The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Steiner's work in the Threefold Commonwealth, from the first Workmen's Lecture in April 1919 up to the foundation of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart in September of the same year, reached an important climax in the giving of the lectures here published. We can only understand these lectures rightly by reminding ourselves of the stress laid on the spiritual aspect in this "threefold" work, and of the way in which the finer overtones to be found in it echo the conditions of that time. For a while in Central Europe the gates, we may say, stood open wide. Questions were being asked which went right to the root of things, and answers were sought which should truly probe the problems to their very depths. Everything seemed possible. For just as it appeared as though, from the spiritual aspect, the war had lasted not for four or five years but for a whole century, so now a vista was opened before men's eyes which seemed to stretch even far beyond the present century.

Such are the fundamental thoughts which Rudolf Steiner develops in these lectures; they are, of course, colored by the events of the time in which they were given, but they reach far into the future. They are more comprehensive ±han anything which up to this time could be accomplished in the Waldorf Schools and Rudolf Steiner Schools. In the light of the content of these lectures on "A Social Basis for Primary and Secondary Education" the Waldorf school education appears as only one of the many possible forms of social education which can be developed in the future.

I do not wish to enter into details, but I would stress one fundamental thought which runs through these lectures. This is the thought that we need to rediscover how to learn. For Rudolf Steiner the act of learning was not the imprinting of more or less important details into the head of the learner, but rather he looked upon learning as a process which involves the whole man, awakening forces in every source and spring of his being in such a way that once aroused they will never cease to flow. Learning will then become a constant living and growing of the spirit of man. Of the plant we may say that as long as it grows, it lives, and as long as it lives, it grows. Of man we may say that in his spirit he only grows and lives as long a he learns. In this connection I should like to mention two past experiences of mine which seem to bear a close connection with each other.

In April 1910 I had a talk with the famous Russian author, Maxim Gorki, on the island of Capri in Italy. Gorki was living there at that time in a kind of exile. At the end of the conversation I asked him if he would not like to send a greeting to young students of his land. He thought for a moment and then said: "you see, a Russian peasant is accustomed to hard work. With great industry and self-denial he wrestles with the earth for the production of her fruits. He has learnt to work. But the unfortunate thing is that the Russian intellectuals have not learnt to work. Over a glass of tea and cigarettes they spend night after night in endless discussions. They have not learnt how to learn. Give them this as my greeting: "Learn to work as the peasant works when he tills the ground; learn how to learn.' "

I had half forgotten these words when on a later occasion they suddenly flashed into my consciousness almost like a streak of lightning, together with an image of the setting in which they had been said. This occasion was in the year 1919, at the time when these lectures on "A Social Basis for Primary and Secondary Education" were being given. Rudolf Steiner said the following words: "through the catastrophe of the World War which now, outwardly at least, lies behind us, history has wished to teach us a lesson. There would have been innumerable things to learn. But the great misfortune of the present time is that men have lost the capacity to learn. So, with the ear of the spirit we may now hear resound through the world like a battle-cry this word: Learn how to learn!"

I am fully aware that in contrast to Gorki learning in Rudolf Steiner' s sense rests upon a very different basis; nevertheless the significant fact remains that two outstanding men of the twentieth century used the same words to express a great and inspiring thought in the history of social pedagogy.

What lay behind Gorki's words—presumably even against his will—has been caught up by the whirlpool which engulfed the history of Eastern Europe. But the words of Rudolf Steiner, founded as they are upon the spirit, are seeds which even still today are healthy and capable of growth. They wait expectantly for men who can provide them with the soil and ground that is needed for their development.

To those therefore who can bear within their hearts the words "Learn how to learn!" with thoughts rooted deeply in the spirit and reaching out to all mankind—to such men it will be given to read these lectures aright.

Herbert Hahn

Just now, when I am giving public lectures on the social question here in Zürich, it is perhaps appropriate that in our study-group we should occupy ourselves with the inner aspect of the social problem, so exceptionally important at the present time.

We know that in every human being whom we encounter in the outer world, who stands before our bodily faculties of perception, we must recognise beneath the surface the real inner man. We first become aware of this inner man when we appreciate that fundamentally he is connected with everything relevant to human life and knowledge that weaves and surges through the world.

Just think, my dear friends, how different, with regard particularly to the human being, our anthroposophical conception of the world is from the ordinary conception! Remember my attempt to give an outline of the anthroposophical view; recall all you have read in my Occult Science, and you will realise the following: the evolution of the Earth is not only bound up with man, but is conceived as having emerged from the earlier incarnations, so to speak, of our Earth planet. Our present Earth-evolution emerged from the Old Moon evolution, this from the Old Sun, the Old Sun from Old Saturn. Then consider everything which had to be brought together to carry this planetary evolution forward to the Earth stage, and you will say: throughout the whole cosmic process man is never absent. He is involved in all of it. All the forces and happenings of the cosmos are focused on man—that is how we must conceive it.

In a conversation between Capesius and the Initiate, in one of my Mystery Plays, I have specially tried to show what an impression it must make on anyone if he realises that all the generations of the gods, all the power of the universe, are summoned to the task of placing man in the centre of their creative activity.

I have pointed out, in connection particularly with this entirely valid conception, how essential it is to emphasise the need for human modesty—how essential it is to say again and again: “Yes, if we could consciously experience our whole being in its relation to the cosmos, and bring our whole being truly to expression, it would be revealed as a microcosmos! But in fact, how much can we know or experience or bring to expression of all that we are as man, in the highest sense?” Whenever we bring clearly before us what we are, we waver always between pride and modesty. We must certainly not give way to pride, but neither must we surrender to modesty. It would be a surrender if, after taking account of our place in the world from a cosmic standpoint, we were to fail to reckon our human task in the highest possible terms. We can never think highly enough of what we ought to be. We can never take seriously enough the deep sense of cosmic responsibility which must overcome man if he holds in view the relationship of the whole universe to his human existence.

In the light of Spiritual Science this should certainly remain no mere idea, no mere fact of knowledge: it should become an experience—an experience of holy awe in the face of what man ought to be and yet only in the rarest cases can be. Whenever, too, we encounter another person, we should be impelled by this experience to feel: “Standing there, you bring a great deal to expression in this present incarnation. But you journey from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation: the succession of your lives bears the imprint of eternity.” And in many other directions also we can widen and deepen this experience. From this experience we are led through Spiritual Science to a true appraisal of human worth, to an appreciation of human dignity in the context of the world. This experience can permeate the soul through and through; it can, if it inspires the entire inner life, bring us into the right mood for regulating our relationships with other human beings.

All this, which I have just explained, we can regard as a primary gift of modern Spiritual Science: we learn to appraise rightly all that is human in the world. That is one point.

Something else will arise in us out of a deeply-felt and not merely theoretical Spiritual Science. It is this. If we take into account all the happenings of the world, all the elemental life in earth, water and air—if we take account also of all that shines down to us from the stars and breathes from the wind, all that speaks to us from the several kingdoms of Nature—if we contemplate all this in the light of Spiritual Science, then we find it connected through and through with man! Everything will have value for us because we are able to bring it into connection with the human. Supersensible perception makes us feel, in very truth, that man is related to everything in the universe. Christian Morgenstern, the poet, has crystalised in beautiful verses (which I have often spoken of to our friends in connection with a certain chapter in St. John's Gospel) the experience which comes over us when we allow the ranking of the kingdoms of Nature to work on our minds. Then we can say: “The plant gazes on the lifeless realm of the minerals. ... Certainly it must feel itself to stand higher in the order of Nature than the mere lifeless minerals.” But then the plant, gazing on the mineral which prepares the ground for it, will be impelled also to say: “I certainly stand higher than you in the ranks of beings, but it is to you, since I grow out of you, that I am indebted for my existence. In thankfulness I bow before the ground which lies beneath me.” And so, again, must we conceive the experience of the animals in relation to the plants, and again in the human realm, where man in the course of his evolution is raised to a higher level. He must gaze down with awe and reverence at that which in a certain sense stands beneath him—not merely formulating all this intellectually, but so that the weaving pulse of life in all things becomes for him a real cosmic soul-experience. [Christian Morgenstern: We Found a Path. The Washing of the Feet.] This is how a genuine Spiritual Science should lead us on. Thus it enables us to establish a living relationship between humanity and all other existences.

Now a third point. Spiritual Science does not talk endlessly, in a pantheistic way, about “spirit” underlying everything. No, Spiritual Science does not only talk about spiritual reality; its aim is to let the reality of the spirit flow directly into all it says. It strives to speak in such a way that everyone for whom Spiritual Science is a living experience knows that, whenever his thinking touches the spirit, the spirit itself lives and weaves in his thought. Whoever is breathed upon by the impulse of Spiritual Science—if I may put it so—will not merely think about the spirit: he will allow the spirit itself to speak through his thoughts. The immediate presence of the spirit, the active power of the spirit—these are what Spiritual Science leads us to seek.

And now take the feelings which Spiritual Science calls to life in the depth of the human soul and compare them with the social demand of which I spoke yesterday—the social demand which in a certain sense lives in the proletarian consciousness of the present time. Consider: all that lives to-day in the consciousness of the workers, as the foundation of their knowledge, is an ideology, nothing but a web of abstract thoughts! Yes, this is said to be the essential characteristic of spiritual experience, that it is merely an ideology: economic happenings are the only reality. From these happenings, as they run their course, the conflicts of human life derive; everything that man thinks and learns and creates artistically arises from them like a smoke, a mist. Everything that he regards as custom, morality, law and so on—all merely an ideological shadow-show! And now compare this shadow-show with the spiritual life which penetrates the soul from the impulse of Spiritual Science. The aim of our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is to carry spirit out as living reality into the world through the soul of man. This living spirit is banished from that contemporary outlook which originated with the middle class, and which the workers, to their misfortune, have taken over. Banished ... and that which ought to live in men's consciousness, the “spirit in me”—that exists now merely as ideology.

Consider, again: how much can be understood about humanity, in this earthly life, through the ordinary senses! Why, in order to gain a comprehensive view of humanity we have to bring in not only the evolution of the Earth, but the Moon, Sun, and Saturn evolutions! How lacking from the modern outlook is that fine feeling for human dignity which enables us, once we have acquired it from Spiritual Science, to establish a right relationship when as human beings we encounter other human beings! Can you suppose for a moment that in the chaos of social life to-day will be found that right relationship between man and man which is essential to any real solution of the social problem? How can such a right relationship possibly emerge unless it rests on that evaluation of mankind in cosmic terms which springs only from spiritual knowledge and spiritual experience?

A third point. No true relation to the realm of law and human rights can be found to-day through the abstract conceptions loved by economists and political theorists. The only way is to seek for direct personal contact with the facts and events of the surrounding world. This third point recalls what I have already indicated: through Spiritual Science, taken into the soul-life, we must experience our relationship to all the beings that stand above and below us in the hierarchical order of the divine and natural worlds.

Now consider this contrast. On the one hand, take that which fills the consciousness of the proletariat—think how far removed it is from any experience of the living reality of the spirit in man, how it has reduced everything spiritual to an ideology! Think how far removed a truly spirit-permeated valuation of man is from the way of thinking which the proletarian of to-day applies to man and embodies in his general outlook! Think, finally, how far removed the almost universal standards of judgment to-day—the reckoning of everything in economic terms—are from that appreciation of extra-human phenomena to which we come when we learn to experience all that may be drawn from Spiritual Science as to the relationship of men to these other realms of existence.

Consider a further contrast. Think what mankind has come to as a result of the intensive invasion of human souls by the materialism of the past century. On the other hand, think of the hopes that can be kindled by the knowledge that true Spiritual Science is now able to find its way into the hearts of men. Put these two facts side by side and ask yourselves whether a true apprehension of the social problem will not depend on the grasping by human souls of all that Spiritual Science has to give.

If you experience rightly these two prospects, the hopeless and the hopeful, then, my dear friends, anthroposophical activity will become for you what indeed it should be to-day for all men: a necessity of life—a necessity which should penetrate all other preoccupations.

You may say to yourselves: Nothing seems clearer to me in the whole context of man's recent development than that the social problem has come to a head; but nothing, also, seems clearer than that men stand tragically at a loss in face of this social problem. For in this epoch, when the social problem thrusts itself so forcibly on to the scene, men are going through one of their hardest ordeals—the ordeal of having to find their way to the spirit through their own inner strength. Today we can look for no revelations unless we seek them freely; for since the middle of the fifteenth century we have been living in the age of the Consciousness Soul—the age in which everything is destined to be brought into the light of consciousness. Let us not be led to complain vainly: “A fearful catastrophe has fallen on mankind ... why have the gods thrust mankind into such an appalling disaster! Why did the gods not lead men clear of it, for it is surely piteous that men should have been brought to such a pass?” Let us not forget that we are living in the age when the free spiritual activity of man is due to reach expression—when the gods, in accordance with their primary purpose, may not reveal themselves unless the human being, by free resolve, opens the innermost sanctuary of his soul to receive them.

With regard to the most important aspects of human evolution, and with regard particularly to Christianity, we stand at a turning-point. Certainly many people, who are active in social affairs, have indicated a willingness to accept Christianity—but only as much of Christianity as serves to remind us of our own social ideals. But this most important of all impulses, which alone gives earthly existence its true meaning and purpose, cannot be dealt with in that way. We must be clear about this: all that has been generally understood about Christianity, so far, is only a beginning. It amounts to little more than an acknowledgment of the fact that the Christ was once present in the man Jesus and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. All that Christianity has been able to teach men in nearly 2,000 years is the simple fact that the Christ descended to Earth and established a connection with the Earth. Human understanding was not ripe for more. Only now, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, is humanity becoming ripe to understand, not merely the fact that the Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, but the real significance of this event. Mankind will be able to understand the content of the Mystery of Golgotha only out of the spiritual foundations which can be built in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In this study-group I have often remarked how extraordinarily banal it is to say: “We live in a time of transition.” All times are times of transition! The point is not to call this or that period a time of transition; the point is to see what is involved in a particular change or transition. That is the essential thing: to perceive what is changing!

