The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! Before I begin my talk today, it will be necessary for me to say a few introductory words. We are experiencing a certain crisis in our Anthroposophical movement, which is becoming apparent in the ever-increasing opposition, especially in the character that this opposition is taking on. It is indeed something extremely unpleasant to talk about this antagonism, so I will not do so – or at least only in a very limited sense – but it is necessary, especially at the present time, that we become aware of the directions in which the individual endeavors within our anthroposophical movement have developed in the course of recent years.

I need only evoke the memory of those members of our movement who have been with us for a long time, those members who have participated above all in the older phase of our anthroposophical movement, which had a more esoteric character, which worked, I would say, more out of the spiritual substance itself. I would like to begin by evoking memories of the special way in which anthroposophy was disseminated to the public in those days. Its esoteric character has become particularly evident in recent times through the publication of the Munich cycle in 'Drei', which was intended to provide a forum for discussion of the contrast between the oriental and occidental spiritual views. The aim was to show how the Christ impulse has shaped the development of the occidental spiritual view in the world. And anyone who delves into what was discussed in that cycle – which is now publicly available – will be able to envision the particular way in which efforts were made at the time to bring Anthroposophy first to smaller circles and then to ever larger circles, but how the whole thing nevertheless bore a kind of unified character, which was dominated by a certain esoteric core. The fact that in recent years the anthroposophical movement in general has taken on a somewhat different character did not depend, my dear friends, on those who have to lead this anthroposophical movement in an active sense. I would like to say: what has become necessary in recent years was not something we sought; it has come to us as a demand from the outside world. Through the dissemination of anthroposophical literature – which has gradually become quite extensive – a wide variety of circles, which initially did not go along with the gradual esoteric development, have become acquainted with the anthroposophical worldview and then judged this anthroposophical worldview from the points of view that were accessible to them.

In particular, I would like to draw attention to the way in which scientific and scientific-theological circles gradually began to occupy themselves more and more with the anthroposophical worldview. As a result, anthroposophy, which can certainly take on a scientific character if it wants to, was in a sense dragged into this scientific character from the outside, and it was only natural that a number of younger co-workers with a good scientific training should now take it upon themselves to impress this scientific character on the anthroposophical movement. As a result, the public work of the anthroposophical movement, as it has emerged in recent times at congresses, university courses and so on, has taken on a completely different character than it had before. And perhaps, if that sounds a bit radical, I can describe this different character by saying — this is neither a criticism nor a praise, but simply something I want to state: When I look at some older members of the anthroposophical movement, I see that they say: We have found our way into the esoteric anthroposophical movement through the cognitive and religious needs of our hearts, insofar as it has lived out its spiritual substance; we have absorbed the character of this esotericism, even if it is, of course, in the way as it had to be lived in the public lectures of the earlier days of our anthroposophical movement, but now we hear a scientific keynote where anthroposophy is represented, which in a certain way also gradually and logically builds up the anthroposophical from the most elementary, as one is accustomed to in external science.

And so many such members would like to say: This is something that does not really interest us; in part we take it for granted, in part it only slows us down; we come much more quickly on the inner path of spiritual understanding to the insights that anthroposophy can give than if they are built up piece by piece through all sorts of thoughts and logical constructs that we don't need at all, that actually seem extremely superfluous to us and do not interest us. Why, my dear friends, should we not simply say these things as they exist in the feelings of many of our members? Today, I would say, we have these two currents — these two currents in the main. The fact that we have these two currents would actually be enough to satisfy everything that Anthroposophy must want from its own soul and everything that is demanded from outside, if it were not for another thing; and we must bring this other thing to our attention with a certain inner strength and a certain seriousness.

It is entirely possible, starting from the elementary discussions – for all discussions are elementary, and should be permeated by the forms of today's science – it is entirely possible, starting from these elementary discussions to establish anthroposophy scientifically on the basis of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, sociology and so on, in order to gradually ascend to that which is inwardly esoteric. However, to do this we would need a much larger circle of active collaborators, and above all, I would say, a work that would be dedicated solely to this. For the older members will not be able to complain that the esoteric tone of the older anthroposophical movement does not emerge at least where branch meetings are held, where what was previously practised in branch meetings with a certain esoteric character is continued. If what has been introduced into smaller circles as a certain continuation of esoteric life cannot now be continued in the appropriate way, it is not because this could not happen out of the inner forces of the anthroposophical movement, but only because the members involved have not taken it seriously enough and have treated it in such a way, especially in relation to the outside world, that they themselves have made its continuation impossible for the time being or have jeopardized it. I do not want to talk about that. But the fact that the old esoteric character has been preserved in the branch meetings can be seen from each of the branch meetings that have been held here in this place. On the other hand, the completely esoteric, which is based on science, has emerged more in our public lectures.

Today, there is an abyss between the two tendencies in our movement; there is no mediation, no bridge over this abyss. And we cannot build the bridge because we simply do not have the co-workers, and because those who are co-workers lack the time to build this bridge between what the world demands of us today – a scientific basis for anthroposophy – and what must be worked out from the esoteric. This is, of course, something that should actually be added in principle, that should be sought, but for which we still lack the time and manpower today. However, it cannot be denied that it is precisely because of this abyss that our anthroposophical movement as a whole is suffering to a certain extent, both externally and internally. For one thing, we shall always have a certain section of our members who love one aspect of it but are extremely critical of the other. Those who believe that they have the scientific character of anthroposophy in the fullest sense of the word within them often disdain that which, after all, also arises from justified reasons. And the opposite is also the case, understandably, but no less damaging to the movement as a whole. Those who can more quickly arrive at the final results find the slow path, which is already given by the demands of our time, the slow, scientific path, boring and uncomfortable and unnecessary. But quite apart from that: the fact that there is an abyss between the two currents, over which there is still no bridge today, so that I myself, for example, am obliged to maintain the scientific character as far as possible in public lectures, then to delve into the esoteric in branch lectures, means that our whole movement has something that hinders it, that does not allow it to advance in the appropriate way.

For there is something unhealthy, my dear friends, when, for example, let us say, a university course or a conference is held here or there, and then people come from outside; there are - and this There is no denying that people come who initially have no idea of what is to be given to the world through anthroposophy, what is to be given to science and also to practical life through anthroposophy. They now hear there what we are presenting today at such congresses and on such college courses, and most of them will reject it. But of course there are also those – and they are the ones who really matter, even if they are still so few in number – there are also those who already feel the seriousness and scientific character of anthroposophy, who can say to themselves: this is something that needs to be examined further. The reason for this is that they are addressed in the very forms in which all kinds of worldviews are discussed in the world today. If such a person were to come into a branch meeting in which something particularly intimate and esoteric was being discussed, and they would hear something that is completely out of context and for which they lack the prerequisites, it is quite possible that they would say: “They present this to us in public, but in their actual more intimate meetings, it is clear that they are completely insane.” You see, my dear friends, that is something that is entirely within the realm of possibility – it does not depend at all on the degree to which it is already becoming reality today. It has become a reality to a high degree because we have always had members among us who lack all sense of tact in their dealings with other people, and who throw all kinds of things at them about anthroposophy that the others then do not understand. As I said, all kinds of things happen. But it does not even depend so much on the extent to which these things become reality as on the nature of the movement itself, on what is possible within it, for its prosperity, its health and its illness depend on this. It is, of course, all too easy to fall prey to all manner of prejudices when it comes to spreading anthroposophical knowledge, because people believe that this person or that could easily be convinced of this or that. Yes, you see, I would like to tell you an example of this that I have often spoken of.

When the anthroposophical movement was still working within the theosophical movement, albeit quite independently, the chairman of a branch of the Theosophical Society once came to me. He was a very important scholar, a well-known scholar in his field; it was quite early on in the anthroposophical movement within the theosophical movement. Because I was dealing with a specialist in his field, I initially tried to touch on his subject here and there, to present to him something that could lead from his field to anthroposophy. I presented to him something about plant growth, about the plant's place in the universe, and then gradually moved on to more anthroposophically substantial things. He was not at all interested in that. And the right thing to do was to draw back at the right moment and say to oneself, when this man works as a teacher at his university, he wants to lecture in the same way as the others lecture; when he is in his botanical cabinet, he wants to instruct his students in the usual way and, with regard to how he presents himself to the world as a botanist, he wants to be left in peace: this has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. On the other hand, he immediately warmed to it when one began to speak directly of the astral body, to speak directly of the etheric body. He could have his erudition on one side of his bookkeeping, and on the other that which was given to him anthroposophically-theosophically. But it did not occur to him to want to establish any connection between the one or the other, so that it was self-evident that what was given was to be left out of the effort.

Of course, this is something that has not always been taken into account in recent times. People want to bring anthroposophy into the specialized knowledge of those people who do not want it at all, who want to get it out with all their might. Of course, there is no harm in making public what the various sciences have to say about anthroposophy, or in bringing it to those who can understand it with common sense. But time and again, we encounter the prejudice that when we discuss botany, we should invite botanists; when we discuss zoology, we should invite zoologists; and when we discuss aesthetics, we should invite aesthetes. What prevails there is a certain unworldliness. It is this unworldliness that has done us so much harm, especially in recent years, and it is this unworldliness that we should overcome. One should not think that we can spread anthroposophy indirectly through specialized learning. We should be clear about the fact that specialized learning must be forced from the outside to accept the anthroposophical – it will not do so of its own accord. This is not about slackening in our zeal and saying: so things have to be done differently. It is about seeing things in a healthy way, as they are in the world.

Exactly the same things that I have said now in relation to the scientific in anthroposophy, the same applies in relation to the social and the sociological, only that there is an even stronger tendency towards unworldliness, and we have thus ended up in the unfortunate situation that is expressed today in an opposition that is not at all interested in anthroposophy. This opposition wants something quite different, and it is regarded in a completely false way in our own midst and is therefore of course underestimated, so that the belief always finds adherents that is directed against what I have actually been saying for a long time: that one should not believe that this opposition is not spreading. It will spread, it will take on ever larger forms, and it is now on the way to actually wanting to gradually make every public activity for anthroposophy within Germany impossible. We must not be under any illusion that this endeavor already exists in a very forceful way today: to prevent all public activity for anthroposophy within Germany. It is my duty to say this, especially here, because of what has been undertaken here in recent years, and because it is impossible here to harbor illusions.

And you see, my dear friends, this gives us a picture of how we must become more and more aware of the conditions of anthroposophical life, how we must not get caught up in our favorite ideas, how we must always familiarize ourselves with the demands of the time, and how we must, above all, take the most serious approach to what is to penetrate the world through the anthroposophical movement. It has gradually become our custom to start things at many points, to do this and that and to completely forget that each individual thing only makes sense if the whole anthroposophical movement is healthy and if the necessary things are really done from each individual thing to the whole of the anthroposophical movement. And that is what is missing. Above all, there is little response to what I myself have said in the various branches, again and again and for years, especially since the movement has become more externalized. What has been said has simply not been taken seriously enough.

Above all, we must adhere to the basic facts that are peculiar to the contemporary anthroposophical movement. We must hold fast to these fundamental facts. We must realize that from the middle of the 15th century until well into the 20th century – or more precisely until the end of the 19th century – human development was primarily one that, firstly, engaged the mind, the intellect, for the progress of humanity, but secondly brought it to a certain level. The intellect has been wonderfully developed in the past centuries. But just as each individual age, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, corresponds to a particular kind of development of soul and body that does not carry over into the next stage of life, so it is with the development of humanity in general. The age that has passed is that of the intellect, of the mind. And this development of the intellect, it should not - this is in the laws of human development - go into the further progress of this development. It is so that we are now standing before the beginning of a spiritual development of mankind. That what the intellect can achieve, it has achieved for the time being; it can only be carried into the further development of mankind as it has been trained in past centuries, as an heirloom. On the other hand, human development depends on taking into account the wave of spiritual life that is flowing from the spiritual heights into the physical-sensual world in which man lives, and to replace pure intellectual development with a spiritual kind of development.

It may well be that the human race, which has so far been civilized, says to itself: We hold fast to the old mind; we hold fast to experiment and observation and to what the mind can make of them ; we reject what individuals claim: that precisely in our time a mighty wave of spiritual life is penetrating from spiritual heights into earthly life; we want to know nothing about it, we want to continue to serve the intellect. — They cannot do this, because the intellect has passed its peak, it can only be propagated; but this propagation also means that it is going into decline. Indeed, the intellect is declining; we can already see the beginning of this decline today, and can even prove it outwardly. What is the use of closing our eyes to such things? We only have to look impartially at a single phenomenon that can shed light on the matter. Look, for example, at how young people who devoted themselves to study some forty years ago, even together with their teachers, still had something of the individual in their intellectual activity. You could approach people forty years ago – they were good intellectuals, they sought to penetrate from the intellect into the sensory and spiritual world, as well as one can penetrate with the intellect. When you met them – sometimes they were quite young people – what they said was interesting in the first five minutes; individual things came out of a human personality; you said to yourself, now I am curious to hear what he will say next, and you listened with a certain satisfaction. Today, if you approach such people, young people for all I care, and you listen to them for the first five minutes – or maybe not even that long – so you listen to them at first, it turns out that their minds are already running down, like something coming out of a machine; you are not curious about what they will say next, because you can know it in advance: the machine continues to clatter on. It is as if people have become entirely mechanical; individuality has been completely lost, even in the realm of the intellect. You can't even tell the individual people apart anymore, because everyone says the same thing, especially in certain groups.

This phenomenon allows us to study the decline of the intellect in an extraordinarily clear way – quite externally, without going into the spiritual side of it. In short, the intellect has just passed its peak; it can be inherited, but it will be subject to decline, and humanity needs the reception of that spiritual life which flows from the spiritual heights into physical life on earth. This can be rejected. But if it is rejected, precisely for those people who reject it, the possibility of human progress, human culture, human civilization, ceases, and the further development of humanity must seek other peoples, other regions. That is what must be emphasized here with all sharpness, what should also be seen or heard with all sharpness. For, my dear friends, we not only live in an age of change in earthly conditions, but this change in earthly conditions is only an expression of the change taking place in the spiritual realm, which first reveals itself in the world of the senses, but which underlies this world of the senses as a spiritual realm.

Within the world that we can survey with our senses, we have the solid-earthly, the liquid-watery, the airy-gassy; we have that which lives in the warmth of the ether, and we then have the ether region. The way humanity has become, it speaks of earth, water, air and so on in a very external sense, as the senses see it, and it is not taken into account that all these effects are based on facts that take place in the solid, earthy: spiritual elemental beings and their activity. Nowhere do we have to do merely with gold, silver, granite and so on, with what is earthly; everywhere we have to do with underlying spiritual entities. The solid earth is inhabited by spiritual elemental beings. These spiritual elemental beings have been sensed in the old instinctive clairvoyance; they have been called gnomes. One need not, for the sake of poetic license, continue this designation for my sake, for the clever humanity of the present day laughs when it is said that gnomes exist, but they do exist, just as electricity, magnetism and so on do. There are also beings in the solid, earthly world that are not visible to the external senses, but they have a mind that is essentially wiser, smarter, more cunning than the human mind. One might say that in their entire being, these elemental spirits that underlie the earthly world are active minds, active cunning, active cunning, but also active logic. No matter how clever a person is in the intellectual field, he can never become as clever as these elemental spirits of the earth, not even a quarter as strong. We must realize that the intellect, as it is in us, can only ever reach a certain degree. And these elemental spirits are effective, they are there, they are truly there in the whole of the world just as much as people are.

People have brought their minds to a certain level in the age of the last few centuries. I would say that this was a time of dryness and drought for the elemental spirits that I have just described and characterized. They saw themselves, as it were, restrained in their rule by the interaction of what human beings developed as intellect. They also held back, but since the human intellect has been in decline, since that time, this intellect of the elemental spirits has been emerging in a very noticeable way into the reality of human life as well. And if people are such functioning automatons as they are today, it is because they are actually under the influence of the clever elemental spirits of the mind, which would never actually work in the very uppermost part of the mind. But in those people whom we do not want to listen to because they always say the same thing, the activity of the intellect has slipped down a little from the brain, and in these lower parts the characterized elemental spirits immediately assert themselves. They assert themselves so strongly that unsuspecting minds have opened up in recent times, imagining something like the following. They say: 'We don't know anything about this mind, which reveals this or that about the world to us; it is nothing special; there must be much, much more in the subconscious. Much comes up from the subconscious. You can no longer talk to people at all, because what you talk to them about does not reveal what is working in them as their mind. You have to analyze them, and then what has slipped down as the mind can be brought up through the analysis. In truth, all this analyzing is nothing more than a demonstration of how powerfully the cunning, the sly elemental spirits work in all sorts of hidden corners of human beings. Many minds are unsuspecting in the face of these phenomena because they themselves are suggestively influenced by the mind that has gradually become automatic, as it works in science. This is the difficulty of communication that has a real understanding of the facts in this area, in contrast to what is still powerful in many ways today, but powerful in such a way that it is simultaneously crumbling the whole of civilization.

Just as the spirits of cunning and intellect work within the solid, earthly realm, so within the watery element those spiritual entities work that are related in their whole being to human feeling, but can live this feeling in a much more intense way. We humans place ourselves before things, we place ourselves before the blooming, fragrant rose, we are in a sense delighted, enchanted by the blooming, fragrant rose. But the beings of whom I am now speaking do not place themselves before things, but they weave and live through things, they themselves then live through in the fragrance of the rose the feeling of well-being through and through, which we only have in its external effects; they live through the liquid, they live through the warming and cooling; they live in that within which emanates on its surface what we humans have in feeling. But the more people are given over to the decay of the mind, the more everything that belongs to the human emotional life in the human organism will be exposed to these spiritual beings, which have their element in the liquid; and again, the human being will be permeated in his subconscious regions by these spiritual beings.

The breathing of humanity will be influenced more and more, deep into the organization, by those entities that are more akin to the human will and that live more in the aerial element of our earthly existence. These entities are characterized above all by the fact that they exist as a multitude, as a diversity, so that one can say: their number is incalculable. Just when you approach the host of those elemental spirits that live in the solid, earthy, when you, let us say, come to a lump of the earthly – what use is it then not to express these things as they are? It must be possible to express these things as they are, even if the world then and presents it as twisted and paradoxical – when you touch such a lump, which is full of such clever, cunning creatures, they come out from all sides. You have a very small lump in your hand, but the number of creatures inside is immeasurable; it increases before the spiritual vision, everything wells up. You can start counting what you thought was a unit: 1, 2, 3, 4 - you count, you are used to counting what you otherwise have in your external life, but now you realize: If you are supposed to count these entities, their number is such that when you count: one, two, three, while you are going from one to two, it has multiplied so much that it is no longer correct. The three is already there before you have finished counting to two. Even our mental operations are not sufficient to penetrate, in terms of numbers, into the realms we are dealing with here.

Now, you see, that is the one world that is there. Today we can do wonderful chemistry and also make what is done in chemistry anthroposophical through all kinds of intellectual skills – initially quite justified – because oxygen, hydrogen, chromium, bromine, iodine, fluorine, phosphorus, carbon and so on, they are there; potassium, calcium are there, they have certain relationships to each other, certain effects on each other. We can do all that, and that is very nice. But all that we do is based on spiritual effects, on spiritual beings and their deeds. And we have to penetrate from what we consider externally, or even externally anthroposophically, to what is there as a spiritual basis. We have to penetrate to the spiritual elemental beings, we must not reject that. We must therefore be aware that if we merely continue the culture of past centuries in a rational way, even in the branches of science, we will not make any progress. We must be aware that we will only make progress if we take into account the wave of spiritual life that wants to enter our physical world everywhere and that we must meet halfway if we as humanity do not want to decline with our culture.

As soon as we ascend into the ether, we encounter the warmth ether, the light ether, the so-called chemical ether and the life ether. When we see through these ether forms with the spiritual eye, with the eye that finds the elemental beings of which I have just spoken, then we also find the elemental beings of the ether spheres. We find the beings of light, we find the beings of number, we find the beings that make life flow through the cosmos, that carry it. We find all of this. These entities have a completely different character than the entities in the lower elemental realms. I will characterize the qualities of the upper beings and the lower beings and will do so today only with number. I said that the essential feature of the lower elemental spirits is that their number is immeasurable, that we cannot keep up with the counting. The essence of the upper beings is that they all flow into one another; the beings of light still relatively little – they have a certain individuality – but the further we come to the life ether, the more we find in the beings have the endeavor to form a unity; and we begin to be no longer able to distinguish the one being from the other being, because the one being lives in the other, wants to connect with it to form a unity. A corresponding realization, which was particularly directed towards the ether, towards the spiritual aspect of the ether, therefore came to the monotheistic concept of the spirit, which reached its peak in the Old Testament Jewish monotheism. Yahweh is essentially the summary of what the various ether elemental spirits want to make of themselves by flowing together into a unity. Today's human being is not free to merely look at what lives in outer physical culture and civilization; it is incumbent upon him to see the happenings of the universe in an intensive, more comprehensive sense.

And there you can see how - if man does not grasp the spiritual that wants to flow into physical culture and physical civilization - you can see how these entities will achieve their specific goals if man does not decide to pay attention to the seething host of intellectual, sentient and volitional beings, that is, the earth, water and air beings, to the influx of all the beings that are connected with the etheric effects. Then these beings, uninfluenced by human knowledge, will go their own ways. And we can already see today, if we have an ability to observe such things, how the elemental spirits of the lower realms, of the earthly realm, of the watery and airy realms, have more or less decided to make something different out of the earth than what is suitable for human beings. These elemental spirits have decided to gradually turn human beings more or less into automatons, to turn the earth into something essentially different from what is suitable for human beings as an earthly existence. The form of the earth that I had to describe when I had to depict world evolution in the sense in which, I might say, it lay in the intentions of the beings who lived at the starting point of world evolution, these elemental beings do not want to have this form, for all these elemental beings of the lower realms would like to develop as the host of Ahriman. And as the human intellect declines and man does not develop that which he has developed as his intellect, enlightened by spirituality, so the human intellect, during its decline, is converted by the elemental spirits — who, if I may say, at their congresses know something much more intelligent than we do at our congresses, the human intellectual achievement is converted by the elemental spirits into the Ahrimanic intellectual achievement of the earth. And those elemental spirits that live in the etheric being join the luciferic beings and also want to work on this other-becoming of the earthly. I would like to say: the lower elemental spirits would harden and permeate and interweave the earthly in a different way than it should happen in favor of man; the higher elemental spirits would give that which is permeated by the lower spirits a character that would allow it to have an effect on the cosmos. But man would merely develop further in what is being worked on, I would say as a kind of vermin of this planet, which is to come into being in this way.

The only way to escape this is if humanity decides to pay attention to the fact that a spiritual wave wants to enter our earthly development, that this spiritual wave wants to guide us to feel and see the Christ impulse in the form in which it must be felt and seen in the present. This Christ impulse is, after all, most fiercely opposed by today's theology, and it is characteristic, my dear friends, that a theologian at the University of Basel, a colleague of Nietzsche, Overbeck, as a theologian in the 1870s, was led to reflect on whether today's theology — since as a professor he also had a say in the matter — is at all Christian. And in a very ingenious book, which made a very deep, if not exactly pleasant, impression on Nietzsche, Overbeck proved: There may still be much that is Christian in people's minds today, but there is certainly nothing Christian left in theology; it has certainly become unchristian. - This is how one would summarize what Overbeck presented. People are not even aware of this. They are not aware, for instance, that in a work like Harnack's Essence of Christianity, wherever Christ or Jesus appears, the name can be crossed out and simply replaced with Yahweh or Jehovah, and the meaning does not change at all. For he particularly emphasizes this meaning when he says: It is not the Son but only the Father that belongs in this Gospel; that which is called the Son is only the teaching of the Father. —That the essence of the Gospel is the message of the Son, that is the Christian element. But Harnack no longer has that; he is no longer a Christian.

There we can already see the effect of what happens under the influence of the higher, ethereal elemental beings, who only strive for unity, but not for the unity interwoven with the Christ impulse. We must absorb this Christ impulse within us, and we can only absorb it fruitfully if we turn to the insights that can come through the spiritual wave that wants to come in, wants to come in through many gates into our present physical earth. Those whose senses are open to it can perceive everywhere how the spiritual wants to come in and how the spiritual is only now, in our time, imparting to us the true form of the Christ, the Christ impulse and the mystery of Golgotha.

All this, however, has its strongest enmity in those who, even as theologians and philosophers - albeit speaking in terms of concepts and ideas - have become materialists, crass materialists. It is of no use today to speak in the same formulaic words about the mystery of the world as one speaks about chemical, magnetic, electrical phenomena. Our culture and civilization can only advance if we penetrate from the outside inwards to the inside, if we really have the will to look at the spiritual world in the same way as at the physical. It is remarkable how people today immediately say: Yes, we want to profess belief in the unified God and the unified spirit, but leave us alone with the many spiritual beings. The one who knows the truth in this field cannot leave them alone for the reason that there are really quite a lot of them, as I showed you with the example of earthly elemental beings, of which there are so many that one is surprised to come across any at all. In its lower realm, in the one sphere, the spiritual, where today it tends towards the Ahrimanic, is present in an immeasurable number - there it is dominated by number; in the realm where it strives towards the ethereal, towards the higher, it is dominated by the striving for unity, for union. But today there is a tendency within these realms for the many to connect with the one and for the one to connect with the many. However, this connection can only take place in the sense of the right development of humanity if humanity is willing to include these spiritual realms in the field of its knowledge and insight in the same way as that which can be seen with the senses.

And now, my dear friends, I have endeavored today to present to you, I would say, a very esoteric chapter, an esoteric chapter, but one that is at the same time connected with the most important phenomena of our time, of our present time. Today we cannot merely describe in historical terms what is happening externally; today we must also point out the facts that are taking place in the next realm – in the next realm, where the lower and higher elemental beings are preparing to take possession of the earth, to snatch it from people, through the decline of the human intellect and people's resistance to spirituality. They want to snatch it from those people to whom the Christ Impulse has been given, which went out from the Mystery of Golgotha, in order to develop the Earth with it in the sense in which it is to develop further according to the intention of those spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies who stood at the beginning of this development and who have given the Earth the direction of its development from the very beginning. Humanity must find its way into this direction, into this line.

Now, my dear friends, yet another must one day come before our soul. Every time spirituality has appeared in humanity and wanted to assert itself, the enmity of the opponents of this spirituality has also appeared. And indeed, there has always been a struggle within human development around spirituality. We see today among us how a wild fight is now beginning against that which wants to spread as an anthroposophical world view, a fight from sides that fight with means that can only be overcome if the mask is torn from their face at the right time. Not to criticize, but to draw attention to what is necessary, I would like to mention a few things. You see how much is going on today in the fight against anthroposophy by certain people, who are fighting in an outrageous, brutal, inhuman way, because they are fighting and fantasizing with lies and untruthfulness, people who actually know nothing about what they are fighting against. There has always been a struggle, my dear friends.

You see, it was many years ago that I was suspected, for example, by a certain group, of being a Jesuit emissary, that everything I do gets its impulses from the Jesuits. This accusation came from certain quarters – it was many years ago. Later came the other accusation: that what I was doing came from the Freemasons and that the Jesuits would have to oppose it with all their might. And I could mention many other sides from which the fight was waged, and the feathers with which the fight was waged – I mean the pens, because birds were not, at least not very beautiful ones – were not always dipped in the purest ink. But now a fight is beginning against which the other fight, which I have just characterized, was a really noble one. Such a fight is beginning now. And about this fight, one should have no illusions, especially not that one could somehow do something with refutations and the like. Of course, one cannot say in all details that this or that should be done, but one would like to evoke an interest in things, a compassion for things.

You see, with a personality whose name has been mentioned a lot here in Stuttgart, there is still a lot of brutal opposition. I am not saying that everything comes from there, but a lot of it is connected with it. Now, another brochure has been produced here recently against this personality on the occasion of a lecture she gave. I must always ask why such things are presented to us in private? Why are they not made known to a wider public? Why are these things, which we are dealing with, not discussed in our magazines? As I said, I do not say this in a reproachful way, but only to make a note of it. If things continue to be modern, if things continue to be done in such a way that on our side what should be done is not done, while - it is not believed, I have been saying it for years - on the other side, work is being done, and will continue to be done, in the most intensive way, with all means, in all ways - if, on our side, only when or there is a fuss, it goes without saying that individuals are doing their very best, and that is commendable, but the other side is not doing anything commendable, even those who are directly involved are twiddling their thumbs in the face of the subversive activities or at most writing philosophical treatises against them, which is of no use at all.

These things must be considered by each individual. Perhaps they will be considered when, on the other hand, it is seen how truly our physical culture is endangered by world conditions today, but how behind this physical culture there is a world that must be characterized spiritually, as I have done today, and to which we must turn when we want to talk about the fate of humanity at all. For it is not true that the fate of humanity can only be characterized by what can be perceived externally. The fate of humanity is intimately connected with those spiritual beings and their deeds that stand behind the outer nature kingdoms as the elemental kingdoms, which we must also recognize if we want to recognize how the world is run. This does not only mean that we pursue theories, but that we absorb with all our being the reality of the activity of the elemental and higher spirits, of which true spiritual science proclaims to us, just as we absorb through the external food that which maintains the processes of our physical body. Only when we know ourselves in a world of spirit as well as in the world of matter will we find the possibility of gaining the right position that we must take if Anthroposophy is to fulfill its task.

If this is not taken very seriously, then perhaps it will soon be seen in this now expanded house that the great hopes that many have placed in the anthroposophical movement cannot be fulfilled. But it can be considered! We could look up — in a living, not just theoretical, inwardly moved and enthusiastic, not just comfortable way — from what is happening on the physical plane to what is taking place in the spiritual world.

This is what I wanted to develop here today before your souls. I would just like to add: It must also be taken into account, of course, that what is now happening in the form of a noisy agitation against anthroposophy is only the outward product of the untruthful agitation that has been going on for years by the personalities behind it, who are often regarded as very spiritual. Some of the things that occur in scientific circles are, through their inherent untruthfulness and lack of will to really penetrate into the matter, have contributed their fair share to the fact that those who are driven into the fight blindfolded today, act in a somewhat unruly manner and agitate against Anthroposophy. I would like to say that those who are often regarded as “masters” have contributed their fair share to what the henchmen are doing, because the scientific fight against anthroposophy has not been fought with clean weapons either.

The Goetheanum, which has been under construction in Dornach for the past ten years, no longer stands there; the building has been lost to the work of the Anthroposophical Society, and what an appalling loss it is! One need only weigh what the Goetheanum has meant to the Society to form some idea of the enormity of that loss and of the load of grief brought upon us by the catastrophic fire of last New Year's Eve.

Until 1913, when the foundation stone of the Goetheanum was laid in Dornach, the Anthroposophical Society served as the guardian of the Anthroposophical Movement wherever it had established branches. But then the Society began to feel that it needed a central building of its own. Perhaps members here will appreciate especially keenly what the Society as a whole has lost in the building that became its home, for in Stuttgart the Society has its own building. We have been privileged to carry on our activities in it for many years, and Stuttgart members therefore know from experience what it means to work in a building of their own, conceived as a suitable setting for the Anthroposophical Movement.

