, as it were, into entities. We only come to a right view of this phenomenon if we discover this connection between what has been sub-consciously experienced and what comes to meet the dead person after he has gone through the gate of death, as something surprising. Only then do we comprehend why so many people who do not like to reflect about this or the other thing, but leave it to the sub-conscious, are surprised when the whole of the subconscious really comes to meet them after death. They are surprised by it: nevertheless, they have themselves very much to do with what comes to meet them. It is really a part of their own life, the part of their own experience which has either not been noticed at all or only very indistinctly.

To appreciate a thing like this in the right way is today a necessity, but still difficult problem of spiritual-scientific knowledge. But the pointing out of this fact is a matter of quite fundamental importance for our time. For only if one proceeds from these things can one come to a quite reasonable answer to the question: Why is the answer to the question what is man, really? so extraordinarily difficult for the men of the present time?

If one takes human life in its inner development it splits up into three parts. One embraces all that we have as endowments, talents, and abilities. The second part embraces all that we develop in intercourse between our consciousness and that of other men. The third sphere embraces all that we experience. Our age behaves very considered towards these three parts of human nature, and really only has regard for the middle part. It is true that there is much lamentation from a certain side today about the failure to recognise gifted people, but for the most part it is the gifted people themselves who lament in this way. It can be said that the habit of fostering talents in a thoroughly devoted way is dying out to an ever greater extent. In the way, the treasuring of human experience is dying out. Man is no longer conscious today that he is not merely, so to say, growing older but that as he becomes older he is becoming cleverer, wiser. This feeling for human development is to an ever increasing extent being lost to men. When people have reached a certain age today they are, so they believe, all equally wise. They have to put in a word about everything in the same way, according to the opinion of many, and neither talent nor the experience which is required through life should intervene in this discussion. Our whole democratic world-outlook (which will always tend to dig its own grave) rests fundamentally, on the assumption that when a man has reached a certain age he can come to decisions, in combination with his fellow men, about God and the world and about villages besides—about every possible thing.

But what a man develops in combination with his fellow men through the reciprocal interaction of consciousness with consciousness belongs only in one sphere of social life—the State-life. The State has certainly become man's idol, just for the reason that people only wish to admit the validity of what is active among men in the way which has just been intimated. They are not prepared to accept the other two spheres as independent social organisations, as a result of nothing but inner forces. One really only becomes cleverer by taking one's part in the management of life, by which I do not understand merely the milking of cows and the cooking of cabbage, but the management of life in its widest sense. To the economic sphere also belong, as it were, spiritual services, so far as these have a definite commodity value—and they really must have this, for otherwise no one would ever be able to live by spiritual services. Naturally, they also have a value in another sphere, but they have a commodity value in addition to this. Experience results just from this arrangement, to which the production of spiritual values also belongs, insofar as these are commodity values.

Now people do not know at all today, outside spiritual science, how to distinguish between these three spheres of human nature. Our natural endowments, as a result of which we are spiritually gifted for one thing or another, or adapted for this or that (for bodily aptitudes are also included with individual abilities)—all these do not entirely belong in our individual human nature, as human beings are understood today. However paradoxical it sounds the more gifted with genius a man is today, by so much the less is he, basically speaking, an individual man, for our endowments, our individual abilities are produced before our birth or before our conception as a result of many generations of interworking between the cosmos and the forces of inheritance. I have already presented this to you. (R.S. Ancient myths and their significance, 7 lectures). Our endowments of genius, our individual abilities, are in general all dependent on the head. In whatever the particular endowment of a man may consist, however it may appear to be connected with the special muscle-formations, it still has its origin in the head. Even though one's individual abilities depend on whether one is a giant who can break thick-trunked trees or a little bit of a fellow, all this still has its origin in the head. All that is, as it were, inborn in Man in the way individual abilities has its origin in the head.

What a man effects in relation to other men has its origin in intercourse, in the life between birth and death, such as speech and all the social elements in human life. But with the experience which we have we enter into a much more difficult chapter than most people picture to themselves today, for the men of today are very rarely experienced men because they do not let the experiences come to them. In the present time most men have even a kind of timidity about gathering experiences. One is put to shame if one has to confess that one has an opinion about something today different from what one held ten years ago. But one should not be ashamed of having become more sensible during these ten years. The ideal of present-day man, you see, is not to apply life to becoming wiser. Today, to a great extent people waste their lives as regards becoming more experienced. But it is just the individual who is expressing himself in this fact of becoming more experienced.

You can be a marvelous genius; what you have gone through in your earlier incarnations will only word to a very slight degree into what you bring forth as a result of your marvelous genius. These earlier incarnations are for the most part entirely innocent of real genius, for this is caused by an interworking between the cosmos and the forces of heredity through some generations. Geniuses are given to mankind, and truly not let fall from heaven in order to satisfy themselves. But people are quite specially embarrassed in face of what we acquire for ourselves as we become more sensible from year to year until our old age. The fact that we become more sensible from year to year, that we carry on the experiences of life and use them to become wiser—this is connected with our incarnations.

If we look in this connection at a personage such as Goethe, we notice very, very remarkable results. One can speak of Goethe's genius. This Goethean genius is already expressing itself in his youth. But what appears in him in his youth in the way of abilities has value as something which has fallen from heaven. But as Goethe became more and more mature in age, never ceasing to become more mature, what he had brought with him from his earlier incarnations was forming and gradually evolving in him. But men hate this today. Even Goethe himself had to lament that it was just the production of his youth, the credit for which he did not claim for himself, which were especially dear to people but that, on the contrary, they declined everything which he had acquired as a result of his life experience. I have often quoted to you a verse which he made with reference to the first part of his Faust—the second part had not been produced at the time. It runs—

See how they praise my Faust, and how they savour
My other writings which have gained their favour.
All the old chit-chat pleases them so much,
But now the riff-raff think I've lost my touch".

But this went on, you see, until far into our time. Yet how the candid and clever Friedrich Theodor Vischer has insulted the second part of Faust, parodied it, called it a cobbled-together, glued-together botch of Goethe's old age, because in our time people have not much feeling for ripening, for increasing of experience! But the fact that the life of today holds nothing which can give us an answer to the question: What is Man, really? is connected with this. For the answer to this question can only be given today out of life-experiences. But this life-experience ought not to come about in such circumstances that the Spiritual is shut out. One should be able gradually to get the feeling as one's life progresses: you are learning not only from the eternal, sense-perceptible course of things, but also from what is coming up from what underlies the things.

With regard to all this, the position is such, today, that from a certain point of view the question inevitably is how are we to get the spiritual life free from the state life! If spiritual life is to remain for the future bound up with the state life, then it will not be able to develop in such a way as men need in order to become really more experienced in their lives. The State would have to make spiritual life even shallower, because it cannot enter into those intimacies of spiritual life which lead to real experiences. The State could only engage in a spiritual life of a quite democratic kind, for democracy pertains to the State. But in its own depths spiritual life can never work democratically. You cannot plunge down into the depths of spiritual life, not yet into the depths of human knowledge, if you remain within the bounds of democracy. But everything must be democratic in the State: in it, judgement is only to be given on what every man can judge for every man. But in this way no real knowledge of Man can ever be assured. This must be removed to a sphere which is not quite alone by itself. Men pass one another by today, and will continue to pass one another by until they come to look on one another in a spiritual way.

This was not necessary in earlier times, for at that time men were not such complicated beings as they are today. The complication of human nature consists in the fact that mankind as such is, as it were, really only 27 years old. I have already explained to you from another point of view, that is to say, human beings only develop up to their 27th year. What comes after that no longer develops by itself, as in older times: development must be sought to get this. In his youth, up to his 27th year, man undergoes a development in which what pertains to humanity flows into him. Up to his 27th year, he is expecting something from life. Now comes the 27th year and now life, of itself, gives him nothing more. If, then, he does nothing about it on his own account, life from that time begins to be quite hollow, empty and barren for him, but it may be that he soars up to receive into himself the spiritual life, of which I said that it is flowing over mankind like a a wave.

This crisis, which is taking place at the present time in every human life about the 27th year and which then remains until about the 35th year, expresses itself in characteristic phenomenon. For everything which lives in universal human nature then expresses itself with particular intensity in single phenomenon. Thus, for example: a personage lived until a short time ago who was looked on as a very leading figure, although he did not in reality do much leading. At a definite point of time, this personage had an important decision set before him. But the following now appears. This personage had formerly incarnated in the 9th century of the Christian epoch and at that time was a kind of black magician in a place in southern Europe. This fact had such an influence on the present incarnation that this personage really died as this decisive event occurred: that is to say, the body was abandoned by the soul which had hitherto incarnated in it. But the personage lived on in an external way and, as judged by external appearances, was still there. Think what a chance this was for all sorts of Ahrimanic spirits and entities to live on in a man who had died in this way! This is one case of the kind which has frequently brought about the complication of present-day life. Things like this play into what is coming to pass on earth today as human activities, into what makes up human destinies today.

Without a feeling for decisive events such as the one which I have just mentioned, one can form no judgement about what is coming to pass. I have often stressed this: one cannot form judgements about the so-called "events leading up to this world-war catastrophe" in the same way as one used to deal with history before, because windows were being opened everywhere for Ahrimanic beings, who entered in. Spiritual basic causes of the most dubious and singular kind have played into the events of July 1914. Without the help of spiritual factors, one is unable to speak in a historical way about what led to this world-catastrophe.

But consider how necessary it is to take things really seriously today. Consider the basic phenomena which I have quoted before: up to the 7th year a human being develops his physical body, up to about the 14th year his etheric body, up to the 21st year his astral body, up to the 28th year his sentient soul. The 27th year is particularly important today. After that, up to the 35th year, first the mind-soul is working and then the consciousness soul. The Ego arises in the mind soul—you can read about this in my Theosophy.

But now, today, Man develops himself only until the 27th year in accordance with what human nature gives him. He develops himself in such a way that he awaits the rise of the Ego in the mind-soul. But this does not come of itself, because the development from the 28th to the 35th year no longer proceeds by itself.

This is the tremendous question which stands before the human being of today. Just imagine that a man lives on beyond his 27th year without having done anything to develop what gives the true ego-feeling and with it the feeling of being a man, namely the knowledge of Man. What happened? The question what is Man, really? The answer becomes either: "Away from Man to the Supreme", which gives us a merely unreal substance, or else it comes to expression as: "Something is out of order in myself. Consequently, I have not come into the world in such a way as befits a man. I find myself on a definite path. And not only I: many of us are the same. We become peculiar men, and fit ourselves into no order. Who among us is guilty? We ourselves are guilty, before ourselves and before life".

Then you have the question what is Man, really? arising from Spiritual Science. It lies at the basis of present day human nature. Is it not a serious task for the future to think how we really can separate the spiritual life, which enables us to have life experiences even about the Spirit, from the democratic state-life, which can never meddle with intimate experiences of life! Do you believe that anything could at any time arise in Theology, Jurisprudence, Philosophy, Medicine or the faculties of Political or Natural Science, as a result of which attention would be drawn to the fact that during this dangerous period between the 27th and 35th years there can come about an inward desolation of man, that in extreme cases the soul can even depart from the body and that thereafter the man only seems to continue to live, while he is possessed by a kind of Ahrimanic nature? The complication of modern life demands that the spiritual life shall be able really to flow over into the Spiritual. Today, the most important questions do not allow themselves to be grasped on the surface of life. And how is merely political democracy, which is fully justified in the sphere of state-life, to make it possible that men shall make their appearance in the future who will bring what they have to say about life wholly and completely in the form of a spiritual message out of the Spiritual World! Were it to be impossible in the future for spiritual messages to be brought to mankind out of the Spiritual World, then earth-evolution could in no way reach its goal. But the possibility of this kind of spiritual life depends on the freedom of spiritual life, depends on the spiritual life being genuinely set on its own feet, emancipated from the State. Otherwise the same thing will appear again and again which happened "far, far away from here", when the question arose of appointing new teachers in a university. Those who had to appoint them felt a certain anxiety because no one was teaching in the various faculties except people who had nothing in particular to say. Then it was loudly urged in the democratic assembly that "people with special qualifications" should be appointed. But the Democrats thumped with their sticks on the floor and shouted: "We want no people with special qualifications! We want average people, average people!"

All these things have a serious and deep basis. Our task is to point to this serious subsoil and, before everything, to oppose the most terrible evils of recent times, superficiality and thoughtlessness. It is often said: the Social Question is also a spiritual question. But then, the spiritual life must be considered in its fundamental nature, otherwise the spiritual consideration remains wholly imprisoned on the surface, above all when dealing with the Social Question.

Translator Unknown

From the various discussions on our present-day stage of development you will have seen that, from a certain higher point of view, mankind is at the present time passing through a very important phase in its existence. If I say "at the present time" we must naturally be aware that what is in question is a very long period, and when we speak of the "present time" today we mean the epoch of the consciousness soul, into which mankind entered roughly at the middle of the 15th century and which extends over 2,000 years. We will, in turn, be succeeded by another epoch, in which an essential part of human nature, quite different from what has developed in the epoch which has just elapsed, will force its way to the surface.

We always divide up the whole evolution of mankind, you see, into sequences of seven phases, whether we are fixing our eyes on longer or shorter epochs. We are now standing in the fifth epoch, and we know that in the sixth epoch the spirit-self is to take possession of mankind. The development of the Ego belongs to our epoch, although it particularly brings the consciousness- soul to expression. In passing over from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch man passes over a sort of Rubicon (see diagram), when the whole of mankind enters into a phase of development which leads up to higher spirituality. This is a very important, significant fact. Now when one is describing conditions of evolution on a great scale, for example those which concern the whole of mankind, it is always inadequate to do so by means of the conditions of development of individual men. If one does this, one is very liable to get mere comparisons. What I am about to quote is, of course, more than a mere comparison, but you must be on your guard against taking the matter pedantically. You must take it in a broad sense.

You know that when a human being enters into the supersensible world he has to pass what we call the Guardian of the Threshold. One comes into the supersensible would by passing this Threshold. You will find this passing- over depicted in my little booklet The Threshold of the Spiritual World. If you take what is depicted there, together with certain chapters of the work How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can get more precise representations of this. You know that when one passes over the Threshold the existing bonds in the human soul which connect thinking, feeling and willing become more loosened. Thinking, feeling and willing become in a certain sense more independent. On this side of the Threshold in a normal spiritual life, these three activities of Man are more interwoven.

Regard must be had to these facts, that one has to pass over the Threshold on entering into the supersensible world, and that, in a certain sense, a kind of splitting apart of the three principal activities of human soul-life takes place, which makes thinking, feeling and willing independent. What the individual man can consciously experience while passing over into the supersensible world is being experienced by the whole of mankind in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies the Threshold through which the whole of mankind must pass.

The fact that the whole of mankind is passing through the Threshold does not at all need to come directly to the consciousness of individual men. If, for example, men were to persevere in that disposition which the majority now has, in refusing all spiritual knowledge, the whole of mankind would pass over the Threshold just the same in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but men, for the greater part, would not be aware of the fact. That powerful soul-spiritual event which can be described as the Crossing of the Threshold can only be experienced consciously by men if they partake in that knowledge which is obtained through Spiritual Science. But event if not a single man were aware that the whole of mankind is passing over the Threshold, that in reality mankind is already, at this time, engaged in this passing, the passing would, nevertheless, take place. It does not in the least depend on whether mankind is aware of it or not. It can be that men are not aware of it. They can hinder the spreading of knowledge of this fact by their stubbornness. But the bringing to expression of the fact in the development of mankind is not thereby prevented.