I have also remarked here, from many points of view, on the particular changes which human consciousness and human soul-development, in the broadest sense, are undergoing in our time. To-day I should like to draw attention once more to a particular aspect of man's earthly evolution.

I said just now: Through Spiritual Science we seek not merely to entertain thoughts about the Spiritual, but to let the living reality of the spirit reveal itself in our thinking. Similarly, we can recall the words of Christ Jesus: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” The right way to grasp Spiritual Science is not to believe that the entire substance of Christianity is contained once for all in the Gospels, but to recognise that the Christ is in truth present at all times, even unto the end of the world. And present not as a dead force, calling merely for belief, but as a living power which increasingly reveals itself. And in our epoch what is this revelation? The content of modern anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science is concerned not merely to talk about the Christ, but to utter what the Christ wishes to say to men in our time, through the medium of human thoughts.

So we can say: In those ancient times, when the life of men was still largely instinctive, when in their souls something of the old, atavistic clairvoyance survived, then the Spiritual found utterance in the human soul. It was active still in human thoughts and in the human will. Truly, the gods dwelt in men. To-day, however, they dwell in human beings after a different fashion. One might put it in the following way. In ancient times the gods had a certain task with regard to the Earth's evolution: they had set its fulfilment before themselves as a goal. They accomplished their purpose by inspiring men with their own powers, and breathing imaginations into the human soul. But—strange as it may seem—these primal aims for the Earth's development are now fulfilled. They were fulfilled, fundamentally, by the end of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Since then the spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies (whom in our sense we may call the gods) stand in a different relationship to human souls.

Once, the gods came in search of men in order to realize their purpose for the Earth with men's help. To-day it is men who must seek out the gods; by their own inner activity they must raise themselves to the gods. The human being must reach such a relationship to the gods as to achieve his aims, his consciously conceived aims, with the help of divine powers. That is the right thing in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul. In earlier times the aims of men were unconscious, instinctive, just because the conscious purpose of the gods was working in them. Human aims must now become ever more conscious: then they will be infused with powers capable of raising them into the sphere of the gods, so that human aims may be inspired with divine energies.

My dear friends, give thorough thought to these words. Much lies in them. They point to the necessity which from our time onwards should draw forth an elemental striving from the depths of human nature. We can cultivate this in various realms of the soul. Above all we must seek to deepen social life by bringing Spiritual Science to bear on human relationships. Because in earlier times the gods were directly concerned with the evolution of mankind, and sought through men to realize their aims—for this very reason men were much more closely related to one another than they are to-day. It had to be so. To-day human beings are in a certain sense driven apart, and they have to seek quite a different relationship to one another. But first they have to learn about this. From a purely external point of view you can see everywhere that one human being knows very little about another. Spiritual Science is only beginning to show how human nature and human worth stand in their cosmic setting. In daily life one man knows little about another; he does not penetrate into the depths of his fellow man's soul. That is the general rule. Through a deepening of social life a new understanding of man must be found, and must permeate human development.

Instead of having eyes only for the man of flesh, apprehending him in a naturalistic way, devoid of the spirit, we must reach the stage of a spirit-filled social organism, wherein the activity of the gods in other men can be recognised.

But we shall not attain to this unless we do something about it. One thing we can do is to strive to deepen our own life of soul. There are many paths to that. I will mention only one, a meditative path. From various points of view, and with various aims, we can cast a backward glance over our own lives. We can ask ourselves: How has this life of mine unfolded since childhood? But we can do this also in a special way. Instead of bringing before our gaze what we ourselves have enjoyed or experienced, we can turn out attention to the persons who have figured in our lives as parents, brothers and sisters, friends, teachers and so on, and we can summon before our soul the inner nature of each of these persons, in place of our own. After a time we shall find ourselves reflecting how little we really owe to ourselves, and how much to all that has flowed into us from others. If we honestly build up this kind of self-scrutiny into an inner picture, we shall arrive at quite a new relationship to the outer world. From such a backward survey we retain certain feelings and impressions. And these are like fertile seeds planted in us—seeds for the growth of a true knowledge of man. Whoever undertakes again and again this inward contemplation, so that he recognises the contribution which other persons, perhaps long dead or far distant, have made to his own life, then when he meets another man, and establishes a personal relationship with him, an imagination of the other man's true being will rise before him.

This is something which must emerge as an inward and truly heartfelt social demand, bound up with this present time and necessary to the future development of mankind. So must Spiritual Science reveal its practical power to kindle and enrich human life.

This subject has a further aspect. In earlier times all self-knowledge, all introspection, was a much simpler affair, for a deeply inward social impulse is now emerging—and not only because of the enhanced awareness of some people concerning property or poverty. This impulse shows itself, for example, in the following way. Nowadays we pay very little attention to the fact that throughout life a constant process of ripening goes on. Inwardly honest men, such as Goethe, feel this. Even in his latest years Goethe was still eager to learn. His inward growth continued; he felt he had not finished with the task of becoming a man. And in looking back on his youth and prime he saw in all that had come to him then a preparation for the experiences brought by old age. Nowadays people very seldom think in that way—least of all when taking account of man as a social being. Everyone, as soon as he is twenty, wants to belong to some corporate body and—in the favourite phrase—to exercise his democratic judgment! It never occurs to anyone that there are things in life worth waiting for, because increasing ripeness comes with the years. Men to-day have no idea of that!

That is one thing we must learn, my dear friends—that all stages of life—and not only the first two or three decades of youth—bring gifts to man.

And there is something else we must learn. We are not concerned only with ourselves, but with people at other stages of life; and particularly with children, as they are born and grow up. A consequence of human evolution is that much which used to unfold of itself in the soul now has to be attained by extraordinary exertion—by a striving for super-sensible knowledge, or at least for a real knowledge of life. It is the same with the child as with people in general—a great deal in his own being remains hidden from him. And this applies not only to the experiences that will come in later life. A great deal that was formerly revealed through atavistic clairvoyance now remains hidden from a person who pays attention only to himself, who seeks for knowledge only within himself. It remains hidden from the cradle to the grave. This is also a consequence of the state of consciousness belonging to our age. We can strive for clear insight, yet much remains hidden—and precisely in the realm where we need to see clearly. This is a special characteristic of our time: we enter the world as children, bearing some quality which is important for the world, for the social life of humanity, for the understanding of history. But we cannot reach a knowledge of this, not in childhood, or in maturity, or in old age, if we remain shut up in ourselves. Knowledge of it, however, can be reached in a different way. We can reach it if we look at the child with finely-tuned spiritual perception, and realise that in the child is revealed something which the child does not and cannot ever know, but which can be understood by the soul of another person who in old age gazes on the child. It is something revealed through the child—not to the child himself and not to the man or woman whom the child becomes—but to the other person who from a later age looks with real love on his youngest contemporaries.

I draw special attention to this, my dear friends, so that from this characteristic of our age you may see how a social impulse, in the broadest sense, weaves and surges through our time. Is there not something profoundly social in this necessity: the necessity which ordains that life becomes fruitful only when age seeks its highest goal through fellowship with youth—the fellowship not merely of this or that man with another, but of the old with the very young?

This social fellowship is called for by the innermost spirit and sense of our time. And in this way Spiritual Science, by speaking to people who are already prepared to some extent through acquaintance with its other branches, can lead to a deeper grasp of the social problem. As persons marked out by knowledge of Spiritual Science, you have before you all a great social task if you take the force of feeling which social questions stir in you and make it a means of working for mankind to-day. Carry your enthusiasm into the social and socialistic discussions of the present time, kindle and deepen in yourselves the social feeling and understanding which should prevail between man and man—then you will be discharging a truly anthroposophical task in the social realm.

We will speak further of this next week, when we shall again have a group lecture in between the two public lectures.

A week ago I was saying that we here, as anthroposophists, are able to grasp in a much deeper sense all that is necessary for reaching a judgment on the burning questions of the present day. We can do much more in this way than is possible in wider circles. In a sense we can look on ourselves as a kind of leaven—if I may use the biblical word—so that everyone in his own situation may try to contribute something, out of a strong warmth of impulse, towards the needs of the time.

If we recall what has been said as the keynote of the public lectures, we shall appreciate that the immediate essential is to strive towards a certain differentiation—a certain “membering”—of the social organism. I say always “strive towards”—there is no question of wanting to effect a revolutionary change overnight. We must strive towards a differentiation of a great deal which under modern influences has become centralised. What we must work for—instead of the so-called unitary State—is that a certain realm of society, embracing all that has to do with spiritual life, should unfold freely and independently alongside the other realms. This realm will include the upbringing of children, education, art, literature, and also (as I have remarked already and shall mention in the public lecture tomorrow) everything concerned with the administration of civil and criminal law.

As a second “limb” of the social organism we should recognise, but in a restricted sense, that which has been known as the “State.” It is precisely on the shoulders of this “State” that men nowadays want to pile as much as possible—State schools, State child-care, and so on. That has been the great tendency of the last four hundred years. And to-day, under the influence of social ideas and socialistic thinking, people want to weld economic life into a single whole with political life. These two realms must be separated once more. The political State must stand on its own independent ground, as the second sphere of society; and the same relative independence must distinguish the realm of domestic economy, where commodities circulate—that is, economic life.

Now, my dear friends, we will look at this question from a point of view not easily reached by anyone outside our movement. And we will carry the matter to a certain culmination, so that out of this culmination a deeper understanding of the human situation to-day may spring forth.

Let us look first at what is called, in an earthly sense, spiritual life. Spiritual life in this earthly sense embraces everything which in one way or another lifts us out of our solitary egoism and draws us into community with other human beings. Let us take, as the most important manifestation of earthly spiritual life for most people still, that aspect of it which should bring us into relation with super-earthly spiritual life—I mean the practice of religion, as this takes its course in the various congregations.

In the human soul are needs which cause people to seek each other out; people are united by experiencing similar needs. The upbringing of a child means that one soul is caring for another. Anyone who reads a book is drawn out of the egoistic circle of his individual life, for it is not he alone who absorbs the author's thoughts; even when he is only half-way through a book he is already sharing these thoughts with a great company of other readers. And so, through this kinship of soul-experience, a certain human community is formed. This is an important characteristic of spiritual life: it has its springs in freedom, in the individual initiative of the single human being, and yet it draws men together, and forms communities out of what they have in common.

Here, for anyone who seeks deeper understanding, is a fact to be kept in mind—a fact which brings every kind of human fellowship into relation with the central event of earth-evolution—the Mystery of Golgotha. For since the Mystery of Golgotha everything concerned with human fellowship belongs in a sense to the Christ Impulse. That is the essential thing—the Christ Impulse belongs not to single men but to the fellowship of men. In truth, according to the mind of Christ Himself, it is a great mistake to suppose that the solitary individual can establish a direct relation with Christ. The essential thing is that Christ lived and died, and rose from the dead, for humanity as a whole. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, the Christ Event is immediately relevant (we shall return to this point) wherever human fellowship unfolds. And accordingly, for anyone who really understands the world, the earthly spiritual life which springs from the most individual source, from personal circumstances and gifts, leads to the Christ Event.

Let us now first consider this earthly spiritual life—religion, education, art and so forth—on its own account. We gain through it a certain connection with other human beings. Here we must distinguish between the connections we form through our individual destiny and karma, and those which in this narrow sense are not dependent on our karma. Some of the connections we establish in the course of life are the direct outcome of relationships formed in earlier lives; some will bear karmic fruit in future lives. Human beings form connections with one another in manifold ways. The connections formed directly through our karma must be distinguished from the wider connections that arise when we meet people through joining a society, or a religious body or a fellowship of belief, and also from those that come through reading the same book or through common enjoyment of a work of art, and so on. The people we encounter in these ways on earth are not always related to us karmically from an earlier life. Certainly, there are communities which point to a common destiny in earlier lives; but with the wider groupings of which I have just spoken it is generally not so. This brings us to a further point.

Towards the end of our time in the super-sensible world, between death and a new birth, when we reach the period just before our next incarnation, we enter into relations—as far as we are ripe for them—with Angels, Archangels and Archai, and with the higher Hierarchies as well. But also we come near to other human souls, due to be incarnated later than ourselves—souls which have to wait longer, one may say, for their incarnations. During this period we have a whole range of super-sensible experiences to go through, according to our individual stage of development, before we are plunged again into earthly life. And the forces we thus receive place us on earth in the situation which will enable us to find our way into those experiences of earthly spiritual life of which I have just spoken.

The essential point to grasp is that our spiritual life on earth—all that we experience through religion, or through upbringing and education, through artistic impressions and so on—is not determined solely by earthly circumstances. Our earthly spiritual life takes its character from the experiences we have had in super-sensible realms before birth. Just as an image in a mirror indicates what is being reflected, so does earthly spiritual life point to what the human being has experienced before entering his physical body.

Nothing on earth stands towards the super-sensible world in so intimate, real and living a relationship as this earthly spiritual life—which indeed shows aberrations, many aberrations ... but these very aberrations have a relation full of meaning to all that we experience—certainly, in a quite different way—in the super-sensible. This connection with pre-earthly life places spiritual life on earth in a quite special situation. Nothing else in earthly life is so closely bound up with our life before birth!

This is a fact to which the spiritual investigator is bound to draw particular attention. He distinguishes spiritual life from man's other earthly activities, because super-sensible observation shows him that spiritual life on earth has its roots and impulse in the life before birth. So for the spiritual investigator this earthly spiritual life marks itself off from other human experiences.

It is different with what can be called, in a strict sense, political life, the life of civic rights, which brings administrative order into human affairs. You see, however hard one may try to discover, with the most exact methods of spiritual science, the deeper connections of political life ... one can find no relation between this political life and the super-sensible. Political life is entirely of the earth! We must clearly understand what this signifies.

For example, what shall we take as a preeminently earthly type of legal relationship? The relation to property, to ownership. If I own a plot of land, then it is solely by political means that I am given an exclusive right and tenure of the land. It is this which enables me to exclude all others from using the land, building on it, etc. So it is with everything that has to do with public law. The sum total of public law, together with the means taken to protect a society from external interference—all that makes up political life in the strict sense.