Up to the time when the Anthroposophical Society felt moved to establish its center in the building at Dornach, its only way of carrying on its work—except, as has been said, in Stuttgart—was in meetings. It had to rely solely on words to convey the possibility of a connection of man with the spiritual world such as has become a necessity for present day human evolution. Of course, the medium of the spoken word will always remain the most important, significant and indispensable means to that end that is available to the Movement. But additional ways opened up to us with the building of the Goetheanum. It became possible to speak to the world at large in the purely artistic forms striven for in it. While it is true that people who lack a sense for what anthroposophy has to offer through the medium of words will also evince little feeling for the artistic forms they perceive in the Goetheanum at Dornach, it is nevertheless true that people of our time tend to find it easier to approach things with their eyes than to rouse themselves to inner activity through what they hear. The Dornach building thus vastly widened the possibility of conveying the spirituality so needed by the human race today. In its visible forms and as a visible work of art, the Goetheanum spoke of the secrets of the spiritual world to an immeasurably greater number of people than had previously been able to learn of them through spoken words. Anyone with enough goodwill to look without prejudice at the building and at the anthroposophy underlying it found in the Goetheanum proof positive that anthroposophy is not tainted with sectarianism, but rather addresses itself to the great task of the age: that of taking up and embodying in every facet of our civilization and our culture the rays of a new spiritual light now available to humankind. Perhaps it was possible for an unprejudiced person to detect a sectarian note in one or another of the many meetings held in rented lecture halls. But that became impossible for people of goodwill as they looked at the Dornach building, where every trace of symbolism or allegory was studiously avoided and the anthroposophical impulse confined itself to purest art. People had to see that anthroposophy fosters something of wide human appeal, not something strange and different, that it is trying to fructify the present in a way that has universal human meaning in every realm of modern endeavor. The Goetheanum whose ruins are now so painful to behold had become in this sense a powerful means of expressing what the true nature of the Anthroposophical Movement is. We tried to carry our intention of keeping to the universally human into every least detail of the building. We strove to achieve pure art, for such a striving is profoundly part of the anthroposophical impulse. So the Goetheanum became a means of communicating the lofty concerns of the Anthroposophical Society even to people who had no interest in the Society as such.

This is the way things were for almost ten years. But a single night sufficed to end it.

To speak these two sentences in sequence is to be plunged into feelings that defy expression. Anything that could be reported of the work and worries of the past ten years falls into insignificance beside the irreparable loss of this vital means of showing what the Anthroposophical Movement is.

Now that the Goetheanum is gone, everyone who loved it and had a real sense of what it signified longs to have it rebuilt in some form or other. But the very thought of rebuilding should remind us that ten years have passed since the building was begun, and that the Anthroposophical Movement is of a nature that attracts enemies. In these grief-stricken days we have been given a further taste of what enmity means. Yet, on the other hand, the catastrophe also brought to light what hosts of true friends the Goetheanum had made for the Anthroposophical Movement. For along with messages from members, so gratefully received by me—messages in which they wrote of their grief and anguish—there were many from individuals who, though they had remained outside the Society, wanted to express their fellow-feeling in the matter of our catastrophic loss. Much warmth toward our cause came to light on that occasion.

Indeed, it was love that built the Goetheanum, and at the end, too, it stood under the sign of love. Only a boundlessly sacrificial spirit on the part of those who, when we began building in 1913, had long been devoting themselves to the movement, made the building possible. Immeasurable sacrifices were made—material, spiritual and labor sacrifices. Many friends of the Movement joined forces in Dornach and worked together in the most selfless way imaginable to bring the building into being.

Then the terrible war broke out. But even though the building tempo slowed down considerably during those harrowing years, no breach was made in the cooperative anthroposophical spirit of the members who were working together. The Dornach building site was a place where representatives of many European nations at war with one another worked and thought and carried on together in peace and loving fellowship. Perhaps it can be said, without any intention of boasting, that the love built into this building will stand out when historians come to record the waves of hatred set in motion among civilized peoples in the war-time years. While that hate was raging elsewhere, real love prevailed in Dornach and was built into the building—love that had its origin in the spirit. The name anthroposophy bears is justified: it is not mere learning like any other. The ideas it presents and the words it uses are not meant as abstract theory. Anthroposophical ideas are not shaped in the way other kinds of learning have been shaping ideas for the past three or four centuries; words are not meant as they are elsewhere. Anthroposophical ideas are vessels fashioned by love, and man's being is spiritually summoned by the spiritual world to partake of their content. Anthroposophy must bring the light of true humanness to shine out in thoughts that bear love's imprint; knowledge is only the form in which man reflects the possibility of receiving in his heart the light of the world spirit that has come to dwell there and from that heart illumine human thought. Since anthroposophy cannot really be grasped except by the power of love, it is love-engendering when human beings take it in a way true to its own nature. That is why a place where love reigned could be built in Dornach in the very midst of raging hatreds. Words expressing anthroposophical truths are not like words spoken elswhere today; rightly conceived, they are all really reverential pleas that the spirit make itself known to men.

The building erected in Dornach was built in this reverential spirit. Love was embodied in it. That same love manifested itself in renewed sacrifice during the night of the Goetheanum fire. It was spirit transformed into love that was present there.

I cannot speak at this time of the deeper, spiritual aspects of the Goetheanum fire. I can understand someone asking questions close to his heart such as, “How could a just cosmos have failed to prevent this frightful disaster?” Nor can I deny anyone the right to ask whether the catastrophe could not have been foreseen. But these questions lead into the very depths of esoterics, and it is impossible to discuss them because there is simply no place remaining to us where they can be brought up without at once being reported to people who would forge them into weapons for use against the Anthroposophical Movement. This prevents my going into the deeper spiritual facts of the case.

But what was cast in the mould of love has called forth bitter enmity. Our misfortune has unleashed a veritable hailstorm of ridicule, contempt and hatred, and the willful distortion of truth that has always characterized so large a part of our opposition is especially typical of the situation now, with enemies creeping out of every corner and spreading deliberate untruth about the tragedy itself. Our friends present at the scene of the fire did everything in their power to save what simply could not be saved. But ill-wishers have had the bad taste to say, for example, that the fire showed up the members for what they were, that they just hung about praying for the fire to stop of itself. This is merely a small sample of the contempt and ridicule we are being subjected to in connection with the fire.

I have been warning for years that we will have to reckon with a constantly growing opposition, and that it is our foremost duty to be aware of this and to be properly vigilant. It was always painful to have to hear people say that our enemies in this or that quarter seemed to be quieting down. This sort of thing is due to people's willingness to entertain illusions, unfortunately all too prevalent among us. Let us hope that the terrible misfortune we have had to face will at least have the effect of curing members of their illusions and convincing them of the need to concentrate all the forces of their hearts and minds on advancing the Anthroposophical Movement. For now that the wish to build another Goetheanum is being expressed, we need to be particularly conscious of the fact that without a strong, energetic Anthroposophical Society in the background it would be senseless to rebuild. Rebuilding makes sense only if a self-aware, strong Anthroposophical Society, thoroughly conscious of what its responsibilities are, stands behind it.

We cannot afford to forget what the bases of such a strong Anthroposophical Society are. Let us, therefore, go on, on this solemn occasion, to consider the way a strong Anthroposophical Society, aware of its responsibilities, should be conceived in the situation we are presently facing.

Until 1918, my dear friends, the Anthroposophical Society was what I might call a vessel to contain the spiritual stream believed by leading members to be vitally needed by present day humanity. Up to that time the only additional element was what grew out of the heart of anthroposophy, out of anthroposophical thinking, feeling and will. Even though the Dornach building was everything I have just described—an expression of the Anthroposophical Movement in a much broader sense than words can ever be—its every least detail came into being out of the very heart of anthroposophy.

But anthroposophy is not the concern of a separatist group; sectarianism is abhorrent to it. This means that it is capable of making whatever springs from its center fruitful for all life's various realms. During the hard times that followed upon the temporary ending of the war in Europe, friends of the Movement saw the tragic shape of things that prevailed on every hand in the life about them, and they realized how essential new impulses were in every realm of life. Much that grew out of the Anthroposophical Movement after 1919 took on a very different character than it would have had if anthroposophy had gone on shaping its efforts as it had been doing prior to that time. It is certainly true that anthroposophy is called upon to make its influence felt in every phase of life, and most certainly in those fields where friends of the Movement, motivated by anthroposophy, have sought to be fruitfully active. But external events have somehow brought it about that much that has been undertaken did not, in fact, spring directly from an anthroposophical spirit, but was instead founded and carried on alongside and unrelated to it. So we have seen a good deal happen since 1919 which, though it cannot be called unanthroposophical, has nevertheless been carried on in another sort of spirit than would have prevailed had the Anthroposophical Movement continued to pursue the course it was following up to 1918. This is a fact of the greatest importance, and I ask you not to misunderstand me when I speak about these matters as I must, in duty bound.

I am most decidedly not referring to such appropriate undertakings as Der Kommende Tag, [DER KOMMENDE TAG. A public corporation serving economic and spiritual concerns in Stuttgart. It was to demonstrate cooperation between economic and cultural institutions. Founded in 1920 and liquidated in 1925, the enterprise became a victim of inflation and other unfavorable events.] undertakings that came into being in close connection with the Anthroposophical Movement, even though they carry on their existence as separate entities. What I shall have to say does not apply to this type of enterprise. Please, therefore, do not take my words as reflecting in the least on the standing of such undertakings in the material sphere as these, for they have every intention of proceeding along lines entirely in harmony with the Anthroposophical Movement. What I am about to say refers exclusively to the Anthroposophical Society as such, to work in and for the Society.

This Anthroposophical Movement, which is partially anchored in the Anthroposophical Society, has been able to demonstrate its universally human character especially clearly here in Stuttgart, where it has proved that it did not spring from some spiritual party program or other but had its origin rather in the full breadth of human nature. Unprejudiced people probably realize that the proof of anthroposophy's universally human character is to be found here in Stuttgart in one area in particular: the pedagogy of the Waldorf School. [The first “Free Waldorf School” according to the pedagogy of Rudolf Steiner was founded at Stuttgart in 1919. At present, there are some seventy Waldorf Schools in many countries.] The proof lies in the fact that the Waldorf School is not an institution set up to teach anthroposophy, but to solve the problem of how to teach for the best development of the whole wide range of human capacities. How can education best serve human growth? Anthroposophy must show how this problem can be solved. A sect or a party would have founded a school for teaching its views, not a school based on universally human considerations.

The universally human character striven for in the Waldorf School cannot be too strongly emphasized. One can say in a case like this that a person who is a genuine anthroposophist is not in the least concerned with the name anthroposophy; he is concerned with what it is about. But it is about universally human concerns. So when it is brought to bear on a certain goal, it can function only in the most universally human sense. Every sect or party that sets out to found a school founds a sectarian school to train up, say, Seventh Day Adventists or the like. It is contrary to the nature of anthroposophy to do this. Anthroposophy can only give rise to universally human institutions; that is what comes naturally to it. People who still treat the Anthroposophical Movement as a sect despite these facts are either unobservant or malicious, for the Waldorf School here in Stuttgart offers positive proof that anthroposophy is concerned with what is universally human.

But circles within the Society should also pay close heed to this same fact. The way the Waldorf School was founded, the whole spirit of its founding, are matters for the Society's pondering. This spirit should serve as a model in any further foundings related either to the Anthroposophical Society or to the Movement. Perhaps we may say that the Goetheanum in Dornach and the Waldorf School and its procedures show how anthroposophical activity should be carried on in all the various spheres of culture.

To make sure of not being misunderstood, let me say again that I have used Der Kommende Tag as an example of something that has its own rightness because of the way it was set up, and it is therefore not among the institutions that I will be referring to in what follows. I am going to restrict my comments to what is being done or contemplated in the way of anthroposophical activity within the Anthroposophical Movement itself. I want especially to stress that the Movement has succeeded in demonstrating in the Waldorf School that it does not work in a narrowly sectarian, egotistic spirit, but rather in a spirit so universally human that the background out of which its pupils come is no longer discernible, so universally human have they grown. It is superfluous, in the case of the Waldorf School, to ask whether its origin was anthroposophy; the only question is whether children who receive their education there are being properly educated. Anthroposophy undergoes a metamorphosis into the universally human when it is put to work. But for that to be the case, for anthroposophy to be rightly creative in the various fields, it must have an area—not for its own but for its offsprings' sake—where it is energetically fostered and where its members are fully conscious of their responsibilities to the Society. Only then can anthroposophy be a suitable parent to these many offspring in the various spheres of culture and civilization. The Society must unite human beings who feel the deepest, holiest commitment to the true fostering of anthroposophy.

This is by no means easy, though many people think it is. It is a task that has certain difficult aspects. These difficulties have shown up especially strongly here in Stuttgart too since 1919. For though on the one hand the Waldorf School has thus far preserved the truly anthroposophical character I have been discussing, we have seen just in this case on the other hand how extraordinarily difficult it is to keep the right relationship between the Anthroposophical Society as the parent, and its offspring activities. This may sound paradoxical, but if I go into more detail you will perhaps understand me also in this.

The comments I am about to make are not intended to reflect in any way on the worth of the various movements that have sprung up since 1919 in connection with anthroposophy; all I have in mind is their effect on the Society, so no one should mistake my words for value judgments. I am speaking exclusively of effects on the Society. The enterprises that I shall be referring to have not always been conceived by those responsible for them with what I might call up-to-date feeling for the spirit of the commandment, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord giveth thee.’ The moving spirits in these projects have often—indeed, usually—been members of the Anthroposophical Society. The question now arises whether these members, active in fields connected with the Society, have always kept the parental source clearly in mind, competent though they undoubtedly are in their chosen fields. Is the effect of their professional activity on the Society desirable? This is a very different question than whether the persons concerned are professionally competent. Speaking radically, I would put it thus: A person can be the most excellent Waldorf School teacher imaginable, one wholly consonant with the spirit in which the Waldorf School grew out of the Anthroposophical Movement to become a universally human undertaking. He can carry on his work as a Waldorf teacher wholly in that spirit. The school can shape itself and its work in the anthroposophical spirit all the better for not being a school to teach anthroposophy. The individual Waldorf teacher may make most excellent contributions to it without necessarily doing the right thing by the Society as a member. I am not saying that this is true in any given instance, just that it could be true. Or let us say that someone can be an able officer of Der Kommende Tag, a person with the ability to make it flourish, yet prove most inadequate to the needs of the Anthroposophical Society. But the failure to give the parent entity what it needs in order to foster all its offspring properly is cause for the greatest anxiety, for really deep worry about the Anthroposophical Movement.

My dear friends, the fact that this situation prevailed in a certain field was what forced me to speak as I did about the Movement for Religious Renewal¹ in my next-to-last lecture at the Goetheanum. I most certainly do not mean to criticize the Movement for Religious Renewal in the slightest, for it was brought into being three and a half months ago with my own cooperation and advice. It would be the most natural thing in the world for me to be profoundly delighted should it succeed. Surely no doubt can exist on this score. Nevertheless, after it had been in existence for three and a half months, I had to speak as I did at that time in Dornach, directing my comments not to the Movement for Religious Renewal but to the anthroposophists, including of course those attached to the Movement for Religious Renewal. What I had to say was, in so many words: Yes, rejoice in the child, but don't forget the mother and the care and concern due her. That care and concern are owed her by the Movement for Religious Renewal, too, but most particularly by the members of the Anthroposophical Society.

For what a thing it would be if the Society were to be slighted, if anthroposophists were to turn away from it to an offspring movement, not in the sense of saying that those of us who have grown together with the Anthroposophical Movement can be the best advisors and helpers of an offspring movement, but instead turning away from the Anthroposophical Movement of which they were members with the feeling that they have at last found what they were really looking for, something they could never have found in anthroposophy! Though there is every reason to be overjoyed at the parent's concern for the child, it must be clearly recognized that the child cannot prosper if the mother is neglected. If anthroposophists who join the Movement for Religious Renewal leave much to be desired as members of the Anthroposophical Society, we would face exactly the same situation as would have to be faced in the case of a Waldorf School teacher who, though a first-rate man in his field, contributed too little to the Society. But this is just the fate we have been experiencing since 1919, little as the fact has been noticed.

We have witnessed the well-intentioned founding of the Union for the Threefolding of the Social Organism. [UNION FOR THE THREEFOLDING OF THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. The Union had its seat in Stuttgart and published the weekly review, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus.] This Union was largely responsible for the failure to get a hearing for the threefold commonwealth in nonanthroposophical circles. What it did do was to try to hammer the threefold impulse into the Anthroposophical Movement, which was already permeated by everything basic to it, and this in a far deeper way than could ever be matched by its quite external, exoteric expression in the threefold commonwealth. We had the sad experience of seeing that some anthroposophists who worked so zealously and intensively at this task became less valuable members of the Society than they had been.

Such has been our fate for the past four years. The situation has to be described as it really is, because it will take a strong, energetic Anthroposophical Society to justify any thought of rebuilding the Goetheanum. We must remind ourselves how significant a phenomenon it was that Stuttgart was just the place where an excellent beginning was made in a wide range of activities. But to be realistic we need to ask the following question (and I beg you not to misunderstand my speaking of these basic matters on the present solemn, sad occasion).

To avoid any misunderstanding, let us return to the example of the Waldorf School. It is of the first importance to grasp the difference between spreading anthroposophy by means of words, in books and lectures, and concerning oneself with the welfare of the Anthroposophical Society as such. Theoretically, at least, it does not require a society to spread anthroposophy by means of books and lectures; anthroposophy is spread to a great extent by just these means, without any help from the Society. But the totality of what comprises anthroposophy today cannot exist without the Anthroposophical Society to contain it. One may be a first-rate Waldorf teacher and a first-rate spreader of anthroposophy by word and pen in addition, yet hold back from any real commitment to the Society and to the kind of relationships to one's fellow men that are an outgrowth of it anthroposophy. Must it not be admitted that though we have a superb Waldorf School and a faculty that performs far more brilliantly in both the described areas than one could possibly have expected, its members have withdrawn from real concern for and a real fostering of the Society? They came to Stuttgart, have been doing superlatively well what needed doing in both the areas mentioned, but have not committed themselves to serving the Anthroposophical Society; they have failed to take part in its fostering and development.

I beg you to take these words as they are meant. We have had people working energetically and with enthusiasm on the threefold commonwealth. The more active they became in this field, the less activity they devoted to the Society. Now we face the threat of seeing the same thing happen again in the case of able people in the Movement for Religious Renewal. Again, in an especially important area, resources of strength could be withheld from the Society. This is a source of deep anxiety, particularly because of the immeasurably great loss we have just suffered. It makes it necessary for me to speak to you today in the plainest language possible.

For clarity's sake and in order somewhat more adequately to characterize the way we need to work in the Society, I would like to point out another thing that I will have to describe quite differently. In the past four years, during which the Society has seen so much happen, there has been a development with two different aspects. This double way of evolving is characteristic both of the movement I have in mind and of the Society. I am referring to the student, or youth movement.

Let us recall how it began a short while ago. At the time it called itself the Anthroposophical Union for Higher Education. [ANTHROPOSOPHICAL UNION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION publicized in 1920 the two courses on Higher Education given at the Goetheanum in the fall of 1920 and spring of 1921.] It is hard to press these things into any sharply defined form, since they are alive and growing, but we can try. What were its founders (and more especially its godfather, Roman Boos), more or less consciously aiming at? Their goal was to bring the influence of anthroposophy to bear on study in the various scientific fields, to change and reform tendencies that those individuals active in the movement felt were going in the wrong direction. The movement was conceived as affecting what went on in classrooms in the sense that young people studying in them were to introduce a new spirit. That is the way the program adopted at that time should be described.

Then, a little later on in fact, quite recently—another movement made its appearance. I don't want to call it a counter-movement, but it differed from the earlier one. It appeared when, here in Stuttgart, a number of young students came together to foster a concern for universal humanness, humanness with a spiritual-pedagogical overtone. It was not their purpose to bring the influence of anthroposophy directly into classrooms, but instead into another setting entirely: into man's innermost being, into his heart, his spirit, his whole way of feeling. There was no talk, to put it radically, of giving a different tone to words used in the classroom; the point was rather that, here and there among the young, there needed to be some individuals who experience their present youth and their growing older with a different kind of feeling in their hearts because the impulse to do so springs from their innermost being. Since they were not just students but human beings as well, and were growing older as human beings do, they would carry their humanness, conceived in the universally human spirit of anthroposophy, into the classroom also. These young students were not concerned with academic problems encountered in classrooms, but with the young human beings in them. The place was the same in both instances, but the problems were different.

But the Anthroposophical Society can do its work properly only if it is broad-minded enough to be able to find its way to the innermost being of everyone who turns to it for help in his searching and his striving.

Among the various exercises to be found in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, you will discover six that are to be practiced for a certain definite period of time. One of these is the cultivation of a completely unprejudiced state of mind. Indeed, dear friends, the Anthroposophical Society as a whole needs to cultivate these six virtues, and it is essential that it strive to acquire them. It must be so broadminded that it reaches the humanness of those who turn to it, and so strong that it can meet their needs. One of the problems of the Society showed up in the fact that when I came here a short while ago and found the young people in the picture, the Society had completely withdrawn from them, making a patching up of relationships necessary.

I am speaking a bit radically, but that may help to make my meaning clearer. I wanted, in this example, to show how important it is for the Society to be able to meet life's challenges.

Now let us turn our attention to another matter. For quite some time past, able members of the Society have been at work in the most varied branches of scientific endeavor. I am truly speaking with the greatest inner and outer restraint when I say that we have absolutely top-notch scientists who are not being given the appreciation they deserve from us. They have taken on the responsibility of developing the various branches of science within the Society. In the Society's beginning phase it had to approach people purely as human beings. It simply could not branch out into a whole range of different fields; it had to limit itself to speaking to people from its innermost heart, as one human being speaks to another. Its task was first to win a certain terrain for itself in the world of human hearts before going on to cultivate any other field. Then, since anthroposophy has the capacity to fructify every aspect of culture and civilization, scientists appeared as a matter of course in the Society and were active in their fields. But again, my dear friends, it is possible for a member to be a first-rate scientist and yet ignore the Society's basic needs. A scientist can apply anthroposophical insights to chemistry and physics and the like in the most admirable way and still be a poor anthroposophist. We have seen how able scientists in these very fields have withdrawn all their strength from the parent society, that they have not helped nurture the Society as such. People who, in a simple and direct way, seek anthroposophy in the Society are sometimes disturbed to hear, in the way these scientists still speak with an undertone reminiscent of the chemical or physical fields they come from, for though chemistry, physics, biology and jurisprudence are still connected by a thread with the universally human, the connection has become remote indeed. The essential thing is not to forget the parent. If the Society had not fostered pure anthroposophy in its innermost heart for one and a half decades, the scientists would have found no place in it to do their work. Anthroposophy provided them with what they needed. Now they should consider how much their help is needed in so fostering the Society that some return is made to it for what anthroposophy has contributed to their sciences.

This will perhaps help us to look more closely at what has been going on in a wide range of activities and then to admit a fact that, though it may sound trivial, is actually anything but that. Since 1919, anthroposophy has given birth to many children, but the children have been exceedingly neglectful of their mother.

Now we have to face the frightful disaster of the fire that has left us looking, broken-hearted, at the Goetheanum ruins there in Dornach. We are also confronted by an Anthroposophical Society that, though its roster of members has recently grown a great deal longer, lacks inner stability and itself therefore somewhat resembles a ruin. Of course, we can go on holding branch meetings and hearing about anthroposophy, but everything we now have can be wiped out by our enemies in no time at all if we are not more thoughtful about the problems I have laid before you today.

So my words today have had to be the words of pain and sorrow. This has been a different occasion than those previously held here. But the events I have described and everything that has gone with them force me to end this address in words of sorrow and pain as profoundly justified as my expression of gratitude to those whose hearts and hands helped build the Goetheanum and tried to help at the fire. They are as called for, these expressions of pain, as is the recognition of everything heart-warming that our members far and near have lately been demonstrating. Their purpose is not to blame or criticize anyone, but to challenge us to search our consciences, to become aware of our responsibilities. They are not intended to make people feel depressed, but rather to summon up those forces of heart and spirit that will enable us to go on as a society, as the Anthroposophical Society. We should not let ourselves turn into groups of educators, religious renewers, scientists, groups of the young, the old, the middle-aged. We must be an anthroposophical community conscious of the sources that nourish it and all its offspring. This is something of which we must be keenly aware. Though the Dornach flames have seared our very hearts, may they also steer us to the realization that we need above all else to work together anthroposophically. Let me express this wish to you today, my dear friends, for the special fields too would lose the source of their strength if they were unmindful of their parent. We will certainly have to admit that, due to the difficulties inherent in such relationships, the parent has often been forgotten by just those of her offspring who were most obviously her progeny. But despite the fearful enmity we face, we can perhaps accomplish something if we change our ways before it is too late, as it soon may be. We must realize that we are going to have to work anthroposophically in the Anthroposophical Society, and that our chief common task is to forge a connection between man and that radiant spiritual light from heavenly worlds that seeks him out at the present moment of his evolution. This is the consciousness and this the task to which, while there is still time, we need to be steeled by the Dornach fire whose flames we feel in our very hearts.

Let us bring this about, dear friends! But let me ask you to take with all due weight as well what I have had to say to you today with a sore heart. May my words call forth the strength to work, the will to work, the will to pull together in the Anthroposophical Movement especially. Nobody should take personally the statement that he has been an outstanding contributor to the work of Der Kommende Tag, the Waldorf School faculty, the Movement for Religious Renewal, and so on. May everybody—those both in and outside special fields, the old, the young, the middle-aged—be mindful of the parent society that has brought forth and nurtured them all and in which, as a member of the Society, every specialist must join forces with everybody else. Specialization has flourished far too strongly in our midst, only to decline again because the parent was not kept sufficiently in mind. May the Dornach fire kindle our will to strengthen ourselves to serve the Anthroposophical Society and to work sincerely together with clear purpose!

• 1. MOVEMENT FOR RELIGIOUS RENEWAL. The Christian Community with its center at Stuttgart. The next to last lecture at the Goetheanum on December 30, 1922, is contained in the book, Man and the World of Stars, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1963.

A week ago I commented here on the grievous event of the Goetheanum fire and other current concerns of the Anthroposophical Society. Today I planned to speak about purely anthroposophical matters, but I find it necessary to say a few introductory words about Society problems. I was able to attend at least the second part of yesterday's meeting, and saw how easy it is to misunderstand matters involving the nature of the Society such as were brought up by me last week. It is not a moment too soon to correct these misconceptions. My introductory remarks tonight will nevertheless still have to do with an anthroposophical view of life and perhaps on that account prove worthwhile to this or that listener.

I am mainly interested in going on with yesterday's discussion about judgment-forming in the Society. A challenge was issued, quite independently of anything I said, to the effect that every member should form his own independent judgments about matters affecting the Society. Now of course nothing could be truer. But we need to concern ourselves with the fact that when a challenge of this kind is presented one has to consider the whole context of what is under discussion, no matter how right the isolated statement may be in itself nor how fully I agree with it in principle. Something can be perfectly true but it may not necessarily apply in a given instance. Every truth can be presented as true in itself, but it is colored by the context in which it is brought up, and in the wrong place it can lead to the gravest misconceptions.

Now the point of view on judgment-forming was expressed in connection with my lecture of December 30th last in Dornach, in which I discussed the relationship of the Anthroposophical Society to the Movement for Religious Renewal. The comment was made that members should make their own judgments and not be influenced by mine. Of course they should! But in the form in which this advice was presented, it was and is profoundly at odds with the state of mind that comes from a real grasp of anthroposophy. For the anthroposophical world conception is not based on merely exchanging the view of things prevailing today for a different view similarly arrived at. As becomes evident in the whole posture of anthroposophy, it is not enough to think differently about all sorts of things, but—far more importantly—to think these different thoughts in a different way, to feel them with a different attitude of soul. Anthroposophy requires that thinking and feeling be utterly transformed, not just changed as to content.

Anyone inclined to test the great majority of my lectures in this respect will find that I keep strictly to what I have just expressed, and that it lies in the very nature of an anthroposophical view of the world to present things in such a way that hearers are left wholly free to form their own judgments. If you go through most of my lectures, including those on subjects such as that treated in the lecture of December 30, 1922, you will find their chief content to be simply facts, that they present facts, either those of super-sensible realms, of the world of the senses, or of history, and that their presentation is such that the reader can always draw his own conclusions about them, completely uninfluenced by me. Indeed, one of the lecture cycles held in Dornach even carries the sub-title, “Presentation of Facts on which to base Conclusions,” or the like. Since this is the case, the results are such as to remove any justification for saying that people were told what to think. For one person will draw one conclusion from my lectures, another a quite different one, and each thinks his is the right view of the matter. Each could be right from where he stands, because I never try to pre-determine the outcome, but simply to provide facts on which conclusions can be based. I thus deliberately expose myself to the danger that a series of facts I am presenting can be quite variously interpreted. For my interest is solely in communicating facts, and anybody who wants to look into the matter will find that the only time I express a judgment is when something needs to be corrected or refuted.

This has to be the case. A world view such as that based on anthroposophy must always be keenly conscious of the time context to which it belongs. We are now living in the age of consciousness soul development, a condition of soul wherein the all-important thing is for individuals to draw their own conclusions and learn to give facts an unprejudiced hearing, so that they can then make fully conscious judgments. The style of my presentations springs from an awareness that man has entered upon the development of the conscious soul. This accounts, as I said, for the varying conclusions that can be drawn from my words. I try to present the facts as clearly as possible. But there is never any question of “should” or “shouldn't.” Anthroposophy is there to communicate truth, not to propagandize. This has often been emphasized as, for example, in my refusal to take sides about vegetarianism. When I describe what effects a vegetarian diet has on people and what the effects of meat-eating are, I do so merely to present the facts, to make the truth known. In the age of the consciousness soul, anyone really acquainted with the facts of any case can confidently be left free to form his own judgments. It is essential to an anthroposophical view of things to be really clear on this point.

So, taking my style from the Anthroposophical Society rather than from the Movement for Religious Renewal, I tried in my lecture at Dornach on December 30, 1922, to show what the relationship between the two groups is. On that occasion I followed my general rule of merely presenting facts, and anyone who reads the lecture of that date will see this to be true. What action to take was a matter left to everyone's free weighing. The lecture makes this clear, and I expressed myself on the subject here a week ago as plainly as could be.

The matter of context has to be taken into consideration if one is to make really responsible assertions of an anthroposophical nature. One cannot make the remark that people should form their judgments independently of Steiner at utterances based in the strictest sense on anthroposophy. For except when Steiner is refuting or having to correct a statement, his hearers are even being forced by the way he puts things to form their own judgments; they are given no chance to adopt his.

