The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Before I proceed to the important consequences of spiritual science, which deal with the moral, social and religious forces of the human being, that are particularly relevant to the present day, I would like to insert a consideration today of what spiritual science has to say about the physical and mental health of the human being. Such a consideration as today's is justified because, after all, a person can only set humane and dignified moral goals, set social tasks and bring forth a corresponding religious life from the depths of his soul if these goals and achievements are based on what can be called his physical, mental and spiritual health.

You will assume from the outset that when we speak about the foundations of health in the spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical sense, then the spiritual and soul factors that come into consideration will be particularly touched upon. Now, however, such a consideration immediately encounters one of the oldest and, one might say, most controversial questions of human world view: the question of the connection between the soul and spirit in the human being and the physical body in general. Much has been thought about and much has been investigated with the means of various scientific fields regarding this question: How does the spiritual-soul of man actually relate to the physical body?

The spiritual science meant here must take the view that it cannot regard this question, as it is usually asked, from the outset as a correctly asked one. The usual question is: How does the human spirit or soul relate to the body, to the physical organization? This does not take into account whether the soul condition and soul strength that we can call the arbitrary of the human being, might not perhaps found a special relationship between spirit and body in different ways in different people, whether certain circumstances might not intervene through precisely these forces that the human being develops in his soul, in his physical organization. And this question can actually only be treated by a spiritual-scientific consideration, such as the one I took the liberty of presenting to you yesterday. For if we consider what has led the science of the West to its triumphs in the sense in which it was characterized yesterday, we must say that it is not an element that leads to the human being, but rather an element that, in a certain respect, actually removes us from the human being.

What, in particular, does the scientist who has adopted the principles of the last three to four centuries strive for in his science? He strives in particular to gain such ideas about external things and also about man, in which as little as possible, or even better, no human feelings and impulses of will interfere. The more one is able to keep apart from scientific observation everything that can be called subjective and personal, the more one believes that the ideal of this scientific observation has been fulfilled. The physicist and the biologist no longer believe that they can fulfil their task if they mix anything into their findings that can only be grasped inwardly in the soul.

If I may recall what I characterized yesterday as an ideal of oriental world view, which admittedly belongs to a distant past, it must be said that since the whole person was brought up for that transformation, for that development of human nature, which in the Orient formed the basis of a world view, this method was the complete opposite of what appears to us today as a scientific ideal.

Now, when we devote ourselves to such things, we have to discard many of the prejudices that apply, I would say, as a matter of course. However, in a short time these will no longer be matters of course, but prejudices that have been created by the education of humanity over the last three to four centuries.

If we really delve into the fundamental character of what characterizes all our thinking, impregnated as it is with science, we find that only one part, one link in the whole of human nature, actually finds favor with this thinking today : that which may be called the intellectual element, the element that rises to thoughts free of feeling and will, that wants to add nothing from its own subjective human nature to this process of imagining. But as a result, the whole human being as such does not participate in the most important scientific work, but only that part of the human being that is the bearer of the intellectual soul life.

What I characterized yesterday as the truly Western striving for a spiritual-scientific world view wants to develop the soul forces that produce a world view out of the whole of human nature, without returning to oriental ideals. Therefore, yesterday I had to characterize the paths of knowledge that lead to such an anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific world view in the following way. While the man who is merely scientific develops intellectualized thinking through his experiments or his observations of nature, the one who wants to ascend to a spiritual-scientific view must draw purified feelings and purified will impulses from the depths of his soul life. He must indeed immerse himself in a world of thought. He must be able to work in an intellectual way just as only the most exact scientist can. But he stands in a different way to intellectuality with his humanity than this exact scientist does. He immerses himself in worlds of ideas, he immerses himself in that which otherwise only the pale, shadowy thought delivers. But just as one otherwise only participates in the events of external life with one's sympathies and antipathies, with one's whole emotional world, just as one otherwise only participates in the demands of life with one's will impulses, so in the case of someone who wants to seek the path into the spiritual world in the sense of this spiritual science, feeling, willing, sympathies and antipathies accompany thoughts and ideas. We connect an inner element of sympathy or antipathy, an inner volition, with the way in which the ideas work, how they relate to one another. We would otherwise only have this kind of connection with a person of flesh and blood, or with nature in a lesser sense, or we develop it when we are hungry or thirsty or when other tasks of ordinary life arise. The inner life is as active in the volition under the influence of hunger and thirst as it is in the feelings that one develops towards loved or hated people, as it is in the methods that are to lead to spiritual insight. The whole human being, with all their feelings and intentions, participates in these methods. This develops different insights, different relationships to the external world and also to other people than mere intellectual activity.

If the insights that become the content of spiritual science in this way – which, after all, are a closed book to the broadest sections of contemporary humanity, not because the spiritual scientists seal this book with seven seals, but because those who should approach this spiritual science so that they need not approach it, first seal it with the seven seals of their prejudices and their scorn and derision - when this content of spiritual science is then taken up by people, when the soul of the human being unites with it, it therefore also works differently than the content of mere intellectual knowledge. It takes hold of the whole soul of the human being directly. It pours energies and forces into the whole soul of the human being. And when the content of spiritual science is gained in such a way that it corresponds to the great world-law connections, then it pours, so to speak, the same forces into the human soul from which the human organism is built. For the human organism is built out of the forces of the world. Spiritual scientific knowledge, in turn, goes back to these forces of the world. Thus, there must be an inner harmony between what is recognized through spiritual science from the perspective of world law and what arises from the organization of the human being as the human being himself, in that the human being receives his own organization from the foundations of the world order.

But this has the consequence that there is a completely different relationship between what one takes in as the content of spiritual science and the whole development of the human being, and what only occupies the intellect, such as natural science or, as today, social science and the like, and this human being himself. But there is something that obscures this relationship. This makes it difficult for anyone who has not yet penetrated to the actual meaning of spiritual science to form a precise idea of such things. It must be said that just as the healthy nature of the human being is organized in a healthy way out of the world, so too is the content of spiritual science gained in a healthy way and can therefore, since it encompasses the whole human being, not only have an effect on the intellect but also on the whole human being. If one says this, then today, anyone who is a layperson in spiritual science will draw the following conclusion. He will say: Of course, I will hypothetically admit that you, as a spiritual scientist, draw healthy thoughts from your view of the world. Thoughts that are intellectual and shadowy have no effect on the human organism; yours are conceived with reference to the whole nature of man, they therefore have an effect on the human organism, and we shall be able to use them, let us assume hypothetically, in the sense of healthy human nature. Let us say, then, that the thoughts which you develop as healthy thoughts through your spiritual science will be used in such a way that we imbibe them and let them take effect in us, and then, like a medicine, they can work against the aberrations of human nature. |

However obvious this hypothesis may be, and however much credence it has found among certain superstitious people, it corresponds little to reality as I have just stated it. And here it is necessary, I might say, to touch on the foundation that must be laid in order to understand the interaction between healthy spiritual and mental life and healthy physical life in the right way. When a human being enters physical existence through birth or through conception from spiritual worlds, by clothing himself with a physical body, we see that what the soul and spirit takes on with this physical body needs time to take effect. The child arrives in the physical world with its predispositions. But it must grow up. We can observe how, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade, the physical organization first brings forth what is spiritually and soulfully predisposed in the human being. Those who, through the spiritual science referred to here, acquire the ability to penetrate into the real connection between the spiritual and soul life and the bodily and physical, come to the following realization, not through some kind of logical fantasy, but through a penetrating, very conscientious observation of life that is continued over long periods of time:

Just as the whole nature of the human being takes time to integrate as a spiritual-soul element of the physical organization, so everything that we take in spiritually and soulfully first takes time to integrate into the physical-bodily organization. So when I, as an eight-year-old child, or as a twenty-year-old, or only as a fifty-year-old, take in something of spiritual-soul content, when something of such content takes hold of my soul, then this content is, in relation to my bodily organization where it enters my soul, as young as the soul of a child in relation to the bodily organization, and such soul content takes time to take effect in the body. Therefore, one cannot hope that, in the manner of American thought healing, one can invent thoughts that are introduced into the person like a liquid medicine and that work immediately. No, the transformation that the spiritual-soul content undergoes as it increasingly penetrates the bodily-physical requires time. One spiritual-soul content needs less time, the other more, but time must elapse between the moment when a spiritual-soul content is taken up in the abstract, when we penetrate it cognitively, and the state when it has organized us thoroughly.

What I am telling you here is not just any old idea that can be carelessly tacked onto life's phenomena. Rather, it is something that is discovered as conscientiously as any laboratory or clinical result, and much more conscientiously. In such investigations, one starts out from the paths that ordinary, everyday spiritual assimilation undergoes in the human being, in that the human being can later conjure up from the depths of his soul that which he has once taken into that soul, in terms of memory. In the course of their lives, the vast majority of people simply bypass the paths that the soul life takes in relation to memory; they do not observe how it is quite differently experienced when we remember something that we experienced decades ago and something that we experienced three days ago. We certainly draw both from the depths of our soul. But what we experienced three days ago or even three years ago proves, to someone with the ability to observe such things, to be something that is drawn, I might say, from the shallower depths of our soul life, and is still entirely mental content. What one remembers as an older person from one's childhood experiences is what one brings up from the depths of the soul. If one observes the process, one sees how it is already intimately intertwined with the whole body, how it permeates our body like a soul blood, how it has strongly taken on the character of the forces that denote the habitual in us.

This, of course, is only the beginning of the detailed method by which it is observed how, over time, what we absorb as spiritual-mental content first unites with the physical body. From this you will realize how spiritual science must demand that its way of caring for physical and mental health be considered not only among the arts that have an immediate effect, but how it appeals to what, first of all, is child-rearing, and secondly, what is national education and national life. For spiritual science must work with foresight, I would say with a prophetic vision, with regard to human health.

If you see through what I am touching on here, you will only then realize what it means when spiritual-scientific impulses are incorporated into educational methods, when our children are actually educated in such a way that the educational impulses are kept in a spiritual-scientific sense; and then the things that are taught to children are imbued, not with spiritual-scientific theories – the world has no need to fear that – but with a spiritual-scientific attitude, with a spiritual-scientific disposition of soul, and above all with a spiritual-scientific pedagogical fire. This will penetrate the child's mind, and will then connect with the soul and physical organization, growing and, because it is healthy, merging with the human organization in a healthy way, making it healthy and strong, and resistant to external influences.

When the world once realizes the full significance of what spiritual science can achieve here, then gradually all the beautiful theories of infectious diseases and the like, which today are only viewed in a one-sided way, will not disappear, but they will become less important. Much more attention will be paid to the way in which bacilli and bacteria enter our organism than to how strong we have become in soul and spirit to resist these invasions. This strength in human nature will not require an external remedy, but the remedy that strengthens people internally from the spirit and from the soul through a healthy spiritual-scientific content. In this way, public health care is placed on a fundamentally different basis through spiritual science than anyone could have dreamt of, who believes that the salvation of human development can only lie in the continuation of current views.

Among many things, I would like to draw attention to just one, to which I have already drawn the attention of some prominent figures here in this city from other points of view. Today, for example, in education, in teaching, an enormous value is placed on the so-called contemplation, and rightly so, because within certain limits it is good to lead the child directly to the external or internal contemplation and to let his ideas and concepts be imagined by him in such a way that he draws them himself. But not everything that is needed for the child's development into a human being can be brought to it in this way. And so much must enter into the child merely by looking up to his educator, to his teacher as his authority, to the one who develops a certain fire in educating, in teaching, who transmits imponderables from himself to the child with his fire. There will then be some things that the child absorbs in the belief that the authority believes in them; but it does not yet understand them. Then the time may come, perhaps fifteen or twenty years after the child has left school, when he remembers: “You learned that then and didn't understand it. Now you have matured, now you are bringing it up from the depths of your soul. Now you understand it.” Anyone who is familiar with the soul life of a human being knows that such an understanding, mediated by later ripening, of what one has carried in one's soul for years, perhaps decades, develops forces that strengthen the human being inwardly; nothing pours such energy into the will from the innermost part of the soul as learning to understand something through one's own ripening power, something that one took in years ago on authority, on someone's saying. In this way, pedagogy can be combined with ideal and spiritual hygiene. When such far-reaching views are fully integrated into our public health care system, then the spiritual that is rooted in humanity will be able to truly unfold its energies, which are so beneficial for humanity. While everything we absorb through our intellect and its development is, so to speak, detached from the human being and therefore cannot have an effect on the human being, what is drawn from the whole human nature, the spiritual-scientific, can also have an effect on this whole human nature. And if, in the field of medicine, we look not only for momentary success but also for a system of health care that takes into account the laws of the world, and thus also the laws of time, we have the opportunity to work in this direction with tremendous benefit. Unfortunately, however, the nature of present-day humanity is such that it does not like to look at that which eludes the moment and which, I might say, goes into the great with its effect. Modern man would prefer to take leave of the laws of the world and become ill at will. You will understand that I do not mean this quite literally, but it is something that human nature tends towards. And then, again, he would like to be cured in the twinkling of an eye. But what must be borne in mind is that the strong inner energy should be developed in individual people's education, and indeed throughout their whole lives, in order to really bring to fruition the healing powers of the soul, of the spirit, in people. From this point of view, it will be seen that physical and mental health depend very much on the development of such a strong and vigorous soul life in people that this strong and vigorous soul life can actually intervene in the physical being.

To do this, it is necessary to broaden our perspective over longer periods of time. That which affects our intellect does not affect our will at the same time. And although we may never have influenced our will, we can strain our will at any age with ever so healthy ideas and thoughts, in order to act on our soul from the intellect, we will not succeed. For from the intellect, no spiritual-soul content can directly intervene in human nature. We must also influence the will. We influence the will through everything that arouses our interest in the world, that arouses our share, our loving participation in the world. People often go through the world, I would say, with a certain mental deficiency. Of course, there are also deeper causes, but one of the causes of imbecility is that such people have not understood how to develop a broad and deep interest in everything that lives and works around them when they were children, because this development of interest affects the will. And only when the will has been strengthened in this way can that which affects the intellect later gain influence over the whole human being. The worst thing that can happen to a person in terms of their physical and mental health is that their physical organization separates from their spiritual being. In mediumship, this separation of the physical organization of the human being from his soul and spiritual being is brought about in an almost experimental way. We see that the spiritual-soul being is virtually paralyzed, put to sleep for a certain time, so that the bodily-physical, with which, however, the spiritual is also always connected, seems to work automatically. Seen from the right point of view, mediumship is nothing more than a real illness, a real discord between the spiritual-mental, which has become quite unenergetic, and the physical-bodily, which therefore gains the upper hand. Therefore, mediumship, when it is radically extended, is always associated with the paralysis of the will, with the entire paralysis of the soul of the medium concerned. And since the moral can only arise from the soul's energy, there is also, as a rule, a certain moral decline associated with mediumship. It is precisely from the insight into the connection between spiritual and mental health and physical and bodily health that everything that is the dark side of mediumship can truly be seen.

If only those who judge mediumship without knowledge of the actual essence of spiritual science did not all too often lump spiritual science together with all the aberrations of the zeitgeist or of modern times in general, as I am pointing out here! It is certainly easier to appeal to spiritless mediumship to learn something about the spiritual world than to appeal to spiritual science, which demands effort. When one appeals to mediumship, one has the spirit reported by a medium, but first one has to eliminate the spirit. It is a convenient method to get to the spirit. Spiritual science, however, demands that one not switch off the spirit in another in order to learn something about the spirit, but that one bring the spirit within oneself to higher development and unfoldment, so that one can direct one's forces into the spiritual world and experience the peculiarities of the spiritual world there. If one were to look at spiritual science without prejudice, one would see how it is the universal remedy against such aberrations as those to which I have now alluded in a few words.

Thus, it can be said that health care is a necessary consequence of what spiritual science wants to bring into human development. But of course human nature is subject to a wide variety of influences. No one should interpret what I have discussed so far as if I meant that the cultivation of spiritual science should one day eliminate all diseases from the world. I certainly do not mean that at all. Diseases have their causes. The process of healing is more important than the knowledge of their causes. And here it is a matter of the fact that spiritual science also has something to say, not only about the care of health, which has spiritual scientific foundations, but that, as with all aspects of life, it also has something to say about medicine itself. It is a fact, though denied by many because they do not want to admit the truth on this point, but it nevertheless exists, that many people who have really thought things through and have gone through medical studies today, when they then feel abandoned to suffering humanity, are afflicted by the most bitter mental anguish because they then realize what demands the human organism makes on human insight when it strays from the healthy into the diseased, and how little can be gained for this medical work from the means and methods of knowledge of the purely scientific approach. The shadowy side of mere natural science observation is clearly shown in medicine, which, incidentally, also has a light side with regard to the observation of mere external nature. In medicine, the dark side is there. For one has only to consider the following: This natural science, it may be said once more, places its main emphasis on completely excluding the human being by looking at the world in an intellectualistic way and seeking its natural laws in an intellectualistic way through experiments. One learns only what can be learned from observation of the effect of this or that remedy on the sick person, of the effect in general of this or that natural product on the human being. But one lacks the inner vision of the connection, firstly, of the whole human nature, but secondly, of the connection between what is produced outside in nature, be it as food or as a remedy, and the human being itself. And only when one wishes to proceed from pure natural science to medicine in such an unprejudiced way does one realize what it means to exclude the human being from the point of view and then to apply what has been gained from such a point of view to human nature. Natural science excludes everything that can arise in human nature in order, as it says, to arrive at true objectivity. And it does achieve objectivity. But this objectivity does not include the human being. Man first excludes himself. It is no wonder that he does not include the human being in the science that he is now developing. Now this science is to be applied to the human being. It cannot be applied because no consideration has been given to the human being.

The complete opposite is the case with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Here, the whole human being is called upon to gain insights into the human being and the world. In this case, however, the insights are also based differently. In order to make myself clear on this point, I would also like to recall today how the spiritual science that is meant here is basically only one expression of what was established in the first element as a new knowledge of nature by the much-misunderstood natural scientist, not the poet Goethe. It is precisely for this reason that we call our building out on the hill in Dornach the Goetheanum, because we want to practise Goetheanism, but not the kind of Goetheanism practised by Goethe researchers who believe that the Goethean spirit came to an end in 1832 and that in order to practise Goethean science one has to study what this Goethean spirit has produced. No, we are pursuing a Goetheanism that does not go back to 1832, but which is a Goetheanism through the continuing influence of the Goethean spirit today from 1920. But what appears in Goethe in a very elementary way can today be grasped in a higher education by the course of human development.

Now I want to mention something seemingly quite remote, but by means of which I will be able to illustrate how one can reach the highest heights of spiritual science, starting from Goetheanism. Goethe proceeded from the similarities, the relationships, especially in the nature of living beings. It became clear to him how the whole plant is only a complicated leaf and a single plant leaf is an entire plant, only simply formed. Thus, Goethe saw in every part of an organism the metamorphosis, the transformed form of the other part. He sought to discover the origin of the enigmatic forms of the human skull bones, namely for the unbiased observer. As he himself recounts, he once went to the Jewish cemetery in Venice and found a sheep's skull that had split particularly well. The bones had fallen apart in such a way that their shape had a direct effect on Goethe's soul. And as he looked at this shape, he said to himself: Yes, these skull bones are nothing other than transformed, metamorphosed backbone bones. If the simple, almost ring-shaped vertebrae of the spine transform themselves – so Goethe believed – in such a way that certain extensions grow stronger and certain bulges flatten, then the skull bones arise from the transformed growth of the simple vertebrae of the spine. In this way, Goethe was able to express for the first time what, with a certain modification, is also a result of our present-day human anatomy: that the skull bones are transformed spinal cord vertebrae. In connection with this, because it will also explain the matter I am referring to, I may relate a kind of personal experience. These Goethean views have been particularly close to me since the late 1870s. Well, I already started writing about the Goethean scientific world view back then. This view of the transformation of the skull bones, the vertebral bones into skull bones, was also part of what I developed in more detail for the Goethean world view. But I said to myself, how could it have escaped such a universal mind as Goethe's that when one speaks of the transformation of the vertebral bones into skull bones, one must proceed to the view of the transformation of the simple nervous structure in the spinal cord into the complicated structure of the brain, so that one must also look at the brain as a transformation of the simple nervous structure that sits inside the spinal cord vertebra. And when I was appointed to Weimar at the end of the 1880s, to work at the Goethe and Schiller Archive on the new edition or the first edition of Goethe's unpublished writings, it was naturally a pleasant task for me to examine whether there might be something to be found somewhere, a clue that Goethe also had this view of the transformation of form of the brain from simple nerve ganglia. And lo and behold, when I got hold of a notebook with poorly written pencil strokes from the 1790s, I found Goethe had noted down this view of the human brain exactly as I had suspected!

I would like to point out another way of looking at things – admittedly, it is only just emerging in Goethe in an elementary form – a way of looking at things other than that which merely observes the laws of nature in an intellectual way. I would like to point out a way of looking at things that is instinctively within Goethe, which draws on the whole human being. In the kind of dissecting, analytical experimental method that is common in natural science today, one does not see such transformations correctly, because one must take everything into account, not just what one can measure and count. One must also take into account what one can only observe in terms of its intensity, its quality. In spiritual science, one must advance even further. There one must actually observe things according to the qualities that the spirit of the world, the soul of the world, impresses upon them, which are not found in the external scientific method.

Then one arrives at such results as the one that one might believe to be perhaps only an aperçu, but which is not an aperçu, but the result of spiritual scientific work, which I may say I have been working on for more than thirty years, that result which divides man into three, I would say, subdivisions of his nature. It is usually assumed that what is spiritual in man is soul-like and bound to his sensory nervous system. That is indeed today's one-sided view – the one who is familiar with the development of science understands that it had to come to this – that today man believes that the spiritual-soul life depends solely and exclusively on the nervous system. You can read what I have to say about this point from spiritual scientific investigations in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul), which was published two years ago. There I tried to show that only the intellectual-sensual life is connected to the sensory nervous system as its tool in human nature, that which observes objects sensually and processes them intellectually. In contrast, the human being's emotional life is directly, not only indirectly, connected to the rhythmic life in the human being, that rhythmic life which includes the respiratory system, the blood circulation system connected to it, and which is connected to the carrier of the intellectual system in a peculiar way, namely like this: we have the so-called cerebral fluid in us as the most important component of our brain. Our brain is, however, first and foremost a nervous organ that has to process what is conveyed by the senses. But this brain floats in brain water. And this brain water, which fills our main cavity, our spinal cord cavity, has a special task. When we exhale, the brain water sinks from top to bottom. The diaphragm rises, causing the brain water to sink; the opposite happens when we inhale. So we are in a continuous rhythm of brain water rising and falling.

This rhythm of the ascending and descending brain water is the outer carrier of the emotional life in man. And through the interaction of that which the brain nerves experience with that which arises as such a rhythm through the brain water, that which is the exchange between feelings and thoughts arises.

This is an area where anthroposophically oriented knowledge of the human being has a long way to go if the human being is to be properly understood in his soul-spiritual and physical being. Only when one has developed those methods of knowledge within oneself, which are characterized in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science”, in other of my writings, then one really learns to recognize, by having an inner soul life that is able to see through such things, how emotional life can be separated from intellectual life. Otherwise they mix. And the person with ordinary knowledge does not learn to recognize that the brain, that the nerve-sense apparatus, is only the carrier of the intellectual, while the rhythmic in the human being is the carrier of the life of feeling.

And in the same way, the metabolism is the carrier of the will, wherever it occurs; the metabolism in the brain is also the carrier of the will. But with the nervous-sensory activity, with the rhythmic activity, with the metabolic activity, the essence of the human being in relation to his functions is exhausted. That is the whole human being. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to grasp this whole human being through the powers of knowledge, again from the whole human being. Because it draws on everything that comes not only from the intellect, but also from the life of feeling and its carrier, the rhythmic activity of the human being, and because it also draws its insights from what lives and weaves spiritually in the human being's metabolism, it can grasp the whole human being. Only in this way does it actually learn to recognize what the lungs, liver, spleen and other organs mean in the human being; for this can only be recognized by taking the spiritual impregnation of things as a guide.

In this way, one acquires an intuitive knowledge of the human being, and one paves the way for an intuitive medicine. By looking at the human being as a mechanism, one does not learn to recognize him. You only learn to recognize the mechanical aspects of the human body. By taking hold of the human being in this way, by further expanding the Goethean approach, which is intuitive, and by further spiritualizing it, the individual organs of the human being in their metamorphoses become transparent. But then, when one has come to know what these individual metamorphoses of the human organism mean, one can place the human being, who one has now grasped, back into nature. If we first recognize nature in such a way that we exclude the human being, then we cannot place the human being back into nature. If we really get to know the human being as I have described him, we can also place him back into nature. We study his organology and we learn to recognize the deep relationship that exists between the human being and the cosmos. Then the connection between the food taken from the outer nature and the human organization becomes clear. But then the connection between the remedy taken from the outer nature or from the soul in the case of spiritual healing and the whole human nature also becomes clear.

I could only sketch out this view of the human being. But what I have sketched out is the way out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into an intuitive medicine, into the kind of medicine that, I would like to say, so many long for today, who have gone through the course of medical studies without prejudice and then feel released upon suffering humanity. They miss the intuitive, spiritual element in what has impressed them in human knowledge and the art of healing. It is precisely in medicine that it is most intensely apparent what a science can achieve when it excludes the human being from its methods.

Oh, I know that what I am saying is still facing a wall of prejudice in the present. But this wall of prejudice must be addressed again and again. It will take a long time before a larger number of people will attempt the path outlined here, because it is less convenient than the path taken today. Just as the whole plant is, in the Goethean sense, a complex leaf, so the whole human being is, in a sense, composed of three people: the thinking person, who perceives through the senses; the rhythmic person; and the metabolic person. Each represents a person in a certain way, and the three people must be built up to form the whole nature of the human being. And each link in the human being relates to external nature in a different way. But what that mysterious connection is between remedy and disease can only be grasped by the intuitive medicine characterized here.

I also know that many people today still feel that it is presumptuous of the spiritual science meant here to think, among many other things, of reforming medicine. It must think of it out of a sacred obligation to the progress of humanity. For he must realize that the path trodden by natural science in the last three or four centuries, which has been a blessing in so many fields, can never become a healing one for the treatment of the sick person. Just as the artist cannot be a true artist if he only knows the aesthetic laws intellectually, so the physician cannot be a healer if he only knows what are today called natural laws. He must be able to live with his whole being in the weaving and being of nature itself. He must be able to immerse himself in the creative and weaving nature. Then he will be able to follow with heartfelt interest the paths that nature takes when it is ill. Then, from the observation of the healthy person, the observation of the sick person will become clear to him.

Not only does spiritual science have something to contribute to hygiene, which it gains from spiritual forces, but spiritual science must also open up the prospect of an intuitive medicine. Anyone who engages with this spiritual science will hear how I have today only characterized in broad strokes and in general, in the abstract, a path to an intuitive medicine, but how much of what I have outlined here is already developed, how much is just waiting for the moment when the official representatives of medical knowledge come and acquire the insight that it must be taken up. This applies to physical illnesses of the body as well as to illnesses of the soul itself. Today, one must already appear immodest if one wants to point out what spiritual science believes it can contribute to the healing and nature of the human being on the basis of sound knowledge.

I would like to make the transition to what I will deal with tomorrow about the moral, religious and social nature of man by pointing out, in conclusion, how, precisely in such a field as that of a truly intuitive medicine, it would be the ideal of the spiritual scientist to be able to express himself before those who are truly experts. If they would come and allow their expertise to be spoken without prejudice, then they would see how this expertise could be enriched by spiritual science. Spiritual science does not fear the criticism of experts. Spiritual science is not amateurish dilettantism. Spiritual science attempts to create from deeper scientific foundations than those of ordinary outer science today. Spiritual science knows that lay opinion, not expertise, is what it might fear if it had not long since unlearned fear for easily understandable reasons. Spiritual science has no need to fear or be afraid of expertise or impartiality. It knows that the more expertly its results are considered, the more they will be taken up in a positive sense. Particularly with regard to the perspective of an intuitive medicine, one would like to recall an old saying, the universal value of which I do not wish to examine today, but which in a certain limited sense must certainly apply to the approach that willingly shows itself to be applied in the art of treating the sick person. The ancients said: Only the same can recognize the same. In order to heal the person, one must first recognize him. What science does today in the human being is not the whole human being, therefore not the human being, therefore not the human being. When the whole human being is called upon to recognize the human being, then the same - the human being - will be recognized by the same - the human being. And then an art of human knowledge and human treatment will arise that, on the one hand, will maintain human health in social coexistence as much as it can be maintained, and which, on the other hand, will treat illness as it can only be treated from the combination of all the real healing factors.

A view of the world, as it is intended to be in spiritual science, must prove itself by giving people support for what they need in life. The support for life must be what we can call moral strength. But the support for life must also include, among other things, what we can call the inner soul-condition that can arise in a person from feeling that he is a member of the great cosmic whole, from feeling so incorporated into the cosmic whole that it corresponds to what one can call one's religious need. As for man's inner moral strength, Schopenhauer spoke an excellent word, even if the further remarks he made on these words in his own way seem quite disputable. He said: It is easy to preach morals, but to found morals is difficult. This is indeed a true saying of life. For in general, to recognize what is good, what the moral life demands of us, is relatively easy as a matter of intellect. But to draw from the primal forces of the soul those impulses that are necessary in man to place himself in the fabric of life as a morally powerful being, that is difficult. But that is what it means to found morality. To found morality is not merely to say what is good, what is moral. To found morality is to bring to man such impulses, which, by absorbing them into his soul life, become a real strength, a real efficiency in him.

Now, at the present stage of civilization, man's moral consciousness is embedded in the world in a very unique way, in a way that is not always fully consciously observed, but which is the reason for many uncertainties and insecurities that prevail in people's lives. On the one hand, we have our intellectually oriented knowledge, our insight, which makes it possible for us to penetrate into natural phenomena, which makes it possible for us to absorb the whole world into our imagination to a certain extent, which makes it possible for us, in an admittedly very limited way, as we have seen in the last two reflections here, to also make ideas about the nature of man.

Alongside what flashes up in us as our cognitive faculty, as everything that is, I would say, directed by our human logic, alongside all this, another element of our being asserts itself, the one from which our moral duty, our moral love, in short, the impulses for moral action, arise. And it must be said that modern man lives, on the one hand, in his cognitive abilities and their results, and on the other hand, in his moral impulses. Both are soul contents. But for this modern man, there is basically little mediation between the two, so little mediation that, for example, Kant could say: There are two things that are most precious to him in the world: the starry heavens above him, the moral law within him. But precisely this Kantian way of thinking, which lies dormant in the modern human being, knows of no bridge between what leads to knowledge of the world on the one hand and what moral impulses are on the other. Kant regards the life of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason and the moral life in his Critique of Practical Reason as if by chance.

And if we are completely honest with our sense of the times, we must actually say that there is an abyss here between two ways of experiencing human nature. Today's science, in forming ideas about the course of world evolution in the most diverse fields of knowledge, regards the workings of nature from the simplest living creatures, indeed from inorganic nature, right up to the human being. It forms ideas about how this world, which is directly before us, came into being. It also forms ideas about the processes by which the former end of this world, which is immediately before us, could take place. But now, from within man, who is nevertheless interwoven with this natural order, there wells up what he calls his moral ideals. And man perceives these moral ideals in such a way that he can only feel himself valuable if he follows these ideals, if there is agreement between him and these ideals. Man makes his value dependent on these moral ideals. But if we imagine that the forces of nature, which become accessible to man through his knowledge, are once upon a time approaching their end, where does today's sense of time leave what man creates out of his moral ideals, out of his moral impulses? Anyone who is honest, who does not shroud today's consciousness in nebulousness, must admit that, in the face of present-day scientific knowledge, these moral ideals are something by which man must guide himself in life, but by which nothing is created that could once triumph when the earth, together with man, comes to an end.

It is, for today's consciousness, one must only admit it, no bridge between the cognitive abilities that lead to natural knowledge and the abilities that govern us by being moral beings. Man is not aware of everything that goes on in the depths of his soul. Much remains unconscious. But what rumbles unconsciously down there asserts itself in life through disharmony, through mental or even physical illness. And anyone who just wants to see what is going on today without prejudice will have to say: our life is surging, and there are people in this life with all kinds of mental and physical contradictions. And that which surges up wells up from a depth in which something is indeed active that is like those weak human powers that cannot build a bridge between the moral life and the knowledge of nature. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science addresses these questions in the following way. It must abandon everything that is, on the one hand, only a theoretical view of external reality. It must therefore recognize everything that, as I explained in the last two lectures here, would like to exclude the human being from this view of nature, so that a true objectivity can arise.

What I characterized as the path to the spiritual world is presented, to summarize what I said earlier, in the following way: First of all, anyone who wants to enter the spiritual world must devote themselves to a certain inner soul-spiritual work. In my books, I have summarized this inner practice, this inner spiritual-soul work, as meditation and concentration work. This work enables people to relate to their imaginative life differently than they do in ordinary life when we observe natural phenomena or even social life. It is a complete being-with-the-ideas, which otherwise only accompany our outer impressions like shadows. Just as I said, we usually face people or nature or anything else in physical life with our feelings, with our sympathies and antipathies, and we face facts with our will emotions. How these ideas arise, that disturbs us, that challenges our sympathy and antipathy, that stimulates our entire life force. This becomes our destiny. While we are outwardly quite calm, inwardly we are going through something that is by no means weaker than what we otherwise go through as life's destiny in the outer world. We are, so to speak, doubling our lives. While we usually get excited, develop sympathy and antipathy, and assert volitional impulses only in the outer life, in relation to outer events, we carry what otherwise only occupies us in this outer material world into our inner life of thought. If we can do this — and everyone can do it if they practise as I have described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in my 'Occult Science' —, if we can really carry this out, then there comes a moment for us when in which he not only has images of the world when he opens his senses, when he hears or sees, but where he has images purely from the life of imagination, so full of content images, if I may use the expression, so full of sap, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception. They come through this thus intensified and sharpened life of imagination. Without sensory perception, we live in a world of images, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception.

But another significant experience is linked to this – these things can only be understood as experiences; abstract logic, so-called reasoning does not lead to them. Another experience is connected to this: We learn through such practice what it means to develop a spiritual-soul activity independently of the physical activity. The moment comes for the human being when he can rightly admit to himself, if I may put it this way, that he is a materialist, however strange and paradoxical that may sound. At this moment he can say: yes, in ordinary life we are completely dependent on the tools of our body. We think through the instrument of our nervous system. But that is precisely what characterizes this outer life, that we traverse it only by developing the soul and spiritual when it avails itself of the bodily instruments. But the soul and spiritual is not dependent on merely availing itself of the bodily instruments. Through the efforts described, it can free itself from the physical tool, can become free of the body. No matter how much speculation and philosophizing one does with materialism, if one only brings against it what can be known from ordinary life, one will never refute it, because for ordinary life, materialism is right. Materialism can only be refuted through spiritual practice, by detaching the soul-spiritual from the bodily in direct experience. One visualizes – I called it imaginative visualization in the books mentioned – one visualizes, but outside of the body, whereby the “outside” is of course not to be imagined spatially, but independently of the body. This is one side of what one must get to know within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in order to really build the bridge that cannot be built in the way we have described. What one attains in this way as the content of imaginative knowledge is not in the human body, but outside of it. This provides the practical explanation that our innermost being was in the spiritual-soul world before it clothed itself with this body. For one is not only outside of the body, one is outside of time, in which one lives with the body. In this way, one really experiences the prenatal, or let us say, the pre-physical conception in man. Just as a light from outside shines into the room, so our prenatal life shines into our present life in this imagination.

What shines in is not just thoughts, it has a living content. This living content reveals itself as something very special. It reveals itself as a certain, I might say, intellectual content. So, as we cultivate, sharpen and strengthen our imaginative life in the way I have described, we come out of ourselves into a will content that has something living about it at the same time. It is the will content that creates in us what clothes itself in the physical body, what we do not have through heredity, what we do not have at all from the physical world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not arrive at the realization of immortality through speculative processing of ordinary life, but rather through the cultivation of a cognitive faculty that is initially not present in ordinary life. What is particularly important for us today, however, is that in this way we reach beyond our physical body, even beyond the time in which our physical body lives. There one arrives at ideas that are still difficult for most people today to imagine, but which must become an important link in the evolution of humanity towards the future.

And now something very strange comes to light when one not only exercises on one side, that of the life of imagination, but also when one exercises on the side of the life of will. We human beings live, I would say, as Faust goes through life, saying, “I have only run through the world.” We run through the world. Of course, we undergo a development between birth and death, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade; but we undergo this development by, as it were, abandoning ourselves to external objectivity. Hand on heart, how many people do it differently than letting themselves be carried by life, be it by childhood, where adults educate them, or by later life and its fate? They become more perfect because the world makes them more perfect. But what do most people do differently, other than just abandon themselves to the stream of life? However, by abandoning oneself to the stream of life, one does not come to the spiritual path meant here. It is necessary that one takes self-discipline into one's own hands, that one actually works on oneself in such a way that one not only develops through the life that fate brings one, but that one develops further by making up one's mind: you want to implant this or that attitude. Now one works on implanting this attitude. One can undertake something on a small scale, one can do something on a large scale. But there is a big difference between just carrying out something in yourself, in the training of your own nature, by abandoning yourself to life, or taking this training of your own self into your own hands. By taking it into your own hands, you get to know the will in its effectiveness; because you learn to recognize what kind of resistance stands in the way of this will when you want to cultivate it in self-discipline. Oh, one gets to know all kinds of things in this way, one strengthens above all one's own powers of the spiritual-soul, and one will very soon notice when one exercises such exercises in self-discipline – but one must practice them for years – that one then acquires inner powers. These inner powers are of such a nature that we do not find them in outer nature. They are of such a nature that we do not find them in the ordinary life of the soul that we have carried within us before our exercises. We discover these forces only when we engage in such an inner exercise with ourselves. These forces are capable of something very definite: they are capable of absorbing into our own self, in a much more conscious way, the moral impulses that otherwise arise in the soul as if they were instinctive, as if they were indefinite and separate from the cognitive faculties. But understand me correctly, not into the self that we develop in our body, but into the self that we develop when we step out of our body with our imagination in the way described earlier. We cannot get the true form of the moral impulses into our sensual body, into our sensual perception; but we get what stands there so isolated that Kant presented it quite isolated as the categorical imperative, we get that into our self that has separated from the body.

And then what I have described earlier as imagination, as pictorial representations, becomes imbued with what one can call the objective power of moral impulses; it becomes imbued with moral inspiration. We now recognize that what wells up in us as moral imperatives, as moral ideals, is not rooted only in us, but in the whole of the world. We learn, by being outside of our physical being, to recognize that which does not appear in its true form within the physical organization, but in this true form, we recognize it through imaginative beholding, as objective forces of the world.

Such a vision can open up to a person who, with his or her healthy common sense, properly takes in what the spiritual researcher is able to say from his vision of the spiritual world. Anyone who imbues themselves with such a vision feels something very special about what today's popular public lectures are. It may sound strange when I say it, but I would like to say: anyone who unreservedly absorbs this inspiration in their imagination, which coincides with the moral forces that are present in human life, and imagines how can see through something like this in the present through spiritual knowledge, would like to think: if only such knowledge could take hold of people, at least as strongly as they are seized when they hear that X-rays or wireless telegraphy have been found! In view of what is taking place in the soul of a spiritual scientist, one would like to say: it is very necessary for present-day civilization that people should come to appreciate the spiritual forces for human strengthening that can be found in this way, just as much as what can be useful and beneficial in the outer life.

I believe that we have touched on an important challenge of civilization in the present day. The spiritual-scientific insights are, I repeat, not speculation, they are experiences. And the fact that so few people today accept them is because most people allow themselves to be blinded by materialistic scientific views, let their own prejudices stand in their way, do not apply their common sense, and therefore cannot properly

examine what the spiritual scientist says. They always say: we cannot see for ourselves what the spiritual researcher says. I would like to know how many people who believe in the Venus transits have ever seen a Venus transit! I would like to know how many people who say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen have ever observed in a laboratory how to determine that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen and so on. There is a logic of common sense. Through it one can check what the spiritual researcher says. I certainly cannot paint illusions before those who use their common sense, nor can I talk fantasies to them, because they can use their common sense to see whether I speak like a dreamer or whether I speak in logical contexts, whether I speak like someone who puts forward one idea after another, as one does even in the most exact science. Anyone who acquires such a healthy knowledge and understanding of human nature will be able to distinguish whether he has a fantasist in front of him or a person who, by knowing how to clothe his view in healthy logical forms and not giving the impression of a dreamer in other ways, is to be taken seriously. We have to decide many things in life in this way; why should we not decide in this way the most important thing: insight into the order of the world? There is no other way for someone who cannot become a spiritual researcher themselves – but everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, as I have explained in the books mentioned – to determine this; because spiritual science is something that is experienced, something that must be experienced, not something that is only achieved through logical conclusions.