If you first of all take this in its abstract aspect, you will be able to say to yourselves during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch of ours, during the development of the consciousness-soul, something significant and mighty is happening to mankind. To this belongs the fact that a certain separation is taking place of the life of thinking from those of feeling and willing. Please fix your attention clearly on this fact. A separation is taking place in mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which makes independent the life of thinking, that of feeling and that of willing. The three spheres of the soul-life of the whole of mankind are becoming more independent. And this will distinguish that mankind of the future from the mankind of the past, that in the past the soul was more centralised in itself, while in the future it will feel itself to be three-membered. If a human being is alone by himself, he will certainly be able to undergo his development in this sense in which we find it intimated in the work How Does One Attain Higher Worlds?: this concerns single, individual men. When men are taken together as a people, a state, and economic organisation and so forth, when men have intercourse with one another to get to know and to satisfy their common interests, this splitting of the whole soul-life into three spheres is developing because, as has been said, behind the scenes of existence of the whole of mankind is passing through a phase of development which one can compare with the passing of the individual man through the Threshold into the supersensible world.

Now there area actually men in our time who are aware of something of these events which are occurring behind the scenes of existence. But they are only aware of them, I should like to say, in the negative sense. I have often mentioned to you the name of Fritz Mauthner, who has written a Critique of Speech and a thick, two-volume Dictionary of Philosophy.¹ After I have recently said something substantial to you, just about the significance of speech in human life,² it will be interesting to you to hear how a man of the present day thinks about the soul-life of man, who, like Fritz Mauthner, directs his attention just to speech but in doing so has no inkling of the existence of Spiritual Science, who has no idea of what Spiritual Science can do for mankind. Just in the case of this kind of man of the present-day, who is entirely ignorant of spiritual-scientific matters but who has an acute brain, more intelligent than those of innumerable official learned men, one can find peculiar opinions uttered about human development when he turns his attention to the working of speech, to the human soul.

On the whole, as you know well, the mankind of today is still infinitely proud of what it calls its Science. Fritz Mauthner is not at all proud of this Science. He sets no store at all by this Science. For he believes that, while they think they have a Science, they are in fact, merely muddling about with words, that they are merely relying on words, and that while they think in words, come to an understanding with words and think that they have an inner soul-life, they are, nevertheless, fundamentally only moving about in the external words. Fritz Mauthner has made this clear.

Now call to mind that I recently said to you³: of the whole construction of our speech, the dead most clearly understand what we say to them in verbs, while they aware of almost nothing of what we want to say to them when wee speak to them in nouns. In this connection you can already have a feeling of what importance speech has in the real spiritual life of men. And if men cannot rid themselves of the speech-content of their so-called thinking then, when they think in nouns, they are in actual fact thinking something completely unspiritual, something which does not make its way into the Spiritual World at all. They cut themselves off from the Spiritual World as a result of thinking in terms of nouns. It is, indeed, very much the case at the present day that men are cutting themselves off from the Spiritual World by a kind of thinking in terms of nouns.

Peoples which have already fallen into decadence and which experience their verbs in a very substantive way [...] are thereby setting themselves completely off from the Spiritual World.

Now after Fritz Mauthner had found that, in everything which is carried on today as Science, there really exists nothing more than a sort of "making a fool of oneself" through speech, he comes to an opinion about the human soul which is remarkable in the highest degree for the present day. He says in the first place, men confront the world. While they are confronting the world and perceive it with their senses, they are really only becoming aware of those impressions which they denote by means of adjectives. People do not pay attention to this, but it is a good remark. If you see a bird flying, if you see a table standing, you are really only perceiving qualities through your senses—let us say, the colour of the bird. You are also only perceiving the qualities of the table. It is really only a self- deception, an illusion, that you still perceive a special table apart from these qualities, that you can perceive something else besides those impressions which you denote by adjectives, namely what you can denote by nouns. With his senses, man only perceives the qualities of things. When he puts these sensible qualities into words by means of adjectives, by means of the adjectives of speech, he is living sensually with the things, in an external way. And a man like Fritz Mauthner asks himself: but what can a man, who is living with the things in an external way, really receive into himself from the things? What can he reproduce about the things? He can only receive, thinks Fritz Mauthner, what is reproduced through Art, by which is understood the whole development of art from the most primitive stages of mankind to what can be indicated today as the highest stage of art. When man digests what he perceives with the senses, what he can uttered through adjectives, Art arises.

For people like Fritz Mauthner, who have stripped off much that is superstitious in the present time, especially the superstitions of our schools, artistic creation, even the most primitive of all, is the only thing which man achieves creatively in union with things. But man is not satisfied with merely expressing the qualities of things by means of adjectives: he forms nouns. But with the nouns he indicates nothing at all of what approaches men in the external sense-world.

Fritz Mauthner makes this especially clear, and for this reason he says in the second place: when Man arises to illusionary life by forming nouns, mysticism arises in his soul. Here he believes that he is penetrating into the essence of things, and is not aware that he really has nothing in the nouns. In this sphere—so Fritz Mauthner thinks—he can only dream. He therefore says: if you men really want to live, you must represent things artistically, for only then are you awake. If you have no mind for artistic representations, you really are not awake at all in your soul. You are dreaming if you think that you can penetrate into the essence of things further than can be done by the mere artistic forming of sensible quality- data. You fall into unreality with your mysticism, but you have a certain satisfaction in this mysticism. You dream of things by forming nouns in reference to them.

It is true that, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, this is a foolish assertion, but one which is extraordinarily acute and important for the present time, because in fact a man does only experience dream illusions if he develops only those qualities which people love today in the whole world of nouns, in which he can live mystically. But the majority of men do not make this clear to themselves.

However strangely it may sound, it is an extraordinarily important fact for the life of the present day that men work with the external, sensible qualities of things, with what they bring to expression in adjectives. They work on these external things by altering their qualities in some way. Then, disregarding the fact that they are working on these external things—let us say, in primitive art, people turn to the churches, to the schools, in order to learn something about the essence of things. But there they get only get an education expressed in nouns, really nothing but illusions. A man like Fritz Mauthner has a quite correct feeling for this. If one walks over a meadow and sees the green surface there, differentiated in the most varied way, interspersed with white, blue, yellow and reddish varieties of flowers, one has what is the true reality in the sensible world. But men believe that they can get hold of something beyond this. If they walk on the road, one beside the other, and the one stretches out his hand and picks something which looks yellow, he then asks the other: but what is the plant called? The other has, perhaps, learned at some time, from someone else or at school, what this plant is called, and he utters a noun. But this whole proceeding is an illusory one—it is a mere dream-activity. The true activity consists merely in seeing something yellow of a particular shape, but what is said about it in nouns is a dream-activity.

Men love this dream-activity today, but in fact it has no content. Many people, who are left unsatisfied by mere occupation with the external, qualitative impressions, listen to sermons and take part in divine-services. But all that lives in their souls as a result of the sermons and church services is also, at bottom, no more that a dream, a tissue of illusions, nothing real. Men who occupy themselves more accurately with the character of speech, as Fritz Mauthner did, notice this and draw attention to the fact that in the moment when one goes beyond what is artistic or artistically handled one at once enters the sphere of mystic dreaming.

Then Fritz Mauthner differentiates yet a third stage in the soul-life of men today, one which he calls Science. Today this is quite specially proud of the idea of development, of evolution. It prefers to express what it presents in verbs. But now take what I have said to you with reference to the experiencing of verbal activity, the activity of verbs. But how many people experience verbs eurhythmically today? How dry, insipid and abstract is what men experience in verbs! The German says Entwicklung. One says "evolution" if one is going to utter the same idea in speech in a different way. But one certainly has no idea at all of the reality of the words "evolution" or Entwicklung unless one is in the position concretely to carry one's feeling right through this word, inwardly to live through it.

But how many people, if they say: "the physical man of today has evolved (entwickelt) from lower organisms" think of a ball of thread is wound together and which is being unwound, which is "e-volved"! If you have a ball, the thread of which is wound up, and unwind it, you can say: "you are evolving this". This is evolution (Entwicklung). For you have the concrete representation.

Now consider Ernst Haeckel, who says that man has evolved from the apes. We do not wish to speak of the substance of the matter. Do you believe that he pictures to himself that there is a ball of thread and that something has been unwound from it by the changing of the ape into a man? Is it not the case that quite certainly nothing concrete like this lies in the word which is uttered when someone says that man has evolved from the ape—otherwise he would have had to think of the "unwinding of a thread from a ball!"

What does it mean when one utters the word "evolves" but really calls up no picture of it before oneself? This is the remarkable thing that men today, while they are thinking scientifically, prefer to express themselves in verbs, take refuge in verbs, but that they think nothing at all while using verbs. For if they were to make clear to themselves what they really are thinking, they would not get on at all with the object of their thoughts. Scientific concepts are really nothing else than scientific absence-of-thought. Today you can take the thickest text book, especially in political economy, and go through the concepts there—there are just as many absences-of-thought contained in them as there are concepts.

Now in this way somebody like Fritz Mauthner, who has no inkling of Spiritual Science, naturally cannot look into the reasons for the absences-of-thought into which we area now looking after we have just discussed how things are connected with speech. But Fritz Mauthner feels that, in the present day scientific way of thinking, this scientific talk is nothing more than an absence-of-thought, in consequence of the boundaries of thinking in terms of speech. It is, however, a hard fact if one has to confess: in the lower school grades, where, to be sure, plenty of sins are being committed against the children, the nature of the child demands that one gives it concrete thoughts, because it still wants to have something perceptible to the senses. But then, when people pass into the Gymnasium or become high school girls, one can already expect more from them in the way of absence-of-thought, for already the Conceptional is ceasing to have a content. And when one passes right on to the University, this is the summit of the absence-of-thought with is there traded-in as science, for the only reality today consists in handling things, what is artistic, what one brings out of the laboratory, the dissecting room and so on, the technical, the artistic. But what is "thought-out"—yes, I see, to be uttering a piece of nonsense—is nothing thought-out: it is an absence-of-thought.

Fritz Mauthner feels this. He therefore sets out this list of three steps, firstly Art, secondly Mysticism (which, however, is a state of dreaming), and thirdly Science, of which he says that in reality it is a learned ignorance a docta ignorantia.

I. Art
II. Mysticism: dreaming
III. Science: docta ignorantia

Thus one must take something uttered by a man like this as being a confession of a representative man of the present-day. Something of this kind is said by just the man who has stripped off those superstitions under the sway of which the majority of men live today, one who, as a result of his consideration of speech, has come to see what an emptiness is overflowing over present day mankind, while in the highest level of education pretended thoughts are taught which are, nevertheless, only absence-of-thought. Then this absence-of-thought overflows with a clutter of words into popular literature and comes at last, in journalism, to that terrible bog of words from which the majority of men nourish themselves spiritually today.

I could have quoted some other personage of the present day as an example: however, Fritz Mauthner brings this thing to expression in a uniquely precise, narrowly-systematised manner. Consider it well, what I have brought before you with regard to a representative man of the present day who has no inkling of Spiritual Science. If, intelligently and in an unprejudiced way, you take the conversation which the men of today carry on with one another, from the customary afternoon gossip to what is said in meetings of professional or territorial bodies, in the Reichstag or the Duma, there results a jumble of speech, of words, permeated by absence-of-thought.

But in this way one describes the real facts about what one must call "culture" today. I have depicted to you no more than the facts which just simply exist. And the task of the spiritual scientist is to look into this condition in a really unprejudiced way, courageously and without deceiving himself. You see, people who stand outside Spiritual Science are already coming to the view that it is a terrible superstition to consider Science, as it holds sway today, as anything but a docta ignoratntia. And it has gradually come to be this. Since it has been described by Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464) at the beginning of the 15th century by the words docta ignorantia, our science has become this to an ever greater extent.

Now, of course, simple people can come and say: "But what are you saying? You have surely as often told us that the present time has attained to something magnificent in respect of Natural Science, and that you fully acknowledge the triumph of Natural Science". Yes, my dear friends, but nature contains no thoughts! It is just in the age of absence-of-thought that Natural Science can develop to the greatest extent of all, because it needs no thoughts, but merely external formulae, in order to classify natural-scientific facts. Natural Science owes its greatness just to the circumstance that, in order to be correct Natural Science, it may be without thoughts and even ought to be so. But the thing to which I wanted particularly to draw your attention to is this: that already in the present day people are noticing how mankind is passing through something which is turning their inner soul-life into a state of dreaming and Science really into one of sleeping, a state of ignorance. This, again, is the comfort which people feel today in Science and scientific thinking, that it lets itself sleep so comfortably in their souls. People do not at all believe how deeply the men of today are sleeping while they consider that they know something, how obedient they are to authority, even to excess, when freed by what they call "science" and what is given to them as Science, but how, out of their deep sleep, they can nowhere apply this Science to their real surroundings. Yes, they look on the application of "something scientific" to external life as a fantastic thing.

Just put in a library—it must be a very big one—all the learned works about psychiatry, all the works on mental diseases. You would then have gathered together much that is ingenious, in the sense of the present time. But yet one must also assume that the psychiatrists who occupy themselves professionally with affairs know what is in the books at least, they must know the principal facts, and they do know them, but as though they were asleep. For if, for example, it is a matter of considering life, of considering the fact that a man, who has for years controlled events over a great part of Europe, was and is really mad, then their science of psychiatry is of no use to people, for they do not think of applying their Science to real life.

These things were not always like this in the development of mankind. If we go back into other epochs, this was not present in the same measure. And, the further back we go, so it is present to a smaller extent. When men had the old, atavistic clairvoyance in ancient times, their dreams were then no dreams as we understand the term today, but they had a psychic content, in which they perceived something real. And people examined human affairs out of their sleep. Today it has come about that if men want to remain men they must gather their a knowledge different from that before which Fritz Mauthner finds them standing as before a docta ignorantia or a dreamlike mysticism. Men must wake up, and they can only do so through spiritual-scientific knowledge. Therefore I refer to what must happen as a awakening. This awakening must be something very real, something encroaching very, very deeply into life. Today people speak, and think in speech as it is described by us, and they believe that by this means they have thoughts as well. But in reality they have no thoughts. For what are thoughts for the man of today, if he really grasps them as thoughts? They are, in fact, nothing real: they are reflections of something real. And just when the man of today soars up to thoughts, if he is sinking at the real life of ideas, he must be conscious of the fact that these ideas as such are phantoms of reality, but are not reality itself.

I recently brought you a chapter of Hegel (Vol. 1, Lecture 8). I told you that it would be difficult to understand, because Hegel always bestirs himself in thoughts. This, to be sure, is so terribly difficult for men today—to bestir themselves in thoughts. One even becomes offensive to people, offensive in the highest degree, if one bestirs oneself in thoughts. When first I began to speak about Anthroposophy in Berlin, all sorts of people came from the most diverse directions of so-called spiritual life and wanted to see really what was happening, people who had taken part in Spiritualism, who had tried by means of all sorts of questionable mediumistic methods to experience something of the Spiritual World—all of them came there. And then it often turned out that just this kind of person regularly went to sleep in my lectures, especially when they were themselves rather mediumistic. One could see many a person there, sound asleep. Then they stayed away for the future. And some of them said that they dared not continue to go these lectures, for the spirits had told them that they would be dealing with ideas there, with thoughts, and that they dared not go to them.