An overall view of things anthroposophical is far better served by emphasizing this than by what some were emphasizing here yesterday, and the inappropriateness of what was said could encourage many seeds of misunderstanding. It is exceedingly important that I state this here, because it is a matter of anthroposophical principle.

There is a further matter to consider. In forming independent judgments it is not enough to be sure they are one's own. One must be equally sure, before expressing them, that one has taken all the pertinent facts into consideration. Anybody can draw his own conclusions. The point is to arrive at the correct ones when a sufficient overview of the facts of the case permits it or when facts that obviously do not apply have been discarded. I must therefore emphasize—and I bring up these introductory problems in duty bound, not because I have the least desire to do so—that what was said yesterday about all kinds of reports about the Movement for Religious Renewal having been carried to Dornach, so that my words could have been influenced and my opinions shaped thereby, is simply incorrect. The lecture in question was completely unrelated to any such reports, as fair-minded reviewers will see for themselves.

A third item was brought up in connection with my lecture, namely, that one faction was having chances to be heard while the other had none. If I am not mistaken, the Waldorf School faculty was named as a case in point, because I meet regularly with it. The truth is, however, that the matter had never even been discussed with the Waldorf faculty up to the time of giving the lecture. Here again is an example of a judgment made in ignorance of the facts. It might easily be thought that, since I meet frequently with the Waldorf faculty, there had been frequent discussions of the matter. But pedagogical matters naturally form the agenda of such meetings; anthroposophical gossip definitely has no share in them.

As I said, I stress these things in duty bound because they have to do with the nature of anthroposophical work, and we are at the point of at least trying to put that work on a healthy basis in the Society. Of course I was able, right after the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal, to hand over to appropriate persons the task of giving the Society all the necessary information about it; I didn't have to do this myself. That was apparent to anyone who heard the closing words I spoke on the occasion of launching the Movement for Religious Renewal. It is always a terrible thing for me to be forced to break off communicating facts in order to say the kind of things that I was compelled to say yesterday. But as things are now, the whole weight of everything connected with anthroposophical activities is burdening my soul, and unless something really adequate is done to clear up just those misunderstandings that are escaping notice because they are not as crassly evident as others, our anthroposophical work cannot progress. But the work must progress; otherwise, we would obviously have to leave the situation of the Goetheanum as it is. Resuming work on it depends entirely on strengthening the Society and freeing it of misunderstandings that sap its very lifeblood.

That lifeblood is sapped when, for example, no attention is paid to the principle involved in speaking of ethics in the sense required by the Spirit of the Time for the age of the developing consciousness soul and delineated by me in the Philosophy of Freedom. At the time I wrote it, I did not exactly relish exposing myself to the reproaches certain to issue from narrow-minded quarters because of my repudiation of authoritarian ethics. But every sentence I set down was formulated in the way I am always at pains to do, taking the greatest care to leave the reader free, even in relation to the development of thought and feeling under discussion in the book mentioned. So I must point out how out of place it is to bring up the question of a lecture like that of December 30, 1922, influencing the conclusions drawn by members of the Anthroposophical Society. There might be many other occasions where such a question could be raised. But it creates misunderstandings to raise it in connection with the lecture referred to, and to do so disregards the fact of my sacred concern to avoid influencing people's judgment by what I say on the subject of vitally important aspects of activities within the Society.

So I have again expressed my intention of formulating what I have to say in such a way that nobody's judgment can be influenced. It is therefore unnecessary to warn those who attend my lectures to preserve their freedom of judgment.

Now let me continue in the spirit of my previous comments and go on to consider how a spiritual-scientific judgment is arrived at. I am speaking now of judgments that express spiritual-scientific truths.

It can give one a strange feeling to observe how little aware people are of the seriousness with which the communication of spiritual truths is weighted. All one has to do to form and express judgments about things of the everyday world of the senses is to practice observation or logic at a given moment. Observation and logic are perfectly adequate bases for forming judgments about sense-derived and historical data. In the realm of spiritual science, however, they are not adequate. There, it is not enough to deal just once with forming a particular judgment. What is required is something quite different, something I shall call here a twofold re-casting of a judgment. This re-casting usually takes more than a short period of time; indeed, the period tends to be quite a long one. Let us say that one forms some judgment or other on the basis of methods you are familiar with from descriptions given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and in the second part of An Outline Of Occult Science. Following these procedures, one arrives at this or that conclusion about spiritual beings or processes. At this point one is obligated to keep this conclusion to oneself and not to express it. Indeed, one is even obligated to regard it simply as a neutral fact which, for the time being, one neither accepts nor rejects. Then, perhaps even years later, one comes to the point of undertaking the first re-casting of this judgment in one's own soul life; one deepens and in many respects even transforms it. Even though the content of the judgment may remain the same after its re-casting, it will have taken on a different nuance, a nuance of inner participation, perhaps, or of the warmth one has spent on it. In any case, it will incorporate itself in the life of the soul quite differently after this first re-casting than on the previous occasion, and one will then have the feeling of having separated oneself in some way from the judgment. If it has taken a matter of years to accomplish the first re-casting, one cannot, of course, have been turning the judgment over in one's mind every minute of the time. The judgment naturally disappears into the unconscious, where it carries on a life of its own quite independently of the ego. It has to have this independent life. One must stay away from it and let it live all to itself. Thus the ego element is eliminated from the judgment, which is then turned over to an objective faculty in oneself. When one first makes an observation and draws a logical conclusion from it, the ego is invariably involved. But when—possibly after a lapse of several years—a judgment is re-cast for the first time, one has the distinct experience of its emerging from the soul's depths to confront one like any other fact of the surrounding world. All this time it was out of sight. Now one comes across it again, one re-discovers it, and it seems to be saying, “The first time you formed me imperfectly, or even incorrectly, but now I have corrected myself.”

This is the judgment the true spiritual scientist seeks, the kind that develops its own life in the human soul. It takes a lot of patience to re-cast it because, as I have said, the process of re-casting can take years, and the conscientiousness that spiritual science demands means keeping silent while letting things speak.

But now, my dear friends, after re-casting a judgment in this way and experiencing its emergence out of an objective realm, one has the strong feeling that it occupies a place somewhere in oneself despite its objective recovery. So one can still feel that, in view of the responsibility one has to let the thing speak while remaining silent oneself, one should not express this kind of judgment on a spiritual-scientific matter. One therefore waits again, and perhaps again for years, for the second re-casting. As a result, one arrives at a third form of the judgment, and one will find a significant difference between the process that went on in the period between the first forming of the judgment and its first re-casting and the process it underwent between the first and second re-casting. One notices that it was comparatively easy to recall the judgment in the first time-interval described, while in the second it is extremely difficult to summon it up again, into such soul-depths has it descended, depths into which the easy judgments gleaned from the outer world never descend. Re-cast judgments of the kind I mean sink to the deepest levels of the soul, and one finds out what a struggle it costs to recall such a re-cast judgment between its first and second re-casting. By judgment I mean here an overview of the whole area covered by the fact in cases where the facts are of a spiritual-scientific nature. When one then arrives at the third form of the judgment, one knows that the judgment has been in the realm of the thing or process under study. In the period between its first forming and first re-casting it remained within one's own being, but in the second such interval it plunged into the realm of the objective spiritual fact or being. One sees that in its third shape the thing or being itself gives back the judgment in the form of a certain outlook one now has. Only now does one feel equal to communicating this view or judgment of a spiritual-scientific fact. The communication is made only after completing this twofold re-casting and thus arriving at the certainty that one's first view of the matter has pursued a path directly to the facts of the case and returned again. Indeed, a judgment of super-sensible things that is to find valid expression must be sent to the realm where the relevant facts or beings dwell.

No one with a right approach to presentations of basic and significant spiritual-scientific facts will find this hard to understand. Of course, a person who reads lecture cycles just as he would a modern novel will not notice from the way it is presented that the all-important thing, the real proof, lies in this twofold re-casting of a judgment. He will then call such a statement a mere assertion, not a proof at all. But the only proof of spiritual facts is experience, experience conscientiously come by and based on a twofold re-casting of judgments. Spiritual things can be proved only by experiencing them. This does not hold true of understanding them, however. Anyone with a healthy mind can understand any adequate presentation. But to be adequate, it has to have supplied that healthy mind with all the pertinent data, so pertinently arranged that the very manner of the presentation convinces of the truth of a given conclusion.

It makes a strange impression to have people come and say that spiritual-scientific truths ought to be as susceptible of proof as assertions about facts observed in the sense world. A person who makes such a demand shows that he is unfamiliar with the difference between perception of things spiritual and ordinary experience on the physical or historical level. Individuals who acquaint themselves with anthroposophy will notice that the single truths it presents fit into the picture of anthroposophy as a whole, and that this whole in turn supports the further single truths they hear. These further truths then illuminate things heard in the past. An increasing familiarity with anthroposophy is thus constant growth in experiencing its truth. The truth of a mathematical statement can be discerned in a flash, but it is correspondingly lifeless. Anthroposophical truth is a living thing. Conviction cannot be arrived at in a single moment; it is alive, and goes on growing. Conviction about anthroposophy might be compared to a baby just starting out in life, uncertain at first, scarcely more than a belief. But the more one learns, the more certain one's conviction becomes. This growing-up of anthroposophical conviction is actually proof of its inner aliveness.

We see here, furthermore, that what one thinks and feels about the concerns of anthroposophy is not only different from what one thinks and feels in other areas today, but that one must think differently, feel differently, take a different approach than is usual elsewhere. This different approach or attitude is basic to an understanding of anthroposophy, and it forms the basis for an anthroposophical fructification of all the various fields of life and learning.

This fact will have to be kept particularly clearly in mind by scientists coming into the movement. They should not only make it their goal as scientists to develop a different picture of the world than that striven for by external science, but should also be aware that their chief responsibility consists in bringing an anthroposophical frame of mind and an inner aliveness to bear on the various scientific fields they enter. This would keep them from resorting to polemics against other types of science, and instead help them to proceed in the direction of developing aspects of those sciences that would remain undeveloped without anthroposophy. I must stress this in a time of crisis for our Society, a crisis due in no small measure to the way scientists have been conducting themselves in it.

I must add here that the battle over atomism that the journal Die Drei [DIE DREI: an anthroposophical journal.] has been waging can only mean the death of fruitful scientific exchange. This debate should not be carried on with resort to the same kind of thinking practiced by opponents and with a failure to see that in certain vital points their assertions are correct. The all-important thing is to realize that physics is just that field of science that has brought out facts quite ideally suited to serving as the foundation of an anthroposophical outlook, provided one takes physics just as it is, without polemics. As we have seen in the polemical debate in “Die Drei,” polemics unrelieved by an anthroposophical approach can only lead to unfruitfulness.

I had a further reason for stressing this: I want to make it fully clear as a matter of principle that everything that is done in the name of anthroposophy cannot be laid at my door! I respect people's freedom. But when harmful things happen I must be allowed to exercise my own judgment about bringing them up. Complete independence must be the rule in anthroposophical concerns, not opportunism. Least desirable of all is the comradely spirit so frequently met with in discussions about scientific questions.

Now, my dear friends, as I often point out, we have to be clear when we are presenting anthroposophy that we are now living in the age of consciousness soul development. In other words, rational and intellectual capacities have become the most outstanding aspects of man's present state of soul. Ever since the time of Anaxagoras, a philosopher of ancient Greece, we have been sifting every judgment, even those based on external observation, through our intellectuality. If you examine the rationalistic science of today, particularly mathematics, which is the most rationalistic of all, and consider the rationalistic working over of empirical data by the other sciences, you will form some idea of the actual thought-content of our time. This thought-content, to which even the youngest children are exposed in modern schools, made its appearance at a fairly definite point in human evolution. We can pinpoint it in the first third of the fifteenth century, for it was then that this intellectuality appeared on the scene in unmistakable form. In earlier times people thought more in pictures even when they were dealing with scientific subject matter, and these pictures expressed the growth forces inherent in the things they thought about. They did not think in abstractions such as come so naturally to us today.

But these abstract concepts educate our souls to the pure thinking described in my The Philosophy of Freedom. It is they that enable us to become free beings. Before people were able to think in abstractions they were not free, self-determined souls. One can develop into a free being only by keeping the inner man free of influences from outside, by developing a capacity to lay hold on moral impulses with the aid of pure thinking, as described in the The Philosophy of Freedom. Pure thoughts are not reality, they are pictures, and pictures exercise no sort of compulsion on us. They leave us free to determine our own actions.

So, on the one hand, mankind evolved to the level of abstract thinking, on the other to freedom. This has often been discussed here from several other angles.

Let us now consider how things stood with man before earthly evolution brought him to a capacity for abstract thoughts, and so to freedom. The humanity incarnated on the earth in earlier periods was incapable of abstract thinking. This was true of ancient Greece, not to mention still earlier periods. The people living in those early days thought entirely in pictures, and were therefore not as yet endowed with the inner sense of freedom that became theirs when they attained the capacity for pure (that is, abstract) thinking. Abstract thoughts leave us cold. But the moral capacity given us by abstract thought makes us intensely warm, for it represents the very peak of human dignity.

What was the situation before abstract thought with its accompaniment of freedom was conferred on man? Well, you know that when man passes through the gates of death and casts off his physical body, he still retains his etheric body for a few days thereafter and sees his whole life, all the way back to the moment of his first memory, spread out before him in mighty pictures, in an undetailed, comprehensive and harmonious panorama. This tableau of his life confronts a person for several days after he has died.

That is the way it is today, my dear friends. But in the time when people living on earth still possessed a picture consciousness, their experience immediately after death was that of a rational, logical view of the world such as human beings have today, but which those who lived in earlier times did not have in the period between birth and death.

This is a fact that proves a signal aid in understanding human nature. An experience that people of ancient as well as somewhat later periods of history had only after death, that is, a short looking back in abstract thoughts and an impulse to freedom, which then remained with them during their lives between death and rebirth, came, in the course of evolution, to be instead an experience that they had during life on earth. This constant pressing through of super-sensible experience into earthly experience is one of the great secrets of existence. The capacity for abstraction and freedom that presently extends into earthly life was something that came into an earlier humanity's possession only after death in the form of the looking back I have described; whereas nowadays, human beings living on the earth possess rationality, intellectuality and freedom, exchanging these after death for a mere picture consciousness in their reviewing of their lives. There is a constant passing over of this kind going on, with the concretely super-sensible thrusting itself into sense experience.

You can see from this example how anthroposophy obtains the facts it speaks of from observation of the spiritual, and how subjectivity has no chance to color its treatment of a fact. But once we arrive at these facts, do they not affect our feelings and work on our will impulses? Could it ever be said of anthroposophy that it is merely theory? How theoretical it would sound to say merely that modern man is ruled by freedom and abstraction! But how richly saturated with artistic feeling and religious content such a statement becomes when we realize that what gives us modern human beings freedom in our earthly experience and a capacity for abstraction is something that comes to us here on earth from the heavenly worlds we enter after death, but that makes its way to us in a direction exactly counter to the one we take to enter them! We go out through the gates of death into spiritual realms. Our freedom and capacity for abstraction come to us as a divine gift, given to the earth world by the spiritual. This imbues us with a feeling for what we are as human beings, making us warmly aware not only of the fact that we are bearers of a spiritual element, but of the source whence that element derives. We look on death with the realization that what lies beyond it was experienced by people of an earlier time in a way that has now been carried over into the modern experiencing of people here on earth.

The fact that this heavenly element, intellectuality and freedom, has been thus translated into earthly capacity makes it necessary to look up to the divine in a different way from that of earlier ages. The Mystery of Golgotha made it possible to look up in this new way. The fact that Christ came to live on earth enables him to hallow elements of heavenly origin that might otherwise tempt man to arrogance and similar attitudes. We are living in a period that calls on us to recognize that our loftiest modern capacities, the capacity for freedom and pure concepts, must be permeated by the Christ impulse. Christianity has not reached its ultimate perfection. It is great just because the various evolutionary impulses of the human race must gradually be saturated by the Christ impulse. Man must learn to think pure thoughts with Christ, to achieve freedom with Christ, because he will otherwise not have that relationship to the super-sensible world that enables him to perceive correctly what it gives him. Studying ourselves as modern human beings, we realize that the super-sensible penetrates into earthly life through the gates of death in a direction directly counter to that that we take on dying. We go one way as human beings. The world goes the opposite way. With the descent of Christ, the spiritual sun enters from spiritual heights into the earth realm, in order that the human element that has made its way from the super-sensible to the sense world come together with the cosmic element that has taken the same path, in order that man find his way to the spirit of the cosmos. He can orient himself rightly in the world only if the spirit within him finds the spirit outside him. The spirit that an older humanity found living in the world beyond death can be rightly laid hold upon by people living on the earth today only if they are irradiated by the Christ, who descended to earth from that same world whence rationality and intellectuality and freedom made their way into the experience of incarnated human beings.

So we may say that anthroposophy begins in every case at the scientific level, calls art to the enlivening of its concepts, and ends in a religious deepening. It begins with what the head can grasp, takes on all the life and color of which words are capable, and ends in warmth that suffuses and reassures the heart, so that man's soul can at all times feel itself in the spirit, its true home. We must learn, on the anthroposophical path, to start with knowledge, then to lift ourselves to the level of artistry, and to end in the warmth of religious feeling.

The present rejects this way of doing things, and that is why anthroposophy has enemies. These enemies have many strange qualities. I have been talking of such serious matters today that I don't want to end on a serious note, although these matters are a good deal more serious than is generally realized. But we should often consider what a contrast exists between the seriousness of genuine anthroposophical striving and the ideas about it entertained by a good many of our fellow men. Some of them are absolutely grotesque, though others would strike us as simply droll were it not for the fact that we have to put up a defense against them. Sometimes I also find it necessary to turn my own spotlight on the outer world, with everyone free to make of it what he will. So I am going to close today's weighty discussion with a comment that is not to be taken too weightily.

A little while ago, our friend Dr. Wachsmuth brought me in Dornach a rude pamphlet not only attacking anthroposophy, but making me and those close to me its special targets. He said at the time that he wasn't leaving the book with me because it would be insulting even to assume that I would read such a particularly crude piece of invention. I didn't see the book again. Dr. Wachsmuth took it away with him, and I gave it no further thought.

Yesterday I traveled through Freiburg, accompanied by Frau Dr. Steiner and Herr Leinhas. We stopped off for refreshments and were sitting at a restaurant table. Two men were seated at the adjoining one. One of them had a rather bulging briefcase and other such accoutrements. We took no special notice of these people, and they left shortly before we did. After their departure the waiter brought me a book, saying that one of the gentlemen had asked him to give it to me. Herr Leinhas asked who the men were, and was told that one of them was Werner von der Schulenburg. On the book's flyleaf stood the words, “With the author's compliments.”

You see, my dear friends, what can happen. Perhaps this will give you some idea what a conception of tact—not to mention other qualities—exists nowadays among those who parade their enmity.

I have found it quite impossible lately to pay much attention to my enemies. Anyone who has been following my recent activities will have seen how occupied I have been presenting new truths to add to the old. This takes time, which one cannot afford to let anyone interrupt and waste, no matter how savage the attacks become.

I have described to you today how much is involved in arriving at anthroposophical truths. If the Society becomes fully conscious of this, it will find some of the strength it needs for its current reorganization. That, my dear friends, is a vital need. Please do not take it amiss that I have harped on this theme so insistently today.

In view of the deliberations that have been going on here with reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society as their object, I would like to shape today's lecture in a way that may help my hearers form independent judgments in these decisive days. To this end I shall be speaking somewhat more briefly and aphoristically than I usually do when discussing aspects of anthroposophy, and shall confine myself to commenting on the third phase of our anthroposophical work. This evening I will speak for the same reason on the subject of the three phases of the Anthroposophical Movement.

We often hear references being made these days to the great change that came over Western spiritual life when Copernicus substituted his new picture of the heavens for the one previously held. If one were to try to state just what the nature of this change was, it might be put as follows. In earlier times man thought of the earth realm as the object of his study and the chief concern of learning, with little or no attention being paid to the heavenly bodies circling overhead.

In recent times the heavenly bodies have come to assume a great deal more importance than they used to be accorded. Indeed, the earth came to be thought of as a mere grain of dust in the universe, and man felt himself to be living on a tiny speck of an earth quite insignificant by contrast with the rest of the cosmos and its countless thousand worlds. But if you will permit me to give just a sketch of this matter for the sake of characterizing the third phase of our Anthroposophical Movement, it must be pointed out that by reducing the earth to a mere grain of dust on the one hand, man also lost the possibility on the other of arriving at valid judgments about the rest of the universe other than those based on such physical and more recent chemical concepts as may apply. Research that goes beyond this and devotes itself to a study of soul and spiritual aspects of the universe is ignored. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the whole stance of modern learning. Man loses the possibility of seeing what he calls his soul and spirit as in any way connected with what rays down to us from the starry world. You can judge from certain passages in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, how intent anthroposophy is on creating a renewed understanding of the fact that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. Anthroposophy aims at re-creating the possibility of knowing the cosmos as spirit.

In this quest anthroposophy encounters a serious obstacle on its path, an obstacle that I am going to describe without reservation.

People come forward, quite rightly proclaiming anthroposophy with great enthusiasm. But they emphasize that what they are proclaiming is a doctrine based not on their own experience but on that of a spiritual investigator. This makes for instant conflict with the way of thinking prevailing in present day civilization, which condemns anyone who advances views based on authority. Such condemnation would disappear if people only realized that the findings of spiritual research recognized by anthroposophy can be arrived at with the use of various methods suited to various ways of investigation, but that once they are obtained, these results can readily be grasped by any truly unprejudiced mentality. But findings acceptable to all truly unprejudiced mentalities can be made and still not lead to fruitful results unless those presenting anthroposophical material do so with attitudes required for anthroposophical presentations that are not always prevailing.

Let me be explicit. Let me refer to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, published about thirty years ago, and recall my description in its pages of a special kind of thinking that is different from that generally recognized as thinking today. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature, or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at the hand of nature, thoughts that, indeed, he has only recently developed the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh century, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of it—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did the Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader as he read to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relation to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing at the moment of awakening that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color-filled, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily motions to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, The Riddle of Man, where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thoughts. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit have on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking.) One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as a result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person; it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life-element of its thinking, and the thinking left to it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there, seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, though in that book I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works because matters like these have to be gradually developed, one finds that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into formerly passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we will. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily matter comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes a part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belong to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side given its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them, for it belongs to a different world than that that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see, but the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our will leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a grain-of-dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we re-discover elements in the universe that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its suffusion with will, and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the universe and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my more recent lectures have concerned themselves with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read, speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!

Now I want to try to improve the present state of things by speaking briefly about the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. A start was made with the presentation of anthroposophy about two decades ago. I say two decades, but it was definitely already there in seed form in such writings as my Philosophy of Freedom and works on Goethe's world conception. But the presentation of anthroposophy as such began two decades ago. You will see from what I am about to say that it did begin to be presented as anthroposophy at that time.

When, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, I gave my first Berlin lectures (those printed under the title, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age), I was invited by the Theosophical Society to participate in its work. I myself did not seek out the Theosophical Society. People who belonged to it thought that what I was saying in my lectures, purely in pursuit of my own path of knowledge, was something they too would like to hear. I saw that the theosophists wanted to listen to what was being presented, and my attitude about it was that I would always address any audience interested in hearing me. Though my previous comments on the Theosophical Society had not always been exactly friendly and continued in the same vein afterwards, I saw no reason to refuse its invitation to lay before it material that had been given me for presentation by the spiritual world. That I presented it as anthroposophy is clear from the fact that at the very moment when the German section of the Theosophical Society was being founded, I was independently holding a lecture cycle [From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. History of Human Evolution Based on the World Conception of the Orient up to the Present, or Anthroposophy, 1902–3. No manuscript of these lectures is available.] not only about anthroposophy but with the name anthroposophy included in the title. The founding of the German section of the Theosophical Society and my lecture cycle on anthroposophy took place simultaneously. The aim, right from the beginning, was to present pure anthroposophy.

That was the start of the first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement. It was first exemplified in those members of the German section who were ready to absorb anthroposophy, and further groups of theosophists joined them.

During this first phase, the Anthroposophical Society led an embryonic existence within the Theosophical Society. It grew, as I say, within the Theosophical Society, but developed nevertheless as the Anthroposophical Society. In this first phase it had a special mission, that of counterposing the spirituality of Western civilization, centered in the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Theosophical Society's course, which was based on a traditional acceptance of ancient Oriental wisdom.

This first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement lasted until 1908 or 1909. Anyone who goes back over the history of the Movement can easily see for himself how definitely all the findings made on the score of prenatal existence, reincarnation and the like—findings made on the basis of direct experience in the present, not of ancient traditions handed down through the ages—were oriented around that evolutionary development in man's life on earth that centered in the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse. The Gospels were worked through, along with a great deal else. By the time it became possible for the Anthroposophical Movement to make the transition over into artistic forms of revelation, as was done with the presentation of my mystery plays, the content of anthroposophy had been worked out and related to its central core, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time when the Theosophical Society was sidetracked into a strange development. Since it had no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it committed the absurdity, among others, of proclaiming to the world that a certain young man of the present was the reincarnated Christ. Certainly no serious person could have tolerated any such nonsense; it appeared ridiculous in Western eyes. But anthroposophy had been developed as part of Western civilization, with the result that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared in a wholly new light in anthroposophical teaching. This led to the differences with the Theosophical Society that culminated in the virtual expulsion of all the anthroposophists. They didn't mind that because it didn't change anthroposophy in any way. I myself had never presented anything but anthroposophy to those interested in hearing about it, and that includes the period during which anthroposophy was outwardly contained by the Theosophical Society.

Then the second phase of the Anthroposophical Movement began. This phase was built on a foundation that already included the most important teachings about destiny, repeated earth-lives, and the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual illumination fully keyed to present day civilization. It included interpretations of the Gospels that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present.

The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917, was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels. You need only consider such examples as my lecture cycles of that period, one held in Christiania in 1910 on the European folk souls, the other at Prague in 1911 on the subject of occult physiology, and you will see that anthroposophy's second phase was devoted to working out its relationship to the sciences and practical concerns of the day. The cycles mentioned are just two examples; the overall aim was to find the way to relate to modern science and practice.

During this second phase of the Society's life, everything centered around the goal of finding a number of people whose inner attitude was such that they were able to listen to what anthroposophy was saying. More and more such people were found. All that was necessary was for people to come together in a state of soul genuinely open to anthroposophy. That laid the foundation for an anthroposophical community of sorts. The task became one of simply meeting the interest of these people who, in the course of modern man's inner evolution, had reached the point where they could bring some understanding to anthroposophy. They had to be given what they needed for their soul development. It was just a matter of presenting anthroposophy, and it was not a matter of any great concern whether the people who found their way to anthroposophy during the Society's first two phases foregathered in sect-like little groups or came to public lectures and the like. What was important was to base absolutely everything on a foundation of honestly researched knowledge, and then to go ahead and present it. It was quite possible to do this satisfactorily in the kind of Anthroposophical Society that had been developing.

Another aspect of the second phase was the further development of the artistic element. About halfway through it, the plan to build the Goetheanum took shape. A trend that began with the Mystery Plays was thus carried into the realms of architecture, sculpture and painting. Then eurythmy, the elements of which I have often characterized in my introductory talks at performances, was brought into the picture. All this came into existence from sources to which access is gained on the path sketched in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sketched in sufficient detail, however, to be understood and followed by anyone really desirous of taking that path.

This second phase of the Society's life was made especially difficult by the outbreak of the frightful war that then overran Europe and modern civilization. It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period, when mistrust and hatred were flooding the entire civilized world. The fact that the Goetheanum was located in a neutral country in a time when borders were closed often made it hard to reach. But the reasons for believing in the sincerity of anthroposophical efforts were more firmly founded on fact, even during the war, than any reasons for mistrusting it afterwards. It can truly be said that the war period brought no real disruption of the work; it continued on. As I have already mentioned, a large number of individuals from many different European countries confronting one another in hate and enmity on the battlefields worked together in a peaceful and anthroposophical spirit on the Goetheanum, which we have now lost in the terrible disaster of the fire.

Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number of individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through. The Threefold Movement, later called the Union for Free Spiritual Life, the Union for Higher Education, and so on, had to be undertaken with the clear intention of putting one's whole being irrevocably behind them. It was no longer possible, in the third phase, to rest content with the simple presentation of anthroposophy and merely to foregather with people whose inner search had led them to it. Instead, a number of individuals wanted to undertake this or that project, and they did so. This created all kinds of groupings in addition to the original purely anthroposophical community.

One of them was the scientific movement. It was built on the foundation of relationships of anthroposophy to science that had been established during the second phase. Scientists made their appearance in our midst. They had the task of giving modern science what anthroposophy had to offer. But there should have been a continuation of what I had begun in the way of building relationships to contemporary science. Perhaps I may remind you of lectures I gave during the second phase of the Movement. I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics into anthroposophy. I did the same thing in the case of other aspects of learning. This attitude, this way of relating, should have continued to prevail. If that had happened, the result would have been a different development of scientific activity than the one we have been witnessing during this third phase. Most importantly, we would have been saved from what I described at the earlier meeting as fruitless argumentation and polemics. Then we would presently be faced with a positive task, and could say that anthroposophy does indeed have a contribution to make to science, that it can help science go forward along a certain path, and in what specific way that can be accomplished. The outcome would have been a different attitude toward science than that evidenced in a recent issue of Die Drei, indeed in several issues that I looked over in connection with the cycle of lectures on science given by me last Christmastide in Dornach. I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in such unfruitful polemics. I say this not for the sake of criticizing but to point out what the task of the scientists in the Society is.

Something of the same kind ought to be happening in other respects as well. Let us take a case in point; I called attention to it on the occasion of my last lecture here.

In the third phase of the Movement, we saw the Union for Higher Education come into being. It had an excellent program. But somebody should have stayed with it and put all of himself behind it, made himself fully responsible for it. My only responsibility was for anthroposophy itself. So when someone else starts an independent enterprise founded on anthroposophy, that project becomes his responsibility. In the case I am discussing, nobody stayed with that responsibility, though I had called attention to the necessity of doing so at the time the program was being drawn up. I said that programs of this kind should be started only if an iron determination exists to carry them through; otherwise, they ought never to be launched. In this case it was the group guiding the Society that failed to stay behind it.

What was the outcome? The outcome was that a number of young people from the student movement, motivated by an intense longing for true anthroposophy but unable to find what they were looking for in the Society, sought out the living source of anthroposophy. They said expressly that they wanted to know the artistic aspects of anthroposophy as well as the others. They approached Frau Dr. Steiner with the intention of being helped by recitation and declamation to experience what I might call the anthroposophical swing of things.