This is the genuine earth-life—the life connected solely with impulses which take their course between birth and death. However much the State may imagine itself to be God-given ... the truth to which all religious creeds, in their deeper meaning, bear witness is as follows. The first truth was conveyed by Christ Jesus when in the old phraseology he said: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” Faced with the pretensions of the Roman Empire, He wished above all to separate everything to do with political life from all that bears the imprint of the super-sensible. But when the purely earthly State seeks to make itself the bearer of a super-earthly impulse—when, for example, the State seeks to assume responsibility for religious life, or for education (this last responsibility, unfortunately, is taken for granted in our day)—then we have the situation characterised by the deeper teachings of religion, when they said: Wherever an attempt is made to mix the spiritual-super-sensible with the earthly-political, there rules the usurping Prince of this world.

What is the meaning of the “usurping Prince of this world?” You know, perhaps, my dear friends, that people have thought a great deal about this, without getting anywhere. Only through spiritual science can one reach the meaning. The usurping Prince of this world rules whenever an authority which should be concerned only with the ordering of earthly affairs arrogates to itself the spiritual—and seeks also, as we shall see later, to assimilate economic life. The rightful Prince of this world is he for whom the political realm includes only those things which belong wholly to the life between birth and death.

So we have come to an understanding of the second “limb” of the social organism, in the sense of spiritual science. It is the realm orientated towards those impulses which run their course between birth and death.

Now we come to the third, the economic realm. Just think, my dear friends, how economic life draws us into a particular relation with the world. You will readily understand what this relation is if you compel yourselves to imagine that it were possible for us to be entirely absorbed in economic life. If that could happen, what should we be like? We should be thinking animals, nothing else. We are not thinking animals for the reason that besides economic life we have a life of rights—a political life—and a knowledge of the spirit, an earthly spiritual life. Through economic life we are thus plunged, more or less, into the midst of human relationships. And because of this interests are kindled—precisely in this field of human relations we are able to develop interests which in the true sense of the word are fraternal. In no other realm than that of economic life are fraternal relationships so easily and obviously developed among human beings.

In the spiritual life ... what is the ruling impulse in earthly spiritual life? Fundamentally, it is personal interest—an interest arising out of the soul-nature, certainly, but none the less egoistic. Of religion, people demand that it shall make them holy. Of education, that is shall develop their talents. Of any kind of artistic representation, that it shall bring pleasure into their lives, and perhaps also stimulate their inner energies. As a general rule, it is egoism, whether of a grosser or more refined sort, which leads a person—quite understandably—to seek in spiritual life whatever satisfies himself.

In the political life of rights, on the other hand, we have to do with something which makes us all equal before the law. We are concerned with the relation of man to man. We have to ask, what our right should be. No question of rights exists among animals. In this respect, also, we are raised above the animals, even in our earthly affairs. But if we are connected with a religious community, or with a group of teachers, then—just as much as in civic relationships—we come up against personal claims, personal wishes. In the economic sphere, it is through the overcoming of self that something valuable, not derived from personal desires, comes to expression—brotherhood, responsibility for others, a way of living so that the other man gains experience through us.

In the spiritual life we receive according to our desires. In the sphere of rights we make a claim to something we need in order to make sure of a satisfactory human life as an equal among equals. And in the economic sphere is born that which unites men in terms of feeling: that is, brotherhood. The more this brotherhood is cultivated, the more fruitful economic life becomes. And the impulse towards brotherhood arises when we establish a certain connection between our property and another's, between our need and another's, between something we have and something another has, and so on.

This fraternity, this brotherly relation between men which must radiate through economic life if health is to prevail there, may be thought of as a kind of emanation rising from the economic sphere—and in such a way that if we absorb it into ourselves we are able to take it with us through the gate of death and carry it into the super-sensible life after death.

On earth, economic life looks like the lowest of the three social spheres, yet precisely from this sphere arises an impulse which works on into super-earthly realms after death. That is how the third member of the social organism presents itself in the light of spiritual science. Its character is such that in a certain sense it drives us into regions below the human level; yet in fact this is a blessing, since from the fraternity of economic life we carry through the gate of death something which remains with us when we enter the super-sensible world. Just as earthly spiritual life points backward, like a mirrored image, to super-sensible spiritual life before birth, so does economic life, with all that arises from its influence on men—social interests, feeling for human fellowship, brotherhood—so does economic life point forward to super-sensible life after death.

Thus we have distinguished the three social spheres, in the light of spiritual science: spiritual life, pointing back to super-sensible life before birth; political life, bound up with the impulses which take their course between birth and death; and economic life pointing forward to the experiences we shall encounter when we have passed through the gate of death.

Now, just as it is true that the being of man belongs not only to earthly but to super-earthly realms—that he bears in himself the fruits of his pre-natal life in the super-sensible, and develops in himself the seeds (if I may use this image) of the experiences that will be his in the life after death—just as it is true that in this connection human life is threefold, unfolding on earth between these two reflections of the super-earthly, so in truth must the social organism be itself “three-membered,” if it is to serve as foundation for human soul-life as a whole.

For those, accordingly, who through spiritual science understand man's place in the cosmos, there are much deeper reasons for recognising that the social organism must have a threefold structure, and that if everything is centralised, if everything is piled on to a chaotically jumbled social life, then man is bound to degenerate ... as indeed in modern life he has, in some respects, which has led on to the frightful catastrophe of the last four years.

You see: to grasp human life in such a way as to realise that every human fellowship is inwardly related to the whole of humanity and to the wider world—this is what ought more and more to come home to men from the deepening of spiritual-scientific knowledge. This is also the true Christ-Knowledge for our time and the immediate future. That is what we shall learn if we are willing, today, to listen to the Christ. He Himself said—I have often quoted it: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” This means: Christ did not speak only during His time on earth; His utterance continues, and we must continue to listen for it. We should not wish merely to read the Gospels (though certainly they ought to be read over and over again); we should listen to the living revelation that springs from His continued presence among us. In this epoch He declares to us: “Make new your ways of thinking” (as His forerunner, John the Baptist, said: “Change your thinking”), “so that they may reveal to you man's threefold nature which demands also that your social environment on earth shall have a threefold membering.”

You see, it is absolutely true to say: The Christ died and rose again for the whole of mankind; the Mystery of Golgotha is an event which concerns the whole of humanity. At the present time it is particularly necessary to be aware of that—at this time when nation has risen against nation in savage struggle, and when even now, after events have led on to a crisis, we find no thoughtfulness, no consciousness of the community of mankind, but on manifold sides a delirium of victory! Make no mistake: all that we have lived through in the last four years, all that we are experiencing now and have still to experience—to anyone who looks below the surface all this shows that mankind has reached a kind of crisis with regard to knowledge of the Christ. And the reason for this is that the true spirit of fellowship, the true relationship between men, has been lost. And it is very necessary that men should ask themselves: How can we find our way again to the Christ Impulse?

A simple fact will show that the way is not always found. Before the Christ Impulse entered into earth-evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, the people from whom Christ Jesus was born looked on themselves as the chosen people, and they believed that happiness would come to the world only if all other peoples were to die away, and their own stock to spread over the entire face of the earth. In a certain sense that was a well-founded belief, for Jehovah, the God of this people, had chosen it as his people, and Jehovah was regarded as the one and only God. In the time before the Mystery of Golgotha this was a justified perception for the old Hebrew people, since out of this old Hebrew people Christ Jesus was to emerge. But with the enactment of the Mystery of Golgotha this way of thinking should have come to an end. After that, it was out of date: in place of the recognition of Jehovah should have come the recognition of Christ—the recognition which compels one to speak always of humanity, just as, for those who looked up to Jehovah, one people only was in question. Not to have understood that is the tragic fate of the Jewish people. To-day, however, we are coming up against all sorts of reversions. What is it but a reversion when every nation—though it may suppose itself to be doing something quite different and may use other names—wants to worship a sort of Jehovah, a special national goal of its own!

Certainly, the old religious formulae are no longer used, but the outcome of present-day mentality is that every nation wants to set up its own national god and so confine itself within a strictly national existence. And the inevitable result is that nation rages against nation! We are experiencing a reversion to the old Jehovah-religion—with the difference that the Jehovah-religion is breaking up into a multitude of Jehovah-religions. To-day we are really confronted with an atavistic reversion to the Old Testament. Humanity is bent on dividing itself up into separate sections all over the earth—quite contrary to the spirit of Christ Jesus, who lived and stood for the whole of humanity. Humanity is trying to organise itself under the sign of national deities, Jehovah-fashion. Before the Mystery of Golgotha that was quite proper; now it is a reversion. This must be clearly understood: the way of nationalism is a reversion to the Old Testament.

This reversion is preparing heavy ordeals for mankind, and against it only one remedy will suffice: to draw near once more to the Christ by the path of the spirit.

Those concerned with spiritual science are therefore bound essentially to ask the question: How, out of the depths of our own hearts and souls, under the conditions of the present time, shall we find Christ Jesus?

This is a very serious question (I have often spoken of it before from other points of view in this group), as you can see from the fact that many official exponents of Christianity have lost the Christ! There are plenty of well-known parsons, pastors, etc., who talk about the Christ. The burden of their discourse is that men can reach the Christ through a certain deepening of the inner life, a certain inner experience. But if one comes close to what these people mean by the Christ, one finds that no distinction is made between this Christ and God in general—the Father-God, in the sense of the Gospels.

You will agree that Harnack, for example, is a celebrated theologian. He is emulated by many here in Switzerland. Harnack has published a small book, The Nature of Christianity; in it he speaks a great deal about the Christ. But what he says concerning Christ ... why should it apply to Christ? It could apply just as well to the Jehovah-God. For this reason the whole book, The Nature of Christianity, is inwardly untruthful. It would become truthful only if it were hebraicised—if it were so translated that wherever the word ‘Christ’ stands, ‘Jehovah’ were written instead.

This is a truth of which people to-day have scarcely any inkling. From countless pulpits all over the world Christ is spoken of, and people believe, simply because they hear the word ‘Christ,’ that the preacher is really speaking about the Christ. They never come to the point of thinking: “Strike out the word ‘Christ’ from what the pastor says and substitute ‘Jehovah’—that and nothing less will make it right!” You see, a definite untruth lies at the root of the deepest ailments of our time.

Do not think that in saying this I want to accuse or criticise any individual. That is not so. My wish is simply to bring out the facts. For those persons who often fall into the deepest inner untruth—one could even say, into an inner lie—have thoroughly good intentions, in their own way. It is hard to-day for humanity to reach the truth, since what I have called an inner untruth has an exceptionally strong backing of tradition. And this inner untruth, which has come to prevail in immeasurably wide circles, gives rise to another, so that in the most diverse realms of life the question is asked: Is anything still true? Where is any genuine truth left?

For this reason, those who are striving along the path of spiritual science are specially moved to ask earnestly: How shall I find the true way to the Christ—to that unique Divine Being Who may rightly be called the Christ?

Indeed, if here on earth our soul-life follows customary lines of development from birth to death, then we have no inducement to come to the Christ. We may be as spiritual as we like: we have no inducement to come to the Christ!

If, without doing a certain thing—which I will indicate in a moment—we simply pass on from birth to death, as most people do to-day, we remain far from the Christ. How, then, do we come to the Christ?

The impulse to take the way to the Christ—even though it be oft-times an impulse rising from the subconscious or from an obscure realm of feeling—must come from ourselves. Any person who is normally healthy can come to the God whom we have identified with the Jehovah-principle. Not to find the Jehovah-God is nothing else than a sort of illness in mankind. To deny God, to be an atheist, means that you are in some way ill. Anyone who has developed normally and healthily cannot be a denier of God, for it is merely laughable to believe that the healthy human organism can have other than a divine origin. The Ex Deo Nascimur is something which declares itself to a healthily developed man in the course of human life. For if he does not recognise—I am born out of the Divine—then he must have some defect, which expresses itself in the fact that he becomes an atheist. But to come to that generalised conception of the Divine, which out of inner falsehood is called Christ by modern pastors—that is not to come to the Christ.

We come to the Christ only—and here I am speaking with special reference to the immediate present—if we go beyond customary conditions of health, given by nature. For we know that the Mystery of Golgotha was enacted on earth because mankind would not have been able to maintain a worthy human status without the Mystery of Golgotha—that is, without finding its way to the Christ Impulse. And so we must not merely discover our human nature between birth and death: we must rediscover it, if we are to be Christians in the true sense, able to draw near to the Christ. And this rediscovery of our human nature must take place in the following way. We must strive for the inner honesty—we must nerve ourselves to the inner honesty—to say: “Since the Mystery of Golgotha we have not been born free from prejudice with regard to our world of thought—we are all born with certain prejudices.” Directly we regard the human being as perfect, after the manner of Rousseau or in any other way, we can by no means find the Christ. This is possible only if we know that the human being living since the Mystery of Golgotha has a certain defect, for which he must compensate through his own activity during his life here on earth. I am born a prejudiced person, and freedom from prejudice in my thinking is something I have to achieve during life.

And how can I achieve it? The one and only way is this: instead of taking an interest merely in my own way of thinking, and in what I consider right, I must develop a selfless interest in every opinion I encounter, however strongly I may hold it to be mistaken. The more a man prides himself on his own dogmatic opinions and is interested only in them, the further he removes himself, at this moment of world-evolution, from the Christ. The more he develops a social interest in the opinions of other men, even though he considers them erroneous—the more light he receives into his own thinking from the opinions of others—the more he does to fulfil in his inmost soul a saying of Christ, which to-day must be interpreted in the sense of the new Christ-language.

Christ said: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The Christ never ceases to reveal Himself anew to men—even unto the end of earthly time. And thus He speaks to-day to those willing to listen: “In whatever the least of your brethren thinks, you must recognise that I am thinking in him; and that I enter into your feeling, whenever you bring another's thought into relation with your own, and whenever you feel a fraternal interest for what is passing in another's soul. Whatever opinion, whatever outlook on life, you discover in the least of your brethren, therein you are seeking Myself.”