My dear friends, I still call to mind a lady—she appeared to have become unwell—who ran out the door at some speed but who laid herself down at full length as soon as she was outside. The giving of thoughts had made this impression on her! Today, people in general are not trained in real thoughts, because they consider that when they bestir themselves in the projection of speech they have thoughts. But just when one admits oneself to be thinking, one is aware that, in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch of today, one has shadow-pictures if one really thinks, that is to say if one lives in thoughts. If one rightly comprehends the character of the life of thought, one is aware that the soul, as it were, bestirs itself on the surface of the thoughts, while something remains behind in the unconscious. There is the soul. But it sees something which it sends forth like the shadow-pictures of that in which it lives. It must comprehend the shadow-pictures, thoughts, ideas, and must carry them over into something which still, in many cases, remains unconscious for the men of today. How can it do this? It can only do it when that is received into the life of thoughts about which we can give ourselves up to no deception of any kind when we receive it: that is, the will to think, the feeling of the will while we are thinking, the feeling that we are present, that we are really leading over one thought into another, that, while we are thinking, we always have a clear picture underlying our thoughts.

Men do not love this today. They sit, walk or stand today, and their thoughts are churning up in their heads as I have just described, which is really absence-of-thought, but it is playing through their heads. Men give themselves up to these so-called thoughts, passively give themselves up to them, even take in every so-called thought which rolls through their heads. And the result of this is that the will to think, that which works arbitrarily and actively in thoughts, is of the utmost rarity in the souls of men today.

The man who holds himself to be a leader of opinion today wishes to the smallest degree to sit down and bring his will into activity. He quickly takes up the newspaper, so that his thoughts may be unrolled from outside, or a book—but does not develop within himself that activity which now really leads to active thinking. The mankind of today lives in a state of social laziness with regard to this active thinking—one can call it nothing else.

All these things give the real form of that transition which a man like Fritz Mauthner feels when he thus utters what I have described to you above. But all these things are phenomena connected with the crossing of the Threshold by the whole of mankind. The whole of mankind must pass by the stern Guardian of the Threshold in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. And just in the epoch of the development of consciousness, it ought to come to the consciousness that mankind is passing through this stage in its development. But then a sort of splitting-up of the life of the soul must take place. What was centralised as a unity in earlier times must be split asunder into a trinity, and every single member must be centralised on its own account.

Because this is a question effecting human beings in their community-life, not individual men, it can only come about if there are external points of support, on which this tendency towards inward threefoldness can go on developing. These external points of support must now be present in the social organism in which men live. It is not in my choice that I must speak about the threefold social organism today. It is this which must be made clear to mankind from the signs of the times, from those signs of the times which become clear when one considers that mankind must pass the stern Guardian of the Threshold. And if you seek for an inner characteristic of the reasons why the threefolding must come about in the social organism, then just re-read that chapter in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds which deals with the Guardian of the Threshold. It is all there already, from another point of view.

When one studies Spiritual Science, one is studying the most significant impulse of the present day development of mankind. Spiritual Science explains, from the most diverse points of view, the most intensively working life-necessities of the present time. And, while the splitting of the human soul into the three members of thinking, feeling and willing is pointed out in the chapter in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds about the Guardian of the Threshold, it is a result demanded of the whole of mankind that they give thought to the Threefold Social Organism.

This is how the things are connected. If you consider the individual human being who steps over the Threshold to the supersensible world, you can say to yourselves this man experiences in himself the separation into a life of thinking, a life of feeling and a life of willing. If you consider the mankind of today who, while they are going through the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, step over the Threshold behind the scenes of historical Becoming, then you must say: this mankind must find its life of thinking in an independent spiritual organism, its life of feeling—that is to say the relations of feeling which play between man and man—in the independent rights-organism, and the life of will in the economic circuit, in the economic organism.

If you consider these matters in this way you will have the right foundations for the necessity of such statements as are made with regard to the Threefold Social Organism. Then you will also rise above the mere babel of words which often rules the present time. Then you will have insight that at the present time one should not dispute in words but should realise that words only gain importance and point to thoughts if one brings them into the right direction, if one considers that everything which must develop itself as thought-life in the spiritual organism of mankind is the cultivation of the individual capabilities of mankind, i.e. that individualism must rule in the spiritual organism, democracy must rule in the rights- or state-organism because this has to do with what every man develops in the way of relations with every man; in the sphere of economics, associative life must rule which holds together the co-workers in a profession, or the association which also arises as a result of the connection of production with consumption—in other words, socialism must rule in the sphere of the economics organisation. But the three independent members must appear separated in their characteristic qualities.

Now we are still living in a time in which Ahriman plays ball with men, while he lulls them into illusion about what really is to come to pass. So he causes them, as he has been done in former times, to mix together the will-organism and the feeling-organism—namely, socialism and democracy—and causes them to say: we are striving for social-democracy. As a result, the individualistic momentum is entirely left out, for, you see, people do not love thoughts. For otherwise one would have to say: "we must strive for individual-social-democracy", and this would destroy the most significant ideas which doctrinal social-democracy has today. In the confusion which the harmonising-together of socialism and democracy brings to social-democracy, you see an activity which Ahriman is carrying on with men. And one will only feel the seriousness of this tendency if one keeps one's attention on the transition at the Threshold of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and knows that, because the whole of mankind lives within the Social Organism must come about, just as a threefolding of the soul-life of the individual must come about in the passing of the individual man over the Threshold.

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• 1. Fritz Mauthner, Philosophisches Wörterbuch, Munich 1910.
• 2. The Social Question as a Question of the Soul: The Inner Experience of Speech.
• 3. R.S. The Social Question as a question of soul

Translator Unknown

Let us once more briefly set before our eyes what we tried to make clear to ourselves yesterday. We said present-day mankind, insofar as it comes into consideration as modern mankind, is passing as a whole body through something which is similar to what, in the development of individual men, can be designated as the crossing of the Threshold to the supersensible world. If, now, one discusses the development of individual men as I have done in the book How Does One Attain to Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and the booklet The Threshold of the Spiritual World, one is normally referring to the conscious ascent into supersensible life. When one speaks of the crossing of the Threshold, one also implies a quite conscious event, as we have often described it. I have already made you aware of this yesterday, that one should not strain the concepts if one is compelled to carry them over from one sphere into the other. Therefore I can only say to you mankind as a whole is now passing through something similar to a crossing of the Threshold. For I already intimated that it could come to pass, it would be altogether possible for mankind to refuse Spiritual Science. Then they would have no means of knowing anything about the fact that a process is being undergone by the whole of mankind of such a kind as is the crossing of the Threshold. After all, events take place in what has to assert itself as the crossing of the Threshold by the whole of mankind quite other than those which take place in the individual man when he enters in a conscious way on the path into the supersensible world. And I have already indicated yesterday that the essential thing for the whole of mankind in the crossing of the Threshold as it must come about in the course of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, the time of the development of the consciousness-soul, consists in the separation of the three soul-capacities so that they attain a kind of independence, as has been known to you in essence for a long time. For the whole of mankind, thinking, feeling and willing are not remaining as they now are, chaotically mixed together—as I said, I am speaking of mankind in its entirety. The life of the soul is membering itself in such a way that the whole of mankind are experiencing their thinking, their feeling and their willing more independently than hitherto. In the future, therefore, it needs the membering of the Social Organism into three spheres, which it did not hitherto require in the same way. If, then, one speaks about this threefolding of the Social Organism today, one does so from the consciousness of a necessity which is taking place in the whole of mankind according to the spiritual laws of the universe.

Now the mistake ought not to be made to wish at once to find the all-embracing, the great process in single events which are occurring here or there. Since the middle of the 15th century we have only lived through a small part of the epoch of the development of the consciousness-soul. Such an epoch extends over 2,000 years. This epoch of the development of the consciousness-soul will thus still last for a long time, and the event which one must, nevertheless, already comprehend as this passing over the Threshold of the supersensible will bring itself to being in various stages by means of various events. But I ask you not to make the mistake of, perhaps, immediately identifying only the world-catastrophe of the present-day with the "all-embracing event" of which I spoke yesterday. It would be a mistake if you were to do this. But it is no mistake if one seeks, out of great processes which embrace long periods of time, to understand the events in which one is living. For only when one understands them in this way does one find one's way in relation to single events. Therefore let us speak of something today which in a certain way belongs to the symptomatology of this development of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch after the crossing of the Threshold. The rise of the development of the consciousness soul is, you see, to be read with quite special clearness just from the culture of Middle-Europe. It has already been clearly preparing itself here since the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, and then led to certain events which we shall presently discuss, and certainly formed itself in Middle-Europe in such a way that it has quite particularly led, from then on, to the middle-European catastrophe in the present moment of human development, and must lead further into this catastrophe.

It is certainly the case that this Middle-Europe is really condemned to experience certain things, in the first place more quickly and in the second more violently, more characteristically than is the rest of Europe. One can clearly see how, since the beginning of the 15th century, something arises in Middle-Europe which introduces the period of the development of the consciousness-soul. And now one can further see, from the catastrophic events of Middle-Europe in particular, how difficult a path mankind has to pass over just in this period of the development of the consciousness-soul, what difficult struggles, what terrific blows are being endured, so that the period of the consciousness-soul can push impulses which lie in it to the surface of human development.

In this matter it can be of special importance to fix one's attention on the meaning for Middle-Europe of the point of time about the year 1200. It is assumed that about the year 1200—of course, only approximately—the Nibelung-epic was brought to completion, i.e., that poem which, in relation to the population of Middle-Europe, is very frequently compared with what the Homeric poems were for the Greek world. The Nibelung-epic manifestly important folk-destinies of a period which proceeds by a long time the age in which the poem was brought to completion, came to expression in pictorial, imaginative form. And anyone who looks into the Nibelung-epic today with an honest inner disposition, and even into what Jordan, Wagner, and others have made out of it much later, must say to himself: the sort of humanity, the being of Man which shines out of the Nibelung-epic is, basically, only barely understandable for the men of today. The Nibelung-epic points back to a time in which things were, quite clearly, altogether different in Middle-Europe, even as regards the landscape, and in which human characteristics have developed, out of the nature of the landscape, quite different from those which developed later.

If one has a clear power of perception, one cannot but get the feeling from the Nibelung-epic how the human beings spoken of in it have lived in barren regions which were covered by thick forests over wide areas. What may be called a forest-character is expressing itself in the Nibelung-epic, all that impresses itself on people who are accustomed to live in forest-covered lands. We cannot imagine that the Nibelung-epic had the same outlook as had, for example, the men of the later Germany after the year 1200, although the actual forms in the Nibelungenlied are already very much "humanized". We must imagine that these men were inwardly endowed with a soul-life quite different from that of later men. We must imagine that they had a much more instinctive, more elementary kind of feeling than had the men of later times. The light of Christianity, you see, had not yet really penetrated into the Nibelung-men. But we wish to look less at the content of this soul-life than into the formation, the fashioning of the soul-life of these men. It is clearly something more instinctive (if one does not misunderstand this word), something fiercer, more elementary, which issues from the human soul with a more primal force than happened later.

Nearly at the end of the period into which the Nibelung-epic still points, the period begins which one can call the middle-European civic period, the period of middle-European civic life. How did this develop? It came about in such a way that gradually the forests were rooted up in wide areas, that over wide districts of Middle-Europe meadows and cornfields made their appearance in places which were formerly covered by almost impenetrable forests. This brought into being middle-European city-life, in the first period of the development of the consciousness-soul. And the qualities of this European city-life certainly appeared nowhere in so characteristic a way as in this Middle-Europe, because the destinies of this city-life have already rounded themselves out in a tragic way in Middle-Europe, because in our days they are already bringing themselves to a certain conclusion, because this city-life in Middle-Europe is fundamentally at the end of its development today. It has gone through the world-catastrophe in accordance with its own characteristic disposition, and will go on in accordance with its disposition through this into the world-catastrophe to follow, and will have to undergo experiences different from those of the rest of the European bourgeoisie. The rest of the European bourgeoisie will at a later date experience certain phases of development which, in the case of the middle-European bourgeoisie, are already clearly pointing today to the final catastrophe. Thus, in the middle-European bourgeoisie, we already have a sort of destiny rounded-out in itself—the ascent in the period when wide regions which later became Germany were being transformed from forests into meadows and fields, the development from the 13th to the 20th century, and the terrible, tragic precipice in the 20th century.

This phenomenon, which has a kind of compactness here in Middle-Europe, can nowhere be studied according to its symptomatology in the same way as in this Middle-Europe. And he who wishes really to fix his attention, quite seriously, on the great impulses of human development should not be too cowardly to keep in view the characteristic, important symptoms which are expressing themselves in this. For everything else in Europe is only to be understood if one just fixes one's attention, in an unprejudiced way from the higher point of view of Spiritual Science, on this destiny which is rounded-out in itself.

But it is one-sided to speak of one culture-stream and to say: with the 13th century the later middle-European bourgeoisie arises from the Nibelung-men and becomes the bearer of this middle-European culture. It is of course true and, within these limits, right, but it is one-sided because it is only right within these limits; it is true that that disposition of soul which is here referred to as that of the middle-European bourgeoisie spread itself particularly over the middle-European states, and that middle-European civilization developed out of this bourgeoisie. This is completely true on the one side. But it is not the whole truth; it is only part of it, a part of the phenomena which have developed in that Middle-Europe which is in its death-throes today, together with many other things which have developed at the same time. The other part is that something has remained from the old forest—and Nibelung-men, that something has remained over of characteristics which have continued to live in their souls beyond the old epoch of which the Nibelung-epic tells us. The men who, if I may say so, have developed into the middle-European bourgeoisie under the sunshine of the cornfields and meadows were not the only ones who lived in Middle-Europe after the year 1200 and then on into the 20th century, but there were also other men who had retained something of the old inner wildness and primitive soul-nature of the Nibelung-men.

But if one fixes one's attention on a phenomenon like this, one should not forget that the passing of time is not without significance in the development of mankind, that the passing of time represents a reality. If anyone retains something which really belongs to an earlier age of soul-culture, he does not remain in the same disposition and corresponds to this old soul-culture, but he comes into decadence, into a decline, and loses touch with the demands of the age. He develops into a later age qualities which should have been developed as it would have come to pass in an earlier age, but in a morbid way, with the characteristic marks of decay and decadence.

As a result we saw, in the one line of development, the middle-European bourgeoisie of the new age develop itself, which I should like to call the highest of the cornfields and meadows into which the forests had been transformed: on the other line we see among this bourgeoisie in Middle-Europe men who have retained the old soul-life of the Nibelung-time, who have only adopted the new age and Christianity in an external way, and who therefore display this old Nibelung-soul-character in a decaying form. The men who now displayed this old Nibelung-character in a decaying form are the middle-European territorial princes and their dependents, the territorial princes who have now been cast from their thrones by the dozen. To this middle-European Nibelung-aftergrowth belongs the first place all that formed the human content of the House of Habsburg, but the rest of the territorial princes of Middle-Europe as well. No one understands what is now being tragically consummated who does not also know how to fix his attention on this sub-stratum below the events, on the fact that the more progressive part of the population of Middle-Europe has been ruled and administered through the centuries by that part which has retained the soul-character of the old Nibelung-men in a decadent form.

There was actually a huge contrast between the whole inner soul-structure of those whom one could call the followers of the middle-European bourgeois-system and those who sat on the kingly or princely thrones and their dependents. The soul of some King of Bavaria or Duke of Brunswick and that of a middle-German man who has received an average education are two spiritual powers altogether different from each other. These lived side by side in past centuries like two alien races, perhaps with even stronger points of difference than between two alien races.

One must have the courage to take a good look at an underlying historical fact like this. For it is just in catastrophic times that events in human development do not depend on the external events which conventional history records. What for the most part touches on human destiny and human development depends on underlying facts such as this. Only reflect that the rest of the European bourgeoisie was not concerned with this destiny, to stand in this kind of way in relation to a number of men who had retained an earlier age in their soul-life, but that this was the case only with the middle-European bourgeoisie. Take, for example, but only to make it clearer, the man who, streaming from this Middle-Europe but migrating from it, later turned into the English-speaking peoples. These had not—if I may say so—entered into the development which has been gone through in Middle-Europe. They have taken with them what was present in old times within the European, middle-European bourgeoisie, have carried it elsewhere, and have not had to fret it away in the struggle with backward Nibelung-men.