So if you study worldviews, I would say the combination of imagination and inspired morality, you get to know something else, you learn to recognize what the contradiction is between so-called natural causality, natural necessity, and the element in which man lives as in his freedom. For it is only in the element of freedom that we can live with our moral impulses. We look out into the outer nature. Overwhelming for the view of nature that has developed over the last three to four centuries is what is called the necessary connection of the following with the preceding, what is called general causality. Thus, nature, including the human condition, presents itself as if everything were seized by a natural necessity. But then our freedom would be in a sorry state; then we could not act differently than the natural necessity in us compels us to act. Freedom would be an impossibility if the world were as the scientific view that has become popular in the last three to four centuries wants it to be.

But once we have gained the point of view that I have just described, the point of view of observation outside the human body, then everything that is permeated by necessity is, so to speak, presented as a kind of natural body. And this natural body produces a natural soul and a natural spirit in all possible places. The natural body is, as it were, that which has cast and thrown off the nascent world; the natural spirit, the natural soul, is that which grows into the future.

Just as, when I see a corpse before me, this corpse no longer has the possibility of following anything other than the necessities that have been determined by the soul and spirit that dwelled in it, so too that which is corpse-like in external nature has nothing in it of impulses as necessities. But in every place, what grows into the future springs forth. Our natural science has only been accustomed to observing the natural corpse, and therefore sees only necessity everywhere. Spiritual science must be added to this. It will see the life that is sprouting and has sprouted everywhere.

Thus man is placed, on the one hand, in the realm of natural causality and, on the other, in that which is also there but contains no causality. This contains something that is the same as the element of freedom we experience inwardly. We experience this element of freedom as I have described it in my Philosophy of Freedom when we rise to inwardly transparent, pure thinking, which is actually an outflow of our will activity. You can find more details in my Philosophy of Freedom.

Thus, what we gain by creating a possibility of knowledge for ourselves outside the human body carries us into a world where the contrast between natural necessity and freedom becomes explicable. We get to know freedom itself in the world. We learn to feel ourselves in a world in which freedom resides.

When I describe something like this to you, I do not do it just to show you the content of what I am describing, but I want to present it to you show you how man can enter into a certain frame of mind by absorbing knowledge drawn from such regions, by invigorating himself with such knowledge.

Just as we are imbued with joy when we experience an extraordinarily joyful event, as some people, when they have drunk so and so much Moselle wine, are completely imbued with the mood that comes from the Moselle wine, so too can a person's entire state of mind be seized by something so truly spiritual that it permeates the person. When has a person's state of mind been gripped by something, at first only in the outer life, but then in a shadowy way? When the categorical imperative or conscience moves in the face of moral obligations. But the content of this conscience now becomes clear and it will also take on a different emotional nuance. For what has actually happened – whether a person is a spiritual researcher himself, or whether he absorbs what the spiritual researcher brings through his common sense and incorporates it into his soul as insights – what has happened to the person? He has merged with something, has united with something, with which one only comes together when one goes out of oneself, when one alienates oneself from oneself. You will find no better, more realistic definition of love and the feeling of love than that which can be described as the state of mind that overcomes one when one penetrates, free of the body, into the entity of the outer world. If moral imperatives otherwise appear as a constraint, they can be cast in such a form that they appear imbued with the same mood that must permeate spiritual scientific knowledge. These moral impulses, these moral imperatives, can learn from the soul-attitude that comes to us through the assimilation of spiritual science; they can be warmed through by what must live in spiritual science in the highest sense: by love.

I tried to show this again in my Philosophy of Freedom, that love is the most dignified impulse for moral action in man. Within the modern development of the spirit, these things have already been spoken of more instinctively than can be the case today, when we can, if we want, have progressed in spiritual science. Kant once spoke of the compelling duty, of the, I would say, humanly restraining categorical imperative, which allows no interference of any sympathy. What one does out of moral duty, one does because one must. Kant therefore says: Duty, you exalted, great name, you carry nothing with you that means ingratiation or the like, but only the strictest submission. Schiller did not consider this slavish submission to duty to be humane. And he countered this Kantian argument with what he expressed so beautifully and so magnificently in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”.

But we need only take a small epigram that Schiller coined in opposition to this rigorist, rigid concept of duty as propounded by Kant, and we have an important humanistic contrast with regard to the moral life: “I gladly serve my friends,” says Schiller, “but unfortunately I do it reluctantly. And so it often rankles me that I am not virtuous.” He believes that in the Kantian sense, one should not gladly serve one's friends, but rather submit to one's duty in obedience. But that which can make human life truly human is when we fulfill what Goethe says in a few monumental words: Duty, where we love what we command ourselves. But the mood to love what one commands oneself can only be kindled from that state of the human soul that comes about in the acquisition of spiritual science.

So when one delves into spiritual science, it is not something that runs alongside life, like preaching morals, but there is a development of strength within it that directly takes hold of the moral will. It is a grounding of morality. It is there that which pours into the human being the moral love. Spiritual science does not merely preach morals; spiritual science, when taken in its full seriousness, in its full power, grounds morality, but by not giving words of morality, but giving strength for virtuous love, for loving virtue.

Spiritual science is not just theory, it is life. And when one acquires spiritual science, it is not just a matter of reflection, it is something like absorbing life, like breathing. This is what spiritual science can offer modern civilization in the moral sphere, what it must offer. For in ancient times, as I indicated the day before yesterday, people also had a spiritual science, but it was instinctive. Where did the spiritual science of the ancient, millennia-old developing Oriental wisdom come from? It was a dull, dream-like visualization of the world. It came from human instincts, from human drives. This spiritual science was instinctive. People saw into nature through a kind of clairvoyance. And this clairvoyance was connected with their blood, was connected with their outer physicality. But the moral impulses of that time were also connected with this blood, with this outer physicality. Both came from one source. Humanity is undergoing a development and believes that we can be like people thousands of years ago; this is the same as believing that an adult man can be like a child. We can no longer stand on the standpoint of the primitive clairvoyant arts of the ancient Orient or ancient Egypt. We have advanced to Galileism, to Copernicanism. We have advanced to the point of observation that arises in the intellect. In those ancient oriental ways of looking at things, the intellect had not yet developed. But for that, we must also get the impulses for our moral action from the spirit, not from instinct. That is the worst thing today, that people, when they talk about ideals or impulses for life, always make everything absolute. When some party member or enthusiastic theorist appears on the scene today, dreaming of a thousand-year Reich, they say: I want this or that for humanity and they think to themselves that what they are saying is good for humanity in all times to come and for the whole earth. That it is good in the most absolute sense. Anyone who really looks into the life of developing humanity knows that what is good, what is valid for the world view, is always only appropriate for a certain age, that one must know the nature of this age. I have often said in earlier lectures here: spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented, as I express it here, does not imagine that it is something absolute. But it does believe that it speaks from the heart of the present and the near future, that it says for human souls what these human souls need in the present and in the near future. But she knows full well that this spiritual science: if in five hundred years someone will again speak of the great riddles of the world and of the affairs of humanity, he will speak in different tones, in a different way, because there is nothing absolute in this sense, nothing that lasts forever.

We are effective in life precisely because we are able to grasp it in its liveliness, in its metamorphosis, even where we stand in it. It is easier to set up absolute ideals in abstractions than to first get to know one's age and then, from the essence of this age, to speak what is appropriate for it. Then, when, through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific impulses, man, as has been said, permeates himself with what comes to him from the spirit, then he will know that he is spirit as man, is soul, then he will know that he lives through the world as spirit and soul. And then he will address every other human being as spirit and soul. One would be inclined to say that something tremendous will come about when this becomes spiritual science in human life, when it becomes an attitude that permeates human life to such an extent that one consciously encounters another human being as a riddle to be solved, because with each person one looks into infinity, into spiritual depths and abysses.

What emerges from this real observation of our fellow human beings as spirit and soul will give rise to social and moral forces that must form the basis for a real treatment of the burning social question of our time. I cannot imagine that those who see through the whole essence of the social question and at the same time let today's human condition take effect on them do not suffer certain mental anguish. We live in a time when the social question needs to be resolved in a certain way. We also live in a time when the promoters of the social order are inspired by the most anti-social instincts, when the demand for social organization of life seems to be in opposition to what lives in human souls as anti-social instincts. No matter how beautiful the programs may be that are drawn up, no matter how beautiful the ideas that are entertained as to what should be done to solve the social problem, a way to solve it can only be found when the spirit is seen, felt and sensed among people, when people treat each other with respect, protection, honor and love, and not just the physical part of their fellow human beings.

That is why I have called in my book “The Essentials of the Social Question” for the separation of spiritual life from the rest of social life, so that this spiritual life can be placed only on its own foundations, independent of the state and independent of economic impulses, purely of human nature. Only such a free spiritual life will truly spread social instincts, social views and attitudes among people. Social morality also depends on people taking in their spiritual state what can become them in the pursuit of what can be said from the research of spiritual science.

And that in which man must rest as a whole, worthy and dignified, so that he does not feel as a mere lonely wanderer, but as a member of the world, the religious element, can, in the sense that modern man needs it, only be kindled and fanned by that which is attained as an inner mood in the pursuit of spiritual science.

The events of the world order or of human development that religious feelings point to stand there as fact. The Mystery of Golgotha, for example, stands there as fact. What took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, when the Christ came into the flesh in Jesus, is a fact. One must distinguish this fact, this objective fact, from the way in which man approaches the understanding and contemplation of such a fact. In the times when Christianity first spread, it was able to flow within the human attitudes that still came from the ancient Orient. What happened in Palestine as the event of Golgotha was understood with the ideas that in a certain way came from ancient times, from primitive human attitudes. For centuries, those who were able to do so were honest and sincere in their understanding of the event of Golgotha through such ideas. But then came the time when Galilean science arose, when Giordano Bruno overcame space in such a remarkable way for the human conception by showing that what is up there the blue firmament is only that which lives in ourselves, the boundaries that we ourselves set, while in a far-flung sea of space the stars are in infinity. All that Copernicus brought, all that has been brought to the newer world-picture of externals by the spirits who have lived up to the present day, has come. In this time men have inwardly become accustomed to a different way of looking at the world than that through which Christianity was first comprehended. In this time a new relation must also be won to the religious foundations of the evolution of mankind. The point is not to shake the facts on which the religious development of humanity is based. But the point is to appeal to modern human conscience in such a way that the man of today, out of his state of soul, can understand the Christ event as he must.

Those who say that a new path must also be sought to the old facts on religious ground mean it most honestly and reverently with regard to religion. Spiritual science, oriented towards anthroposophy, will be the best preparation for understanding Christianity or other religious content in a modern way. Those who do not honestly mean it with religious life do not admit this, because they want to preserve ways to the foundations of religious life to which man today, when he otherwise pays homage to the views of his time, cannot pay homage.

We have come to materialism in modern times. Certainly, different types of people have become the instigators of materialism; but among these people there are also those who have retained certain old habits of life in the development of humanity, habits of life that have led to a monopoly being given to the denominations for everything that can be said about the spirit and soul. Because the confessions alone had the right to decide what should be believed about the spirit and soul, natural science was left without a spirit to guide its research. Today, natural science believes that it has taken on this form because it had to, when researching nature, one must exclude the spirit. Oh no, natural science has become so because in earlier times it was forbidden to research nature with spirit, because the church had to decide about spirit and soul. And today, people continue the habits and even trumpet them as unprejudiced scientific judgment.

One only has to look at such researchers, who in the sense of materialistic research must be highly praised, as for example at the Jesuit priest and ant researcher Wasmann, the excellent materialistic researcher in the field of natural science, a researcher who, however, does not allow a grain of spirit to flow into what dogma is. Spirit and soul must be excluded. Therefore: external science is materialistic. The founders of the religions of the book are not in the least the originators of modern materialism. However paradoxical it may sound today, it is true: because the church did not allow the spirit to be brought into the contemplation of nature, natural science has become spiritless. The others have only adopted this as a habit. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must bring the spirit back into the study of nature. Let me say once more: this spiritual science is not based on the idea that spirit only makes occasional or brief visits, as in materialism, so that man can convince himself that there is a spirit. No, this spiritual science wants to show that in the small and large, in all material things, there is always and everywhere spirit, that one can always and everywhere follow the spirit. But because spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy always and everywhere investigates spirit in the most material form, it shows that there is no such thing as a material substance that is independent of spirit, just as there is no ice that is independent of water. Ice is transformed water, water that has cooled down; matter is spirit that has solidified. One must only explain it in the right way in each individual case. By showing, as everywhere, where there is matter, where there is outer life, there is spirit, and by leading man to connect with the ruling spirit, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science also provides the impetus for a real religious deepening today.

But one experiences many things in this field. You see, an experience of a man who is even well-intentioned is the following. Someone says: I cannot examine spiritual science as Steiner presents it; it may contain truths, but it should be kept very far from all religious life, because religious life must represent a direct relationship, a direct unity of man with God, far from all knowledge. And now the person in question says, very strangely: in our time we have too much of religious interest, of religious experience; people just always want to experience something religious. They want to have religious interest. You don't need any of that in religion. In religion, you only need direct unity with God. Away, says the churchman in question, with all religious interest, with all religious experience.

Now, an unprejudiced person must say today that even if people still long for an unclear religious experience, even if they still awaken an unclear religious interest in themselves, that is precisely the beginning of the yearning to really find a way into the religious element, as I have described it to you now. Whoever is honest and sincere about religious life should take hold of that urge for religious interest and religious experience. Instead, the clergyman condemns religious experience and religious interest. The question today is whether real religious understanding is to be found in those who speak as they do or in those who try to speak as I have spoken to you today. However, you also have to recognize people by their fruits.

In a recent lecture, a man who is also a churchman, but also a university professor, tried to refute anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Two young friends of mine were in this lecture, and they were able to speak afterwards in the discussion. Because of the context, these two young people, who had absorbed the impulses of spiritual science well, brought forward words from the Bible to prove how what is written in the Bible, if properly understood, agrees with what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say in this area. And at one point the chairman, who was a real churchman, didn't know what else to do but say, “Here Christ errs!” It could be retorted, “So you believe in a God who errs!” A fine religious sentiment. It produces strange blossoms today. Religious sentiment is only genuine when it enters into real moral life. There one certainly has strange experiences. I now find it pretty much the most disgusting thing that can be said about what appears as a social consequence in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, from beginning to end, and that it has been lied about by a whole series of German newspapers. But people today find it compatible with morality to say that the following can happen as a moral consequence of religious practice. Recently, a canon, that is, a churchman of the Catholic kind, gave a lecture in a city about the spiritual science presented here, and at the end he said: find out from the opposing writings what kind of worldview the man represents, because you are not allowed to read his own writings and those of his followers. The Pope has forbidden Catholics to read them.

The recommendation to get to know something from the evil-intentioned, from the most malevolent opposing writings, is the moral consequence of some religious practices of the present day. No wonder that what we have experienced in the last five years has poured out over the world from such underground life. Or was it not a surfacing of lies and hatred of humanity and much more that was rooted and still is rooted in the depths of human souls? Should not the fact that one has experienced give cause to seriously consider whether a thorough re-education is not necessary? Has not something like world-historical immorality come to the surface of world history in the present? Or is it religious sentiment that has been acted out in the world in the last five years? Those attitudes that have not had centuries, but millennia, to work on improving humanity, are now seeing their fruits! Nineteenth-century theology no longer recognizes anything of the spirituality of the event of Golgotha. This spirituality, this divine Christ in the man Jesus, will be rediscovered through the path of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. From there, he will again enter into human souls, to prompt them not merely to preach morality, but to establish within themselves the right instinctive motivation for moral action and work in the world. Is there not an obvious need for renewal and reconstruction? Does this necessity not emerge when one looks at the events of the last five to six years? Do we not see the fruits of that which has been living under the surface for centuries and has now come to the surface? Should this not be proof that thorough religious and moral work is necessary?

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to collaborate on this work, the necessity of which any unbiased person must admit today if they are not asleep in their soul within the great events of the time. And anyone who wants to criticize it, who wants to condemn it, should first raise the fundamental question: does it honestly want to collaborate on the real progress of humanity? And only when he has conscientiously informed himself about it so that he can form an opinion about it, will it become clear to what extent this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has the right to participate. Because it wants to honestly and sincerely participate in the necessary progress, in the necessary rethinking and relearning of humanity.

Among the somewhat authoritative judgments that have been made in the present day about today's chaotic world situation, one of the most significant is undoubtedly that of the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who, in his book The Economic Consequences of the Versailles Peace, offers such an assessment of the current general world situation. Keynes was undoubtedly led to such a judgment by his external circumstances. During the war, he was assigned to the English Treasury and was in a position to form a basis for such a judgment from the underlying facts that presented themselves to him there. On the other hand, he was among the envoys, among the collaborators of the Versailles Peace Treaty itself. However, he resigned from this position as early as June 1919. And this resignation, like the conclusions he reaches in his book on the economic consequences of the peace treaty, are precisely what sheds significant light on the way this personality relates to the current world situation. Keynes, too, was one of those who, when they first went to Versailles, probably still saw something of a prophet and organizer of the current world situation in the personality of Woodrow Wilson, who had come over from America and was received with such great glory. He has thoroughly changed his mind. And those of us who, even at a time when Woodrow Wilson was being declared a world liberator by an enormous crowd, including from this place here in Switzerland, has given his opinion that the empty and abstract arguments of Woodrow Wilson and his manifestos cannot contribute anything to the real reconstruction of the destroyed civilization, may well point to such an authoritative judgment today. In his book, Keynes describes, as far as personality is concerned, with an intense vividness — one might say. He describes how Woodrow Wilson arrives in Versailles, how he participates in the meetings, how slow his thinking is, how he, so to speak, always lags behind. While the others are already well ahead with their assessment of the situation, he is still far behind with something that was said five, six or ten sentences ago. He is a man who suffers from the slowness of his thinking. Much else is vividly described in relation to the personality of this alleged liberator of the world.

But Keynes also speaks about the other leading figures who were involved in this peace agreement, and speaks urgently. He describes how Clemenceau is a man who has actually slept through the whole development of European humanity since the 1770s, who actually wanted nothing more from this peace settlement than to reduce the world, in a sense, to what was available in Europe in the 1770s. And he then describes no less vividly and graphically how Lloyd George is actually superior to everyone else, how he has a certain instinct for sensing what is being thought and done and wanted by the personalities around him. And from all this one can see how difficult it is today, even for an astute observer like Keynes, to gradually arrive at a judgment through the force of the facts. That is what contributes more and more to the increasing chaos in the world today: that the leading personalities, the affairs that public life has brought to the surface in recent decades, are not at all up to the great demands of the present time. This is precisely what emerges from the book and its assessment. It shows that all the destructive forces at work in the world cannot be brought under any kind of judgment by those who have been called to leadership by public life. And since Keynes saw that nothing could come out of this conference that would lead to a healthy and prosperous further development of European civilization, he resigned from office right at the beginning of the negotiations. And the way he constructs his judgment is extraordinarily significant. In the present situation, one really only needs to construct something real on judgments that are based on such foundations. Keynes' judgment is, I would say, calculated. Only those personalities who have a certain sense and instinct for calculating the future with all sobriety from still existing forces in a certain way can really have a say in the present. They should be listened to with special attention, because the great majority of judgments made today are based on some kind of nationalistic or other prejudices, while only a few people are able to form objective judgments from the facts themselves. Keynes is one of them. He considers what might follow from what the three leading figures at Versailles have cooked up, especially in economic terms, and what would have to happen to the economic life of European civilization if nothing else occurred but the forces that were brought to bear at Versailles. And Keynes calculates – I say explicitly and I emphasize it very strongly – Keynes calculates that nothing other than the economic ruin of Europe can follow from this peace agreement. Of course, the intellectual and political ruin of Europe must be connected with the economic ruin.

Thus the book about the economic consequences of the Versailles Peace Treaty is interesting enough just because of its content. But in some respects it becomes even more interesting because of its conclusion. In this conclusion Keynes openly admits that he has no idea what should be done or wanted to get out of the chaos into which we are entering. And in making this confession, he says something that is actually extraordinarily significant, which he summarizes in a single sentence. He says that one can only hope that some salvation for European civilization will come from the combination of all the forces involved in a new state of mind and new imaginations.

My dear attendees, this is said by a man who has been immersed in the circumstances, who was called upon to participate, who, through his analysis, shows that he is a person who can calculate soberly in the broadest sense. A new state of mind, a gathering of all forces for a new view of the powers at work in the public life of humanity, where can these be found? How can we arrive at such a view?

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it will not take much impartiality to convince you that the first step in this direction is to examine the essentials of contemporary public life without any prejudice and to ask ourselves: What are the actual forces at work in contemporary public life? In earlier lectures, which I had the honor of giving here, I pointed out what kind of historical considerations should be used to arrive at the truly effective forces in human life. Above all, one must look for certain symptoms that vividly illustrate what is at work in the depths of human development. And so I would like to point out something that is perhaps one of the most outstanding forces that has worked with the forces of destruction. I would like to point out the basis of the world view of the present day, but in the way it has developed over the last three to four centuries. I do not wish to give the impression that a Weltanschhauung, founded in the solitude of a thinker, can now go out and influence every single soul, and that public affairs can, as it were, come into being out of such a Weltanschhauung. That is certainly not the case. But just as public affairs grow out of the will, out of feeling, out of the emotional life, out of the thoughts of the overall state of the human being, so too does the world view grow out of this overall state of human life, especially of the human soul. And one can see, as in a symptom, what the people of an age are like in their whole work and in their whole activity, when one, so to speak, considers the symptom of the world view, insofar as one wants to point to the world views that are decisive and have come into their own in the present. This determining factor is characterized, in particular, by the fact that everything that has not entered our world view through tradition from ancient times has developed out of the soil of natural science, which seeks to base its knowledge on external material observation alone. What does this natural scientific world view show, when looked at more deeply?

Perhaps only someone who can admire it can judge it correctly. And in earlier lectures, I have certainly expressed my admiration for the scientific world view strongly enough. These remarks, which I am developing here, are not meant to be a criticism of this scientific world view, which is certainly justified in its field. This scientific view, especially in its technical and economic consequences, has led to great fruits of civilization for humanity. But suppose there were some spirit today — it is hardly possible, firstly, given the vast field of scientific knowledge and, secondly, given its specialization — but suppose there were some spirit today that embraced the whole revolution of the scientific view from mathematics and from mechanics up to biology and up to what can be gained from biology for the science of the human soul: such a mind would undoubtedly be able to gain significant insights into certain areas of nature and being. But if such a mind were to ask itself with complete clarity the great and comprehensive human question: What is man in his own essence and in his whole relationship to the world? then the one who stands firmly on the ground of natural science, who is able to correctly assess the scope of scientific knowledge, would have to say: the scientific world view cannot answer these questions about the human being and about the relationship of the human being to the rest of the cosmos. This question remains unanswered, even by the latest physical scientific knowledge. There are already some great insights into how man has emerged in outward physical development from lower, animal-like forms to his present human form. But these insights have led man far away from what man is in his relationship to spiritual worlds. Those who cannot admit this to themselves without prejudice will also be unable to form an opinion about the inner impulses from which present-day humanity acts, whether it is organizing public affairs or destroying public organizations. For even if we are not always conscious of how we think consciously about the nature of man and his position in the world, even if we are not always conscious of the thoughts we entertain in this position, these thoughts, however unconsciously or instinctively they may be, they work in our feelings and in our decisions of will. They therefore become the creators of all public, spiritual, political and economic life. Anyone who wants to see things correctly will realize that economic interrelationships, since they are made by people, but since people in turn act out of their soul impulses, the economic interrelationships of the world are also a reflection of what people are able to feel about themselves and about their relationship to the world. Now we have to say: the scientific world view has grown large over all that is non-human. It cannot provide any answers about the human being itself. It is extensive when information is required about the sub-human realms. But how does the information that we, as human beings, acquire relate to what we should allow to flow into social life from our ideas and from our inner soul impulses, and in particular into the way we live together with other people and groups of people? Can we receive any impulses for human activity and human coexistence from those areas that lie outside of the human being? This is best shown by observing the relationship between the human being and language.

Language is basically the medium through which everything that leads from person to person comes to life. Through language, we also control economic life. Through language, we inaugurate external political and spiritual conditions. Now there is something most remarkable, which unfortunately is not often considered thoroughly enough. When we try to apply our language to scientific knowledge, we can never do anything other than extend the words, the phrases, and everything we use to express natural laws, those natural laws that we today so admire as the great progress of modern humanity, we can do nothing but extend to nature what we have formed in words as an expression of inner soul conditions or of conditions in man. Such subtle minds as Goethe's noticed this. That is why Goethe said: Man does not realize how anthropomorphic he is. -— When we say: an elastic ball pushes the other -, and we derive from it the laws of elastic' push in physics, then we basically start from what we have in the word meaning for the push that we carry out in our own organism. And anyone who really wants to investigate will see that everything that can be applied from language to natural science, which deals with the non-human, must be taken from the human being.

How did our language come to have content? It would have come to very little content if we could only imitate the mooing of a cow and other animal sounds. How did our language come to have such content? Those who can look impartially at the course of human development will find that all the content of language comes from the fact that, in times that were indeed behind our civilization, humanity had a certain instinctive-spiritual knowledge, I say: an instinctive-spiritual knowledge with the natural elementary empathy that arises in the human soul. With the impulses of the will, with pictorial imagination, which found expression in myth and mythology, spiritual insights came to man, and out of these spiritual insights he formed the content of the soul , which then became the content of his language in modern times, which is great in that it looked in a certain disdainful way at what instinctive spiritual abilities gave to man in an earlier time. In this modern time, in which one has become great primarily in relation to natural science, in this modern time our words have not been given any new content. And one thing is historically significant in the last two to four centuries: our language, all languages of our civilized world, have lost their old content. No new content could be poured into them because that which cannot provide such content, mere knowledge of nature, is that which has been developed in this very time. And in this time, which we must otherwise admire so much, there took place what may be called the emptying of civilized languages of their old spiritual content.

What did the civilized languages become as a result of losing their old instinctive content and natural science being unable to give them a new one? — They became that which has now reached a certain climax in the present day. They became that which developed into a phrase, and truly nothing that would only have a meaning in a limited area, but what is practiced today by those who exercise world domination is called a phrase. And the four to five years of horror that we have behind us have shown the world domination of the phrase at its peak. Today we live under the world domination of the phrase. What is the remedy for this world domination of the phrase? Only the acquisition of a new spiritual content, a conscious spiritual content. The old spiritual content, acquired by earlier humanity through instinct, which made language the sum of words, not phrases, is gone. Humanity that is truly attached to the present can no longer believe in it. A new conscious spiritual content must be conquered.

That, dear attendees, is what the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which has its representatives in the Dornach building, is consciously striving for: to conquer conscious spiritual knowledge in addition to scientific knowledge, which provides such great insights into everything gives such wonderful insights into everything outside of the human being, to conquer with the same clarity of thought, logical rigor, and scientific conscientiousness, spiritual knowledge that can now provide information about the great question of the nature of the human being and the human being's place in the rest of the cosmos. However, before one can proceed to such knowledge, one must admit that, although the external scientific method must be imitated in its conscientiousness today by all knowledge, it cannot itself lead to spiritual knowledge. In order to arrive at spiritual knowledge, it is necessary that the human being of today, above all, brings to bear those inner abilities that are to arise precisely on the soil of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here. I have shown how man can come to such knowledge through his own soul life, for example in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in the second part of my 'Occult Science'. However, one thing is necessary - I have emphasized it here often enough - one thing is necessary for man, to which he now only surrenders with the greatest reluctance. It is necessary to have what I would call intellectual modesty. Modern man is so proud of his intellectual development. Intellectual modesty only asserts itself when, for example, one says to oneself: Suppose you give a five-year-old child a volume of Goethe's poetry. What will the child do with a volume of Goethe's lyric poems? It would probably tear it up or play with it. It certainly would not get from the volume of Goethe's lyric poems what an adult can get and what the volume of Goethe's lyric poetry is actually meant for. The abilities that can determine it, that can make it possible for him to let the volume of Goethean poetry take effect on him in the right way, must first be cultivated in the child bit by bit. For this development of childlike abilities, one surrenders a lot in human life today. But that a person, when he has grown up and is equipped only with the abilities that one can acquire in normal, external, sensual human life today, that he could then stand before the world itself as the five-year-old child stands before the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems, that he must first develop by taking his soul abilities into his own hands in order to extract from what what is presented to him in the world, something that can be compared to what the child first draws from the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems when he has grown up, in other words, what he does with the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems at the age of twenty-five – yes, to admit that, in his intellectual arrogance, the man of the present does not want to do that. But this must be asserted above all, that in order to truly know oneself, to finally fulfill the Apollonian saying “Know thyself,” it is necessary to take hold of the human soul faculties. How this is possible in detail will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture.

Today I would just like to emphasize in general terms that it is indeed possible for the human being to strengthen their thinking through a certain treatment of their thinking, which I will describe tomorrow. This enables their thinking to no longer passively , but that it is inwardly seized as by a will, becomes active, that it becomes more intense, that it occurs in such a way that the person knows through inner experience in direct perception: now thinking has become a spiritual-soul seeing. While in ordinary thinking one is dependent on one's thinking apparatus, on one's body, on the nervous system, and while, just when one develops thinking a little, one sees through this dependence, one also knows that when thinking is strengthened in the appropriate ways, which are described in the books mentioned, it becomes free from the body, it becomes an activity that is no longer guided by the instrument of the body. Certain meditations, to which one devotes oneself with the same objectivity with which one conducts an experiment in a chemical laboratory or observes the stars in an observatory, empower this thinking and free it from the tool of the body. It is only when this thinking is to be used for a real world-view that self-discipline of the will must be applied. When self-discipline of the will, together with inner meditation, develops into will-imbued thinking that is independent of the body, only then does spiritual knowledge arise, conscious spiritual knowledge, which in turn can give man what instinctive spiritual knowledge once gave him: content for speech, content for language. The moment man ceased to feel within himself the impulse to give content to his speech out of himself, the moment instinctive spiritual perception ceased and was replaced by external natural perception, which cannot give content to speech, the development of man in a certain respect came to a standstill. But man must recognize from the signs of the present that he must acquire self-knowledge and knowledge of humanity through conscious inner soul work, through the development of his thinking to soul-vision, and that only through this can arise what in turn gives content to our language, what can eliminate the world domination of the phrase.

But such knowledge also gives us the insight that the external world, as we observe it with our senses, is something we grow into in the course of our lives between birth and death, that these external observations cannot give us the actual spiritual, that this, the actual spiritual content, is brought into the world by us, that we bring it with us, in that we descend from spiritual worlds — as I said, we will talk about these things in more detail tomorrow — through birth into this physical world, that when we speak of the spiritual content, we must look at what people carry within, what they develop only through the instrument of their body, little by little, from year to year. It is not the ever-increasing wealth of the world's experience that brings the spirit into reality, but what we, as human individuals, bring into the world through our birth. Today people are only afraid of what man himself brings into the world. They are afraid because they believe that if he asserts it, it would lead to fantasy. But there are ways to avoid this fantasy. But anyone who realizes that, fundamentally, all spiritual content must come from human individuality will readily admit that a fruitful development of this spiritual life can only come about if the human being is given the full opportunity for human development, if he is not dependent in his spiritual development and in the expression and revelation of his spirit on any external powers that serve only here in the physical world. For with the rise of pure scientific knowledge, that knowledge which only provides information about what is non-human, there has also arisen, as organically connected with it, the dependence of spiritual life not on what the human being carries into the world through birth, but on what the external state life establishes, on what the economic life makes of the human being. At the same time as the natural sciences were coming of age, we saw the omnipotence of the state develop to the highest degree, with the state stretching its tentacles over everything that is intellectual life; it began to organize school life, and economic life, on the other hand, became decisive for the lives of those personalities who were able to enter precisely this intellectual field. But this has gone hand in hand with the fact that the human being has lost the ability to give birth out of himself a spiritual content, to give his words a spiritual content. Therefore, in the age of natural science, the dependence of spiritual life on political and economic powers has developed, and under this influence the world domination of phrase has developed.

This is the first link in the chain of present-day organizations that are working towards destruction: the world domination of phrase, of empty talk. If a person is incapable of investing words with the spiritual substance that he draws directly from his connection with the spiritual world, then words must become empty phrases; words must gradually become so ingrained in a person that he is, as it were, merely carried away by the mechanisms of language. And unfortunately we see this all too clearly emerging in modern times: that which breaks out with elemental force from the spiritual and soul inner being of the human being, which, as it were, only discharges into language, disappears. Life in the mechanisms of language becomes more and more intense, and it has reached its climax in recent years. Because people, by talking to each other about the civilized world, were talking directly or indirectly through the print of nothing, and by the words only taking place in their mechanism, that which was driven by chaotic forces to destruction developed.

I know very well that there is little inclination in the present day to go into these intimacies of human life when the causes of the present chaos are to be discussed. But no one will gain clear ideas and clear judgments about these causes if they do not want to go into these intimacies of the human soul. Not until this happens will harmony replace chaos in public affairs; not until spiritual deepening, through genuine spiritual science, gives rise in man to the urge to give his words full content. For that which certainly first appears in the scientific field, that which is born in the scientific field, it pushes its way into the other habits of life, it becomes the one that sets the tone in public life. And anyone who has an eye for observing life sees how, in the end, only the final consequences of what is ultimately present as the characteristic feature play out in everyday life, where worldviews are formed. Indeed, people have not wanted to properly survey the connections that arise there for a long time. Here in Switzerland, a blustering spirit once worked, I explicitly call him a blustering spirit so that you can see that I am not overestimating him, Johannes Scherr. He spoiled a lot with his blustering tone and his blustering judgment, which was also in the healthy thoughts that he had in what he said publicly. In the 1960s and 1970s, he made a very significant judgment based on a truly penetrating observation of historical and social life. He said: If the materialistic demon, which now only relies on that which man sees and experiences in the external world, continues to prevail, it will also enter into everything that man does in external public affairs; it will enter into economic and financial life, and a social structure will develop that will finally lead to the fact that one must say: Nonsense, you triumphed!

My dear audience! We don't like to listen to such people. This judgment of Johannes Scherr has also been ignored. But now, fifty years later, it must be said for those who look at everything connected with the so-called world catastrophe: the words of this world observer Johannes Scherr, which culminated in the sentence: You will have to say: Nonsense, you triumphed – the words have been fulfilled! For Johannes Scherr saw well how that which is spirit has gradually been squeezed out of human life, how the materialistic un-spirit has taken the place of the spirit, and he was able to turn this observation into a true prophecy. The world simply does not know that what is initially only a worldview, only a theory, that basically after two generations becomes moral, public action, becomes deed. Oh, the world should be much, much better at noticing certain connections! It should form a much more thorough judgment, a real judgment about certain things!

A philosopher, Avenarius, also worked here for a time. He is a kindred spirit of Mach, who in turn had a student work here in Zurich quite recently. These people have drawn the consequences in the field of world view from the current materialistic lack of spirit – I call it a lack of spirit because mere knowledge of nature cannot infuse our language with substantial content. They, the philosophers, Avenarius and so on, have drawn the consequences for their world view from the materialistic lack of spirit of the time. The philosophy they have gained, and the whole way in which people like Avenarius live, is good bourgeois. Of course no one will recognize in these people anything other than good citizens. But today something else should be recognized. Today, we should study the question based on the facts: What has become of the state philosophy of Lenin and Trotsky? What is the state philosophy of the Bolsheviks? It is the Avenarius-Mach school of thought! It is not just a matter of the temporal connection that a number of these people studied here in Zurich; it is the inner factual connection that what lives in the human soul as a world-view thought in one generation becomes action in the third generation. And in these deeds one can see the causes as they play out in the world. But today's humanity only wants abstract logical judgments and does not understand that something that is logically deduced is not yet a judgment of fact, that one must look with real spiritual insight into the real context, into the context of reality, and then seemingly most dissimilar, the bourgeois world view of Avenarius, which, however, emerged from a materialistic lack of spirit, is revived deep in that which fundamentally destroys all human society, which leads to the gravediggers of all European civilization.

At the same time, this indicates that this world domination of the phrase is not something that applies only to a narrow field. It is something that permeates our entire public life as a fundamental force, especially in the field of the spirit. And there will be no salvation until the spiritual life emancipates itself from that which has emerged as the basis for this phraseology, until the spiritual life emancipates itself from the external political or legal life, from the economic life, and to build only on what the spirit itself brings forth from itself, that is, what the individual human being produces from what he carries into the sensual world through birth from the spiritual world. To arrive at spiritual content is the only way to overcome the world domination of phrase. And there is something else closely associated with phrase. Because the phrase does not connect the context of the word with the content, the word very easily becomes a carrier of lies in the age of the phrase. And it is a straight path from the phrase to the lie. Hence the domination, the triumph of lies in the last four to five years, which in turn is so much a part of the process of destruction we are heading for if spirit is not called into the place of the un-spirit!

So much for the one area of public life, the area of intellectual life. But there are other areas as well. But all of them are dependent on the intellectual life to a certain extent. If the intellectual life is dominated by empty phrases and meaningless talk, then the feelings and perceptions cannot be given full expression. But that which develops in the feelings and perceptions in social life, that which is kindled in the interaction from person to person, as one person sympathizes with another, that is custom, that is what emerges from the social community into the realm of custom. And it is only from this customary practice that law can develop historically. But this law can only develop if the sentiments that arise in the interaction between people do not become imbued with empty phrases, if these sentiments are linked to words that are full of substance and to speech that is supported by thought. And in the age of empty phrases, the feeling between human beings cannot be kindled in the appropriate way either; only an external relationship between human beings can arise. The consequence is that in the age in which empty phrases develop in the field of social intellectual life, conventions develop in the field of social feeling instead of the direct substantial relationship between human beings. of man to man, which can at most be regulated by external treaties, that even between nations one raves about treaties because one does not come to the elementary living out of that which can be revealed from person to person. This age of convention makes a second area of our public life so empty of content: it deserts human coexistence, as the phrase deserts the spiritual life, the life of the soul.

This is what leads to the mere external man, not to the right born from within the man. For this right can only be ignited when the word borne by thought flows from the head to the heart. Just as real right, which can flourish in social life alone, belongs to the real spiritual life, which is filled with substantial spirit, so convention belongs to the spiritual life that lives in phrase. Thus we have characterized two areas of our public life in the present.

The third area from which public life emerges is human volition. A conscious will, a will that places a person in human society in such a way that this person brings something into society that flows from his or her own human nature, cannot come about unless it is driven by real, substantial, spiritual content. The phrase is unsuitable for evoking a real conscious will. Just as spiritual life becomes a mere phrase when it becomes dependent on the external life of the state or of the law, or on the external life of economics; just as the life of the law itself is absorbed in convention when it can only be nourished by empty phrases, so the sphere of economic life, the sphere of external human coexistence, is supported, not by the practice of real life but by mere routine, when the will is not inspired by the spirit. Therefore, alongside convention and empty phrases, we see the emergence in the age from which our present age has developed, in the sphere of life and in the outward expression of life, in the sphere of economic life, of routine everywhere.

What is meant by this: our economic life is dominated by routine – it may become clear from this if I say: a realistic consideration of our public life has shown that in the field of economic life, that chaos must end, which is prevalent in the present, where everyone only wants to acquire out of their own selfishness and no one is aware of the context in which their own production is placed in relation to the production of the whole. Only when we realize that this economic life, which has gradually descended into chaos, can only be healed by associating the most diverse professional and life spheres with one another, by people who belong together in different occupations really integrating with one another, so that associations arise from occupation to occupation, that associations arise between the consumers of a profession and the producers of the profession, in short, that our economic life acquires a structure so that the producers, by organizing themselves internally, join forces with their consumers, so that the individual who is a consumer or producer in a profession can see how his consumption and production into some economic cycle - only when the person lives in such an organization, when our economic life is based on association, only then does the individual see how he contributes to the economic process through what he produces or how he participates through what he consumes. Then the individual human being not only knows how to handle this or that in some routine of life, but he also knows that what he does belongs to the overall process of the economic life of humanity. Then he acts out of other impulses. Then what he does is not dominated by a superficial routine, but by a life practice that is only possible if one can connect an idea to it, if one places oneself economically within the overall organism of humanity. Because life has become dominated by empty phrases and because human interaction has become dominated by convention, people have not found the opportunity to associate with each other in this way. They have been turned away from the tasks they face and have become mere routine workers. And routine spread from the individual mechanical action to the mechanism of our entire organization and our entire financial system. The phrase-filled time became the time of the routiniers. And the routiniers brought about that catastrophe, which shows this or that on the surface, but which in its depths shows the causes that lie in the area that has just been characterized.

If we examine the things that dominate contemporary life with an open mind, without sympathy or antipathy, we have to say: in the field of intellectual life, empty phrases; in the field of legal life, conventions; and in the field of economic life, routine. Only the forces that I will describe tomorrow can lead to salvation. This is when the phrase is replaced by speech that is filled with a substantial spirit, with a spirit that has been contemplated, and that can only come about in an independent spiritual life that brings forth what man has to bring into the outer life, which does not want to dominate this spiritual life like the laws of nature, which are gained through outer experience. The conventions of what is externally established must give way to the living interplay that can arise when, on a strictly democratic basis, all mature human beings enter into that which is generally human affairs, which the human being does not bring in through his birth, but which can only develop in the human coexistence of mature human beings. Only when man arrives at such a world-view from the phrase-free, thought-filled word, can the true practice of life develop out of the routine that clings to ephemeral economic objects. that testify and reveal that what is achieved on the ground of economic life is more than what is accomplished by the machine, that it is a link in the overall process of human development on earth. We will not stop at this if we stand as a routine worker at our machine, in our factory, in our bank or anywhere else; we will only stop if the threads of association go from one person to the next, if one person learns from another how he or she is connected to the social organization closest to him or her through his or her consumption and production. What these people achieve together through their combined efforts and associations will be something more than what the human being can achieve in economic life. Man must work, but through his economic activity his whole human being rises out of the transitory and into the eternal. And he will experience from his economic life that precisely by becoming a practitioner in this life, he has a school of practice, the results of which he can carry even through death.