So does the Christ speak to our life of thought—the Christ Who desires to reveal Himself in a new way—the time for it is drawing near—to the men of the twentieth century. Not in such a way that people should speak in Harnack's style of the God who may equally well be the Jehovah-God, and is in fact nothing else, but so that it may be known: Christ is the God for all men. We shall not find Him if we remain egotistically bound up with our own thoughts, but only if we relate our own thoughts to those of other men, if we expand our interest to embrace, with inner tolerance, everything human, and say to ourselves: “Through the fact of my birth I am a prejudiced person; only through being reborn into an all-embracing feeling of fellowship for the thoughts of all men shall I find in myself the impulse which is, in truth, the Christ Impulse. If I do not look on myself alone as the source of everything I think, but recognise myself, right down into the depths of my soul, as a member of the human community”—then, my dear friends, one way to the Christ lies open. This is the way which must to-day be characterised as the way to the Christ through thinking. Earnest self-training so that we gain a true perception for estimating the thoughts of others, and for correcting bias in ourselves—this we must take as one of life's serious tasks. For unless this task finds place among men, they will lose the way to the Christ. This to-day is the way through thinking.

The other way is through the will. Here, too, people are much addicted to a false way, which leads not to the Christ but away from Him. And in this other realm we must find again the way to the Christ. Youth still keeps some idealism, but for the most part humanity to-day is dry and matter-of-fact. And men are proud of what is often called practical technique, though the expression is used in a narrow sense. Humanity to-day has no use for ideals which are drawn from the fountain of the spirit. Youth still has these ideals. Never was the life of older people so sharply severed from the life of the young as it is to-day. Lack of understanding among human beings is indeed the great mark of our time.

Yesterday I spoke of the deep gulf which exists between the proletariat and the middle-class. Age and youth, too—how little they understand each other to-day! This is something we ought to take most seriously into account. We may try to reach an understanding with youth on the ground of its idealism ... yes, that is all very well, but to-day efforts are made to drive the idealism out of young people. The aim is to do this by depriving youth of the imaginative education which is given by fairy-tales and legends, by all that leads away from dry external perceptions. All the same—it will not be too easy to drive all the youthful, natural, primitive idealism out of young people! But what is this youthful idealism? It is a beautiful thing, a great thing—but it ought not to be all-sufficient for human beings, for this youthful idealism is in fact bound up with the Ex Deo Nascimur, with that aspect of the Divine which is identical with the Jahve aspect. And that is just what must not remain sufficient, now that the Mystery of Golgotha has been enacted on earth. Something further is required—idealism must spring from inner development, from self-education. Besides the innate idealism of youth, we must see to it that in human society something else is achieved—precisely an achieved idealism: not merely the idealism that springs from the instincts and enthusiasm of youth, but one that is nurtured, gained by one's own initiative, and will not fade away with the passing of youth. This is something which opens the way to the Christ, because—once more—it is something acquired during the life between birth and death.

Feel the great difference between instinctive idealism and achieved idealism! Feel the great difference between youthful enthusiasm and the enthusiasm which springs from taking hold of the life of the spirit and can be ever and again kindled anew, because we have made it part of our soul, independently of the course of our bodily existence—then you will grasp this second idealism, which is not merely the idealism implanted in us by nature. This is the way to the Christ through willing, as distinct from the way through thinking.

Do not ask to-day for abstract ways to the Christ; ask for these concrete ways. Seek to understand the way through thinking, which consists in becoming inwardly tolerant towards the opinions of mankind at large, and developing social interest for the thoughts of other men. Seek also for the way through willing—there you will find nothing abstract, but an inescapable need to cultivate idealism in yourselves. And if you cultivate this idealism, or if you introduce it into the education of young people—which is particularly necessary—then you will have something which inspires men not to do only what the outer world impels them to do. For from this idealism arises the resolve to do more than the sense-world suggests—to act out of the spirit. When our actions spring from this achieved idealism we are acting in accordance with the intentions of the Christ, Who did not descend from worlds above the earth in order to achieve merely earthly ends, but came down to the earth from higher realms in order to fulfil a super-earthly purpose. We shall grow towards Him only if we cultivate idealism in ourselves, so that Christ, Who represents the super-earthly within the realm of earth, can work through us. Only in achieved idealism can there be realised the intention of the Pauline saying about Christ: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Anyone who refuses to develop this second idealism through a rebirth of his moral nature can say only: “Not I, but Jehovah in me.” But whoever cultivates this second idealism, which must essentially be cultivated, he can say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

These are the two ways through which we can find the Christ. If we pursue them, we shall no longer speak in such a way that our speech is an inward lie. Then we shall speak of Christ as the Divine Power active in our rebirth—while Jehovah is the Divine Power active in our birth.

People to-day must learn to appreciate this distinction, for it is this which leads also to genuine social feeling, a genuine interest in our fellow-men. Whoever develops an achieved idealism in himself, he will have love for human-kind. You may preach as much as you like from pulpits, telling men they ought to love one another: it is like preaching to a stove. The most excellent exhortations will not persuade the stove to heat the room. It will heat the room all right if you stoke it with coal—there is no need to preach to it that its ovenly duty is to heat the room. In just the same way you can keep on preaching to men—love, love, love ... that is mere sermonising, mere words. Strive rather that men should experience a rebirth of idealism, that besides instinctive idealism they should achieve in their souls an idealism which persists throughout life, then ... then you will kindle a warmth of soul in the love of man for man. For as much as you nurture an idealism in yourselves, by so much will you be led in your soul life away out of egoism towards a concern for other men.

And if you follow this twofold way, the way through thinking and the way through willing, which I have shown you with regard to the renewal of Christianity, there is one thing you will certainly experience and discover. Out of a thinking which is inwardly tolerant and interested in the thoughts of others, and out of a willing reborn through the achievement of idealism, something unfolds. And this can be described only as a heightened feeling of responsibility for every action one performs.

Anyone with an inclination to examine the unfolding of his soul will feel in himself, if he follows the two ways—it is a feeling different from anything encountered in the course of an ordinary life which does not follow the two ways—this heightened and refined sense of responsibility towards everything one thinks and does. This heightened feeling of responsibility will impel one to say: Can I justify this that I am doing or thinking, not merely with reference to the immediate circumstances of my life and environment, but in the light of my responsibility towards the super-sensible spiritual world? Can I justify it in the light of my knowledge that everything I do here on earth will be inscribed in an akashic record of everlasting significance, wherein its influence will work on and on? Oh, it comes powerfully home to one, this super-sensible responsibility towards all things! It strikes one like a solemn warning, when one seeks the two-fold way to Christ—as though a Being stood behind one, looking over one's shoulder and saying repeatedly: “Thou art not responsible only to the world around thee but also to the Divine-Spiritual, for all thy thoughts and all thy actions.”

But this Being who looks over our shoulder, who heightens and refines our sense of responsibility and sets us on a new path—he is the one who first directs us truly to the Christ, Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. It is of this Christ-Way, how it may be found and how it reveals itself through the Being I have just described, that I wanted to speak to you to-day. For this Christ-Way is most intimately connected with the deepest social impulses and tasks of our time.

There is truly great significance in how certain men feel impelled to-day to speak about the present situation of mankind—men who at least try, with the aid of their feelings and perceptions, to see into the heart of social affairs. In this connection I would like to read you a few sentences from the address which Kurt Eisner gave to a gathering of students in Basle, shortly before his death. Perhaps some of you already know these sentences, but they are extraordinarily important for anyone who wants to grasp the symptomatic meaning of certain things to-day.

“Do I not hear and see clearly” (he says, referring to his earlier remarks), “that in our life this very longing strives to find expression—and yet accompanying it is the conviction that our life, as we are compelled to lead it to-day, is plainly the invention of an evil spirit! Imagine a great thinker, knowing nothing of our time and living perhaps two thousand years ago, who might dream of how the world would look after two thousand years—not with the most exuberant imagination would he be able to conceive such a world as that in which we are condemned to live. In truth, existing conditions are the one great mirage in the world, while the substance of our desires and the longings of our spirit are the deepest and final truth—and everything outside them is horrible. We have simply interchanged dreaming and waking. Our task is to shake off this ancient illusion about the reality of our present social existence. One glance at the war: can you imagine a human reason which could devise anything like it? If this war was not what men call reality, then perhaps we were dreaming, and now have woken up.”

Just think of it—in his efforts to understand the present time, this man was driven to make use of the concept of a dream, and to ask himself the question: Is not the reality which surrounds us to-day much better called a bad dream, than true reality?

So we have the remarkable case—and consider how typical it is—of a thoroughly modern man, a man who has felt himself to be a herald of a new epoch, who regards outwardly perceptible reality as nothing else than maya—rather as Indian philosophy does—as in fact a dream; and this man feels impelled by the singular events of the present to raise the question (no matter in what sense but still to raise it) whether this reality is not indeed a dream!

Yes, the whole tenor of Eisner's speech shows that he was using more than a mere phrase when he said that this present reality could be naught else than something inflicted on mankind by an evil spirit.

Now let us recall some of the many things that have passed through our souls in the course of our anthroposophical endeavours, and above all the fact that in general we try not to look on outwardly perceptible reality as the whole of reality, and that over against the perceptible we set the super-sensible, which alone prevents the perceptible from ranking as the true, complete reality. This outlook, however, is no more than a tiny spark in the currents of contemporary thought, for these are widely permeated by materialistic ideas—and yet we see that such a man as Kurt Eisner, who is certainly untouched by this spark (at any rate in his physical life), finds himself driven by the facts of the present day to make this surprising comparison: he compares outward reality, at least in its current manifestation, to a dream! Faced with present-day reality, he is driven to a confession which he can express only by calling to witness the general truth of the unreality, the maya-character, of the reality that is outwardly perceived.

Let us now go rather more deeply into many of the things which our consideration of the social problem has brought before our souls in the last few weeks. Let us observe how the trend of events in the past century has more and more brought men to the point of denying the reality of the spiritual or super-sensible world, so that this denial is, one might say, established in the widest circles. Certainly, in some quarters—you may object—a great deal is said about the spiritual world; churches are still numerous, if not always full, and words which purport to tell of the spirit echo through them. Moreover—to-day and also yesterday evening—you can listen almost all the time to bells, which again should be an expression of something recognised in the world as spiritual life. But in this connection we experience something else, too. If to-day an attempt is made to hear what the Christ is saying for our present age, then it is precisely from the adherents of the old religious communities that the most vehement attacks come. Real spiritual life, one that relies not merely on faith or on an old tradition, but on the immediate spiritual findings of the present—that is something which very, very few people want to-day.

On the other hand, is it not as though modern humanity were being impelled—not perhaps by an evil world-spirit, but by a good world-spirit—to think again of the spiritual side of existence—as witness the fact that people are surrounded by a sense-perceptible reality of such a kind that a man of modern outlook has to say: It is like a dream... even a great thinker of two thousand years ago could not have conceived the shape which outer reality would wear to-day?

In any case, here is a modern man led by such a recognition to form conceptions which are not customary to-day. I know that the conceptions of reality, which to-day I have pointed to as important, are found rather difficult by many of our anthroposophical friends. But, my dear friends, you cannot cope with life to-day unless you have the will to take account of these difficult conceptions. How do people usually form their thoughts in a certain realm to-day? They hold a crystal in their hands: that is a real object. They take a rose, plucked from its stem, and in just the same way they say: that is a real object. They call them both real objects in the same sense.

Natural scientists, in their chancelleries of learning and in every laboratory and clinic, talk about reality in such a way as to grant it only to things which have the same kind of reality as the crystal and the plucked rose. But is there not an obvious and important difference in the fact that for long ages the crystal retains, quite of itself, its existing form? The rose, plucked from its stem, loses its form in a very much shorter time; it dies. It has not the same degree of reality as the crystal. And the rose-stem itself, if we tear it from the earth, has no longer the same degree of reality that it had while it was planted in the earth. This leads us to look at objects in a way quite different from the superficial observation of the present day. We may not speak of a rose or a rose-stem as real objects; in order to speak of reality in the fullest sense we must take the whole earth into account—and then speak of the rose-stem, and its roses, as a kind of hair sprouting out of this reality!

So you see—sense-perceptible reality includes objects which cease to be real, in the true sense of the word, if they are separated from their foundation. It is here, in this great illusion, that we have to search among the appearances of outer reality for what truly is reality. Mistakes of the kind I have mentioned are common in looking at nature to-day. But anyone who makes them, and has got used to them as the result of centuries of habit, will find it extraordinarily hard to think about social questions in a way that corresponds to reality. For this is the great difference between human life and nature: anything in nature which no longer has full reality, such as the plucked rose, is allowed to die. Now something can have an appearance of reality which is not reality: the appearance is a lie. And we can quite well incorporate as a reality in social life something which is in fact not a reality. Only then it need not immediately fade away; it will turn into a source of pain and torment for mankind. Indeed, nothing can bring forth healing for mankind which is not first experienced and thought out in terms of complete reality, and then planted in the social organism. It is not merely a sin against the social order, but a sin against the truth, if—for example—daily work proceeds on the assumption that human labour-power (I have often said this here) is a commodity. It can be made to seem so, indeed: but this seeming results in pain and suffering for human society, and sets the stage for convulsions and revolutions in economic life.

In short, what needs to become a familiar thought for people to-day is this: not everything which is revealed in the outer appearance of reality—revealed within certain limits—is bound to be a true reality; it may be a living lie. And this distinction between living truths and living lies is something which should be deeply engraved in human minds to-day. For the more people there are in whom it is deeply engraved, in so many more will the feeling awake: we must seek for those things which are not lies, but living truths ... and the sooner will the social organism be restored to health. What must be added to this?

Something further is necessary for discerning the true or merely apparent reality of an external object. Imagine a being who comes from a planet with a different organisation from ours, so that this being has never encountered the distinction between a rose, growing on its stem, and a crystal—he might well believe, if a crystal and a rose were placed before him, that their reality was of the same kind. And he would no doubt be surprised to find the rose soon withering, while the crystal remained unchanged. Here on earth we know where we are in face of the realities, because we have followed the course of things through long periods.

But it is not always possible to distinguish true reality in the way one can with the rose. In life we encounter objects which require us to create a foundation for our judgment if we are to lay hold of the true reality in them. What sort of foundation is this—with respect particularly to social life?