It thus comes about—I have said this to you on another occasion—that there are, in the English-speaking peoples for example, certain instincts for the development of the consciousness-soul which are completely lacking in Middle-Europe, certain instincts for political life in particular, while the mankind of Middle-Europe had to remain non-political, without politics, had no disposition at all to take part in any way in political life for they were ruled, you see, by men who had retained an earlier age.

Yet how strikingly clear does it appear to one who turns his glance to the second half of the 18th century. We there look on the spiritual blossoms of the middle-European bourgeoisie; we need only name Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and many another to indicate the blossoms of what had been germinally developing upwards since the time of the Nibelungen. And, in the same age as the men who represent these blossoms, with their culmination in Goethe and Goetheanism, there stands, by contrast, in Frederick the Great, the most complete retention of the Nibelung-wildness in its fullest decay! Seek for a human contrast where you will, there is no other which works so tragically, when considered i n perspective, as Goethe by the side of Frederick the Great.

As for the development which followed, it remains, indeed, only to be said that the utmost absence-of-thought, the most dreadful indifference to spiritual interests, arose in the 19th century and had to continue in the 20th until Goetheanism, the greatest spiritual impulse which struck into mankind during its century, has come to be hardly noticed at all. For Goetheanism is hardly regarded at all by civilization in general. In this is expressing itself that complete absence-of-thought, that complete lack of interest and lack of attention towards human development which began in the 19th century and continued in the 20th. And the whole of the inner untruthfulness of this culture of the 19th and of beginning of the 20th century is required in order to represent the period of Frederick the Great and its impulses as characteristic of modern times. Once could really say nothing more inappropriate about Frederick the Great than what has been said about him in current historical representations.

One must also see more recent events on this substratum, not merely events of a local nature but also those which encroach deeply into international life, certainly events which, until today, have been entirely missed by mankind, who slept through them. For can there be anything more tragi-comic than when men, who are separated by cosmic distances from all that has developed in Weimar, now come together in Weimar in the farce of the present-day National Assembly? Anything more nonsensical than the gathering of this present-day assembly in Weimar is impossible to devise.

I had this in mind when I spoke a short time ago of a more rapid and also more vigorous development. today I must often think about various conversations which I had in the eighties of the last century with people who were enthusiastic for what is German, among them, for example, the man who later wrote the History of Modern Austria—Heinrich Friedjung (1854-1920), whom I recently mentioned in another connection in the lecture in the "Bernoulli" and whose strange action you find mentioned, as you may remember, in one of my printed lectures. (R.S. The Christmas Mood, Novalis as proclaimer of a Christianity to be understood spiritually).

At that time it was said that Middle-Europe in the age of Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the others who were of like mind with them had reached a high-point of the spiritual development of mankind. Friedjung and some who were in my company at that time spoke somewhat like this now it must really go on, it must ascend further. I remember very well how I said: no, that was the high-point; from then on it descends again. With our present-day age the middle-European world has brought to the surface just what it had in it in the way of subjectivity.This, then, was the characteristic appearance of Middle-Europe; after that, it went downwards, not upwards any more.

Naturally, this was at that time taken very amiss of me; it was perhaps even considered to be nonsense. I can understand quite well that much of what I had to say in my, and of what I have to say, is regarded by my contemporaries as nonsense. But this, nevertheless, is a quite characteristic phenomenon. What began about the year 1200 and had its mighty culmination in Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller, is certainly present, but it cannot be understood in the framework of the national middle-European life. But the specifically middle-European culture wills no longer to be national but to be above nationality, international, an outlook which has also got to be honestly cultivated in our Spiritual Science, in contrast with all the national chauvinism of the present-day. This is going to be the characteristic phenomenon, that the true substance of what came to light about the turn of the 18th-19th centuries can be perceived and lived only by this spiritual-scientific cultural life.

Let us look back a little, and fix our attention on a certain nuance of this middle-European cultural life. For one who knows how to take history symptomatologically it still remains a very remarkable fact, pointing deeply into historical mysteries, that in 1077—thus comparatively speaking, a long time before the now Age of Consciousness—a representative of the old wildness of the Nibelung-souls (as the Salic and also the Saxon Emperors also were, Henry IV, had to do his terrible penance at Canossa before the monk of Cluny (or at least the follower of the monastic system pf Cluny), who had become a great Pope. For the great Pope Gregory, who had put Henry IV under the ban of the Church and forced him to come to Canossa, stood entirely under the influence of the Cluniac stream, that ecclesiastical current which aimed to raise up the Church to be the preponderant power in Europe. And the whole of the wildness of the old Nibelung-character expressed itself in this Henry IV, the Salic, in his relations with Pope Gregory.

And still another thing which has found its continuation in later times was already expressing itself at that time, the fact that Middle-Europe could simply do nothing except come into conflict with what had, in a round-about way, become pseudo-Christianity through Romanism, what had developed from the original Christian impulse into a Christian empire. The old Nibelung-wildness was in a certain way made subject to the Roman Empire. It was then replaced by that stream which rose over the forests of Middle-Europe which had been turned into cornfields and meadows. Basically speaking, this transformed stream which replaced the old Nibelung-outlook was in no way fitted to take in the impulses of the Roman Empire. It was really continually struggling against the type of Christianity which had become political. And while, on the one side, it brought its own nature to extension and unfolded what was in its own being, it saw itself on the other side humbled, ruled and administered by those who had retained the old Nibelung-wildness in the manner already described.

I repeat that in order to understand things like this one must be clear with oneself in a spiritual-scientific way that if something which was great in an earlier time is retained in a later time it becomes unhealthy in the later time and falls into decay. This is the characteristic thing about the contrast which exists in Middle-Europe. There is all that arose with the beginning of the 13th century after the uprooting of the old forests, all that began to sound from earth to heaven with the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide and what has run into Goetheanism. This is the one, unpolitical side, which is undergoing a completion in itself of the circle of its development but which always has beside it, without realizing the whole consequences of this fact, the old Nibelung-character on the thrones with the princely diadems—but in a state of decadence.

Middle-Europe came into the second half of the 19th century under this kind of circumstances and conditions, and went on into the 20th century, and thus entered into the phase which must now be so frequently described as characteristic of present-day Europe, as distinct from Russia. One must speak, just in these connections, about modern industrial development, of the machine-age, the rise of capitalism. These are international phenomena. If one speaks of the rise of the age of technical development, of the industrial age, of the capitalist age, one is speaking of international impulse. But these international impulses acted in a different way in every place. I should so much like to see a really unprejudiced description of what has developed in Middle-Europe from the time when Walther von der Vogelweide sang until the day when Goethe spoke the loftiest words about humanity—a humanity which no longer understands Goethe's words at all, without the dreadful scholastic judgments which have been mixed into conventional history in all spheres. I should like to see what lies in these years of development described in an unprejudiced way, to see it described quite in accordance with reality. Then it would really be possible for the untruthfulness to be removed, where it has penetrated into the hearts and souls of men in so tremendously elementary a way that even the most truthful man has to become untruthful. Then the untruthfulness will be removed, to which even a man like Goethe was impelled when he spoke about Frederick the Great, simply because the power of what held sway as a universal opinion was so strong that the most truthful man could do nothing except say the same as the others did.

Truthfulness demands something else, quite different from any blind acceptance-of-authority or the like. Therefore truthfulness is an individuality, a being which is so avoided in human development. Therefore untruthfulness calls forth as much that is tragic in human development. One would have to speak of a quite special revelation of the new age if one wished to describe, faithfully to reality and in an unprejudiced way, what lies in the development from the time in which Walther von der Vogelweide sang his songs to the time in which Goethe gave a hitherto unrevealed treasure of spiritual life to his contemporaries and to a posterity which did not understand him. But one would be impelled to call attention to the fact that something was, as it were, secretly developing for the whole of mankind on earth and that what was not secret, what one observes as world-history, was the Luciferic shaping of the old Nibelung-wildness.

Thus, from the year 1200 until the 20th century, the natural development of the Middle-Europe stood facing something Luciferic which the retained Nibelung-wildness was unfolding as soul-life in an age which had meanwhile become different. Let us consider these two streams. Let us consider the stream of which we may look for the starting-point about the year 1200, and let us set opposite to it the Luciferic element of the territorial princes. Then we shall understand the terrible Luciferic-Ahrimanic combination which was brought about, in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, in the last phase of a Middle-Europe which is moving towards its end. I mean the combination between the Ahrimanic element of modern industrialism, with its technical development and capitalism, and that of the old territorial princely system, Junkerdom, the dependents of the old Nibelung-wildness which had fallen into decay.

It is this which has brought Middle-Europe to its ruin. This Ahrimanic-Luciferic marriage between rising industrialism (other regions of the world were gripped by this in a way different from what happened in Middle-Europe, where the old Nibelung-wildness held sway in the territorial princely system) and the political administrators of Middle-Europe, the territorial princely system, was what would not permit the unfolding of a really middle-European or German mission to come about, as was called for in my Manifesto (Manifesto to the German people and to the civilized world: Vol. 1, lecture 1). And if one is quite frankly and freely to describe what terrible symptoms of a world-historically tragic decline were present from 1914 to 1919 and will, as a result, continue to be present just in Middle-Europe, one will have to describe the co-operation—cruelly terrible for this region of Middle-Europe—of the old, decadent, Nibelung-nobility with the newly-arisen industrialists of Middle-Europe, who justified their world-historical position by no inner pretensions of the soul.

The types which have appeared in Middle-Europe in these years out of these two different circles have become the most terrible destroyers of Middle-Europe. These were the men who, in boundless haughtiness and out of what they imagined to be a practical outlook, have for years been trampling down everything which was trying in any way to foster the further consideration of what began to sing with Walther von der Vogelweide and found its finality with Goetheanism. It is no longer to be wondered at that the external world has coined the term "militarism" in order to indicate these much deeper phenomena in an inappropriately-appropriate, appropriately-inappropriate way, for the world outside Middle-Europe is not even very much more thoughtful than is the middle-European world. Understanding for the middle-European nature has nowhere been found, but it must also be said that what has developed into Goetheanism in this Middle-Europe has gone backward with giant strides since the age of Goethe.

If one speaks of the crossing of the Threshold into the supersensible world, one must always call to mind something which was always said in the old days, when men knew much from atavistic clairvoyance, about the experiences of the human soul which crosses this Threshold to the supersensible, namely "passage through the gate of death". Many a thing is going on in the whole of humanity which is announcing itself in a soul-spiritual way as a passing through the gate of soul-spiritual death. And, as I wish to say once again, all sorts of things ought to be considered not in such a way that one just immediately identifies single phenomena with the great, revolutionary impulses of world-historical development. But one must be able to drag what happens in individual instances into the light of what can come to us, spiritual-scientifically, as illumination of the great, incisive impulses of our time.

It is, to be sure, just now that something remarkable has happened just in Middle-Europe. Characteristic phenomena can be perceived. What I have often described to you as expressing the reality of the soul-life through speech is letting itself continue in this middle-European spiritual life just about the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The industrial-technical-capitalist coloring which the fashionable culture of Middle-Europe has gradually taken on is bringing it about that people are quite forgetting the earlier age up to the 12th century. Really, the Germans of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th do not know how they are Germans, or as the result of what. The events of the early age were received in a real sleep of the soul, for this had not penetrated into the consciousness of the so-called educated classes, who gradually broke with what had found its finality in Goetheanism. Nothing of the true spiritual substance which was coming up had penetrated into the consciousness of the so-called educated classes. And thus it could come about—and many similar examples could be brought forward—that serious people were inclined to take as serious drama or serious poetry the glorification of the German heroic past by a brawling fellow such as Ernst von Wildenbruch.

Ernst von Wildenbruch has dramatized much about certain emperors, kings and princes of the early days, but he has always represented only the least important family events of all, and never world-historical impulses. One therefore has the feeling in his dramas: words are sounding here like a tinny noise, nothing but beaten tins! But we have already come so far in the age of industrialism, which must work destructively just on peoples, such as the German people, with an innate talent for spirituality, that people feel the tintinnabulations of Ernst von Wildenbruch to be real poetry. Yes, we have come so far that men like Herman Grimm, who have attained to a really fine comprehension of the recent development of Art, who have brought to it a fine spiritual comprehension of a phase of human development, are filled with deep admiration as they stand before the soulless bawling of Ernst von Wildenbruch and liken this to the songs of the great poets of world-history. So far has modern mankind departed from what is an inner comprehension of true reality! And yet you know what Herman Grimm is one of the personages of the new age whom I honor most.

This, my dear friends, must be recorded if one is to describe in what an age we live. This must be stressed and described in order to understand what it is to mean that our time is, in a certain way, passing through a spiritual death in order to come to a higher stage in the development of mankind.

This lecture appeared in The Golden Blade, 1954.

From the two preceding lectures you will have realised that in finding it necessary to speak at the present time of the threefold social order, anthroposophical spiritual science is not actuated by any subjective views or aims. The purpose of the lecture yesterday was to point to impulses deeply rooted in the life of the peoples of the civilised world—the world as it is in this Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. I tried to show how, from about the year 1200 A.D. onwards, there awakened in Middle Europe an impulse leading to the growth of what may be called the civic social order, but that this civic social life of the middle classes was infiltrated by the remains of a life of soul belonging to earlier centuries—by those decadent Nibelung traits which appeared particularly among the ruling strata in the mid-European countries.

I laid special stress upon the existence of a radical contrast in mid-European life from the thirteenth until the twentieth centuries, culminating in the terrible death-throes of social life that have come upon Middle Europe. This incisive contrast was between the inner, soul-life of the widespread middle-class, and that of the descendants of the old knighthood, of the feudal overlords, of those in whom vestiges of the old Nibelung characteristics still survived. These latter were the people who really created the political life of Middle Europe, whereas the bulk of the middle class remained non-political, a-political. If one desires to be a spiritual scientist from the practical point of view, serious study must be given to this difference of soul-life between the so-called educated bourgeoisie and all those who held any kind of ruling positions in Middle Europe at that time. I spoke of this in the lecture yesterday.

We will now consider in rather greater detail why it was that the really brilliant spiritual movement which lasted from the time of Walter von der Vogelweide until that of Goetheanism, and then abruptly collapsed, failed to gain any influence over social life or to produce any thoughts which could have been fruitful in that sphere. Even Goethe, with all his power to unfold great, all-embracing ideas in many domains of life, was really only able to give a few indications—concerning which one may venture to say that even he was not quite clear about them—as to what must come into being as a new social order in civilised humanity. Fundamentally speaking, the tendency towards the threefold membering of a healthy social organism was already present in human beings, subconsciously, by the end of the eighteenth century. The demands for freedom, equality and fraternity, which can have meaning only when the threefold social order becomes reality, testified to the existence of this subconscious longing. Why did it never really come to the surface?