Thus it follows from an observation of the present life, which is more directed towards the spirit, from the three most characteristic domains, that of phrase, that of convention, that of routine, the necessity to work according to a threefold structure of social life, according to a recovery of our spiritual life through its independence, through a recovery of our legal life, which can only be freed from convention when living democratic interaction occurs between all mature human beings, and through a recovery of economic life in which the independence of economic life abolishes routine in favor of a real life practice. But this can only happen when people associate with each other, because it is only through this social interaction that something arises out of what the individual can produce, something that leads all of humanity beyond itself, from mere matter to spirit. Phrase means unspiritualness in the realm of spiritual life; convention means unspiritualness in the realm of the state and of the law; routine means unspiritualness in the realm of economic life. In place of unspiritualness, spirit must come. How it can, and with what forces it can, is what I will attempt to describe tomorrow. For only when, in place of empty phrases, there is again speech that is borne by thought, and only through this, when in place of convention there is the legal life that is imbued with human social feeling, and only through this, when in place of economic routine there is spiritualized economy , an economy ordered by the spirit and steeped in associations, only in this way will our entire public life be healed from what ails it in the present, one must say: what would destroy it if no healing process were to occur.

In the present, unfortunately, we only notice too much the phrase, the convention, the routine. We see the result: chaos. For the future we need the thought-borne word, the spirit filled with substance, the living law that results from the interaction of all mature human beings. That is spirit instead of un-spirit at this point. In the field of economic life we need the associations that arise from the spirit, we need the replacement of routine with the true, spirit-filled economy. In the economic field this means replacing the unspiritual spirit of the present with the spirit of the future. And only by doing so can we rise from pessimistic moods, which are all too justified today when we look at the world around us, to a certain hope for the future. We do not build on what could be thrown at us somewhere today as hope for the future, but that we build on our own human will, which wants to stake its power, its endurance, its fire, out of the present for the future, the victory of the spirit over the un-spirit.

[There follows a brief discussion).

Closing remarks

The first speaker in the discussion initially concluded his remarks by pointing out that an international language serves as a unifying element in humanity. I do not want to go into the pros and cons that can be asserted against such an international language, because this can only be decided through extensive discussion. But I will assume that those who strive to establish such an international language have a certain right. We know what has been tried and done in this direction. Well, it is not enough with the associative way in which such a language has been pursued so far, because such a language would still have to find completely different ways to people than it has found so far if it is to have a truly practical significance. But I do not want to speak out against such a language. Because, you see, on the one hand I know that what arises artificially in our time also bears the characteristic properties of all that our time can produce: a certain intellectualism, a certain intellectualism. And I cannot help but confess that it seems to me that precisely that which has brought us down today, intellectualism, the anti-elemental, was also essentially active in the construction of today's attempted international language. I can very well appreciate the view of those who say: what will ultimately become of that originality of human self-revelation in poetry, in speech, which is truly connected with the innermost being of man, if we pour an abstract language over all mankind? On the other hand, I have also heard some truly wonderful poems in Esperanto, and I must say that I have already tried to achieve a certain objectivity in this matter.

However, what I have presented today, ladies and gentlemen, is not at all affected by the question of such a language. Because, hypothetically speaking, if such a language were to be poured out on humanity, it would be unable to contain anything other than empty phrases if we did not come to a new revival of the substantial spirit. Whether we ultimately turn phrases in Esperanto or in English or in German or French or in Russian is irrelevant. What matters is that we find a way to bring substantial spirit into Russian, German, English, French and Esperanto. And that is one of the questions I have addressed today.

So, as I said, I do not want to say anything against the efforts of those who go for such an abstract language. I believe that perhaps the one point of view could be not entirely unfruitful if it were possible to have an international language for that which really lives in international economic life, for example, that then perhaps the possibility would be given for the actual spiritual life, which after all must always must always arise from individuality, to liberate the other languages. This can only happen if they can develop individually, just as the spirit must develop individually, if their development is not to be disturbed by the lust for conquest and domination on the part of political powers. I believe, however, that the hopes of the Esperantists and similar people are still on much weaker ground than the hopes of those who believe that if only a sufficiently large number of people can come together today to work towards a renewal of our intellectual life from the real spirit, then a better time could dawn, even if it is not perfect. Those who see reality as it is cannot belong to the group that hopes for an earthly paradise. I believe that the latter type of person is still more in touch with reality than those who hope for an international language.

What was said by the second speaker was essentially an interpretation of what I said in part of my lecture, and I would just like to note that when discussing such talking about such things, that it is necessary not to regard human beings as if one could simply approach them and make them better by teaching them. In public life I have often used the image for the pure teaching method: If I have a stove in front of me, then I can say: it is your stove duty to warm the room, it is your categorical imperative to warm the room. I can now preach on and on, with all Kant's insight I can preach on and on, it will not get warm. If I remain silent and just put wood in the stove and light it, the stove will warm the room without any preaching. It is the same with people. If the whole human being is in question, if not only that is in question which can, for example, provide a theoretical echo in the human being, if the whole human being is in question, preaching is of little use, because then one is dealing above all with the human being standing within a social totality. And the human being in a social totality is something different from the individual, unique human being. If we demand of the individual human being that he should somehow contribute to the betterment of humanity through a concentrated life of thought, then it must first be possible for such a concentrated life of thought to develop in a fruitful way. Ultimately, this is only possible in a free spiritual life. Further explanations can be found in the “Key Points of the Social Question”. The question today is not so much to examine what is good for the individual, but what must be brought about in the human social organism so that the individual can truly develop.

In 1894, during the nineties, I published for the first time my “Philosophy of Freedom”. In it, as a consequence of a spiritual world view, there is also a certain ethic that is built precisely on the individual human being. But there is a prerequisite, and this prerequisite must be made by everyone who grasps the problem of freedom in a serious and realistic sense: that, if it is possible to have intuitions that establish human freedom, then it must also be possible for that individual human being to bring forth something that can be built upon in social coexistence. But our attention must constantly be directed to this social life. Therefore I may say that in a certain sense my Philosophy of Freedom is supplemented by my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (Key Points in the Social Question). Just as my Philosophy of Freedom investigates the source of the forces that lead to freedom in the individual human being, so my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage investigates how the social organism must be constructed so that the individual human being can develop freely. And these are basically the two great questions that must occupy us in contemporary public life. A real answer to this question will at the same time be able to shed some light into the chaos.

I would like to note that I have organized today's and tomorrow's lectures in such a way that today's lecture should, so to speak, be more of a critique of the times, pointing out what has been in the present so far, that this present has become what we see it as, drifting into chaos, equipped with tremendous destructive powers. Tomorrow I would like to explain what needs to be done to enable national life in the broadest sense and the life of civilized humanity in general to emerge from the chaos. I would like to show how the forces that already lie within man, and that lie particularly in human coexistence, can be unleashed, but how they are fettered today. Therefore, the positive, to which the last speaker obviously wanted to point, will be more in my tomorrow's lecture than in my today's. But it had to be pointed out, what we are suffering from, so that a knowledge of the will can be built on this knowledge of the present, which is necessary for a prosperous development in the future.

But I would like to mention one more thing in conclusion. Those who are serious about the great issues of the present must not think in a traditional sense, they must not be followers of something similar to a “thousand-year Reich” or the like, they must not think that we can establish a paradise on earth here, but they must think that every reality can only develop in accordance with its own conditions of existence, that within the life between birth and death one can only come to a 'yes' in this life if one is able to constantly supplement the imperfections of physical life with the prospect of a spiritual life: One of the greatest mistakes of our time is that a large number of people gradually want everything that makes life worth living to come from the mere external life. And this is how social questions are formulated today: How must the external life be designed to give people everything they imagine a paradise would offer? Those who ask the question in this way will never come to an answer. You can only come to a true, genuine answer if you are imbued with a sense of reality. And I will take the liberty of speaking tomorrow about what such a sense of reality can give as an answer to the great question of the present.

Yesterday I took the liberty of explaining how three destructive forces are at work in the decline of our time: the world domination of phrase, the world domination of convention, the world domination of routine. And yesterday I tried to suggest how the phrase should be replaced by thought-filled speech, by thoughts imbued with spiritual substance, which can express themselves through language in the social life of people. And in this connection I tried to suggest how the revival of spiritual life must take the place of convention, which can only arise from the living interaction of mature people living together in the democratic sense. And I tried to suggest how the practice of spiritualized life must take the place of mere routine, of spiritless routine.

If we initially characterize all these things only from the outside, they actually only seem to touch on the surface facts of our present life. But in truth, they push straight to that which, on the one hand, is rooted in the innermost part of human existence, but which, on the other hand, is also lived out in the most significant, most far-reaching and decisive social facts of life.

Yesterday I already hinted at how one of the fundamental causes of our present civilization, which is permeated by so many destructive forces, must be sought in a particular symptom. I pointed out that for three to four centuries it has essentially been scientific knowledge that has provided the basis of our world view, the one that seeks to establish

What is otherwise present in our social life are the traditional impulses for a worldview. What has been bearing fruit in a new way, what has really moved people for three to four centuries, is the question: in what way can a worldview flow from the scientific foundations of human knowledge? It is no wonder that, under the urge to found a world view in this way, precisely those forces of the human soul have been developed that are capable of bringing such a world view into being. A very specific kind of thinking and a very specific kind of will has emerged in these last centuries and has reached a certain peak of activity in our present time. Natural science, after all, emphasizes time and again that its conscientious method depends on investigating the world of facts, so that nothing is introduced into what is determined about the facts themselves, that nothing is introduced from the human being, from the human personality itself. In vain have minds such as Goethe's, who realized the one-sidedness to which mere knowledge of nature, separated from man, must lead, pointed out how real knowledge, useful for a comprehensive world view, must not be separated from man, how even the external physical fact must be considered in connection with the man standing in the world. On the other hand, it can be said that this approach, separated from the human being, has in turn celebrated its great triumphs by bringing the world of technology to what it is today. But all this could only come about under the influence of a certain kind of thinking; that thinking which devotes itself either to what nature presents through itself to observation, or to that which we can present in experiment. To understand the language of facts itself, that is the ideal of this thinking.

In this thinking, little flows in from that — the one who, in addition to spiritual science, has also conscientiously and methodically dealt with natural science knows what human will is, from what impulsates us as we carry out our task in the outer life, as we come into contact and relationship with other people, as we, in other words, place ourselves in the social being. Yes, the great triumphs of science and technology have only been possible because, to a certain extent, man has learned to think in such a way that his will influences his thinking as little as possible. One could say that a kind of thinking habit has developed under the influence of this fact over the last three to four centuries.

Now, with such thinking, one can recognize great things in the mineral world, the plant world, but less so in the animal world, and — as I already hinted at yesterday — nothing at all with regard to the true nature of man. And the reason why no other thinking has been developed alongside this, I might say, unwilled thinking, is to be found in a certain fear of everything that enters our thinking when man, of his own accord, gives this thinking its structure and organization. In this way, fantasy and arbitrariness can enter into thinking through human volition. And again and again it is pointed out how fantastic the worldviews of certain philosophers appear, who have indeed introduced human volition into their thinking, in contrast to the certain results that natural scientists have arrived at, who allowed only what nature itself or the experiment told them.

It was simply not known that it is possible to permeate human thinking with the will in such a way that in this well-trained, will-borne thinking, arbitrariness disappears just as it disappears in relation to that thinking which is only concerned with external facts or with experiments. In order to discover such thinking, which is permeated by the will, it requires, however, spiritual exercises performed with energy, care and patience. To this end, a person who wants to become a spiritual researcher, who really wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, from which alone knowledge of man can flow, must repeatedly and repeatedly over long periods of time and with inner soul methodology, hold thoughts in which he develops nothing but inner volition. He must develop such volition in these thoughts as one otherwise only develops in the outer world. In the outer world one loves, one hates, one takes up this or that activity, rejects this or that activity. In the outer world one has to deal with something about which one can only have opinions. One has to deal with something that contains crises. Whatever one recognizes in the outer world through one's will, or against which one is fought, must be carried into the world of one's thoughts if one wants to become a spiritual researcher, and one will gradually notice that these thoughts really become powers carried by the will, imbued with inner conformity to law. You must accept what I have just said in apparent abstraction in such a way that the work that is characterized by it, the inner soul work, is one that takes a long time and is carried out just as methodically, albeit in the spiritual realm, as everything we do with the most precise instruments for our chemical or physical experiments. Just as the chemist or the physicist carries out his experiments with exactitude, so the spiritual researcher carries out that which is the weighing of one thought against another, the effect of one thought upon another. In this way, abstract thinking, which has developed under the influence of natural scientific research in the course of the last three to four hundred years, rises to become an inwardly living thinking, a thinking that is more an image-gazing of a spiritual nature than ordinary abstract thinking. This is one side of it, which must be developed into real knowledge of the human being, because it is impossible to use that abstract thinking for this knowledge of the human being, which must be a spiritual knowledge, a spiritual vision, that celebrates its great triumphs in natural science. But this thinking, which is fully at home in natural science, has certain, I would say impossible results, especially in social life in the broadest sense. The more abstract our thinking becomes, the more dogmatic it becomes in the individual. Certainly, one becomes very critical, conscientious, and methodical when applying the thinking cultivated in the last three to four centuries. But one does become opinionated with regard to one's social integration into all of humanity or into a part of humanity. Just do some research and you will see when you stick to the thinking that has made science great: you get used to always being right — and the other person is right too! And people, that would be the extreme, basically couldn't communicate with each other at all.

Are we not living in the midst of this state of affairs? Today, anyone who has gone through a life of trials and tribulations and has struggled with problems for decades, who is compelled by today's education of humanity to present these problems in the accessible, conventional forms of spiritual-scientific concepts, he does not find young people everywhere who come and say, with their one-and-a-half decades of experience at most: This is my point of view, this is what I think, this is what I counter with my rich life experiences. And finally, taken in the abstract, one cannot even disagree with these beginners in life, who can think just as logically as the aged with life experience. scientific knowledge is basically not bound to human development. It is something that one achieves, wherever one finds oneself, and which one finally attains when one has reached a certain degree of adulthood. And so we can say: this abstract thinking, this intellectualism, which has today reached a high degree of perfection, gives everyone something that they actually want to communicate to everyone else, but which the other person already knows from within themselves. They want to communicate in social life. They cannot communicate because the other person is not inclined to receive the message, but at most to counter it with their point of view.

What makes science great is inapplicable in social life, because in it man gives, would like to give, something that no one else really wants to receive because he already believes he has it. Whoever really thinks through what the real basic direction of our entire present-day soul life is, will have to see much of what is present in our social life today in terms of destructive forces, which drive people apart instead of bringing them together. He will have to see it partly in what I have now characterized as a peculiarity and social consequence of abstract thinking, which is useful precisely for natural science.

Spiritual science will lead beyond this thinking because it cultivates that which remains unconscious in today's thinking, because it pushes the will – that is precisely what remains unconscious – into this thinking, because it develops deliberate thinking. And from deliberate thinking, real knowledge of human nature can follow. But that is only one element.

The other element is that, under the influence of this way of thinking, as it has emerged in the scientific world view, man has also come to contrast volition-barren thinking with thought-barren willing. Today's human being basically consists of this duality, of that soul element that cannot be described other than as volition-devoid thinking, and of the other soul element that must be described as thought-devoid willing. Spiritual scientific knowledge, in the same way that it attempts to integrate the will into thinking, seeks to bring the person who wants to become a spiritual researcher to face his own actions, the results of his own will, with an objectivity that is otherwise only applied to external facts. When he sets out on the path of spiritual research, man must become a faithful observer of what he himself does and what he himself wills. In a sense, he must first of all lift himself up ideationally and walk beside himself as in a higher self. And this higher self must observe the human being in everything he does, as one would otherwise only observe when observing external natural facts or conducting experiments. For then one learns to develop thoughts from something that, especially in the last three to four centuries, has been dominated and impulsed by the most personal emotions, particularly in certain radical, extreme circles. One learns to recognize that in thoughts which one otherwise does not see at all, whose thoughts otherwise remain completely unconscious.

And because the human being breaks down into these two elements, today we see, on the one hand, abstract scientific knowledge that only deals with the non-human, and social impulses that are only effective as personal instincts. We see how natural science has risen to certain heights, how, for example, in the East — and it will not remain with the East, unfortunately — education, which has been gained from this natural scientific thinking, now wants to gain principles from it for social coexistence , as can be seen in the East, that with scientific social policy one can do nothing but organize the most savage human instincts, organize them in such a way that the organization must drive humanity to its downfall.

These things are connected with what has come to prominence in the last few centuries, and must be considered in this context. Only when one cultivates the will in thinking, as I have indicated, then cultivates thinking in willing - the exact description can be found in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of my “Secret Science”, and in similar books – only then, when one has founded a spiritual science in this way, which can penetrate into the real being of man, will such a science not stand powerless in the face of the whole human personality. Yes, our present-day science is powerless in the face of the whole human personality, because thinking that is not pulsating with will is an activity of the human head alone; it is intellectualism that has no communicative power for life. Spiritual knowledge, as it gradually forms into a worldview from such foundations, as I could only hint at here, spiritual science is something that not only takes hold of human thoughts, the human intellect, but the whole human personality. Because it has emerged from the will, from volitional thinking, it places this human thinking in the social community, and because it carries thought into the will, it can also inspire thoughts in people that bring forth true life practice, not just routine, but life practice that can only be based on ideas, on spirit-borne will.

This spiritual-scientific world view is needed today above all in the field of that spiritual life which is most important for the public, we need it in the field of the art of education. And it is precisely in the art of education that one can explore the inner truth of what I have just characterized as the principles of a spiritual science. In the already mentioned “Waldorf School”, which was established in Stuttgart under the aegis of our friend, Mr. Molt, an attempt has been made to found education as an art on a spiritual-scientific basis. This Waldorf School does not want to be a school of world view. Those people who say that it wants to be a school in which, instead of old worldviews, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is already brought into the child are not telling the truth. That is not the case with this school, but rather the fact that what is meant here as spiritual science can grasp the will of the human being, can permeate his actions, and that what remains only a thought, an idea, in other worldviews can be methodically formulated in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific worldview. Therefore, the question at the Steiner Waldorf School in Stuttgart is not what content we want to convey to the children, but rather that our spiritual science becomes method in it, becomes that which provides the basis for the teacher's work, for teaching, for educating, for acting, for willing.

However, this does mean that this pedagogy, this art of education, is built on a real knowledge of human nature. A true knowledge of human nature can only be gained through the methods that I have briefly outlined today. Through these methods, one learns to recognize how, above all, certain epochs can be distinguished in the developing human being, based on the inner soul-spiritual. These epochs are often superficially overlooked today, even in science, which thinks it is very exact. Of course, certain processes can be seen in the child when the teeth change around the age of seven. But those who look deeper into human nature also see how, during this time of changing teeth, a complete metamorphosis of the entire soul life takes place in the child. While in the first period, from birth to seven years, everything the child does, everything the child feels inclined and capable of doing, stems from the principle of imitation, from a feeling one's way into everything that those around the child do, the change of teeth marks the beginning of the epoch when, around the age of seven, the child's inner abilities are oriented towards authority. Up to the age of seven, the child will, as a matter of course, imitate the elementary life around him, even in the movements of his hands and the way he forms his speech, doing what the adults around him do. He will completely interweave himself into what emanates even from the imponderables of the directions of thoughts and ideas in his environment. From the seventh year onwards, the child needs to believe in those around him: they know, in a certain sense, what is right; they need authority. No matter how much one may rail against authority today, one should bear in mind that from the seventh year onwards, until around the year when sexual maturity occurs, authority is something that a person must be influenced by if they are to develop healthily. For a second epoch in human childhood is that from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, to about the age of fourteen. About, I say; it is not some kind of number game that is at issue here, but the important stages, the transformations of the life metamorphoses, that are at issue. At about the age of fourteen, the human being becomes sexually mature. A complete transformation of his soul life occurs, and that which inwardly enables him to judge independently occurs, to confront the world with what arises as judgment in his inner being, while from the seventh to the fourteenth year he can thrive if he has the authority to look up to.

Now it is precisely the years from the change of teeth to sexual maturity that the child has to be cared for in teaching and education during his so-called primary school years. But even during this time, certain epochs and sub-epochs can still be distinguished. The imitative impulse, which stems from the innermost being of the human being and prevails until the seventh year, extends, in a weakened but clearly recognizable form, beyond the seventh year into the ninth year. And anyone who, through spiritual science, acquires a living sense of how this interplay of imitative ability and need for authority comes to expression in every single child in all their learning and in relation to all education, will be able to see a unique educational problem in every child, even if they have the largest class in front of them. For such a person, as an educator and teacher, cannot be devoted to some standardised pedagogy, not to a pedagogy that in turn sets up abstract principles out of intellectualism: this is how one must educate, or this is how one must educate. No, the person who has become a teacher through spiritual science sees in the developing child something that the artist sees in each individual work that he creates: always something new and ever new. There are no abstract pedagogical principles here, only a living process of finding one's way into the child, of bringing something out of the child, of solving the riddle of what is hidden in the child, what wants to come out through the body as a spiritual-soul element. For it is the peculiarity of spiritual knowledge, which must above all be applied in the art of education, that it leads the human being back to the direct life of the soul. This is not the case with intellectualism, with abstract knowledge. When I have grasped something in the abstract, I have grasped it, and then I carry it further into life. At most, I remember what I have already learned. This is not the case with spiritual knowledge. Anyone who has taken just a few steps in this spiritual knowledge knows that spiritual knowledge does not give you something that you can merely remember. Nor does spiritual knowledge give you something that you can merely remember, like what I ate and drank today can give me something that I can merely remember tomorrow and the following days; you are not satisfied as a person if you are only supposed to remember what you ate four weeks ago. But one is satisfied as a human being who has absorbed an abstract realization when one remembers what one has learned or acquired four weeks ago. It is not the same with spiritual knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is interwoven with the human being, goes down, is digested and must always be revived, thus going into the phenomena of life.

If someone were a great spiritual researcher in his forties and did not continue to cultivate a living relationship with what can be known, he would starve in relation to the soul-spiritual content, as someone would starve who stopped eating when he turned forty. Abstract knowledge, as magnified by science, can be satisfied with appearances. It is a one-time conclusion. Spiritual knowledge brings people into a living connection with their environment, and must be constantly renewed if it is not to die away. In life, it becomes similar to eating and drinking in a lower realm.

By saying something like this, the world should recognize how radically different this spiritual knowledge is from the one that is believed to be the only possible one today. But imagine that this knowledge of the spirit permeates everything the teacher wants to do, permeating his actions and thoughts when he enters the classroom, just as iron invigorates our blood. Imagine an attitude that comes from a spiritual realization and that knows: you have to approach each individual in a special way, you cannot memorize anything, you have to face each child as a new riddle — only that gives a real pedagogy, a pedagogy full of life. Today there is much talk of educating the individuality. All kinds of fine, abstract principles are also given about it, but nothing will be achieved by this. We will only achieve something in our demanding time by founding a pedagogy as art. This pedagogy as art, which looks into the human being anew each time, forgets the science of knowledge, just as the artist discards all aesthetics and everything when he wants to create positively. What use are all the principles of beauty when we want to shape the clay! Anyone who knows what artistic creation is will agree with me. What use are all pedagogical rules when we begin to unravel and develop what is soul and spiritual in the child? It is a matter of us as educators becoming artists. We can become such artists when spiritual science penetrates our civilization as a living component. Then we will also see how we have to educate the will during the period between the seventh and ninth year, when the sense of imitation balances with the sense of authority. Above all, we must not approach the child in an inartistic way with what is determined by human convention. We must not present to the child as convention that which speaks only to the intellect. This includes the letter forms, and it also includes writing and reading. All of this is based on human convention, as we have it today, because we are no longer in the time of the old pictographic writing. We have to get away from that. That is why we try to develop reading and writing – writing first – from an artistic point of view. We try to draw or paint such forms first, from which the letter forms can then be built; first the artistic, then the intellectual. But in order for what the child's nature actually desires in this age to flourish in the right way, everything must be based on this artistic teaching. And now that we have been teaching at the Waldorf School for only a few months, we can see how it is possible to work from the artistic, how it is possible, above all in music, in song, in eurythmy, in inspired musical art – for that is what eurythmy for the child — how it is possible to give the child something in all of this that his nature demands, that his nature wants, but which at the same time makes the artistic sense pliable, makes the artistic sense inclined to receive the whole world in an artistic way. Then, when the ninth year approaches, when the human being can establish a relationship between the self and the outside world, then one can experimentally steer towards what nature description is, then one can evoke science from the artistic.

However, it must always be taken into account – however strange, however trivial it may sound, it must be said – that the human being is human. The so-called timetable, as we often have it today, does not take into account the fact that the human being is human. There is nothing less educational than teaching the child three quarters of an hour of one subject and then three quarters of an hour of something completely opposite. Three quarters of an hour of religion, three quarters of an hour of arithmetic, three quarters of an hour of writing and so on. In the Waldorf school, we try to get everything out of the laws that express themselves in the soul and spirit of the child. It is certainly necessary to do something, for example, arithmetic, for three, four, five to six weeks, without a timetable, and only when a certain amount of work has been done, you move on to something else. This is the concentration of teaching. At the end of the school year, everything that comes into consideration can be summarized by repetition. But the timetable is actually the enemy of every true art of education.

And in this way, not only can we achieve something in terms of the educational and teaching guidance of the child, but we can also deduce the necessities of the curriculum from the development of the child itself. When I held the pedagogical course for the teachers of the Waldorf School, which prepared them for their task, I was primarily concerned with developing a curriculum that is actually the mere result of what the child demands . from the sixth, seventh to the eighth, ninth year, from the ninth year to the twelfth year, from the twelfth year to sexual maturity. From what is elementary in the development of human nature, from what should be done, one can see, if one has a sense and understanding of the human being through spiritual science, from year to year, and one can see, when one enters the classroom, with a deep pedagogical sense, from what the faces of the children sitting in front of you tell you. In this way, an attempt is made – I can only sketch it out for you, I cannot describe these things in detail – to bring direct life into one of the most important social areas, into the art of education, through spiritual science. |

All abstractions, everything that makes technology great, is not fruitful where it is about bringing people together. The true art of education will have to seek its sources in spiritual science. It will only be able to do so when, in the sense of the threefold social organism, spiritual life is liberated from the state and economic life. It was only because there was still a gap in the Württemberg Education Act that it was possible to bring the Waldorf school into this gap as an independent school in which pedagogical and artistic principles can really be applied. To accept spiritual science, one does not have to become a spiritual scientist. Just as one can accept modern astronomy or modern chemistry and does not have to become an astronomer or a chemist, but only needs common sense, so one also only needs common sense, if one does not allow oneself to be influenced by prejudices, to accept what the spiritual scientific researcher brings from the depths of the soul to the surface. But when one becomes imbued with what is recognized out of will-borne thoughts and out of thought-borne volition, then one also acquires the necessary enthusiasm for life, which today's sleeping humanity lacks and which must come if things are to improve.

Until a sufficiently large number of people energetically demand what is necessary for a new beginning, it will not come of its own accord from some corner. Today's development of humanity is predisposed to demand the great goals in life out of will, out of conscious will. We have pursued that policy long enough, which always looks diplomatically at what is there and according to which one says: it will work out again. Today people see how things get worse every day; every day they believe that what has just happened will not happen again. They have not the slightest sense that in decline the power of the rising must be recognized. And so, as in the art of education, we must also look for the forces that can lead to the new building in the life of the nation. There too, only those forces can arise that come from the spirit, from the knowledge of the spirit, from the contemplation of the spirit. How those two soul elements that I have pointed out stand in relation to each other in our social life and in the life of our nation today! Abstract thinking, which every human being actually has – it is quite irrelevant whether one has outgrown the cobbler's workshop, is the son of the cobbler or [gap], if one has brought it to a level of thinking. This thinking is independent of the personal; from this thinking one has one's standpoint. But these standpoints are actually not necessary at all, for every person actually has the right to his own standpoint, and he could actually go through the world as a loner with this standpoint. There is no need to live together at all if everyone has “their standpoint” and no one has anything to say to the other.

But the peculiar thing about spiritual knowledge is that it frees us completely from these “points of view”, from this standing on points of view, that it actually becomes something that makes people receptive to life, to a true school. For anyone who becomes acquainted with spiritual science in the sense in which it is meant here as anthroposophically oriented, as it is represented by the Dornach building, every single person they meet in life becomes an interesting problem. The child itself, that is important for the art of education; the child becomes an interesting problem. And just as one feels hunger in relation to the outer nature in physical life, and how one must connect with the outer nature, so as a spiritual scientist one feels the need to constantly engage with what other people mean, what other people think, feel and want. In the broadest sense, spiritual science brings us together with people.

Today, the humanities scholar can say, above all, that when he reads other worldviews, he lets them affect him differently than other people. He is less concerned with what is error or truth, because that is usually only one's own point of view that decides this, and I have just expressed my own point of view. But however great the supposed error may be that is produced by this or that person, thinking or acting, what the person presents to us is the complement of our own being if we imbue ourselves with spiritual science. Just as the natural scientist has the need to deal with the experiment, so the spiritual scientist has the need to deal with everything human. If he establishes a world view, it becomes a social impulse because it does not divide people, but brings them together; because it brings individual life into that which is otherwise only an abstract point of view that anyone can have towards anyone else. The spiritual researcher encounters the small child, who perhaps can only babble, perhaps cannot even babble, who can reveal secrets to him through the still completely childlike eye. He receives revelations from all humanity. Through this, what spiritual science has to say, if it is only taken up into human life, becomes an impulse for social togetherness of people. Just as scientific knowledge has extracted the content of thought from human language, just as it has created the phrase, so spiritual science will bring secrets into our language, living spiritual substantiality, and our language will become, through the fact that spiritual science leads man to man, the most important social remedy for the coming time.

And precisely because knowledge has become so abstract on the one hand, the will has become dependent on mere emotions, on mere personal instincts, as I have also explained today. By creating its content out of the will borne by thoughts, spiritual science can give people a basis for more far-reaching interests than mere personal feelings or personal egoism can. What has become the decisive factor in social life in the last three to four centuries? The decisive factor has become selfishness. If we cannot rise through knowledge to the human, if the human cannot penetrate us, then we can only assert selfishness in social life. But in the moment when we have spiritual life in its independence, and thereby found that independence in the art of education, which I have outlined today, and in the moment when we permeate our will with ideas, we can find the way in our economic life from person to person, we can form associations out of the various professions and out of the coming together of consumers and producers, and we can build an economic structure into the social organism that is built precisely on what one person can learn from another, what one person can experience from another. As a result, the routine of life will be transformed into the practice of life. The more inwardly one looks at human life, the more one looks at human life itself, the more the necessity of the threefold social organism emerges from every corner. And just as economic life is fertilized by a will imbued with ideas, on the other hand, spiritual life [gap], so that which takes place between human beings - in today's world it actually only takes place as convention, and so that one also wants convention in the form of the League of Nations between peoples - to become a living element in the legal life of the state, which, as an independent link in the threefold social organism, should stand in relation to the other independent links, the independent spiritual life, the independent economic life. But at the same time, you can see from the example of the art of education how spiritual science reaches into the life of the people, into social life, how it must be this spiritual science, on the foundations of which the structure of the threefold social organism must be built. Oh, to what extremes has man come in recent times under the influence of the two soul elements described! On the one hand, we have abstract thinking, which, I might say, reaches beyond all human individuality and is the same in all people who have developed the ability for this logical, abstract, intellectual thinking. Because it is the same, it is also necessary that what man cannot attain as an abstract man, what he wants to acquire in the social community, is built on the subhuman, on mere instincts, on selfish instincts. And so we see how, in the age of Darwinism, when it was noticed that the struggle for existence, which is only valid to a limited extent in the animal kingdom, had come about, natural scientists wanted to become social politicians, social scientists, and now also wanted to establish the struggle for existence as the natural thing in human life. Yes, it is even true that the struggle for existence would rage in human life if only the instincts of egoism could be active in social life. And Lenin and Trotsky also want to stage this struggle for existence; they will only organize egoism. This is known to everyone who can see through human life today. Everything else will be a mask. We can already see the inner falsity of Leninism, which promises people the moon, shorter working hours, and has already arrived at the point of imposing twelve-hour working hours because this turns out to be a necessity within the mechanism that is to be introduced.

But never in human life will what is present in him as abstract thinking, what is the same in all people, be able to say yes to this struggle for existence; it will always be dissatisfied with this struggle for existence, it will always strive for harmony, for overcoming the struggle for existence. But if we do not succeed in pouring real spirituality into abstract intellectualism, the world of abstraction will be too weak to eliminate egoism from social life. And on the other hand, egoism will remain brutal if it is not infused with that which only spiritual knowledge, spiritual insight, can bring to man. That which appears dualistically in man today, on the one hand abstract intellectualism, on the other hand the mere rule of instincts, can only find its balance through the fact that both can be permeated by the spirit. When thoughts are spiritualized, they are brought to the individual human being and make this individual human being not only someone who wants to be right, who can give only that which others do not want, but someone who must constantly engage with other people, must constantly engage with other people, so to speak, using the language of thoughts instead of the language of phrases. But this can only be done out of a spiritual life that is not merely built on memory, but that, like hunger and thirst, is built on the daily renewal, on the metamorphosis of life, which must constantly renew itself, even if it has already reached the highest level. This can only happen if the instincts are imbued with those thoughts that arise in the way I have described today. Then, within his economic associations, man will be able to want what goes beyond the individual human being. Then economic life can be spiritualized. It is already the case that wherever one looks into real life today, the necessity for what one can demand as the threefold social order arises. This is not a utopia. Only those who have no sense of reality, who are utopians themselves, describe the threefold social order as utopian, and therefore declare everything that does not fit into their utopias to be utopian.

What is offered to the world as the impulse of the threefold social order is taken from the fullness of life. But it also shows that this full life demands today a permeation with what can be grasped in a living vision. This vision is necessary for the human being. And until it is recognized that the human being is not a mere creature of nature, it will not be possible to arrive at a solution to the social problems that are so pressing today. Years ago, when theoretical materialism was at its height, people who could already see through it were indignant against this materialism. But one cannot help saying that after all, the people who became theoretical materialists, like Haeckel and the like, were not clever people. We are confronted with the peculiar phenomenon that truly bright minds have become materialists. Why? They have become materialists because thinking, which over the last three to four centuries has developed as abstract thinking - this is particularly clear to the spiritual researcher - must be explained in materialistic terms. The thinking that makes science great is bound to the tools of the brain, to the tools of the human body. Thought ceases with death. But when we infuse our thought processes with will, when we are not only guided by observation of nature and experiment, when we permeate thought with that which arises out of the will, then something arises that can become free of the body, that is truly soul-spiritual. Materialism was right for the kind of thinking that has become prominent in the last three to four centuries and has reached its peak in the present. This must be explained in materialistic terms. That is why the cleverest people in the second half of the 19th century became materialists, because they were ultimately faced with the great mystery: what about ordinary thinking, which has reached such heights in natural science? This must be explained in materialistic terms. Materialism in its own way is fully justified, and no one can be a spiritualist in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science who does not know that materialism has a right to exist in its limited field. Anyone who now asks the question: either materialism or spiritualism? — is barking up the wrong tree. For materialism has its domain, and it must be clearly understood that if man wishes to save the soul-spiritual, he must also go beyond the thinking of which he is so proud today. And in the same way, a truly desirable social order will never be able to come about if man wishes to found these social orders only on the basis of ordinary egoistic emotions, for these can only found the struggle for existence, not a social dream à la Lenin. Man can only found a real social order if he incorporates the spiritual and soul aspects, as described today and as it is inspired in him by that world view that comes from spiritual insight, into this social life. Then man will be able to recognize and verify through life what was in Goethe's mind when he turned his gaze to the nature of man and asked himself: What is man's actual relationship to nature? — Goethe said to himself: When we survey everything from the wonderful stars above to all that presents itself in the various realms of nature around us, we must look at man, standing in front of this nature, how he absorbs this nature , how he transforms it, how he gives rise to it as something new within himself, creating a higher nature through the human being in the human being, a higher nature that is spiritual-soul, soul-spiritual. Goethe expresses this so beautifully when he says:

Out of such an attitude, which leads man through nature, beyond nature, to himself, to the soul-spiritual, only that which is to build up our social life can arise. But it will only arise if man, through his will, directs his gaze to that which the study of spiritual life itself can give him.

Therefore, it must be said: It is not in external institutions and their transformation that we should see what can lead us forward. However we may reshape external institutions, it will not lead to a new structure. This can only lead to a new structure if man himself seeks out in his own inner being that which is currently inclined towards destruction within him. For everything external that arises in a person's life is done by the person himself, by the innermost being of the person. Only by relearning, only by rethinking can we make progress. Therefore, it cannot get better sooner than until a sufficiently large number of people muster the courage to rethink, to relearn. And finally, that which may once again come upon humanity as constructive forces must arise out of the courage to elevate the real spirit, so that, as I said yesterday in conclusion, the real spirit may gradually but effectively eliminate the un-spirit.

[There follows a discussion.]

Closing words

Dear attendees! I actually have no particular point of reference from Mr. B.'s remarks to say anything significant in this closing word, because he has provided the example of how to judge from the abstract thinking of the present that which would like to be said from spirit-fertilized thinking. And so I would like to say a few words for those of the honored audience who might have misunderstood, perhaps even with justification, what I said about the curriculum.

What I said about the curriculum is that it should work towards concentration. I did not say that there should be no variety. Apart from the fact that one could argue whether this variety should be created after three to five weeks for arithmetic, or whether this is better or that, this is a purely didactic question that cannot be treated agitatorially, but only factually. But apart from that, one has to work on concentration in class, so that a certain workload is processed in such a way that the timetable is not a hindrance. One really works through a workload for three to six weeks, as long as it is necessary, without being interrupted by anything else. Naturally, the child's nature is fully taken into account. So that you do not misunderstand me, I would like to explain to you how it is in some classes at the Waldorf School. Let's take the fifth grade. I could just as easily mention the first. There, the lessons begin a few minutes after eight o'clock in the morning. In the first two hours, the children are taught to concentrate, which is otherwise decentered and scattered throughout the school day by the usual school subjects and the timetable. So in these first two hours, until a few minutes after ten o'clock, the children work in a concentrated way towards what is otherwise viewed as the content of the school subjects. So that, let's say, in a sufficient number of weeks, arithmetic is taught, then language teaching is taught for a number of weeks, and so on. Then comes what makes concentration possible by doing it in a certain way; we teach foreign languages, French and English, to even the youngest children, so that the first classes receive foreign language teaching. And it makes a great impression when you see the little sponges coming to their lessons and see how they have actually made progress with great joy in the few weeks of foreign language lessons. There they are actually working towards using the language. So for five to six weeks in the first class it is already the case; then French is taught until 11 a.m. and English until 12 noon. Then the children go home. And on some afternoons – the children have enough free time, and it is also part of the change that they now come out again – on some afternoons, when they come back, they have singing, music and eurythmy, soulful gymnastics, soulful movement art. In this soulful movement art, the children not only have physiological gymnastics, which is also practiced, but spiritualized movement. They have, as it were, given a mute language in eurythmy. The children find their way into this extraordinarily well. And when there are eurythmy performances on days when the children are called together for special festivities, the children crowd around it, and you can see how it all comes to life. So there can be no question of there being no variety or no consideration for what suits the child's nature. But if it is said: if the children get too bored, something else has to come along – yes, my dear audience, that is precisely the task: to never let the children get too bored! At most, the children may become unruly because something is bothering them, but they would never want the lesson to end because they were bored. And in this short time, since I have attended school for long periods twice and actually always take the lead in teaching, I have been able to see for myself how, in this way, life is actually brought into the whole teaching.

My dear attendees, if you want to establish equal rights for all, not through talk but through action, then you really don't have to get worked up in a talkative way about the difference between entrepreneurs and workers, which despite all the talk is still there today; it simply exists as a fact, and if you talk today, you really can't wipe away this difference for the time being. The fact is that in the Waldorf school, the child of the proletarian sits next to the child of the entrepreneur. The children are educated in complete unity, and this is where equal rights for all are established in practice! While all the talk and agitating is going on, the “entrepreneurs” and “workers” do not have to be there, nothing will be achieved, but they must have equal rights. In short, the question cannot be solved with talk; the only way to solve it is to create goals and, above all, to envisage the real solution of the social question. By always interfering with inflammatory phrases when action is required, not a single step towards improvement can ever be taken! That is what matters today: to distinguish between action and talk. If we do not make this distinction between the talkers and those who want to do something, we will not get anywhere. The talkers will talk all social order to death. With fine talk, nothing can be achieved in our time, no matter how much this talk is based on equality. Equality must be established; mere talk of equality achieves nothing.