Now, in the two preceding lectures I spoke about this foundation; to-day I will add something more. You know from my writings the descriptions I have given of the spiritual world—the world which man lives through between death and rebirth. You are aware that in referring to this life in the super-sensible, spiritual world one must be clear as to the relationships which prevail between soul and soul. For there the human being is free from his body: he is not subject to the physical laws of the world we live through between birth and death. So one speaks of the force or forces which play from soul to soul. You can read in my Theosophy how one must speak in this connection of the forces of sympathy and antipathy, playing between soul and soul in the soul-world. In a quite inward way these forces play from soul to soul. Antipathy sets soul against soul; through sympathy, souls are made gentler towards each other. Harmonies and disharmonies arise from the inmost experiences of souls. And this inward experience by one soul of the inmost experience of another is what determines the true relationship of the super-sensible to the sense-perceptible world. It is only a reflection—a sort of lingering remnant—of this super-sensible experience, the experience which establishes a true connection with the sense-world, that can be experienced here in the physical world during life.

This reflection, however, must be seen in its true significance. We can ask: How, from a social point of view, is our life here between birth and death related to our super-sensible life? From here we are at once led—as we often have been in studying the necessary threefolding of the social organism—to the middle member, frequently described: in fact to the political State. People who in our epoch have reflected on the political State, have always been concerned to understand exactly what it is. Moreover, the various class-interests of modern times have led to everything being jumbled up together in the State, so that without further knowledge it is pretty well impossible to tell whether the State is a reality, or a living lie.

It is a far remove from the outlook of the German philosopher, Hegel, to the very different outlook which Fritz Mauthner, the author of a philosophical dictionary, has lately proclaimed. Hegel regards the State more or less as the realisation of God on earth. Fritz Mauthner says: the State is a necessary evil. He regards the State as an evil, but one men cannot do without—as something required by social life. So are the findings of two modern spirits radically opposed.

Owing to the fact that a great deal which was formerly instinctive is now rising into the light of consciousness, the most variously-minded people have tried to form conceptions of how the State should be constituted and what sort of entity it ought to be. And these conceptions have taken the most manifold forms. On the one hand we have the pious sheep who refuse to grasp what the State really is, but want to portray it in such a way that there is not much to say about it, but a great deal to bewail. And there are the others, who want to change the State radically, so that men may derive from the State itself a satisfying form of existence. Hence the question arises: How can we gain a perception of what the State really is?

If one observes impartially what can be woven between man and man within the context of the State, and compares it with what can be woven between soul and soul in the life after death (as I described it just now), then and only then can one gain a perception of the reality of the State—of its potential reality. For, just as every relationship which arises from the fundamental forces of sympathy and antipathy in the human soul after death lives in the inmost depths of the soul, so everything built between man and man through political State-life is a pure externality, based on law, on the wholly external ways in which men confront one another.

And if you follow this thought right through, you come to see that the State represents the exact opposite of super-sensible life. And it is the more complete in its own way, this State, the more fully it fills this opposite role: the less it claims to incorporate in its own structure anything that belongs to super-sensible life, the more it merely embodies purely external relationships between man and man—those wherein all men are equal in the sight of the law. More and more deeply is one penetrated by this truth: that the fulfilment of the State consists precisely in it’s seeking to comprise only what belongs to our life between birth and death, only what belongs to our most external relationships.

But then we must ask: If the State reflects super-sensible life only by standing for its opposite, how does the super-sensible find its way into all the rest of our sense-life? In the last lecture I spoke of this from another point of view. To-day I must add that the antipathies which unfold in the super-sensible world between death and birth leave certain remnants, and we bring these with us into physical existence. Working against them in physical life is everything which lives in so-called spiritual life, in spiritual culture. This is what draws men together in religious communities, and in other spiritual societies, so that they may create a counterpart of the antipathies which have lingered on from the life before birth.

All our spiritual culture should be justified on its own ground, for it reflects our pre-earthly life and in a certain sense equips mankind for life in the sense-world, and at the same time it should be a kind of remedy for the antipathies which remain over from the super-sensible world. That is why it is so dreadful when people bring about schisms in spiritual life, instead of working for unity—in spiritual life above all. The remaining antipathies are surging in the depths of the human soul and prevent the achievement of what should be the essential aim: true spiritual harmony, true spiritual collaboration. Just where this should prevail, we find sects springing up. These schisms and sectarianisms are in fact the reflections on earth of the antipathies which are bound up with the origins of all spiritual life, and for which spiritual life should really come to serve as a remedy.

We must recognise this spiritual life as something which has an inner connection with our life before birth—indeed, a certain kinship with it. We should therefore never try to organise spiritual-cultural life except as a free life, outside the realm of politics, which in this sense is not a reflection but a counter-image of super-sensible life. And we shall gain a conception of what is real in the State, and in spiritual-cultural life, only if we take super-sensible life into account, as well as the life of the senses. Both together make up true reality, while the life of senses alone is nothing more than a dream.

Economic life has a quite different character. In economic life the single man works for others. He works for others because he, just as much as the others, finds it to his advantage to do so. Economic life springs from needs, and consists in all kinds of work which go to satisfy the ordinary natural needs of human beings on the physical plane—including the finer but more instinctive needs of the soul. And within economic life there is an unconscious unfolding of something whose influence continues on the far side of death.

Men work for one another out of the egoistic needs of economic life, and from the depths of this work come the seeds of certain sympathies which are destined to flower in our souls during the life after death. And so, just as spiritual-cultural life is a kind of remedy for the remains of antipathies which we bring into earthly existence from the life before birth, so are the depths of economic life a seed-ground for sympathies which will develop after death.

Here is a further aspect of the way in which we learn from the super-sensible world to recognise the necessity of a threefold ordering of the social organism. Most certainly, no one can reach this point of view unless he strives to become familiar with the spiritual-scientific foundation of world-knowledge. But for anyone who does this it will become more and more obvious that a healthy social organism must be membered into these three realms, for the three realms are related in quite distinctive ways to the super-sensible world, which—as I have said—is the complement of the sense-world and together with it makes up true reality.

But now observe—in recent centuries no one has spoken any longer of these interconnections of outward physical existence, as it manifests in cultural life, political life, and economic life. People have gone on spinning out the old traditions, but with no understanding for them. They have lost the practice of taking a direct way, through an active soul-life, into the world of the spirit, in order there to seek for the light that is able to illuminate physical reality, so that this reality comes then to be rightly known for the first time. The leading circles of mankind have set the tone of this unspiritual life. And in this way a deep gulf has arisen between the social classes—a gulf which lies at the root of our life to-day and is not to be drowsily ignored.

Perhaps I may again recall how, before the time of July and August, 1914, drew on, people who belonged to the leading classes—the former leading classes—were accustomed to praise the stage which our civilisation, as they called it, had at last reached. They spoke of how thought could be carried like an arrow over great distances by the telegraph and telephone, and of the other fabulous achievements of modern technique which culture and civilisation had carried to such an advanced stage. But this culture, this civilisation, was already rushing towards the abyss, out of which have come the frightful catastrophes of to-day. Before July and August, 1914, the statesmen of Europe, especially those of Central Europe—this can be established from the documents—declared times without number: Under present conditions, peace in Europe is assured for a long time. That is literally what was said, by the statesmen of Central Europe especially, in their party speeches. I could show you speeches made as late as May, 1914, when it was said: Through our diplomacy, the relationships between countries have been brought to a point which permits us to believe in enduring peace. That, in May, 1914! But anyone who at that time saw through those relationships, had to speak in a different vein. In lectures I gave then in Vienna, (See: The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth.) I repeated, before the war, what I have often said in the course of recent years: We are living in the midst of something which can be called only a cancerous social disease, a carcinoma of the social organism. This carcinoma, this ulcer, duly broke out, and became what people call the World War.

At that time, of course, the statement—we live in a carcinoma, a social ulcer—was for most people a mere way of talking, a phrase, for the World War was still in the future. People had no notion that they were dancing on a volcano! For many it is just the same to-day, if attention is now called to the other volcano—and it certainly is one—which lies in all that is now coming to expression out of the social question, as it has long been called. Because people are so fond of sleeping in face of reality, they fail to recognise in this reality the forces which alone turn it into true reality.

You see, that is why it is so hard to bring home to people to-day what is so necessary—to bring home the point of the threefold ordering of a healthy social organism, and the necessity of working towards this threefold ordering! What is it, then, that distinguishes this way of thinking, which comes to expression in the demand for a threefold social order, from other ways of thinking? You see, these other ways spring from trying to work out what would be the best social order for the world, and what must be done in order to reach it. Now observe how different is the way of thinking which is founded on a threefold ordering of the social organism! There is no question here of asking: What is the best way of arranging the social organism? We start from reality by asking: How must human beings themselves be interrelated, so that they will be free members of the social organism and be able to work together for what is right and just?

This way of thinking makes its appeal, not to theories or social dogmas, but to human beings. It says: Let people find themselves in the environment of a threefold social order, and they will themselves say how it should be organised. This way of thinking makes its appeal to actual human beings, not to abstract theories or social dogmas.

Anyone who lived entirely alone would never develop human speech—human speech arises only in a social community. In the same way, anyone who lives alone cannot arrive at a social way of thinking; he will have no social perceptions and no social instincts. Only in a rightly formed community is it possible to build up social life in face of the happenings of the present time.

But a great deal stands in contradiction to that. Because of the rise of materialism in recent centuries, men have moved away from the true reality. They have become estranged from it, and lonely in their inner lives. And most lonely of all are those who have been torn out of the context of their lives and are connected with nothing but the dreary machine—on the one hand, the factory; on the other, soulless capitalism. The human soul has indeed become a desert. But out of the desert there struggles up whatever can proceed from the single individual. And this consists of inner thoughts, inner visions of the super-sensible world, and also visions which throw light on external nature.

Now it is just when we are quite alone, when we are thrown back entirely on ourselves, that we are best disposed in soul for all the knowledge that can be gained by the single individual concerning his relationships with the worlds of nature and of spirit. In contradistinction to that, we have everything that should flow from social thinking. Only if we reflect on this can we form a right judgment of the momentous hour of history in which we are now living. It was necessary, once in the course of world evolution, that men should have this experience of loneliness, in order that out of their loneliness of soul they should develop a life of the spirit. And the loneliest of all were the great thinkers, who to all appearance lived in abstract heights, and sought from there the way to the super-sensible world.

But of course men must not seek only the way to the super-sensible world and to the world of nature; they must also find a way that unites their thinking with social life. Social life, however, cannot be developed in loneliness, but only through genuine living together with other men; and so the lonely individual who emerged in our modern epoch was not well fitted for social thinking. Just when he rightly wanted to make something worth while out of his inner life, the fruits of his inner life turned out to be anti-social, not social thinking at all! The present-day inclinations and cravings of mankind are the outcome of spiritual forces which are bound up with loneliness, and are given a false direction by the overwhelming influence of Ahrimanic materialism.

The importance of this fact comes out clearly if one asks about something which many people find terrible. Suppose one asks: What do you mean by “bolshevistic”? Most people will say: “Lenin, Trotsky.” Now, I can tell you of a Bolshevist who is no longer alive to-day, and he is none other than the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. You will have heard and learnt a great deal about Fichte's idealistic, spiritual way of thinking. But you will not know much about the sort of man Fichte was unless you are familiar with the outlook he expressed in his Geschlossenen Handelstaat (A Closed National Economy), which can be bought very cheaply in the Reclam Library. Read how Fichte conceives the social ordering of the masses of mankind, and compare it with the writings of Lenin and Trotsky—you will find a remarkable agreement. Then you will become critical of merely external representations and judgments, and you will be impelled to ask: What really lies at the bottom of all this? And if you try to enter into it more closely and to get clear about its foundations, you will come to the following.

Suppose you try to make out the particular spiritual orientation of the most radical men of the present day, and endeavour perhaps to penetrate into the souls of the Trotsky’s and Lenin’s, their ways of thinking and forms of thought, and then you ask: How are we to think of such men? And you get this answer: One can imagine them first in a different social setting, and then again in our own social order, in this social order of ours which has developed in the light—or, more truly, in the darkness, the gloom—of the materialism of recent centuries. Now consider, if Lenin and Trotsky had lived in a different social order—what might they have become, with their spiritual forces unfolding in a quite different way? Deep mystics! For in a religious atmosphere the content of such souls might have developed into the deepest mysticism. In the atmosphere of modern materialism it has become what you know it to be.

Take Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Geschlossenen Handelstaat: we have here the social ideal of a man who in truth sought most earnestly to tread the highest path of knowledge who put forth a way of thinking which was constantly inclined towards the super-sensible world. When he conceived the wish to work out for himself a social ideal also, this was indeed a pure impulse of the heart, the human heart. But the very thing which fits us to pursue inwardly the highest ideals of knowledge is a handicap if we want to apply it to social life; it unfits us for developing a social way of thinking. Along the spiritual path taken by Fichte, a man has to make his way alone. Social thinking has to be developed in the community of other human beings. And then the social thinker's task is above all to consider how the social order must be laid out if men are to work together rightly at the task of founding social life on the direct experience of social fellowship. Therefore I never say to people: this is how you should organise private property as a means of production, or public property as a means of production. I am bound to say, rather: Try to work towards a threefold ordering of the social organism; then the operations of capital will be regulated from the spiritual realm, and infused with human rights from the political realm. Then spiritual life and the life of rights will flow together with economic life in an orderly way. And then will come in that socialisation which, in accordance with certain concepts of justice, will see to it that whatever a man acquires, beyond his own needs as a consumer, shall continually pass over into the spiritual realm. It returns once more to the spiritual realm.

At the present time this arrangement applies only to spiritual property, where it shocks nobody. A man cannot preserve his spiritual property for his descendants for more than a certain period—thirty years after his death at most. Then it becomes public property. We have only to take this as a possible model for the return flow of everything that is produced by individual effort, and indeed of everything embraced by the capitalist system—a model for the leading back of all this into the social organism. The question then is simply—how is it all to be divided up? In such parts as will do justice to the immediate spiritual and individual abilities, and also the former individual abilities, of the human beings concerned: it will be a question for the spiritual realm. Men will arrange it like that, if they are rightly situated within the social order. That is what this way of thinking assumes.