This is connected with the whole inherent character of mid-European spiritual life. At the end of the lecture yesterday I spoke of a strange phenomenon. I said that Hermann Grimm—for whom I have always had such high regard and whose ideas were able to shed light upon so many aspects of art and general human interest of bygone times—succumbed to the extraordinary fallacy of admiring such an out-and-out phrasemonger as Wildenbruch! In the course of years I have often mentioned an incident which listeners may have thought trivial, but which can be deeply indicative for those who study life in its symptomatological aspect. Among the many conversations I had with Hermann Grimm while I was in personal contact with him, there was one in which I spoke from my own point of view about many things that need to be understood in the spiritual sense. In telling this story I have always stressed the fact that Hermann Grimm's only response to such mention of the spiritual was to make a warding-off gesture with his hand, indicating that this was a realm he was not willing to enter. A supremely true utterance, consisting of a gesture of the hand, was made at that moment. It was true inasmuch as Hermann Grimm, for all his penetration into many things connected with the so-called spiritual evolution of mankind, into art, into matters of universal human concern, had not the faintest inkling of what ‘spirit’ must signify for men of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. He simply did not know what spirit really is from the standpoint of a man of this epoch. In speaking of such matters one must keep bluntly to the truth: until it came to the spirit, there was truth in a man like Hermann Grimm. He made a parrying gesture because he had no notion of how to think about the spirit. Had he been one of the phrasemongers going about masked as prophets today endeavouring to better the lot of mankind, he would have believed that he too could speak about the spirit; he would have believed that by reiterating Spirit, spirit, spirit! something is expressed that has been nurtured in one's own soul.

Among those who of recent years have been talking a great deal about the spirit, without a notion of its real nature, are the theosophists—the majority of them at any rate. For it can truly be said that of all the vapid nonsense that has been uttered of late, the theosophical brand has been the most regrettable and also in a certain respect the most harmful in its effects. But a statement like the one I have made about Hermann Grimm—not thinking of him as a personality but as a typical representative of the times—raises the question: how comes it that such a true representative of Middle European life has no inkling of how to think about the spiritual, about the spirit? It is just this that makes Hermann Grimm the typical representative of Middle European civilisation. For when we envisage this brilliant culture of the townsfolk, which has its start about the year 1200 and lasts right on into the period of Goetheanism, we shall certainly perceive as its essential characteristic—but without valuing it less highly on this account—that it is impregnated in the best sense with soul but empty of anything that can be called spirit. That is the fact we have to grasp, with a due sense of the tragedy of it: this brilliant culture was devoid of spirit. What is meant here, of course, is spirit as one learns to apprehend it through anthroposophical spiritual science.

Again and again I return to Hermann Grimm as a representative personality, for the thinking of thousands and thousands of scholarly men in Middle Europe was similar to his. Hermann Grimm wrote an excellent book about Goethe, containing the substance of lectures he gave at the University of Berlin in the seventies of the last century. Taking it all in all, what Hermann Grimm said about Goethe is really the best that has been said at this level of scholarship. From the vantage-point of a rich life of soul, Hermann Grimm derived his gift not only for portraying individual men but for accurately discerning and assessing their most characteristic traits. He was brilliant in hitting upon words for such characterisations. Take a simple example. In the nature of things, Hermann Grimm was one of those who misunderstood the character of the wild Nibelung people. He was an ardent admirer of Frederick the Great and pictured him as a Germanic hero. Now Macaulay, the English historian and man of letters, wrote about Frederick the Great, naturally from the English point of view. In an essay on Macaulay, Hermann Grimm set out to show that in reality only a German possessed of sound insight is capable of understanding and presenting a true picture of Frederick the Great. Hermann Grimm describes Macaulay's picture of Frederick the Great in the very apt words: Macaulay makes of Frederick the Great a distorted figure of an English Lord, with snuff in his nose.

To hit upon such a characterisation indicates real ability to shape ideas and mental images in such a way that they have plasticity, mobility. Many similar examples could be found of Hermann Grimm's flair for apt characterisation. And other kindred minds, belonging to the whole period of Middle European culture of which I spoke yesterday, were endowed with the same gift. But if, with all the good-will born of a true appreciation of Hermann Grimm, we study his monograph on Goethe—what is our experience then? We feel: this is an extraordinarily good, a really splendid piece of writing—only it is not Goethe! In reality it gives only a shadow-picture of Goethe, as if out of a three-dimensional figure one were to make a two-dimensional shadow-picture, thrown on the screen. Goethe seems to wander through the chapters like a ghost from the year 1749 to the year 1832. What is described is a spectral Goethe—not what Goethe was, what he thought, what he desired.

Goethe himself did not succeed in lifting to the level of spiritual consciousness all that was alive within his soul. Indeed, the great ‘Goethe problem’ today is precisely this: to raise into consciousness in a truly spiritual way what was spiritually alive in Goethe. He himself was not capable of this, for culture in his day could give expression only to a rich life of the soul, not of the spirit. Therefore Hermann Grimm, too, firmly rooted as he was in the Goethean tradition, could depict only a shadow, a spectre, when he wanted to speak of Goethe's spirit. It is thoroughly characteristic that the best modern exposition of Goethe and Goetheanism should produce nothing but a spectre of Goethe.

Why is it that through the whole development of this brilliant phase of culture there is no real grasp of the spirit, no experience of it or feeling for it? Men such as Troxler, and Schelling too at times, pointed gropingly to the spirit. But speaking quite objectively, it must be said that this culture was empty of spirit. And because of this, men were also ignorant of the needs, the conditions, that are essential for the life of the spirit. Here too there is something which may well up as a feeling of tragedy from contemplation of this stream of culture: men were unable to perceive, to divine, the conditions necessary for the life of the spirit, above all in the social sphere; For the reason why the social life of Middle Europe has developed through the centuries to the condition in which it finds itself today is that it had no real experience of the spirit, nor felt the need to meet the fundamental requirement of the spiritual life by emancipating it, making it independent of and separate from the political sphere. Because men had no understanding of the spirit, they allowed it to be merged with the political life of the State, where it could unfold only in shackles. I am speaking here only of Middle Europe; in other regions of the modern civilised world it was the same, although the causes were different.

And then, in the inmost soul, a reaction can set in. Then a man can experience how in his study of nature the spirit remains dumb, silent, uncommunicative. Then the soul rebels, gathers its forces and strives to bring the spirit to birth from its own inmost being! This can happen only in an epoch when scientific thinking impinges on a culture which has no innate disposition towards spirituality. For if men are not inwardly dead, if they are inwardly alive, the impulse of the spirit begins of itself to stir within them. We must recognise that since the middle of the 15th century the spirit has to be brought to birth through encountering what is dead if it is to penetrate into man's life of soul. The only persons who can gain satisfaction from inwardly experiencing the spiritualised soul-life of the Greeks are those who, with their classical scholarship, live in that afterglow of Greek culture which enables the soul-quality of the spirit to pulsate through a man's own soul. But men who are impelled to live earnestly with natural science and to discern what is deathly, corpse-like in it—they will make it possible for the spirit itself to come alive in their souls.

If a man is to have real and immediate experience of the spirit in this modern age, he must not only have smelt the fumes of prussic acid or ammonia in laboratories, or have studied specimens extracted from corpses in the dissecting room, but out of the whole trend and direction of natural scientific thinking he must have known the odour of death in order that through this experience he may be led to the light of the spirit! This is an impulse which must take effect in our times; it is also one of the testings which men of the modern age must undergo. Natural science exists far more for the purpose of educating man than for communicating truths about nature. Only a naive mind could believe that any natural law discovered by learned scientists enshrines an essential, inner truth. Indeed it does not! The purpose of natural science, devoid of spirit as it is, is the education of men. This is one of the paradoxes implicit in the historic evolution of humanity.

And so it was only in the very recent past, in the era after Goetheanism, that the spirit glimmered forth; for it was then, for the first time, that the essentially corpse-like quality in the findings of natural science came to the fore; then and not until then could the spirit ray forth—for those, of course, who were willing to receive its light. Until the time of Goethe, men protected themselves against the sorry effects of a spiritual life shackled in State-imposed restrictions by cultivating a form of spiritual life fundamentally alien to them, namely the spiritual life of ancient Greece; this was outside the purview of the modern State for the very reason that it had nothing to do with modern times. A makeshift separation of the spiritual life from the political sphere was provided by the adoption of an alien form of culture. This Greek culture was a cover for the spiritual emptiness of Middle European life and of modern Europe in general.

On the other hand, the need to separate the economic sphere from the Rights-sphere, from the political life of the State proper, was not perceived. And why not? When all is said and done, nobody can detach himself from the economic field. To speak trivially, the stomach sees to that! In the economic sphere it is impossible for men to live unconcernedly through such cataclysms as are allowed to occur, all unnoticed, in the political and spiritual spheres. Economic activity was going on all the time, and it developed in a perfectly straightforward way. The transformation of the old impenetrable forests into meadows and cornfields, with all the ensuing economic consequences, went steadily ahead. But into economic life, too, there came an alien intrusion, one that had actually found a footing in the souls of men in Middle Europe earlier than that of Greece, namely the Latin-Roman influence. Everything pertaining to the State, to the Rights-life, to political life, derives from this Latin-Roman influence. And here again is something that will have to be stressed by history in the future but has been overlooked by the conventional, tendentious historiography of the immediate past, with its bias towards materialism—the strangely incongruous fact that certain economic ideas and procedures are a direct development from social relationships described, for example, by Tacitus, as prevailing in the Germanic world during the first centuries after the founding of Christianity.

But that is not all. These trends in economic thinking did not go forward unhampered. The Roman view of rights, Roman political thinking, seeped into the economic usages and methods originally prevailing in Europe, infiltrated them through and through and caused a sharp cleavage between the economic sphere and the political sphere. Thus the economic sphere and the political sphere, the former coloured by the old Germanic way of life and the latter by the Latin-Roman influence, remained separate on the surface but without any organic distinction consistent with the threefold membering of the body social: the distinction was merely superficial, a mask. Two heterogeneous strata were intermingled; it was felt that they did not belong together, in spite of external unification. Inwardly, however, people were content, because in their souls they experienced the two spheres as separate and distinct.

One need only study mediaeval and modern history in the right way and it will be clear that this mediaeval history is really the story of perpetual rebellion, self-defense, on the part of the economic relationships surviving from olden times against the political State, against the Roman order of life. Imaginative study of these things shows unmistakably how Roman influences in the form of jurisprudence penetrate into men via the heads of the administrators. A great deal of the Roman element had even found its way into the wild Nibelung men in their period of decline. “Graf” is connected with “grapho”—writing. One can picture how the peasants, thinking in terms of husbandry, rise up in rebellion against this Roman juridical order, with fists clenched in their pockets, or with flails. Naturally, this is not always so outwardly perceptible. But when one observes history truly, these factors are present in the whole moral trend and impulse of those times. And so—I am merely characterising, not criticising, for everything that happened has also brought blessings and was necessary for the historic evolution of Middle Europe—all that developed from the seeds planted in mid-European civilisation was permeated through and through by the juristic-political influences of the Roman world and the humanism of Greece, by the Greek way of conceiving spirit in the guise of soul.

On the other hand, directly economic life acquired its modern, international character, the old order was doomed. A man might have had a very good classical education and be an ignoramus in respect of modern natural science, but then he was inwardly on a retrograde path. A man of classical education could not keep abreast of his times unless he penetrated to some extent into what modern natural scientific education had to offer. And again, if a man were schooled in natural science, if he acquired some knowledge of modern natural science and of what had come out of the old Roman juristic system in the period of which I have spoken, he could not help suffering from an infantile disease, from ‘culture scarlet fever’, ‘culture measles’, in a manner of speaking. In the old Imperium Romanum a juristic culture was fitting and appropriate. Then this same juristic principle, the res publica (i.e. the conception of it), was transplanted from ancient Rome into the sphere of Middle European culture, together with the element of Nibelung barbarism on the other side. One really gets ‘culture scarlet fever’, ‘culture measles’, if one does not merely think of jurisprudence in the abstract, but, with sound natural scientific concepts, delves into the stuff that figures as modern jurisprudence in literature and in science.

We can see that this state of things had reached a certain climax when we find a really gifted man such as Rudolf von Ihering at an utter loss to know how to deal with the pitiable notions of jurisprudence current in the modern age. The book written by Ihering on the aim of justice (Der Zweck im Recht) was a grotesque production, for here was a man who had made a little headway in natural scientific thinking endeavouring to apply the concepts he had acquired to jurisprudence—the result being a monstrosity of human thinking. To study modern literature on law is a veritable martyrdom for sound thinking; one feels all the time as though so many worms were crawling through the brain. This is the actual experience—I am simply describing it pictorially.

We must be courageous enough to face these things fairly and squarely, and then it will be clear that we have arrived at the point of time when not only certain established usages and institutions, but men's very habits of thought, must be metamorphosed, re-cast; when men must begin to think about many things in a different way. Only then will the social institutions in the external world be able, under the influence of human thinking and feeling, to take the form that is called for by these ominous and alarming facts.

A fundamental change in the mental approach to certain matters of the highest importance is essential. But because between 1200 and the days of Goetheanism, modern humanity, especially in Middle Europe, absorbed all unwittingly thoughts that wriggled through the brain like worms, there crept over thinking the lazy passivity that is characteristic of the modern age. It comes to expression in the absence of will from the life of thought. Men allow their thoughts to take possession of them; they yield to these thoughts; they prefer to have them in the form of instinct. But in this manner no headway can be made towards the spirit. The spirit can be reached only by genuinely putting the will into thinking, so that thinking becomes an act like any other, like hewing wood. Do modern men feel that thinking tires them? They do not, because thinking for them is not activity at all. But the fact that anyone who thinks with thoughts, not with words, will get just the same fatigue as he gets from hewing wood, and actually in a shorter time, so that he simply has to stop—that is quite outside their experience. Nevertheless, this is what will have to be experienced, for otherwise modern mankind as a community will be incapable of achieving the transition from the sense-world into the super-sensible world of which I spoke in the two preceding lectures. Only by entering thus into the super-sensible world, with understanding for what is seen and apprehended in the spirit, will human souls find harmony again.

The year 1200 is the time of Walter von der Vogelweide, the time when the spiritual life of Middle Europe is astir with powerful imaginations of which conventional history has little to say. Then it flows on through the centuries, but from the 15th and 16th centuries onwards takes into itself the germs of decline with the founding of the Universities of Prague, Ingolstadt, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Restock, Wurzburg and the rest. The founding of these Universities throughout Middle Europe occurred almost without exception in a single century. The kind of life and thinking emanating from the Universities started the trend towards abstraction—towards what was subsequently to be idolised and venerated as the pure, natural scientific thinking which today invades the customary ways of thought with such devastating results.

Fundamentally speaking, this gave a definite stamp to the whole mentality of the educated middle class. Naturally, many individuals were not deeply influenced, but all the same the effect was universal. Of salient importance during this period was the increasing receptiveness of people to a form of soul-life entirely foreign to them. Side by side with what was developed through those who were the bearers of this middle-class culture, which reached its culmination in Goethe, Herder and Schiller, alien elements and impulses were at work.

I am speaking here of something profoundly characteristic. In their souls, the bearers of this culture were seeking for the spirit without a notion of what the spirit is. And where did they seek it? In the realm of Greek culture! They learnt Greek in their intermediate schools, and what was instilled into them by way of spiritual substance was Greek in tenor and content. To speak truly of the spirit as conceived in Middle Europe from the thirteenth right on into the twentieth century, one would have to say: spirit, as conveyed by the inculcation of Greek culture. No spiritual life belonging intrinsically and innately to the people came into being. Greek culture did not really belong to the epoch beginning in the middle of the 15th century, which we call the epoch of the evolution of self-consciousness. And so the bourgeoisie in Middle Europe were imbued with an outworn form of Greek culture, and this was the source of all that they were capable of feeling and experiencing in regard to the spirit.

But what the Greek experienced of the spirit was merely its expression in the life of soul (Seelenseite das Geistes). What gave profundity to the culture of ancient Greece was that the Greek rose to perception of the highest manifestation of soul-life. That was what he called ‘spirit’. True, the spirit shines down from the heights, pulsing through the realm of soul; but when the gaze is directed upwards, it finds, to begin with, only the expression of the spirit in the realm of soul.