Another question, esteemed attendees: Must not the materially precondition be created for the economically oppressed today, so that the possibility is offered to him to absorb spiritual? I have just written an article in the last or next-to-last issue of the journal for “Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (Threefolding of the Social Organism), which appears in Stuttgart: “Ideas and Bread” - to counter the popular prejudice that, when on the part of the satiated and even today those who can still satiate themselves repeatedly point out: All that is needed to solve the social question is for people to work. That is easy to say! The point is for people to see a goal, a meaning in their work! But on the other hand, it is also not enough to always hear from the other side: First bread must be created for the people, then they will rise spiritually, or then one can ensure that they rise spiritually. It is spiritual work that leads to bread being earned. You have to organize, you have to bring what is being worked on into some kind of structure, into a social one, otherwise the bread cannot be created. If a terrible wave of famine is now spreading across Central Europe, this wave of famine has not come about because bread has suddenly been withdrawn from people, but because people have entered into a social order as a result of the war catastrophe, within which no bread is being earned and within which no ideas are working that earn bread. that bread has suddenly been withdrawn from people, but that people have come into a social order through the catastrophe of war, within which no bread is earned, within which no ideas are at work that make bread earned. The ideas that were worshipped by people until 1914, who were the leaders, have been reduced to absurdity by the last five to six years, they have been dismissed. We need new ideas! And if we do not decide to say to ourselves, “We need new ideas,” then these new ideas will organize the social order, they will create the necessary bread; if we do not decide to do so, then we will not be able to move forward into the future in a healthy way. It is very strange how, I would say, it shows in individual cases that people do not want to admit to themselves how the truth actually lies and works. Until 1914, Prince Krapotkin was certainly one of the most radical. When he went back to Russia, people soon began saying: Yes, if we only get bread from the West, things will get better! — And then they heard that he was writing an 'ethics'. You see, that is what has destroyed us, that people have material life on the one hand, and an abstract spiritual life on the other, and that nothing of the abstract spiritual life spills over into the real material life. The spirit does not show itself by being worshipped; the spirit shows itself by becoming capable of dominating and organizing matter as well. That is precisely the problem: our creeds have come to mean that man has only beautiful things to look forward to when he has finished working, or at most a directive on the first white page of the ledger that says, “With God.” Even if what is processed there in debit and credit does not always justify the statement, “With God!” But therein lie the symptoms of the decline of our time, that we have lost the power to find the transition from what we profess spiritually to material life, that the prevailing attitude is: Oh yes, do not link material life with the spirit! The spirit is something very sublime, it must be kept free from material life! No, the spirit is not there for that, so that it can be kept free from material life, so that when you leave the factory you can only have it as a Sunday afternoon sensation, no matter how noble it may be. The spirit is there for that, so that you can carry it through the factory gate, so that the machines go after the spirit, so that the workers are organized after the spirit. That is what the spirit is for, to permeate material life! And that is what has destroyed us, that this is not the case, that we have an abstract spiritual life alongside a spiritless material life ruled by mere routine. It will not get better until the spirit becomes so powerful that it can rule matter. It is not the spirit that is alien to matter and the world that spiritual science wants to lead to, but the spirit that can rule man, which one finds not only when one is glad to leave the factory, but which one carries gladly and joyfully into the factory, so that every single action is done in the light of this spiritual life.

Those who want the spirit in the sense in which it is meant here, they truly do not want an impractical spirit, they want the spirit that really has something to say in the world, not just something to chat about, something that can give pleasure in free hours, but a spirit that, by dominating matter, organizing life thoroughly, can connect intimately with life. Whether we want to continue to drift deeper and deeper into misfortune by denying this spirit or not depends on this spirit and our acceptance of it. Today we must decide on this either/or. The more people who decide to embrace this active spirit, the better it will be for the future of humanity.

That is what I wanted to add to what I said today.

Today, an endless number of what could be called social programs or the like are buzzing through the air, truly challenged more than at any other time by all the forces at work in the present that are leading to destruction. There is no lack of proposals as to how a new structure might be developed out of this destruction. Nevertheless, when the idea of the threefold social order, urged on by the needs of the time, seeks to assert itself among these various proposals, it is primarily because of the realization that that the idea of the threefold social organism has something to offer which, if one grasps its inner essence, cannot be equated with programmatic proposals or social ideals in the abstract sense. What I would like to present to you here is thoroughly imbued with the realization that today there is a great danger for all such things to fall into utopianism. One need only think of how, basically, even if it is not yet sufficiently noticed here or there in the European world, everything that was thought to be established in the traditional economic, legal, and intellectual order is subject to a certain process of destruction, and how this process of destruction has become all too clear in the course of the last four to five years of horror for European civilization.

In such times, one cannot build on this or that that is already there and has retained its reality. After all, the most firmly established institutions have, so to speak, been reduced to absurdity by recent years. And so it is obvious that we have to build on a completely new foundation. Man can only do this by building from the foundation of thought, and it soon becomes apparent that the foundations that make a solid structure possible are not easy to find. For at first one seems to have no point of reference at all as to whether what one wants to translate into reality from one's thoughts can somehow be justified in this reality. And anything that cannot show and prove from the outset, through its content, that it can be fully realized, is utopian.

The idea of the threefold social order seeks to avoid the danger of utopianism by not actually setting up anything that could be called a social philosophy , what is called a social program, but that it wants to point to a special way in which people can work together in public life so that the forces of destruction can be countered by forces of new construction, of new development.

I would like to say that what the others indicate should happen, according to the idea of threefolding, should only arise when such cooperation between people and groups of people can take place, which is what the idea of threefolding of the social organism seeks to express. When one stands on this ground, one does not take the standpoint that one is somehow omniscient, that one is a prophet who can indicate how this or that institution should turn out in the future for the benefit of humanity, but one only wants to call upon the judgment of those who have something to say in such a way that, through the cooperation of people, this judgment can also become objective reality.

The inspiration for this idea of the threefold social organism actually goes back a long way for the person speaking to you today. It is rooted in decades of life experience relating to the social conditions in the most diverse areas of Europe, but especially in Central Europe and those parts of Central Europe that, through their fate in the last great war catastrophe, show how what had previously been the social structure of humanity, of civilized humanity in Europe, is striving towards something new, and is unable to cope with the forces that, I would say, are moving from the depths of humanity to the surface today. If one looks impartially at historical life, especially in the last third of the 19th century, in the years of the 20th century that preceded 1914, one can clearly see how that to which one adheres so dogmatically, which one still regards today, even though it has been shaken in many areas of Europe, as something that should not be shaken, such as the unified state, which has gradually taken hold of all areas of public life for three to four centuries, is no longer up to its task in the face of certain great demands of humanity, how it is not capable of simultaneously encompassing intellectual life, state-political or legal life in the narrower or even in the broader sense, and economic life. Therefore, for those who were last concerned with the idea of the threefold order, the idea arose to start precisely there and raise the question: what form must the state, which has so far been regarded as a necessary unity, take in relation to the three main spheres of human life, in relation to the spiritual sphere, to the legal-political sphere and to the economic sphere? And now, before I proceed to a kind of justification, I would first like to take the liberty of presenting to you a brief sketch of how the cooperation of people should be conceived so that the tasks that arise for people from these three main areas of life can now really be mastered from within the social structure.

In summary, the life of these three areas has only taken place in the last three to four centuries. You only need to remember — to cite one example — how, with the “development of medieval conditions into modern ones, schools, up to the universities, were not founded by the state, but by church communities or other communities, which had their development alongside the beginnings of state life. It was only in the course of the last three or four centuries that the view arose that the unified state must also extend its power, for example, to schools, universities and the like. Likewise, one can say that economic life was also supported by corporations founded on economic impulses; it was led by those personalities who formed associations only out of economic motives. And it was only in the course of the last three or four centuries that the state extended its power over economic life, so that this combination of spiritual, legal and economic life is something that has only come about in its full significance in modern times, although it has of course shown itself earlier here and there, because everything in the historical life of mankind announces itself in advance.

In contrast to this, the idea of the threefold social order seeks to place each of these three fields on its own ground. It starts from the assumption that a certain impulse has, in the course of modern history, risen with an inner necessity, I would say again, from the depths of human feeling and sensing to the surface of historical becoming. And that is – one cannot deny it, I believe, even if one is still so biased – that in public life, despite everything that is emerging today, the most powerful impulse is after democracy. This impulse occurs as something elementary in the development of humanity. One can say: just as in the individual human being of a certain epoch of his life, let us say, sexual maturity occurs, so in the development of European humanity, preparing since the 15th century, the tendency towards democracy emerges.

If we try to identify the essential element in the various forms demanded for the democratic coexistence of people, it ultimately turns out to be this – at least it emerges as the only reasonable possibility – that the affairs of the state should be managed by the cooperation and joint judgment of all people of legal age , who in this cooperation and in this joint judgment are regarded as equals, so that everyone stands as an equal in relation to the other, with equal rights in his judgment, with equal rights in the contribution he has to make to social life, and also equal in everything he has to demand from this social life. This is the abstract democratic demand. In the modern history of humanity, it becomes concrete through the fact that it is connected with the most important feelings and impulses. One can also say that this democratic tendency has found its way into the state structures of Europe in the most diverse ways, fighting against that which has emerged from feudal and other social orders. The democratic tendency has more or less pushed its way into the old-established forms. But the urge to do so has left its mark on modern history. Since the States could not avoid adding the democratic force to their former powers in some way, even if some, I might say, only did so for the sake of appearances, they also extended this democratic principle to the fields of intellectual and economic life.

But now, as a result, a significant contradiction in public life as a whole has emerged in the development of modern humanity. The one who is serious and honest about realizing the democratic impulse must actually notice this inner contradiction in modern public life. It is the contradiction that I would like to characterize in the following way: spiritual life, up to its most important part, school life, cannot develop out of anything other than the abilities of human beings, which are quite individually different from one another. The moment one wants to extend the levelling influence of democracy to that which wants to flourish and thrive in the individual form of the adult, the moment spiritual life must always suffer in some way, must always feel oppressed in some way. Therefore, I believe that anyone who is truly serious about the democratic tendency, who says that democracy must be everywhere in public life, must say: Then one must exclude from all that all mature people decide upon as equals that which truly not all mature people as equals can have an appropriate judgment about. By pursuing this thought to its ultimate consequences, by also checking whether you have really taken into account everything that comes into question, you will come to the conclusion that, precisely when you strive for the democratization of modern state life, you have to extract the whole intellectual life from this state life, from the political-legal life.

The spiritual life must be placed on its own ground. It must be placed so firmly on its own ground that those who teach, for example, from the lowest school to the highest levels of education, are at the same time the administrators of the education and teaching system, and that the administration of the education and teaching system is connected with the entire spiritual life of a social organism, whatever it may be. Only when one — and I would like to speak specifically here — makes the person who teaches at school responsible for both tasks, and only when one creates institutions in such a way that the person who works in the spiritual life , especially if he is teaching and educating, has nothing to do with anyone other than other teachers and educators. If the entire spiritual organism is an independent unit built upon itself, then all the forces inherent in humanity can truly be unleashed in the realm of spiritual life, and spiritual life can develop to its full fruition. This seems to indicate, at least in some kind of abstract form, the necessity of separating intellectual life, which must be built on its own principles and impulses, from everything that is absorbed in democracy.

But just as intellectual life must be separated from mere state life, economic life must also be separated from it. Admittedly, this is an area in which one finds fewer opponents today than in intellectual life. In the sphere of intellectual life, especially in the field of education, it has become customary during the last three or four hundred years to regard as enlightened only those who recognize the superiority of the State over education, and who cannot imagine that it would be possible to restore the independence of intellectual life without lapsing into clericalism or something of that kind.

In the economic sphere the situation is basically similar. While spiritual life is concerned with that which is inherent in man as an ability, which must be developed freely, which, so to speak, man carries into this physical existence through his birth, economic life is concerned with that which must be built on experience, which must be built from that into which one grows by being absorbed in a particular economic field with one's professional activity. Therefore, what comes from democratic life cannot be decisive in economic life, but only what comes from professional and factual foundations.

How can these professional and factual foundations be given to economic life? Actually, not through any kind of corporation, through any kind of organization that is so beloved today, but solely through what I would like to call associations. So that associations are formed by people who immerse themselves in their professions and become truly knowledgeable and skilled in the field of economic life. Not that people are organized, but that they join together according to objective criteria, as they arise from the individual economic sectors, from the relationship between producers and consumers, from the relationship between professional and economic sectors. A certain law even emerges here – you can read about the details in my writings – as to how large such associations may be, how they should be organized, and how they become harmful when they become too large, and how they become harmful when they become too small. It is perfectly possible to found an economic life by building it on such associations, by basing everything that is achieved in the social structure through the purely economic impulse of such associations on the purely material and technical. In a sense, everyone knows whom to turn to for this or that, if they know that they are linked to the other in one way or another through the social structure of associations, and that they have to guide their product through a chain of associations in such and such a way.

Of course, since I have to speak briefly here, I can only sketch out the principles of the matter. And so, I would like to say, the spiritual life must develop independently out of its own forces, in that those who achieve it are at the same time the administrators; likewise, the economic life must develop out of its own perspectives, in that those who are active in the economic life join together according to the principles of the economic life. If economic life is independent, then that which can only be based on the equal judgment of all mature human beings will arise as the content of the third link in the social organism, the actual state community.

I know very well that many people are truly frightened when one speaks to them of this threefold social organism, which is said to be necessary for the future. But this is only because people usually think that the state should be split into three parts. How should these three parts then work together? The truth is that unity is maintained precisely because these three parts are brought to their full development in the way I have only been able to sketch out, because the human being as a unity is present in all three parts. He participates in some way in the spiritual organism. If he has children, he is interested in the spiritual organism through the school. With his spiritual interests, he is somehow involved in the spiritual organism. He carries what he has received from the spiritual organism into this democratic state, since he is a participating adult in the democratic state, in his deeds, in his life. But what public law, public security, public welfare and so on is, which concerns every adult, is developed on the basis of the unified state. And with the constitutions of the soul, which are developed there in the direct interrelationship from person to person, one enters again into economic life in one's special field, in which one is linked through various associations in which one is active. One carries what one has gained from spiritual life, from public life, into this economic life, fertilizes it through it, maintains it, brings justice and spiritual fertilization into this economic life. The human being himself forms the unity between what is not the division into estates.

I have often been told that this would be a return to what in ancient Greece included the nourishing, defending and teaching classes. Such an objection only shows how superficially such things are often viewed today. For it is not a matter of a division of people themselves, not of a division into classes, but of the external life being divided into three in its institutions. It is precisely because man is part of such a tripartite social organism that all estates can cease to exist and true democracy can come about. I would say that the development of modern states points to this with an inner necessity for anyone who is unprejudiced.

Do we not see that, on the one hand, they have to take account of the necessary impulse towards democracy, but then, on the other hand, allow democracy to be corrupted by the fact that, as a matter of course, the able will always have more weight in the democratic life of the state than the less able? In matters where ability is important, this is entirely justified, for example in the intellectual sphere. On the other hand, the actual democratic state must be kept free and pure from such overpowering influences of particularly capable personalities, because there must be an area according to the basic demand of modern humanity in which only that which is equally valid for all people who have come of age is asserted.

The economic field shows particularly well how impossible it is to allow what man acquires through his special development as an ability in economic life to have an effect. He may acquire economic supremacy through it. But it must not become a social supremacy. It will not become one only because that which is economic power, which remains within economic life, cannot possibly become a political or legal supremacy. All the factors that have led to the caricature of the so-called social question would be overcome if people were willing to accept that economic life would be placed on its own ground and that democratic state life could, in turn, be placed honestly and sincerely on its own ground. The development of newer states shows how necessary it is for humanity to turn to such principles. And so, in addition to the historical impulses that one must take up in order to be pointed to this idea of the threefold social order, allow me to characterize the two subjective sources from which this impulse has arisen for me over many years.

The first source is that, with spiritual-scientific knowledge, which I have chosen to represent my view of life, one can inform oneself about certain developmental conditions of humanity differently than from the currently prevailing materialistic-scientific worldview. This currently prevailing materialistic-scientific worldview cannot actually lead to a real understanding of the historical development of humanity, because what we call “history” today is basically more or less a fable convenante. We make history today - and then want to learn something from this history for the social and political tasks of the present - in such a way that we imagine that what follows in human development is always the effect of the preceding, this preceding in turn the effect of a preceding and so on. A truly appropriate comparison of the whole development of humanity with the development of the individual human being, one that is not based merely on analogies, could heal one from this error.

When I see the individual develop, I have to say: What occurs in the first years of life, in the middle years of life, at the end of life, that does not present itself in such a way that I can speak of cause and effect. I cannot truly say that a person who turns thirty-five only experiences organically what is the effect of what he experienced at twenty or twenty-five, but we see as man develops, we see certain developmental impulses and developmental forces arise from his organism, from his entire organic being and nature, which show themselves to be particularly effective at certain periods of time.

Thus, for each individual, there are life epochs: When the second dentition appears, at around seven years of age, we find that the child's entire soul life changes. Before, the child imitated; now it becomes one who needs to come under a certain authority and to follow the judgments of people. Again, at puberty, a transformation of the soul life clearly begins. This transformation of the soul life can also be observed in later epochs, if only we have an organ for it.

For the individual human being, it is not just a matter of cause and effect, but of developmental forces shooting up from the depths of his being. And if you study history properly, you will find – to cite just one example – such a turning point in the development of all civilized modern humanity around the middle of the 14th or 15th century. There we find precisely that transition which, out of the elementary necessity of development, actually gave rise to modern humanity with its demands. Oh, there is a great difference between what man has regarded as the right way for himself to live a dignified life since that fifteenth century and what the man of the Middle Ages regarded as such.

The story of the soul – which we have not actually pursued – as it can arise from spiritual science, of which our building in Dornach is a representation, leads one to see what I have called the democratic principle as something that occurs in modern humanity in the same way as one sees the qualities that occur in the individual human being, say, at the age of sexual maturity. By taking into account the fact that modern humanity is quite different and that the developmental principles of the whole of humanity, as well as of the individual, must be taken into account, it becomes clear that democracy is something that cannot be opposed. , but that, because democracy is something that springs from the most elementary human nature, the social organism must be tripartite so that what can be democratically ordered comes into its own in the development of humanity. That is one thing, this spiritual-scientific view of the developmental impulses of humanity. The other is the observation of the facts of the life of nations.

I can only give you a few examples here. But it is still interesting to see from individual examples the impossibility of the newer unitary state structures coming out of their unity to form a truly viable social structure. It is only necessary to refer to a few examples to show this. You will understand that, as a non-Swiss, I do not mention Switzerland as an obvious example. I need only mention that what has already occurred to such a high degree in some European states will also gradually occur in the others, and that it is quite a short-sighted attitude to keep relying on the thought: Oh, it's different for us, we don't need to worry about what's happening elsewhere.

Now, I have chosen as an example the East of Europe, Russia, not only because Russia, with her tragic destiny, is particularly significant for our study of humanity, but also because, according to the practical political judgments of the leading English politicians, Russia is also the country in which, most vividly, I might say, as in an experiment taking place in the life of nations, what needs and what impossibilities prevail in modern national life must show. Let me highlight just a few aspects of this Russian national character.

There, placed in the middle of the Russian absolutism of the 1860s, which you know only too well, we encounter the curious institution of the zemstvo. These are assemblies of representatives of the rural population, those people who are involved in economic life or other areas of life in individual rural areas, who come together in certain assemblies to discuss these matters, I would say in the manner of a council or the like, a cantonal council. From the 1860s onwards, Russia was full of such zemstvos. They actually do fruitful work; they work together with something else that is traditional in Russia: the Mir organizations of the individual village communities, a kind of compulsory organization for the economic life of the village. There we have, on the one hand, old democratic customs in the Russian peasant organization, but in the appearance of the Zemstvos we have something newer that definitely tends towards the democratic. But something very strange is emerging. And this strangeness becomes even more striking when we look at another phenomenon that has emerged in Russia before the world catastrophe destroyed everything or cast it in a different light.

In Russia, it has been found that people from the most diverse individual professions have associated with each other, and in turn that associations have arisen from profession to profession, bank cashiers and bank cashiers have formed associations. These associations have in turn joined together to form more comprehensive associations. Those who came to Russia actually held their meetings not with individuals, but encountered such associations wherever they had anything to do with.

All of this was incorporated into the other state life of absolutism. Now, if you study these zemstvos, if you study the associations, if you study the Mir organization itself, you notice one thing. Of course, these organizations also extend to many other areas of life, such as school institutions and the like, but they do not do anything special there. Anyone who engages in an unbiased study of these associations – after all, the Semstwos did not develop into corporations either, but actually into associations, with farmers joining those at the forefront of industrial life, and so on. Even if it all took on the character of a public institution, in reality one was dealing with associations, and they all did good. But what they did, they actually only did on the basis of economic life. And we can say: In this Russia, the strange thing is that an organic system based on associations is emerging. Furthermore, it is proving that the Russian state is incapable of dealing with what is emerging there. So we can say: as the necessity of the early capitalist development, as it occurs in Russia, leads to economic organizations, these must, out of an inner necessity, take their place alongside the political institutions.

Now, something else peculiar occurs in Russia in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. Yes, of course, absolutism founds its schools; but these schools are nothing more than, I would say, a reflection of the needs of absolutist state life. Now, a spiritual life is developing in Russia, a more intense spiritual life than the West of Europe assumes. But how must this spiritual life develop? Absolutely in opposition, yes, in revolutionary turmoil against everything that is Russian statehood. One sees that this tightly and uniformly organized state is splitting apart into three parts, but really only wants to split apart. But it cannot. It shows us, precisely through what it is experiencing, how impossible it is to compress these three most excellent spheres of human life into a unified state.

I can only sketch this out for you. If you study in detail how these three elements in Russian state life then develop into the world war, how out of the world war first the really insubstantial rule of Miliukov develops, but then under Kerensky something develops that can be called the transformation of absolutism into a democratic state, but still entirely with a belief in the omnipotence of the unitary state, then can be seen precisely from what Kerensky's short reign must fail, how this Russian state, which wants to become democratic, is unable to address the most important issues, an economic issue, the agrarian issue, because the associations of Russian life are such that anything democratic that is tried out of the old absolutism breaks down on them.

Of course, everything is also showing itself in a certain concrete way. You can't see everything in it right away. But anyone who looks at it impartially, at this becoming Russia, its steering into an impossible social-democratic structure, because the unified state is fragmented at the impossibility of combining the three areas of life, will see that this example of Eastern Europe is a very significant one and that the far-sighted English politicians are right to look at Russia as the field in which, as in a world experiment, the course of human development is being demonstrated.

One could survey the whole of Europe from such points of view, one would see everywhere how the unified state is gradually disintegrating. Even if it still appears firmly established in some areas, it will dissolve because it cannot cope with the proper interaction of the three human spheres of life. Just see how, in more recent times, where, for example, the political sense, the political attitude completely fills the innermost being of the human being, how there the political attitude cannot become master over economic life.

In this respect, France is a good example. France has saved from its revolution in the 18th century what is now a truly inner democratic spirit, even if this democratic spirit is coupled with a great conservatism in relation to family life. Even if much of the democratic reminds one of the philistine and patriarchal, the tendency towards democracy is perhaps, if not purest, then at least most pronounced in the Frenchman's deepest convictions among the peoples of Europe. This democratic spirit first sought to express itself in the life of the state. It was precisely through this expression of the democratic spirit in French state life that the state was, on the one hand, abstractly dissected into its departments; but these departments were, in turn, combined into a single unit. All this was the fruit of the French Revolution.

One has only to consider one thing in this structure of the French state: the position of the departmental prefect, and one will see how inorganically the political-legal, the state element, is linked to the economic element. The prefect is actually nothing more than the executive organ of the Paris government from a certain point of view. I might say that the Paris government has the various departmental prefects as it has its many hands. But the departmental prefect, in turn, must be in contact with the economic interest groups in his department. So that when there is an election in France, the prefect will certainly direct that election, but it will not turn out differently than it can turn out from what the prefect concedes to the economic interest groups.

Thus we see how parties exist in France, parties with party slogans, and party watchwords too, but how these party watchwords signify much less reality than that which grows out of the economic interests of the department. In this respect, the study of the individual facts of French life is extraordinarily interesting. In France, in particular, one can see how a proper interaction of the legal-state and the economic can never be transformed into a certain public truth, because the state element cannot control the economic element.

I myself have, I would like to say, studied for decades from direct observation what was bound to lead to the downfall, let us say, of Austria. There was no way for Austria to avoid going to the dogs, one way or another. For as the newer democratic life emerged, it also had to bring something like democracy into its state life, into this state life, which above all had its intellectual structure from such a diversity of peoples that there were actually thirteen official languages in Austria, which on the other hand had a complicated economic life, leaning on the Orient on the one hand, on Germany and Western Europe on the other, on Italy and so on. When something democratic was to be introduced into this Austrian state life, it was formed in such a way that a Reichsrat was created. Four different sections were elected to this Reichsrat: the curia of the chambers of commerce, the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial centers, and the curia of the rural communities. If you look more closely at the reason: nothing but representatives of economic interests were elected to the Austrian parliament to shape the state. Of course, they achieved nothing, except that they transformed economic interests into state interests, and nothing of a real state emerged at all, but rather a conglomeration of economic interests, against which the spiritual life of the various nations then rebelled, something that was bound to move towards fragmentation for internal reasons.

We can observe something else, however, that is much more international and universal, and we will see how everything that is considered impartially in the modern life of humanity tends towards this threefoldness. Take the most striking thing that has emerged: I am not talking explicitly about the social question, but about the social-democratic question. In Russia, because the old state life, when it wanted to democratize itself, fragmented due to the impossibility of unifying the three areas of life in such a way as to a resulted in something completely alien being imposed on Russian culture, and that what is now unfolding in Russia is, of course, nothing other than something that must necessarily lead the social life it affects into ruin. What Social Democracy, the Socialist trend that swears by Marxism, can practically achieve, especially in terms of democracy, which is truly demanded by the innermost human being, can be seen from the sad state of present-day Russia, where it can already be reported that the ideals of the gullible workers are being fulfilled in such a way that now, under the necessity of the circumstances, is compelled to transform the eight-hour day into a twelve-hour day, and that instead of the usual organization, in which the worker thinks he will find his freedom, a military labor regiment is being set up that promises to be much more tyrannical than the Prussian military regiment ever was. These are the fruits of Leninism, of Trotskyism!

They cannot be otherwise. They only show, in the most radical form, how the social-democratic current developed out of the proletariat – because today's Russian rule over the many millions of the Russian people includes only a few million industrial workers, and basically there is a tyranny of the few million industrial workers today – how the social-democratic current developed. How did it develop? Yes, we can say: this social democracy, which is particularly characterized by the fact that it derives all human life only from economic production, that it regards all spiritual life only as an ideology, as something that rises like a smoke from economic production, this social democracy, how could it arise?

This social democracy, which is under Marxist influence – I do not mean healthy socialism, of course – is actually the sin of bourgeois currents that have arisen in modern times, the result of the sin of bourgeois currents, I might say. For if you look everywhere, you would see, as I have shown with two examples, France and Russia, that the whole civilized world has gone through this in its development in modern times. You would see everywhere that economic life has become one that has been stamped by technology , which has taken man away from his former connection with his occupation, and placed him in the abstract, indifferent machine, in the indifferent factory – and the proletariat, basically, has known nothing but economic life.

In more recent times, it would have been necessary to place this ever-growing proletariat in a social structure. From what historical development has brought forth in humanity, nothing could be gained by which one could, as it were, have devised a unified structure for those who are the leaders in economic life, in intellectual life, and so on, and those who have to work by hand. To a certain extent, the old powers had not been developed into new forces. The old princely states did not give rise to real institutions that would have been supported by democracy. So it has to be said that what modern social democracy actually is came about because the leading classes, the leading people in modern history, could not cope with what economic life had brought about. They have left the states so organized that they could not encompass the ever more massive and massive economic life. And so it is precisely the failure to come to terms with what was brought about by the emergence of the proletarian in human souls that shows that nothing fruitful for a possible structure of the social organism could arise from what could be imagined by the state.

And so I could cite many more examples that would show you that it is indeed necessary, on the basis of what can be observed, to place the three most important spheres of human and human existence on their own ground.

This necessity could truly have been discussed before this terrible catastrophe befell the world and so clearly revealed the destructive forces in the last four to five years. But I do not believe that humanity in the period before 1914, when people only lived in illusions about what they felt was a great, powerful upsurge in modern humanity, could somehow have been won over to an understanding of this necessity. Now, however, the time has come when it is no longer enough to prove theoretically that such a necessity exists. Instead, states that have been particularly exposed to the dangers of the unitary state have been swept away in their old form and are faced with the necessity of rebuilding themselves from scratch.

We see the eastern former Russian state fragmented, faced with the necessity of rebuilding itself, but also with the powerlessness to rebuild itself in a way that will flourish, having to accept something is being imposed on it that never grows out of its own nationality, but is imposed on it like a general socialist template that can be applied to everything. And we see, for example, in Germany, where a failed revolution, the revolution of November 1918, really shows a lot of how only chaos, real chaos, results from the circumstances. And the most striking, I would say heartbreaking, thing in the life of present-day Germany is that wherever you meet people and talk to them about public affairs, they appear at a loss. Why are they at a loss? For the simple reason that the dogma of the unified state is deeply rooted in the souls and because the terrible lessons of the last four to five years have truly not been enough for people to erase this dogma from them. I have asked many individuals where it comes from that they are so lethargic that they cannot be won over to rallying for anything positive in the direction of reconstruction. The people confessed calmly: Yes, we were in the trenches for so long, we didn't know if we would still be alive in eight days, it had to gradually become indifferent to us whether we would still be alive in eight days; shouldn't it be indifferent to us now what social institutions are made in eight days? One accommodates oneself to the mood of the soul. Many a person, truly not just one, has said this.

Of course, the circumstances of the time make many things understandable, but something greater, something more significant is the historical, the purely human necessity. There is only either-or. And I believe that here too it could be realized – since the conditions are truly not far away that are likely to throw their waves into the whole of Europe – what should be realized: that it is impossible to bring the three spheres of life, intellectual life, state life, economic life, into a unity. The necessity should be realized to place each of these three spheres on its own ground.

I am well aware of the many objections that can be raised from the old point of view against this threefold ordering of the social organism. But anyone who considers the present world situation, as I have tried to describe it with a few examples, will say to himself: this proposal differs from all the other, more utopian proposals for the reorganization of the social organism in that it does not present a program, that it does not come with the pretension of knowing everything, but that it says: if people organize themselves socially in such a way that their best that their best comes about independently in a free, emancipated spiritual life, that in which all mature people are equal, in an independent democratic state life, that in which everything must develop from economic foundations, in an independent economic life, then the fact that people are called upon to work socially will bring about something like the solution of the social question.

For I do not believe that anyone who knows life can go along with the superficial view that the social question arose yesterday, and that one only needs to have some ideas or draw some conclusions from life in order to hammer out a program that will solve the social question. There are many such concoctions. But the impulse for the threefold social order is not based on this ground of omniscience. It is permeated by the conviction that the social question has indeed arisen, that it cannot be solved overnight or with any single measure: it will always be there in the future, it will permeate our lives, and the solution can only consist in being continuously under such institutions, so that the daily new difficulties can be overcome little by little. The whole of life in the future will consist in being a kind of solution to the social question.

The impulse for threefolding hopes that the social question can be resolved through the work and judgment of individuals in the threefold social organism. It does not seek to solve the social question theoretically; it seeks to give people the opportunity to solve the social question through collaboration and joint reflection. But even what can be proposed – today I have only been able to give you a rough sketch – these characteristics of the three areas of the social organism, even that is by no means regarded by the bearers of this idea as something that could be any kind of dogma. That is all I ask: that it be discussed, that as many people as possible be imbued with what the needs of the present time teach, that out of the best forces of the human being, that which can lead to a new structure be done.

When good will from all sides works together, a fruitful discussion can arise. And it is this fruitful discussion that is really important to those who are the bearers of the idea of the threefold social organism. If they had to believe that they could not have emerged before the distress of the world catastrophe occurred, they now have some optimism; although, I would say, a sad optimism: that the ever-widening spread of distress must become the great teacher, that it is precisely out of distress that people will have to recognize that something like what is being said today — I do not want to say in the content that we are able to give to the idea of the threefold social order, but in the impulse that we would like to give to the public discussion through this idea — that something like this must somehow be taken seriously. Much will depend on whether such things can be taken seriously. A kind of spiritual drowsiness still hangs over European humanity, and indeed over modern civilized humanity. Even if those who are already working today in the movement for the threefold social order have done this or that out of their convictions, they know that the right thing will only come when a sufficiently large number of people engage with the details of the matter.

We have already had the opportunity to found a free school in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, where children between the ages of six or seven and fourteen or fifteen are taught in an eight-year primary school according to the principles of a free spiritual life, so that they grow into a social order from a free spiritual life. We have tried many different things in this area, and economic matters are also being considered, where we want to try to place the most diverse branches of economic life under the aspects of the threefold order, to organize them, to finance them according to these aspects; for it will perhaps be particularly necessary, in order to be convincing, that the model, that the example, is there. But in order for this example to have a sufficient impact, in order to put it into practice at all, it is necessary, above all, that a sufficiently large number of people take part in the discussion of what the impulse for the threefold order of the social organism actually wants.

I would like to have stimulated a little thought on this point, and on this alone, with the very sketchy remarks that I have been able to make in the short time available to me this evening.

A discussion then followed in which various questions and objections to the remarks made in the lecture were raised.

Final Word

Actually, I have to admit that no real objections have been raised. I understand very well that, based on what I have said tonight, a wide range of questions can be asked, and I believe that it is impossible to cover such a question so exhaustively in a one-hour lecture that hundreds and thousands and perhaps even more questions cannot be asked afterwards. I would therefore just like to make a few comments, which may at least provide some insights instead of an answer to the various questions, which would really take several days. First of all, with regard to what the Chairman said last, that there are no clear formulations of what threefolding actually wants. You see, I have tried, as well as it is possible for such a movement, which is basically only at the beginning of its work, to discuss some of these problems in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question', for example, the problem of the circulation of the means of production, which I have put in the place of the unworkable socialization of the means of production, and so on. You will find more such details in the Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage than one might perhaps expect. I must emphasize again and again that my attempts to grasp this impulse of threefolding are actually drawn from the whole of life, and that the whole of life actually has dimensions not only in two directions, but always also in the depths. I would ask you to bear in mind that the movement is in its infancy and that at the end of my presentation today, if I may call it that, I actually called for a discussion. I believe that only a discussion will produce the right results.

Now I would like to at least touch on some individual questions. An important misunderstanding between Dr. S. and me will have arisen precisely because I do not speak at all, as the doctor understood it, of three parliaments. I do not see the essence of this threefold structure as being that the unified parliament is divided into three parliaments, but rather that we only have a parliament in the modern sense for that which can be democratically administered or oriented, but that the other two areas are not administered by parliament, but are administered from what arises from within themselves. It is very difficult for me to discuss these concrete things in abstract terms. I would therefore like to build the answer, so to speak.

When setting up the Waldorf School, I once again had to deal in detail with what I would call a cross-section of the state administration for the school system. Right? I had to constitute the Waldorf School from two sides. On the one hand, I had to base it on what I believed the spiritual life itself would demand as an impulse for the Waldorf School. On the other hand, I could not build castles in the air. That is, I had to create a school where it is possible for students to leave, for example, at the age of fourteen or, if you like, in between, and then be able to join another school later on. Naturally, I had to deal with the curricula. Now, I first came across – please excuse me for having to go into very specific details, but I believe this is the best way for me to communicate – I came across the curricula. The curricula are state-defined descriptions of the subject matter, the teaching objective and so on. It is quite another matter if one, as a pedagogical and didactic artist, can study purely from the essence of the human being how, from the age of seven to fourteen, what is to be brought to the human being takes place. I am convinced that the teaching objectives for each year can be read from the developing human being.

Now I want those who are immersed in the living teaching to set the teaching goals, and not those who are torn out of it and become state officials, who thus pass over from the living teaching to democracy. So I want what comprises the spiritual life to be administered by those who are still immersed in it, who are building this spiritual life. So it is important that the whole structure of the administration is built on the structure of a spiritual life itself. Isn't it true that today, for example, I still had to make the decision that children, after completing three classes, can join again — in order to have freedom in between — after another three years, at the age of twelve, they can join again. So I had to do justice to an external aspect.

That is the essence of the threefold social order. It has a real basis everywhere and must also work from a real basis. But if you have a real basis, you do not have something vague. Spiritual life is there, it has an administration simply because one person is in one position and another in another. In this separation of the spiritual body from the state body, I would simply like the administration to be hierarchical, and I believe – of course this is something that cannot be explained quickly – that the hierarchical administration will have all imperfections. I know what the lecturers in particular will object, but perhaps even major imperfections are sometimes necessary in such transitions in order to arrive at something perfect. But the point is that, little by little, a purely didactic body of intellectual life, which, if administered in a way that is justified by the facts, only slightly echoes Klopstock's “Republic of Scholars”. And that something like this is actually possible in the field of intellectual life if one only has the good will to found it.

I think that it will then become very clear – let me mention something specific, pick out an example – that pedagogy, when practised at university level, has been one of the worst disciplines so far, at least in the whole of Central Europe. As a rule, it has been saddled on some pedagogue who has practised it as a secondary subject. In such a republic of scholars, the one who proves to be capable can be called upon for three years, can teach education, and then return to the teaching profession.

But as far as the external structure is concerned, I must say that, on a small scale, things have gone excellently so far with our teaching staff at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. The question arose right at the beginning: Who will be the director? – Of course, nobody; we simply have teachers with equal rights in all classes, and one of this teaching staff, who has slightly fewer hours than the others, takes care of the administrative matters. In this way, it can already be seen that the capable teachers also have a certain authority over the others, a natural authority, and a certain hierarchical system emerges. However, this does not need to be an answer to the question, as the senior judge L. meant: Who commands? — but it happens automatically. Naturally I will refrain from mentioning names, but it does happen. And in the intellectual field....

What about the parents' say in the choice of teachers? That's dictatorship!

Professional and objective! Of course, call it a dictatorship for my sake, the name doesn't bother me. It is a dictatorship in the sense that it is not the individual who decides. Since you are a scientist, you will easily understand when I say: when it comes to the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem, it does no harm if a “dictatorship” decides, because a certain necessity lies in the matter.

And religious education?

The point here is that some theoretical questions now become didactic questions. In the religious instruction as it is organized in the Waldorf School, although I do not want to say that it is always organized in this way, because there may be developments here too, it is important that it is appropriate for me, for example, that what I was able to give as a pedagogical and didactic teaching course is expressed only in the methodology, not in the world view, but in the way the lessons are taught. The Waldorf school is not meant to be a school of world view in any direction. This could only be achieved by the fact that my institutions all relate to the pedagogical-didactic and work from that. The children who come from Catholic parents have their Catholic religious education, the children who come from Protestant parents have their Protestant religious education from the respective Catholic and Protestant pastor. Now, there were a large number of proletarian children and also anthroposophist children, and there was a demand for free religious education. And the children whose parents demand free religious education receive free religious education from us, based on our convictions. So in this question, an emotional truth, combined with certain social driving forces, decides.

Things naturally look different in the process of becoming than after some time. But it is precisely in practice that it can be seen that one can make progress if one does not want a parliament for spiritual matters. That is why I cannot go along with the “three parliaments”, nor can I answer the question, “if Kerensky had had three parliaments. . .»; that is just it, that he should have solved the agrarian question in his one and failed because of it. I see no causal nexus between threefolding and what came before, for example; I just wanted to point out that what came before failed because of the three spheres of life, which I cannot take as two or four or even more, because there are only three.

Dr. S.: I didn't seriously consider that objection.

Dr. Steiner: I did not understand it any other way! Now I am wondering, since the state has failed in its establishment of the three parliaments, how one can make progress through a new beginning, not through a causal nexus, although what is good must remain. You see, the elements of the answer to your questions lie in what you said. I do not want a parliament in the economic field either; heaven forbid, no democracy in the economic field! But an order that does not arise hierarchically, but from the thing itself.

Now, these areas are not simply juxtaposed. If you read my “key points,” you will find that the circulation of the means of production is essentially determined by what is determined in the intellectual sphere, so that the intellectual sphere has a direct effect on the economic sphere. And so much of economic life is determined by the organization in relation to one's position. What I want to say is that the spiritual organization will also be concerned with determining whether a person is capable of doing this or that and will be trained for it; the economic position in which he can be placed depends on this. Of course, this must now be done jointly by the economic and spiritual aspects. The fact that he is qualified for this or that will already place him in a different position from another person. Nothing hierarchical develops from this, but in a certain sense nothing bureaucratic either. Every bureaucratic parliament for the economic system only leads to the disintegration of the economic system. So the essential thing for me is the way the three elements are organized, and you can't say that everyone will be in three parliaments; it is only one parliament in which everyone can be, but only based on the judgment of each mature human being. So let's say, to highlight the most important area: all legal matters. The legal issues are actually such that they are at least in the interest of every person who has come of age, and I would like to say, of course, that every person who has come of age is not ideally equally capable with every other person who has come of age. But a certain arithmetic mean does yield the appropriate result in relation to legal issues. At this point, one should now turn to the theory of the basis of law in general. Law is not really based on judgment, but on perception, on the habits that arise from the interaction of people living together. This can be judged when people who belong together judge it. I do not believe, Doctor $., that the individual human being therefore needs to find the right law, but together they will find it. That is what democracy does. I see much more of importance in the interplay than in the details. I would like to see people who have come of age in the democratic parliament and have them decide there mainly on legal matters, but also, and rightly so, on welfare issues, because every person who has come of age can decide there; of course, in many things not on the

objective and technical.