Another development was taking place alongside this one, my dear friends. In the third phase of the Movement, the spiritual worlds were being described in the way I described them at the beginning of my lecture today when I gave a short sketch of a certain matter from the standpoint of purely spiritual contemplation, from a level where it is possible to show how one develops a different consciousness and thereby gains access to the spiritual world. The first and second phases were concerned with relating the Movement to the Mystery of Golgotha, to science, to the practical conduct of life. The third phase added the direct portrayal of spiritual realms. Anyone who has kept up with the efforts that were made during these three phases in Dornach and here too, for example, anyone with a real feeling for the advance represented by the third phase over the first and second phases, anyone aware to what extent it has been possible in recent years to spread anthroposophy beyond the boundaries of Central Europe, will notice that we are concerned with bringing into being a really new third phase in direct continuation and further development of the first two phases. Had we not entered the third phase, it would not really have been possible to develop the Waldorf School pedagogy, which is based on taking man's eternal as well as temporal nature into account.

Now please compare the discussions of yesterday and the week before with what I have just been saying in the interests of frank speaking and without the least intention of criticizing anyone, and ask yourselves what changes these three phases of our work have effected in the Society. Would not these same discussions, identical as to content, have been just as conceivable sixteen or eighteen years ago as they are today, when we have two decades of anthroposophical work behind us? Does it not seem as though we were back at the founding of the Society?

I repeat that I have no desire to criticize anybody. But the Anthroposophical Society can amount to something only if it is made the nurturing ground of everything that anthroposophy is working to achieve, and only if our scientists, to take an example, always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics.

Teachers have a similar task, and, to a special degree, people engaged in practical life. For their functions are of the kind that draws the heaviest fire against anthroposophy, which, despite its special potential for practicality, is most viciously attacked as being impractical.

So the Society is presently faced with the necessity of being more than a mere onlooker at really anthroposophical work going on elsewhere, more than just the founder of other enterprises that it fails to provide with truly anthroposophical zeal and enthusiasm. It needs to focus consciously on anthroposophical work. This is a completely positive statement of its mission, which needs only be worked out in detail. If this positive task is not undertaken, the Anthroposophical Society can only do anthroposophy more and more harm in the world's regard. How many enemies has the Threefold Movement not created for the Anthroposophical Movement with its failure to understand how to relate itself to anthroposophy! Instead, it made compromise after compromise, until people in certain quarters began to despise anthroposophy. We have seen similar things happen elsewhere. As I said in my first lecture here, we must realize that anthroposophy is the parent of this movement. That fact should be recognized. If it had been, a right relationship to the Movement for Religious Renewal, which I helped launch, would have resulted. Instead, everything in that area has also gone amiss. I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that takes us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

Please do not take offense at my speaking to you as I have today, my dear friends. I had to do it. As I said in Dornach on January 6th last, the Anthroposophical Society is good; it is capable of listening receptively to even the sharpest parts of my characterization. But the guiding elements in the Society must become aware that if the Society is to earn its name in future, they must make themselves responsible for keeping it the conscious carrier of the work. The conflicts that have broken out will end at the moment when the need for such a consciousness is clearly and adequately recognized in a spirit of goodwill. But there has to be goodwill for that need to be brought out into the open and any fruitless criticism dropped. Furthermore, there is no use giving oneself up to comfortable illusions, making compromises in adjustments between one movement and another, only to end up again in the same old jog-trot. It is time to be absolutely serious about anthroposophical work, and all the single movements must work together to achieve this goal. We cannot rest content to have a separate Waldorf School movement, a separate Movement for Religious Renewal, a separate Movement for Free Spiritual Life. Each will flourish only if all feel that they belong to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I am sure that everyone truly concerned for the Movement is saying the same thing in his heart. That is the reason I allowed myself to express it as sharply as I did today. Most of you were already aware of the need for a clear statement that could lead to the establishment of the consciousness I have described as so essential.

The Movement has now gone through three phases, during the last of which anthroposophy has been neglected in favor of various offspring movements. It must be re-discovered as the living spiritual movement demanded by modern civilized life and, most especially, by modern hearts. Please take my words as meant to serve that purpose. If they have sounded sharp, please consider them the more sincerely offered. They were intended not as an invitation to any further caustic deliberations but as a challenge to join in a Movement guided by a true heart for anthroposophy.

The development of conditions in the Anthroposophical Society makes it seem desirable to touch on at least a few of them again tonight. It was really never my intention to use lecture time to go into such matters as organizational and developmental aspects of the Society, for I see it as my task to work for pure anthroposophy, and I gladly leave everything related to the life and development of the Society to others who have assumed responsibility for it at the various places. But I hope to be able, at the delegates' meeting that will soon be held, to discuss at greater length the subject originally intended for presentation today. In view of the need evidenced by the way the Society's current concerns are going, you will perhaps allow me to make a few comments complementing what I said a week ago about the three phases of anthroposophical development.

Today, I want to bring out those aspects of the three phases that all three share in common; last week I concentrated, even though sketchily, on their differences.

I would like to start by discussing how a society like ours comes into being. I believe that what I am about to say could serve many a listener as a means to self-knowledge and thus prove a good preparation for the delegates' meeting.

It is certainly clear to anybody who keeps up with the way civilization and culture are presently developing that the times themselves demand the deepening of knowledge, the ethical practice, the inner religious life that anthroposophy has to offer. On the other hand, however, a society such as ours has to act as a vanguard in an ever wider disseminating of those elements that are so needed under the conditions that prevail today.

How is such a vanguard created? Everybody who has sought out the Anthroposophical Society from honest motives will probably recognize a piece of his own destiny in what I am about to describe.

If we look back over the twenty-one or twenty-two years of the Society's development, we will certainly discover that by far the greater number of those who approach the Society do so out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the spiritual, psychological and practical conditions they find surrounding them in life today. In the early days of the Society, which, when considered factually and not critically, might even be called its better days, something was taking place that almost amounted to flight from the life of the present into a different kind of life built on human community, a community where people could live in a way they felt in their souls to be in keeping with their dignity as human beings. This alienation from the spiritual, psychic and practical situation prevailing in the life around them must be taken into account as a factor in the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. For those who became anthroposophists were the first people to feel what millions and millions of others will be feeling keenly indeed in a not too distant future, that older forms have come down into the present from by-gone days in which they were not only fully justified but the product of historical necessity, but that they no longer provide what modern man's inner life requires and the dignity of full humanness demands.

Anyone who has a really open mind about these things and has come to anthroposophy in honest seeking will find, if he practices self-observation, that this drive to satisfy his soul needs in a special community rather than in just any other present day group of human beings is something that springs from the innermost core of his humanity, something he feels to be a special phenomenon of the present moment working its way to the surface of his soul from the eternal sources of all humanness. Those who have come honestly to anthroposophy therefore feel the need to belong to an anthroposophical community to be a real and deep concern of their hearts, something they cannot really do without if they are honest. But we must admit, too, that the very clarity (clarity of feeling, not of thought) with which people seek belonging in the anthroposophical community shows how little able the outer world presently is to satisfy a longing for full humanness. People would not feel so urgently impelled to seek anthroposophy if the soul's feeling of alienation from conditions existing in the world today had not become so particularly intense.

But let us go on and consider something else. What I have been describing thus far might be called a reversing of human will impulses. A person is born into a certain period and educated to be a man of his time. The result is that his will impulses simply coincide with those of all the rest of the human world around him. He grows up, and as he does so he grows without any great inner stirrings into the will tendencies of the surrounding population. It takes a deeply experienced inner revulsion against these habitual will impulses that he has adopted from the outside world to turn this erstwhile external will inward. When he does so, this reversing of the direction of his will causes him to notice the longing, experienced so keenly in our time, that wells up as though from eternal wellsprings, impelling him to seek a different belonging to the community of men than lay in the previous direction of his will.

Now everything that has to do with the will is intrinsically ethical and moral. The impulse that drives a person into the Anthroposophical Society is thus, in its will and feeling aspects at least, an ethical-moral impulse. Since this ethical impulse that has brought him into the Anthroposophical Society stirs him in his innermost holy of holies as it carries him to the eternal wellsprings of his soul life, it goes on to develop into a religious impulse. What otherwise lives itself out simply as a matter of response to externally imposed laws and traditional mores and as habits more or less thoughtlessly adopted from the life around one, in other words, everything of an ethical, moral, religious nature that had developed in the course of one's growing up, now turns inward and becomes a striving to make one's ethical-moral and religious being a full inner reality. But it is not consistent with full human stature for a person to couple his life of will and—to some extent at least—his life of feeling with the acceptance of just any haphazard type of knowledge.

The kind of knowledge that we may not, perhaps, absorb with our mother's milk, but are certainly receiving as inner soul training by the time we are six, and go on receiving—all these things that our minds in their learning capacity take in, confront the ethical, moral and religious elements in us as their polar opposite, though one perfectly harmonious and consistent with them. But they are by no means an inconsiderable item for a person who seeks to bring a religious deepening into his anthroposophical striving. The kind of life and practice that civilized man has developed in recent centuries is just exactly the kind from which an anthroposophist longs to free his moral, ethical and religious nature. Even if he makes compromises with the life about him, as indeed he must, his real desire is to escape from what the civilization of recent centuries has produced, leading as it has directly to the catastrophic present. It may be that this desire exists only as an instinct in many of those who seek out the Anthroposophical Movement, but it is definitely present.

Now let us recognize the fact that the factors accounting for the development of the religious and will impulses of recent centuries are the very same ones responsible for the direction and whole nuance of the modern life of learning. Only a victim of prejudice could believe and say that the modern way of knowledge has produced objective physics, objective mathematics, objective chemistry, that it is working toward an objective science of biology, and so on. That is pure prejudice. The real truth is that what we have had drummed into us from about our sixth year onward is the product of externally influenced will and religious impulses that have evolved during recent centuries. But when a person seeking anthroposophy wants to escape from these will impulses and from the religious forms in which man's moral life finds its highest expression, he cannot help asking at the same time for a way of knowledge in keeping not with the world he wants to leave behind but with the new world of his seeking. Since he has turned his will impulses inward, he must, in other words, strive for the kind of knowledge that corresponds to his in-turned will, that takes him ever further away from the externalized science that has been an outgrowth of the externalizing of all life in the civilized world in the past few centuries. An anthroposophist feels that he would have to be inconsequential and reverse the direction of his will again if he were not to change the direction of his knowledge. He would have to be a quite unthinking person to say, “I feel my humanity alien to the kind of life and practice that past centuries have brought us, but I feel quite at home with the knowledge they produced.” The kind of learning that the world he wants to escape from has acquired can never satisfy a person with an in-turned will. Many an individual may come to realize purely instinctively that the life and practice he longs to flee received their present form from the fact that man believes only in what his eyes see and what his mind makes of his physical observations. Seekers therefore turn to the invisible super-sensible realm as the basis of knowledge. Externalized forms of life and practice are outgrowths of a materialistic science, and a person impelled to regard these forms as subhuman rather than as fully human cannot feel suited by a science based on an exclusive belief in the external and material and what the mind concludes about them.

After the first act in the soul drama of the anthroposophist, the moral-religious act, there comes a second, one already contained in seed form in the first. It consists in a compulsion to seek super-sensible knowledge. That the Anthroposophical Society builds its content on knowledge received from super-sensible worlds is something that comes about quite of itself. Everything that the will thus experiences as its destiny, everything that the striving for insight recognizes as its seeking, is fused into one indivisible whole in the heart and soul of an anthroposophist; it is the very core of his life and his humanity. As such it shapes and colors his whole attitude, the state of soul in which he takes his place in the Society.

But now let us weigh the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and practice. He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but life's outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a single step or with one stroke. So his soul is caught and divided between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical Society. A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth or superficiality of the individual. But this very pain, this tragedy, contains the most precious seeds of the new, constructive life that has to be built up in the midst of our decaying culture. For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit is an outgrowth of pain and suffering. It is perhaps just those individuals with the deepest sense of the Society's mission who have to have the most personal experience of pain and suffering as they take on that mission, though it is also true that real human strength can only be developed by rising above suffering and making it a living force, the source of one's power to overcome.

The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one's will; secondly, in experiencing super-sensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one's time to a point where it becomes one's personal destiny. One feels oneself sharing mankind's evolution in the act of reversing one's will and experiencing the super-sensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time's true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness. The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”

What I have been describing here are the factors that brought the Anthroposophical Society into being. The Society wasn't really founded; it just came about. You cannot carry on a pre-conceived campaign to found a thing that is developing out of some genuine inner reality. An Anthroposophical Society could come into being only because there were people predisposed to the reversal of their wills, to the living knowledge, to the participation in the time's destiny that I have just characterized, and because something then made its appearance from some quarter that was able to meet what lived as those needs in those specific hearts. But such a coming together of human beings could take place only in our age, the age of the consciousness soul, and those who do not as yet rightly conceive the nature of the consciousness soul cannot understand this development. An example was provided by a university don who made the curious statement that three people once joined forces and formed the executive committee of the Anthroposophical Society. This donnish brain (it is better to be specific about what part of him was involved, since there can be no question in his case of fully developed humanness), this brain ferreted out the necessity of asking who selected them and authorized them to do such a thing. Well, what freer way could there possibly be for a thing to start than for three people to turn up and announce that they have such and such a purpose, and anyone who wants to join them in pursuing it is welcome, and if someone doesn't, why, that's all right too? Everyone was certainly left perfectly free. Nothing could have shown more respect for freedom than the way the Anthroposophical Society came into being. It corresponds exactly to the developmental level of the consciousness soul period. But one can perfectly well be a university don without having entered the consciousness soul age, and in that case will have no understanding for matters intimately allied to freedom.

I know how uncomfortable it makes some people when things of this kind have to be dealt with for the simple reason that they are there confronting us. They throw light, however, on the question of what must be done to provide the Society with what it needs to go on living. But since anthroposophists have to keep on being part of the world around them and can escape from it on the soul level only, they become prone to the special nuance of soul experience that I have been describing and that can run the gamut of inner suffering to the point of actual tragedy. Soul experience of this kind played a particularly weighty role in the coming into being of the Anthroposophical Society. Not only this: it is constantly being re-lived in the case of everyone who has since sought out the society. The Society naturally has to reckon with this common element, which is so deeply rooted in its social life, as with one of the lasting conditions of its existence.

It is natural, too, that in an evolution that has gone through three phases, newcomers to the Movement should find themselves in the first phase with their feeling life. Many a difficulty stems from the fact that the Society's leaders have the duty of reconciling the three co-existing phases with one another. For they go on side by side even though they developed in succession. Furthermore, in their aspect as past stages in a sequence, they belong to the past, and are hence memories, whereas in their simultaneous aspect they are presently still being lived. A theoretical or doctrinaire approach is therefore out of place in this situation. What those who want to help foster anthroposophical life need instead is loving hearts and eyes opened to the totality of that life. Just as growing old can mean developing a crochety disposition, becoming inwardly as well as outwardly wrinkled and bald-headed, losing all feeling for recalling one's young days vividly enough to make them seem immediate experience, so too is it possible to enter the Society as late as, say, 1919 and fail to sense the fresh, new, burgeoning, sprouting life of the Movement's first phase. This is a capacity one must work to develop. Otherwise, the right heart and feeling are missing in one's relation to anthroposophy, with the result that though one may scorn and look down upon doctrines and theories in other spheres of life, one's efforts to foster anthroposophical life cannot help becoming doctrinaire. This does serious damage to a thing as alive as an Anthroposophical Society ought to be.

Now, a curious kind of conflict arose during the third phase of the Movement. It began in 1919. I am not going to judge it from an ethical standpoint at the moment, although thoughtlessness is indeed a will impulse of sorts, and hence a question of ethics. When something is left undone, due to thoughtlessness, and that same thoughtlessness leads to a lot of fiddling around where a firm will is what is really needed, one can surely see that an ethical-moral element is involved. But I am not as much interested in going into that aspect of the subject today as I am in discussing the conflict into which it plunged the Society, a long-latent conflict. It must be brought out into the open and frankly discussed.

In the first phases of anthroposophical development, there was a tendency for the anthroposophist to split into two people. One part was, say, an office manager, who did what he had to do in that capacity. He poured his will into channels formed by the way things have developed in modern external life and practice during the past few centuries, channels from which his innermost soul longed to escape. But he was caught in them, caught with his will.

Now let us be perfectly clear about the will's intense involvement in all such pursuits. From one end of the day to the other, the will is involved in every single thing one does as an office manager or whatever. If one happens to be a schoolmaster or a professor instead of an office manager and is therefore more involved in thinking, that thinking also flows into one's will impulses, insofar as it has bearing on external life. In other words, one's will really remains connected with things outside oneself. It is just because the soul wants to escape from the direction the will is taking that it enters the Anthroposophical Society with its thought and feeling. So the man of will ends up in one place, the man of thought and feeling in another. Of course, this made some people happy indeed, for many a little sectarian group thought it a most praiseworthy undertaking to meet and “send out good thoughts” at the end of a day spent exerting its members' wills in the most ordinary channels. People formed groups of this sort and sent out good thoughts, escaping from their outer lives into a life that, while I cannot call it unreal, consisted exclusively of thoughts and feelings. Each individual split himself in two, one part going to an office or a classroom, the other attending an anthroposophical meeting where he led an entirely different kind of life. But when a number of anthroposophically thinking and feeling people were moved to apply their wills to the establishing of anthroposophical enterprises capable of full and vigorous life, they had to include those wills in the total human equipment needed for the job. That was the origin of the conflicts that broke out. It is comparatively easy to train oneself to send out good thoughts intended to keep a friend on a mountain climb from breaking his legs. It is much harder to pour good thoughts so strongly into a will engaged in some external, material activity that matter itself becomes imbued with spirit as a result of one's having thus exerted one's humanness. Many an undertaking has suffered shipwreck because of an inability to do that, during the Society's third phase of development. There was no shortage of fine intelligences and geniuses—I say this very sincerely—but the intelligence and genius available were not sufficiently applied to stiffening and strengthening the wills involved.

If you look at the matter from the standpoint of the heart, what a difference you see! Think how dissatisfied the heart is with one's external life! One feels dissatisfied not only because other people are so mean and everything falls so short of perfection, but because life itself doesn't always make things easy for us. You'll agree that it isn't invariably a featherbed. Living means work. Here one has this hard life on the one hand, and on the other the Anthroposophical Society. One enters the Society laden with all one's dissatisfaction. As a thinking and feeling person one finds satisfaction there because one is receiving something that is not available in the outer life one is justifiably so dissatisfied with. One finds satisfaction in the Anthroposophical Society. There is even the advantage there that one's thoughts, which in other situations are so circumscribed by will's impotence, take wing quite easily when one sits in a circle sending out good thoughts to keep the legs of friends on mountain climbs from getting broken. Thoughts fly easily to every part of the world, and are thus very satisfying. They make up for one's external life, which is always causing one such justifiable dissatisfaction.

Now along comes the Anthroposophical Society and itself starts projects that call for the inclusion of the will. So now one not only has to be an office manager in the outer world, though with an Anthroposophical Society to flee to and to look back from at one's unsatisfactory life outside—a life one may, on occasion, complain about there; one now faces both kinds of life within the Society, and is expected to live them there in a satisfied rather than dissatisfied state of mind!

But this was inevitable if the Society wanted to go farther and engage in actual deeds. Beginning in 1919 it did want to do that.

Then something strange happened, something that could probably happen only in the Anthroposophical Society, namely, that people no longer knew what to do with their share of dissatisfaction, which everyone naturally wants to go on having. For one can hardly accuse the Society of making one dissatisfied. But that attitude doesn't last. In the long run people do ascribe their dissatisfaction to it. What they ought to do instead is to achieve the stage of inner development that progresses from thoughts and feelings to will, and one does achieve just that on a rightly travelled anthroposophical path. If you look in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, you will see that nowhere is there a recommendation for developing thought that does not include aspects that bear on will development.

But modern humanity suffers from two evils, both of which must be overcome in the Society. One is fear of the super-sensible. This unadmitted fear accounts for every enemy the Anthroposophical Movement has. Our enemies really suffer from something that resembles a fear of water. You know, of course, that a fear of water can express itself in another, violently compulsive form, and so we need not be surprised if the kind I am referring to sometimes vents itself in a sort of phobia. Sometimes, of course, it can be comparatively harmless. Some people find anthroposophy a rewarding subject to write about; these books bring in money and appear on book lists. There must be themes to write about, and not everybody has one inside him, so it has to be borrowed from the world outside. The motives in such cases are sometimes more harmless than one might suppose. But their effects are not equally harmless.

Fear of super-sensible knowledge, then, is one characteristic of the human race. But that fear is made to wear the mask of the scientific approach, and the scientific approach, with the limits to knowledge it accepts, is in direct line of inheritance from man's ancient Fall into error. The only difference is that the ancients conceived the Fall as something man ought to overcome. The post-scholastic period is still haunted by a belief in the Fall. But whereas an earlier, moralistic view of it held that man was born evil and must overcome his nature, the intellectualistic view holds that man cannot gain access to the super-sensible with his mind or change his nature. Man's willingness to accept limits to knowledge is actually an inheritance from the Fall he suffered. In better days he at least tried to overcome error. But conceited modern man not only wants to retain his fallen status; he is actually intent on staying fallen and loving the devil, or at least trying to love him.

That is the first of the two evils. The second is the weakness, the inner paralysis that afflicts modern human wills, despite their seeming activity, which is often nothing more than pretense. I must add that both these ominous characteristics of modern civilization and culture are qualities that anthroposophical life must overcome. If this anthroposophical life is to develop in a practical direction, everything it undertakes must be born of fearless knowledge and a really strong will. This presupposes learning to live with the world in a truly anthroposophical way. People used to learn to live anthroposophically by fleeing the world. But they will have to learn to live anthroposophically with the world and to carry the anthroposophical impulse into everyday life and practice. That means making one single whole again of the person hitherto split into an anthroposophist and a practical man. But this cannot be done so long as a life lived shut away from the world as though by towering fortress walls that one cannot see over is mistaken for an anthroposophical life. This sort of thing cannot go on in the Society. We should keep our eyes wide open to everything that is happening in the world around us, that will imbue us with the right will impulses. But as I said the last time, the Society has not kept pace with anthroposophical life during the third phase of anthroposophy, and the will element is what has failed to do so. We have had to call away individuals who formerly guided activities in the various branches and assign them tasks in connection with this or that new enterprise, with the frequent result that a person who made an able Waldorf School teacher became a poor anthroposophist. (This is not meant as a criticism of any of our institutions. The Waldorf School is highly regarded by the world at large, not just by circles close to it, and it can be stated in all modesty that no reason exists to complain about any of the various institutions, or if there is, it is on an entirely different score than that of ability.) It is possible to be both a first-rate Waldorf teacher and a poor anthroposophist, and the same thing is true of able workers in the other enterprises. The point is, though, that all the various enterprises are outgrowths of anthroposophy. This must be kept firmly in mind. Being a real anthroposophist is the all-important thing. Waldorf teachers, workers at Der Kommende Tag, scientists, medical men and other such specialists simply must not turn their backs on the anthroposophical source or take the attitude that there is no time left from their work for anthroposophical concerns of a general nature. Otherwise, though these enterprises may continue to flourish for a while, due to the fact that anthroposophy itself is full of life and passes it on to its offspring, that life cannot be maintained indefinitely, and the offspring movements too would eventually die for lack of it.

We are dealing with enemies who will not meet us on objective ground. It is characteristic of them that they avoid coming to grips with what anthroposophy itself is, and instead ask questions like, “How are anthroposophical facts discovered?” or “What is this clairvoyance?” or “Does so and so drink coffee or milk?” and other such matters that have no bearing on the subject, though they are what is most talked about. But enemies intent on destroying anthroposophy resort to slander, and samples of it have been turning up of late in phenomena that would have been quite unthinkable just a short while ago, before civilization reached its lowest ebb. Now, however, they have become possible. I don't want to go into the specifics; that can be left to others who presumably also feel real heart's concern for the fate of anthroposophy. But since I was able to be with you here today I wanted to bring up these problems. From the standpoint of the work in Dornach it was not an opportune moment for me to leave, however happily opportune it was to be here; there are always two sides to everything. I was needed in Dornach, but since I could have the deep satisfaction of talking with you here again today, let me just add this. What is most needed now is to learn to feel anthroposophically, to feel anthroposophy living in our very hearts. That can happen only in a state of fullest clarity, not of mystical becloudedness. Anthroposophy can stand exposure to the light. Other movements that claim they are similar cannot endure light; they feel at home in the darkness of sectarianism. But anthroposophy can stand light in all its fulness; far from shrinking from exposure to it, anthroposophy enters into the light with all its heart, with its innermost heart's warmth. Unfounded personal slander, which sometimes goes so far that the persons attacked are unrecognizable, can be branded for what it is. Where enmity is an honest thing, anthroposophy can always reply on an objective basis. Objective debate, however, requires going into the question of methods that lead to anthroposophical knowledge. No objective discussion is possible without satisfying that requirement. Anybody with a heart and a healthy mind can take in anthroposophy, but discussions about it have to be based on studying its methods and getting to understand how its knowledge is derived. Experimentation and deduction do not call for inner development; they merely require a training that can be given anybody. A person with no further background is in no position to carry on a debate about anthroposophy without undergoing training in its methods.

But the easy-going people of our time are not about to let themselves in for any such training. They cling to the dogma that man has reached perfection, and they don't want to hear a word about developing. But neither goodness nor truth are accessible to man unless he acts in the very core of his free being to open up the way to them. Those who realize what impulses are essential to sharing with one's heart in the life and guidance of the Anthroposophical Society and who know how to assess its enemies' motives will, if they have sufficient goodwill, also find the strength needed to bring through to a wholesome conclusion these concerns with which, it was stated before I began this talk, the Society itself is also eager to deal.

Today I want to point once again to an ideal associated with the Goetheanum, which we have just had the great misfortune of losing. My purpose in referring to it again is to make sure that correct thinking prevails on the score of a step about to be taken in Stuttgart in the next few days, a step in the direction of making a new life in the Anthroposophical Society. Whatever anthroposophy brings forth must be built on a solid foundation of enthusiasm, and we can create the right enthusiasm only by keeping oriented to that ideal that every anthroposophical heart should be cherishing and that is great enough to unite all the Society's members in its warmth.

It cannot be denied that enthusiasm for this ideal of anthroposophical cooperation has dwindled somewhat during the three successive phases of anthroposophical development, though the ideal itself remains. As we stand grieving beside the ruins of the building that brought that anthroposophical ideal to eloquent external expression, it becomes the more important that we join forces in the right common feeling toward it. Shared feeling will lead to shared thoughts and beget a strength much needed in view of the constantly increasing enmity that confronts us. Therefore, instead of continuing to discuss matters that have been the focus of my lectures of the past several weeks, you will perhaps allow me to recall an outstanding memory that has a connection with the Goetheanum and is well-suited to restoring the kind of relationships between members that we need in the Anthroposophical Society. For to hold common ideals enkindles the love that every single anthroposophist should be feeling for his fellow members and that can be relied on to dissipate any hard feelings that members of the Society could be harboring against any others, even if only in their thoughts about them.

You may remember that when we started the first High School course at the Goetheanum, I gave a short introductory talk stressing the fact that what people were accomplishing there represented a new kind of striving whereby art, science and religion were to be united in a truly universal sense.

What was being striven for at the Goetheanum, what its forms and colors were meant to convey, was an ideal, a scientific, artistic and religious ideal. It should be the more deeply graven on our hearts now that it can no longer speak to us through outer forms and colors. That will perhaps be brought about if we continue to do as we have been doing these past few weeks in regard to other subjects under study and enquire how earlier periods of human evolution went about pursuing a scientific, artistic and religious ideal.

If we look back at the tremendous, lofty spiritual life of the ancient Orient, we come to a time when the spiritual content of everything revered by these Oriental peoples was immediate revelation to them—a time when they had no doubt whatsoever that the things their senses perceived were mere tracings in matter of divine realities that had been revealed to a visionary capacity none the less real to them for its dreamlike quality.

That way of beholding, instinctive though it was, was at one time such that people in certain specific states of consciousness could perceive spiritual beings in the universe in all their immediate reality, just as with their bodily senses they perceived things and creatures of the three natural kingdoms. The Oriental of an older time was just as convinced by immediate perception of the existence of the divine-spiritual beings connected with the human race as he was of the existence of his fellow men.

This was the source of his inner religious certainty, which differed in no way from his certainty concerning things in nature round about him. He saw his god, and could therefore believe in his existence just as firmly as he believed in the existence of a stone, a plant, clouds or rivers. What modern science dubs animism, picturing the ancients relying on poetic fantasy to endow nature with a living spiritual element, is an invention of childish dilettantism. The fact is that people beheld spiritual beings in the same way they beheld the world of nature and the senses.

This was, as I said, the source of the certainty in their religious life. But it was equally the source they drew on for artistic creation. The spiritual appeared to them in concrete form. They were familiar with the shapes and colors assumed by spiritual elements. They could bring their perception of the spiritual to material expression. They took such building materials as were available, the materials of sculpture and of the other arts, and applied such techniques as they had to express what was spiritually revealed to them.

The reverence they felt in inner soul relationships to their gods was the content of their religious life. When they imprinted on matter what they had beheld in the spirit, that was felt to be their art. But the techniques and the physical materials at their disposal for expressing what they thus beheld fell far short of their actual visions.

We come upon a period in the evolution of the ancient Orient when the divine-spiritual—or, as Goethe called it, the sensible-super-sensible—that man beheld was exceedingly lofty and gloriously beautiful. People's feelings and fantasy were powerfully stirred by their perception of it. But because techniques for dealing with material media were still so rudimentary, artistic creations of the period were but primitive symbolical or allegorical expressions of the far greater beauty human beings perceived with spiritual eyes. An artist of those ancient times describing his work with the feeling-nuance we have today would have said, “What the spirit reveals to me is beautiful, but I can bring only a weak reflection of it to expression in my clay or wood or other media.”

Artists in those days were people who beheld the spiritual in all its beauty and passed on their vision in sense perceptible form to others who could not behold it for themselves. These latter were convinced that when an artist embodied what he saw spiritually in his symbolical or allegorical forms, these forms enabled them, too, to find their way into the world beyond the earth, a world that a person had to enter to experience his full dignity as a human being.

This relationship to the divine-spiritual was so immediate, so real, so concrete that people felt that the thoughts they had were a gift of the gods, who were as present to them as their fellow men. They expressed it thus, “When I talk with human beings, we speak words that sound on the air. When I talk with the gods, they tell me thoughts that I hear only inside me. Words expressed in sounds are human words. Words expressed in thoughts are communications from the gods.”

When human beings had thoughts, they did not believe them to be products of their own soul activity. They believed that they were hearing thoughts whispered to them by divinities. When they perceived with their ears, they said they heard people. When they heard with their souls, when their perception was of thoughts, they said they heard spiritual beings. Knowledge that lived in idea form was thus communication from divine sources in the experiencing of ancient peoples, perception of the Logos as it spoke directly through the gods to men.

We can say, then, that men's beholding of the gods became the inner life of the religious ideal. Their symbolical-allegorical expression of divine forms through the various media was the life underlying the ideal of art. In their re-telling of what the gods had told them lived the ideal of science. These three ideals merged into one in ancient Oriental times, for they were at bottom one and the same.