Man's task in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, however, is to lift himself into the very essence of the spirit—an attainment still beyond his reach in the days of Greece. This is of far greater significance than is usually supposed, for it sheds light upon the whole way in which medieval, neo-medieval culture apprehended the spirit.

What, then, was required in order to reach a concept, an inward experience, of the spirit appropriate for the modern age? It is precisely by studying a representative figure like Hermann Grimm that we can discover this. It is something of which a man such as Hermann Grimm, steeped in classical lore, had not the faintest inkling—namely, the strivings of natural science and the scientific mode of thinking. This thinking is devoid of spirit; precisely where it is great it contains no trace of spirit, not an iota of spirituality. All the concepts of natural science, all its notions of laws of nature, are devoid of spirit, are mere shadow-pictures of spirit; while men are investigating the laws of nature, no trace of the spirit is present in their consciousness.

Two ways are open here. Either a man can give himself up to natural science, contenting himself—as often happens today—with what natural science has to offer; then he will certainly equip his mind with a number of scientific laws and ideas concerning nature—but he loses the spirit. Along this path it is possible to become a truly great investigator, but at the cost of losing all spirituality. That is the one way. The other is to be inwardly aware of the tragic element arising from the lack of spirituality in natural science, precisely where science appears in all its greatness. Man immerses his soul in the scientific lore of nature, in the abstract, unspiritual laws of chemistry, physics, biology, which, having been discovered at the dissecting table, indicate by this very fact that from the living they yield only the dead. The soul delves into what natural science has to impart concerning the laws of human evolution. When a man allows all this to stream into him, when he endeavours not to pride himself on his knowledge, but asks: ‘What does this really give to the human soul?’—then he experiences something true; then spirit is not absent. Herein, too, lies the tragic problem of Nietzsche, whose life of soul was torn asunder by the realisation that modern scientific learning is devoid of spirituality.

As you know, insight into the super-sensible world does not depend upon clairvoyance; all that is required is to apprehend by the exercise of healthy human reason what clairvoyance can discover. It is not essential for the whole of mankind to become clairvoyant; but what is essential, and moreover within the reach of every human being, is to develop insight into the spiritual world through the healthy human intelligence. Only thus can harmony enter into souls of the modern age: for the loss of this harmony is due to the conditions of evolution in our time. The development of Europe, with her American affinities on the one hand and the Asiatic frontier on the other, has reached a parting of the ways. Spiritual Beings of higher worlds are bringing to a decisive issue the overwhelming difference between former ages and modern times as regards the living side-by-side of diverse populations on the earth.

How were the peoples of remote antiquity distributed and arranged over the globe? Up to a certain point of time, not long before the Mystery of Golgotha, the configuration of peoples on earth was determined from above downwards, inasmuch as the souls simply descended from the spiritual world into the physical bodies dwelling in some particular territory. Owing to physiological, geographical, climatic conditions in early times, certain kinds of human bodies were to be found in Greece, and similarly on the peninsula of Italy. The souls came from above, were predestined entirely from above, and took very deep root in man's whole constitution, in his outer, bodily physiognomy.

Then came the great migrations of the peoples. Men wandered over the earth in different streams. Races and peoples began to intermix, thus enhancing the importance of the element of heredity in earthly life. A population inhabiting a particular region of the earth moved to another; for example the Angles and Saxons who were living in certain districts of the Continent migrated to the British Isles. That is one such migration. But in respect of physical heredity, the descendants of the Angles and Saxons are dependent upon what had developed previously on the Continent; this was a determining factor in their bodily appearance, their practices, and so forth. Thus there came into the evolutionary process a factor working in and conditioned by the horizontal. Whereas the distribution of human beings over the earth had formerly depended entirely upon the way in which the souls incarnated as they came down from above, the wanderings and movements of men over the earth now also began to have an effect.

At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, however, a new cosmic historic impulse came into operation. For a period of time a certain sympathy existed between the souls descending from the spiritual world and the bodies on the earth below. Speaking concretely: souls who were sympathetically attracted by the bodily form and constitution of the descendants of the Angles and Saxons, now living in the British Isles, incarnated in those regions. In the 15th century this sympathy began to wane, and since then the souls have no longer been guided by racial characteristics, but once again by geographical conditions, the kind of climate, and so forth, on the earth below, and also by whether a certain region of the earth is flat or mountainous. Since the 15th century, souls have been less and less concerned with racial traits; once again they are guided more by the existing geographical conditions. Hence a kind of chasm is spreading through the whole of mankind today between the elements of heredity and race and the soul-element coming from the spiritual world. And if men of our time were able to lift more of their subconsciousness into consciousness, very few of them would—to use a trivial expression—feel comfortable in their skins. The majority would say: I came down to the earth in order to live on flat ground, among green things or upon verdant soil, in this or that kind of climate, and whether I have Roman or Germanic features is of no particular importance to me.

It certainly seems paradoxical when these things, which are of paramount importance for human life, are concretely described. Men who preach sound principles, saying that one should abjure materialism and turn towards the spirit—they too talk just like the pantheists, of spirit, spirit, spirit. People are not shocked by this today; but when anyone speaks concretely about the spirit they simply cannot take it. That is how things are. And harmony must again be sought between, shall I say, geographical predestination and the racial element that is spread over the earth. The leanings towards internationalism in our time are due to the fact that souls no longer concern themselves with the element of race.

A figure of speech I once used is relevant here. I compared what is happening now to a ‘vertical’ migration of peoples, whereas in earlier times what took place was a ‘horizontal’ migration. This comparison is no mere analogy, but is founded upon facts of the spiritual life.

To all this must be added that, precisely through the spiritual evolution of modern times, man is becoming more and more spiritual in the sphere of his subconsciousness, and the materialistic trend in his upper consciousness is more and more sharply at variance with the impulses that are astir in his subconsciousness. In order to understand this, we must consider once more the threefold membering of the human being.

When the man of the present age, whose attention is directed only to the material and the physical, thinks of this threefold membering, he says to himself: I perceive through my senses: they are indeed distributed over the whole body but are really centralised in the head; acts of perception, therefore, belong to the life of the nerves and senses—and there he stops. Further observation will, of course, enable him to describe how the human being breathes, and how the life passes over from the breath into the movement of the heart and the pulsation of the blood. But that is about as far as a he gets today. Metabolism is studied [in] all detail, but not as one of the three members of threefold man: actually it is taken to be the whole man. One need not, of course, go to the lengths of the scientific thinker who said: man is what he eats (Der Mensch ist, was er isst)—but, broadly speaking, science is pretty strongly convinced that it is so. In Middle Europe at the present time it looks as if he will soon be what he does not eat!

This threefold membering of the human being, which will ultimately find expression in a threefold social order because its factual reality is becoming more and more evident, manifests in different forms over the earth. Truly, man is not simply the being he appears outwardly to be, enclosed within his skin. It was in accordance with a deep feeling and perception when in my Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation”, in connection with the characters of Capesius and Strader, I drew attention to the fact that whatever is done by men on earth has its echo in cosmic happenings out yonder in the universe. With every thought we harbour, with every movement of the hand, with everything we say, whether we are walking or standing, whatever we do—something happens in the cosmos.

The faculties for perceiving and experiencing these things are lacking in man today. He does not know—nor can it be expected of him and it is paradoxical to speak as I am speaking now—he does not know how what is happening here on the earth would appear if seen, for example, from the Moon. If he could look from the Moon he would see that the life of the nerves and senses is altogether different from what can be known of it in physical existence. The nerves-and-senses life, everything that transpires while you see, hear, smell, taste, is light in the cosmos, the radiation of light into the cosmos. From your seeing, from your feeling, from your hearing, the earth shines out into the cosmos.

Different again is the effect produced by what is rhythmic in the human being: breathing, heart movement, blood pulsation. This activity manifests in the universe in great and powerful rhythms which can be heard by the appropriate organs of hearing. And the process of metabolism in man radiates out into cosmic space as life streaming from the earth. You cannot perceive, hear, see, smell or feel without shining out into the cosmos. Whenever your blood circulates, you resound into universal space, and whenever metabolism takes place within you, this is seen from out yonder as the life of the whole earth.

But there are great differences in respect of all this—for example, between Asia and Europe. Seen from outside, the thinking peculiar to the Asiatics would appear—even now, when a great proportion of them have lost all spirituality—as bright, shining light raying out into the spiritual space of the universe. But the further we go towards the West, the dimmer and darker does this radiance become. On the other hand, more and more life surges out into cosmic space the further we go towards the West. Only from this vista can there arise in the human soul what may be called perception of the cosmic aspect of the earth—with the human beings belonging to it.

Such conceptions will be needed if mankind is to go forward to a propitious and not an ominous future. The idiocy that is gradually being bred in human beings who are made to learn from the sketchy maps of modern geography: Here is the Danube, here the Rhine, here Reuss, here Aare, here Bern, Basle, Zürich, and so forth—all this external delineation which merely adds material details to the globe—this kind of education will be the ruin of humanity. It is necessary as a foundation and not to be scoffed at; but nevertheless it will lead gradually to man's downfall. The globe of the future will have to indicate: here the earth shines because spirituality is contained in the heads of men: there the earth radiates out more life into cosmic space because of the characteristics of the human beings inhabiting this particular territory.

Something I once said here is connected with this. (One must always illumine one fact by another). I told you that Europeans who settle in America develop hands resembling those of the Red Indians; they begin to resemble the Indian type. This is because the souls coming down into human bodies today are directed more by geographical conditions, as they were in the olden days. In our own time, the souls are directed, not by racial considerations, not by what develops out of the blood, but by geographical conditions, as in the past. But it will be necessary to get at the roots of what is going on in humanity. This can be done only when men accustom themselves to concepts of greater flexibility, capable of penetrating matters of this kind. These concepts, however, can be developed only on the foundation of spiritual science. And such a foundation is available when the spirit can be brought to birth in the human soul. For this, man needs a free spiritual life, emancipated from the political life of the State.

I have now given you one or two indications of what is astir in humanity, and of the need to strive for a new ordering of social life. Social demands cannot nowadays be advanced in terms of the trivial concepts commonly employed. Men must have insight into the nature of present-day humanity; they must make good what they have neglected in the study of modern mankind.

Translator Unknown

Today, first of all, I have the urge in my soul to say something to you with regard to what wills, out of the impulses and need of our time, to be spoken to mankind in general through my booklet about the Social Question which will be appearing in the near future. It will be called The Key Points of the Social Question in the Vital Necessities of the Present and the Future (GA 23). It will have become evident to you from the lectures which we have held here for many weeks that what I now have to say just with regard to the Social Question is, perhaps, not only a sort of secondary stream by the side of what is pulsing in our whole spiritual-scientific striving, but that, in fact, matters must be so considered that this spiritual-scientific striving develops, in a way peculiar to itself, understanding for the needs and demands of our time and of the near future. The basic character of our time can really only be radically helped as a result of spiritual impulses. Everything else could at best be a substitute. Even the external activity which has to take place will have to be of such a kind that—I will not say a particular form of Spiritual Science, but that a spiritual life, penetrating to the real Spirit, becomes possible within the Social Order.

This is necessary for the reason that, as a result of human development, the man of the present day is in a quite definite position, which I have described to you from the most diverse sides. Today I shall only refer once more to the fact that, basically speaking, all considerations have led us to realise how the man of the present day is, as a result of his organisation, in a certain state of disunion at the present point of time. You see, one can easily be inclined to look on man as a unity in his whole being. But he is not a unity. We know that he is a three-membered being. And these three members of the human entity stand in different relationships to the physical-, soul- and spiritual outer world, and to his own inner part, in the various epochs of the post-Atlantean period.

We can now consider the three-membered man in two different ways. (We will make this schematic and simply place the three members of man one above the other—see diagram). Whether we now give names to these three members according to their physical aspect and say: nerves-senses system, rhythmic or breathing-and-heart system, and metabolic system, or whether we give them names according to their spiritual aspect and say the Intuitive-spiritual, the Inspirational-psychic and the Imaginative-bodily, or whether we proceed with other words as I have represented in my book Theosophy regarding this three-membered man from the spiritual aspect, or whether we fix our attention on the physical projection of the three-membered man, to which I have drawn attention in my last book, Riddles of the Soul, from every point of view it appears to us that man is a three-membered being. But this three-membered being, man, is, if I may say so, on the other hand not at all so "simply three-membered". We can say: Man is, in a certain sense, a double being, a twofold being, and the boundary really goes midway through the rhythmic system, right through the breathing-and-heart system.

In our present phase of development, the inner part of man really only lives in the metabolic system and the lower part of the heart-lungs system, of the rhythmic system. There, man is inward in reality in today's age. On the other had, with regard to the upper part of the heart-breathing system and similarly with regard to the nerves-senses system, man is to a great extent external today. You will at once understand what I mean. Man perceives the external world through the senses: he then works it up by means of his understandings. He also breathes in the outer world by means of his lungs. From outside, man takes what comes from perceptions, from the working of his understanding, from breathing-in. But man is, as it were, a sort of dwelling-house with respect to what comes to him from outside (see diagram). The whole of external nature is really contained in this upper part of man: colours, tones, stars, clouds, the air even as far as the breathing process—and you yourselves are really only the dwelling-house for this external matter. In olden times, men have found something else which was related to this upper part: elementary spirits and also divine-spiritual beings of the higher Hierarchies. They have spoken of these nature-beings in their mythologies, which were wiser than the natural-scientific knowledge of today. Now they have fallen out of human perceptions.

Today, Man only perceives the sensible and works it up. Here, he is really carrying only the external world into himself. We are hardly sufficiently aware of how little of ourselves there really is in what we carry into ourselves as perceptions of the outer world, or even as what the memory retains of the outer world. If you go up this hill in the morning or at midday and see the Goetheanum, then go down and carry in yourself the picture of the Goetheanum and all that has happened, you apparently have something in you, but yet something which is only a mirror-image in you, for the Goetheanum is standing here on this hill. You are only its dwelling-place—with the upper part of Man which I have separated off (see diagram). And Man is so poor in spirit today because he no longer finds the Spirit in the external world.

Yes, my dear friends, there were times in the development of the Earth in which, after people had gone down again, what had been seen would have worked in those who had come up the hill here and thus had seen something such as the Goetheanum, not only as a fantasy, as an inner mystery but as a world of facts. From what they had seen people would have received—just as they carry down colours and forms now—those spiritual beings which had slipped out of every corner and which had taken part in what man did here. But this is over for men, just as though the elementary and spiritual beings had fled out of external nature. External nature is emptied of Spirit, and as a result so is this part of the human interior. And all that really is left for what is inward is the lower part of the chest, and the metabolic system with the limbs.

For the externalised man of today, this is what he calls his "inner part" if he does not really begin to interest himself in true spirituality. Man has arrived at the point where he speaks, it is true, of his "inner part", but, basically speaking, he means nothing beyond his metabolic system and, at most, the connection which the breathing and the rhythm of the heart enter into with the metabolic system. We should not be deceived about it, and should be clear with ourselves: when men declare that they are out of order in their "inner part", that they have inner difficulties, this is only a verbal expression for some lack of regularity in the metabolic system.

One man is cheerful, another ill-tempered owing to his "inner part", one is passionate, another full of humour. Basically speaking, all this is a result of the metabolic system and at most the reaction of the breathing and heart-circulation on the metabolic system. When one says that the soul is out of order in this or that person, it is, in reality, his stomach and intestines which are out of order. All that people call "soul-life" is, basically speaking, only a verbal expression for events in the metabolic system. Naturally, no one wants to confess, in accordance with reality: my stomach, my intestines, spleen or liver or such things are not in order within me, but we say: my soul has this or that difficulty. This sounds better, more elegant, to many people; they consider it to be less materialistic. To anyone who looks at things according to reality, it is merely more untruthful. For we stand today in that phase of development in which human nature already separates itself into these two members.