Now, the eight-hour day is something that cannot seriously be considered at all for the threefold social organism, because what does an eight-hour day actually mean? I must confess that I do not, but for the greater part of the year I work much more than eight hours and do not find it in any way excessive. I do not believe that it is possible to establish such an eight-hour day without undermining our real social life. In my “Key Points of the Social Question” you will therefore find that everything that relates to the time of work is determined within the democratic state, and on this basis, the contracts for the distribution of the proceeds are then concluded, not labor contracts, but contracts for the distribution of the proceeds between what I call the labor manager and between what I must call the worker.

So that in the right-wing parliament?

In the right-wing parliament, the time and nature of the work is determined. In this respect, the manual laborer is on an equal footing with the intellectual laborer, because the intellectual laborer cannot assert his interests. You can come to an understanding with goodwill, but you cannot make any demands that relate to economic life itself, you cannot regulate export and import according to parliamentary laws; rather, that must be studied from the economic conditions, from factual and technical knowledge. The fact that I have been working in a company for twenty years also gives me a different moral authority with my fellow human beings than if I have only been there for a year. In democratic life, it is not a matter of whether I am a cheeky young badger of twenty-one years old passing judgment on something. In economic life, it simply depends on whether life experience is taken into account. This is simply necessary for the good of humanity.

I deliberately raised the question of the eight-hour day. Now, if there were a four-hour day, what could the manager do? I don't care about the eight-hour day. I also work more. I am talking about the regulation of working hours.

All right. The matter is this: if the democratic parliament decides on a four-hour day, then this four-hour day will either be sufficient to run the economy within the economy, or it will not be sufficient. If that is not the case, then it will be a matter of everyone, in turn, realizing from their mature reason — for the change must also be carried out democratically — that the change must come about democratically, not in any other way, not by the economically more powerful being able to exert pressure. So what exists as the legal basis of economic life belongs in the democratic parliament. But what is the economic question? Isn't everything an economic question? One might ask: can spiritual life be separated from economic life at all? The objection has been raised that this costs money. In economic life, I see associations emerging from the individual branches of economic life, which interweave, from related and unrelated branches, production, consumption and so on. To describe this in detail would be going too far.

What is important is this: the various members of the spiritual life, who are in their administration of the spiritual life what I have described for the spiritual life; as participants in economic life, they form economic consumers and are members, associations that belong to the economic body. What I separate is life; it is not an abstract separation into three bodies, but it is life that is structured. It is true that spiritual life is indeed administered hierarchically, but the economic life of all those who work spiritually is part of the economic life of the associations. So in their economic activity, teachers and so on are also economic entities and economic organizations. And so the various people actually work together. And this can only be followed in detail; just as, after all, when one wants to present chemistry, not everything can be presented in one hour, but one must refer to what can then be done in detail.

But to answer a question from Judge L., it is easier to discuss and answer certain questions with people who have simply come of age than factual questions, I think that is obvious in the end.

Basically, socialist agitators usually have no understanding of economic life and even less of the conditions of economic life. And so the most diverse utopias have been put forward as to how one thing or another can be organized. For example, I would like to mention how industrial sectors that are based on a fine, meticulous interlocking of very different things are supposed to cope with their exports if they are to be organized according to a Möllendorff planned economy or something similar. It depends on certain things that can only be administered from within an economic organism, not by government, but from within.

It is characteristic, for example, when it is said: You cannot take school out of the state today; people will not put up with it, and it is not necessary in a socialist state. Those who do not know the conditions that really exist in humanity, but which haunt the minds of political agitators, must say to themselves: in the socialist state it would be even more necessary! Above all, for the good of the people, it would be even more necessary to at least take the school out of what is intended for humanity in the socialist state, as it is imagined by Marxism.

So I believe that if the good will exists to respond to the individual – I have already been repeatedly confronted with the objection of the three parliaments – I want to have the threefold structure for its own sake, not just to have three groups of people, three houses next to each other; there really won't be three houses. If I am understood correctly, it will probably be found that we can meet in the concrete solutions that I have already given for individual questions, and for others, if I still have some time to live, will still give - I would prefer if you will give others - I think we will get along quite well.

I would like to emphasize again here: it is not a matter of omniscience, but rather of trying to determine, without utopia, what should happen in detail, starting from the assumption that the three areas of life different conditions of life, and that only when people from the three areas of life work together in a qualitatively different way, not just in a parliamentary, quantitative way, but in a qualitative way, will the concrete findings emerge in the right way.

I must also say that for me, this threefold social order is so firmly established that I would compare this certainty, of course cum grano salis, with the certainty of the Pythagorean theorem. You cannot prove it everywhere, in all cases, but you can prove that you can use it. The threefold social order does not have to be abstracted from all particulars, but it can be applied in all details, in this case practically applied, in that in the threefold organism precisely the state life, economic life and spiritual life are organized in such a way that a practical result is achieved.

I believe that answering the very extensive questions of Mr. Chief Justice L. would take too long this evening; but it may be seen that the point here is to start from the concrete shaping of reality, and that it is therefore extremely difficult with abstract answers, because one wants to remain in the full reality.

I would just like to come back to this: I also find it extremely interesting that within French folklore, syndicalism has emerged, and I believe that this question is best solved by studying socialization. It is very interesting to study the different nuances of English and French socialism. English socialism is basically a watered-down form of capitalism. It is actually entirely what works in capitalism. So the purely economic element in the English labor question is actually only sharpened to the interests of the worker in the big picture; but it has not gone away completely, so that English socialism has an economically opportunistic coloring.

German socialism has taken up Marxism with military efficiency and military organizational spirit, and it has acquired a tight military organization. And those like me who have worked in a workers' educational school that had grown entirely out of social democracy, but was also thrown out by its non-Marxist orthodoxy, that is, by its non-Marxism, by saying: Not freedom, but a reasonable compulsion can judge that. German socialism is basically something that is entirely in line with the same spirit that produced Prussian militarism.

Without wishing to say anything favorable about the nature of the people or to accuse the Germans of anything, French syndicalism is, after all, — through its associative character, I must see it as the best beginning for precisely what I must think of as the association in economic life. And especially when I compare it with English and German socialism, I see that it arises from the same thing that I have tried to characterize, from the democratic spirit. These are two sides; one side has shown itself among the bourgeoisie, the other among the workers. And what is more capitalist and more profit-oriented in the bourgeoisie is syndicalism among the workers. It is only the obverse and reverse sides.

So I believe that these three different nuances, the English, French and German nuances of socialism, are related to the qualities of nationality.

And this brings us to a question that I consider to be extremely important. We should not start from a general socialism and we should not believe that there is such a thing as an abstract socialism. Instead, we should ask: How should each national culture be treated based on its own characteristics? And anyone who comes from Western Europe, has observed and reflected on Swiss social conditions, goes to Russia and imposes something completely alien on the Russian people, actually destroys what the Russian people could have formed out of themselves. — But, as I said, not all social issues can be resolved today.

Dear attendees, at your request I would like to discuss with you today some aspects of the social impulse, which wants to face the world under the name of the threefold social organism. And it may be carried out into the world from here, for the very reason that spiritual science is to be practised here and actually already today the widest circles could understand that a recovery of the general world conditions can only come about through a deepening of the spirit.

After this short lecture, we still have a tour of the building ahead of us, so you will understand that I want to be brief and can only give you a few aphoristic pointers to the essentials of the idea of threefolding.

This idea of threefold social order is not entirely new. It has its origin in decades of observation of the conditions prevailing in Europe, especially in Central Europe, and especially of those conditions that led to the terrible catastrophe of the last five to six years.

For the person speaking to you today, these circumstances, under which a large part of the world is now suffering terribly, did not come as a surprise. It was in the spring of 1914 that I gave a series of lectures to a small audience in Vienna – in Vienna, you know, the world conflagration started in Vienna! Within these lectures I had to say, simply under the obligation, I would like to say, to the time, that one should not calm down in doing so, but should always praise the great importance of the development of the present in all possible words, but that one should look at what is being prepared. And I had to say at the time – so it was in the early spring of 1914, many weeks before the outbreak of the World War! – Anyone who surveys the social conditions of Europe with a certain expert eye can only compare certain phenomena, especially in our economic life, with a kind of social cancer disease that must come to a terrible outbreak in the shortest possible time.

You see, anyone who said something like that in the spring of 1914 would have been seen as a dreamy idealist with pessimistic views. And those who considered themselves “practitioners” at the time spoke of the general political situation as being relaxed, of the best relations between the governments of Europe, and so on.

Today, it may well be pointed out that it was not the idealist who was wrong with his prediction, but rather the ten to twelve million people who have been killed since then by the world conflagration, and three times as many who have been crippled within the civilized world, who provide sufficient proof that the “idealist” was right to speak such words.

One is also reminded today in a certain way of the position that people who thought they were practical took at that time.

Even today, some will say that one is being pessimistic when making such a prognosis. One is not being pessimistic, one is only speaking out of an understanding of the circumstances.

And just as today, strengthened, so to speak, by spiritual science, one can take a deeper look at the situation, so it has been possible for decades. One could carefully observe how the individual relationships between states in Europe developed more and more into antagonisms, and how the measures taken were by no means sufficient to deal with the tensions that were accumulating everywhere. And one had to foresee what was coming: the years of terror that we now seem to have left behind us.

Today, however, it may be said that just before these terrible years, if I may put it this way, there were no ears to hear these things. It was only when a great part of Europe was struck by the terrible adversity that is now here that people began to listen. So people said at the time, there were no ears to hear, and even today we still have to wait and see if we are really being heard. Nevertheless, despite the hardship, despite the terrible lessons that the last few years have brought us, it cannot be said that the idea of threefolding, which has emerged from careful observation of the circumstances, has already been received in the appropriate way today. And so I would like to tell you right at the outset why people are so opposed to this idea of threefolding, why they consider it a kind of utopia, a kind of fantasy.

You see, the reason for this is that conditions of such a complicated nature, conditions that have spread such devastation and chaos, have actually never existed before in the whole of human development! Humanity has been through a lot; at certain times, a lot has also befallen Europe. Conditions as they are now have really not yet existed in the time of historical development.

Circumstances have brought it about that in the past small groups of humanity have been seized by phenomena of decline. Even when the great Roman Empire was heading for its decline, it was still a small area in relation to the whole earth. Today, the amalgamation of conditions that we have spread across the whole civilized world makes the phenomena of decline more visible. It is no wonder that it is now necessary to have not a small idea of how to improve this or that in a limited area, but rather a comprehensive idea that really intervenes as deeply as the confusion runs deep. The threefold social order is such an idea. It is based not only on observation of the actual situation but also on a consideration of the historical moment in which humanity finds itself today. And it is also because it actually takes into account all of present-day civilized humanity that the idea of threefolding is so rejected. It is considered utopian, it is thought to be something that has been thought up. But it is the most real, or at least wants to be the most real, that has to be integrated into the present circumstances.

If we take a look at the development of intellectual, political and economic conditions in the present day, we have to link them to the same development over the last three to four centuries. Anything further back has a completely different character. The last three to four centuries, and especially the 19th century and the period since then, have brought humanity to a very particular state of development. In some areas, this is not yet apparent. The health of the Swiss people has been rightly mentioned here. It must be counted on for the future. But it is also necessary, in order for this health to remain, that there be no illusions that, in the face of all that is now collapsing, a small area could remain isolated. This cannot be the case.

You see, there are large areas in Central and Southeastern Europe today that you know suffer greatly from the fall of the exchange rate. The economist opposes this fall in the exchange rate, I would say, as a major phenomenon compared to minor phenomena that have always existed in the past. It was known that when the value of a currency falls in any particular area, imports into that area are somewhat undermined; exports are thus all the more encouraged. This law can no longer be applied to the devastation of economic conditions that has occurred in Central and Eastern Europe.

But so far, only the disadvantages of the fall in the value of a currency in certain areas have been shown! It will not take them very long to realize the disadvantages of a currency appreciation in a country! They will come, and it will not take that long, then the countries with depreciating currencies, where economic conditions are declining, will not be alone in their worries; the countries with appreciating currencies will think with fear about their high currencies.

These things show those who can see into the circumstances how, despite the fact that the economic area of the earth basically forms a unit today, despite all state structures, how the weal and woe of a small area of the earth depends on the weal and woe of the whole earth. Therefore, even today, social conditions can only be considered in a completely international sense.

If we look at what has actually brought us to today's situation, we have to say: We see how far we have come – today you do not see it yet – – but you could actually say, you could see it in the malformation of Eastern Europe, in the malformation of Russia. It must be said: such things are deeply significant, as we can now read in Russia, for example – I will mention a small thing, but it is deeply significant – as we can now read in Russia. You could read that Trotsky called on people not to celebrate May 1, but to work on May 1. Please, over there in Russia, the ideal of socialism is to be realized on a large scale – a paradise was promised to the people. That which the proletariat has designated as its sign of manifestation for decades – the May celebration – is something that must be abolished there. It is only one expression of all that must be abolished there! For a long time people have spoken of the evils of militarism, and rightly so. In Russia, labor is currently being militarized. In Russia, it is currently being said that it is nonsense that a person here on this earth should have control over his own person. There can be no such thing as freedom of disposal over one's own person. This is clearly shown by the fruits it has borne in the extreme case to which the development of the last three to four centuries has brought it. We must look at these things. We must realize that this state – I do not mean the individual state, but the state in general – which has developed from quite different conditions over the course of these last three to four hundred years, that this state has overburdened itself with things that the state as such cannot provide. For why?

You see, in order to look at such things soberly and clearly, without fantasy, we have to embrace the idea that the whole life of humanity is something similar to the life of the individual human being. We cannot describe the life of the individual in such a way that we always say: Now, when a person is forty years old, he is in the world the effect of the cause that was present at thirty-nine years, which in turn is the effect of the cause present at thirty-eight years, and so on. We cannot say that, but there is an inner, lawful development in the human being. Man gets second teeth around the seventh year, according to an inner law. He goes through other developmental stages in later years. There is a certain impulse living within man that makes him ripe for something at a certain time. It is the same with all mankind. What has emerged in all mankind over the last three to four centuries is something from which mankind cannot escape.

There was no other way for humanity than to call for democracy. Whatever ideals have been set in the external social life, the ideal of democracy is the one that has most powerfully seized and must seize humanity of the present. The state must become democratic, democratic in the broadest sense. Especially in Switzerland, where there is an old democracy, people should feel this, but they will also gradually perceive the necessity to relieve this democracy of certain areas.

What does democracy mean? Democracy means that people should have the opportunity to decide for themselves, either by referendum or by representation, on matters that are the same for everyone and that are the concern of every mature person. That is the ultimate ideal of democracy: equality among people with regard to decisions, in other words, everything that is equal among people of legal age. But what did the state, which has just developed in the course of history and emerged from very different circumstances, strive for? There are two fields in human life where democratic decisions can never be taken: one is the field of intellectual life and the other is the field of economic life. Those who are sincere in their belief in democracy must realize that if democracy is to be complete, intellectual life must be excluded from the sphere of the purely democratic state, as must economic life.

Anyone who is able to observe in this area can see from obvious examples how impossible it is to carry intellectual life as such into the democratic political sphere. I will not speak of the conditions here; that is not for me; but it is not at all possible to look at these conditions only from a small point of view today, but one must look at the whole world, at least the whole civilized world.

But if you look at the former German Reichstag, which apparently existed until 1914 and beyond, you have a perfect example of how the state – whether it is more or less democratic is not important in this case – has become overburdened with purely spiritual matters. Among the parties in the German Reichstag, they had a very large party, the so-called Center. In the present metamorphosis of the old Reichstag, which is called the National Assembly, the Center Party is again playing a role. This Center Party had no interests except purely religious, that is, spiritual matters. If any economic or political question came up, it was decided by some compromise which the Center Party made with other parties. But it is quite natural that this Center always had only the interest to promote its own spiritual interests. In short, if you follow the train of thought to its conclusion, it becomes clear that matters of purely spiritual concern have no place in the political parliament.

Take economic life. You see, Austria is the country that really shows, I would say is the textbook example of what has developed under the newer conditions, of the fact that the countries must perish. Only, Austria is the textbook example of what is perishing!

Anyone who, like myself, has spent thirty years of their life in Austria and has been able to see the developments that took place in the last third of the 19th century could see all the conditions coming about that have developed there, could see all the newer social conditions occurring. They also thought of making a parliament in Austria. But how was this parliament formed? Four curiae were formed: the curiae of the cities, the curiae of the provinces, the curiae of the municipalities, and the curiae of the big landowners. These were purely economic curiae, economic associations that were elected to the political parliament. They then decided from their economic point of view what should be public law. There you have the other example! In the German Reichstag you have the example of how a party that seeks purely intellectual goals turns out to be a troublemaker in a purely economic parliament. In Austria you have built up a parliament based on purely economic curiae, and anyone who has observed the situation knows that this parliament was never able to deal with what would have been necessary in Austria, for example: to regulate the spiritual conditions insofar as they manifested themselves in the secular conditions of the nationalities.

In Austria one could see something else. There the state was only a political entity. There were thirteen official languages. These thirteen official languages could not be brought under one roof; one could not bring them under one roof under the impression, because the people with the different languages had the most diverse intellectual interests in Austria. They tried to preserve some of it through private channels. Oh, I was often there when, you know, such long straws, the ones in the so-called Virginia cigars, were auctioned off in America in favor of the school associations! The school associations were founded to do something out of the intellectual interests themselves that the state as such could not do. But the idea of a unified state was too much in people's minds for such private foundations to achieve any great or widespread effect. And so I could go on telling you about the impossibility of keeping together certain things that the modern state wants to keep together.

The medium-sized states of Europe and Russia have had to learn the hard way that the centralized state cannot survive as it has existed up to now. Those who have not yet been affected by this fate still believe that it can be averted. It cannot be averted unless we grasp the legal idea of how to remedy the situation by human will. And here, based on ample observation and consideration of historical circumstances, is where the idea of threefold social order comes in. It says: People must become ever more honest and sincere in their striving for democracy. But then the democratic principle must be limited to the mere state principle, in which every person has to decide in the same way on everything that concerns all mature people. As I said, this can be done either by referendum or by representation. But then, the entire intellectual life, on the one hand, must be separated out from this state structure, from what is to be administered strictly by parliament. This entire intellectual life has increasingly come into the power of the state in recent centuries, and even today most people regard it as a great advantage of the modern state idea to absorb intellectual life, especially the school system. There is still a great deal of resistance to the most terrible prejudices. But the world does not see the connections.

But if you ask yourself: how did it actually come about that today we are not only faced with class struggles, but with the approval of class struggles? That we are faced with a complete lack of understanding between people? That we are witnessing the tyrannical rule of a few hundred thousand people in Russia over millions of people today, pretending to be democratic? Where did it all come from? It has been slowly prepared. One needs to think of a single word – I have pointed this out in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question in Present-Day Necessities of Life' – to see why, out of error, a large part of humanity today, the part of humanity that includes the proletariat, stands up and believes: Only by means of what you are all too familiar with, can they bring about any kind of change in the circumstances. The only word that needs to be mentioned is the one that could be heard at all, all social democratic events over decades: it is the word “ideology”. And this word, ideology, ladies and gentlemen, points to the entire course that the materialistic world view has taken in modern times.

Whatever one may think of the earlier conditions of humanity, we certainly do not want to restore the earlier conditions, we want forward and not backward; but one must still say: look at the man of the past! He knew that there lived in his soul something that had a direct connection with the spiritual that permeates the world. What, after all, has man known since the middle of the 15th century about these connections between his inner being and a spiritual in the world! The sun, they say, is a glowing ball of gas. What do people know today about the stars, about the sun! If you ask our scholars: what was the origin of the evolution of the earth? — they will tell you: it was once a nebula; then the sun and planets were formed over thousands of years. People have also surrendered to this realization! I have often referred to the description by Herman Grimm, who said: “Future people will have a hard time understanding the madness that speaks of the origin of the earth from the primeval mist in this Kant-Laplacean idea.” — But today it is regarded as a great development and science.

What was cultivated there then drove out the most diverse currents, and these currents flowed into the proletariat. And basically, what is being advocated in Russia today by Trotsky and Lenin is only the final consequence of what our scholars taught as materialism at the universities.

Here in Switzerland, there was a man who ranted a lot in the 1970s, but he saw what was coming. They didn't like him because he ranted a lot, Johannes Scherr. But besides a lot of ranting, he also saw important things. And he said as early as the 1970s: If you look at the economic development, if you look at the spiritual life, as it had to come down more and more, you will finally come to the point where Europe has to say: nonsense, you have won!

In the last five to six years, people have been saying, and still do: “Nonsense, you have won!”

Ideology, what does it mean? It means nothing other than: All spiritual life is ultimately only a smoke that rises from mere economic life. Economic conditions are the only reality, as Marxism preaches in all keys. And that which arises from economic conditions is that which man carries within himself as the content of his soul. Law, custom, religion, science, art: all ideology. This is the seed that has sprouted: ideology, disbelief in the spiritual life.

Where does this disbelief come from? This disbelief comes from the amalgamation of the spiritual life with the state life in recent centuries. For intellectual life, ladies and gentlemen, can only flourish if it is placed entirely on its own ground. Consider – I will pick out only the school system, because it is the most important area of the public intellectual life – the school system is organized so that those who teach and educate are at the same time the administrators of the teaching and education system. Just imagine: the teacher of the lowest class in the school has no one to obey but someone else whom he does not obey but whose advice he follows, who is himself involved in teaching and education. Someone who is so far relieved that he can simultaneously administer the teaching and education system, so that no one from any political department can interfere in the spiritual life itself, so that the spiritual life itself stands on its own feet. You can read about this in my book. I have tried to make the matter as clear as possible, that only a spiritual life that is left to its own devices can free us from all the harmful effects that have plunged us into misfortune. But only one that is drawn directly from the spiritual can, in turn, generate faith in the spiritual, the connection with the spiritual.

I would like to be clear. We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart because there is still a school law there that I would say leaves a small gap. This Waldorf School is a real unified school, because the children of the workers from the Waldorf Astoria factory are next to the children of the factory owners and so on, all together; it is a real unified school, a complete elementary school, up to the fourteenth, fifteenth year of age.

I held a pedagogical course for the teachers I selected myself, in order to prepare the teachers for this school, where teaching should only be done according to the knowledge of human nature, according to the observation of what what is in man; where teaching should not be based on some or other prejudice that it must be so and so, but on observation of what comes into the world through man, what should be taught from it. I have reported on this in a wide variety of journals, including here, on how the methods in the Waldorf School have been established. But what I want to mention to you now is this: if you consider such a course to be the way to teach and educate, then you are guided by what knowledge of human nature, what real spiritual science, reveals. But in today's school system, there is something else. There is also what the teachers believe to be the right thing for the education of the child. But then more and more something else has come. I had to look at it, precisely because I had to proceed very practically when I founded the Waldorf School with regard to its spiritual content. Coming from political life, the decrees are: First class: this and that must be taught, that and that is the teaching goal. Second class: this and that must be taught, that is the teaching goal. — You see, that comes from political life! Is it not obvious that it does not belong there, that the person who does not look inside, who understands nothing of teaching and education, must give the instructions? The prescriptions must come only from those who are educators, and they should not be called over as experts to the ministry, but should be involved in the living process of educating and teaching. Spiritual life must be placed on its own ground in all areas of the school system. Then the spirit will take hold of people again.

So that one must say: the state honestly realizes democracy by relieving itself of the intellectual life, which is based entirely on expertise and professional competence, in which, after all, one truly cannot decide by majorities, but only according to what one knows. There it is a matter of only the specialized and the factual being the deciding factors, of the decisions coming from the self-administration of the school system. That is one area that must be excluded from the state. The other area is the economic one. Do you see where all the things come from that are driving the world more and more into a general economic crisis today? Where do such things come from, as for example in 1907 in Europe, which could be very well noticed by individual people? But it happened at that time, even if not without pain, it still passed without major catastrophes for the world economy, I would say, only with the pain of some. Then again there was rejoicing among everyone about the great economic progress and “how we have come so gloriously far” in more recent times. No one noticed how certain characteristic phenomena were pointing to what is now gradually developing into a general world crisis. These characteristic phenomena...

All these things have taken place everywhere, on a small and large scale. They can essentially be traced back to the fact that since the beginning of the 19th century, money has gradually become the ruler over the entire economic life. Money as the ruler over the entire economic life; what does that mean? You see, whether it is wheat – because you have to look at the monetary value – it costs so and so many francs. When you buy skirts, if you just look at the monetary value: francs. In short, money is not specified, it is not based on the concreteness of economic life. It is something that exists in the non-real world, like the abstract concepts in the intellectual life, with which you cannot lure a dog behind the stove in reality. Except that the abstract, fantastic concepts do not cause as much harm as this generalized abstractness of money. One can point out how, in the course of the 19th century, the money lender gradually became the actual driving force in our economic life. Whereas before, it was only the economic, economic man who mattered. Gradually, the possibility also arose for states to become involved in economic affairs, so that states themselves became economic actors.

If one examines the causes of war impartially, one will find that they arose and had to arise from purely economic circumstances, because the circumstances I have mentioned developed. Here again, careful study provides insights into what is at stake: that we must return to a coming together of man with economic production itself. Man must again be brought close to what he produces. Man must again grow together with wheat and rye and everything else he produces, and he must change economic life according to what he produces. And people must not be allowed to multiply this money purely for the sake of it. Without thinking about these things, we will not get anywhere. A recovery of economic life is only possible if man is brought together with the economy again, working out of the needs of the economy.

But this can only come about if one does not organize from the state, but if one allows the people who are in the corresponding economic sectors to come together in associations, if one builds an economy of interests merely on expertise and skill and craftsmanship in economic life. Two things are necessary: first, that one can do what one wants to produce, and second, that one has the trust of the people. But this can only be achieved if one is involved in the corresponding branch of the economy and has grown together with it.

But this is how the individual occupations arise, this is how the laws of production and consumption arise. On the other hand, the various economic methods can only be brought into a certain relationship with each other if the various associations work independently, without interference from the state or any other authority. Just as intellectual life must be set apart from state life and stand on its own two feet, so must economic life. Intellectual life can flourish only if the individual who has the abilities can also develop these abilities for the benefit of his fellow human beings. Spiritual life is most ideal and most socially beneficial when the individual, who is gifted, can work in the service of his fellow human beings. Economic life is most effective when those who produce in any field, or when the consumer circles, combine in such a way that simply through the existence of the associations and connections, there is a real trust that is not dependent on money, when the credit system is a real one and not a mere fiction , as was the case in the previous period, and when you know that you can support any branch of production because the people you have now got to know and who have grown together with their branch of production are in that branch of production.

This is certainly still the case in small communities; in the large-scale conditions that have actually brought about the decline, it is no longer the case.

You see, I have only been able to sketch out what threefolding is about. I could only show you that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity has reached the point where what was once charged to the state as a unified entity now wants to be divided into three independent areas: the spiritual life, which administers itself independently, in the democratic state life, which will be the legal life in particular, and in the economic life, which is standing on its own two feet and is in turn a separate area. That alone is the essential thing: we can see from what the civilized world should and actually wants to strive today, except that people have not yet become aware of it, and that people want to hold on to the old conditions.

You see, it is very strange how one can see precisely in Social Democracy, as it is developing today, the most conservative principle. For what does Social Democracy want? It wants to turn the state into a single large cooperative, through which it could militarize everything. This could be said today when looking at Russia, where everything is being militarized. The militarization of labor is already being discussed from a Russian perspective, because social democracy with a Marxist slant says: the state is there. We now load everything onto it, education and economic life and everything. That is the unhealthy thing! The socialist idea in particular represents the last, most unhealthy consequence of what has developed over the last few centuries.

The healthy thing is to recognize that what has been charged to the state, what it cannot decide out of its democratic nature, must be separated from it and put on its own two feet, intellectual life and economic life. Of course, one can understand that many people today cannot go into such ideas, because people today have been brought up to regard the state as something that works best through a certain omnipotence. One is not really serious about the democratic idea if one wants to saddle the state with everything. One is only serious about the democratic idea if one wants to see that which can be treated equally among all mature people. If it depends on the individual person, on the abilities that he carries into this world from other worlds through his birth, then it is a matter of this world, this spiritual world, also having to be organized out of these abilities. In economic life, it is important that we do not impose an abstract organization on everything, which the monetary economy is by its very nature, but that it should be possible to manage out of the concrete economic life. But out of the concrete economic life, only associations can be formed that join together and that, through their mutual relationship, really achieve what can be a healthy relationship between consumers and producers. Of course, such a concept, which, as it were, addresses everything that is currently being pushed aside in the wake of decline, and which recognizes that decline can only be stopped by thoroughly seeking a new formation, such a concept cannot be understood immediately. One realizes that it cannot be understood immediately. For people are actually organized to always think to themselves: Yes, things are bad now, but they will get better again. They think that improvement will come from some unknown quarter. That is how it was done, for example, in Germany during the war. Whenever things went badly, people waited for improvement to come from some unknown quarter. It did not come! So today we should not wait for things to improve, from somewhere, we don't know where! No, humanity today – as the advent of democracy itself testifies – is called upon to act in a mature way. But one is only mature when one does not expect improvement to come from some vague source, but when one says to oneself: Improvement can only come from one's own will, from an understanding will that sees through the effect. [Gap] If only one percent of today's civilized humanity could bring themselves to a clear recognition of the danger for the whole civilized world, and could see, could see how urgently the conditions strive for threefolding! But threefolding is being trampled underfoot everywhere. If only one percent of people would understand things to a certain degree, things would get better. Because only through people can improvement come! The worst thing for humanity has always been fatalism.

But the worst thing today is precisely this fatalism! Recently, you could read here in a paper that appears in Basel a letter from a German who says: We in Germany must now accept going through Bolshevism. Then, when we have gone through Bolshevism, then — one does not know from where! — the better will come.

This is the most terrible fatalism. It is the consequence of the fact that, basically, the deepest essence of Christianity is still not understood today. The Christ came into the world for all men. He did not come into the world merely for the one people from which He proceeded; He did not fight merely for the one national God, for He taught: Not this one national God, but that which is God for all men, that is what matters. Have not people in the last five or six years looked back to the old Jehovah again, have they not fought everywhere for the folk gods by giving these folk gods the name of Christ? Was it the real Christ, the Christ to whom all people are entitled, that they spoke of? No, it was not the Christ to whom all people are entitled that was spoken of; it was the individual folk gods! And, of course, the individual peoples are spoken of in this sense today, as they were then, as embodying their separate ideals. Christianity, in turn, must be understood as a general one; but not just in words, but in mature ideas.

You see, just by giving a few sketchy thoughts in this short time today, but by speaking again and again to people about threefolding, there were also people who appeared who are “good Christians” today, that is, they appeared with phrases. They talked about all sorts of things, but they thought it should be said today that Christianity should be fulfilled, that Christ should really come. — I could only reply: There is a commandment: You shall not take the name of your God, the name of your Lord, in vain. — Does that make one a bad Christian because one does not always have the name of Christ on one's tongue? The Christ did not just want to be addressed with the name “Lord! Lord!” – but he wanted to bring an attitude among people that, when developed, takes on concrete forms, that do not always just refer to his name, but that bring about social conditions in his spirit that embrace all people equally.

It may appear that the words used do not mention Christianity, but this threefold social organism is intended to be in the spirit of true, genuine, practical Christianity. And I am deeply convinced, dear ladies and gentlemen, that one day it will be recognized that the idealists who speak of threefolding today are the true practitioners. And the others, who say: Oh, pipe dreams! — these are the ones who speak that way today, well, just as, for example, the foreign ministers of the German Reichstag and the Austrian delegation spoke almost identically in June 1914. These two practical gentlemen said something similar in Berlin and Vienna: Our friendly relations with St. Petersburg are the very best there are. The political situation has relaxed; we are approaching peaceful conditions in Europe - in May, June 1914! Negotiations are in progress with England, the practitioners said in Berlin, which will soon lead to satisfactory results. The satisfactory results then came in August 1914! So the “practitioners” spoke, so the practitioners foresaw things.

We should bear this in mind, ladies and gentlemen, when we hear such a proposal as the threefold social order being dismissed as the mere idealism of a few visionaries, whereas it should be seen as the most practical of proposals, the one that takes reality most fully into account and seeks to align itself with our times!

I thank you, my dear attendees, for listening to what I had to present. I can only ask for your indulgence, since in the short time available to me I could, of course, only present a few pure thoughts without the necessary proofs, but which you can find in the corresponding books and magazines, which are also available here in Switzerland, and which you can also find in “Social Future”, published by Dr. Boos. I have only been able to give you a few guiding ideas; and I only hope that these guiding ideas may perhaps be able to evoke in you the feeling that this impulse of the threefold social order is not a randomly thrown-out idea, but that this threefold is a response to the deepest needs of humanity today, but one that can truly lead humanity out of its current plight. It can lead us out of chaos and decline and towards a new beginning, which so many people today long for, and rightly so.

[Closing words of the organizer.

I could imagine that the editor of a wit-breathing could be tempted to take the floor at a sample fair event about the recovery of economic life, the builder of the Dornach Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum. For it is already generally recognized that nothing could be further apart than what people who know the matter superficially imagine by the nebulous mysticism of the Dornach Goetheanum and what can be seen as a living practice. And yet, it might seem even more paradoxical and amusing that precisely in recent times, in the last few weeks, in a place in southern Germany – and Switzerland will follow suit in the very near future – the founding is being undertaken, precisely by the current of thought and world view represented in Dornach, of a company for the promotion of economic and spiritual real values.

As I said, this could appear even more paradoxical. For one sees in such a spiritual movement, as it is, for which the Dornach building is to be the representative of the external expression, one sees in it something completely impractical, which only has to be discussed when one has to turn away from the real practical goals in life, more or less for Sunday rest.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I do not want to keep you for long with introductory remarks about the tasks of the spiritual movement represented by the Goetheanum. But I would just like to say that this spiritual movement, precisely because of its special nature, wants to be the basis for the practice of life that we really need for the present, in order to get out of that which has driven us into that which has always been regarded as so practical and which has shown itself to be so particularly practical in the ruining of European civilization in the last five to six years!

Certainly, in the free school of spiritual science referred to here, people's attention should not only be directed to what confronts man in the external material world, but humanity should once again be made aware that everything material is based on the spiritual, and that one cannot understand the material if one does not understand the underlying spiritual. But how the spiritual world is to be opened up, which paths the individual person has to take to come to this real, actual spiritual world, that is not what I want to talk about today. That has been discussed in the various books that have been published on this subject. But what I would like to talk about is the fact that the particular kind of spiritual activity that must be cultivated in order to achieve something in man through this particular kind of spiritual activity and effort, something that is not impractical but practical, in that it opens up a healthy, illusion-free view of reality. However strange it may sound, the aim of the Dornach School is not to escape from reality, but quite the opposite. The aim of the Dornach School is to acquire a healthy view of reality, the acquisition of such a healthy view that can see what is going on in every reality, which must be directed by man himself, above all in economic reality.

And to express myself even more clearly, I would like to illustrate what I have to say with the following comparison.

You see, my dear audience, if a chemist were to claim to have invented a new way to bleach laundry, and then tried to use this method, and lo and behold, the laundry turned a dirty brown from this method, he would probably not be considered a good chemist, and it would be said that he actually understands nothing of real chemical science. This is certainly true today in the fields of technology and external life, insofar as these fields depend on scientific thinking. But it is not at all true when it comes to the technology that arises in economic life, in the management of economic life, and that is supposed to depend in some way on healthy economic thinking, on a real, let us say, national or social economy or the like. Let me give you an example of this. A long time ago, there was a lot of arguing in the international world among those people who thought about economic issues, about how best to give validity to the economic movement called the free trade movement. From a certain point of view, they examined the damage that international economic life suffers as a result of customs duties and the like being levied at national borders; customs duties that are based on the most diverse intentions. In short, there were once parliaments - now they are long gone, the times - in which the free trade movement was seen as an ideal, as an economic ideal. Then, in certain circles, they thought about a way to promote free trade, especially tariff-free trade. They argued so fiercely that they said: love and the protective tariff issue are the greatest cause of madness in the world. At that time the supporters of the gold standard and the supporters of metallism, the gold and silver standard, were at loggerheads. The supporters of the supposed gold standard were those people who said, based on their scientific economic insight: By promoting the gold standard, we promote free trade. That was an economic and scientific conviction.

What did reality show, then? It so happened that just after these scientific-economic declamations were let loose, significant gold finds were made in Africa, and those countries that had little of the areas where gold was found were able to mint the gold in particularly abundant amounts. But one would always have to expect such things, and above all the chemist would have to calculate with the analogy of what I have mentioned for clarification. But in reality, what happened? It turned out that the introduction of the gold standard led to the introduction of protective tariffs everywhere, that is, reality showed exactly the opposite of what was predicted theoretically from economic thinking.

It is exactly as if a chemist, with a product that is supposed to bleach the laundry, made the laundry a dirty brown color. As I said, there are many examples where economic thinking does not come close to reality, where reality takes an opposite course. There are many such examples.

Anyone who raises the question today: Is there an economic crisis, an international economic crisis? – they truly only need to look at the conditions. This economic crisis is everywhere on the doorstep. However, people have very different ideas about its specific nature and causes. But can we really hope that with such thinking, in the face of reality, such a complicated phenomenon, such a complicated fact as the international economic crisis, can be readily understood?

Surely that cannot be the case! Now you will say: Aha, there is someone who claims that the economic thinkers are all stupid, they all know nothing; the economy is running, and the economic thinkers are all stupid. No, I do not claim that they are all stupid, I claim rather that there are very clever people among economists, in some respects much cleverer than in all the other professions of life, but that what what the monometallists, the supporters of the gold standard, said and what happened was the opposite of what the very clever people advocated in very clever sentences and turns of phrase and theories. No, I am not saying that all economists are stupid. Rather, I want to start from the strange fact that modern civilization has brought about the peculiar phenomenon that one can be a brilliant economic thinker and think exactly the opposite of what is reality in economic life! This is a remarkable phenomenon, but one that is also evident from the fact that people are actually quite helpless in the face of today's European confusion, especially in the circles of those who have learned economic thinking best in the traditional way.

And here you see, I would just like to claim that what one has simply acquired as a thinking technique can be seen through by the healthy spiritual science that is practiced in the movement for which Dornach is the external representative , it is possible to see through things in their outer reality, of which one can easily prove by countless examples that they are not seen through by those who are regarded as experts.

You see, above all when economic crises are being discussed – people usually think of the things that lie in the constellations between consumption and between production – one talks about an economic crisis occurring when there is overproduction that cannot be used up by consumption. It can just as well be proved that the economic crisis does not come from overproduction but from underconsumption, simply from the fact that people, who perhaps do not have enough money to buy what has been produced, buy too little. And the strange thing is, you can prove one thing or the other. If you go back only as far as the economic crises of 1919, you will find that one was caused by overproduction, the other by underconsumption, and the third by entirely different causes, such as an imbalance between capitalism and labor, or, which also applies to individual cases, that economic crises are bound to occur when there is too much saving in a large community of people, and so on. Now, all these things do not take into account what is most important for the economic life of the present day.

Here I can really speak from a kind of personal experience. It was a long time ago, at the end of the nineties of the last century and the beginning of this century, that I got to know the Central European working class thoroughly. I was a teacher at a workers' educational school, but it was only through this that I was really able to get to know the labor movement from all sides. And I got to know it, firstly, because the various lectures I had to give were sometimes followed by very lively discussions that showed what was being thought in the broadest circles of the growing workforce. On the other hand, I was received with my own lectures and was able to see how one can take in what is not just economic and so on. And anyone who, I would say, has lived with a certain observant sense of human conditions and without prejudice in such a way knows how to say what the error is when one thinks today that mere economic categories, such as capital and wages and the like, or import and export, trade, finance, balance of payments, currency and other things, there is more than what is only on the surface. No, in these things there is really, for the present crisis, what is only on the surface. For everything that happens in economic life ultimately originates with people, with people's thoughts, and what people do, so that qualifications of capital and wage relationships arise, of import and export and so on, of currency fluctuations. Ultimately, this depends on what arises from people's thoughts.

You see, I can speak without prejudice, because I was a teacher among workers for five or six years and I managed to get a large following among the workers, but one fine day the leaders of the workers' movement realized that there is one who cannot be tolerated, that there is one who teaches not orthodox Marxism, that there is one who endeavors to instill into the hearts and minds something quite different from the orthodox teaching.