In the first ideal, men looked up to divine revelation. Their whole soul life was completely suffused with religious feeling. Science and art were the two realms in which the gods shared mankind's life on earth. The artist engaged in creative activity felt that his god was guiding his hand, poets felt their utterance being formed by gods. “Sing to me, Muse, of the anger of the great Peleid, Achilles.” It was not the poet speaking; it was, he felt, the Muse speaking in him, and that was the fact. The abstract modern view, which attributes such statements to poetic license, is a grotesque piece of the childish nonsense so rampant today. Those who adopt it do not know how truly Goethe spoke when he said, “What you call the spirit of the times is just your own spirit with the times reflected in it.”

If we now turn our attention from the way the threefold ideal of religion, art and science lived in ancient Oriental man to consider how it was expressed by the Greeks and the Romans who were such a bare, prosaic copy of them, we find these three ideals in a further form of development. The divine-spiritual that had revealed itself to man from shining heights above was felt by the Greeks to be speaking directly through human beings. Religious life attached itself much more closely to the human, in the sense that a Greek not only experienced his inner life, but his very form, as god-permeated, god-suffused. He no longer looked up to shining heights above him; he looked at the marvellous shape of man. He no longer had the ancient Oriental's direct contemplation of divinity; his beholding was only a weak shadow of it. But anyone who can really enter into Greek poetry, art and philosophy perceives the basic feeling the Greek had, which led him to say that earthly man was more than just a composite of the material elements that his senses perceived in the external world; he saw in him a proof of the existence of divinity. This man of earth whom the Greek could not regard as of earthly origin was for him living proof that Zeus, that Athene ruled in spiritual worlds.

So we see the Greeks looking upon the human form and man's developing inner life as sublime proof of the gods' governance. They could picture their gods as human because they still had such a profound experience of the divine in man.

It was one thing for the Greek to picture his gods as human beings and quite another for modern man to conceive a divine man under the influence of a degraded anthropomorphism. For to the Greek, man was still a living proof of his divine origin. The Greeks felt that no such thing as man could exist if the world were not permeated through and through by the divine.

Religion played a vital part in conceiving man. A person was revered not for what he had made of himself, but just because he was a human being. It was not his everyday achievements or an ambitious earthly striving to excel that inspired reverence; it was what had come with him as his humanness into life on earth. The reverence accorded him enlarged to reverence for the divine-spiritual world.

The artistic ideal entertained by the Greeks was, on the one hand, a product of their feeling for the divine-spiritual element they embodied and to which their presence on earth testified. On the other hand, they had a strong sense—unknown to the ancient Oriental—of the laws governing the physical world of nature, the laws of consonance and dissonance, of volume, of the inertia or the supporting capacity of various earth materials. Where the Oriental handled his media awkwardly and was unable to go beyond a crudely symbolical-allegorical treatment of the spiritual reality that overwhelmed and overflowed him, so that the spiritual fact he was trying to give expression to in some work of art was always far more glorious and grand than the awkward representation of it, the Greek's striving was to embody all the fulness of his spiritual experience in the physical medium he had by this time learned to handle.

The Greeks never allowed a column to be any thicker than it had to be to carry the weight it was intended to support. They would not have permitted themselves to represent anything of a spiritual nature in the awkward manner characteristic of ancient Oriental art; the physical laws involved had to have been perfectly mastered. Spirit and matter had to be united in a balanced union. There is as much of spirit as of material lawfulness in a Greek temple, and a statue embodies as much of the spiritual element as the expressiveness of the material allows. Homer's verses flow in a way that directly manifests the flowing of divine speech in the human. The poet felt as he shaped his words that he had to let the laws of language itself be his guide to the achieving of perfect control over every aspect of his utterance. Nothing could be left in the awkward, stammering form typical of ancient Oriental hymns. It had to be expressed in a way that did full justice to the spirit. The goal, in other words, was so fully to master the physical laws inherent in the artistic medium employed that every last vestige of what the spirit had revealed was made manifest in sense perceptible form.

The Greeks' feeling that man was evidence of divine creation was matched by their feeling that works of art, like temples and statues, also had to bear witness to divine governance, though that was now conceived as acting through the agency of human fantasy. Looking at a temple, one could see that its builder had so mastered all the laws of his medium that every least detail of their application reflected what he had experienced in his intercourse with the gods.

The earliest Greek tragedies were plays in which the dramatis personae represented spiritual beings such as Apollo and Dionysos, with the chorus an echo of sorts, an echo of the divine that ruled in nature. Tragedies were intended to bring to expression through human beings as an adequate medium events transpiring in the spiritual world. But this was not conceived as in ancient Oriental times, when man had, as it were, to look up into a higher realm than that where the work of art stood. Instead, it was thought of as taking place on the level on which the tragedy was being enacted, making it possible to experience in every gesture, every word, every recitativ of the chorus how a spiritual element was pouring itself into sense perceptible forms beautifully adapted to it. This constituted the Greek ideal of art.

And the scientific ideal? The Greek no longer felt as livingly as the Oriental had that the gods were speaking to him in ideas and thoughts. He already had some inkling of the fact that effort was attached to thinking. But he still felt thoughts to be as real as sense perceptions, just as he felt earthly human beings with their human forms and inner life to be walking evidence of divinity. He perceived his thoughts in the same way that he perceived red or blue, C # or G, and he perceived them in the outer world in the same way that eyes and ears receive sense impressions. This meant that he no longer experienced the speaking of the Logos quite as concretely as the Oriental did. The Greeks did not compose Vedas, of which the Orientals had felt that the gods gave them the ideas they expressed. The Greek knew that he had to work out his thoughts, just as someone knows that he has to use his eyes and look about him if he wants to see the surrounding world. But he still knew that the thoughts he developed were divine thoughts impressed into nature. A thought was therefore earthly proof of the gods' speaking. Whereas the Oriental still heard that speaking, the Greek discerned the human quality of language, but saw in it direct earthly proof of the existence of divine speech.

To the Greeks, science was thus also like a divine gift, something obviously despatched to earth by the spirit, exactly as man with his divine outer form and inner experiencing had been sent here. So we see how the religious, artistic and scientific ideal changed in the course of humanity's evolution from the Oriental to the Greek culture.

In our epoch, which, as I have often explained, began in the first third of the fifteenth century, Western man's development has again reached a point where he is confronted with the necessity of bringing forth new forms of the venerable, sacred ideals of religion, art and science. This development was what I had in mind when we were launching the first High School course at the Goetheanum. I wanted to make it clear that the Goetheanum stood there because the inner laws of human evolution require that the religious, artistic and scientific ideals be clothed in magnificent new forms transcending even those of Greece.

That is why one feels so overwhelmed by grief as one's eye falls on ruins where a building should be standing and indicating in its every form and line and color the new shape that the three great ideals should be assuming as they emerge from the innermost soul of an evolving humanity. Grief and sorrow are the only emotions left to us as we contemplate the site that was meant to speak so eloquently of the renewal of man's three great ideals. Ruins occupy it, leaving us only one possibility, that of cherishing in our hearts everything we hoped to realize there. For while another building might conceivably be erected in its place, it would certainly not be the one we have lost. In other words, it will never again be possible for a building to express what the old Goetheanum expressed.

That is why everything the Goetheanum was intended to contribute to the three great ideals of the human race should be the more deeply graven on our hearts. In our day we cannot say with the clairvoyant Oriental of an older time that the divine-spiritual confronts us in all its shining immediacy as do the creatures of the sense world, or that the deeds of the gods are as present to our soul perception as any sense perceptible acts that may be performed in the external world in everyday living. But when we quicken our inquiry into man and nature with the living quality with which anthroposophical thinking and feeling endow such studies, we see the world for the cosmos, or the universe clothed in a different form than that in which the Greeks beheld it.

When a Greek made nature the object of his study or contemplated human beings moving about in the world of the senses, he had the feeling that where a spring welled up or a mountain thrust its cloud-crowned peak into the sky, when the sun came up in the rosy brilliance of the dawn or a rainbow spanned the heavens, there the spirit spoke in these phenomena. The Greeks beheld nature in a way that enabled them to feel the presence of the spirit in it. Their contemplation of nature really satisfied them; what they saw there satisfied every facet of their beings.

I have often emphasized how justifiably people speak of an advance in natural science, and anthroposophy is in a unique position to recognize the real significance of the scientific progress of recent centuries. I have often stressed this. Anthroposophy is far from wanting to denigrate or to criticize science and scientific inquiry; it honors all truly sincere study. In the course of recent centuries, my dear friends, people have indeed learned an enormous amount about nature. If one goes more deeply into what has been learned, the study of nature leads, as I have often stated from this platform, to insight into man's repeated earth lives, insight into the transformation of nature. One gets a preview of the future, when man will bring to new forms of life what his senses and his soul and spirit are experiencing in the present moment.

If one undertakes a suitably deeper study of nature, one's total outlook on it becomes different from that that the Greeks had. It might be said that they saw nature as a fully matured being from which the glory of the spiritual worlds shone out. Modern man is no longer able to look upon nature in this light. If we survey everything we have come to know and feel about nature's creations as a result of making use of our many excellent devices and instruments, we see nature rather as harboring seed forces, as bearing in its womb something that can come to maturity only in a distant future.

The Greek saw every plant as an organism that had already reached a perfect stage for the reason that the god of the species lived in each single specimen. Nowadays we regard plants as something that nature has to bring to still higher stages. Everywhere we look we see seed elements. Every phenomenon we encounter in this unfinished nature, so pregnant with future possibilities, causes us to feel that a divine element reigns over nature and must continue to do so to ensure its progressing from an embryonic to an eventually perfect stage.

We have learned to look much more precisely at nature. The Greek saw the bird where we see the egg. He saw the finished stage of things; we, their beginnings. The person who feels his whole heart and soul thrill to the seed aspects, the seed possibilities in nature, is the man who has the right outlook on it.

That is the other side of modern natural science. Anyone who starts looking through microscopes and telescopes with a religious attitude will find seed stages everywhere. The exactness characteristic of the modern way of studying nature allows us to see it as everywhere creative, everywhere hastening toward the future. That creates the new religious idea.

Of course, only a person with a feeling for the seed potentialities that each individual will live out in other, quite different earthly and cosmic lives to come can develop the religious ideal I am describing.

The Greeks saw in man the composite of everything there was in the cosmos of his own period. The ancient Orientals saw in man the composite of the whole cosmic past. Today, we sense seeds of the future in human beings. That gives the new religious ideal its modern coloring.

Now let us go on to consider the new ideal of art. What do we find when we subject nature and its forms to a deeper, life-attuned study, refusing to call a halt at externalities and abstract ideas? My dear friends, you saw what we find before your very eyes in the capitals of our Goetheanum pillars and in the architrave motifs that crowned them. None of this was the result of observing nature; it was the product of experiencing with it. Nature brings forth forms, but these could just as well be others. Nature is always challenging us to change, to metamorphose its forms. A person who merely observes nature from the outside copies its forms and falls into naturalism. A person who experiences nature, who doesn't just look at the shapes and colors of plants, who really has an inner experience of them, finds a different form slipping out of every plant and stone and animal for him to embody in his medium. The Greek method, which aimed at completely expressing the spirit through a masterly handling of the medium, is not our method. Our way is to enter so deeply into nature's forms that one can bring them to further, independent metamorphosis. We do not resort to the symbolical-allegorical Oriental treatment or strive for the Greek's technical mastery of a medium. Our method is so to handle every line and color in the work of art that it strives toward the divine. The Oriental employed symbolism and allegory to express the divine, which rayed out like an aura from his works, rayed out and welled over and submerged them, speaking much more eloquently than the forms did. We moderns must create works where in the form element speaks more eloquently than nature itself does, yet speaks in a manner so akin to it that every line and color becomes nature's prayer to the divine. In our coming to grips with nature we develop forms wherein nature itself worships divinity. We speak to nature in artistic terms.

In reality, every plant, every tree has the desire to look up in prayer to the divine. This can be seen in a plant's or a tree's physiognomy. But plants and trees do not dispose over a sufficient capacity to express this. It is there as a potential, however, and if we bring it out, if we embody in our architectural and sculptural media the inner life of trees and plants and clouds and stones as that life lives in their lines and colors, then nature speaks to the gods through our works of art. We discover the Logos in the world of nature. A higher nature than that surrounding us reveals itself in art, a higher nature that, in its own entirely natural way, releases the Logos to stream upward to divine-spiritual worlds.

In Oriental works of art the Logos streamed downward, finding only stammering expression in human media. Our art forms must be true speech forms, voicing what nature itself would say if it could live out its potential. That is the new artistic ideal that comes to stand beside the religious ideal that looks at nature from the standpoint of its seed endowment.

The third is our scientific ideal. That is no longer based on the feeling the Orientals had that thoughts are something whispered straight into human souls by gods. Nor can it have kinship with the Greek ideal, which felt thoughts to be inner witnesses to the divine. Nowadays we have to exert purely human forces, work in a purely human way, to develop thoughts. But once we have made the effort and achieved thoughts free of any taint of egotism, self-seeking, subjective emotionality or partisan spirit such as colors thoughts with prejudiced opinions, once we have exerted ourselves as human beings to experience thoughts in the form they themselves want to assume, we no longer regard ourselves as the creators and shapers of our thoughts, but merely as the inner scene of action where they live out their own nature. Then we feel the largeness of these sefless and unprejudiced thoughts that seem to be our own creations, and are surprised to find that they are worthy of depicting the divine; we discover afterwards that thoughts that take shape in our own hearts are worthy of depicting the divine. First, we discover the thought, and afterwards we find that the thought is nothing less than the Logos! While you were selflessly letting the thought form itself in you, your selflessness made it possible for a god to be the creator of that thought. Where the Oriental felt thought to be revelation and where the Greek found it proof of divine reality, we feel it to be living discovery: we have the thought, and afterwards it tells us that it was permitted to express divinity. That is our scientific ideal.

Here we stand, then, in the ongoing evolution of the human race, realizing what point we have reached in it. We know, as we look at the human head with the ears at the side, at the larynx and the distorted shoulder blades, that we must be able to do more than just contemplate them. If we succeed in transforming these shapes of nature, a single form emerges from a further development of the shoulder blades and a growing-together of the ears and larynx: a Luciferic form, composed of chest and head, wings, larynx and ears.

We reach the point of perceiving the artistic element in nature, the element that endows its forms with life, allowing a higher life of form to emerge than that found in nature itself.

But this also puts us in the position of being able to trace nature's own activity in the metamorphoses whereby it transforms the human being, and we are able to apply this same artistry in the pedagogical-didactic field. We bring this same creative artistry to pedagogical work with children, who are constantly changing. For we have learned it at hand of an art that we recognize to be the Logos-producing nature-beyond-nature. We learn it from springs that are more than springs, for they commune with the gods. We learn it from trees that are more than trees; for where the latter achieve only a stammering movement of their branches, the former disclose themselves to modern artistic fantasy in forms that point to the gods with gesturings of branch and crown. We learn it from the cosmos as we metamorphose its forms and re-shape them, as we tried to do in our Goetheanum. All these studies teach us how to work from day to day with children to help support the process that daily re-shapes, re-creates them. This enables us to bring artistry into the schooling of the human race, and the same holds true in other areas.

That is the light in which the three great ideals of humanity—the religious ideal, the artistic ideal, the scientific ideal—appear, re-enlivened, to the contemplating soul of the anthroposophist. The forms of the Goetheanum were intended to fill him with enthusiasm for experiencing these lofty ideals in their new aspect. Now we must quietly engrave them on our hearts. But they must be made a source of enthusiasm in us. As we acquire that enthusiasm and are lifted toward the divine in our experiencing of the three ideals, earth's highest ideal develops in us. The Gospel says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself, and God above all.” Another way of putting it is, “If one looks upon the divine in the light of the present day aspect of the three ideals, as a modern human being must, one learns to love the divine.” For one feels that one's humanness depends on devoting oneself with all the love at one's command to the three ideals. But then one feels oneself united with every other individual who is able to do likewise and offer up the same love. One learns to love the divine above all else, and, in loving God, to love one's neighbor as oneself. That keeps any hard feelings from developing.

That is what can unite and make a single entity of the separate members of the Society. That is the present need. We have had the experience of going through a phase in the Society in which anthroposophy was poured into separate channels, such as pedagogy and other practical concerns, into artistic activities, and so on. Now we need to pull together. We have first-rate Waldorf School teachers and other professionals. Everyone who is giving of his best at a special post needs to find a way to bring the sources of anthroposophical life to ever fresh flowing. That is what is needed now.

Since that is our need, since the leading anthroposophists need to prove their awareness of the present necessity of re-enlivening the Anthroposophical Society, we have arranged a meeting on these matters. It is to take place in Stuttgart in the next few days. Those who mean well by the Society should be cherishing the warmest hopes for what will come of that occasion. For only if the individuals present there can develop the right tone, a tone ringing with true, energetic enthusiasm for the three great love-engendering ideals, only if the energy and content of the words they speak guarantee this, can there be hope of the Anthroposophical Society achieving its goal. For what eventuates there will set the tone for the turn things will take in wider circles of the Society.

I will know, too, what my own course must be after seeing what comes of the Stuttgart conference. Great expectations hang on it. I ask all of you who cannot make the journey to Stuttgart to be with us in supporting thoughts. It is a momentous occasion that calls for participation and wholesomely based, energetic effort on behalf of the great ideals so essential to modern humanity. We are informed of them not by any arbitrary account set down by human hand, but in that script graven by the whole course of evolution, the whole import of man's earthly development, which declares itself to us every bit as plainly as does the sun to waking human beings.

Let us set about kindling this enthusiasm in our souls; then it will become deeds. And deeds are essential.

The background mood out of which I shall be addressing you today is not the same as that that prevailed on earlier occasions when I was privileged to speak here. Since New Year's Eve 1922, that mood is conditioned by the dreadful picture of the burning Goetheanum. The pain and suffering that picture inevitably causes anyone who loved the Goetheanum because of its connection with anthroposophy are such that no words can possibly describe them.

There might seem to be some justification for feeling that a movement as intent on spiritual things as ours is has no real reason to grieve over the loss of a material expression of its being. But that does not apply in the case of the Goetheanum we have lost. It was not an arbitrary building for our work. During its erection, a process that went on for almost ten years, I often had occasion to explain that a structure that might suitably have housed some other spiritual or similar movement would not have been appropriate for our Anthroposophical Movement. For, as I have often said, we are not just a spiritual movement, which, as its membership increased, found itself with a number of people in its ranks who wanted to build it a home in some conventional style or other. The point here was that anthroposophy is built on a spiritual foundation that is not one-sidedly religious or scientific or artistic. It is an all-embracing movement, intent on demonstrating every aspect of mankind's great ideals: the moral-religious, the artistic, and the scientific ideals. There could, therefore, be no question of erecting any arbitrary type of building for the Anthroposophical Movement. Its design had to come from the same source from which anthroposophical ideas receive their shaping as an expression of the spiritual perspective gained on the anthroposophical path of knowledge, and it had to be carried out in artistic harmony with that outlook. For almost ten years many friends worked side by side with me trying to incorporate and demonstrate in every single line, in every architectural and sculptural form, every choice of color, what was flowing from the wellsprings of anthroposophical investigation, anthroposophical life, anthroposophical intention. That was all incorporated there, and the building was intimately associated with the artistic and scientific striving in the Movement. Friends who attended eurythmy performances in the Goetheanum will surely have felt how, for example, the architectural forms and decoration of the auditorium harmonized with and responded to eurythmic movement. It was even possible to have the feeling that the movements of the performers on the stage there were born of those architectural and plastic forms. If one stood on the podium speaking from the heart in a truly anthroposophical spirit, every line and form responded and chimed in with what one was saying. That was our goal there. It was, of course, a first attempt, but such was our goal, and it could be sensed. That is why those who worked on the Goetheanum at Dornach have the sensation that the very feelings they put into their efforts went up in the flames of New Year's Eve. It was just this intimate connection of anthroposophical feeling and will with the Goetheanum forms—forms that were artistically shaped by and for spiritual contemplation and that can never find a substitute in any thought forms or words—that makes our grief at the loss we have suffered so immeasurably deep.

All this ought to become part of the memories of those who grew to love the Goetheanum and to feel the intimate connection with it just described. We must, in a sense, build a monument to it in our hearts in memory form. Even though the very intimacy of our connection with it is the reason why we are now shelterless, we must seek the more intensively for a shelter in our hearts that will replace the one we have lost, We must try with every means at our disposal to rebuild in our hearts, for all eternity, this building that has been lost as an external source of artistic stimulation. But the terrible flame into which all the lesser flames of New Year's Eve were drawn is there in the background of every effort yet to be made in the field of anthroposophy. Though living, spiritual anthroposophy came to no harm in the fire, a great deal of work that we had been trying to accomplish for anthroposophy in the present day world was brought to naught.

I do believe, though, that if what we experienced on that occasion becomes properly rooted in our members' hearts, the grief and pain we suffered can be turned into strength to support us in everything we are called upon to accomplish for anthroposophy in the near future. It is often the case in life that when a group of people find themselves faced by a common disaster, they are united by it in a way that gives them strength and energy to go on together in effective common action. Experience, not grey theories or abstract thoughts, should be the source on which we draw for the strength needed for our anthroposophical work.

My dear friends, I want to add these comments to those I will be making in connection with the theme I have had to choose for this conference, to a description of the conditions that must prevail in anthroposophical community building. I would like to include them not only because they are graven on my heart, but because they point to a fact on which we would do well to focus our attention in these coming days. A great deal of sacrifice and devotion went into the work on the Goetheanum. The impulses from which that sacrifice and devotion sprang have always been there to count on in the two decades of our work, wherever anthroposophy really lived. They were born of hearts filled with enthusiasm for anthroposophy, and the Goetheanum was the product of deeds done by anthroposophically-minded individuals. Though, for a variety of reasons, we are thinking—are having to think—today about how to regenerate the Society, we should not forget on the other hand that the Society has been in existence for two decades; that a considerable number of people have undergone experiences of destiny in their common work and effort; that the Society is not something that can be founded all over again. For history, real history, history that has been lived and experienced, cannot be erased. We cannot begin something now that began twenty years ago. We must guard against any such misconceptions as these as we proceed with our current deliberations. Anyone who has found his way into the Society over the years certainly sees plenty to find fault with in it, and is justified in doing so. Many a true and weighty word has already been uttered here on that score. But we must still take into account the fact that the Society has been effective and done things. There are certainly people enough in the Society who can express the weight of their grief and sorrow in the words, “We have suffered a common loss in our beloved Goetheanum.”

It makes a difference whether a person joined the Society in 1917 or later, and whether one's relation to it is such that these grief-stricken words issue from long and deep experience in it. That should influence our deliberations. It will do much to tone down the feelings that some of our friends had good reason to express here. I heard someone say (and I certainly felt the justice of the remark), “After what I have listened to here I will go home unable to continue speaking of anthroposophy as I used to when I was still full of illusions.” Part of what that sentence conveys will disappear if one considers how much those individuals who have been anthroposophists for two decades have gone through together, and how much they have had to suffer with each other recently, because that suffering is the product of a long life in the Anthroposophical Society. The load of worry we are presently carrying cannot wipe out all that human experience; it remains with us. It would still be there even if events here were to take a much worse turn than they have taken thus far. Are we to forget the depths for the surface? That must not be allowed to happen in a spiritual movement born of the depths of human hearts and souls. What has come into being as the Anthroposophical Movement cannot rightly be called sunless. Even the sun sometimes suffers eclipse.

Of course, this should not prevent our dealing with the situation confronting this assemblage in a way that enables us to provide anthroposophy once again with a proper vehicle in the form of a real Anthroposophical Society. But our success in that depends entirely on creating the right atmosphere.

It will, of course, be impossible for me to cover the whole situation today. But in the two lectures I am to give I shall try to touch on as much of what needs to be said as I possibly can. Some things will have to be left out. But I do want to stress two matters in particular. Those are the pressing need for community building in the Society and the symptomatic event of the entrance into the Anthroposophical Movement of the exceedingly gratifying youth movement. But in anthroposophical matters we have to develop a rather different outlook than prevails elsewhere. We would not have taken our stand on ground that means so much to many people if we could not see things in a different light than that in which the modern world habitually views them.

Community building! It is particularly noteworthy that the community building ideal should be making its appearance in our day. It is the product of a deep, elemental feeling found in many human souls today, the product of a sense of definite relationship between person and person that includes an impulse to joint activity.

A while ago, a number of young theologians came to me. They were preparing to enter the ministry. They were intent above all else on a renewing of religion, on a renewal permeated through and through by the true Christ force, such as to be able to take hold of many people of the period in the way they long to be taken hold of but cannot be by the traditional confessions as they are today. I had to bring up something that seemed to me to have vital import for the development of such a movement. I said that a suitable method of community building must be found. What I had in mind was to develop a religious and pastoral element capable of really uniting people. I told these friends who had come to me that religious community could not be effectively built with abstract words, the usual kind of sermon, and the meagre remnants of a divine service, which are all that most contemporary churches have to offer. The prevailing intellectualistic trend that is increasingly taking over the religious field has had the effect of saturating a great many present day sermons with a rationalistic, intellectualistic element. This does not give people anything that could unite them. On the contrary, it divides and isolates them, and the social community is reduced to atoms. This must be easy to see for anyone who realizes that the single individual can develop rationalistic and intellectualistic values all by himself. Simply attaining a certain cultural level enables an individual to acquire increasingly perfect intellectual equipment without depending on anyone else. One can think alone and develop logic alone; in fact, one can do it all the better for being by oneself. When one engages in purely logical thinking, one feels a need to withdraw from the world to the greatest possible extent, to withdraw from people. But the tendency to want to get off by oneself is not the only one man has. My effort today to throw light on what it is in the heart's depths that searches for community is called for by the fact that we are living in a time when human nature must go on to develop the consciousness soul, must become ever more conscious.

Becoming more conscious is not the same thing as becoming more intellectualistic. It means outgrowing a merely instinctual way of experiencing. But it is just in presenting anthroposophy that every attempt should be made to portray what has thus been raised to a clear, conscious level in all its elemental aliveness, to offer it in so living a form that it seems like people's own naive experiencing and feeling. We must make sure that we do this.

Now there is one kind of community in human life that everyone over the entire globe is aware of, and it shows that community is something built into humankind. It is a type of community to which a lot of attention is being given in modern cultural and even political and economic life, and this in an often harmful way. But there is a lesson of sorts to be learned from it, though a primitive one.

In a child's early years it is introduced into a human community that is absolutely real, concrete and human, a community without which one could not exist. I am referring to the community of human speech. Speech is the form of community that we might say nature presents to our contemplation. Speech—and especially our mother tongue—is built into our whole being at a time when the child's etheric body is not yet born, and it is our first experience of the community building element. We can lay it to the rationalism of our age that though people nowadays have some feeling for languages and nationality and conceive folk groups in relation to the language they speak, they do so from the political-agitational standpoint, without paying any heed to deep and intimate underlying soul configurations, to the tremendous aspects of destiny and karma attached to a language and to the spirit behind it, all of which are the real and intrinsic reason why human beings cry out for community. What would become of us if we passed one another by without hearing resounding in the other's words the same life of soul that we ourselves put into those same words when we use them? If everybody were to practice just a little bit of self-knowledge, we would be able to form an adequate picture, which I cannot take the time to develop now, of all we owe to language as the foundation of a first, primitive building of community.

But there is a community building element still deeper than language, though we encounter it more rarely. On a certain level, human language is indeed something that unites people in community life, but it does not penetrate to the deepest levels of soul life. At certain moments of our life on earth we can become aware of another community building element that transcends that of language. A person feels it when his destiny brings him together again with others whom he knew as children. Let us take an ideal example. Someone finds himself in later life—in his forties or fifties, say—in the company of several companions of his youth or childhood whom he has not seen for decades but with whom he spent the period between his tenth and twentieth years. Let us assume that good relationships prevailed among them, fruitful, loving relationships. Now imagine what it means for these individuals to share the experience of having their souls stirred by common memories of their youthful life together. Memories lie deeper than experiences on the language level. Souls sound more intimately in unison when they are linked by the pure soul language of memories, even though the community experience they thus share may be quite brief. As everyone knows from such experiences, it is certainly not just the single memories that are summoned up to reverberate in the souls of those present that stir such intimate soul-depths in them; it is something quite else. It is not the concrete content of the particular memories recalled. An absolutely indefinite yet at the same time very definite communal experiencing is going on in these human souls. A resurrection is taking place, with the countless details of what these companions experienced together now melting into a single totality, and what each contributes as he enters into the others' recollections with them is the element that awakens the capacity to experience that totality.

That is how it is in life on earth. As a result of pursuing this fact of soul life into the spiritual realm, I had to tell the theological friends who had come to me for the purpose described that if true community were to come of the work of religious renewal, there would have to be a new form of worship, a new cultus, suited to the age we live in. Shared experience of the cultus is something that quite of its own nature calls forth the community building element in human souls. The Movement for Religious Renewal understood this and accepted the cultus. I believe that Dr. Rittelmeyer spoke weighty words when he said from this platform that such a development of community could conceivably become one of the greatest threats to the Anthroposophical Society that the Movement for Religious Renewal could present. For the cultus contains a tremendously significant community building element. It unites human beings with one another. What is it in this cultus that unites them, that can make a commonality out of separate individuals atomized by intellectuality and logic, and that most certainly will create commonality? For that is surely what Dr. Rittelmeyer had in mind, that this is the means of building community. Since community, however, is also a goal of the Anthroposophical Society, the Society will have to find its own way of building it if the Movement for Religious Renewal is not to pose a threat to it from that angle.

Now what is the secret of the community building element in the cultus developed for the Movement for Religious Renewal with that specific end in view?

Everything that comes to expression in the various forms of worship, either as ceremonial acts or words, is a reflection, a picturing of real experiences, not earth experiences, of course, but real experiences in the world through which man makes his way before he is born; in other words, experiences of the second half of his path between death and rebirth. That is the part of the cosmos he passes through from the midnight hour of life after death to the moment when he descends again into life on earth. In the realm thus traversed are found the beings, the scenes, the events faithfully reflected in all true forms of worship. What is it, then, that a person is experiencing in the cultus in common with others whom some karma or other has brought together with him? For karma is so intricately woven that we may ascribe all encounters with our fellow men to its agency. He is experiencing cosmic memories of pre-earthly existence with them. They come to the surface in the soul's subconscious depths. Before we descended to earth, we and these others lived through a cosmic lifetime in a world that reappears before us in the cultus. That is a tremendous tie. It does more than just convey pictures; it carries super-sensible forces into the sense world. But the forces it conveys are forces that concern man intimately; they are bound up with the most intimate background experiences of the human soul. The cultus derives its binding power from the fact that it conveys spiritual forces from the spiritual world to earth and presents supernatural realities to the contemplation of human beings living on the earth. There is no such reality for man to contemplate in rationalistic talks that have the effect of making him forget the spiritual world, forget it even in subconscious soul depths. In the cultus he has it right there before him in a living, power-pervaded picture that is more than a mere symbol. Nor is this picture a dead image; it carries real power, because it places before man scenes that were part of his spiritual environment before he was incarnated in an earthly body. The community creating power of the cultus derives from the fact that it is a shared, comprehensive memory of spiritual experiences.