You may ask: by what means can this be corrected? There is only one help for the man of today, namely to get loose from himself, by means of an interest in the affairs of mankind, through real interest in what concerns all men today, and to turn the attention as little as possible to these irregularities of the metabolic system in the wider sense, which are, nevertheless, almost universally present today. If men could get loose from themselves through a far-reaching interest, which is to be reached only by taking Spiritual Science seriously—then alone can health pour itself out over the human race today.

Today, you see, one has really characteristic experiences. I was recently at the League of Nations Congress at Berne¹, where they spoke about all the things about which it is unnecessary to speak today, because they just lead to nothing, and where they did not speak about all that is most necessary today. But I do not at all wish to mention this as the main point. I should like to mention, as the main point, something about the manor of speaking which cropped up in what almost all the speakers said. In at least every third sentence uttered by these speakers is found the little word "I". "I am of the opinion", "I think", "It seems to me that this or that is necessary", "I am in favour of this or that"—you can hear this in almost every sentence. And the men were quite angry if one did not join in in the same strain! If one speaks more from an objective standpoint, if one puts one's sentences in such a way that one gives priority to the inner, objective contents of the matter, without personal opinion, they say that one is speaking authoritatively, that one is speaking arrogantly. But surely the highest arrogance is when one brings the word "I" into one's mouth every third sentence.

But people have certainly forgotten, today, to feel this arrogance. They find it more sensible if someone is always talking of himself, and they find it in the highest degree immodest and arrogant if someone tries to speak from an objective standpoint, for, you see, they have this dim feeling: he is asserting that he knows something beyond what is his personal opinion. And it is a great sin today if anyone asserts that he does know something beyond what is his personal opinion. And as to those personal opinions—!

To those who are versed in Spiritual Science I should frequently like to describe this kind of conference more accurately, just from its spiritual-scientific standpoint! One hears a speaker of the kind who utters the little word "I" with every third sentence—"I think", " I am of the opinion", "this is sympathetic to me", "I ask you to enter into this": when this speaker is speaking about the super-State, the super-parliament, the spiritual scientist says to himself: the man surely has something wrong with his liver, something is out of order in his liver and the metabolic system is speaking out of the man. A second speaker gets up and talks in a similar way. As he goes away, the spiritual scientist says to himself: probably he has a gall stone. The third is inclined to stomach trouble.

These things are important only in an age in which materialism is pulsating, where the free soul, independent of what is material, does not speak, where, in fact, it is the body which speaks. And very often indeed, today, it is the body which speaks. Really, people are only accustomed to make use of old words of their bodily indispositions. To one who looks into things in a spiritual-scientific way it would be preferable if, instead of talking about the Superman (naturally, I do not mean Nietzsche, but the others who have spoken about the "Superman" after Nietzsche's time) were to talk about the "sub-stomach". For in this way they would better catch the likeness of the reality which is, in fact, speaking out of them.

This is not pessimism, my dear friends: it is quite simply the world of present day facts. And in the present time men are impelled to become untruthful for the simple reason that they are ashamed to call the facts by the right name. There is even a longing in them to give themselves up to that "man" which is, in fact, only the physical man. In our time it is certainly the case that perhaps the only reason why we have no Molière to write a new Malade imaginaire is that we should need too many Molières, for today there is a genuine enthusiasm for being ill in people who have time to be ill. Such people as have no time for it do not, for the most part, turn their attention to those conditions which are sufficient causes for making others, who have time to be ill, feel that they are ill.

One must look for the destructive workings of materialism not only where people talk of materialism or where they talk materialistically: these working show themselves in numerous other examples as well. And sometimes even talk about the Spirit today as nothing else than the purest materialism, for this talk about the Spirit is, for very many people, nothing else than an anaesthetic for their otherwise cosy materiality. The will to activity is lacking in men today, the will to real inner activity. This is the reason why the bourgeoisie has remained in a state of ineffectiveness in face of the Social Question which has been rising up for 70 years. It is a monstrous materialism which has taken hold of men in the most diverse forms—and especially the circles on whom, in recent times, was set the task of turning to the Spiritual.

One must know this about the basic impulses of our time, about what is living in our time. Not to know it implies that one is giving oneself up to illusions. Spiritual Science is of such great importance for present day men because it takes them away from themselves, but it must be truly comprehended in this sense. An illusion can easily arise regarding Spiritual Science: a quality can assert itself, which is so thoroughly propagated at the present time just as a result of materialism—namely, superficiality. If people grasp in a superficial way what Spiritual Science wishes to arouse in the way of interests, they can be all the more hardened in themselves, can be all the more pressed into themselves. Then nothing else at all is of assistance than to return again and again to what does not in any way concern us personally, but what represents the content of our Spiritual Science and the things which are found in its content, to take them as objectively as possible and, when one speaks about the most subjective things, not to take them in a subjective way! Only think how important it is to resist, in this point, temptations which lie near.

When I recently depicted how Man is really capable of development from outside only up to the 28th year today, and how development comes to an end at that point of time when he is standing just before the mind-soul and the Ego but does not come to them, and thereby goes to meet a certain inner emptiness—this, then, is an important truth for the present time. It is important to know this: it is important to receive it into oneself as an inner experience. But it would be dangerous to think afterwards: am I, perhaps, one of those who have not developed to the mind-soul in the right way from the 28th year forward? Just the most subjective things, which refer to what is most important of all, should be taken up objectively: we should not look into whether we are among those in whom something can happen in this way: we should just be able to look away from ourselves in the most important human truths, and look at the age, at humanity, and not always think of ourselves in an egotistical way.

It is this which is characteristic of the time, which is coming forth from the deep impulses of our time and which makes it so difficult today to propagate ideas which refer to the very most important impulses of the development of the time. Man can develop no interest from this basic disposition which I have described. Their ideas remain sensations for them, do not sufficiently take hold of them, do not sufficiently spur them on to activity.

This must now be said at a time when a kind of transition has occurred for all people who are genuinely interesting themselves in our Spiritual Science. Until now you have had a spiritual-scientific literature which refers to the inner development of man and to knowledge about the Spiritual World, and which spoke to a man in such a way that he could take hold of the world, his relationship with the world, his relationship with other men, so far as it is soul-spiritual, from the most varied points of view. Now this Spiritual Science is running, with a branch—it is proceeding as the main body of Spiritual Science, for just this main body of Spiritual Science is the most necessary thing of all for really making all relationships healthy—into a stream which speaks of the Social Question, of the making healthy of the Social Organism, and which may no longer be taken inactively, no longer just passively, because otherwise it would miss its goal. And just now it will appear how many of us have made themselves ripe, during the many preceding years in which they were taking Spiritual Science into themselves, for a clear grasp of what is now to be understood as the Social Question. For what matters is a clear, unprejudiced, unsentimental grasp of what is to be uttered particularly in my forthcoming book The Basic Issues of the Social Question—it will be something on account of which we shall now have to undergo a certain trial.

Up to now, one could certainly be a good spiritual scientist if one studied Spiritual Science without troubling oneself about what was going on in life outside. And we have, you see, just two phenomena within out anthroposophical movement about which we really should reflect. We have the one phenomena that we have quite good anthroposophists who, though they know a great deal about cosmic development, the membering of Man, reincarnation, destiny and karma, nonetheless have no inkling of the reality of life, but who have sought something just in Anthroposophy, which has enabled them to hold themselves aloof from this reality of life. Those whom what I have just said specially concerns do not realise at all that it does concern them. For every one of them considers himself in naive fashion to be a practical man with regard to his life. This is the one phenomena which we have among us.

The other phenomena is sectarianism in some form or other. There is a deep inclination present, you see, to produce sectarianism just in movements which have to do with the Spiritual. It does not depend on whether this sectarianism is now developing from little cliques which appear with a sectarian character, even in very minor matters, or whether direct sectarianism is produced. For the main point is to realise that objectivity, an impersonal point of view, must permeate this anthroposophically-oriented spiritual-scientific movement which is here referred to.

This, you see, was always the difficult thing about our movement, that the personal was interchanged with what is objectively-factual, mostly without our being aware of it. When people gather into a clique which is larger of smaller, they are in full belief that they have a quite factual interest. Certainly they fully believe this, for they do not notice at all that they in reality they are generally doing what they wish for, just because this person stands near them spiritual-scientifically, because he is connected with them is such and such a way, because they wish to have just this or that relationship with him, or the like.

People are not aware of this. They live in the full belief that they are being objective. But just this sectarianism, this gathering in cliques, has brought forth the dreadful consequence that the promulgation of Spiritual Science, in whatever sphere it may be, is not judged today according to what it is but according to what a society, the Anthroposophical Society, is making and has made out of it. While I point to the most mischievous shortcomings and the most horrible "marsh-plants", of the type of an S------, it may not at all be overlooked, if one goes to the root of the matter, that this kind of "marsh-plant" has been coaxed on, raised up and cultivated by the cliquishness and sectarianism which have developed widely in the last 17 or 18 years in the anthroposophical movement. But what is going on in this anthroposophical movement very often projects itself into Anthroposophy because, you see, sins are committed by very many members against what is the most significant impulse of the time today, against individualism in the spiritual sphere. How frequently do we hear: we Anthroposophists, we Theosophists, want this or that! It is dreadful that we have as many as three basic principles!—We need no basic principles at all, for it is not these which matter: we need truths, not summarising-principles, and these truths are only for single human beings, for the individual. The Society—how often I have said it—should be something outward, but the thing itself does not concern the Society.

We must now be able to take this in a really and truly serious way. If what is now to flow into the world as a result of efforts with regard to the Social Question is to be borne along by sectarianism or clique-spirit or the various narrow-mindednesses which I have described today, quite terrible injury will be done to the matter! Here we must really develop to a more broad-minded way of thinking: we must seek for access into real, practical life. This is the main point.

Do take what I am saying about these things only in a friendly spirit. Do not take it as though I should like to say anything derogatory on the one side or the other. But now I really am compelled to utter a fundamental warning before this social side of our activities becomes the concern of all members, as it is to become—a warning not to mix into this social thinking any sectarianism, any pettiness, anything which has no wide horizon, which does not arise from clear thinking. But try, to an ever greater extent, to think from the experience and reality of life! I was, indeed, highly astonished when, a short time ago, the slogan (Devise) reached by ears, which I suppose must be uttered here from the one side or the other: one should carry practically into life the things which I am now putting forward as social ideas. What was meant was the carrying over of those practical ideas into the most unpractical measures that could be! We ought not to let that arise which has just led into the most terrible chaos and mischief in our time, the confusing of real with illusory practicality in life. What has been expressed there is so unpractical, has been thought out in so sectarian a way that I do not want to go into it further: it has to so small an extent the will really to step into practical life that I beg you before everything to look on what is going on in real life today, to know how to learn from what the various statements which I make have arisen.

For do you believe that it is a light-hearted theory when one says that labour-power has the character of a commodity? This may only be said if one has got to know it to an ever-greater extent as the most characteristic thing in life. Thus I should like, for example, to say the following—without anger, for these things are not to be taken in a personal way: I have been asked whether the three-membering—economic life, rights-life, spiritual life, could not be realised within our Society.

Certainly, one can utter something in this way with words, if one stands very well within our movement, if one feels for it quite honestly and deeply. But yet, if one say this, it is as though one had not at all grasped the basic nature of our movement. One has understood nothing at all about what I have said about the Social Question if one thinks that we can split our Society here into three, like a sect! For what are the three branches of the healthy Social Organism? First, take economic life. Do you, perhaps, wish to carry on some sort of communal economy in this Society—I do not know at all how it is to be externally realised—within the rest of the economic sphere outside? Do you wish, then, not to understand at all that one cannot cut oneself off in an egotistical way—even if it be in a group-egotistical way—and leave everything else out of consideration? You carry on economic life, in fact, together with the rest of the economy of the surrounding territory. You take, in fact, milk, cheese, vegetables, all that you need, from an economic body from which you cannot isolate yourselves. You cannot, in fact, reform the times by cutting yourselves adrift from the times. If someone wants to make a Society like this into an economic corporation, it appears to me just as though someone has a large family and says: I shall now begin threefolding in my family!

These ideas are too serious, too comprehensive. They ought not to be dragged into the petty-bourgeois field of various sectarianism which has always been there. They must be thought of in connection with the whole of mankind. They would, you see, cut themselves completely off from practical thinking about the economic circulation of the world if they wished to set up a group-economy for a sect. So much for economic life.

And rights-life! Just found the Rights-state within our Society! If you steal something, it will be entirely without importance if three people come together and pass judgement about this theft. The external court will certainly take you in charge and pass judgement. You just cannot draw yourself out of the external organisation with regard to the Rights-state.

Finally, consider spiritual life. Since there has been an Anthroposophical Society or since, with its anthroposophical content, it has belonged to the Theosophical Society, where has there been anything carried on here within this spiritual community which is dependent in even the smallest degree on any state- or political organisation? From the first day of this Society forward, our ideal has been fulfilled with regard to spiritual life, which, above all, is our task! Do you believe that it is only today that this is be achieved in this Anthroposophical Society? Is not everything fulfilled, just in this Anthroposophical Society, which is to be desired from the external spiritual organisation? Is it not the most practical ideal just with regard to this? Do you wish, now, to reform the Anthroposophical Society according to this aim? To be sure, you must have entirely failed to grasp what sort of a society you have been for so many years if it is only now that you wish to realise the Spiritual Third in this society!

Therefore, look upon just what we have been able to preserve by the skin of our teeth—freedom of spiritual investigation and teaching, at least in those people who long for no state-appointment for what they teach here—as a kind of starting-point for the rest. Just see what really is so, and do not let your thinking miss it. In my book about the Social Question it is stated again and again to be an inherited evil of the present age that the so-called practical people of today have let their thinking and speaking miss the things which matter. Is this evil also to establish itself in us, so that we no longer speak about the things which matter? It cannot be our task to carry free spiritual life into this place, but to carry out into the world what has always existed here as free spiritual life, to make it clear to men that all spiritual life must be of this kind.

What matters is, at least in the first place, to see the nearest reality. In this direction, what I have brought forward about the Social Question must, in the first place, be understood by Anthroposophists. Within the Anthroposophical Society at least, one should avoid propagating odd ideas with expressed intention of making practical what is represented here. Take seriously what has been gone through as a principal feature of the lectures of the last weeks—perhaps, indeed, of the last months: before everything, regard it quite seriously that the present time makes necessary a new adjustment of Man with regard to life, that it is not enough that we only take in now thoughts but that we should find the possibility to adjust ourselves in a new way in face of life, and that we should avoid everything which tends to isolation and to shutting ourselves off. Regard it seriously, before everything, that mankind has come to a real cul-de-sac in all three spheres with their so-called culture. How can this cul-de-sac show itself more clearly than in its chaotic, destructive effects in East- and Middle-Europe? The conditions in Russia do not arise only from the war. The war is only the culmination. What men have thought, perceived and felt for a long, long time, and what one was compelled to describe as a kind of social cancer² has brought this chaos to a head in East- and Middle-Europe.