A meeting was held with my students. Hundreds of my students were present at the meeting at the time, along with labor leaders, second-string players, but sent by the first string, who said all sorts of things, including that I was an impossible personality in the labor movement. I said: Yes, but do you want to cultivate something in the future that is good for the future, and you do not understand the simplest thing, freedom of teaching? Then one of the leaders managed to utter the word: freedom of teaching? No, we only know reasonable compulsion! And yet, although the vote was unanimous against the four, against the four leaders, my activity was of course completely impossible.

That, you see, that entitles me, precisely on the basis of the facts, to speak with some impartiality about what is actually taking place today in economic life in the context of an increasingly international Europe.

But one must also really be able to study that which comes from within the human being himself, and which the categories I have mentioned, which are usually enumerated, actually bring about. One must first ask oneself: what peculiarities does the belief have that has gradually spread among the European proletariat?

You see, the most characteristic feature of the way millions of people think is that, first of all, they think of the spiritual life in such a way that everything that man produces spiritually, including what he produces out of his spirit as law, as custom, as religion, as science, that this is nothing more than something that the human brain gives birth to in an abstract way, which is a kind of ideological superstructure on the only reality, the substructure, the only reality: the economic life of production and consumption.

This has become established in the minds of millions upon millions of people. I do not want to examine now to what extent this can be traced back to the theory of Marx and Engels, but it has become established in millions upon millions of people: the whole of intellectual life is an ideology, something that has merely grown out of economic life.

Yes, perhaps in the circles of those who feel very clever about economics, people will think little of this belief of the proletariat with regard to the current economic crisis in international life. But that is precisely the great mistake: today people think little of the most important things. For one does not learn to recognize the source of the crisis, namely, what lives in the unconscious of men, and from which the economic disaster arises, if one does not turn one's gaze to the soul life of the masses. One must take into account the spiritual life of the masses; for it may be possible to believe that intellectual life is only an ideology, but it is impossible to live with that, and the human being becomes desolate, the human being loses his footing in life.

And this is the strange thing: with an unparalleled fanaticism the great masses cling to these doctrines. The masses, especially those who today set the tone in certain economic circles of laborers, cling with fanaticism to these doctrines; but in so doing they become more and more desolate.

How did this come about? Materialism did not arise from the working class itself; materialism arose in the leading circles over the last four centuries. Only, the leading circles have preserved the old traditions out of a certain half-heartedness. On the one hand, they have begun to think materialistically about the external life in which they are immersed, but on the other hand they have preserved the old traditions as their religion, as their morality and so on, and basically lead a double life.

The worker cannot do this, having been called away from what he used to stand by, what he had grown together with: from the trade, the products of which he loved, into which he put his life. He has been called to the abstract machine, placed in the abstract factory. He seeks his salvation in that which the others only take halfway. You can only judge it when you have stood in it. This has gradually emerged. And so that great lack of understanding arose in Europe.

This lack of understanding hangs over Europe like a terrible fate today. There are those at the top who have to manage the capital, there are those at the top who have to direct economic life, who could direct it if they only wanted to, who could also transform materialism into a healthy world view, who could also be practical. There are those who could do anything if they wanted to.

Then there are those at the bottom who have taken seriously the materialism that has developed in these leading circles, who can do nothing, who believe that by saying, “Capitalism must be fought,” they can achieve something with this phrase; who do not know that economic life in the modern sense of the word cannot be had at all without capitalism, that without capitalism one can only return to barbarism. The worker has become helpless in his thoughts, helpless in the face of reality, throughout Europe, the worker who has been forced into the machine, who seriously imagines those theories that, I might say, arise as by-products of life with the others, with which one cannot live and certainly not manage, as shown by such things as metallism and monometallism and the like.

This great misunderstanding, what has brought it about? Well, you can see what it has brought about in the development of European conditions. Look at Russia. In Russia, something has arisen in accordance with the peculiarities of the people that is difficult to study for someone who looks at these things impartially and without prejudice, without being an agitator. There were many differentiations of socialist and social ideals in Russia. What was there in this Russia until 1914? The broad masses of people, held down by Russian militarism and the hated tsarism, had something that could not be bridged to the other thing that existed in the ruling circles. They did not want to achieve what they should have achieved: to build the bridge, as leaders, as intellectuals, to build this bridge. We see the emergence of modern capitalism. We see the emergence of modern individualism with the calling in of a million-fold crowd into factories, to machines. What would have been necessary there was to resort to a new practical thinking, and it would have been necessary for the intellectuals to make themselves leaders, to gain trust, to make the masses understand that they understand, to actually carry out the airs and graces of economic life in earnest. They did none of that. They lived for themselves, an upper class. They let the others study. The proletariat, in particular, studied an extraordinary amount, simply devoted to what were the waste products of education, materialistic waste products of education.

Today the fruits of this are present in the economic crisis in Europe. It is a spiritually conditioned, tragic fate.

Then, out of what held it down, what one did not want to penetrate spiritually, what one did not want to penetrate spiritually with reasonable views, what one wanted to hold down through the external physical violence of militarism and that of the absolute monarchy or of any other powers, out of what was needed to neutralize that which one did not want to conquer spiritually, out of that came the European war catastrophes.

And what came about then? For Russia, Leninism and Trotskyism emerged. Not out of Russian socialism, oh no, Leninism and Trotskyism were born out of Russian socialism. Nothing like Leninism and Trotskyism could ever have been born out of Russian socialism. Something quite different would have emerged if the intellectuals had sought to reach an understanding with the broad masses of the population in a reasonable way. No, Lenin and Trotsky did not grow out of the revolution! Lenin and Trotsky grew out of the circles of those who were affected by the war, of those who were affected by the war as the ultimate consequence of militarism. The results of the war have taken root in Russia and have once again suppressed that which wanted to come from below, with which one should have come to an understanding. Lenin and Trotsky are not heroes of socialism; they are the sons of the European war catastrophe and only became possible because the misery of the war's aftermath spread across Russia. And what happened in the rest of Europe – read Keynes's very fine book (you can find it in a very good English translation), The Economic Consequences of the Peace. What happened in the rest of Europe – what was it? Is it the confession of economic thinking? Is it the economic striving up to 1914 that brought us into the terrible catastrophe? No, it is not that, but what we are experiencing, including all the exchange value worries of individual countries, is not a healthy return to healthy views that one believes can be obtained by the fact that the disease has been reduced to absurdity by the catastrophes. What we are experiencing is the result of the war. Out of a very, very short-sighted judgment, a German general coined the words that have been repeated many times during this war catastrophe: “War is only politics carried out by other means.

During the war, I repeatedly compared this dictum with the word: Divorce is just marriage continued by other means! But with a certain correct variant, one could still say: This peace is, especially in the field of economic life, just the continuation of the war by other means. This is not said by someone with an agitational or one-sided view of the current economic situation, but by even the most objective critics, from the side that would have the most reason to judge objectively today, from the side of the English, Keynes says this in his book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace Agreement”.

Now, if you really look at these things, you have to say: Oh, the causes of the current economic disasters run much, much deeper! And finally, you just have to look at today's economic life as it has developed to see that. There is no need to be captivated by the one-sided declamations about capitalism and anti-capitalism; instead, one only needs to surrender to the objective facts, which are certainly justified by modern conditions, that our economic life is intimately intertwined with what we have to call the money economy.

Now, of course, I am far from entertaining the foolish idea of wanting to fight the money economy. That is out of the question, because I would consider that a foolish idea, just as I would consider it a foolish idea to want to reform money in some way. No, but the issue is that, as a result of all the modern economic conditions, what money represents in economic life has become abstract.

An English economic journalist said quite rightly: the functions that money actually performs in our economic life are extremely complex and cannot really be teased out for examination.

You see, my dear audience, if someone is a thinker of a rather abstract nature, if he always goes from the particular to the general, if he sees all kinds of flowers out in the meadow with a specific name and then says: plants or flowers – and compares “flowers” with animals and so on, he thinks abstractly. He brings abstract thoughts that encompass many things and spreads them out like a carpet over the concrete parts.

This is how it is in real economic life with money. Money brings a completely abstract element into real economic life, into reality. Just think, if I am the owner of 50 francs, then I am the owner of these 50 francs, and it is initially irrelevant whether I have 50 francs in my wallet, whether I buy a rabbit for 50 francs tomorrow, or whether I buy flour or a silver watch, or whether I buy a skirt or something similar. The concreteness of economic life is lost to the abstractness of money. This comes to light in the moment when money is exchanged for money, when you buy with money. You can see best how, just as abstractions hide from the reality of thinking, the abstractness of money hides from reality. If you have followed the newspapers in Germany in the last few weeks, you could see that people were very pleased with the slight improvement in the value of the currency. But then it went down again. And anyone who knows the deeper connections will not be very impressed by a temporary improvement in this currency. Well, the blame was shifted to all sorts of causes, although in the background nothing else stood, than that German notes available in Spain were bought by Americans on the stock exchange through some special constellation, through some special intention, and that this caused the little bit of a surge in the German currency. This escaped notice for the simple reason that whenever money as such circulates in trade, when money as such is traded, it is far removed from the concrete economic life, and one no longer sees the connections. Just as when someone speaks in abstract terms, a mill wheel goes around in your head and you no longer have any idea what he actually means by his abstractness, so you no longer know with the money manipulations what is actually going on in economic life.

You see, in these matters it is essentially a matter of the medium of exchange becoming alienated in actual economic life; and that is the reason why we have entered into such a terrible economic crisis. For this economic crisis was actually already there before the war, and the war was only the expression of this economic crisis. [Gap.]

You see, someone in, say, 1865 could have had the greatest possible facilities for air travel, but he could not use them because there was no air travel yet! It does not help to be clever in just any area of life. When circumstances lead one away from the direct experience of that which is to be experienced, then every clever thought helps nothing. And the fact that one has been driven away from real life in the economic field, as in other fields, is what modern civilization has produced by welding the three main areas of life – spiritual life, political or legal life and economic life – more and more into a unified state.

The money economy was favorable for welding together in the unitary state. As I said, I beg you not to misunderstand me at all, that I might want to object to something about the money economy. I just want to point out how what has not been grasped by the money economy must lead precisely to the recovery of our economic life!

It has been repeatedly asserted in modern times that the centralized state is a panacea. This panacea has been held up as an ideal by the leading people so far, but also by the socialists; for what do the socialists want? Use the framework, the fully developed framework of the state, to build their socialist fallacies. Even Lenin and Trotsky did nothing other than to use the war to pour their socialist abstractions over what was left of the old Russian tsarist state. The idea of a unified state has only emerged in the last three or four decades (those who really know their history know that it was only a short time ago) among those who believe they want what is best for all public affairs and who, as a result, fail to to see what is maturing in the reality of humanity: that what is maturing in the reality of humanity is the urge towards spiritual life, the urge towards legal or state life and towards economic life to come to completely different constellations than we have had so far. I want to touch on one corner, I would like to say.

In many areas of European life, what we call inheritance law stands out from old institutions. Inheritance law is connected with the relationships of blood ties between people. If you follow the lines of inheritance law into the whole of public life, including the configuration of state and social contexts, you will see how much of economic life depends on this law. Inheritance law has an effect on certain people in these or those economic sectors; it brings people into it, they are in it, and individual things become out of their abilities. But ultimately, a large part of the economy as a whole is made up of these individual things. In short, we have inheritance law closely tied to blood ties, to that which is organized in humanity by nature.

What has happened in those states that have considered themselves the most exemplary in the last three to four centuries? They have learned to organize from nature. Organizing is attributed especially to the Germans. They were only so good at it that they distorted it to the point of mechanization. But it has been poured out over the whole civilized world. Organizing, which is inherent in humanity by nature, has also been carried into social life. And this organizing, which is connected with blood ties, this organizing, which has a very symptomatic one - there are many others - in inheritance law, this organizing, it comes out basically very clearly also in the organization of intellectual life. And finally, although the Catholic Church wants to be a democratic institution that also allows those at the bottom of the social ladder to rise to the highest positions of the church hierarchy under certain circumstances, in practice, what has welded together such things, such as the old organizations that depend on blood ties, has also crept into Catholic church organizations; because, after all, more high-ranking nobles had become archbishops than others, and so on. In short, we see in many respects how what comes from blood ties extends into the modern social order; and what is particularly evident in such things as inheritance law, but the human race, with its innermost consciousness, has actually outgrown. If someone says, “Man is man,” and points to a seven-year-old child and to a forty-year-old adult, you will laugh. You will not say that the forty-year-old person is only the consequence of the thirty-five-year-old, the thirty-year-old and so on, but you will look at the person as if what is in his being develops from his depths. It is only in history that the foolish view has arisen that the following is always only the effect of the preceding, whereas for a long time the human race has been such that the successive phases in its innermost being arise in the same way as, for example, the change of teeth or sexual maturity in the individual. Thus, during the last period, while the elements that arose from the old blood ties and the conditions caused by them have remained as inheritances in the spiritual, economic and legal life, while the old public rights have remained, the urge for a new order has unconsciously taken hold of people, for something different to occur.

So you see, if you want to try to find out what people really want, then something like in my “Key Points of the Social Question” appears. One only does not pay attention to how these things are overheard in true reality and true practice, in what life demands today. Inheritance rights have their origin in the old development of humanity. People want to keep them as if they wanted to keep their twelve or fourteen years of development, just as someone who is twelve or fourteen does not understand that at twenty one must be different than at twelve or fourteen. Of course, in detail, such follies will not be wanted. There we have the right of inheritance. It has become something that people's consciousness does not want to accept. Today, people think too highly of their individuality to cling to the conventional means of inheritance out of convention, even if it is only out of convention. If we are honest and listen to what humanity actually wants, we come to what you find set out in The Essential Points of the Social Question, where it is shown that humanity tends towards a social order in which the individual, who has certain abilities, is connected with the means of production, or, let us say, with capital. If he can no longer combine these abilities with it, then the sum of the means of production or the capital must pass from him to someone else who is qualified. This shows how the old age must grow into the new age. The old age made the economic configuration dependent on blood. The new age makes dependent - in the consciousness of man it already exists - wants to make dependent the configuration of economic life on what is consciously experienced. So that in the new order inheritance law is not spoken of in the usual sense. For this reason, for example, inheritance law is often doubted today; it is doubted that inheritance law can be spoken of at all. It is only to be said that if I have acquired a sum of means of production through my abilities, through which I can achieve something, have accumulated a capital, then I have the obligation, when I myself can no longer be the steward, to transfer it to another, who in turn, according to his abilities, must be connected with it. What was only dependent on blood must be replaced by reason and human individuality.

This may sound radical to some, but it is not spoken out of any radicalism, but only heard from what mankind unconsciously actually wants.

If we look at the development of humanity from this point of view, we see that people have reached such a point in the general science of the human race, in spiritual life, in legal and political life and in economic life through the standpoint they have adopted that they can no longer be compressed into the unified state.

This is where the impulse for the threefold social organism comes in, demanding that spiritual life be completely left to its own devices. This is perhaps the most controversial point today, because it is considered particularly clever to make the state the guardian of spiritual life. But this must be demanded by those who today recognize what humanity unconsciously wants: that spiritual life be completely left to its own devices.

Let us take one of the most important parts: the public school system. From the teacher of the lowest school class up to the highest teacher, everything must be self-governing.

You see, I was called upon to found the Waldorf School in Stuttgart because of the pedagogical and didactic principles that arise from such a way of thinking. Emil Molt, the local factory owner of the Waldorf-Astoria factory, set up this Waldorf School. It was my responsibility to give the Waldorf School its spiritual foundation, and to this day, although it is not always apparent from the outside, the actual management and leadership of the school has been entrusted to me. And so, for weeks, I gave a pedagogical course for the teachers, in order to point out the direction in which this school should work.

Yes, I was also obliged – you will still have the opportunity to see how far we have come so far – I was also obliged, you see, to recognize the slippery slope on which spiritual life finds itself in its most important area, the school system. Of course, I also had to develop curricula and, in order to orient myself, I had to see what was there in order to do justice to the current school teaching goals and curricula.

Now, esteemed attendees, I can still remember – though it was a long time ago when I was at school myself or interacted with teachers – that everything in the school program was something printed on one page; now it has become thick books and everything is specified down to the last detail. On the one hand, we have what the pedagogical artists and pedagogical scientists put into their books, what they convey to the teacher. On the other hand, there is what comes from expertise and specialized knowledge. Then there is the bureaucratic aspect, which comes from the state. This is much more important than one might think! There is no justification for anything other than the factually specialized to have a say in the administration of intellectual life. This is clearly evident, for example, in the field of education. How differently people would be educated and introduced to economic life if spiritual life were completely free to govern itself only on the basis of its own foundations! This can only be appreciated by someone who has really formed a sound judgment about the connection between free spiritual life, the development of human abilities out of free spiritual experience, and its significance for economic and state life. The question here is to finally realize: How does spiritual life fit into the whole process of human development?

Well, my dear audience, spiritual life is organized. And the more elementary a field is, the more organized is the spiritual life. Consider the example of the family. Look at how the individual grows out of the family, how a son grows into the artistic, out of what was similar to father or mother, not only outwardly physically, but spiritually and mentally. The further back you go in the years, the more you can see from what grows out of the family, how nature organizes spiritual life.

What exactly do we have to do for the spiritual life? With regard to the individual, we have to bring the individual out of the organization: we have to overcome the organization, the organization that is given by nature; we have to educate the individual into freedom. Freedom must first be acquired in earthly life. Then freedom can only be acquired if we, as teachers, educators or participants in intellectual life, are truly able to understand the human being, to work from the most individual abilities of the human being, and to place the human being in economic life according to the abilities with which he reveals himself to us in the context of nature.

That is the peculiar thing about intellectual life, that one has to say: The very person who thinks honestly about democracy thinks precisely in the way that comes over people in their fourteenth or sixteenth year, when they reach sexual maturity. And so, over the course of the last three to four centuries, humanity has been taken over by the tendency towards democracy. The very person who thinks honestly demands that all the matters that people develop when they come of age be treated in such a way that they, as equals among equals, have to organize things. This will be evident in the education of people in the field of intellectual life. It depends so much on the individual human ability and expertise that it must never be the subject of democratic administration or constitution, but must be left to the self-administration of this intellectual life.

And economic life? Economic life cannot be organized [gap]. Ideological, unworldly people, in all kinds of utopian ideals, indicate which forms economic life should be organized according to, whereby economic life should be brought into this or that structure. That would be the death of economic life! This nonsense began when the so-called German Republic first tried to get itself up and running. The way the planned economy thinks is just as nonsensical: economic life can be organized! But anyone who understands economic life knows that economic life cannot be organized! Economic life can only grow together into a whole in associations. That means: Economic life cannot be organized from above or from any direction, from any side, but economic life can only be successful in associations that grow out of the professions, out of those who belong together in a certain area of production and consumption.

That which has similar interests is linked in associations with that which has related interests. Related interests are linked together. However, a chain or a structure is not formed by organizing it from the outside, but rather by one link attaching itself to these associations through other links. It is a matter of a concatenation and interweaving of such people who stand in it in life, who grow out of life, who have expertise and ability in a certain area of economic life, who have grown into economic life in a certain way, who can also gain trust because they stand in it, because they are related to a branch in a certain sense. But it is necessary that this branch is associated with the next, so that one is not forced in a random way to come out of the abstractness of making money, but because one knows that by being involved in an associative economic work, one turns to the representative of another association for this purpose. He in turn knows how it is.

Yes, you see, my dear audience, that is what happens when you have an economic life built on association, that the cleverness of economic thinking helps you a little! What does cleverness help you when you are faced with an opaque economic life? You can see that in monometallism, in free trade. They have just resulted in protective tariffs. Today, we cannot see through economic life. First, living conditions must be created that allow us to see through connections. We will understand economic connections when, through an association, someone, for all I care, from a different crossroads, can communicate with someone who is part of a different association. If he can turn to this or any other association directly, then cleverness helps a little, as it is connected through the associations, and these connections, these measures must be grasped somehow, and even so far as reality allows through the chain of associations. That was the peculiarity of the previous economy, that there was no possibility of progressing in this way and letting things grow. That, ladies and gentlemen, has still not been understood today.

I am not saying this out of any kind of hubris, but because I believe that everyone can see this today. It has not been recognized that this threefold social order must stand for the independence of spiritual life, of that economic life that is built on associations and on nothing but associations, entirely on associations growing out of the economic underground itself, while the state must remain for what is in between, must have nothing to do with economic life, must have nothing to do with free spiritual life. Spiritual life must be based on the knowledge of the individual human being and on his or her abilities. The economic system must be built on the practical experiences and practices of economic life, which can be acquired in the lively interaction of association with association. The state has nothing to do with either of these. The state has something to do with the people who stand in this way in economic life, on the other hand stand in spiritual life, who will find themselves with all mature people in democratic state life, where public law is established, which then radiates on the one hand into spiritual life, on the other hand into economic life. There is no need to fear that the three members of the social organism will fall apart. They will connect through people. One person is in one circle, the other in the other. The three organizations are separate only for the good of humanity, because the more complicated circumstances of modern times demand this structure of the social organism.

This is what can really intervene to heal the economic life that has been shaken by crises. I said in my book The Core Problems of the Social Question: the threefold idea is not some utopian fantasy; the threefold idea can be linked to immediate reality everywhere. This immediate reality should be taken as it is; but it should in turn grow into a healthy state through state-free, associative life in the economic sphere. To separate economic life from the organization of the state and to base this economic life on its own laws, which can only arise from association to association, that is what is necessary. This looks abstract, but my dear attendees, it is not abstract, it is the most concrete thing.

The economists are there, it is only a matter of their striving for the appropriate association, regardless of political boundaries, according to the related relationships that prevail between production and consumption, between one branch of industry and another. And in the long run, a unified effort by people internationally involved in economic life should actually succeed in overcoming the efforts that are currently being made here or there to improve the value of currencies and so on. Just think how mere abstract economic activity in money can become detached from real conditions. Take Germany before 1914. In one year, about five to six billion capital was saved and earned. New issues, including mortgage bonds, land registry debts and everything that was spent on luxury buildings, new apartments and the like, together amounted to about 11 billion marks before 1914. A capital of 5 to 6 billion was earned or saved, new issues amounted to 1 billion, twice as much! What does that mean? It means that one is moving beyond the real economy, because the real economy has to be earned. Beyond the real economy is the capital value, double that of the real capital value. Because the earned capital value should only have appeared from new issues and mortgage bonds totaling 5 to 6 billion marks. That was actually there. Imagine where this leads when the abstract money economy emancipates itself in this way from the concrete economy of economic life!

The only way to cure this is for people to come into contact with the experiences of economic life itself, that is, for someone who is active in a particular area of economic life to associate with the system in which another person is involved, with the system in a different area. What the threefold social order shows is not a dilettantish thing, it is not utopian, it is something that directly affects practical life everywhere. And people today cannot come to terms with this idea of threefolding for a very specific reason: they do not yet want to reckon with the fact that we are in a state of great confusion. They always want to help with little mixtures and little remedies. That will not work, my dear attendees! When someone is seriously ill, they must also resort to strong medicines. We shall not manage with the social remedies that are otherwise recommended. It must be admitted that what is proposed under the idea of the threefold social organism wants to be a strong remedy. But the saying applies not only that a rough wedge belongs on a rough log, but also that a severe illness also requires a radical remedy. And I believe that anyone who can see through the ever-increasing confusion of international economic life in Europe, this slide into barbarism, will be serious enough to take a closer look at what he believes can lead out of this decline to a new ascent, what he believes can be achieved precisely by a real study of the conditions, not as the monometallists did, but from a real study of the conditions, so that one stands, as the one who treats the laundry with a chemical agent and then makes it black or brown - opposite reality -, I believe that when one realizes the magnitude of the European danger, one will then seriously approach the study of the remedy. That is what matters, and that is what I have wanted to draw attention to in a variety of ways for so long, and what I once again wanted to point out in the most serious way today, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I was asked:

Will capital ownership be abolished in the threefold social organism?

You see, in reality it is about something different from capital ownership. The point is that it is possible to work on a capital basis in the first place. It is not possible to abolish capital as such in our complicated modern life, as so many incomprehensibly demand. Of course capital is needed, even if only in the form of the means of production. Capital is needed to set the modern economic apparatus in motion. So capital must be there.

I have explained this in more detail in my book “The Crux of the Social Question”. But the point is to find ways of managing capital that are indicated in my book ” The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life Today and in the Future” about this capital, that he administers this capital, or rather production, only as long as he himself can be present. Then, whether it is land or other means of production, it passes to someone else in the way that the person concerned can still manage it, who is now linked to it through his abilities. In this way, it will gradually become clear that the more capable people there are, the more fruitful economic life can become, because the management of capital can really pass to capable people.

You see, it is not a matter of being anything other than the steward of that which is to be understood as capital. People cannot yet imagine this. But just take something that, I would say, is already exemplary in a certain way, like the Dornach building, which I had to mention several times in the lecture.

The question may arise: Who does it belong to? It does not really belong to anyone in the old sense. It only makes sense if it passes to those who can manage it in the appropriate way. The means and ways must be found to manage it.

What can be achieved with a more or less ideal institute can also be achieved with every practical institution, with every factory, especially if it is done in a practical spirit. And you can easily imagine a social structure that replaces the old ownership based on blood ties with a new ownership based on the management of those who have capital based on skills.

I would like to link this directly to the question that was asked orally by a gentleman earlier:

To what extent will these institutions be able to eliminate so-called exploitation?

It is quite clear that this exploitation can only exist as long as personal power also exists in the economic sphere. In my book 'The Core of the Social Question', I explain how the social organism appears in three parts, and how economic life is shaped entirely from an economic point of view. Let us say, for example, that a company has a manager and employees, perhaps also hierarchically structured with a senior manager, middle managers and so on, right down to the manual workers. In economic life, no one has power over another. This is because the relationship between an adult and an adult is not regulated in economic life. In economic life, we are dealing with economics. But the position of the emancipated person in relation to the emancipated person is precisely the subject of the state or legal system; the measure, the duration of work, is somehow mutually ordered in the state, political or legal sphere. This threefold structure of the social organism, I have been told, is what Plato already advocated when he divided human society into the nourishing, defending and teaching classes. No, dear attendees, it is the exact opposite of what Plato said.

No, esteemed attendees. It is the very opposite of what Plato said when he said that human society is divided into the productive, the military, and the learned; there he divided people into these three groups, and the individual belonged to one of the three groups. Today, it is not a matter of dividing people up, but of the organization presenting itself as a three-part structure, with each person and their interests represented in all three organizations, in one way or another.

Imagine a person has children. Through the school system, he is part of the spiritual organization. From the outset, like every person who has come of age, he is part of the legal organization, like everyone else, regardless of what he is or whether he has any other profession or activity than anyone else. And he is part of the economic organization, because the teacher, in so far as he must eat and drink, belongs to the economic organism. That is what comes into consideration: it is not that human beings are divided into sections, but that the social organism is divided into sections.

But this makes impossible everything that leads to exploitation in the modern sense. Today, exploitation is caused, firstly, by external political power, including that of the human individual, that is, political power that is politically regulated. Secondly, by economic power. Economic power, for example in the wage relationship, that is impossible. Because in the future – I mean, if one could think of it, that a sufficient number of people would really come together and thereby the healthy conditions would be imprinted on the three-part social organism if it were given a place – there would be no real exploitation in this three-part social organism. But one thing would be recognized: You see, all social ideals are more or less, when they appear so comprehensively today, more or less quackery, for the simple reason that they do not happen taking into account the real conditions. People always think: How must the social organism be organized so that all people are well? Of course, everyone still has their own subjective views on this. The idea of the threefold social order does not ask that question at all! Because of course, if you look at a natural organism, the lion organism or something like that, you can ideally think of something much better organized than the lion organism. You just have to think about its possibilities based on its conditions. In the same way, the ideas of threefolding do not think of a thousand-year Reich, do not believe in a paradise on earth, but the idea of threefolding asks what social structure is possible if human beings are as they are. From this it deduces the social structure that lies in the threefold social organism. It is precisely from the associative organization of economic life that you can see how things are conceived entirely out of reality.

Yes, it is basically quite easy to draw up social programs, comprehensive programs! Oh, I still remember in the eighties of the 19th century: I was quite often in the so-called Café Griensteidl in Vienna, which was so famous because the old 48ers had already frequented it; during the revolution it became the café of the literati. Karl Kraus, who is well known in Switzerland, wrote his little book 'Die demolierte Literatur' (Demolished Literature) about this rather famous Café Griensteidl. It was indeed the case that everyone who went to Café Griensteidl fancied themselves to be a great man. So actually at every table in the afternoon, when you drank your coffee, at every table the social question was solved three times, between two and four o'clock, and by the same people at night, until after midnight, if you didn't exactly attach great importance to the “Sperr-Sechserl”!

So programmatic solutions to this social question can be found very easily!

You see, if you don't look at reality at all, but work from programs and abstract ideals, then organizations can be thought up in abundance.

Goethe satirized the abstract design of worldviews so beautifully in his poem: “The world is an anchovy salad!” You can just as well say that the world, instead of consisting of abstract atoms, as the monists, for example, do, you can just as well say that the world is an anchovy salad, and prove it; or you can go as far as Gustav Theodor Fechner, who proved quite exactly in a very nice little brochure, a small writing, that the moon consists of iodine. You will find very exact proof there. So basically, if you think abstractly, you can prove anything. That is precisely how people fall into so many errors, by pursuing the abstract instead of entering into reality. But it is not enough to be logical. You also have to be realistic. Real thinking must have two things: logic and conformity to reality. One is inconceivable without the other. But above all, conformity to reality is necessary.

And so it is also necessary not to imagine some arbitrary state of the world and then forge programs based on that, but rather to ask: What is possible? That is the fundamental question for the threefold social organism! And there is no possibility at all that exploitation in the modern sense will take place. You see, there are two sides to everything! From his point of view, even the capitalist can say that he is being exploited. Isn't that right? The point is to look at what is possible. Then there is another interesting question:

What has to be done to avert the danger of Bolshevism based on the ideas presented?

You see, it must be said again and again – and it is not for nothing that I repeat it again and again in the Stuttgart Dreigliederungszeitung, which appears every week and I have already expounded the idea in the newspaper dedicated to the threefold order of the social organism here in Switzerland : in the “Social Future”, which is edited by Dr. Boos here and is particularly adapted to Swiss conditions, and in which the threefold order is represented here in Switzerland, that it is necessary above all that the threefold idea take hold in a sufficiently large number of minds. It must first be understood. People must be there to understand it so that it can take root. For, my dear attendees, then this idea of threefolding, or rather what comes from it, is the only real way to avert present evil.

In these three lectures I would like to give a kind of comprehensive picture of the will of the spiritual-scientific movement, of that will that emerges from the clearly visible tasks of the present itself and from what can be recognized as the tasks for humanity in the near future.

Today, in a kind of introduction, I would like to make some remarks about the nature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and about the necessity of a spiritual-scientific movement within the civilization of the present. Tomorrow, I would then like to show in particular how this spiritual science leads to a deeper knowledge, a life-filled grasp of the human soul and spirit, and from there to a deepening of moral consciousness. I would then also like to show how this spiritual science must relate to the religious beliefs of the present day, and in the third lecture I would like to show how calamity in the present arises from the psychological peculiarities of the peoples spread across the earth today, how it has arisen from the historical development of these peoples. So that I would like to proceed, so to speak, from a characteristic of spiritual science to a consideration of present-day civilization, illuminated from the spiritual-scientific point of view.

If one hears about such a thing as the spiritual movement, of which the Dornach building is the external representative, in an external, superficial way, as is the taste of many contemporaries, one immediately has the feeling that something like this can only be for Sunday, because on all weekdays people have their useful occupations, which are regulated, which may have shown great irregularities once every four or five years due to some event, but which are rebuilt when they are destroyed. One does not have the feeling that something that has to do with these everyday tasks of humanity could arise through a spiritual movement. And so the opinion has arisen that everything for which the Dornach building is the external representative is a sectarian movement, that it wants to be a kind of new religious formation, and at most leaves it to those who, with a certain fanaticism arising from one or other motivation, cling to the old, to seek all possible forms of struggle against such a movement.

Now, my dear attendees, in addition to everything else, I would like to point out right at the starting point of this reflection that the spiritual movement, which is meant here as anthroposophically oriented, has been developing very practical activities in recent weeks. As in other places, a very practical activity is also underway here, in that an attempt is being made — please bear with me, it may even sound paradoxical when one speaks in the name of a spiritual scientific movement — to counter the decline of contemporary life by setting up a 'joint-stock company for the promotion of economic and spiritual values'. Very practical activities are to be started in the near future. And there it should also be shown how what is meant by the anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientific movement is really not a sum of Sunday afternoon sermons, but something that is intimately connected with what our time needs in terms of new impulses for practical life.

Let me therefore start with a characteristic representation of practical life in a particular direction, in order to then be able to characterize more intimately the will of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from that direction. Many people who want to reform social life today out of more or less ideology, out of utopianism, have already noticed what I am about to point out; but they have not noticed it in such a way that they have been able to look at the fundamental issues that are at stake.

If you follow the various movements of the 19th century that, since the middle of the century, had been aiming to replace the gold and silver currency, the dual currency, with the gold currency as a single currency, you can see that these supporters of, let's say, monometallism, approached the matter from a very specific point of view. They said – and this can be seen from countless parliamentary reports of the European parliaments – that free trade must develop under the influence of the unified gold standard throughout the civilized world, free trade as the real basis of unhindered economic life, free trade that is not affected by all kinds of tariff barriers, protective tariffs and so on. This idea of promoting free trade through monometallism, through the gold standard, has been discussed in all possible keys. But what has happened under the influence of the gold standard? Precisely where this gold standard has been radically introduced, the opposite of what the clever economic practitioners predicted has occurred everywhere! Everywhere the necessity has arisen to resort to protective tariffs, including the American states. That is to say, almost all those who talked about the gold standard, whether from their practical knowledge of life or from the science of political economy, were mistaken about what was rooted in reality.

Now one may say: Have all people been stupid then? Did people really have no logic? Did they understand so little about life that the opposite of what they predicted came to pass? I do not think that the people who argued in favor of free trade during the 19th century were all fools; on the contrary, I think that they were very clever people who spoke with sharp logic and yet missed the point of reality! What is not realized when such a matter is discussed today is that, in the sense of the way of thinking that has developed in the civilized world over the last three to four centuries, one can be very clever and yet one's judgment can be unrealistic; one can consider oneself a great practitioner and give the most impractical advice that is possible. And basically it was this impractical advice that, over the last few decades, has driven humanity into its terrible catastrophe. Particularly in Germany, one could see how the real mastery of the circumstances gradually changed into the judgment of the great or small industrial and commercial leaders of the state. Other people have become more or less dependent on the industrial and commercial leaders. The influence of the commercial and industrial leaders was much greater than one would actually like to think. It was only during the war that it became clear how everything actually depended on the judgments of these leaders, and how disastrous the judgments of these leaders turned out to be.

And from this one could see that the whole of public life is, so to speak, summed up in the judgments of such alleged practitioners. But it was this that brought about the fateful catastrophe that befell civilized humanity in the last five to six years and that is far from over.

The reason for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to appear at all is the observation of this fact. That was the reason why, precisely from the side from which this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is asserted, the practical expression of this spiritual science must be pointed out again and again. I know how it surprised individuals, even the small group here in Basel, when I pointed out many years ago that we started with a semi-practical activity, so to speak, namely, performing mystery plays. Some “mystics” have thought that this is something that should not really be done; because in that way one becomes allied in a certain direction with practical measures that one needs. But I said at the time: My ideal would be not just to stage plays, but to develop a banking activity in order to permeate the most practical aspects of life with the kind of thinking that is necessary if one wants to pursue fruitful spiritual science. From a factual basis, I was always convinced that one does not arrive at the results that spiritual science seeks through unhealthy, superficial thinking, but precisely through healthy, careful and alert thinking, and that one can learn to train one's thinking in a way that was not possible under the materialistic approach of the last few centuries; that one can become practical for life through the healthy way of thinking, which is necessary when one does spiritual science in the sense in which it is meant here. I would like to say: a healthy treatment of life comes about as a kind of by-product. If you don't want to acquire stupid, nebulous, but true insight into the nature of the world through spiritual science, you are urged not to develop a rambling, nebulous way of thinking, but a way of thinking that is much clearer than what you are used to in science today. And if one develops this thinking, if one makes an effort to understand what spiritual science wants to be understood, then one trains one's thinking in such a way that one can also think correctly and appropriately in practical areas of life and no longer predict, for example, that monometallism will develop free trade when the circumstances are such that protective tariffs are introduced under the gold standard!

It is precisely this kind of world view, called anthroposophy here, that gives rise to a way of life, a real immersion in reality, in contrast to materialism, which everywhere tends towards the intellectual, towards merely looking at the world from the outside, and remains barren, with the exception of the only area where it could be fruitful, where it has led from triumph to triumph: that of external technology. But to see clearly in this direction, it is necessary that what I have developed over the years here from the most diverse points of view about the nature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science be touched upon again today, at least with a few words. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science basically starts from the most intimate, innermost human soul activity. It makes this human soul activity the very method of spiritual scientific research. But in that which lies in the depths of human nature as activity, as essence, is explored by this spiritual science, at the same time the human being is pointed to the whole universe, to the natural universe and to the social universe. The human being will penetrate into the depths of the world precisely by learning to look into the depths of his own being in an appropriate way.

Spiritual science must start from two things in human experience: firstly, from a further development of the life of imagination and, secondly, from a further development of the life of the will. In a certain sense, we develop that which is imagining and thinking, either for the external practical world or for conventional science. And we develop our will insofar as we are harnessed, I might say, in instinctively brought about social conditions. Spiritual science, however, leads to the recognition that just as one can develop the still undeveloped powers of the child in such a way that it can then, as an adult, enter the world with a certain imagination, with a certain will, one can also further develop that which the human being does today out of a certain laziness, as everyday and also scientific imagining and willing. To do this, however, it is necessary to first acquire a correct knowledge of the human being in a certain sense. It is necessary to gain the ability to look at the developing human being. In any case, we will have to learn to look at the developing human being, which is a necessity for a reform of the education system. This education system will have to be reformed. It will be done when it is realized that a large part of the social confusion of today stems from the failure of education and teaching. But it will not be possible to reform the education system until we look at the developing human being with real expertise, at this developing human being who, in each individual instance, presents a puzzle that, in a sense, needs to be solved. We look at the developing child. What wonderful events we encounter when we look at the child in the first weeks, in the first months, in the first years of its growth, when we really do not look away at what happens from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, but delve into this growing human being: what wonders of the event, of world events we encounter there!

Usually, for example, one only looks at something like the change of teeth from the outside. One does not consider what happens at the same time as the change of teeth, namely a complete transformation of the entire child's mental state. Until the change of teeth, the child lives in such a way that, fundamentally, its most inner instinct is to imitate what happens in its environment through people, especially through those people with whom it has grown together through blood or upbringing. We can grasp every hand movement the child makes if we know how devoted the child is to the people around him; and basically every hand movement is an imitation, even if sometimes in such a way that the imitator conceals himself. But anyone who can observe will notice that, for example, there is also an affiliation, an imitative affiliation to the environment in the formation of speech.

Thus we see how the child is an imitator in the first years of life. And by observing the child and seeing how, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, something grows from the innermost depths and is then transferred into form, gesture, movement and action, into sound and thoughts. If we observe this in a child, we will notice – if we cannot do it any other way, then for the sake of my argument we will start from the hypothesis – how the soul-spiritual works on the physical. And if you immerse yourself in such an observation, if you see how the soul and spirit work on the body, then you cannot help but follow this work of the soul and spirit on the body right into the innermost part. Then one will say to oneself: something significant is happening throughout the whole organism, which is fulfilled around the seventh year in the second teeth that replace the milk teeth. In a sense, this change of teeth marks a conclusion.

And what then occurs in the child when the change of teeth is complete? Everyone can clearly and distinctly observe that the child's images, which were previously somewhat fleeting, came and went, were chaotic, then form themselves into more stringent contours, so that they take shape so firmly that they crystallize, as it were, and then become lasting memories.

The ability to remember does, however, occur earlier in some people, but the clearly defined memory, the memories shaped into thoughts, that is when they occur. And anyone who then follows this series of images cannot help but say to themselves: Yes, that is the same activity; up until the change of teeth, it was a spiritual-soul activity to drive out the teeth. This mental-spiritual activity worked in the organism. Now it has completed its activity, its field. Now it appears as a mental-spiritual activity itself. The clearly defined thoughts, the thoughts that are capable of being remembered, these thoughts now occur. What did they do earlier? It was they who worked in the organism to bring out the teeth; the same activity that later lives in thinking and remembering lived in the organism, was active there to drive out the teeth. It is, so to speak, an organic activity, metamorphosed, transformed into a spiritual-soul activity. And as such a spiritual-soul activity, it now lives on in the human being.