The Anthroposophical Society also needs just such a force to foster community within it. But the ground this springs from need not be the same for the Anthroposophical Movement as for the Movement for Religious Renewal. The one by no means excludes the other, however; the two can co-exist in fullest harmony provided the relationship between them is rightly felt.

But that can be the case only if we acquire some understanding for a further community building element that can be introduced into human life. Memory, transposed into the spiritual realm, rays out to us from the form the cultus takes. The cultus speaks to greater depths than those of intellect: it speaks to man's inwardness. For at bottom the soul really does understand the speech of the spirit, even though that speech may not be fully consciously perceived in present day earth life.

Now, in order to grasp the further element that must come to play a corresponding role in the Anthroposophical Society, you will not only have to contemplate the secrets of language and memory in their relationship to community building; you will also have to consider another aspect of human life. Let us study the condition in which we find a dreaming person and compare it with that of someone going about his daytime activities wide awake.

The dream world may indeed be beautiful, sublime, rich in pictures and in significance. Nevertheless, it isolates people here on earth. A dreaming person is alone with his dreams. He lies there asleep and dreaming, perhaps in the midst of others awake or asleep, the content of whose inner worlds remains completely unrelated to what is going on in his dream consciousness. A person is isolated in his dream world, and even more so in the world of sleep. But the moment we awake we begin to take some part in communal life. The space we and those around us occupy is the same space; the feeling and impressions they have of it are the same we have. We wake at hand of our immediate surroundings to the same inner life another wakes to. In waking out of the isolation of our dreams we awaken, up to a certain point at least, into the community of our fellowmen, simply as a result of the way we are related to the world around us. We cease being completely to ourselves, shut in and encapsulated, as we were when absorbed in our dream world, though our dreams may have been beautiful, sublime, significant. But how do we awaken? We awaken through the impact of the outer world, through its light and tones and warmth. We awaken in response to all the various impressions that the sense world makes on us. But we also wake up in ordinary everyday life in the encounter with the external aspects of other human beings, with their natural aspects. We wake up to everyday life in the encounter with the natural world. It wakes us out of our isolation and introduces us into a community of sorts. We have not yet wakened up as human beings by meeting our fellow men and by what goes on in their innermost beings. That is the secret of everyday life. We wake up in response to light and tone and perhaps also to the words someone speaks in the exercise of his natural endowment, words spoken from within outward. In ordinary everyday life we do not wake up in the encounter with what is going on in the depths of his soul or spirit, we wake up in the encounter with his natural aspects.

The latter constitutes the third awakening, or at least a third condition of soul life. We awaken from the first into the second through nature's impact. We awaken from the second into the third at the call of the soul-spiritual element in our fellowmen. But we must first learn to hear that call. Just as a person wakes up through the natural world surrounding him in the right way in everyday life, so do we wake up rightly at a higher level in the encounter with the soul-spirit of our fellowmen as we sensed light and tone on awakening to everyday life. We can see the most beautiful pictures and have the most sublime experiences in our isolated dream consciousness, but we will scarcely be able to read, for example, unless highly abnormal conditions prevail. We are not in a relationship to the outer world that would make such things possible. We are also unable to understand the spiritual world, no matter how many beautiful ideas we may have garnered from anthroposophy or how much we may have grasped theoretically about such matters as etheric and astral bodies. We begin to develop an understanding for the spiritual world only when we wake up in the encounter with the soul-spiritual element in our fellowmen. That is where the first true understanding of anthroposophy sets in. Yes, it is indeed necessary to base our understanding of anthroposophy on what can be called a waking up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of another person.

The strength needed to achieve this awakening can be created by implanting spiritual idealism in human communities. We talk a lot about idealism these days, but it has become a threadbare thing in the culture and civilization of the present. For true idealism exists only where man reverses the direction he takes when, in presenting the cultus, he brings the spiritual world down to earth; when, in other words, he consciously makes himself capable of lifting to the super-sensible-spiritual, the ideal level, what he has seen and learned and understood on the earthly level. We bring the supernatural down into a power-permeated picture when we celebrate the ritual of the cultus. We lift ourselves and our soul life to the super-sensible level when our experiences in the physical world are experienced so spiritually and idealistically that we come to feel we have experienced them in the super-sensible world itself and that what we perceive here in the sense world suddenly comes all alive on being lifted to the ideal level. It comes alive when properly permeated with our wills and feeling. When we ray will through our inner being and infuse it with enthusiasm, we carry our idealized sense experience in a direction exactly opposite to that taken when we embody the super-sensible in the ritual of the cultus. Whether the anthroposophical community be large or small, we can achieve what I am characterizing when, infusing living power into the spiritual ideas we form, we put ourselves in a position actually to experience something of that awakening element, something that doesn't stop at idealizing our sense experience and leaving it at the stage of an abstract thought, but that endows the ideal with a higher life as we live into it and make it the counterpart of the cultus by raising it from the physical to the super-sensible level. We can achieve it in our life of feeling by taking care to imbue everything we do for anthroposophy with thoroughly spiritualized feeling. We do this when, for instance, we feel that the very doorway we reverently enter on our way to an anthroposophical assemblage is consecrated by the common anthroposophical purpose being served in the room it leads to, no matter how mundane the setting. We must be able to feel that everybody joining with us in a communal reception of anthroposophy has the same attitude. It is not enough to have a deep abstract conviction of this; it must be inwardly experienced, so that we do not just sit in a room where anthroposophy is being pursued, a group of so and so many individuals taking in what is being read or spoken and having our own thoughts about it. A real spiritual being must be present in a room where anthroposophy is being carried on, and this as a direct result of the way anthroposophical ideas are being absorbed. Divine powers are present in sense perceptible form in the cultus celebrated on the physical plane. Our hearts and souls and attitudes must learn similarly to invoke the presence of a real spiritual being in a room where anthroposophy is being talked of. We must so attune our speaking, our feeling, our thinking, our impulses of will to a spiritual purpose, avoiding the pitfall of the abstract, that we can feel a real spiritual being hovering there above us, looking on and listening. We should divine a super-sensible presence, invoked by our pursuit of anthroposophy. Then each single anthroposophical activity can begin to be a realizing of the super-sensible.

If you study primitive communities, you will find another communal element in addition to language. Language has its seat in the upper part of man. But taking the whole man into consideration, you will find that common blood is what links members of primitive communities. Blood ties make for community. But what lives there in the blood is the folk soul or folk spirit, and this is not present in the same way among people who have developed freedom. A common spiritual element once entered groups with common blood ties, working from below upward. Wherever common blood flows in the veins of a number of people, there we can discern the presence of a group soul.

A real community spirit is similarly attracted by our common experiencing when we study anthroposophy together, though it is obviously not a group soul active in the bloodstream. If we are able to sense this, we can form true communities.

We must make anthroposophy real by learning to be aware in anthroposophical community life that where people join in anthroposophical tasks together, there they experience their first awakening in the encounter with the soul-spiritual element in their fellows. Human beings wake up in the mutual encounter with other human beings. As each one has new experiences between his encounters with these others, and has grown a little, these awakenings take place in an ever new way as people go on meeting. The awakenings undergo a burgeoning development.

When you have discovered the possibility that human souls wake up in the encounter with human souls, and human spirits wake up in the encounter with human spirits, and go to anthroposophical groups with a living awareness that only now have you come awake and only now begin to grow together into an understanding of anthroposophy, and on the basis of that understanding take anthroposophical ideas into an awakened soul rather than into an everyday soul asleep to higher things, then the true spirit of community descends upon the place where you are working. Is truth involved when we talk of the super-sensible world, yet are unable to rise to awareness of a spiritual presence and of this reversed cultus? We are firmly grounded in our understanding of things of the spirit only when we do not rest content with abstract spiritual concepts and a capacity to express them theoretically, but instead grow into a sure belief that higher beings are present with us in a community of spirit when we engage in spiritual study. No external measures can bring about anthroposophical community building. You have to call it forth from the profoundest depths of human consciousness.

I have described part of the path that leads to that goal, and tomorrow we will follow it further. Descriptions of this kind are intended to show that the most important thing for any further development of the Anthroposophical Society is that it become absorbed in a true grasp of anthroposophy. If we have that grasp, it leads not only to spiritual ideas but to community with the spirit, and an awareness of community with the spiritual world is itself a community building force. Karmically preordained communities will then spring up as an outcome of true anthroposophical awareness. No external measures for achieving that can be indicated, and a person who offers any such is a charlatan.

Now these matters have been understood to some degree during the two decades of anthroposophy's development, and quite a good many members have also understood them in a spiritual sense. I will perhaps return to this subject and discuss it more fully tomorrow when I continue with these reflections and go on to point out a further goal. For now, I would like to add just a few words on matters that may have been occupying you after hearing my description of the spiritual bases of anthroposophical community life. On the one hand, things in the Anthroposophical Movement are really such as to necessitate my describing them as I have done. The Anthroposophical Society may present this or that appearance in a given phase. But anthroposophy is independent of anthroposophical societies and can be found independently of them. It can be found in a special way when one human being learns to wake up in the encounter with another and out of such awakening the forming of communities occurs. For one undergoes ever fresh awakenings through those with whom one finds oneself foregathered, and that is what holds such groups together. Inner, spiritual realities are at work here.

These matters must be increasingly understood in the Anthroposophical Society. Every consideration brought up in connection with the Society's welfare ought really to be pervaded with forces intimately related to anthroposophy itself.

It was deeply satisfying to me, after spending weeks attending larger and smaller conclaves where preparations were being made for these delegates' meetings, and listening there to debates reminiscent of the ordinary, everyday kind of rationalistic considerations in which parliaments and clubs engage, to go to an assemblage of young people, a meeting of young academicians. They, too, were pondering what ought to be done. For a while the talk was about external matters. But as time passed, it changed, all unaware, into a truly anthroposophical discussion. Matters that first appeared in an everyday light took on aspects that made anything but an anthroposophical treatment impossible.

It would be ideal if, instead of dragging in anthroposophical theories in an artificial, sentimental, nebulous way, as has so often happened, a down-to-earth course were to be pursued. Taking life's ordinary concerns as a starting point, the discussion should lead to the conclusion that unless anthroposophy were called upon, no one would know any longer how to go about studying such subjects as physics and chemistry. This spirit could serve to guide us.

But no solution will be found by tomorrow evening if things go on as they have up to this point; they can only lead to a state of tremendous, tragic chaos. The most important thing is to avoid any sentimental dragging in of all sorts of matters, and instead fill our hearts with anthroposophical impulses, conceived in full clarity.

As things are now, I see two parties, two separate groups of human beings sitting in this room, neither of which in the least understands the other, neither of which is able to take the first small step toward mutual understanding. Why is this the case? It is because what one side is saying issues inevitably from the experience of two whole decades, as I explained briefly earlier today, and the other side takes no interest whatsoever in that experience. I say this not in criticism, but in a spirit of concerned pleading. There have been occasions in the past when well-meaning people, in their own way genuinely enthusiastic about anthroposophy, have simply cut across our deliberations with such comments as, “What possible interest can these reports have for us when they keep on being served up at a moment when the important thing is that people unacquainted with the great dangers the Society faces want to learn about them?” Here, on the one side, we see an elemental, natural interest in the life of the Anthroposophical Society, a life that may have certain familial characteristics, but that has the good aspects of the familial as well. On the other side we find no interest in that life, and instead just a general conception of an Anthroposophical Society.

As things stand today, both points of view are justified, so justified that unless we can quickly develop a wholly different form of discussion, the best thing we could do (I am just expressing my opinion, for the decision will have to be made by the Society) would be to leave the old Society as it is and found a union of free anthroposophical communities for those who want something entirely different. Then each party could carry on in the way that suits it. We would have the old Society on the one side, and on the other a loose but closely related confederation of free communities. The two societies could work out ways of living together. It would be better to solve the problem this way than to continue on in the hopeless situation that would present itself tomorrow evening if the discussion were to go on as it has thus far. So I ask you to put on the agenda the further question whether you would not prefer to avoid the false situation that would develop from keeping the two groups welded together, regardless of whether things stay as they have been or undergo some modification. If the situation remains as it is, with each side failing to understand the other, let us go ahead and set up the two suggested groups within the one movement. I say this with an anxious, a very anxious heart; for surely no one will deny that I understand what it is to feel concern for our anthroposophical undertaking and know what it means to love it. But it is better to have two devoted sisters, each going her own way and united only by a common ideal, than to settle for something that would again lead in short order to a state of chaos.

My dear friends, you simply must not let yourselves overlook the fact that it is the various single enterprises that are causing our troubles. That should have been worked out in clearest detail. I am certainly not stating that the last Central Executive Committee accomplished a great deal more, materially, than the one before it, not any more, that is, than I accomplished when I was similarly active at the center in my role as General Secretary. But that is not the question. The real question is: What should have happened, anthroposophically speaking, after all the various enterprises were started here in Stuttgart? This will have to be answered. We cannot at this point dissolve what has been brought into being. Once these enterprises exist, we must find out how to keep them flourishing. But if we fail, as we have in the past four years, to learn how to go about this in an anthroposophical spirit, if we introduce enterprises as foreign bodies into the Anthroposophical Movement, as we have done, these institutions that have been in existence since 1919 will ruin the whole Anthroposophical Movement. They will ruin any Central Executive Committee, no matter what name it is given.

We should therefore keep our discussions objective and impersonal, and try to reach some clarity on what form the Society ought to take, now that it embraces all these institutions, and among them one as wonderful as the Waldorf School. Not a single word has yet been spoken on this subject, for those who are most familiar with what is going on in Stuttgart have thus far kept fairly silent. I would particularly like to hear what the two members of the Central Executive Committee would say to this. [The members of the Central Executive Committee were Ernst Uehli, Emil Leinhas, Dr. Carl Unger.] (I am not including Herr Leinhas, the third member, as he was the only one who helped me in a problematical situation and who continues to help. Indeed, for his sake I hardly like to see him go on devoting himself to the Central Executive Committee, ideally fitted for it though he is.) It is not a question of these two gentlemen defending themselves, but simply of saying what they think about the future shaping of the Anthroposophical Society, which is capable of amalgamating the enterprises that have been in existence since 1919; otherwise, it would have been an irresponsible deed to launch them. We cannot leave it at that, now that they exist.

These are very, very serious questions. We have to deal with them and discuss them objectively and impersonally. I meant what I said objectively, not as an attack on any member or members of the Central Executive Committee. Nobody is being disparaged, but in my opinion these problems, thus again sharply enunciated by me, had to be brought up. If the two proposed societies are to be established, the group that would be a continuation of the old Anthroposophical Society could make itself responsible for the projects the Society has undertaken, and the other group, that feels no interest in them, could pursue a more narrowly anthroposophical path.

This is what I wanted to put before you in a brief sketch. Tomorrow at twelve I shall speak in detail about matters of business.

I would have liked to follow my usual procedure in lecturing to the kind members of the Anthroposophical Society and to have addressed this gathering on purely anthroposophical matters. The whole course the meetings have taken, however, and the things that have been happening in the past few days have made me decide to confine my comment to questions of immediate interest to this assemblage. I hope there will be other opportunities to speak on more specifically anthroposophical subjects, if not to all of you at once, then at least on several occasions to smaller groups.

The goal of this pair of lectures is to show how anthroposophy can really become wisdom to live by, how it can influence our day-to-day intentions and attitudes. I shall, therefore, devote myself to laying an anthroposophical foundation on which to approach the problems we shall be dealing with here. Yesterday I spoke from that angle about community building in the Anthroposophical Society; today I want to continue and to add something on the subject of the contribution that an anthroposophical view of the world makes to living life in a more adequate way than one could do without it.

In order to show you the opposite side of the matters discussed yesterday, I am taking as my starting point something well-known to everybody familiar with the history of societies built on foundations similar to those on which our own sciety is based. A little later on I will also characterize some of the differences that distinguish the Anthroposophical Society from every other. But for the moment I want to point out that there have been a great many societies that have based their existence on one or another method of attaining insight into the spiritual world, though the level reached was influenced considerably by various historical settings and the particular characteristics and capacities of the groups of people who participated. One finds every shading and level in the wide variety of societies, which covers the whole range from a really serious and significant level down to that of charlatanism.

But one thing is well-known to anyone acquainted with the history of such socities. That is, that a certain moral atmosphere is always created—and indeed, necessarily so—when certain conditions exist. One could describe this atmosphere as being that of a real, genuine striving for brotherliness among the members of such a society. This goal is usually listed among the precepts or in the statutes of these societies, and—as I said—necessarily so, brotherliness being one goal and insight into the spiritual world the other.

Now the thing that people familiar with the history of such societies know is that these societies built on brotherliness and spiritual insight are the worst beset with conflicts. They present the widest opportunities for fighting, for partings-of-the-way, for splitting up into separate factions within the larger group, for group resignations, for sharp attacks on those who stay and those who leave, and so on. In short, human strife is at its most rampant in groups dedicated to brotherhood.

This is a strange phenomenon. But anthroposophical insight enables us to understand it. What I am presenting in these two lectures is also part of the system of anthroposophy, if you will forgive me the pedantic term. So, though this lecture will not be a general discussion, it will still be an anthroposophical one, shaped with special reference to our meetings.

If we return to the matters brought up yesterday, we find three levels of experience among the phenomena of human consciousness. We find people either asleep or dreaming, who, in a state of lowered consciousness, experience a certain world of pictures that they take to be real while they are sleeping. We know that these people are isolated from others inhabiting the physical world in common with them; they are not sharing common experiences. No means exist of conveying what they are experiencing. We know further that a person can go from this state of consciousness to that of everyday awareness, can be awakened to it by external nature, and this includes the natural exterior of other people, as I described yesterday. A certain degree of community feeling is awakened simply as a result of natural drives and the ordinary needs of life, and languages come into being in response to it.

But now let us see what happens when these two states of consciousness get mixed up together. So long as a person continues in completely normal circumstances and is able, by reason of a normal psychic and bodily condition, to keep his isolated dream experience separated from his shared experience with others, he will be living acceptably in his dream world and in the world of reality. But let us assume that, due to some psychological quirk, and it would have to be considered such, a person finds himself in a situation where, though he is in a day-waking state of consciousness involved in a common life with others, he is not having the same feelings and ideas as his companions. Let us assume that the pathological condition he is in causes him to project into his waking consciousness a world of feelings and ideas similar to those of dream life. Instead of developing logically ordered thoughts, he produces a pictorial world like the picture world of dreams. We call such a person mentally ill. But for the moment the thing of chief interest to us is that this person does not understand the others, and unless they are looking at him from a medical pathological angle they cannot understand him either. At the moment when the state of mind prevailing at this lower level of consciousness is carried over to a higher level, a person becomes a crass egotist in his relations with his fellow men. You need only think this over to see that a person of this kind goes entirely by his imaginings. He comes to blows with the others because they cannot follow his reasoning. He can commit the wildest excesses because he does not share a common soul world with other human beings.

Now let us move on from these two states of consciousness to the two others. Let us contrast the everyday state of consciousness, to which we are guided by the natural course of external events, with that higher one that can, as I showed yesterday, awaken through the fact that a person wakes not just in the encounter with the natural aspect of his surrounding but also in the encounter with the inner being of the other person. Though one may not ordinarily be fully and immediately aware of it, one does waken to such a higher level of consciousness. Of course, there are many other ways of entering the higher worlds, as you know from my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But for the period of time one is privileged to spend with others in that way, one can find oneself in a position to understand and witness things one would otherwise not understand or witness. One is presented with the possibility of living in the element that those who know the spiritual world describe in terms applicable to that world—the possibility of speaking of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego, of repeated earth lives and their karmic aspects.

Now at this point there is a possibility of the whole state of mind of ordinary consciousness being carried over into the spiritual world one thus enters and applied to it. This is the same thing that happens on another level when the state of soul of a person absorbed in dream pictures is projected into ordinary life: one turns into an egotist in the most natural way. This occurs if one fails to realize that everything in the higher worlds of the spirit has to be looked at in an entirely different way than one looks at the sense world. One must learn to think and feel differently. Just as dreamers have to switch over into a totally different state of consciousness if they want to share a life with others in an ordinary state of waking, so must there be similar awareness of the fact that the content of anthroposophy cannot be approached with the attitude of soul one has toward the things of ordinary experience.

That is the root of the problem of reaching any understanding and agreement between the everyday consciousness, which is also that of ordinary science, and the consciousness anthroposophy makes possible. When people come together and talk back and forth, one with the ordinary consciousness exemplified in the usual scientific approach and the other with a consciousness equal to forming judgments that accord with spiritual reality, then it is exactly as though a person recounting his dreams were trying to reach an understanding with someone telling him about external facts. When a number of people meet in an ordinary state of consciousness and fail to lift themselves and their full life of feeling to the super-sensible level, when they meet to listen in a merely ordinary state of mind to what the spiritual world is saying, there is a great—an immeasurably great—chance of their coming to blows, because all such people become egotists as a natural consequence.

There is, to be sure, a powerful remedy for this, but it is available only if the human soul develops it. I am referring to tolerance of a truly heartfelt kind. But we have to educate ourselves to it. In a state of everyday consciousness a little tolerance suffices most people's needs, and social circumstances put many a situation right again. But where the ordinary everyday state of mind prevails, it often happens that people talking together are not even concerned to hear what the other is saying. We all know this from our own personal experience. It has become a habit nowadays to give only scant attention to somebody else's words. When a person is part way through a sentence, someone else starts talking, because he is not the least interested in what is being said. He is interested only in his own opinion. One may be able, after a fashion, to get by with this in the physical world, but it simply cannot be done in the spiritual realm. There, the soul must be imbued with the most perfect tolerance; one must educate oneself to listen with profound inner calm even to things one cannot in the least agree with, listen not in a spirit of supercilious endurance, but with the most positive inner tolerance as one would to well-founded utterances on the other person's part. In the higher worlds there is little sense in making objections to anything. A person with experience in that realm knows that the most opposite views about the same fact can be expressed there by, let us say, oneself and someone else. When he has made himself capable of listening to the other's opposite view with exactly the same tolerance he feels toward his own—and please notice this !—then and then only does he have the social attitude required for experiencing what was formerly merely theoretical knowledge of the higher worlds.

This moral basis is vital to a right relationship to the higher realms. The strife that I have described as so characteristic of the societies we are discussing has its root in the fact that when people hear sensational things, such as that man has an etheric and astral body and an ego as well as a physical body, and so on, they listen for sensation's sake but do not undertake to transform their souls as these must be transformed if they are to experience spiritual reality differently than they would a chair or a table in the physical world, and one experiences even these objects differently in the physical world than one does in dreams. When people apply their ordinary soul habits to what they think they are understanding of teachings about the higher worlds, then this inevitably develops strife and egotism.

Thus it is just by grasping the true nature of the higher worlds that one is led to understand how easily societies with a spiritual content can become involved in conflicts and quarreling, and how necessary it is to educate oneself to participation in such groups by learning to tolerate the other person to an immeasurably greater degree than one is used to doing in situations of the physical world. To become an anthroposophist it is not enough to know anthroposophy from the theoretical side: one's whole approach has to be transformed in certain ways. Some people are unwilling to do this. That resulted in my never being understood when I said that there were two ways of occupying oneself with my book, Theosophy, for example. One way is to read or even study it, but with the usual approach and making the judgments that approach engenders. One might just as well be reading a cookbook as Theosophy for all the qualitative difference there is. The value of the experience is identical in both cases, except that reading Theosophy that way means dreaming rather than living on a higher level. When one thus dreams of higher worlds, the impulses one receives from them do not make for the highest degree of unity or the greatest tolerance. Strife and quarreling take the place of the unity that can be the reward of study of the higher worlds, and they keep on spreading. Here you find the cause of the wrangling in societies based on one or another method of gaining insight into the spiritual world.

I said that the various paths described in part in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds lead into the spiritual world. Now when a person has to concern himself intensively with seeking knowledge of those higher worlds, this requires his developing a certain attitude of soul, as you will understand from what I have been explaining in this pair of lectures, though in quite another connection. A true spiritual investigator has to have a certain attitude of soul. One cannot find one's way to truth in the spiritual realm if one is constantly having to give one's attention to what is going on in the physical world in ways quite proper to that sphere, if one has to occupy oneself with matters requring the kind of thinking suited to the physical realm.

Now you will agree that a person who gives his fellowmen a reliable account of things in the spiritual world, a person justified in calling himself a spiritual investigator in the sense in which the other sciences use that term, needs a lot of time for his research. You will therefore find it natural that I, too, need time to do the research that enables me little by little to present anthroposophy or spiritual science in an ever widening perspective in my lectures.

Now if one goes one's way alone, one can of course make time for this within the framework of one's destiny. For a person who is a genuine spiritual investigator and wants to give his fellowmen a trustworthy account of what he discovers in the spiritual world will, as is natural, form the habit of ignoring his opponents. He knows that he has to have opponents, but he is not bothered by their objections to his statements; he could think up the objections himself. So it is natural for him to take the attitude that he is simply going to go his own positive way without paying much attention to anyone's objections, unless there is some special reason to do so.

But this attitude is no longer tenable when one has joined forces with the Anthroposophical Society. For in addition to the responsibility one feels toward the truth, one has a further responsibility in relation to what the Society, of which it is often said that it makes itself an instrument of that truth, is doing. So one has to help carry the Society's responsibilities. This can be combined to a certain extent with the proper attitude toward opponents. Until 1918 that situation obtained with the Society and myself. I paid as little attention as possible to objections, and did so, paradoxical though this may seem, as a consequence of maintaining the tolerance I have been describing. Why, indeed, should I be so intolerant as to be constantly refuting my opponents? In the natural course of human evolution everything eventually gets back on the right track anyhow. So I can say that up until 1918 this question was justified, to some extent at least.

But when the Society proceeds to take on the activities it has included since 1919, it also takes on the responsibility for them. Their destiny becomes involved with that of the Society, and the Society's destiny becomes involved with that of the spiritual investigator. The spiritual investigator must either assume the burden of defending himself against his opponents—in other words, of occupying himself largely with matters that keep him from his spiritual research, since they cannot be combined with it—or else, to get time for his research, turn over the handling of opponents to those who have accepted a certain responsibility for the peripheral institutions. Thus the situation in our Society has undergone fundamental changes since 1919, and this for deeply anthroposophical reasons. Since the Society, as represented by certain of its members, decided to launch these institutions, and since the foundation on which they are all based is anthroposophy, that foundation must now be defended by people who do not have to carry full responsibility for the inner correctness of the material that genuine research has to keep on adding, day by day, to the previous findings of spiritual investigation.

A large proportion of our opponents consists of people in well-defined callings. They may, for example, have studied in certain professional fields where it is customary to think about things in some particular way. Thinking the way he does, such a person simply has to oppose anthroposophy. He doesn't know why, but he has to be an opponent because he is unconsciously on the leash of the profession in which he has had his training and experience.

That is the situation in its inner aspect. From the external standpoint, the question whether what has been established as the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish or decline requires that these opponents be dealt with.

But the real leaders of the opposition know full well what they are about. For there are some among them who are perfectly familiar with the laws that govern spiritual research, even though their view of those laws and that of anthroposophy may differ. They know that their best means of keeping a person who needs peace to pursue his spiritual research from doing his work is constantly to bombard him with hostile writings and objections. They know very well that he cannot give his attention to both refuting them and carrying on his research. They try to put obstacles in his path with their opposition. The mere fact of their putting these attacks in writing is the hostile act. The people who know what they are doing are not so much concerned with the contents of such books as they are with using them as weapons to hurl at the spiritual investigator, and they are particularly intent on tricking and otherwise forcing him into the necessity of defending himself.

These facts must be looked at completely objectively, and everyone who really wants to be a full member of the Anthroposophical Society ought to know them. A good many people are, of course, already familiar with what I have just been saying. The trouble is that some informed members habitually refrain from mentioning any such matters outside their circle.

Experience has long shown that such a course cannot be maintained in the Society. The Society used to publish lecture cycles labeled, “For members only.” Here in Germany, and probably elsewhere too, one can go to public libraries and borrow these same cycles. All the cycles are available to non-members. One can tell from writings of our opponents that they too have them, though it may sometimes have been difficult to get hold of them. But people of this sort are far less apt to shy away from difficulties than is sometimes the case with anthroposophists.

The secrecy that many societies still find it possible to maintain is simply out of the question in the Anthroposophical Society, due to its special character as an institution based on the most modern concept imaginable. For its members are meant to remain free individuals. They are not bound by any promises; they can simply join the Society as honest searchers after knowledge. I have no desire to make secrecy an aim. If that interested me, I would never suggest setting up a loose confederation of groups alongside the old Anthroposophical Society. For I predict, though without implying condemnation, that a great many more escape channels will be opened to the world at large by such a confederation, allowing egress to material that older members believe should be kept in their own cupboards. But the innermost impulse of anthroposophy cannot be grasped by people unwilling to see it put to work in complete accord with the most modern human thinking and feeling. It is, therefore, the more essential to understand what the prerequisites of such a society are.

Now I want to bring up something that I will illustrate with an example taken from my own experience, though not in a spirit of foolish conceit. Last summer I gave a course of lectures at Oxford on the educational methods of the Waldorf School.¹ An article appeared in an English journal that, though I cannot quote it verbatim, made the following point. It began by saying that a person who attended the lectures at the Oxford educational meetings without prior awareness of who Dr. Steiner was and that he had some connection with anthroposophy would not have noticed that a representative of anthroposophy was speaking. Such a person would simply have thought him to be a man speaking about pedagogy from a different angle than the listener's own.

I was exceedingly delighted by this characterization because it showed that there are people who notice something that is always my goal, namely, to speak in a way that is not instantly recognized as anthroposophical. Of course, the content is anthroposophical, but it cannot be properly absorbed unless it is objective. The anthroposophical standpoint should lead, not to onesidedness, but, on the contrary, to presenting things in such a way that each least detail can be judged on its own merits and its truth be freely recognized.

Once, before the Oxford lecture cycle was delivered and the article about it written, I made an experiment that may not seem to you at all significant. In June of this year I attended the Vienna Congress and gave two cycles comprising twelve lectures.² I undertook to keep the word anthroposophy out of all of them, and it is not to be found there. You will also not find any such phrase as “the anthroposophical world view shows us this or that.” Of course, despite this—and indeed, especially because of it—what was presented was pure anthroposophy.

Now I am not making the philistine, pedantic recommendation that anthroposophists should always avoid using the word “anthroposophy.” That is far from my intention. But the spirit that must inspire us in establishing right relations with the rest of the world can be found by looking in that general direction. That spirit should work freely in leaders active in the Society; otherwise I will again be held responsible for unanthroposophical things that are done in its name. Then the world would have some justification for confusing the one agent with the other.