But what is most lacking at the present time? Judgement is lacking most of all! In the present time, social enlightenment is most of all lacking! It is this which the bourgeoisie has neglected most of all—the right kind of social enlightenment. There is, you see, no social sense in men. Every man knows only himself! This is why judgement is so short-sighted. If one speaks like this today, that economic life is to be brought into the Anthroposophical Society, then this is how I should be able to represent something real to myself—if we were to buy a cow, take care of it and milk it, and thereby produce something and deal in the right way with what had been produced. Then this would not be any sectarianism within our Society, for an ordered economic life what matters before everything is to take measures to raise productivity, taking account of necessary needs.

Here a beginning was actually made, which only, in the first place, partly failed because of the personage by whom it was made. Remember, we made a beginning with our bread through Herr von R., producing bread not according to the principle of production but according to that of consumption, which can be the only really sound principle. We wished, first of all, to provide consumers, which should gave been possible through a Society. Then production would have been put in hand according to the number of these. This was a real, practical beginning. It has only failed because Herr von R. was or is a quite unpractical man. Thus this was a practical idea, but one which only had to do with the Anthroposophical Society so far as the Society represented, in the first place, a body of consumers. What matters is to turn one's glance to the thing, not to the Anthroposophical Society, certainly no to make this into an isolated sect.

With referenced to these external things which lie at the basis of production, and to many another thing, you will not come far if you do not grasp on a large scale the ideas which are in my book about the Social Question. For, in the last resort, economic practical experience is necessary for the reform of economic life; one must even know how to milk cows, and it is more important to understand the milking of cows than to put in hand some economic understanding in a little sect and then, nevertheless, to obtain milk from outside.

In our case, what matters would be to realize in just what the impulse of the present time must lie, what is the most important thing at the present time. You can engage in all the undertakings that you wish today. Go, if you can, to Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, etc. Put in hand there the best, most idealistic things; do what you wish! At the latest, all these undertakings will be bankrupt within ten years—that is how things are today. With the thoughts which men have today, you can put in hand the most idealistic undertakings; in ten years they will be bankrupt—of that you can be quite sure. It will not always be as quick as it was just now in Munich, where one workers' and soldiers' council was set aside by another, and this again by another yet more radical, and so on but everything which you put in hand today in the way of such undertakings, which appear very good and sound to you, will in their turn be overthrown so long as the same ideas remain in people's heads as have been there for centuries and are still wandering about there like ghosts.

Nothing more is to be done with these ideas! One must therefore certainly accustom oneself to think and learn the other way round, and to take in new ideas as a constituent part of the inner being of one's soul. You cannot at once, from one day to another, apply new ideas to undertakings, but you can work out in detail the ideas which are in my book, down to the most extreme specialization, because they are practical. You can try to put this or that in hand. But you will also need people, you see, for everything which you put in hand. And, so long as the old thoughts are haunting the heads of those people, your undertakings will soon become bankrupt or else will take on the earlier forms, so that everything will remain in the old manner. Therefore it is not the most important thing today to put this or that in hand. Naturally, you can put good things in hand for yourselves. I do not at all want to tempt you to put bad things in hand. But I am only drawing your attention to the fact that even if you put the best things in hand you will not change the times by doing so. In order really to work in any sphere in the new style, one can undertake something in the manner which I previously indicated to you with regard to bread, or one can do it in some such way as we are doing in the sphere of our literature.

How did we start? In the first place, I spoke to a very small circle in Berlin. Then the circles became ever larger. While they were becoming larger the need arose to have in books what was spoken. The readers were there before the books were printed. Follow up the theories about social ideas today; one of the fundamental evils of our social order consists of the continual crises and the danger of crises which arise as a result of sporadic overproduction, when people produce things without deliberation. It is worst of all in the book-trade. If you only knew what is produced in the book-trade in the way of books, editions of which are often produced of 500 copies, sometimes still more, of which not fifty copies are sold! You have employed the setter-up, you have employed the printer, you have used up paper, all for nothing! All this is thrown to the winds; a misuse of human labor-power has taken place! In the moment when you produce things without deliberation, you must be aware that you are using up human labor-power without the consumption being there to justify this using up of human labor-power, for this using-up of human labor-power is only justified by the existing need. Not the content, but the demand must be there. The spending of human labor power is only justified when one can foresee that the product of human labor is for the benefit of human beings.

Thus, in the single sphere into which we could step in a certain way as reformers, we have done so. We have even had to take refuge in under-production, not over-production. The world could by no means think otherwise than that the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis came to an end for want of readers, as other magazines have done. Just when it had to come to an end because other demands came upon me, the moment had to come when it would first have had half as many readers again as it had before, then twice as many, then three times as many. We have even had to resolve on underproduction, not overproduction. But thus crises were avoided in a sound way.

The book-trade lives in a continual crisis. If one makes statistics of books which are not bought, one sees that books are produced which are not bought today because care cannot be taken to see that they are bought. Many people have a certain insight into these things. I once spoke with Eduard von Hartmann in the eighties about the literature of the Theory of Knowledge. It was at the time when I wrote my booklet Truth and Science which is now out of print, of which no copy was printed uselessly, no copy went for waste-paper with a resulting waste of human labor-power. Eduard von Hartmann said to me: people have all their works on the Theory of Knowledge printed in editions of 500; we know that we have at the most sixty readers in Germany; in this case one should have them hectographed and send the books to the small number of readers who are really interested. It is known that works on Theory of Knowledge have had no more readers at that time.

Do not find fault with the fact that I have just spoken here about this purely economic question of anthroposophical literature. These things have nothing to do with the content of the books, you see, nothing to do with spiritual value. They can, however, illustrate what is really meant and what really matters at the present time—that first of all a sound association of consumers should be created and that production should not take place "into the blue". Not even Truth, my dear friends, should be produced from mere human predilection!

It is to this that the answer refers which I once gave to two Catholic priests in Colmar after a lecture on "The Bible and Knowledge", and which I recently touched on again. After the lecture, the two priests came to me and said: as regards to the content of the lecture they really had nothing special to object to, but they had a lot against the manner of speaking, for the way in which they spoke down from the pulpit was suitable for all men. The way in which I spoke was not suitable for all men, but only for educated people. I could only reply to them what matters in not what opinions you hold, and I hold, about the way in which one should speak to all men; no doubt we can have all sorts of interesting ideas about that, but what matters is not how one should speak but what the facts demand. And now I ask you do all the people go to you in the church? You cannot assert this. Thus I am speaking for those who remain outside and who yet also have a right to hear of Christ, and there area quite enough of them today.

These are facts which cannot be denied. But the old bourgeois education, which is wholly shut up in itself, does still deny it. It imagines something is right if done in this way: it must be so; it must be done like this. But, for life, it is not at all necessary that it be done in this way! What matters, for life, is that one observes: this is there and that is there, that one lets the facts which are there demand of one what one has to do. There are only apparently trivialities, for life today is continually sinning against these trivialities.

What is thus necessary before everything is another adjustment, and also the insight that we must see how this culture, which has been so praised, has carried death in itself, has dissolved itself. You must not believe that culture has been ruined as a result of the Radical-socialist movements of today. It has ruined itself. What the upper classes had in the way of culture has led itself into negation, is perishing by its own qualities. This upper class has simply not taken care that the lower, proletarian classes who are coming after them know anything rational about social arrangements, and thus it is astonished when they come to the fore in their social ignorance and bring really nothing about except chaos.

The position is quite serious, and it is out of this realization of the serious situation of the whole world today that the ideas flow which I have had to utter in my book about the Social Question. People will only understand this book aright if they grasp that one can put the best arrangements in hand today but that just nothing is to be done with the men who have the ideas of our time in their heads. Before everything, their heads must be filled with other ideas. What, then is the true, the real, the truly practical task? To spread enlightenment, my dear friends, before everything, to spread enlightenment and teach people to think differently! This is the task which is laid on every one of you, to bring enlightenment into people's heads, not to think of sundry reformations in details, but to give enlightenment about what is necessary in the most universal way. For, before everything, men must become different today; that is to say, the thoughts, the feelings in men's souls must become different. It is a question of carrying these ideas out there wherever one can. That is the practical thing, to put these ideas into practice. Something is achieved with every quarter of a man—pardon my speaking in such a way—when you win for these ideas. And it is achieved in the greatest degree if you win over people who have practical standing. In the matter of the signatures under the Manifesto, I recently said: it is really quite a cause for joy that there are writers' signatures under the Manifesto, but one bank director who really understands the Manifesto and works in its sense is of more value than ten writers who set their names under it.

Today, what matters is to take hold of life where it is to be taken hold of. And today this cannot be done except while one is spreading enlightenment before all else, is working in an enlightening way. For what people need as the most necessary thing of all is knowledge of the conditions for the life of the healthy Social Organism. If they do not learn to know the conditions for the life of the healthy Social Organism, they will continue to destroy the old Social Organism so long as destruction is possible. It is natural, you see, only up to a certain point. Everything which is done just now without these ideas is an exhaustion of the forces of the old order, a pulling down of the old order. This has begun in Russia and will go on further from there. What matters is to build up. But you can only build up today if people understand how the building-up must be done. For we are living in the age of the development of the consciousness-soul, that is to say in the age of conscious individualities, in the age when people must know what they are doing.

My book is written out of this spirit, and I should like it understood in this spirit. I should like you to lay it in your hearts in this spirit. It will simply serve the time; it will utter what must be uttered out of the spirit of the time. Cliques, sectarian trends within the body of our own Society, have taken care enough that, basically speaking, people presume all sorts of ghost-hunting and the like when there is talk about Anthroposophy. But one does not seek the Spirit here by always merely talking about the Spirit—one can leave that to other gentlemen—but the important thing is that the Spirit shall be in the position really to plunge down into practical life, to understand how practical life must be handled. Anyone has a poor kind of belief in the Spirit who wishes to grasp it only in a shadowy form which is floating above life. Therefore, to an ever greater extent, you must really avoid turning away from life, must to an ever greater extent seek really to understand life, to look into life; otherwise the same phenomena of which I have spoken will happen again and again. Examples can be given by hundreds and thousands. A lady came to me and said: a man has come to me to ask me to lend him money, but he is a brewer who brews beer for this money. I really cannot support this—a brewery! Now, you see, this is quite nice; in this narrow circle, the lady did not wish to support the brewery because she was an abstainer and not only wished to be an abstainer on her own account but wished also to make propaganda for temperance. I had to reply to her: "I suppose you have money in the bank, by which you live. Have you an inkling how many breweries the bank helps with your money? Have you an inkling of all that is done there? Do you believe that all this is in the sense of the idea which you have just followed with regard to the sum which you were asked to lend to the brewer? But are you not doing the same thing when your money, which you have deposited in the bank, is carried over into economic life?" For do you really believe that it means that you are turning yourself towards life if you do no more than judge this life in the narrowest circles, if you do not at all set about fixing your attention on the broad aspect of life?

But the important thing is this: our Anthroposophical Society is no field for experimenting, but it is to be the germ for everything good which is to come over mankind. With regard to the Social Question, what matters is above all that a wider stream of enlightenment about social necessities shall stream out from it. For you are certainly behaving practically, conforming with life, if you spread these things, but you must also really take trouble to spread them conformably with life, and not remain in a narrow interpretation. I hope that not one of you comes to the strange idea that we are dealing in the old national-economic ideas, by which people learn National-economy. For God's sake don't bring in anything pertaining to "export national-economics" here today, for this, you see, consists of ideas from the oldest lumber-room of all! Do not believe that you are learning to think in a national-economic way if, today, you take practicable concepts into yourselves in a scholastic way, as they are perhaps taught at universities. Do not make any programs which appear to put into practice what I have given in lectures but which, rather, mean nothing more than the terribly-grinning old bourgeois masks! Let us set ourselves on the solid ground of the great demands of our time; let us consider social life before everything in these demands of our time!

I could not but say this before you just now, when we are about to make a journey to Germany and many a task will come to meet me; and though we hope that our absence will this time be much less long than on other occasions, we are yet living in a time when one should really never make plans and projects covering a long time. One can only say people who have found one another as the members of the Anthroposophical Society have done remain together wherever they are, stand in the matter with steadfast courage and inner boldness and stick to their course, whatever the terrible billows of the present time may bring. For the most part, they will not bring anything easy. We shall most likely experience many a thing which will raise the question in us: how should things go further just among us? Stick to your course even when this happens; do what is your part in order to carry something further in the world, and you will be doing what is right.

I could only remain here at this time until this book was completed, for this book is to be of service to the time. Our friends will undertake it here, will take care of its distribution in Switzerland, and I hope for many a reason that I can be here again quite soon to take part in this work. Partly for a reason which is very much misunderstood just here in Switzerland. One can certainly hear from someone on the other side: "but what does the foreigner want just here in Switzerland? He should leave us in peace. Our democracy has lasted for 600 years; it is healthy, it is proof against what is going on outside among the crazy eastern and middle-European peoples."

I have now the conviction that the best could be done today where it could still be brought about from free-will. If such social ideas as are recorded in my book were to blossom in Russia today, this would come to pass because the most external need compelled it, and if the most external need compels it—the same in Middle-Europe, the same in Germany—then the right impulse is no longer there. The right impulse just for these ideas, which will bring social healing to mankind, would be present if they would come to pass out of freedom on a ground of which one can say the Bolshevists have not come to us, we still have something of the old conditions. Oh, if understanding for it were developed to bring forth these ideas from free-will, just on the ground here, before the water runs into the mouths of the people here as well, then Switzerland could be the blossoming land of Europe, for it is equipped for this by its geographical position! It is equipped with a gigantic mission in spite of its small size. But it will only be able to fulfill this mission if it brings to completion, from free-will, what neither the eastern nor the middle states can bring to fulfillment from free-will today—they would have had to take it in hand before now—and what the western states will not do because they have not sufficient disposition to do so. Here there are dispositions, the geographical presuppositions; everything is present here. All that is needed here is good-will towards free human resolve. To this belongs just activity of thinking. To this belongs thought-will.

Thought-will is what the mankind of today most lack. Thought-will develops very well, even geographically, among those men whom souls come because they wish to go into the mountains. (I drew your attention to this yesterday: souls no longer set very much value on race, they go to a geographical situation). Thought-will does not develop in regions such as that in which The Three Gypsies (poem by Lenau) was composed. This is a very beautiful poem, but it is composed in the plain. Man does not need a plain-disposition today; he certainly needs a mountain-disposition. Therefore, much could come out of the Swiss mountains; therefore one would like to have certain foundations here also, a point from which something could proceed. And therefore it seems important to me not to be silent just here but to speak as long as possible of the great needs of the time. And I call especially to our friends here in Switzerland to understand the demand for enlightenment, to take care that the demands of the time pass over into the consciousness just of those who live in this place. The more Swiss heads and Swiss hearts are won just for these social ideas, the better it will be for Europe and for the world. I say this quite particularly to the Swiss. You can, you see, my dear Swiss who are among us, make the foreign thing into a Swiss thing—then it is a Swiss thing! All these distinctions, really have only a passing value.

I could not but say this to you today, and I hope that you have understood me quite aright with regard to these things. I hope that the spirit which should fill and envelop this building may be further maintained as a result of the disposition of our members, and that we may at some time find ourselves together again here, held together by this spirit which, from the beginning forward, was such that it could now live itself out and which cannot be any different, for from the beginning forward it has willed to realize itself in what lies in the demands of our time.

With this I should like to take leave of you for the present. But this place here should have such a spiritual importance that if it should at any time be necessary and if the only way for me to come to work here would be to ride here on a wasted, half-dead nag, I should not shrink from even this. But tasks can come in other places which may delay my return. But in spite of everything, good-bye in our spirit, particularly in the spirit which I have slightly depicted in this last gathering and presented to your hearts.

• 1. 7-13 March 1919: see also The Real Foundation of a League of Nations. Troxler Press, Berne
• 2. see Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth, cycle 32, Lecture 6, p.12