In every century, I daresay, these things would be done differently; in such matters no arrangements are valid for all time. But our epoch is accustomed to judging everything from a materialistic standpoint, and so nothing is seen any longer in the right light. I have often pointed out how in modern times labour-power has become a commodity. Ordinary wage contracts are based on that; they derive from the assumption that labour-power is a commodity, and they are determined by the amount of labour which the workman renders to the employer. A healthy relationship will arise only under the following conditions: the contract must by no means be settled in terms of so much labour; the labour must be treated as a rights-question, to be fixed by the political State; and the contract must be based on a division of the goods produced between the manual workers and the spiritual workers. Such a contract can be based only on the goods produced, not on the relationship between workmen and employer. That is the only way to put the thing on a healthy footing.

People ask: whence come the social evils which are associated with capitalism? They say, these evils come from the capitalist economic system. But no evils can arise from an economic system: they arise first of all because we have no real labour laws to protect labour; and further because we fail to notice that the way in which the worker is denied his due share amounts to a living lie. But what does this denial depend on? Not on the organisation of economic life, but on the fact that the social order permits the individual capacities of the employer to be unjustly rewarded, at the worker's expense. The division of proceeds ought to be made in terms of goods, for these are the joint products of the spiritual and the manual workers. But if you use your individual capacities to take from someone something which ought not to be taken, what are you doing? You are cheating him, taking advantage of him! One need only look these circumstances straight in the face to realise that the trouble does not he in capitalism, but in the misuse of spiritual capacities.

There you have the connection with the spiritual world. First make the realm of society healthy, so that spiritual capacities are no longer enabled to take advantage of the workers: then you will bring health into the social organism as a whole. It all turns on perceiving everywhere what is right and just.

In order to perceive this, one needs a principle of justice. To-day we have reached a stage when principles of justice can be derived only from the spiritual world. And again and again it must be pointed out that nowadays it is not enough to keep on and on declaring: People must recover belief in the spirit. Oh, there are plenty of prophets ready to speak of the necessity of belief in the spirit! But it gets nowhere for people merely to say: “In order to bring healing into the unhealthy conditions of our time, men must turn from materialism to the spirit.” ... No, mere belief in the spirit brings no healing to-day! Any number of celebrated prophets may go round the country saying over and over again: “People must turn inwardly” ... or, “The Christ used to be the concern of a man's personal life only; now He must be brought into social life”... with such phrases absolutely nothing is accomplished! For what matters to-day is not merely to believe in the spirit, but to be so filled with the spirit that through us the spirit is carried directly into material existence. It is useless to-day to say. Believe in the spirit ... what is necessary is to speak of a spirit which is in truth able to master external reality, and can truly declare how the membering of the social organism is to be accomplished. For the cause of the unspiritual character of the present day is not that men do not believe in the spirit, but that they cannot reach such a relationship with the spirit as would enable the spirit to seize hold of matter in real life.

How many men there are to-day who think it extraordinarily fine to say: “Oh, there is nothing spiritual in mere material existence—one ought to withdraw from it: our duty is to turn away from material existence to the set-apart life of the spirit.” Here is material reality: you clip your coupons ... and then you sit down in the room reserved for meditation, and off you go to the spiritual world. Two beautifully distinct ways of living, kept gracefully apart! That leads nowhere to-day. What is wanted to-day is that the spirit should wax so strong in human souls that it does not merely find expression in talk about how men are to be blessed or redeemed, but penetrates right into what we have to do in material existence—so that we enable the spirit to flow into and penetrate external reality. To talk habitually about the spirit comes very easily to human beings. And in this connection many people slip into strange contradictions. The character in Anzengruber's play, who denies God, illustrates this; it is specially emphasised that he denies God by saying: “As truly as there is a God in heaven, so am I an atheist.” This type of self-contradicting person, even though it may not take so crass a form as in Anzengruber's play, is far from rare to-day. For it is very common to talk in this style: As truly as there is a God in heaven, so am I an atheist!

All this gives us further warning not to think merely of belief in the spirit, but to try above all to make such an encounter with the spirit that it gives us strength to see through the reality of the material, external world. Then indeed people will stop using the word spirit, spirit, spirit... in every sentence. Then a man will prove by the way he looks at things, that he is seeing them in the light of the spirit. This is what matters to-day: that people should see things in the light of the spirit, and not merely keep on talking about the spirit.

This is what needs to be grasped, so that anthroposophical spiritual science may not be constantly confused with all the talking about the spirit which is so popular nowadays. Again and again, when some Sunday afternoon preacher of the worldly sort has merely spoken in a better style than usual, one hears that someone has said: “He speaks quite in the spirit of Anthroposophy!” Usually, in such cases, he is doing the very opposite! This is the point that needs attention; this is what counts.

Whoever recognises this is not far from perceiving that such a well-intentioned remark—I might say, a remark spoken from a presentiment of tragic death—as the one I quoted from Kurt Eisner, is particularly valuable, because it strikes one like the confession of a man who might say: “To be honest, I don't believe seriously in the super-sensible—at least I have no wish to give it any active attention. Those who speak about the super-sensible have certainly always said: the reality we perceive here with our senses is only a half-reality; it is like a dream! But I am bound to scrutinise the form which this sense-perceptible reality has assumed in the social life of the present—and then it does look to me very like a dream! The effect is that one is forced to say: this reality is clearly the invention of some kind of evil spirit ...”

Certainly a noteworthy confession! But might it not be otherwise? This tragic, terrible guise in which present-day reality presents itself to humanity, could it not be the educative work of a good spirit, urging us to seek in what looks like an evil nightmare for the true reality, which is compounded of the sense-perceptible and the super-sensible? We must not take an exclusively pessimistic view of the present; we can also draw from it the strength to achieve a kind of vindication of contemporary existence.

Then we shall never again allow ourselves to stop at the sense-perceptible: we shall feel impelled to find the way out of it to the super-sensible. Anyone who refuses to seek for this way will indeed be unable to think far without saying: this reality is the invention of an evil spirit! But whoever develops the resolve to rise from this reality to a spiritual reality, will be able to speak also of education by a good spirit. And in spite of everything we see around us to-day, we should remain convinced that humanity will find a way out of the tragic destiny of the present. But, of course, we must attend to the clear injunction that bids us work together for social healing.

This I wished to add to what I have said recently.

Automated Translation

We are living at a time when one can see what anthroposophic Spiritual Science—as it is called—has really been striving after for years. To a certain extent the fiery signs of the times can be regarded as proving the necessity that led to the birth of this movement and has kept it before the world for some years now. And perhaps the best result of our anthroposophic strivings would be a conviction of this necessity in the hearts and souls of those taking part. Though this or that event in the external world may take on a stormy character, though that which is striving to develop from out of the depths of human evolution may have this or that appearance, the essential nature of what is happening to-day can only be grasped if we look at those events which escape the ordinary human powers of perception still usual among us. Such events are only really perceptible when we study the world from a spiritual point of view.

I should like to start by mentioning one such phenomenon which almost escapes notice among the manifold stormy events of to-day. It is regarded as something insignificant and unimportant, but it is an actual fact for one who, from spiritual sources, has acquired the ability to study life as it actually is.

It may sound an extraordinary statement, but it is nevertheless true, that for some seven, eight or ten years now a real student of human life can observe quite a different expression on the faces of new-born babies. Many people, it is true, do not notice this, for the most important things of life pass unheeded to-day. But one who has acquired an eye for such things knows that very many children born during the last seven to ten years wear a melancholy expression. It is as if they ‘held back’ from the world. One might say that even from the first days of life, from the first week onwards, something different can be seen in the physiognomy of these children. And if we investigate this remarkable fact that seems so strange to the man of to-day, we find that the souls entering the world through birth bear within them from before conception and birth that which gives their faces this melancholy expression. Hidden though it often be behind all their smiles, it is nevertheless there in the faces of these children, almost from birth. It was not there formerly. In these souls there lives—though it is quite unconscious, of course—a “reluctance” to enter life. Souls entering through birth to-day feel a kind of hindrance, a difficulty, in entering the physical world.

Now it is a fact that man undergoes an important experience in the spiritual world before entering the physical world through conception and birth, and the effects of this experience are active in his coming life. Here on the earth men die; they pass through the gate of death, laying aside their physical bodies and taking their souls into the spiritual world. These souls still bear within them the effects of all they have experienced in the physical world. After passing through the gates of death human souls appear, on the whole, as the after-effects of what they have immediately experienced in earthly life. Now such souls meet those who are about to descend into a physical body. (This is actually the case. I can only tell you of it, for these things can only be brought from the spiritual world through actual experience of them.) This meeting between those souls who have just passed through the gate of death and those who are just about to enter the physical world through the gate of birth is an important event. Its effect is decisive in many respects. In a certain sense, its function is to give the descending souls some idea of what they will encounter here. It is from this meeting that the “impulse” is derived that stamps the peculiar expression of melancholy on the faces of children entering the world to-day. They do not want to enter the world of which they have learnt through this meeting. For they know how, in a sense, their “spiritual plumage” will be ruffled by what mankind, immersed in materialistic thoughts and feelings, views and deeds, is experiencing on the earth to-day.

This fact (which, naturally, can only be established spiritually) and other things beside throw a strong light on our whole age. The present times can only be understood on such a basis, and we ought to strive for such an understanding.

I have started from something which can, of course, only be apprehended through spiritual perception. But other events of to-day are speaking to us loudly and clearly and can strike everyone who, though without spiritual vision, does not go through life half asleep. We have seen the great catastrophe of the World-War extend over the world during the last four or five years, causing great harm; we can turn our thoughts again and again to the outward and visible causes of this terrible catastrophe (as, I believe, everyone who is not asleep must do); we can study the course of this catastrophe and, finally, the events which have followed from it over large areas of the globe. One thing must be clear to every soul that is really awake. Consider the peculiar fact that this catastrophe of the world-war burst over Central Europe, for example, actually without anyone knowing how it all came about. This was indeed the case. People ask how it arose, pronounce this or that person guilty—and then, when they imagine they have laid the blame at somebody's door, repeat again and again: Yet it cannot be like that; there must have been some other factor at work.

People tell themselves that a great social movement has developed out of the catastrophe of the world war. Whether they belong to a party or not they try to understand what ought to be done in the present social catastrophe. Yet all the thoughts they form about it are only “thought-mummies” in the face of current events—thoughts that are powerless before the storm of events and quite inadequate to their true character. And if we look more closely at all this—especially now when all kinds of memoirs are being published by persons who, apparently, were directly concerned in the outbreak of the world-catastrophe—we have to ask ourselves: Were these people really “within” the events of four or five years ago? Did they really know what they were doing? Had they any conception of the far-reaching consequences of what their intellects had thought out? People ought more and more to admit to themselves to-day what the Russian Minister Suchomlinoff admitted at his trial. Speaking of the three or four hours in which he made his most important decisions, he said: I must have lost my reason then; I must, indeed, have been mad!

Such things are very significant. They point to the wide-spread mental confusion among those concerned. And one who is really in a position to see through the terrible nature of present world-events, discovers what people will come to see more and more, namely: that there was not so very much moral failure, but all the more intellectual blundering through sheer incapacity to grasp world-events.

It is just the same to-day. How helpless, in the main, is the great majority of people in the face of world-events that have come upon them. A most serious question is presented here. What really lies at the base of all this?

At the base of this lies something which is extraordinarily difficult for our materialistically-minded age to grasp, namely: that just since the historical moment in which the wave of materialism rose especially high, the strongest spiritual force that has ever willed to enter human life from the spiritual world is now seeking to enter. It is this that is characteristic of our age. Since the beginning of the last, third of the 19th century the spirit—the spiritual world—is willing to reveal itself to men in all strength; yet men have gradually reached a point in their development when they are only willing to use their physical bodies as instruments for receiving anything at all in the world. Their materialistic outlook has accustomed them to consider—even to maintain on theoretical grounds that the physical body is the instrument of thinking and, indeed, of feeling and willing too. Men have persuaded themselves that the physical body is the instrument of all spiritual life. They have not persuaded themselves of this without grounds; they have good reason for this, namely: That man in the course of his evolution had gradually come to be able to use only the physical body. It had really come about that only the physical body could be used as the instrument of spiritual activity.

So we stand to-day at the infinitely important juncture in human evolution where, on the one hand, the spiritual world is willing to reveal itself with great power, while, on the other, man must find the strength to free himself from his greatest entanglement in what is material and come to a new reception of spiritual revelations.

To-day man is confronted by the greatest trial of his strength—his power to work his way in freedom to the spirit which is approaching him of itself, if he does not shut himself off from it. The time is past when the spiritual could reveal itself to man in all sorts of subconscious and unconscious processes. The time has come when man must receive the light of the spirit through a free, inner deed. All the confusion and want of clarity in which men are living to-day come from the fact that men must receive something that they do not yet want to receive: an entirely new understanding of things.

The old ways of thought, the old ways of regarding world-events, came to full expression in the terrible catastrophe of the world-war. Its infinitely significant warning signs are nothing but a call to re-model our ways of thinking, to try a new way of regarding the world, for the old way can only lead again and again to chaos and confusion. It is time we realised this. It is time we realised that the leading statesmen in 1914 had come to a point at which nothing more could be achieved with the old methods of thought. Because of this they led humanity into misfortune. People must impress this fact strongly upon themselves, or they will not form a strong resolution really to meet the spirit and the life of the spirit in freedom and inwardness of soul.

The lamentable thing about the time in which we are living is that we see things being revealed everywhere which cannot be understood with previous points of view and previous conceptions of life; yet people cling firmly to these old points of view and conceptions of life and simply do not want to come to new modes of conception. The anthroposophic view of the world wanted to prepare mankind for such new modes. Fundamentally, the anthroposophic view of the world had no real opponents except inner comfort and laziness of soul. People cannot rouse themselves to bring the inner forces of their souls to meet the spiritual wave invading our life so powerfully to-day.