You see, this is how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science proceeds in a strictly methodical way. It says to itself: Just try to see how strongly active in the organism during the first seven years of life is what later only works as thought work, as memory work. Now, let us say, we take up this intensified activity of thinking, of imagining, and we hold to it, not just to let the translated spiritual-mental activity of the later years work in our soul, but to let the stronger activity work, which was able not only to form thoughts into memories, but to drive out teeth. But that is only one part of the activity, the greater, more intense one, up to the seventh year. This stronger activity is tackled through what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls meditation. Meditation is nothing other than intensified thinking, thinking made more intense, thinking that has been trained. Meditation consists of taking a thought or a train of thoughts – what is good for one person, for another, and the more precise thing can be found in the writings: 'How to Know Higher Worlds', 'Occult Science in Outline', 'The Riddle of Man' and 'The Riddle of Souls' and so on – this meditation, which is meant here, consists of taking a thought or a train of thoughts in the center of our consciousness and then engage ourselves so intensely in this train of thoughts, that we do not just unfold the abstract, intellectual activity of thought that we have in ordinary science or in ordinary life, but that intense activity of thought that, if we were still children under seven years of age, would engage our organism, seething and boiling within the organism. But when we engage in it as a spiritual-mental activity, it carries us along, so that we learn to live with thoughts as with realities. Just look at how people live with thoughts and judgments in their everyday lives or in ordinary science; they do not disturb them. It disturbs a person when he is friends with someone who harms him, or when he is in love with someone else, or when he is hungry or thirsty, and so on. The things of the body disturb a person; thoughts do not in the same way.

In meditation, you learn to move as you move in everyday life. And gradually you realize that meditating internally gives you a jolt. While in ordinary life you have a kind of guidance in your world of thoughts through the outside world, while you surrender to the thoughts that surround us as they come through the unbridled memories, emerge, disappear again and so on, meditation consists in bringing one's thoughts into consciousness of one's own will, in handling a thought as one moves one's hand when one performs some action with it. And gradually one really gets the feeling that one learns to think as one otherwise learned to grasp or to walk: that the activity of thought arises as something separated from the human being. When one thus advances to such a thought activity, which is more intense than ordinary thought activity, to a thought activity of which one inwardly experiences: if one were still a child, this thinking, which one develops in meditation, developing in meditation, would even intervene in the growth and formation of the body. When one develops this thinking, one comes to know what it means to be free of the body in thinking and imagining and devoting oneself to an activity.

It is quite true that ordinary thinking is entirely bound to the brain. And this is precisely what one learns to recognize when one becomes acquainted with this body-free thinking, to which one can only rise through meditative development. This thinking, which is as arbitrary as hand movements or leg movements, which one can perform through exertion, under which one tires, which one must refrain from after a certain time, just as one must refrain from exertion of the external body, when one gets to know this thinking, when one gets to know it from within, only then does one have an experience of creative thinking, of creative imagination. Then one grasps a being in the human being that is ethereal-thinking and that at the same time is that which has descended from supersensible worlds through birth or, let us say, through conception, and has worked as a sculptor, as an architect, on the human body. We have grasped that which works on the human body, and we have thus vividly transported ourselves back to what we were as human beings before we descended into this physical body and accepted the body that was given to us through inheritance from father, mother and so on. We have an experience of the prenatal or pre-conception life, an experience of what our supersensible existence was before our present physical existence.

Through the development of thinking, our human life extends beyond birth and conception. What I am telling you here is just as certain a result of a strict methodical investigation, walking the paths that I have outlined here, as any chemical result. What chemistry accomplishes in the laboratory or astronomy in the observatory is no more certain than what arises from the intimacy of the developed human thought life as the knowledge of the supersensible human being before birth; it is simply further developed thinking that provides the method of penetrating into the supersensible world. This thinking also provides the possibility of saying something about this prenatal life. We will come back to this tomorrow. But now I would like to point out the other side of what must be developed in man in order to ascend from sensory knowledge to supersensible knowledge. This other side is the will. And to understand the significance of this development of the will, you need only consider how far removed what we call the content of our moral ideals, our moral impulses, is from what is an external natural event, which is also a natural event in man. That is precisely the concern of the philosophical world view, that so-called ideals cannot be brought into the natural existence. On the one hand, geologists and astronomers describe how our Earth, together with everything that belongs to our planetary system, emerged from a primeval nebula according to eternal, iron laws, how it split off, how plants developed, how animals developed up to the point of man. Then they follow this in order to hypothesize how it will all perish again. But let us consider: The world of ideals does not enter into this world, nor the world of that which we must set before us if we want to lead a dignified human existence, nor the world of that under whose influence we carry out our actions; all that speaks to our conscience does not enter into it. But, my dear audience, what significance does this have for everything that takes place as a purely natural existence? In today's world view, there is no bridge that can be built from the moral ideal to what develops naturally. The astronomer and the geologist look to a final state of the earth, when everything will either succumb to the heat death or, as others describe, will be frozen, and so on. What we now call moral ideals will be a grandiose grave. What will become of what we call moral ideals? They are, as it were, like human thought, thoughts that slip over natural existence for such a materialistic world view. Those who start from the point of view of the spiritual science meant here do not theorize about these moral ideals, but seek to deepen life in another way. Above all, he tries to introduce into human arbitrariness something that is otherwise only considered by man in such a way that he leaves himself to it in a passive way.

And again, to help us understand what I mean, if we look with an unbiased eye at the second epoch of human life, the epoch from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. We see again how certain forces gradually develop in the child from the age of seven to fourteen, culminating in the years fourteen or fifteen. We see how individual love emerges first, how everything that is connected with the reproduction of the human race emerges. But we do not usually follow how a spiritual-soul element from the age of seven to fourteen or fifteen years again works as it did in the first seven years of life and comes to a conclusion, so that it is released and, as it were, redeemed from the organic activity in the fourteen or fifteen years. If we observe the development of the boy, we find – in a somewhat different way, which need not be further discussed here, it is more soul-like in the female sex – we find the conclusion of this epoch of life in the change of the voice, in the different timbre that the voice takes on. What is it actually that has shot into speech? If we observe impartially, we find that it is the will. In the first seven years of life it was the life of imagination, which then forms into a thought capable of remembering. Now it is the will that shoots into the organism, integrates with the organism and from now on permeates speech as free will, whereas until then, up to the 14th or 15th year, the child was not free in his speech, but — this can be demonstrated — was under the influence of his surroundings. So that we can say: In the second epoch of life, that which later appears as will, is what shapes the organs. And it comes to light in adolescence, in the 17th, 18th year, and into the twenties, glowing with ideals. That which has been working on what then appears as sexual love, as human love in general, has been released. What has been released after the 14th, 15th year of life in sexual maturity has been working until the 7th year; it is the will – first the will, which is bound to the organ, then the will that is released. If one takes this up again, and in such a way that one now turns to the will and transforms what one usually passively accepts as a human being into something active, then one will see that a second, special spiritual-soul power develops in the human interior. This is achieved by observing how one can say to oneself: If you look back on your life, you have actually changed from year to year – this is less noticeable – but in any case, from decade to decade, you have become a different person. Life, external circumstances, suffering, joys, all kinds of things intervene in life. And each of you may ask yourselves whether you have not become a different person over the decades? But this is not under your control. Life grinds you down. Life makes you someone else.

The method of spiritual science consists precisely in taking the development of the soul into one's own hands in this area, in taking the moral ideals of life more seriously than one otherwise does, for example, in taking these moral ideals of life into one's own self, in examining how one can shape something that one sets out to do so that one wills it, just as one wills to eat when one is hungry. You can bring it to that. You can bring it to the point where what are otherwise only abstract moral ideals become instinct, that they become an inner urge. Then, indeed, what otherwise, as I said, hovers above nature, of which one cannot understand what its actual meaning is, then it approaches the human inner organic becoming. Yes, even if it sounds paradoxical to many, there comes a time when moral impulses have the same effect on us as food has on our taste buds. One no longer has only an abstract feeling towards something that one finds good or bad, but one gets an inner antipathy towards something morally monstrous or bad, or even just blameworthy, just as one gets an antipathy towards something that tastes bad. What otherwise floats in abstract heights, intimately approaches what otherwise lives in taste and smell. You get a feeling of it when you just raise an arm, so what you set before you is effective in the arm's metabolism. In other words, when you actively take your human development into your own hands, you get a feeling of the spiritual-soul penetrating the physical-bodily. Just as one becomes free of the bodily in thinking when one develops it, so one will, through the other development that I am now discussing, which simply takes in that which 15th year, will be so intensively absorbed by the organism that love will not only have its usual effect in social or individual life, but love will have such an effect that it first organically shapes us into a body. If one now applies this intensity of love to one's own self-education, then one acquires in the will that which is strong enough to work, even if this body is given over to the earth or the elements. Once one has realized how the will has the power to affect the body, how the will not only instills moral impulses in us in the abstract, but how the will compels us to feel the moral impulses as we otherwise feel food through taste, then one has also grasped how this will intervenes in one's own human natural existence, how it intervenes in the entire natural existence of the universe. Then, through this other side of development, one acquires the possibility of grasping what lies beyond the grave. Just as through the development of the life of ideas one grasps prenatal life as something supersensible, as something eternal, so through the development of the will one grasps life after death. What the human being experiences here in this physical world is expanded by what spiritual science brings to light, precisely beyond this physical world. However, this does not mean that one merely speculates beyond the physical world. Rather, in order to arrive at what I have just described, one must actually develop a life of thought and will that is connected to reality. One develops the life of thought so truly that one has it in one's powers, in which it shapes us ourselves, by entering into life. One grasps the life of will in such a strong reality that one has it, as it will work even when our body with all its instincts and natural drives has decayed.

Then, when this has been achieved, one has something that can take on the same role as the content of my “Occult Science”, for example. Just as one speaks of the outside of the world from an external natural science, one can speak of the inside of the world. Not everyone needs to become a spiritual scientist to be able to understand spiritual science. Unflinching human understanding leads to the ability to grasp this spiritual science. We need not discuss how many spiritual researchers there will be in the future. There may be many, there may be few. From my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” you will see that anyone can become a spiritual scientist up to a certain point, namely, if one is willing to develop one's natural gifts, one can see into the supersensible world. To become a spiritual researcher in the sense meant here is perhaps not possible for some people for the simple reason that it requires much that a person in ordinary life cannot actually strive for. Just think how much time a person who becomes a chemist must spend in the laboratory, separated from the rest of life, and how, in a certain sense, he must renounce many things in the other life. This is the case with every single human activity in life. Just consider what it means when someone has to familiarize themselves with a world that is very different from the one in which we live daily from waking up to falling asleep, with a world that has very different laws, although these laws are effective here, but in secret. This imprints something on a person that is at the same time the source of suffering and pain. And every true spiritual researcher will tell you: He gratefully accepts the joys that life has brought him and would like to thank the world powers in a humble prayer for what he has been allowed to experience in joy. But he does not really owe his knowledge to his joys, which in a certain way lull him to sleep about the actual essence of life — we owe our knowledge to suffering. And it is the intense suffering that passes through our souls when we have climbed a certain step in going out from the world of sense-activity, as I have described to you today.

Then comes the other. Just think, I said it myself, thinking becomes something like grasping or walking: it is placed at the discretion of man. Otherwise we are accustomed to think involuntarily, to let thinking run on so automatically. This thinking must be transformed in such a way – at least for the time when one is doing spiritual research – as we otherwise move our hands and legs at will. One must now learn to differentiate precisely – and one learns this carefully when one is instructed in the right way in spiritual research – one must now carefully learn to separate the life that one must lead in the physical world and the life that leads into the spiritual world. Because here in the physical world one must be able to live like another human being. Those who become estranged from life out of a certain arrogance or out of a lust of the soul, who can devote themselves mystically and thereby despise life, who perhaps isolate themselves from the rest of humanity, don all kinds of strange clothes and the like, or say, “We belong to a completely different kind of people,” are not the real spiritual researchers. Those are rather the real spiritual researchers, who are not at all noticeable because they are in the outer life just as the others are, and even more practical, because they penetrate that with the real laws of the outer life, which one cannot get to know at all in the outer world, but only from the supersensible world; for everything sensual is completely dependent on the supersensible world. That is why I have often said that this spiritual science, which is meant here, will see its ideals fulfilled most when it can work precisely in the various practical branches of life. For example, I said, it would be a very special fulfillment of this anthroposophical ideal if one could talk to a number of doctors about what spiritual science could become for a renewal of medicine. This has now already been fulfilled: A course has been held in Dornach for doctors and prospective doctors on what can be contributed to medical science by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Truly, everything is closer to this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which is fruitful for practical life activities, than the insubstantial arguing with those who, out of blind fanaticism or much worse, open themselves up defamatory to present this spiritual science as a religious sect because they have a general aversion to any human progress. For those who are serious about this spiritual science, it is not about arguing with creeds, but about serious work in all practical areas of life.

This is what is to be achieved above all from Dornach, and in the face of which, I would say, all the ramblings that are now arising from all sides are simply grotesque. Just try to familiarize yourself with what is really wanted and you will see that it looks quite different from what is now going through a large part of the press. That is what it is about: that in fact, through the method described, through which man penetrates more deeply into his own being, he also penetrates more deeply into the world. On the one hand, one learns to recognize the reality that brings us into existence; on the other hand, one learns to recognize the reality that carries us out of existence. But through this one also gains the possibility of looking more deeply into life itself. Today people pass each other by, not knowing what influence one person has on another, not only that which is conveyed through the outer sensual body, but how soul actually works on soul, spirit on spirit. People are almost afraid to think about these effects of soul on soul, of spirit on spirit. But until we arrive at an understanding of how human beings act upon one another as spiritual beings, we shall never gain a correct conception of what the supersensible world is.

The spiritual researcher must absolutely accustom himself to looking uninhibitedly into the supersensible world and thereby fulfill his place in the material world. This necessity of regulating one's life in the world here in a completely different, much more conscious way when one is a spiritual researcher is, among many other things, perhaps not everyone's cup of tea. But it is enough if the results that individual spiritual researchers communicate are simply taken up into common sense. Spiritual science is not concerned about not being understood by unprejudiced thinkers. No, it knows that the more unprejudiced, the more appropriate, the less dilettantish, the more scientific the approach, the more it will be understood. It positively demands to be taken as exactly and seriously as possible. Then it will be seen that one can no longer talk about it in the way one talks about it when one is only superficially acquainted with it. Common sense can certainly say yes to the results of spiritual science; but then a certain demand is made on it, a demand that people do not love today, but because they do not love it, they have brought themselves to the catastrophe that humanity has had to go through in the last five to six years.

You see, if you were to take and read my “Secret Science” with the kind of attitude that people particularly love today, then it is rubbish, and you are also entitled to grumble about it. It is not in a position to tell you as much as you are told when you sit down in a movie theater and pictures roll in front of you. You don't need to work very hard. You can be passive. If you were to sit and listen to a lecture accompanied by lantern slides, you could doze off. During the intervals you can passively devote your attention to the lantern slides. It is different with a lecture such as I am giving today. In a certain sense, one has to go along with it oneself if it is to have any meaning for the human being. But only in literature — my “occult science” has no content for anyone who does not go into it themselves. It is, so to speak, only a score, and one has to work out the content oneself through active inner work; only then does one have it. But in so doing, one acquires active thinking as an observer of what the spiritual researcher has explored. This thinking submerges into reality and connects with reality. One acquires a thinking that no longer says: If we introduce the gold standard, we will favor free trade. This thinking, standing completely outside of reality, is unreal in relation to reality. One trains oneself in a thinking that is intimately connected with reality and that can also orient itself in practical cases to reality. The other thinking is untrained. The trained thinking, which to a certain extent emerges as a by-product of spiritual scientific endeavors, has the effect that one becomes a practical person in the face of the demands that life makes today.

Therefore, this spiritual science may also claim that the apparent practitioners, the illusionary practitioners, who — well, how should I put it, I dare not say loudmouthed — who have loudly boasted that they knew everything that happens in business and other life, and have so shattered life as it has been shattered, will have to be replaced by those people who know something to say about the real course of life because they have learned to say something about life in so far as it concerns the relationship of man to the universe.

I may always refer back to the fact, which is, after all, demonstrable, that it was in the early spring of 1914, in Vienna, in the very place where the world conflagration started, that I said to a small group: We are in the midst of a social development in Europe that shows us how public life suffers as if from a social carcinoma, as if from a social cancer that must break out terribly in the near future. That was in the early spring of 1914. A little later, men who also think in terms of practicalities, for example the German Foreign Minister and the Austrian Foreign Minister, told their parliaments or delegations almost identically: the general political détente is making great progress. We are on friendly terms with Russia, and thanks to these friendly relations we will soon enter an era of European peace. In Germany, they said: We are negotiating with England, and although these negotiations have not yet been concluded, they promise to be concluded in the near future and will establish a long-lasting peaceful relationship between Germany and England. All this in May 1914! That is what the practical people said. The other one who said: We are suffering from a social carcinoma, was the dreamer, the fantasist, the crazy anthroposophist. But the practical men, the ones people listened to, said what I have mentioned to you. Their practicality was fulfilled in such a way that in the next few years ten to twelve million people were killed and three times as many were crippled!

But how these predictions have been fulfilled here, how they have been fulfilled in the field of monometallism, how the measures of these apparent practitioners, who are alien to real life, have had an effect on a small scale, has all been demonstrated in the last five to six years. Today, spiritual science asserts itself to civilization by saying how one must delve into the content of spiritual science in order to apply such thinking, which is not only logical but also realistic. I said explicitly that I do not consider the monometallists stupid, but I do consider them to be people whose thinking cannot be immersed in reality, whose thinking is unrealistic. I know how many people do not believe today that it is precisely through intellectual deepening that one can enter into real life!

This is how spiritual science relates to the spirit of our time; this is how it relates to the unspiritual in our time. How does this unspirituality express itself? Well, humanity has actually only acquired intellectualism in the last three to four centuries. It has developed out of an ancient wisdom, which was, however, more instinctive, more dream-like, and therefore had to fade away. Intellectuality had to arise. We have arrived at a point in intellectual development from which we must move away again in order to recognize spiritual things, which mere intellect can never do. Everything, including our science, medicine, jurisprudence, all the individual sciences, have become alienated from reality today, with the sole exception of the inorganic sciences and technology with their entourage. Thus intellectuality has had to develop in recent centuries. There used to be an instinctive spiritual knowledge, but it has faded for a while. A new spiritual knowledge must replace it again.

But we have the inheritance of this ancient spiritual knowledge within us, and one of the most significant parts of this inheritance is our language itself, that is, all our languages of civilization. That which lives in our language has not emerged from a world view such as that practiced in the last three to four centuries. If people had not already had the languages, out of such soul activity as led to intellectualism, people would never have developed the languages. The languages are an ancient heritage. They emerged from a time when people grasped the spiritual, even if only instinctively. What did they become in the age of intellectualism? They have become what has gradually brought our public life to a state of phraseology. We live because we have lost the old spiritual substantial content that was in the word, we live with language in the phrase and we depend on finding substantial content for our languages again through spiritual deepening. But the phrase is the sister of the lie. And ask yourself, without prejudice, how the lie has carried its triumphal march through the world in the last five to six years, how we live in the age of phrase! Our spiritual life is entirely characterized by phrase. This is the un-spirit in the spiritual life of the present: phrase-mongering. We can only escape this spirit of empty phrases, this part of the unspiritual, by filling ourselves with anthroposophical spiritual science. If we want spiritual content with spiritual substance, then our words will in turn resonate with spiritual content. Today people speak words and more words because they have lost their spiritual content. This is the one point that is pointed out from a spiritual science point of view in the idea of threefolding the social organism, that the spiritual life is dominated by empty phrases, that a way must be sought – we will have to talk about this way in the next few days – to bring substantial content back into our words from the spiritual life. That is the first task we have to accomplish in the face of the anti-spirituality of our time.

The second task is this: it has become clear that this more recent time is completely under the influence of the urge to develop democratic, truly democratic life. This has seized people as otherwise the individual human being is seized by sexual maturity or other periods of life. Since the middle of the 15th century, the call for democracy, for true democracy, has been making itself felt more and more throughout the civilized world. And what is true democracy? Honestly grasped, democracy is a coexistence of people in the social organism in such a way that every adult is equal to every other adult. This cannot be developed with regard to intellectual life; because there it depends on abilities. Spiritual life must be kept separate on its own ground. Democracy can only embrace political life. But what has become of political life? Because the urge to form democracy is there, but this urge is interrupted everywhere under the influence of modern materialistic un-spirit — what has become of this life? Instead of a legal coexistence, instead of the real legal life born out of the inner being of man, a life of convention has arisen. Just as we live in phrases in our spiritual life, so in our legal life we live in conventions, in what is set down in paragraphs. These are not things to which people belong with their souls, but which they obey because they are conventionally set down by an absolute power or, for example, a democracy. The second thing that spiritual science wants with regard to the threefold social organism is to establish real democracy in the area where democracy can be. So that convention is replaced by what must arise from the innermost part of human nature among people who have come of age with equal rights.

And in a third area, the area of economic life, we have to replace economic unity, the calculation of circumstances, with real economic judgment, which will arise in the way that I will also suggest in the next few days, but which you will also find by name in my “Key Points of the Social Question.” This economic judgment has emerged in the face of the unspirituality of modern times. Man has become a routine practitioner instead of a real economic practitioner, a routine practitioner who simply stands in the fabric into which he was born or into which other circumstances of life have placed him. Man is not a real practitioner in the field of economic life, but a routine practitioner under a compulsively shaped demon. We live under the demon of phrase, of convention, of routine. We cannot escape this if we do not fulfill both the legal, intellectual and economic life with the sense of reality and spirit that we can acquire from the practice of spiritual science.

Now, people today still overlook such things. With regard to the fact that one can point to the most important thing that is really directly involved in practical life, people often stick to the judgment that it is just a dream, a fantasy, and so on. Yes, that's just the way people are. Here in Switzerland, a man named Johannes Scherr lived in the 1870s. In many respects he was a blusterer, he poured out his scathing criticism of everything and anything, just like a blustering person. But in his blustering there is often a very sound judgment. This Johannes Scherr, out of a certain insight into what he saw in his time, said: “If this continues, if people in their knowledge merely chase after materialism, if in their external political and social lives they merely financial economy, as it is now being ignited, where everyone only considers their financial or industrial interests, pursues their selfishness, if this continues, then the time will come when man will have to say: nonsense, you have triumphed!

I would like to know who, with an unbiased mind, has not had to stand up in recent years and still does so now, when he sees what is happening here and there in the world, when he sees how the opposite of everything that could could only benefit, throughout the whole civilized world, if one has, in particular, during the ad absurdum of the present civilization in this war, placed oneself in these circumstances, how one did not have to say: Well, the time has come when one would not have to say: Nonsense, you have won, like Johannes Scherr; but: Nonsense, you have decided!

I will develop the rest in the next few days. Today I wanted to say by way of introduction that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not want to participate in bringing about a state in which one will have to say more and more: “Nonsense, you decided” — but rather to help bring about a state in which, out of the innermost human ability, out of the innermost real human knowledge, one will have to say: We can bring meaning back into life, constructive meaning. This is what spiritual science wants to work on.

And it draws its strength from faith, which is surely more than mere belief, from the conviction that the time will have to come when the unspiritual spirit of empty phrases, the unspiritual spirit of convention, the unspiritual spirit of routine will have to be conquered by the spirit that, out of a deeper knowledge, speaks again of the meaning of life. For spiritual science must be convinced: not the spirit of convention and routine will lead man to a salutary development of his life, but alone the spirit. Therefore, as strongly as it can, spiritual science would like to raise the call for the spirit and for its true knowledge in the face of the needs of the present day and the near future.

In yesterday's lecture I already pointed out how, under the influence of the newer world view determined by natural science, a certain uncertainty had to come into humanity with regard to the question: How does the world event, which natural science presents as a natural necessity, relate to the validity and significance of moral human values?

The scientific world view has increasingly come to the conclusion that everything that happens in the world happens necessarily according to natural law. And it has increasingly come to include in this natural lawfulness only that which, in essence, has nothing to do with the moral being. And so we have seen the emergence, actually only quite clearly in the middle of the 19th century, of a scientific world view, put together from the various results of scientific thought, which initially says, roughly, for our Earth and what belongs to belongs to it: this Earth is a member of a general system, our solar system, and it emerged with it from a kind of primeval nebula state, clenched itself out of it, and separated itself over the course of time. Then the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms emerged, and with the perfection of the animal form, man also emerged. It will be, as that natural law of the forces that has led the world to this point and to this present form continues, that which is now inhabited by humans as earth, will be deserted, deserted of animals, deserted of plants, and will again disappear into the general process of the world.

Certainly, anyone who feels strongly about what natural science means to people today as an authority will hardly doubt that this world view has a certain exclusive significance. Indeed, there will be very many, especially among the present educated, who will strictly assert that anyone who refuses to recognize the significance of this world view will be disgraced.

However, those who make a fool of themselves include people whose voices carry a great deal of weight. I have already pointed out in earlier lectures how the brilliant art historian Herman Grimm points out in his book on Goethe how little this world view corresponds to man's original, elementary perception. He says: the sight of a bone around which a hungry dog circles is more appetizing than this world view. It will be somewhat difficult for a future historiography of humanity to explain the madness of the times that led to this Kant-Laplacean theory.

Of course, today such a thing is regarded as laymanship, dilettantism and so on. That which has been scientifically established is, so to speak, inflated into a whole world view as a worldview, and then it asserts itself in this way. And we are faced with the question: How does one relate to such a world view, which in certain respects claims its exclusivity, how does one relate to such a world view the voice of the moral ideal, of conscience, which can be heard within the human being, the voice that calls upon us to do this and not to do that, the voice that tells us that this is good and that is evil? How does the whole moral life fit into this world view?

I have met many people who see this moral life as a kind of ephemeral smoke that rises, actually the illusion of a smoke that rises from natural scientific events, that fills people with illusion for a while, only to disappear forever. And how should one think differently, if one is completely honest, than that what arises in the mind of man, after man has developed over the course of millions of years from lower animal forms, how should think otherwise than that what arises in the mind of man as ideals will also disappear without a trace when the earth falls back into the state into which it dissolves in the general course of the world. It would have been just an episode that men had set themselves moral ideals. Men would have acted under the influence of these moral ideals. All these moral ideals would have meant nothing more than that they were illusionary bubbles that had arisen, according to which men had arranged their lives, and which had no further consequences in the evolution of the world.

I know how much is still objected to today from the materialistic side against such a full consequence of this world view. But there is something that must also be touched upon in the face of the objections that materialists make today when they are told: Your world view, your world view based solely on natural science, actually reduces the moral value of man to nothing more than an illusionary bubble.

Let us take a look around us in the time when the scientific world view emerged in the civilized world with full freshness and fire. It was roughly in the middle of the 19th century, when, I would like to say, not as drowsily and inconsequentially as today, but out of full fire, the materialists hammered the nails to it, as one thoughts – everything is only ordered as physics, chemistry and biology want it – how one thought about moral values from this thought; I would like to give some examples of this, which are perhaps no longer sufficiently known today. You see, at the time when materialism, I might say in the bloom of its youth, was sweeping through European civilization, there was a historian named Hellwald; he wrote a cultural history from the point of view of the natural-scientific world view. He said to himself, drawing the real, true consequences of this natural-scientific world view: moral ideals, indeed moral ideas of man, are illusions. How can we think of any objective justification of moral ideas after the necessary event, as chemistry assumes, as physics assumes? But people have always had moral ideas. This must simply be explained scientifically, says the cultural historian Friedrich von Hellwald. But for the time being, he expresses himself about moral ideals from a purely scientific, that is, at that time, natural scientific point of view. I would like to demonstrate this way of expressing oneself in a sample. He says: “The task of science is to destroy all ideals, to prove their hollowness, their vanity, to show that belief in God and religion are deception, that morality, love, freedom and human rights are lies.”

You see, that is how people spoke when they believed that scientific causality could only be presented as a world view, at the time when it was just taking root in people's hearts, when people did not approach these things in an inconsistent and cold manner.

But, says the same historian, why did people then delude themselves with these moral ideals, which are vain? Science testifies to their vanity. Because people, he says, needed them; they needed them in the struggle for existence. If you have moral illusions, if you believe in the deception of moral ideals or ideals of truth, you will fare better in the struggle for existence than if you do not believe in these illusions. That is why these bubbles rose. That is why people seized on these moral ideals. They were the right means in the struggle for existence.

That was the consequence of the last third of the 19th century! This is something that still haunts the souls, but the souls are no longer as consistent as those of the people of that time were, and so today's souls do not admit to the consistency that consists of either either accept the Kant-Laplacean or a similar natural image, then I have to declare the moral ideals to be illusions and lies, or else I have to tear down what is merely a natural scientific world view.

Yes, people were more consistent. I would like to read you another example. A lady wrote to one of the leading scientific world-view designers of the time, Moleschott. This lady wrote the following about her view of moral human value: “The moral measure for every human being lies only in his own nature, and is therefore different for everyone. What are debauchery and passion in themselves? Nothing more than a greater or lesser extent of a fully justified urge.” And the lady continues: ‘I love humanity as it is, and even the thief and the murderer have their lesson’ - she means Moleschott's lesson - ”taught me to respect and recognize his human rights. Everything that makes the thief as well as the merchant is fully entitled in the circle of human abilities. In both cases, cunning and trickery, combined with the urge to acquire, are only one combination with other mental powers, the animating principle. Everything that enters life has also acquired its right to live with this entry. Therefore, I must say it again: Even man who has become a thief brought with him the right to fulfill his nature and to make it all-round, and in this way he can only be a powerful, moral nature. And like the thief, so every vicious person, even he who has become a murderer. He can only achieve the perfection of his humanity by satisfying his lust for murder.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was not a revolutionary, that was a very decent, bourgeois-minded lady who, only in the time of the virginity of that world view, which today is basically also represented, but only not taken seriously, taken seriously enough, who just knew: if you think the way most people still think today in terms of the scientific world view, then you have to think about the moral value of man the way she thinks. It was a deeply felt commitment that such a personality had to the confession that I quoted here, which basically leads to the dissolution of all striving for truth, to the dissolution of all ideals and has absolutely no point of reference, to think of moral human value as somehow anchored in the world.

I have read to you these examples, which could be multiplied, so that you may see how it has come about that what is happening in Europe today has taken root in human souls. Is it any wonder that the mood that is sweeping across Europe today is one with which you are sufficiently familiar, when this mood was born precisely in the consistently thinking and feeling people who held this world view in the mid-19th century and the beginning of the last third of the 19th century?

It is indeed the case that modern man, in the half-heartedness of his soul, does not admit to himself that he would actually have to think in this way about moral human value if he does not revise his world view, as presented to him by the scientifically minded creators of world views. This is the great seriousness of all those questions that arise when we seek to build a new world view. This is what weighs so heavily on the soul of those who see in spiritual science, of which I also spoke to you again yesterday, something that must necessarily be included in the present course of human development and that of the immediate future. Only from this can it be expected that the moral value of man will gain ground and truly gain ground, that the scientific world view itself will be fertilized by spiritual science, by the knowledge of the spirit.

Now we need only consider some of the things mentioned here yesterday to see clearly and in all their depth how the world cannot be known by man unless he can first enlighten himself. We will only recognize the processes going on in the world in their true essence if we can explore them from the soul's point of view. In this way we remember, as was asserted yesterday, how the spiritual science meant here seeks its methods and spiritual insights through the inner development of the soul. And once again I would like to briefly point out what is developed within the human soul, how this human soul being is brought further than in ordinary life and in ordinary science, in order to enter into the insights of the spiritual world. I have already pointed out how the head develops, how we see in the child, as it enters the world, how from day to day, from year to year, an inner soul-spiritual element pushes its way to the surface. We see how the features of the child's face become more and more soulful, more and more spiritual, how something is at work in there that is shaping the human being into the surface in a plastic way. We may only sense it, but an unbiased observation that delves deeper into things sees through it, that what is expressed, I might say, in the features of the face extends further into the child's organism. And yesterday I pointed out that the most intense expression of what is happening through this plastic shaping of the human body by the soul and spirit is the change of teeth, the eruption of the second teeth that take the place of the milk teeth. The formation of these second teeth shows most strikingly how, in the first seven years of life, the human organism rapidly hardens. Then, when the child has grown teeth, the images take shape, they can become lasting memories; they take on contours. At that moment in human life, when the forces that have been working within the organism until the seventh year have in a certain way fulfilled their task for the organism, the change of teeth occurs. Then those forces that have been working in the organism until the change of teeth come into their freedom. They show themselves in their spiritual and soul form; they then work in human memory and in human thinking. The same thing with which we think, with which we form our memory, has worked in our organism as the human plastic artist until the age of seven; it has brought it about that the dental substance has separated out of the wholeness of the human organic substance, if I may suggest it so aphoristically; otherwise, in order to explain the matter fully, one would have to give many lectures on this change of teeth.

You see, it is only a small sample, but a sample of how spiritual science does not want to indulge in some kind of cloud cuckoo land, how it does not rise into mystical fog, but how it points straight to the knowledge of reality, how it shows what works as spiritual-soul in the human organism during the first seven years. This spiritual science teaches us to recognize the human organism! It is the fate of materialism that it cannot recognize matter, that it tells us nothing about matter. Spiritual science tells us precisely about matter such things as I have now indicated in the work of that which later becomes thought movement, in the human organism up to the seventh year. If one could go into the details, one would see how the soul and spiritual work in the human organs, in the liver, lungs, kidneys, and so on. Spiritual science will bring real knowledge of material processes because it is able to explain these material processes from the spiritual.

When one goes further in the training of those methods by which one can enter the spiritual world, then one must further develop, through meditation, that which has been separated off in the seventh year as thinking activity, as imagination, as I indicated yesterday. Then one must work inwardly with one's thoughts as intensely as one works with thoughts during the first seven years of life, when one must not only conjure thoughts before one's consciousness, but when one's power of thought works so strongly in the organism that it ultimately causes the teeth to form out of the organism. But when one works one's way through meditation into such intensified activity of thought and imagination, then one also notices the difference between this thinking, which then brings one directly into the contemplation of the spiritual world, which allows one to recognize directly how man spiritual soul through birth into his physical existence, and can then compare what one has artificially attained, I might say, through meditation, with what ordinary human thinking is.

So you have seen what ordinary human thinking consists of, the thinking that people do in their daily lives and in ordinary science. People do this thinking, but they cannot know what this thinking actually consists of. One only learns to recognize what this thinking consists of when one can compare it with thinking that is free of the body, that is not bound to the brain, that takes place in the purely spiritual-mental, etheric, which one can only acquire through meditation. Only then is it possible to compare the ordinary thinking of a person with this completely free thinking. It is important to be able to do this, because only then can a real science of the whole significance of the human soul be established.

You see, it is an extraordinarily meaningful experience to grasp thinking in its body-free state, and to compare it with how thinking is when it is bound to the brain as ordinary thinking in life. One then sees in relation to thinking the difference that exists between man and animal. Much has been fabled about this difference between man and animal, especially by modern science. But to recognize what this difference consists of can only be done through such comparison as I have just indicated.

And if you ask yourself: Yes, how does ordinary thinking arise in contrast to body-free thinking, which is directly linked to the soul of the human being, in that it only takes place in the spiritual-soul realm, then what - you can now ask - is ordinary thinking like from the point of view of this body-free thinking? This ordinary thinking is completely bound to the brain. There must be something of an organic organization through which this ordinary thinking proceeds. The body-free thinking that is acquired through meditation does not need this nervous tool. Ordinary thinking needs this nervous tool. Man has this nervous tool only because his nervous organization is not as highly developed as that of animals. The animal, so to speak, advances to a certain point with its animal organization, hardens to a certain point. At the beginning of life, man does not go as far as animals in hardening, ossifying and sclerotizing his soul life. But during the course of life, the human being develops this hardening. For that which is expressed in the hardening of the organism, in that the second teeth appear as pure products of hardening, is also continued in ordinary everyday thinking; only they do not become teeth, they become much softer insertions, I would say, into the organism, which in turn dissolve. But this thinking, this ordinary thinking, consists precisely in the fact that man, in the continuous process, is constantly killing that which arises in him, sprouting, sprouting life. What comes to light is that in us, thought is continually shooting forth, temporarily, as reality earlier than the teeth, as deadened parts from the organism, and that this shooting dissolves again into sclerotization, ossification. Thinking consists precisely in the fact that, in relation to our head system, our nervous sense system, we continually carry death within us.

This is what I have already pointed out here in other contexts. Our thinking consists in the fact that, in the continuous process of time, we carry out through our own inner activity that which the animal is predisposed to from the beginning: the process of sclerotization, ossification, death, which we carry within our organism. One looks at this perpetual dying, without which man's ordinary thinking cannot take place, from the point of view of body-free thinking, which one has acquired through meditation. And this dying is only continually compensated for by the fact that, in turn, the invigorating forces shoot up from the rest of the organization, from the blood and heart organization, into the head, which tends towards continual dying. In man, precisely because he is a thinker, there is a continual struggle between dying and life. And what occurs at the end of physical life, the unique moment of dying, is just the synthetic summary of what always happens on a small scale. We continually die from our sensory-nervous organization; only this dying is continually suspended. Only when the rest of the organism, not just the head, no longer has the ability to suspend dying, only then do we really die. Death is not something that happens to man only once; death is an ongoing process. And it is to this death that we owe thinking. It is only because we integrate death into ourselves through thinking that, firstly, this thinking is present in us at all, but secondly, we learn to recognize what the dead actually is.

When one has trained one's mind, freed from the body and cultivated through meditation, one sees, firstly, other minds, and sees how they continually mineralize, ossify the human substance, and one gets to know the process of mineralization. By getting to know the mineral kingdom in man, as a purely mineral product of thinking, filling man, filling him with the dead, one gets to know the mineral kingdom in oneself. And by raising thinking in oneself above the degree of death, awakening it in oneself, by experiencing that something must die in us for thoughts to arise, by experiencing this, one also learns to recognize the secret of the universe. One comes to recognize the true significance of the mineral kingdom outside of us. We can only come to know the mineral kingdom of the non-human world by recognizing the mineral kingdom in the human being, which is bound up with thinking. True knowledge of the world comes only through intimate knowledge of the human being. And by seeing how something dies in man, one escapes the prejudice that crept into the nineteenth century as the sharpest, most intense prejudice and has remained until our days; I might say that man stared, caught in the grip of an infamous suggestion, at the mineral world with its causality. He knew of nothing within himself that could have taught him the essence of this mineral world. He could only say to himself: This world was once a cosmic mist, a Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula. From this emerged the planetary system, the earth; everything else developed from it, and it will continue in this way. This becoming, this causal event, is something eternal; within it, the moral values of man are bubbles that rise, and in addition, bubbles that consist only of illusions. If you learn to recognize this mineral realm by learning to recognize it within yourself, then you learn to see through its essence in the outer world. You see within yourself how the mineral realm is a continuous dying. And you no longer construct the outer world picture in the old way, but you now know how this outer world picture is actually constructed under the prejudice of science. It is very ingeniously constructed, as we have already pointed out: you could follow the change in the human heart over five years and you would find that the human heart is different today than it was five years ago. You could then follow it further to see what it is like after another five years, and then calculate what it will be like after three hundred years. It is just no longer there, but the calculation can be very accurate and correct. This is how geologists and astronomers calculate what the earth would look like after millions of years. This earth is just as little there as a human being is still there as a physical human being after three hundred years. And just as little as the human heart was there three hundred years ago, the earth was just as little there at that time, which geologists take into account!

This can be learned by getting to know the nature of the mineral kingdom in the human being itself, by the path I have indicated. But then, when you have got to know the nature of the mineral kingdom in this way, you know that the mineral kingdom disappears from the earth without the whole earth disappearing, just as, in the case of man, what is ossified in him ceases in death, without the whole human being ceasing in soul and spirit.

And further: just as one can advance thinking through meditation, one can also advance human feeling; just as one can make human thinking clairvoyant in a certain way, one can also make human feeling clairvoyant, so that one can also enter the spiritual world through human feeling. And just as one gets to know the mineral kingdom through thinking in the way I have just indicated, so one learns through feeling becoming free of the body, and being able to look back at everyday feeling is bound up with the human glandular system, one learns to recognize how this everyday feeling is bound up with a similar process in the organism, as the plant process is in the outer world.

And again, one gets to know the nature of the plant process in the outer world. And one learns to recognize - which seems very paradoxical to today's man - that the plant kingdom has a longer existence than the mineral kingdom, that the plant kingdom is also older than the mineral kingdom. Today's man cannot imagine anything other than that the plant kingdom grows out of the soil of the mineral kingdom. He would do better to observe how a distinctly mineral substance grows out of the plant kingdom in the form of coal! From this he would be able to see how all the minerals that exist today are a secretion, a result of an original plant, and how the plant kingdom will have a longer existence than the mineral kingdom.

Just as one can free thinking and feeling from the body, so too can one free the will. And when one attains this free will — I also spoke about this yesterday, how one attains this free will through a particularly suitable, intensive self-education, through a self-comprehension, through self-discipline — then one learns to recognize the special being in man that is now related to the animal kingdom. Then one also learns to recognize the nature of this animal kingdom. But also how the plant kingdom is in turn a separation of the animal kingdom, how the animal kingdom is older than the plant kingdom, which has separated out of itself, how it will exist longer, how the plant kingdom will disappear sooner than the animal kingdom. Not in the physical animal forms as they are today, of course, but in the animal entities that are embodied in this physical realm.