Here too the objective spirit of anthroposophy needs to be properly grasped and, above all, manifested in what is done. We will first have to undertake some degree of self-education to that end. But self-education is needed in anthroposophical circles; countless mistakes have been made in the past few years for want of it, with the launching of the peripheral institutions contributing to the problem. I state this simply as an objective fact, without meaning to accuse anyone personally.

If the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish, every single one of its members is going to have to become fully aware of these facts. But this cannot happen under present day social conditions unless an effort is made to set up a lively exchange, even if only in the form of some such medium as a news sheet conceived as a link between the Society's various centers of activity. But again, that would require every such circle, even if not every individual member, to develop a living interest in the concerns of the whole Society, and particularly in its ongoing evolution. There has been too little of this. If the Anthroposophical Society did not exist, there would presumably still be a certain number of books on anthroposophy. But one would not have to be concerned, as a society is, with the people who read them. These people would be scattered all over the world, singly or in groups, according to their karma, but one would not have to have any external contact with them. The spiritual investigator is not in any fundamentally different situation, even in a society such as ours was up to 1918. But the situation changed at the moment when the Anthroposophical Society assumed responsibility for things that existed on the physical plane.

I am putting all this in a much more plain spoken way than I have on other occasions. But say them I did, in one form or another, when the peripheral institutions were being launched. I couldn't, of course, whisper them in every member's ear, and I don't know whether it would have helped if I had done that. But the Society existed and had leaders. They should have seen to it that conditions in the Society were such that it could include the various institutions without jeopardizing spiritual research.

I will call this the negative aspect of community building in contrast to the positive aspect I presented yesterday. I would like to add that everyone interested in creating community of the positive kind that I described from the standpoint of the prerequisites of its existence must be aware of the matters discussed today in relation to the Anthroposophical Society's life and progress. They must all be taken into consideration as affecting the various areas of anthroposophical life.

In this connection let me cite the following instructive example. I come back again to the tragic subject of the ruined Goetheanum. In September and October 1920 we held a three week course there, the first of the so-called High School courses. Yesterday, I described how the Goetheanum was built in a definite artistic style that was the product of an anthroposophical approach. How did this style originate? It came into being as a result of the fact that persons to whom we cannot be grateful enough undertook, in 1913, to build a home base for what existed at that time in the way of anthroposophical works in a narrower sense, and what, again in that narrower sense, was still to issue from anthroposophy. They wanted to create a home for the staging of mystery plays, for the still germinal but nevertheless promising art of eurythmy, and, above all, for presentations of anthroposophy itself as these projected cosmic pictures derived from spiritual-scientific research. That was my intention when these persons asked me to take initiatives in this connection. I saw it as my task to erect a building designed in a style artistically consonant with the work that was to go on in it. The Goetheanum was the outcome.

At that time there were no scholars or scientists in our midst. Anthroposophy had indeed taken some steps in a scientific direction. But the development that was to include activity in the various professional fields among the Society's functions had not yet begun. What developed later came into being as a direct outgrowth of anthroposophy, exactly as did the Waldorf School pedagogy, the prime example of such a process.

Now an artistic style had to be found to suit each such development. It was found, as I believe, in the Goetheanum. The war caused some delay in building. Then, in 1920, I gave the course of lectures just referred to. It was given at the behest of the professionals who had meanwhile joined the Society and were such a welcome addition to it. They arranged a program and submitted it to me.

In my belief, complete freedom reigns in the Anthroposophical Society. Many outsiders think that Steiner is the one who decides what is to go on in it. The things that go on most of the time, however, are such as Steiner would never have thought up. But the Society does not exist for my sake; it exists for the members.

Well, I sat there, all attentiveness, at this lecture series of September and October 1920—this is just an aperçu, not a criticism—and let my eyes range over the interior of the Goetheanum. In the Goetheanum Weekly I described how, in eurythmy for example, the lines of the Goetheanum continued over into the eurythmists' motions. But according to the original intention, this should have been the case with everything done there. So I let my inner eye test whether the interior decoration, the architecture, the sculptured forms, the painting, harmonized with what the speakers were saying from the podium. I discovered something that people did not at that time have to be faced with, namely, that everything I may call in the best sense a projection of the anthroposophical outlook, everything that had its origin in pure anthroposophy, harmonized marvellously with the Goetheanum. But in the case of a whole series of lectures, one felt that they should have been delivered only when the Goetheanum reached the point of adding a number of further buildings, each so designed that its style would harmonize with the special studies and activities being carried on inside it. In its destiny of almost ten years, the Goetheanum really shared the destiny of the Anthroposophical Society, and one could readily become aware, by feeling out the way the architectural style harmonized or failed to harmonize with what went on in the building, that an inorganic element had indeed insinuated itself into the pure ongoing stream of the anthroposophical spiritual movement.

Now this is not said to blame anybody or to suggest that things should have been done differently; everything had to happen as it did, naturally. But that brought another necessity with it: The necessity of bringing about a complete rebirth of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and so on, through anthroposophy, to give consciousness the quick forward thrust I described it as needing. For the ordinary way of looking at things simply does not provide a basis for anthroposophical presentations. But that forward thrust was not always in evidence. Its lack could be felt in the testing that the artistic style of the Goetheanum gave it; in the Anthroposophical Society it manifests itself in the phenomenon of the clouds that have gathered and hung over us these past days. Now that a most welcome destiny has brought science into the anthroposophical stream, we face the immediate and future task of bringing it to rebirth through anthroposophy. No purpose is served by losing ourselves in all kinds of meaningless polemics; the urgent task is rather to see to it that the various disciplines are reborn out of anthroposophy.

We had to make do somehow during the period when substitutes were the order of the day. I was often called upon, in response to a need somewhere, to deliver cycles of lectures to this or that group on subjects which, had anthroposophical life been progressing at a normal tempo, might better have waited for future developing. Then these cycles became available. They should have been put to use in the first place as a means of helping the various sciences to rebirth through anthroposophy. That lay in the real interests of anthroposophy, and its interests would have coincided fruitfully indeed with those of the Anthroposophical Society.

People have to know all these facts. You see, my dear friends, in the course of the various seminars held here and there under the auspices of the High School, I repeatedly assigned problems that needed solving. At the last address I gave in the Small Auditorium of the Goetheanum during the scientific course, which was held at the end of 1922 and was to have continued there into 1923, I gave the mathematical physicists an assignment. I discussed how necessary it was to solve the problem of finding a mathematical formula to express the difference between tactual and visual space. There were many other occasions when similar matters were brought up. We were confronted with many urgent problems of the time, but they all needed to be worked out in such a thoroughly anthroposophical way as to have value for every single group of anthroposophists, regardless of whether tactual and visual space and the like meant anything to them. For there are ways in which something that perhaps only one person can actually do can be made fruitful for a great many others when it is clothed in some quite different form.

Thus, the difficulties that have proliferated are a consequence of what I must call the exceedingly premature steps taken since 1919, and, in particular, of the circumstance that people founded all sorts of institutions and then didn't continue sharing responsibility for them—a fact that must be stressed again and again. These difficulties have given rise to the problematical situation now confronting us.

But none of them can be laid at the door of anthroposophy itself. What my kind listeners should be aware of is that it is possible to be quite specific as to how each such difficulty originated. And it must be emphasized that it is most unjust to dismiss anthroposophy on account of the troubles that have arisen.

I would, therefore, like to append to the discussion of just such deeper matters as these a correction of something that was said from this platform yesterday; it disturbed me because of my awareness of the things we have been talking about here. It was stated that people were not aware that the Anthroposophical Movement could be destroyed by our opponents. It cannot be. Our opponents could come to present the gravest danger to the Anthroposophical Society or to me personally, and so on. But the Anthroposophical Movement cannot be harmed; the worst that could happen is that its opponents might slow its progress. I have often pointed out in this and similar connections that we must distinguish between the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society. My reason for saying this was not that the Society no longer needed to be taken into account, but that the Society is the vessel and the Movement its content. This holds true for the single member as well as for the Society. Here too, full clarity and awareness should reign. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with the Anthroposophical Society. Nor should the fact go unrecognized that developments of the past three or four years have meant, for members, a close interweaving of the unfolding destiny of anthroposophy with the Society's destiny. The two have come to seem almost identical, but they must nevertheless be sharply differentiated.

There could, theoretically, have been a Waldorf School even if the Society had not existed. But that could not have happened in reality, for there would have been no one to found and steer and look after the school. Real logic, the logic of reality, is quite a different thing than abstract logical reasoning. It is important that members of the Society understand this. A member ought to have some rudimentary realization, even if only on the feeling level, that insight into higher worlds has to be built on an awareness that super-sensible experience differs greatly from experience of the ordinary physical world. Something in the physical world can seem just as right as a dream content does to the dreaming person. But the carrying over of things of one's dream life into situations of everyday waking consciousness nevertheless remains an abnormal and harmful phenomenon. It is similarly harmful to carry over into the consciousness needed for understanding the spiritual world convictions and attitudes quite properly adopted in ordinary waking consciousness.

I can give you an instructive example. As a result of the way modern man has become so terribly caught up in intellectuality and a wholly external empiricism, even those people who are not especially at home in the sciences have taken up the slogan: Prove what you are saying! What they are stressing is a certain special way of using thought as a mediator. They know nothing of the immediate relationship the soul of man can have to truth, wherein truth is immediately apprehended in just the way the eye perceives the color red, that is, seeing it, not proving it. But in the realm of reason and intellect, each further conceptual step is developed out of the preceding one. Where the physical plane is concerned, one is well advised to become a bright fellow who can prove everything, and to develop such a good technique in this that it works like greased lightning. That is a good thing where the physical plane is concerned, and a good thing for the sciences that deal with it. It is good for the spiritual investigator to have developed a certain facility in proving matters of the physical world. Those who acquaint themselves closely with the intentions underlying the work of our Research Institute will see that wherever this technique is applicable, we, too, apply it. But if you will permit me the grotesque expression, one becomes stupid in relation to the spiritual world if one approaches it in a proof-oriented state of mind, just as one becomes stupid when one projects a dreamer's orientation into ordinary waking consciousness. For the proving method is as out of place in the spiritual world as is an intrusion of the dream state into the reality of waking consciousness. But in modern times things have reached the point where proving everything is taken as a matter of course. The paralyzing effect this trend has had in some areas is really terrifying.

Religion, which grew out of direct vision, and in neither its modern nor its older forms was founded on anything susceptible of intellectual-rational proof, has now become proof-addicted rationalistic theory, and it is proving, in the persons of its extremer exponents, that everything about it is false. For just as it is inevitable that a person become abnormal when he introduces dream concerns into his waking consciousness, so does a person necessarily become abnormal in his relationship to higher worlds if he approaches them in a way suited to the physical plane. Theology has become either an applied science that just deals practically with whatever confronts it or a proof-minded discipline, better adapted to destroying religion than to establishing it.

These, my dear friends, are the things that must become matters of clear and conscious experience in the Anthroposophical Society. If that is not the case, one takes one's place in life and in human society simply as a person of many-sided interests who functions sensibly at all the various levels, whereas from the moment one concerns oneself with the material contained in innumerable cycles, one cannot exist as a human being without spiritual development.

The spiritual investigator does not need to rely on proof in meeting his opponents. Every objection that they might make to something I have said can be taken from my own writings, for wherever it is indicated I call attention to how things stand with physical proof as applied to super-sensible fact. Somewhere in my books one can always find an approximation of the opponents' comments in my own statements, so that, for the most part, all an opponent need do to refute me is to copy passages out of my writings. But the point is that all these details should become part of the awareness of the members. Then they will find firm footing in the Society. To occupy oneself with the anthroposophical outlook will mean finding firm footing, not only in the physical world but in all the worlds there are.

Then anthroposophical impulses will also be a fountainhead of the capacity to love one's fellowmen and of everything else that leads to social harmony and a truly social way of life. There will no longer be conflict and quarreling, divisions and secedings among anthroposophists; true human unity will reign and overcome all external isolation. Though one accept observations made in higher worlds as truth, one will not wander about like a dreamer in the physical world; one will relate to it as a person with both feet set firmly on the ground. For one will have trained oneself to keep the two things separate, just as dream experience and physical reality must be kept separate in ordinary life.

The key need is for everyone who intends to join with others in really full, genuine participation in the Anthroposophical Movement within the Society to develop a certain attitude of soul, a certain state of consciousness. If we really permeate ourselves with that attitude and that consciousness, we will establish true anthroposophical community. Then the Anthroposophical Society, too, will flourish and bear fruit and live up to its promise.

• 1. Spiritual Ground of Education Oxford, August 16-25, 1922. Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 2. The Tension Between East and West, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1963.

The meetings at Stuttgart came to a close two days ago, and you are probably thinking that I ought to give you a report on some of the things that happened there. We arrived at a certain definite conclusion, which seemed inevitable under the conditions that prevailed.

It will be essential to an understanding of what came about that I give you a sketch of how things developed. You know from comments I have been making these past several weeks that lengthy preparations preceded the Stuttgart meetings. The aim of these preparations, which proved extremely tiring to all concerned, was to try to create a situation in which the life-needs of the Anthroposophical Society could be met, thus ensuring the Society's continuance in the immediate future.

In everything that follows it should be kept in mind that what went on in Stuttgart did not have its origin in the sad events surrounding the Goetheanum fire, nor was it influenced by them. For I had already talked with a member of the Executive Committee early in December and discussed with him the necessity of doing something to consolidate the Society, and he was given the assignment of getting the whole Executive Committee and various others to take on the problem. So what occurred in Stuttgart was a direct consequence of the talk I had on December tenth with Herr Uehli to acquaint him with my observations on the current state of affairs in the Society.

The burning of the Goetheanum came as a most painful experience while we were in the midst of these developments. But even if we still had the Goetheanum standing here in its pristine form, these things would have happened exactly as they did. For what was it we faced? We were facing the fact that the Anthroposophical Society had taken on a form in the past two decades that had undergone considerable modification since 1919 as a consequence of including various enterprises among its concerns.

My words could easily be taken as deprecating these undertakings, but nothing of the sort is intended. I need only mention the name of the Waldorf School, which is one of the enterprises I was referring to, to convince you that my remark was made for quite a different purpose than to express some superficial judgment. It implied no reflection on the worth and significance of any of these enterprises or on anyone responsible for their guidance.

The transactions in Stuttgart were meant to—and indeed did—concern themselves solely with the Anthroposophical Society from the aspect of its whole configuration and how it should be shaped.

Now it is not an easy matter to describe this configuration as it really is, since it branches out in so many directions. But I believe that everyone of you has some idea of how the Society has developed up to the present, and can picture things for himself with the help of the comments I have been making here in the past several weeks to round out the picture.

One of the especially important developments that have taken place in the Society's life has been the incurring by leading individuals—or at least by a considerable number of them—of quite specific anthroposophical tasks for the Society that have grown out of the work. These tasks have been waiting for completion since 1919, but they were not carried out. When the problem this caused became only too plain, I had to speak to the Central Executive Committee in Stuttgart as I did on December tenth last.

One of the latest undertakings to grow out of the soil of the Anthroposophical Movement was the Movement for Religious Renewal, which has contributed heavily to the current crisis in the Society. That is one aspect of the facts that have developed in the Society's life.

The other aspect is that youth has approached the movement—youth full of deep inner enthusiasm for anthroposophy and everything it includes, and university youth has also come into the picture with quite different expectations, with a quite definite picture of what is to be found in the Society, with quite definite feelings. One might say that these academic young people approach the Society with strong heart impulses and a special sensitivity to the way the anthroposophists reacted to them, and that they took everything not so much from a rational angle as in a spirit of keen feeling-judgment.

Now what lay behind all this?

The fact is, my dear friends, that young people today are having soul experiences that are making their first appearance on the stage of human evolution. This fact is not to be summed up in abstract, superficial phrases about a generation gap. That gap has always existed in some sense, and been especially marked in strong personalities while they were young and preparing themselves for life at an educational institution. We need only recall certain characteristic examples. You can read in Goethe's Truth and Science how, when he was a student in Leipzig, he stayed away from lectures because he found them so terribly boring, and went instead to the pretzel bakeshop across the street to chat with companions while Professor Ludwig and others held forth in the lecture halls on learned doctrines.

But despite the ever-present generation gap, even these somewhat radical members of the younger generation eventually took over their inheritance from their elders. The geniuses among them did likewise. Goethe most certainly remained an incomparable genius to the day he died. But when it came to taking part in the life of his time, he became not simply Goethe the genius but the fat privy councillor with the double chin. That must also be recognized.

These things have to be looked at in a completely unprejudiced way. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, the generation gap about which people talk superficially today was always there, but it was resolved in good philistine style, with youth gradually absorbing more and more philistine characteristics and entering, as it always had, into what its elders passed on to it.

Today, however, that is no longer possible. If one were to use terminology borrowed from Oriental wisdom, one would have to say that it became impossible when Kali Yuga ended, because from that time forward social life was no longer ruled by the principle of authoritarianism as it had been heretofore. Mankind's involvement in the consciousness soul phase of its development took ever more marked effect. This lived in the souls of people born in the 1890's and in the first few years of the twentieth century, perhaps not in a sharply defined form, but nevertheless in an extremely strong instinctive way. This inner life of theirs has to be really lovingly contemplated by older people if they want to understand it. That takes quite a bit of doing. For our culture, our civilization has assumed a form, especially in educational institutions, which makes the resolving of problems between youth and age that always used to take place no longer possible. Young people of the present feel this; it is their inner destiny. It shapes every aspect of their lives, and means that they approach life with a quite definite craving or demand. This predisposes present-day young people to become seekers, but seekers of a wholly different stripe than their elders.

This holds true of them in every area of life, and especially in the spiritual area. It is very strange how the older generation has been reacting to them for some time past. I have not neglected to call your attention to characteristic instances. Let me remind you of the lecture I gave on Gregor Mendel. Every now and then, scientists of the twentieth century have rather vehemently stated it as their opinion that Gregor Mendel, a Moravian, the solitary schoolmaster who later became an abbot, was a genius who had made remarkable contributions to the work of determining the laws of heredity. If we review Gregor Mendel's relationship to the educational institutions he attended, we cannot miss the fact that when he was old enough to take his examinations for the teaching profession he failed them by a wide margin. He was thereupon given time to prepare himself for a second try. Again he flunked. At that time—I am speaking of the 1850's—people were a lot more tolerant than they became later. So, in spite of his two failures to pass his teacher's examinations, Mendel was appointed to a secondary school position, and he became the man who accomplished something regarded as one of the greatest feats in the field of modern natural science.

Let us take another case closer at hand: that of Röntgen. Nowadays nobody doubts that Röntgen is one of the greatest men of modern times. But he was dismissed from secondary school as a hopeless case. He had the greatest trouble getting a position as a tutor because he couldn't finish school; he had been thrown out, and later just barely managed to get into a college, where he finally graduated. But even then he was unable to get a tutorial post in the field in which he sought it. In spite of this, he performed one of the most epoch-making feats in the fields of practical and theoretical science.

These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. On every hand we find indications of the unbridgeable gap between what older times had to offer and what lives in youth in an indefinable way.

Putting the matter in rather radical terms, one can say that modern youth could not care less how many Egyptian kings' graves are opened; they are not much concerned with that. But they do care about finding far more original sources of serving human progress than the opening of ancient kings' graves offers. Youth feels that we have entered upon a phase of mankind's evolution in which much more elementary, more original sources will have to be drawn upon for its furthering.

Now we can certainly say that young people with this longing have done a great deal of searching during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then they came to know of anthroposophy and felt at once that it led to the primal sources of their seeking, to the deepest origin of humanness. They then approached the Anthroposophical Society. And last Monday or Tuesday a representative of these young people said in Stuttgart that they had received a shock on approaching it, that the contrast between the Anthroposophical Society and anthroposophy had startled them. This is a very weighty fact, is it not? It cannot simply be dismissed. You have to consider what young people, especially those from the universities, have had to suffer.

Let us say, for example, that they wanted to take a doctorate in one of the freer branches of learning and teaching, such as the history of literature. How were things done in the last third of the nineteenth century? Where did most of them get the themes for their dissertations? For brevity's sake I will have to put it rather radically. The professor had undertaken to write a book about the Romantic school. So he assigned one student Novalis, another Friedrich Schlegel, a third August Wilhelm Schlegel, and a fourth Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann—if they were lucky. If they weren't, they were assigned dissertations on Hoffmann's punctuation or his use of parentheses. The professor then read through these dissertations and took the substance of his book from them. It had all become quite mechanical. The young person was just part of a mechanism, a learned mechanism, and if I may repeat myself, after the end of Kali Yuga everything that lived in an elemental way in the youthful soul rebelled against this sort of thing. I am citing just one of countless possible examples of the same phenomenon.

Now here we have these two factors side by side: the Anthroposophical Society, in the form it had assumed during its two decades—a form I need not describe, as everyone can picture it for himself from his own standpoint—and the young students. But what the Society was encountering in these young people was simply the keenest and most radical fringe of an omnipresent element. This fact stood out only too plainly at the Stuttgart meetings.

On the one hand, the leaders of the old society were committed to what had gradually taken on fixed forms. One was perhaps a Waldorf teacher, another an office manager at “Der Kommende Tag.” We have to give all due weight to the fact that all these people were overwhelmed with work. Everybody in the Society who had any free time had been drawn into these enterprises. Rightly or wrongly, this caused a certain bureaucratic spirit to spring up in the Society.

Among these undertakings was the “Union for the Threefold Membering of the Social Organism.” Right from the moment of its founding in 1919, it had a director, and after I had worked awhile with this Union I was compelled to say that I could not go on, that I would have to withdraw. As I said in Stuttgart recently, I had to strike out and simply declare that I could not go on.

Then another director, an excellent man, took things over. I was unable to get to Stuttgart for several weeks, but when I eventually arrived, I was anxious to find out what had been happening. There were a number of matters awaiting disposition, so a meeting was held and I was informed about what had transpired. I was told, “Well, we've been setting up a card file. We have small cards on the lower right-hand section of which we clip the smaller newspaper items, and then we file them in cabinets. Then there are larger cards made of heavier paper to which we attach longer magazine articles, and there are other cards of still another size for filing letters that come in.” This went on and on. Hours were spent describing the way the card file was set up, the sacrifice and devotion with which people had been working on it for many weeks, what it contained, how everything had been so neatly stowed away in it. Now I had a mental picture of this card file with all the various sizes of cards in it, and the marvellous record there of everything that had been going on in the Society and what our opponents had been up to. It was all beautifully recorded! There must have been a simply huge pile of these cards stacked up in layers. But the people sitting there vanished as though they were ghosts; only the card file was real. Everything had been recorded!

I said, “Well, my dear friends, do you have heads as well as a card file? I am not in the least interested in your files, only in what you have in your heads.”

I am sure you will understand that I am not criticizing, just reporting, for the people who had arranged the files were groaning under the tremendous burden of their work. But on the other hand, just imagine youth coming there with their hearts on fire with enthusiasm for ideals that encompassed the whole future, only to be told the story of the card files. I am not saying that it was superfluous to have files or that they were of no value; I am saying that they were excellent and vitally necessary. But that is not the way things should be going. Hearts were needed to go out to hearts.

Now this created all sorts of impossible situations. These and many other problems finally reached a point where a reorganization of the Society had to be considered. There had to be a chance for the Society to provide human beings with opportunities to work in it, to live out their special individual capacities, to find and breathe an atmosphere in which they could go on developing. These were absolutely fundamental problems that the Society was facing. A complete revision of all the conditions surrounding its life was indicated, and that it has a tremendous life-potential is shown in the fact that youth has now approached it full of teeming inner life. But the contrasts grew and grew.

Of course, there were some individuals in the older group who had never taken any interest in the card files (if I may use the files as symptomatic of the whole approach in question). Some of these others may have been very old indeed, but still not have wanted to bother with things like the files, which had gradually become a necessity. There were definitely such members who had joined the Society as early as 1902 or 1903, who, though they may have been very different from the young people in many other respects too, had also never concerned themselves with what I will term the history of the Society.

So we faced extraordinarily difficult problems at the preliminary meetings. An incalculable weight of worry burdened one's soul.

But we don't need to talk about those sessions now. The Delegates' Conference, a summons to which was the outcome of the preparatory meetings, was held in Stuttgart last Sunday. The first order of business was to hear what the provisional steering committee, which was made up for various reasons of members of the erstwhile Central Executive and called the Committee of Nine, had to say about the past and present and future of the Anthroposophical Society. Then the German and Austrian members were to be given a hearing in the persons of their delegates.

Well, things proceeded as planned. But since I want to give you just a brief sketch of what led to the final decision, I will refrain from describing what amounted to a veritable hailstorm of motions. Scarcely was one taken care of and the business of the meeting resumed than two or three more fairly flew up to the chairman's table. It can only be described as a hailstorm, and there seemed to be no end to the discussion about them. But I will skip over all this and stress instead that absolutely excellent talks were given, penetrating, deeply anthroposophical talks. Albert Steffen spoke wonderful, heartfelt, profound words. Mr. Werbeck gave a masterly description of the categories of our opponents and of their relationship to the Anthroposophical Movement and to the rest of civilization. Dr. Büchenbacher gave a vivid account of the way people who entered the Society from about 1917 on responded to what they encountered in it. As to the fact that not everything said was first-rate and as to some lesser contributions in between, it is probably better to maintain a courteous silence. But excellent, magnificent contributions were interspersed among what I will refer to as “others.” In spite of this, Sunday and Monday and Tuesday passed, and by Tuesday evening a point was reached where one could see clearly that if the next day, the final one, were to be anything like the preceding ones, the delegates would leave as they had come. For almost nothing of what lived in the many individuals assembed in the hall had really come out, even though much anthroposophical substance had been contributed in excellent speeches. This was an assemblage of human beings and the speeches all dealt with realities, but there was no living reality in the meetings, just abstraction; they were a classic example of life lived in the abstract. By Tuesday evening real chaos reigned. Everybody was talking past everybody else.

Now I had no choice but to decide to make a proposal of my own directly after the Tuesday lecture that had been scheduled for me—a proposal based on what lived in the people represented there—and almost the entire membership of the German and Austrian Societies was present. But one had to get at what was real there and pull it together. I was to speak on Tuesday about community building, a theme called for by much that had been said. So I made a proposal. I said that we could see how everyone was talking past the others and that nothing that was being said was bringing the underlying realities of the situation to the surface. Leaving other aspects aside for the moment, one could distinguish two types of feeling, two differing viewpoints, two sets of opinions. One type is represented by the old Anthroposophical Society and the committee speaking for it; the other is made up of individuals who, to put it as exactly as possible, have no real interest in the stand taken by the committee representing the Society. They are individuals completely without interest in what the committee had to say, though they are fine anthroposophists: One can scarcely imagine anything finer than the contributions made by the young people at the Stuttgart conference; they reflected an energetic, wonderful spirit. The soul of youth made a noble impression as it urgently stormed the gates of anthroposophy. But here too there was no interest in what the Society was as a society, or in what it stood for.

A phenomenon like this has to be taken as a reality. We have to learn to see it as a fact; there is no use acting like blind men and closing our eyes to it. So I had no choice but to say that since we were confronted there with these two types, any abstract talk about reaching agreement was simply false. The old society cannot be other than it is, nor can the second group. The Society as a whole will therefore have the best chance of continuance if each faction goes its own way, with the old aristocracy—no, let me rather call them the members of the older society, laden down with history—forming one group, and the stormily progressive old and young forming another.

There is in existence an ancient draft of a constitution for the Anthroposophical Society. I can recommend its study to both parties! Each of them can carry out its provisions quite literally, but the outcome will be entirely different in the two cases. That is the way things are in real life, no matter how they may look in theory.

So I made the proposal that the old Anthroposophical Society continue with its Committee of Nine. I characterized things in the following way. I said that the old society included the prominent Stuttgart members who carry on their separate undertakings in exemplary fashion and do a tremendous lot of work; in fact, one of their outstanding characteristics, demonstrated during the four days of the conference, was the weariness they brought with them from their previous labors. I said that when I come to Stuttgart and find something needing to be done, I have only to press a button; that is the way it has been in recent years. These leading personalities in Stuttgart are extremely insightful. They grasp everything immediately without one's having to say very much. There would never be time enough to discuss everything at length. Theirs is a lightning grasp; one need only touch on a matter to have it absolutely clear to them. But for the most part they do nothing about it. Then there is the other party, full of anthroposophical soulfulness, whole-heartedly immersed in anthroposophy. I can also say something to the leaders of this group. They understand nothing of what I am saying, but they do it that very instant. That is a tremendous difference. The first group understands immediately, but does nothing. The second category understands nothing; they only give promise of eventually understanding everything; they are full of energy and feeling, but they do the things at once. They do everything without understanding it.

So there will have to be two quite differently constituted groups in the Society if it is to stay united. One group should never be allowed to get in the way of the other's functioning. There is the one group—what name shall I give it, since we have to have one? It's just a question of terminology, of course. Let's call it the conservative, the traditional party, the neatly-filed members (not to limit the term to just a set of cards), the party that occupies the curule seats. People in this party have titles: president, vice president, and so on, and administer the Society. They sit there and have a routine procedure for everything. I see a man in the audience looking at me significantly who, while I was still in Stuttgart, was in a position to inform me what such procedures sometimes lead to. For example, a credit slip for a sum like 21 marks was sent out, and it cost 150 marks to send it. That is what it costs these days to send mail to foreign countries: 150 marks. If one wants to write somebody that a credit of 21 marks has been entered on the books to his account, it costs 150 marks to do it properly. That is the way things go in an orderly ABC set-up. So there we have the party of routines, the old Anthroposophical Society. One can belong to it and be a good member. Then there is the free union of individuals who care not a whit for all that sort of thing, who simply want a loose association based on a purely human element. These two streams should now be acknowledged.

I started by giving just a thumbnail sketch of this, a mere indication. That same evening a speech was made, maintaining that it would be the worst thing that could possibly happen, for it would split the Society in two, and so on. But that was the reality of the situation! If a move were to be made that fitted the facts rather than the way people thought—for what they think is seldom as significant as what they are—it had to be the one suggested, for that would fit the realities involved. As I said, a speech was instantly made about it, warning of the terrible consequences that would ensue if anything of the sort were to prove necessary, and so on.

Even in an external, purely spatial sense, the outcome was chaos. The hall was crammed with people huddled in groups, leaving no loopholes to squeeze through between them, and they all stopped me to ask what this or that had meant. The inner chaos of the situation had become outer chaos by eleven o'clock that Tuesday evening when I tried to leave the assembly hall.

I arrived, rather weary, at the place where I was staying. At midnight someone came to fetch me. I wasn't quite on the point of going to sleep. Someone came and said that a meeting was underway down in the Landhausstrasse. I was stopped again on my way to the floor where the meeting was in progress, and drawn into a side-meeting, so that it was nearly one o'clock in the morning by the time I arrived where I was supposed to be. But it was at once apparent that my proposal had been understood after all, quite correctly understood. Now the details could be profitably discussed. It had become clear that something could really be done on the basis proposed.

Certain doubts were expressed, as was perfectly natural. It was said, for example, that there were members who sympathized with the young people and wanted to go along with their aims, but who nevertheless belonged historically to the old society and even held positions in it, which they wanted to keep so they could go on working there.