I have just said that people are no longer accustomed to use anything but their physical bodies for thinking. It is this that had led to the materialistic view of the world. Now there is one thing that simply must be understood to-day. Nature, as studied by natural science to-day—that science which has achieved so many triumphs—can be understood with the instrument of the physical brain or of the physical body in general. But one cannot understand human life with this instrument of the physical body. We can only understand human life if we can rise to a thinking that is not produced by the physical body alone. It is this thinking that should be cultivated through the anthroposophic view of the world. Of course people say they do not understand the anthroposophic outlook—what is given in our books or presented in lectures. And we can quite believe them. But what does this mean? It only means that they want to se their physical brains for understanding. They do not want to learn another kind of thinking than that which can lazily find support in the physical brain. The anthroposophic view of the world cannot, of course, be understood with such thinking. It is not that one would have to be clairvoyant in order to understand it. But one must train oneself to a thinking that is not bound to the physical brain. What is to be found in anthroposophic literature and can be acquired with the healthy human understanding—for the healthy human understanding is not bound to the brain—gradually develops a thinking, a feeling and a willing that are adequate to the needs of to-day. It is a fact that what the present requires of us cannot be understood by the instrument of the physical body; it must be apprehended, through the instrument of the etheric body, i.e., with the body of formative forces underlying the physical body.

The spiritual world which is striving to reveal itself to men, only finds expression in their deeply unconscious feelings. Men are dominated by an unconquerable fear of the spiritual world. When they say they do not understand spiritual science this is really only an excuse. The truth is, they are afraid of the revelations of the spiritual world. It is only because they will not admit this fear that they say they do not understand spiritual science, or that it is not logical—or they make other excuses. In truth, they are afraid and therefore seek all possible excuses in order to escape from the great problems. How glad people are when they can escape the great tasks and riddles of present day life! When one spoke, maybe from this or that angle, of important problems of our age, people grew uncomfortable. Then perhaps they went to see the plays of Ibsen in which some of the great problems of the age find partial expression. But they did not need to take these seriously; all that is “merely” dramatic art. People grew uncomfortable when one spoke to them directly of the penetration of the physical world by the spiritual. Now Björnson had treated of this in his dramas, but one had no need to believe it; it was “only” art. People felt an unconquerable fear of taking these things seriously.

Again, class differences became greater and greater, the gulf between the governing and proletarian classes became wider and wider. The social question produced riddles; one talked of these but felt uncomfortable about them. Yet people went to the theatre to see Hauptmann's “Weavers,” though they felt no need to take a serious attitude to the problems it presented. One let oneself be stirred a little by the abysmal depths in human life, but there was no need to take it seriously, for it was “just” art. People took refuge in something that they did not need to take seriously. This is a phenomenon that is characteristic of the psychology of the age. What lies behind this?

Behind this lies the fact that men, in accordance with the will on the part of the spiritual world to reveal itself to them, ought to have striven to take seriously certain things which cannot be grasped through the instrumentality of the physical body, but only through “imaginative” forces—just as art itself can only be grasped by “imaginative” forces. Man's physical body is built up like a natural product; it is a work of nature. Man's etheric body is built up like a work of art; it is a real work of plastic art—only, it is in constant motion. And what man receives (for his enjoyment) from understanding a work of art, must be intensified and clarified, must become perception which he takes seriously, i.e., “Imagination,” “Inspiration” and “Intuition.” Man then understands what is willing to reveal itself to him to-day. For behind present events waits concealed what can only be understood spiritually. One should feel deeply that the spiritual revelation trying to enter our present world can only be grasped through spiritual science itself i.e., through that thinking and feeling, through those inner impulses of will which can be trained by spiritual science and belong to the same region of soul as artistic perceptions—though these are not taken seriously and remain mere mirror-images.

At one time I tried to draw attention to something that is urgently needed by the present age. Naturally it was not understood because of the philistine character of our science—that terrible monster of official, academic science. My book “Philosophie der Freiheit,” which appeared in 1892, contains a chapter entitled “Die Moralische Phantasie” (Moral Imagination). In terms of Spiritual Science one could say “imaginative moral impulses.” I wanted to point out that the domain usually reached only in artistic fantasy must now be grasped by mankind in all earnestness, for it represents a stage that man must attain in order to receive the super-sensible which cannot be grasped by the brain.

At the beginning of the nineties I wanted to point out, at least in regard to man's moral perceptions, that the super-sensible must now be grasped in all earnestness. One should realise all this to-day; one should feel that the thoughts, the inner impulses of soul that were carried over into the catastrophe of the world-war and into the present period of social upheaval are no longer of any use. We need new “impulses” (or springs of action). If one comes to-day with a new “impulse,” it is the last thing that people understand. For if one brings a new “impulse,” whose source is entirely within the spiritual world, and presents it as a remedy for the evils of our age, complaints are heard on all sides, from the extreme right to the extreme left, that it is all incomprehensible. Of course one does not understand it if one wants to retain the old forms of thinking. But to-day it is necessary to overcome these old forms, re-modelling one's whole soul inwardly. All external revolutions, no matter how agreeable to this or that party or class, lead into the worst of blind alleys and will bring the greatest misery to mankind if not illuminated by the inner revolution of the soul. This means throwing off one's absorption in the purely materialistic view of the world and preparing actively to receive the spiritual wave that is willing to invade human evolution as a new revelation. The revolution from matter to spirit is the only salutary revolution; all others are only like diseases of childhood—scarlet-fever or measles—afflicting the early stages of what is trying to come to healthy expression in the emergence of the spirit at the present time.

A strong inner resolution is necessary to-day if we are to be equal to the demands made upon us by our present age. Let us consider in all earnestness that it is a spiritual world that is trying to invade our life. Spiritual forces are there and we should make our decisions, our deeds, our whole thinking dependent on them. This is demanded of us to-day! Much is changing in the present time. Let me point to something symptomatic which also sounds strange when spoken of, but appears of the greatest importance when viewed spiritually.

I have just spoken to you of the etheric body as a necessary instrument for a certain spiritual understanding of what in art need only remain a mirror-image. Now we know from Spiritual Science that in addition to the physical body and “etheric body” we possess an “astral body”—or whatever you like to call it. It is the psychic element proper and is essentially more spiritual than the “etheric body.” At the time of his physical development man was naturally more “remote” from this than from his “etheric body.” For the “etheric body,” underlying, as it does, the physical body, has a kind of “form” [Bildgestalt] even though it is a “form” in constant motion. The “astral body,” however, is really formless. When we speak of it, we are speaking of an “image” or “picture” which, we know, is only intended to “represent” the “astral body,” for this is really formless. The “astral body” has been changing during the last three to four centuries and is very different in modern man. The human beings of the past had “astral bodies” that were, comparatively speaking, permeated with all kinds of spiritual forces; the spiritual feelings and impulses at work in their lives were due to this spiritual element in their “astral bodies.” To-day our “astral bodies” have becomeempty. They are remarkably empty, and this is because, at the present time, when the power of the spiritual world is striving to reveal itself from without (to a certain extent), man is to receive this external spiritual world. Hence his “astral body” has gradually become empty. He ought to fill himself again with what is revealing itself from without. This has a quite definite effect on man. And now I am coming to a fact which, as I have already said, sounds so very strange when one speaks of it just as strange as when one speaks of the child's melancholy countenance. Nevertheless it is a fact.

The most important event in the series that led to the outbreak of the catastrophe of the world-war fell—so far as Berlin was concerned—on the 1st [of] August, at some time between a quarter past three in the afternoon and eleven or twelve o'clock at night. Various people were concerned—people belonging, of course, to our materialistic age. Now for the materialistically-minded man of to-day that is the most unfavourable time for making decisions. For we have come to a very, very important point in human evolution. The man of to-day cannot form sensible decisions at all if he does not wake up with them in the morning. This is true, however strange it may sound, and men will recognise it more and more from external acts. It is not necessary that we should be conscious of these decisions; in our sub-consciousness we live through in the night what we can experience on the following day. Man has not yet got so far as to be able to survey it prophetically, but that is not the point. If you harbour a thought at 3:30 or 6 o'clock, it may be a thought that you have already had in the night and now arises in you again. If, however, a thought arises that you have not already formed in the night but which is produced from out of the events of the day, it cannot be a reasonable thought in the case of the man of to-day. The man of to-day has to draw his most important impulses from the spiritual world. These do not come from the physical world at all. To-day we cannot but be “unreasonable” if we do not bring our decisions with us, if we do not appeal to this life in the spiritual world. When our “astral body” is free at night, i.e., outside the physical and “etheric” bodies and together with the spiritual world, that which is most essential takes place; it is prepared for the Reason of the day (and more so than in the case of our ancestors). The moment of waking should be sacred for the modern man. He should feel: I come from the spiritual world and enter the physical; all that is good, all that makes me capable of being a reasonable man, I have experienced between falling asleep and waking up, through intercourse with the spiritual world, through intercourse with the dead I have known in life and who have died before me—in short, through intercourse with those who are no longer in a physical body. I experience it when I am with them in the purely spiritual world. From this experience I ought to draw the fundamental mood of sacred regard for the moment of waking; this fundamental feeling will then make it possible for me throughout the day to say in one case “Here I am helped by a spiritual impulse” and in another case “Here I receive no help; this must not be decided before tomorrow.”

That is a way of conducting one's life spiritually, really reckoning with spiritual factors. Of course, in a materialistic age men do not reckon with spiritual factors for they are always so “clever.” They believe that nothing more than the instrument of the physical body is required in order to be clever. They do not appeal to what can be revealed to them when they are separated from their physical body and are together with the spiritual world in their “astral body.” Nothing but the will to conduct life spiritually, the will to allow spiritual decisions, spiritual impulses, to play a part in what we do in the physical world can make humanity healthy again.

This is what man should really consider thoroughly to-day. The anthroposophic view of the world cannot consist in a number of abstract concepts which we receive, studying them and resting content that we have a different view of the world from that of others. No; our whole thinking and our whole feeling must become different, so that we realise that we must let our life be penetrated by the light of the spirit. Humanity's present misfortunes have come from its refusal to entertain the spiritual—an attitude that has been cultivated to the utmost. The catastrophe of the world-war has, more than any previous event, arisen from external, purely material causes. It has therefore been the most terrible catastrophe of all. Man should learn from it that he was driven into it by his previous thinking, feeling and willing; he will not come out of it—though it will assume other forms—until he boldly determines to undertake the inner transformation of his soul.

The facts which I have put before you are indeed facts: the melancholy expression on the faces of children, the necessity of using our etheric body for gaining an understanding of the world, and the necessity of appealing to the moment of waking, to what remains of the previous sleep and glows on, as it were, in us.. It will be more and more necessary for man's future evolution that he should let the spirit play an active part.

One should understand that the anthroposophic view of the world is not intended as something sensational for “psychic idlers”—and many of our present day mystics are just that. One should see in it not a kind of dessert supplementing life's external, physical enjoyments, but something connected with the deepest impulses of our cultural life. The latter cannot become healthy unless fructified by the anthroposophic view of the world. We should engrave this fact deeply upon our souls when we have learnt to know this anthroposophic view.

With the above words I wanted to describe, from a certain point of view, the present decisive moment in human evolution. Of course it is quite easy, if we judge with the thoughts of the age, to condemn as mere foolishness the important things that are most in need of being said to-day. People believe themselves Christians but have not even understood the saying that what is wisdom with man is often foolishness unto God, and that all foolishness—perhaps folly and madness—before men can yet be wisdom unto God. Indeed, people to-day forget so easily the inner impulses and like to cling to the empty phrase. When one speaks to men to-day and utters the word “Christian” or “Christ” or “Jesus” after every fifth word, one is considered to be speaking in a Christian sense, even if what one is saying may be very unchristian. But if we hold we are making known what the Christ is revealing to our souls to-day, and if in doing so we take account of the commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”—a saying that has been carried over into Christianity—people find it unchristian. They repeat, in parrot fashion, the Ten Commandments, but take the name of their God in vain every moment and believe themselves to be specially Christian in consequence. So, too, one is not regarded as a true German if one has not always the word “German” on one's lips; though to-day the important thing is to see that the deepest forces of the German people have been, as it were, trampled under foot during the last thirty years and must be raised again by a spiritual deepening. We look to the West and find a civilization that strives to become completely materialistic, though it has, at least, a certain inner surety of instinct and on this account cannot completely drown in materialism. We look to the East and find a cultural life that despises the West and us too, for the Eastern culture still clings to an ancient spirituality and is renewing it in a certain way. We stand between these and are called to find the right path between Western materialism, and Eastern spirituality (which is not suitable for us). We in Central Europe should become conscious of our great responsibility and conscious, too, how much our sense of responsibility for this position has been lost in the last decades. What has our spiritual life become? An appendage to the political life and to the economic life. The state as trustee of the spiritual [cultural] life, especially of education, has destroyed the spiritual life. The economic life on which we depend for our daily bread has further destroyed us. We require a free spiritual life, for only into such can we introduce that which the spiritual world would reveal to mankind. This stream of spiritual life must descend! But it will never reveal itself to the servant of the state, the state professor; and it will never reveal itself to one who, in the spiritual life, is the coolie of the economic life. It will only reveal itself to him who has daily to struggle with the spiritual life and stands within the free life of the spirit. Our age requires the life of the spirit to be set free from the shackles of the state and of economics.