And then you get a real insight into the human world. Then you get such an insight into this human world that you say to yourself: It is man, after all, who has outgrown all these realms, because, in a sense, just as the plant kingdom has separated the mineral kingdom, the animal kingdom has separated the plant kingdom from itself; man, in turn, has separated the animal kingdom from himself; he is older than the animal kingdom and lasts longer than the animal kingdom. First the mineral perishes, then the plant, then the animal. Then that part of the human being that we have come to know by looking at what arose from the death of the mineral, what arose from the death of the plant, from the death of the animal, will be there when the other three realms have disappeared. —What will arise from our earth, from our earthly existence? He who studies man can already recognize this now. He sees how thinking, how thoughts arise from the grave of the ossified part of the organism within us. When what is in the mineral kingdom, what is in the plant kingdom, and what is in the animal kingdom has disappeared, what has been brought forth by man out of his conquest of the dead mineral kingdom, out of his conquest of the plant kingdom, and out of his conquest of the animal kingdom will emerge from all these things that have perished. And we are reminded that what we develop today as moral ideals will, in our germinal thoughts, shape the world when everything contained in today's mineral, plant and animal kingdoms has disappeared. We now place ourselves in the world as we must place ourselves when we look at the plant in the picture: it grows upwards, forming leaf after leaf; but the little germ is already there, which will then become a new plant. The old leaves flake off the plant; the petals, all this has no significance for the further development. We stand in the world as human beings. We see how that which will one day be an earthly process is already happening in us. We see how a mineral kingdom is forming in us because we think, how a plant kingdom is forming in us because we think, how an animal kingdom is forming in us because we think. Triumphing over all this is that which develops in us as thinking, feeling and willing. The germ is thus given. We must only have the possibility of knowing that that out of which this germ develops falls away, like the petals, the stem leaves fall away, that this just gives the germ of a new world.

The enemy of this recognition has developed in the 19th century, in that one could not imagine anything other than: The mineral event contains within itself a substantiality that is constant. One spoke of the constancy of matter, of force. In the moment in which one posits these dogmas, in this moment, this mineral is something; in this moment one does not see that this mineral is doomed to destruction, later the plant world is doomed to destruction , and later the animal element will be doomed to destruction. And on this common grave will arise not nothingness but that which we human beings carry within us today.

Yes, this earth with everything in the three realms on it will perish. But what we are already developing in ourselves today, and to which we ascribe moral human value, that is the germ of a new earth, the germ of a new world existence. We do not look at the moral value of a person by saying: That is an illusionary bubble that rises — because we see how everything around it, like the leaves of the plant, falls away, and everything else falls away from the earth, but what we carry as the moral value of a person develops as a germ. We only have to overcome such ideas as the prejudice of the constancy of matter, of the constancy of force, these terrible dogmas that natural science has implanted in the 19th century because it had no idea of what man can recognize when he rises to spiritual knowledge and then in itself, in the microcosmic, in the human being: the death of the mineral kingdom, over which triumphs the thought that can only develop by continually dying, just as the new plant germ can only develop by the old plant leaves dying and the germ triumphing over the old plant leaves. Our moral humanity, our moral human value, is the triumphant element in the other realms, in that which belongs to the other realms, in that which perishes in the other realms.

Here we see how moral worldviews burst into natural scientific worldviews. We see how the scientific world view is concerned with that which is dying in the world, while the moral world view is concerned with that which is now emerging as a germ in this dying as a new world. We become aware that by building a moral world with ideals, we are working on the germ of a future world. In this way, the moral value of man is placed on the same level as the natural process. But the natural process is rejected within its limits, this observation of nature, which indeed reaches its results in any case, by taking man into the clinics and doing the examinations on the cadaver. Natural science does the examinations on what is dying. It also only reaches knowledge about what is dying. But what the clinician cannot take to the morgue, what cannot be dissected, what triumphs over what is to be dissected, that is what already now, as a moral human value, is building a new world.

You see, the task of spiritual science is to break the presumptions, if I may say so, of the scientific world view. For spiritual science sees clearly and distinctly: Yes, it is so, either one rejects this natural scientific world view - not of course natural science with its proven results itself - but one rejects this natural scientific world view, or one must reject the moral value of man. It is only because people today are so inconsistent and so arrogant that they do not realize that in order to rescue the moral value of man they must decide to grasp a spiritual-scientific world-view. Humanity does not see it, because it wants to keep the world-view that today is based only on the study of nature. But then it would have to speak as Mathilde Reichardt once wrote to the materialistic naturalist Moleschott: “Therefore I must say it once more: even man, who has become a thief, brought with him the right to perfect his nature and make it all-round, and in this way he can only be a powerful, moral nature. And like the thief, so every vicious person, even the one who has become a murderer. He can only reach the perfection of his humanity by satisfying his lust for murder.” Either one speaks in this way, and thus gives science its right as a worldview, denies any moral human value, or one turns to spiritual science.

There is a third way. One says: I am indifferent to all world-views; I prefer to oversleep the existence of the world in an instinctive way. Certainly, this third way is also possible. Many people do it today. Those who seriously want to come to terms with themselves and their relationship to the world can only follow one of the paths described. That is the way things are today. This decision is there. Natural science has grown into a world view. One does not preach theoretically, as Mathilde Reichardt and the cultural historian Hellwald and others have done, that the thief, that the murderer can only become a full human being if he lives it up, because natural causality operates in him in exactly the same way as in the so-called honest man. One does not preach this theoretically. But that which lives in this spirit is going through Europe. It has produced the last five to six years. It will continue to work. Europe is being barbarized; or Europe must realize that it cannot build a world view on the basis of natural science alone.

This may sound fanatical today, it may sound radical today. Let each one look into his own heart and ask himself the question, but let him ask it earnestly enough, and I do not believe that the seriousness of the situation can produce any other answer. And then one looks at such a world view, which seeks to regain the moral value of the human being from the soul, and how it is compelled to seek the moral value of the human being from the spirit, and how it must break with the manifold prejudices of our time: the constancy of energy, the constancy of substance, and so on. Look at this spiritual science: it must acquire a completely different way of presenting itself to the world. It leads to looking at what appears to be only thought, what appears to be only a very rarefied thought that scurries away and disappears. It leads to holding this as the germ of a new reality after the whole earth has disappeared. This spiritual science will be felt by anyone who is serious about the matter as a necessity of our time. But it must also be felt as a necessity by the religious, by the truly religious of our time. Our time needs the possibility of being able to grasp how something spiritual can place itself in this physical world.

Now let us look at what a person steeped in today's education can say about the event of Golgotha. He cannot help but say about the event of Golgotha: Well, it must have been preparing itself in the events of the earth for the whole time leading up to this event of Golgotha, then it was there. Then it had its consequences again. It must be part of the series of causes and effects. For how should someone who is educated in today's world, which is based solely on natural science, see the possibility that with the event of Golgotha something completely new has entered the earth, in order to continue to shape itself with the further development of the earth! Only by grasping that something in the innermost life of man, in the actual world of thought, reaches beyond this earth and all its kingdoms, only by grasping this, that there is something in the earth that is not exhausted in the intellectual, in the sensory, , and triumphs over this earth, and whose substance goes beyond the earthly, one is also able to look at the essence, at the spirit being that has entered the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha and, as the Christ Jesus, gives further meaning to the earth.

Today it is necessary to approach spiritual science, which is kindled in man, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the secrets of Christianity. For today, Christianity must be understood spiritually. Let us look at the materialists: Just as they, if they are consistent, deny the moral value of man, so Christianity must be an absurdity to them. People cannot remain within the framework of the old traditional creeds, for if you look at the representatives, say of the Catholic Church, for example, you will see how they cultivate the most materialistic of all sciences when they become scientists! You can look at those who become scientists as Catholic priests: they do not want to bring the spirit into science. They want to keep science from being imbued with the spirit, because they want to preserve the old traditional forms in the spirit. They fear the new discovery of spiritual substantiality; they flee from it. There is nothing to be gained from it either. And if we look at the Protestant forms of interpreting Christianity, we see how powerfully the scientific world view weighs on this Protestant newer theology: They cannot fit the event of Golgotha into what is happening in the world! That is why they say that one must understand Christ Jesus only in terms of his moral qualities, in terms of what he has brought in as an ethos. But then again, this ethos is completely in the air if it is not anchored in a spiritual-scientific worldview.

Anyone who recognizes the dangers in which Christianity finds itself today will have to say to themselves: Christianity, in particular, depends on resorting to spiritual science in order to gain knowledge of its center, to gain knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha itself. For just as spiritual science points to where the germ of the future earth is to be found, so spiritual science also points to where the forces are that have united with the earth without being directly contained in the pre-Christian part of the earth. The spirituality of the Mystery of Golgotha can only be grasped by those who, through spiritual science, have first struggled to achieve spiritual understanding at all. Those who are serious about Christianity should appeal to spiritual science to save it. Those who are serious about Christianity, who take religion seriously, will also do so.

Why then do the people of the purely scientific age still have moral ideals? We can learn this from voices such as those of Hellwald and Mathilde Reichardt, which could, however, be augmented by numerous others. They teach us: the task of science is to destroy all ideals, to prove their hollowness, their vanity, to show that belief in God and religion are deception, that morality is a lie, and so on. - So one would actually have to say from a purely scientific world view, if one were not too cowardly to do so!

From such a standpoint, Christianity cannot be saved. The ground for Christianity will only be created again by the possibility, achieved through spiritual science, of looking into the spiritual itself, and of looking into it in such a way that this spiritual life is recognized as reality and not as illusory bubbles that one only devotes oneself to because one needs them in the struggle for existence. No, not because one needs the spiritual in the struggle for existence, but because it is produced out of our world with a necessity, just as the germ of the new plant is produced out of the old one with a necessity! But only if one realizes that the old is not subject to the constancy of energy, to the indestructibility of matter, but that all material substance decays like the leaves of a plant, and that the spiritual is the germ of what is to come, like the germ of a plant brings forth the new plant. Only when one realizes this spiritual necessity can one come to the sources of human value, where moral human value lives. What is left for people of the calibre of Mathilde Reichardt, the Hellwaid and others as moral ideals is the conventional adherence to inherited ideals. If such ideals had not been handed down from the views that brought us from the 19th into the 20th century, they would never have been won! Fertile soil for moral ideals will only be that which is provided by spiritual science as such soil.

For all these reasons, spiritual science truly believes that it is not working out of the mere subjective needs of its adherents, but out of the necessity of the time. — How it must work out of the necessity of the character of today's peoples, how these peoples are constituted today in relation to their souls, in relation to their external cultural conditions, is what I would like to speak about tomorrow: as it also I might say, this spiritual biography and history of the earth as a necessity — which I have tried to show today through the nature of the human soul in relation to moral human value —, to turn our gaze to the dawning of a new spiritual life. For only when we find this way to the spirit do we also find the sources of moral human value again, and we no longer need to despair that the whole earth will one day be a desolate grave, and not even a memory will remain of that which lived as moral human values in the soul being.

Spiritual science shows that moral human values rightly arise in the soul being because future worlds create their seeds precisely in the human soul through moral human values. Today's moral human values are the natural values of future worlds. Just as we look into natural values today and see the results of past worlds, so we see in what arises deep within our chests the dawning of new worlds. Spiritual science does not speak of eternity in abstract form. For that which lives in eternal becoming, in change, so that it emerges naturally from the moral and again bears the moral for future worlds in its bosom, that which lives in the change of the times, has the life of the eternities. And because the germ of the eternities rests in the human soul-being, the human soul has its true eternity.

Yesterday I endeavored to show how, with the rise of a world view that is entirely influenced by a foundation in natural science, it gradually became impossible to associate moral human values in the human consciousness with what stands as a world picture before the human soul in this form. And it was pointed out how this determination of the moral human value must in turn be found from the sources of spiritual-scientific knowledge. Yesterday, I endeavored to show how humanity can come to a full awareness of its moral dignity by taking up spiritual science.

We can approach the same task from a different angle by undertaking a spiritual-scientific study of the natures of the peoples inhabiting the Earth today, by investigating the spiritual and moral forces at work in these peoples, in order to answer the question: To what extent can people of the present day strive, out of the various national forces, towards what can be called a social recovery based on ethical, moral recovery?

We have experienced as humanity that external material, namely economic, interrelations have gradually spread to almost the entire inhabited earth. The earth has become an economic area. And people were forced, according to the knowledge they had, to organize this economic area of the earth in a certain way: to bring the old state structures and folk organisms, which were created under completely different conditions, into a relationship with each other in such a way that they could be joined together, poorly and poorly, into this common economic area, which is precisely what more recent civilization has brought to humanity.

That this integration has not become possible is shown by the developments of the last five to six years; but it is also shown by the developments that we are still undergoing: the decline of our public life. Consider all the praise of modern civilization at the beginning of the 20th century, in the way that people took care of their affairs across national and state borders at lightning speed, as it were, and how telegraph, telephone and so on worked with tremendous speed that had never been imagined before, and how all the boundaries that had previously seemed insurmountable seemed to have been overcome. And lo and behold, all of that was so unfounded that today we are facing national borders that are more sharply defined than they have been in a long time, have not been defined more strictly in a long time. And what is the main thing, that which a few centuries ago, perhaps even into the 19th century, was still perceived as natural, the closing of national and state borders, today we can only see it as something völkisch perverse, perverse to humanity, something that cannot be justified by the real conditions of human development. And the question must arise: what has caused humanity to take such a terrible step backwards?

We will very soon discover the reason, at least superficially, if we ask ourselves: has the soul and spiritual life of humanity kept pace with all that has been created in material terms across the globe? We have spread the same type of railway transport across the entire civilized world and also across the uncivilized world; we have understood how to carry the other means of transport everywhere, even to carry the type of transport everywhere. We have not understood how to bring a mutual, real understanding of humanity and the world everywhere. We have, so to speak, experienced the economic and material body of a unified world culture, and we have not been able to bring about an ensoulment, a spiritualization of this material and economic body of a unified world culture. What has taken shape as an economic and material unity across the earth has remained soulless. The question must therefore be asked: How can we attain the soul of the earth's humanity, which is striving for community? There is no other way to achieve this than to decide to look at the real essence of the peoples inhabiting the earth today.

Now, of course, it is not possible to go into all the details of different peoples in a short lecture; but it is perhaps possible to sketch a picture based on certain typical characteristics of how people live on earth in terms of their essence, their soul being. And here we may say: If we look at humanity on earth with the eyes that spiritual science trains, then in oriental regions we see a type of human being that preserves an ancient culture - albeit one that declining in modern times. This type of human being had ancestors in ancient times who had an extremely high culture and civilization, although one that is very different from our own. We can see various peoples differentiating themselves from this oriental type. It will not be possible to go into this differentiation; but the type can be characterized to a certain extent.

Then we see a second type of human being. I would like to call him the middle type of human being, the one who, in particular, formed the basis of European culture, of Central European culture, who goes back to the Greek people, and who, in a certain respect, has found his continuation in the present in the Central European peoples.

And we see a third type of human being, the type of the Western peoples, which has then found its most radical expression in the American peoples.

From these three types, we will be able to try to find an understanding of the essential nature of the peoples of the earth.

Let us now turn our attention to the East. Today, something is asserting itself out of oriental civilization, as exemplified by Rabindranath Tagore, whose words sound so peculiar to us, partly so familiar because they touch the innermost sides of our soul, partly so foreign because they are spoken out of completely different foundations than what can be spoken out of Central and Western European culture. One is filled with humble respect when one delves into this oriental civilization and what it has produced for the Oriental with his full humanity. One need only consider individual examples: the Vedas, or that which the Vedanta world view has produced in Indian culture; one can delve into that which has been produced by Persian culture; one can delve into that which the Babylonian-Assyrian world . In all these cases, one can say that the person who studies these things in modern times with the modern scientific method of investigation will perhaps not be moved by them, but will merely decipher all kinds of strange, exotic things from Sanskrit, from the sacred scriptures. But the one who approaches these oriental cultures with a full heart and a healthy, open, free mind will find how wonderful it is that they take us back to the primeval times of humanity, when, however, the whole way in which human beings related to the world was different from the way it has become today with us and with Western peoples. But this instinctive way, this intuitive way of relating to the world, this dreaming about the world, if we understand it correctly, gives deep, tremendously deep insights into the world nature of man, insights that we, despite all our scientific and other efforts, have not yet arrived at in the middle and western world.

If we ask: What is the basis of such things? — I must refer you to something that I have already mentioned here, I must refer you to what I have asserted in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Mysteries of the Soul) about the threefold nature of man, in order to gain a general idea of the nature of the peoples of the earth, of what I have already mentioned here.

I have already mentioned here that my assertions regarding the threefold nature of the individual are based on thirty years of study, and that the individual actually consists of three differently organized members: what may be called the nerve-sense human being, what may be called the rhythmic human being, and what may be called the metabolic human being.

These three aspects of human nature are not so distinct from each other that we can say: I draw a line here, the nerve-sense human being stops, the rhythmic human being begins. These three aspects are interwoven. But they can be distinguished from each other by someone who wants to differentiate them; for the soul also points back to the threefold human being. Everything that takes place in our sensory perceptions and in our imagination points to the nerve-sense human being as its tool. Everything that relates to our feeling, that is experienced in our feeling, points back to the rhythmic human being. And it is a great mistake — which will be recognized when our abstract natural science becomes healthy again — to believe that the human being's emotional and feeling life is directly connected to the nervous system. It is only indirectly connected to the nervous system. Just as our mental life is directly connected to the nervous system, our emotional life is directly connected to our breathing, our heart rhythm, in short, to the rhythmic human being; and to the nervous system only in that we perceive the rhythm and thus the world of feelings. Only the perceptions, the perceptions of our feelings, are mediated by the nervous system. The feelings themselves are directly connected to the rhythmic human being. And so the impulses of the will, the volition, are directly connected with the metabolic human being. And again, the thoughts of the will, the thoughts of our volitional impulses, they are the ones that are connected with the nervous system, not the will itself, which is directly connected with the metabolic system. I can only mention this here.

Something that I may now regard as a scientifically proven fact, although the whole of external science still resists it – it will be forced to accept it by the facts themselves – is that what appears in the individual human being as three parts of his being is not distributed in the same way among the people, insofar as they belong to the individual peoples, whom we want to consider today only according to their types. For the remarkable thing is that, especially when we look at these oriental peoples, namely at the way in which oriental peoples were formed in ancient times, when they developed their wonderful culture, we find that these oriental peoples, especially in the period in which they developed the most spiritual culture, were completely organized around the metabolism. This was the predominant factor in the primitive oriental peoples: the metabolism at work in them. The rhythmic activity and especially the nervous sensory activity receded behind the metabolism.

The spiritual scientist is surprised when he goes back to primeval times in the Orient and finds the remarkably sophisticated and refined Vedanta and Veda culture and everything that has otherwise emerged from Oriental wisdom and the Oriental world view. He is surprised that this is directly related to a particular refinement of metabolism and a decline of the other aspects of human nature.

It must be said, however, that it was precisely through this refinement of metabolism that the Oriental achieved what I mean here by his fine, his high-minded culture. Just as the plant, with its roots sunk in the soil, draws the juices of the soil directly into itself, just as it attracts everything in its surroundings with its blossoms, just as it is connected with its entire metabolism to its natural environment, to everything that it reflects like a mirror, so it is with the Oriental essence of man in those times of Asian primeval culture. There the human being does not merely absorb the substances of the environment, as we do now; he does not unconsciously inhale the surrounding air as we do; he absorbs everything that causes his metabolism with original, elementary power. In this way, he lives in that which he takes up through metabolism. And we can say that that which lives on in the human being through metabolism, that which becomes sensation in him, that which becomes thought in him, is just as much a natural expression of his being from the relationship of metabolism with his surroundings as the tree flower and fruit that we see on the tree, directly reflect the relationship to the environment; in its flower and fruit, the tree reflects what lives in its environment in terms of climate, substances and materials. The people of the Orient have, of course, taken what they have absorbed from outside and developed it into a high level of flowering and fruit. But what is now emerging in the older oriental culture appears to us as if it were born of nature itself, as if nature itself had blossomed there in human knowledge and human understanding, and man should only have become the organ of passage for what nature itself wants to create in wise and meaningful ideas about the world.

This is the peculiarity of this ancient Oriental culture that it literally provides the proof: when nature itself is allowed to speak, when it is allowed to make an organ for itself in man, then it speaks in the highest spirituality. And this ancient Oriental culture has become the highest spirituality precisely because it is only through man that what nature itself speaks is realized. This ancient Oriental culture elevated to the level of flowers that wisdom which can be fostered by nature itself, it elevated it to a new being of the senses. Nature reveals itself in supersensible contemplation. Nature does not reveal itself — and this is directly proved — through materialistic contemplation, through materialistic attitude; nature reveals itself through spiritual contemplation, through spiritual attitude. Nature does not speak of matter when it expresses its essence through man; nature speaks of spirit when man does not merely hold up to it the view of mere gross matter.

This is the wonderful teaching that comes from the ancient oriental culture. It once lived in the Orient. It also influenced the outer life in the Orient in the form of theocracy. The people who were the children of nature, cared for by nature itself, not the students of nature who developed its wisdom like trees develop their fruits, these people spoke only of the divine, the superhuman, when they spoke of the world. They spoke of what is supersensible. They also applied this view of the supersensible to social life: they founded their theocracies. This type of human being brought forth what we can call the view of the divine through human beings in the original culture of Asia. It is the view of the divine as spiritual that is the legacy of these ancient oriental times.

Christianity is based on a fact. Those who do not see the origin of Christianity in the fact of Golgotha do not understand Christianity correctly. However, it is different with the views of this Christianity, with how we understand Christianity. The views that enable us to understand Christianity by looking only at the historical, without new spiritual-scientific deepening, are those of oriental inheritance. For there one reached the superhuman, there one reached the supersensible-spiritual. Therefore, basically, even Christianity spread out from the Middle East and the West.

As an ideal, man can always consider the member that is, as it were, above that which is elementally implanted in him by nature. The Oriental has incorporated as his elementary the metabolic system as his own. The superimposed system is the rhythmic system. In this he seeks his ideal. He seeks to rise from what nature gives him to what he can conquer for himself in conscious human activity. Therefore, the goal of the oriental type, of those who strive for an ideal, is to strive for the rhythmic human being. And we see how those who, like a natural blossom of the Vedas, the Vedanta wisdom, have brought forth the most wonderful view of nature into human culture, how they regard as their ideal a special way of rising consciously into spiritual worlds through the rhythmic human being. Unconsciously, they rise to the spirituality of which I have just spoken. Consciously, they elevate it to an ideal through which the rhythmic human being can rise. This is: to regulate breathing in a certain way, to practice yoga philosophy, yoga practice, to train and educate what is in the rhythmic human being in a certain way. The rhythmic human being becomes their ideal. That which, I would say, lies one step above the metabolic human being, becomes the ideal for this human being.

And so we see how a priesthood, a teaching profession or actually a humanity, which is both at the same time, crystallizes out of the oriental folk type, which sees the ideal in this yoga training, to organize the rhythmic human being in a special way in order to achieve something higher than what can be achieved through the elementary implanted powers.

If we look at everything that we can learn from this ancient oriental culture and see how it reaches up to the purest, finest spiritual level, and how a wonderful, concrete abundance really does flow from the spiritual — for, full of content, it may seem fantastic, full of content is this spirituality - we must say: What these people could never acquire, who were so great in the indicated areas and who sought their ideal in the training of the rhythmic human being, what is missing there, is a certain life in the right, a certain structure in a community of rights. It is impossible to somehow incorporate this into the culture that produced the Vedas, the Vedanta, and the other spiritual structures of the Orient! No matter how much one may misunderstand what can be found of this kind by applying Western concepts to it, an unbiased judgment must say: There is spiritual life there. The legal and economic life is instinctive; it remains instinctive. It rises from the foundation in which the economic, in which the legal or state life exists, and from this the spiritual life rises to the highest consciousness. And basically, Westerners live for the most part from the legacies of Orientalism in the spiritual life.

We have even seen how, in a certain direction, which is called the theosophical one, often confused with ill will or lack of understanding for our movement, how, through this theosophical direction, I would like to say, ultimately, out of full decadence, people are once again seeking to carry a new spirituality from the Orient to the West, always this trait of carrying the spiritual from the Orient to the West. Today it signifies an extreme decadence. At the time when the Orient could give Christianity the necessary spiritual depth, it was a matter of course.

A different picture presents itself when we consider the type of people who, I might say, appears most sympathetically in the ancient Greek people, but who then found their continuation in Central Europe. There we have the other aspect of human nature, so to speak, developed with elementary necessity. People are usually unaware of what is present in them as a self-evident entity. The people of Central Europe do not know that the main thing in them, in relation to which the other aspects of human existence recede into the background, is the rhythmic human being. All the virtues and vices of Central European people and those who have been infected by them are based on this predominance of the rhythmic system.

The rhythmic system is connected with what human feeling is. Human feeling encompasses everything from the virtues of fortitude to the passions of courage and so on. All that Tacitus describes, for example, about the ancient Germans is basically something of the soul that is based on the rhythmic human being, just as Oriental wisdom and sensuousness are based on the metabolism. And that which makes the Greeks into such unified human beings, what we admire so much about the Greeks when we really understand them, this sense of proportion, is ultimately based on a perfectly adapted human rhythm of inhalation, exhalation and all the other rhythms. Greek symmetry is ultimately a consequence of the human rhythmic system.

What we see dawning in Greek art, what confronts us as Greek sculpture, is not something imitated from a model. What the Greeks sculpt is formed in such a way that they feel within themselves, as if it were a second person, the rhythmically harmonious human being in action and then develop it. Or, if they dissolve, represent it as in the well-known group of Laocoön. Everything that the Greeks achieved as a plastic human form is based on their feeling of themselves from within the symmetry of the rhythmic system.

And if we look, for example, at the Greek tragedies – one could see all sorts of things that express the Greek essence: passions are to develop through tragedy, fear and compassion. And again, through the same tragedy, which arouses fear and compassion, this passion should be calmed, worked off. That is catharsis. That is what the Greeks sought as self-regulation, as the rhythmic in drama, as an image of their own essence. And we hear Aristotle say that true virtue consists in not going to one extreme or the other, not to the spiritual or the material, not to the high or the low, but in keeping to the middle way. All that the Greeks experience as self-evident is the harmonious human being, who is harmonious through his rhythm of life.

And we see this play of the rhythmic system in the continuation of Greek culture, in Goetheanism, in what has taken place as a newer upsurge of spiritual life in Central Europe; we see it in particular in the figure of Goethe.

Just as the Oriental, by allowing the system of metabolism to speak within him, effectively placed before himself the highest spirituality, so the rhythmic system, which brings about the actual symmetry in the human being, placed the human being himself before him. And one cannot imagine a more beautiful expression of this need to present man in his harmonious proportions, through his life rhythm, than in Goethe's book about Winckelmann, where Goethe weaves everything he has to say about the harmonious human being into this book. In this book, we find beautiful expressions such as: “When nature has reached its pinnacle in man, and man takes in everything that is around him, order, harmony, measure and meaning, he feels himself again in himself as a whole nature and rises to the creation of a work of art.” Or: If nature has reached its summit in man, then, if it could understand itself, it would exult and admire this summit of its becoming and essence.

And one can say that when such mature words, words that are so completely sweet with cultural maturity, are spoken, then they are the expression of the whole essence that lies at the bottom of it all, in a national sense.

And when Schiller wrote that letter to Goethe at the beginning of the 1890s: “I have long observed the course of your being. You take all of nature together to build man out of its individual components. You construct man out of intuition. You could actually have done that perfectly only if you had been born a Greek, or at least an Italian.” This description of the human being from the depths of human nature, this presentation of the human being to humanity, just as the Oriental presents the divine to the world, in a sense nature itself presents its essence to the world – this presentation of the human being to humanity is the essence of the Mediterranean type of human being. For him, the next step is the ideal.

What the nerve-sense human being is, that becomes the ideal for him. Therefore, we from these Central European lands unconsciously see, just as the Oriental unconsciously asserts his spirituality from his metabolism, we see from the rhythm that which is natural culture asserting itself. On the other hand, we see the ideal of working towards the idea, of working towards idealism. And in Greek culture we can already see the germ of what idealism of thought was in Plato and Aristotle.

In turn, the ideal of spirituality arises out of the nervous-sensual human being in German idealism of world-views: in the whole Central European idealism of world-views, the ideal of spirituality arises out of the nervous-sensual human being, just as the ideal of yoga arises in the Orient. And there we see how what remains instinctive, really instinctive, is the economic organization, but how a second thing appears, which was still instinctive in the Orient and is now entering into consciousness: that is reflection, pondering on the legal nature of human social coexistence.

And so we see the legal nature of social coexistence developing out of the type of the middle peoples, especially in the middle regions.

The Oriental peoples developed a spirituality in ancient times. It then declined. And even when we hear Rabindranath Tagore speak today, it is like a sound from a distant, bygone era: beautiful, delicate, but we cannot believe that it still exists. And it really isn't there either. It is, I would say, a cozy abstraction. It speaks deeply to us, but it does not actually speak of a present reality. Because in the Orient this spirituality has also come into decadence, humanity preserves, so to speak, an inheritance of the oriental primeval culture through its inclination towards the spiritual life.

In addition, there is what man has to say about man, what man has to look at about man. And that has come through the middle population. There man stands before himself. In the Orient, man stands before the superhuman, and it is from the world of the superhuman that moral ideas spring.

It is emphasized again and again, even today, by Rabindranath Tagore, that the culture of the Orient is built above all on morality, on all moral qualities, while he accuses Western and American culture of being built on mechanism, on technical mechanism, on political state mechanism, that it is empty of moral ideas. And it is the case that in the East, from the vision that arises in the way we have described it, a wealth of moral ideas wells up from the spiritual world. And basically, we still live on these moral ideas today. For the materialism of the West, as was sufficiently clear from yesterday's lecture, has not produced any moral ideas as such. Moral ideas are an ancient inheritance, for they only flow into the human soul when this human soul has a connection to the spiritual world.

In Mediterranean culture: the human being stands before himself; he receives moral ideas as an inheritance. Ideas of right arise, the regulation of human relationships in such a way that the individual human being faces the individual human being in social life. One might say: by coming into his own being, the human being comes to ask: how do I follow that which is the moral idea? A need arises in the human being that the Oriental did not have, precisely at the time when his spiritual culture flowed most purely into his being. Within this entire culture of the Orient, the further back we go into older times, the word and the essence of freedom have no meaning. Man is a member of the world order; he is incorporated into the world order. Freedom is something that basically has no meaning. One cannot speak of it. For the commandments of the moral life, which are connected with the contemplation of the Divine-Spiritual, have such an effect on man that, by contemplating them from his spirituality, they are realized by him as a matter of course. He feels no human relationship to them. Just as he must eat, so he feels that he must obey the commandments if he only recognizes them.

What is so naturally connected with the spiritual world in the original oriental wisdom — although it no longer springs forth in the declining oriental culture — becomes an issue in the moment of world-historical development when man confronts man, when Mediterranean culture emerges. And this becomes a particularly important issue when the culture, the actual cultural direction of the Western peoples emerges. That is the third type.

Just as the Oriental was originally predisposed for the metabolic, the Mediterranean for the rhythmic human, so the Western human is predisposed for the nervous-sensory human. And anyone who can also follow the highest that has developed in spiritual and material, in inner and outer civilization in Western Europe and in America – apart from the Romance peoples, who have taken a very different path, who have inherited from the ancient Latin peoples, who do not represent this purity, represent what is Western European, what is Western in general. If we look at the other Western population, it is the population in which the neuro-sensual human being predominates. This neuro-sensual human being, who has produced the type that , with concepts, with ideas, to understand everything, which in particular goes to the abstract, which goes to that which does not place man before man as in the Central European, which does not place the superman before man as in the Oriental, but which places nature before man.

That is the peculiar thing: if one ascends with the natural organization to the nerve-sense human being, then external nature stands before the human being. Just imagine what an absurdity it would be for the Oriental to ask whether he is somehow connected with animality in a materialistic way. He perceives the spiritual world, the supersensible world, directly, precisely because he is the metabolic human being. The Westerner does not have this view of the spiritual world. He has reflection on the spiritual world, he has abstraction. For him, what presents itself to him, even if it is the human being himself, becomes extra-human nature for him. For Goethe, it is human being against human being, and he wants to understand the human being. Schiller says: It is you who wants to build up the whole human being out of all the details of nature. But it is the human being that Goethe wants to build up; and basically he only wants to understand nature in order to ultimately see the human being in nature everywhere.

Among Westerners, among nerve-sense human beings, Darwinism arises in the form in which the 19th century experienced it. There, the human being is not what stands in the first place; there, so to speak, the idea of the human being dawns, there one no longer knows anything about the human being as such, there the human being becomes the highest animal. The animal series is studied, everything about the forces that play a role in this animal series is studied. Not man is understood, but the highest animal is understood. And man is only considered the highest animal. The human element recedes. But in return there is the most pronounced sense of knowledge of nature, there is that wonderful deepening into the details of everything that is the view of development, for example in Darwinism.

Of course, something like Darwin's Origin of Species could never have emerged from an oriental point of view. Nor could Goethe have written something like that. What he has written, I have tried to present again and again: it is of a completely different nature. It is not Darwinism in the later sense, it is something different.

But because this Western type of human being is a nerve-sense human being, I would like to say, in retrogressive development, the ideal of knowledge of nature, the ideal of material knowledge, the living in of the material arises.

And basically it is the way of thinking of the Western world, which has been introduced into Central and Eastern Europe for a long time. For that which has grown up in Central Europe itself is a continuation of Greek culture. What has grown up in Russia out of its own Russian nature is even a continuation of ancient Orientalism; but that which modern culture of the 19th century has become more and more is that which is out of the nerve-sense human being of the West.

Thus we must view the three human types, from which the various nations have further differentiated. We must realize how, admittedly, the most spiritual spirituality was instinctively present in primitive Oriental humanity; how the soul-centered apprehension of man was present in the Greeks and showed only an echo at the end of the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century in Central European culture, which has emerged in Goetheanism, and how we are under the influence of the nervous-sensory culture, how we must think out of it. It certainly does not produce any moral ideals directly. Does that mean it has no moral value? Yesterday I presented you with examples of the moral worldview of naturalistically thinking people, from which one might conclude that this newer naturalism has no moral value at all. That is not the case. Of course, it has no moral content. Its moral content is old inheritance and must be old inheritance. But it has a moral value. What is its moral value? It has the moral value that man forms a picture of nature as a picture of the world, which, precisely, does not give him any moral ideas. By immersing himself in his environment, the Oriental received the moral ideas with his picture of nature. And so, as he followed nature as a natural man, he followed the moral and spiritual world as a moral man.

The Mediterranean man puts man before himself. He received the image of man by looking into the world. But at the same time, I would like to say, the moral idea became abstract. It had to assert itself as an inheritance. But man still felt the warming of this moral idea. And in essence, much of the religious life of the time in which the Mediterranean peoples set the tone was this warm feeling for the moral order of the world. It is only when he has the morality-free image of nature around him that man feels abandoned and lonely in the face of his moral feelings. Man looks out into the world in which he stands as a natural being to which he belongs as a natural being. It gives him nothing moral. If he wants morality, he must bring it forth from the source of his innermost being. He stands there before the world, which gives him no directive. He must seek the directive. Freedom has no meaning in the oriental spiritual culture. Freedom acquires its meaning out of naturalism. This materialism, which arises out of the nerve-sense human being of Western peoples, has a moral significance. This culture demands of man that he become conscious of his freedom and give birth to his morality out of himself. If one were to remain with mere naturalism — which was the result of yesterday's reflections here — then one would, like the personalities whose statements I quoted yesterday, trample morality into the ground. But if we had not gone through this dangerous stage of human development, where morality is called into question, where morality is given in the freedom of human decision, humanity could not develop to freedom! This is the meaning of human development, from an original spiritual culture to the material culture of the West, which is particularly geared to economic life, which has basically brought an ethics of utility to the surface, but which must give people the consciousness of freedom with regard to the actual moral impulse.

We obtain a basis for considering the differentiations of peoples when we start from these three types of human beings. But we never attain a characteristic of full humanity, which we need today for the human being, if we take that which emerges from these one-sidedness.

What can be learned from such a consideration is that when a human being develops out of any local culture, no matter how large the locality, that which is predisposed in him, it is a one-sidedness. The wonderful primeval culture – a one-sidedness, Western culture with its materialism – a one-sidedness.

All this gives an idea of how one-sided what lives in the individual peoples is. Therefore, the modern human being, who now understands that a uniform culture must grow over the whole earth, not only materially and economically, but also spiritually, must develop spiritual and moral ideas from foundations other than the national. Humanity is predisposed to this, for in its various nations it brings forth the one-sided talents. But the individual human being must rise above the national. He only rises above the national when he does not base on any nationality anything other than what belongs to his own nationality, but when he is able to shape the general humanity out of this nationality.

In my book, 'Philosophy of Freedom', which appeared for the first time at the beginning of the 1990s, I tried to lay the ethical foundations of the world view. There I have tried to show people the way to freedom and morality at the same time, so that nothing can be found in this book that would be born out of a one-sided, nationalistic direction. Everything is thought out so that the Oriental can think like the Westerner and like the Mediterranean man. There is absolutely no mention of any national differentiation in it.

The underlying theme that runs through the entire book is that man is not yet fully human when he feels that he belongs to a human differentiation, to a nation, to a people, and that he is only fully human when he outgrows this differentiation. Of course, a person is Russian, a person is English, a person is French; but the Frenchman, the Russian, the Englishman are not human as such, but the human being must grow out of his nationality. This is precisely what a real understanding of this nationality shows.

But then one comes to build morality on human individuality. And when it is built on human individuality, then one arrives at the basis on which morality must rest in social life: in social life, morality must rest on the trust that the individual can have in the individual. This trust must be there. This is what education must work towards, the education that alone can bring about an improvement in our social conditions.

In certain circles, it is repeatedly mentioned that only compulsion, only power, only organization can bring order to the human social organism. No, organization will never bring order; rather, the social organism can only flourish to the extent that one person can have trust in another, that morality is anchored in the human individuality.

What I have tried to substantiate in my Philosophy of Freedom has been called “ethical individualism”. This is because what emerges as ethics, as a moral idea, must in fact arise out of the individuality of the single human being.

But now comes the significant part. Yesterday I read you a passage from a personality who corresponded with the materialist Moleschott. It says: the moral impulses are in every human being, therefore they are different in every human being. — You see, that is materialism. The real insight is exactly the opposite. It is true: the ethical foundation is in every human individual. But in the highest sense, it is a wonderful fact that it is the same in every human individual; it is not a kind of predetermined sameness, not an organized sameness, but a given sameness that appears among human beings. And again and again we approach every human being to establish, together with each person, trusting moral impulses.

This is what makes ethical individualism, when it is properly grasped, when it is understood as the true act of human freedom, a universal ethic at the same time, and what gives us hope that we will come to it as moral human beings. Just as we do not find it right when we meet each other on the street for one to push the other as he passes by - people will naturally step aside - so, when the human consciousness of which I spoke to you yesterday and the day before takes hold of people from spiritual-scientific foundations, it will generate such feeling, such thinking in people, that what is morally alive among them will become as natural as not bumping into each other when walking past each other. We can, if we live side by side as human beings, understand people in whatever situation in life; we can bring morality out of human nature itself. This shows how, starting from spiritual-oriental primeval times, to human feeling in the middle of the earth, to human abstraction, to human understanding of the world, to understanding both the world and nature, how this is the way to finally bring man to truly grasp freedom.

But only if he rediscovers morality from a spiritual-scientific basis. In the Orient, morality was given through the content of ethical ideas, but these still work through man as if by natural necessity. Out of this natural necessity, the content of morality was thrown out. Man stood, as it were, morally naked before nature, morally naked before nature. He is to give birth to morality again within himself, in his individuality. He will only give birth to it again if he can give birth to it out of the rediscovered spiritual essence of his innermost being.

That is what spiritual science, spiritual knowledge wants: to give birth to a moral will that can truly effect our social advancement. Spiritual science wants this because it believes it must recognize that this is necessary for humanity in general and for humanity in the near future in particular, that social recovery can only come from spiritual recovery.

In the comments from yesterday and the day before, you have heard a great deal about how often the attacks that are made against this spiritual science today are shameful. I could tell you many more such things, but I do not wish to do so at this moment. But I would like to say this today in conclusion: however the attacks may assert themselves, if they were able to destroy the efforts being made today in the field of spiritual science for this world-historical moment, spiritual science would have to arise anew! For their hope is not based on the subjective will of an individual or a few, or even of a sect; no, their hope is based on the fact that humanity needs this spiritual science and everything that is vitally connected with it with regard to the most important matters of the soul in the present and the near future. They are counting on the hopes of spiritual science, that it will flourish because humanity needs it, and will demand it as it demands a renewal of spiritual life. This may perhaps be trampled down for the moment by malevolence, by lack of understanding. But it cannot be overcome in the long run. Because what humanity will need will be given to it, no matter how dreadful, how malicious or how misunderstanding its opponents may be. What is to be done for the good of humanity will be done because it must be done for inner, for spiritual and divine reasons.