I said that this could easily be solved. The only problem in the case of individuals who join both sections is to arrange that they pay only one membership fee. Surely some technical means of doing this can be worked out. There should be no question of anyone being excluded from one of the sections because he is a member of the other. In all such matters, we should simply see to it that the realities of a situation have a chance to be recognized.

I went on to say that the various institutions can also accommodate both directions. I can easily conceive the possibility of a Waldorf teacher leaning toward the looser association and becoming part of it while a colleague feels drawn to and joins the more tightly organized group. They will, of course, still work together at the Waldorf School in a perfectly harmonious spirit.

Yesterday some people were wondering how life in this or that branch of the Society would be affected. I asked why adherents of the two groups should not be able to sit beside each other at branch meetings. But the inner realities must always be given a chance to live themselves out. When a thing is conceived in a realistic spirit, there is always a way of working it out, and this makes for unity.

It took only until 2:15 a.m. for the young people to become clear on essentials. There were, however, some white-haired young ones among them who could look back over a span of quite a few decades. It became clear, as Tuesday night changed into Wednesday morning, that the proposal would work.

Wednesday was devoted to discussing these plans. And Wednesday evening witnessed their adoption—I will give you just the résumé, and then add a few supplementary comments to this report.

So there we now have the old Anthroposophical Society with its Committee of Nine as described, and the other looser, freer Anthroposophical Society whose chief striving it is to get anthroposophy out into the world and to work for a deepening of man's inner life.

Tomorrow and the following day I will review the most important aspects of the two lectures I delivered in Stuttgart. They are intimately bound up with the life in the Anthroposophical Society, for the first lecture was on the subject of community building and the second on the reasons why societies based on brotherliness are so given to quarreling.

A provisional committee was formed for the loose association. It was made up of Herr Leinhas, Herr Lehrs, Dr. Röschl, Herr Maikowski, Dr. Büchenbacher, Herr Rath, Herr von Grone, Rector Bartsch from Breslau, and Herr Schröder. You notice that not all of them are extremely young; their number includes dignified patriarchs. So the radicalism of youth will not be the only standpoint represented, but it will certainly be able to make itself felt.

That is the way things came out. Now they need only be rightly managed. The loose association undertook specifically to form smaller, closer communities—to work for anthroposophy exoterically on a big scale, and to work esoterically on a small scale forming communities held together not so much by any set system of external organization as by inner, karmic ties.

These, then, were the two groupings we came out with. I will have something more to say about them tomorrow and the next day. It was a very necessary development! Anything that is alive refuses to let itself be preserved in old, preconceived forms; arrangements must change with and adapt themselves to the living.

You remember my saying as I left for Stuttgart that the Society's whole problem was really one of tailoring. Anthroposophy has grown, and its suit, the Anthroposophical Society—for the Society has gradually become that—has grown too small. The sleeves scarcely reach to the elbows, the trousers to the knees. Well, I won't labor the analogy. The suit looked grotesque, and this was apparent to any wholehearted person who has recently joined the Society.

Now we shall have to see whether this effort to make a new, more fitting garment rather than take the old one apart—for it would certainly get torn—will succeed. It definitely has the inner capacity to do so. We shall have to see whether people develop the strength essential to this way of working. Real life presents very different possibilities from those of theory, and that holds true in this case also. We will have to create something that can really stand the test of life.

Now there we have Herr von Grone, who is a member of both committees, the committee of the free and the committee of the more tightly organized; he will serve on both. Things will work out best if we let everybody function in his own way, either as a patriarch or as a young enthusiast, and if someone wants to be both at once, why should he not be a two-headed creature? It is absolutely vital that people's energies develop freely.

Certain things won't work, of course. I was told about one such situation, where the chairman of a group once had the startling experience of yielding the floor to someone who launched out on a flaming address only to have another person talk at the same time. The chairman said, “Friends, this is impossible!” “Why that?” was the answer. “We're trying to live a philosophy of freedom here! Why should one's freedom be limited by allowing only one person to speak? Why can't several talk at the same time?” You will agree that some things won't work, but fortunately they're not always specifically called for.

I, for my part, am thoroughly convinced that things will work again for awhile. Not for always, though; nothing can be set up for eternity. As time passes we will again find ourselves confronted with the necessity of devising new garments for the anthroposophical organism. But every human being shares that destiny; one can't keep on wearing the same old clothes. An organization is actually never anything more than a garment for some living element. Why, then, should one make a special case of social organisms and try to tailor them for eternity? Everything living has to undergo change, and only what changes is alive. In the case of something as particularly teeming with life as the Anthroposophical Movement we must therefore shape a life-adapted organization. Of course we can't attempt reorganization every single day, but we will certainly find it necessary to do so every other year or so. Otherwise the chairs occupied by the leading members will really become curule seats, and when some people make a specialty of resting on the curule seats, those not occupying them begin to itch. We must find a way to make sitters on curule seats itchy too. In other words, we're going to have to start jostling these chairs a little. But if we find the right way of arranging things, everything will go beautifully.

My dear friends, my intention was to give you a report. I certainly did not feel it to be a joking matter. But things of real life are sometimes just exactly those most suited to a slightly humoristic treatment.

Yesterday I undertook to give you a sort of report on the events that took place in Stuttgart. I went on to say that I would like to convey something of the substance of the lectures I delivered there. So I will do that today, and tomorrow try to add further comment supplementing yesterday's report.

The first lecture on Tuesday was conceived as a response to a quite definite need that had developed and made itself clearly felt during the discussions of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; they have been described to you at least from the standpoint of the mood that prevailed there. The need I refer to was for a survey of the essentials of community building. Community building by human beings working in anthroposophy has recently played an important role in the Society. Young people in particular—but other, older ones as well—entered the Society with a keen longing to meet others in it with whom they could have a type of experience that life does not afford the single individual in today's social order. To say this is to call attention to a thoroughly understandable longing felt by many people of our time.

As a result of the dawning of the age of consciousness, old social ties have lost their purely human content and their purely human strength. People always used to grow into some particular community. They did not become hermits; they grew into some quite specific community or other. They grew into the community of a family, a profession, a certain rank. Recently they have been growing into the communities we call social classes, and so on.

These various communities have always carried certain responsibilities for the individual that he could not have carried for himself.

One of the strongest bonds felt by men of modern times has been that of class. The old social groupings: those of rank, of nationality, even of race—have given way to a sense of belonging to a certain class. This has recently developed to a point where the members of a given class—the so-called higher classes or aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat—make common cause. Thus communities based on class have transcended national and even racial and other such loyalties, and a good many of the elements witnessed in modern international social life can be ascribed to these class communities.

But the age of the consciousness soul, which began early in the fifteenth century and has come increasingly to the fore, has recently been making itself felt in human souls with growing urgency and vehemence. This has made human beings feel that they can no longer find in class communities any elements that could carry them into something beyond merely individual existence. On the one hand, modern man has a strong sense of individuality and cannot tolerate any interference with his life of individual thought and feeling. He wants to be recognized as a personality. That goes back to certain primal causes. If I may again resort to the terminology I used yesterday, I would say that since the end of Kali Yuga—or, in other words, since this century began—something has been stirring in contemporary souls, no matter how unconsciously, that could be expressed in the words, “I want to be a distinct individual.” Of course, not everybody could formulate it thus. It shows itself in many kinds of discontent and psychic instability. But underlying them is the desire to be a distinct personality.

The truth is, however, that no one can get along on earth without other human beings. Historic ties and bonds like those that unite the proletariat in a sense of class belonging, for example, do not supply anything that on the one hand can satisfy the urge to be a distinct individual and on the other unite individuals with their fellowmen. Modern man wants the purely human element in himself to relate him to the purely human element in others. He does indeed want social ties, but he wants them to have an individual character like that experienced in personal friendships.

An endless amount of what goes on between human beings in contemporary life can be traced to a craving for such human communities. It was quite evident a while ago when a group of younger people came to me wanting to bring about a renewal of Christianity. It was their belief that such a renewal could be achieved only by making the Christ impulse very much alive in the sense that anthroposophy has demonstrated. This longing felt by younger theologians, some of whom were just completing their training and were therefore about to assume pastoral duties, others of whom were still studying, was the element that gave birth to the latest offshoot of our Society, the Movement for Religious Renewal.

Now quite a variety of things had to be done for this Movement for Religious Renewal. It was of first concern to bring the Christ impulse to life in a way suited to the present. To do this meant taking very seriously indeed the fact I have so often stressed: that the Christ not only spoke to human souls at the beginning of the Christian era but has carried out the promise that he made when he said, “I will be with you always, unto the very end of the earth.” This means that he can always be heard whenever a soul desires it, that a continuing Christ revelation is taking place. There had to be an ongoing evolution from the written Gospels to immediately living revelation of the Christ impulse. This was one aspect of the task of religious renewal.

The other was one that I had to characterize at once by saying that religious renewal must bring communities into being, that it must build religious communities. Once a community has equipped an individual with knowledge, he can do something with it by himself. But that direct experience of the spiritual world, which is not based on thought but rather on feeling and is religious by nature, this experience of the spiritual world as divine can only be found by forming communities. So a healthy building of community must, I said, go hand in hand with the healthy development of religious life.

The personalities who undertook the launching of this Movement for Religious Renewal were, at the outset, all Protestant theologians. Their attention could be called to the fact that it was just the Protestant denominations that had recently been tending to lay increasing emphasis on sermons, to the neglect of ritual. But preaching has an atomizing effect on communities. The sermon, which is intended to convey knowledge of the spiritual world, challenges the individual soul to form its own opinions. This fact is reflected in the particularly pronounced modern antagonism to the credo, the confession of beliefs, in an age when everyone wants to confess only to his own. This has led to an atomization, a blowing apart of the congregation, with a resultant focusing of the religious element on the individual.

This would gradually bring about the dissolution of the soul elements of the social order if there were not to be a renewed possibility of building true community. But true community building can only be the product of a cultus derived from fresh revelations of the spiritual world. So the cultus now in use in the Movement for Religious Renewal was introduced. It takes mankind's historical evolution fully into account, and thus represents in many of its single details as well as in its overall aspects a carrying forward of the historical element. But its every aspect also bears the imprint of fresh revelations, which the spiritual world can only now begin to make to man's higher consciousness.

The cultus unites those who come together at its celebration. It creates community, and Dr. Rittelmeyer said quite rightly, in the course of the Stuttgart deliberations, that in the community building power of the cultus the Movement for Religious Renewal presents a great danger—perhaps a very grave one—to the Anthroposophical Society. What was he pointing to when he said this? He was calling attention to the fact that many a person approaches the Society with the longing to find a link with others in a free community experience. Such communal life with the religious coloration that the cultus gives it can be attained, and people with such a longing for community life can satisfy it in the Movement for Religious Renewal. If the Society is not to be endangered, it must therefore also make a point of nurturing a community building element.

Now this called attention to a fact of the greatest importance in this most recent phase of the Society's development. It pointed out that anthroposophists must acquire an understanding of community building. An answer must be found to the question whether the community building that is being achieved in the Movement for Religious Renewal is the only kind there is at present, or whether there are other possibilities of attaining the same goal in the Anthroposophical Society.

This question can obviously only be answered by studying the nature of community building.

But that impulse to build community, which modern man feels and the cultus can satisfy, is not the only one that moves him, strong though it is; there is still another. Every human being of the present feels both kinds of longings, and it is most desirable that each and every one should have his need met by providing community building elements not only in the Movement for Religious Renewal but in the Anthroposophical Society as well.

When one is discussing something, one naturally has to clothe it in idea form. But what I am about to present in that form really lives at the feeling level in people of our time. Ideas are a device for making things clear. But what I want to talk about now is something that modern man experiences purely as feeling.

The first kind of community building that we encounter the moment we set out on earthly life is one that we take quite for granted and seldom think about or weigh in feeling. That is the community built by language. We learn to speak our mother-tongue as little children, and this mother-tongue provides us with an especially strong community building element because it comes into the child's experience and is absorbed by him at a time when his etheric body is still wholly integrated with the rest of his organism and as yet quite undifferentiated. This means that the mother-tongue grows completely at one with his entire being. But it is also an element that groups of human beings share in common. People feel united by a common language, and if you remember something I have often mentioned, the fact that a spiritual being is embodied in a language, that the genius of language is not the abstraction learned men consider it but a real spiritual being, you will sense how a community based on a shared language rests on the fact that its members feel the presence of a real genius of speech. They feel sheltered beneath the wings of a real spiritual being. That is the case wherever community is built.

All community building eventuates in a higher being descending from the world of the spirit to reign over and unite people who have come together in a common cause.

But there is another, individual element eminently capable of creating community that can make its appearance when a group foregathers. A common tongue unites people because what one is saying can live in those who are listening to him; they thus share a common content. But now let us imagine that a number of individuals who spent their childhood and early schooldays together find an occasion of the sort that could and indeed often does present itself to meet again some thirty years later. This little group of forty- or fifty-year-olds, every one of whom spent his childhood in the same school and the same region, begins to talk of common experiences as children and young people. Something special comes alive in them that makes for quite a different kind of community than that created by a common tongue. When members of a group speaking the same language come, in the course of meeting and talking, to feel that they understand one another, their sense of belonging together is relatively superficial compared with what one feels when one's soul-depths are stirred by entertaining common memories. Every word has a special coloring, a special flavor, because it takes one back to a shared youth and childhood. What unites people in such moments of communal experience reaches deeper levels of their soul life. One feels related in deeper layers of one's being to those with whom one comes together on this basis.

What is this basis of relationship? It consists of memories—memories of communal experiences of earlier days. One feels oneself transported to a vanished world where one once lived in company with these others with whom one is thus re-united.

This is to describe an earthly situation that aptly illustrates the nature of the cultus. For what is intended with the cultus? Whether its medium be words or actions, it projects into the physical world, in an entirely different sense than our natural surroundings do, an image of the super-sensible, the spiritual world. Every plant, every process in external nature is, of course, also an image of something spiritual, but not in the direct sense that a rightly presented verbal or ceremonial facet of the cultus is. The words and actions of the cultus convey the super-sensible world in all its immediacy. The cultus is based on speaking words in the physical world in a way that makes the super-sensible world immediately present in them, on performing actions in a way that conveys forces of the super-sensible world. A cultus ritual is one in which something happens that is not limited to what the eyes see when they look physically at ritualistic acts; the fact is rather that forces of a spiritual, super-sensible nature permeate ordinary physical forces. A super-sensible event takes place in the physical act that pictures it.

Man is thus directly united with the spiritual world by means of the physically perceptible words and actions of the cultus. Rightly presented, its words and actions bring to our experience on the physical plane a world that corresponds to the pre-earthly one from which we human beings have descended. In just the same sense in which forty- or fifty-year-olds who have met again feel themselves transported back into the world they shared in childhood does a person who joins others at the celebration of a genuine cultus feel himself transported back into a world he shared with them before they descended to the earth. He is not aware of this; it remains a subconscious experience, but it penetrates his feeling life all the more deeply for that very reason. The cultus is designed with this intent. It is designed with a view to giving man a real experience of something that is a memory, an image of his pre-earthly life, of his existence before he descended to the earth. The members of congregations based on a cultus feel especially keenly what, for purposes of illustration, I have just described as taking place when a group comes together in later life and exchanges memories of childhood: They feel transported into a world where they lived together in the super-sensible. This accounts for the binding ties created by a cultus-based community, and it has always been the reason why it did so. Where it is a matter of a religious life that does not have an atomizing effect because of its stress on preaching but instead emphasizes the cultus, the cultus will lead to the forming of a true community or congregation. No religious life can be maintained without the community building element. Thus a community based in this sense on common memories of the super-sensible is a community of sacraments as well.

But no form of sacrament- or cultus-based community that remains standing where it is today can meet the needs of modern human beings. To be sure, it may be acceptable to many people. But cultus-based congregations would not achieve their full potential or—more important still—reach their real goal if they were to remain nothing more than communities united by common memories of super-sensible experience. This has created an increasing need for introducing sermons into the cultus. The trouble is that the atomizing tendency of sermons as these are presently conceived by the Protestant denominations has become very marked, because the real needs arising from the consciousness soul development of this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch have not been taken into account. The concept of preaching in the older confessions is still based on the needs of the Fourth Post-Atlantean period. In these older churches, sermons conform to the world view that prevailed during the period of intellectual soul development. They are no longer suited to the modern consciousness. That is why the Protestant churches have gone over to a form of presentation that makes its appeal more to human opinion, to conscious human understanding.

There is every good reason for doing this, of course. On the other hand, no really right way of doing it has yet been found. A sermon contained within the cultus is a misfit; it leads away from the cultus in a cognitive direction. But this problem has not been well recognized in the form preaching has taken in the course of man's ongoing evolution. You will see this immediately when I remind you of a certain fact. You will see how little there is left when we omit sermons of more recent times that do not take a Biblical text. In most cases, Sunday sermons as well as those delivered on special occasions take some quotation from the Bible for their text because fresh, living revelation such as is also available in the present is rejected. Historical tradition remains the only source resorted to. In other words, a more individual form of sermon is being sought, but the key to it has not been found. Thus sermons eventuate in mere opinion, personal opinion, with atomizing effect.

Now if the recently established Movement for Religious Renewal, built as it is in all essentials on an anthroposophical foundation, reckons with fresh, ongoing revelation, with a living spiritual experience of the super-sensible world, then it will be just the sermon factor that will bring it to recognize its need for something further. This something is the same thing that makes fresh, ongoing, living knowledge of the spiritual world possible, namely, anthroposophical spiritual science. I might express it by saying that sermons will always be the windows through which the Movement for Religious Renewal will have to receive what an ongoing, living Anthroposophical Society must give it. But as I said when I spoke of the Movement for Religious Renewal at the last lecture I gave over there in the still intact Goetheanum, if the Movement for Religious Renewal is to grow, the Anthroposophical Society will have to stand by it in the liveliest possible way, with all the living life of anthroposophy flowing to it from a number of human beings as the channel. The Movement for Religious Renewal would soon go dry if it were not to have at least some people standing by it in whom anthroposophical cognition is a really living element.

But as I said, many individuals are presently entering the Society, seeking anthroposophy not just in the abstract but in the community belonging that satisfies a yearning of the age of consciousness. It might be suggested that the Society too should adopt a cultus. It could do this, of course, but that would take it outside its proper sphere. I will therefore now go on to discuss the specifically anthroposophical way of building community.

Modern life definitely has other community building elements to offer besides that based on common memories of pre-natal experience of the super-sensible world. The element I have in mind is one that is needed by the present in a form especially adapted to the age of consciousness.

In this connection I must point out something that goes entirely unnoticed by most human beings of our time.

There has, to be sure, always been talk of idealism. But when idealism is mentioned nowadays, such talk amounts to little more than hollow phrases, even in the mouths of the well-meaning. For ours is a time when intellectual elements and forces have come especially strongly to the fore throughout the entire civilized world, with the result that there is no understanding for what a whole human being is. The longing for that understanding is indeed there, particularly in the case of modern youth. But the very indefiniteness of the form in which youth conceives it shows that something lives in human souls today that has not declared itself at all distinctly; it is still undifferentiated, and it will not become the less naive for being differentiated.

Now please note the following. Imagine yourselves back in times when religious streams were rising and inundating humankind. You will find that in those bygone periods of human evolution this and that proclamation from the spiritual world was being greeted by many people with enormous enthusiasm. Indeed, it would have been completely impossible for the confessions extant today to find the strength to carry people if, at the time of these proclamations, souls had not felt a much greater affinity for revelations from the spiritual world than is felt today. Observing people nowadays, one simply cannot imagine them being carried away by anything in the nature of a proclamation of religious truths such as used to take place in earlier ages. Of course, sects do form, but there is a philistine quality about them in great contrast to the fiery response of human souls to earlier proclamations. One no longer finds the same inner warmth of soul toward things of the spirit. It suffered a rapid diminution in the last third of the nineteenth century. Granted, discontent still drives people to listen to this or that, and to join one or another church. But the positive warmth that used to live in human souls and was solely responsible for enabling individuals to put their whole selves at the service of the spirit has been replaced by a certain cool or even cold attitude. This coolness is manifest in human souls today when they speak of ideals and idealism. For nowadays the matter of chief concern is something that still has a long way to go to its fulfillment, that still has a long waiting period before it, but that as expectation is already very much alive in many human souls today. I can characterize it for you in the following way.

Let us take two states of consciousness familiar to everybody, and imagine a dreaming person and someone in a state of ordinary waking consciousness.

What is the situation of the dreamer? It is the same as that of a sleeping person. For though we may speak of dreamless sleep, the fact is that sleepers are always dreaming, though their dreams may be so faint as to go unnoticed.

What, I repeat, is the dreamer's situation? He is living in his own dream-picture world. As he lives in it he frequently finds it a good deal more vivid and gripping—this much can certainly be said—than his everyday waking experience. But he is experiencing it in complete isolation. It is his purely personal experience. Two people may be sleeping in one and the same room, yet be experiencing two wholly different worlds in their dream consciousness. They cannot share each other's experience. Each has his own, and the most they can do is tell one another about it afterwards.

When a person wakes and exchanges his dream consciousness for that of everyday, he has the same sense perception of his surroundings that those about him have. They begin to share a communal scene. A person wakes to a shared world when he leaves dreams behind and enters a day-waking state of consciousness. What wakes him out of the one consciousness into the other? It is light and sound and the natural environment that rouse him to the ordinary day-waking state, and other people are in the same category for him. One wakes up from dreams by the natural aspects of one's fellowmen, by what they are saying, by the way they clothe their thoughts and feelings in the language they use. One is awakened by the way other people naturally behave. Everything in one's natural environment wakes one to normal day consciousness. In all previous ages people woke up from the dream state to day-waking consciousness. And these same surroundings provided a person with the gate through which, if he was so minded, he entered spiritual realms.

Then a new element made its appearance in human life with the awakening and development of the consciousness soul. This calls for a second kind of awakening, one for which the human race will feel a growing need: an awakening at hand of the souls and spirits of other human beings. In ordinary waking life one awakens only in meeting another's natural aspects. But a person who has become an independent, distinct individual in the age of consciousness wants to wake up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of his fellowman. He wants to awaken to his soul and spirit, to approach him in a way that startles his own soul awake in the same sense that light and sound and other such environmental elements startle one out of dreaming.

This has been felt as an absolutely basic need since the beginning of the twentieth century, and it will grow increasingly urgent. It is a need that will be apparent throughout the twentieth century, despite the time's chaotic, tumultuous nature, which will affect every phase of life and civilization. Human beings will feel this need—the need to be brought to wake up more fully in the encounter with the other person than one can wake up in regard to the merely natural surroundings. Dream life wakes up into wakeful day consciousness in the encounter with the natural environment. Wakeful day consciousness wakes up to a higher consciousness in the encounter with the soul and spirit of our fellowman. Man must become more to his fellowman than he used to be: he must become his awakener. People must come closer to one another than they used to do, each becoming an awakener of everyone he meets. Modern human beings entering life today have stored up far too much karma not to feel a destined connection with every individual they encounter. In earlier ages, souls were younger and had not formed so many karmic ties. Now it has become necessary to be awakened not just by nature but by the human beings with whom we are karmically connected and whom we want to seek.

So, in addition to the need to recall one's super-sensible home, which the cultus meets, we have the further need to be awakened to the soul-spiritual element by other human beings, and the feeling impulse that can bring this about is that of the newer idealism. When the ideal ceases to be a mere abstraction and becomes livingly reunited with man's soul and spirit, it can be expressed in the words, “I want to wake up in the encounter with my fellowman.”

This is the feeling that, vague though it is, is developing in youth today, “I want to be awakened by my fellowman,” and this is the particular form in which community can be nurtured in the Anthroposophical Society. It is the most natural development imaginable for when people come together for a communal experience of what anthroposophy can reveal of the super-sensible, the experience is quite a different one from any that the individual could have alone. The fact that one wakes up in the encounter with the soul of the other during the time spent in his company creates an atmosphere that, while it may not lead one into the super-sensible world in exactly the way described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, furthers one's understanding of the ideas that anthroposophical spiritual science brings us from super-sensible realms.

There is a different understanding of things among people who share a common idealistic life based on mutual communication of an anthroposophical content, whether by reading aloud or in some other way. Through experiencing the super-sensible together, one human soul is awakened most intensively in the encounter with another human soul. It wakes the soul to higher insight, and this frame of mind creates a situation that causes a real communal being to descend in a group of people gathered for the purpose of mutually communicating and experiencing anthroposophical ideas. Just as the genius of a language lives in that language and spreads its wings over those who speak it, so do those who experience anthroposophical ideas together in the right, idealistic frame of mind live in the shelter of the wings of a higher being.

Now what takes place as a result?

If this line (Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard) represents the demarcation between the super-sensible and the sense world, we have, here above it, the processes and beings of the higher world experienced in the cultus; they are projected by the words and ritualistic acts of the cultus into the physical world here below the line. In the case of an anthroposophical group, experience on the physical plane is lifted by the strength of its genuine, spiritualized idealism into the spiritual world. The cultus brings the super-sensible down into the physical world with its words and actions. The anthroposophical group raises the thoughts and feelings of the assembled individuals into the super-sensible, and when an anthroposophical content is experienced in the right frame of mind by a group of human beings whose souls wake up in the encounter with each other, the soul is lifted in reality into a spirit community. It is only a question of this awareness really being present. Where it exists and groups of this kind make their appearance in the Anthroposophical Society, there we have in this reversed cultus, as I shall call it, in this polar opposite of the cultus, a most potent community building element. If I were to speak pictorially, I would put it thus: the community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to the place where the cultus is being celebrated, so that they may be present in the congregation, whereas the anthroposophical community seeks to lift human souls into super-sensible realms so that they may enter the company of angels. In both cases that is what creates community.

But if anthroposophy is to serve man as a real means of entering the spiritual world, it may not be mere theory and abstraction. We must do more than just talk about spiritual beings; we must look for the opportunities nearest at hand to enter their company. The work of an anthroposophical group does not consist in a number of people merely discussing anthroposophical ideas. Its members should feel so linked with one another that human soul wakes up in the encounter with human soul and all are lifted into the spiritual world, into the company of spiritual beings, though it need not be a question of beholding them. We do not have to see them to have this experience. This is the strength-giving element that can emerge from groups that have come into being within the Society through the right practice of community building. Some of the fine things that really do exist in the Society must become more common; that is what new members have been missing. They have looked for them, but have not found them. What they have encountered has instead been some such statement as, “If you want to be a real anthroposophist you must believe in reincarnation and the etheric body,” and so on.

I have often pointed out that there are two ways of reading a book like my Theosophy. One is to read, “Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., and lives repeated earth lives and has a karma, etc.” A reader of this kind is taking in concepts. They are, of course, rather different concepts than one finds elsewhere, but the mental process that is going on is in many respects identical with what takes place when one studies a cookbook. My point was exactly that the process is the important thing, not the absorption of ideas. It makes no difference whether you are reading, “Put butter into a frying pan, add flour, stir; add the beaten eggs, etc.,” or, “There is physical matter, etheric forces, astral forces, and they interpenetrate each other.” It is all one from the standpoint of the soul process involved whether butter, eggs and flour are being mixed at a stove or the human entelechy is conceived as a mixture of physical, etheric and astral bodies. But one can also read Theosophy in such a manner as to realize that it contains concepts that stand in the same relation to the world of ordinary physical concepts as the latter does to the dream world. They belong to a world to which one has to awaken out of the ordinary physical realm in just the way one wakes out of one's dream world into the physical. It is the attitude one has in reading that gives things the right coloring. That attitude can, of course, be brought to life in present-day human beings in a variety of ways. They are all described and there to choose from in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But modern man also needs to go through the transitional phase—one not to be confused with actually beholding higher worlds—of waking up in the encounter with the soul-spiritual aspect of his fellowman to the point of living into the spiritual world just as he awakes from dreams into the physical world through the stimulus of light and sound, etc.

We must rise to an understanding of this matter. We have to come to understand what anthroposophy ought to be within the Anthroposophical Society. It should be a path to the spirit. When it becomes that, community building will be the outcome.

But anthroposophy must really be applied to life. That is the essential thing, my dear friends. How essential it is can be illustrated by an example close at hand. After we had had many smaller meetings with a varying number of people there in Stuttgart and had debated what should be done to consolidate the Society, I came together with the young people. I am not referring to the meeting I reported on yesterday, which was held later; this was a prior meeting, but also one held at night. These particular young people were all students. Well, first there was some talk about the best way to arrange things so that the Society would function properly, and so on. But after awhile the conversation shifted to anthroposophy itself. We got right into its very essence because these young men and women felt the need to enquire into the form studies ought to take in future, how the problem of doctoral dissertations should be handled, and other such questions. It was not possible to answer them superficially; we had to plunge right into anthroposophy. In other words, we began with philistine considerations and immediately got into questions of anthroposophy and its application, such as, “How does one go about writing a doctoral dissertation as an anthroposophist? How does one pursue a subject like chemistry?” Anthroposophy proved itself life-oriented, for deliberations such as these led over into it quite of themselves.

The point is that anthroposophy should never remain abstract learning. Matters can, of course, be so arranged that people are summoned to a meeting called for the purpose of deciding how the Society should be set up, with a conversation about anthroposophy as a further item on the agenda. This would be a superficial approach. I am not suggesting it, but rather a much more inward one that would lead over quite of itself from a consideration of everyday problems to the insight that anthroposophy should be called upon to help solve them. One sees the quickening effect it has on life in just such a case as the one cited, where people were discussing the re-shaping of the Society only to end up, quite as a matter of organic necessity, in a discussion of how the anthroposophist and the scientific philistine must conceive the development of the embryo from their respective standpoints. We must make a practice of this rather than of a system of double-entry bookkeeping that sets down such philistine entries on one page as “Anthroposophical Society,” “Union for a Free Spiritual Life,” and so on. Real life should be going on without a lot of theory and abstractions and a dragging in of supposedly anthroposophical sayings such as “In anthroposophy man must find his way to man,” and so on. Abstractions of this kind must not be allowed to play a role. Instead, a concrete anthroposophical approach should lead straight to the core of every matter of concern. When that happens, one seldom hears the phrase, “That is anthroposophical, or un-anthroposophical.” Indeed, in such cases the word “anthroposophy” is seldom spoken. We need to guard against fanatical talk.

My dear friends, this is not a superficial matter, as you will see. At the last Congress in Vienna I had to give twelve lectures on a wide range of subjects, and I set myself the task of never once mentioning the word “anthroposophy.” And I succeeded! You will not discover the word “anthroposophy” or “anthroposophical” in a single one of the twelve lectures given last June in Vienna. The experiment was a success. Surely one can make a person's acquaintance without having any special interest in whether his name is Mueller and what his title is. One just takes him as he is. If we take anthroposophy livingly, just as it is, without paying much attention to what its name is, this will be a good course for us to adopt.

We will speak further about these things tomorrow, and I will then give you something more in the way of a report.