These things which are being made known to-day in another form through our “Threefold State” proposals, are the Christianity of to-day; they are, spiritual revelations clothed in external forms. They are what men need; they alone offer men a real basis and a real possibility for learning anew to transform their thinking. It is this that is so necessary for mankind to-day. We have had to wage war with a country that possesses an instinctive political life of great perfection and has long possessed many colonies with which it has industrial ties. We have fought as a country with an industrialism that was only developing and which wanted to possess colonies. For these strivings we required “spirit” [Geist]—and no one had committed the sin against the Spirit more than those who took a leading part in the economic life of Germany during the last three decades. For their programme was: rejection of the spiritual life, surrender to mere chance, blind chance. It is as if the World Spirit had wished to give the German people the greatest lesson by imposing the greatest test. This nation was to be shown the Spirit cannot be ignored. But it appears as if this is being learnt with difficulty, for this nation is still inclined to condemn everything else rather than lack of consciousness of responsibility towards the spirit. The lamentable events occurring in this domain to-day show that men's souls are still asleep. There is a total lack of conscious realisation how ill-fitted for their task are the men who guide the destiny of the German people and have to represent it before the West. There is simply no realisation that the whole delegation_, to Versailles is senseless because of the men taking part. The will not to see events as they are is still a witness to the fact that men's souls are asleep; otherwise they would have said long ago: The delegates to Versailles whom we have sent are as unfitted as possible to understand the present moment of world history. One will only judge these things correctly when one becomes conscious of responsibility towards the spirit—when one recognises that we are living in a very important moment of the world's history and that it is our duty to take things very seriously. In certain fields there is much talk about this, that and the other, and it is more comfortable to say: those who hold the responsible positions will manage somehow. But nothing good can come if those who hold responsible positions to-day still harbour the old thoughts. Whether they be old-fashioned aristocrats, or decadent aristocrats, or Marxian Socialists who know nothing about the world but, at most, have absorbed something of Marx' “Kapital”—whoever they be nothing good can come if they do not develop the will to turn their souls from the old to new thoughts. The revolution of the 9th [of] November, 1918, was no revolution, for what has changed is only the external stucco. But what is trying to change can be seen most clearly in those who now wear the outward stucco instead of those who wore it previously. It is necessary to see what lies at the base of all this. But thoughts are necessary, and for these one must have the will; and this will can only come when trained through active intercourse with the spiritual world. On this account active intercourse with the spiritual world is the sole real balsam that humanity needs.

This is what I wanted to put before you in a form in which it must appear to one to-day in face of contemporary events. I wanted, as the opportunity was given us to speak together again, to put this before your souls so that ever more and more and in ever wider and wider circles within our Anthroposophic Movement a striving might arise which can not only give the single individual an inner feeling of comfort but can bear fruits for the cultural life of the whole of humanity.

It is a deep satisfaction to me to see how many more friends of our Anthroposophic Movement are present to-day than a year ago. May the Spirit now quickening the development of the world and of humanity bring it about that in another year there may be as great, or even a much greater, increase in our numbers. For the more human souls there are who become convinced by this Spirit of the need for the new thinking, feeling and willing, and for a new sense of responsibility, the better it will be.

From the description contained in my book KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS you know that when the human being will be able to look into the spiritual world, he will, to a certain extent have that experience which we designate as the “crossing of the threshold”. In my book I have described this crossing of the threshold by pointing out that the three soul-forces of man, which have a rather chaotic and intermingling activity during his physical life begin to organise themselves; the forces of thought, feeling and of the will become independent. These forces become independent through the fact. that the human being crosses the threshold. In many respects, the whole course of mankind's development resembles the life-course of the individual human being. But things have become displaced. What the individual human being experiences consciously when he strives to attain clairvoyance in the spiritual world, namely, the crossing of the threshold, must be experienced unconsciously by the whole of mankind, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, Humanity has no choice in regard to this; it must experience this unconsciously—not the individual human being, but HUMANITY, and the individual human being together with humanity. What does this mean?

What is now a joint activity of thought, feeling and will within man, will in future take on a separate character and this will come to the fore in various spheres. We are just passing through a time in which humanity is unconsciously crossing the threshold of a significant portal, a fact which is clearly evident to the clairvoyant power. Humanity passes through this crossing of the threshold in such a way that the spheres of thought, feeling and will become separated. This imposes duties upon us, the duty of shaping external life in such a way that the great change which takes place in man's inner life may be experienced even in his EXTERNAL life. Through the fact that thinking grows more independent within the life of humanity, we must build up a foundation upon which the activity and influence of thinking can become sounder; we must moreover create a foundation upon which feeling can develop independently, and also a foundation upon which the will can reach its particular development. What has hitherto exercised a chaotic and intermingling activity in public life must now be organised into THREE SPHERES. In public life, these three spheres are: ECONOMIC LIFE, POLITICAL or JURIDICIAL LIFE and CULTURAL or SPIRITUAL LIFE. This need of a three-partition is connected with the mystery of human evolution which pertains to the present time.

Do not think that the “threefold social organism”, which is now being advanced, is just some sort of invention. It has been born out of the most intimate knowledge of human evolution, out of the knowledge of what must occur if the goal of human evolution is not to be renounced. During the past years, we have been involved in the fearful catastrophe of the great war, because of the difficulty which existed in recognising a goal of a spiritual character, and because people withdrew themselves more and more even from the mere act of recognising at least the existence of such goals. We must extricate ourselves from this chaos. The very course of human evolution demands that we should extricate ourselves from this chaos. Indeed, for this reason I think that the necessity of a threefold social organism will only be recognised thoroughly by those who depart from anthroposophical feelings and from a knowledge of the events which are taking place in the evolution of humanity. At present, people do not like to acknowledge such things. The present time likes to turn to tasks connected with the things which lie closest at hand, and it does not like to penetrate into the deeper mysteries of life.

What grieves the heart of one who is able to look into these mysteries, is the fact that humanity has such a strong aversion to the very things which it needs most. Yet it is impossible to abide by the thought which has just been expressed. We may say: every kind of pessimism is wrong. But this does not imply that every kind of optimism is right. Right and justified is, however, the APPEAL TO THE WILL. It is not at all a question of whether something takes place in this or in that way, but that we should WILL things in accordance with the direction of human evolution. We should realise over and over again that the old time has come to an end and that we must close our accounts with it. A real understanding of the present can only be gained if we rightly close our accounts with the old time. For the NEW time can only be taken into account from a SPIRITUAL standpoint! We should not delude ourselves that we can carry over into the new time the things which we have cherished in the past. In our external life, we must begin to turn to the new thoughts, which are now beginning to be active.

Mankind now faces two paths: One of these leads through the mechanization of the spirit. In more recent times, the spirit has become very mechanical, particularly in regard to the abstract laws of Nature, which have also been applied to social life, as ruling laws. Mechanization of the spirit—vegetalization of the soul! Vegetables sleep—and the human soul also tends to sleep. In a sleeping state we pass through the most important events. The most important events of the past years have literally been ‘slept away!’ Even to-day, most important events are being slept away.

Let us now turn our gaze to the East. There we can see that the animalization of the bodies is coming up in a very strong measure. Just as the Americanization of the spirit represents a mechanization of spiritual life, so the Bolshevism which tends to spread out in the East represents an animalization of the bodies. Emotions lead people to reject and criticize this or that, yet they do not wish to grasp real life.

At the present time, humanity has therefore the choice of advancing in a direction where it can find, on the one hand, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetalization of the souls and the animalization of the bodies, or else it may, on the other hand, seek the path leading to an AWAKENING OF THE SPIRIT, discover this awakening of the spirit in the impulses which correspond to the epoch of the consciousness-soul, discover it in the connection of the human soul with the higher Hierarchies, discover, it in the recognition of the conscious human soul which comes from earlier conditions of earthly existence, discover it in the three-partition of social life! All these things are connected. And the human beings who unite in that movement which we designate as a spiritual-scientific movement oriented towards Anthroposophy, should feel that they are a KERNEL from which the forces ray out that can give rise to a new social structure. Everything which comes from other directions and seeks to transform social life may be very useful; but humanity should strive after the goal of transforming social life in a real and true way, and this can only be the outcome of SPIRITUAL IMPULSES!

At present, the human beings still ignore a secret of life which is intimately connected with the present moment of evolution. In the past, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to attach great importance to this mystery, but to-day it is necessary to bear it in mind. This Secret of life consists therein that man, such as he is constituted to-day, from the aspect of body, soul and spirit, contemplates in a certain way every night the events of the following day, but so that it is not always necessary for him to be fully conscious of these coming events, to have them in his day-time consciousness. The one who, is fully conscious of these coming events, is his angel, his ANGELOS. What we experience during the night in common with that Being whom we call our “angel”, is a FORESIGHT, a prevision of the next day. But. you must not consider this from the standpoint of human curiosity, for this would be quite wrong; you must instead consider it from the standpoint of PRACTICAL LIFE. Only if the human being is intimately pervaded by this feeling, will he be able to make the right decisions and take over thoughts into the course of his day. Let us assume quite concretely that someone wishes to do a certain thing at a definite time, say, at midday. What he thus intends to do, has already been arranged during the preceding night between himself and his Angelos. This is the case with the human being ever since the middle of the fifteenth century, but it is not necessary that he should be conscious of it, for it has nothing to do with his curiosity. Man should instead be pervaded with the feeling that the things which he has arranged with his angel during the preceding night should become fruitful in the course of his day.

Many things of the present can show us in an overwhelming way what I have explained to you just now. Particularly the years of sorrow, the past four or five years, can send a great truth trickling into humanity, namely, that the consciousness of being connected day by day with the higher Beings, through the experiences of the preceding night, unfortunately did not exist. What a different course would the events of the past four or five years have taken, had the human beings been pervaded by the feeling: “Whatever you do, is in agreement with the arrangements which you have made with your Angel, during the past night!” These are the things which must be discussed to-day. We must speak of the fact that the human being should, learn to consider his life between birth and death as a CONTINUATION of his soul-spiritual life before birth. We must speak of the fact that throughout his life the human being should be able to feel the revelations of the god within him, and we must speak of the fact that the human being should carry into the life of daytime the conscious feeling: “Whatever you do, from morning, to night, has been arranged between you and your angel from the time of your falling asleep to the moment of waking up!”

The human beings should turn to these kinds of feelings, which are far more real in the face of the spiritual world than the more abstract feelings of to-day pertaining to religious beliefs; they should turn to feelings which do not depart from selfish, but from unselfish human impulses. Feelings of this kind can give rise to the connection which we need with the Beings that belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi. These Beings can then once more interest themselves in the human beings. Man's attitude and feelings towards the spiritual world should move in the direction which I have just now indicated.

One more thing should be grasped clearly. You know that the religions of to-day talk a great deal of “God” and of the “Divine”. To WHAT do they really refer? They merely refer to something which at least exists in the human soul as a pale inkling. It is not so important to consider HOW certain things are named, but rather what exists in the human soul. People speak of “God”, they speak of “Christ”—yet they always mean nothing but their ANGEL! They can still turn to their Angel, for this touches a familiar note in their souls. It is quite an indifferent matter whether the religions of to-day speak of God, of Christ, or of anything else, for the THOUGHT-material which gives rise to their talk merely reaches as far as the Angel-beings that belong to man, as far as the Angeloi. At present, people do not rise beyond this hierarchy, for to-day they feel averse to seek a connection with the spiritual world which is more encompassing than the one which rises out of their egoism. The connection with the ARCHANGELOI, with the hierarchy of the Archangels, must be sought in another way. The present field of human interests must be considerably enlarged, so that the human beings may rise in their feelings from their inclination for the Angeloi as far as the Archangeloi.

The human beings should experience in their souls more or less the following and say to themselves: Terrible events have taken place in the whole civilised world, during the past four or five years. Many people have searched for the cause of these happenings; many have accused one another; they have spoken a great deal of “guilt” and “lack of guilt”. Even if we discard the most extreme form of superficiality, we shall soon lose interest in this empty talk of “causes”, “guilt”, or “lack of guilt”, simply because we can see that what has risen to the surface during the past four or five years resembles the waves Of the sea, which are driven to the surface from below by the sea's own forces. The forces of humanity had been stirred up from year to year. One nation after the other began to participate in the great foolishness which had taken hold of humanity during the past few years and one could say: Something which has the nature of elemental forces has been stirred up and has been driven to the surface; the sea of human life has grown restless. What is that?

A clear view of things is impossible unless we extend this fact, that a great restlessness has taken hold of mankind, to that space of time which we designate as “history”. We must say to ourselves: The armed contest of the past four or five years is only the beginning of events which will be enacted upon an entirely different sphere, events of a kind which has not hitherto existed in the development of humanity. We are not facing an end—for to say this, can only result from a superficial observation of human evolution—but we are facing the BEGINNING of the greatest battles, of the SPIRITUAL battles of the civilised world! Let us concentrate our efforts upon the task of being ready to cope with these, battles. In the near future, the East and the West threaten to face one another AS SOULS, in an ever growing measure!

When we pass through birth, we bring along with us into our physical-sensory existence the forces of the super-sensible world, taken from our super-sensible existence. These forces continue to be active. At the present time, this can only be grasped with greatest difficulty. How do these forces continue to be active?—They are active in everything we develop in the physical world in the form of SPIRITUAL LIFE. It would be impossible to have poets among us, it would be impossible to develop a world-conception or a science, it would be impossible to develop impulses for the education of man, and there would be no possibility whatever for the development of a spiritual life, if we would not bring along with us through birth the impulses that come from our pre-natal life.

On the other hand, what we develop within the economic life as impulses of the will—brotherliness, human love, thinking for others and not only for ourselves, working for others and not only for ourselves—what we do, as it were, “on the quiet”, through the fact that we stand within the economic life, gives us the most important impulses for what we then carry along into the spiritual world in the form of impulses. In the same way in which we bring along with us from the spiritual world forces that constitute, above all, our spiritual life upon the earth, so do we bring back again into the spiritual world those forces that we develop through our economic life in the form of love for humanity and brotherliness. These forces accompany us in the spiritual world; there, they are important impulses for us. If we contemplate that which develops from year to year in the life of a child, we can see in it the inheritance coming from the spiritual world, enabling us to develop a spiritual sphere of activity upon the earth; and if we look upon that which occurs through our economic life, namely, that through our will we develop activities for others, we can see therein the impulses which we carry along with us into the spiritual world when we pass through the portal of death.

What we develop ONLY between birth and death, appears to one who is able to contemplate the spiritual world as a contrast to what we develop in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Read my descriptions of the “Soul-region” and of the “Spirit-region” in the book Theosophy, for there you will find that these things are described in concepts that arise altogether from a living contemplation of those conditions. Everything that constitutes the sphere of law is the, very opposite of the impulses that arise during the life between death and a new birth.

Our spiritual life is based upon the forces that come from the time before our birth, or conception; we develop an economic life in order to carry into the spiritual world forces that we unfold through it; and what we unfold HERE, what pertains exclusively to the earth, is the political, juridical life, the life of the State. This has no connection with the spiritual world.